A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Criticism of Lovecraft—initially fed through ‘fan’ circles (including such noted critics as Fritz Leiber, George T. Wetzel, and Matthew H. Onderdonk)—had to fight off vicious and clumsy attacks on his work by professional critics insensitive to weird fiction (chiefly Edmund Wilson’s notorious review-article, ‘Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous’, published in the New Yorker for 24 November 1945), but eventually this work bore fruit with the emergence of more scholarly criticism in the 1970s, led initially by Dirk W. Mosig and carried on by such critics as Donald R. Burleson, Peter Cannon, David E. Schultz, Robert H. Waugh, Robert M. Price, and myself. The scholarly journal Lovecraft Studies was established in 1979 and has published much sound criticism of Lovecraft.

Many of Lovecraft’s colleagues wrote memoirs of Lovecraft, chiefly at the urging of August Derleth, who published them in various volumes of Lovecraft miscellany published by Arkham House over the years. These have now been gathered in Peter Cannon’s noteworthy volume, Lovecraft Remembered (1998). L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography appeared in 1975, but was widely criticized for lack of sympathy with its subject and an inadequate discussion of Lovecraft’s work and thought.

Media adaptations of Lovecraft were somewhat slow in appearing, and to this day their quality is very variable. Lovecraft’s work was heard on radio as early as the late 1940s; some film versions appeared in the 1960s (The Haunted Palace, 1964; Die, Monster, Die!, 1965; The Dunwich Horror, 1970), but they were both unfaithful and mediocre. Stuart Gordon’s series of films, beginning with Re-Animator (1985), are over-the-top, self-parodic adaptations of some of Lovecraft’s worst tales, but they were nevertheless intermittently successful in their campy manner, and have brought new fans to Lovecraft. His work has been adapted for comic books, role-playing games (most famously, The Call of Cthulhu, published by Chaosium), interactive computer games, and the like. But Lovecraft’s dense prose and slow-moving action has proved very difficult to translate into other media, and it cannot be said that any of these adaptations is, from an aesthetic point of view, entirely successful.

The widespread imitation of what came to be called the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is difficult to discuss objectively. Through the urging of August Derleth, who seemed to have a kind of mania about the Mythos, many horror and science fiction writers tried their hands at imitating Lovecraft, but with almost uniformly poor results. Perhaps only Colin Wilson (The Mind Parasites, 1967) and a very few others, who used Lovecraft as springboards for their own conceptions, have produced sound work in this vein. Ramsey Campbell began his career at a very early age by writing a volume of Lovecraft imitations, published by Arkham House in 1964, but very quickly found his own voice and has now become the finest writer in the field, although he lacks the popularity of some of his best-selling colleagues.

Lovecraft has now been dead for more than sixty years, and his work commands a far wider, and far more diverse, audience than it ever did in his own lifetime. His tales have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have elicited a library of learned commentary, his letters, essays, and poems have been published, his life has become the stuff of legend, and he himself has emerged as a dark but compelling icon of popular culture. Lovecraft is one of those few authors whose work appeals to college professors as well as to teenagers, to hippies as well as to businessmen, to highbrow novelists as well as to lowbrow film producers.

As for Lovecraft’s life, perhaps it is sufficient to say that, in large part, he lived it very much as he wished. We all wish that he could have secured a greater modicum of commercial success during his own lifetime; but he was willing to make sacrifices in personal comfort so as to preserve the purity of his art, and the endurance and increasing popularity of his work show that he made the right decision. So perhaps it is time to honour a man whose devotion to his work, generosity to his friends, and sensitivity of imagination knew virtually no bounds. His life is over now, and only his work remains.

CHAPTER THREE

Notes

Abbreviations used in the notes: AHT = Arkham House transcripts ofLovecraft’s letters; JHL = John Hay Library, Brown University (Providence, RI); SHSW = State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, WI); SL = Selected Letters (1965–76; 5 vols.). Chapter One

1. The 1850 U.S. census, probably enumerated in June 1850, gives George Lovecraft’s age as thirty-one. See Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, ‘Lovecraft’s Ancestors’, Crypt of Cthulhu No. 57 (St John’s Eve 1988): 19.