Lovecraft: Terrifying Beginnings

I’ve been familiarized with the entire Lovecraftian mythos over the last eight years, but oddly enough I’d never gotten to picking up any of his actual writing.  Just last night I started into a collection of his stories and I am already greatly impressed.  I was shocked to find out more about the man himself, and it makes me glad that I always take some extra time to read the Introductions in books.  Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in August of 1890 in the town of Providence, Rhode Island.  Most fans know pretty well that much about him, but what really caught me off guard is the fact that he was reciting poetry by the age of two, reading at three, and writing by the age of seven. 

Even at this young of an age he quickly took to tales such as Grimm’s fairy tales, Arabian Nights, and the classics of Greek mythology.  Just to illustrate the wonder of the man as a child, from the introductino of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by S.T. Joshi,

His earliest surviving literary work, “The Poem of Ulysses” (1897), is a paraphrase of the Odyssey in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse.

By this time, at the age of seven, he had even already begun to write what was known as “weird fiction”, but the earliest of these stories no longer exist.  Another obvious influence on the young writer were the works of Edgar Allan Poe, even to the point that several of Lovecraft’s early writings are far more macabre than they are, what would become known as his typical style, weird-horror fantasy. 

Having lost his father around these years, and suffering from apparent mental illness, Lovecraft had a tough time getting through school.  It was during these formative years that he decided he wanted to be an Astronomer and fell in love with the stars, however his lackluster performance in math prevented this from ever coming to fruition.  He would never leave his love of space behind, though, and having abandoned writing at the age of 18 he returned to the world of amateur fiction at the age of 27, in the year 1917.  From then on his writing was frequently published in various pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, and after his death his stories, letters, and essays would go on to be published countless times in numerous languages and countries. 

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the man, for me, are his views on religion.  He wrote on it very keenly in a collection called Selected Letters,

I certainly can’t see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete scepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable.  All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist.  They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don’t regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine.  In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, pracitcally and provisionally, as an atheist.  The chance’s of theism’s truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.

He further explains how his views influence his writing in Miscellaneous Writings,

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclinations best — one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

The man had such complete conviction that there was nothing more to this world, to the complete and utter lack of spirituality and the ethereal due to a lack of physical evidence, yet he felt a constant drive to imagine and create an entire mythos to fill this void.  His unique description of how he comes by his agnostic views is very intriguing, as it seems to lend itself to the opportunity for being convinced.  I suppose this is part and parcel with the definition of the term, not caring one way or the other in the end, but that he takes it so far as to classify himself as a conditional atheist.  The very nature of this concept calls forth further questioning as to what, precisely, would constitute proof of the existence of a deity.  Certainly there is room for personal interpretation, but I am most curious what exactly would have been needed to convince Lovecraft himself out of his atheism and into the realm of theism.  Perhaps it would have been something so bizarre and foriegn to his ideals it would have driven him mad simply at the sound/sight of it? 

(I intend to continue with this train of thought and others, as I read more of his work and as I think more on it, so don’t fear the cut-off here simply build upon it with me!)