(no subject)
So I got H. P. Lovecraft's book of early essays, just so I could see what he wrote about Elsa Gidlow's and Roswell George Mill's journal of avant-garde poetry and gay liberation, started in 1917. As I predicted, he hated both the poetry and the gay stuff, and found it "artistic chaos characteristic of the late Oscar Wilde of none too fragrant memory."
Apparently the whole thing turned into a literary shouting match. Gidlow describes him as "Mr. Lovecraft with his morbid imitations of artists he seems not even able to understand." Lovecraft described her in turn as perpetuating "morbid imitations of morbid artists that nobody outside the asylum is able to understand."
Really, the next best thing to finding out that two of your favourite writers were close friends, collaborators, and readers of one another's work is to find out that they were bitter archenemies. Not that I imagined grim, moral, conservative Lovecraft to get along with a hippie lesbian poet from Montreal, but I didn't expect that depth of mutual loathing.
I am disappointed that Lovecraft refers to Gidlow as neither "cyclopean" nor "eldritch." Everything in Lovecraft got to be one or the other, if not both. He must've really hated her not to let her even be "eldritch." Every man, woman, child, and fish-dude in Lovecraft got to be "eldritch."
I've also been reading Émile Nelligan's journals and poetry this week. For those of you who've never heard of Nelligan, he's considered one of Quebec's greatest poets, if not the greatest, even though his career only spanned three years -- published at 16, insane at 19, which I suspect remains an Olympic world record for poets.
The onset on his schizophrenia is usually blamed on his having an English-speaking father and a French-speaking mother, and being unable to reconcile the two cultures. Apparently, it was a form of schizophrenia not yet in the DSM -- Type 6, the Poetical Type, triggered by bilingualism in the home.
Apparently the whole thing turned into a literary shouting match. Gidlow describes him as "Mr. Lovecraft with his morbid imitations of artists he seems not even able to understand." Lovecraft described her in turn as perpetuating "morbid imitations of morbid artists that nobody outside the asylum is able to understand."
Really, the next best thing to finding out that two of your favourite writers were close friends, collaborators, and readers of one another's work is to find out that they were bitter archenemies. Not that I imagined grim, moral, conservative Lovecraft to get along with a hippie lesbian poet from Montreal, but I didn't expect that depth of mutual loathing.
I am disappointed that Lovecraft refers to Gidlow as neither "cyclopean" nor "eldritch." Everything in Lovecraft got to be one or the other, if not both. He must've really hated her not to let her even be "eldritch." Every man, woman, child, and fish-dude in Lovecraft got to be "eldritch."
I've also been reading Émile Nelligan's journals and poetry this week. For those of you who've never heard of Nelligan, he's considered one of Quebec's greatest poets, if not the greatest, even though his career only spanned three years -- published at 16, insane at 19, which I suspect remains an Olympic world record for poets.
The onset on his schizophrenia is usually blamed on his having an English-speaking father and a French-speaking mother, and being unable to reconcile the two cultures. Apparently, it was a form of schizophrenia not yet in the DSM -- Type 6, the Poetical Type, triggered by bilingualism in the home.