Edmund Wilson, at The New Yorker. (Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson)
The most damaging review of Lovecraft’s work, ultimately reflecting the view of the prevailing literary establishment, appeared in 1945. “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous,” written by Edmund Wilson for The New Yorker,61 had an enormous impact because of the stature of its author. Often called the dean of American critics, Wilson (1895–1972) notoriously had little regard for speculative fiction; eleven years hence, in a review of The Fellowship of the Ring, he expressed his unfettered disdain for J. R. R. Tolkien, suggesting to readers that, if they “must read about imaginary kingdoms,” they instead choose Poictesme—an invented French province in the fictional series Biography of the Life of Manuel, by James Branch Cabell, whose work has largely been forgotten.62 At the time, Wilson’s own defining achievement was To the Finland Station (1940), a history of socialism and a study of European political thought from Michelet through the Russian Revolution. In the case of Lovecraft, having familiarized himself with the material published by Arkham House, Wilson declared, “I regret that, after examining these books, I am no more enthusiastic than before. . . . [T]he truth is that these stories were hack-work contributed to such publications as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, where, in my opinion, they ought to have been left. The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” Wilson went on: “Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe’s is only one of the many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays real attention to writing.” Wilson found it “terrifying” that a critic as respected as Thomas Ollive Mabott had contributed a Lovecraft tribute to one of the Arkham House volumes. “One of Lovecraft’s worst faults is his incessant effort to work up the expectations of the reader by sprinkling his stories with such adjectives as ‘horrible,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘frightful,’ ‘awesome,’ ‘eerie,’ ‘weird,’ ‘forbidden,’ ‘unhallowed,’ ‘unholy,’ ‘blasphemous,’ ‘hellish’ and ‘infernal.’ 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.”63 Reflecting a profound literary bias, Wilson concluded his essay with these hostile words: “[T]he Lovecraft cult, I fear, is on an even more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars and the cult of Sherlock Holmes.”64
Prior to 1990, Lovecraft gained little attention from any but devoted fans and specialists. Fritz Leiber Jr., a correspondent of Lovecraft’s late in the latter’s life, published a general critical essay entitled “A Literary Copernicus,” extolling the writer’s achievements.65 Peter Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction (1952),66 a study of the field, included a large section on Lovecraft. Yet for all the attention he lavishes on Lovecraft, Penzoldt appears unsure of whether his attention is justified. “Lovecraft’s work has both great merits and great defects. He was an exceedingly cultivated and well-read man. . . . Yet Lovecraft’s greatest merit was also his greatest fault. He was too well read. . . . [H]e was influenced by so many authors that one is often at a loss to decide what is really Lovecraft and what some half-conscious memory of the books he has read.” Another influential early scholar was Barton L. St. Armand, a Brown University professor who published two important critical works in the 1970s, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (1977) and an earlier piece appearing in the journal Rhode Island History. Paperback editions of Lovecraft’s tales from Lancer and Ballantine in the 1960s and early 1970s and publicaton of 1975 of Lovecraft: A Biography, by fantasy writer L. Sprague de Camp, focused further interest on Lovecraft’s writings.
Eric Hoefler, in his dissertation on the growth of Lovecraft-related scholarship,67 essentially dismisses the period prior to 1990. His primary reason for doing so is that virtually all of the serious scholarship during that period appeared outside what he calls “established” journals—journals that are not devoted exclusively to genre fiction or that are little-recognized in the academic community. In 1979, Necronomicon Press, founded in 1976 by Marc Michaud, then an undergraduate at Brown University, began publishing Lovecraft Studies, edited by S. T. Joshi, who served many years as editorial director for the press. This contained many excellent scholarly articles and lasted for forty-three issues (1979–2005), but it had a tiny circulation. With only a year’s hiatus, it was succeeded by the Lovecraft Annual, also superbly edited by Joshi, which began in 2007 and continues today. Shortly after the launch of Lovecraft Studies, in 1981, Crypt of Cthulhu, a charming mixture of Lovecraft criticism, original fiction, and lively correspondence among Lovecraftians, edited by Robert M. Price, began publication (ceasing only in 2002, after 107 issues). The magazine began as Price’s contribution to the Esoteric Order of Dagon, an amateur press organization formed by a group of Lovecraft devotees in 1973. A large fanzine, Nyctalops, with copious original artwork as well as criticism and original fiction, first appeared in May 1970; edited initially by Harry O. Morris and later Edward Berglund, it ran for nineteen issues until 1991. This body of fan-created criticism led Peter Cannon, by then one of the foremost Lovecraft scholars, to observe in 1990, “We have attracted little notice in the academy, apart from Brown University. The audience of Lovecraft Studies consists almost entirely of horror fiction fans; only a handful of college libraries carry the premier journal in the field. Serious Lovecraft criticism has rarely appeared in print outside the science-fiction horror-fantasy realm.”68
Lovecraft Studies, 19/20 (Fall 1989), cover by Jason C. Eckhardt, depicting frequent contributors.
By 1990, the dam was effectively broken, no doubt helped by publication of Peter Cannon’s H. P. Lovecraft the previous year. Cannon addressed this critical introduction to “the believers and the skeptics” with the hope of persuading the latter that “Lovecraft is more than a mere horror writer.” S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, the first full-length philosophical study of Lovecraft’s work, was published in 1990, and explored the evolution of Lovecraft’s view that the current phase of Western civilization was declining and ending. In the same year, the University Press of Kentucky published Donald Burleson’s Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, a work of criticism founded in the deconstructionist school and the first to approach Lovecraft’s fiction without leaning heavily on biographical detail or Lovecraft’s correspondence or essays. While Burleson has been almost exclusively associated with criticism of horror fiction,69 this marked the first serious, in-depth examination of Lovecraft’s literature by “literary” standards.
Many surveys of horror writing and book-length works of Lovecraft scholarship have been published since; the majority are listed in this volume’s bibliography. In Hoefler’s words: “Lovecraft scholarship has begun its rise to visibility in the larger academic community, moving from the relatively closed circle of scholarship in the 1980s. . . . After 2000, scholarship was advanced by articles that, though few in number to date, received wider recognition and contributed substantially to the field rather than merely recapitulating previous work, connecting Lovecraft to larger trends in Western intellectual history and new schools of analysis.”70 This is confirmed by Joshi’s 2009 bibliography,71 listing 112 books and pamphlets about Lovecraft and numerous items of criticism in books and periodicals (371 general studies, 310 biographies and memoirs, and 244 studies of individual stories). Certainly, the crowning achievement of this period was S. T. Joshi’s massive two-volume biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence, released by Hippocampus Press, now the leading publisher of Lovecraftian scholarship. The monumental work considers in detail Lovecraft’s correspondence and the writing of each and every story.
LOVECRAFT’S PHILOSOPHY AND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS
“HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT was not a theoretician,” declares Michel Houellebecq.72 But “philosophy,” meaning a worldview and statements of ethical principles, is found throughout Lovecraft’s stories and letters, and s
cholars have explored Lovecraft’s “philosophy” in detail.73 In a review of a book on the subject, Graham Harman’s Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy,74 Brian Kim Stefans explains:
Even if Lovecraft were not writing philosophy proper, much of the coherence of his “cosmicism” results not in the noncontradictory material or technological universes typical of most science fiction—think of the droids and lightsabers that populate the world of Star Wars—but in a singularly fraught metaphysical universe. In Lovecraft’s version of reality, laws seem to function in ways that make our foundational certainties—Euclidean geometry, the private experience of dreams, the inviolable divisions between human, animal, plant, and the nonliving, etc.—merely contingent: just the way things appear to us, rather than absolute necessities.75
In other words, one may search in vain in Lovecraft’s writing for a detailed cosmogony of the “Lovecraft universe.” Lovecraft’s essential view was that much of the cosmos is in fact without rules, at least rules intelligible to humans, and that it is not only inaccurate but inartistic to depict alien beings and worlds in human terms. Lovecraft was not J. R. R. Tolkien, in that his stories were not based on some carefully thought-out tapestry of language and mythology, nor even a consistent backstory. Although some have claimed that Lovecraft penned a Cthulhu Mythos, no such coherent mythology can be found in his writings. Such mythology as may have grown up was the later invention of the circle of friends and admirers who surrounded him and the writers who aped his stories.76
Clark Ashton Smith, probably in his forties.
Although the biographical details of Lovecraft’s life suggest a man uncomfortable with humanity and fundamentally unable to have a relationship with a wife or companion, this ignores his very real connections with dozens of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Lovecraft corresponded with hundreds of individuals, ranging from family members to readers, like Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, August Derleth, Bernard Austin Dwyer, and, later, Robert Bloch, as well as his “clients”—the writers who engaged his services for revisions, such as Zealia Bishop. He also devoted much time to visiting, traveling with, and entertaining friends. He enjoyed forming “clubs” or “unions” of these colleagues. The “Gallomo” (Albert Galpin, Lovecraft, and Maurice Moe) was one of the earliest groups, formed in 1919, with whom he shared his dreams. In New York, the men who loosely formed the Kalem Club (Reinhardt Kleiner, James F. Morton, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur Leeds, Everett McNeil, George Kirk) were his primary source of intellectual sustenance.
In his letters, Lovecraft often discussed his work. The phrase Cthulhu Mythos never appears in any of his known correspondence. He mentions the term “Arkham cycle” in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith77 without specifying to which stories he refers, but he never spoke seriously about any mythology or pseudomythology. In 1931, August Derleth, then thirty, suggested that the label “the Mythology of Hastur” (referencing Chambers’s The King in Yellow) be applied to the litany of folklore referenced by Lovecraft in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930). Lovecraft wrote, “It’s not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine ‘The Mythology of Hastur’—although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony—or daimonogeny.”78 Lovecraft actually suggested that Derleth make reference to this quasi-mythology in his story “The Horror from the Lake” and was incensed when Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected the piece:79
Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long, 1931.
Of all Boeotion80 blundering & irrelevancy! And what pointless censure of the introduction of Cthulhu & Yog-Sothoth—as if their use constituted any “infringement” on my stuff! Hades! The more these synthetic daemons are mutually written up by different authors, the better they become as general background- material. I like to have others use my Azathoths & Nyarlathoteps—& in return I shall use Klarkash-Ton’s Tsathoggua,81 your monk Clithanus, & Howard’s Bran.82
Derleth failed to understand that Lovecraft did not intend to create a permanent or unchanging pantheon. Lovecraft’s views were different from those of his role model Lord Dunsany, who said of his Pegāna cosmosgony that his inability to master Greek “left me with a curious longing for the mighty lore of the Greeks, of which I had had glimpses like a child seeing wonderful flowers through the shut gates of a garden; and it may have been the retirement of the Greek gods from my vision after I left Eton that eventually drove me to satisfy some such longing by making gods unto myself, as I did in my first two books.”83 In contrast, Lovecraft viewed his creations as part of an “open source” universe, to be visited by those whom it interested.
Nonetheless, in “H. P. Lovecraft: Outsider,”84 Derleth asserted that Lovecraft intended to create a fixed framework:
After a time there became apparent in his tales a curious coherence, a myth-pattern so convincing that after its early appearance the readers of Lovecraft’s stories began to explore libraries and museums for certain imaginary tales of Lovecraft’s own creation, so powerful that many another writer, with Lovecraft’s permission, availed himself of facets of the mythos for his own use. Bit by bit it grew, and finally its outlines became distinct, and it was given a name [by Derleth!]: the Cthulhu Mythology. . . .
Derleth goes on to quote—he says—Lovecraft: “. . . all my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again. . . .” In fact, the quotation from Lovecraft now appears to be spurious, having been fabricated, in all innocence, by a mutual friend, Harold S. Farnese. Farnese had written Derleth a letter, “quoting” Lovecraft as follows (emphasis added to highlight the only part of the original construction that Derleth left out):
. . . all my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who in practicing black magic lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again. . . .
Derleth’s view of Lovecraft’s intentions took firm hold: As the esteemed scholar and critic George T. Wetzel, writing in 1955, asserted, “[w]hen the body of Lovecraft’s prose is studied, it is at once seen that there is a varied and elaborate repetition of certain concepts and supernatural actors to which the phrase ‘The Cthulhu Mythos’ has justifiably been given.”85
Derleth called the Cthulhu Mythos “basically similar to the Christian mythos,” yet there is no evidence whatsoever that Lovecraft modeled his mythology, such as it was, on the monotheistic Christian religion. In fact, Lovecraft rejected Christianity, labeling himself a “sceptic,” an adherent of “cynical materialism.”86 Schultz summarizes: “Derleth’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is, at best, an artificial, rigid grouping of Lovecraft’s stories based upon a misinterpretation by someone not attuned to Lovecraft’s philosophical outlook. . . . Lovecraft’s stories were founded on his own philosophical outlook, whereas Derleth’s interpretation is founded on his.”87 Richard L. Tierney has suggested abandoning the Cthulhu Mythos as a descriptor, calling it nothing more than Derleth’s incorrect and earthbound interpretation of Lovecraft’s cosmic vision.88 Dirk W. Mosig reached a similar conclusion, proposing the term “Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth,” though this seems hardly less didactic.89
Lovecraft did not see life as a struggle between good and evil or light and dark forces. Rather, like Blaise Pascal,90 he perceived the universe as frightening because of its indifference. “I am . . . an indifferentist,” he wrote. “I do not make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. . . . [The cosmos] doesn’t give a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy
.”91
It would be a mistake to say that the Cthulhu Mythos does not exist. It does; it is merely not Lovecraft’s invention. Instead, it is the product of Derleth (who wrote numerous stories consistent with what he perceived to be the mythology) and numerous other acolytes who have carried on the tradition.92 Of course, the influence of Lovecraft extends far beyond those writers who are identified as authors of Cthulhu-mythologic tales. Stephen King suggests the following (incomplete) pantheon of those writers “touched” by Lovecraft and his dreams: Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, William Hope Hodgson, Fritz Leiber Jr., Harlan Ellison, Jonathan Kellerman, Peter Straub, Charles Willeford, Poppy Z. Brite, James Crumley, John D. MacDonald, Michael Chabon, Ramsey Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, Kingsley Amis, Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams.93 “This is just where the list starts, mind you,” says King.94
THE LEGACY OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 5