The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation

Abstract

Lehigh University Press has published a new book in the Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe Series. Edited by Sean Moreland, The Lovecraftian Poe comprises essays on various subjects from the creative writings of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft to film adaptations of their works, and these essays shed light on the ways in which Poe influenced his successor Lovecraft, who has, in turn, shaped “how many modern readers approach, understand, and appreciate Poe” (Moreland xvii). That Lovecraft revered Poe is common knowledge. This veneration was not, however, sycophantic, as the contributors to Moreland's collection suggest. Wrestling with his forebear's influence, “Lovecraft transformed Poe's writings,” wherein he found themes and devices that he refashioned inside the workshop of his genius (Moreland xvi). Following Lovecraft's death in 1937, artists continued this process, providing fresh insights into the textual legacy of Poe, whose works live anew through the creations of others who see the author of “The Raven” through the alembic of Lovecraft's genius. For Moreland and his colleagues, this complicated web of influences demands further scrutiny; The Lovecraftian Poe is, therefore, a response to the “dearth of critical work” dedicated to the Lovecraft/Poe connection (Moreland xv).This connection is on display in the first four chapters, most of which feature detailed analyses of Poe's and Lovecraft's writings. In Chapter 1, Brian Johnson identifies “Poe's influence as a topic of concern” in the work of Lovecraft, demonstrating that the Providence writer experienced some creative anxiety of the Bloomian sort (3). Through fascinating close readings of Lovecraft's letters, Johnson points out this tension, an agitation that finds literary expression in tales such as “The Outsider” and “The Rats in the Walls.” Johnson cleverly interprets these stories as allegories in which characters contending with the past represent Lovecraft, whose “indebtedness to Poe” (6) disturbed the Rhode Islander while he sought “a unique authorial voice” (4). The following chapter also features allegorical readings. Here Dan Clinton identifies an undercurrent of meaning—to borrow a phrase from Poe—running through Lovecraft's “The Call of Cthulhu” and Poe's “Ligeia,” tales that are more than mere horror yarns: the latter story “dramatiz[es] Poe's ideas of literary effect” (34), and the former tale exhibits Lovecraft's belief that “aesthetic instincts” derive from “primitive customs and conditions” (33). Cloudy prose fogs up the opening and closing sections of this essay, and Clinton makes the strange claim that Poe, the writer of “Alone” and “William Wilson,” was uninterested in “the formative experiences of childhood” (27). That remark would certainly have surprised Marie Bonaparte and Kenneth Silverman. Nevertheless, Clinton's investigation of the ways that Poe and his American successor “trace literary effects to enduring features of human perception” is arresting in its originality (27). Similarities between Poe's and Lovecraft's fictional treatments of race is the subject of Chapter 3, wherein Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock asserts that Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and At the Mountains of Madness, a Lovecraft novel inspired by Pym, express contempt for nonwhites while challenging conceptions of racial difference dear to white supremacists. Analyzing Poe's portrayals of the natives of Tsalal as well as Lovecraft's descriptions of the shoggoths, prehistoric creatures that signify racial otherness, Weinstock concludes that the two writers, both of whom uttered unsavory opinions on race, nevertheless could imagine that “racial difference” is a cultural illusion concealing fundamental similarities that connect all humans (52). Weinstock overstates when he writes that Pym, a novel with an unreliable narrator, “cannot be read as other than a racist text” (58), but he rightly discerns an ambivalence about racial difference that Poe and Lovecraft share. In Chapter 4, Michael Cisco deems Kant, not Burke, the purveyor of the sublimity associated with the “cosmic horror” that fascinated Poe and Lovecraft as storytellers, but the essay is thin on commentary that would help readers appreciate that Kantian influence.The tales of Poe and Lovecraft figure prominently in other essays in The Lovecraftian Poe. In Chapter 5, upward and downward motions occupy the attention of Juan L. Pérez-de-Luque, who compares Poe's fictional portrayals of such spatial shifts with Lovecraft's. Interpreting the dramatic ascents of characters such as Hans Pfaall, the aeronaut, and Hop Frog, who absconds up a chandelier chain, as signs of Poe's faith in human potential, Pérez- de-Luque claims that Lovecraft, in whose stories ascents and descents have negative results, “seems to curse our fate forever” (105). This essay has the merit of heightening awareness of vertical motions in the writings of Poe and Lovecraft, but some of Pérez-de-Luque's Poe readings are unconvincing. One might disagree with the suggestion that the disaster-plagued voyage of Hans Pfaall showcases human mastery and triumph, and the climactic scene of “Hop-Frog,” in which the title character, full of murderous glee, escapes after carrying out a brutal revenge on his tormentors, is terrifying, not soothing—there is, at any rate, little evidence to support the assertion that Hop-Frog enjoys “a peaceful life” following that grim exit (100). While Pérez-de-Luque notes how Lovecraft differs from Poe, Robert H. Waugh attends to similarities between the two writers, who invest cats and eyes with symbolic power. Somewhat discursive, Chapter 6 contains Waugh's meandering yet intriguing interpretations of that imagery. Especially fascinating is his suggestion that feline images in “The Black Cat” and “The Rats in the Walls” signal the narrators' aristocratic aspirations, desires that underline class themes in the tales. Like Waugh, Alissa Burger emphasizes creative continuities between Poe and Lovecraft. In Chapter 10, she argues that these writers and their literary heir Stephen King found the same storytelling technique—using unreliable narrators who confess their dark secrets to others—an effective mode of horror writing. Burger notes, however, that the three writers used that narrative approach for different ends, making it difficult to determine precisely what Lovecraft and King inherited from Poe. Lovecraft's imaginative divergences from Poe figure prominently in Chapter 11, in which Ben Woodard comments on the ways that those writers portray cities. Taking “The Man in the Crowd” as an example, Woodard indicates that urban crowds, with their “potentiality for the criminal,” worry Poe (200), while writers like Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti ignore social matters in their depictions of industrial decay, which represent the emptiness of modern life. Woodard makes a strange misstep when he suggests Poe was “a Victorian or Edwardian” writer (195), but that blunder hardly ruins a valuable essay that helps readers better understand why Poe's conception of urban horror is unique. Considering the influence of Poe and Lovecraft on a contemporary writer, Sean Moreland considers the example of Caitlin R. Kiernan, whose The Drowning Girl, a novel with a schizophrenic woman as its protagonist, is the subject of Chapter 12. Here Moreland makes a strong case that Kiernan “feminizes the weird,” a literary mode popularized by male writers such as Poe and Lovecraft (225). The question of influence is also important in Chapter 13, wherein John Langan identifies four keywords (“manner,” “alive,” strike,” and “Lovecraft”) that Lovecraft used while articulating his relationship with Poe, one of his literary heroes. These terms seem to be important signals, but Langan's essay is short and undeveloped.The authors of Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 13 venture further afield, moving beyond topics primarily related to fictional prose. Dedicated to Lovecraft's verse, Chapter 7 displays the work of the painstaking prosodist Sławomir Studniarz, who analyzes representative Lovecraft poems, pieces with conventional rhyme schemes and meters that nevertheless feature interlinear sonic patterns similar to those in Poe's verse. This formal feature is not, Studniarz argues, the only connection between the two poets, for both writers explore macabre themes, showcase uncanny settings in their verse, and share some ideas about poetics. Acknowledging that many critics have dismissed Lovecraft's poetry as tripe, Studniarz demonstrates why that work deserves sustained study. Such scrutiny can help readers appreciate the attention to craft that characterized Lovecraft the artist as well as his debts to Poe, which clearly include poetic inspiration. Written by Miles Tittle, the next chapter deals primarily with Lovecraft's borrowings from Winsor McCay, a cartoonist whose Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend may be the source for the framing device that Lovecraft employs in “The Poe-et's Nightmare,” a poem in which a gluttonous writer's indigestion leads to bad dreams from which the man eventually wakens. Dreams are of course important in Poe's prose and poetry and, as Tittle suggests, creating dreamscapes by adapting ideas from Poe and McCay is part of the Lovecraftian pursuit of “an original use of Poe's legacy” (141). Tittle's attention to graphic art sets the stage for Murray Leeder's essay (Chapter 9) about The Haunted Palace, a 1963 film that includes material borrowed from Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. For Leeder, the creative hodgepodge that is The Haunted Palace—the work of writers, a film crew, and performers—proves that “authorship … is a strange thing” (173). Effectively theorized, this chapter is an invigorating read, informative and cogently expressed. An additional treat—this essay contains information gleaned from an interview with the director Roger Corman that Leeder himself conducted.Few essays in The Lovecraftian Poe are breathtakingly splendid, but the entire collection has a stimulating effect, inspiring further investigation into the ways in which Lovecraft and others have (re)created the Poe that contemporary readers know. Moreland's collection benefits from the diversity among the contributors, a group that includes literary scholars as well as creative writers with special insights into literary influence and the creative process. For lagniappe, Moreland includes a foreword from the esteemed Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi and an afterword from Kiernan, whose work Moreland discusses in Chapter 12. There are, of course, some problems with the book. Conspicuous errors appear in the text, in which readers encounter the following mistakes: “urban setting … are common” (100), “take placed in 1875” (170), and “the last half century ore more” (239). Such things should not surface in a book so expensive. Furthermore, Poe fans may be disappointed that some chapters contain less commentary on works by Poe than one might expect from a book titled The Lovecraftian Poe. These issues should not, however, discourage perusal of the volume, the publication of which is an important step toward filling a critical gap. Since Lovecraft freely recognized his borrowings from Poe, many scholars, as Moreland suggests in his introduction, may have concluded that extended studies of the Poe/Lovecraft nexus are unnecessary. Moreland and his contributors remind us how wrong that conclusion is.