When looking at an artist whose life was abbreviated or whose career hinges on a specific inflection point, it is tempting to consider what would have transpired if that life was even a little bit longer or if that inflection never occurred.
In the April 2004 issue of Spin commemorating the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, Chuck Klosterman wrote a speculative article, in the form of a timeline, in which Kurt Cobain survives the turmoil of 1994 to become a much more famous version of Jeff Mangum. I posited that world literature would have been spared some of its most controversial entries had their author been spared an adult life of imprisonment. Maggie Nelson for her part regretted that Sylvia Plath had not lived to attain the refinement of Francis Bacon, embracing “abstraction” with some equivalent of his late masterpiece Jet of Water. And I sometimes think of the dystopian R.D. Laing that would have emerged had J.G. Ballard stayed in medical school. I could go on. What if Nathanael West paid more attention to the road? What it William S. Burroughs and joined the CIA and what if James Jesus Angleton had stuck to poetry? What if Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t so Edgar Allan Poe-ish? And for our present purposes, what if H.P. Lovecraft had … gone to the doctor?
Lovecraft’s neuroses and his surrounding life circumstances have a notably intense codependence with his work. Not simply his views on race, which permeated his fiction above and below text, but his various hangups with physical existence in general.1 His reticence toward sex2 is well-known, but his phobia of doctors was more consequential for ending his life at age 46 from intestinal cancer. By that point he was hardly famous, with only a coterie of admirers, pulp magazine editors continuously butchering his work, one standalone book (the famously inept edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth), and many more ambitious works he deemed worthless and left in a drawer.
This runs exactly counter to his posthumous fame, which China Miéville likened to a papacy of horror: an authority that is as centralized and remote as it is far-reaching. And an authority managed entirely by a court of Cardinals, all self-appointed, interpreting and applying his concepts through the limitations of their own skills and judgment. It includes August Derleth, posthumous publisher and “collaborator,” his most committed scholar S.T. Joshi, and a horde of filmmakers. It makes for a very grand, contentious, and unending cadaver synod, using and abusing ideas hastily frozen in time and thawed, much like one of their most popular descendants, into unusual and barely coherent forms.
It should come as a comfort to those who’ve committed so much energy to beating back the enormous influence of H.P. Lovecraft to consider the likelihood that no one would be more shocked at the vast reach of that influence than Lovecraft himself. The Schwarzenegger-ization of the work of Robert E. Howard or the faint echoes of Clark Ashtons Smith’s hard-edged fantasy would make sense enough; but for his own ideas to become so enthusiastically raided across multiple mediums would suggest that something must have gone terribly wrong along the way.
That Lovecraft ascended to respectability at all should not be a surprise. American literature is the carnival freak show of the Western canon. Excepting maybe Emerson and Updike, actual normal people are far and few between, even in our hallowed curricula. It’s a majority of brilliant dropouts, shut-ins, waste-cases, and losers. And depending on where your bias falls you can abuse that canon one way or the other. Academic gurus overstate the rustic romance of our national genius while damaged scribblers pine for a Poe-esque or Thoreauvian aura without much concrete proof to merit it. But even by the standards of the freak show, Lovecraft is the one true outsider artist among them: provincial in life and in thought, gifted with an astounding intelligence yet erratically educated, and driven equally in his craft by overthinking and underthinking.
Lovecraft’s dense, philosophical, and sensorially intense horror fiction seemed like a flawed but compelling experiment in interwar America. His established hatred of pulp fiction’s shoddy standards in storytelling was made plain in the letters sections of the magazines he read. His effete, pseudo-aristocratic reputation belies both his flair for literary shit-stirring and the strongly expressed aesthetic vision he articulated in treatises and his personal correspondence. Lovecraft dedicated his brief and unprofitable career to putting theory into practice. The fruits of that practice are among the most polarizing in literature. They are either morally and aesthetically unreadable, worse even than the pulp dreck he so disdained, or a pitch-perfect conveyance of his dark, unsayable concepts.
His style is a notorious wildfire of long sentences, labyrinthian exposition, British spelling, and those famously archaic adjectives. Ironically, his most philosophically representative sentence is his clearest: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” So opens “The Call of Cthulhu,” whose titular cosmic monstrosity makes manifest humanity’s smallness in the universe. Ignorance was bliss for Lovecraft, who wrote time and time again of hapless nerds self-owning into horror and madness through their pursuit of knowledge. Getting all the facts meant only confirming our arbitrary, fragile place in a depthless emptiness.
At the same time, that style betrays an entangled thematic conflict. Art, Lovecraft wrote “must … form primarily the crystallization or symbolization of a definite human mood—not the attempted delineation of events.” Yet his own mood was hardly definite, clashing as it did with the importance of imparting, on the one hand, the chasmic chaos of the universe and, on the other hand, the idea that there are good races and not good races and that mixing them is very bad. This is to say nothing of the physical repulsions that undulated and writhed in his densely descriptive passages, which even I rather lazily judged “indescribable” but which may be more accurately the verbal cacophony of the firsthand account, as many of his stories are (not always plausibly framed) eyewitness statements.
Lovecraft’s acute subjectivity, like his style, is seen as both liability and asset. Unlike his thematic cousin, Franz Kafka, Lovecraft wallowed in the postwar era. His writing, especially at the end of his career, had gone too far in melding science, actual or fictive, with “mood,” creating visions too intense and totalizing for the 1950s imagination to accept. Cold War readers wanted to drift alongside the precipice at a safely ironic distance, not swing over it by the ankles from a trapeze. But once the 1970s made the latter prospect more attractive, Lovecraft was something you could selectively read and appropriate. The truly ugly stuff could be set aside in favor of slightly different ugly stuff. His physically confounding cosmic entities became verbal Rorschach blots. Some of its fruits—The Thing, Alien, Re-Animator, “The Last Feast of Harlequin”—are exquisite emanations of influence while the wider “mythos,” despite Lovecraft’s basic approval of its existence, gets lost in the RPG/table-top weeds.
Medical negligence allowed Lovecraft an excruciating end to his life. And, despite the efforts of many authorial interlopers, death is a significant impediment to artistic development. Though it is not clear to what extent Lovecraft would have developed had he lived a little longer into World War II. Fame, I’m sure, would still have eluded him. He was not equipped for it. But it is highly suggestive as to how Lovecraft would have met the consequences of the era, if at all. He died before Hiroshima, before the popularization of Freud and Nietzsche, and while a significant number of Americans (himself included) felt neither threatened nor horrified by the rise of Hitler. He died before events could challenge his mood, and the very conception of his work.
The strongest indication of what that might have looked like was gleaned by Laura Miller: “Whatever Lovecraft thought he was doing, he wasn't big on self-awareness, or else he'd have been Beckett.” Not that that constitutes an improvement, moving him as it does over to a literary kiosk that Americans manage to take even less seriously than pulp fiction. On its own, Beckett’s abysmal modernism suffocates easily in our atmosphere; its only assurance of survival is sublimation into our thriving occult. Lovecraft’s prose would become suffused in druidical portent; its vivid phenomena would give way to a more esoteric style, not so much minimalist as void-like. His cult would be smaller, more protective of his words, treating them with an incantatory severity. The result would be something like a darker-hued reflection of The Church of Scientology.
But no matter his fate, the author for whom cult worship was the surest sign of delusion, is stuck with the ironic curse of being a fomenter of cults, whether of horror’s cadaver synod or modernism’s black mass.
The Whisperer in Darkness features a character who consents to have his brain placed in a special container by the alien antagonists, supposedly for safe travel through space. It is not the typical Lovecraft stand-in but I can’t help but think that this outcome held no small attraction to him.
For the typical Lovecraft protagonist, sex was less an activity in which you partook than a dirty secret you discovered. Lovecraft all but admitted this when he wrote that after he “had nearly fallen asleep over the tame backstairs gossip” of Sherwood Anderson’s then-inescapable Winesburg, Ohio, he wrote “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family” in response. It is a story in which a man discovers that an ancestor of his had fucked and procreated with an ape.