Starting I Am Providence, ST Joshi's biography of HP Lovecraft.
Joshi is arguably the greatest Lovecraft scholar alive, but this passage about Lovecraft's habit of reading dime novels as a boy, and in particular its rank elitism, brought me up short:
It is one of the great paradoxes of Lovecraft’s entire literary career that he could, on the one hand, absorb the highest aesthetic fruits of Western culture—Greek and Latin literature, Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley—and at the same time go slumming in the cheapest dregs of popular fiction. Throughout his life Lovecraft vigorously defended the literary value of the weird tale (unlike some modern critics who misguidedly vaunt both the good and the bad, the aesthetically polished and the mechanically hackneyed, as representative of “popular culture”—as if literary merit is determined by what masses of half-literate people like to read), and he adamantly (and rightly) refused to consider the weird work found in dime novels and pulp magazines as genuine literature; but this did not prevent him from voraciously lapping up these lesser products. Lovecraft knew that he was reading trash, but he read it anyway. It has become fashionable to find literary—as opposed to sociological—value in dime novels by maintaining that they (and popular fiction generally) were read by all classes of society; Edmund Pearson, writing in 1929, already initiated this tendency by concluding his study with accounts by eminent literati of the day (Booth Tarkington, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Marc Connelly, William Lyon Phelps) who read and enjoyed dime novels in their youth. But the brute fact is that the dime and nickel novels were read primarily by the young, the poor, and the ill-educated. The literary formulae they inculcated—thrilling action at all cost and in spite of all probability and verisimilitude; “cliffhanger” conclusions to chapters; stereotyped character portrayal; stilted dialogue; a highly stylised and mechanical structure—were the worst possible influences on anyone wishing to write serious literature, and were all repudiated by Lovecraft by the time he developed a critical awareness of the distinction between good and bad writing. By then, however, he had already read so much of this material—and its descendants, the pulp magazines—that, as he himself correctly detected, his own style became, in small part, insidiously corrupted by their example.
Joshi contends that pulp fiction is only for the "half-educated". I wonder, does he himself make sure to read only things that are properly approved for "educated readers"?
His surprise and dismay that the adolescent Lovecraft could enjoy dime novels alongside the likes of Shakespeare, Dryden & Keats betrays more about his own literary snobbery than anything else. Plus royaliste que le roi, perhaps.
Such a "bewildering catholicity" (in Joshi's phrase) of literary taste is arguably the mark of a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity: a trait found in young Lovecraft and many other intelligent people besides. It's hardly "bewildering" unless one is too elitist to be curious about the wider world around them.
