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

The other split was one within the United itself. Lovecraft addresses this matter in two essays, ‘The Pseudo-United’ (United Amateur, May 1920) and ‘A Matter of Uniteds’ (Bacon’s Essays, summer 1927). In 1912 occurred a hotly contested election at the UAPA convention in La Grande, Oregon; the result was that both of the two candidates for president, Helene E. Hoffman and Harry Shepherd, declared themselves the winner. In his various remarks Lovecraft never makes it clear that it was the Hoffman faction that refused to accept the verdict of the UAPA directors (who confirmed the election of Shepherd) and withdrew. Indeed, if all one knows of the controversy comes from Lovecraft, one would think it was the Shepherd group that was the rebel organization; but in fact the amateur world to this day regards the Hoffman group as the rebels and the discontents, even though many acknowledge their literary and numerical superiority.

In any event, the Hoffman supporters established their own association, retaining the title United Amateur Press Association, while the group around Shepherd called itself the United Amateur Press Association of America. Lovecraft joined the former because he had been recruited by Edward F. Daas of that faction; probably he did not at the time even know of the existence of the other, as it was largely centred on Seattle, Washington. It is, however, somewhat ironic that what Lovecraft called the ‘pseudo-United’ actually outlasted his own United; the latter essentially collapsed from disorganization and apathy around 1926, while the other United carried on until 1939. But for all practical purposes it was a moribund association, and when Lovecraft was persuaded to resume amateur activity in the 1930s he saw no option but to work for the NAPA.

The United’s split with the National was something Lovecraft vigorously supported and never wished to see healed. His contempt for the older group—which he fancied (perhaps rightly) to be a haven of old-timers resting on their laurels, men who looked back fondly to their lost youth as amateur printers and typographers, and politicians devoted to furthering their own causes and gaining transient and meaningless power in an insignificant arena—is unremitting. In ‘Consolidation’s Autopsy’ (published in the Lake Breeze for April 1915 under the not very accurate pseudonym ‘El Imparcial’) he dynamites the position of those Nationalites who are seeking some sort of rapport with the United. Dismissing the National as ‘an inactive Old Men’s Home’, he writes scornfully of their fostering the ideal of the ‘small boy with a printing press’—a somewhat double-edged charge, since Lovecraft himself had been exactly that only a few years earlier. Indeed, perhaps the vehemence of his response rests precisely in his awareness that he himself had a somewhat arrested adolescence and was anomalously long in separating himself from boyhood interests.

As Lovecraft plunged into amateur activity, contributing essays and poems (later stories) to amateur journals, becoming involved in heated controversies, and in general taking stock of the little world he had stumbled upon, he gradually formulated a belief— one that he gained remarkably early and maintained to the end of his life—that amateur journalism was an ideal vehicle for the effecting of two important goals: first, abstract self-expression without thought of remuneration; and second, education, especially for those who had not had the benefit of formal schooling. The first became a cardinal tenet in Lovecraft’s later aesthetic theory, and its development during his amateur period may be the most important contribution of amateur journalism to his literary outlook. It is not, of course, likely that amateurdom actually originated this idea in Lovecraft’s mind; indeed, he would not have responded so vigorously to amateurdom if he had not already held this view of literature as an elegant diversion.

At the same time that Lovecraft was hailing the non-mercenary spirit of amateurdom, he was regarding the amateur world as a practice arena for professional publication. This is not a paradox because what he meant by ‘professional publication’ was not hackwork but publication in distinguished magazines or with reputed book publishers. In so doing one is not buckling down to produce insincere pseudo-literature simply for money but allowing the polished products of one’s ‘self-expression’ to achieve a worthy audience.

The means to achieve these lofty goals in amateurdom was education. It is surely plausible to believe that Lovecraft’s own failures in formal education caused him to espouse this goal as fervently as he did. Consider his statement in ‘For What Does the United Stand?’ (United Amateur, May 1920):