by Kenneth Hite
August Derleth was an excellent writer in his own field, regional fiction, and an occasionally gifted pasticheur. His Lovecraft pastiches—especially the “posthumous collaborations,” which consisted of Derleth writing a story based on a Lovecraftian commonplace-book entry—are not his best, however. Derleth also read Lovecraft’s cosmic horror in the light of his own Roman Catholicism, not merely establishing a Pythagorean “elemental” scheme for Lovecraft’s various entities (harmless enough) but adding a pantheon of “good” Elder Gods and recasting the blind, Darwinian universe of Azathoth and others into a Manichean struggle of good and evil. As the publisher and editor of Arkham House, Derleth published and encouraged “Lovecraftian” fiction that adopted his understanding of the Mythos, and even when he published stories in a less dualistic vein he often included in the anthologies a totalizing essay setting out his own vision as Lovecraft’s. (This lamentable trend did not die with Derleth.) All that said, of course, Derleth was, at least, keeping Lovecraft in print, seeding his tales into other publishers’ anthologies, and building a stable of writers dedicated to their own vision of Lovecraft’s work. Derleth also underwrote the publication of five volumes of Lovecraft’s letters, ensuring that future critics would have plenty of ammunition with which to snottily condescend to Derleth’s misunderstanding of Lovecraft’s philosophy. In short, without August Derleth, H.P. Lovecraft might well be no more famous today than William Hope Hodgson—who owes some large part of his small fame to the fact that Lovecraft’s literary criticism mentions him.
August Derleth also published the single best, most important literary-critical study of H.P. Lovecraft to date, Fritz Leiber’s “A Literary Copernicus” (1949). Leiber, soon to be a major talent not just in horror, but in fantasy and science fiction as well, understood that Lovecraft partook of all those traditions, especially science fiction. Leiber wrote that Lovecraft “shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space.” Like Leiber, many of the increasingly confident and important SF and fantasy authors of the postwar era recognized Lovecraft for his impact, even if, unlike Leiber, they (mainly devotees of manly, modernist prose a la Heinlein and Hemingway) denigrated his actual writing. The SF community, like Lovecraft fandom, found itself marginalized by the academy, and developed its own pet critics and scholars, often coming (in the great tradition of Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Poe, Swinburne, Eliot, Auden, and Lovecraft) from the ranks of successful authors.
Among them were the two most significant figures in Lovecraftian criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, friends and collaborators L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. Carter, a pasticheur of even more limited gifts than Derleth, became a (quite skilled) editor at Ballantine Books in 1969. In the wake of the Tolkien boom, he drove the reprinting not only of Lovecraft but of Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, William Beckford, Arthur Machen, and other key figures who influenced Lovecraft. Carter also churned out numerous anthologies (and a very able history of fantasy, Imaginary Worlds) tying Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos to the burgeoning fantasy scene, a tack he followed in his literary biography Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos. Perhaps thanks to his strong fantasy leanings, Carter was sympathetic to Derleth’s interpretation of the Mythos. With de Camp, Carter edited, revised, and expurgated Robert E. Howard’s fiction for Lancer Books, further expanding the reputation of the “Lovecraft Circle.” In 1975, de Camp published the first full-length biography of Lovecraft, Lovecraft: A Biography. Although thoroughly researched and quite well-written, it has been criticized for making Lovecraft seem a pathetic figure, along with a helping of armchair psychoanalysis and a perceived over-emphasis on Lovecraft’s racism. In part to counter de Camp’s work, Frank Belknap Long published a windy reminiscence that contributed little to critical or biographical understanding, and Willis Conover edited his and Lovecraft’s correspondence into Lovecraft at Last, a biography of Lovecraft’s last year and his relationship with a young fan (Conover). This work, its influence limited by its small-press distribution, is probably the finest portrait of Lovecraft as a human being, although Conover was obviously working from within a very narrow perspective.
But in the 1970s, armchair psychoanalysis was all the rage. The scholar Barton L. St.-Armand examined “The Rats in the Walls” as an exploration of the Jungian unconscious and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a novel driven by homesickness. A French critic, Maurice Levy, analyzed Lovecraft’s tales as HPL’s obsessive subconscious search for a “cure” for his own pessimism, racism, and reactionary aesthetic. (Ever avant-garde, the critic and novelist Colin Wilson had diagnosed Lovecraft as neurotic, even psychotic, and “sick” in The Strength to Dream (1961), a study of literary imagination. On the other hand, he treated Lovecraft as a serious writer.) In America, HPL fan and Ph.D. in psychology Dirk Mosig led the way with “The Four Faces of ‘The Outsider,’” a full-throated assault on the established New Critical version of HPL that saw him solely (or primarily) as mythographer and genre author. Mosig also expanded on Richard L. Tierney’s initial demolition of “The Derleth Mythos” in “H.P. Lovecraft: Myth-Maker,” an attempt to divine Lovecraft’s metaphysics from his fiction to the detriment of the received Derlethian wisdom. Mosig pioneered the intensive examination of Lovecraft’s writings as expressions of Lovecraft that has slowly taken over Lovecraft studies—a revolution made possible and plausible by de Camp’s biography, for all that the later critics disparaged it.
One seminal development in Lovecraft criticism in the 1970s demands mention: the publication of Meade and Penny Frierson’s fanzine-cum-festschrift HPL in 1972. With Stuart David Schiff (who would go on to become one of the horror field’s most gifted critics and editors) at the non-fiction editing helm, this 144-page hectographed amateur publication was a depth charge. In addition to plentiful fiction and art, it contained memoirs or criticism by leading scholars, gifted authors, and Lovecraft’s correspondents, including Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Joseph Payne Brennan, E. Hoffmann Price, Colin Wilson, and James Wade. The two most significant works within were Richard Tierney’s aforementioned de-Derlethification “The Derleth Mythos,” and “The Cthulhu Mythos” by George T. Wetzel. This revision of Wetzel’s landmark article from 1955 (during the last echoes of the post-mortem “Lovecraft circle” critical scene) remains almost the only serious attempt at a structuralist analysis of Lovecraft’s fictional oeuvre. (Indeed, it approaches archetypal criticism a la Northrop Frye.) To paraphrase Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground, HPL only sold 500 copies, but everyone who bought one started writing Lovecraft criticism, including Dirk Mosig.
Another was Dirk Mosig’s protégé, an Indiana prodigy named S.T. Joshi. While still in high school, Joshi contracted with Kent State University Press to produce a bibliography of Lovecraft. While at Brown University, he produced a landmark anthology, H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, the first book on Lovecraft from an academic press (Ohio University Press). Although it reprinted Wetzel’s study, it further aimed critical thought in the direction of Lovecraft’s influences, metaphysics, and philosophy. (A second, centennial, anthology edited with David E. Schultz, An Epicure in the Terrible (1991), included more thematic material, albeit still in service to Lovecraft the metaphysician.) In 1979 he also started Lovecraft Studies, a journal for the academic discussion of HPL, which provided an outlet for gifted scholars such as Steven J. Mariconda, Peter Cannon,3 and pulp historian Will Murray. He further labored to produce critical, error-free texts of Lovecraft’s work, helming the revised editions at August Derleth’s old company, Arkham House. Truly the Bastille had fallen, as Joshi was firmly in the Tierney-Mosig “anti-Derleth” school of Puritan neo-orthodoxy. Over the next decade, as Lovecraft Studies flourished, and the revised Lovecraft texts became available (1984-1989), S.T. Joshi was the overwhelmingly dominant force in Lovecraft scholarship and Lovecraft criticism.
Lovecraft studies (and Lovecraft Studi
es) suffered with the rest of the academy from the “French Disease” in the 1990s, ushered in by Donald Burleson’s deconstructionist Lovecraft study, Disturbing the Universe (1990), which was, however, published by an academic press (University of Kentucky). Even the best of scholars fell victim to the bug on occasion, leaving the floor clear for the historicist Joshi and his interpretations. Joshi fiercely emphasized what he saw as the essential unity of Lovecraft’s vision, as expressed in the fiction, the letters, and the critical essays. For Joshi, Lovecraft is most valuable as a philosopher, an exponent of the unified life, a tireless evangelist for the gospel of atheist cosmicism, or what he calls “mechanist materialism.” This vision of Lovecraft’s vision received full expression in Joshi’s magisterial biography, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), probably the most comprehensive one-volume biography possible. Joshi also labored mightily and long to claim the reactionary Lovecraft for the Left, a project cast into some doubt by Michel Houellebecq’s 1991 Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, which made Lovecraft’s reaction the source and soul of his horror.
Although I take plenty of shots at Joshi and his interpretations later on in this Tour, I want to make clear that he is the indispensable man at the heart of what academic Lovecraft revival there has been; the August Derleth, if you will, of serious Lovecraft criticism. Like Derleth, he shows an unvarying tendency to read his own views onto HPL, but also like Derleth he does not exclude or punish those who differ. Joshi’s The Weird Tale (1990) examined Lovecraft in the light of the other great horrorists of the century: Blackwood, Bierce, James, Machen, and Dunsany, providing intensely interesting and valuable insights on them and their great Providence scion. His reading in the literature of the weird is vast, and his historical research (both first-hand in the John Hay Library, and second-hand by identifying problems for other scholars) has made Lovecraft one of the best-documented literary figures in any century.
Joshi’s only rival for eminence in the field during the 1980s and 1990s was Robert M. Price, who edited The Crypt of Cthulhu, “a pulp magazine and theological journal” perhaps intended to take some of the piss out of the academic tone of Lovecraft Studies. A fanzine that reprinted a lot of minor Cthulhiana by various authors, Crypt gave Price a leg up as an editor for various small presses, including many, many collections from Chaosium, the publishers of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Like Crypt, CoC bowed in 1981, and set off its own tsunami of Lovecraft fandom, which eventually washed up in critical studies. (As it did in my case.) Price’s anthologies for Chaosium featured a strong historical perspective, tracing individual themes and topoi backward to Victorian fiction and forward through the various waves of “Cthulhu Mythos stories,” presenting the tales as serial myths rather than Joshi-style philosophical proofs. Price, a theologian and minister, occasionally toyed with neo-Derlethianism, pointing out that Lovecraft presented his mythologies as mythologies within the fiction, and analyzing them in those terms rather than as variables in mechanist-materialist equations. This has its own delicious irony, as Price’s other main contribution to the critical study of HPL is to define all of Lovecraft’s gods as aliens, and to describe Lovecraft’s mythopoetic project as a “demythologization.”
In the new century, scholarship seems to be in something of a hiatus: the Chaosium anthologies have slowed to a crawl, and both Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu have been sporadic in the last decade. (Joshi published another biography of Lovecraft in 2001, a “biography in letters” called Lord of a Visible World and a very interesting primary research work on Lovecraft’s Library.) After 70 years Lovecraft seems to have made the jump to cult figure in the academy, however, showing up in works by hip scholars like Erik Davis and Victoria Nelson, and in an increasing number of studies of the currently trendy Gothic. Robert H. Waugh, an English professor at SUNY (New Paltz) has apparently decided to take a swipe at the “reigning scholar” crown with Monster in the Mirror, a 2006 anthology of essays centering on “The Outsider” and privileging Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism while remaining sympathetic to the work. Joyce Carol Oates in the mainstream, and China Miéville in the spec-fic world, have taken up the mantle of critical Lovecraft defenders. Lovecraft finds himself in both the Library of America and (in a trilogy edited by S.T. Joshi) Penguin Classics; surely, no more imprimatur is needed. But that said, Lovecraft’s Library of America appearance spawned a whole new series of ignorant reviews that could have been ground out by a reanimated Edmund Wilson, save that Wilson was a much better writer. Withal, Lovecraft repays critical study; the work is its own reward. If that allows too much fanboy raving, it also leaves air in the room for the interested and intelligent reader, who has only one or two pillars to avoid. (Pity the poor would-be Shakespeare amateur, with tens of thousands of interpretations blotting out the work like so many tentacles.) Like August Derleth’s Elder Gods’ never-ending battle against the black magic of the Great Old Ones, and like the later critics’ never-ending battle against August Derleth, the battle for Lovecraft’s critical reputation will perhaps go on until the stars once more come right and great Cthulhu strides forth again.
The Stories
The Tomb
[June 1917]
We’re off!
And with a jolt, we begin with early, prolix, Poe-wannabe Lovecraft. “The Tomb” is essentially Charles Dexter Ward before Lovecraft really knew how to write a plot, use setting, or set a mood. Jervas Dudley, though, is surprisingly well developed for an HPL character, and amazing for an early HPL character, possibly because, as Joshi theorizes, he’s a thinly disguised version of Lovecraft himself. Fighting your way through the interminable drifts of this story (it almost has more in common with his forgettable juvenilia, for all that it barely predates “Dagon”), you come across a few nuggets of interest, beginning with this early version of Lovecraft’s hyper-dimensional cosmos:
It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
I’m also susceptible to the way Lovecraft roots and buttresses his various hateful lineages, and to associated things like the “mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall.” And this is just a really great line:
“Several faces I recognised; though I should have known them better had they been shrivelled or eaten away by death and decomposition.”
Other than that, it’s mostly useful as a kind of Burgess Shale of Lovecraft’s artistic evolution. Like “Dagon,” “The Tomb” introduces a lot of themes and topoi that HPL will return to often—the interpermeability of the real and dream worlds (Dream-Quest, the other “Dreamlands” tales, “Dreams in the Witch House”), and of history and the present (“He,” “Shadow Out of Time,” “Dreams in the Witch House” again), antiquarian tendencies as the road to doom (“He” again, “Whisperer in the Darkness,” “Haunter of the Dark,” etc.), blasphemous or cursed family lines (“Rats in the Walls,” “Lurking Fear,” “Dunwich Horror,” etc.), and even that cleansing blast of lightning (“Lurking Fear,” “Haunter of the Dark”). As I mention above, the whole story, with its neurasthenic, ancestrally-obsessed scion possessed by his villainous forefather, prefigures Charles Dexter Ward.
Since it’s a sloppier story than “Dagon,” it also introduces a lot of things that HPL didn’t wind up using so much, beginning with the “dryads” (and the parallel “hideous soul of the forest”), the almost explicit fairy-tale structure (parallelling Theseus’ life), buried treasure and necromancy (both surprisingly rare
in Lovecraft), and the Georgian rip-roaring attitude exemplified by the drinking song. One can’t help but feel, reading this, that there was the seed of a really good Hell-Fire Club novel in HPL somewhere.
Dagon
[July 1917]
Like the narrator, Lovecraft saw the central action of “Dagon”—the crawl across the primordial mud flat away from the temple—in a dream.
Even more than “The Tomb,” this is an appropriate beginning in so many ways. It’s really the first piece of mature fiction Lovecraft wrote (and the first he published in Weird Tales), and it introduces a surprisingly developed set of the themes he’d visit for the next 20 years. There’s the “archaeological exposition” in the form of hieroglyphics or bas-reliefs, the topos of the submerged evil god/place, the allusions to existing myth but with substantial changes, and even the final despairing narrative shriek to break closure conclusively. If “The Tomb” is Charles Dexter Ward in embryo, “Dagon” is both “Call of Cthulhu” and Mountains of Madness in ovo. “Dagon” is also the story that forced Lovecraft to begin his lifelong project of defending, and explaining critically, weird fiction. (Members of the APA where he first circulated the tale disliked it, and its genre, intensely.) As great a writer as HPL is, he’s almost as great a critic. (This is surprisingly common.)
This story thus begins both those strands of his thought, and is almost the purest exposition (save the prose-poems) of his thesis that weird fiction is built up from incident, not from action. This, perhaps, is why the narrator is such a passive weakling. Indeed, more than most Lovecraft stories, we really are faced with an unreliable narrator. The sunken continent rises while the narrator dreams wildly, and sinks while he is delirious. In short, he enters and leaves Dagon’s realm through his dreams (on a boat, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are). His only proof is nothing: he clearly remembers seeing Dagon at the temple, and he hears noises…but are you going to believe a self-confessed suicidal morphine addict? This device keeps this story surprisingly fresh; it’s one of Lovecraft’s few completely successful (in my mind) variations on Poe’s structure, and he continues to ring its changes all the way to “The Shadow Out of Time.”