Too Sane

I just finished reading L. Sprague de Camp's biographies of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard.* They left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Part of my reaction is surfeit, having read them both in one evening . . . but jeez louise, the word around town wasn't wrong when it said this Lovecraft bio was hostile! de Camp's almost invariable procedure is to quote Lovecraft and to follow up with a challenge, offering his opinions as the final word. In some cases this is justified - Lovecraft was one very weird cat in a whole host of ways - but ultimately it seems egotistical and ill-mannered of a biographer to intrude himself so repeatedly and so obtrusively. It's also obvious despite demurrals that de Camp really dislikes Lovecraft as a person. It seems a clash of temperaments and values: the practical sensible man versus the unworldy dreamer.

There's more sympathy in the Howard bio - you would damn well hope there would be, as de Camp spent much of his career subsisting parasitically on the corpse of Conan - but there's way too much psychobabble for my taste. And even here I feel de Camp finds Howard a little distasteful.

Ultimately I think De Camp was just too sane to really understand people like Lovecraft and Howard. I'm reminded of Damon Knight's comment in In Search of Wonder: "Howard had the maniac's advantage of believing in whatever he wrote; de Camp is too wise to believe wholeheartedly in anything."

I look forward to taking a look at some of the other Lovecraft bios, S.T. Joshi's and maybe Frank Belknap Long's. But not just now. In a few weeks. Right now I'm tuckered out on these two of the Musketeers of the Weird.

*OK, OK, the latter is a colloboration with his wife Catherine and another person. Just in the interest of precision.