{"id":8674,"date":"2013-08-16T02:44:01","date_gmt":"2013-08-15T23:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=8674"},"modified":"2013-08-16T02:44:01","modified_gmt":"2013-08-15T23:44:01","slug":"book-review-lovecraft-and-influence-his-predecessors-and-successors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2013\/08\/16\/book-review-lovecraft-and-influence-his-predecessors-and-successors\/","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert H. Waugh (ed.), Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors<\/i> (Studies in Supernatural Literature series), Scarecrow Press, 2013.<\/p>\n

I was kindly sent a free paper copy of this book for review.\u00a0 The book is a slim 200-page case-bound hardback, printed on-demand by Lightning Source on quality archival paper, and with a useful complete index of titles and authors.\u00a0 Endnotes are used for each essay, and the microscopic font used for these could have usefully been made a little larger.\u00a0 I only spotted one typing error in the book.\u00a0 The cover is pleasingly designed, which makes a nice change from most Lovecraft books. I read all the essays once, and read some two or three times.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"linf\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Lovecraft got God! Well, not quite. But he did sometimes slip in a few references to the King James Bible, and he was not averse to loosely inverting or gleefully perverting a Bible story.\u00a0 This occasional influence is the subject of the opening essay, by the accomplished Bible scholar and Lovecraftian Robert M. Price. \u00a0Price provides a useful, if partial, survey of the Biblical references in Lovecraft\u2019s fiction. For those lacking access to Price\u2019s work, now to be found mostly on eBay in costly used copies of his Crypt of Cthulhu<\/i> fanzine or the now-defunct and un-digitised Lovecraft Studies<\/i> journal, this essay may prove a useful introductory summary.\u00a0Price discusses Bible references in \u201cThe Dunwich Horror\u201d (messiah and crucifixion parallels) and \u201cThe Colour out of Space\u201d (parallels with the Bible story of Lot), and sees further parallels in six other stories.\u00a0 It seems a pity that Price omits \u201cThe Lurking Fear\u201d, in which the theme of the Prodigal Son is both obvious and inverted, and in which there is a covert use of exactly 140 years (the Biblical \u201cfour generations\u201d) as the given period for the Martense family devolution. Several of Price\u2019s suggested connections seemed a little tenuous to me. I found it difficult to believe, for instance, that the cultists of \u201cThe Call of Cthulhu\u201d (1926) were modelled on the Baptist Millerist prediction of apocalypse for 1843-44.\u00a0 Why the Baptists, and not the Mormons (Christ was coming back in 1891), the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses (feverishly predicting the apocalypse five times between 1914 and 1925), or even the apocalypse panics said to have been spurred by Halley\u2019s Comet in 1910? \u00a0Or simply the more general apocalyptic strains in Christianity, or even the mystical variety of Judaism which Lovecraft literally rubbed shoulders with in the used bookshops of New York City (on the latter see the fragment \u201cThe Book\u201d, for instance).<\/p>\n

J.D. Worthington looks at the 18th<\/sup> century and specifically at the stylistic influence of the Georgian and Queen Anne period on Lovecraft\u2019s fiction. Steele and Johnson are briefly identified as key early influences.\u00a0 Pope is treated more fully, in terms of his influence on Lovecraft\u2019s early poetry and as a general early philosophical influence.\u00a0\u00a0 But Worthington concludes of Lovecraft\u2019s fiction that Pope\u2019s influence… \u201cmay be less that has generally been thought\u201d.\u00a0 Addison is briefly discussed in terms of the influence on Lovecraft\u2019s view-of-life and of manners, via Lovecraft\u2019s reading of The Spectator<\/i> (1711-14).\u00a0 Sir Samuel Garth\u2019s masterful translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses<\/i> is pointed out as a long-lasting influence on Lovecraft, in that it was a key text which provided him with classical myths in an elegant and alluring translation.\u00a0 In this, Garth\u2019s influence must have mingled with that of Hawthorne\u2019s books of children’s tales from antiquity.\u00a0 Swift is discussed as an influence, with Swift\u2019s blunt attitude to religion being detected in Lovecraft.\u00a0 While much of Swift\u2019s influence is detected in the poetry and the more combative amateur journalism, an attempt is made to pin Swift to Lovecraft\u2019s fiction. \u00a0A scatological incident of Yahoo shit-throwing in Swift\u2019s Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/i> is highlighted.\u00a0 But could this incident really<\/i> have birthed Lovecraft\u2019s gelatinous monsters, then reached down the decades to trigger the invention of the shoggoths?\u00a0 I was doubtful about that.\u00a0 Worthington concludes that while Lovecraft\u2019s poetry was stultified by the 18th<\/sup> century influence, he also spied there the potential for a bracing alliance of monster-filled myth and anti-religious satire.<\/p>\n

James Goho provides some starting pointers in relation to Lovecraft and the American Gothic, while noting that this is a category into which literary academia apparently deems it difficult to fit Lovecraft. Cotton Mather is said to \u201chaunt\u201d Lovecraft, with the Magnalia Christi<\/i> occasionally popping up as a sort of quasi-Necronomicon<\/i>.\u00a0 But I found it hard to see how Mather could have been linked to Lovecraft\u2019s use of the \u201ccult of degenerate Esquimaux\u201d in the story \u201cThe Call of Cthulhu\u201d, other than perhaps via the hazy and hateful idea of Indian origins in Mather (\u201cprobably the Devil decoyed those miserable savages\u201d). \u00a0Mather and Hawthorne are said to have influenced Lovecraft by directing him to the reality of the past, in terms of its effects on the present.\u00a0 Goho does not mention Charles M. Skinner\u2019s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land<\/i>, or oral folklore, both of which Lovecraft borrowed from to help shape his fiction.\u00a0 Yet Charles Brockden Brown is suggested as a possible influence, a writer of bleak sensational novels of human savages and degenerates in the American landscape of the 1700s.\u00a0 However, no evidence is presented that Lovecraft knew of Brown before 1922, when he only acquired a short excerpt from Brown\u2019s novel Weiland<\/i> (included in Vol.9 of the multi-volume Lock and Key Library anthology, which it seems Lovecraft had found cheap and complete in New York City).\u00a0 We then move to Melville, where the reader learns that… \u201cMelville\u2019s influence on Lovecraft is on a broad scale\u201d. \u00a0I look forward to reading a future book on this obviously monumental subject, since it has so far only given us about four essays.\u00a0 Beirce\u2019s newspaperman-bleakness and horrible \u201csense of inevitable doom\u201d are noted, and then Goho rapidly works through a few more commonly-cited authors — only to conclude these had a very slight influence on Lovecraft\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

Donald R. Burleson outlines Hawthorne\u2019s alleged influence on Lovecraft, and in this he follows Cannon’s short essay on the subject published in the 1980s.\u00a0 Burleson immediately discounts Hawthorne\u2019s pervading sense of \u201cunpardonable sin\u201d, as being \u201cvirtually meaningless\u201d to the atheist Lovecraft.\u00a0 Burleson might have considered that a tainted heredity, understood within a eugenics framework such as the four-generation family degeneration theory, might have operated in a similarly \u2018unpardonable\u2019 manner. \u00a0Burleson reminds readers that Hawthorne\u2019s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys<\/i> (1852) and Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls<\/i> (1853) usefully served to introduce Lovecraft to palatable versions of Greek and Roman myth and its associated monsters. \u00a0He repeats his long-standing claim that Lovecraft\u2019s reading of Hawthorne\u2019s Notebooks<\/i> \u201cas early as 1919<\/a>\u201d, and the interesting basic proto-Necronomicon<\/i> story-germ to be found therein (17th<\/sup> Oct 1835) of… “An old volume in a large library, — every one to be afraid to unclasp and open it, because it was said to be a book of magic.” Burleson points to Hawthorne\u2019s regional fiction as providing a template for a… \u201cgloomy ancestral connection with the north-east\u201d, then focuses down on Hawthorne\u2019s spectral personification of the exteriors of old houses.\u00a0 This naturally leads to a discussion of the shared motifs in The House of the Seven Gables<\/em> (1851) and Lovecraft\u2019s \u201cThe Shunned House\u201d (1924). Several other somewhat tenuous parallels between the authors are pursued, none being very convincingly nailed down.<\/p>\n

Alex Houston tackles the influence of Poe, noting the bequeathing of the signature baroque style, and of characters who are subordinated to story. Lovecraft also took the monologues of Poe\u2019s characters, but he expanded them so as to tell of the actions of others within the story.\u00a0 In this I would argue he also found an acceptable way to bring into modern fiction something of the old archaic \u2018ring composition\u2019 method of fairy-tale telling in oral cultures, in which stories are nested within each other in a complex and mirrored pattern.\u00a0 Lovecraft\u2019s expanded monologues are also said to serve as vehicles by which he slowly reveals cosmic and transcosmic horrors.<\/p>\n

Darrel Schweitzer contributes a lively and detailed chronological essay on the influence of Dunsany on Lovecraft. \u00a0\u00a0Schweitzer notes that Lovecraft adopted from Dunsany\u2019s stories: the use of subtle suggestiveness; his cleanly poetical phrasing; and a craftsman\u2019s stress on internal rhythm. The latter being something that (my guess) must surely have arisen from oral culture, then still a living folk tradition in rural Ireland, and from regularly reading the King James Bible aloud.\u00a0 Schweitzer notes that Lovecraft did not transfer Dunsany\u2019s vivid use of metaphor into his own stories, something which I might add could have overburdened an already rich style.\u00a0 Schweitzer finds interesting the fact that both authors were outdoorsmen, given to a sense that nature cares little for humanity — while also paradoxically longing for the lost summer idylls of their childhood.\u00a0 To which I might add that each, in their own special way, was a very British<\/i> outdoorsman.\u00a0 Meaning men culturally tuned to be attentive to subtle landscape-moods amid the fleeting and fickle nature of the weather, while also appreciating how the long winter damp and darkness can be used to cultivate imaginative inner landscapes by the fireside.\u00a0They were also hunters over territories, each in their own way: Dunsany the aristocrat hunting living animals in landscapes; while Lovecraft (deprived by poverty of his rightful stag and grouse) hunted antiquities set amid complementary aesthetic landscape-impressions.<\/p>\n

Gavin Callaghan has written recently (in Lovecraft Annual<\/i>) on the Sherlock Holmes stories as a possible inspiration for Lovecraft.\u00a0 Here he confines himself to the influence of the Munsey proto-pulps.\u00a0 He notes Lovecraft\u2019s tales are rather short, compared to the rambling cent-a-word epics found in the Munsey magazines.\u00a0 The collective themes of proto-pulp and early science fiction are suggested as offering Lovecraft an early framework: lost cities in the inner-earth, usually with entrances under volcanoes or at the poles; ape-men and cannibals contrasted with \u2018noble\u2019 savages; sinister hypnotic Orientals or crazed devil worshipers involved in human sacrifice; eccentric scientists inventing new machines or gas; humans sent to other dimensions or the planets; malign meteors and comets.\u00a0Callaghan notes Lovecraft\u2019s inversion of the conventional jut-jawed hero of the pulps (conveniently losing the tedious female \u2018love interest\u2019 in the process, I might add), while he kept the then-pervasive racial framework of \u2018savagery vs. civilisation\u2019.\u00a0 Edgar Rice Burroughs is suggested as a key influence in this regard, especially relevant to Lovecraft\u2019s ape-related stories such as \u201cFacts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family\u201d.\u00a0 The Tarzan series is suggested as a literary source for the idea of a proto-language shared by both apes and men. George Allan England is suggested as the source of the idea of \u2018bestial degeneration\u2019, both individual (ape-blood transfusions into humans) and collective (\u2018The Horde\u2019 in the tedious post-apocalyptic Darkness and Dawn<\/i> trilogy 1912-14, man-beasts which England hints are descended from blacks).\u00a0 Although one suspects these ideas could be traced back to some earlier point, and perhaps to popular scientific discussions. A more probable influence is suggested: of Burroughs\u2019s John Carter of Mars on The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath<\/i>.\u00a0Callaghan sees Lovecraft\u2019s later longer stories as arising from a slow return to the old proto-pulp Munsey themes of his boyhood.<\/p>\n

T.R Livesey looks at the influence on Lovecraft of invasion narratives in early science-fiction, but he opens with… \u201cit is hard to say what invasion stories Lovecraft may have read; none of the obvious examples appear in his library\u201d.\u00a0 Followed by detailed recountings of The Battle of Dorking<\/i>, The Riddle of the Sands<\/i>, and The War of the Worlds<\/i>.\u00a0 There is also a short discussion of the seminal Edison\u2019s Conquest of Mars <\/i>(1898), an \u2018Edisonade\u2019 which it seems rather more probable that Lovecraft actually read — since he was an avid fan of the author Garrett P. Serviss in his youth.<\/p>\n

The book then shifts gears and starts to look at the influences that Lovecraft may have had on others after his death.\u00a0 The first of these essays is by Norm Gayford, offering a close textual comparison of the fiction of Lovecraft with that of his young \u201cSonny\u201d Frank Belknap Long, usefully buttressed by points drawn from their joint correspondence.\u00a0 Long\u2019s late novel Journey Into Darkness<\/i> is treated to a detailed analysis. \u00a0\u00a0In contrast to Lovecraft, Long\u2019s characters appear to be able to \u201cfeel healed\u201d, \u201creappreciating their humanity, regaining it\u201d at the end of their ordeals. \u00a0There is an interesting discussion of Lovecraft\u2019s \u201csense of futility\u201d late in his life, and how this served to prevent much new writing.<\/p>\n

S.T. Joshi then ably tackles Lovecraft\u2019s influence on Ramsey Campbell.\u00a0 Joshi steps through this influence in chronological order, demonstrating the gradual divergence from Lovecraft, and the absorption by the late 1960s of the master\u2019s finer points.\u00a0 At that point Campbell then publically \u2018dropped\u2019 Lovecraft, evidenced via comments in a 1969 interview.\u00a0 His early attempts at finding his own voice are called \u201cforced\u201d by Joshi, but by the late 1970s he started to publish fiction that still merits the coveted Joshi Stamp-of-Approval.\u00a0 Joshi then skips to 1994, when Campbell made a return to straight Lovecraft pastiche, before tracing various fleeting uses of Lovecraft\u2019s ideas in the novels Midnight Sun<\/i> and The Hungry Moon<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The volume\u2019s editor, Robert H. Waugh, faces down the big one: Lovecraft\u2019s influence on science-fiction.\u00a0 Interestingly, I discovered here that Arthur C. Clarke has a chapter in his autobiography in which he discusses his reading of Lovecraft.\u00a0 Waugh traces Clarke\u2019s own fictional seriousness to the similar seriousness he found in Lovecraft\u2019s later work, then he carefully outlines the other uses Clarke made of Lovecraft\u2019s later works.\u00a0 These included mixing hard science with \u201creverent awe\u201d on a cosmic scale, while including touches of speculation on the transcosmic.\u00a0 Next Waugh examines Fritz Leiber.\u00a0Then Lovecraft\u2019s influence on Philip K. Dick is detected in terms of: claustrophobic environments in an unclean world; characters with fragile egos and psychic dysfunction; scepticism; and paranoia.<\/p>\n

Michael Cisco usefully surveys the similarities and differences between Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs, after quickly reporting finding no hard evidence of actual influence (Burroughs made a couple of jokey references to Lovecraft in passing, and that\u2019s it).\u00a0 This is an exemplary study which illuminates Lovecraft by proxy, and it is worth reading even if you think you have no interest in Burroughs. The reader learns about both men\u2019s approaches to: science; the nature of reality; evolution; the value and defence of civilisation; and the distorted politics of their times. The essay will form a solid foundation stone for anyone writing on the subject in future.<\/p>\n

John Langan examines Lovecraft and Stephen King.\u00a0 Langan begins with a concise survey of King\u2019s various comments on Lovecraft, then looks for any thematic borrowings.\u00a0 He quickly finds that the only real focus available is on what he calls the \u201canimal sublime\u201d in King, and tries to relate this to Lovecraft.\u00a0 \u201cThe Rats in the Walls\u201d is discussed over four pages, leading to the conclusion that Lovecraft may have showed King how an \u201canimal humanity\u201d could be spooked up in a story.<\/p>\n

The book ends with an essay by Steven J. Mariconda.\u00a0 Here the reader will learn almost as much about Lovecraft as about Thomas Ligotti.\u00a0 Readers will be well aware that both Lovecraft and Ligotti use disorder and irrational \u201cirrealism\u201d, anchored in Poe, but perhaps not so aware of the role of the fin de siecle<\/i> symbolist poets in this. Mariconda highlights the symbolist inheritance that inspired writings on… \u201cvisions, dreams and madness\u201d.\u00a0 This claim is underpinned by a clear reference to the historical debate which was had over symbolism within amateur journalism during the early 1920s, something of which I would like to hear more in The Fossil<\/i> in the future.\u00a0 The claim is also underpinned by a fascinating short discussion of the key role played by Alfred Galpin and Samuel Loveman in carefully guiding the noted poet Hart Crane through the symbolist poets, seemingly in a systematic manner, in 1922 (Kleiner gives his own account of helping Crane with the French decadents in Lovecraft Remembered<\/em>).\u00a0 Galpin and Loveman are, of course, names that Lovecraftians will usually associate with the Lovecraft circle.\u00a0 The implication of this new finding is a suspicion that Lovecraft was similarly informally educated about the symbolist poets, and at around the same time in mid\/late 1922. If so, it seems the influence was not long-lasting: in 1923 Lovecraft forcefully warned Long off imitating the… “little tinkling sophistication of petit-maitre\u00a0Frenchmen” (Selected Letters<\/em> I, p.260) and felt that European decadence as a movement led inevitably to… “a sickly, decadent neo-mysticism”.<\/p>\n

Mariconda goes on to discuss Ligotti\u2019s \u201cJ.P. Drepeau\u201d, \u201cSpectacles in the Drawer\u201d, and \u201cGreater Festival of Masks\u201d.\u00a0 This leads into a short discussion on technique, and on the attitudes of Lovecraft and Ligotti to the European surrealist writers.\u00a0 In a letter (given undated in the essay, but actually March 1937 to Morton) Lovecraft felt the surrealists to be fresh and likely to revive art (literature and painting were then much more intertwined than they are today), but he felt that without a coherent story to hold it together a parade of unfiltered mental imagery was likely to be trivial and hollow.\u00a0 Ironically the literary surrealists under Breton agreed with him on this point, and by that date they had thrown out their old experimental techniques and were instead seeking to reconcile literature with leftist political action.<\/p>\n

Though somewhat uneven in quality, this is a volume that may be useful to academics and students who are starting out with Lovecraft.\u00a0 It may be especially useful to advanced university students who are required by their thesis supervisor to pair Lovecraft with another author.\u00a0 The book\u2019s long-term value to independent Lovecraft scholars, given its hefty $75 list price, seems a little more doubtful. \u00a0I didn\u2019t learn a great deal about Lovecraft that was new to me, but I did find some topics neatly summed up and clarified.<\/p>\n

August 2013<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert H. Waugh (ed.), Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors (Studies in Supernatural Literature series), Scarecrow Press, 2013. I …<\/p>\n

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