Chris Perridas on Lovecraft's Health

Before March is out, it would be remiss not to mention this fantastic post about H.P. Lovecraft's health from Chris Perridas' blog--a speculative exercise in attempting to identify the possible roots of his early demise. Yes, another anniversary of HPL's death blurred by on March 15, the unlucky Ides of 1937 that may have been the parting shot in a long line of blows for this man.

Perridas muses on Lovecraft's infamous "nervous breakdown" in 1907, and wonders if it may have been the result of an unknown disease. If so, it would help explain the bizarre state of the Providence writer's health in the three decades he existed after that fateful year. Frequent troubles with cold, bipolar energy fluctuations, and a various digestive issues plagued him. Assuming all of these were not psycho-somatic (after all, the digestive problems proved real and fatal enough), they are well worth investigating in the effort to understand his career.

Lovecraft's life was not a happy one, as is clearly reflected in the worldview left fossilized in his fiction and voluminous letters. But could ill health have been the main cause of his bleak, cosmicist trajectory? Many would say no. They will point to the valid damage inflicted by Lovecraft's environment--most notably his strange, overbearing, and sometimes cruel mother, as well as the lifelong financial siege he weathered as the family fortune wilted.

Still, the involuntary physiological shocks that frequently gripped him may have been the most persistent reminder that he inhabited a frail body in a universe that could do little to offer him relief. The nature of these painful episodes is fairly well understood, but their causes are not. Short of exhuming the old weirdscribe's body, current technology and interest only allows speculation on the origins of Lovecraft's pivotal handicaps. Chris Perridas, however, publishes well thought speculation; ideas that may lead Lovecraft researchers to one day pinpoint his birth as writer and philosopher by demarcating the rise of his bodily downfall.

-Grim Blogger