Re: Comparing Smith to Lovecraft and Howard.
Posted by:
Kipling (IP Logged)
Date: 26 August, 2023 10:59AM
Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Hmmm... about six hours later no response, so
> maybe I can prod this discussion a little.
>
> My sense with Howard is that he is actually a
> pretty typical modern person. He does not
> experience himself as receiving attention or value
> from any inscrutable agency. Heredity is
> extremely important to him, but it is not
> something finally mystical; it is just the
> accumulated experience of his ancestors
> transmitted to him down through the ages and
> giving him certain potentials, proclivities,
> liabilities (melancholy) and assets. The gun in
> his desk drawer (or wherever he kept it)
> symbolizes his unquestioned right to do with his
> own life as he pleases.
>
> On heredity -- I think heredity was important to
> Lovecraft too, but more his sense of a cultural
> inheritance belonging to his Anglo-Saxon forbears.
> I don't think "blood" was nearly as important to
> Lovecraft as to Howard. But whether "cultural
> inheritance" or "blood," no reference to mystical
> entities was needed to account for one's identity,
> or any thing that happens. They were buffered
> against such experience like the rest of us who
> have had modern educations, etc.
>
> Agreed?
>
> What about Smith?
I agree with your perspective on Howard, Dale. If there is any one thing that characterizes the tone of his letters, from the few I've seen, it is what you've described -- fierce independence. All 3 of these writers needed that to cope with the economic depression. This distinguishes them from Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber, who some would say surpassed them, certainly. Leiber struggled the loss of his spouse, and seems to have identified with Howard more than with the other two. I wonder if of all these writers the least prolific of them all, Lovecraft, will over time be more read for his letters than his fiction. About all of them have been published in durable scholarly editions, and it seems to me that their lasting influence may outlive that of his tales. I'm not taking anything away from his fiction. But I was early on exposed to the letters in my college library. If my guess is correct, HPL will be remembered as Samuel Johnson is-- the idiosyncratic scholar of a golden age of sorts in the development of the fantasy genres. Anecdotally, one of his letters to Elizabeth Toldridge, who challenged his materiallistic views a bit, revealed that I might be distantly related to Lovecraft's maternal line by marriage, through my own maternal Dutch grandmother. Lovecraft was relating some of his genealogical research to Ms. Toldridge about John Carter, who ran a printing establishment in Providence called Shakespeare's Head. One of his daughters married a guy named Walter Raleigh Danforth, (another name fictionally employed by HPL) and Danforth was the cousin of the father of Lovecraft's eldest aunt's husband. John Carter was also the brother-in-law of a Captain John Updike, who owned the house right next to Carter's printing business. HPL sketched the two houses (Updike's had been torn down), noting that the name Updike is "of remote Dutch derivation-- Op Dyck" (Selected Letters Ii, p. 354). So this made me curious since my grandma's maiden name was Updike, and I knew she had registered as a Daughter of the American Revolution. One of her six children, my Uncle Edward Deeds, mentioned his having done some research on the Updikes and had a photograph of an Updike family reunion. These are the kinds of things that abound in Lovecraft's letters, displaying his knowledge of New England history. In my graduate program I had a seminar on New England Regionalism in which I read two of Edith Wharton's novels, but Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman appealed more to my Lovecraftian side.
jkh