The Lovecraft Project:

H. P. Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we human beings are a tiny, insignificant fraction of the universe, and that there are things much bigger and more important than us hidden in the depths of the world.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

This short story follows an old narrator remembering some things about this man he met one day, one Dr. Samuel Johnson. But the thing is: the narrator claims to be two hundred years old, being born in August 1690, and that he can easily pass for a young man, deceiving his neighbors.

There’s this kind of metacommentary throughout the whole text, which makes the reader feel like Lovecraft is poking fun at himself, such as when the narrator writes: “Tho’ many readers have at times observ’d and remark’d a Sort of antique Flow in my Stile of Writing, it hath pleased me to pass amongst the Members of this Generation as a young Man.” It’s alluring to wonder whether Lovecraft sees himself in the figure of the narrator, as an old man trapped in a young shell, feeling wiser beyond his age, but also dislocated and out of place. The narrator claims to love contrary opinions, believing that they make fertile ground for group discussions, but one’s also left wondering if Lovecraft would really have like to be called out for his bigotry and egregious opinions on race, but I may be digressing.

The best part of this poor excuse of a story is when the narrator recalls his first meeting with Dr. Johnson: he starts making small talk, telling Johnson about a favorable review on his newspaper of Johnson’s work, but the man’s responses are increasingly arrogant and rude. What makes the moment stand out, therefore, is the surprising reaction of the narrator, who appears to like Johnson the more the man berates him. After Dr. Johnson scornfully says, “I do not require to become familiar with a Man’s writing in order to estimate the Superficiality of his Attainments, when he plainly shews it by his Eagerness to mention his own Productions in the first Question he puts to me,” this is the sentence that immediately follows: “Having thus become Friends, we convers’d on many Matters.”

These amusing exchanges, however, soon come to an end, as the narrator decides it’s more important to describe the formation of a book club. The narrative, then, becomes a chore. There’s too much irrelevant information in the text, which makes the narrative loses its focus, leaving Dr. Johnson to center around some big names that were members of said club, which are listed in the most insipid form possible: “Other members of the CLUB were Mr. David Garrick, the Actor and early Friend of Dr. Johnson, Messieurs Tho. and Jos. Warton, Dr. Adam Smith, Dr. Percy, Author of the Reliques, Mr. Edw. Gibbo, the Historian,” and the list goes on. The interesting dynamic between the narrator and Dr. Johnson is dropped, making the narrative directionless.

The narrator tries to justify this lack of direction by framing it as the nonsensical rambles of an old man who’s about to take his afternoon tea, confessing this in the last paragraph, “I seem to ramble along without much Logick or Continuity when I endeavour to recall the Past.” But then the story suddenly ends right after it, without purpose or meaning. Everything is so absurdly inane that the whole story almost reads like a parody of biographies.

In A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Lovecraft tries to mimic the disarrayed memories of an old man reminiscing about the past, crafting a narrative that is non-linear and mostly illogical. But the rub is that it’s also incredibly pointless. There’s nothing of substance in the scenes remembered by the narrator, and, in the end, when he promises to tell more if the response to this first recollection of events is favorable, the reader can only shudder at the thought.

October 19, 2020.