I’m about halfway through the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and that is where I think I’m going to have to stop. It isn’t that Lovecraft doesn’t have fascinating things to say. It’s more that at times the things he has to say are … well … too fascinating.

Sometimes I find his sentiments interesting in terms of the way they differ from my own, as in this letter from August 12, 1928, in which he states:

I prefer non-committal, non-sensational titles as a general rule; especially when the stories are themselves subtle & elusive in their weirdness.

Not me! I prefer more ornate titles, both in my own writing (the titles of mine I like the best are always more complex, as with “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” and “10 Things I’ve Learned About Writing”) and in that of others (as with Samuel R. Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” and Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”).

I also break with Lovecraft’s comments from August 20, 1928:

I note that you prefer the dialogue form as a medium of expression—a circumstance which perhaps indicates that you are a playwright at heart. I myself am the exact opposite. My purpose in writing a tale is to delineate a certain visual picture or crystallise a certain atmospheric effect—in which human beings are only incidental “properties”.

While it’s interesting to see Lovecraft make his methods concrete in that way—since the allure of his stories has always been the language and the atmosphere, rather than any of the people—in my own work, it is the people and characters who come first.

And then there’s this passage, from March 8, 1929, with which I could not agree more:

Wright is certainly not much of a paying proposition—though I hope his low rates will not cause you to stop writing such weird matter as your own inclination may impel you to write. Heaven knows, I wrote weird stuff before I ever thought it had the remotest chance for publication; & shall probably still be writing it long after the collapse of the present mystery fashion has closed the market again.

I’ve always written for the joy of it first, and any possible market second, and would keep writing even if I knew I had no chance of publishing ever again, for I’m one of those brought alive by the act of creation. I liked knowing that Lovecraft felt the same way.

But then we get to those places in which Lovecraft became too interesting. For mixed in with these writing comments are his many statements about the need to stand up for racial purity, as in this May 2, 1928 letter in which he explains to Derleth why, even though he dislikes New York, he is willing to vacation in Flatbush:

It is pretty well protected by restrictive agreements among property-owners, hence is not likely to be engulfed in the mongrel welter of the metropolis for many decades to come.

His loathing for members of other races becomes even more pronounced later the same year, on Oct. 12, 1928:

In the matter of politics—I don’t go much with the younger crowd. I’m more interested in keeping the present 300-year-old culture-germ in America unharmed, than in trying out any experiments in “social justice”. Smith, to my mind, is a direct exponent of the newer-immigration element—the decadent & unassimilable hordes from Southern Europe & the East whose presence in large numbers is a direct & profound menace to the continued growth of the Nordic-American nation we know. Some people may like the idea of a mongrel America like the late Roman Empire, but I for one prefer to die in the same America that I was born in. Therefore, I’m against any candidate who talks of letting down the bars to stunted brachycephalic South-Italians & rat-faced half-Mongoloid Russian & Polish Jews, & all that cursed scum! You in the Middle West can’t conceive of the extent of the menace. You ought to see a typical Eastern city crowd—swart, aberrant physiognomies, & gestures & jabbering born of alien instincts.

I shuddered reading that, but pressed on, because the nuggets of wisdom about writing and the publishing scene of the late ’20s were just too rich. But then I reached the missive of October 6, 1929, in which Lovecraft wrote—

Home is one’s ideal setting if one is to develop one’s best attributes, & New York is no place for a white man to live.

—and I thought to myself, no, this is too much, I can’t go on.

Lovecraft may be no different than others of his day, and perhaps I should just take it all with a grain of salt, chalking it up to him having been a product of his time, no better, no worse. However, I find that passages such as these disgust me so much that I no longer want to press ahead in what is otherwise a riveting volume. Maybe I’ll return to pan for gold later once I’ve calmed down. But if I do, it will probably be awhile.

Great artists have always had flaws in their personal beliefs, I know that. But that doesn’t mean I necessarily want or need to know those flaws intimately, even though they color the art. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing, muddying my admiration for the work. As Stephen King has said, “It is the tale, not he who tells it,” and I wouldn’t want my disgust at one to muddy my admiration for the other.

I’d rather think of Lovecraft as the author of “Cool Air” and “Pickman’s Model” than as the man who’d consider me stunted brachycephalic rat-faced cursed scum.