H. P. Lovecraft

by Michel Houellebecq

  Antibiography

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft serves as example to all who wish to learn how to fail in life and eventually succeed in their work. And even on that score, results are not guaranteed. Practicing a policy of complete non-engagement vis-à-vis vital realities carries with it the risk of plunging into deepest apathy; one might no longer even write—and that is exactly what almost happened to him, several times. Another danger is suicide, which one must learn to negotiate with; thus, over the course of several years, Lovecraft always kept a small bottle of cyanide at hand. This can come to be very useful, so long as one can hold out. He did, but not without difficulty.

  First, money. In this regard HPL presents the disconcerting example of an individual who is both poor and disinterested. Without ever quite falling to the depths of utter destitution he was, nevertheless, extremely financially constrained throughout his life. His correspondence painfully reveals how he had to constantly pay attention to the price of each thing, including the most basic consumer items. He was never able to undertake a significant expenditure such as the purchase of a car or the dreamed-about trip to Europe.

  The bulk of his income derived from revision and correction work. He accepted work at extremely low rates, virtually for free if it was for friends; and when one of his invoices went unpaid, in general, he abstained from resending it. It was not dignified for a gentleman to become involved in sordid money matters or to express too lively an anxiety where his own interests were concerned.

  Otherwise, he did dispose of a small sum by inheritance that he nibbled at throughout his life, but it was too meager to amount to more than a small stipend. What’s more, it is somewhat poignant to note that at the time of his death this sum had subsided to almost zero, as if he had lived exactly the number of years allotted him by his (rather feeble) family fortune and his own (rather strong) ability to economize.

  As for his own works, they brought him almost nothing. In any case, he did not consider it proper to make a profession of literature. As he writes, “a gentleman shouldn’t write all his images down for a plebian rabble to stare at.” The sincerity of such a declaration is obviously difficult to appreciate; it might appear to us to be the consequence of a formidable web of inhibitions, but one must also consider it to be a rigid interpretation of the obsolete code of conduct to which Lovecraft adhered with all his might. He always wished to see himself as a country gentleman, cultivating literature as one of the fine arts, for the sake of his own pleasure and that of a few friends, without worrying about the public’s taste, fashionable themes, or anything else of the kind. Such a character no longer has a place in our society; he knew this, but always refused to take it into account. And, anyhow, what set him apart from a true “country gentleman” is that he owned nothing, but this, too, he did not wish to acknowledge.

  In an age of frenzied commercialism, it is a comfort to see one who so obstinately refused to “sell himself.” Here, for example, is the letter he attached to the first manuscript he sent to Weird Tales in 1923:

  “Dear sir,

  Having a habit of writing weird, macabre and fantastic stories for my own amusement, I have largely been simultaneously hounded by nearly a dozen well-meaning friends into deciding to submit a few of these Gothic horrors to your newly founded periodical. Enclosed are five tales written between 1917 and 1923.

  Of these the first two are probably the best. If they be unsatisfactory, the rest need not be read…

  […]

  I have no idea that these things will be found suitable for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself.

  My models are invariably the older writers, especially Poe, who has been my favourite literary figure since early childhood. Should any miracle impel you to consider the publication of my tales, I have but one condition to offer and that is that no excisions be made. If the tale cannot be printed as written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection. Excision by others is probably one reason why no living American author has a real prose style… but I am probably safe for my MSS are not likely to win your consideration. ‘Dagon’ has been rejected by Black Mask to which I sent it under external compulsion—much as I am sending you the enclosed.”

  Lovecraft was to change with regard to many points, especially his devotion to the style of the “old writers.” But he remained steadfastly proud and masochistic, and his fiercely anticommercial streak never varied: he refused to type his texts, he sent editors dirty, crumpled manuscripts, and he systematically disclosed all his prior rejections… He did everything to displease. No concessions. Here too, he played against himself.

  “Of course, I am unfamiliar with amatory phenomenon save through cursory reading.”

  —Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, September 27, 1919

  Lovecraft’s biography presents very few events. “Nothing ever happens” is the leitmotif of his letters. But it can be stated that this life, already so pared down, would have been rigorously empty had he not crossed paths with Sonia Haft Greene.

  Like him, she belonged to the “amateur journalism” movement. Around 1920 this movement was very active in the United States, and brought a number of isolated writers, who were outside the usual network of publishing, the satisfaction of seeing their work in print, distributed, and read. This was Lovecraft’s only social activity; it brought him all his friends, and also his wife.

  When she met him, she was thirty-eight years old, in other words, seven years his senior. She was divorced, had a sixteen-year-old daughter from her first marriage, lived in New York, and earned her living as a sales-woman in a clothing store.

  She appears to have immediately fallen in love with him. For his part, Lovecraft maintained a somewhat aloof attitude. In reality, he knew nothing about women. She had to take the first step as well as the ones that followed. She invited him to dinner, came to visit him in Providence. Finally, in a small Rhode Island village called Magnolia, she took the initiative and kissed him. Lovecraft blushed, turned pale. When Sonia gently teased him, he had to explain to her that it was the first time since his tender childhood years that he had been kissed.

  This was in 1922, when Lovecraft was thirty-two years old. He and Sonia were married two years later. With the passing months, he seems to have progressively decongealed. Sonia Greene was an exceptionally sweet and charming woman—general opinion indicates she was also a very attractive woman. And the unthinkable took place: the “old gentleman” fell in love.

  Later, after the failure of their marriage, Sonia destroyed all the letters Lovecraft had written her. Only one remains, bizarrely pathetic in its wish to fathom human love, written by one who feels himself to be so very far from humanity in every way. Here are a few brief passages from it:

  “Dear Mrs. Greene:

  The mutual love of man and woman for one another is an imaginative experience that consists of having its object hear a certain special relation to the aesthetic-emotional life of its possessor…

  With long years of slowly nurtured love comes adaptation and perfect adjustment; memories, dream-pictures, delicate, aesthetic stimuli and usual impressions of dream-beauty become permanent modifications through the influence of which each tacitly exercises upon the other.

  There is a universal difference between the romances of youth and of maturity. By forty or perhaps fifty a wholesome replacement process begins to operate, and love attains calm, cool depths based on tender association beside which the erotic infatuation of youth takes on a certain shade of cheapness and degradation.”

  Theoretically speaking, these considerations are not incorrect; they simply appear somewhat misplaced. Let’s just say that as a whole it is a somewhat unusual love letter. All the same, this blatant anti-eroticism does not hinder Sonia. She feels capable of coming to terms with her bizarre love
r’s reticence. There is, in relationships between human beings, an element of pure mystery, particularly remarkable in this case. Sonia appears to have understood Lovecraft perfectly: his frigidity, his inhibitions, his refusal of and aversion to life. As for him, who at thirty considered himself an old man, it’s amazing that he was able to envision a partnership with such a dynamic, lush, lively being. A divorced Jew, no less—which for a conservative anti-Semite such as himself, must have presented something of an insurmountable obstacle.

  It has been suggested that he might have wished to be supported financially. Although this is not necessarily a far-fetched idea, the turn events were to take must have cruelly belied such a project. Of course, as a writer, he may have given in to the temptation to “acquire new experiences” regarding sexuality and marriage. Finally, one must remember that it was Sonia who made all the first moves and that Lovecraft was never capable of saying “no” with regard to any matter whatsoever. But, there is yet another and more unlikely explanation that might appear to be the best: Lovecraft seems to have been in love with Sonia in a certain way, just as Sonia was in love with him. And these two dissimilar beings, who nonetheless loved one another, were united by the ties of matrimony on March 3, 1924.

  The Shock of New York

  Immediately after their marriage, the couple began living in Brooklyn in Sonia’s apartment. Lovecraft was to spend two of the most surprising years of his life there. The misanthropic and slightly sinister recluse from Providence was transformed into an affable, lively man, ever ready for an outing to a restaurant or a museum. He sent enthusiastic letters announcing his marriage:

  “Two are joined to form but one. Another will now bear the Lovecraft name. A new family is founded!”

  “I wish you could behold Grandpa this week, getting up regularly in the daytime, hustling briskly about,… And all this with a prospect of regular literary work—my first real job—in the offing.”

  His correspondents came to visit him; the Lovecrafts’ apartment was never empty. They were all taken aback when they met a young man of thirty-four where they had expected to find a disenchanted old man. Lovecraft at this point was equally surprised. He even began to entertain dreams of literary celebrity and to contact editors, to entertain the possibility of success. This miracle bore Sonia’s signature.

  He didn’t even miss the colonial architecture of Providence that he had considered so indispensable to his survival. On the contrary, his first contact with New York was marked by a sense of awe, echoes of which can be found in “He,” a largely autobiographical story written in 1925:

  “Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flower-like and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and itself become a starry firmament of dream redolent of faery music…”

  Lovecraft had never been so close to happiness as in that year of 1924. Had their union lasted… Had he been able to find a job as the editor of Weird Tales… He might have…

  But, it would all fall apart after a minor event with considerable consequences: Sonia lost her job. She tried opening her own boutique, but the business went under. As a result, Lovecraft was forced to look for work in order to ensure the subsistence of their household.

  This proved to be an absolutely impossible task. Nonetheless, he tried—he answered hundreds of job offers, applied for other jobs spontaneously… it was all a complete failure. Of course. He had no understanding of the realities behind words such as “dynamic”, “competitive”, “commercial sense”, “efficiency”… Still, in an economy that at the time was not even in crisis, he should have been able to find at least a subordinate position somewhere… But, no. Nothing at all. Apparently in the American economy of his era, there was absolutely no conceivable place for an individual like Lovecraft. This is a kind of mystery; and he himself, while quite aware of his eccentricity and his deficiencies, did not quite understand it.

  Here is an extract of the circular letter he ended up writing to “potential employers”:

  “The notion that not even a man of cultivation & good intelligence can possibly acquire rapid effectiveness in a field ever so slightly outside his own routine, would seem to be a naive one; yet recent events have shown me most emphatically what a widespread superstition it is. Since commencing two months ago, a quest for work for which I am naturally & scholastically well fitted, I have answered nearly a hundred advertisements without gaining so much as one chance for satisfactory hearing—& all, apparently because I cannot point to previous employment in the precise industrial subdivision represented by the various firms. Faring thus with the usual channels, I am at last experimentally taking the aggressive.”

  The vaguely burlesque nature of the endeavor (“experimentally,” for instance) should not mask the fact that Lovecraft found himself to be in a truly dire financial situation. And that his repeated failures were a surprise to him. Although he may have been vaguely aware that he was not altogether in step with the society of his day, he nonetheless had not expected such utter rejection. Further along, the distress pierces through when he announces that he is “willing, in deference to custom & necessity, to begin most modestly, & with the small remuneration which novices usually receive.” But there was nothing at all. No matter what the remuneration, his applications were of interest to no one. He was inadaptable to the market economy. And he began to sell his furniture.

  At the same time, his attitude toward his environment deteriorated. You have to be poor to truly understand New York. And Lovecraft was about to discover what lay behind the curtain. These paragraphs follow the earlier description of the city in “He”:

  “But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eye, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.”

  Here are the first hints of the racism that later nourishes HPL’s body of work. It first appears in a most banal form: unemployed, threatened by poverty, Lovecraft had more and more trouble tolerating the hard and aggressive urban environment. Furthermore, he began to feel bitterness toward immigrants of diverse origins, who he saw blending easily into the swirling melting pot that was America in the 1920s, while he himself, in spite of his pure Anglo-Saxon origins, was unable to find any work. But there was more. There was more to come.

  On December 31, 1924, Sonia left for Cincinnati, where she found a new job. Lovecraft refused to accompany her. He could not bear to be exiled in an anonymous Midwestern city. At any rate, he no longer believed in it—and he began to consider a return to Providence. One can follow the evolution of this process in “He”: “With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.”

  He nonetheless remained in New York a little over a year. Sonia lost her job in Cincinnati but found another in Cleveland. American mobility… She returned home every two weeks and brought her husband the money necessary to survive. And he continued in vain his pitiful search for employment. In fact he felt awful about it all. He would have liked to return home to Providence to his aunts, but he did not dare. For the very first time in his life it was impossible for him to behave as a gentleman. Here is how he described Sonia’s attitude to his aunt Lillian Clark:

  “I have never beheld a more admirable attitude of disinterested & solicitous regard; in which each financial
shortcoming is accepted & condoned as soon as it is proved inevitable, & in which acquiescence is extended even to my statements (as determined by my observation of the effect of varying conditions on my nerves) that the one essential ingredient of my life is a certain amount of quiet & freedom for creative literary composition… A devotion which can accept this combination of incompetence & aesthetic selfishness without a murmur contrary tho’ it must be to all expectations originally entertained; is assuredly a phenomenon so rare & so akin to the historic quality of saintliness, that no one with the least sense of artistic proportion could possibly meet it with other than the keenest reciprocal esteem, respect, admiration, & affection…”

  Poor Lovecraft, poor Sonia. The inevitable happened all the same, and in April 1926 Lovecraft abandoned the New York apartment and returned to Providence to live at his older aunt Lillian Clark’s house. He was to divorce Sonia three years later—and would never know another woman. In 1926, his life had for all intents and purposes ended. His veritable body of work—the “grand texts” series—was about to get underway.

  New York had marked him forever. During the course of 1925, his hatred of the “foul mongrels” of this modern Babylon, the “foreign colossus that gibbers and howls vulgarly…” did not cease to exasperate him and drove him delirious. It could even be posited that a fundamental figure in his body of work—the idea of a grand, titanic city, in whose foundations crawl repugnant nightmare beings—sprang directly from his New York experience.

  Racial Hatred

  Lovecraft had in fact always been a racist. But in his youth this racism did not go beyond what was acceptable within his social class—that of the puritanical Protestant old bourgeoisie of New England. Along these same lines, he was also by nature reactionary in every regard, be it verse technique or young girl’s dresses, he valued orderly, traditional notions over freer, progressive ones. There is nothing especially outstanding or eccentric about this. He was just particularly old-fashioned. It seemed self-evident to him that Anglo-Saxon Protestants were by nature entitled to the highest positions within the social order; as to other races (he really barely knew any other races, and had no wish to become acquainted with them), he only felt a distant and benevolent disdain toward them. Let each stick to his own station in life, avoid all thoughtless novelty and all will be well.