A Phobic Fantasist
HOFFMAN, BARRY
A Phobic Fantasist Lovecraft: A Biography By L. Sprague de Camp Doubleday. 512 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Barry Hoffman Who is H.P. Lovecraft, and why is anyone asking, let alone replying with a...
...Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects of de Camp's book is the glimpse it gives into the lives of amateur journalists and journeyman fantasists...
...This conservatism, this fear of being unable to control events around him, became the shaping element in Lovecraft's fiction...
...In the end, he fails to relate the life of the writer to the work of the writer...
...A fervent Anglophile, he defended the Loyalist side in the American Revolution, and argued that New England should secede and rejoin the British Empire...
...to evoke terror in the reader by describing a situation that defied normal expectation or natural laws...
...And de Camp's study is valuable for the sympathetic picture it provides of a frightened, precocious, pampered child of the American gentry who grew into a neophobic, xenophobic, ethnocentric, misanthropic, schizoid adult just beginning to achieve a measure of maturity at 47 when his life ended...
...To achieve this effect, Lovecraft constructed a complex but characteristically systematic counter-Christian cosmology-"the Cthulu mythos"-replete with chants, priests, cults, legends, and ancient source documents (the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the Pnakotic Manuscripts) that delineated the workings and history of a conspiratorial world of demonic, supernatural and alien powers waiting to take over the earth...
...Dominated in his youth by his mother (who, like his father, died insane), Lovecraft slept in the same room till he was 30...
...Lovecraft, and why is anyone asking, let alone replying with a 512-page book...
...De Camp goes a long way toward portraying the complexity of Lovecraft the man...
...He employed 18th-century diction in his speech and letters, was kind to everyone he knew and considered most forms of employment as undignified "commercialism...
...The pure horror story had, in his mind, a single purpose...
...Yet he never does succeed in making any critical sense out of the stories...
...If his positions on race and politics were dangerous in others, however, in him they were merely silly...
...He was, like Hawthorne, Dickinson and Thoreau, yet another version, albeit an extreme one, of the New England isolate shielding himself against a problematic existence with a world of words-he even dated his personal correspondence from places like "the 66th Vortex of the Space-Time Abyss" or "the Tower of Nargham in Pnath...
...Any complexity of vision was sacrificed to the goal of terrifying by allusion to unknown, lurking forces...
...He was a lonely youngster, constantly ill...
...Their various productions are a strong testament to the hold Lovecraft's peculiar imagination seems to have had on his acquaintances...
...A believer in Aryan supremacy and a verbally virulent anti-Semite (he wanted to kill off all the "Asiatic types of puffy rat-faced Jews so that a white man may walk the streets without nausea"), Lovecraft proceeded to marry a Jew...
...Unlike his avowed mentor, Poe, or other "weird" writers with whom he was familiar, Ambrose Bierce, for instance, or the English gothics, Lovecraft relied almost entirely on his descriptive powers...
...A self-described fascist, he vigorously supported Franklin Roosevelt, defended Norman Thomas and felt socialism was probably the best system of government...
...Apart from opinions that are embarrassingly glib (Nietzsche is "that great German windbag"), he offers paraphrases in place of interpretation, and as a substitute for analysis he is content to note whether a tale is "competent hack work," "one of the best," or something in-between...
...This vitality of imagination, along with the strength of his personality, served to make Lovecraft a leading figure among contributors to pulp magazines like Weird Tales...
...The answers, briefly, are that he is a horror-story writer who has been the object of a growing cult since his death 38 years ago, and that L. Sprague de Camp feels he deserves the attention of a lengthy biography both for his "strange personality" and the originality of his prose...
...Lovecraft's distaste for the outside produced not only a proclivity to fantasy but also a strong tendency toward reactionary "thinking...
...after he finally married and changed lodgings, he insisted on being surrounded by his old furniture...
...They corresponded feverishly with Lovecraft (he wrote over 100,000 letters), created stories based on each other's dreams and became full-fledged Lovecraftians by taking up the threads of the Cthulu mythos, expanding upon it, using it to shape their own tales, and detailing it with reverential care...
...He showed little interest in characterization, plot, the intricacies of point of view, or the enriching convolutions of familial or sexual psychologies...
...Underlying this ideological confusion was a straightforward personal stance: He aimed in all things to be a "gentleman," or his version of one, "an absolutely passive spectator...
...At 17 he suffered a nervous breakdown that he attributed to the rigors of attending high school, and instead of going to college, he literally pulled the shades on his room for five years in dread of human contact...
...Throughout his life he dreamed of being a Roman patrician or an 18th-century Englishman...
...What we hate," he wrote in his later years, "is simply change, as such...
...There is little argument about Lovecraft's strangeness...
...The result was a spawn of proteges and acolytes, writers who were themselves an odd assortment of men with amazingly prolific careers: August Derleth (the author of over 800 books), Clark Ashton Smith, David Wandrei, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard (who, though dead at 30, had more than two dozen novels to his credit...
Vol. 58 • August 1975 • No. 16
