The Provost and the Pulpster

M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft

This newsletter marks the start of the second year of From the Unquiet Silence. Please help spread the word to everyone that you know who relishes literate ghost stories and enjoys the occasional deep dive into structure and literary evolutions. We will inaugurate our second year together by examining a figure that I am often called upon to address: the American H.P. Lovecraft. What follows is a diagnostic of the profound differences between tales of terror (James) and horror (Lovecraft). Lovecraft adored him. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, H.P. Lovecraft calls M.R. James “a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank,” praising his economy, clarity, and eerie precision. And yet, when Monty James encountered Lovecraft’s work, he winced. He noted with a scholar’s despair that “cosmic” was used twenty-four times in a single story. The critique, offered to a friend in private correspondence, dismissed the work as “woolly or too nasty.”

The divergence is instructive. James, precise and understated, had no taste for grandiose, overdrawn, pan-galactic deities with tentacled faces. His own uncanny creations crept, waited, then revealed themselves only in glimpses that instilled a sense of dread transforming, ultimately, into terror. He believed in the suggestive power of language, the value of indirection. Lovecraft, by contrast, blew open the boundaries of horror, flinging his prose into realms of planetary madness and ancestral slime.

Their stylistic contrast is as stark as their metaphysics. James writes with restraint, music, and narrative cunning. Lovecraft’s imagination is vast, even as the emotional register remains oddly unseasoned, and his sentences are often slack, his paragraphs misshapen. There is a fever in Lovecraft's tone that blurs rather than sharpens, and where James refines towards implication, Lovecraft expands towards operatic accumulation. Whatever one makes of the mythos, it is difficult to argue that Lovecraft approached prose with anything like James’s discipline or grace.

Both men were writing about intrusion, things from outside breaking into the known world, but they differed on scale. James was local: his ghosts lived in country churches, tucked among Latin inscriptions and forgotten shelves. Lovecraft was galactic. Where James whispered of the liminal, Lovecraft screamed of the infinite.

There’s a temptation to frame their relationship as antagonistic, but that would miss the deeper point: they share an impulse, even if it forks. Both wrote to unsettle. Both distrusted the surface of things. Lovecraft’s pantheon may seem cartoonish to a Jamesian reader, but his reverence for James was real. “In inventiveness and atmosphere,” he wrote, James was unsurpassed.

One imagines James, perhaps over sherry at Eton, setting Lovecraft’s prose down with a shudder (not of fear but of stylistic dismay). Still, the lineage is there. The cold corridor that originated at the altar of a Suffolk church eventually opened onto a chaotic vision of the disarticulated cosmos.

Next month, I will discuss a peculiar narrative trick that M.R. James could well have picked up from his love of reading Dickens.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan