some thoughts on Joshi

Joshi is witty, perceptive, and a seemingly scrupulous researcher.

However, I am finding his judgments of specific stories to be the opposite of my own in an increasing number of cases. (Not that this matters to anyone else, but it does sometimes make me wonder if we’re reading the same author.) I’m certainly in agreement on the excellence of “Charles Dexter Ward,” but do not agree that “The Rats in the Walls” is a masterpiece and “The Horror at Red Hook” an abomination; in fact, I much prefer the latter. And Joshi is awfully hard on “The Dunwich Horror,” which I think is a masterpiece (though a few aspects of the conclusion are a bit hard to swallow).

A larger problem with the biography is that it tends to level Lovecraft’s productions too much. In these 600+ pages, his greatest stories occupy only a small proportion of the account. I’ve learned an amazing amount from this book, but I think I much prefer Houllebecq, who does oversimplify some of the biography, but who in many ways comes closer to capturing the essence or nectar of who Lovecraft was.

I have a Kafka biography in German that does something similar, focusing on just a few key years of Kafka’s career rather than trying to cover the entire life. That might not be a bad idea for biographies, in fact… If it’s true (as I always suspected and as Clement Greenberg stated in words) that no one has more than about 15 years of peak originality, it might be interesting to write more biographies focusing on just a few key years in any given career.

Oh yes, I have a similar biography of Einstein in my office that focuses only on the years in quest of general relativity. In a way it makes things highly readable, since there’s no sitting through tedious accounts of what the grandparents did for a living. Einstein is already a fully formed adult from page 1, he simply has another big discovery lying ahead of him, and we see him get there.