Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft

This being the 136th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I thought it the perfect opportunity to write another installment in my increasingly irregular Reconsiderations series. I also think it makes sense as a topic, given that, since its inception, Grognardia has focused not just on the history of roleplaying games but also on the authors and literature that inspired those games – and there are few authors who can reasonably be said to have had more of an impact on RPGs than Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is, after all, an Appendix N author and one Gygax notes as being among "the most immediate influences upon AD&D," alongside such other notables as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance. This alone demonstrates my point, but, of course, Gygax is not alone in having been an admirer of HPL. Innumerable RPG creators, both past and present, have acknowledged the role Lovecraft and his stories have played in their own creations. There's thus a good reason why, in my first ever post commemorating his birth, I called him "the father of us all."

Up until now, I've been very consistent in saying that, while I have greatly enjoyed Lovecraft's stories since I was about 12 years-old, he was never my favorites of the famed Weird Tales trinity. I would always say that, of those three authors, Clark Ashton Smith was the one I held in the highest esteem. However, over the last year my focus has shifted and I've begun to question my feelings on this matter. 

To be clear, my regard for CAS remains as immense as ever. He truly is a unique author with a unique voice. I will always chesish his stories, particularly his "dying earth" tales of Zothique, which I frequently reread both for their luxurious language and melancholy tone. That said, I have better come to appreciate how much I owe to Lovecraft.

I don't mean this simply in the obvious sense that I have read and enjoyed his stories for more than four decades, though that's certainly part of it. Nor do I mean merely that Lovecraft's influence can be found everywhere in the hobby that has occupied so much of my life. What I mean is something more personal and, until fairly recently, something to which I had never given much thought.

Last summer, at the conclusion of my The Shadow over August series, I described Lovecraft as a kindred spirit and, as the last twelve months have rolled on, I find it an ever more apt description. There are, of course, many things about Lovecraft with which I do not identify, just as there are aspects of his personality and opinions that I find objectionable or simply baffling. I have no interest in pretending otherwise, but neither do I think a man must be admirable in every respect before we can recognize something of ourselves in him. Indeed, it may be precisely because Lovecraft was such an odd and contradictory man that I increasingly find him so compelling.

Lovecraft was a bookish introvert who often seemed more comfortable with the products of imagination than with the demands of everyday life. He was deeply attached to the past, suspicious of much that passed for progress, fascinated by history and antiquity, and given to constructing elaborate imaginary worlds partly for the sheer pleasure of doing so. He maintained friendships across great distances through correspondence and took enormous pleasure in sharing ideas, stories, discoveries, and enthusiasms with an ever-growing circle of like-minded people. He was, to use a deliberately anachronistic term, a nerd. Obviously, I see a lot of myself in him.

And that may explain why my affection for Lovecraft has grown recently. When I was younger, I approached him primarily through his fiction. I judged him, quite reasonably, I think, by his fiction. Judged solely on that basis, I still think I prefer Smith. At his best, CAS possesses a command of language and an imaginative opulence that few writers of fantastic fiction have ever equaled. However, I'm no longer sure that "Which of the Weird Tales trinity wrote the stories I like best?" is the only or even the most interesting way to judge these immensely talented men.

Lovecraft's achievement extends beyond the stories themselves. He created a body of ideas that have proven extraordinarily fertile in the hands of others. More importantly, he wanted them to be fertile. He freely lent elements of his imaginary mythology to friends and correspondents, borrowed from them in return, and delighted in the resulting cross-pollination. What we now call the "Cthulhu Mythos" was never a carefully guarded intellectual property or a meticulously defined fictional setting. Rather, it was something closer to a shared sandbox of the imagination.

Seen from the perspective of roleplaying games, that aspect of Lovecraft seems especially significant. Roleplaying games are themselves exercises in shared imagination. Referees borrow ideas from books, movies, history, mythology, and one another. They then transform them, combine them, and hand them over to players, who transform them yet again through play. The results are rarely tidy and almost never attributable to a single creator. There is something remarkably Lovecraftian – though not in the cosmic horror sense, but in the creative sense – about that process.

This may be one reason his influence on roleplaying games has been so much greater than simply inspiring monsters in Dungeons & Dragons or even providing source material for Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft and his circle offered a way of creating fantastic worlds that was open, collaborative, allusive, and cumulative. For example, Smith might come up with Tsathoggua and Lovecraft would borrow him. Lovecraft, in turn, creates the Necronomicon and inspires Howard to create the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (with its German title provided by August Derleth). With every borrowing, this shared imaginary world became a little larger and a little more convincing. Anyone who has refereed a long-running roleplaying campaign will recognize this process.

That recognition has caused me to look at Lovecraft differently. For years, I think I regarded him chiefly as one of the great ancestors of the hobby, an enormously influential writer whose fingerprints could be found everywhere. I still regard him that way, of course, but increasingly I see something else as well. Lovecraft is an example of the kind of imaginative life that I myself have tried, in my own much smaller way, to live.

Lovecraft wrote because he loved writing. He read voraciously because he loved learning. He corresponded because he loved exchanging ideas with people who shared his enthusiasms. He invented worlds, histories, books, cults, and strange names because doing so delighted him. He did these things despite disappointments, financial difficulties, personal failures, and the knowledge that the wider world would likely take little notice of most of what he did. Yet, here we are, 136 years after his birth, still talking about him.

Perhaps that's what has changed most in my estimation of Lovecraft. Clark Ashton Smith may remain the pulp fantasy writer whose prose most dazzles me, while Robert E. Howard may remain the one whose best stories possess an energy few writers, even today, can match. Meanwhile, Lovecraft increasingly seems to me the one whose life of the imagination I understand best and have inadvertently emulated the most.

When I called Lovecraft "the father of us all" back in 2008, I was thinking primarily about his influence on RPGs and on the imaginative culture from which it sprang. I still think that's true. Now, though, I would add another meaning to the phrase. Lovecraft belongs to that long lineage of bookish dreamers who found the ordinary world insufficient and responded not by abandoning it but by adding to it, by creating strange countries of the imagination and inviting others to visit them. Some of those visitors then created countries of their own.

I'm one of them – as I suspect are most of the people reading this post.