Another interesting topic: What would Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft or any of the others think of our new president or society in general. I know HP would not care for the president but maybe his decions? Robert E. Howard would probably love to go and fight and CAS, he may want to be a peace maker. Tough, since they aren't around to speak. But Frank Belknop Long knows and has stated that they would probably of found a way to change, adapt and maybe even go with the flow.

Clark would almost certainly not have cared about the election one way or another, since his circumstances were such that he lived in a perpetual economic crisis already. However, support for the killing of the unborn would be a policy utterly alien to his background and philosophy -- and, he did not trust government generally, and in particularly he was of a generaton of writers who often found opportunity to oppose the Creation (or Re-creation of the Federal Reserve) - and near the time of his death was when "notes" began to replace "silver certificates" -
What funds he had were very dear to him indeed - his loss of the money he got for the Sterling correspondence was a terrible blow to him - I recall him saying in the back seat of my Model A Ford, ... and they were all silver certificates!"

Interesting side observation for what it's worth: the presidents who have opposed the Federal Reserve system, have either been assassinated or shot - Lincolm, Mckinley, T. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan. Curious coincidence - some of these chaps actively opposed the concept, some less so - just an oddity, maybe no conneection.

OConnor,CD Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Another interesting topic: What would Robert E.
> Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft or any
> of the others think of our new president or
> society in general. I know HP would not care for
> the president but maybe his decions?

I think that's putting it a bit mildly. Of course, given the fact that Lovecraft died on the cusp of WWII, right before the first use of the atomic bomb, the beginning of the Cold War, the formation of Israel, and the rise and triumph of the Civil Rights movement, anything that we can say about Lovecraft’s political development would only be a guess, and thus possibly wrong. Lovecraft’s semi-positive reaction to some of FDR’s collectivist and semi-socialistic reforms, for example, showed that Lovecraft was, on some issues at least, amenable to change, and Lovecraft’s seemingly embarrassed response, later on, to some of his earlier, notorious political essays, shows that his political ideas underwent some evolution.

If one were to base one’s guess on Lovecraft’s prevailing views on race, however, which underwent very little evolution, (despite what L. Sprague de Camp alleges), as well as the overall quasi-Spenglerian underthrust (which was actually Roman in origin) of Lovecraft’s fiction -and in which Blacks, women, and Jews are inextricably intertwined in a paranoid, nightmarish process of apocalyptic polemical caricaturization- it quickly becomes clear that Lovecraft’s view of the 2008 U.S. election would be similar to the views expressed in stories as diverse as “Nyarlathotep” and “At the Mountains of Madness”. In “Nyarlathotep”, we will recall, a “slender”, “swarthy” , “pharaonic” man from North Africa, of “old native blood”, succeeds in toppling Western civilization during a “season of political and social upheaval”, all of this being but a prelude to invasion from the East (“yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments”) and a final, hypnotic descent into a subterranean, cosmic gulf: (the bottom of that cryptic, Lovecraftian “moon ladder” which Lovecraft-scholar Robert Waugh had so much difficulty in deciphering.)

In “At the Mounatins of Madness”, meanwhile (a story often and erroneously cited as an example of Lovecraft’s supposed political liberalization [!]) Lovecraft presents a didactic parable for what he saw as the decay of the traditional aristocratic-hierarchical structures of Western society, via a process of racial and social pluralization and cosmopolitan societal transformation. Here, as elsewhere, Lovecraft invokes his familiar symbol of “beheading” in relation to what he regarded as this "unnatural" reversal of traditional hierarchical-aristocratic values -the “liberation” of the Shoggoths and the overthrowing of the true “men”, (i.e. the Old Ones), being, for Lovecraft, the ultimate horror. It is not difficult to see how such a view applies to the Nov. 2008 election, which came as a climax, and a symbolic rebuke, to centuries of American racial oppression, enslavement, and genocide.

One must be careful, however, about attempting to impute or adapt Lovecraft’s political views to the context of the present day. Some people, for example, have attempted to paint a parallel between Lovecraft’s racist critique of Cthulhu’s “hybrid” followers, for example, and the present day assault on Western society by Islamo-fascist forces. And admittedly, it does not take too much imagination to see a close parallel between the more recent suspensions of civil liberties during the latest incarnation of the U.S. “War on Terror”, and Lovecraft’s similar solution, in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, to the infiltration of U.S. society by the matriarchal/mercantile “Deep Ones”, a solution in which:

“secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed…. (…) …Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the end…” (JOSHI/PENGUIN 268)

In truth, however, the similarities above, although startling, are merely ones of analogy, Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth” being written, not in the context of a rise in Islamo-Fascism and Muslim terrorism, but rather in the context of labor unrest, socialist pacifism, anarchist agitation, striking workers, Bolshevist revolution, bootleg gangsters, women’s suffragettes, and foreign immigration, most of which Lovecraft opposed/detested -although the roughly-contemporaneous concentration camps being established in Europe by nations such as Germany to decimate so-called “subhumans” and “vermin” are an even more likely (and disturbing) parallel.

A neo-Cato writing in the post-colonial/post-imperialist western world, Lovecraft was caught up in the juncture of the decay of that British Empire which he so loved, and into whose “idyllic”, aristocratic, feudal past he wished, somehow, to return. Lovecraft’s unique neo-Roman, neo-Catoesque outlook on this particular world, meanwhile, was predetermined by both his family/societal values, and the way in which these values interacted with his main sources of reading during childhood- namely, the literature of ancient Greece and, more importantly, republican and imperial Rome ---often through the equally-influential filter of 18th-century English translations. So that, in the end, Lovecraft saw his world through the same lens through which a latter-day Cicero would have seen it. As historian M. I. Rostovtzeff observes, during the later Roman Empire (in the West, that is- the Eastern Empire kept chugging right on):

“..the civilization of the world of Greco-Roman cities, of the Greek ‘politai’ and Roman ‘cives,’ was gradually simplified, barbarized, reduced to its elements, and the bearers of this civilization, the cities and their inhabitants, gradually disappeared or changed their aspect completely. Cicero would not have recognized his compatriots if by chance he had come to life again in the Rome of the early popes and the late emperors, though some of them still wrote Ciceronian Latin.” (CHAMBERS 60)

For my part, although I do not agree with Lovecraft’s aristocratic lament for the end of the feudal order, I think that Lovecraft’s polemical critique of Western decay -although aristocratic, anti-feminine, racist, and undemocratic, even anti-democratic -was also quite acute in predicting/perceiving the forces which would shape the western world in the decades and century to come. Lovecraft was able to predict such things as the later Dionysian excesses of U.S. culture; the wide and seminal influence of Black music and culture on popular music, dance, and sports; the ineluctable growth and influence of feminism and the women’s liberation movement; the growth of the gay liberation movement; even the growth of popular occultism; and, most importantly, the changing racial complexion of the U.S., along with the growing power of post-colonial nations and their concommitant challenge to U.S. power throughout the world. That Lovecraft did so from a polemically-opposite perspective to all of these burgeoning movements does not diminish his accuracy, although one can argue against his erroneous view that such changes somehow represented a “calamity”. Indeed, Western life goes chugging right on.



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 1 Feb 09 | 05:02PM by Gavin Callaghan.

"Chugging right along" is a moronic phrase, and there is no debate about whether Lovecraft or anyone else is correct in seeing the current situation in a negative light.

I somehow sense much anger in you.

Political discussions have a history in this forum of turning nasty very quickly... which perhaps makes it no different from any other forum?

Anyway...

Part of my admiration for CAS stems from his great wisdom in remaining relentlessly apolitical. CAS also had the good sense to realize that he would have been better off almost anywhere than in the America of his day. Lovecraft seems foolish in comparison, to me, not because of the content of his political views, but because he held any such views, at all, and because he held them so passionately.

Still, I am a firm believer that Lovecraft is too complex a personality to be reduced to his political views (still less do I feel that his stories are best explicated by them). He also made some very acute comments. One of my favorites, and a view that would seem surprising coming from a "conservative", is the following scathing indictment of the effects of capitalism, American-style, on the arts, and, indeed, on any higher interests:

"Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved & crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercial-satellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – & they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises". (Selected Letters 5.397-98)

What Lovecraft wrote was true then, and it is all the truer today, so we can add that to his feats of crystal-gazing, I think.

Kipling Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Chugging right along" is a moronic phrase, and
> there is no debate about whether Lovecraft or
> anyone else is correct in seeing the current
> situation in a negative light.

That is because political correctness forbids the idea that Lovecraft could be right. If you try to debate that here on this forum, it would become very heated and infected. That's why Gavin Callaghan's ambitious, potentially provocative post, has been left be. If you try to debate it elsewhere, in media or public, you will quickly become censored and silenced.

The liberal-leftish tendency that pervades all offical thinking today, is partly a violent backlash reaction to Hitler and Nazi Germany, seeking compensation values at the extreme opposite end of the scale. And the change was in large part led by the politically idealistic naive generation born in the 1940's. The 1968 movement had a profound and lasting impact on all of society, from left to right, even making the conservatives more liberal. Those values are taken for granted, thus are politically correct. Hence, debate outside of its circumference is not welcome. You can't openly discuss, or critically question the worth of multiculturalism. And Europe will likely, within the next few decades, pay a high price for this censoring of democratic speech; the diametrically opposed cultures of the quickly growing population of muslim asylum immigrants (only in UK, during 2008, the population growth number for muslims was 10 times higher than for all the rest of the UK population put together, reinforced by "white flight" from Britain. Please take a moment to consider that.) and the native Europeans, leading to society falling apart from within, while coming together in an escalating clash of violence. The current major ethnic cultural geographical transformation of Europe has been orchestrated by pc politicians, in a very short time span of only two decades. We can thank Hitler for this. This never would have been allowed to happen, if it weren't for him and the freak of Nazism.

(Now I am still expressing opinions here, outside of the PC, and of course that will stir a direct provocation. But that's just the way it goes. Me, I personally don't mind, since I rather enjoy being a social outsider and iconoclast. I find it healthy to be suspicious of that which is widely socially accepted. If you want to remain part of the social community though, keep your mouth shut, and just quietly accept what the future will bring.)

But the current negative situation is just as much the decadence of unchecked careening materialism, starting with Western Industrialization, and now spreading to the rest the World. This vulgar way of living will eventually collapse on itself, unless we wake up and condition it with other values.

And also, most of us dislike thinking about painful unpleasant things, or analyzing the possibility of coming dark times. Easier then to look away, and "chug right along" happy-go-lucky in the tracks used to. Until one day reality brutally breaks it off, the way the element of surprise always works for the short-sighted.

Speaking of Muslims, it is interesting to note that one of Smith's earliest, yet enduring, literary love affairs was with that crown jewel of Islamic folk culture, THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.

Also, in relation to Calonlan's comment about CAS, the Federal Reserve, and silver certificates, it's interesting to note that the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his Philosophical View of Reform, expressed his ardent opposition to paper money and its use to increase the national debt.

Unfortunately for “Kipling“, I did not write “chugging right along.” What I in fact wrote was “chugging right on.”

“Moronic” or not, I believe my phrase was correct in its basic essentials. Certainly, that “apocalypse” which Lovecraft foresaw and associated with racial emancipation and political self-determination did not come to pass. True, Lovecraft himself was forced to give up such amenities as his childhood home, his carriage house, his maids and servant-help, and his presumed right to look down on and oppress those of a different racial caste than himself -and what the U.S. had at that time was basically a racial caste or apartheid system. But while Lovecraft may have seen this change as “apocalyptic“, such a perspective is subjective to an undeniably extreme degree, and that is putting it kindly.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Still, I am a firm believer that Lovecraft is too complex a personality to be reduced to his political views (still less do I feel that his stories are best explicated by them). He also made some very acute comments. One of my favorites, and a view that would seem surprising coming from a "conservative", is the following scathing indictment of the effects of capitalism, American-style, on the arts, and, indeed, on any higher interests:

Lovecraft’s anti-mercantile bias is not as incongruous in relation to his conservatism as it might seem. There is a wide range, of course, amongst conservative views: the Catholic conservatism of someone like the late Wm. F. Buckley; the Protestant, anti-Catholic conservatism of various evangelical and Jehovah’s Witnesses groups; the conservatism of Orthodox Judaism, Islam, and other religions; the anarchic, anti-statist conservatism of Libertarians; the atheistic, capitalistic conservatism of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism; and the aristocratic conservatism of landed gentry and hierarchical authority. Lovecraft’s views correspond with the last of these.

In their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe this aristocratic conservatism in their chapter on what they call “Feudal Socialism”, which is one example of what they call generally “Reactionary Socialism”- surely a corollary to what Lovecraft, decades later, would be touting under the banner of “Fascist Socialism” in his story “The Shadow Out of Time”, and in his letters. As Marx and Engels, “the Ponds and Fleishman of economics,” explain it,

“Owing to their historical position [i.e., at the losing end of the rise of bourgeois industrial capitalism and its successive political revolutions in England, the U.S., and France] it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart [i.e., mercantile capitalism.] Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.”

It can be argued that Lovecraft’s stories form the tail-end of this purely “literary battle” on the behalf of the aristocracy, and that his repetitive and overriding concern with such things as aristocratic decay, loss, and suicide (most notably the death of the aristocrat at the end of “Celephais“ -whom Lovecraft contrasts with “a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer” who “enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility”- [the teetotaler Lovecraft here managing to work his anti-wine, anti-Bacchanalian critique into his economic polemic -here as elsewhere, Lovecraft‘s polemical antagonisms are minutely interconnected]), stems from an essentially “aristocratic lament” for this “impossible” “restoration” of what Lovecraft calls in his 1937 letter “the agrarian aristocratic age.” (LS V:397) Indeed, it is striking how Marx and Engels’ description of this aristocratic literary battle: “Half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future,” so precisely echoes even the finer points of Lovecraft’s fiction and other writings: such as the sharp, mocking, and polemical tones of HPL’s satirical verse, and the interpenetration of wistful past and unbearable present/future in his weird fiction.

This conflict between landed aristocracy and rising industrial/ mercantile capitalism likewise underlies those forces which gave rise to the English Civil War and the beheading of the King at the hands of the merchant-controlled parliament, an event to which Lovecraft seems to allude occasionally in his fiction -as Robert Waugh suggests in his essay “’The Rats in the Walls,’ the Rats in the Trenches.” (LA 2:162) I would further submit that this beheading of King Charles, and the violation of aristocratic hierarchy which it typifies, likewise underlies Lovecraft’s overriding concern with “beheading” throughout his fiction: whether the beheading of the Old Ones by the Shoggoths (“their chief common injury was total decapitation“), the beheading of the church steeples in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (“a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish decapitated steeple of an ancient church“), and even the beheading of the Dutch gentleman in “He” and of Herbert West in his early fiction.

This “beheading” idea likewise underlies HPL’s critique of the Bolshevist revolution: Lovecraft expressing the view in 1919 (common in business literature in the early 20th and late 19th century, and later adopted by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism) that a revolution in Russia would succeed only in separating the workers from the “hated” but necessary “brains of their…’economic masters’” -causing the “rabble” to “use up the resources of civilization without being able to produce more; cities and public works will fall into decay, and a new barbarism will arise.” (MW 270) Even earlier examples of this same conflict between landed aristocracy and the “newly rich“, can be found in decadent Roman literature, as well- such as the satirist Petronius’ painful portrait in his Satyricon of an “upstart” (and, interestingly, in terms of Lovecraft’s own polemical/racial concerns, Semitic) merchant named Trimalchio.

This anti-mercantile, aristocratic pose permeates HPL’s writings, whether fiction or non-fiction. It underlies HPL’s description, in his 1937 letter to C. L. Moore, that only those of “assured position” “can enjoy” “intrinsic excellence” (LS V:397) -Lovecraft’s description, in this same letter, of how uneducated peasants and later capitalists both “copied educated gentlefolk” closely paralleling and, indeed, seeming to explain, much of the “mimic/parody” language/imagery in Lovecraft’s quasi-Spenglerian parable, “At the Mountains of Madness”. (How a landed aristocracy, in whatever culture, could ever be described by anyone as “gentlefolk” -their power obtained by force, and enforced by religious edict and arbitrary whim- is another question.)

This aristocratic pose underlies Lovecraft’s conceit, in “Cats and Dogs”, that his preferred animal, the cat, “is for the aristocrat” (MW 556), HPL observing that “Dogs then, are peasants and the pets of peasants; cats are gentlemen and the pets of gentlemen.” (MW 555) This aristocratic pose likewise underlies Lovecraft’s description of the working immigrant poor in “The Street” as “brainless, besotted beasts” (more “beheading” and teetotaler/anti-Bacchanalian language, again), which “would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying, till the land of our fathers should be no more” -language and imagery which will later reappear, in cloaked form, in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, in which the immigrant-hybrid population of Innsmouth is described as lying “for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor”, “judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed.” The denizens of Innsmouth, tellingly, are likewise described as being akin to dogs, as well -HPL’s narrator being horrified by “the bestial abnormality of their faces and the dog-like sub-humanness of their crouching gate” -this Hogarthian caricaturization being a perfect illustration of the process by which HPL’s hated foreign “crowds” in “The Horror at Red Hook” were transmogrified into the entities of HPL’s conservative/aristocratic Cthulhu-cosmology.

Lovecraft’s anti-mercantile/commercial/industrial bias informs his works in various ways. One notes, for example, Lovecraft’s tracing of origin of the “degeneration” (i.e., racial intermixing) in Innsmouth to Captain Obed Marsh’s opening of trade with the Kanakys in the South Pacific -a trade which, as A.B.C. Whipple notes in his book Yankee Whalers in the South Seas, was inevitably accompanied by racial intermixing. The growth of capitalism likewise necessitated the importation into the American colonies of huge numbers of slaves -a process analogous, in Lovecraft’s fiction, to the importation and breeding of “Shoggoths” by the Old Ones in “At the Mountains of Madness” -the “breeding” of which on earth was enough to cause convulsions of horror even in Abdul Alhazred. In “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” too, the vampiric Joseph Curwen of Providence cum Salem, is a prosperous merchant and importer- who naturally employs mainly “mongrel riff-raff” (as Lovecraft puts it) in his crews. Lovecraft’s anti-mercantile bias, in this regard, is curious, given that it was the rise of the merchant/commercial classes in England which gave rise to the founding of the American colonies (and thus HPL’s beloved New England) in the first place- albeit under a royalist banner, a banner which became increasingly frayed as time went on. And it is this fraying of the royalist connection, as a result of increased commerce and the further rise of the capitalist classes, which the aristocratic Lovecraft most laments- though he tries to make the best of it, with his atavistic (and, by implication, Puritan) “God Save the King” war-cry.

Lovecraft is not alone in this anti-commercial, anti-industrial, aristocratic “lament” ---Lovecraft’s views in this regard bearing a striking similarity to those of such Boston Decadents as Fred Holland Day, Ralph Adams Cram, and the dirt-poor (but still aristocratic) Louise Imogene Guiney, who immediately preceded Lovecraft upon the scene. Cram, for instance, explains Cram-biographer Douglas Shand-Tucci, was “a besotted royalist, identifying strongly with the lost cause of that minority of old” associated with King Charles I (SHAND-TUCCI 183), and referring to him as “Charles the Martyr.” (SHAND-TUCCI 373) In Cram’s manifesto, The Decadent, Cram’s cloistered aristocratic protagonist, the decadent Aurelian Blake, isolates himself completely from the “modern world“, characterized as an “urban incubus, ‘this gigantic abortion‘”. (KAHLIL GIBRAN, His Life and His World 48)

Cram goes on to characterize “’…the nineteenth century'" as "'seething with impotent tumult- festering towns of shoe factories and cotton mills, lying tradesmen and legalized piracy; pork-packing, stock-brokers, quarreling and snarling scientists, and railroads, politicians, mammonism, realism, and newspapers.’” (ESTELLE JUSSIM, Slave to Beauty, 60) Cram would later go on to write conservative, Catholic books such as Heart of Evrope [sic], extolling the dark ages in Europe, and describing the Protestant reformation as a catastrophe to Western civilization. As Day biographer Estelle Jussim observes, “The idea that the medieval period had been the golden age was based upon the notion that craftsmen-artists then were inspired, dedicated and happy. Certainly, in the nineteenth century, industrialization was creating an unhappy populace alienated from the fruits of its own labors by factory technologies.” (JUSSIM 285)

In such Boston Decadent publications as The Knight Errant (1892), Cram and the others would demand what they called “‘a new chivalry’” to combat ‘“a world grown old and ugly’” due to the advance of human industry, knowledge, and science. (JUSSIM 53) (Cf., here, Lovecraft’s repeated reiteration, throughout his fiction, of the supposed danger of “knowledge.“) These Boston Decadent attempts to combat what one called the “‘parching simoom of commercialism’” reached their apogee in the (naturally short-lived) The Mahogany Tree, where F. H. Day’s attempt to ban all “Philistines” from the magazine expanded to include “‘even the Philistinism of advertisements and the hope of making money.‘” (GIBRAN 45)

Another later Mahogany Tree editorial complains: “‘The world is going at too rapid a pace for its own good as a world, and far too rapidly for the individuals who make up this, our boasted nineteenth century civilization…. We have tried of course to reform the world, to induce mankind to turn now and then from the mad chase after the Almighty Dollar, and smoke cigarettes and read Oscar Wilde. We have taken sides against electrical cars, bicycles, and Mr. Howells…’” (GIBRAN 46)

Lovecraft, interestingly, will likewise often invoke the specter of “electric cars” -whether in the form of subway trains, subway tunnels, and streetcars (working or abandoned), throughout his fiction, often in relation to corruption or decay. (Cf. Robert Waugh’s “The Subway and the Shoggoth,” Lovecraft Studies 39 & 40.)

Lovecraft, too, would likewise perpetuate some of the same bizarre conservative/Anglophile eccentricities of the Boston decadents, which an 1892 Boston newspaper editorial would describe as the atavistic “wish to reinstate U in such words as ‘honor’, to substitute Roman numerals for Arabic, and to spell certain words with capital letters. These are harmless oddities…” (GIBRAN 47) Lovecraft would later refer approvingly to Cram, and his works, in various places throughout his writings, Lovecraft even referring in a 1927 letter to the greater “actual artistic insight, vision, & devotion” (SL II:101) of elite Bostonian artistic circles as compared with those of commercial/mercantile New York City -this, despite the overriding Christian, mystical, and Anglo-Catholic concerns of these same Boston Decadents.

Indeed, throughout his writings, one finds HPL’s arguments closely paralleling those of Christian conservatism- as in “The Street”, in which Lovecraft’s “grave“ and “stalwart” colonial men, with their “laws and deeds of old”, are obviously Christians -Lovecraft, however, cleverly eliding over any explicit Christian or Old Testament references. One thinks, here, too, of the “decapitated steeple” and the overthrowing of the Christian churches by the mixed-race immigrants in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

And, not surprisingly, Lovecraft’s anti-commercial impetus closely parallels that of Cotton Mather, too- the often hysterical views of Mather and his Puritan circle reflecting the desperation of a theocratic/royalist oligarchy under pressure from the rising economic power of more moderate capitalism and democracy. One could even argue, quite convincingly, that Lovecraft’s views are closer to those of the Puritan Cotton Mather than to those of the more egalitarian Roger Williams, the founder of HPL’s own state of Rhode Island. (In “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward“, for example, Lovecraft will implicitly associate witch-haunted Salem with Providence, HPL describing how the vampiric Joseph Curwen “had fled from Salem to Providence- that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting….”)

Lovecraft’s relationship with Decadence was tenuous, however, and though Lovecraft eventually recognized the validity of some Decadent artistry and vision, much of HPL’s work can be read as a sort of decadent critique. For instance, it could be argued that such “banned”, “forbidden” books as the Necronomicon, kept under lock and key in Arkham or Cambridge, are related to those earlier, banned, censored, or disavowed books by Decadents like Cram, Beardsley, or Oscar Wilde, which created such a furor in Boston during HPL’s youth. This idea is made more than plausible by the location of the first appearance of this “Necronomicon” -i.e., in HPL’s decadent -Wildean parody/critique, “The Hound”. One thinks, here, too, of the 1896 scandal surrounding the sculpture of a naked, dancing Bacchante in front of the Boston Public Library, denounced by one contemporary Boston newspaper writer as “‘the incarnation of drunkenness and lewdness, a goddess of shame‘” -ideas which, years later, the teetotaler Lovecraft would incarnate in such stories as “The Horror of Red Hook”, with its “leering”, naked “nymph” Lilith, as well as the theme of decadent sculpture (whether the bust in “Hypnos” or the bas reliefs in “At the Mountains of Madness”) found throughout HPL’s writings. (The Bacchante statue, Taliban-fashion, was later removed from public view by the Boston Public Library and placed in storage for decades.)



Edited 12 time(s). Last edit at 3 Apr 09 | 06:06PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Gavin,

As always, your analysis is interesting, regardless of whether I agree with all the details. I do quibble a bit with the word pose, as it implies insincerity, whereas Lovecraft took the aristocratic ideal very seriously.

I do agree with you regarding the complexities of "conservatism", and I was being a little facetious in my own remarks on the subject. I also agree that Lovecraft's anti-capitalist comments can be seen as reflecting reactionary values of either the monarchic or even the fascistic kind.

I am glad that you mention Cram. He has always interested me, and I really ought to learn more about him. I like the weird tales of his that I've read, and his article on Gothic architecture in an old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, I believe, is most interesting. I've also spent many an hour at St. John the Divine.

Last, I'd be wary of overdoing it regarding Lovecraft's prudery. After all, you have to be able to account for his fondness for Arthur Machen!

Kyberean Wrote:
> I do quibble a bit with the word pose, as it implies insincerity,
> whereas Lovecraft took the aristocratic ideal very seriously.

Kyberean's right, I used that word deliberately, and a bit snarkily. It is accurate, though, at least in relation to HPL's actual position/economic status. HPL's aristocratic ideals certainly resulted in some of the strangest episodes in his fiction; such as HPL’s observation, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, that it is "lucky that servants have no imagination" (a paraphrase from memory); or the bizarre sequence in The Dunwich Horror, in which the academic heroes have to laboriously explain to the Dunwich rustics how a telescope works!

>Last, I'd be wary of overdoing it regarding Lovecraft's prudery.
>After all, you have to be able to account for his fondness for Arthur Machen!

HPL's relation to Machen is interesting, and was certainly not unalloyed with certain reservations, particularly HPL's critique of what he called Machen's overly "jaunty" Stevensonian style. I’m doing research now to determine whether this had a deeper basis- i.e. in the overly “queer”, decadent elements of Machen’s aesthetic. In other words, if HPL’s works can be seen as a decadent critique, then Machen’s works would have been subsumed within this critique. Machen, interestingly, was more of an Anglican than H.P. “God Save the King” Lovecraft ever was.

>>overestimate prudery

My reading of HPL’s works is completely the opposite. Indeed, I’m finding that sex is central to HPL‘s writings. Consider, for example, HPL’s first entree into magazine writing- in the context of the Fred Jackson-controversy in the Munsey pulp magazines. HPL wrote in in 1913 to protest the amount of sexual/sentimental content in Jackson’s stories, which HPL regarded as unvirile/effeminate (the same criticism which HPL made about the ancient Greeks).

This controversy took place on the cusp of the first division of pulp magazines into various genre markets, with HPL leading the charge. (Ironically, Forrest J. Ackerman would later lead a similar charge against HPL and CAS in the science-fiction pulps!) Tellingly, many of the readers who wrote in to The Argosy to take exception to HPL’s prudery, intimated in their letters that there seemed to be something “weird” or wrong about Lovecraft- some suggesting that he belonged in the madhouse, for example, or that he suffered from “brainstorms”, etc. It is significant, then, that when the genre “Weird Tales” magazine began publication (the “unique” magazine), it was this “weird” sub-market to which HPL naturally gravitated; thus proving The Argosy readers right, in a way. And it is this “weirdness”, basically a form of repression, which gives rise to so many of the nightmarish subterranean, fecal, anal, cannibalistic, and sadomasochistic elements in HPL’s supposedly cosmic vision: the cannibalistic desires of the narrator of “Rats in the Walls”, and his dreams of the swineherd and his flock, writhing around in filth; HPL’s overriding concern with basements and things buried in basements, etc., etc., etc....

Ultimately, all of this repression probably derives from what happened to HPL’s father ---HPL’s rejection of that sexuality which destroyed his father (and by extension, his father's family), expanding to encompass everything which HPL associated with sexuality: thus Blacks, women, chorus girls, wine/alcohol, Dionysian rituals, chants, and dance all fell under HPL's mental and intellectual/aesthetic taboo. --Hence all of the evil couples found in HPL’s fiction: the ghoul Queen Nitocris in Imprisoned with the Pharaohs and her husband Kephren; the Dame de Blois and Duke de Blois in Psychopompos, Lord Jermyn and his "secluded, eastern wife” in Arthur Jermyn, Captain Marsh and his secluded Polynesian wife in Shadow Over Innsmouth, etc., etc., etc., and even Cthulhu and his consort Shub-Niggurath, the latter of whom is described as a sort of “sophisticated Astarte”. All of these, presumably, would be aesthetic variations on HPL's father's own profligacy, and the women associated with his father's imaginary assignations. And, given the extent of HPL’s alleged “psycho-sexual contact” with his mother, we see this “evil woman” theme expanding to encompass even his mother, as well- hence “Mother Hydra” and her consort “Dagon” in “Shadow Over Innsmouth”, etc.

Consider, too, Lovecraft's angry letter, sent to Paul Cook, about an overly-sexy story which Cook published in an amateur journal, about a nude female artist's model (I think Cook described the letter as "sizzling", and he destroyed it) –an episode which has an interesting analogue, later on, with Lovecraft's writing of "Pickman's Model", in which the nude feminine model has been bestialized into a cannibalistic ghoul. The change here, I suggest, is similar to the one by which HPL transformed the naughty nude Dancing Bacchante sculpture, locked up in the Boston Public Library's basement, into the "forbidden" Necronomicon, similarly kept "under lock and key" in the Miskatonic library. The ultimate expression this artist's model-critique can be found in HPL's "Medusa's Coil", in which Mme. de Russy is revealed, in the decadent artist's portrait of her, to be a "negress"- the ultimate symbolism, for HPL, of the female nude model's sexual corruption and profligacy.

The decadent painter's denouncing of "moonlit sentimentality" (a paraphrase from memory) in this same story -when he rejects the sexual advances of Mme. de Russy- likewise recaptitulates HPL's initial 1913 critque, first published in the Argosy, of the stories of Fred Jackson. As the years passed, the sophistication by which HPL expressed his polemic changed, but the polemic remained essentially the same.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 12 Apr 09 | 07:31PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
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> The change here, I suggest, is similar to the one by
> which HPL transformed the naughty nude Dancing
> Bacchante sculpture, locked up in the Boston
> Public Library's basement, into the "forbidden"
> Necronomicon, similarly kept "under lock and key"
> in the Miskatonic library.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the relationship between the two given here, but it's certainly something to think about.


> The decadent painter's denouncing of "moonlit
> sentimentality" (a paraphrase from memory)

Pretty darned close: "'Moonlight! Good God, what cheap sentimentality!'" (HM, p.181)

On the subject of his use of the image of Bacchantes -- I'm glad to see someone bringing that into such a discussion, as it's something that has caught my eye as well. It's also interesting that such a response to dance dates back to his mother's attempts to enroll him in a dance class, with his quotation from Cicero placing it on the same level as insanity -- another form of degeneration -- such a parallel as he would draw in such essays as "More Chain Lightning", associating the use of alcohol to voluntarily engaging in "devolution".

You've drawn some very thought-provoking connections here. A stimulating discussion indeed....

As Kyberian observes, most people "don't like to think about it" and are trendy in their political views. Subsequent to reading those comments I spoke with a student who used those very words. Amber favors Buddhism but blames the social indoctrination of religion for most of the world's troubles. Her history textbook upset her with its in-vogue emphasis on the hidden abuses of power that belie the sacrosanct version of American history (which President was it who said, "just go ahead and kill those people" anyway?). So I didn't ask her what she thought of the more insidious, recent abuse of power-- congressional spending-- and wish her well with her Social Counseling career. The vandals who poured tar on Smith's desk, slashed his portrait with his own rapier, and shot holes in a book or two may have been forward-looking individuals in need of straightening out. To paraphrase Ed Koch, the people have voted, now they must be punished.
"No more-- No more-- No more--
(Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree/Or the stricken eagle soar)

jkh

jdworth Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It's also
> interesting that such a response to dance dates
> back to his mother's attempts to enroll him in a
> dance class, with his quotation from Cicero
> placing it on the same level as insanity --
> another form of degeneration --

Yeah, I note the Cicero quote in my essay-in-progress as well- part of HPL's larger "madness"/"fever"/"degeneration" nexus of related terms.