re: Lovecraft

Although “The Call of Cthulhu” is a wonderfully arranged and highly effective story, on the sentence-by-sentence level is stylistically simple compared with later tales. I’ve been marvelling at the increasing sophistication with which Lovecraft takes earlier tricks and twists, modifies, and combines them in fresh ways with each new story.

This is another reason that “The Shadow Out of Time” is so disappointing. The more I read it, the less I see in it (and it’s always been near the bottom of my list of his mature productions). It’s as if Lovecraft is going through the motions, doing Lovecraft shtick. Brilliant passages are rare, while relatively banal self-imitations are common.

For most of the time while reading the tales, I tell myself that Edmund Wilson was making one of the biggest mistakes of his career, comparable to his denigration of Kafka as second-rate. But whenever reading “The Shadow Out of Time,” I often wince at how often Wilson’s critiques seem to hit home.

I really wish I hadn’t heard about the judicial system or use of pens by the rugose cones known as the Great Race. I suppose this could still be great fiction in the right hands, if handled with a certain atmospheric brilliance. But that’s not what Lovecraft does well. What he does well is to just barely hint at the other world as it peers through the cracks of this one: to make us feel the gravity of that other world even as he forbids us to see it directly.

But possibly the worst moment in “The Shadow Out of Time,” the one that really makes me cringe, is when we find that Peaslee has spoken with one of the Antarctic monsters and tells us that his name is S’gg’ha. Why not just tell us the birthday of S’gg’ha while you’re at it? Why not tell us his favorite color and quote a page or two from his diary? It’s about as sad as listening to Charlie Parker ineptly play “Lover Man” while strung out on heroin.