Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity
For me, the chief difficulty of writing an autobiography is finding anything of importance to put in it. My existence has been a quiet, uneventful, and undistinguished one; and at best must sound woefully flat and tame on paper.
I was born in Providence, R.I.—where, but for two minor interruptions, I have ever since lived—on August 20, 1890; of old Rhode Island stock on my mother’s side, and of a Devonshire paternal line domiciled in New York State since 1827.
The interests which have led me to fantastic fiction were very early in appearing, for as far back as I can clearly remember I was charmed by strange stories and ideas, and by ancient scenes and objects. Nothing has ever seemed to fascinate me so much as the thought of some curious interruption in the prosaic laws of nature, or some monstrous intrusions on our familiar world by unknown things from the limitless abysses outside.
When I was three or less I listened avidly to the usual juvenile fairy lore, and Grimm’s Tales were among the first things I ever read, at the age of four. When I was five the Arabian Nights claimed me, and I spent hours in playing Arab—calling myself “Abdul Alhazred,” which some kindly elder had suggested to me as a typical Saracen name. It was many years later, however, that I thought of giving Abdul an eighth century setting and attributing to him the dreaded and unmentionable Necronomicon!
But for me books and legends held no monopoly of fantasy. In the quaint hill streets of my native town, where fanlighted Colonial doorways, small-paned windows, and graceful Georgian steeples still keep alive the glamour of the eighteenth century, I felt a magic then and now hard to explain. Sunsets over the city’s outspread roofs, as seen from vantage-points on the great hill, affected me with especial poignancy. Before I knew it the eighteenth century had captured me more utterly than ever the hero of “Berkeley Square” was captured; so that I used to spend hours in the attic poring over the long-s’d books banished from the library downstairs and unconsciously absorbing the style of Pope and Dr. Johnson as a natural mode of expression. This absorption was doubly strong because of the ill-health which rendered school attendance rare and irregular. One effect of it was to make me feel subtly out of place in the modern period, and consequently to think of time as a mystical, portentous thing in which all sorts of unexpected wonders might be discovered.
Nature, too, keenly touched my sense of the fantastic. My home was not far from what was then the edge of the settled residence district, so that I was just as used to the rolling fields, stone walls, giant elms, squat farmhouses, and deep woods of rural New England as to the ancient urban scene. This brooding, primitive landscape seemed to me to hold some vast but unknown significance, and certain dark wooded hollows near the Seekonk River took on an aura of strangeness not unmixed with vague horror. They figured in my dreams—especially those nightmares containing the black, winged, rubbery entities which I called “night-gaunts.”
When I was six years old I encountered the mythology of Greece and Rome through various popular juvenile media, and was profoundly influenced by it. I gave up being an Arab and became a Roman, incidentally acquiring for ancient Rome a queer feeling
[ xi ]
