Literary Biography and Psychological Criticism: In the Matter of H. P. Lovecraft

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 10,Number 2, Fall, 1979 Literary Biography and Psychological Criticism:In the Matter of H. P. Lovecraft Stephen A. Black L. Spraguede Camp. Lovecraft: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976. 480pp. (Abridgement of the first edition, Doubleday, 1975). FrankBelknap Long. Howard Philips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside. SaukCity, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1975. 237 + xiv pp. BartonLevi St. Armand. The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1977. 102 + viii pp. Psychologicalcriticism, we can't get away from it, any more than we can avoid psychiatric ideas when we try to understand the people we know. Psychologicalnotions pervade our language and the assumptions beneath our views ofthe world. I think that one can hardly pick up a twentieth-century book aboutliterature that is not psychological, although no great number set out to be so, and fewer still are well informed psychologically. A few literary scholars have troubled themselves to undertake disciplined psychological study, and to publish scholarly work that reflects the discipline. Yet such studyin itself cannot guarantee an account of a literary work or an author that makes one exclaim, "Now 1 understand! Now I know what I was feeling andthinking!" It is as easy to intellectualize the blood and guts out of a story or author with psychological ideas as with, say, philosophical ideas. Having abiasin favor of scholarship that gives me a sense of the humanly credible, as wellas several years of formal training in the discipline of psychoanalysis, I findmyself evaluating literary studies as follows: if psychological thinking does or should play a significant role in the understanding of the scholar's subject,then the reader may rightfully expect the scholar to behave responsiblyin his use of psychology or in his rejection of psychological explanation. These considerations arise from reading three recent books about H.P.Lovecraft (as well as fifty-odd works by Lovecraft) which I am asked to discuss. One cannot discuss Lovecraft without becoming psychological, partly because the man himself apparently struggled with psychosis most of 244 Stephen A. Black his life, partly because his psychological struggle determined the way he wrote and partly because many of his fictions have explicitly to do with insanitv' Before turning to the books about Lovecraft, I should say somethingabo~; the man himself, for, despite the protestations of his enthusiasts, Lovecraftis likely to be almost entirely unknown to academic readers of this journal. (In the past twenty-two years of my academic life I have heard his name mentioned only once and have never heard a conversation about his work. Until several months ago when the present review article was proposed, I had not read any of Lovecraft's sixty-odd "weird" stories and novelettes. Most ofmv colleagues, I learn upon enquiring, are nearly as ignorant as I was with regard to Lovecraft.) Howard Phillips Lovecraft spent nearly all his life in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was born in 1890. His father became delusionally psychotic when Lovecraft was two and died a couple of years later in a mental hospital of "general paresis" (i.e. tertiary syphilis). About the same time, Lovecraft's mother began to show psychotic symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, etc.) which persisted until she died, also in a mental hospital, in 1921. Lovecraft himself survived a lifelong struggle with severe depressions and suicidal preoccupations until he died of cancer in 1937. Except for a brief marriage inthe mid-I 920's, when his wife took over the mothering role, Lovecraft was cared for nearly all his life by his mother and two aunts. Like Emily Dickinson, Lovecraft seldom left his house during the day, he dressed eccentrically-in clothes that had been worn by his father and grandfather-and he spoke and wrote in an imitation eighteenth-century manner. He could rarely tolerate direct contact with other people, but maintained a sort of social life through an enormous correspondence-a biographer estimates that he wrote 100,000 letters! Through his correspondence he collected around himself a cult of people who, like Lovecraft, organized their life around the hobby of "Amateur Journalism." Lovecraft's fellow "Amateurs" did not always stop short...