In some earlier exchanges on The Corner, J. J. Miller mentioned S. T. Joshi’s biography of H. P. Lovecraft.
Way back in May 1997, the splendidly literate paleo-papo-con magazine Chronicles published a review of both that book and Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous Writings. The reviewer was the late Sam Francis (for a passing mention of whom, see one of my reviews here).
Francis’s review is simply brilliant. If you want to know why anyone still cares about Lovecraft eighty years on — a thing that, as Francis says, would have astonished Lovecraft himself! — here’s the answer.
Lovecraft believed that his order could not be saved, and that in the long run it didn’t matter anyway, so he jogged placidly and cynically on, one of America’s last free men, living his life as he wanted to live it and as he believed a New England gentleman should live it: thinking what he wanted to think, and writing what he wanted to write, without concern for conventional opinions, worldly success, or immortality. And yet, despite the indifference he affected, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has in the end attained a kind of immortality, for the classic tales of horror he created will be read as long as that genre of literature is read at all. And since man’s horror of the alien cosmos into which he has been thrown is perhaps the oldest theme of art, that may be for a very long time to come.
I only met Sam Francis once, at an American Conservative bash in Washington a couple of years before he died. He was a shy and scholarly man, and already unwell. I am not exactly Mr. Extravert either, so we mumbled some pleasantries at each other and passed along. Now I wish I had made a better effort to get acquainted.
[Many thanks to Tom Piatak and the guys at Chronicles for help in locating that.]