Cthulhu Cthursday: Ec’h-Pi-El Speaks: An Autobiographical Sketch By H.P. Lovecraft

Ech’h-Pi-El Speaks is a short work written by Lovecraft and published in 1972 by Gerry de la Ree in a limited run of five hundred. The piece is just over three thousand words and, according to de la Ree, is the longest autobiographical piece by H.P.L. published; at least at the time. The illustrations were done by Virgil Finlay, who was a correspondent of Lovecraft shortly before his death, although the illustration on the right was only partially finished before it was completed by Joe Wehrle in 1971.

Most of the details presented in this essay are well known to Lovecraft enthusiasts and he spends a good deal of it listing his influences. He also takes the time to point out just how much he feels his work falls short of what he would term “literature”, though “It doesn’t look so bad beside the unutterable junk forming the bulk of “W.T.’s” (Weird Tales) contents […].” His summation of his views presents, perhaps, the clearest window into the man’s work:

That’s the kind of guy I am — a cynic and a materialist with classical and traditionalist tastes; fond of the past and its relics and ways, and convinced that the only pursuit worthy of a man of sense in a purposeless cosmos is the pursuit of tasteful and intelligent pleasure as promoted by a vivid mental and imaginative life. Because I believe in no absolute values, I accept the aesthetic values of the past as the only available points of reference — the only workable relative values — in a universe otherwise bewildering and unsatisfying.

Thus I am an ultra-conservative socially, artistically, and politically, though an extreme modernist despite my 39 years in all matters of pure science and philosophy. Loving the illusory freedom of myth and dream, I am devoted to the literature of escape; but likewise loving the tangible anchorage of the past, I tincture all my thoughts with overtones of antiquarianism.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Virgil Finlay [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]