Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, Second Edition
Copyright © 1995 by Darrell Schweitzer
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“Introduction” copyright © 1995 by Darrell Schweitzer.
“Notes on an Entity,” by Robert Bloch, from Tamlacht #12 (1972). Reprinted by permission of the author and Victor Boruta.
“A Literary Copernicus,” by Fritz Leiber, Jr., from Something About Cats, ed. August Derleth. Copyright © 1949 by August Derleth. Reprinted by permission of the author and of Richard Curtis Literary Agency.
“The Four Faces of the Outsider,” by Dirk W. Mosig, from Nyctalops #9. Copyright © 1974 by Harry O. Morris and Edward P. Berglund. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Story-Writing,” by H. P. Lovecraft, from Whispers #6/7. Copyright © 1975 by Stuart Schiff. Reprinted by permission of Stuart Schiff.
“Character Gullibility, etc.,” by Darrell Schweitzer, from Nyctalops #10. Copyright © 1975 by Harry O. Morris and Edward P. Berglund. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Some Thoughts on Lovecraft,” by Arthur Jean Cox, from Haunted #2, December 1964. Copyright © 1964 by Sam Russell. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Derleth Mythos,” by Richard L. Tierney, from HPL. Copyright © 1972 by Meade and Penny Frierson. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Genesis of the Cthulhu Mythos,” by George Westzel, from Nyctalops #10. Copyright © 1975 by Harry O. Morris and Edward P. Berglund. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Lovecraft’s Ladies,” by Ben P. Indick, from Xenophile #18. Copyright © 1975 by Nils Hardin. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“When the Stars Are Right,” by Richard L. Tierney, from Etchings and Odysseys #1. Copyright © 1973 by Eric Carlson and John Koblas. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“H. P. Lovecraft and Psuedomathematics,” by Robert Weinberg, from Nyctalops #5. Copyright © 1971 by Harry O. Morris and Edward P. Berglund. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Textual Problems in Lovecraft,” by S. T. Joshi, from Lovecraft Studies #6 (Vol II, No. 1, Spring 1982). Copyright © 1982 by Marc A. Michaud. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“H. P. Lovecraft: The Books,” by Lin Carter, annotated by Robert M. Price and S. T. Joshi. This version appears here for the first time, copyright © 1995 by Robert M. Price and S. T. Joshi. Carter’s original text appeared in Inside and Science Fantasy Advertiser, copyright © 1956 by Ronald L. Smith, and somewhat revised in The Shuttered Room, edited by August Derleth, copyright © 1959 by August Derleth. Reprinted by permission of Robert M. Price for the estate Lin Carter and James Turner for Arkham House.
All other articles appeared for the first time in an earlier version of this book, Essays Lovecraftian, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, published by T.K. Graphics in 1976, and copyright 1976 by Darrell Schweitzer.
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Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Robert Reginald,
with thanks and gratitude.
INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer
The Eternal Lovecraft
They’ve tried to dismiss him in the past: Edmund Wilson, sneering in the pages of The New Yorker in the ‘40s (“Tales of the Marvelous and Ridiculous”), John Brunner in Inside Science Fiction in the ‘50s (“Rusty Chains”), Damon Knight in the otherwise classic In Search of Wonder (embarrassingly confusing August Derleth’s pastiches of Lovecraft with the real thing), and many more. When any giant appears in literature, there will always be those who say no, that’s not a giant after all.
The test, of course, is time. Lovecraft’s international reputation continues to grow. Books about him continue to appear. Generation after generation, he excites and intrigues new readers. He will not be dismissed.
After fifty years, Edmund Wilson seems mean-spirited and myopic. The terrible irony may one day be—and one sincerely hopes not, considering the merit of their other work—that one day John Brunner and Damon Knight, along with other Lovecraft detractors, will be remembered solely for what they said about Lovecraft, even as Lovecraft will surely keep August Derleth’s name alive.
The verdict is now in: Lovecraft is the most important writer of supernatural horror fiction in English since Poe. While he hasn’t (yet) generated as much secondary material as Poe, he probably is more widely read today, and more influential on new writers than Poe. His position in horror (or what he called “weird fiction”) is rather like that of Robert Heinlein in science fiction: it is difficult to work in the field without responding to Lovecraft, even if only to reject him. If living literature may be seen as a kind of on-going debate or dialogue between many authors, Lovecraft has, in his own specialized area, made the opening statement. The rest is response. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ recent acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, defining her whole aesthetic in what she calls “the grotesque,” was a direct and explicit answer to Lovecraft.
It is Lovecraft’s vision that sustains him. He was indeed a visionary writer, on par with H. G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon, whose art encompassed the entire universe and meditated on mankind’s (very small) place in the overall scheme of things. His radical innovation is—one might think anomalously for a virtually life-long “conservative”—one of modernism. Lovecraft rejected the old spiritual world which had driven the human imagination since the beginning of the species, and turned, instead, to the material universe revealed by science. Remember that in Lovecraft’s time the universe was suddenly getting bigger in (literally) quantum leaps: Relativity was new; astronomers had determined that “spiral nebulae” were in fact galaxies beyond our own, unimaginably far away and receding; the planet Pluto was just discovered. A generation earlier, Darwinism had conclusively shaken people’s formerly secure ideas of who they were and where they had come from. (And in Lovecraft’s time, as today, there was still resistance to the uncomfortable truth. Lovecraft was doing much of his best work about the same time as the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”)
Lovecraft, sensing vast changes in mankind’s very conception of existence, was able to look ahead, imaginatively and emotionally, and consider the implications. This is why Lovecraft’s stories seem vital when the masters of the traditional ghost story, no matter how technically skilled, come across as cozy and quaint. E. F. Benson and M. R. James are still entertaining, but Lovecraft is a serious writer, in the best sense of the term. He is not going away.
One bit of evidence that he isn’t going away is that there is demand for a third edition of this book, which is nearly twenty years old. Discovering H. P. Lovecraft began life in 1976 as Essays Lovecraftian, published by T.K.-Graphics, an amateur imprint just then in the process of going out of business. The 1976 edition was rushed, with virtually no proofreading, and many resultant horrors, not necessarily of the eldritch kind. The 1987 Starmont edition, the first under the present title, featured numerous corrections and updatings, and some changes in the actual contents, the most significant of which was the addition of S. T. Joshi’s “Textual Problems in Lovecraft.”
The material has aged well. Now, the Borgo Press edition has something of a retrospective quality about it. Here are significant articles about Lovecraft, spanning several decades. Fritz Leiber’s “A Literary Copernicus” is one of the very first explorations of Lovecraft’s “cosmic” outlook, and still one of the best. Dirk Mosig’s “Four Faces of the Outsider” was a landmark in the psychological criticism of Lovecraft, indicating a whole new direction that Lovecraft studies were beginning to take in the early 1970s, largely led by Mosig. At the same time, Richard Tierney’s “The Derleth Mythos” threw off the shackles of Derlethism—a revolution in itself, probably not possible until Derleth’s death in 1971. George Wetzel was one of the first important Lovecraft scholars, very active in the 1950s.