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

Lovecraft makes it very clear that Cook’s encouragement was instrumental in his resumption of weird writing; and this encouragement was both private and public. One instance of the latter is Cook’s effusive article entitled ‘Howard P. Lovecraft’s Fiction’, prefacing his printing of ‘Dagon’ in the Vagrant for November 1919, a perspicacious piece of work even though it conjectures that Lovecraft may have been influenced by Maupassant, whom he had probably not read by this time.

Poe, of course, is the dominant influence on Lovecraft’s early tales, and looms large over the bulk of Lovecraft’s fiction up to at least 1923. And yet, even ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The Outsider’ (1921), Lovecraft’s most obviously Poe-esque tales, are far from being mere pastiches; but it is evident that Lovecraft found in Poe a model both in style and in overall short-story construction.

In particular, the idiom Lovecraft evolved in his early tales— dense, a little overheated, laced with archaic and recondite terms, almost wholly lacking in ‘realistic’ character portrayal, and almost entirely given over to exposition and narration, with a nearcomplete absence of dialogue—is clearly derived from Poe. So much did Lovecraft customarily acknowledge the Poe influence that he would sometimes exaggerate it, as in his famous lament of 1929: ‘There are my “Poe” pieces & my “Dunsany” pieces—but alas—where are any “Lovecraft” pieces?’²

The most obvious stylistic feature common to both Poe and Lovecraft is the use of adjectives. In Lovecraft’s case this has been derisively termed ‘adjectivitis’, as if there is some canonical number of adjectives per square inch that is permissible and the slightest excess is cause for frenzied condemnation. But this sort of criticism is merely a holdover from an outmoded and superficial realism that vaunted the barebones style of a Hemingway or a Sherwood Anderson as the sole acceptable model for English prose. Lovecraft was predominantly influenced by the ‘Asianic’ style of Johnson and Gibbon as opposed to the ‘Attic’ style of Swift and Addison; and few nowadays—especially now that such writers as Thomas Pynchon and Gore Vidal have restored richness of texture to modern English fiction—will condemn Lovecraft without a hearing for the use of such a style.

Nevertheless, I think a case could be made that Lovecraft spent the better part of his fictional career in attempting to escape—or, at best, to master or refine—the stylistic influence of Poe, as is suggested by his frequent remarks in the last decade of his life on the need for simplicity of expression and his exemplification of this principle in the evolution of his later ‘scientific’ manner.

The tales of Lovecraft’s early period do not require much analysis; on the whole, they are relatively conventional, showing only hints of the dynamic conceptions that would infuse his later work. Some of the tales are more interesting for their genesis than for their actual content. ‘The Tomb’, written in the summer of 1917, tells the story of Jervas Dudley, a ‘dreamer and a visionary’ who appears to be possessed by the spirit of his eighteenth-century ancestor. It was inspired by Lovecraft’s stroll in Swan Point Cemetery in June, in the company of his aunt Lillian. They had come upon a tombstone dating to 1711, causing Lovecraft to ponder: ‘Here was a link with my favourite aera of periwigs … Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me?’³

‘Polaris’, written in the summer of 1918, strikingly anticipates Lovecraft’s later ‘Dunsanian’ tales, but was written a full year before he ever read Lord Dunsany. The story was inspired by a dream occurring in late spring of that year, when Lovecraft saw himself hovering as a disembodied intelligence over ‘a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills’.⁴

Most curious of all, ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ (1919), depicting the psychic possession of a backwoods denizen of the Catskill Mountains region of New York state by some cosmic entity, was inspired by a newspaper article in the New York Tribune about the State Constabulary’s encounter with just such denizens in that region.⁵ This article appeared on 27 April 1919, and actually mentions a backwoods family named Slater or Slahter, the exact character name used by Lovecraft in his story.

‘Dagon’, the second tale of Lovecraft’s maturity, is of interest chiefly for its contemporaneousness of setting (we are clearly in the midst of the First World War) and for its suggestion of an entire alien civilization that had once dwelt literally on the underside of the world. It is a theme that Lovecraft would develop exhaustively in his later work.