Out of the Shadows. James Arthur Anderson
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
The Milford Series
Popular Writers of Today
ISSN 0163-2469
Volume Seventy-Five
Copyright © 2011 by James Arthur Anderson
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To the three wonderful women in my life: my mother, Ruth M. Anderson; my sister, Elaine Clark; and my wife, Lynn Llorye Anderson.
PREFACE, by S. T. Joshi
The story of how H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) emerged from being a mere “pulp hack” to being on the cusp of literary and academic respectability is a “weird tale” as bizarre as anything he ever wrote. In his declining years he appears to have become grimly resigned to the realization that his tales would find a merited oblivion in the already crumbling pages of the pulp magazines in which they had appeared. The dilemma facing Lovecraft was that his work was out of step both with the dominant social realism of the mainstream magazines as well as the stilted and mechanical formulas of the pulps. His best work was rejected by pulp editors who could not pigeonhole it in within their narrow parameters, but there was not the slightest chance that it could find a home in the “slick” magazines of the day. Accordingly, Lovecraft became increasingly discouraged with the development of his own career; unusually, and inexplicably, sensitive to rejection, he came to conclude toward the end of his life that the rejection by Weird Tales of At the Mountains of Madness (and, perhaps more relevantly, the unfavorable response it received from some of his closest colleagues) “did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career” (SL V 224). It is scarcely to be wondered that Lovecraft’s half-dozen attempts to negotiate book deals with major publishers all came to naught, marred by his inexperience in literary marketing, his excessive humility, and his incomprehensible refusal to offer a perfectly good short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for publication.
The resurrection of Lovecraft’s work by his devoted friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, is too well-known to rehearse. That these two colleagues—one of whom never met Lovecraft in the flesh, the other of whom met him only fleetingly at wide intervals—would form a publishing company initially devoted to the sole purpose of issuing Lovecraft’s work seems to be a scenario unparalleled in literary history. In addition, Lovecraft was posthumously compelled to rely on the kindness of strangers—those many “fans” who diligently scoured amateur journals, pulp magazines, and fan publications for his fugitive writings, and who made the first tentative overtures at critical analysis. Dr. James Anderson is correct in believing that their efforts, although on occasion valuable, were marred by a certain lack of academic rigor.
All this changed—somewhat—in the 1970s, when a new generation of Lovecraft scholars emerged with a single-minded determination to raise the level of appreciation of Lovecraft and his work. But even these scholars were in many cases outside the academic mainstream. Even those who were professors—preeminently Dirk W. Mosig, whose relatively few years of work in the early 1970s planted the seeds for much of the Lovecraft scholarship of the last three decades—were not in the conventional humanities disciplines one might expect. Mosig was a professor of psychology; Donald R. Burleson, whose two books and many articles have made him a pioneering Lovecraft interpreter, was initially a professor of mathematics. I myself was trained in the study of Latin, Greek, and ancient philosophy, although I have found these disciplines of great value in placing Lovecraft within the context of literary and intellectual history. Other scholars, such as Peter Cannon, David E. Schultz, and Steven J. Mariconda, were outside the academic arena altogether.
The work of these and other scholars culminated in the Lovecraft Centennial Conference at Brown University in August 1990, a gathering that attracted participants from around the world. At last, a leading university had given its imprimatur to the study of Lovecraft. Slowly, attitudes in the academy began to change. When Burleson’s challenging deconstructionist study, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (1990), appeared, a brief review in American Literature (the flagship journal for the academic study of American writing) noted: “It’s getting to where those who still ignore Lovecraft will have to go on the defensive.” Since 1990, work on Lovecraft appears devoted largely to unearthing his lesser-known writings—especially his letters—and to the dissemination of his tales. My three editions of Lovecraft with Penguin Classics presents all his major fiction in corrected and annotated texts. To be sure, Lovecraft will not become a “classic” merely because a publisher says so, but the tide seems definitely to have turned. Articles on Lovecraft have recently appeared in Extrapolation, Neophilologus, Paradoxa, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and other standard academic venues. Victoria Nelson’s dense chapter on Lovecraft in The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2002) is perhaps an augury of what we can expect in the future—a sophisticated attempt to incorporate Lovecraft the man (or, perhaps more accurately, the cultural icon) and the writer within the realms of American and world civilization.
But, as Dr. Anderson’s book keenly demonstrates, there is still much room for interpretation of the basic thrust of Lovecraft’s stories. In his lucid, concise analyses he has shown how felicitously the critical methodology of structuralism can be used to illuminate the complexities of Lovecraft’s richly textured work. But Anderson is wise to use an eclectic mix of critical approaches, demonstrating his awareness that a single hermeneutic has inevitable limitations that can result in critical blindness. Anderson’s thorough familiarity with Lovecraft’s texts (essays and letters as well as stories) and with the best scholarship on Lovecraft is evident on every page of his book, and the fluidity with which he weaves together different critical approaches into a unified commentary is enviable. Because Lovecraft’s work is so at odds, both in matter and in manner, with what has come to be regarded as the “classic” American literature of the first three decades of the twentieth century, an approach like Anderson’s is necessary to show that Lovecraft in his way can lay claim to being a “classic” himself.
And yet, the real test of a classic is not the amount of critical commentary an author generates, whether in or out of the academy, but the degree to which his work affects the thoughts and lives of a wide array of literate readers over many generations. By that test, Lovecraft has already achieved a respected place in the canon of American literature. It now remains only to clarify the exact contours of that status by the explication of his best work. In that task, James Anderson has made an exemplary contribution.
S. T. Joshi
CHRONOLOGY OF H. P. LOVECRAFT’S LIFE
1890 August 20: H. P. Lovecraft born in Providence, RI.
1893 Lovecraft’s father committed to Butler Hospital.
1898 Father dies
1904 Death of grandfather Whipple V. Phillips.
1904 Attends Hope High School
Moves to 454 Angell Street
1906 Astronomy column in Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner
1908 Nervous condition prevents graduation from high school
1908-1913 Period of seclusion at home.
1912 First published verse “Providence in 2000 A.D.,” in Providence Evening Bulletin.
1914 Joins United Amateur Press Association
1917 Volunteers for R.I. National Guard and is rejected for health reasons.
“The Tomb” and “Dagon.”
1919 Mother institutionalized
Attends lecture by Lord Dunsany in Boston.
Writes “The White Ship.”
1920 Begins correspondence with F. B. Long
“Celephais” and “From Beyond.”
1921 Mother dies.
Meets Sonia Greene in Boston
“The Outsider” and “The Music of Erich Zann.”