A fine short article from PulpFest today, “Pulp History: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” considers what the hero pulps and imaginative escapism meant emotionally to ordinary people during the hard times of the Great Depression in America. It makes the interesting point, not often encountered, that the first science-fiction fandom was in part a defiant grassroots expression of sheer hope by youngsters. Hope in the face of what must have seemed like an inescapable disaster that, so far as they knew, was set to go on and on and damage their entire lives. It’s good to think that Lovecraft played his part in keeping some of that hope alive, and helping the scene to grow into something more imaginative and sustainable than it might have been.

It’s often said that the flying cars never arrived, but the more thoughtful of those early writer-fans got what they wanted. Not least of whom was the influential Arthur C. Clarke, who interestingly was an early fan of Lovecraft’s cosmicism. Within a few decades there really were manned rockets leaving earth, and the initial exploration of the Solar System was underway. The escapism of the 1930s had reached escape velocity, you might say. Perhaps the steely-eyed missile-men of the Cold War would have got us part of the way there anyway. But without Lovecraft’s progeny we might not have had the post-war will toward sustained space exploration, nor enjoyed the ride half as much.

Anyway, PulpFest is set for early August 2022, which is less than three months away now. It’s to be in a place called “Mars, PA” which I had to look up. Bing Maps reveals it is not actually on Mars, but rather a small town to the north of Pittsburgh and about 250 miles west of New York City. Booking now.

Here’s an interesting bit of historical back-story, relating to the literary atmosphere into which the younger Lovecraft would have emerged. He might have felt “The Dead Hand of William Dean Howells”, as a new article at DMR puts it. In this and a follow-on post, DMR looks at this William Dean Howell…

the “Dean of American Letters [and] literary tastemaker for the entire nation […] and his twisted jihad against any fiction containing a hint of adventurous fun or overt heroism

His main influence appears to have been from roughly circa 1887 when the Haymarket anarchist bombings led him to become a strident leftist, until the tumultuous events of 1919 and the counter-reaction they caused among the public. Howell died a year later in 1920. It is suggested by DMR that his influence after 1888 helped to bifurcate narrative literature. As well as breeding an academic cadre of gloomy leftists… “who hate the very concept of the individually competent and heroic” and who also strive to paint history as an un-heroic parade of horrors.

The division of literature being suggested, as I would phrase it, is into…

accessible imaginative adventure tales + (increasingly) science and technology

vs.

a rather dull and class-ridden realism + (increasingly) leftist politics

Sounds plausible, though admittedly I’m no expert on the emergence and reception of the proto-pulps before about 1922. Nor of literary realism. And I’d imagine that historians of early pulp might well suggest other cultural and economic forces at work in the emergence of early pulp forms. Nevertheless it does appear from what I read that Howells would have been a potent part of the mix. I’d then surmise that, as with many things, having something frowned on or censored can give it a potent allure for rebellious youth. As with so many cultural zealots, it sounds to me like Howells and his ilk may have been effectively publicising and making more exciting the very thing he wanted to stamp out. This probably worked in an inter-generational way, rather than directly. In that a copy of Black Cat or Adventure was made more exciting because Grandma and the Sunday School teacher would confiscate it if found. Neither young Billy or the news-stand vendor would have been reading William Dean Howell directly. At the editorial level, Howell and his ilk would be causing self-censorship, true. But this would just mean that some of the crudity was refined out… and thus the thing they hated was more likely to be tolerated on the news-stands and to reach young Billy.

Incidentally, talking of derided tales of heroism, this month I interviewed someone who had a big hand in the underlying CG for Emmerich’s recent war-movie Midway. And so I took a look at the movie, along the way, ignoring its bad reviews. I’m glad I did. It’s great. What did those reviewers see? It doesn’t seem to have been the same movie I saw.

Anyway, ignore the slathering of bad reviews it had on release. I found Midway to be a very fine movie on the small screen + headphones, and a straightforward celebration of American heroism of a type I didn’t think was being made today. Don’t be put off by thinking that it might be as convoluted and stop-start as the first half of his latest and somewhat clunky disaster-epic Moonfall.

But back to Howells. Did Lovecraft ever pass an option on Howells? Just once and obliquely, when he noted in passing a house as having once been lived in by the…

correct old lady William Dean Howells of Boston

That appears, so far as I have access to the materials, to be the limit of Lovecraft’s opinion of the famous critic. To Lovecraft he was, it seems, to be considered a ‘fussing old maid’ of the prim and censorious Bostonian type.¹ I even checked the Morton letters ebook, which can only be searched on a Kindle 3. No mention of Howells there either.

I find that J. Vernon Shea’s late memoir of Lovecraft is online, as printed in Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 1966). It can thus be seen in context. The magazine’s editor thinks, for instance, Lovecraft’s entire work to be “entirely unwholesome” and has “great reservations”. Elsewhere in the issue Fritz Leiber reviews the first book of the Selected Letters.

In I Am Providence Joshi much later remarked…

Some of his essays on Lovecraft — especially “H. P. Lovecraft: The House and the Shadows” (1966) — are quite notable.

Shea’s memoir runs to 7,700 words and seems more of an early attempt at a short biography than a memoir, and as such has largely been overtaken. It appeared six years after Moskowitz’s article-biography on Lovecraft (Fantastic, May 1960). But in context it’s an interesting snapshot of Lovecraft ‘as known’ among the science-fiction crowd in the summer of 1966. At that time the counter-culture was incipient but also still somewhat ahead in time. There was great disdain among the science-fiction gate-keepers for genre-mixing (fantasy/sci-fi, sci-fi/horror), allied to a huge concern for ‘respectability’ amid the ever-present thought of ‘what will the mainstream culture think of us?’.