Cosmo Digital

Author: S.T. Joshi
Page Count: 655 pages
Review originally written 6-21-2003

I have long been interested in Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This fascination is not limited to just his fictional works, but is now extended to his letters and his life as a whole. I am not exactly sure why he holds such a great interest for me, save that I wonder what he was like. I tookup this massive biography in order to answer that question.

I have heard of this book years before, and have made a few half-hearted attempts to find it at the library. For awhile I held off on making any serious attempt to find it, mainly because I had read some of Lovecraft's letters in 2001 and had a very difficult time getting through those. I knew any biography of Lovecraft would contain numerous excerpts from his stories and correspondence, and so I figured a biography, expecially one of a scale such as this one, would be difficult to read, and more importantly, comprehend.

Eventually I was able to obtain this book through an interlibrary loan from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Norlin Library. I am regretful that I only recently discovered this ability to find books from other libraries. It would have made the research paper for AP English much easier, as I could of had greater access to the many works by and about Kafka, who I wrote the paper on. It might have even saved me a trip up to Boulder. But anyway, that is in the past now. I am just glad to have such an interlibrary loan feature in order to find the less well-known books I want to read.

This book was not the most exciting novel out there, but I found many parts of it to be quite interesting, and that helped get me through its 655 pages. The book was divided up chronologically, which gave it a very well organized format. I mention this because the previous book of letters I read, Lord of a Visible World, was not arranged in this fashion, but rather by subject matter. That made it very confusing to try to piece together a coherent narrative of Lovecraft's life, and I would have been quite confused had I not read a biography before I read that book of letters. This book, in comparison, gave a very precise explanation on the events in H.P. Lovecraft's life in sequence, and so I rank it at being far better than Lord of a Visible World, even though I am unsure as to which book was written first, if that really matters.

One of the more interesting parts of this book were the accounts of Lovecraft in New York. When one looks at this in comparision with the rest of his life, the decision to get married and move to New York seems to be a very rash decision. It looks as if this is a decision which Lovecraft almost immediately regretted, but for some reason chose to remain there for I believe a couple years, because the majority of his friends lived in the area.

The most difficult parts of this book were the chapters that dealt with the evolution ofLovecraft's philosophical beliefs. This is not because the ideas themselves were difficult to understand, but rather because a large portion of these chapters were taken up with excerpts from Lovecraft's writings, and he can be very verbose and long-winded at times. Some of these which were easier to get through were the ones that dealt with his political thought, as Lovecraft ecentually bought into some of the ideals of socialism. One very interesting part was when Lovecraft talked about Hitler, who at that time hadn't yet begun with the genocidal acts he would become infamous for. In one particularly memorable quote, Lovecraft says: "I know he's a clown, but by God, I like the boy."

Although this sounds bad, the part I enjoyed the most was the end, where Joshi wrote about the events that happened with Lovecraft's work after his death. I noticed that there was a very negative portrayal of August Derleth, especially for his takeover of Lovecraft's work and the Cthulhu Mythos. I will admit that I would agree that some of these acts are reprehensible, but I do not hold such a bad view of Derleth as Joshi does.

What is really interesting about this book is not what it reveals about Lovecraft, but rather what it reveals about Joshi. In the preface Joshi comes out and says his own opinions will get in and he makes no claim to objectivity. From his subtle comments, I am able to gleam that Joshi holds a very low view of popular culture, and especially newer unreal fiction. I noted a very scathing view of Brian Lumley, with both his take on the Cthulhu Mythos, and his other series of horror fiction. "Lumley thankfully abandoned the 'Cthulhu Mythos' and gone on to write multi-volume cycles of novels ... whose unreadability is only matched by their inexplicable popularity." (645). What I find interesting is that although Joshi completely blasts Lumley, he still devotes a whole paragraph to him, perhaps conceding that Lumley is an important author, after all.

Overall, this biography of Lovecraft is a very interesting, well written account of his life. I feel that Joshi could have made the book even better by leaving out his opinions, but it seems inevitable that some should get in from having studied Lovecraft for so long. I might eventually have to buy this book and make it part of my collection. That will be far in the future, however.

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