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Lovecraft; A Biography,, by L. Sprague De Camp
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Few writers have had more ironic, paradoxical lives that Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), the great horror-fantasy writer of Providence, Rhode Island. Never having a book of his stories published in his lifetime, he became a best seller after his death. Dying in poverty and obscurity, convinced of his own utter failure, he has been hailed not only as the equal of Poe but even as once of the greatest writers of all time. A self-proclaimed misanthrope, he collected a circle of devoted friends, who remember him as one of the kindest, most delightful and most lovable persons they had known. The son of parents both of whom died insane, Lovecraft became a powerful philosophical thinker. A scientific materialist, he embraced pseudo-scientific racial theories, only to abandon them in his last years. A poseur who liked to fancy himself as an eighteenth century English gentleman, he condemned poses and affectations in others. A political ultra-conservative, he became a Socialist and New Dealer. A man who prided himself on aristocratic reticence, he poured out his inmost thoughts in at least 100,000 letters, making him one of the greatest letter writers of all time. Here is the tale of his weird upbringing; his bizarre habits, preferences, his tragi-comic literary and marital careers; his key role in the origin of science-fiction fandom; and how he worked his nightmares and neuroses into the stories that became a legend after his death.
- Sales Rank: #1332762 in Books
- Published on: 1975-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 510 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
HPL, a man you could like.
By W. Zeranski
Okay, de Camp has been catching hell for this biography for decades. Well, I've read the book, as well as texts by other biographers, and de Camp's work is readable--and entertaining. The structure of the book is well laid out. I like the bits of Lovecraft's poetry used to head the beginning of each chapter, and I do agree with de Camp that the bulk of HPL's poetry to terrible. BUT--the horror poetry-- such as the `Fungi from Yoggoth' is outstanding.
Way back, twenty, twenty-five years ago, I read and I learned a great deal about HPL from this biography. I must add, it was the first major work done on Lovecraft's life and that is no small achievement, considering that at the time the book was published, Lovecraft was still a little-known horror writer for the Pulps.
de Camp's effort gave HPL's reputation a good and very positive shot in the arm. Positive? How can there be a positive when HPL's racism is such a sticking point. Well, the simple fact is, if you read the book--all the way to the end--you learn how much HLP changed. HLP, the so-called recluse, was very much apart of the world. He married. He divorced. He lived in New York and travel in the South. He was just like anybody else, then as well as now.
De Camp treats his subject with care simply by being honest. de Camp showed me a man I could like.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Filled with Information and Critique
By Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, Esq.
Sprague was a friend and correspondent of mine for some few years, during the time when I first became obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft and determined to become a modern Cthulhu Mythos writer. I supplied some corrections and information after this hardcover edition of his HPL biography was published, which is why he kindly listed me in the paperback edition. There were some few corrections made in the mass market pb published by Ballentine. Sprague worked extremely hard on this book, and he got most of the biographical facts correct, thus as a biography this is a good book. Most of the critique, if I remember rightly, comes from Sprague's interpretation of what he considered Lovecraft's eccentricities; he often sounds as if he could get HPL on the psychiatrist couch and so lecture him on how to improve his soul (Sprague told me, for example, that I could be "cured" of my homosexuality, which even then seemed like a very old fashioned and conservative idea). Sprague was a successful and completely professional writer, and as such he had no patience with Lovecraft's non-commercial stance -- something about which HPL and E. Hoffmann Price exchanged many heated letters, some few of which may be found in the SELECTED LETTERS editions published by Arkham House (it was a topic that so bugged Price that he continued his arguments long after HPL's death in the letter columns of the fanzine NYCTALOPS). Sprague seems to be constantly scolding Lovecraft in this book for not behaving as a professional writer "should" behave, It is an attitude that finds its most perverse manifestation in this passage from Lin Carter's A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS:
"Lovecraft was such a bundle of contradictions that he will be the despair of his eventual biographer. How does one deal with a man so quirky and changeful and perverse that within a month after selling his first story to WEIRD TALES, he turns around and writes a piece of snobbish idiocy to Long such as the following?:
'I am well-nigh resolv'd to write no more tales, but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick. I have concluded, that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman; and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment, to be indulg'd in with Infrequency and Discrimination.'
In that passage you have much of what I would call the worst of Lovecraft, his weakness and his folly: the absurd pretensions to gentility on the part of a man who had lived barely above the level of utter poverty for three years; the ludicrous self-delusion of thinking himself an 'artist' -- the snobbishness of spelling 'literature' with a capital L -- and the silly affectation of 18th-century spelling and grammar. What an infuriating poseur he sounds in his letters!"
To which I would respond: but Lovecraft's family background and very early youth WAS a product of gentility; but Lovecraft WAS most definitely an artist, and his sincere attempts to create weird fiction that was Literary Art is why he has been published in Penguin Classics ans The Library of America; his spelling of 'literature' with an L was part of his quaint pose, which is one of the joys in his wonderful correspondence.
There is much of what I call "bad attitude" toward Lovecraft in the book, which comes about from the author's stress on the value of being a professional and commercial writer; but as HPL wrote in his famous letter to Edwin F, Baird, WEIRD TALES' first editor, "...I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself." Here is an example of de Camp's critcism, in which he reprints Lin Carter's comments on "The Nameless City," a story included in the third Penguin edition of HPL's fiction:
"All such words denote, not physical facts, but the narrator's emotional reaction to facts. Not all adjectives are objectionable; a moderate use of them gives the story color. But adjectives like 'horrible' and 'ghastly,' which merely convey the mental state of the author or his fictional narrator, slow the story down without enhancing it. As my colleague Lin Carter, in criticizing Lovecraft's story 'The Nameless City' puts it:
The story is overwritten, over-dramatic, and the
mood of mounting horror is applied in a very artificial
manner. Rather than creating in the reader a mood of terror,
Lovecraft DESCRIBES a mood of terror; the emotion is applied in the
adjectives--the valley in which the city lies is 'terrible'; the
ruins themselves are of an 'unwholesome' antiquity; certain of the altars
and stones 'suggested forbidden rites of terrible, revolting, and
inexplicable nature.' Of course, if you stop to think about it,
such terms are meaningless. A stone is a stone, a valley is a valley,
and ruins are merely ruins. Decking them out with a variety of
shudderry adjectives does not make them intrinsically shuddersome.
This excess of modifiers is simply a beginner's bad writing. Poe did much of it, for in his day it was considered 'fine writing'; but standards have changed. To the young Lovecraft, however, Poe could do no wrong."
This is such a load of ichor -- and there is something quite pathetic about a writer as prosaic as Lin Carter condemning the imaginative prose of H. P. Lovecraft. In "The Nameless City," a valley IS MUCH MORE than a valley, and the antique ruins are so much more than "merely ruins." This is one of my favorite tales by HPL, and I have written my own sequel to it, "Immortal Remains." Yet even S. T. is highly critical of the tale:
"The absurdities and implausibilities in this tale, along with its wildly overheated prose, give it a very low place in the Lovecraft canon. Where, for example, did the creatures who built the nameless city come from? There is no indication that they came from another planet; but if they are simply early denizens of the earth, how did they come to possess their physical shape? Their curiously COMPOSITE nature seems to rule out any evolutionary pattern known to earth's creatures. How do they continue to exist in the depths of the earth? The narrator must also be very foolish not to realise at once that the entities were the ones who built the city. Lovecraft does not seem to have thought out the details of this story at all carefully."
Now to me such criticism is nonsense. The story is a tale of phantasy and horror -- it does not NEED to make any kind of "logical" sense or have its roots in mundane reality. Had Lovecraft stopped to add such details to the story about the history of the reptilian race, he would have dragged the narrative to dull slowness. His aim in writing the tale was to evoke a mood of mystery and terror, and in this he is superbly successful. This was one of Lovecraft's favorites among his own works, and I love this tale.
The hardcover first edition offered here of de Camp's biography is the best edition of this book, for it contains an index that was not included in the paperback. I return to this book now and again, just for the joy of reading the Life of H. P. Lovecraft, which has so shaped my own. I share with Lovecraft an inability to behave as a professional writer perhaps "should" -- I lack the discipline that is required to live as a full-time commercial writer. Some of us simply cannot exist like that, nor do we wish to. But this in no way minimizes our sincere work in the genre of weird fiction.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
There's a lot of great material about Lovecraft's associates like Robert E
By Bert
In my opinion, this remains the definitive Lovecraft biography. The only drawback is De Camp's questionable use of Freudian psychoanalysis to draw assertions about Lovecraft and sexuality. But overall De Camp does a superb job at presenting the complexities and thought of the man. It's also very humanist in taking Lovecraft to task for his reactionary views but exploring where those views may have come from. It also does a compelling and poignant job at showing how Lovecraft evolved in the 1930s. There's a lot of great material about Lovecraft's associates like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Henry S. Whitehead. Highly recommended for any fan of Lovecraft and a necessary read for any scholar.
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