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.
