For his part, Whipple Van Buren Phillips proved to be an entirely satisfactory replacement for the father Lovecraft never knew. Lovecraft’s simple statement that at this time ‘my beloved grandfather … became the centre of my entire universe’23 is all we need to know. Whipple cured his grandson of his fear of the dark by daring him at the age of five to walk through a sequence of dark rooms at 454 Angell Street; he showed Lovecraft the art objects he brought from his travels to Europe; he wrote him letters when travelling on business; and he even recounted extemporaneous weird tales to the boy.
And so, with Whipple virtually taking the place of his father, Howard and his mother seemed to lead a normal enough life; indeed, with Whipple’s finances still robust, Lovecraft had an idyllic and actually rather spoiled early childhood.
He appears to have begun reading at the age of four, and one of his earliest books appears to have been Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The next year, he discovered a seminal book in his aesthetic development: the Arabian Nights. The book’s effect upon Lovecraft was immediate and pronounced:
how many dream-Arabs have the Arabian Nights bred! I ought to know, since at the age of 5 I was one of them! I had not then encountered Graeco-Roman myth, but found in Lang’s Arabian Nights a gateway to glittering vistas of wonder and freedom. It was then that I invented for myself the name of Abdul Alhazred, and made my mother take me to all the Oriental curio shops and fit me up an Arabian corner in my room.24
Elsewhere, however, Lovecraft provides a different (and probably more accurate) account of the coining of the name Abdul Alhazred: ‘I can’t quite recall where I did get Abdul Alhazred. There is a dim recollection which associates it with a certain elder—the family lawyer, as it happens, but I can’t remember whether I asked him to make up an Arabic name for me, or whether I merely asked him to criticise a choice I had otherwise made.’25 The family lawyer was Albert A. Baker, who would be Lovecraft’s legal guardian until 1911. His coinage (if indeed it was his) was a singularly infelicitous one from the point of view of Arabic grammar, since the result is a reduplicated article (Abdul Alhazred). In any event, the name stuck.
The Arabian Nights may not have definitively steered Lovecraft toward the realm of weird fiction, but it certainly did not impede his progress in that direction. Although only a relatively small proportion of tales are actually supernatural, there are abundant accounts of crypts, tombs, caves, deserted cities, and other elements that would form significant features in Lovecraft’s imaginative landscape.
What might have finally stacked the deck in favour of the weird for Lovecraft was his unexpected discovery of an edition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Gustave Doré, which he stumbled upon at the house of a friend of his family’s at the age of six. Here is the impression the poem, and the pictures, made upon a young Lovecraft:
Fancy … the discovery of a great atlas-sized gift-book leaning against the mantel & having on the cover gilt letters reading ‘With Illustrations by Gustave Doré’. The title didn’t matter—for didn’t I know the dark, supernal magic of the Doré pictures in our Dante & Milton at home? I open the book—& behold a hellish picture of a corpse-ship with ragged sails under a waning moon! I turn a page … God! A spectral, half-transparent ship on whose deck a corpse & a skeleton play at dice! By this time I am flat on the bearskin rug & ready to thumb through the whole book … of which I’ve never heard before … A sea full of rotting serpents, & death-fires dancing in the black air … troops of angels & daemons … crazed, dying, distorted forms … dead men rising in their putrescence & lifelessly manning the dank rigging of a fate-doomed barque …26
Who could resist such a spell? However, if the Ancient Mariner was the principal literary influence in the early development of Lovecraft’s taste for the weird, a searing personal event may have been as significant: the death, on 26 January 1896, of his maternal grandmother, Robie Alzada Place Phillips.
It was, perhaps, not so much the loss of a family member—to whom Lovecraft does not appear to have been especially close—as its effect upon the remaining members of the family that so affected the young boy:
the death of my grandmother plunged the household into a gloom from which it never fully recovered. The black attire of my mother & aunts terrified & repelled me to such an extent that I would surreptitiously pin bits of bright cloth or paper to their skirts for sheer relief. They had to make a careful survey of their attire before receiving callers or going out!
Seriocomically as Lovecraft narrates these events, twenty years after the fact, it is evident that they left a profound impression upon him. The aftermath was quite literally nightmarish:
And then it was that my former high spirits received their damper. I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which I called ‘nightgaunts’—a compound word of my own coinage. I used to draw them after waking (perhaps the idea of these figures came from an edition de luxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Doré, which I discovered one day in the east parlor). In dreams they were wont to whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents. It is fully fifteen years—aye, more—since I have seen a ‘night-gaunt’, but even now, when half asleep & drifting vaguely along over a sea of childhood thoughts, I feel a thrill of fear … & instinctively struggle to keep awake. That was my own prayer back in ’96—each night—to keep awake & ward off the nightgaunts!27
And so begins Lovecraft’s career as one of the great dreamers—or, to coin a term that must be coined for the phenomenon, nightmarers—of literary history. Even though it would be another ten years from the writing of this letter, and hence a full thirty years after these dreams, that he would utilize the night-gaunts in his work, it is already evident that his boyhood dreams contain many conceptual and imagistic kernels of his mature tales: the cosmic backdrop; the utterly outré nature of his malignant entities (in a late letter he describes them as ‘black, lean, rubbery things with bared, barbed tails, bat-wings, and no faces at all’28), so different from conventional demons, vampires, or ghosts; and the helpless passivity of the protagonist-victim, at the mercy of forces infinitely more powerful than himself. It would, of course, take a long time for Lovecraft to evolve his theory and practice of weird fiction; but, with dreams like these at such an early age, his career as a writer of horror tales comes to seem like an inevitable destiny.
Lovecraft’s family—in particular his mother—must, however, have been concerned for his physical and psychological health at the onset of his dreams, and at what may have been a general pattern of gloomy or depressed behaviour. Lovecraft speaks frequently in later years of a trip to western Rhode Island taken in 1896, and it seems likely that this trip to ancestral lands was, at least in part, an attempt by his family to rid him of his nightmares and his general malaise.