A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

As to my dietary programme—bosh! I am eating enough! Just you take a medium-sized loaf of bread, cut it in four equal parts, & add to each of these ¹⁄

₄ can (medium) Heinz beans & a goodly chunk of cheese. If the result isn’t a fullsized, healthy day’s quota of fodder for an Old Gentleman, I’ll resign from the League of Nations’ dietary committee!! It only costs 8 cents—but don’t let that prejudice you! It’s good sound food, & many vigorous Chinamen live on vastly less. Of course, from time to time I’ll vary the ‘meat course’ by getting something instead of beans—canned spaghetti, beef stew, corned beef, &c. &c. &c.—& once in a while I’ll add a dessert of cookies or some such thing. Fruit, also, is conceivable.⁵

This is surely one of the most remarkable passages in all Lovecraft’s correspondence. It suggests many things at once—the crippling poverty under which he was at this time living (and, although under somewhat less straitened circumstances, he would continue to live for the rest of his life, even back in Providence); the fact that he had largely abandoned restaurant meals in the interest of economy; and the rather schoolboyish tone of the entire passage, as if he were a teenager attempting to justify his behaviour to his parents.

There is a still more depressing note in all this. In October Lovecraft was forced to buy an oil heater for the winter, since the heat provided by his landlandy, Mrs Burns—especially in the wake of a nationwide coal strike organized by the United Mine Workers and lasting from September 1925 to February 1926—was insufficient. The heater came with a stove-top attachment, so that Lovecraft could now indulge in the luxury of ‘the preparation of hot dinners. No more cold beans & spaghetti for me …’⁶ Does this mean that, for the first nine and a half months of the year, Lovecraft was eating cold meals, mostly out of cans? In spite of an earlier remark about heating beans on a ‘sterno’ (a tin of a waxlike flammable substance), this seems to be a dismal probability—else why would he boast about the prospect of hot dinners?

The room at 169 Clinton Street really was rather dismal—in a run-down neighbourhood, with a dubious clientele, and infested with mice. For this last problem Lovecraft purchased 5-cent mousetraps, as recommended by Kirk, ‘since I can throw them away without removing the corpus delicti, a thing I should hate to do with a costlier bit of mechanism’.⁷ (Later he found even cheaper traps at two for 5 cents.) Lovecraft has been ridiculed for this squeamishness, but I think unjustly. Not many of us would wish to handle the corpses of mice.

The final insult came on the morning of Sunday 24 May. While Lovecraft was sleeping on the couch after an all-night writing session, his dressing alcove was broken into from the connecting apartment and he was robbed of nearly all his suits, along with sundry other abstractions. The thieves removed three of his suits (dating from 1914, 1921, and 1923), one overcoat (the fashionable 1924 coat that Sonia had purchased for him), a wicker suitcase of Sonia’s (although the contents were later found in the thieves’ apartment), and an expensive $100 radio set that Loveman had been storing in the alcove. All that Lovecraft was left with, in terms of suits, was a thin 1918 blue suit hanging on a chair in the main room, which the thieves did not enter. Lovecraft did not discover the robbery until 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday the 26th, since he had had no previous occasion to enter the alcove.

The property was of course never recovered, although a police detective came over and promised to do his best. And yet, after an initial outburst of anger and frustration, Lovecraft managed to respond to the whole situation with surprising good humour, for only two days later he wrote a long letter to Lillian on the matter and in the process made light of the situation:

Alas for the robes of my infancy, perennial in their bloom, & now cut off—or snatched off—in the finest flowering of their first few decades! They knew the slender youth of old, & expanded to accomodate [sic] the portly citizen of middle life—aye, & condensed again to shroud the wizened shanks of old age! And now they are gone—gone—& the grey, bent wearer still lives to bemoan his nudity; gathering around his lean sides as best he may the strands of his long white beard to serve him in the office of a garment!⁸