Here are the opening sentences for each section of the Introduction from the Centipede book, so you can compare them to New England Decadent:
"Introduction. The popular conception of Lovecraft, and the image which HPL himself consciously projected in his later years, is that of the staunch New England gentleman, a gentleman of decidedly Puritan extraction. 'I thank the powers of the cosmos that I am a Rhode Island Englishman of the old tradition!' he often exclaimed in his letters to younger friends, even though the fact is that Lovecraft was rejected by his more prosperous and prominent Yankee relatives, who thought of him as a 'queer duck,' 'crazy as a bedbug,' and an inveterate ne'er-do-well."
"II. Lovecraft's reaction to the prospect of a doomed and crumbling universe was also exactly the same as that of the patrician youths of the eighteen-eighties and nineties. This was Aestheticism, or 'art for art's sake,' a term associated with Oscar Wilde and his most exquisite creation, Dorian Gray,' who countered the curse of 'that terrible taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing,' by alternating the actual physical decadence of sensual overindulgence with the rarified delights of the supreme collector and connoisseur."
"III. It is as an artist of the afterglow of Decadence, the twilight of the Gods, that Lovecraft must be judged. Here a paradox exists relative to Lovecraft's connection with the tradition of weird and fantastic art, of which he had little or almost no knowledge until relatively late in his career. Rather, the brilliance of Lovecraft's emerald cities and non-Euclidian worlds came instead from the vividness of his dreams and the actual cosmic horrors of his nightmares, which alternate between scenes reminiscent of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan,' at one pole, to the apocalyptic canvasses of a Hieronymus Bosch, at the other."
"IV. What Lovecraft continues to stress in his fiction, in spite of the imaginative revels we are presented with here, is precisely the effect of this confrontation with ancient evil."
It certainly reminds me of New England Decadent, but the Introduction seems a bit too abrupt to be the first portion of a book discussing Lovecraft and his texts. J. D., do you have Lovecraft -- A Study in the Fantastic, by Maurice Levy, in S. T.'s translation? I have an extra copy in need of a home, & if you wou'd like it, PM me your mailing address and I shall send it as a gift. It, too, is a work to which I constantly return.
The book on Weird Tales writers is not a collection of letters, I think, but of essays by those writers about writing for WT. Or so I think. When I glanced through the book at WFC I saw that the portion by H. Warner Munn was an article that I had Harold write for me for a fanzine I was planning, but that was eventually published elsewhere. It is a huge, wonderful book, with delightful artistic renditions of the writers discussed and reprinted.
