a book I’ll never write

One of the books I’d like to write, but never will, would be a parallel biographical study of Lovecraft and Chandler. The reason for the link is partly just the personal coincidence that I picked them both off the same Library of America rack at the same Iowa City bookstore, three years apart. But it’s also a very interesting contrast.

Chandler: born 1888
Lovecraft: born 1890

They’re from the same generation. Both were writers of first-rate literary caliber who were somewhat pigeonholed as pulp fiction writers– Chandler in detective fiction, Lovecraft in the weird.

Although Lovecraft seems like a late bloomer in many ways, his best work was already finished by the early 1930’s, and he was dead in 1937. By contrast, Chandler didn’t even publish his first pulp story until 1933, and his first novel not until 1939, when Lovecraft had already been dead for two years.

Both married beautiful older divorcées. But there the similarity ends– Chandler was a smooth ladies’ man, a heavy drinker, and an adulterer, while Lovecraft was almost hopelessly inhibited.

Both tried to enlist for WWI. Lovecraft was rejected due to nervous disabilities, while Chandler, a healthier specimen all the way around, participated in trench warfare in France.

Lovecraft never made it to Europe, but Chandler grew up largely in England (he had an Irish mother). [ADDENDUM: Poe also grew up partly in England.]

Lovecraft died poor and obscure. Chandler died well-known, and to some extent a Hollywood icon.

Lovecraft idolized colonial New England, while Chandler was most at home in Los Angeles.

Both are unusually powerful as letter-writers. Chandler can’t match the prolific rate of Lovecraft as a correspondent (who can?) but Chandler’s letters still rank among the most thought-provoking I have ever seen.

What would these two men have had to say to each other if they had met? Probably not very much, even though it’s not impossible that they might have read a few of each other’s pulp stories. If Lovecraft had met Chandler in the early 1930’s, he would have encountered a heavy-drinking oil company manager with literary tastes but no literary track record. I can’t imagine that their personalities would have meshed well.

But the end of Lovecraft’s career merges so perfectly with the beginning of Chandler’s own that it’s almost as if they shared a single muse passed from one to the other.

They are perhaps the only two fiction writers whose works I compulsively reread. Every couple of years I feel like rereading all of Chandler’s novels (I’m unable to stomach his pulp stories so far), and as for Lovecraft’s stories, I’m rereading them all the time.