Review: The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft

ROLAND, Paul, The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft, Plexus Publishing Ltd., London, 2014.

Octavo; paperback; 238pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece, illustrations likewise and 16pp. of black-and-white plates. Mild wear; a heavy bump to the text block lower corner. Very good.

I’ve read quite a few biographies of HPL over the years, of varying capability, and this is the first time I've read one that drops – absolutely drops – the fan-boy breathlessness and approaches the job with a serious attitude and no desire to discover the shoggoths lurking in the corners of the man’s existence. If you have anyone out there in your life pestering you for some kind of idea about who HPL was, give them a copy of this book – it’s “just the facts, ma’am”.

Roland is a clear-eyed reviewer of both Lovecraft’s fiction and his life and he takes a decidedly interesting tack in cruising through the muddy waters of the latter. Many other writers try to find moments of crisis which underscore HPL’s shifts and relocations – they want the dark times and phobias, the cris de couers, the supernatural influence; Houllebecq wants a detached philosophy of life coldly adopted at an early age despite the cost; Tyson wants the pernicious influence of an extra-dimensional Necronomicon working its malign will across the Veil. Roland, on the other hand, stares at the raw facts and ties the strange quirks of Lovecraft’s life together with his correspondence and his literary output.

Of course, he’s not the only biographer to wade through HPL’s enormous correspondence; what makes him unusual though, is that he uses Lovecraft’s literary output as a timeline for examining his life, identifying the substance and quality of each story, or novella, and correlating it with the man’s own words, and those of his correspondents at the time. In this way he gains insights beyond what HPL is saying to others, and what is actually going on inside his head: for instance, what he writes to, say, Sonia Greene at one point, can be quite different to what he writes to his Aunt Lillian, or Samuel Loveman, and this raises flags as to which account is truth and which is obfuscation. Roland then consults the historical record – what Lovecraft actually did – and also the writing he created at the time to solve the mystery.

For instance, he notes that during the writing of the instalment piece “Herbert West: Re-animator” for the small magazine “Home Brew”, both Greene and Loveman berated him for wasting time on a low-circulation rag when he might be serving-up something of better quality for a more widespread audience. In his letters to them both, he remarks that he is contractually-obliged to finishing the work, demeaning and arduous as it is, and that there’s nothing to be done until it’s over. When examining the story itself, Roland finds that it’s written with a definite ghoulish glee, lovingly-crafted and worked, belying any notion of it being an onerous task. It’s obvious therefore that HPL was taking distinct pleasure in the piece, and was simply attempting to deflect his friends while indulging in the guilty pleasure of penning it.

Conversely, while later battling the same criticism from his friends, he laboured while writing “The Lurking Fear”, which was written under the same contractual terms. Comparing the whingeing tone of his letters to his friends and the comparatively lacklustre efforts of this writing, Roland concludes that the shine had long come off working for “Home Brew” and that HPL was looking to other avenues for stimulation.

Speaking of Sonia Greene, Roland also compares the various records from which he is working to her account of her life with Lovecraft, as printed in the “Providence Sunday Journal” on August 22^nd 1948. This material is entirely re-printed as an Appendix to Roland’s work and makes interesting reading after the analysis provided by Roland. Her observations are straightforward and lack the fawning worship of other narrators, coming as they do from one who sought to carve out a married life with the man, a person with whom she was very much in love. Her observations are clear-eyed and insightful, especially when she comments upon his racism and his self-image as a relic of a past generation.

Fans of Lovecraft – especially the breathless kind – will find that Roland seems to diminish their hero somewhat, and this is true to an extent. However, this is exactly the kind of treatment that such a sacred cow deserves. While not denying the power of his writing, Roland unveils Lovecraft as a pompous stuffed shirt, unwilling to engage with society on its own terms, but craving the attention and praise of his peers (although not Sonia, a writer of some merit herself, whom he referred-to amongst his cronies as the “ball-and-chain”). Roland also dissects HPL’s writing in a cruelly-efficient fashion, calling him out for overblown language and triteness of material. On balance he gives generous praise but it’s measured and fair. I should say “Spoiler Alert” too, for anyone about to embark on this biography – if you haven’t read all of Lovecraft previously, all the plots of his major and minor works are outlined as part of the forensic process.

If there’s one area which deserves criticism in this work, it’s Roland’s musing upon whether or not Lovecraft suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome. Nowadays it seems fashionable to drag figures from history and examine them for a potential spot on the Asperger’s spectrum, but seriously, it’s a lame and pointless exercise. There’s plenty of material out there to back the view that Asperger’s, ADD and ADHD are products of a modern age and that trying to fathom whether or not, say, George Washington might’ve needed a handful of Ritalin to get by, is about as useful as trying to work out if Donald Trump might be susceptible to St. Anthony’s Fire, or St. Vitus’ Dance (would that it were so!). The fact that Roland points out that HPL’s mother was a long-term fan of lead-based cosmetics and that complications of syphilis might have led to his father’s death seem worthy of follow-up, but he allows them to fall by the wayside in favour of the hot-button topic of Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s about as useful as Mormons converting the long-term dead to their faith; please stop it now.

All-in-all, that last caveat aside, this is a solid work on the life of Lovecraft, one that regards his own written word with a jaundiced eye and seeks out other (usually overlooked) sources for corroboration. Examining his written productions for clues as to his state of mind at the time of writing is an inspired take on the standard process, allowing both the work and its author to undergo critical scrutiny. If you’re looking for a solid biography for the creator of Cthulhu and Co., without the occult significance of New Age ritualists, the nihilism of career existentialists, or the exultations of the Post-humanists, then this is your best, meat-and-potatoes alternative.

Four Tentacled Horrors from me.