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INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer

The Eternal Lovecraft

They’ve tried to dismiss him in the past: Edmund Wilson, sneering in the pages of The New Yorker in the ‘40s (“Tales of the Mar­velous and Ridiculous”), John Brunner in Inside Science Fiction in the ‘50s (“Rusty Chains”), Damon Knight in the otherwise classic In Search of Wonder (embarrassingly confusing August Derleth’s pastiches of Lovecraft with the real thing), and many more. When any giant ap­pears in literature, there will always be those who say no, that’s not a giant after all.

The test, of course, is time. Lovecraft’s international reputa­tion continues to grow. Books about him continue to appear. Genera­tion after generation, he excites and intrigues new readers. He will not be dismissed.

After fifty years, Edmund Wilson seems mean-spirited and myopic. The terrible irony may one day be—and one sincerely hopes not, considering the merit of their other work—that one day John Brun­ner and Damon Knight, along with other Lovecraft detractors, will be remembered solely for what they said about Lovecraft, even as Love­craft will surely keep August Derleth’s name alive.

The verdict is now in: Lovecraft is the most important writer of supernatural horror fiction in English since Poe. While he hasn’t (yet) generated as much secondary material as Poe, he probably is more widely read today, and more influential on new writers than Poe. His position in horror (or what he called “weird fiction”) is rather like that of Robert Heinlein in science fiction: it is difficult to work in the field without responding to Lovecraft, even if only to reject him. If living literature may be seen as a kind of on-going debate or dialogue between many authors, Lovecraft has, in his own specialized area, made the opening statement. The rest is response. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ re­cent acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, defining her whole aesthetic in what she calls “the grotesque,” was a direct and explicit answer to Lovecraft.

It is Lovecraft’s vision that sustains him. He was indeed a vi­sionary writer, on par with H. G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon, whose art encompassed the entire universe and meditated on mankind’s (very small) place in the overall scheme of things. His radical innovation is—one might think anomalously for a virtually life-long “conservative”—one of modernism. Lovecraft rejected the old spiritual world which had driven the human imagination since the beginning of the species, and turned, instead, to the material universe revealed by science. Remember that in Lovecraft’s time the universe was suddenly getting bigger in (literally) quantum leaps: Relativity was new; as­tronomers had determined that “spiral nebulae” were in fact galaxies beyond our own, unimaginably far away and receding; the planet Pluto was just discovered. A generation earlier, Darwinism had conclusively shaken people’s formerly secure ideas of who they were and where they had come from. (And in Lovecraft’s time, as today, there was still re­sistance to the uncomfortable truth. Lovecraft was doing much of his best work about the same time as the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”)

Lovecraft, sensing vast changes in mankind’s very conception of existence, was able to look ahead, imaginatively and emotionally, and consider the implications. This is why Lovecraft’s stories seem vital when the masters of the traditional ghost story, no matter how technically skilled, come across as cozy and quaint. E. F. Benson and M. R. James are still entertaining, but Lovecraft is a serious writer, in the best sense of the term. He is not going away.

One bit of evidence that he isn’t going away is that there is demand for a third edition of this book, which is nearly twenty years old. Discovering H. P. Lovecraft began life in 1976 as Essays Love­craftian, published by T.K.-Graphics, an amateur imprint just then in the process of going out of business. The 1976 edition was rushed, with virtually no proofreading, and many resultant horrors, not neces­sarily of the eldritch kind. The 1987 Starmont edition, the first under the present title, featured numerous corrections and updatings, and some changes in the actual contents, the most significant of which was the addition of S. T. Joshi’s “Textual Problems in Lovecraft.”

The material has aged well. Now, the Borgo Press edition has something of a retrospective quality about it. Here are significant arti­cles about Lovecraft, spanning several decades. Fritz Leiber’s “A Lit­erary Copernicus” is one of the very first explorations of Lovecraft’s “cosmic” outlook, and still one of the best. Dirk Mosig’s “Four Faces of the Outsider” was a landmark in the psychological criticism of Love­craft, indicating a whole new direction that Lovecraft studies were be­ginning to take in the early 1970s, largely led by Mosig. At the same time, Richard Tierney’s “The Derleth Mythos” threw off the shackles of Derlethism—a revolution in itself, probably not possible until Der­leth’s death in 1971. George Wetzel was one of the first important Lovecraft scholars, very active in the 1950s. His “Genesis of the Cthulhu Mythos” was, I suspect, reworked from earlier material.

And, of course, “Textual Problems in Lovecraft” marked a new turning point, the first time anyone had serious examined the transmission of Lovecraft’s writing itself. The result of such inquiries was, ultimately, the new, corrected editions of Lovecraft’s work, pre­pared by Joshi and published by Arkham House. But since most an­thologizations and translations of the stories and, so far, all paperback editions are based on the old, defective texts, this article is more than a milestone long passed. It’s a still valid warning: you may not be reading the real Lovecraft.

New to this edition is a major piece, “H. P. Lovecraft: the Books,” by the late Lin Carter, reprinted from the Derleth-edited com­pilation, The Shuttered Room (1959) and updated and annotated by the leading Lovecraftian scholars of the present day, S. T. Joshi and Robert M. Price, the editor of Crypt of Cthulhu magazine. With the help of Joshi and Price, Carter’s listing of all the books and pseudo-books mentioned in Lovecraft and in the subsequent Cthulhu Mythos remains the best guide available anywhere.

The bibliographies and notes to this edition have, of course, been updated. A sequel is planned. Watch for Discovering H. P. Lovecraft II, probably under another title. The new volume will not be historical, but will concentrate on recent (even brand new) explorations of this endlessly fascinating writer.