Infinitely abysmal.(Tales)(Book Review)

Infinitely abysmal

H. P. Lovecraft Tales. Library of America, 850 pages, $35

The appearance of a volume of Tales by the pulp fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) in the Library of America has been met with unpredictable reactions, especially in conservative journals. Michael Dirda, the editor of The Washington Post Book World, enthused about it in The Weekly Standard of March 7, leading with the declaration, "No flail understanding of modern literature is possible without taking [Lovecraft] into account."

John J. Miller, the otherwise perspicacious contributor to National Review, wrote in The Wall Street Journal of March 15, describing Lovecraft's stories as "strangely engrossing ... contain[ing] many elements that will be familiar to fans of The Da Vinci Code." Should we expect that some day Dan Brown's absurd, offensive pastiche of Catholic theology and history will also find a place in the Library of America--which was conceived as an American equivalent of the French Pleiade, and includes works of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, as well as our outstanding literary stylists?

Regrettably, it was left to Laura Miller, of Salon.com, to point out the ultimate scandal of Lovecraft's choice for inclusion in the distinguished series. Miss Miller noted that Edmund Wilson, who should need no introduction, branded Lovecraft a "hack" guilty of "bad taste and bad art"--but also that no work of Wilson, one of our most important authors, is to be found on the Library of America's roster.

Who was Howard Phillips Lovecraft? An underemployed recluse who lived in Providence, Rhode Island, he invented an alternative cosmology inhabited by gigantic, malign, and incomprehensible creatures with crudely invented names like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, which are said to have preceded life as we know it in tenancy on earth. In addition, the exemplars of the "Cthulhu Mythos" are responsible for architectural and other technological artifacts beyond the understanding of any human being, and have the bad habit of interfering with human life in mysterious but frightening ways.

Subtle Lovecraft was not; he never used one word when a score suggested themselves to him. His stories always evince overwriting of a kind that disappeared with the pulp genre in which it flourished A victim of Lovecraftian monstrosity is described, in his story "The Lurking Fear" as "lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness."