Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Dreamer on the Nightside. Frank Belknap Long

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СКАЧАТЬ him which has appeared in both Europe and America in the past few years. Such readers would feel justifiably cheated if I failed to devote at least one chapter to a generalized summary of the peak aspects of his growing fame.

      There are some writers so closely linked to the legends which their lives have created that a kind of umbilical cord unites both aspects of their renown. Although cutting it would perhaps not diminish their actual literary stature, it is only when both aspects are considered as a totality that a figure of extraordinary fascination emerges. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the dreamer and myth-maker of Providence, Rhode Island, was such a writer.

      Interest in Lovecraft today is sweeping American college campuses on an unprecedented scale. At Brown University where thousands of his letters are on deposit in the John Hay Library, there are two groups of students numbering well over a hundred undergraduates, who conduct frequent excursions to sites which have figured prominently in his stories, and who hold ghost-watching vigils in awed expectation of seeing some spectral presence arise from a shadowed recess between two old houses with small-paned windows, or from the cypress-shadowed fringes of a Providence graveyard that was not unknown to Poe.

      In well over fifty other colleges from coast to coast, similar circles have been formed. And in more than 200 colleges there are individual students whose interest in Lovecraftian lore absorbs them, when they are not attending classes, to the exclusion of almost everything else. There are Lovecraft groups at UCLA, Boston University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of the City of New York. At Georgia Southwestern College, “The Miskatonic Literary Circle” (after a place name invented by HPL) includes more than fifty members and provides an opportunity for both students and faculty interested in Lovecraft to meet and exchange ideas.

      Several MA theses and one PhD thesis have thus far been written about Lovecraft, and more appear in immediate prospect. But interest in Lovecraft is far from confined to university campuses—he enjoys both a serious literary reputation and a popular readership that may be “cult figure” oriented to some extent, but which is entirely in accord with the fascinating, pluralistic kind of fame that seems to have a way of attaching itself to strikingly original writers, painters, and musicians.

      To cite just two examples: in France during the mid-1840s, Gautier acquired much the same kind of fame by becoming the romantic forerunner of all bohemian artists, whether poets, novelists, or painters; and in Victorian England, Swinburne likewise possessed a “cult figure” popularity which in his youth seldom failed to keep pace with his serious literary renown as a major poet. It caused his followers of the period to go parading in long processions at Oxford, Cambridge, and even through the streets of London, reciting with wild abandonment many stanzas from Poems and Ballads.

      HPL, of course, was a quite different kind of writer, and far less likely to win the allegiance of youthful extroverts. But among the young for whom the mystery and strangeness of cosmic realms can create a miraculous merging of reality and dream, his influence is becoming just as great.

      In France today Lovecraft has become far more than just one of perhaps twenty widely read and discussed American writers of the twentieth century. He occupies an almost unique position in the realm in which Poe has remained unchallenged since the age of Baudelaire, and in France that realm has always been considered one of the most important branches of literature. To excel as a master of the macabre, as well as a cosmic myth-maker not unlike the Poe of Eureka, is to achieve a double kind of distinction, both in the eyes of the French intelligentsia and to others who would shun that label, preferring to think of themselves simply as lovers of imaginative literature who know when an original and powerful writer has crossed the Atlantic to cast a new and special kind of spell.

      There is such an abundance of both early and quite recent critical tribute in France that not all the material could be included without imparting to this chapter the sort of bibliographical cast I have sought to avoid in the pages which follow, but some of it can be mentioned here without incurring such a risk. A few years before his death, Jean Cocteau hailed Lovecraft as the peer of Poe, but he was not the only prominent Gallic literary figure to have equated the best of Lovecraft with the best of Poe. He has received an even higher tribute from Jacques Bergier, who regards him as superior to Poe, both as a literary craftsman and as a spell-caster extraordinary in the realm of the marvelous. (Perhaps the soundness of Bergier’s judgment may be open to dispute, because he has graciously called my The Hounds of Tindalos “one of the ten most terrifying and significant short stories in all literature.” But everyone at times makes a few forgivable errors in judgment—eminently forgivable by me at least!—and one has to remember I would never have written that particular story had I not explored with HPL the dark, multidimensional corridors through which we both wound our way in pursuit of unnamable presences older than Time. If I had never met and talked with HPL, I am quite certain there would have been no The Hounds of Tindalos for Jacques Bergier to praise!)

      Some five years ago Maurice Lévy, a young professor at the University of Toulouse, visited America on a Fulbright Scholarship to consult the Lovecraft letters at Brown University. I had the very great pleasure of meeting him at the time, and his recently published book about HPL bears a title which is indicative of how universal this author’s fame has become in France. The title is simply Lovecraft—just that and nothing more. Had it not been for Professor Levy’s New York visit, I would not have known at the time that classroom discussions of Lovecraft had taken place at the Sorbonne, as well as his own university, and that L’Herne, one of the two or three most important French literary journals, had declared HPL to be “the foremost American writer of supernatural literature in the past two centuries.” Among the most notable of the books containing Lovecraft tributes have been Marcel Schneider’s La litterature fantantique en France (1964), Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction a la litterature fantastique (1970), and L’Amerique fantastique de Poe a Lovecraft (1973). (The occurrence of “fantastique” in the titles of all three volumes is a tribute to Gallic perceptiveness, for there is no other adjective that conjures up so instantly, in an all-embracing way, the literature of the weird, the strange, and the marvelous.) This last handsome volume includes an excellent introduction by Jacques Finné.

      In America an article by Edmund Wilson published in The New Yorker in 1945 discussed the incredible following which Lovecraft had acquired even at that early date. While not really a favorable review, the very fact that a critic of Wilson’s renown felt the need to devote two or three full columns to The Outsider in so prestigious a publication suggests strongly that he was more uncertain on the matter of Lovecraft’s nightside genius than he was willing to concede. If one reads between the lines of that review, the impression becomes inescapable that such was the case; when a critic is moved despite himself and without quite knowing the reason, his indignation can become a kind of self-protective weapon that can diminish the danger, real or fancied, of being assailed by some unknown dimension with which he would otherwise have been powerless to cope.

      Articles about HPL are appearing everywhere today, both in the smaller journals and in publications of mass circulation, most notably in the New York Times Book Review and in the June 11, 1973 issue of Time. (Marc Slonim, “European Notebook,” New York Times Book Review, 17 May 1970, pp. 10-14; Philip Herrera, “The Dream Lurker,” Time, 11 June 1973, pp. 99-100.) There has even been a series of drawings in Playboy, by the gifted young artist Gahan Wilson, which are unmistakably based on Lovecraftian characters, although not identified as such.

      Lovecraft’s own fiction has in recent years appeared in many hardcover and paperback anthologies bearing the imprint of major publishers, and his stories have been translated into at least eighteen foreign languages. There have been seven screen productions based on the Cthulhu Mythos and on his earlier, more macabre tales, in addition to a number of radio and television adaptations. (I am not terribly happy with these film productions, for they fail to do justice to the cosmic sweep and realistic power of the Mythos and have been marred as well by the introduction of ridiculous, Hollywood-like intrusions on a “romantic interest” level, with one or two erotic incidents which would be perfectly legitimate in a different СКАЧАТЬ