H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Read online

  H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study

  Donald R. Burleson

  Hippocampus Press

  —————————

  New York

  H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study copyright © 2016 by Donald R. Burleson.

  Revised and updated electronic edition copyright © 2016 by Hippocampus Press.

  Originally published by Greenwood Press, 1983.

  Published by Hippocampus Press

  P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.

  http://www.hippocampuspress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.

  First electronic edition, 2016

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  I. Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  His Life in Brief

  His Philosophy as an Artist

  2. Stirrings: Emergence of a Dark Talent (1917–1919)

  “The Tomb” and “Dagon”

  First “Dunsanian” Tales

  Other Writings

  3. Early Years: Beginnings and Foreshadowings (1920–1923)

  “The Terrible Old Man” and “The Picture in the House”

  Dunsanian Tales

  “The Outsider” and “The Rats in the Walls”

  “The Music of Erich Zann”

  Other Writings

  4. New York: Writing in Exile (1924–1926)

  “The Shunned House”

  “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He”

  “In the Vault” and “Cool Air”

  Other Writings

  5. Homecoming Burst of Creativity: The Lovecraft Mythos (1926–1928)

  “The Call of Cthulhu”

  The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

  “The Colour out of Space”

  “The Dunwich Horror”

  Other Writings

  6. Sporadic Inspiration: Growth of the Mythos (1929–1933)

  “The Whisperer in Darkness”

  At the Mountains of Madness

  “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

  “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Thing on the Doorstep”

  Other Writings

  7. Final Years: Powers Undiminished (1934–1937)

  “The Shadow out of Time”

  “The Haunter of the Dark”

  Other Writings

  8. Major Literary Influences on Lovecraft

  Poe and Hawthorne

  Dunsany and Machen

  Epilogue: General Conclusions

  Selected Bibliography

  Preface

  The present volume is an attempt to bring serious critical scrutiny to bear on an author whose works in the field of fantasy horror, though they have enjoyed various kinds of popularity, have heretofore been afforded relatively little attention in the realm of literary criticism. H. P. Lovecraft was not only a writer of highly worthy and unique stories, novels, and poems; he was a philosopher of genuinely incisive perception, an essayist of much persuasive power, a literary critic, and an epistolarian whose equal is scarcely to be found. However, the present study shall, of necessity, focus on Lovecraft the writer of fiction as illuminated by his works, his self-criticism in his many letters, and the literary influences that helped shape him as a fantaisiste of the first water. Like Poe, Lovecraft is a deserving writer whose emergence as an accepted and admired artist has been slow in coming; but come it must.

  A blended variety of critical approaches will be employed here, in the belief that no single “school” of criticism is capable of bringing out more than a fraction of the worth in an author’s effusions. While formalist philosophical, and biographical schools of criticism cast light, each in its way, on Lovecraft’s writings, a number of works lend themselves equally well to Jungian and mythic-archetypal criticism. Following the great Northrop Frye, one must allow that a work of fiction belongs as much to the reader and critic as to the author—that in seeking interpretations and critical discernments of a work, one need not confine oneself to those things of which the author was certain to have been consciously aware. Indeed, Lovecraft himself, though writing more for himself than critics or readers, largely subscribed to this view, remarking in a letter of 7 November 1930 to Clark Ashton Smith: “As for the unconscious element in composition . . . I agree with you that it is really very considerable.” The present study brings a number of critical approaches to bear on Lovecraft and attempts to present a balanced view—for no matter how much one admires an author’s writing, no matter how certain one is that an emerging author shall come in time to have his greatness more generally acknowledged, one must recognise that any writer is somewhat uneven, that in all honesty some works are decidedly less worthy than others.

  The organisation of this study is essentially chronological—this approach being far less problematical than, say, a thematic grouping of the works—in the sense that the chapters run in a chronological sequence of periods and the stories chosen for main critical treatment within each chapter are treated, except for occasional groupings of convenience, in the order in which they were written (which is often quite different from the order in which they were published). However, in each chapter a number of works not treated in the chapter’s main sections are grouped together at the end for somewhat lighter critical treatment under the classification “Other Writings.” This classification does not necessarily imply a general value judgment against these works, for although some few of them (for example, “Herbert West—Reanimator”) are frankly inferior to the mainstream of the Lovecraft canon, a good many others (for example, “The Strange High House in the Mist”) are excellent. Rather, this mode of classification recognises that, in a study of this length, not every work can be afforded equally extensive treatment and that, even among works of high general merit, not all stories provide critical potential equally illuminative of Lovecraft. (One can scarcely claim, for example, that there is as much interpretative potential in the splendid prose poem “What the Moon Brings” as there is in “The Dunwich Horror.”) Further, this mode of organisation provides an opportunity to comment on a little of Lovecraft’s poetry in each period. Although it is not primarily for his poems that Lovecraft will be remembered, they do shed additional light on his nature as an imaginative artist—especially considering that in a sense Lovecraft’s fictional style is an outgrowth of his poetic instincts, much as can be said for Faulkner.

  Since Lovecraft had a hand in a voluminous mass of “revision” (ghostwriting) pieces during his career—to the extent that in all likelihood we shall never know all the facts concerning exactly what he ghostwrote, or for whom—and since much of this writing is decidedly inferior to his primary work and was produced under artistically artificial circumstances, no attempt has been made here to cover the bulk of Lovecraft’s writing bearing the bylines of other writers. Exceptions are the Houdini piece and two works written for Zealia Bishop; in particular, “The Mound” is a major piece forming an important element in the Lovecraft Mythos.

  The writers who to some extent influenced Lovecraft are numerous. For the most part the influences are very slight, but important influences are to be discerned in the cases of Poe, Hawthorne, Dunsany, and Machen; it is
argued in the final chapter that Lovecraft derives certain central points of influence from each of these writers, assimilating them to Lovecraftian purposes of high originality. Decidedly, Lovecraft as fantaisiste is a great deal more than the sum of his parts.

  This study is the first full critical survey of Lovecraft’s fiction ever published. As one who has studied Lovecraft’s work since 1955, I may, however, make bold to predict that critical attention to the gentleman from Providence will expand with the passage of time. Lovecraft will endure.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., Sauk City, Wisconsin, for their kind permission to quote from the writings and letters of H. P. Lovecraft.

  Special thanks go to Lovecraft scholar and friend S. T. Joshi for the many varieties of insight and assistance given me along the way. I am especially glad to have had his Index to the Selected Letters, without which the writing of the present volume, with its dependence on nearly a thousand otherwise unindexed Lovecraft letters, would have been virtually impossible.

  I give thanks to all those friends and colleagues whose encouragement has so furthered the progress of this book. I thank Dr. John and Ann Dixon, of the house in Vermont that I was able to identify as the Akeley house, for their kind hospitality and interest in my work. In particular, I thank my friend Donald Wandrei for his invaluable assistance and encouragement.

  I am indebted to the highly professional editorial staff at Greenwood Press for the splendid job they have done in the production process; they have been a pleasure to work with.

  Loving thanks go to my wife Mollie—herself a serious Lovecraftian—who endured my reading most of this volume aloud to her and offered many helpful comments, and to whom the work is dedicated.

  Finally, thanks go to the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft for having lived and written—for having remained true to his artistic principles, for having enriched the lives of all who shall read him.

  I. Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  His Life in Brief

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft stands as a figure unique in all of literature. His strangely fertile mind has produced a corpus of stories, novels, and poems whose nature transcends facile classification; to say merely that he wrote “horror stories” is to miss much of the depth of conceptualisation that pervades his work, work characterised by intensely mood-evoking narrative power. Like all human beings, Lovecraft is a complex tangle of facets and contradictions, but his literary legacy to us is one that is nevertheless rich in its interpretability and in its capacity solidly to hold and charm the mind. One can like or dislike Lovecraft and his writings, but one cannot forget or ignore them, or fail to find them worthy of thoughtful scrutiny. One does not simply read Lovecraft; one rereads and ponders him—one is haunted by him.

  Lovecraft’s life was one that gives the lie to myths that readily arise around such a person—that he was a sickly recluse with no friends, that he was a Poe-like, gloomy figure steeped in morbidity, that he lacked a sense of humour, that he lived apart from the real world and cared nothing for it—but his life was one nonetheless strange in its own ways. If Lovecraft was not the spectral phantom of thoughtless folklore, neither was he a colourless or average personality, any more than any great artist is likely to be. His was, after all, an exceedingly uncommon mind.

  Lovecraft was born at 9:00 a.m. on 20 August 1890 in the home of his maternal grandfather Whipple Phillips at 454 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island. He was to reside for all his relatively brief life in his beloved Providence, except for his two years (“my period of exile,” he called this period) in New York. His father Winfield Scott Lovecraft was permanently institutionalised with paresis in 1893 and died five years later, so that Lovecraft’s father-figure soon came to be his maternal grandfather, a kindly, intellectually inclined gentleman who gave the child free access to his enormous personal library and encouraged the boy’s intellectual precocity and his early urge to write. From this ersatz-paternal influence and the inspiration of the beauty and fascination that he found in his native city, Lovecraft developed a mentality inclined to thrive on love of the past—in particular, he imbibed Colonial New England history and architecture, the appeals of eighteenth-century writers, and the lore of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Lovecraft’s childhood was a time of intellectual discovery and challenge, a time of comfortable and leisurely family life, a time to which he would always look back with fondness and longing.

  His mindset soon took on a flavour of strangeness with his discovery, at the age of eight, of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. “It was my downfall,” he later wrote, “and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb.”

  1 Although at this age his interest in the classical world remained strong—he wrote, for example, a competent verse narrative of the Homeric Ulysses and ably translated passages of Ovid from the Latin—there is little doubt that this youthful discovery of Poe engaged his mind powerfully to the effect that he would have a lasting predilection for the sombre and the bizarre. In 1905 at the age of fifteen, Lovecraft wrote his first (discounting very early juvenilia) fictional effort; “The Beast in the Cave,” a piece of decidedly horrific cast; but it would be twelve more years before he would begin in earnest, near his twenty-seventh birthday, to write horror tales. In the intervening years, he produced much astronomical and other scientific writing, minor poetry, amateur press criticism, and many essays, but none yet of the spectral fiction for which he would come to be known.

  In 1904 Lovecraft’s grandfather and mentor Whipple Phillips died, and the event ushered in not only grief but also financial strain and upheaval for the family. The old homestead was sold, and Sarah Susan Lovecraft (for six years now a widow) took her son Howard to live several blocks eastward at 598 Angell Street, a two-family house. There Lovecraft, beset with nervous disorders and only sporadically attending Hope Street High School, wrote astronomical articles for local newspapers and slowly adapted to the shock of no longer living in the relative luxuriance of the Phillips home. In 1908, short of credits for graduation, Lovecraft stopped attending high school, never to return for a diploma. Like Milton after Cambridge, however, Lovecraft demonstrated that for some people much more can be said for self-education than for formal schooling. Indulged by his mother (as he would later be by her sisters Lillian and Annie), he declined to seek employment or enter much into the world around him for the first five years after his leaving high school; he essentially stayed home, writing a great deal of imitative eighteenth-century-style verse, reading and learning with a voraciousness the results of which are well known to anyone who has thoughtfully perused some of the erudite letters later to come from Lovecraft’s pen. He felt his life blighted by his inability to go to Brown University and formally continue his education as once planned, but the ironic fact is that he attained a self-taught education of which some university professors could well afford to be envious.

  In 1913, when Lovecraft (truly at this stage of his life something of a hermit) had been largely out of social circulation for five years except for a few bicycle outings with such friends as Chester and Harold Munroe—they maintained an elaborately constructed clubhouse in nearby Rehoboth, Massachusetts—an event occurred which, though it may have seemed of little consequence at the time, would give a great deal of shape to Lovecraft’s life. Lovecraft wrote a long letter to the editor of The Argosy denouncing the love stories of author Fred Jackson. His attack provoked an avalanche of replies from other readers, most of them strongly disagreeing with Lovecraft’s views. Lovecraft in turn replied in verse, with a long poem “Ad Criticos” containing such digs as

  Scrawl on, sweet Jackson, raise the lover’s leer;

  ’Tis plain you please the fallen public ear.

  (Lovecraft here is, of course, emulating his idol Alexander Pope.) Exchanges of this sort between Lovecraft and Jackson’s defenders continued in the letters column of The Argosy for over a year; the ed
itor eventually even set aside a section in the magazine for these letters. The controversy finally played out, but not without a profound effect on the course of Lovecraft’s life. Edward F. Daas, official editor of one faction of the United Amateur Press Association, noticed the letters and, impressed with Lovecraft’s way with words, recruited him into the UAPA. Thus began Lovecraft’s involvement with amateur journalism, an activity with which he would continue to be involved, in varying degrees, throughout his life—and, most important, an activity that had the effect of drawing Lovecraft into a circle of friends, an emergence from solitude, and a social context for his real beginnings as a writer. He soon began to publish his intermittent amateur magazine The Conservative and to write extensive criticism for the UAPA’s official organ, the United Amateur. Lovecraft became vice-president of the UAPA in 1915, its president in 1917, and its official editor in 1920, and began a lifelong habit of voluminous correspondence with friends whom he had met through amateur journalism. He was eventually to write tens of thousands of letters, more than any other epistolarian in history, in fact—his output exceeded the combined outputs of Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and Samuel Johnson—and his letters not only serve to illuminate him personally but in many cases stand as astonishing displays of erudition and original thought. It is most significant that Lovecraft’s social contacts in the amateur press led, in a sense, to his beginning anew to write fiction, which he had abandoned for a decade. In 1917 his amateur press friend W. Paul Cook, a printer who lived in Athol, Massachusetts, and who accepted the contract to print The Conservative, persuaded Lovecraft to try his hand at writing short stories. That summer Lovecraft wrote his first two serious pieces of weird fiction: “The Tomb” (June) and “Dagon” (July).