Disdain is not a productive literary sentiment; generally, it results only in well-bred silence. But Lovecraft was forced to live in New York, where he came to know hatred, disgust, and fear, otherwise stimulating sentiments. And it was in New York that his racist opinions turned into a full-fledged racist neurosis. Being poor, he was forced to live in the same neighborhoods as the “obscene, repulsive, nightmarish” immigrants. He would brush past them on streets and in public parks. He was jostled by “greasy sneering half-castes,” by “hideous negroes that resemble gigantic chimpanzees” in the subway. And in the long lines of job seekers he came across them again and realized to his horror that his own aristocratic bearing and refined education tempered with his “balanced conservatism” brought him no advantage. His currency was worth nothing here in Babylon; here wiles and brute force reigned supreme, here “rat-faced Jews” and “monstrous half-breeds skip about rolling on their heels absurdly.”
This is no longer the WASP’s well-bred racism; it is the brutal hatred of a trapped animal who is forced to share his cage with other different and frightening creatures. Still, his hypocrisy and good manners last till the end, as he writes to his aunt that individuals of their background must not stand out by their speech or by any inconsiderate actions. According to those close to him, when he crossed paths with members of other races, Lovecraft grated his teeth and turned rather pale, but would keep calm. It was only in his letters that his exasperation poured forth—later it showed up in his stories and eventually became something of a phobia. His sight, nourished as it was by hatred, grew into paranoia and eventually his gaze was actually deranged, portending the verbal hyperbole of the “great texts.” Here, for example, is how he describes the Lower East Side and its immigrant population to Belknap Long:
“The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They—or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed—seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses… and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi fluid rottenness.
From that nightmare of perverse infection I could carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal linements of the morbid mould of disintegration and decay… a yellow and leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point…”
Indisputably great Lovecraftian prose. But what race could possibly have provoked this outburst? He himself no longer knew; at one point he mentions the “Italico-Semitico-Mongoloids.” The ethnic realities at play had long been wiped out; what is certain is that he hated them all and was incapable of any greater specificity.
His descriptions of the nightmare entities that populate the Cthulhu cycle spring directly from this hallucinatory vision. Racial hatred provokes in Lovecraft the trancelike poetic state in which he outdoes himself by the mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences; this is the source of the hideous and cataclysmic light that illuminates his final works. The association is clear in “The Horror at Red Hook.”
The longer Lovecraft was forced to remain in New York against his will, the greater his repulsion and his terror, until they reached alarming proportions. Thus he would write to Belknap Long, “the New York mongoloid problem is beyond calm mention.” Further on in the letter he declares, “I hope the end will be warfare…” In another letter, in a sinister presage, he advocates the use of cyanide gas.
His return to Providence hardly helped matters. Prior to going to New York, he had not even suspected that foreign creatures could be slithering onto the streets of this charming provincial city; he most likely had passed by them without ever seeing them. But now his gaze was endowed with a painful acuity; and even in those beloved neighborhoods he found the first stigmata of this “leprosy”: “Oozing out of various apertures and dragging themselves along the narrow lanes are shapeless forms of organic entity…”
However, gradually, this sanctuary to which he was able to retreat away from society produced its effect. By avoiding all visual contact with the foreign races he regained his equanimity to some extent. His admiration for Hitler subsided. Where once he’d seen him as an elemental force called to regenerate European culture, he came to see him as “a clown,” and then, to concede that although his objectives were fundamentally sane, the absurd extremism of his then-current policy risked leading to disastrous results that directly contradicted his original principles.
Concurrently, the calls to massacre became more infrequent. He had written in a letter “either stow ’em out of sight or kill ’em off,” and he gradually came to consider the first solution to be preferable, especially after a stay in the South at the home of the writer Robert Barlow, where he was shocked to assess that rigorous racial segregation allowed a white, educated American to feel at ease amongst a majority black population. “Of course,” he clarified, in a letter to his aunt, “they can’t let niggers use the beach at a Southern resort—can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of chimpanzees?”
The role of this racial hatred in Lovecraft’s body of work has often been underestimated. Only Francis Lacassin has had the courage to put the question honestly; in his preface to the Letters he writes: “The myths of Cthulhu draw their cold power from the sadistic delectation with which Lovecraft subjects humans, punished for their resemblance to the New York rabble that had humiliated him, to the persecution of beings come from the stars.” This remark seems extremely profound to me, even though it is incorrect. What is indisputable is that Lovecraft, as it is sometimes said of boxers, was “full of rage.” But it must be stated unequivocally that in his stories the role of the victim is generally played by an Anglo-Saxon university professor who is refined, reserved, and well-educated. Someone who, in fact, is rather like himself. As for the torturers, servants of innumerable cults, they are almost always half-breeds, mulattos, of mixed blood, among the basest of species. In Lovecraft’s universe, cruelty is not an intellectual refinement, it is a bestial impulse that perfectly reflects the darkest stupidity. As for the courteous, refined individuals characterized by their great delicacy of manner… they provide the perfect victims.
So the central passion animating his work is much more akin to masochism than to sadism, which only underscores its dangerous profundity. As Antonin Artaud noted, cruelty toward another can only produce a mediocre outcome; cruelty conferred upon oneself, on the other hand, is of an altogether different order of interest.
It is true, HPL occasionally manifests an admiration for the “blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans.” But it is most certainly a bitter sort of admiration; he feels extremely distant from these beings and, unlike Howard, never envisioned putting them in his work. In response to the young Belknap Long, who gently teased him for his admiration for the “great blond beasts of prey,” he wrote with marvelous frankness: “You are perfectly right in saying that it is the weak who tend to worship the strong. That is my case exactly.” He knew perfectly well that there was no part for him in any heroic Valhalla of battles and conquests other than that of the vanquished, as usual. He was pierced to the core by his failures, by what seemed like his wholly natural and fundamental predisposition to failure. And in his literary universe, too, there could be only one part for him: that of the victim.
How We Can Learn From Howard Phillips Lovecraft to Turn Our Spirit into
a Living Sacrifice
Lovecraft’s heroes strip themselves of life. Renouncing all human joy, they become pure intellects, pure spirits striving toward a single goal: the search for knowledge. At the end of their quest, a terrifying revelation awaits them: from the swamps of Louisiana to the frozen plateaus of the Antarctic desert, in the very heart of New York and in the somber vales of Vermont’s countryside, everything proclaims the universal presence of evil.
“Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”
Evil, in all its aspects; instinctively adored by cunning degenerate populations who have composed terrifying hymns to its glory.
“Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old and where They shall break through again. […] The wind gibbers with Their voices and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? […] As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where Man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”
This magnificent invocation calls for several remarks. First, Lovecraft was a poet; he is amongst those writers who began with poetry. The first quality apparent in his work was the harmonious rhythm of his sentences; the rest was to come later, and after much work.
Next, it has to be said that these stanzas to all-powerful Evil sound disagreeably familiar. In general, Lovecraft’s mythology is very original, but at times it appears to be a frightful inversion of Christian themes. This is particularly the case in “The Dunwich Horror,” in which an illiterate peasant woman, who has known no men, gives birth to a monstrous creature endowed with superhuman powers. This inverted incarnation ends with a repugnant parody of the Passion where the creature, sacrificed at the summit of a mountain that overlooks Dunwich, cries out desperately, “Father! Father! YOG-SOTHOTH!” in a faithful echo of “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani.” Here, Lovecraft goes back to a very ancient source of horror where Evil is the product of a carnal union against nature. This idea fits his obsessive racism perfectly; for, to him, as to all racists, it is not one particular race that represents true horror, but the notion of the half-breed. Using both his knowledge of genetics and his familiarity with sacred texts, he concocts an explosive synthesis of abject, unprecedented force. To Christ, the new Adam come to regenerate mankind; Lovecraft opposes the “negro” who has come to regenerate humanity through bestiality and vice. “The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones…” This is just a frightening paraphrasing of Saint Paul.
Here we approach what lies beneath Lovecraft’s racism: he who designated himself the victim and who picked his tormentors. He felt no doubts regarding this topic: “sensitive persons” would be vanquished by “greasy chimpanzees”; they would be pulverized, tortured, and devoured, their bodies would be torn apart in ignoble rites to the obsessive rhythm of ecstatic drumbeats. Already the varnish of civilization was cracking; the forces of Evil await “patient and potent” because they are going to regenerate again on earth.
Underlying these ruminations on the decay of cultures, which are merely a superimposed layer of intellectual justification, is fear. Fear from afar, preceded by repulsion—it is what generates indignation and hatred.
Dressed in their rigid, rather grim clothes, accustomed to repressing their emotions and desires, the Protestant Puritans of New England may have at times succeeded in forgetting their animal origin. Which is why Lovecraft consents to their company, but even then, only in moderate doses. Their very insignificance is reassuring. But in the presence of “negroes,” he experiences an irrepressible reaction of his nervous system. Their vitality, their apparent lack of complexes or inhibitions, terrifies and repulses him. They dance in the street, they listen to music, rhythmic music… They talk out loud. They laugh in public. Life seems to amuse them, which is worrisome. Because life is itself evil.
Against the World, Against Life
More so today than ever before, Lovecraft would have been a misfit and a recluse. Born in 1890, he already appeared to his contemporaries, in the years of his youth, to be an obsolete reactionary. It’s not hard to imagine what he would have thought of our society today. Since his death, it has not ceased evolving in a direction which could only have led him to hate it more. Mechanization and modernization have ineluctably destroyed the lifestyle he was attached to with his every fiber (it is not as if he harbored any delusions about humanity’s ability to influence events; as he wrote in a letter, “Everything in modern existence is a direct & absolute corollary of the discoveries of applied steam power & of large-scale applications of electrical energy”). The ideals of liberty and of democracy that he so abhorred have spread all over the planet. The man who declared: “What we detest is simply change itself” could only have bristled at the degree to which the idea of progress has come to be an indisputable and almost unconscious credo. The reach of liberal capitalism has extended over minds; in step and hand in hand with it are mercantilism, publicity, the absurd and sneering cult of economic efficiency, the exclusive and immoderate appetite for material riches. Worse still, liberalism has spread from the domain of economics to the domain of sexuality. Every sentimental fiction has been eradicated. Purity, chastity, fidelity, and decency are ridiculous stigmas. The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised.
Horror writers are reactionaries in general simply because they are particularly, one might even say professionally, aware of the existence of Evil. It is somewhat curious that among Lovecraft’s numerous disciples, none has been struck by this simple fact: the evolution of the modern world has made Lovecraftian phobias ever more present, ever more alive.
Robert Bloch, one of his youngest correspondents (when they exchanged their first letters he was fifteen), is an exception. His best stories are ones where he pours forth his hatred of the modern world, of youth, of liberated women, of rock, etc. Jazz already appears to him to be a decadent obscenity; as for rock, Bloch interprets it as a return to the most apish savagery endorsed by the hypocritical amorality of progressive intellectuals. In “Sweet Sixteen,” a band of Hells Angels, simply described at the outset as ultraviolent hoodlums, carry out sacrificial rites on the daughter of an anthropologist. Rock, beer, and cruelty. This works perfectly, is perfectly coherent, perfectly justified. But such attempts at inserting the demoniac into a modern setting remain exceptional. And Robert Bloch’s realist writing and the attention he brings to his characters’ social background is clearly set apart from the influence of HPL. Of those writers with a more direct link to the Lovecraftian movement, none adopted and appropriated the master’s reactionary racial phobias.
True, this is a treacherous path that only leads to narrow straits. Not because of censorship or litigation. Horror writers probably feel that marked hostility toward any form of freedom in the end breeds hostility to life itself. Lovecraft felt the same way, but he did not stop halfway; he was an extremist. That the world was evil, intrinsically evil, evil by its very essence, was a conclusion he had no trouble reaching, and this was also the most profound meaning of his admiration for Puritans. What amazed him about them was that they “hated life and scorned the platitude that it is worth living.” We shall traver
se this vale of tears that separates birth from death, but we must remain pure. HPL in no way shared the hopes of Puritans; but he shared their refusal. He explained his point of view in a letter to Belknap Long (written, moreover, only a few days before his marriage):
“And as for Puritan inhibitions—I admire them more every day. They are attempts to make of life a work of art—to fashion a pattern of beauty in the hog-wallow that is animal existence—and they spring out of that divine hatred of life which marks the deepest and most sensitive soul.”
Toward the end of his days, he did come to, at times, express poignant regrets in the face of the solitude and perceived failure of his existence. But his regrets remained, if one might express them thus, theoretical. He remembered the periods in his life (the end of adolescence, the brief and decisive interval of marriage) where his path might clearly have bifurcated toward what is called happiness. But he understood that he was probably incapable of behaving any other way. And in the end, like Schopenhauer, he concluded that he hadn’t fared too badly.
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