At least he didn't call it 'crowd sourcing'

[While while looking for notes I'd made for last week's Hitchcock/Lovecraft post, I search for that author's name and this popped up. I wrote it twelve years ago but for some reason never got around to hitting publish. I've shifted a bit in my feelings about these writers, but for the most part, the following still stands.]  

I came across this piece by Jess Nevins as part of a silly they're-trying-to-suppress-Lovecraft thread on a chat room that will remain linkless. Overall, I thought it was pretty good, but this passage bothered me for a couple of reasons. First, of course, was the trendy and not all that apt use of 'open-source.' Second was how close this comes to, for me, the most interesting part of the Lovecraft phenomena before veering away:

"The question of why Lovecraft gained in popularity after his death and Clark Ashton Smith or Algernon Blackwood did not is slightly more complicated. Lovecraft escaped the fate of the vast majority of writers — obscurity, to a greater or lesser degree — through several extra-literary events. Luckhurst only alludes to Lovecraft’s letter writing, but it was critical in establishing Lovecraft as a literary presence to his contemporaries. Lovecraft was an extraordinary correspondent, writing an estimated hundred thousand letters in his lifetime, to fans and fellow writers, especially those working for the pulp Weird Tales. Decades before the social media, Lovecraft used letter writing to create a presence for himself in the consciousness of fans and writers and to create the social capital that paid off after his death.

"Too, Lovecraft was the first author to create an open-source fictional universe. The crossover, the meeting between two or more characters from discrete texts, is nearly as old as human culture, beginning with the Greeks if not the Sumerians. The idea of a fictional universe open to any creator who wants to take part in it is considerably newer. French authors like Verne [*] and Balzac had created the idea of a single universe linked through multiple texts, and following them, the dime novels and story papers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had established the idea of ongoing fictional universes, but those universes were limited to magazines published by the original stories’ publishers. It was Lovecraft who first created a fictional universe that anyone was welcome to take part in. Both during his lifetime and immediately afterward, other authors made use of Lovecraft’s ideas and creations in their own stories and novels. Lovecraft’s generosity with his own creations ultimately gave them a longevity that other, better writers’ ideas and characters did not have."

The open-source line seems rather silly both because this sort of thing had been going on for years and because it doesn't really describe the Lovecraft Circle. As for precedents, characters without clear owners (particularly from history, folklore and fakelore) were created by open groups of writers building on each others' ideas. For just one of the examples that preceded the Lovecraft Circle, check out Pecos Bill.

Some Lovecraft scholar might call me on this, but the Circle seemed to have mainly been established (Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard) or in a few cases promising (Robert Bloch) writers with a previous epistolary relationship with Lovecraft rather than something open to anyone. It was, nonetheless, an extraordinary bit of literary symbiosis organized around Lovecraft's impressive strengths and severe limitations.

Put bluntly, Lovecraft was an otherwise mediocre writer capable of moments of brilliance. His stories often had the impression of being rough drafts or, in the case of The Call of Cthulhu, notes for a story (critic E.F. Bleiler aptly called Cthulhu "a fragmented essay with narrative inclusions"). Lovecraft constantly produced wonderful elements but his finished works tended to be less than the sum of their parts.Writers like Howard could use these ideas to their fullest potential and by doing so could promote Lovecraft far more effectively.

Just to be clear, Lovecraft was a genuinely collaborative spirit, eager to participate and supportive of other writers (qualities probably enhanced by his association with the amateur press movement) and there was more to the Circle than just picking through Lovecraft's ideas. These were gifted people working in a period of great literary exploration that extended from high culture to genre fiction and the Circle's experiment in literary support and cross-fertilization is notable even given the standards of the time.



* Not exactly a consistent one. Thanks to a deeply muddled chronology, Mysterious Island takes place both before and after Twenty Thousand Leagues.