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

  In 1919 Lovecraft began attending amateur journalism conventions. It can be speculated that the permanent hospitalisation of his mother at this time may well have left him feeling freer to do such things, for there is no doubt that in her emotional instability she coddled and inhibited him to an abnormal degree. Shortly after the death of his mother, Lovecraft met amateur journalist Sonia H. Greene at a convention in Boston during the summer of 1921 and began a romance with her. The following year he made his first visit to New York City, where Sonia lived, and met his young correspondence friend Frank Belknap Long. Lovecraft had begun to get out and see a little more of the world; his visit to New York was followed by other treks, to New England spots and to Ohio.

  At this time he was well into the writing of his early weird fiction, producing (among other tales) “The Terrible Old Man,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” “Celephaïs;” and “The Picture in the House” in 1920; “The Nameless City,” “The Quest of Iranon,” “The Outsider,” and “The Music of Erich Zann” in 1921; “The Hound” and “The Lurking Fear” in 1922. However, at this point there was virtually no market for his work. He gave vent to some of his tales in amateur press publications, notably The Tryout (published in Haverhill, Massachusetts); and his “The Lurking Fear” and another, more gruesome, serialisation called “Herbert West—Reanimator” found print in a magazine named Home Brew, which Lovecraft would come to refer to as a “vile rag.” His real ventures into published authordom had to wait until the beginning of publication in 1923 of Weird Tales, the magazine that would publish the majority of his works over the years.

  In a March 1924 elopement to New York, Lovecraft finally married Sonia, with whom he had been touring New England and corresponding heavily for three years; they set up housekeeping in Brooklyn. Sonia, an accomplished milliner and businesswoman, provided virtually all of their income; Lovecraft, though he jobhunted sedulously in New York and occasionally made a little money writing advertising copy and the like, was ill-prepared to meet the demands of full-blown economic responsibility in his new life, and remained essentially unemployed. He and his friends—Frank Long, Samuel Loveman, Donald and Howard Wandrei, James F. Morton, and others—formed a club devoted to heated discussion, exploration of secondhand bookshops, and other such occupations. Lovecraft was offered the editorship of Weird Tales, which had faltered financially under the editorship of Edwin Baird, but he was hesitant to move to Chicago to accept the post (fearing that the magazine would fold and strand him there), and the job went instead to Farnsworth Wright. Sonia, less hesitant to move west to improve upon career opportunities, did so early in 1925, leaving Lovecraft set up in another Brooklyn apartment; they remained married, but it is obvious that the marriage had problems.

  Lovecraft came to despise New York for its “mongrelised” and densely packed population and the ruination of what had been its antique charms. In April of 1926 he returned to Providence to live in an apartment at 10 Barnes Street, his aunt Lillian Clark taking up housekeeping soon thereafter in an apartment upstairs. Sonia came to Providence hoping to live with her husband and carry on a millinery business there, hut Lovecraft’s aunts Lillian and Annie, with an exaggeratedly proud sense of the status of their family in Providence, refused to have Lovecraft thus supported by his wife. Lovecraft quietly acquiesced in the refusal, and the marriage was essentially over at this point, though Lovecraft did not formally take steps toward divorce until 1929, and only then under Sonia’s insistence. (Interestingly, an official final decree was never filed.)

  Lovecraft’s return to his native Providence signalled an astonishing new burst of creativity in one whose pen had produced, during the two-year New York “exile,” only such few tales as “The Shunned House,” “He,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” and “In the Vault.” Providence seems to have been the elixir needed, for beginning with his return Lovecraft entered an artistic period in which he would produce some of his finest and best-known stories. Finishing a sketch that he had begun in New York, he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” in the summer of 1926, giving considerable form to what would come to be known as the Lovecraft Mythos. (August Derleth, however, was later inclined to give undue weight to the centrality of this tale to the Lovecraft canon, and unfortunately took the tale as an excuse to coin the much-used term “Cthulhu Mythos,” a term of which Lovecraft is virtually certain to have disapproved, had he ever heard it.) In late 1926 and early 1927 Lovecraft experimented twice with novel length, writing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, though he was dissatisfied with both works. In March of 1927 he wrote what he himself would come to consider his best story, “The Colour out of Space,” published in Amazing Stories, and in August of 1928 after visiting W. Paul Cook in Athol and Mrs. Edith Miniter in North Wilbraham (both towns in western Massachusetts) he drew heavily and cleverly on his impressions of these places and wrote “The Dunwich Horror.”

  From 1929 onward Lovecraft was busy travelling, visiting friends, and, at least sporadically, writing. Although he was encouraged by the publication of “The Dunwich Horror” in Weird Tales, he wrote, with the exception of some ghostwriting for Zealia Bishop, practically no more fiction until 1930, when he brought his impressions from a 1928 Vermont visit out of incubation and wrote his Vermont tale “The Whisperer in Darkness,” labouring over the story for several months off and on. He then visited Quebec and wrote a 136-page “Quebeck” travellogue, indulging in his favorite archaisms of spelling and language and composing purely for his own amusement. Early in 1931 he ventured into a new experiment with novel length, writing his Antarctica tale At the Mountains of Madness, only to be plunged into dejection by the refusal of Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales to publish it. He recovered sufficiently by December, however, to produce a remarkable story, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

  The next few years for Lovecraft would see a good deal of travel—to the Carolinas and Georgia and Florida in 1931; to Virginia, Tennessee, the home of E. Hoffmann Price of New Orleans, to other parts of the South, and to Canada again in 1932; to various New England spots and New York in 1933; to Florida for a long stay with his friend Robert Barlow and family in the summer of 1934, and again in the summer of 1935. During this period Lovecraft wrote rather sparsely in quantity but impressively in quality. In 1932 he produced “The Dreams in the Witch House”—a tale inferior in some respects to his usual level but captivating nonetheless—and his collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” a sequel to his 1926 story “The Silver Key.” In 1933 Lovecraft wrote, besides several pieces ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, “The Thing on the Doorstep.” From this point onward Lovecraft’s production, though very sparse, was most impressive in conceptualisation. From November 1934 to March 1935, he wrote his magnificently cosmic novelette “The Shadow out of Time,” followed by “The Haunter of the Dark” in November 1935 and by two collaborations in 1936: “In the Walls of Eryx” with Kenneth Sterling and “The Night Ocean” with Robert Barlow. This latter piece was published under Barlow’s name, and it is uncertain how heavy a hand Lovecraft had in the piece; in any case it stands as his final fictional effort.

  Lovecraft’s health had been faltering for some time at this point, and in late 1936 he was beset continually with what he described as digestive troubles and a swelling in the feet; characteristically, he did not seek medical attention, but blamed his discomfort on the New England winter cold from which he had recoiled all his life. When his aunt Annie Gamwell finally summoned doctors, Lovecraft was diagnosed as having cancer. On 10 March 1937 he entered Jane Brown Memorial Hospital, where he died early on the morning of the fifteenth, of intestinal cancer and inflammation of the kidneys. He was buried in his grandparents’ family lot in Swan Point Cemetery, in his beloved Providence, with his name entered on the central shaft but without an individual gravestone. Forty years later, by the fundraising organisational efforts of Lovecraft scholar Dr. Dirk Mosig and with money contributed by members of the Esoteric
Order of Dagon (an amateur press association formed in honour of Lovecraft), a gravestone was provided, installed on 19 August 1977; besides the name H. P. Lovecraft and his inclusive dates, the inscription on the stone reads: “I am Providence.”

  Lovecraft’s life as an artist of weird fiction properly begins, however, only with the critical recognition that has slowly but steadily grown up after his death. In 1939 August Derleth and Donald Wandrei formed the publishing firm of Arkham House (named after Lovecraft’s fictive town-name) for the purpose of publishing the writings of Lovecraft, which otherwise could have languished forgotten in the files of Weird Tales and other magazines or in piles of unpublished manuscripts. Thus, over the years the stories, novels, and even some of the poetry remained in print, appearing eventually in many paperback editions and making Lovecraft known to more readers than he could ever have imagined to be aware of his work. Unfortunately, under the editorship of Derleth, the texts of Lovecraft’s stories are extremely corrupt, containing as they do literally thousands of errors.

  2 Nevertheless, Lovecraft has remained visible as a writer because of these editions of his work. Although his popularity has most often been predominantly of the “fan” or “cult” type (aside from some early serious scholarship by George Wetzel and others), he began in the 1970s to achieve more serious critical attention in his native United States—some decades after his critical acceptance in France, where, like Poe, he has enjoyed ready and warm acclaim at the hands of readers and critics who have never automatically stigmatised all fantasy fiction as literarily inferior. It is noteworthy that in order to “classify” Lovecraft as a writer in a specific field, we must resort to the French word fantaisiste, a word surrounded, for the French, by no attitudinal colourings of disparagement. Lovecraft’s stories have been translated into a great many languages; his life and writings have been the subject of several graduate theses and dissertations; at least one college literature course has been devoted to a critical reading of his works alone;

  3 five volumes of his letters have been published; he has been the subject of many scholarly panel discussions at various international conferences; and he has sparked a growing corpus of critical commentary and analysis. Perhaps most significantly, unlike many writers in his chosen field, Lovecraft has continued to be read and admired, far beyond what he would have perceived to be the limits of his popularity.

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  Further biographical details will emerge as they best relate to him as a writer—in connexion with Lovecraft’s works themselves—in the critical discussions to follow.

  His Philosophy as an Artist

  It is a central tenet of formalist criticism that a work of art must stand on its own merits, quite apart from any consideration of the author’s life, intentions, or philosophical views about art or other matters. Indeed Lovecraft’s stories and novels do stand by themselves, considered internally in terms of their craft, style, and thematic qualities. Nevertheless, that school of criticism is only one among many views, and it is interesting to consider at least in brief the views of the man who gave the world the Lovecraft Mythos, especially his views as they concern art, the artist, and the universe to which the artist must respond. While Lovecraft’s works can and should be examined in formalist critical terms, as linguistic and stylistic objects in their own right, it adds. something of depth to one’s understanding of these works to examine such considerations as the philosophical sources and undertones; indeed, the Lovecraft canon is a good example of the dictum that to find what there is to find in the appreciation of fiction, one needs must eschew narrow approaches and employ a blend of critical viewpoints. The attitudinal underpinning of Lovecraft’s writing will be noted in more detail in examining the works themselves; it will suffice here to give an aesthetic overview. For that purpose, we can do no better than to rely rather heavily on Lovecraft’s own highly illuminating pronouncements.

  Lovecraft, like most people, changed his views at various times in his life, and even seemed to hold views at a given time that were contradictory at least in part. For example, Lovecraft in his letters often gave vent to seemingly horrendous “racist” remarks against Jews, black people, and others, yet habitually treated individual people with warmth and kindness, even marrying a Jewess—she, Sonia, it was who remarked that his “hatred” seemed to be a hatred of people in the collective abstract, for he got on well with them as individuals. As he grew from his thirties into his forties, into the twilight of his short life, Lovecraft changed politically from a rather brittle conservative to a liberal with express socialist leanings—a change opposite in direction to that in which most people indulge as they grow older, but one which finds its explanation readily in the fact that the experience of the Great Depression brought Lovecraft to a reasoned opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, an opposition made very clear in his letters.

  With regard to spiritual matters, Lovecraft had absolutely no use for religion whatever. He saw a real dichotomy between science and religion, and an attempt to place him in Sunday school in early childhood, when he was already aware that the world was full of viewpoints other than the Christian, failed utterly. He professed agnosticism all his life, though somewhat approving of the existence of churches and organised religions for those who need them. In a 1935 letter he remarked:

  While religion was a perfectly natural thing for mankind in early ages, when nothing definite was known about the constitution of matter & the causes of natural phenomena, there is really no basis for its existence in the light of what we know about the universe, & about our own mental & emotional processes, today.

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  This disinclination toward religion extended to a loathing of all mystical or supernatural matters, including astrology, which he abominated as the worst kind of superstition. Lovecraft’s view of the universe was essentially that of a “mechanistic materialist.

  6 The cosmos for him was a pointless, random collocation of atoms, winding down toward total entropy like an expiring clock. This view did not make him morose, for he took the attitude that one may as well enjoy beauty and aesthetic stimulation and the warmth of friendship even in a meaningless world. His view, however, did seem to give him a sort of objectivity or aesthetic distance in which his fictive pantheon could flourish; since he had no belief in the supernatural, he was emotionally free to imagine any sort of ultimate cosmic entities he liked.

  Further, his world-view was such that mankind was, to him, incidental and wholly insignificant, and this view is the thematic key to much of Lovecraft’s fiction. The horror, ultimately, in a Lovecraft tale is not some gelatinous lurker in dark places, but rather the realisation, by the characters involved, of their helplessness and their insignificance in the scheme of things—their terribly ironic predicament of being sufficiently well-developed organisms to perceive and feel the poignancy of their own motelike unimportance in a blind and chaotic universe which neither loves them nor even finds them worthy of notice, let alone hatred or hostility. The true horror, for example, of “The Shadow out of Time” is not the Great Race, or even the older, intangible entities that the Great Race fears; rather, it is the crushing realisation by the protagonist that he and all mankind, far from occupying the centre of the cosmic stage even on earth, are scarcely important or long-enduring enough to occupy that stage’s shabbiest comer. The protagonist finds that there are vast cycles of time and immensities of space that reduce human concerns to the merest atoms. Thus was Lovecraft able to play upon the central idea of utter cosmic alienage, removing the spotlight from mankind and playing it upon the blindly wheeling cosmos itself.

  7 Lovecraft makes his own central statement of literary philosophy in a 1927 letter to Farnsworth Wright:

  Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards�
��are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

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  Lovecraft further remarks, in a 1931 letter:

  The only things I can conceive as worthy protagonists of cosmic drama are basic natural forces and laws, and what spells interest for me is simply the convincing illusion of the thwarting, suspension, or disturbance of such forces and laws. To me a climax is simply an effective demonstration of a temporary defeat of the cosmic order. I use human puppets as symbols, but my interest is not with them. It is the situation of defeat itself—and the sensation of liberation therein implicit—which provides me with the thrills and catharsis of Aesthetic endeavor.

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  Nevertheless, Lovecraft of course had to operate on the basis that fiction is a human activity—that the horrors to be experienced are experienced vicariously by the reader through the subjective reactions of the fictional character. One finds these character reactions to be highly significant; the horror is not really some unspeakable external reality, but rather the protagonist’s emotional reactions to his glimpses of that reality, and his realisation of the awesome implications for mankind. In “The Colour out of Space,” for example, it is not so much the “blasted heath” that one finds horrific; rather, it is the narrator’s ponderous fear of that site and its implications, in his mind, of unspeakable alienage. Thus, one may term Lovecraft’s approach to fiction a sort of “ironic impressionism”—impressionism because it is the act of perceiving and feeling and pondering the implications of glimpsed external realities that finds emphasis, rather than those realities themselves; ironic because Lovecraft on the one hand makes the human capacity for fear and other emotional responses the conduit of effectiveness in presenting his ideas, while on the other hand reducing this very feeling and thinking human creature to self-understood insignificance by the implications of that creature’s glimpses of what lies beyond his previous understanding of the cosmos. The “blasted heath” is not so much a physical phenomenon as a psychological process, a fear-response and an awe, in a mind that by the very experience discovers its own minuteness and precariousness in a cosmos far vaster, far more indifferent to human concerns than that mind has ever imagined. This ironic capability to sense one’s own vanishingly small place in the universe is the central feature of the Lovecraft Mythos and constitutes an effect virtually unprecedented in literature.