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

i A Dreamer and a Visionary ii

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies

General Editor DAVID SEED

Series Advisers

I. F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford

Robert Crossley Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future

David Seed (ed.) Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds) Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference

Brian W. Aldiss The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy

Carol Farley Kessler Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings

Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy I. F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come

Joseph Conrad and Ford Modox Ford (Foreword by George Hay, Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors

Qingyun Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias

John Clute Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews

Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story: Studies in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction Mike Ashley The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950, The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine, Volume I Patrick Parrinder (ed.) Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia

Warren Rochelle Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

S. T. Joshi A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in his Time

iii A Dreamer and a Visionary H. P. Lovecraft in his Time S. T. JOSHI

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2001 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street

Liverpool

L69 7ZU Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Permission to quote extracts from the works of H. P. Lovecraft has been granted by Robert C. Harrall, Administrator of the Estate of H. P. Lovecraft British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available.

ISBN 0 85323 936 3 cased ISBN 0 85323 946 0 paperback

Typeset in Meridien by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow v

The Time Machines

Contents

Preface vii

Chapter One: Unmixed English Gentry 1

Chapter Two: A Genuine Pagan (1890–97) 8

Chapter Three: Black Woods and Unfathomed Caves

(1898–1902) 25

Chapter Four: What of Unknown Africa? (1902–08) 40

Chapter Five: Barbarian and Alien (1908–14) 62

Chapter Six: A Renewed Will to Live (1914–17) 77

Chapter Seven: Feverish and Incessant Scribbling (1917–19) 107

Chapter Eight: Cynical Materialist (1919–21) 125

Chapter Nine: The High Tide of My Life (1921–22) 143

Chapter Ten: For My Own Amusement (1923–24) 163

Chapter Eleven: Ball and Chain (1924) 186

Chapter Twelve: Moriturus Te Saluto (1925–26) 211

Chapter Thirteen: Paradise Regain’d (1926) 233

Chapter Fourteen: Cosmic Outsideness (1927–28) 251

Chapter Fifteen: Fanlights and Georgian Steeples (1928–30) 270