lovecraft

So...what is the deal with Lovecraft?

I recently set about reading a collection of selected letters from Lovecraft's correspondence.  It has had a tremendous effect on me.  I hope to shed some light on that here.

H. P. Lovecraft was a horror writer in the early 20th century, a Rhode Islander by breeding and an 18th-century English country squire by temperament.  He wrote some very terrifying stuff, and worked the gamut of scary from monsters-in-the-dark to humanity's-cosmic-insignificance.  Virtually unknown as a writer at the time of his death in 1937, his popularity has grown steadily since, so that today nearly everyone who considers herself a reader has at least heard of him.  Even if you're not so well-read, odds are that his work has influenced multiple pieces of entertainment that you enjoy.  Although he was most famous for his works that created the Cthulhu mythos, they numbered very few in comparison to the larger part of his writing.  He perceived himself as carrying on the literary tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, and he nursed a lifelong penchant for the weird into his sorrowfully early grave.

I have read many (certainly not most) of his works, and they always struck a chord in me.  Traditionally "scary" books and movies don't do much to frighten me; how can you be surprised when you know surprises are coming?  But Lovecraft has a defter touch, and his writing instills you with horror not with the terror inherent in its subject matter, but with the awful truths he forces you to recognize and grapple with.  "Boo" can be scary.  A bloodless corpse can be scarier.  But Lovecraft plays the instrument of human fear like a master, and brings us face-to-face with existential terrors too awful to contemplate.

But I could gush over his fiction all day.  That's not what this is about.  I hoped to use Lovecraft as a character in a story I was working on, and to that end, I decided to explore his psyche through the greatest insight into his mind he provided us -- thousands of letters to his close friends and family, thoughfully preserved by those lucky individuals.  Lovecraft himself kept none of the letters he received; he treated postal correspondence as though it were as flighty as words spoken into the air.

I got my hands on the Selected Letters, painstakingly gathered and edited by August Derleth and James Turner, and happily began reading them.  Before long, however, I realized that Lovecraft and I shared an especial connection.  At times, it seemed as though his thoughts were reaching over the decades to connect with mine.  Other times, I was simply disgusted by some of his views on the world; how lucky I am to look back with a modern perspective!  But even then, I understood where he was coming from, even if I disagreed.  A very rational man, that Lovecraft.  Disturbingly so.

I've given up on that story, but no matter; I'm still fully committed to finishing his letters.  Enough of his life and thoughts track mine that I have virtually no choice in the matter, if only to gain some clues into my own future .  Which is not to say that I think we're fated to go down the same path -- I just feel that coincidence has put a similar mind into a similar set of circumstances, and I would be foolish not to learn from his example.

Also, I truly feel that Lovecraft's writing expresses to perfection many of my own thoughts on life, truth, meaning, virtue, and happiness.  Rather than go through the onerous process of paraphrasing, I figured I'd just serve up his thoughts to you directly.  So you may feel free to click below for my own choice excerpts:

Scott's Selections from Selected Letters of Lovecraft, 1911-1924

I have only just finished the first volume.  There are four of these left to go.  Once I've perused them, I hope to provide similar sets of excerpts with my favored letters chosen.  Note that I have given a title to each letter, visible under the bookmarks section, referencing the letter's meaning or the part of it that most moved me.  I've also drawn a circle around the numbers and addressees of the letters I actually mean for you to read (as some have been inadvertently included as a factor of the scanning process.)

A final note:  Lovecraft was a horrible racist.  His racialist attitudes, at least as of 1924, place him more closely in line with Hitler than American-style racism.  He's more than a white supremacist; he's an Aryan supremacist, although I don't think that term had come into common use by 1924.  Obviously I disagree universally with all of his views concerning race.  But there is value, too, in seeing how an otherwise brilliant, sympathetic, kindly soul can be so blighted with hatred and contempt by a poor education.  We should all give thanks for the suffering endured by our forebears, that we might live in a slightly more enlightened time.