The spook of Providence H.P. Lovecraft’s wretched excess BY RICHARD C. WALLS
	H.P. Lovecraft: Tales Library of America, 856 pages, $35. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life By Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Dorna Khazeni. Believer Books/McSweeney’s, 248 pages, $18.

The addition of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) to the Library of America’s prestigious list of honored authors begs the question whether he really is that good or whether the L of A is just running out of Great American Writers. It’s not a question of snobbery toward writers of pulp origin who maintained their fealty to a déclassé genre — Dashiell Hammett’s induction in 1999 caused no heads to turn — but rather Lovecraft’s reputation as wonderfully eccentric in his prose and other than that just a terrible, terrible writer. He’s rarely gotten any respect outside the realm of hardcore fandom (though Joyce Carol Oates has been kind to him recently and Michel Houellebecq loves him to death), and for some, this serious-looking volume will be a vindication. But he’ll always be odd man out in the canon — it’s likely, for example, that he’s the only writer on the Library of America roster to have had a work made into a movie starring Sandra Dee, 1970’s The Dunwich Horror.

Lovecraft’s stylistic sins are numerous. There’s the constant reiteration that what he’s trying to describe is undescribable. The excessive and often arcane verbosity with its unintentionally comic pomposity, like an adolescent’s idea of sophistication. The protracted descriptions that postpone the obvious and give the impression that he’s being paid by the word. The characters who are never more than stick figures. And the scant use of dialogue, which give many of his stories the pace, texture, and numbing effect of a scholarly lecture on an egregiously obscure topic. When I first read him, at age 12, I thought he was brilliant.

Lovecraft, who spent most of his life in Providence, wrote mainly for the pulp magazine Weird Tales; he was always struggling, and though he found a small cult of admirers during his lifetime, he never came anywhere close to the mainstream. That he wrote what he felt compelled to write rather than what might have had more commercial potential is admirable in a romantic sort of way but doesn’t make the stories any easier to slog through. And apart from the writing, there’s his racism. He was a prodigy in this area; the Library of America’s biographical time line includes a 1905 work titled "De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature over Northern Ignorance," "a poem decrying abolition, based on white supremacist writings of William Benjamin Smith." And then there’s this from his first professionally published story, "Herbert West — Reanimator," where he describes a black man killed in an illegal boxing match: "He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life — but the world holds many ugly things."

Consisting of five short vignettes linked together (it was written for serialization), "Reanimator" is actually one of Lovecraft’s more effective stories, gruesome and atmospheric. (It’s the source of a 1985 cult-hit horror movie and a couple of sequels.) The early "The Outsider," with its relative brevity and Escher-like geography, is another success. It’s when he hits his stride and finds his cosmic theme that he becomes leaden. In these stories, a race of Elders who live in a sort of timeless parallel universe are occasionally aroused by snooping humans, and their grandiose awfulness, their sheer undescribable hideousness, leads to the snooper’s death or at least drives him or her into an agonizing insanity. As Houellebecq puts it in Against the World, Against Life, in these stories " . . . something is hiding beneath the surface of reality that at times allows itself to be perceived. Something truly vile." This something is often a creature called Cthulhu, which Edmund Wilson described, in a dismissive essay on Lovecraft, as a "whistling octopus." That’s a little harsh — Cthulhu, as any fan will tell you, is so much more — but it points to the generally anticlimactic ending of so many of Lovecraft’s tales. More often than not, the guy was all wind-up and no pitch.

French novelist Houellebecq makes a case for Lovecraft in his longish essay, which was first published in France in 1991 and will be reissued by Believer Books on May 1 fleshed out by two Lovecraft stories — "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness" — and an introduction by Stephen King. Houellebecq’s novels are aggressively gloomy, especially in regard to sex (which doesn’t exist in Lovecraft’s world), and are peopled by unhappy, chronic masturbators and hard-working orgiasts. But they can also be darkly funny and insightful, so that after a while you start to skim over the sex scenes in order to get to the good parts. In the Lovecraft essay, he spells out his own world view: "The world stinks. The stench of cadavers and of fish blends together. A sense of failure, a hideous degeneration. The world stinks. There are no ghosts under the tumescent moon; there are only bloated cadavers, swollen and black, about to explode in pestilential vomiting," etc.

Houellebecq sees Lovecraft as a kindred misanthropist. "Those who love life do not read," he writes. "Nor do they go to movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world. As for Lovecraft, he was more than a little fed up." An acute polemicist, Houellebecq knows that the best way to argue for Lovecraft is to make a virtue of his shortcomings. "HPL’s writings have but one aim," he contends, "to bring the reader to a state of fascination. The only human sentiments he is interested in are wonderment and fear. He constructs his universe upon these and these alone. It is clearly a limitation, but a conscious, deliberate one. And authentic creativity cannot exist without a certain degree of self-imposed blindness."

Indeed, it’s what one finds grandly silly in Lovecraft that makes him so great. After quoting an extended passage of backwoods dialect from "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (sample: "Haow abaout the night I took my pa’s ship’s glass up to the cupalo an’ seed the reef a-bristlin’ thick with shapes that dove off quick soon’s the moon riz?"), Houellebecq writes, "Such emphatically inflated passages evidently present a stumbling block to erudite readers; but it is imperative to point out that it is these very passages that true fans prefer. . . . where he sets aside all stylistic restraint, where adjectives and adverbs pile upon one another to the point of exasperation. . . . "

And so Houellebecq puts himself on the side of authenticity and against the limited perceptions of erudition. Smart move, but still not very convincing. He does better when he moves away from the texts and sums up Lovecraft’s character, which he says is " . . . fascinating in part because his values were so entirely opposite to ours. He was fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, glorified puritanical inhibitions and evidently found all ‘direct erotic manifestations’ repulsive. Resolutely anti-commercial, he despised money, considered democracy to be an idiocy and progress to be an illusion. The word ‘freedom,’ so cherished by Americans, prompted only a sad, derisive guffaw. Throughout his life, he maintained a typically aristocratic, scornful attitude toward humanity in general coupled with extreme kindness to individuals in particular."

My own summary: is Lovecraft entertaining? Sometimes. Is his writing terrible? By most standards. Are his stories frightening? I would say no.