Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Author
The American writer of the twentieth century most frequently compared with Poe, in the quality of his art (bizarre, brilliant, inspired, and original, yet frequently hackneyed, derivative, and repetitive), its thematic preoccupations (the obsessive depiction of psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror perceived as “truth”), and its critical and commercial reception during the writer’s truncated lifetime (dismal), is H.P. Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island (1890-1937). Like Poe, Lovecraft created a small body of work carved by monomaniacal passion out of a gothic tradition that had already become ossified in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Poe, though more systematically than Poe, Lovecraft set forth an aesthetics of the art to which, by temperament and family history, he was fated. (Lovecraft’s frequently updated essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) is a pioneering effort in tracing the history of the gothic sensibility from Ann Radcliffe, Hugh Walpole, “Monk” Lewis, and Charles Maturin through Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, Poe, and Lovecraft’s contemporaries Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, M.R. James and others.) Both tried to sell their writing and editing skills in a debased and demeaning marketplace, with little financial reward, burning themselves out in the process. Both were beset by dreams, nightmares, “visions.” Both entered upon brief, disastrous marriages (though there are bleakly comical overtones to Lovecraft’s marriage to a woman seven years his elder.) Both left no heirs. Both died prematurely, Poe at forty, Lovecraft at forty-six, having egregiously mistreated their bodies.
Open Culture, 2015:
The Atlantic, 2015
The Unlikely Reanimation of H.P. Lovecraft
Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine Lovecraft faced such poverty and obscurity, when regions of Pluto are named for Lovecraftian monsters, the World Fantasy Award trophy bears his likeness, his work appears in the Library of America, the New York Review of Books calls him “The King of Weird,” and his face is printed on everything from beer cans to baby books to thong underwear. The author hasn’t just escaped anonymity; he’s reached the highest levels of critical and cultural success. His is perhaps the craziest literary afterlife this country has ever seen.
Lovecraft in 1934. (Lucius B. Truesdell / Wikimedia)
Which isn’t to say Lovecraft’s reanimation is simply a feel-good story. His rise to fame has brought both his talents and flaws into sharper focus: This is a man who, in a 1934 letter, described “extra-legal measures such as lynching & intimidation” in Mississippi and Alabama as “ingenious.” On the 125th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth on August 20, 1890, the author’s legacy has never been more secure—or more complex. Stephen King calls him “the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale,” and yet Lovecraft was also unarguably racist—two distinct labels that those studying and enjoying his works today have had to reconcile.
Lovecraft never really held an office job; he was too proud, or possibly too fragile. (Various anxieties and ailments precluded him from attending college or participating in World War I.) He spent much of his time writing, and, as a child prodigy who continued scribbling until his “death diary,” he left behind a mountain of work. He wrote hundreds of poems and scores of essays, the most famous beginning, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He wrote tens of thousands of letters—nearly 100,000, according to some estimates.
The New York Review of Books, 2014:
Beyond the peculiarities of Lovecraft’s vision is his writing style. Edmund Wilson was one of the first to note the pile-up of adjectives in Lovecraft’s sentences and the ubiquitous hyperinflated tone. “The only horror,” Wilson writes, “is the horror of bad taste and bad art.”
But Lovecraft’s writing included several other faults not noted by Edmund Wilson. There is a certain tonal monotony in Lovecraft’s work resulting from his technical limitations: he cannot modulate out of the same death-haunted key.
In addition, he had no ear at all for common speech, and his New Englanders sound like vaudevillians: “Nothin’ was to be diff’runt on the aoutside, only we was to keep shy o’ strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us.” When he tries for anything resembling realism, he typically fails. In a period when American writers were struggling to find a natural idiom, his default style is that of upholstered Victorian prose:
Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare…we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One—perhaps a lone survivor—to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.
His narrators cannot calm down; the fever never breaks. Accordingly, simple human decency, kindness, and generosity have no place anywhere in the stories. Their emotional range is limited to dread on one end of the spectrum and hysteria on the other.
When confronted with the monstrous, furthermore, his narrators tend to lapse into a variety of understatements in which the hideous object of attention is claimed to be indescribable. The horrors, it turns out, are unnamable, and “The Unnamable” stands as a key story. Lovecraft supplies the reader with hundreds of characteristic sentences in which the monstrosity is first located and then verbally barricaded as if it were a sacred object. For example: “The effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict,” or “The cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey.”
This effect is intensified by Lovecraft’s habit of beginning his dramatic paragraphs with topic sentences, a habit he probably acquired from his reading of discursive prose. For any fiction writer, this technique is tricky and dangerous to use; it loads on to the beginning of the paragraph the conclusion that the reader should come to on her own by the paragraph’s end. In effect, the topic-sentence habit bullies the reader into having the reaction the narrator has already experienced before the evidence itself has been presented.
Such a procedure violates the logic of sequential perception and outfits the topic sentences with a previews-of-coming-attractions tone: “Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of the earth’s globe,” one paragraph begins, and one paragraph later, “Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed disturbingly close at hand.” Confronted with paragraph after paragraph constructed this way, along with the racism, misogyny, and the semicomical monsters, including hissing six-foot penguins, the reader may well, out of exasperation and distaste, lay the book aside.
Vulture, 2014: “What You Learn About George R.R. Martin After Hanging Out With Him for 801 Minutes”
Day 1: Thursday, October 23.
Providence, Rhode Island.
“I thought this would be spookier,” admits George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones series, as he stares down at the grave of H. P. Lovecraft. We’re at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, final resting place of the horror writer whom Martin numbers among his inspirations. “Is this the cemetery where there are ghouls underground eating the dead?” he wonders aloud.
There’s no sign of malevolent spirits, but a slight drizzle does add a little eerie atmosphere. Lovecraft, who died in 1937, is interred with his parents in a family plot. Fans have added a headstone of his own, at which they have left tributes: shells, bugs in boxes, a plastic watermelon slice. “I should leave him an offering, but I don’t have anything cool,” says Martin, who is wearing his trademark fisherman’s cap and suspenders. “I should have brought some Westeros coins. I usually have some in my pocket.”
Unfortunately, the coins—currency from the fictional world of Martin’s books, inscribed VALAR MORGHULIS (“All men must die” in High Valyrian)—are back home in New Mexico, overlooked in the packing for this East Coast tour. At this stop, Martin is to receive the Brown University Library’s inaugural Harris Collection Literary Award. We leave a few regular old pennies on Lovecraft’s tombstone, and Martin wiggles his fingers under his chin in a salute to the author’s squidlike deity Cthulhu. “I eat calamari in my revenge!” Martin jokes. It’s hard to imagine what the reclusive Lovecraft would have made of today’s Providence, which is a lot less gloomy than it was in his day. Driving away from the cemetery and through town, Martin turns mock tour guide: “There’s Tortilla Flats, where he often ate his burritos! And ice cream—if you’re going to eat a kitten, you need some ice cream!”
Salon, 2014:
We live in a culture increasingly dominated by fandoms, and while the enthusiasm of fans can be invigorating it’s not always conducive to critical thought. When we love a writer’s work — and I must confess that I do love Lovecraft’s, if not everything about it — we often have an attendant and childish desire to idolize its maker. In Lovecraft’s case, this impulse is particularly perverse because the power of his fiction derives from the hot mess of its creator’s psyche. Like Poe, Lovecraft speaks to a gnarled, doomy and phobic corner of human nature that all of us visit from time to time.
This is leavened by the undeniable camp appeal of his prose style, with all its wheezing, creaking, gibbering, florid and hilariously hyperbolic excesses: “I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.” Some readers cannot tolerate such cavalcades of bossy adjectives; the critic Edmund Wilson once complained, “Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words — especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.” Which is a fair cop … and yet, and yet. For the Lovecraft buffs I know, the silliness is a significant part of the charm.
If there was ever a writer who should not be taken too seriously, it’s this one. Although Lovecraft’s stated theme — the terror of confronting the insignificance of humanity in an unfeeling, unthinking universe — is as heavy as it gets, the latent content of carnal, particularly sexual, revulsion often threatens to take over. The oozing goo, the primordial squids! Whatever Lovecraft thought he was doing, he wasn’t big on self-awareness, or else he’d have been Beckett. Freud and his theories of repression and sublimation become impossible to resist when you’re tracing this author’s energy to its source — that is, to all the stuff Lovecraft was avoiding thinking about while allegedly facing the unthinkable. This is what makes his fiction go.
And race is part of it. Lovecraft’s contempt for and horror at what he saw as the degraded, brute physicality of non-WASPs was really his dread of physicality itself. Like most racists — and despite the “man of his time” defense, Lovecraft was worse than many of his day — the loathing he directed at others was a deflected form of self-hatred. That doesn’t excuse it, any more than you get a pass on kicking a puppy because you had a bad day at the office.
The unsavory manifestations of Lovecraft’s dread can’t be surgically removed from his fiction by an act of willful blindness, as some fans seem to think. (And of course, it’s a lot easier to ignore the hateful elements of someone’s work when it’s not directed at people like you.) To the contrary, they help us to understand it, but to do that we need to be able to accept the truth that even great artists — greater ones than Lovecraft, certainly — have their ugly sides, and that ugliness can be inextricable from their greatness. Art, being human, is an expression of the whole self. This isn’t the same as accepting Lovecraft’s racism. You can acknowledge, contemplate and discuss that racism without feeling obliged to reject the work as a whole.
The Wall Street Journal, 2015:
His influence can be felt just about anywhere in pop culture, from film (the works of director John Carpenter, for instance) to comic books (“Watchman” creator Alan Moore and “Hellboy” creator Mike Mignola are two examples) to television (Lovecraft was a character in an episode of “Supernatural,” and Rod Serling adapted some of his stories for “Night Gallery”). Modern horror master and fellow New Englander Stephen King has occasionally tapped into Lovecraftian tradition, most recently in his 2014 novel “Revival.”
Starting today, HPL’s hometown of Providence, R.I., is celebrating the author’s 125th birthday in style with NecronomiCon, a four-day festival that will feature writers inspired by Lovecraft’s works, academic talks, games, vendors and “social events such as the dreaded Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast.”
The Guardian, 2014:
Ten things you should know about HP Lovecraft
10. Cthulhu is pronounced ‘khlul-loo’ (because we’ve all wondered at some point)
In a 1934 letter to amateur writer Duane W Rimel, Lovecraft explained how to pronounce the name of his alien creation:
The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man’s, hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats... The actual sound – as nearly as any human organs could imitate it or human letters record it – may be taken as something like Khlûl’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness.
Related sites:
H.P. Lovecraft’s Facebook Page (842,252 Likes)
Documentary Film: “Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown” (90 min)
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