Defending Lovecraft (S.T. Joshi replies to Charles Baxter)
This column was brought to my attention by Larry Correia, and I wish to pass the favor on to my readers.
Mr Correia in his column was responding, in his incounterfeitable style, to Grimi Wormtongue, son of Gálmód, who, writing for the British printed matter called Guardian, we find busily if frenetically savaging HP Lovecraft for reasons best explained by the Anonymous Conservative.
To anyone attempting to exploit the link and read the Guardian column, I must include a ‘trigger warning’ to those who, like me, love the the nuance, precision, and strength of expression of the Queen’s English, for the Guardian publication (I cannot in good conscience call it a newspaper) retains a most negligent editor, who permits his writers yammer in jargon not as amusing as the neologisms of Dr Seuss, nor as gay as those in a Marry Poppins song, which seemingly erupt in an epileptic spasm of ink. This phenomenon, which is of interest in alienists, seems similar to glossolalia, in that it seems to be the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any readily comprehended meaning, but is prompted by the inspiration of a spirit somewhat more unclean and dubious than that which inspires revivalists and evangels.
Here is my trigger warning: always keep the trigger finger outside the guard until you are ready to shoot. Do not point until you are ready to shoot, do not shoot until you are ready to kill, aim for the center of mass and empty the cylinder.
I include below the cut an image of Mr Correia holding his typewriter as a warning to the wise.
In the course of this ‘enhanced interrogation’ technique carried out by Mr Correia with verbal tetsubo, reference was made to a more scholarly defense of HP Lovecraft, and his position in the Commonwealth of Letters, by Mr Joshi, who was responding to a similar savaging performed, I assume, with more skill and literacy by Charles Baxter than was seen in Wormtongue’s limp and self congratulatory effort.
The column itself, entitled Reply to Charles Baxter’s “The Hideous Unknown of H. P. Lovecraft” can be found here: http://www.stjoshi.org/review_baxter.html
Here is a quote:
Lovecraft was an almost universally beloved figure in his time, as evidenced by the dozens of memoirs written by his friends, colleagues, and relatives. A comment by Ernest A. Edkins is representative: “I think that the most lasting impression Lovecraft left me was one of essential nobility, of dauntless integrity. … He remains enshrined in my memory as a great gentleman, in the truest sense of that much abused term.”[10]
Baxter has a low opinion of Lovecraft’s prose. It is easy to quote Edmund Wilson’s strictures from 1945, but there are several good reasons for not regarding Wilson as the voice of God on this issue. First, Wilson revealed a severe prejudice toward all genre writing, as witness his condemnations of detective fiction (“Why Do People Read Detective Stories?”) and of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (“Oo, Those Awful Orcs”). Wilson was simply unable to acknowledge that non-mimetic literature can convey anything significant about humanity and its place in the cosmos. (It will be news to Mr. Baxter that Wilson substantially revised—and revised upward—his view of Lovecraft about twenty years later, when he read the first volume of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters [1965]; he even wrote a play, The Little Blue Light, with some Lovecraftian touches.)[11]
Second, Wilson’s review appeared when he and many others assumed that the barebones austerity of Hemingway was the only “correct” style that could be utilized in literary fiction (Lovecraft himself derided Hemingway’s prose as “machine-gun fire”[12]), but I thought we had learned something since then. Steven J. Mariconda, who has done more to analyze Lovecraft’s prose style than any other scholar, has concluded that he was a “consummate prose stylist” and adds:
The bulk of his stories are atmospherically effective. … He wrote as he did for carefully considered reasons, leveraging a naturally erudite style into an effective instrument to create weird atmosphere. … He plumbed the depths of fear, dream, time, and space as few others have, and nothing other than the unique style we now know as “Lovecraftian” could have better conveyed the intense philosophical and psychological conceptions that were his concerns.[13]
If Mr. Baxter wishes the opinions of someone more eminent than Mariconda (and, indeed, than himself), I can cite Joyce Carol Oates, who has stated:
Most of Lovecraft’s tales … develop by way of incremental detail, beginning with quite plausible situations … One is drawn into Lovecraft by the very air of plausibility and characteristic understatement of the prose, the question being When will the weirdness strike? There is a melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft’s most passionate work, like ‘The Outsider’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the eader’s memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded.
These sentences come from Oates’s introduction to Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (Ecco Press, 1997), one of the best short analyses of Lovecraft ever written. It was originally written as a review-article of my H. P. Lovecraft: A Life in these pages (October 31, 1996).
Baxter also underestimates the tonal and stylistic variety of Lovecraft’s prose. He has made no attempt to seek out an entire group of imaginary-world fantasies (modeled largely after the work of Lord Dunsany), ranging from such exquisite early specimens as “The White Ship” (1919) and “Celephaïs” (1920) and culminating in the expansive short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–27), that are very different from his dense tales of supernatural horror. These tales were deliberately excluded from Klinger’s volume. Baxter also ignores such things as the melding of weirdness and pathos in “The Outsider” (1921; also not included in Klinger), the self-parodic humor in “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1921–22) and “The Lurking Fear” (1922), and the transmogrification of the horrific “other” to the horrific self in such existential fictions as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35).
Moreover, Baxter seems strangely tone-deaf to the radical change from Lovecraft’s early “first-person hysterical” style, as seen in such tales as “The Tomb” (1917) and “Dagon” (1917), to the far more sober, scientifically based fictions of his last decade. I for one would find it difficult to find a passage of more effective rhythmic modulation than in the first paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926):
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.[14]
The first sentence is now cited in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I trust Mr. Baxter is prepared to admit that the editors of Bartlett’s know a good bon mot when they encounter one.
Even when Lovecraft seems to be at his flamboyant worst, he reveals a sensuous love of language that can be intoxicating, as in this celebrated example from “The Outsider”: “It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.”[15] At least one dictionary has quoted a part of this sentence as an example of the metaphorical use of the word “eidolon.”
Lovecraft made every word count. He adhered as rigidly to Poe’s theory of the “unity of effect” as Poe himself did. He recognized that a richly textured prose style was perhaps the best means to convey the realism that the supernatural tale required if it were to be convincing to a skeptical audience. He outlines his principles in the seminal essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” (1933):
In writing a weird story I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere, and place the emphasis where it belongs. One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately—with a careful emotional “build-up”—else it will seem flat and unconvincing. Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. … Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.[16]
The upshot of all this is that Lovecraft developed, in the course of a relatively short career spanning less than twenty years, a highly coherent aesthetic of the weird and developed a prose style that he believed was appropriate to its expression. Whatever one may think of Lovecraft’s prose, I would suggest to Mr. Baxter that he be a little less intolerant when assessing work that doesn’t accord with his own presuppositions.
I begin to wonder whether the hostility that Mr. Baxter shows toward Lovecraft—and, by extension, the entire realm of weird fiction—is based on a dim (and, to him, unwelcome) realization that, for at least the past century or so, many of the most dynamic aesthetic developments in Anglophone literature have come from what used to be derided as “genre fiction”—especially the vital interrelation between literature and media—and that the mainstream fiction in which Mr. Baxter himself has worked for his entire career now occupies a lesser place, with a dwindling readership and decreased relevance in today’s culture. Such writers as Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, James Ellroy, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, and the like are what even highly educated people want to read.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
