The title interested me for a simple reason. Some three years earlier, I had been hurled into notoriety by the completely unexpected success of my first book, The Outsider, a rather heavy tome on existential philosophy. It had become an overnight best seller—to the publisher’s amazement—and was translated into sixteen languages within the course of a year. I knew my title was not original. The Negro writer Richard Wright had written a book of the same title in the early fifties. Camus’s L’Etranger, called The Stranger in America, is translated into English as The Outsider. There are at least three more novels of the same title. Still, I felt that my use of the word had a certain originality, for before my book, an outsider had simply meant somebody who didn’t belong. (‘We can’t have that bounder in the club. He’s a demned outsidah’.)
I opened the Lovecraft book—I’d never heard his name before. It was an old, black-bound edition, printed in the late months of 1939, and it was on crumbling yellow paper that smelt musty. And before falling asleep I read The Outsider, The Rats in the Walls, and In the Vault, the story about the mortuary keeper who chops off the corpse’s feet to make it fit the coffin.
I knew immediately that I had discovered a writer of some importance. So the next morning, when I left, I borrowed the book. And driving back towards my home in Cornwall, I brooded on the question of the horror story, and the type of imagination that produces it. I brooded to such good purpose that as soon as I got home, I began to write a book called The Strength to Dream, in which Lovecraft figures largely.
I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly, a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously: that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse, and had about it an element of rassentiment , a kind of desire to take revenge on a world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy.
Well, the book appeared in England in 1961, and I thought I had done with Lovecraft. But later that year, I found myself in Providence, lecturing at Brown University. There I met the Blake scholar Foster Damon, who looks and sounds like Mark Twain, and he showed me the house where Poe had lived and told me of legends that still survived. But here, in this town of clapboard houses, with its streets ankle-deep in leaves, my imagination was haunted by another writer Lovecraft. I found that his stories now returned to mind a dozen times a day. I went and looked at the house in which Love-craft had lived; I spent hours in the university library reading Love-craft’s letters in manuscript, and a thesis that somebody had written on his life and work. Here I read for the first time The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. And I had to admit that there was something about Lovecraft that makes him very hard to dismiss. In many ways, I found him more impressive than Poe. Poe’s imagination was simply obsessed by death. In some ways, his most typical story is The Premature Burial, which is the kind of nightmare that might occur to any of us. Basically, Poe is a gentle romantic, a lover of beautiful, pale women and ancient Gothic mansions set among wooded hills. Lovecraft is not so concerned with death as with terror. Poe is pre-Dracula; Lovecraft is very much post-Dracula. Poe’s world is the world we all live in, seen through eyes that were always aware of ‘the skull beneath the skin’. Lovecraft’s world is a creation of his own, as unique and nightmarish as the world of Heironymus Bosch or Fuseli.
I found the address of Arkham House in a bookseller’s catalogue, and wrote to enquire what books of Lovecraft were still available. The result was a friendly letter back from August Derleth, who knew my work. As a result of some of Derleth’s comments, I made several alterations of the Lovecraft sections in the American edition of The Strength to Dream, (although he still considered it unfair to Lovecraft). And, at some point in our correspondence, Derleth said: ‘Well, if you’re so critical about Lovecraft, why don’t you write a fantasy novel, and see whether it’s any good…’
For a long time, it was only an idea floating in the back of my mind. Whenever I thought about it, I always came up against the same problem—a problem that has also given some trouble to Derleth, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, and various other writers in the Lovecraft tradition. It is this. You begin your story with the old house or farm or whatever it is, and its queer goings-on. Then the narrator goes to investigate. Then Something Awful Happens—a rotting corpse knocks on the front door, a monster with tentacles on its belly tears down the wall, etc. This is inevitably the climax of the story, and it is hard to think up something that really terrifies you enough to make you terrify the reader.
And then one day, when writing a chapter on phenomenology in a book about my own kind of existentialism, I saw the solution—monsters inside the mind… The result is my first fantasy novel—and probably the only one I shall ever write.
But to return to Lovecraft. I am now willing to admit that my assessment of him in The Strength to Dream was unduly harsh. But I am still no nearer to understanding why Lovecraft exercises such a curious hold upon my imagination, when the work of Arthur Machen, for example, strikes me as only mildly interesting.
I suppose what makes Lovecraft both good and bad is the fact that he was an obsessed writer. And this is also the reason that so few of the works in the Lovecraft tradition have touched the same level of imaginative power. August Derleth or Robert Bloch can capture the Arkham atmosphere and style excellently, but it doesn’t express their true centre of gravity as writers. Bloch is really himself in the all-too-possible horrors of Psycho, with its motel rooms and atmosphere of realistic nastiness such as you might find in the pages of any True Detective magazine. As to Derleth, his finest work is in a sphere far removed from horror or fantasy—books about everyday life in Sac Prairie, about the changes of season, the animals and birds. (His work reminds me in many ways of that of a much underrated English novelist, Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, as well as of that strange nature mystic, Richard Jeffries.) He is a writer in the great American tradition of Thoreau and Whitman—even, to some extent, of Sinclair Lewis.
This explains why Lovecraft has remained unique, in spite of the number of writers who have been fascinated by his mythical world and by his style. He created the Cthulhu Mythos out of inner necessity, as Blake created the Prophetic books out of inner necessity.
All of this amounts to admitting that Lovecraft possessed genius. And it is this, I think, that makes him basically a tragic figure. It also links him with my own ‘Outsider’ thesis, and with the present novel.
My starting point in The Outsider was that, round about the year 1800, a strange change came over the human race—or over an important part of it. Quite suddenly, there appeared a new sort of man,—romantic man. In the days before the ancient Greeks, romantic man would have been regarded as wicked and dangerous. Because some deep instinct tells him that man is not a mere insect, a ‘creature’, but is, in some important sense, a god. The Greeks called this sin hubris, and it was punishable by madness and death. And that is why the fate of so many of the romantics would have confirmed the Greeks in their view that these men were wicked and dangerous. When you come to think of it, the list of men of genius who died insane, or in accidents, or of tuberculosis, or committed suicide, is terrifying and impressive. Shelley, Keats, Poe, Beddoes, Holderlin, Hoffmann, Schiller, Kleist, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Dowson, Johnson, Francis Thompson, James Thomson . . . the list could be extended for pages. And these are only some of the famous ones. How about all the would-be poets and artists who never made the grade and died quietly in some dirty lodging house?
Now all romantics have one thing in common. They are like those Greek sailors who heard the Syrens’s song, and prefer to fling themselves overboard rather than return to the dull world of everyday