By the age of seven Lovecraft had already begun to read, begun to write poetry and prose nonfiction, and gained what would prove to be a lifelong love of England and of the past. But his imaginative appetite was not complete; for he claims that in the winter of 1896 yet another interest emerged: the theatre. The first play he saw was ’one of Denman Thompson’s minor efforts’,34 The Sunshine of Paradise Alley, which featured a slum scene that fascinated him. Shortly thereafter he was enjoying the ‘well-made’ plays of Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero; but the next year his taste was improved by seeing his first Shakespearian play, Cymbeline, at the Providence Opera House. He set up a little toy theatre in his room, hand-painted the scenery, and played Cymbeline for weeks. Lovecraft’s interest in drama continued sporadically for at least the next fifteen to twenty years; around 1910 he saw Robert Mantell’s company perform King John in Providence, with the young Fritz Leiber, Sr, as Faulconbridge. Lovecraft was also a very early enthusiast of film, and throughout his life we will find selected films influencing some of his most significant writing.
From the age of three onward—while his father was slowly deteriorating both physically and mentally in Butler Hospital—the young Howard Phillips Lovecraft was encountering one intellectual and imaginative stimulus after the other: first the colonial antiquities of Providence, then Grimm’s Fairy Tales, then the Arabian Nights, then Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, then eighteenthcentury belles-lettres, then the theatre and Shakespeare, and finally Hawthorne, Bulfinch, and the classical world. It is a remarkable sequence, and many of these stimuli would be of lifelong duration. But there remained one further influence that would definitively turn Lovecraft into the man and writer we know: ‘Then I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!’35
CHAPTER THREE
Black Woods and Unfathomed Caves (1898–1902)
Lovecraft dates his first work of prose fiction to 1897,1 and elsewhere identifies it as ‘The Noble Eavesdropper’, about which all we know is that it concerned ‘a boy who overheard some horrible conclave of subterranean beings in a cave’.2 As the work does not survive, it would be idle to point to any literary sources for it; but the influence of the Arabian Nights (the cave of Ali Baba and other stories involving caves) might be conjectured. A still more likely source, perhaps, would be his grandfather Whipple, the only member of his family who appears to have enjoyed the weird. As Lovecraft states in a late letter:
I never heard oral weird tales except from my grandfather— who, observing my tastes in reading, used to devise all sorts of impromptu original yarns about black woods, unfathomed caves, winged horrors (like the ‘night-gaunts’ of my dreams, about which I used to tell him), old witches with sinister cauldrons, & ‘deep, low, moaning sounds’. He obviously drew most of his imagery from the early gothic romances—Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, &c.—which he seemed to like better than Poe or other later fantaisistes.3
Here are some of the components (unfathomed caves, deep, low, moaning sounds) of the imagery of ‘The Noble Eavesdropper’. But Lovecraft admits that this is the only tale he wrote prior to his reading of Poe.
Poe was, by the turn of the century, slowly gaining a place of eminence in American literature, although he still had to face posthumous attacks by Henry James and others. His championing by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and other European writers had slowly impelled reconsideration of his work by English and American critics.
I do not know which edition of Poe was read by the eight-yearold Lovecraft; it must have been some school edition. It is, in fact, a little difficult to discern any clear-cut Poe influence in the first several of Lovecraft’s surviving juvenile stories—‘The Little Glass Bottle’, ‘The Secret Cave; or, John Lees Adventure’, ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard; or, A Dead Man’s Revenge’, and ‘The Mysterious Ship’. None of these early stories is dated, with the exception of ‘The Mysterious Ship’ (clearly dated to 1902), but they must have been written during the period 1898–1902, perhaps more toward the earlier than the later end of that spectrum. Perhaps the only tale of genuine interest is ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard’—which contains not only a subtitle (‘or, “A Dead Man’s Revenge”) but a sub-subtitle (‘A Detective story’). This is the longest of Lovecraft’s juvenile stories, and at the end of the autograph manuscript he has noted (obviously at a much later date): ‘Evidently written in late 1898 or early 1899’. The fact that it is labelled a detective story should not lead us to think it is influenced by Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ or any of his other detective stories, although no doubt Lovecraft read them. Even the most cursory glance at this wild, histrionic, and rather engaging story should allow us to point to its predominant source: the dime novel.
The first dime novel was published in 1860, when the firm later known as Beadle & Adams reprinted, in a 128-page paper-covered volume 6 by 4 inches in dimensions, a novel by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens. The fact that it was a reprint was critical, for it allowed the firm to claim that here was a ‘dollar book for a dime’.4 Beadle & Adams was the leading publisher of dime novels until it folded in 1898, having been driven out of business by the bold and innovative publishing practices of Street & Smith, which entered the dime novel market in 1889.
It should not be assumed that dime novels were merely action thrillers, although many of them were; there were westerns (Deadwood Dick from Beadle & Adams; Diamond Dick from Street & Smith), detective or espionage stories (Nick Carter from Street & Smith; Old King Brady from Frank Tousey), tales of high school and college life (Frank Merriwell from Street & Smith), and even pious tales of moral uprightness (Horatio Alger, Jr, wrote prolifically for Street & Smith in the 1890s). Their principal features were their price, their format (paper covers, 128 pages or less), and, in general, their action-packed narrative style. The leading dime novel series were, of course, priced at 10 cents, although there was a wide array of smaller books, called ‘nickel libraries’, at 5 cents aimed at younger readers.
It is one of the great paradoxes of Lovecraft’s entire literary career that he could, on the one hand, absorb the highest aesthetic fruits of Western culture—Greek and Latin literature, Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley—and at the same time go slumming in the cheapest dregs of popular fiction. Throughout his life Lovecraft vigorously defended the literary value of the weird tale (unlike some modern critics who misguidedly vaunt both the good and the bad, the aesthetically polished and the mechanically hackneyed, as representative of ‘popular culture’—as if there is any merit to what masses of half-literate people like to read), and he adamantly, and rightly, refused to consider the weird work found in dime novels and pulp magazines as genuine literature; but this did not prevent him from voraciously lapping up these lesser products. Lovecraft knew that he was reading trash, but he read it anyway.