85th anniversary of HPL’ s death

Lover of hills and fields and towns antique,

How hast thou wandered hence

On ways not found before,

Beyond the dawnward spires of Providence?

“To Howard Philips Lovecraft” by Clark Ashton Smith

***

On this day 85 years ago, H.P. Lovecraft passed away in Providence, RI. According to his main biographer, S.T. Joshi*,

He [HPL] was pronounced dead at 7.15 a.m. That evening Anne [one of HPL’s aunts] telegraphed a reply to Barlow [HPL’s friend and colleague]:

HOWARD DIED THIS MORNING NOTHING TO DO THANKS.

[…]

A funeral service was held on March 18 at the chapel of Horace B. Knowles’s Sons at 187 Benefit Street. Only a small number of friends and relatives were there—Annie, Harry Brobst and his wife, and Annie’s friend Edna Lewis. These individuals then attended the actual burial at Swan Point Cemetery, where they were joined by Edward H. Cole and his wife and Ethel Phillips Morrish, Lovecraft’s second cousin. […] Lovecraft’s name was inscribed only on the central shaft of the Phillips plot, below those of his father and mother: “their son / HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT / 1890–1937.” It took forty years for Lovecraft and his mother to receive separate stones.

...He passed away in desperate precarity, poverty even, not knowing about the astounding impact his writings would have on the whole lore of weird/horror/sci fi literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. But, at least, at the very end Lovecraft (“Yrs for the Sign of Nodens—Ech-Pi-El”) would know that he was backed up by the Weird amateurdom, which transformed later into an ocean of literary/academic Lovecraftiana.

I guess there is no point right now to add anything else to my love and appreciation of HPL’s writings; I’ve mentioned that often enough. It is also true that given the current circumstances, the struggle to write anything remotely academic is as real as ever. Yet there is one thing that resonates with my (fairly chaotic) thoughts at the moment: the following excerpt from his essay “The Despised Pastoral” (1918):

It is not impossible that the intellectual upheaval attendant upon the present conflict will bring about a general simplification and rectification of taste, and an appreciation of the value of pure imaginary beauty in a world so full of actual misery, which may combine to restore the despised pastoral to its proper station.**

I want to believe that the despised pastoral—and also the despised academic writings about whatever subject you chose—will be restored, because even at the very edge of the abyss a weak, fragile and confused humankind can brace itself in the final attempt not to fail. Otherwise we all are doomed, and, tragically, none of the Great Old Ones would be the reason for the failure but ourselves.

Rest in peace, Old Gent.

____________________________

* Joshi, S.T. I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. Vol.2. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press; 2013; 1008-1009.

** Collected Essays, Volume 2: Literary Criticism. By H.P. Lovecraft, Edited by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press; 2004; 22–23.