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

But how did Lovecraft come into contact with the Eddys at all? There is some doubt on the matter. Muriel Eddy wrote two significant memoirs of Lovecraft, one published in 1945, the other in 1961. The first memoir seems on the whole quite reliable; the second, written in a gushing and histrionic manner, makes many statements not found in the first, including the claim that Lovecraft’s mother and Eddy’s mother (Mrs Grace Eddy) had become friends by meeting at a women’s suffrage meeting and that at this time (probably in in 1918, although Muriel Eddy supplies no date) the two of them discovered their their sons were both enthusiasts of the weird.¹² This is a remarkable assertion, and I am frankly sceptical of it. There is no other indication that Susie Lovecraft was interested in women’s suffrage. Lovecraft does not, to my knowledge, mention the Eddys in correspondence prior to October 1923, at which time he refers to Eddy as ‘the new Providence amateur’.¹³ He certainly gives no indication that he had once been in touch with the Eddys and was only now re-establishing contact. My feeling, then, is that the whole story about Susie Lovecraft and Grace Eddy—and about the Eddys’ early association with Lovecraft—is a fabrication, made by Muriel so as to augment the sense of her and her husband’s importance in Lovecraft’s life.

In any event, C. M. Eddy was already a professionally published author by this time. He was working on stories to submit to Weird Tales, whose editor, Edwin Baird, he knew. Two of these—’Ashes’ and ‘The Ghost-Eater’—had already been rejected, but Lovecraft ‘corrected’¹⁴ them and Baird thereupon accepted them. ‘Ashes’ (Weird Tales

, March 1924) is perhaps the single worst tale among Lovecraft’s ‘revisions’, and no one would suspect his hand in it if he had not admitted it himself. This maudlin and conventional story about a mad scientist who has discovered a chemical compound that will reduce any substance to fine white ashes contains a nauseously fatuous romance element that must have made Lovecraft queasy. ‘The Ghost-Eater’ (Weird Tales, April 1924) is a little better, although it is nothing but a stereotypical werewolf story. Here again I cannot detect much actual Lovecraft prose, unless he was deliberately altering his style to make it harmonize with Eddy’s more choppy, less prose-poetic idiom.

In late October Eddy was working on another story, entitled ‘The Loved Dead’. Lovecraft clearly had a greater hand in this story than in the two previous ones; indeed, the published version (Weird Tales, May–June–July 1924) reads as if Lovecraft wrote the entire thing. The tale is, of course, about a necrophile who works for one undertaking establishment after another so as to secure the intimacy with corpses he desires. ‘The Loved Dead’ seems to be a parody, both of itself and of this sort of lurid, sensationalist fiction. But, as we shall see, when it was published not everyone found it quite so amusing. Lovecraft revised one final story for Eddy, ‘Deaf, Dumb, and Blind’ (

Weird Tales, April 1925), around February 1924, just prior to his move to New York.

In 1929 Lovecraft made the following evaluation of the progression of his aesthetic thought:

I can look back … at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.¹⁵

Simply put, these two phases (which would then be followed by a third and final phase combining the best features of both the previous two, and which might best be called ‘cosmic regionalism’) are Classicism and Decadence. The classical phase I have treated already: Lovecraft’s early absorption of the Augustan poets and essayists and the Graeco-Roman classics (either in the original or in translations deriving from the Augustan age), and his curious sense of psychic union with the eighteenth century, fostered a classicism that simultaneously condemned his poetry to antiquarian irrelevance and made him violently opposed to the radical aesthetic movements emerging in the early part of the century.