For three years Lovecraft had written reams of essays, poems, and reviews of amateur papers. Would he ever resume the fiction writing that had showed such promise up to 1908? In 1915 Lovecraft wrote to G. W. Macauley: ‘I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility.’29 Macauley claims that he ‘violently disagreed’—not because he had actually seen any of Lovecraft’s fiction but because, having sent a story to Lovecraft for comment, he had received such an acute and elaborate analysis that he became convinced that Lovecraft had the short-story writing faculty within him. Criticism of fiction and fiction-writing are, of course, two different things, but in Lovecraft’s case one cannot help feeling that the frequency with which he remarks on the failings of stories published in the amateur press points to a growing urge to prove that he can do better. Fiction was, of course, always the weakest point in the amateur press, not only because it is generally harder to master than prose nonfiction but because the space limitations in amateur papers did not allow the publication of much beyond sketches or vignettes.
Lovecraft finally allowed ‘The Alchemist’ to be printed in the United Amateur for November 1916. It was to be expected that he would himself attack it in the ‘Department of Public Criticism’ (United Amateur, May 1917), saying that ‘we must needs beg all the charitable indulgence the Association can extend to an humble though ambitious tyro’. The single word ‘ambitious’ may suggest Lovecraft’s desire to write more fiction if this one specimen, however much he may deprecate it himself, receives favourable notice. It appears to have done just that, but even so it would still be more than half a year before Lovecraft would break his selfimposed nine-year ban on fiction-writing. That he finally did so, writing ‘The Tomb’ and ‘Dagon’ in quick succession in the summer of 1917, can be attributed in large part to the encouragement of a new associate, W. Paul Cook of Athol, Massachusetts, who would be a significant presence throughout the rest of Lovecraft’s life.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Feverish and Incessant Scribbling (1917–19)
W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) had long been a giant in the amateur world. Cook was unmistakably a New Englander: he had been born in Vermont; he was a direct descendant of the colonial governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire; and he resided for much of his adult life in Athol, Massachusetts. For years he was the head of the printing department of the Athol Transcript, and his access to printing equipment and his devotion to the amateur cause permitted him to be a remarkable philanthropist in printing amateur journals virtually at cost. He began printing The Conservative in 1917. During his term as President of the UAPA Lovecraft appointed Cook Official Printer, a position he held for three consecutive years (1917–20) and again for three more years in 1922–25. Curiously, at the same time he served as Official Editor of the NAPA (1918–19) and its President (1919–20).
Cook was one of the few amateurs who had a strong taste in weird fiction; Lovecraft would later admit that Cook’s ‘library was the most remarkable collection of fantastic & other material that I have ever seen assembled in one place’,1 and he would frequently borrow many rare books to which he himself did not have access. It is scarcely to be doubted that Cook, during his visit with Lovecraft in September 1917 (for which see further below), discussed this topic of mutual interest. Whether at this time he convinced Lovecraft to let him print his other juvenile tale, ‘The Beast in the Cave’, is not clear; at any rate, that story appeared in Cook’s Vagrant (a NAPA paper) for June 1918.
Lovecraft makes it very clear that Cook’s encouragement was instrumental in his resumption of weird writing; and this encouragement was both private and public. One instance of the latter is Cook’s effusive article entitled ‘Howard P. Lovecraft’s Fiction’, prefacing his printing of ‘Dagon’ in the Vagrant for November 1919, a perspicacious piece of work even though it conjectures that Lovecraft may have been influenced by Maupassant, whom he had probably not read by this time.
Poe, of course, is the dominant influence on Lovecraft’s early tales, and looms large over the bulk of Lovecraft’s fiction up to at least 1923. And yet, even ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The Outsider’ (1921), Lovecraft’s most obviously Poe-esque tales, are far from being mere pastiches; but it is evident that Lovecraft found in Poe a model both in style and in overall short-story construction.
In particular, the idiom Lovecraft evolved in his early tales— dense, a little overheated, laced with archaic and recondite terms, almost wholly lacking in ‘realistic’ character portrayal, and almost entirely given over to exposition and narration, with a nearcomplete absence of dialogue—is clearly derived from Poe. So much did Lovecraft customarily acknowledge the Poe influence that he would sometimes exaggerate it, as in his famous lament of 1929: ‘There are my “Poe” pieces & my “Dunsany” pieces—but alas—where are any “Lovecraft” pieces?’2
The most obvious stylistic feature common to both Poe and Lovecraft is the use of adjectives. In Lovecraft’s case this has been derisively termed ‘adjectivitis’, as if there is some canonical number of adjectives per square inch that is permissible and the slightest excess is cause for frenzied condemnation. But this sort of criticism is merely a holdover from an outmoded and superficial realism that vaunted the barebones style of a Hemingway or a Sherwood Anderson as the sole acceptable model for English prose. Lovecraft was predominantly influenced by the ‘Asianic’ style of Johnson and Gibbon as opposed to the ‘Attic’ style of Swift and Addison; and few nowadays—especially now that such writers as Thomas Pynchon and Gore Vidal have restored richness of texture to modern English fiction—will condemn Lovecraft without a hearing for the use of such a style.
Nevertheless, I think a case could be made that Lovecraft spent the better part of his fictional career in attempting to escape—or, at best, to master or refine—the stylistic influence of Poe, as is suggested by his frequent remarks in the last decade of his life on the need for simplicity of expression and his exemplification of this principle in the evolution of his later ‘scientific’ manner.
The tales of Lovecraft’s early period do not require much analysis; on the whole, they are relatively conventional, showing only hints of the dynamic conceptions that would infuse his later work. Some of the tales are more interesting for their genesis than for their actual content. ‘The Tomb’, written in the summer of 1917, tells the story of Jervas Dudley, a ‘dreamer and a visionary’ who appears to be possessed by the spirit of his eighteenth-century ancestor. It was inspired by Lovecraft’s stroll in Swan Point Cemetery in June, in the company of his aunt Lillian. They had come upon a tombstone dating to 1711, causing Lovecraft to ponder: ‘Here was a link with my favourite aera of periwigs … Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me?’3
‘Polaris’, written in the summer of 1918, strikingly anticipates Lovecraft’s later ‘Dunsanian’ tales, but was written a full year before he ever read Lord Dunsany. The story was inspired by a dream occurring in late spring of that year, when Lovecraft saw himself hovering as a disembodied intelligence over ‘a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills’.4