Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Hippocampus Press, 2015, $25.00 tpb; 550 pages
Lovecraft as Mentor
Why was H.P. Lovecraft, among his contemporaries and in the generation that followed such a revered, even beloved figure? Here’s a guide for those bewildered by the continuing fascination with Lovecraft as a personality, not just as the author of stories.
Imagine yourself as 16 or 17 (or even as young as 14) years old sometime in the middle 1930s. You write to someone you believe to be the premiere weird fiction author of the age, the equivalent of, say, Stephen King or Neil Gaiman today. It’s a much smaller world, yes; the “field” largely consists of the readership of three or four pulp magazines. That your idol is living in dire poverty has not crossed your mind. Your letter is polite but fairly typical kid stuff: Gee, I like your stories. Where can I get some of the earlier ones? Is the Necronomicon for real? Where can I get a copy?
The average author might respond to something like that with a cheerful post card. But not Lovecraft. His first reply is several pages long. Correspondence springs up. Within just a couple of exchanges, you are a full-fledged member of the Lovecraft Circle. Your idol is not only answering your questions but offering vast streams of erudition and wit. He is recommending books. He is offering to lend books and even manuscripts, many of which circulate in round-robin fashion among other “famous” Weird Tales contributors such as Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei, all of whom you’re now in touch with. You get to read his unpublished material. He encourages you to write weird fiction yourself and asks to see your efforts. He critiques them at length. He is even lending original artwork by Clark Ashton Smith which is “making the rounds” with “the gang.”
And more important than that, he’s addressing you as if you’re an adult and his equal. The result, as several such correspondents later testified, was not merely jaw-dropping; it was life-changing. For Robert Bloch, Lovecraft was a major help in setting him on the course of his career. (Bloch, who like so many Depression kids did not get to go to college, later said, “Lovecraft was my university.”) Some of the others did not actually become writers or publishers. Kenneth Sterling became a medical researcher and physician. Willis Conover became a broadcaster for Voice of America and a renowned jazz expert. But Lovecraft stayed with them throughout their lives. Sterling, later in life, wrote a moving memoir. Conover arranged his correspondence into a “dialog” and produced a wonderful book, Lovecraft at Last (1975).
Sterling, who was younger and bolder than the rest, didn’t start with a letter. He knocked on Lovecraft’s door one day and introduced himself. Lovecraft was a little taken aback and describes the meeting in letters to other correspondents. Given as he was to genial mimicry of people’s accents, he refers to “Leedle Mestah Stoiling,” but the friendship blossomed. Lovecraft immediately saw the brilliance in Sterling and even collaborated with him on a substantial story, “In the Walls of Eryx.” (Sterling, an obvious prodigy, had already sold stories on his own to Hugo Gernsback, including the immortal “The Brain-Eaters of Pluto” in Wonder Stories for March 1934. Even more amazing from Lovecraft’s point of view he’d somehow managed to get paid for it.) Before long the Lovecraft-Sterling correspondence moves on to philosophy and politics. They are discussing the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, Marxism, the class struggle, etc. Sterling, like many young intellectuals of the period, flirted with Marxism. Lovecraft even goes so far as to say that the Russian Revolution might turn out for the best, though he hopes that difference in conditions will make it possible to achieve socialism in the United States with less violence. HPL the Red? No, it’s more subtle than that, but we are clearly far beyond the proudly “reactionary” Lovecraft of The Conservative of 1920.
The correspondents in this volume are Robert Bloch, Natalie H. Wooley, Robert Nelson, Mrs. Elmer Nelson, William F. Anger, Kenneth Sterling, Donald Wollheim, Wilson Shepard, and Willis Conover. These were not his only younger correspondents, of course. The thick book of his letters to Robert Barlow, O Fortunate Floridian (University of Tampa Press, 2007) is even more impressive. Also included in the present volume are selections of writings by these people, two very early stories by Bloch, poetry by Wooley and Robert Nelson (a Weird Tales writer and fan who died at age 20), Wollheim’s fake book review of the Necronomicon, etc. What all of these writers have in common is that they have something to do with the emerging science fiction fan movement, of which HPL was well on his way to becoming a patron saint through his contributions to fanzines. (He expresses amazement that there are as many as twenty fanzines being published and suggests they be consolidated into perhaps four or five.) Most correspondents are addressed by typical, eldritch-sounding pet names. Bloch becomes “Bho-Blok” or “Ludvig” (an allusion to the author of Bloch’s invented tome, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten), Conover “Khono-Vhah,” Anger “An-Ghah,” and Sterling sometimes dubbed as elaborately as “O Grand Exalted Booleywag” when he is not just “Illustrious Kheh-Es.” HPL signs himself with such closings as “Yours for the Grey Litany of Yoth, E’ch-Pi-El.” He tended to be a little more reserved with female correspondents, though: Natalie Wooley is always just “Mrs. Wooley.”
What is most remarkable about this is the sheer generosity of Lovecraft’s efforts. He gives Bloch (and the others, as much as they are inclined for it) invaluable mentoring. At times you do have a sense that he is being polite and patient with adolescent prattle as when Conover goes on about his pet ghoul or Bloch (by implication, since his letters are not here) perhaps describes his efforts at a vaudeville comedy at greater length than Lovecraft is really interested in. Conover (or his pet ghoul) got a little carried away at one point when he actually sent HPL a gift-wrapped human skull (dug from an Indian mound) for Christmas in 1936. Lovecraft professed to be delighted but declined offers of any more such souvenirs. He promised to glue the skull back together as it had apparently been shattered in the mail.
The dark side of Lovecraft comes out notably once in a letter to Wooley where he discusses eugenics and his racial ideas. He is talking nonsense when he writes,
Compare the way the Gauls took on the highest refinements of Roman culture the moment they were absorbed into the empire, with the way the negroes [sic] remained utterly unaffected by the Egyptian culture which impinged on them continuously for thousands of years. (199)
(Admittedly John W. Campbell was still spouting the same line 30 years later with considerably less justification for his ignorance, when information about, say, the pyramids of ancient Meroe was more readily available.) Mrs. Wooley doesn’t seem to have been bothered by this. The subject is not continued in the next letter.
What we otherwise have here is the mature Lovecraft in peak form. If this were the only extant volume of Lovecraft correspondence, it would be invaluable for the study of a major writer as it contains any number of important statements about Lovecraft’s philosophy and aesthetics. We get what appears to have been a surprisingly candid insider’s view of the weird fiction field in the 1930s. Here’s something you wouldn’t expect him to tell just anybody about Hugo Gernsback from a letter to William Anger referring to a fanzine expose by Donald Wandrei:
Others I know—including CAS—have recovered cash from the Rat only through legal action.... But his [Gernsback’s] shifty tactics will overreach themselves and wreck him in the end. Meanwhile he relies on suckers, pays two or three contributors he can’t afford to lose, & counts on the MSS. of writers who don’t care if they’re paid or not. (233)
Prophetic words. This was written in April 1935. Within a year, Gernsback had sold Wonder Stories and was out of the field. Maybe more congenial is a description (to William Anger [228]) of an exhibition three or four hundred Clark Ashton Smith drawings (far more than are now extant) at the apartment of Samuel Loveman in New York. Now that might be worth the expense of a time-machine. . . .
To Natalie Wooley he gives some sage advice:
don’t bother with weird fiction at all unless you feel a genuine inclination toward it. It is the most difficult of all material to market professionally, & the circle of those who truly enjoy & appreciate it is always discouragingly small. The only reason I write it is that I virtually can’t help it—weirdness & phantasy having fascinated me more than anything else ... ever since I could walk or talk. It is ... the only field in which I have anything to say fictionally.... The demand for weird fiction is always faint & narrow, & on the higher literary levels is so interwoven with special conventions & restrictions that the spontaneous & unconventional writer has scarcely any chance. (191)
He goes on (with Wooley) to advise against writing for a living. He espouses atheism: “Religion has served its purpose & is meaningless in the light of today’s understanding of the universe” (210). He gives numerous examples of his own mythic and powerful view of the universe (albeit here based on now-obsolete science, since we know about exoplanets and HPL did not):
the number of bodies inhabited by highly evolved organic beings at any one period of the cosmos is probably very small. It takes what amounts to a rare accident to produce a solar system, & still another rare accident, to produce the stream of biological modifications culminating (so far) on this planet as mankind. It is unlikely that any other planet of this system could have complexly evolved—& other similar systems (if there are any) we can never know.... There is also the possibility that life is merely a temporary attribute of this one region & period—the complex structure of matter in other sections of space & time being totally alien to the ... cell-pattern which we locally observe & embody.... we now have to envisage a cosmos constantly expanding with no future limit in sight—a case of utter waste and dispersal. (194–95)
In other words, a vast, empty lonely void into which mankind has momentarily flickered into existence. HPL was not waiting to find Dejah Thoris or E.T., or even Cthulhu. There is only the abyss. But meanwhile back on Earth, he tries to make things pleasant for his numerous and expanding list of correspondents and even gives Wollheim (324) a useful discourse on how to read his handwriting, which seems entirely relevant today as we debate whether or not cursive should be retained in the schools.
Darrell Schweitzer lives in Philadelphia. He isn’t old enough to have met or corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft, but he has met people who did.
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