Lovecraft’s career as an author of weird tales can be dated to age fifteen, when he wrote “The Beast in the Cave.” Of course, there may have been earlier efforts, but he shared this story with friends, and it was eventually published. His first published work, however, was “The Tomb,” followed shortly thereafter by “Dagon” (here, below). These appeared in amateur journals in 1919, the year of his mother’s commitment to Butler Hospital for the Insane, and over the next few years he wrote dozens of stories that circulated in the same manner. Later, virtually all of these were reprinted in Weird Tales, with his first appearance there being “Dagon,” in October 1923. Lovecraft’s earliest efforts have been classed as “Poe” stories (evocations of horror, cast in the form of confessions or narratives) or “Dunsany” stories (inventive of mythology and folklore), and Lovecraft admitted that he attempted to copy their styles.42 While the early stories showed an emerging talent, they little reflect (perhaps with the exception of “Dagon”) what would eventually become Lovecraft’s own voice. In this volume, the first eight tales (concluding with “The Hound”) were all written prior to 1922 and are often overlooked in assessing Lovecraft’s achievements. Some—like “The Picture in the House” and “The Hound”—reveal Lovecraft beginning to work out how he could adapt the narrative and intense emotional style of Poe to fit his own themes, while others, such as “Dagon,” “Nyarlathotep,” and “The Nameless City,” in particular, show Lovecraft playing with the creation of mythologies.
The cover of Weird Tales for October 1923. Note that Lovecraft did not then (or ever) have an illustration of one of his stories appear on the cover, although his name often appeared.
With the composition of “The Festival” in 1923, Lovecraft began to write tales set in the recognizable landscape of New England, yet modified to include invented locales: the seaport of Kingsport, the vaguely inland town of Arkham, and the regions of the Miskatonic River. While “The Picture in the House” is set in New England and “Herbert West: Reanimator” takes place in part in Arkham, the locations are poorly developed. With “The Festival,” the town of Kingsport becomes an even more important “character” than the nameless narrator. But Lovecraft was not interested in mere local color or in establishing himself as a regional writer. His aims were much less mundane. He sought to show how commonplace, well-known neighborhoods could harbor and conceal the supernatural. The imaginative writer, wrote Lovecraft,
devotes himself to art in its most essential sense. It is not his business to fashion a pretty trifle to please the children, to point a useful moral, to concoct superficial “uplift” stuff . . . or to rehash insolvable human problems didactically. He is the painter of moods and mind-pictures—a capturer and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies—a voyager into those unheard of lands which are glimpsed through the veil of actuality but rarely, and only by the most sensitive.43
“Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class,” Lovecraft admitted,
but I have no wish to make such an appeal. The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me, for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author’s perspective. There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression. I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relations to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.44
Lovecraft’s stories circulated largely among his friends, and when he began selling them in 1923 to Weird Tales, the leading purveyor of similar fiction,45 he was paid, in keeping with the standards of the day, poorly. That is, he worked for the lofty rate of 1 cent per word (the “top” writers got 1½ cents per word, a rate never achieved by Lovecraft). The fledgling magazine settled in for a long run (1924 to 1954, though it appeared earlier than 1924 and had shrunk considerably by the late 1930s), but it never achieved the success of the bigger pulps such as Argosy, and its circulation was estimated at less than 50,000 at its peak. S. T. Joshi states that in 1925, Lovecraft received $35 for “The Festival” and $25 for “The Unnamable.”46
Lovecraft’s time of experimentation with styles and imitation was over by 1926, when he returned to Providence, and in his remaining years, he produced his greatest stories. “The Call of Cthulhu,” in many ways his signature tale, was written then, swiftly followed by his autobiographical The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and his grand The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), both unpublished during his lifetime. Lovecraft’s own favorite,47 “The Colour Out of Space,” was also written in 1927.
To make ends meet, he began the work known as “revision,” rewriting (and in many cases writing) more than thirty stories to be sold under the name of other authors. He published a formal schedule of fees for such work, and it became an important means of support for him. Clients came to him from his friends and correspondents and ranged from experienced writers to rank amateurs. The “revisions” are set forth in a table in Appendix 6. Some of the stories are almost pure Lovecraft (for example, Zealia Bishop’s “The Mound,” written in 1930, and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” nominally cowritten with E. Hoffmann Price in 1933); others partake more of the original authors. All reflect Lovecraft’s influence, for better or for worse.
Though the nation was still reeling from the effects of the stock market crash of 1929, the year 1931 brought forth two of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” written six years before his sudden death. At the Mountains of Madness demonstrated that the newly invented genre of scientific fiction could be used to explore deep themes, in particular Lovecraft’s vision of the insignificant place of mankind in the universe. The story—the record of an expedition to the Antarctic leading to the discovery of a hitherto-unknown civilization populated by races other than humans—has been produced in radio and film as well as graphic form, and its Antarctic setting was reused (without the philosophical weight) in John W. Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There? and the 1951 and 1982 movie versions of The Thing. “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” containing none of the science-fictional elements of At the Mountains of Madness, is Lovecraft’s version of an “invasion” tale, cast in the form of a narrative by a young man making a rite-of-passage journey around New England. It reeks of an indescribable genius loci that hides dark secrets. “The Shadow over Innsmouth” was eventually his first published book, issued in 1936 in a very limited edition (two hundred copies were distributed) by a small press aptly named Visionary Publishing Co.
Lovecraft’s remaining years produced a few more masterpieces of horror—“The Dreams in the Witch House” in 1932 and “The Thing on the Doorstep” in 1933—and two powerful and shocking evocations of alien beings among humankind, “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Haunter of the Dark” in 1934 and 1935. By late 1935, however, he seemed to have lost his interest in writing fiction. Suffering from constant stomach pains, he produced a few revisions and nothing truly his own. By late 1936, he was composing “Instructions in Case of Decease,” which expressed his wishes regarding control of and potential profits from his literary estate, also addressing potential exploitation of same, and no fiction. At the beginning of 1937, suffering lingering digestive problems, he was in intense pain; nonetheless, he began keeping a meticulous “death diary” of his last months of life, maintained until he was too weak to write.48 By the end of February, his physician recollects, Lovecraft was told that he was terminally ill, suffering from intestinal cancer. He was heavily medicated with painkillers, and on March 10, he was hospitalized. He died five days later, before which his copious correspondence did not diminish; as late as the date of his death, a long, apparently half-finished letter was found at his desk, begun just prior to his hospitalization.
Several years befo
re his death, in 1933, Lovecraft summarized his achievements:
It is now clear to me that any actual literary merit I have is confined to tales of dream-life, strange shadow, and cosmic “outsideness”, notwithstanding a keen interest in many other departments of life and a professional practice of general prose and verse revision. Why this is so, I have not the least idea. I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales, and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favourite weird authors—Poe, Arthur Machen, Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, and Montague Rhodes James. The only thing I can say in favour of my work is its sincerity. I refuse to follow the mechanical conventions of popular fiction or to fill my tales with stock characters and situations, but insist on reproducing real moods and impressions in the best way I can command. The result may be poor, but I had rather keep aiming at serious literary expression than accept the artificial standards of cheap romance.
It was not only his chosen subjects that worried Lovecraft; he also thought little of his own craftsmanship:
I have tried to improve and subtilise my tales with the passing of years, but have not made the progress I wish. Some of my efforts have been cited in the O’Brien and O. Henry annuals, and a few have enjoyed reprinting in anthologies; but all proposals for a published collection have come to nothing. It is possible that one or two short tales may be issued as separate brochures before long. I never write when I cannot be spontaneous—expressing a mood already existing and demanding crystallisation. Some of my tales involve actual dreams I have experienced. My speed and manner of writing vary widely in different cases, but I always work best at night. Of my products, my favourites are “The Colour out of Space” and “The Music of Erich Zann,” in the order named. I doubt if I could ever succeed well in the ordinary kind of science fiction.
Summing up what he saw as the future of the genre, and in typical fashion revealing his own sense of alienation from the world of commercial and popular tastes, he wrote:
I believe that weird writing offers a serious field not unworthy of the best literary artists; though it is at most a very limited one, reflecting only a small section of man’s infinitely composite moods. Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric—confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot. The “punch” of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law—an imaginative escape from palling reality—hence phenomena rather than persons are the logical “heroes.” Horrors, I believe, should be original—the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence. Current magazine fiction, with its incurable leanings toward conventional sentimental perspectives, brisk, cheerful style, and artificial “action” plots, does not rank high.49
Like the posthumous enshrinement of figures such as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix some three and a half decades later, death brought Lovecraft attention from the wider public that he never achieved in life. The Providence Evening Bulletin ran an error-filled obituary on March 15, 1937, but made note of Lovecraft’s “death diary,” and on March 16, the New York Times ran an obituary headed “Writer Charts Fatal Malady.” A small funeral service was held a few days later. In the communities of weird writing and the amateur press, mourning was widespread and numerous tributes were published. More significantly, within two weeks of his death, two of Lovecraft’s friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, with what David E. Schultz called “breath taking swiftness,”50 were communicating with other friends and undertaking to build a monument to Lovecraft’s literary reputation by collecting his stories and papers for the first time.
Derleth was then only twenty-eight but already a veteran short story writer; his stories had begun to appear in Weird Tales when he was seventeen. He never met Lovecraft, but their correspondence, which began in 1926, was extensive and intimate. Wandrei, a poet and short story writer, also had begun his association with Lovecraft in 1926. He and Lovecraft saw and wrote to each other sporadically until Lovecraft’s death. Wandrei was only a year older than Derleth, and after Lovecraft introduced them to each other, the two became close friends. Deeply moved by the death of a fellow writer and friend whose literary output and personal ministrations they had come to cherish, the two younger men decided to form Arkham House Publishers, and in 1939 they put out an edition of 1,268 copies of The Outsider and Others.51 It received far-flung attention, discussed below, and encouraged the publishers to compile a second collection, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, in 1943, followed by collections of Lovecraft’s writings edited by Derleth that Arkham House entitled Marginalia (1944) and Something About Cats and Other Pieces (1949). The Dunwich Horror and Others was published in 1963 and At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels in 1964. In 1965, the first volume of Selected Letters appeared from Arkham House, also edited by Derleth and Wandrei, who began repackaging some of Lovecraft’s stories in additional collections. The first major single-volume collection of selected works, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and titled Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, appeared in 1997 from Ecco Press, a division of HarperCollins. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s leading biographer, has published a number of annotated editions of Lovecraft’s work, both in the form of collections and single stories (all listed in the bibliography). In 2005 the Library of America released Tales, a collection of twenty-two of Lovecraft’s best stories, edited and with notes by modern horror master Peter Straub. In 2013, Oxford University Press published a small collection of Lovecraft stories, annotated by Roger Luckhurst.
CRITICAL RECEPTION OF LOVECRAFT’S WORK
IT IS EVIDENT from Lovecraft’s letters that he freely shared his stories with his friends during the process of composition and sought their comments and suggestions. The first unbiased comments, however, were those of the readers of the Weird Tales magazines in which the stories first appeared. Published in “The Eyrie,” the letters column of the magazine, these were apparently nearly uniformly fulsome (“surely [Lovecraft] is as great a writer as has ever lived”),52 though the editors—especially Farnsworth Wright, according to Robert Weinberg, the preeminent historian of Weird Tales—were “not loath to praise a story highly in The Eyrie.”53
Outside the hard-core group of readers, however, few were enthusiastic. In fact, until 1945, virtually no one outside of the pulp fandom had paid any attention to Lovecraft (or for that matter, many other pulp writers), negative or positive. In 1924, “The Picture in the House” had received a one-star ranking in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, and “Pickman’s Model” was similarly recognized in the category of “Stories Ranking Third” in the 1928 volume, while Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space” was listed on the Roll of Honor of the 1928 volume of Edward J. O’Brien’s Best Short Stories. In 1930, William Bolitho’s article “Pulp Magazines” in the January 4 issue of New York World noted Lovecraft’s work, “[which] I am sure I would rather read than many fashionable lady novelists they give teas to; and poets too.”
It was left to the cadre of readers of weird fiction to bring Lovecraft into the light. Derleth, writing shortly after Lovecraft’s death, called him “the outstanding American exponent of the macabre tale” and expressed the cautious hope that while “[n]either his prose nor his poetry will ever attain the status of world recognition . . . his genius will be recognized. . . .”54 W. Paul Cook, an early fan and publisher, warned in 1945 of overwrought treatment of the writer: “Irreparable harm is being done to Lovecraft by indiscriminate and even unintelligent praise, by lack of unbiased and intelligent criticism, and by a warped sense of what is due him in the way of publication of his works. . . .”55
Certainly, the harshest critical assessment came from Lovecraft himself. In 1931, he said of his own work, “It is excessively extravagant & melodramatic, & lacks depth and subtlety. . . . My style is bad, too—full of obvious rhetorical devices & hackneyed word & rhythm patterns.
It comes a long way from the stark, objective simplicity which is my goal.”56 Possibly this was false modesty—the pose of what he felt was the essence of the gentleman amateur—but several of what Lovecraft regarded as his best works had been rejected by editors in 1931, and he struggled to make ends meet. In fact, many reviewers and booksellers were simply unaware of his work until The Outsider and Others, the first collection of Lovecraft’s stories ever published, appeared in December 1939. For example, Publishers Weekly, the primary organ of the bookselling community, which today reviews thousands of books annually (though it handled fewer in 1939), noted, “We had never heard of author or publisher. . . .”57
The publication of The Outsider and Others led to the first review of Lovecraft’s work by an academician, Thomas Ollive Mabbott (1898–1968), professor of English at Northwestern, Brown, and, later, Hunter College. Mabbott was well known as a Poe scholar, and his three-volume critical edition of Poe appeared posthumously between 1969 and 1978. Mabbott called Lovecraft’s stories “striking and original. . . . Time will tell if his place be very high in our literary history; that he has a place seems certain.”58 He also commented favorably on Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” included in the volume, calling its discussions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Bierce “so penetrating, sympathetic, and imaginatively keen that scholars will not want to miss them.”
In 1943, Peter De Vries, an acclaimed author of satirical fiction and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, reviewed Beyond the Wall of Sleep (the second Arkham House collection) for the Chicago Sun: “There are moments when he strikes fire, achieving exquisite eerie details, but on the whole his somewhat dated context, his languid and pearly style, adds up at best to a competently wrought anachronism rather than the creative individuality his publishers claim for him—a knick-knack on the whatnot of Neo-Romanticism.”59 Will Cuppy, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, also had guardedly positive comments: “We confess that we are knocked silly by the mass of mania, nightmare, and such in these Lovecraft collections, both of which should be possessed, or at least perused, by any citizen who goes for hideous dream states, demons from the vast abyss, humans doomed and damned, things unnamable and so forth in truly astonishing variety. . . . Heartily recommended to all that way inclined.”60
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