A few days ago on NRO’s Corner, John J. Miller and I had some exchanges about the ever-fascinating (“more fun to read about than he is to read,” observed an emailer) American-Gothic writer H.P. Lovecraft. Among the follow-up emails, here is one arguing that H.P.L. might have found Secular Right at least partly congenial.
Derb,
I apologize for bringing something up almost a week after the topic appeared in the Corner. And it’s entirely possible some devoted Lovecraft fan beside John Miller has already sent you this material. However, I wanted to send you some quick, random thoughts on H. P. Lovecraft’s pessimism.
First, Lovecraft’s biographer, S. T. Joshi, has written a book on just this topic: H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West. (As far as I know, Lovecraft never met Mencken, but Joshi has done work on both.) [Added by J.D.: Joshi is also the compiler of Atheism: A Reader.]
I won’t go into the evolution of Lovecraft’s political thought. Miller has the conclusion basically right even if the back story is more complicated. And Jonah could explain to Joshi why Lovecraft going from an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler (though the stories of a Jewish neighbor who had gone to Germany seem to have damped that enthusiasm) to supporting Roosevelt is not that complicated. (Lovecraft even used the phrase “fascistic socialism.”)
I think Lovecraft’s pessimism took several forms. First, his basic stoic, atheist outlook convinced him nothing ultimately mattered. That position seemed to carry over into a belief that ethics was a matter of aesthetics and not any universal absolute. Traditions gave life meaning. For Lovecraft, that meaning was in following certain cultural patterns: “For example, I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat
with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing — it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.”Life’s pain was curbed by tradition: “So I believe that the soundest course for a man of sense is to put away the complexity and sophistication of an unhappy age, and to return into the seclusion and simplicity of a rural Squire; loving old, ancestral, and quaintly beautiful things, and thinking old, simple, manly, heroick thoughts which — even when not true — are surely beautiful because they bear upon them so much of the ivy of tradition.”
The best squaring of his belief in some objective values and his relativism is: “Thus I am a complete sceptic and a thorough conservative at the same time. My attitude toward a traditional value is to hang on to it (as an aesthetic act) as long as possible, if it is not positively anti-social as judged by the most genuine and permanent factors in human happiness and welfare.”
Lovecraft valued the traditions of a colonial New England gentleman, in its landscape and architecture. The “machine-culture” of the modern world threatened that culture as did immigration. In one sense, Lovecraft was an anti-Semite, but only towards Jews he thought threatened his New England and wouldn’t assimilate. He didn’t consider his wife, a foreign-born Jew, to be one of that type though.
Lovecraft, as an aesthete aristocrat, preferred the Greek world of beauty and harmony to that money-grubbing, utilitarian Roman world.
In art, Lovecraft was no fan of his literary contemporaries, though he read them. (Here is his poem “Waste Paper,” a parody of Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”) Lovecraft cared only about beauty and not coherence. But
beauty he found lacking in Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Eliot,and Hemingway. Joshi concisely sums up Lovecraft as channeling his idol Poe in saying science (and he conceded the above writers may be psychologically valid in their descriptions of minds) was for truth, art for beauty.Joshi concludes his book with Oswald Spengler’s influence on Lovecraft and says Lovecraft saw four forces of decline: democracy, capitalism, immigration, and mechanization. Lovecraft wrote on the new world emerging: “Of course it will be a kind of ‘civilisation,’ in the loosest sense of the term; but it will be no civilisation of ours. We can’t look forward to it with any more sense of personal pride or pleasure than we could look forward to the triumph of any other alien civilization on territory which has known our own.”
Joshi sees — and you sense this having read Lovecraft’s fiction — Lovecraft’s work as being a “fiction of decline.”
So, yes, Lovecraft was a pessimist and a conservative of a certain sort.
I first read Lovecraft as a kid while my parents dragged me through Maine, and his stories added a nice, creepy touch to everything bright and innocent – “I wonder what’s really in the basement of that old church?”
And don’t forget, November 10 is ‘The Feast of St Cthulhu’ day.
Welcome back after long interruption, dear Bradlaugh !
I like your (?) post on the full visible spectrum gentleman site.
Your truly, Florida resident.
I say,
Is there at least one Lovecraft story where the human/humankind/hero wins? I have read several of H.P.’s stories, but am looking for at least one where the democrats don’t win.
I know there aren’t many, but there must be at least one where the forces of Rahm Emanuel are beaten by the human.
I say (dodging a biscuit) how about a little help?
B. F-P.
We replaced survival of the fittest with survival of the cutest. Mencken and Lovecraft were both pointing out that the results of such a change in mission statement must be unsustainable. The cute kittens we couldn’t bear to let starve or be eaten are now shredding our furniture and ruining our carpets and paint with piss. The big-eyed orphans we couldn’t bear not to feed in the 80s and 90s are now murderous rape machines (or rapacious murder machines, depending on the local flavor) destroying even the caricatures of civilization we imposed on them in an earlier age.
Lovecraft’s protagonists are often the poor saps who have to deal with the results of other people’s egotistical meddling in such things. I’m sure he would’ve been horrified by our efforts at smallpox and malaria eradication on peoples who have no desire to embrace the science that led to such discoveries.
Is he a post-Imperialist Kipling?
B. F-P.: “The Dunwich Horror,” one of his best (and best-known) pieces.
Thanks!
Derb, you might have read Frank Belknap Long’s biography of Lovecraft, which Arkham House published in the mid-seventies. If you remember the biographer rattling on about his own came-over-on-the-Mayflower ancestors, that was the one.
That comment — Lovecraft is more fun to read about than to read — is a goodie.
Obviously, based on my user name, I’m a big HPL fan. I’m a bigger fan of his contemporary Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan), though. John J. Miller’s written a couple of commendable pieces about him, and his belief in the dark side of human nature and the decline of senescent civilizations. Fits in nicely with the Hobbesian viewpoint.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGZhNTMyNzcyYWEyMmRiZDRkMzliZWI2OTJkMTlhNzc=&w=MQ==
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009378
Anyone with even the slightest interest in HPL, along with anyone who never heard of him till yesterday but would like to know what the fuss is about, should read this column by the late Sam Francis in Chronicles magazine, issue dated May 1997.
For four dark years I was exiled to central Massachusetts. H.P. Lovecraft helped me get through it by making sense of my surroundings.
@Bradlaugh
Thank you for the link to the article. A very nice summary of his life and themes. I’d forgotten that BOTH parents died in an asylum. That would probably lead to some “issues”.
HPL’s short story “The Colour Out Of Space” was one of the first in that genre I ever read. It was in a collection of sci-fi stories an uncle of mine had borrowed from the local library. I was about ten. HPL wasn’t really a sci-fi author of course — that was about as close as he got — but 1950s sci-fi anthologists claimed him anyway.
If you know the story (if not, it’s here) try to imagine reading it at age ten, by a coal fire in the poky living room of a row house in a smoky industrial English town. Orwell said that an Englishman’s image of the U.S.A. was formed half from reading Mark Twain, half from watching cowboy movies. Mine was about equal parts Twain, westerns, and Lovecraft.
The actual U.S.A., when I finally got to it, conformed pretty well…
@Bradlaugh
“The Colour Out of Space” like many HPL stories is a nice allegory of the industrialization of New England, if you ask me. Of course I may be reading too much into it.
@Tony ‘The Colour Out of Space’ is ‘Alien.’ Hapless group of humans gets caught up in an alien life-form’s reproductive cycle.
@B. Fotheringay-Phipps
With regards to the question below “does humankind ever win in Lovecraft’s works”
Yes, there is. In fact, the greatest (in the sense that it encompasses all other works) of Lovecraft’s stories “The Silver Key” and specifically its sequal “Though the Gates of the Silver Key” – it is revealed that all humans are really pieces of larger entities. The protagonist – who is a flimsy stand-in for Lovecraft himself – finds out that he is a small piece of Yog-Sothoth, as are many dreamers and thinkers. Through the protagonists dreams, he unlocks the key to, at first, distant worlds and realms, and later on to the ultimate secrets of reality, before becoming trapped in our own world once more, cut off from the dreams which freed him. Even so, it is clearly a victory.
Also, I hate to burst a lot of bubbles but…Lovecraft /despised/ the Republican party of his day, and if you read his criticisms of it, they could easily have been written by any democrat today.
@Bradlaugh
Is this quote, from HPL’s pen, via the above essay, the Derb view of us and the universe?
“The world, life, and universe we know, are only a passing cloud—yesterday in eternity it did not exist, and tomorrow its existence will be forgotten. Nothing matters—all that happens happens through the automatic and inflexible interacting of electrons, atoms, and molecules of infinity according to patterns which are coexistent with basic entity itself . . . . All is illusion, hollowness, and nothingness—but what does that matter? Illusions are all we have, so let us pretend to cling to them; they lend dramatic values and comforting sensations of purpose to things which are really valueless and purposeless. All one can logically do is to jog placidly and cynically on, according to the artificial standards and traditions with which heredity and environment have endowed him. He will get most satisfaction in the end by keeping faithful to these things.”
If so, I think I understand the affinity. A man of Anglican upbringing, eventually having lost the faith, realizes that the cherished traditions of his childhood world are disappearing rapidly. While younger by two decades, I feel the same thing.
Yeah, pretty close. I’d throw in a dash of humility — matter and energy are stranger things than Lovecraft thought (or, to be fair, than was understood in his time), and are tangled up somehow with human consciousness. The universe is weirder than Lovecraft believed. Probably just as cold, though.
And yes; you pick your illusions (or have them handed down to you), then you hang on tight to them, for mental stability and social functioning. After early middle age, you’re probably not going to be able to switch to another set of illusions.
If you are gifted with good powers of self-deception, you will be able to convince yourself that your illusions are based on certitudes in the mind of an invisible sky god, or inscribed on golden tablets buried under a mountain somewhere; then you will likely be happier and more stable.
If you have a skeptical/empirical/reductionist cast of mind, it will be hard for you to do this, and you’ll end up in Lovecraftian relativism: “There is no standard by which my illusions can be shown superior to yours, but they get me through the night so I’m sticking with them.”
Somewhere in Doomed (comes out next Tuesday!) I mention some research showing that self-deception may be adaptive; i.e. that selfish genome of yours may have a better shot of being passed on to the next generation if it configures your brain with the ability to tell itself pretty lies and believe them.
This sounds right to me. And look, Lovecraft has no descendants. (Neither, by the way, does Thomas Malthus.)
How can a guy simultaneously live his life as he wants to live it AND as a (fill in the blank) SHOULD live it?
Was he just fortunate enough to want that which was expected of him?
Lucky son of a gun.
Well, he sure was lucky to live in the U.S.A., where nobody minded his strangeness & sometimes bizarre opinions. He was unlucky though in being a Miniver Cheevy, stranded out of the time & place where his imagination dwelt. He was utterly unemployable in any useful or productive capacity. If I remember correctly, the poor guy wellnigh starved to death.
I was referring to Mr. Francis characterization of “One of the last free men who lived his life as he wanted and as he thought a New England gentleman should”
Seems contradictory to me, but, but it’s a nitpicky thing to be sure.
Maybe a guy could be all paradoxical and say that the free-est man is the one who knows his place, but somehow, I don’t think that’s what Francis meant, or did he?
Anyway, this discussion about HPL is very interesting to me and I’m enjoying it. Mr. Miller at NRO recommended some of his short stories one Halloween a few years ago, and I just loved them.
The “atmosphere” of his stories is thick as pea soup, with dread lurking just ahead ,and I loved the prose, florid or baroque or overcooked or whatever you want to call it. I thought his description of the countryside was descriptive and evocative.
Put me in with those who think atmosphere is HPL’s greatest character.
Lovecraft writing to Catherine L. Moore in August 1936
“As for the Republicans – how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or that rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical “American hertiage” – economic oversight, price-fixing, “government in business”, etc. recur often in American colonial history). utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
Now, as to Lovecraft’s transition to being a New Dealer, I think there are a couple of reasons why that might have occurred.
– The socialism of the New Deal was actually doing something to come to grips with the machine age he saw upon the world, whereas to from his perspective, I’d say that as much as he loved the ideal of the past, he also made it clear that that past was incompatible with the machine age. And if 1930s American conservatism was of the “do nothing and keep the status quo,” the adaptive nature of the New Deal, from his perspective, would appeal as being rational if not aesthetically pleasing.
– The New Deal funded artists. Lovecraft’s hopes for some kind of socialist/fascist/industrial future included the idea that it would be a technocracy, run by those who knew better. While he had minimal formal education, the man was quite intelligent and an autodidact, and even if he didn’t literally hope to be put in charge, the idea of people he could identify with being in charge, I think that was definitely a plus.
And lastly, though given the title of the post, perhaps most importantly, HPL LOVED the Romans. He saw himself AS Roman. He appreciated Greek art and its effect on the Classical world. But he saw himself as a Roman, and then as an Englishman, with the Germanic element coming in third and losing ground as time goes. He says so himself numerous times in his letters. And of course there is the amazingly detailed dream that he ends up giving to Frank Belknap Long to use ultimately in “The Horror in the Hills.”
Here’s another 1936 quote, from September
“At the present moment, as the failure of orthodox capitalism to decrease unemployment and the concentration of wealth in a mechanized civilization becomes increasingly manifest, we must beware of the irresponsible pamphleteering practiced on both sides of the growing breach between conservative ‘haves’ and radical ‘have-nots’. Facts are distorted amidst the tension, and statements and inferences tend to become emotional and undependable. Orthodox Marxism is certainly a grotesque exaggeration of the truth, though orthodox capitalistic laissez-faire can scarcely be less fantastic in the light of present and future conditions.”
@spookyparadigm
Lovecraft said “the Romans were an extremely prosaic race; given to all the practical and utilitarian precepts I detest, and without any of the genius of the Greek or galmour of the Northern barbarian. And yet — I can’t manage to think behind 450 A.D. except as a Roman!” He also said “the human personality never attained a greater height of satisfying realisation than in the age of Pericles”.
Unfortunately, I’m quoting by way of Joshi so I don’t know the dates or the receipients of those letters. I agree that Lovecraft was fascinated by Rome and especially admired Augustan Age literature and Lucretius. Still, it seems on the basis of those quotes, he admired Greek accomplishments more than Roman as a whole.
If I recall correctly, his ghost-written “The Mound” is the clearest fictional version of his politics.
I’ve read that quote in the letter itself, in one of the five Selected Letters volumes (I can’t remember which, it’s not 3 as I haven’t finished that one yet, it might be 2, from his New York years more or less), and as he’s noting, he does respect and enjoy the Greeks for their art and philosophy, and he also appreciated their mythology especially when he was a young boy. But he really was a Romano-phile, even though he knew them to be as you note, prosaic and practical, but he still saw himself as one. I never really got the depth of that until I read the letters, as it does not come across in the fiction.
It is definitely worth finding his “Romans vs. the Miri Nigri” dream-story, that ends up in Long’s “The Horror in the Hills.” Given that it was a dream, it is quite astounding and shows real immersion in that subject.
As for his politics, I’d point to two basic models. The Mound is what he thought society would become, but it was not something he condoned. He believed that the machine age would lead to the decadence and depravity in The Mound. The society in the mound, without true creativity, art, or science, instead spending its energy on meaningless pleasures and entertainments, is his nightmare for the machine age, and what he thought of American culture and where it was going. His preferred government was instead the Yithians of The Shadow Out of Time, a mild socialist/fascist blend with a heavy emphasis on learning and scholarship and rule by scientific reason and neither nationalist passion nor religious myth.