Lovecraft was easily scared

So, I've been listening to an audiobook collection of four Lovecraft stories: "The Call of Cthluhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" plus two short pieces, "Dagon" and "The Hound". I enjoy Lovecraft, but that's because I read him as a fantasist. As a horror writer, I think he's a dud for the simple reason that his stories aren't frightening. I have an active imagination and hence am easily spooked, including by writers like John Bellairs, and Clark Ashton Smith, and M. R. James, but not by Lovecraft.

Listening to the opening paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror" helped clarify why. The simple truth is that Lovecraft found lots of things frightening that most of the rest of us just don't get scared by. Like fish. And if you don't share his assumptions, then the triggers he puts into his stories don't go off.

To  highlighting just how many things Lovecraft found frightening, here are the first four paragraphs from that famous story, interleaved with some observations by me:


When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

--to a city dweller, the countryside is a strange and somewhat disturbing place

--

      The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. 

--roads are a little unsettling in themselves, esp. narrow ones

The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, 

--trees are scary, especially when they're large

and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. 

--plants are scary when they grow well

At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; 

--plants are also scary when they don't grow

while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

--run-down farms are scary

      Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. 

--farmers sitting on porches? scary

Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. 

--locals who keep to themselves? better not risk it

When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. 

--mountains? scary

The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, 

--round mountains? that's just crazy talk

and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

--stone circles: scary

      Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, 

--gorges and ravines: yup. scary

and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. 

--bridges? scary. 

(actually, as an acrophobiac, I'm with him on this one)

When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, 

--marshes? scary

and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter 

--birdsong? at night? scary!

and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance 

--fireflies: scary

(is Lovecraft the only person who ever lived

who's afraid of lightning bugs?)

to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. 

--frogs: scary

The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

--rivers are scary, especially when they meander

      As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, 

--hills are better the further away they keep

but there is no road by which to escape them. 

--don't want to get too close to those round hills

(I hear they rise wild)

Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, 

--small towns: creepy

and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region.

--old buildings: scary

 It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, 

--collapsing buildings: okay, that can be scary

and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. 

--God given way to Mammon? 

some find that scary, others just kinda sad

One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. 

--again, I'm with him on the bridge thing

Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, 

--"that good fresh country air", as my father-in-law used to call it

as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. 

--really old stuff is scary, the older the scarier

(for an antiquarian, HPL was spooked by age)

It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. 

--getting back on track after an unintended detour: definitely a good feeling

Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

--i.e., that creepy place with the farms and falling-down buildings

and a bridge and trees and hills.

And fireflies. Don't forget the fireflies.

--Luckily, I shd soon have an audiobook of his dreamland stories, Lovecraft's best work, so there's that to look forward to.

--JDR

NPR Does HPL

So, somewhat to my surprise, the next-to-last story on NPR's Morning Edition on Friday was a report from Necronomicon. As usual with any news piece on a meeting with a fantasy/sci-fi theme, the reporter has included the cliche of talking about people in costume (one of those little boxes you have to check when doing a story of this kind, I guess) and also made fun of the name (whereas I'd say "Necronomicon" is a great in-joke instantly recognizable to the people who'd be interested in attending).

But it was interesting to learn, through the piece, that Providence seems to be accepting HPL as a native son, with a bust of him now in the Athenaeum and the CALL OF CTHULHU silent movie from a few years back being shown there as part of some special exhibit. That's a level of local fame I don't think HPL himself ever seriously dreamed of.  Hope they do put together that walking tour of Lovecraft-associated Providence spots that gets mentioned. And I do have to give them credit that in links from the online version of the story they provide links to pieces that raise some serious issues about HPL and his work, but keep them out of the main story. Bemused by the comments, esp. the one by "Pugmire", who I assume is the Lovecraft scholar of the same name, attacking anyone who criticizes Lovecraft's worst novel as being "illiterate". More interestingly, Pugmire asserts that the Lovecraft volume from Library of America is their best-selling title of all time. That would be surprising, but don't really know where to go to confirm something like that. If true, it wd be deeply ironic, since Edmund Wilson, who was a big supporter of a Library-of-America type project, was a notorious detractor of Lovecraft.

In any case, here's the link:

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/31/241655366/providence-kindles-love-of-horror-writer-h-p-lovecraft

--John R.
current book: GODS AND FIGHTING MEN by Lady Gregory [1904]
current audiobook: Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON [1791]

Weighed and Found Wandrei

Weighed and Found Wandrei

So, as part of my project of slowly working my way thr. the various WEIRD TALES authors in Lovecraft's circle, I've now reached one who played a major role historically but seems to have been insignificant literarily: Donald Wandrei, one of the older of HPL's young disciples, having corresponded with Lovecraft from 1926 onwards. His role as co-founder of Arkham House means he shares with Derleth the credit for rescuing HPL's work from obscurity, and likewise the blame of ghettoizing said work into small-press-dom. Derleth of course put himself front and center as the defender of Lovecraft's legacy, as well as claiming the right to say exactly what that legacy was, while Wandrei remained more in the background, playing relatively little part from the early/mid 1940s onward aside from his major project of trying to assemble and transcribe virtually the whole of Lovecraft's correspondence --the first volume of which did not appear until more than a quarter-century after Lovecraft's death, in 1965.

As a person, Wandrei seems to have been an internet troll before his time. This book skirts his role in driving Lovecraft's chosen executive, R. H. Barlow, not just out of Lovecraft studies but out of fandom altogether, as well as the question of his knowledge of, or duplicity in, Derleth's various frauds. But it's not a good sign when the biographical essay at the end of the book ("Of Donald Wandrei, August Derleth, and H. P. Lovecraft", by D. H. Olson) starts by arguing that Wandrei was not a paranoid crank, whatever we might have heard. Talk about an "unaccustomed as I am to public speaking" opener! My own feeling, after reading said piece, was that "paranoid, litigious crank" about summed it up.

Still, personality and talent are very different things. There are authors I don't much like whose works I love, and vice versa. Having now read two volumes of Wandrei stories, I conclude that I've read enough -- I'll probably read his novel THE WEB OF EASTER ISLAND (1948) if I ever get the chance, but two thick volumes of over 700 pages of short stories seems a fair trial to say this stuff is not for me. Of the two, the collection of detective stories, FROST (Fedogan and Bremer, 2000) reads like the kind of stories Harry Stephen Keeler was parodying as far back as the 1920s: infallible inscrutable detective, beautiful sidekick, and bizarrely complicated / spectacularly improbable crimes. It's a tradition still alive and well today in manga like DETECTIVE CONAN and KINDAICHI CASE FILES; readable enough but impossible to take seriously.

The other, DON'T DREAM, collects horror and pulp science-fiction stories together -- in fact, I discovered after the fact that it largely replicates the contents of Wandrei's first book, the Arkham House collection THE EYE AND THE FINGER (1944). Those looking for early Mythos tales will come away wanting: aside from references to "the old ones" "the whisperer in darkness" "the color out of space" [sic] and "the call of Cthulhu" -- all in a single more or less irrelevant paragraph in the story "The Lady in Grey" [WEIRD TALES, 1933] -- there's only one truly Mythos story, though not marked as such: "The Monster from Nowhere" (which shd have been titled The Shoggoth from Space). Two variant stories -- "When the Fire Creatures Came" [1932] and its revised form "The Fire Vampires" [1933] introduce the flame vampires and Fthaggua (Derleth's Cthugha) but are schlock science fiction, not horror; something later adopted into the Mythos rather than an intentional contribution.

Most of these stories are predictable, gruesome pulp sci-fi, with a handful of horrors from exotic jungles contributing their bit. He's fond of past-life regression stories (always accompanied by physical regression as well), as well as amoeba-like division and runaway reproduction of monsters (a theme he uses time after time). Although said to have been fond of the prose-poem, the examples included here show he wasn't any good at the form: these are the most static, uninteresting prose-poems I've ever read (and, as an admirer of Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and Poe, I'm a great admirer of the form). 

Still, a few stories stand out. "The Destroying Horde" [WEIRD TALES, 1935] seems to be the origin of the famed DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS monster 'the gelatinous cube' (deadly because perennially underestimated). "Spawn of the Sea" [ibid, 1933] is a too-obvious prequel to Hodgson's great tale "The Derelict", with bits from Poe's PYM thrown in (Wandrei testifies elsewhere "The discovery of Poe was the greatest literary event of my life" -- p. 356).  It's interesting to note that the opening story here, "A Fragment of a Dream" [1926] features a green sun, but this seems serendipitous; the chances of Tolkien's having seen it -- either in its first appearance in the MINNESOTA QUARTERS [1926] or its reprinting in W. Paul Cook's fanzine THE RECLUSE [1927] or in the Arkham House collection [1944] -- seem effectively nil. Also of minor interest is a Wandrei essay "The Imaginative Element in Modern Literature" which defines all "imaginative literature" as falling into three groupings: ghost stories, horror stories, and "pseudo-scientific romance" (p. 361). It's a good indicator of just how narrowly fantasy can be defined, but wholly inadequate when compared to, say, "On Fairy-Stories" or "Supernatural Horror in Literature": Wandrei was no Tolkien or even a Lovecraft.

There is one outstanding story in this collection, however, which makes the whole seven-hundred-page slog worthwhile just to discover it: "Strange Harvest" (WEIRD TALES, 1953). One of Wandrei's later tales, it's wonderfully atypical. If I came across it anonymously in an anthology I wd have instantly identified it as the work of Rbt Arthur (one of the great unappreciated authors of the era, best known for his later work on Alfred Hitchcock anthologies). It's not an original idea -- all the plants in a remote region gain sentience, and object strongly and effectively to the local farmers' baffled attempts to harvest them -- but handled extremely well, with great humor and effectiveness. The escaping apple orchard, who replanted themselves in a spot more to their liking and whom the would be harvester unwisely pursued, was my favorite bit, but it's hard to resist a line like "Not least among the remarkable events in Shawtuck County that morning was the saga of the fugitive potatoes." (p. 304). That line pretty much tells you whether this is a story you'd like or not. For me, the answer is v. much yes; I'll be hanging on to this volume solely for the essay on Wandrei at the end and this story.

Finally, there's a puzzling passage in Wandrei's deposition, drawn up as part of his suits and counter-suits against Arkham House after Derleth's death and incorporated into the volume's terminal essay. At one point, after mentioning Lovecraft's having appointed Barlow his literary executor, Wandrei goes on to say

"Lovecraft had also given specific authorization to six persons to use all story ideas in his notebooks, and to use all his Cthulhu mythology, these six individuals including Clark Ashton Smith, Frank B. Long, Derleth, and me." (p. 377)

Now, in the first place this does not ring true to the way Lovecraft approached the mythos, which was much more free-form and informal. That he wd encourage some and discourage others doesn't seem to fit the facts very well. And in the second place, assuming any such document or instructions ever existed, who are the other two names, and why did Wandrei omit them from his list?  I can think of lots of possibilities --Howard? Bloch? Kuttner? Price? Barlow? Leiber? et al. -- but no way to narrow it down plausibly to the ones Wandrei had in mind.

So, done with that. Wandrei's true legacy is not in his works (not the short stories and essays, anyway) but in having co-founded a legended small press at age thirty. Now to see if I can find that novel, or whether Donald's brother Howard Wandrei was any better . . .

--JDR

Lovecraft's Blog

So, recently while reading the Mistakonic River Press volume of Lovecraft criticism, I dug out several pamphlets from Necronomicon Press, to confirm that one of the essays printed inside the M.R.P. volume was a piece I'd read before.* In the process, I came across another such booklet that I'd bought years ago (1996) but never gotten around to reading. The last few days I've remedied that, and it's been an interesting experience.

First off, what we have here is basically Lovecraft's blog. Lovecraft did not start out a short-story writer for the horror pulps; he started out as an essayist and editorialist in an amateur press association. THE CONSERVATIVE was HPL's own apa, printed between 1915 and 1923, in which he tackles issues ranging from prosody and politics to pacifism and prohibition. Joshi, the world's pre-immenent Lovecraft scholar, has selected some representative contents to reprint in this little booklet.

So far as rational discourse goes, it's hard to take Lovecraft seriously here: he's interested less in engaging in a discussion than in demolishing those who hold a contrary opinion to his own. Thus, although I agree with Lovecraft on some points (Temperance) and completely oppose him on others (Pacifism), that's largely moot: neither his support nor his condemnation had any sway on my own views. It's best to view these as polemics, relics from flame wars of nearly a century ago. Hence, my characterization of them as Lovecraft's blog: were he alive today, this is the sort of thing he'd be posting on his website.

At it's best, these essays reveal Lovecraft's gift for pastiche: he deliberately re-creates the sustained invective that characterized Swift's vicious little pieces of some two hundred years before (cf. A TALE OF A TUB). He particularly takes care to make his opening sentence as provocative as possible, to get attention and a rise out of the reader. Here are two particularly telling examples:

"After the degrading debauch of craven pacifism through which our sodden and feminized public has lately floundered, a slight sense of shame seems to be appearing, and the outcries of peace-at-any-price maniacs are less violent than they were a few months ago." ("The Renaissance of Manhood", an anti-pacifist diatribe, p. 15; October 1915)

"Of the various intentional fallacies exhaled like miasmic vapours from the rotting cosmopolitanism of vitiated American politics, and doubly rife during these days of European conflict, none is more disgusting than that contemptible subterfuge of certain foreign elements whereby the legitimate zeal of the genuine native stock for England's cause is denounced and compared to the unpatriotic disaffection of those working in behalf of England's enemies." ("Old England and the 'Hyphen'", p. 18-19; October 1916)

Quite apart from literary quality (or the lack of it), these essays are primarily of interest for what they reveal about Lovecraft. His idealization of Pope's prosody and of the colonial era when England and America were one are palpable, but it was a pleasant surprise to find a phrase or two in praise of natural beauty (something almost altogether absent from his later works, aside from the haunting ending of the DREAM-QUEST) -- e.g. "the playing of the sun with the leaves of green trees" (p.23) as one of the things that sometimes brings happiness, or a wistful allusion to "twilight in an old garden in spring" (p.36). He's also somewhat less anti-Xian here than later, or at least less than his apostles wd have us believe. The best essay, I thought, was "Revolutionary Mythology" (p. 21-22; October 1916), in which he casts doubt on the larger-than-life status accorded what since his day have come to be called 'the Founding Fathers' (a phrase apparently invented by Warren G. Harding's speechwriter): he's a case where consensus history has more or less caught up with him (although most Americans still harbor resentments against the Tories, whom he admires). The worst are those on prosody, esp. the one on free verse, which he was constitutionally incapable of appreciating:** his arguments basically come down to a high-handed but heartfelt plea that for everybody to write just like Alexander Pope and all may yet be well.

One question any reader of these pieces has to ask himself or herself: When is a Conservative a Reactionary? Here we have ideas that were for the most part already outside the mainstream ninety-plus years ago, and the ones that did at least briefly hold center stage -- such as Lovecraft's call for something v. like the Palmer Raids (p. 33; July 1919) -- are uniformly discredited by history. The little volume's editor makes things worse with his introduction in which he rightly argues against judging Lovecraft as if he were our contemporary, but then oversteps so badly as to undercut his entire thesis:

"Lovecraft the racist; Lovecraft the political reactionary; Lovecraft the antiquated litterateur: many [of his admirers] do not like to admit these sides of his character, hence try to explain them away. But there is no need to do so, because he was none of these things" ("Introduction", p. iii; emphasis mine). Joshi's argument is that, having been raised in a different time and milieu, "Lovecraft . . . could not but have believed as he did" (p. iv). Unfortunately for this line of defense, plenty of Lovecraft's contemporaries did not in fact hold such views -- including many of his fellow apa writers. Or, for a more well-known example, take Mark Twain, who died just a few years before Lovecraft launched his apa, and who grew up in a pro-slavery environment but came to utterly reject all arguments in favor of slavery.

The argument that Lovecraft was no racist also comes a purler with the piece "In a Minor Key" (July 1915), in which HPL distinguishes between anti-Semitism ("a religious and social animosity of one white race toward another white and equally intellectual race") and laws against 'miscegenation' ("the natural and scientifically just sentiment which keeps the African black from contaminating the Caucasian population of the United States"), adding "The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government" (p.9; emphasis mine).

And as if this were not bad enough, Lovecraft devotes his next paragraph to a gushing defense of the Ku-Klux-Klan: "that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War" (ibid). Although he'd not yet seen BIRTH OF A NATION, the controversy over which had sparked this discussion, he mentions having both read and seen a stage play based on THE KLANSMAN, the book of which NATION was the film adaptation. Furthermore, he asserts his authority on the subject, boasting that he "has . . . made a close historical study of the Ku-Klux-Klan, finding as a result of his [i.e., HPL's] research nothing but Honour, Chivalry, and Patriotism in the activities of the Invisible Empire. The Klan merely did for the people what the law refused to do, removing the ballot from unfit hands . . ." (p. 9; ibid). He concludes: "Race prejudice is a gift of Nature".

Granted, it's interesting to see Lovecraft grant a middle status to those who, while white, do not belong to "the real American people, the descendants of Virginian and New England Christian Protestant colonists" ("The Crime of the Century",*** p. 10; April 1915). Here he sounds remarkably like Pat Buchanan. Elsewhere he accepts assimilation so long as the immigrants are of "Teutonic stock" and forsake old-world alliances, but he indignantly and explicitly rejects the concept of "America as a composite nation whose civilisation is a compound of all existing cultures; a melting-pot of mongrelism wherein it is a crime for a man to know his own grandfather's name" ("Old England and the 'Hyphen'", p. 20; October 1916).

So, an interesting read, yes. Edifying, no. Maybe the most horrifying thing about Lovecraft's stories in the end is the realization that he toned down his racism, phobias, and hatreds in his fiction. Didn't see that coming.

--JDR

*Mariconda's, with its v. useful (albeit incomplete) chart listing Cth. elements in Lovecraft's stories, set out in chronological form.

**but then, you'd expect him to utterly reject anything called Modernism, and he does, whether in poetry or music or art (e.g., cf. p.25)

***i.e., the 'crime', for Lovecraft, being that fellow-Aryans were at war with each other.

Tolkien vs. the Nazis

So, the story has been making the rounds this past week about how back in 1938 JRRT told off his would-be German publisher over their nation's anti-Semitic laws. This is something Tolkienists have known about for years, since the relevant letter appears in LETTERS OF JRRT [1981]. It's only now getting out into general circulation, thanks to articles like the following (thanks to Shelly for the link, and to Steven S. for making sure I heard the news):

http://io9.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr-tolkien-telling-off-nazis-absolutely-nothing

This is one of those times when you can genuinely feel proud of an author you like turning out to be a thoroughly decent human being (and believe me, there are admirers of some authors' works who don't get to feel that v. often -- e.g. the Joyceans). Of course, nobody's perfect, and Tolkien did occasionally make regrettable remarks displaying casual racism typical of his time. And there's also the matter of his sympathy for Franco, whom he saw rather as Defender of the Church than the fascist tyrant he was. But when it really mattered, JRRT's firm stance against the Nazi's veneration of 'Aryan purity' and his specific denunciation of their anti-Semitism was uncompromising -- and all the more welcome in that he was willing to risk something (royalties from the German translation under negotiation) rather than silently acquiesce. Yay, Tolkien.

For a good contrast, compare Tolkien with his contemporaries, novelist Evelyn Waugh (who wrote a book supporting Mussolini's war on Abyssinia) or poet Roy Campbell, a starkly homophobic, misogynist anti-Semitic who enthusiastically praised Hitler and even more enthusiastically backed Franco.

And then of course there's H. P. Lovecraft, who is so notorious a racist that one World Fantasy Award winner posted a piece not that long ago about her qualms in displaying an award shaped in his image (warning: the following link contains some offensive language on HPL's part):

http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2011/12/lovecrafts-racism-world-fantasy-award.html

I may be more attuned to this issue right now partly because I'm getting ready to run a C.o.C. adventure based on HPL's most overtly racist story, "The Horror at Red Hook" [circa 1925] (naturally, I'll be taking out the offensive parts, wh. aren't essential). The other contributing factor is that while digging out my copy of THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH (his Mythos sonnet cycle, wh. is actually quite good) I've just recently come across the chapbook that reprints pieces from his apa, THE CONSERVATIVE [1915-1923]. I'll probably devote a separate blog post to this work, so for now I'll just say that while the editor insists Lovecraft was no racist, Lovecraft's own words in this very booklet emphatically prove him wrong.

More later.

--John R.

current reading: ORTHODOXY (GKC), THE CONSERVATIVE (HPL), THE BRIDGE OF BIRDS original draft (Hughart)

How Long Should a Biography Be?

So, in a comment to my earlier post about the welcome arrival of the newly restored complete edition ('Biographer's Cut'?) of S. T. Joshi's two-volume biography of H. P. Lovecraft,* David Bratman expressed incredulity that, having earlier read the original edition of this book, there could possibly be more remaining to be said about Lovecraft, much less 150,000+ words' worth. David's response I think raises an interesting point: how long shd a biography be?

The answer, I think, depends on how important you think the subject of the biography is. If, for example, you think Tolkien is an interesting but not major figure, then a book like Carpenter's biography (which manages to cover eighty years in less than three hundred pages) is about right. If, on the other hand, you think Tolkien is the Author of the Century, or at the very least one of the most important writers of his time, then the 2298 pages of Wayne & Christina's J. R. R. TOLKIEN COMPANION & GUIDE is manna from above. The same, I think applies for collected letters. Modest volumes of some 300 to 400 pages seemed about right for C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. T. a few years after their deaths (i.e., the 1966 LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS ed. by Warnie** and the 1981 Carpenter/Christopher edition of LETTERS OF JRRT), whereas now Lewis is represented by the three-volume COLLECTED LETTERS (just shy of four thousand pages) and a similar collection cd no doubt be put together of Tolkien's correspondence.

HPL himself got what seemed the full treatment relatively early on, in the form of a huge five-vol. set (with each volume clocking in at around 400 pages). But even this was highly selective, extracted from Lovecraft's epistolary logorrhea and representing only about 5% of the surviving letters (which in turn represents about one-fifth of all the letters he actually wrote). And it cd be justified by the fact that in addition to his fiction Lovecraft was just as important as a behind-the-scenes influence, encouraging younger (Barlow, Howard, Bloch, Derleth, &c) &/or better (Smith, Leiber) writers. More recently, Lovecraft studies has seen the release of single-correspondence collections -- for example, all his letters to Kuttner, or Derleth, or Barlow, each in its own volume. Most of these were sold in tiny editions from small presses, but still collectively they're an enormously valuable primary source for any Lovecraft scholar; Tolkien scholars can, for now, only dream of such treasures.

The best piece I've ever seen about matching the length of biography to the relative importance of the author came in the Introduction to Norman Page's biography of A. E. Housman [1983], which in fact I bought because in skimming it I was so impressed by his argument. Page argues that only a few major figures deserve the full-scale treatment, while secondary figures, like Housman, are best served by shorter, less exhaustive books. As a example, gives a paragraph describing the kind of shoes Housman always wore, then follows this up by saying that every word in that paragraph is true, but none of it is worth knowing -- hence, for the rest of his book he avoids such trivia.

So, in the end it's a circular question. In some cases (e.g., Jane Austen), the relative lack of information will hold the biographies down to a certain length. In others, reticence on the part of the authors & their estates (e.g., T. S. Eliot) will do the same, at least for years and years after their deaths. But in some cases, because of the enthusiasm of the audience, we'll get massive amounts of information, whether their subjects are worth it or not.*** It'll be a boon for those interested in the subject, and those not interested can just ignore it. That makes it a win-win situation for all concerned. Except, perhaps, the trees.

--John R.

.....................................

*rather oddly titled 'I AM PROVIDENCE' -- which wd have come as a bit of a surprise to HPL's fellow citizens of that Rhode Island town, most of whom never heard of him.

**although what was published was entirely re-edited by Christopher Derrick, a fact unknown to the public for several decades.

***for example, is Dorothy L. Sayers really worth a five-volume set of collected letters, which is roughly equivalent to the treatment Virginia Woolf got? The letters' publisher didn't think so, bailing on the project mid-way through, so that the latter volumes had to be published by other means

Books Arrive: Smith and Lovecraft

So, some heavyweight books (literally*) arrived in the mail over the past few days. First there was the two-volume revised-&-expanded edition of S. T. Joshi's biography of H. P. Lovecraft.

This was originally published in 1996, but the manuscript was so long Joshi (the world's foremost Lovecraft scholar) was forced to cut 150,000 words (out of half a million) in order for the publisher to fit it all into one volume. Now he's taking advantage of a switch to a new publisher (Necronomicon Press > Hippocampus Press) to restore the missing material. It also says he did some updates, but a quick spot check shows that a lot of passages have not in fact been updated--for example, a reference to "the latter half of this century" (p. 1034) clearly refers to the one that ended a decade ago, not the one we're in now. The sole reference to Chaosium's CALL OF CTHULHU--probably the single greatest factor in spreading knowledge and appreciation of Lovecraft's work in the last quarter-century--has been expanded from a single sentence then to two sentences now. Of particular interest is Joshi's final judgment of Derleth (p. 1034), who he believes has a mostly negative legacy of having prevented Lovecraft's work from reaching a mainstream audience for decades.

The other book, though unexpected, is v. welcome: Vol. V of a five-volume set of the complete short stories (fantasy) of Clark Ashton Smith (THE LAST HIEROGLYPH, ed. Scott Connors & Ron Hilger), from Night Shade Books. I knew this one wd come eventually, but the timing was unexpected, the first three volumes having arrived in 2007 (January, June, & December) and the fourth in August of last year (2009). The great thing about this series is not only is it complete but the editors used a chronological arrangement, starting with Smith's first short fantasy story (excluding his juvenalia) and ending with his very last. The endnotes discuss their efforts to establish the best possible text and give details about each piece's composition. There have been so many attempts to publish complete collections of CAS's tales, all of which petered out at some point with a significant number of stories left uncollected --most notably the Adult Fantasy Series from Ballantine back in the late sixties/early seventies, but also including the TimeScape series in the early eighties and of course the Arkham House hardcovers from the forties through the seventies. So, well-done, Night Shade Books, for giving the greatest of all the Weird Tales authors a suitable 'Collected Works'.

Finally, and co-incidentally, these arrived while I was reading THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM AND OTHER REVISIONS,** one of the first books I bought after my arrival in Seattle in Sept 1997 (on my first visit to Borders Books, nr SouthCenter). I started reading it then but bogged down without finishing the book, and despite subsequent dipping from time to time never made it all the way through until now.

It's an interesting read, so long as you don't expect too much. Lovecraft's work really divides into three levels. At the very top, like a pyramid's capstone, are a few really good pieces where he outdoes himself, like "The Strange High House in the Mists" and "The Colour Out of Space". Then below this is the pyramid itself, made up of most of his best-known tales, like "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", in which he works out his characteristic concerns in his characteristic mannered prose, with lots of italics. There's not much variation in these, but they've a fun read as he works up what is essentially an alternate reality based around a few firmly-held though contradictory beliefs, a secondary world based on New England in the twenties and thirties. These tales have been hugely influential on any number of writers better than Lovecraft himself, who have looted them for ideas just as Lovecraft pillaged Poe and Dunsany. And then there are the failures, like "The Horror at Red Hook" or "The Picture in the House" or "At the Mountains of Madness", including a few so-bad-it's-almost-good guilty pleasures like the 'Herbert West--Reanimator' series.

And then there's THE HORROR AT THE MUSEUM, the fourth in the three-volume series of Arkham House's complete Lovecraft, the best pieces among which almost rise to the bottommost level of what Lovecraft published under his own name. It's ironic that Lovecraft, a horror writer by avocation, made his living as a ghost writer, 'revising' stories for clients. This book collects together those ghostwritten stories (except for a few, like "Imprisoned Among the Pharaohs", which he wrote for Harry Houdini, that appear in the main three-volume set), dividing them in two lots, 'primary revisions' (in which Lovecraft pretty much wrote the whole story based on an outline or story-idea from a client) and 'secondary revisions' (in which Lovecraft at least had a draft to work from, no matter how drastically he re-wrote the piece).

Reading them, I'm reminded of a passage in Christopher Hitchens' HITCH-22, where he quotes P. G. Wodehouse as saying 'If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?'*** Joshi occasionally takes refuge in the claim that Lovecraft stories he particularly dislikes must be intentional self-parodies. I'd say instead that Lovecraft often lapses into unintentional self-parody. A particularly egregious example here is "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", who is actually writing in his diary while being dragged away to the cellar (to suffer an unnamable fate!); the mental image of him desperately holding on for dear life with one hand while jotting down some observations with the other is so comical as to ruin any effect the story might have aimed for (rather better is "The Loved Dead", where the dying suicide reports feeling hellfire already burning him just before the end). Fans of the Cthulhu Mythos will find relatively little here, aside from Yig. There are certainly references to other Great Old Ones and strange tomes, but they're relatively minor -- it's always been my belief that Lovecraft inserted them into these tales (which appeared under other authors' names) as a way of signaling to WEIRD TALES fans that HPL himself had actually written them, rather like the Old English poem Cynewulf.

After that, reading a judicious mix of some C.o.C. scenarios (the newest from Miskatonic River Press) and a few CAS tales shd serve as a good pallet cleaner . . .

--JDR

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*When I went to mail to a friend in London the extra set I'd ordered as part of a book exchange, I found each volume weighed 2 lbs. 8 oz.

**#II.2880

***one of Wodehouse's stiff-upper-lip quips made when being held in a prisoner of war camp early in WWII, having been captured as an enemy alien during the German invasion of France. For which he was, incidentally, hounded out of England after his release when the propaganda department (including, I think, A. A. Milne) decided to make an example of him for not having said nasty enough things about his captors while locked up -- the main reason Wodehouse left England and lived in America the last thirty years of his long life.