Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

H. P. Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, the author of such works as “The Dunwich Horror” and “Fungi from Yuggoth”, is the object of a small but tenacious cult. It would be fun for anyone allergic to cultism to go through Lovecraft’s works selecting a nosegay of fungi, collecting bigotries and infelicities, perhaps enlisting a computer to determine how many times he used the word “eldritch” . Fun, but far too easy. One could quote almost at random. Lovecraft was an exceptionally, almost impeccably, bad writer. He was not even originally bad. He imitated the worst bits of Poe quite accurately, but his efforts to catch Dunsany’s sonorous rhythms show an ear of solid tin. Derivative, inept, and callow, his tales can satisfy only those who believe that a capital letter, some words, and a full stop make a sentence.

But though dissatisfied, one may be fascinated, as by any extreme psychological oddity. There cannot have been many writers who surrendered themselves so helplessly, so unprotestinglv, to their daemon. Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious. Seldom in his life and never in his writing did he try to fight back, to summon up a shred of coherent reasoning, a scrap of authentic prose, as a bulwark against the terrors and compulsions that tyrannized his mind. But Lovecraft’s feebleness gave his writing its one strength: his tales can be frightening. Read late at night alone, they give the genuine chill. The house creaks; the cat stares fixedly at something about three feet tall which you cannot quite see, there behind the armchair. Is there, perhaps, a webfooted person in the basement?

Indeed there was, in Lovecraf’s basement. His works beg for psychiatric analysis. They probably would not give a Jungian much scope of the kind that Rider Haggard gave Jung himself: Lovecraft’s was a case of arrested development, and Freudian repression-hunting is what is called for. It might, however, be good hunting. At six, the gifted, coddled child of a syphilitic father and a hysterically protective mother wrote down his dream of “a boy who overheard some horrible conclave of subterranean beings in a cave . . .”. He went on writing it down for the next forty years.

There was wit and intelligence in him, which went mostly to waste. He said: “All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.” His effort was “to achieve the essence of real externality ”. That is no mean ambition, and the phrase provides a useful clue about the nature of the “ horror story”. For if we seek to be horrified, now and then, by stories, it is surely worth asking why, and how, and what it is that we are afraid of.

L. Sprague de Camp’s biography does not, however, engage in any speculations of this kind. It is a solid, painstaking book, surely the “definitive life”, readable and well-proportioned despite its length. Mr de Camp seeks neither to glorify nor to debunk – though from time to time he does a bit of each – and he plays none of the dreadful in-group games which the cultists imitate from the master’s letters. He does, however, seek to justify, sometimes at length, Lovecraft’s period of antisemitic, anti-black, anti-everything-but-pure Aryan ranting, but this sort of blither does not need to be “explained” as a prejudice quite common in the early twentieth century, nor do “explanations” of the unreasonableness of racial prejudice help at all. It is enough to point out, as Mr de Camp does, that the rabid antisemite married a Jewish woman; and that his pure-Aryan phase coincided exactly with a period of suicidal depression. I wish Mr de Camp had let his well-marshalled facts stand alone, allowing the reader to perceive for himself the weird, the appalling, the positively eldritch continuity and wholeness of Lovecraft’s life, opinions, and writings, from beginning to end, birth to death. Mr de Camp’s own opinions are sane and moderate, far too sane and moderate to suit his demented subject; and so his book keeps running aground on shallows.

When he attempts to praise Lovecraft’s style, his argument comes down to the usual dreary, defensive dichotomy between art and entertainment, a red herring if ever there was one. Once he loses his good nature and inveighs against “free verse” – “lazy man’s poetry . . . . Anybody, even a child or a computer, can do it . . .”. But in general he is sensible, good-natured, and not defensive. He quotes from an early Lovecraft story, “The Crawling Chaos”:

“On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation.”

“The narrator”, continues Mr de Camp, “flees inland, taking his adjectives with him.”

Y qué quieres que te diga, prefiero a Lovecraft por encima de Dunsany en cualquier momento.

Jamás. Elija día y hora, señor.

Y como arma elijo aburrirnos hasta la muerte leyendo en voz alta sus relatos.

Mmmmm curiosa arma, con la que el ganador moriría, ¿no?