Lovecraft, 'the Copernicus of the horror story'
''People are crazy," Robertson Davies wrote, ''for some sort of assurance that the visible world is not the only world, which is an almost intolerable state of mind." Thus religion in all its forms, tales of alien abduction and crop circles, New Age trappings, and a taste for stories of horror and the supernatural.
It is a specific taste, and those who don't possess it can only wonder and shake their head, or, be they critics and proponents of high art -- most famously Edmund Wilson in a number of essays on genre fiction, most recently in the furor over Stephen King's receiving a National Book Award -- cavil and disparage. Some readers will accept into the fold only those stories of the supernatural that go abroad dressed in mufti, pretending to be something else.
I am not trying to make a case for horror fiction here, simply continuing a plea I have been making for much of my life, one against literary small-mindedness -- a plea toward which I am prompted by the appearance next week of ''H. P. Lovecraft: Tales" as the latest volume from the Library of America ($35).
Many of us who know him at all have, I suspect, more an impression of Lovecraft than we have any particular knowledge or informed opinion of his work. As with many other singular writers, he has become, through the years, iconic: It is difficult to see past the image. Chances are good that we read his work in the squall of our youth and have not since returned to it. We recall the strange names, the adjective-shrouded nouns, the often feverish prose, the parade of events too terrible to be penned and imports too awful to be perceived; yet over the years our apprehension of Lovecraft's work has been fatally abridged, perhaps tempered as well by memories of imitators, and of a string of movies loosely based on it.
Like Hammett and Chandler, so much has he become an element of the very air we breathe and the ground upon which we tread that we take his innovations for granted, failing to recognize and to honor them.
''Lovecraft is, in many senses, the linchpin of the twentieth-century weird tale," S. T. Joshi has written, ''not only for his absorption of the best weird work of the past but for his nurturing of a fair proportion of the best work that followed him." Joshi, biographer of Lovecraft and other major writers, is the chief critic working in the field. It's from Joshi's editions of Lovecraft texts that the current volume, edited by Peter Straub, draws.
One of those influenced early on by Lovecraft, the great Fritz Leiber, spoke aptly of Lovecraft's originality. ''Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the Copernicus of the horror story. He shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space. To do this effectively, he created a new kind of horror story and new methods for telling it."
Rereading Lovecraft's work almost four decades down the line, one finds that, like Twain's parents in the famous epigram, it has gotten much smarter in ensuing years, revealing itself as truly revolutionary.
Holding cosmic will, the spirit world, and survival of personality to be ''the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe," Lovecraft turned away from accounts of ghostly doings to tales of cosmic terror in which human concerns have no purchase, no significance. Individuals, he wrote, are ''momentary trifles bound from a common nothingness toward another cosmic nothingness." Horrible engines forever clang and crash above our head. The Old Ones of ''At the Mountains of Madness" created all life on earth ''as jest or mistake."
And what of the famous Lovecraft style, after all these modernist years?
The language is, of course, that of late romanticism -- an amalgam, Joshi suggests, of 18th-century stateliness, the ''atmospheric floridity" of Poe and Wilde, and the careful formulations of philosophic writing. (The well-wrought sentences, balance, and always sensual surface of Lovecraft's language put me in mind of the fine penmanship once taught universally in our schools.) The stories are told after the fact, almost always in narrative summary by a discounted teller, a man who cannot assimilate, who can neither quite believe nor comprehend, what he has seen and suspects.
Here, for instance, is the beginning of ''The Shadow out of Time":
''After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17-18, 1935."
And this, near the conclusion of ''The Rats in the Walls":
''That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat."
The weird tale, Lovecraft insisted in his landmark treatise ''Supernatural Horror in Literature," should inspire a certain thrill, ''a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers." Now, it is altogether possible that passages such as the above may leave you cold; and if so, you'd best look elsewhere. But if, instead, such passages inspire in you the barest beginning of that frisson Lovecraft so esteemed, then turn to Lovecraft's tales -- or back to them. They are powerful and unique. He is a giant, and rightfully so.
James Sallis's new novel, ''Cripple Creek," is forthcoming this fall from Walker/Bloomsbury. 