A CASUAL INTERNET search reveals dozens of “complete,” “definitive,” “collected” volumes of his stories, along with many books exploring the “mythos” and “worlds” of Lovecraft. T-shirts depicting Lovecraft and Cthulhu in various forms abound. A convention (the NecronomiCon), not held since 1999, was relaunched in Providence, Rhode Island, in August 2013. MythosCon is another convention focused on Lovecraft, while the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival takes place annually in Portland, Oregon, and in Los Angeles. The year 2015 marks Lovecraft’s 125th birthday, with attendant celebrations and tributes. How can one explain the continuing interest in Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his writing?
NecronomiCon, Providence, 2013.
“[It] isn’t so much literary merit—oh, such a slippery term—as his brute staying power,” concludes Stephen King.95 Lovecraft’s stories are pulp fiction, and, worse, genre fiction—meaning, to too many critics, not worthy of attention and surely doomed to evanescence. Yet despite Lovecraft’s commercial failure during his lifetime, his death finally focused attention on his work, and his stories have never since been out of print. The academic community and tastemakers have slowly but perceptibly come to terms with him. Popularity is no touchstone for quality, but increasing popularity more than seventy-five years after the author’s death? There must be something there there, to explain how such an “infantile” cult can last.
Despite his increasing popularity, Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobic views cannot be whitewashed. In the words of Lovecraft scholar Bruce Lord, “Lovecraft’s racism is blunt, ugly, and unavoidable.”96 Although his attitudes may be dismissed as products of the times, his words do not display casual racism, merely reflecting the racist society in which he lived (as may be said, for example, of a few racial slurs in the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle). Nor can Lovecraft’s views be defended on the grounds that other great writers, such as Charles Dickens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway, were anti-Semitic or racist. It seems that Lovecraft’s peculiar upbringing, combined with his family’s tenuous social position in Rhode Island society, grafted onto his consciousness a hostility to virtually all who were not white New Englanders. He was able to tolerate a Jewish friend like the writer Samuel Loveman or a Jewish wife because, in his view, they had essentially given up their alienness, assimilating into the white population. Blacks, of course, could not readily do this, and so seem to have earned his permanent censure. Although the times changed, and the “scientific” bases for racism and the eugenics that he embraced eroded over his lifetime, Lovecraft remained static and unbending. Worst of all, his beliefs may be seen as essential to several of his stories, such as “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” which imagines the horror of interspecies breeding.97
In the end, though one may despise his outmoded and pernicious social views, Lovecraft’s vision of the place of mankind in the cosmos—his “cosmicism”—is more important than those views. His work speaks to the outsider in many readers, that sense that we stand outside the stream of humanity looking on, that deep-rooted feeling that one is “a stranger in this century.”98 Fundamentally, Lovecraft believed that we must make our own place in a cosmos that has no answers to give us. Humans desire to reinterpret or reshape life into a more coherent and manageable pattern than is apparent on its chaotic surface. Some great literature does that for us, by offering examples of ordered worlds, indications of our place in the universe, and philosophies that we can apply to our own lives. Lovecraft’s fiction presents no simple coherent worldview or philosophy; rather, he showed, in the context of richly detailed and realistic frameworks, that we must find our own way. Until all such speculations have been put to rest, readers will continue to turn to Lovecraft’s stories to be frightened, to be perpetually reminded that there is more than one way to look at the universe.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange æons even death may die.99
1. French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), from his Pensées (published posthumously in 1670). Pascal was speaking of the actual immensity of space, as discovered by contemporary astronomers, not merely mathematical infinities.
2. This is from the second part of the essay usually named “In Defense of Dagon,” although this part of the essay, published separately, bore the title “The Defence Remains Open!”; written in April 1921, it was reprinted in In Defense of Dagon.
3. Joyce Carol Oates, “The King of Weird.”
4. In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” first published in 1927 in the amateur journal The Recluse, Lovecraft himself contributed an overview of the genre that so absorbed him. It was serialized in another amateur magazine, The Fantasy Fan, beginning in October 1933, with new material added. There were previous studies of the field—notably, Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror* (1921) and, later, Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927)—but these essentially ignored writers after Poe. Lovecraft took almost a year and a half to complete the essay. Since 1933, many, many other guides, studies, and encyclopedias have covered the field. S. T. Joshi has penned a two-volume study entitled Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi’s useful bibliography surveys the similar work of others, such as Les Daniel’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975), but not all of his judgments are approving—for example, he states, “I do not find much value” in David Punter’s two-volume The Literature of Terror (1980, rev. 1996).
Lovecraft’s library—books he is known to have possessed at some time in his life—is painstakingly catalogued in Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue by S. T. Joshi (2002), and works or bodies of work mentioned here that are included there are marked in this foreword thus: *. The same symbol appears after the name of writers whose work Lovecraft collected.
5. See Augustine Calmet, The Phantom World; or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, &c., vol. 2, 22–23, 28.
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, review of The Monk.
7. There are numerous texts of The Vampyre, which was printed at first without Polidori’s involvement and subsequently revised by him several times. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, in The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus: Collected Fiction of John William Polidori, created a preferred text from Polidori’s editing. In later editions, Polidori changed the vampire’s name to Lord Strongmore, perhaps to avoid confusion with a real Lord Ruthven.
8. Writing to Elizabeth Toldridge on March 15, 1929, he despaired of ever finding his own voice: “There are my ‘Poe’ pieces & my ‘Dunsany’ pieces—but alas—where are any Lovecraft pieces?” (This passage was mistakenly quoted as “my ‘Lovecraft’ pieces” in the original edition of Selected Letters, II, 315).
9. See James Goho’s “The Shape of Darkness: Origins for H. P. Lovecraft within the American Gothic Tradition” for a detailed study of Bierce’s influence on Lovecraft.
10. Lovecraft to Reinhardt Kleiner, February 2, 1916, Selected Letters, II, 20. In a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer dated March 3, 1927, Lovecraft described his introduction to Poe at the age of eight: “Then I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb” (Selected Letters, II, 109).
11. See note 4, above.
12. The four, plus Ambrose Bierce and Lovecraft himself, are the subjects of S. T. Joshi’s fine book-length study The Weird Tale (1990).
13. Stephen King, “Self-Interview,” 10:50 a.m., Sept. 4, 2008, http://stephenking.com/stephens_messages.html.
14. Dunsany’s influence is considered in detail in “Lovecraft’s Debt to Lord Dunsany,” by Darrell Schweitzer.
15. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
16. Gernsback, founder and editor of Amazing Stories, for which Lovecraft eventually wrote, editorialized in April 1926: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the J
ules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
17. Livesey, “Green Storm Rising: Lovecraft’s Roots in Invasion Literature.”
18. In 1892, an obscure Australian clergyman named Robert Potter published a novel called The Germ Growers in London. It reports a secret invasion of Earth by aliens who take on the appearance of human beings and attempt to develop a disease that will wipe out Earth’s population. The aliens’ methodology is somewhat similar to Wells’s “Red Weed,” a biological weapon of the Martian invaders, but is ironically inverted in Wells’s conclusion. For a brief discussion of some other early works featuring extraterritorial life, see “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” note 12, below.
19. First published in 1935.
20. S. T. Joshi, in his introduction to H. P. Lovecraft in the Argosy: Collected Correspondence from the Munsey Magazines, writes, “When we read, in Lovecraft’s letter to the All-Story for 7 March 1914, that he had ‘read every number of your magazine since its beginning in January, 1905,’ we are taken aback both by the voluminous amount of early pulp fiction Lovecraft must have already absorbed and by the fact that in later years he would actually conceal this absorption.”
21. The exchange rate was about $4.87 per pound, a sixpence representing 1⁄40 of a pound.
22. Many pulps lasted until the 1950s and continued to nurture writers such as Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Max Brand, Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Chandler, C. S. Forester, Zane Grey, Robert E. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, Rafael Sabatini, Jim Thompson, Tennessee Williams, and Cornell Woolrich.
23. The influence of the Munsey magazines on Lovecraft is studied in detail in Gavin Callaghan’s groundbreaking essay “A Reprehensible Habit: H. P. Lovecraft and the Munsey Magazines.”
24. That is not to say that Lovecraft’s life has not been thoroughly studied: S. T. Joshi has produced several biographical studies, culminating in the publication of his massive two-volume I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, and the pages of Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu, two journals devoted to the study of Lovecraft, as well as dozens of books, are filled with biographical studies, reminiscences, and dissections. As a result of Lovecraft’s voluminous correspondence, far more has been published about his life than about his work. See text following note 64, below.
25. It is an incomplete and incorrect judgment on Lovecraft to term him a “recluse” (as did Peter Penzoldt—see note 66, below). One of Lovecraft’s many correspondents, the hugely successful writer Robert Bloch, wrote: “During the four-year span of our association (1933–1937) the avowed ‘recluse’ sent me letters and postcards from all over the New England states, from Charleston, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Florida and Quebec.” During this period, Lovecraft had many visitors at his home, and his far-ranging correspondence, Bloch observes, demonstrated his lively interest in contemporary politics and literary and scientific theory (“Out of the Ivory Tower”).
26. The hospital was founded in 1844 with seed money from Cyrus Butler, after whom it was named, and Nicholas Brown Jr., Rhode Island merchant-philanthropist, who also helped found Brown University. See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, note 60, below.
Butler Hospital for the Insane, ca. 1878.
27. In a letter to Maurice W. Moe dated January 1, 1915 (Selected Letters, I, 7), Lovecraft claims that he began “versification” at the age of six. He produced his first published verse—eighty-eight lines and titled The Young Folks’ Ulysses or the Odyssey in plain Olden English Vers, an Epick Poem—when he was seven. The work was self-published. Lovecraft composed hundreds of poems over his career, some appearing in amateur journals, some in Weird Tales. These may be found in the following: Collected Poems, which contains the Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle; A Winter Wish; and The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works.
28. Joshi, I Am Providence, 391.
29. Faig Jr., The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 40.
30. Lovecraft to Mrs. Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 1, 1921, Selected Letters, I, 134. Galpin, an American writer and composer (1901–1963), met Lovecraft through the offices of his high school teacher, Lovecraft’s friend Maurice Moe, who introduced Galpin to the amateur press association, and Lovecraft and Galpin corresponded regularly from 1917 to 1937.
31. This remark is from the same letter.
32. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, April 5, 1931, Selected Letters, III, 370.
33. Lovecraft to Mrs. F. C. Clark, March 9, 1924, Selected Letters, III, 320. Lovecraft wrote this letter six days after the wedding, and it took him numerous pages of similar preamble to work up to telling his aunt of his marriage.
34. Sonia soon left to take a job in Cleveland. She was also hospitalized for a portion of 1924 for gastric problems.
35. Lovecraft to Mrs. F. C. Clark, November 17–18, 1924, Letters from New York, 92–93.
36. In Sonia H. [Greene] Davis, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft.
37. Sonia Davis to Winfield Townley Scott, September 24, 1948 (John Hay Library, Brown University). Lovecraft held Sonia out as an example of how Jews could fit in by assimilation. See note 35, above. He privately expressed support for the racial views of the Nazis, if not their methods. Joshi, in I Am Providence (941), repeats a story of a German-American friend of Lovecraft’s who returned to Germany in 1936 and there learned of the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Although some have suggested that Lovecraft was incensed by this report, he never denounced the Nazis, though he did at least stop talking about the matter.
38. Letter to Donald Wandrei, February 10, 1927, Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, 35.
39. Sonia wrote, “Although [Howard] once said he loved New York and that henceforth it would be his ‘adopted state,’ I soon learned that he hated it and all its ‘alien hordes.’ When I protested that I too was one of them, he’d tell me I ‘no longer belonged to these mongrels.’ ‘You are now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft of 598 Angell St., Providence, Rhode Island’” (Davis, Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, 11).
Sonia Greene (Lovecraft) Davis, ca. 1949.
40. See note 20, above.
41. While far from all have been published to date, since publication of Selected Letters, many volumes of Lovecraft’s letters, collected by correspondent, have appeared. For example, Joshi recently published a two-volume collection of correspondence between Lovecraft and August Derleth. See note 78, below. A great many of Lovecraft’s letters are to be found in the John Hay Library of Brown University, but hundreds, perhaps thousands, remain in private hands and many more are untraceable.
42. See note 14, above.
43. Lovecraft, “The Defence Reopens,” January 1921. Quoted in In Defense of Dagon, note 2, above.
44. In Defense of Dagon, note 2, above.
45. In 1923, J. C. Henneberger, a former journalist, created Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories and Weird Tales, issued by a company he called Rural Publications, located in Indianapolis. Henneberger had a taste for ghoulish stories, and he wanted to provide, in Weird Tales, an outlet for some of his favorite writers. He hired Edwin Baird as the first editor of the monthly, assisted by Farnsworth Wright. The magazine sold poorly at first, amassing serious debt. After thirteen issues, Henneberger reorganized, selling off Detective Tales and giving controlling ownership of Weird Tales to his printer. Baird went with Detective Tales, and Henneberger, now in Chicago, needed a new editor. His first choice was Lovecraft, who had already had a number of stories published in the magazine, but Lovecraft—perhaps fearing the financial instability of the job and definitely disliking the idea of a move to the Midwest—turned the offer down. Henneberger then promoted Wright, who remained at the helm until 1940, when new owners let him go to cut costs.
46. See I Am Providence, 572. The former was about 3,700 words, the latter about 3,000 words. Lovecraft later got the top rate of 1½ cents per word f
or “The Dunwich Horror,” $240 for that tale. Short story writers don’t do much better today—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, for example, probably the preeminent venue for mystery short stories, pays 5–8 cents per word, less than Lovecraft’s 1 cent in today’s dollars!
47. Lovecraft expressed this view in numerous letters and in the context of suggestions for anthologies.
48. The journal is lost but portions remain, copied into various letters. Before the disappearance of the journal, a complete reprint was published; see R. Alain Everts, The Death of a Gentleman: The Last Days of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Including Lovecraft’s Diary for 1937. The following are condensed entries for March 1937:
Mch 1—AEPG [Lovecraft’s aunt Annie E. Phillips Gamwell] tel. [Dr. Cecil Calvert] Dustin [an internal medicine doctor] about specialist—enormous abdominal distension—feet again swollen—intense pain—drowse
2—pain—drowse—intense pain—rest—great pain
3—pain—callers—Brobst—pain—pain
4—pain worse—[Lovecraft’s friend Harry] Brobst call—read—pain worse—bad night, frequent immersions [in hot tub]
5—pain intense
Sat 6—Dr. [William Lessel] Leet [internal medicine specialist] call while in bath—bad day—hideous pain—read paper—bad night
7—hideous pain
8—weak—pain less—pain
The following are full entries:
9—pain—do very little—AEPG tel Dr. Leet—pain—nourishment difficult—very bad night
10—pain & weakness—Brobst call—Dr. Leet call—recommend hospital, prepare—off with AEPG to J[ane]. Brown [Memorial Hospital]—wait—finally get room—AEPG stay for dinner—ho—Leet call—very bad nigh—regurg.
11—pain—Dr. Jones take blood—bath—pain—elec. pad—AEPG call.
Lovecraft wrote nothing further and died on the morning of the fifteenth.
49. This and the previous quotation are from Lovecraft’s essay “Some Notes on a Nonentity,” written in November 1933 for William L. Crawford, who requested it for Unusual Stories; later reprinted in Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
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