The Recognition Of HP Lovecraft: His Rise From Obscurity To World Renown by S.T. Joshi (book review).

For all his fame today, HP Lovecraft’s recognition as a great writer was a long time coming. In ‘The Recognition of HP Lovecraft’, S.T. Joshi tackles this head-on, working his way through the different phases of Lovecraft’s life and posthumous reputation. Joshi starts by examining how Lovecraft’s contemporaries in the amateur press perceived him, emphasizing the significance of their observations for Lovecraft’s growth as a writer. Alfred Galpin, for example, made some perceptive comments on how Lovecraft handled, or rather failed to handle, the creation of convincing human characters while praising his ability to create weird fiction comparable to Poe or Dunsany.

The second chapter, entitled ‘The Pulp Era (1923–1937),’ is in some ways the most surprising chapter, given the assumption among most Lovecraft fans that his work was little appreciated during his lifetime. Yes, he published his stories and poems in the amateur press, and yes, he managed to make a few bucks selling stories to the pulp magazines of the time, most notably ‘Weird Tales’. Joshi, however, makes it abundantly clear that readers, critics, and editors all discussed Lovecraft and his stories. On the other hand, this section also includes accounts of where Lovecraft’s fiction was rejected by editors and publishers, or, as often as not, it seems, damned with faint praise. See one critic’s comment that he’d rather read Lovecraft than the works of certain fashionable lady novelists.

It’s the third and fourth chapters where things get really juicy. These cover the years between Lovecraft’s death in 1937 and the 1960s, when Lovecraft’s work was published and, to some extent, curated by August Derleth. As one of Lovecraft’s correspondents and admirers, he was keen to see Lovecraft’s work published in book form. But he was not, as it turned out, Lovecraft’s literary executor. It should have been Lovecraft’s friend and fellow weird fiction author RH Barlow, but he was, at this time, too young, at 18 years old, to take on such a role as the law stood at the time.

Nonetheless, Derleth took on the job of pushing Lovecraft’s work under the noses of mainstream publishers but didn’t make much progress. So, together with another writer, Donald Wandrei, he founded his own publishing firm, Arkham House. They published collections of stories from many contemporary authors of weird fiction, including Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long, but Derleth is best known today for putting Lovecraft’s work into general circulation. As Joshi points out, this was no mean feat, and Derleth sometimes had to work from incomplete and handwritten manuscripts. He wasn’t altogether successful in this, and Joshi has spent quite a bit of time publishing corrected manuscripts that fix the omissions and errors that crept into the Derleth editions. But whatever their flaws, Derleth did at least succeed in making Lovecraft available to a far wider readership than had ever been the case when Lovecraft was alive.

Having said that, a new generation of critics did not generally favor Lovecraft. Some of the opprobrium is perhaps well reasoned. Francis Laney had been a fan at one point but, by 1948, had tired of Lovecraft’s unrealistic settings and his ‘consistent telegraphing of the punch line’. On the other hand, Fritz Leiber remained impressed by Lovecraft’s legacy, describing him as a ‘literary Copernicus’ who shifted supernatural fiction away from ghost stories outwards into space. Leiber was also one of the first to criticize Derleth’s development of Lovecraft’s fiction into a straightforward good-versus-evil mash-up.

Joshi has never been particularly complimentary about Derleth, and it’s telling that the chapter that covers the revival of Lovecraftian scholarship begins with the death of Derleth in 1971. Quickly dismissing Derleth’s contributions to a final anthology of Mythos fiction as ‘distressingly amateurish’, Joshi makes the case that the horror fiction craze of the 1960s and 1970s prompted a renewed interest in Lovecraft by young readers. Articles started to be circulated in magazines, while scholars began to take Lovecraft seriously. Dirk Mosig was a professor of psychology who, Joshi argues, becomes the pivotal figure here. Whereas much that had been published about Lovecraft until Mosig was written by fans, Mosig examined Lovecraft’s work from the perspective of an academic. He also prompted other scholars to take Lovecraft seriously.

With Lovecraft becoming ever more mainstream, the mid-70s saw a flurry of books, including biographies. One of these, ‘Lovecraft: A Biography’ by L Sprague De Camp, is worth mentioning because it’s here, for the first time, that Joshi decides to tackle the other side of Lovecraft’s reputation: his racism. De Camp’s biography of Lovecraft is not, Joshi argues, objective. Where De Camp sees Lovecraft’s racism as problematic, Joshi seems to argue that De Camp fails to place that racism in the context of American history. I’m not sure I completely accept that.

The rest of the book is, perforce, a brisk survey of the explosion of scholarly work and popular interest in Lovecraft. By the time you get to the 1980s, the popularity of the ‘Call of Cthulhu’ roleplaying game and the success of Stuart Gordon’s film adaptation of ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ brought Lovecraft firmly into mainstream popular culture. But there were also more scholarly books brought to the mass market that looked at Lovecraft from a variety of different perspectives. Joshi mentions all the significant ones, including his own contributions, and, while he doesn’t hold back on his thoughts on these, for the lay reader, being pointed in the direction of the best anthologies or critical essays is something to be welcomed.

All in all, an excellent read. If the last quarter feels a bit more superficial than the rest, that was probably unavoidable given the scope of what Joshi is trying to do here. But taken in its entirety, he does a cracking job of explaining how, and not just why, Lovecraft is so influential and widely discussed today given his almost complete failure as a writer in his own time.

Neale Monks

February 2024

(pub: Hippocampus Press, 2023. 340 page paperback. Price: $25.00 (US). ISBN: 978-1-61498-345-3

check out website: www.hippocampuspress.com/h.-p.-lovecraft/about-hp-lovecraft/the-recognition-of-h.-p.-lovecraft-by-s.-t.-joshi