The Unfortunate Truth About H.P. Lovecraft

In his time, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was largely unknown beyond the pages of pulp science fiction magazines like 'Astounding' or 'Weird Tales'. He barely made ends meet with the money he made from the sale of these stories, and indeed disliked most of them as hackish tripe. He was a fan of Lord Dunsany's fantasy fiction and his early work reflects this. He does not come into his own stylistically until the late 1920s in my opinion. His childhood was one marked by personal infirmity, and his father was consigned to an insane asylum when Howard was quite young, and he did not have much in the way of formal schooling, but read voraciously.

A scientific materialist himself, he did not believe in the supernatural, and was a staunch athiest. His best work also reflects this, by showing the tension between humans who think they are the reason the universe exists, and the realization that ultimately the universe is an uncaring place in which humanity is just another flyspeck in its infinite reality. Gods are generally aliens so far beyond human understanding that they are indistinguishable from a deity for all intents and purposes. Magic is similar but more of a grey area. Usually depicted, when he bothers to describe it with exactitude, as formulae of a scientific nature involving non-euclidean geometry and trans-spacial and trans-temporal contact. His protagonists often are driven insane by the process of learning these things and of the realization that the universe is actually far far beyond their ken.

Lovecraft has influenced modern horror more completely than any other horror writer, and you will find that most of the tropes of the modern horror story track back to Lovecraft in one way or another. For an author largely unknown in is lifetime, this is high praise.

The problem to which the title of this entry refers is that Lovecraft was also a racist, classist, and anti-semite, although his one brief marriage was to a Jewish woman. He was an anglophile and many of his stories, including The Horror at Red Hook and The Call of Cthulhu, overtly reference the 'dirty' 'unintelligent' non-white foreigner, using the 'savages' trope to distance the narrator from the things he is witnessing and not understanding. He even uses the N-word as a name for the narrator's pet cat in 'The Rats in the Walls'. He often depicts non-white or non-english speaking people as invaders bringing with them the foreign gods and belief systems that will ultimately bring the downfall of the white, cultured, male protagonist. Unfortunately, this xenophobia informs most of his work at a thematic level. Recurring themes include intellectual dehumanization through external influence, physical dehumanization through interbreeding and inbreeding, the idea that understanding alien motivation is impossible, curiosity about that which is outside is dangerous and even deadly.

We see the intellectual dehumanization in the way he depicts the followers of the Cthulhu cult, and in the mind switching capabilities of the Great Race of Yith, the evil influence in 'The Shunned House', and even in the insanity-producing dreams sent to the 'sensitive' by Cthulhu when the stars are nearly right, as well as the total destruction of a farm family in 'The Colour out of Space'. We see the physical abjection via interbreeding and inbreeding in 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', 'The Rats in the Walls', 'Notes on Arthur Jermyn and His Family', the episodic story of the Martense family in 'The Lurking Fear'. It is worth noting that the lowly of the world are generally subject to outside influence, while the rich are subject to internal decay. But all are informed by a kind of otherness which separates them from the rest of the world,and therefore makes them dangerous.

By making full understanding of 'the other' a source for potential insanity, whether it is an alien intelligence or the unexplained or perceived 'culturally' inappropriate behavior, Lovecraft's xenophobia becomes obvious. Furthermore, all of his narrators are of an upper middle class background. They are college educated, from 'good' families, generally monied with the exception of journalists, and have a curiosity possibly born of entitlement. They have a tendency toward naivete, which gets them into trouble when they encounter the other, and ultimately proves their downfall. Curiosity killed the dilettante.

The upshot is that while the dread, invasion, usurpation, loss of humanity whether intellectual or physical, and doubt as to our place in the universe, are all valid themes for horror to explore, we have a better than usual picture, due to Lovecraft's prolific letter-writing to friends and admirers(the Lovecraft Circle), of the beliefs that inspired these themes. Lovecraft becomes a case study, then, in having to separate the author from his written work. There are many writers and artists like this, Richard Wagner and Ezra Pound to name just two. His body of work, despite his sometimes florid prose, is worth analysis, examination, and enjoyment. The man himself was an imperfect person with many mistaken notions as to the human condition. He lived in a time when Mankind was discovering just how small in the universe it actually was, and struggled with this conceptually. He often spoke of himself as a man born in the wrong century. He would have been much happier a hundred years earlier, when the classes were more firmly defined, and the different races maintained a greater level of separation, and one's provincial perspective as a white male human was not questioned but glorified.