H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, by Michel Houellebecq

Original title: H.P. Lovecraft: contre le monde, contre la vie

Michel Houellebecq translated by Dorna Khazeni with an introduction by Stephen King, Orion Books, 245 pp, £8.99

literature/ literary studies

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.” - Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“I am only about half alive.” - H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to Alfred Galpin, May 1918

In an inversion of the typical reasons one might read a biography, the French author Michel Houellebecq’s admiring but devastating account of the early 20th century horror sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft’s life, titled H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, is best read as a Houellebecq novel—his very first. The likeness in trajectory between Lovecraft as described by Houellebecq, and the prototypical Houellebecqian man is so striking as to leave one wondering whether it is the latter’s percept that transmuted the raw facts of Lovecraft’s life, or if it was his reading of Lovecraft at a formative age that saw the emergence of his infamous critique of the liberalization of values. In any case, the cover art for the 2008 print edition published by Orion is somewhat misleading as to the book’s contents: the fantastical illustration of monsters in brown and gold suggest the escapist delights of fantasy, horror, and YA fiction. While Lovecraft is often discovered by readers in their youth, Houellebecq’s analysis is better suited to those who have lived long enough to accumulate the compacted disappointments and resentments that render this biography so devastating to behold.

The four-part essay (originally published in French in 1991, then translated into English and introduced by an anodyne Stephen King in 2005), follows the same trajectory as realist fiction like Madame Bovary, insofar as the book begins in Lovecraft’s childhood and proceeds more or less linearly toward the protagonist’s untimely death. More precisely, it starts with a picture of a lethargic, moody, socially obscure young man living indefinitely in his mother’s house; that is to say—anticlimactically. Having already lost his religious faith in an otherwise idyllic childhood, Lovecraft adhered to a bitter philosophy of a vast cosmos indifferent to humans and their efforts. He wrote a single story, The Alchemist, before plunging at age eighteen into a five year period of utter inactivity, as if intuiting the real implication of those “shades of the prison-house” described by Wordsworth; “Adulthood is hell”, he wrote in a 1918 letter.

Some signs of life eventually emerged from Lovecraft in the form of written correspondence, which would prove the only reliable form of social activity throughout his life. Around the same time, he wrote a scathing critique of the “insipid love stories” of writer Fred Jackson in a series of letters to the pulp weekly, The Argosy. This resulted in his being invited to join the United Amateur Press Association, a part of the independent journalism movement that was growing in popularity across the US at the time (and which sounds rather a lot like today’s network of Substack and Twitter (excuse me, “X”) writers). It was through this network that his contact with the outside world began: Lovecraft met friends, collaborators, as well as the only woman he was to ever “know”—the divorced, Jewish, independent writer and single mother seven years his senior, Sonia Haft Green; an unlikely match for the conservative and anti-semitic Lovecraft. The couple would go on to marry and enjoy at least one year of joyous, optimistic matrimony before “the inevitable” would occur.

Following a long-distance courtship initiated by Sonia, Lovecraft would leave his mother’s home in Providence, Rhode Island, to join his wife in New York City. There, Sonia supported him financially as he tried in vain to secure an income in an economy that was “at the time not even in crisis”—leading Houellebecq to conclude that “in the American economy of his era, there was absolutely no conceivable place for an individual like Lovecraft.” He was flummoxed by his inability to achieve any employment whatsoever given his estimation of his intelligence and capacities. Inflexible and antiquated, Lovecraft fared like some Yankee Ashley Wilkes, experiencing the new world as cruel and terrifying.

While one can never know the true nature of another’s relationship, it appears that the tension generated by Lovecraft’s utter failure to make an income metastasized into an insurmountable conflict once Sonia lost her job as a saleswoman in a clothing store. Meanwhile, Lovecraft’s “WASP’s well-bred racism” metastasized too, as he watched immigrants find employment where he did not. Sonia would move to another state to pursue a job while continuing to support him financially as he moved to a smaller, cheaper dwelling in Red Hook. Despite the increased proximity to mixed company, Lovecraft preferred it to the indignity of living with Sonia in some obscure flyover state. Eventually, he would return to Providence and migrate his dependency from his wife to his aunt, and Sonia would request a divorce. The disappointments on all sides were immense, and the dashed futures alluded to with only a series of strategic ellipses by Houellebecq.

Such a trajectory is familiar territory for anyone who has engaged with Houellebecq’s oeuvre. Indeed, Lovecraft could have been a third protagonist, Michel and Bruno’s other half-brother, in The Elementary Particles (aka Atomised), the 1998 novel that launched Houellebecq to literary stardom and which ends in romantic failure, illness and suicide. In a 2010 interview with the Paris Review, Houellebecq stated that the question of whether love still exists plays the same role for him that the question of God played for Dostoevsky. As far as his account of Lovecraft’s life is concerned, the answer to that question is a resounding “no”.

Having experienced the material world’s utter indifference to his refined manners and erudite mind—to anything extraneous to the profit motive, Lovecraft retreated further into a world of his own making, where the love and hate that animated his time in New York would fuel his literary alternative to living life. Far from trivializing or dismissing Lovecraft’s virulent racism as an embarrassing quirk as his other biographers do, Hoeullebecq attributes to it the “hideous corporeal vigor” of Lovecraft’s later, greater works, his “great texts”, including The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, published alongside this biography. Lovecraft’s victims meanwhile, those educated, sexless, sensitiveyoung men like the author himself, were rendered impotent before such material terror. The discomforting phenomenon emerges that a passion as repulsive as racial hatred is nevertheless a passion, and thus can be conducive to the creation of "authentic" work, even great work.

While Lovecraft’s “great texts'' were celebrated by a small circle of peers and collaborators in his lifetime, and inspired cult-like devotion to the writer after his death, they never earned him a real dollar while alive. Writing—even great writing, without love, sex and adequate remuneration does not a life make, and he died relatively young, at age 46, of intestinal cancer. In light of the rigorous materialism of Lovecraft’s conception of life, it is safe to assume that he experienced his death to be meaningless. The brutality of that impression pales before Houellebecq’s own assessment of Lovecraft’s life, which is that Lovecraft hadn’t lived at all, save for his two year marriage to Sonia, and so necessitated his creating “a permanent recourse to life” in writing.

The implications for that growing cohort of anonymous men online today with whom both writers enjoy god-like status, is what makes reading Against Life twenty-odd years after its publication a disconcertingly enlightening experience. The book holds possibly more relevance today than when it was first published for the insight it provides into the psyches of the Lovecraftian NEET (young persons not in education, employment or training) who produces masses of user-generated online content today; despair may be transcended through creation where it cannot be through love. For those not blessed with the NEET’s good fortune (having one endlessly patient female relation or another to host them), they can look to the likes of J.K. Huysmans, the French civil servant (whose own dismal biography features in Houellebecq’s infamous 2015 novel, Submission) who produced his oeuvre in the perimeter hours of the 9 to 5 work day.

One can draw from Houellebcq’s interpretation of Lovecraft’s life that today, when the economy is in crisis, we are seeing Lovecraft's story play out a thousand times over as young men and women vie for the same bureaucratic make-work in brutal competition antithetical to romance. These things so woefully beyond reach in any sustained form for a man like Lovecraft in his age are possibly even more so in our own. Likewise, amidst material scarcity, racial scapegoating and conflict intensifies. Most will not produce great works of art (if they produce anything at all, most simply consume), and yet some, like Lovecraft, will—and in so doing maybe find success after death, but in accordance with the conclusions drawn from Hoeullebecq’s now sizeable corpus, only love constitutes a life. Houellebecq, so ritually regarded as a pessimist, misanthrope or nihilist, is actually our foremost romantic, and this is nowhere more evident than in his devastating analysis of the life of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.