Amidst the prevailing chaos my own reading has been very scant, & even now I am engulfed by tons of unread borrowed books. Recently I’ve perused two biographies of Roger Williams,2 plus George Santayana’s “Last Puritan”3 —the latter a splendid study of the moribund culture amidst which I grew up. Not a mere piece of cheap debunking—but a sympathetic study which praises strong points while shewing up weak points. In general, such a work as one would expect from the greatest living philosopher.
I hope you will find it possible to enter Princeton after your graduation. An academic career would, it seems to me, be admirably appropriate for one with your vital & spontaneous devotion to literature.
This has been a bad year for fantasy in general as well as for certain of its devotees—both M. R. James (aet 73) and George Allen England (aet 59) being on its recent necrology roll.4 Most tragic of all from the standpoint of our little circle is the suicide of Robert E. Howard—who shot himself on June 11 when told that his mother would not recover from her illness. She died the next day without knowing of his act. The blow to his father—a physician—is terrific. His books will be given to his alma mater (Howard Payne College, Brownwood, Texas) as the nucleus of a Robert E. Howard Memorial Collection. Weird fiction’s loss is irreparable—for no other popular magazine fantaisiste’s work had half the zest & power & spontaneity of his. Poor old Two-Gun Bob!
All good wishes—
Yrs most cordially—
H P L
Notes
1. Vardis Fisher (1895–1968), prolific regional novelist.
2. Emily M. Easton, Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer (1930); James Ernst, Roger Williams, New England Firebrand (1932). See HPL to R. F. Searight, 27 August 1936, H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Richard F. Searight, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1992), p. 84.
3. George Santayana (1863–1950), The Last Puritan (1935); cf. SL 5.312–15.
4. James died on 12 June 1936 (one day after Robert E. Howard), England on 26 June 1936.
[9] [ALS]
Rock Bluff on the Edge of a Woodland
Tarn in the Forest of Quinsnicket, some 6
Miles North of 66 College Street., Prov. R.I.
—Oct. 15, 1936
Dear White:—
One of my last afternoon outings, with work & correspondence along in the inevitable black bag. Autumn closes down early in this sub-arctic zone, & tropical-constitution’d old gentleman can’t enjoy sitting in the open very much after this time of year. Oh, to be in Charleston, now that autumn’s here!1
Glad you have been managing to have a reasonably good time despite minor worries & wearinesses. Don’t mind occasional unproductive or even un-studious spells. The best of minds have to lie fallow now & then, & are all the better after their periods of restful idleness. Hope you’re rid of asthmatic troubles—which, by the way, always bothered Ambrose Bierce.
Things hereabouts go much as usual. Barlow left for the west Sept. 1st ,2 pausing in N Y to see Long, Howard Wandrei, & others of the weird fiction group, & calling on Miss Moore in Indianapolis.3 I’ve had several guests since then—shewing each the usual round of antiquarian sights. Busy as the devil with revision—worked 60 hours without sleep a fortnight ago on a job whose deadline loomed perilously close.4 My aunt is still improving, & I’m as tolerable as might be expected with cold weather leering threateningly ahead.
And so you are sampling the celebrated Gertrude Stein! I must admit that I’ve never read any book of hers, since scattered fragments in periodicals discouraged any interest I might otherwise have acquired. I suppose she has been an influence, or something of the sort—otherwise substantial literary figures would not take her so quasi-seriously. But I can’t think that she counts very heavily in the long stream of continuous English tradition. As steins go, I think I’ll do my betting on Ein!
I wish my camera were of the right size & focussing potentialities to get good views of Klarkash-Ton’s grotesque miniature carvings. Donald Wandrei—with a better apparatus—did photograph them, & if I can worm a set of prints out of him I’ll be delighted to let you see them. C A S does better in three dimensions than in two, & some of these sculptural horrors are imaginatively provocative indeed.
Glad ideas for tales & novels are not lacking & hope you’ll have a chance to develop the best of them. Contact with Howell Vines must be inspiring & beneficial—& I hope Vines will have better literary luck in the future than in the past. The part played by commercialism in writing is infinitely discouraging. Little, Brown, & Co. surely have a curious attitude—willingness to publish but not to push—but that’s at least better than unwillingness to publish at all. Hope the new agent will be able to bring about better conditions.
I haven’t read “Eyeless in Gaza”, but greatly admire Aldous Huxley as an honest & vigorous thinker. He & Julian are certainly nobly upholding the traditions of their grandsire! The picture of Proust surely lacks nothing in force & concrete imagery, & probably does form a cruelly just criticism of Proust’s weaker side. It is, however, undoubtedly unjust to Proust on the whole—for the old boy certainly did manage to grind out a tremendously graphic picture of various phases of society & various aspects of human nature. Proust is a veritable idol of sundry friends & correspondence of mine—especially Derleth, Barlow, & J. Vernon Shea. Others—like Long—have no use for him.5 I take a middle ground (from a very limited acquaintance—only the first two books)—which is none the less favourable enough to place P. at the top of 20th century novelists.
Glad the acrostic6 sounded passable for a mechanical thing of its kind. That half-hour’s churchyard pastime has had an amusing series of echoes—more of which, perhaps, are still to come. Although it would never have occurred to Barlow & me to submit our results for publication, old de Castro did—& secured an acceptance from W T! After that, Bob & I did send our results in—but they were turned down because Wright had already taken one. Now that the ball has started rolling, we’ll probably let one or another of the “fan” magazines have our specimens. Meanwhile correspondents began to emulate. Young Henry Kuttner devised a splendidly poetic acrostic—best of all because written at leisure. And an old friend M. W. Moe of Milwaukee—a high-school teacher who visited here in July & to whom I shewed the hidden hillside churchyard—prepared a very clever academic variant & is about to incorporate all the acrostics into a hectographed booklet for use in his English classes. Nor is that all. Derleth is editing a Wisconsin Poetry Anthology for the publisher Henry Harrison, & having seen Moe’s acrostic decided to include it in the volume. All this from little Bobby Barlow’s idle notion of writing an acrostic (his original idea was to have each of us contribute parts to a single poem, but this soon proved impracticable) while seated on a tombstone on a summer’s afternoon!7
No—I haven’t read “The Circus of Dr. Lao.”8 Thanks abundantly for the proffered loan, of which I trust I may ultimately take advantage. If I borrowed it now, though, I’d have to keep it an indefinite time, since my heaps of unread borrowed books come near to hitting the ceiling. This has been the most feverishly rushed year in my recent annals, & many departments of my activities have perforce lapsed into utter chaos.
By the way—I can understand Vines’ preference for the pen over the typewriter. I can’t bear the process of typing, & simply couldn’t think coherently with a machine in front of me. Well-patterned phrases with me take form only when I can mould them by hand with the traditional equipment of the writer.
The other night I attended a meeting of a local society of amateur astronomers—loosely connected with Brown University—& was astonished by the scope & seriousness of their activities. There was an address on early Rhode Island astronomy, & a reflecting telescope used in 1769 was exhibited. I was half-tempted to join—since astronomy used to be a specialty of mine.
Best wishes—
Yrs most cordially—
H P L
Notes
1. Robert Browning (1812�
�1889), “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” (1845), ll. 1–2, but read “England” for “Charleston” and “April” for “autumn.”
2. R. H. Barlow visited HPL in Providence from 28 July to 1 September.
3. I.e., Catherine L. Moore.
4. The job was Well Bred Speech: A Brief, Intensive Aid for English Students by Anne Tillery Renshaw ([Washington, DC: Standard Press, 1936]; LL 726). Much of HPL’s work (including the essay now titled “Suggestions for a Reading Guide”) was excised from the final work. Cf. SL 5.421–22.
5. HPL gave a copy of Swann’s Way—“an appropriately sophisticated Christmas present”—to Long in 1928, with the accompanying poem, “An Epistle to Francis, Ld. Belknap . . .” (see SL 2.255–57).
6. I.e., “In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d” (1936).
7. Moe’s acrostic was published in August Derleth and Raymond E. F. Larsson, ed., Poetry out of Wisconsin (New York: H. Harrison, 1937). All five acrostics were published in David E. Schultz, “In a Sequester’d Churchyard,” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 57 (St. John’s Eve 1988): 26–29.
8. Charles G. Finney (1905–1984), The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935).
[10] [ALS]
66 College St.,
Providence, R.I.,
Nov. 30, 1936.
Dear White:—
Congratulations on the first issue of your consolidated magazine enterprise! Campus1 truly presents an admirable blend of good appearance & well-selected contents, & I hope its announced policy2 may develop with complete success. I read the entire contents, & cannot find any point on which to dissent from the opinions you have expressed. I would say that your own Huxley review3 & Mason’s stream of reflections4 form the genuine high spots. Both of these seem to me tremendously thoughtful & well-expressed. The news & other items are competent & piquant, while the verse all reflects cleverness & wit. There is a certainly a gratifying absence of crude or conspicuously mediocre spots. I was especially tickled by the column of ‘weary words’,5 since one of my recent jobs has involved compiling a set of typical stock phrases.6 I wish I had had this column before I prepared my list! Glad to note items concerning your dramatic progress,7 & to see the pleasant-looking snapshot of you in the gallery of celebrities.8 I appreciate the originality of the consolidation idea, & congratulate you on the honour of launching this innovation as editor-in-chief. It surely must, though, have been a devastating job—considering the complexity & diversity of elements involved!
No very striking events have distinguished the programme hereabouts—though autumn has brought sundry lectures at the college & kindred things to compensate for the waning of outdoor opportunities. The season was not quite as bad & prematurely arctic as I had feared it would be—occasional good days persisting far into October. Oct. 20 & 21 were phenomenally warm, & I went exploring on both days—finding a fascinating forest three miles away which I had never seen before. This place—of which I had heard vaguely in the past, but which happens to be between my usual routes of exploration—is called the “Squantum Woods”, & lies down the east shore of Narragansett Bay—in the town of East Providence. It is now a state reservation, & was made accessible by the cutting-through of the Barrington Parkway. Ædopol, but what I’ve missed for almost half a century! Still, I’m almost glad that some new discovery at my very doorstep was held in reserve for my later years. It renews the illusion of youth & of adventurous expectancy to come upon something fresh & unexpected when one had thought all such things were past! Great oaks & birches—steep sloped & rock ledges—& on both occasions a magnificent sunset beyond the trees. Then glimpses of the crescent moon, Venus, & Jupiter—& the lights of far-off Providence from high places along the parkway. Another goal for next year’s rural rambles!
Snow fell as early as Nov. 24—unusual even for this subarctic zone—& I fear the winter may be a trying one. Hibernation of greater or less rigidity is my lot from now on.
My “Shadow Over Innsmouth” is now out9—but as a first cloth-bound book it doesn’t awake any enthusiasm in me. Indeed, it is one of the lousiest jobs I’ve ever seen—30 misprints, slovenly format, & loose, slipshod binding. The solitary redeeming feature is the set of Utpatel illustrations—one of which, on the dust wrapper, saves the appearance of the thing as it lies on the library table.
With all good wishes, & renewed appreciation of Campus,
Yrs most sincerely,
H P L
Notes
1. Campus: The Newsmagazine of Howard College 1, No. 1 (October 1936), ed. Lee White and Hugh Frank Smith.
2. The policy was enunciated in an unsigned editorial, “The Beginning: Volume One, Number One”: “As it is, this magazine is a combination of The Crimson, student weekly newspaper, The Quill, literary journal, and The Alumnus, alumni quarterly” (p. 1).
3. “For Aldous Huxley” (p. 25) by Lee White, a review of Eyeless in Gaza.
4. August H. Mason, “Words on a Sawmill Air” (pp. 17–18).
5. “Weary Words about Campus People” (p. 10), an unsigned humorous article in which various individuals on the campus are described with trite phrases (“John Hollingsworth is building castles in the air”).
6. This was a chapter entitled “Bromides Must Go” for Renshaw’s Well Bred Speech but not published there; it survives in ms. at JHL.
7. An unsigned news article, “Masquers’ play set for Nov. 13” (p. 7), notes that White will be acting in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
8. White’s photograph appears in a montage on p. 9.
9. The Shadow over Innsmouth (Everett, PA: The Visionary Publishing Co., 1936).
The Negative Mystics of the Mechanistic Sublime:
Walter Benjamin and Lovecraft’s Cosmicism
* * *
Jeff Lacy and Steven J. Zani
In recent years, a small but significant number of H. P. Lovecraft’s critics have begun to address the question of language in his fiction. Language has always been an issue with Lovecraft’s detractors, and anyone familiar with his criticism knows the legacy of critiques of his verbosity and ambiguity. Lovecraft’s early antagonistic reception in the world of critical scholarship was no doubt due in part to his deliberate affect of language and perhaps in part to the generally low opinion of “weird” fiction held by many critics. But it is less our intention to address those old discussions here than to help advance the front of a new one. In John Langan’s postmodern, language-oriented article, “Naming the Nameless: Lovecraft’s Grammatology,” he delivers the argument that “Lovecraft’s language in fact embodies the ideas that drive his fiction” (27). For the new inheritors of the Lovecraft critical tradition, language is the essential question of Lovecraftian texts, and the critical process of this generation should manifest itself in attempting to understand how that language operates. To that end, this essay offers a view of Lovecraft’s texts through the ideological lens of Walter Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin is a Frankfurt School Marxist whose influence extends, among other places, to translation studies. Benjamin’s account of translation, published in his article “The Task of the Translator,” is (in)famous in translation studies for its own verbosity and obscurity. In it, Benjamin challenges the traditional notion of translation (i.e., the transmission of information in a different language), stating, “a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential” (69). To Benjamin, the essential qualities of a work of literature are “the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic’” (70). Thus, rather than imparting information or giving the same content as the original, the act of translation—in the Benjaminian sense—should do something else: seek out the “pure language” that is only hinted at by the original text. “Pure language” is, in essence, a sort of Platonic ideal of what the author of the original text meant but inadequately described in the text’s limited content. The translator, then, follows the cues of the original text to apprehend that pure language and point to
it using the literary tools available in another language.
For Benjamin, the process of translation is useful because it opens up a question of the limitations of language. In sum, he argues, “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (80). The problem of translation—how to “say” the same thing in a different language—becomes a manifest question of the meaning behind the texts themselves. In the words of Ian Almond, “what Benjamin initially calls ‘the echo of the original’ is actually the voice of the translator” (190). When attempting to translate a text, restating the intention of the original author is impossible since the translator can only (re)state a conjecture of what the original author’s intention might have been, based on a reading of the original text. The actual meaning of the text is something of an indeterminate, understood only by virtue of a number of doublings and redoublings that occur when a message is expressed, received, and understood. As Benjamin notes, the translated text is a growth from, an echo of, or a tangent to the original text. Following Almond’s argument, the original text has a similar relationship the author’s own inspiration or intent—besides acting as a point of origin, there is not necessarily any direct correlation of the author’s intent and the original text.
This idea is especially applicable to Lovecraft criticism, where critics often “translate” his epistolary statements into his fiction. As Benjamin indicates, however, translation from one mode of expression to another “liberates the language” from the limitations of the original. This liberating project is what goes on in Lovecraft’s fiction, or, at the very least, in the process of trying to figure out what that fiction means. Lovecraft’s fiction, delivered by narrators who recollect fragments of texts and who speak of unspeakable things, deliberately enacts a process of indeterminacy in translation, leading readers to a different relationship to language and, hence, to Lovecraft’s version of a mystical truth. As we shall see, truth in Lovecraft’s fictional universe is always revealed as a mystical truth with a negative twist; it is a truth whose meaning is nonmeaning.
Lovecraft Annual, No. 1 Page 8