A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

After September Lovecraft lapsed again into literary quiescence. Then, in mid-November, he announces that ‘W. Paul Cook wants an article from me on the element of terror & weirdness in literature’²⁶ for his new magazine, the Recluse

. He goes on to say that ‘I shall take my time about preparing it’, which was true enough: it would be close to a year and a half before he put the finishing touches on what would become ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.

Lovecraft began the actual writing of the article in late December; by early January he had already written the first four chapters and was reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights preparatory to writing about it at the end of Chapter V; by March he had written Chapter VII, on Poe; and by the middle of April he had gotten ‘half through Arthur Machen’ (Chapter X).²⁷

It is not entirely clear from his initial mention that Cook actually wished an historical monograph—an essay ‘on the element of terror & weirdness’ could just as well have been theoretical or thematic— but Lovecraft clearly interpreted it this way.

Lovecraft had, of course, read much of the significant weird literature up to his time, but he was still making discoveries. Two of the writers whom he would rank very highly were encountered only at about this time. He had first read Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) as early as 1920, at the recommendation of James F. Morton, but did not care for him at all at this time. Then, in late September 1924, he read The Listener and Other Stories (1907), containing ‘The Willows’, ‘perhaps the most devastating piece of supernaturally hideous suggestion which I have beheld in a decade’.²⁸

In later years Lovecraft would unhesitatingly (and, I think, correctly) deem ‘The Willows’ the single greatest weird story ever written, followed by Machen’s ‘The White People’.

As with Machen and Dunsany, Blackwood is an author Lovecraft should have discovered earlier than he did. His first book, The Empty House and Other Stories (1906), is admittedly slight, although with a few notable items. John Silence—Physician Extraordinary

(1908) became a bestseller, allowing Blackwood to spend the years 1908–14 in Switzerland, where he did most of his best work. Incredible Adventures (1914)—the very volume toward which Lovecraft was so lukewarm in 1920—is one of the great weird collections of all time.

Blackwood was frankly a mystic. In his autobiography, Episodes Before Thirty (1923), he admits to relieving the heavy and conventional religiosity of his household by an absorption of Buddhist philosophy, and he ultimately developed a remarkably vital and intensely felt pantheism that emerges most clearly in his novel The Centaur (1911), the central work in his corpus and the equivalent of a spiritual autobiography. In a sense Blackwood sought the same sort of return to the natural world as Dunsany. But because he was, unlike Dunsany, a mystic, he would see in the return to Nature a shedding of the moral and spiritual blinders which in his view modern urban civilization places upon us; hence his ultimate goal is an expansion of consciousness that opens up to our perception the boundless universe with its throbbing presences. Several of his novels deal explicitly with reincarnation, in such a way as to suggest that Blackwood himself clearly believed in it. Philosophically, therefore, Blackwood and Lovecraft were poles apart; but the latter never let that bother him, and there is much in Blackwood to relish even if one does not subscribe to his world view.