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

And yet, Lovecraft was by no means in the modernist camp. Several intensely interesting documents of this period bear this out with much emphasis. It is certainly odd that the two great landmarks of modernism—Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land— appeared in the same year, 1922; but their fortuitously joint appearance compelled Lovecraft to address them in some fashion or other. He read The Waste Land in its first American appearance, in the Dial for November 1922 (it had appeared in England in Eliot’s magazine, the Criterion, for October). Shortly thereafter, he wrote one or both of his responses to the poem. The first is an editorial in the March 1923

Conservative headed ‘Rudis Indigestaque Moles’ (taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘A rough and unfinished mass’). Lovecraft asserts: ‘The old heroics, pieties, and sentimentalities are dead amongst the sophisticated; and even some of our appreciations of natural beauty are threatened.’ The Waste Land is one result of this state of confusion and turbulence:

We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold th[e] public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as ‘a poem of profound significance,’ to quote its sponsors.

This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence of Lovecraft’s supposed insensitivy to modernism and of his innate aesthetic conservatism; but it is difficult to see what other reaction he could have made at this stage of his development. It should also be pointed out that many other reviewers—not merely stodgy Victorians like J. C. Squire but level-headed modernists like Conrad Aiken—also found the poem incomprehensible or at least ambiguous and incoherent, although some did not think it a bad poem on that account. As for Lovecraft, he may by this time have given up his literal adherence to eighteenth-century forms—or, at least, his requirement that all other poets do so—but the outward form of The Waste Land with its free verse and its seemingly random progression so offended him that he saw in the poem an actual instance of the aesthetic fragmentation of modern civilization that other reviewers felt it to be expressing.

I think too much has been made of the supposed similarities in philosophy and temperament of Eliot and Lovecraft: to be sure, they may both have been classicists (of a sort) and believed in continuity of culture; but Lovecraft rightly scorned Eliot’s later royalism as a mere ostrich-act and heaped even more abuse on Eliot’s belief in religion as a necessary foundation or bulwark of civilization.

But Lovecraft’s other response to The Waste Land—the exquisite parody ‘Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance’—merits greater attention; for this is his best satirical poem. One wishes, therefore, that there was even the least bit of evidence as to when this poem was written and when it appeared in ‘the newspaper’, as Lovecraft casually notes a decade later.20 This is the only occasion, so far as is known, that Lovecraft even mentions his poem; searches have been made in several of the Providence papers of the period with no results.

What Lovecraft very simply seeks to do in this work is to carry to a reductio ad absurdum his own claim in the Conservative editorial that The Waste Land is a ‘practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general’. In many parts of this quite lengthy poem (135 lines) he has quite faithfully parodied the insularity of modern poetry—its ability to be understood only by a small coterie of readers who are aware of intimate facts about the poet. The ending can only be quoted:

Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.


And cursed be he that moves my bones.


Good night, good night, the stars are bright I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight


Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.


Nobody home


In the shantih.


That delightful final pun ‘confirms the jerrybuilt quality of modern life and art’, as Barton L. St Armand and John H. Stanley remark; and as for the poem as a whole, its ‘scraps of twentieth-century conversations, news bulletins, public announcements, newspaper headlines, and advertising jingles reflect the mundane tawdriness of the present as contrasted to the epic grandeur of the past’.21

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