Correspondence; Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract

135 he package never properly arrived.Instead,there was a brown note stuck to my front door saying that it couldn’t be delivered. When I recovered it from the post office, the box was shipwrecked, cardboard burst and buckled. Inside, some of the books had turned to pulp; others had been soaked and slowly dried, their pages curled arthritically. Tucked among them was a green folder, the papers within damp but legible. I’d mailed the box to my home in Brookline, Massachusetts, from my parents’ house in the suburbs of Hull, the industrial city in East Yorkshire where I grew up. Twenty years earlier, I had come to the U.S. for graduate school, met my future wife, and stayed. These days, I teach philosophy at MIT. The house my essay Correspondence Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft Kieran Setiya T 136 | Kieran Setiya parents live in now is not my childhood home. But there is a room in it that they call mine, where the relics of my life sink beneath the sediment of theirs. On my last visit, I had mined the box’s contents from the bottom drawer of a dresser filled with books and papers dating from my teen infatuation with the author H. P. Lovecraft, who fused horror with sci-­ fi in “The Call of Cthulhu” and other stories. For more than a year after it came, the folder lay unopened on my bedside table. I would glance at it occasionally, sidelong, as if it held some terrible secret, like a forbidden book in one of Lovecraft’s tales. Of course I knew in outline what the documents were. But when I tried to recall the passion that went into them, the dedication of weeks and months absorbed in Lovecraft’s work, I met an almost total blank. There was a void where memory should have been. For the most part, I am happy not to think about my childhood; those are years I am glad to have left behind. A lot of what I can recall I wish I could forget. What I want now to remember, I cannot : the liberating fervor of obsession. Reading Lovecraft changed my life. I was a solitary, introspective child. Through Lovecraft, I escaped into melodrama: a myth of alien beings whose capacities dwarf our own and whose intentions threaten all of life on earth. And I found a way into philosophy. Lovecraft used the trappings of pulp fiction to philosophical ends. He wrote allegories of human insignificance, of the limits of knowledge, of mechanism and a world without purpose. These were problems in which I was already, inarticulately, lost. It was as if he could read my mind. howard phillips lovecraft was born in providence, Rhode Island, August 20, 1890, in the house of his maternal grandfather. His childhood reads like the blueprint for an author of weird fiction : an attic library of old books; a father who goes insane and winds up in a lunatic asylum; a mother so protective that she monitors her one son’s every move, so doting she believes he will be “a poet of the highest order,” so critical she tells him he is physically Correspondence | 137 repulsive. The child is, of course, a prodigy, but a high school dropout; he has a nervous breakdown. A decade later, the mother goes insane and is sent to the same asylum where the father died; she dies there, too. We don’t know how much Lovecraft knew about his father. Winfield Lovecraft was a commercial traveler for a Providence silversmith . When Lovecraft was three, Winfield was diagnosed with “general paresis”—known to us now as syphilis, which in its tertiary stage can lead to madness. He would remain in Butler Hospital until his death five years later. Was all of this kept from his young son? Or did the child witness symptoms of insanity, erratic behavior , changes in personality? “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” Lovecraft would later write, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” The boy was a precocious reader, graduating around age five from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Arabian Nights to...