Lovecraft Annual 1
Page 20
The Lovecraft Chronicles is not merely a fictionalised biography. It is what I believe is termed “alternate history”: that what-if brand of science fantasy that conjectures the state of the world if, say, Hitler had won World War II, or the telephone had never been invented, or George W. Bush had not stolen the election of 2000. In this case, Cannon wonders: what if, in 1933, the prestigious New York firm of Alfred A. Knopf had actually accepted, instead of rejecting, a collection of tales by Lovecraft? Would Lovecraft’s life have changed? Would subsequent history—literary, political, social—have changed? Cannon provides an emphatic yes to the first query, but is a bit more reserved as to the second. Nevertheless, his conclusion that Lovecraft would have gone far beyond his forty-six and a half years and lived to a normal life span of seventy years, dying only in 1960, is unexceptionable.
But the charm of The Lovecraft Chronicles is in seeing exactly how Lovecraft’s life and career change—and change, generally, for the better—with that Knopf acceptance. The book is structured in three parts, each narrated by a different person. Each of these persons—the vivacious teenager Clarissa Stone, the somewhat older Englishwoman Leonora Lathbury, and the first-year Brown University graduate student Bobby Pratt—happens to be Lovecraft’s secretary, a position he can now afford given his new-found literary success. The novel, I will admit, takes a little while gathering steam, but with the Knopf deal things pick up quickly. One of the stories in the book, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” becomes a movie from the studio of Hal Roach; and, still more surprisingly, when Lovecraft goes to Hollywood to be a possible screenwriter, his stiff and vaguely corpselike features make him the perfect candidate for a bit part as a reanimated corpse! So begins Lovecraft’s brief career as a Hollywood actor.
It is all good fun, but the experienced Lovecraftian will derive the greatest pleasure in seeing exactly what liberties Cannon does and does not take with the historical record. Consider this passage:
During this period [the fall of 1933] H. P. produced two new stories, one a recasting in prose of some of his “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnets, the other an elaboration of a dream about an evil clergyman in a garret full of forbidden books. . . . H. P. did not send these new tales on the rounds of his literary circle, but instead submitted them, along with “The Thing on the Doorstep,” directly to the editor of Weird Tales. [Farnsworth] Wright . . . snapped up these three new tales immediately.
There is such an exquisite mixture of fact and fiction here that untangling them is nearly impossible. The first sentence is strictly factual, although Cannon deliberately obscures the fact that that rewriting of the Fungi sonnets (“The Book”) is a fragment, not a completed story. Moreover, the second story—“The Evil Clergyman”— was merely an account of a dream included in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, and it was Dwyer who submitted the “story” to Weird Tales after Lovecraft’s death. Finally, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” although written in August 1933, was not submitted to Weird Tales until the fall of 1936. Cannon, I repeat, is fully aware of all these facts, and his manipulation of them is in strict accord with his contention that Lovecraft’s career would have flowered rather than petered out as the 1930s advanced.
The second part of the book, set mostly in 1936, is to my mind the most successful. Lovecraft, with his new-found success (he is by no means a best-selling writer, but now has sufficient means for his own comfort), fulfils a lifelong dream by travelling to England— where, surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly, given his later political views), he becomes friends with George Orwell and actually participates briefly if somewhat ignominiously in the Spanish Civil War against Franco. But the real heart of this section is his halting romance with Leonora Lathbury. In part one Lovecraft had managed to dodge the young Clarissa’s schoolgirl crush on him, but he is not so successful with the more mature Leonora. If readers think it implausible for Lovecraft to be the protagonist of a love story, they should read how Cannon handles this segment of the novel. It is delicate, true to character, and entirely without sentimentality. There is a wistful poignancy throughout this section: not only is it heart-warming to see Lovecraft finally attain his goal of reaching Mother England, socialising jovially with Arthur Machen among others, but in his involvement with Leonora he seems to be ripening emotionally just as his work is ripening intellectually. How his impending marriage to Leonora is shattered at the last moment is too good to reveal here.
The third section of the book is the skimpiest both in length and in substance. One gets the suspicion that Cannon is getting a bit tired. The narrative skips abruptly to 1960, at which point the ageing Lovecraft has managed to repurchase his birthplace, 454 Angell Street in Providence and decorate it in the manner he remembered as a boy. He has written almost no fiction since the 1940s, when Edmund Wilson harshly reviewed several of his books in the New Yorker, but additional film adaptations and the generosity of August Derleth’s Arkham House allow him continued comfort, if not luxury. Frank Long and his actual wife, the late lamented Lyda, make a rather buffoonish appearance. Without giving away the ending, I will simply remark that the conclusion left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
My keenest regret is that The Lovecraft Chronicles was not twice or three times as long as it is. Cannon’s literary gifts are of such a high order—skill at character depiction, an unfailing ability to keep the narrative moving, a penchant both for dry humour and for pathos— that we would like to see him exercise them to their fullest extent. Instead of hastily and sketchily summarising the events of the twenty-four years between parts two and three, why not elaborate them in detail? Cannon’s portrayal of Lovecraft—nearly all his utterances are cleverly extracted or adapted from statements in his letters—rings so true that we would like to see him put Lovecraft on stage at other key moments in history. What, for example, would Lovecraft have made of World War II, and in particular the appalling revelations of the Holocaust, which definitively made the abstract racism of his earlier years morally indefensible? How would Lovecraft have adapted to the outwardly staid but inwardly seething 1950s? What would he have had to say of (or to) James Dean, Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley? Or is it possible that Cannon is saving all these matters for a sequel?
But whatever one may think of the ending, The Lovecraft Chronicles is a book to enchant and captivate everyone who has the least interest in the dreamer from Providence. How many of us have wished that he had not been so poor, not eaten so badly, and not been so discouraged at the rejection of his best work? By all rights, Lovecraft should have lived to 1960 or even 1970, and enjoyed at least a modicum of the fame that came to him only after death. Kenneth W. Faig once wrote: “we would surely all wish for him a better share of life were he to be given a second round; he surely never lacked the ability to do hard, careful work and perhaps only his disinclination toward self-promotion denied him greater material success.” The Lovecraft Chronicles gives Lovecraft that second round, and shows that, with only a minimal augmentation of self-promotion, he might indeed have had the material success that would have made such a difference in his life. It is that air of “what if”—that sense that Lovecraft was so close, and yet so far, from reaching the goals he had set for himself as man and writer—that makes The Lovecraft Chronicles the poignant human document that it is.
ROBERT H. WAUGH. The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006. 302 pp. Reviewed by S. T. Joshi.
Robert H. Waugh is a remarkable phenomenon in Lovecraft studies. No one could have predicted, when he published his first, relatively brief essay, “The Hands of H. P. Lovecraft” (Lovecraft Studies, Fall 1988), that he would evolve into one of the most dynamic and challenging critics of the Providence dreamer in recent years. At a time when, perhaps through a kind of exhaustion or surfeit, some of our leading critics—Barton L. St. Armand, Donald R. Burleson, Robert M. Price, David E. Schultz, even the indefatigable S. T. Joshi—appear to have finished saying what they have to say on Lovecraft, Waug
h has written article after substantial article breaking new ground, not so much in the accumulation of facts (most of these have by now already been unearthed), but in the advancement of bold new interpretations of Lovecraft’s work.
In a sense, Waugh’s career mirrors that of Lovecraft himself. Just as the Providence writer proceeded from rather nebulous, adjective-laden sketches and prose-poems to immense, richly complex novellas, so have Waugh’s essays become increasingly longer and denser, with an exponential increase in their substance and their suggestiveness. The radical revision of that first essay, now titled “Lovecraft’s Hands,” would be sufficient to prove it—it has been rewritten so exhaustively as to constitute a new piece. I will be honest and say that I am not always clear on the overall thrust and direction of some of Waugh’s essays, but every one of them contains flashes of insight, sometimes tossed off almost incidentally, that make their reading a rewarding experience. At times Waugh seems almost to be free-associating, leading the reader from one topic to another as a bee flits from one flower to the next; but he does so with such intellectual rigour that each point is illuminated before the next is approached. No Lovecraft scholar has read Lovecraft’s work (fiction, poetry, essays, letters) more sensitively; no one has absorbed the best Lovecraft scholarship with a due understanding of both its virtues and its shortcomings; and no one has placed Lovecraft in a broader aesthetic and philosophical spectrum that brings the entire history of Western literature and thought into play.
There are two original essays in The Monster in the Mirror, and they constitute the final two essays in the book. The first, “Lovecraft and Leopardi: Sunsets and Moonsets,” compares the writings and thought of Lovecraft and the great Italian poet, essayist, and thinker. This kind of “compare and contrast” essay could easily have become sophomoric, for of course there is no reason to think that Lovecraft was in any way familiar with Leopardi; one is reminded of Peter Cannon’s whimsical essay comparing Lovecraft and John F. Kennedy. But Waugh’s analysis is written with such panache and sensitivity that at times it seems as if Lovecraft and Leopardi are speaking to each other, discussing their respective views on cosmicism, fantasy, and human morality in a dialogue that spans the centuries and their differing languages. Waugh had done the same in an earlier essay, “Lovecraft and Keats Confront the ‘Awful Rainbow,’” but here it is managed with still greater verve and subtlety.
The other original essay, one of the longest in the book, is “Lovecraft Born Again: An Essay in Apologetic Criticism.” The thrust of this essay is not merely to show that some of Lovecraft’s conceptions are harmonious with Christian thought but that Lovecraft’s stories make some “kind of sense . . . to a Christian.” I suspect that the great majority of Christians do not read Lovecraft’s stories with the kind of care that Waugh himself does, and therefore they are not particularly disturbed with the manifestly atheistic subtext found in them—they read them as entertaining stories, and that is the end of it. A few readers take Lovecraft’s work much more seriously; a decade or two ago Edward W. O’Brien actually maintained that Lovecraft’s tales were “evil” and should be avoided by the devout—perhaps an extreme reaction, but one that at least perceives that there is more going on in those tales than merely the exhibition of bug-eyed monsters.
In putting forth this partial and tentative reconciliation of Lovecraft with Christianity, Waugh resurrects the notion (first propounded by Barton L. St. Armand) that Lovecraft is a kind of aesthetic or philosophic schizophrenic: that he maintains one thing in his letters (the expression of his philosophical views) and another thing in his fiction. In this formulation Waugh is not nearly so crude as St. Armand, who went to the extent of maintaining that Lovecraft was “at once a defender and upholder of a strict universe of natural law as well as its secret subverter”; but his general tendency is in this direction.
I believe, however, that both Waugh and St. Armand have not fully grasped the complex rhetoric of Lovecraft’s fiction. How is that fiction an expression of his mechanistic materialist stance? Is it, in fact, an expression of it? Great care must be taken in interpreting Lovecraft’s statements regarding the nature and purpose of weird fiction. Lovecraft well knew that he could not possibly induce fear in others if he did not induce fear in himself. What, to a materialist like Lovecraft, would constitute the most fearful conception he could imagine? Would it not be the revelation (convincingly expressed in a work of fiction) of the inadequacy of materialism? In “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft writes: “I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis” (CE 2.175–76). Waugh quotes this remark but does not seem to grasp its full implications. If Lovecraft were not, in actual fact, convinced that the universe is materialistic, then he could not possibly find any kind of imaginative release in the “illusion” of its subversion or violation; and that violation occurs only “momentarily” because it takes place only within the context of a work of fiction.
In a sense, Waugh seems guilty of regarding Lovecraft’s tales as mimetic—as reflections of events that could conceivably happen in the real world. But Lovecraft’s brand of weird fiction posits events that “could not possibly happen” (SL 3.434). It is not sufficient to say that Lovecraft did not believe (philosophically) in the literal reality of Cthulhu; it is that he knew that an entity like Cthulhu could not possibly exist in our cosmos. It was only the convincing exhibition (through all the aesthetic means available to him) of the possibility of a Cthulhu that gave him the imaginative liberation he sought. Consider this passage from a letter of 1930:
I get no kick at all from postulating what isn’t so, as religionists and idealists do. That leaves me cold—in fact, I have to stop dreaming about an unknown realm (such as Antarctica or Arabia Deserta) as soon as the explorers enter it and discover a set of real conditions which dreams would be forced to contradict. My big kick comes from taking reality just as it is—accepting all the limitations of the most orthodox science—and then permitting my symbolising faculty to build outward from the existing facts; rearing a structure of indefinite promise and possibility whose topless towers are in no cosmos or dimension penetrable by the contradicting-power of the tyrannous and inexorable intellect. But the whole secret of the kick is that I know damn well it isn’t so. (SL 3.140)
I am not sure that this does not express the sum total of Lovecraft’s aesthetic of weird fiction—and that final sentence is the key that unlocks the entire riddle of Lovecraft’s apparent “schizophrenia” in seeming to postulate non-materialistic or super-materialistic phenomena in his stories. He knew damn well it wasn’t so.
This is why it is highly dangerous to appeal to the stories when attempting to ascertain what Lovecraft “believed.” Waugh occasionally falls into this error. When Waugh writes that Lovecraft “does believe in the existence of physical law, its coherence, rationality, and uniformity—but breaking with Haeckel he also entertains the idea that the universe is so large that areas might exist where the universality of law breaks down,” his evidence for this astonishing assertion is . . . the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.” But that utterance is made precisely for the purpose of laying down the foundation for the tale’s ultimate (fictional and fictitious) subversion of materialism— something Lovecraft knew damn well wasn’t so. Consider a passage in a 1929 letter where he is coming to terms with the theory of relativity and maintaining (in contrast to a wide array of mystics and religionists who were attempting to maintain that relativity had suddenly justified all kinds of outmoded thoughts regarding the existence of God): “We know these [natural] laws work here, because we have applied them in countless ways and have never found them to fail. . . . for many trillion and quadrillion miles
outward from us the conditions of space are sufficiently like our own to be comparatively unaffected by relativity. That is, these surrounding stellar regions may be taken as part of our illusion-island in infinity, since the laws that work on earth work scarcely less well some distance beyond it” (SL 2.264–65). Similarly, Waugh asserts (from the evidence of the fiction) that “For Lovecraft dreams represent a remarkable evasion of the appearance of things,” but they do nothing of the sort.
In other instances where Waugh attempts to establish that “the philosophic dregs of religion tainted Lovecraft,” he comes mighty close to special pleading. No one is likely to think that Lovecraft is the more religious simply because he uses names taken from the Bible, since of course these names are bestowed mostly upon New England characters whose nomenclature, derived largely from the Old Testament, Lovecraft is echoing merely for the sake of verisimilitude. And when Waugh maintains that the Gardner family in “The Colour out of Space” suffers “damnation,” he seems guilty of a misuse of the word—for the notion of damnation cannot possibly be separated from the notion of some kind of post-mortem punishment, something entirely absent in the story. The Gardners simply die—horribly and grotesquely, to be sure, but that is all there is to it. Waugh quotes a line from the story in which the Gardners “walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom”—but a doom is very different from damnation.