{"id":8222,"date":"2013-07-22T12:54:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T09:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=8222"},"modified":"2013-07-22T12:54:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-22T09:54:41","slug":"lovecraft-and-moby-dick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2013\/07\/22\/lovecraft-and-moby-dick\/","title":{"rendered":"Lovecraft and Moby Dick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lovecraft did read Moby Dick<\/em>, it seems, in the spring of 1925. I had assumed Lovecraft had never read the book, since it isn’t listed in S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library<\/em> (2nd ed.). But here is Lovecraft in a letter (Letters from New York<\/em>, p.122) stating that he was about to read the book…<\/p>\n

   [Lovecraft about to depart for Washington, 11th April 1925] “Kleiner and Loveman will wave tear-stain’d handkerchiefs after the tail-lights of the [train] coach that bears Kirk & me away. I shall probably wear my light overcoat, checking it at the Union Station in Washington, where I shall also check the book which is to beguile my hours of idleness — “Moby Dick, or the White Whale”, by Herman Melville”.<\/p>\n

In “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (intended as the final chapter of Lovecraft’s revisory work Well Bred Speech<\/em>, 1936) he notes… “Of Herman Melville at least Moby Dick<\/em> deserves a hearing.”<\/p>\n

His almost-certain reading of Moby Dick<\/em> seems fairly interestingly timed, given its ocean monster theme: four months later he wrote out the plot of “The Call of Cthulhu”.<\/p>\n

Moby Dick<\/em> was apparently deemed an obscure and rather neglected work until the Melville centenary in 1919 — and it wasn’t until 1920 that Melville’s own unexpurgated text of the work finally reached a modern audience and triggered “the Melville Revival”. This new text of the book was swiftly followed by the biography Herman Melville, mariner and mystic<\/em> (1921) and Carl Van Doren’s chapter on Melville in The American Novel<\/em> (1921). The following year saw publication of Melville’s letters. This scholarly interest led in time to a wider public interest, generated especially by the major Warner Brothers silent film of Moby<\/em> in January 1926, titled The Sea Beast<\/em> and starring John Barrymore. Predictably the movie makers managed to add a love interest, as seen in the lavish stills which illustrated Warner’s cash-in reprint of the novel of the book titled “Moby Dick Photoplay”. But this movie tie-in reprint cannot have been the edition Lovecraft took to Washington, since it was released 17th December 1925 according to Catalog of Copyright Entries<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The edition of Moby Dick<\/em> that Lovecraft intended to read in Washington may instead have been borrowed stock from Kirk’s bookshop, and was presumably one of the early 1920s single-volume unexpurgated editions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lovecraft did read Moby Dick, it seems, in the spring of 1925. I had assumed Lovecraft had never read the …<\/p>\n

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