The current issue of my favorite literary magazine, the New York Review of Books, has a good article about H.P. Lovecraft keyed to the recent Library of America edition of his stories and Michel Houellebecq’s biography/polemic.
The reviewer, Luc Sante, is quick to note the irony of HPL being enshrined in a Library of America edition, since the king of American critics, Edmund Wilson, not only conceived the idea of the Library of America, but took great pleasure in cocking a leg over Lovecraft’s work in 1945.
Wilson’s ghost has actually been howling in outrage since 2000 over the fact that two of Lovecraft’s sonnets were included in the Library of America’s survey of twentieth century poetry. The fact that “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Rats in the Walls” have now made it into the black jacket club ahead of Memoirs of Hecate County probably has that same ghost roaming between the Princeton University eating clubs, pulling out what few hairs remained in that patrician dome of his. Karmic payback is a bitch.
I would have linked to the article earlier, but NYRB only recently put it online. The link was bird-dogged by, appropriately enough, Blog-Sothoth.
