H. P. Lovecraft's Letters
His Voluminous Correspondence May be His More Impressive Achievement
Jul 26, 2009
Many, of course, were short, three to eight handwritten pages scribbled on whatever writing material he had at hand. But many more ran to 30, 40 , even as long as 70 pages. When we keep in mind that he must have received a similar volume of mail over the years, it is little wonder that he devoted more than half of each day to correspondence. It was time that many fans wish he had spent writing more of his powerful fiction instead.
Yet many people, like leading Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, consider his letters the superior achievement!
Such is the respect for Lovecraft's correspondence that there are multiple collections of selected excerpts from a variety of publishers. Arkham House, which issued the first collection of Lovecraft's fiction two years after his death, published five volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters; other publishers have recently released single volumes focusing on Lovecraft's correspondence with significant individuals, such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch and R. H. Barlow, with a smattering of material to longtime friends Maurice Moe, Alfred Galpin, and Samuel Loveman.
L. Sprague de Camp, in his 1975 Lovecraft, a Biography, says that Lovecraft's annual output of letters to Clark Ashton Smith alone averaged 40,000 words, a length equal to one of his longest and most famous stories, "At the Mountains of Madness."
Lovecraft rarely kept the letters he received once he had answered them, but remarkably, roughly 10 per cent of his compositions have survived. The John Hay Library at Brown University, where Lovecraft's papers are held along with, among others, those of Henry David Thoreau, has some 2,000 letters in its files; others are still in the hands of collectors.
This bounty allowed Joshi, in addition to his biography, Lovecraft: a Life (1996), to construct, with David E. Schultz, an "autobiography in letters" entitled Lord of a Visible World. Combing through thirty years of material, they excerpted Lovecraft's occasional revelations of personal history and experience, arranging them in chronological order.
The Social Life of a New England Gentleman
Two reasons are generally cited by Lovecraft to explain his tremendous epistolary output, the first being that, raised with the sensibility of a New England gentleman, he thought it rude not to answer a letter received. Secondly, as he elaborated in later life, correspondence was a substitute for a social life. His youth was largely spent in the company of his mother and aunts; illness interrupted his schooling so that he made few friends. ThIs peculiar and isolated upbringing left him with few social skills, To his friend Frank Belknap Long, he wrote:
"...an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatism and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation..."
It wasn't until his early twenties, when he got involved with the national amateur journalism movement, that Lovecraft began this "guarding against...solitary speculation." Many members published 'journals' on an irregular basis, usually in print runs of 20 to 50 copies. These were distributed to fellow amateur journalists. Lovecraft's essays and poetry won him much attention and through these contributions plus attendance at the annual conventions, Lovecraft made his first friends, relationships that would last in some cases to the end of his life. HIs first fiction appeared in some of these journals.
Lovecraft was a man of wide interests and voluminous reading habits. His letters reflect this, often containing lengthy discourses on such diverse topics as astronomy, economics, philosophy, poetry, folklore, politics, Prohibition, Greek and Roman history and literature, science, peculiar dreams he'd had and, of course, weird fiction.
The Lovecraft Circle
Both Joshi and de Camp agree that at any given time, Lovecraft had between 50 and 75 correspondents, some dating back to his earliest days in amateur journalism. But it was the small, fluctuating core that formed around himself and his fellow weird fiction authors that would have the most impact, a group that would later be termed the Lovecraft Circle.
Long-term participants in the Circle included the aforementioned Smith, Howard, Derleth, Wandrei. Long and Bloch, plus short-timers like Henry Whitehead, Wilfred Talman, and, very late in Lovecraft's life, Fritz Leiber. They circulated stories amongst themselves for criticism, exchanged theories and ideas on lost civilizations and the decadence of the modern world. and forged a foundation for horror and fantastic fiction that forever changed the course of the literature.
Even in Lovecraft's day, the art of letter writing was passing away. Telephones and telegraphs were expedient, but not encouraging of long, thoughtful discourse. In our own day of e-mail, text messages,Twitter and social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, the art of letter writing has all but vanished. H. P. Lovecraft may have been its last great practitioner, ranking with such giants as Horace Walpole, Henry James and Jane Welsh Carlyle.
Though less well-known than his famous fiction, the letters of H. P. Lovecraft add a profound dimension to one of the great literary legacies of the 20th century.
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