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My take on Lovecraft as regards the relationship between his work and his apparent personal opinions essentially goes as follows;
All available biographical material creates the impression of HPL being essentially the definitive example of a terminally uptight, repressed white, middle-class Victorian male, and one who took his inbuilt terror of 'The Other' - as represented not only by women, foreigners and non-aryan people of pretty much all kinds, but also by uneducated and poor people, urban living, modernity in general, and any philosophical viewpoint that strayed beyond the bounds of Western rational materialism* - to an absolute extreme.
So yes, he was a racist - read a story like the aforementioned 'The Horror at Red Hook' in which the protagonist fantasises about the virtue of killing two “chattering jews” he sees on a sub-way train and any other conclusion is undeniable ; at some points, especially in that particular story, the fear he expresses toward 'foreigners', 'immigrants', 'mulattos' etc. is positively hysterical. You’ll recall the elderly professor in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ who drops dead of fright after being “jostled by negroes”. His terror of women is also palpable in the few instances in his work in which they actually appear.
So basically, deal with that or go find some more ideologically acceptable authors to read. Personally, It makes perfect sense to me that the man beyond such deranged literary conceptions should be a somewhat disagreeable character with whose views I would not necessarily seek to agree.
Because I think one of the keys to understanding Lovecraft is that he was basically OBSESSED with forcibly shutting out and dismissing anything that he didn't recognise in himself or his extremely insular and old fashioned (even in the 1920s) view of the world.
He hated all of the above not through any personal grudge or fascistic ideology, but just because he hated and feared MOST THINGS that he considered outside of himself.
But then..... when he closes his eyes to go to sleep at night, or sets pen to paper to come up with a story, well just take a look at what comes howling out of the void as soon as he lets his guard down!
One of the reasons Lovecraft’s work remains so powerful compared to that of other horror hacks is that, even at their most fantastical, his stories always give the impression of being intensely personal, relating back constantly to people, places and ideas that were part of his life with a real honesty of feeling. Despite the emotionless façade of his prose, you can always feel the desperate loneliness and fear / fascination with the outside world working just below the surface, eventually exploding into screaming Old One related mania as if he can’t help but plunge himself headfirst into all the stuff he’s locked out of his life, before withdrawing again in pain and self-disgust as his unlucky characters are left with a bullet in their brain or gibbering in the asylum.
We are after all talking here about a guy who came back to Providence after his short, extremely unhappy period of marriage in New York and came up with ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, a story in which a policeman convalescing in the countryside recalls the circumstances that sent him over the edge – a nightmare of nerve-rattling urban claustrophobia full of overcrowded tenements stuffed with horrifying, ratlike immigrants setting up basement churches to their barbaric pagan gods, culminating in a honeymooning couple being slaughtered by, or to, a host of demons presided over by some kind of vicious feminine entity identified only as ‘Lilith’.
It’s one of the most teeth-grindingly demented, almost psychedelically intense, pieces of writing in the whole Lovecraft canon, and gives a shocking insight into how thoroughly disturbed Lovecraft’s view of the world actually was. The irony is, you can almost hear HPL, if asked about it, deadpanning “why, it is nothing but a piece of imaginative fiction – to try and connect it to real life would be absurd and distasteful in the extreme”, and then retiring to sweat through another sleepless night. Deny, deny, deny seems to have been his mantra throughout life, but his writing gives it all away.
But whilst viewing the horrors in Lovecraft’s stories as externalised manifestations of his sexual / social / racial hang-ups is a fairly important notion, I also think it’s fair to say that this is only really half of the equation. Disagree should you wish, but I definitely feel that Lovecraft’s work conveys an essential motherlode of mystical, visionary, or indeed ‘cosmic’, imagery and ideas which is utterly extraordinary – the early prose-poems he wrote based directly on his dreams, and later incorporated into his longer stories, are startlingly powerful and unprecedented. Whatever explanations you may wish to apply to such things, it seems to me that, whether he liked or not (and I think it’s evident he didn’t), HPL was hooked up to the source of religious visions, mystical revelations and whatever else.
Only, as befits the stubborn personality I’ve outlined above, Lovecraft seems to have spent his life fighting this strange inspiration for all he was worth, fearing rather than embracing it, and filtering it through his own prejudices and dysfunctions until the strange power that could otherwise have sparked into the fire of a prophet or visionary or great artist became twisted, damaged and denied by his arch-repressive persona until it mutated into a mass of unspeakably bad energy, and Dread Cthulhu emerged unheeded from his troubled sub-conscious.... and that I think is the kernel of where his genius and abiding power lies.
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*Yes, despite his position as a demagogue of crazed esoteric horror, Lovecraft in real life was utterly dismissive of any religious, mystical or supernatural ideas throughout his life..... in public, at least. |
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