An "Alternative Biography" of the Providence Scribe

by S. T. Joshi

01/17/2005

Cannon, Peter. The Lovecraft Chronicles. Ill. Jason C. Eckhardt. Poplar Bluffs, MO: Mythos Books, 2004. 179 p.

It is a testament to H. P. Lovecraft's enduring and ever-growing celebrity that he is not merely the subject of innumerable critical and biographical studies but that his own life has become the stuff of legend. As a cultural icon, the gaunt, prognathous-jawed dreamer from Providence has served as the focus of any number of tales and novels, from the provocative (Richard A. Lupoff's Lovecraft's Book, 1985) to the inconceivably awful (David Barbour and Richard Raleigh's Shadows Bend, 2000). To some degree, the portrayal of Lovecraft in these variegated works can at times descend to a caricature: Lovecraft the "eccentric recluse," the unworldly bookworm, the sexless misfit--ll of which have some elements of truth, but which are so engulfed in misleading falsehoods that they end up being parodies of the real Lovecraft. It takes the analytical talents of the critic and scholar conjoined with the creative talents of the novelist for any such portrayal to ring true, and such a fusion of skills, rare enough in the mainstream literary community, is particularly scarce in the realm of weird fiction. Thankfully for us, however, there is Peter Cannon.

Cannon has established his bona fides as a scholar with H. P. Lovecraft (1989), a volume in Twayne's United States Authors series, and the culmination of nearly two decades of his work on the Providence scribe. With the exception of Donald R. Burleson, he is the only Lovecraft scholar to excel in the writing of fiction, and Burleson has not sought to feature Lovecraft as a character in his various novels and tales. Cannon, meanwhile, has to his credit the pungent if light-hearted novella Pulptime (1984), in which Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes are put on stage, along with the gorgeous Lovecraft/Wodehouse parodies in Scream for Jeeves (1994). With The Lovecraft Chronicles, he has set a high, perhaps unassailable mark in the curious subgenre of "Lovecraft-as-a-character-in-fiction." This is a mark that only he himself may be able to eclipse in future.

The Lovecraft Chronicles is not merely a fictionalised biography. It is what I believe is termed "alternate history." It is that what-if brand of science fantasy that conjectures the state of the world if, say, Hitler had won World War II, or the telephone had never been invented, or George W. Bush had not stolen the election of 2000. In this case, Cannon wonders, what if, in 1933, the prestigious New York firm of Alfred A. Knopf had actually accepted, instead of rejecting, a collection of tales by Lovecraft? Would Lovecraft's life have changed? Would subsequent history--literary, political, social--have changed? Cannon provides an emphatic yes to the first query, but is a bit more reserved as to the second. Nevertheless, his conclusion that Lovecraft would have gone far beyond his forty-six and a half years and lived to a normal life span of seventy years, dying only in 1960, is unexceptionable.

But the charm of The Lovecraft Chronicles is in seeing exactly how Lovecraft's life and career change, generally, for the better, with that Knopf acceptance. The book is structured in three parts, each narrated by a different person. Each of these persons--the vivacious teenager Clarissa Stone, the somewhat older Englishwoman Leonora Lathbury, and the first-year Brown University graduate student Bobby Pratt--happens to be Lovecraft's secretary, a position he can now afford given his new-found literary success. The novel, I will admit, takes a little while gathering steam, but with the Knopf deal things pick up quickly. One of the stories in the book, "Herbert WestReanimator," becomes a movie from the studio of Hal Roach; and, still more surprisingly, when Lovecraft goes to Hollywood to be a possible screenwriter, his stiff and vaguely corpselike features make him the perfect candidate for a bit part as a reanimated corpse! So begins Lovecraft's brief career as a Hollywood actor.

It is all good fun, but the experienced Lovecraftian will derive the greatest pleasure in seeing exactly what liberties Cannon does and does not take with the historical record. Consider this passage:

            During this period [the fall of 1933] H. P. produced two new stories, one a recasting in prose of some of his "Fungi from Yuggoth" sonnets, the other an elaboration of a dream about an evil clergyman in a garret full of forbidden books. . . . H. P. did not send these new tales on the rounds of his literary circle, but instead submitted them, along with The Thing on the Doorstep, directly to the editor of Weird Tales. [Farnsworth] Wright . . . snapped up these three new tales immediately.

There is such an exquisite mixture of fact and fiction here that untangling them is nearly impossible. The first sentence is strictly factual, although Cannon deliberately obscures the fact that that rewriting of the Fungi sonnets ("The Book") is a fragment, not a completed story. Moreover, the second story, "The Evil Clergyman," was merely an account of a dream included in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, and it was Dwyer who submitted the "story" to Weird Tales after Lovecraft's death. Finally, "The Thing on the Doorstep," although written in August 1933, was not submitted to Weird Tales until the fall of 1936. Cannon, I repeat, is fully aware of all these facts, and his manipulation of them is in strict accord with his contention that Lovecraft's career would have flowered rather than petered out as the 1930s advanced.

The second part of the book, set mostly in 1936, is to my mind the most successful. Lovecraft, with his new-found success (he is by no means a best-selling writer, but now has sufficient means for his own comfort), fulfills a lifelong dream by traveling to England, where surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly, given his later political views), he becomes friends with George Orwell and actually participates briefly if somewhat ignominiously in the Spanish Civil War against Franco. But the real heart of this section is his halting romance with Leonora Lathbury. In part one Lovecraft had managed to dodge the young Clarissa's schoolgirl crush on him, but he is not so successful with the more mature Leonora. If readers think it implausible for Lovecraft to be the protagonist of a love story, they should read how Cannon handles this segment of the novel. It is delicate, true to character, and entirely without sentimentality. There is a wistful poignancy throughout this section: not only is it heart-warming to see Lovecraft finally attain his goal of reaching Mother England, socializing jovially with Arthur Machen among others, but in his involvement with Leonora he seems to be ripening emotionally just as his work is ripening intellectually. How his impending marriage to Leonora is shattered at the last moment is too good to reveal here.

The third section of the book is the skimpiest both in length and in substance. One gets the suspicion that Cannon is getting a bit tired. The narrative skips abruptly to 1960, at which point the ageing Lovecraft has managed to repurchase his birthplace, 454 Angell Street in Providence and decorate it in the manner he remembered as a boy. He has written almost no fiction since the 1940s, when Edmund Wilson harshly reviewed several of his books in the New Yorker, but additional film adaptations and the generosity of August Derleth's Arkham House allow him continued comfort, if not luxury. Frank Long and his actual wife, the late lamented Lyda, make a rather buffoonish appearance. Without giving away the ending, I will simply remark that the conclusion left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

My keenest regret is that The Lovecraft Chronicles was not twice or three times as long as it is. Cannon's literary gifts are of such a high order, his skill at character depiction, an unfailing ability to keep the narrative moving, a penchant both for dry humor and for pathos, that we would like to see him exercise them to their fullest extent. Instead of hastily and sketchily summarizing the events of the twenty-four years between parts two and three, why not elaborate them in detail? Cannon's portrayal of Lovecraft--nearly all his utterances are cleverly extracted or adapted from statements in his letters--rings so true that we would like to see him put Lovecraft on stage at other key moments in history. What, for example, would Lovecraft have made of World War II, and in particular the appalling revelations of the Holocaust, which definitively made the abstract racism of his earlier years morally indefensible? How would Lovecraft have adapted to the outwardly staid but inwardly seething 1950s? What would he have had to say of (or to) James Dean, Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley? Or is it possible that Cannon is saving all these matters for a sequel?

But whatever one may think of the ending, The Lovecraft Chronicles is a book to enchant and captivate everyone who has the least interest in the dreamer from Providence. How many of us have wished that he had not been so poor, not eaten so badly, and not been so discouraged at the rejection of his best work? By all rights, Lovecraft should have lived to 1960 or even 1970, and enjoyed at least a modicum of the fame that came to him only after death. Kenneth W. Faig once wrote: "we would surely all wish for him a better share of life were he to be given a second round; he surely never lacked the ability to do hard, careful work and perhaps only his disinclination toward self-promotion denied him greater material success." The Lovecraft Chronicles gives Lovecraft that second round, and shows that, with only a minimal augmentation of self-promotion, he might indeed have had the material success that would have made such a difference in his life. It is that air of "what if," that sense that Lovecraft was so close, and yet so far, from reaching the goals he had set for himself as man and writer, that makes The Lovecraft Chronicles the poignant human document that it is.