Steve Eng on H. P. L.

The following seems to be an essay Steve wrote for a class at George Washington
Universityin 1960. Page 7 of the surviving copy is missing.

The Outsider: A Critical Memoir of H. P. Lovecraft

The literary rise of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has been hindered by one-

sided attention. The twenty-three years since his untimely death have witnessed
vigorous collection of his works in book form, and an unceasing flow of critical
and biographic studies. But the focus has not been wide, aimed thus far at
enthusiastic admirers and bibliophiles, so the notice given his talent by reviewers
and the general public has remained scant.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a fantaisisto of exceptional power, unrivaled
in this country during his lifetime, He wrote after the weird tradition of
Hawthorne, Poe, Fitz-James O'Brien, and Lacadio Hearn, and their English
counterparts: Lord Dunsany, de la Mare, and Arthur Machen. His corpus of writing
in the off-trail province of the outre and macbre shows uncommon verve, and merits
consideration.
Neglect of him outside America's fantasy and science fiction coterie is
almost universal. However Mr. Edmund Wilson did pause to dismiss Lovecraft as a
second rate hack; and, conversely, our foremost Poe scholar, Professor Thomas Olive
Mabbott of Hunter College enjoys every word of his stories. Encouraging was an
issue of the University of Detroit's literary organ devoted entirely to H. P.
Lovecraft,(1) but whatever the publisher its material came mostly from non-academic
quarters. If Lovecraft's point of view is to be understood and any of his art to
endure, then the praise of fantasy connoisseurs must be met by more sober
criticism.
All of which commotion would have astonished, perhaps amused, the retiring
gentleman at the center of this posthumous flurry. For Howard Lovecraft wrote
fantastic fiction and verse primarily as diversion, and constantly disparaged his
own efforts, thinking himself an amature. He did not rely on his own weird writing
for bread and butter, early turning paid revisionist and surviving the Depression
by selling his services to others less gifted. (He wrote with Adolph De Castro,
collaborator with Bierce, and once did a horror story for magician Harry Houdini.)
Since he entertained no hopes for serious acceptance of his prose little pain was
taken to advertise it. Unhappily, no collection saw print before his death.
The first fiction Lovecraft sold was marketed only at the urging of his
friends: he naively rebelled at "commercializing" his talent. Indeed, certain
better stories and poems, and virtually all his causeries and essays, attained
initial circulation through obscure amateur press journals; other minor tales,
verse fragments and sundry prose sketches were contained wholly in his famous
letters.
But whatever the media his bent toward authorship was always satisfied. A
precocious youth, his ambition was to write and publish. When nine years old he
penciled and among his family distributed the four carbon copies of The Scientific
Gazette [underline] (subject: chemistry) and his The Rhode Island Journal of
Astronomy [underline](1903-1907) was hectographed in monthly editions of twenty-
five.
An invalid most of his life, H.P.L. (as he was affectionately known to his
friends) passed his earliest years in the gloom of an antique house in Providence,
R. I. Here he could revel in a copious library's solitude; at four he began to
read: Grimm,and The Thousand and One Nights[underline]. He was none when he
discovered Poe. This shy and introspective child found captivating the gaudy
mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome, and he shuddered over Gustave Dore's
horrendous art; the drawings for Dante, Milton and "The Ancient Mariner" he never
forgot. Thus was Lovecraft attracted to the weird and beautiful; and a diet of
genuine literature shaped his writing style. His first extant story, "The Little
Glass Bottle," was done at the age of six.
 From his childhood surroundings Lovecraft grew to love the culture of the
1700's. The glories of Georgian architecture, surviving so splendidly in old
Providence, charmed the boy. And the eighteenth century prose he admired, while
taking the verse model of Pope, and Thomas Gray's rural tone, as his poetic ideals.
But Lovecraft's intellect ranged further than literature. Wedded to an
affinity for all printed matter was absorption with the sciences; at sixteen he
conducted in the Providence Tribune[underline], and News[underline], columns on
astronomy. One perceives even this early the weight of scientific inquiry
balancing his active imagination. And the work of H.P.L.'s adult career shows the
same contract: materialism aginst fancy.
His childhood left him unequipped for society. At the hands of a neurotic
mother he was sheltered from other children. As Lovecraft's correspondence
painfully testifies, shyness and intellectual hobbies also placed him apart. To
juvenile games he preferred books and his homemade telescope. Pathos for the eight
year old heightened with his father's death from paresis and the subsequent mental
decline of Mrs. Lovecraft. In 1921 she died at an asylum. Lovecraft reached
manhood at a disadvantage. His mother had warped him by over-protectiveness. This
rearing precluded "normal" existence; even as as adult, the son permitted lingering
shyness to confine many friendships to letter-exchanging only.
And his onw morbid inheritance cannot be discounted. Though he was perhaps
not an hereditary syphilitic, physically going through the narrator's horror in his
stories, (2) the insanity of the degenerate New Englanders he drew is frequent. He
was preoccupied with madness.
In 1914 Lovecraft sampled amateur journalism, an eager recruit and the
ultimate President of the two main bodies.(3) These organizations, sponsoring
conventions and "little" magazines, provided him an outlet, albeit unpaid, for
prose and verse written in adolesence. His essays of this period show him a racial
bigot and militaristic Anglophile. But their dogmatism bespeaks his isolation and
lack of worldly contacts in lonely, reclusive years; as his outside experience and
circle of friends widened H.P.L. revised many views.
Lovecraft's passion for amateur journalism lasted his entire life. Even when
he had undertaken his ghost writing and rivisory projects and found popular
magazines would buy his fiction, the badly-mimeographed papers of amateur groups
continued to feature his belles lettres. He contributed to close to one hundred
periodicals, such as The Tryout[underline], The United Amateur[underline],
Driftwood[underline], et al, and for eight years edited his own The
Conservative[underline], sounding board for both literary and political sentiments.
In this avocation Lovecreat as nowhere else could seek to perfect his style. And
until his death he adhered to amateurdom's ideals, unyielding to magazine-story
formulae.
However today his renown depends upon the approximately half-a-hundred weird
tales that were carried under his by-line by the horror magazines of the Twenties
and Thirties. At the time H.P. Lovecraft wrote there existed no quality market for
fantasy fiction in America. So fiction of the supernatural and "scientifiction"
was relegated to the coarse, untrimmed pages of pulp magazines.
But the amateur spirit guiding nearly all Lovedraft's art raised him above
the status of mere pulp author. Thus he scorned editorial requests in later years,
though significantly some rejected pieces were published unaltered after his death.
H.P.L. always deemed two novels "unpublished" for they were marred by numerous
errors and omissions when a science fiction monthly serialized them. All his
stories and poems in Weird Tales[underline] were sold with the stipulation that no
word be changed. He was led by integrity not mere pride; and his dread of mistakes
caused him to re-inspect many accepted MSS. before they reached the printer's
hands.
Lovecraft's faults of style and structure were not the short-comings of a
charlatan dealing out cheap nighmares; instead his defects stemmed from real
attempts at putting something fresh and distictive into fantasy writing. And we
take them as the complement to his strange genius.
Like Henry Adams, H.P.L. felt drawn to the magnificence of the eighteenth
centrury and was alienated by his own era. So he allowed himself many affectations.
His precise speech was said to resemble that of Dr. Johnson in its formality, of
English ancestry and pro-British, he even pretended to deplore the American
Revolution; and in support of his pose as an English gentleman of leisure he tried
restoring the lost art of letter writing to its former place.
A Lovecraft epistle might feature thirty well-packed pages, penned in their
sender's crabbed hand, rife with archaisms of spelling, puncuation and vocabulary,
and the old-fashioned long "s." If in obsolete grammar and calligraphy, they were
fluent and informative. Lovecraft was an omniverous reader of retentive memory;
and his letters would discuss evolution, witchcraft, or archaeology. Erudite past
belief, we would join on paper any controversy; yet he could write warmly personal
messages of sympathy and gentle advice........................
.....................(page 7 of essay
missing)...........................................................................
....................
are monsters out of an alien space-time continuum whose unholy presense is
possible[underline 'possible'] scientificallt, allowing that "willing suspension of
disbelief." One friend observed:
He shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little
world and
his gods, to the stars and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space. (4)
A cold materialism underlies his fiction, despite the trappings of weird
setting and mood. H.P.L. required no diablerie of ghosts: the horror of a
purposeless universe--or multiverse[underline 'multi' but not verse]--was enough.
Though a poet and dreamer for whom beauty was the sole reality, Lovecraft scorned
faith in the occult or supernatural. He might gaze enthralled at the graceful
angle of a spire atop a stately Providence church, but religion and mysticism his
scientific mind doubted. So this credo he expounded in an essay, "Idealism and
Materialism: A Reflection." (1919).
Lovecraft was deeply versed in folklore and magic as his notebook jottings
reveal; however his fiction concerned not ghost phenomena but the dislocation of
time and space. Mental flights into his dear eighteenth century caused him to
consider time "as a mystical, portentious thing in which all sorts of unexpected
wonders might be discovered." (5) And from it he took a basic source of fear.
H.P. Lovecraft is remembered for the group of stories and short novels of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a unique contribution to modern weird writing. This was the
myth-pattern, on which he hung at least thirteen tales, that influenced so many who
came after. First manifest in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), the mythology grew
clearer in further stories. For these narratives he sketched a pantheon of Elder
Gods come from the stars or the fourth dimension to harass mankind, and a catalogue
of diabolic books to call or exorcise them.
For example the loathsome dieties Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are
typical Lovecraft inventions, as well as the Necronimicon[underline], hideous
volume of spells and incantations for which librarians and booksellers have been
plagued by credulous readers. This nonexistant tome was possibly suggested by the
weird work of Robert W. Chambers; the city of lost Carcosa appears in Ambrose
Bierce. H.P.L. owed something to Arthur Machen's books of Pan and the "little
people" of Wales. And in Greco-Roman myths and the arcana of Egypt his mythos had
obvious roots.
Lovecraft's stories derived from the elaborate Cthulhu Mythology expose an
imagination coupled with good craftsmanship. If not read in rapid succession, for
there is a regrettable sameness, they can provide rare entertainment. Outstanding
are "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936), The Shadow Over Innsmouth[underline] (1937),
his only book published while he lived, and "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). This last
tour de force, like many other Lovecraft tales, has been widely anthologized
(notably in the Modern Library), and was adapted for radio. "The Colour Out of
Space (1927), one of its author's three favorites, was an horrific yarn of
astronomy lauded by Edmund Wilson, who discovered little else of value in
Lovecraft. And The Shadow Out of Time[underrline](1936) also evoked cosmic fear
from scientific material. Both stories lie within the "Cthlhu" grouping and have a
realism suggestive of H. G. Wells. Another sorcerous tale, weaving menace-from-
outside with folklore, was "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), skillfully laid in
the wild hills of Vermont.
Lovecraft particularly stated the idea motivating the "Cthulhu" plots when of
his entire output he wrote:
All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the
fundamental
lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another
race, who,
in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet
live on
outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again. (8)
And he even allowed others to use and expand his ingenious myth-structure.
The number of derivitive stories was enormous, yet without exception poor.
But aside from the dream-like fantasies of Lovecraft's formative years, and
those of the Cthulhu Mythos, there remains a third clutch of masterly shorter
pieces, many conceived under the influence of Edgar Poe. If H.P.L. had written
nothing more than "The Hound" (1924), "The Rats in the Walls" (1924), or "The Music
of Erich Zann" (1925) his preeminent rank among macbre writers would stand assured.
The terse, uncanny "In the Vault" (1925) is worthy of an M. R. James, and is the
single true ghost story to leave his pen. "Cool Air" (1928) recalls "The Facts in
the Case of M. Valdemar" Poe's gruesome gem. And "The Outsider" (1926), possibly
Lovecraft's masterwork, could have been the work of Edgar Poe. The length and
verbosity which mar certain otherwise good stories of the Mythos are mercifully
absent in these shorter fantasies; however they possess all the atmosphere and
sense of cosmic dread.
Unluckily H.P.L.'s fiction is harmed by reliance on trite adjectives: so
oftern we read of "Blasphemous" or "forbidden" presences too fearsome for words.
And some critics decry Lovecraft's lack of humor. Names of friends found on
characters no doubt amused his intimates, but not the general reader--who finds no
comic relief to make the eventual climax the more devastating by contrast. The
humor which ran with friendly restraint through his unpublished correspondence
should be seen in the forthcoming Selected Letters [underline] (Arkham House). And
a wry spirit plays over some Lovecraft poems.
But as poet he seldom rose above mere versifying. He abhorred free verse,
T.S. Eliot, "bestial" Whitman, and most Romantics except Poe. Hart Crane he knew,
but this strange poet did not influence him. Whereas in prose he adhered to the
Georgian style he also admired the eighteenth century verse forms, so wrote stilted
and overly quaint lines in imitation. His labored poetry from 1917-1923 is clogged
with Greek mythic allusions, and thymed like the couplets of coffee-house London.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote a quantity of fantasy poetry, some of it not too
amateurish. His first poem "Nemesis" (1917), showed promise, but he was at his
best in the cycle of thirty-six sonnets together called The Fungi From Yuggoth
[underline], composed in the winter of 1929-1930. From this series "Continuity" is
a fortunate specimen, though non-fantasy in theme. It states Lovecraft's failure
to sense order in the patternless cosmos: at best his mind can perceive only the
dimmest continuity in a universe without design.
In handling the supernatural H.P.L. was more facile when doing fiction. A
critic of his verse, Winfield Townley Scott, offered that the office of poetry is
ill served by a motive to scare. (9) Upon testing his ghostly poems you cannot but
agree.
Cat lovers should try his charming defense of the species in "Cats and Dogs"
(1937), but the scholarly monograph Supernatural Horror in Literature [underline]
is Lovecraft's best essay. Privately circulated in 1927, this study probes the
psychology of fear fiction; and it traces weird stories from primitive cults
through the romances of the English Gothic school, Poe and Hawthorne and the
moderns. Like his amazing letters, this survey shows the man's voracious reading.
(His personal library numbered 2000 volumes.)
 Its opeing sentence justifies the terror story: "The oldest and strongest
emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of
the unknown." And in the chapter treating Poe, usually missed by students,
Lovecraft advances a new conclusion about "The Fall of the House of Usher." He
suggests that a trinity was intended: Usher, his twin sister Madeline and the soul
of their centuried house, perhaps all unigied by destruction in the storm. With
reservations, Edmund Wilson found Supernatural Horror in Literature to be "a really
able piece of work." (10)
Howard Phillips Lovecraft died writing. Sent to Jane Brown Hospital in March
of 1937 with cancer and nephritis, till the end he kept notes of his sensations and
pain. His premature death at forty-seven was maybe hastened by the meagre rations
on which he fed in the Depression years, when he often skipped meals to afford
books.
In final judgment Lovecraft the man is not found wanting. Despite his
mannerisms and prejudices, shyness and embarrassment over his irregular features,
he was mourned widely, as the many heartfelt eulogies proved. In his lifetime the
spare, lantern-jawed author was already a legend, his fondness for cats, children
and darkness well-remarked; then after his death ambitious publications of the
Lovecraft Memorial Volumes began. And during the two decades since an actual
Lovecraft cult has sprung up.
The drive for recognition of this strange genius was launched by two Mid-
western admirers, novelist August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei. As The Outsider and
Others [underline] they published thirty-six stories and the essay on weird
literature in 1939, under the "Arkham House" imprint. But a few years later that
collection was worth as much as $100 on the out-of-print market. And the firm has
by now issued nearly the entire works of H.P.Lovecraft. Last November appeared a
twentieth anniversary book, The Shutterd Room [underline], to collect lesser prose
and juvenilia.
The Forties saw pocket books of Lovecraft decorating the news counters;
scores of anthologies included his tales. Popular hardbound editions followed, and
"collaborations" post-mortem, gatherings of verse, resurrected notes and letters,
amateur press essays, a biography, bibliographies--and critical studies from the
fantasy addicts.
Brittish readers sampled Lovecraft in the Not At Night [underline] series of
the Thirties; more recently in England two novels and a book of short stories saw
reprint. And to slightly extend his fame translations have been made in several
languages.
But though an estimated half-a-million persons have read Lovecraft, his
better fiction may soon fall out of print. And unless academic notice is given his
achievement he will stay the choice of a knowing few, perhaps forever the outsider
of American letters.

END

(1)Fresco[underline] (Volume 8 Number 3) Spring 1958

(2)The case was stated by David H. Keller, M. D., "Shadows Over Lovecraft," and was
reprinted with rebuttal from Kenneth Sterling, M. D., ibid.[underline], pp.12-
29
(3)The United Amateur Press Association, and the National Amateur Press
Association.
(4)Leiber, Fritz Jr, "A Literary Copernicus," Something About Cats[underline] by
H.P. Lovecraft (Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House, 1949) page 290
(5)Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity," Beyond the Wall of Sleep[underline]
by H.P. Lovecraft (Arkham House, 1943), page1
(6)DeCamp, L. Sprague "The Unwritten Classics," The Saturday Review of
Literature[underline], (Volume XXX Number 13) March 29, 1947 pp. 7-8
(7)"An Inhabitant of Carcosa," Can Such Things Be?[underline]
(8)Quoted by August Derleth, "A Master of the Macbre," Reading and
Collecting[underline] (Volume 1 Number 9) August 1937, page 9
(9)See his "Lovecraft as Poet," Rhode Island on Lovecraft[underline] (Providence:
Grand-Hadley, 1945) page 7
(10)"Tales of the Marvelous and Ridiculous," in his Classics and
Commercials[underline] (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1950) page 289