Lovecraft: "Nobody Expects Anything of a Letter"
H.P. Lovecraft wrote more letters than it is easy to imagine, unless of course you live in the Age of Email. Scholars conservatively estimate that he wrote over 100,000 letters in his life: they have about 10,000 preserved, and to publish even those unabridged would take 100 volumes each 400 pages long. About a thousand of them are in print across a few handfulls of volumes. For me, his letters are both his towering artistic achievement, and his towering creative achievement in developing his relationship with the fans he did have, fans who would end up preserving his work for all of us. Lovecraft tries to disavow the power of his letters in a paragraph that sound suspiciously like the way many emailers and bloggers would describe writing today:
"Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man's style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace ... If you were to analyse the language of this letter you would find it shot all to hell with solecisms and bad rhythms."
I can't let that stop me: there seems to be so much power in his letters, an easy elegence of style that smells suspiciously 21st century. In an essay that Lovecraft wrote defending his work "Dagon," for example, he penned a line that I think is among the most revealing glimpses into his soul as an artist: "There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression." Here's the story of one of those "seven persons" and a few of the tidbits from those letters that have shaped my view of Lovecraft.
In 1924, a 16-year-old young man wrote a letter to author Clark Ashton Smith in which he expressed admiration for Lovecraft's work. Smith, who was exchanging letters with Lovecraft at the time, mentioned the boy to Lovecraft -- Lovecraft told Smith to send his two unpublished manuscripts to the boy with instructions to return them directly to Lovecraft when he was finished. This began a coorespondence between Lovecraft and this young man, Donald Wandrei, that would continue until Lovecraft's death and, in a way, beyond. Wandrei, who by this point had written short stories and novels with Lovecraft's encouragement, would then found Arkham House, a publisher dedicated to getting Lovecraft's work back in print. With his co-founder, August Derleth, they succeeded, and also managed a massive 30-year effort to collect the letters Lovecraft sent to coorespondants to go along with the ones they had from Lovecraft's estate. Because of that, I can read them today and draw inspiration, including nearly every letter in the Wandrei/Lovecraft exchange over that decade of time (collected in the volume Mysteries of Time and Spirit, The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei edited by Joshi & Schultz.)
Lovecraft might have had more than seven people who actually liked his work, but however small the number was Lovecraft was right: they were enough to create a legacy. Not just the legacy of preserving his works, but also of collecting and preserving his letters, in which we find some of the keys to what Lovecraft was articulating about story during his "major fiction" phase of 1931-1935. These passages -- from the letters, not from the fiction -- are my key to understanding what Lovecraft intended, and also what we've taken as some of our core principles regarding "what it means to be faithful to Lovecraft's vision." I can think of no better way to share them with you then as they are, sans commentary -- and if you're interested in more, I'd recommend to you A Subtler Magick, The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi as springboard:
"Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form -- and the local human passions and conditions and standards -- are depicted as native to other worlds and universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all." (Selected Letters, 1925-1929)
"The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality -- when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt -- as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?" (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)
"The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen ... If any unexpected advance in physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel." (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)
"No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax." (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)
Lovecraft was a creature of his letter writing, and deliciously so for all of us. What he gained from that experience was something he could even articulate. I wonder how many of us receive some similar benefit from our Internet existences:
"As to letters, my case is peculiar. I write such things exactly as easily and rapidly as I would utter the same topics in conversation; indeed, epistolary expression is with me largely replacing conversation, as my condition of nervous prostration becomes more and more acute. I cannot bear to talk much now, and am becoming as silent as the Spectator himself! My loquacity extends itself on paper." (Selected Letters, 1911-1924)
"As a person of very retired life, I met very few different sorts of people in youth -- and was therefore exceedingly narrow and provincial. Later on, when literary activities brought me into touch with widely diverse types by mail -- Texans like Robert E. Howard, men in Australia, New Zealand, &c., Westerners, Southerners, Canadians, people in old England, and assorted kinds of folk nearer at hand -- I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge. Only correspondence could have effected this broadening; for it would have been impossible to have visited all the regions and met all the various types involved, while books can never talk back or discuss." (Selected Letters, 1911-1924)
Through his letters, it becomes easy for me to imagine what Lovecraft might have been like if he had lived today. The Internet might very well have combined a few of the things he was passionate about -- including correspondence, amateur journalism and literary community -- and turned him into a great model for what the rest of us could do with those same tools. I imagine he'd be a frequent and fiery participant in all kinds of online communities as well as one heck of a blogger. I imagine he'd be a defender of the Open Source movement and be Creative Commons licensing his work as "Share Alike". I also imagine that his interest in stories with the "care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax" would have also led him to be fascinated with alternate reality gaming and immersive narrative. Basically, the kind of guy I probably would have learned a lot from.