Finding the balance like H.P. Lovecraft
He is one of the most mysterious authors in history. He is a man about whom we know everything, because his correspondence have been partly recovered at his death. They were correspondences with his friends, his only friends, whom he never saw. Nearly 20,000 letters were found, in which our man spoke of his writings, his vision of the world, his fears, and his anxieties. However, no one knows how to explain what was going on in the head of this very special individual.
This man is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Born in 1890 in Providence, he is considered by many to be the most influential fantasy and horror writer in history. Although he cited Edgar Allan Poe as his spiritual father, it is Lovecraft that Stephen King refers to when asked who was his greatest inspiration in horror literature.
The man from Providence has lived a life similar to his writings. If he had to sum it up in one word, it would be: hideous. This word is deeply inscribed in his heart and has been used hundreds of times to describe his worlds and his characters. Dark environments, filled with horrible creatures with unpronounceable names that destroy humanity without an ounce of mercy.
But it is above all the work of a strange man who has known nothing but poverty, failure and unhappiness during his 46 years of life on Earth.
New York City
Of these 46 years, Lovecraft spent 44 in his hometown, Providence. The other two were spent in New York City. In 1924, at the age of 34, he decided to leave his cocoon and move to the megalopolis, even though he had never really worked in his life, living off journalistic freelance work and a few short stories sold to Weird Tales, an important horror magazine of the time.
The city fascinated him, and he plans to seriously develop his literary work there, but he also wants to marry his wife, Sonia Greene. Shortly afterwards, Sonia was forced to leave New York for financial reasons and leave Lovecraft alone in a dingy studio apartment, where water seeped in and rodents were king.
He isolates himself, could not find a job and develops a deep disgust for this city over the weeks.
Racism and return to Providence
Unfortunately, New York itself was not the cause of this disgust. Lovecraft’s real fear was people. He was deeply racist. Black people, Asians, Jews, his writings spared no one, and his letters were filled with odious remarks about the various communities that make up the city.
He was a child of an Anglo-Saxon settlers family, conservative and deeply Aryan — this is before World War II — which gradually led him to absolute isolation, becoming unable to associate with people he considered different from himself in every way.
While his mental health was at its lowest, he could not find any work, his projects were no longer progressing and he was no longer able to support himself. That is why he made the only possible decision: to return home to Providence.
Providence was Lovecraft’s most cherished possession. During his 44 years in the city, his various homes have all been in the same neighborhood: his childhood house. He never managed to buy back the family house in which he grew up, but he never abandoned the area.
Weird Tales and hope for fame
Soon after his return, Lovecraft began writing his greatest works, including The Call of Cthulhu and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, his only novel. He sold short stories to Weird Tales on a regular basis, as part of their collaboration that began shortly before his departure for New York.
As the years passed, his name began to resonate with fans of the genre. While his fame finally seemed to arrive thanks to his published stories, that he wrote others as a ghostwriter for American authors of the time, and that he seemed to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the hope was only short-lived.
Everything collapsed when a publishing house interested in his work offered him to write a novel that will be published. Racked by his lack of confidence and set back by his absolute intransigence in the face of his editors’ remarks, the book never existed. By this time, Lovecraft was more reclusive than ever, and he ceased all his various activities, simply continuing to sell some of his stories to Weird Tales. He sank further into poverty and was forced to return to live with his aunt.
Glory of a Dead Man
In 1936, when he was at his worst, extreme poverty, malnutrition, and horrible pains forced him to stop writing. Misanthropic and reclusive, he refused to go see a doctor, because of a phobia he had developed. When he finally went, dying, he was diagnosed with colon cancer that had developed in his entire intestine. He died in 1937.
Shortly after his death, August Derleth, one of his greatest admirers, friend, and member of the Lovecraft Circle, founded Arkham House, a publishing house dedicated to him. Over the years, his stories were recovered, put in order, printed and published piecemeal. It is then that his work made some noise. Many authors wrote stories around the Cthulhu mythos, and Lovecraft made a name for himself outside Providence. In the 1960s, he officially became a reference and found himself in the hands of many teenagers in the world, including Stephen King.
Today, a life-size statue has been officially dedicated to him in Providence, and he continues to inspire many horror writers.
Death in redemption
It is very complicated to conclude about the life of such a man. In his later years, his racist positions softened, and he even voted for the Democrat Roosevelt in 1936. In his correspondences, he also repeatedly said that he wished his past writings would disappear and never be found again. The few trips he made during the Weird Tales years led to his gradual acceptance of other communities, though still predominantly white.
At first glance, learning lessons from a life marked by failure seems complicated, but it is its strength. Riddled by his lack of self-confidence, he was unable to publish the best works of his career during his lifetime. Who knows what the story would have been like if he had the strength to seize the opportunities and publish all his writings?
This lack of confidence also made him a model of humility, inviting the members of the Lovecraft Circle to appropriate his worlds and write about them, even telling them to continue the Cthulhu mythos when he would no longer do so.
Now, the lesson seems to make what he failed to do, drowned by his thoughts and doubts: to find balance. His love for literature was the rhythm of his life. He did not care about fame and fortune, he only cared about writing his world. He refused to be modified by publishing houses: it was HIS work, and that is how he liked it. All he lacked was the confidence to tell himself that we would like it too.
In his last letters, he describes himself as a man who has not found his place in his world. That was the case, but he would surely be happy to know that today he has found one in our libraries.
Translated and corrected from french by Juliette Busson
