Howard Philips Lovecraft

Howard Philips Lovecraft , more known under name H.P. Lovecraft or even HPL (Providence, Rhode Island, August 20th 1890 - Providence, March 15th 1937), American writer, is one of the fathers of the fantastic Littérature and terror of the 20th century. He is the author of an about sixty Nouvelle S, of a Romance as well as poems. He is also the prolific author of more than 80.000 listed letters, but it is estimated that he wrote some more than 100.000, including some of almost 70 pages (its wife, Sonia Haft Greene admitted to have destroyed a whole trunk of letters after their divorce); the loss of documents (including texts of youth) prevents any reliable estimate of the number of its works. He also wrote articles of philosophy and sciences, working in particular like negro arts person. He was known general public only after his death.

Biography

He writes his first poems, like his first news, the small bottle of glass ( The little knell bottle ) at the six years age. He passes his childhood in the town of Providence, generally with the variation of the children of his age, locked up in the family home from which the curtains are drawn, the child suffering obviously from a too great sensitivity to the light. March 3rd 1924, it marries Sonia Haft Greene and settles at her, in the district of Brooklyn to New York. In April 1926, Lovecraft leaves the apartment of New York to turn over to live in Providence in his/her oldest aunt, Lillian Clark. He will divorce three years later and will not know any more an other woman.

He imagined a fabulous Cosmogonie gods, creatures and strange places gathered under the expression Mythe of Cthulhu , a term invented by the writer August Derleth after his death and which one finds in the majority of his texts.

Recluse, morbid and corroded by a permanent discomfort, Lovecraft was in perpetual financial problems, but it remained always prolix in councils with his friends writers. Always dissatisfied, he worked without slackening and published in particular in pulps, whose magazine Weird Tales where one made him test all the kinds but, having hardly the direction of the human contacts, and being unaware of the ordinary human needs, its works seemed written by extraterrestrial so that they were generally refused, not corresponding to the leading criteria of this kind of press intended for the public of then.

Not succeeding in living of its feather, it practiced various odd jobs, and it would seem that he was guard of a cinema little time before his death.

Deceased of a Cancer of the intestine, it left behind him quantity of texts not published. Its will charged Robert H. Barlow, one of its correspondents, the publication of the remainder of its work. Unfortunately, Barlow did not discharge a its task, publishing one text in 1938. But this mission was taken again by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, friends of Lovecraft who also worked them for the review Weird Tales . They created together the publisher Arkham House which had the role to publish works of Lovecraft. It is thanks to their eagerness and their devotion that the writings of HPL could be diffused, until him to offer a success which he had never known of alive sound.

Many biographical studies were written on Lovecraft, like that of the French writer Michel Houellebecq ( H.P. Lovecraft Against the world, against life , ISBN 2-290-05586-4). The principal biographers of Lovecraft are S.T. Joshi, whose work made it possible to exhume many unknown works, mainly work of literary negro, and Lyon Sprague de Camp, whose work remains a reference, and who has the merit to update certain psychological mechanisms which led Lovecraft to develop its style and its personality.

As historical curiosity, a commemorative plaque was affixed on the building where Lovecraft remained at the time of its passage to Quebec, with the whole beginning of the year 1930. The building (Saint-Andrew) is located at 801, rue de Bougainville, with the Holy-Foy intersection of the way. Lovecraft, like so much of other writers, was allured by the European seal of the city. He wrote a remarkable text besides on the history of Quebec, in which he evokes his “perfume of soft antiquity, quietude and eternity… ”.

Broad Topics

The fundamental idea of its work is related to Time. For him, even human imagination has its limits like our directions and the things. Also, more the field of our knowledge increases and more our imagination must grow with them so that the man ends up being frozen by “silence eternal of these infinite spaces” like was already Pascal before him. In this infinite of space and time, this last ends up devouring itself like the corrosive snake the tail. This mental voyage in this space is however not quantifiable by the mathematicians since it is about the human anguish. Thus Lovecraft it is devoured by the anguish of Time, it is what brings out more its work and that it translated in the literary field by the means of the fantastic one, or more exactly of the fantastic Réalisme. This branch of the literature constituted like it says it itself: “only true realism, the only standpoint of the man with respect to the universe”.

Thus, the novels of Lovecraft present the world like a universe haunted by old and banished forces, waiting the hour of their return, whose prototype is the Léviathan. The recurring monsters are Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth or Nyarlathotep. The Necronomicon , work supposément written by the Arab contradicts Abdul Al-Hazred, is also an important “character”. the Call of Cthulhu , published in 1926, is the angular part of this universe. It is hardly difficult to perceive under the names of its monsters of the reminiscences of creations much older such Gog and Magog or Astaroth, topics on which the author could graft his strange imaginations.

One distinguishes remanent topics in his work, such as the Folie - whose his/her parents were touched, the futility of the Croyance S, the degeneration, the unions against nature, the Xénophobie, the general impression that the world in which he lived was only one unpleasant lure and immonde. Haunted by many phobias, it could not support the proximity of the sea, nor even the objects while coming, so much was large its aversion for the paramount element of the life. The cold made it sick and the only living beings which seem not to have displeased to him were the cats, it always had of them several at his place for only company. He often acknowledged that he would have preferred to live at the 18th century.

Dream and literary production

The Rêve is a recurrent theme in the work of Lovecraft, omnipresent. Not only this one holds an important place in the writings of the Master of Providence, but it contributed in itself directly to the literary production of Lovecraft. Indeed, a great part of its news are only the transcription of its dreams, more or less worked over again. The sleep occupied in fact an important place in the life of Lovecraft, in particular because of its bad physical condition, as this passage testifies some to one of its letters with Rheinhart Kleiner, dated from the May 21st 1920:

"These two dreams occurred in the middle of one afternoon when I stopped my work with end of nervous exhaustion and posed the head on my arms at the edge of the table in front of me. I come to a point where I thus dormant very frequently - that helps me to hold and to make some more than usually. "

Thus, the thin animals of the night (night-gaunts) started to haunt its nightmares in 1896, following the death of his/her grandmother and of the mourning which followed in its family entourage.

Among works where the dream plays a central role, one can note the following ones:

Hypnos , where the two protagonists are Onironaute S , exploring the universe of the dream lucidly.
the Call of Cthulhu , where the Large Old Cthulhu, plunged in its dreams since unmemorable times at the bottom of the absorbed city of R' lyeh, communicates with the men through the dreams.
Across the wall of the sleep , described the double human life and dreamed of a man.
the Thing in lunar clearness .
In the abyss of time , the main character is brought, through increasingly precise dreams to remember obscure events of its last life.
the Nightmare of Innsmouth , where the hero of the history comes into oneiric contact with his ascending, who belongs to Those the depths (the Deep ones).
In the House of the witch , the protagonist lives the old residence of a witch who materializes in her room each evening, when he falls asleep, to physically involve it in the world of the dream, being used as medium to be transported of a point to the other of the universe.
Him
Nyarlathotep , one of its nightmares which it laid down on paper and of which it says to have written the first paragraph before it is completely awaked .
the Tomb , which is the transcription word for word of a dream that it made the night from December 10th to 11th 1919.
the cursed Clergyman .

One can add with these accounts of many news and a novel which one can include in a whole of inspiration more, one oneiric cycle to some extent, which is detached by its universe and its particular environment, and which includes in particular:

the oneiric Search of Kadath the unknown factor , whose hero Randolph Carter is not other than Lovecraft in person, and who leaves to research, in the world of the dream, the town of Kadath, inhabited by the Anciens Gods.
Polaris
Céléphaïs
the white Boat
Cats of Ulthar
the Other Gods
the Search of Iranon
Curse of Sarnath

The posthumous success of Lovecraft is such as certain authors continued to publish news articulated around the Myth of Cthulhu, inter alia August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Stephen King or Colin Wilson. The cinema, the cartoon, the rock'n'roll also briskly drew from lovecraftiennes creations their stranger nightmares. Let us quote also H.P.L. (1890-1991) , a signed uchronic biography Roland Charles Wagner.

Complementary note: In fact, Robert E. Howard could not publish other posthumous news since it is itself deceased before Lovecraft. He nevertheless wrote on the myth of Cthulhu (Cthulhu: the mythos and kindred horrors). Robert E. Howard committed suicide at the 30 years age when he learned the death from his mother. One can on the other hand see the influence of Lovecraft in some of his writings, knowing oneself and having written each one in Weird Tales .

Lovecraft was the " nègre" other people, in particular of Harry Houdini. He wrote a fictitious account of the adventures of Houdini in hypothetical undergrounds located under the Grande Pyramid of Gizeh. This account is entitled " Prisoner of Pharaons" . He was written in 1924 for the account of Weird Tales . Many writers sent their texts to Lovecraft so that it works them over again against a ridiculous remuneration. The corrections of Lovecraft on these texts go from some sentences to a complete recasting of the history. Regarding this work of mutual aid as naturalness, it forever asserted the paternity of these accounts, of which the number is difficult to appreciate (perhaps several hundreds).

Lovecraft and the Racism

The personal correspondence of Lovecraft indicates that it had racist opinions. He for example declared “ The Negro is basically the biological inferior of all the White and even of the races mongoliennes ”. In The Horror At Red Hook and The Street , it describes the immigrants of its time like declining and potentially dangerous. Certain news such as The Shadow over Innsmouth and Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family informs against the dangers of the interbreeding. Others still, like Herbert West: Reanimator contain racist descriptions of the ethnicities of color and immigrant population. His wife, Sonia, were Jewish and of Ukrainian origin, and indicated that it had regularly had to recall to her husband his origins at the time of certain remarks anti-semites held by him.

Acknowledged racism that one found in his first writings practically disappeared at the end from its career. The latter, very traditionalists at its beginnings, reveal, towards the end of its life, a gradual change in its political opinions. Lovecraft cash turned to socialist and allowed values later to have taken “for money the illusions and the traditional prejudices of the medium” in a correspondence of 1937. He repudiated The Street which was a news openly xenophobe. By many aspects, The Case off Charles Dexter Ward appears to be a worked over again version of The Horror At Red Hook , deprived of its abundant xenophobia.

Some, Michel Houellebecq, which devoted a test to the author, consider that the racism and the xenophobia of Lovecraft are an basic element of its literature and its personality, which were reinforced by its stay in New York and which the disavowal of some of its texts was carried out by social suitability. Others propose the fact that Lovecraft had received an education in adequacy with the values of the puritan company from which it resulted, racism amplified thereafter by its isolated lifestyle, and which its stay in New York on the contrary started a sincere reversal. This question is subjected still today to polemic.

A complete summary of its opinions on the “races” and the cultures is in its Selected Letters IV , published by Arkham House (letter 648 with J. Vernon Shea, dated from the September 25th 1933).

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