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View full-sizeDownload Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937), of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of:
horror
fantasy
science fiction
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien.
Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity.
Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.
His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christianity.
Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
Biography
Early life
Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, at 9:00 a.m. in his family home at 194 (later 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island.
The house was torn down in 1961.
He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry in America back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.
His parents married, the first marriage for both, when they were in their thirties.
This was unusually late in life given the time period. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic in a Chicago hotel room while on a business trip.
He was brought back to Providence and placed in Butler Hospital where he remained until his death in 1898.
Lovecraft maintained throughout his life that his father died in a condition of paralysis brought on by "nervous exhaustion" due to over-work, but it is now almost certain that Winfield Scott Lovecraft died from general paresis of the insane.
It is unknown whether Lovecraft was ever aware of the actual nature of his father's illness or its cause (syphilis), although his mother likely was, possibly having even received tincture of arsenic as "preventive medication", which left her with an unusually pallid complexion in later years.
Lovecraft at approximately age nine. Lovecraft thereafter was raised by his mother, his two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips.
All resided together in the family home.
Lovecraft was a child prodigy, reciting poetry at age two and writing complete poems by six.
His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
His grandfather also stirred young Howard's interest in the weird by telling him his own original tales of Gothic horror.
His mother, on the other hand, worried that these stories would upset him.
Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child, at least some of which was certainly psychological in nature although he attributed his various ailments to physical causes only.
Early speculation that he may have been congenitally disabled by syphilis passed on from father to mother to fetus has been completely ruled out.
Due to his sickly condition and his undisciplined, argumentative nature he barely attended school until he was eight and then was withdrawn after a year.
He read voraciously during this period and became especially enamored of chemistry and astronomy.
He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette.
Four years later he returned to public school at Hope Street High School.
His grandfather's death in 1904 greatly affected Lovecraft's life.
Mismanagement of his grandfather's estate left his family in such a poor financial situation they were forced to move into much smaller accommodations at 598 (now a duplex at 598-600) Angell Street.
Lovecraft was so deeply affected by the loss of his home and birthplace he contemplated suicide for a time. In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, he claimed to have himself suffered a "nervous breakdown", not further described, and consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did graduate).
S. T. Joshi suggests in his biography of Lovecraft that a primary cause for this breakdown was his difficulty in higher mathematics, a subject he needed to master to become a professional astronomer.
This failure to complete his education (he wished to study at Brown University) was a source of disappointment and shame even late into his life.
Lovecraft wrote some fiction as a youth but from 1908 until 1913 his output was primarily poetry that he wrote while living a hermit's existence and having almost no contact with anyone but his mother.
This changed when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories of one of the publication's popular writers.
The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, President of the UAPA, who invited Lovecraft to join in 1914.
Around this time he began to build up a huge network of correspondents.
His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century.
Among his correspondents were:
Robert Bloch (Psycho)
Robert Albert Bloch (/blɒk/; April 5, 1917 – September 23, 1994) was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. His writing career lasted 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film. He began his professional writing career immediately after graduation, aged 17. Best known as the writer of Psycho (1959), the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over 30 novels. He was a protégé of H. P. Lovecraft, who was the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while he started emulating Lovecraft and his brand of cosmic horror, he later specialized in crime and horror stories working with a more psychological approach.
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Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures". Smith was one of "the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft", though some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. The fantasy writer and critic L. Sprague de Camp said of him that "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse". Smith was a member of the Lovecraft circle, and his literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937. His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor. Of his writing style, Smith stated: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counterpoint, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation."
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Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series).
Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American writer. He wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He created the character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre. Howard was born and raised in Texas. He spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains, with some time spent in nearby Brownwood. A bookish and intellectual child, he was also a fan of boxing and spent some time in his late teens bodybuilding, eventually taking up amateur boxing. From the age of nine he dreamed of becoming a writer of adventure fiction but did not have real success until he was 23. Thereafter, until his death by suicide at age 30, Howard's writings were published in a wide selection of magazines, journals, and newspapers, and he became proficient in several subgenres. His greatest success occurred after his death. Although a Conan novel was nearly published in 1934, Howard's stories were never collected during his lifetime. The main outlet for his stories was Weird Tales, where Howard created Conan the Barbarian. With Conan and his other heroes, Howard helped fashion the genre now known as sword and sorcery, spawning many imitators and giving him a large influence in the fantasy field. Howard remains a highly read author, with his best works still reprinted, and is one of the best-selling fantasy writers of all time. Howard's suicide and the circumstances surrounding it have led to speculation about his mental health. His mother had been ill with tuberculosis her entire life, and upon learning she had entered a coma from which she was not expected to wake, he walked out to his car parked outside his kitchen window and shot himself in the head while sitting in the driver's seat. He died eight hours later.
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In 1919, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time, Lovecraft's mother had a nervous breakdown and was committed to Butler Hospital like her husband before her.
Nevertheless, she wrote frequent letters to Lovecraft, and they remained very close until her death on May 21, 1921, the result of complications from gall bladder surgery.
Lovecraft was devastated by the loss.
Marriage and New York
A few weeks after the death of his mother, Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston where he met Sonia Greene.
Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis (March 16, 1883 – December 26, 1972) was an American one-time pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher, businesswoman and milliner who bankrolled several fanzines in the early twentieth century. She is noted for her thirteen-year marriage to American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. She was a president of the United Amateur Press Association.
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Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry and seven years older than Lovecraft.
They married in 1924, and the couple moved to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City.
Lovecraft's aunts may have been unhappy with this arrangement, as they were not fond of Lovecraft being married to a tradeswoman (Greene owned a hat shop).
Initially Lovecraft was enthralled by New York but soon the couple was facing financial difficulties.
Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health.
Lovecraft could not find work to support them both, so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment.
Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to intensely dislike New York life.
Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he sublimated in the short story The Horror at Red Hook.
A few years later he and Greene, still living separately, agreed to an amicable divorce, which was never fully completed.
He returned to Providence to live with his aunts during their remaining years.
Due to the unhappiness of their marriage, some biographers have speculated that Lovecraft could have been homosexual, though Greene is often quoted as referring to him as "an adequately excellent lover".
Return to Providence
Back in Providence, Lovecraft lived in a "spacious brown Victorian wooden house" at 10 Barnes Street (the address given as the home of Dr. Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) until 1933.
The period after his return to Providence—the last decade of his life—was Lovecraft's most prolific.
During this time period he produced almost all of his best-known short stories for the leading pulp publications of the day (primarily Weird Tales) as well as longer efforts like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer.
He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt.
He was also deeply affected by Robert E. Howard's suicide.
In 1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine, and he also suffered from malnutrition.
He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937, in Providence.
Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument.
That was not enough for his fans, so in 1977 a group of individuals raised the money to buy him a headstone of his own, on which they had inscribed Lovecraft's name, the dates of his birth and death and the phrase, "I AM PROVIDENCE," a line from one of his personal letters.
Lovecraft's grave in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence is occasionally marked with graffiti quoting his famous phrase from "The Call of Cthulhu" (originally from "The Nameless City"):
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
On October 13, 1997, unknown individual(s) attempted to dig up Lovecraft's body from his grave, not knowing that his body is not under the new headstone. [10]
Background of Lovecraft's work
H. P. Lovecraft’s name is synonymous with horror fiction; his writing, particularly the “Cthulhu Mythos”, has influenced fiction authors worldwide, and Lovecraftian elements may be found in:
novels
movies
music
comic books
and cartoons.
For example, the insane villains of Gotham City in the Batman stories are said to be incarcerated at Arkham Asylum - Arkham being an invention of Lovecraft’s.
Whole in the head -- Slott, Dan, Sook, Ryan, Loughridge, Lee -- Arkham Asylum_ Living Hell, Volume 1, 2003 jul -- DC Comics -- 0c5979a5023ba470629a3fdfbcb0f9c6 -- Anna’s Archive.pdf
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Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Described as the "King of Horror", his books have sold more than 350 million copies as of 2006, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. King has published over 65 novels/novellas, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections.
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Joe Richard Lansdale (born October 28, 1951) is an American writer and martial arts instructor. A prose writer in a variety of genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense, he has also written comic books and screenplays. Several of his novels have been adapted for film and television. He is the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and eleven Bram Stoker Awards.
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Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman /ˈɡeɪmən/[3] (born Neil Richard Gaiman on 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and a screenwriter. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens, Stardust, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
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have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences.
Lovecraft himself, though, was relatively unknown during his own time.
While his stories might have made it into the pages of prominent pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (often eliciting letters of outrage from regular readers of the magazines), not many people knew his name.
He did, however, correspond regularly with other contemporary writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, people who became good friends of his, even if they never met in person.
August William Derleth (February 24, 1909 – July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House (which did much to bring supernatural fiction into print in hardcover in the US that had only been readily available in the UK). Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing.
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This group of correspondents became known as the “Lovecraft Circle”, since they all freely borrowed elements of Lovecraft’s stories — the mysterious books with disturbing names, the pantheon of ancient alien gods such as Cthulhu and Azathoth, and eldritch places such as the New England town of Arkham and its Miskatonic University — for use in their own (with Lovecraft’s blessing and encouragement).
It’s been suggested that it was the efforts of the Lovecraft Circle — particularly August Derleth — that prevented Lovecraft’s name and fiction from disappearing completely into obscurity.
After Lovecraft’s death, the Lovecraft Circle carried on.
August Derleth was probably the most prolific of these writers and added to and expanded on Lovecraft’s vision.
Derleth’s contributions have been controversial, to say the least; while Lovecraft never considered his pantheon of alien gods more than a mere plot device, Derleth created an entire cosmology, complete with a war between the 'good' “Elder Gods” and the 'evil' “Outer Gods” (such as Cthulhu and his ilk), which the 'good' Gods were supposed to have won, locking Cthulhu and others up beneath the earth, in the ocean etc., and went on to associate different gods with the traditional four elements.
Lovecraft's fiction has been grouped into three categories by some critics.
While Lovecraft did not refer to these categories himself, he did once write:
"There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces' — but alas — where are my Lovecraft pieces?"
(Cthulhu Mythos Megapack 1) Lovecraft, H P_ Klein, T E D_ Rainey, Stephen Mark_ Stableford, Brian - The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack_ 40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales.pdf
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A frequently given explanation is that the Dream Cycle belongs more to the genre of fantasy, while the Mythos is science fiction.
Also, much of the supernatural elements in the Dream Cycle takes place in its own sphere or mythological dimension separated from our own level of existence.
The Mythos on the other hand, is placed within the same reality and cosmos as the humans live in.
Much of Lovecraft's work was directly inspired by his night terrors, and it is perhaps this direct insight into the unconscious and its symbolism that helps to account for their continuing resonance and popularity.
All these interests naturally led to his deep affection for the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who heavily influenced his earliest macabre stories and writing style known for its creepy atmosphere and lurking fears.
Edgar Allan Poe (né Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
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Lovecraft's discovery of the stories of Lord Dunsany with their gallery of mighty gods existing in dreamlike outer realms, moved his writing in a new direction, resulting in a series of imitative fantasies in a "Dreamlands" setting.
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, FRSL (/dʌnˈseɪni/; 24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957), commonly known as Lord Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist. He published more than 90 volumes of fiction, essays, poems and plays in his lifetime, 29 (I.A.92) with a modest amount of material published posthumously. He gained a name in the 1910s as a great writer in the English-speaking world. Best known today are the 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland's Daughter, and his first book, The Gods of Pegāna, which depicts a fictional pantheon. Many critics feel his early work laid grounds for the fantasy genre. Born in London as heir to an old Irish peerage, he was raised partly in Kent, but later lived mainly at Ireland's possibly longest-inhabited home, Dunsany Castle near Tara. He worked with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory supporting the Abbey Theatre and some fellow writers. He was a chess and pistol champion of Ireland, and travelled and hunted. He devised an asymmetrical game called Dunsany's chess. In later life, he gained an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin. He retired to Shoreham, Kent, in 1947. In 1957 he took ill when visiting Ireland and died in Dublin of appendicitis.
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Another inspiration came from a totally different kind of source; the scientific progresses at the time in such wide areas as:
biology
astronomy
geology
and physics, all contributed to make the human race seem even more insignificant, powerless and doomed in a materialistic and mechanical universe, and was a major contributor to the ideas that later would be known as cosmicism, and which gave further support to his atheism.
It was probably the influence of Arthur Machen, with his carefully constructed tales concerning the survival of ancient evil into modern times in an otherwise realistic world and his mystic beliefs in hidden mysteries which lay behind reality, that added the last ingredient and finally helped inspire Lovecraft to find his own voice from 1923 onwards.
Arthur Machen (/ˈmækən/ or /ˈmæxən/; 3 March 1863 – 15 December 1947) was the penname of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language. He is also well known for "The Bowmen", a short story that was widely read as fact, creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
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This took on a dark tone with the creation of what is today often called the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of alien extra-dimensional deities and horrors which predate humanity, and which are hinted at in aeon-old myths and legends.
The term "Cthulhu Mythos" was coined by Lovecraft's correspondent and fellow author, August Derleth, after Lovecraft's death; Lovecraft jocularly referred to his artificial mythology as "Yog-Sothothery".
His stories created one of the most influential plot devices in all of horror: the Necronomicon, the secret grimoire written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
The resonance and strength of the Mythos concept have led some to incorrectly conclude that Lovecraft had based it on pre-existing myths or occult beliefs.
Faux editions of the Necronomicon have also been published over the years.
His prose is somewhat antiquarian.
Often, he employed archaic vocabulary or spelling which had already by his time been replaced by contemporary coinages; examples including Esquimau, and Comanchian.
He was given to heavy use of an esoteric lexicon including such words as
"eldritch"
"rugose"
"noisome"
"squamous"
"ichor"
"cyclopean"
and of attempts to transcribe dialect speech which have been criticized as clumsy, imprecise, and condescending.
His works also featured British English (he was an admitted Anglophile), and he sometimes made use of anachronistic spellings, such as "compleat" (for "complete") "lanthorn" ("lantern"), and "phantasy" ("fantasy"; also appearing as "phantastic" and "phantabulous").
Lovecraft was a prolific letter writer.
During his lifetime he wrote thousands of these letters, however the exact number of letters he wrote is still hotly debated.
An estimate of 100,000 seems to be the most likely figure, arrived at by L. Sprague de Camp.
Lovecraft inscribed multiple pages to his group of correspondents in small longhand.
He sometimes dated his letters 200 years before the current date, which would have put the writing back in U.S. colonial times, before the American Revolution that offended his Anglophilia.
He explained that he thought that the 18th and 20th centuries were the "best"; the former being a period of noble grace, and the latter a century of science.
Themes
Several themes recur in Lovecraft's stories:
Forbidden knowledge
In "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), Lovecraft wrote:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age."
Lovecraft's protagonists are nevertheless always driven to this "piecing together," which makes up most Lovecraft stories.
When such vistas are opened, the mind of the protagonist-investigator is often destroyed.
Those who actually encounter "living" manifestations of the incomprehensible are particularly likely to go mad.
Those characters who attempt to make use of such knowledge are almost invariably doomed.
Sometimes their work attracts the attention of malevolent beings; sometimes, in the spirit of Frankenstein, they are destroyed by monsters of their own creation.
Nonhuman influences on humanity
The beings of Lovecraft's mythos often have human (or mostly human) servants; Cthulhu, for instance, is worshiped under various names by cults amongst both the Eskimos of Greenland and voodoo circles of Louisiana, and in many other parts of the world.
These worshipers served a useful narrative purpose for Lovecraft.
Many beings of the Mythos were too powerful to be defeated by human opponents, and so horrific that direct knowledge of them meant insanity for the victim.
When dealing with such beings, Lovecraft needed a way to provide exposition and build tension without bringing the story to a premature end.
Human followers gave him a way to reveal information about their "gods" in a diluted form, and also made it possible for his protagonists to win temporary victories.
Lovecraft, like his contemporaries, envisioned "savages" as closer to the Earth, only in Lovecraft's case, this meant, so to speak, closer to Cthulhu.
Atavistic guilt
Another recurring theme in Lovecraft's stories is the idea that descendants in a bloodline can never escape the stain of crimes committed by their forebears, at least if the crimes are atrocious enough.
Descendants may be very far removed, both in place and in time (and, indeed, in culpability), from the act itself, and yet blood will tell
and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). An example of a crime that Lovecraft apparently considered heinous enough for this consequence is cannibalism:
"The Picture in the House"
The Worlds of H.P.Lovecraft-The Picture in the House.cbr -- H. P. Lovecraft (writer), Rob Davis (artist), Susan E. Dorne (letterer) -- Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft_ The Picture In The House, 1993 jan 1 --.pdf
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Often in Lovecraft's works the protagonist is not in control of his own actions or finds it impossible to change course.
Many of his characters would be free from danger if they simply managed to run away; however, this possibility either never arises or is somehow curtailed by some outside force, as in The Color Out of Space.
Often his characters are subject to a compulsive influence from powerful malevolent or indifferent beings.
As with the inevitability of one's ancestry, eventually even running away, or death itself, provides no safety:
The Thing on the Doorstep
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips - The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories.pdf
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In some cases, this doom is manifest in the entirety of humanity, and no escape is possible:
The Shadow out of Time
The Shadow out of Time -- Howard Phillips Lovecraft [Lovecraft, Howard Phillips] -- 1934 -- Feedbooks -- 7c3d19e00f8742324d7ffa5eea1a1aef -- Anna’s Archive.pdf
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Though little known to his fan base, Lovecraft was deeply influenced by the German conservative-revolutionary theorist Oswald Spengler (another German proponent of aristocratic elitism, Friedrich Nietzsche, also influenced Lovecraft).
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (German: [ˈɔsvalt ˈʃpɛŋlɐ]; 29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German polymath, whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work, The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan. Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency whose countering would lead to 200 years of Caesarism (extra-constitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of government) before Western civilization's final collapse. Spengler is regarded as a German nationalist and a critic of republicanism, and he was a prominent member of the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution. Although he had voted for Hitler over Hindenburg in the 1932 German presidential election and the Nazis had viewed his writings as a means to provide a "respectable pedigree" to their ideology, Spengler later criticized Nazism due to its excessive racialist elements, which led to him, and his work being censored in his final years. He saw Benito Mussolini, and entrepreneurial types, like the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, as examples of the impending Caesars of Western culture—showcasing his stark criticism of Mussolini's colonialist adventures. Spengler influenced later academics, as well as anti-western ideologies such as fascism and Islamism.
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Spengler's pessimistic thesis of the decadence of the modern West formed a crucial element in Lovecraft's overall anti-modern, conservative worldview.
Spenglerian imagery of cyclical decay is present in particular in "At the Mountains of Madness."
In fact, S. T. Joshi places Spengler at the center of his discussion of Lovecraft's political and philosophical ideas - his book on the topic is entitled, H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West. Lovecraft wrote to Clark Ashton Smith in 1927:
"It is my belief, and was so long before Spengler put his seal of scholarly proof on it, that our mechanical and industrial age is one of frank decadence". (see China Mieville's excellent introduction to "At the Mountains of Madness", Modern Library Classics, 2005).
Lovecraft frequently dealt with the idea of civilization struggling against more barbaric, primitive elements.
In some stories this struggle is at an individual level; many of his protagonists are cultured, highly educated men who are gradually corrupted by some evil influence.
In such stories, the "curse" is often a hereditary one, either because of interbreeding with non-humans (e.g. "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920)
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips - Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.pdf
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"The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931) or through direct magical influence (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).
Physical and mental degradation often come together; this theme of 'tainted blood' may represent concerns relating to Lovecraft's own family history, particularly the death of his father due to what Lovecraft must have suspected to be a syphilitic disorder.
In other tales, an entire society is threatened by barbarism.
Sometimes the barbarism comes as an external threat, with a civilized race destroyed in war (e.g. "Polaris").
Sometimes, an isolated pocket of humanity falls into decadence and atavism of its own accord (e.g. "The Lurking Fear").
But most often, such stories involve a civilized culture being gradually undermined by a malevolent underclass influenced by inhuman forces.
There is a lack of analysis as to whether England's gradual loss of prominence and related conflicts (Boer War, India, World War I) had an impact on Lovecraft's worldview.
It is likely that the "roaring twenties" left Lovecraft disillusioned as he was still obscure and struggling with the basic necessities of daily life, combined with seeing non-European immigrants in New York City.
Race
A common dramatic device in Lovecraft's work is to associate virtue, intellect, elevated class position, civilization, and rationality with white Anglo-Saxons, often posing it in contrast to the corrupt, intellectually inferior, uncivilized and irrational, which he associated with people he characterized as being of lower class, impure racial "stock" and/or non-European ethnicity and dark skin complexion who were often the villains in his writings.
In his poem "On the Creation of Niggers", Lovecraft says:
When, long ago, the gods created Earth In Jove's fair image Man was shap'd at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were next design'd; Yet were they too remote from humankind. To fill the gap, and join the rest to man, Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan. A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Fill'd it with vice, and call'd the thing a NIGGER.
In "The Call of Cthulhu" he writes of a captured group of mixed race worshipers of Cthulhu:
“the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type.
Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.
But before many questions were asked it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved.
Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.”
In a letter of January 23, 1920, Lovecraft wrote:
“For evolved man — the apex of organic progress on the Earth — what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties?
The primal savage or ape merely looks about his native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity!!!!”
In "Herbert West - Reanimator," Lovecraft gives an account of a just-deceased African-American male.
He asserts:
“He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.
The body must have looked even worse in life - but the world holds many ugly things.”
In "The Horror at Red Hook," one character is described as "an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth".
In "Medusa's Coil," ghostwritten by Lovecraft for Zealia Bishop, the story's final surprise--after the revelation that the story's villain is a vampiric medusa - is that she,
“was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers.... [T]hough in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.”
In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," this is a description of an African - New English couple:
"The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah."
In contrast to their apparently alien landlord:
"a small rodent-featured person with a guttural accent"
In the short story "The Rats in the Walls," one of the narrator/protagonist's nine cats is named "Nigger-Man".
“As I have said, I moved in on July 16, 1923. My household consisted of seven servants and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond. My eldest cat, "Nigger-Man," was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts ..."
However, it should be noted that the cat in the story is a courageous and helpful creature; the favorite feline of the story's narrator, so it is difficult to attribute the animal's name to simple bigotry.
The narrators in
"The Street,"
"Herbert West: Reanimator,"
"He,"
"The Call of Cthulhu,"
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth,"
"The Horror at Red Hook,"
and many other tales, express sentiments which could be considered hostile towards Jews.
He married a woman of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, Sonia Greene, who later said she had to repeatedly remind Lovecraft of her background when he made anti-Semitic remarks.
"Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York,"
Greene wrote after her divorce from Lovecraft, "Howard would become livid with rage.
He seemed almost to lose his mind."
Lovecraft was an avowed Anglophile and held English culture to be the comparative pinnacle of civilization, with the descendants of the English in America as something of a second-class offshoot, and everyone else below (see, for example, his poem "An American to Mother England").
His love for English history and culture is often repeated in his work (such as King Kuranes' nostalgia for England in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath").
The narrator of "Cool Air" speaks disparagingly of the poor Hispanics of his neighborhood, but respects the wealthy and aristocratic Spaniard Dr. Muñoz, for his Celtiberian origins, and because he is "a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination."
The degenerate descendants of Dutch immigrants in the Catskill Mountains, "who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South" ("Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919), are common targets.
In "The Temple," Lovecraft's highly unsympathetic narrator is a World War I U-boat captain whose faith in his "iron German will" and the superiority of the Fatherland lead him to machine-gun helpless survivors in lifeboats and, later, kill his own crew, while blinding him to the curse he has brought upon himself.
One of the foremost Lovecraft scholars, S. T. Joshi, notes,
"There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as "typical of his time," for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era.
It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction."
In his book "H. P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life,"Michel Houellebecq argues that "racial hatred" provided the emotional force and inspiration for much of Lovecraft's greatest works.
According to L. Sprague de Camp's biography, Lovecraft moderated his views a lot toward the end of his life.
Sprague de Camp says Lovecraft was horrified by reports of anti-Jewish violence in Germany (prior to World War II, which Lovecraft did not live to see), which he regarded as irrational.
Lovecraft racist antagonism is a corollary of his nihilistic notion of biological determinism: At the Mountains of Madness, in which explorers discover evidence of a completely alien race (the Elder Things) who are credited with the accidental introduction of life to earth, through bioengineering but who were eventually destroyed by their brutish shoggoth slaves.
Even after several members of the party are killed by revived Elder Things, Lovecraft's narrator expresses sympathy for them:
"They were the men of another age and another order of being... what had they done that we would not have done in their place?
God, what intelligence and persistence!
What a facing of the incredible... Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!"
These lines of thought in Lovecraft's worldview — racism and romantic reactionary defense of cultural order in the face of the degenerative modern world — have led some scholars to see a special affinity to the aristocratic, anti-modernism of Traditionalist Julius Evola:
“Certainly "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" with its grandiose portrayal of the onyx city respires the cool and elegant spirit of Tradition, arraigned against which in several stories is the sink of decadence, Innsmouth, an inbred population made up of the offspring of lustful mariners and sea monsters, the negative force of counter-Tradition.
The eternal struggle between the Uranian power of light and the telluric forces of chaos is reflected in Lovecraft's work"
Gender
Women in Lovecraft's fiction are rare, and sympathetic women virtually non-existent; the few leading female characters in his stories — like Asenath Waite (though actually an evil male wizard who has taken over an innocent girl's body) in "The Thing on the Doorstep" and Lavinia Whateley in "The Dunwich Horror" — are invariably servants of sinister forces.
Romance is likewise almost absent from his stories; where he touches on love, it is usually a platonic love (e.g. "The Tree").
His characters live in a world where sexuality is negatively connotated — if it is productive at all, it gives birth to less-than-human beings ("The Dunwich Horror").
In this context, it might be helpful to draw attention to the scale of Lovecraft's horror, which has often been described by critics as "cosmic horror."
Operating on a grand, cosmic scale as his stories are, they assign humanity a minor, insignificant role. Consequently, it is not female sexuality to which the stories categorically deny a vital and positive role — rather, it is human sexuality in general.
Also, Lovecraft states in a private letter (to one of the several female intellectuals he befriended) that discrimination against women is an "oriental" superstition from which "Aryans" ought to free themselves: evident racism aside, the letter seems to preclude at least conscious misogyny (as does, indeed, his private life otherwise).
Keeping in mind, the earliest contact Lovecraft had with women, first, was his mentally ill mother, and later on, a life spent living with two elderly aunts.
No serious misogynistic elements are evident in his fiction.
Risks of a Scientific Era
At the turn of the 20th century, man's increased reliance upon science was both opening new worlds and solidifying the manners by which he could understand them.
Lovecraft portrays this potential for a growing gap of man's understanding of the universe as a potential for horror.
Most notably in "The Color Out of Space," the inability of science to comprehend a meteorite leads to horror.
In a letter to James F. Morton in 1923, Lovecraft specifically points to Einstein's theory on relativity as throwing the world into chaos and making the cosmos a jest.
And in a 1929 letter to Woodburn Harris, he speculates that technological comforts risk the collapse of science.
Indeed, at a time when men viewed science as limitless and powerful, Lovecraft imagined alternative potential and fearful outcomes.
Influences on Lovecraft
Lovecraft was influenced by such authors as
Oswald Spengler
Robert W. Chambers (writer of The King in Yellow, of whom H. P. Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith: "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans — equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them"),
Arthur Machen (The Great God Pan)
Lord Dunsany (The Gods of Pegana and other Dunsany works)
Edgar Allan Poe
A. Merritt (The Moon Pool, later a great liking and admiration of the original version of The Metal Monster)
and Lovecraft's friends Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.
Lovecraft considered himself a man best suited to the early 18th century.
His writing style, especially in his many letters, owes much to Augustan British writers of the Enlightenment like Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift.
Lovecraft even went so far as to write using the antiquated grammatical peculiarities of that literary era.
While Lovecraft's fiction radically inverted the Enlightenment belief in mankind being able to comprehend the universe, his personal outlook as revealed in his letters shows Lovecraft largely agreeing with rationalist contemporaries like Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS[66] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, but also saw the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of World War II, he welcomed American global hegemony in favor of either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He would later criticize Stalinist totalitarianism, condemn the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and become an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).
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He also cited Algernon Blackwood as an influence, quoting The Centaur in the head paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu.
Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".
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He also declares Blackwood's "The Willows" to be the single best piece of weird fiction ever written.
Lovecraft's influence on culture
Beyond direct adaptation, Lovecraft and his stories have had a profound impact on popular culture and have been praised by many modern writers.
Some influence was direct, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many of his contemporaries, such as
August Derleth
Robert E. Howard
Robert Bloch
Many later figures were influenced by Lovecraft, including author and artist Clive Barker, prolific horror writer Stephen King, film directors John Carpenter and Stuart Gordon, game designers Sandy Petersen and Keichiro Toyama, horror manga artist Junji Ito, and artist H. R. Giger.
H. P. Lovecraft’s name is virtually synonymous with horror fiction; his writing, particularly his so-called “Cthulhu Mythos”, has influenced fiction authors worldwide, and Lovecraftian elements can be seen in:
novels
movies
comic books
even cartoons.
Many modern horror writers — such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, F. Paul Wilson, Thomas Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley, to name just a few — have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences.
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges dedicated his short story "There Are More Things" to the memory of Lovecraft. Contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq wrote a literary biography of Lovecraft called H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.
Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote an introduction for a collection of Lovecraft stories.
The Library of America published a volume of Lovecraft's work in 2005, essentially declaring him a canonical American writer.
Other authors have written stories that are explicitly set in the same reality as Lovecraft's original stories.
Lovecraft pastiches are common.
Lovecraft's characteristic devices — like the object that drives one insane upon seeing it — are now eponymous.
There have also been detailed references to the Cthulhu mythos in current and near current science fiction (for example, Babylon 5: Thirdspace and the Doctor Who new adventures novels).
Lovecraft appears as himself in the television tie-in novel Stargate SG-1: Roswell.
He has also been held responsible for the invention of the philosophy "Cosmicism" which was reflected in many works beyond his own, including the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still.
