Lovecraft the Blogger

One of the curiosities of H.P. Lovecraft’s literary career is how little of his work was actually published during his lifetime. Only a modest number of stories appeared under his byline in Weird Tales or elsewhere. Despite this, his typewriter was rarely still. He was, after all, a writer, and writing, as any writer will tell you, is not something one can simply turn off.

What makes this paradox even more striking is the sheer volume of his correspondence. Lovecraft is estimated to have written somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 letters. The exact number is impossible to know, since fewer than 10% survive today. Even if we take the lower estimate, it still makes him one of the most prolific epistolarians of the 20th century. These were not perfunctory notes dashed off in haste. Many ran to dozens of pages, dense with his thoughts on history, politics, philosophy, architecture, literature, science, and, of course, his own dreams and nightmares. For many of his correspondents, a letter from Lovecraft was less a personal communiqué than a miniature essay.

It was in these letters, more than in his published tales, that Lovecraft revealed himself most fully. Through them we glimpse the breadth of his interests, the peculiarities of his mind, his recurring dreams, his everyday concerns, and, inevitably, his darker and less creditable opinions. If his fiction shows us his esthetic vision, his correspondence shows us the man behind it.

Perhaps I am biased because of my own proclivities, but Lovecraft’s letters remind me of blogging. He had no blog, of course, but his endless correspondence functioned in much the same way. The letter was his medium of self-expression, his way of thinking aloud to an audience that was at once personal and diffuse. Many of his letters were, in fact, shared among friends or passed from hand to hand, much as a blog post today might be reposted, linked, or shared across social media.

Nor was this his first experiment with a pre-digital mode of communication. Before his vast correspondence, Lovecraft had already been active in something that feels strikingly like a low-tech precursor to blogging, namely, the world of amateur journalism and the Amateur Press Associations (APAs). In the 1910s, he was deeply involved with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), editing its official organ, The United Amateur, and publishing some of his earliest fiction and essays there. As anyone familiar with the early history of roleplaying games knows, an APA is a kind of distributed network. Members submit their work, which is then collated, printed, and mailed out as a collective periodical. In the pre-digital age, this was often how people with literary ambitions, eccentric opinions, or obscure interests found one another and shared their work. For Lovecraft, the UAPA provided a forum, an audience, and, most importantly, a community.

It’s not hard to see the connection. To be anachronistic, the UAPA was Lovecraft’s early “platform,” while his letters became his lifelong “feed.” Both offered him a way to connect, exchange ideas, and keep writing, whether or not the commercial magazines accepted his fiction. That’s one of the reasons we know Lovecraft better than we know most of his contemporaries. His fiction reveals his artistic ideals, but his correspondence and amateur journalism reveal his mind. Just as blogs today offer insight into their authors’ lives, passions, and obsessions, so too do Lovecraft’s letters and UAPA writings.

I’ve often thought of Grognardia in similar terms. This blog has never been my fiction, nor even my formal criticism, however much I’ve sometimes tried to make it so. Instead, it is an extended conversation with others who share my interests. Lovecraft would have understood that impulse. He may have written comparatively few stories, but he never stopped writing, leaving behind a record of himself more complete than almost any of his contemporaries. That’s not a bad model for the rest of us who also feel compelled to share our thoughts, fears, and dreams with others.