Michel Houellebecq (left) and HP Lovecraft.CRISTÓBAL MANUEL / WIKIPEDIA
Writers tend to fall in love with other writers.
John Fante, his son Dan explained, would randomly pick up the books from his library and rehearse on them the signature of Knut Hamsun, his favorite writer.
Fante was playing at getting into his head.
His masterpiece,
Ask the Dust
, is in fact an attempt to reformulate the marginally canonical
Hunger
.
Fante did not write about Hamsun, but he could have.
It is probable that he spoke about him with whoever wanted to listen to him and who understood exactly why he had done what he had done and how he had done it.
After all, as Lorrie Moore says, "no one like a writer to understand another writer."
And this could apply to any artist, but the writer, says Moore, is the only one who can also express it in the art he practices.
Unfortunately, he adds, "you can't dance to a review of a work of art."
Obviously, Moore, who talks about it at length in his collection of essays
Let's See What Can
Be
Done
(Eternal Cadence), refers to judgment, to criticism, not to the crush that can lead a writer to fall madly in love with another and wanting to start some kind of dialogue with his work, deconstructing it to understand him, like someone trying to understand the lover who has left still a mystery but has left behind a lot of clues that no one better than he can understand.
Writers who have served as the engine, who have served, from the page and without knowing it, as best friends, lifeboats, teachers, fathers and mothers, and even unattainable peaks to admire as what you did not think could exist .
Michel Houellebecq (Saint-Pierre, France, 65 years old) admits something similar about Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Fascinated from the age of 16 by the ability of Providence to exist on the fringes of the world, by "his resounding NO to the world as it is and the reality as the world insists it should be", Houellebecq managed to complete in 1991, when he was still no more than an unknown Parisian official, a very powerful biography of Lovecraft entitled
HP Lovecraft: Against the world, against life
, recently recovered by Anagrama.
“With the distance I think I wrote this book as if it were a kind of first novel.
A novel with only one character, ”he says in the preface, in which he makes clear what attracts him to the misanthropic genius.
Clearly a kind of soul mate.
But it goes further.
That is, in the same way that Emmanuel Carrère deconstructed himself - and his obsession with the Catholic faith then - in his approach to Philip K. Dick in the highly distorted biography that he dedicated to him (
I am alive and you are dead
) , Houellebecq reflects on Lovecraft, pointing out what they do not share - "it is evident that, personally, I have not followed Lovecraft in his hatred for any form of realism", he writes - and what yes - "few have felt as impregnated as he is by the absolute nothingness of any human aspiration ”.
For him, as for Houellebecq himself, "the universe is nothing more than a furtive arrangement of elementary particles."
Emmanuel Carrère (left) and Philip K. Dick.GETTY IMAGES
This is also the case in the biography that Chris Kraus (New York, 66 years old), an iconoclast writer at the forefront who explores the narrative self as well as the world around him, wrote about Kathy Acker:
After Kathy Acker
.
In his case, the rebuilding of Acker has been carried out since the demolition.
By superimposing his own figure and that of the world that Acker has left behind, he in some sense destroys it.
"Acker understands that writing without a myth is nothing" and that "female myths do not work in groups" because "they are always unique."
And that was true in his day, says Kraus.
Then it ceased to be.
“Acker represented, in fact, the end of an era, in which the writer, or the writer, was seen as a hero, and that is the terrible thing about his figure, that the moment he reached what he wanted, the world I had changed and what I had always wanted too ”.
It is not difficult to see in what way the work of Kraus herself, in constant mutation, follows in the footsteps of that one, trying not to make her mistakes, having been inside her head while she wrote that book.
And also suspecting that Acker was the kind of crush that turned her into a writer.
As happened to Jonathan Coe with the weird and yet addictive BS Johnson.
Coe (Bromsgrove, England, 59 years old), author of
What a deal!
, published in 1995 a biography of the ill-fated English genius entitled
Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson
.
“In the mid-1980s, in college, I was trying to find my way, with difficulty, through the work of Robbe-Grillet and Ann Quin and it was wonderful to find someone who, while still committed to breaking with form, was of the most addictive!
His books are both tender and revealing, ”he once explained.
Coe saw a path for his own narrative - never so brave - and also for a way of being in the world.
The same happened to Catherine Millet (Bois-Colombes, France, 72 years old) when she ran into DH Lawrence.
In reality, what Millet saw was exactly the kind of thing she wanted to do.
Like Lawrence, Millet wanted, in some way, to use controversy to propel his story, and not let it just tell himself but ask himself questions.
Hence, she says, that hybrid of novel and philosophical digression that the writer detected in
Lady Chatterley
.
Diving in what must have been his thought, then, was not entirely strange to him.
In
Loving Lawrence
(Anagram) tells why, and is situated, as we said of Kraus, Carrère, Coe or Houellebecq himself, on the contour of the person who preceded her to broaden all kinds of limits and recognize her virtues, as she “did more for the aspirations of women than most twentieth-century novelists.
They are not the only cases.
The younger sister
(Anagrama), the book that Mariana Enríquez dedicated to Silvina Ocampo, could also be included in a trend that is more than a trend.
One would say that the biography of a writer made by another writer is a current that is not talked about enough but that has existed since writers exist, and since they admit to themselves that they may have found a soul mate of the who simply want to know more.
When Houellebecq first read Lovecraft it was said that "he did not know that literature could do that", and years later, already before the manuscript of his biography on the author of
The Call of Cthulhu
, he was still not "sure that he can, "and he got into the disturbing skin of Providence's prose when he stated that" there is something about Lovecraft that is not entirely literary "because" there was something about him not quite human. "
And despite everything, his approach is that of an equal, or the closest thing to an equal, according to Stephen King himself, in charge of signing the prologue of the new edition, with which Lovecraft could have come to dream.
Someone who understood that “when you love life, you don't read.
Nor does he go to the movies much.
Whatever they say, access to the artistic universe is more or less reserved for those who are a little up to their cap.
Lovecraft got to be a little more than until the hat ”.
“Lovecraft knows that he has nothing to do with this world.
And he always loses.
Both in theory and in practice.
He believes that adulthood is hell […] and taking into account the values that govern the adult world, we can hardly blame him for it ”, writes Houellebecq, and only agrees with his also ingeniously misanthropic way.
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