An Interview with S. T. Joshi
*
conducted by Jonathan McCalmont
Born in Pune India in 1958, Sunand Tryambak Joshi's name will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Since the 1970s, Joshi has worked ceaselessly to improve access to and thinking about the works of Lovecraft through a near-constant stream of newly edited stories, biographical information, translations and critical collections. However, his interests are not limited merely to matters Lovecraftian as his editorial and critical skills have also been applied to the works of authors such as Ligotti, Sterling and Mencken and that is without mentioning his collections pertaining to American prejudice and atheistic thought.
Joshi's career is not only an exemplar of the difference that clever criticism can make in public perceptions of an author, it is also an example of how to make a living out of genre without being a writer or a publisher of fiction.
Joshi's career is not only an exemplar of the difference that clever criticism can make in public perceptions of an author, it is also an example of how to make a living out of genre without being a writer or a publisher of fiction.
.....
Fruitless Recursion : You are best known as a Lovecraft scholar but you have also produced works of criticism and numerous collections of essays and fiction on a number of different subjects, so I wonder, how do you define yourself?
S. T. Joshi : It does at times appear as if I’m a kind of jack of all trades, spreading myself into the areas of supernatural fiction, atheism, general literature (H. L. Mencken, George Sterling), and even race relations (Documents of American Prejudice [1999]) and women’s studies (In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women [2006]). A bookstore owner where I was doing a signing said to me, “You’re all over the place.” But I think nearly all my diverse interests can be unified by Lovecraft--most of them are extensions of my interest in Lovecraft and his background. Lovecraft led me to Clark Ashton Smith; Smith led me to George Sterling; George Sterling led me to H. L. Mencken; and so on. I will also mention that I do a lot of editing of texts as a means of earning an income. I have no other job than writing, and editing books is a reasonably convenient means of bringing in the shekels. I don’t think I could make a living just as a literary critic.
FR : Your career trajectory seems to me to have been an interesting one. You live on what you make as a non-fiction genre writer but you never jumped the fence into academia or gave in, as Clute did, to the urge to produce your own fiction. Were you ever tempted by either of those paths?
STJ : As for writing fiction: When I first decided to become a writer--at the age of 14--I started out trying to write fiction, either horror fiction or detective fiction (I was reading a lot of detective stories at that time). I wrote hundreds of stories over the next four years, including one entire novel and half of a second (both detective stories). But I eventually realised that fiction was not my forte: all I was doing was writing imitations of Lovecraft, John Dickson Carr, and the other writers I admired. So I switched to criticism. Every now and then the urge to write fiction comes to me, and I try to do so in a manner that can legitimately be called my own, rather than merely a copy of someone else. So far, none of this fiction has been published; it may never be, and even if it is, it will probably appear under a pseudonym.
As for academia: the chief reason I abandoned my Ph.D. program at Princeton was the dread of having to face a classroom. I think I’d be a very bad teacher--I have no patience for that kind of work--and I also heartily dislike the whole academic culture, with its petty infighting and the impenetrable jargon used by academic critics. So I’ve prided myself on being an outsider. I’ve somehow managed to publish with a lot of academic publishers. I used to have a difficult time getting a hearing, since I didn’t have a Ph.D. and didn’t teach; but now, with my record of publications, it is a bit easier.
FR : You mention that your interests are unified by Lovecraft and I think that in some cases the links are more transparent than others. In particular, I'm thinking of In Her Place (2006), your work on prejudice against women. Did that work spring from research motivated by a desire to understand Lovecraft's infamous neuroses?
STJ : Well, I suppose In Her Place is pretty remote from my work on Lovecraft, and this is perhaps the only book that has no connection with it at all. I conceived of it after compiling my book on race prejudice (Documents of American Prejudice), which of course does spring (in part) out of my attempt to understand why the supremely rational Lovecraft would subject himself to something so fundamentally irrational as race prejudice. I had a falling out with the publisher of the prejudice book (Basic Books), so years later, when Prometheus Books asked me if I had any material of that sort available, I threw it at them and they accepted it.
FR : One 'Lovecraftian' interest that made me smile when I discovered it was the fact that you have written and compiled works on atheistic and agnostic thought. Do you see Lovecraft's work as particularly atheistic and if so, is that one of the things that drew you to him,or did Lovecraft inspire you to godlessness in the first place?
STJ : I am now not certain of Lovecraft’s exact role in the development of my own atheistic thought. Lovecraft expressed his atheism chiefly in essays and (especially) in letters, and I think I read those as early as the age of 15 or so. But I would not have found his writing so compelling if I had not already been inclined to it. I was never given any religious training in childhood: my father, although a Hindu, was a secularist, and insisted that I and my sisters be allowed to figure out our religious or non-religious beliefs for myself. (My mother is still a devout Hindu.) I actually recall, as a teenager, looking at some elementary treatises on the major religions--Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism--and finding them all so preposterous that I could scarcely credit how anyone could believe them. I think Lovecraft was fairly decisive in my becoming an atheist, but it was not long thereafter that I read thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others who cemented my beliefs.
FR : Lovecraft's atheism was expressed in essay form but I think that in his decision to depict gods as inherently other and, at best, wholly unsympathetic, creatures there's also a strong sense of anti-religious sentiment in his work. I think this is what Houellebecq picked up upon when he tried to reclaim Lovecraft as an author in the existentialist tradition. Did you find Houellebecq's reading convincing?
STJ : I will be honest and say that I have not read Houellebecq’s book in detail, but I think he has really not studied Lovecraft thoroughly and is simply using Lovecraft to promote certain agendas of his own. My own belief is that Lovecraft’s “gods” are not expressions of his atheism in any direct sense--at least not in the sense that you have indicated in this question. His gods (who, ultimately, turn out to be merely space aliens) are really symbols for the inscrutability of the universe. To my mind they are not meant to convey the idea that gods are somehow evil or preposterous, since of course they turn out not to be gods at all. I also don’t see Lovecraft as a proto-existentialist. He was an “indifferentist.” He wouldn’t have said that “the universe is absurd” (as the existentialists did), because he thought the universe wasn’t anything in particular--it just existed. To attribute any kind of emotion or affect to it was to anthropomorphise it, a tactic Lovecraft would have regarded as philosophically invalid.
FR : One of your projects that we're reviewing this month is your translation of Maurice Levy's Lovecraft: a Study in the Fantastic. It's comparatively rare for genre works to be translated into English and the situation is scarcely better with regards to genre criticism. What were the circumstances that lead you to decide to translate Levy's doctoral thesis?
STJ : Believe it or not, I translated the bulk of Maurice Levy’s book in the summer of 1977, after my freshman year of college. Even then, I had come to believe that a lot of French criticism on Lovecraft was much superior to most of the criticism in English, and I thought American critics would benefit from getting a taste of the French approach to Lovecraft. In fact, I myself did not immediately realise how superior Levy’s book was even to other French works on Lovecraft; it is head and shoulders above the material in the special L'Herne (1969) issue on Lovecraft, for example. To my mind it remains perhaps the finest general study of Lovecraft ever written. It almost got published around 1980 by Frederick Ungar, but then Ungar suffered some financial difficulties and had to back out of the project. That depressed me a bit, and I didn’t submit the book anywhere for years; then, when I finally queried Wayne State University Press in 1987, it was accepted incredibly quickly and appeared in 1988.
FR : I noticed in the Levy that you seemed to be quite an interventionist translator in that you not only produced an English-language version but you also removed many of the erroneous ideas in the original text. What was the translation process like? was there a lot of back-and-forth or did you just translate around the areas that were out of date?
STJ : Well, I just translated the text as printed, and then later went back and did some tweaking. I felt there was no point in embalming errors in a book of this sort. Levy allowed me a pretty free hand; in fact, I even went back to his original dissertation of 1969 and inserted some text from there. I had actually written a lengthy introduction stressing the importance of Levy’s book for Lovecraft studies, but Levy felt that it was a bit excessive--almost as if he was being treated as a “classic”! So I removed it and wrote only a very brief preface. I will confess that my French has deteriorated through lack of use, so I doubt I’ll be doing much more translation.
FR : So you’ve translated Horror criticism from French and you’ve written and edited a number of works of criticism relating to horror authors. How do you rate the current critical climate for Horror? is interesting work still being done?
STJ : As a result of the work of the past 20 or 30 years, both by myself and by others, I think that Lovecraft and the horror field in general is much more academically respected than it used to be, so that one can approach academic publishers with a treatise on horror fiction and be granted a hearing. Ironically, contemporary horror literature has largely ceased to be a big-time commercial phenomenon and has largely retreated to the small press--where, frankly, it belongs. It will always be a literature for specialised tastes. In terms of criticism, there isn't a great deal of it. I allowed my own two journals, Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, to lapse, although I have now revived them under different guises as The Lovecraft Annual and Studies in the Fantastic. The defunct Necrofile (our review journal) has been revived as Dead Reckonings. I fear I have not paid much attention to academic work in the field, although I believe McFarland is publishing some good books.
FR : I know you’re a busy man but what are you currently busy with? is there anything you’d like us to keep an eye open for?
STJ : My big, long-range project is a comprehensive history of supernatural fiction, which may extend to 2 or 3 volumes and take years to finish. However, I have an academic publisher already interested in the project, and this publisher is willing to publish the volumes separately; and the first one may be done as early as next summer, meaning it would be out in 2010. I've been boning up on a lot of the earlier writing in the field, much of which I had never read (e.g., the Gothic novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries). I have just completed a re-reading of Poe for the first time in about 20 years--a tremendous experience. I don't think there are any good histories of horror fiction out there--those by David Punter, Walter Kendrick, and others range from the mediocre to the dreadful. Les Daniels's Living in Fear (1975) is probably the best we have, but of course it is very much out of date. ... As for other projects--I can mention one that is very, very long-range--the book publication (in about 25 volumes) of Lovecraft's collected correspondence. The first two volumes came out last year (the Lovecraft-Derleth letters). The Lovecraft-Robert E. Howard letters will come out in 2009 (2 vols.), and the Lovecraft-Clark Ashton Smith letters in 2010 (2 vols.). Hope I live long enough to complete the job!
S. T. Joshi : It does at times appear as if I’m a kind of jack of all trades, spreading myself into the areas of supernatural fiction, atheism, general literature (H. L. Mencken, George Sterling), and even race relations (Documents of American Prejudice [1999]) and women’s studies (In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women [2006]). A bookstore owner where I was doing a signing said to me, “You’re all over the place.” But I think nearly all my diverse interests can be unified by Lovecraft--most of them are extensions of my interest in Lovecraft and his background. Lovecraft led me to Clark Ashton Smith; Smith led me to George Sterling; George Sterling led me to H. L. Mencken; and so on. I will also mention that I do a lot of editing of texts as a means of earning an income. I have no other job than writing, and editing books is a reasonably convenient means of bringing in the shekels. I don’t think I could make a living just as a literary critic.
FR : Your career trajectory seems to me to have been an interesting one. You live on what you make as a non-fiction genre writer but you never jumped the fence into academia or gave in, as Clute did, to the urge to produce your own fiction. Were you ever tempted by either of those paths?
STJ : As for writing fiction: When I first decided to become a writer--at the age of 14--I started out trying to write fiction, either horror fiction or detective fiction (I was reading a lot of detective stories at that time). I wrote hundreds of stories over the next four years, including one entire novel and half of a second (both detective stories). But I eventually realised that fiction was not my forte: all I was doing was writing imitations of Lovecraft, John Dickson Carr, and the other writers I admired. So I switched to criticism. Every now and then the urge to write fiction comes to me, and I try to do so in a manner that can legitimately be called my own, rather than merely a copy of someone else. So far, none of this fiction has been published; it may never be, and even if it is, it will probably appear under a pseudonym.
As for academia: the chief reason I abandoned my Ph.D. program at Princeton was the dread of having to face a classroom. I think I’d be a very bad teacher--I have no patience for that kind of work--and I also heartily dislike the whole academic culture, with its petty infighting and the impenetrable jargon used by academic critics. So I’ve prided myself on being an outsider. I’ve somehow managed to publish with a lot of academic publishers. I used to have a difficult time getting a hearing, since I didn’t have a Ph.D. and didn’t teach; but now, with my record of publications, it is a bit easier.
FR : You mention that your interests are unified by Lovecraft and I think that in some cases the links are more transparent than others. In particular, I'm thinking of In Her Place (2006), your work on prejudice against women. Did that work spring from research motivated by a desire to understand Lovecraft's infamous neuroses?
STJ : Well, I suppose In Her Place is pretty remote from my work on Lovecraft, and this is perhaps the only book that has no connection with it at all. I conceived of it after compiling my book on race prejudice (Documents of American Prejudice), which of course does spring (in part) out of my attempt to understand why the supremely rational Lovecraft would subject himself to something so fundamentally irrational as race prejudice. I had a falling out with the publisher of the prejudice book (Basic Books), so years later, when Prometheus Books asked me if I had any material of that sort available, I threw it at them and they accepted it.
FR : One 'Lovecraftian' interest that made me smile when I discovered it was the fact that you have written and compiled works on atheistic and agnostic thought. Do you see Lovecraft's work as particularly atheistic and if so, is that one of the things that drew you to him,or did Lovecraft inspire you to godlessness in the first place?
STJ : I am now not certain of Lovecraft’s exact role in the development of my own atheistic thought. Lovecraft expressed his atheism chiefly in essays and (especially) in letters, and I think I read those as early as the age of 15 or so. But I would not have found his writing so compelling if I had not already been inclined to it. I was never given any religious training in childhood: my father, although a Hindu, was a secularist, and insisted that I and my sisters be allowed to figure out our religious or non-religious beliefs for myself. (My mother is still a devout Hindu.) I actually recall, as a teenager, looking at some elementary treatises on the major religions--Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism--and finding them all so preposterous that I could scarcely credit how anyone could believe them. I think Lovecraft was fairly decisive in my becoming an atheist, but it was not long thereafter that I read thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others who cemented my beliefs.
FR : Lovecraft's atheism was expressed in essay form but I think that in his decision to depict gods as inherently other and, at best, wholly unsympathetic, creatures there's also a strong sense of anti-religious sentiment in his work. I think this is what Houellebecq picked up upon when he tried to reclaim Lovecraft as an author in the existentialist tradition. Did you find Houellebecq's reading convincing?
STJ : I will be honest and say that I have not read Houellebecq’s book in detail, but I think he has really not studied Lovecraft thoroughly and is simply using Lovecraft to promote certain agendas of his own. My own belief is that Lovecraft’s “gods” are not expressions of his atheism in any direct sense--at least not in the sense that you have indicated in this question. His gods (who, ultimately, turn out to be merely space aliens) are really symbols for the inscrutability of the universe. To my mind they are not meant to convey the idea that gods are somehow evil or preposterous, since of course they turn out not to be gods at all. I also don’t see Lovecraft as a proto-existentialist. He was an “indifferentist.” He wouldn’t have said that “the universe is absurd” (as the existentialists did), because he thought the universe wasn’t anything in particular--it just existed. To attribute any kind of emotion or affect to it was to anthropomorphise it, a tactic Lovecraft would have regarded as philosophically invalid.
FR : One of your projects that we're reviewing this month is your translation of Maurice Levy's Lovecraft: a Study in the Fantastic. It's comparatively rare for genre works to be translated into English and the situation is scarcely better with regards to genre criticism. What were the circumstances that lead you to decide to translate Levy's doctoral thesis?
STJ : Believe it or not, I translated the bulk of Maurice Levy’s book in the summer of 1977, after my freshman year of college. Even then, I had come to believe that a lot of French criticism on Lovecraft was much superior to most of the criticism in English, and I thought American critics would benefit from getting a taste of the French approach to Lovecraft. In fact, I myself did not immediately realise how superior Levy’s book was even to other French works on Lovecraft; it is head and shoulders above the material in the special L'Herne (1969) issue on Lovecraft, for example. To my mind it remains perhaps the finest general study of Lovecraft ever written. It almost got published around 1980 by Frederick Ungar, but then Ungar suffered some financial difficulties and had to back out of the project. That depressed me a bit, and I didn’t submit the book anywhere for years; then, when I finally queried Wayne State University Press in 1987, it was accepted incredibly quickly and appeared in 1988.
FR : I noticed in the Levy that you seemed to be quite an interventionist translator in that you not only produced an English-language version but you also removed many of the erroneous ideas in the original text. What was the translation process like? was there a lot of back-and-forth or did you just translate around the areas that were out of date?
STJ : Well, I just translated the text as printed, and then later went back and did some tweaking. I felt there was no point in embalming errors in a book of this sort. Levy allowed me a pretty free hand; in fact, I even went back to his original dissertation of 1969 and inserted some text from there. I had actually written a lengthy introduction stressing the importance of Levy’s book for Lovecraft studies, but Levy felt that it was a bit excessive--almost as if he was being treated as a “classic”! So I removed it and wrote only a very brief preface. I will confess that my French has deteriorated through lack of use, so I doubt I’ll be doing much more translation.
FR : So you’ve translated Horror criticism from French and you’ve written and edited a number of works of criticism relating to horror authors. How do you rate the current critical climate for Horror? is interesting work still being done?
STJ : As a result of the work of the past 20 or 30 years, both by myself and by others, I think that Lovecraft and the horror field in general is much more academically respected than it used to be, so that one can approach academic publishers with a treatise on horror fiction and be granted a hearing. Ironically, contemporary horror literature has largely ceased to be a big-time commercial phenomenon and has largely retreated to the small press--where, frankly, it belongs. It will always be a literature for specialised tastes. In terms of criticism, there isn't a great deal of it. I allowed my own two journals, Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, to lapse, although I have now revived them under different guises as The Lovecraft Annual and Studies in the Fantastic. The defunct Necrofile (our review journal) has been revived as Dead Reckonings. I fear I have not paid much attention to academic work in the field, although I believe McFarland is publishing some good books.
FR : I know you’re a busy man but what are you currently busy with? is there anything you’d like us to keep an eye open for?
STJ : My big, long-range project is a comprehensive history of supernatural fiction, which may extend to 2 or 3 volumes and take years to finish. However, I have an academic publisher already interested in the project, and this publisher is willing to publish the volumes separately; and the first one may be done as early as next summer, meaning it would be out in 2010. I've been boning up on a lot of the earlier writing in the field, much of which I had never read (e.g., the Gothic novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries). I have just completed a re-reading of Poe for the first time in about 20 years--a tremendous experience. I don't think there are any good histories of horror fiction out there--those by David Punter, Walter Kendrick, and others range from the mediocre to the dreadful. Les Daniels's Living in Fear (1975) is probably the best we have, but of course it is very much out of date. ... As for other projects--I can mention one that is very, very long-range--the book publication (in about 25 volumes) of Lovecraft's collected correspondence. The first two volumes came out last year (the Lovecraft-Derleth letters). The Lovecraft-Robert E. Howard letters will come out in 2009 (2 vols.), and the Lovecraft-Clark Ashton Smith letters in 2010 (2 vols.). Hope I live long enough to complete the job!
Excellent interview! Even as a longtime reader, collector and even correspondent of ST Joshi, this had revelations for me about his work and motivations. Well done!
Posted by: Leigh Blackmore | January 19, 2010 at 10:21 AM
This is excellent. I've just recorded a wee video interview with S. T. over at YouTube -- he's great!
Posted by: Wilum Pugmire | May 19, 2010 at 10:12 PM