H.P. LovecraftAgainst the world, against life
1
Preface
When I began writing this essay (around the end of 1988), I found myself in the same situationas many thousands of other readers. Having discovered the stories of Lovecraft at the age of seven, I immediately immersed myself in every one of his works available in French[1]. Later,with a declining interest, I explored those who continued the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as theauthors to whom Lovecraft felt close (Dunsany, Robert Howard, Clark Ashton Smith). From timeto time, often enough, I returned to the ‘major works’ of Lovecraft; they continued to exercise astrange attraction over me, contradictory to all the rest of my taste in literature; I knew absolutelynothing about his life.On reflection, it seems to me that I wrote this book like a sort of first novel. A novel with onlyone character (H.P.Lovecraft himself); a novel with the constraint that all the facts related, all thetexts cited had to be accurate; but, all the same, a type of novel. The first thing that surprised mein discovering Lovecraft was his absolute materialism; unlike many of his admirers andcommentators, he never considered his myths, his theogonies, his ‘ancient races’ as anythingother than pure imaginary creations. The other source of astonishment was his obsessionalracism; never, in reading his descriptions of nightmarish creatures, had I supposed that they couldhave had their source in
real
human beings. The analysis of racism in literature has been focusedfor half a century on Céline; the case of Lovecraft is actually more interesting and more typical.With him the intellectual constructions, the analyses of decadence play only a secondary role. Awriter of the fantastic (and one of the greatest), he pursued racism brutally to its most profoundsource:
fear
. His own life, in this regard, makes a valuable example. A provincial gentlemanconvinced of the superiority of his anglo-saxon origins, he never had anything more than apassing contempt for other races. His time in the rougher areas of New York was to changeeverything. These strange creatures became
rivals
, neighbours, enemies who were probably hissuperiors in terms of brute-force. Thus, in a progressive delirium of masochism and of terror,came the demand that they must be destroyed.The transformation, then, is complete. Few authors, including the greats of imaginativeliterature, have made
so little
concession to reality. For my part, I obviously don’t followLovecraft in his hatred of every form of realism, in his heartfelt rejection of every subjecttouching on money or sex; but I did perhaps, especially in later years, draw some profit fromthose lines where I read of it having “destroyed the structure of the traditional narrative” throughthe systematic use of scientific terms and concepts. His originality, in this sense, appears greaterthan ever. I wrote at the time that there was something “not very literary” about Lovecraft. Sincethen I’ve had a bizarre confirmation of this. In the course of book-signings, from time to time,young people come to ask me to sign the book. They have discovered Lovecraft through theintermediary of role-playing games or CD-Roms. They haven’t read him, and haven’t anyintention to do so. However, curiously, they long – regardless of the texts – to know more aboutthis individual, and the way in which he constructed his world.This extraordinary power of the creator of a universe, this visionary force probably had toomuch impact on me at the time, and prevented me – and this is my only regret – from givingsufficient homage to Lovecraft’s style. His writing, in fact, doesn’t consist uniquely of hypertrophy and delirium; there is also with him a delicacy, a luminous profundity that isextremely rare. This is the case in particular with
The Whisperer in Darkness
[2], a short story thatI don’t mention in my essay, within which we find paragraphs like the following :
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