Re: "I Am Providence" - S.T. Joshi's expanded/unabridged Lovecraft Biography (2 vols.)
Posted by:
Gavin Callaghan (IP Logged)
Date: 5 October, 2009 05:42PM
I find it ironic that after a long absence from the Eldritch Dark, I should return to find two separate threads dealing with H. P. Lovecraft on an ostensibly Clark Ashton Smith-website ---and not a word of complaint from Kyberean, although he repeatedly upbraided me for precisely the same thing. (Although, curiously, Kyberean does see fit to mention me twice by name in these same threads!)
As for the issues at-hand: S. T. Joshi is the premier Lovecraft-scholar now living. As such, any work of his on Lovecraft is worth looking into, and studying in detail. (---Whether I shall have the money to do so myself, of course, is an entirely other matter…) I must also say that Mr. Joshi was very kind to me in our one or two brief contacts in the 1990's, and I also found him to be very exacting in his scholarship.
Where I do disagree with Joshi, is in his apparent “hero-worship†of Lovecraft. Though in no sense hagiographic -Joshi is appropriately critical of Lovecraft in his biography- one gets the feeling (from reading Joshi’s own description of the event) that Joshi’s youthful discovery of Willis Conover’s book, Lovecraft at Last, was almost akin to a religious experience for Joshi. This sense of “hero-worshipâ€, in all its varying degrees and uncritical manifestations, extends to much of Lovecraft’s fandom, as well.
One such example of this “hero-worship“, I fear, may be found in the apparent title of Joshi’s newly-enlarged work, i.e. “I Am Providence†---a title which, if Joshi applies it uncritically (and perhaps he doesn‘t -we'll just have to see), one would find extremely troubling.
Lovecraft is far closer to the Puritanical theocratic Royalism of the Massachusetts Bay colony, than he ever was to the progressive, liberal, racially and religiously tolerant Providence of Roger Williams. Indeed, the frankly religious and “blasphemyâ€-laden language of HPL’s weird-fiction is closer to a vituperative Cotton Mather-sermon on the evils of free-thinking, than to anything Roger Williams wrote in the same time period. The fact that HPL was writing in the early 20th century, while Williams wrote in the 17th, (when polemics such as Mather’s are somehow considered more “excusableâ€), makes Lovecraft’s unabashed atavism all that much more appalling.
As early as 1698, Rhode Island’s leaders were vehemently protesting English parliamentary interference in colony affairs. (Herbert Aptheker, The Colonial Era [1979], p. 27) (Compare this with HPL, who routinely peppered his correspondence with “God Save the King!", and who as late as the 1930’s was still decrying the “sedition†of the American revolution against arbitrary royal authority, and what he called the treasonous secession of “Yankees†from their rightful English masters in 1775 and 1809. [Miscellaneous Writings 374])
Providence itself, H. P. Lovecraft’s hometown, was founded by Roger Williams, who was banished by the Massachusetts colony (APTHEKER 92), and who later succeeded, Herbert Aptheker writes, in “parrying several threats of invasion from Massachusetts, whose rulers wanted to forcibly wipe out ‘Rogues Island.’†(APTHEKER 99)
“Williams,†Aptheker says elsewhere,
“really believed that ‘God had made of one blood’ all mankind, and to him all people were equal in the sight of God and hence should find equal treatment at the hands of his children. In this he included all people of all colors and persuasions. Especially notable was the fact that he included the American Indians (Williams wrote the first Indian-English dictionary), and that he drew the necessary but very provocative conclusion that the forcible taking of their lands was sinful and therefore void, thus questioning the King’s title and all other land titles- questioning, indeed, the whole base of the Massachusetts colony.†(APTHEKER 98)
In Rhode Island, too, “slavery and indentured servitude were forbidden (though the former prohibition did not remain effective in the 18th century)†(APTHEKER 99-100) -an idea which presents a striking contrast to Lovecraft’s own incongruous view of slavery as a “divine†right (in such poems as “De Triumpho Naturaeâ€), and Lovecraft’s love and veneration for the slaveholding aristocracy of the American South. (Lovecraft had pictures of Southern Confederate leaders on his walls; in strained, pseudo-archaic travel-writings, Lovecraft railed against “the empty rantings of Northern Abolitionists†[MW 374]; in Lovecraft’s travelogue on Richmond, Virginia, furthermore, HPL goes into panegyrics over such personages as “William Byrd, Gent.â€, (MW 326), “Robert Edward Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the Great Lost Cause!†(MW 324) -William Byrd, whose personal diary [quoted in Aptheker, pp. 41-43 ff.] reveals him to have been a rabid torturer of the worst sort -and whose amusements consisted of applying things like the “branding-iron, “the bitâ€, and “the whip†to intransigent or rebellious African slaves -often female slaves and children.)
Roger Williams likewise, Aptheker writes, “insisted that all, even the most ‘paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships,‘ be freely permitted and not be the cause of any persecution whatever“ in Rhode Island. (APTHEKER 98) As early as 1654 in England, Roger Williams was asking, “Whether it be not the duty of the Magistrate to permit the Jews, whose conversion we look for, to live freely and peaceably among us?†(Oscar S. Strauss, Roger Williams: The Pioneer of Religious Liberty, D. Appleton-Century Co., 1936., p. 173) As Strauss observes,
“It is gratifying to record as a further evidence of the humane tolerance of Roger Williams, that not alone was he the founder of a State in the New World, which was the first to shelter the Jews under equal laws, but he also took a significant part in securing their readmission into England after long years of exclusion following their final expulsion under Edward in the year 1290.†(174-175)
Perhaps needless to say, this contrasts greatly with HPL’s views on the same subject, cf. HPL’s recurring rhetoric regarding the “weakâ€, “effeminate†aspects of Eastern/Oriental/Jewish philosophy, and what HPL termed the “foetid flood of swart, cringing Semitism“ (MW 376) in New York City.
Significant, too, is Aptheker’s description of colonial Rhode Island as a place where “Jews and Quakers and even ’witches’ did find a haven and equality and fraternity†(APTHEKER 100), ---women and particularly witches repeatedly forming the consorts of Lovecraft’s male agents of “chaos†in his fiction. Here, as elsewhere, HPL is closer to Mather than to Williams.
Rhode Island, too, was ground zero for both the Industrial Revolution in America, as well as that transoceanic mercantile trade which HPL so decried, and of which slavery played so large a part. Here, as elsewhere, HPL was rebelling against the very basis (in this case the economic basis) of his home state.
And while Joshi, in his Penguin paperback edition of HPL’s works, suggests that Lovecraft “could look upon the ‘Puritan theocracy’ of Massachusetts with suitably abstract horror and even a certain condescension†(PENGUIN 70), it seems more likely that Lovecraft’s views were closer to those of Puritan Massachusetts, and its ecclesiastical masters, than otherwise. Lovecraft’s seeming ambivalence and association of “horror†with the Puritan theocracy in his earlier stories is thus the result of the polemical confusion and ideological inconsistencies of Lovecraft’s early fiction, in which Lovecraft’s story ideas did not succeed in accurately reflecting all the aspects of his philosophical polemic.
Like a Roger Williams in reverse, Lovecraft wrote dark treatises of racial miscegenation and decay from the capital city of Williams’ land of tolerance- and did so in the 20th century, when our country was adopting Williams’ own progressive attitudes with more alacrity and enthusiasm than ever before. In truth, then, Rhode Island’s foundation, based as it was in the ideas of racial, religious, and democratic equality, is farther from Lovecraft’s own than the ideas of the Puritan divines.
On a more psychological level, too, in relation to this issue of “hero-worshipâ€, one notes the apprently religious meaning of the phrase, “I am Providenceâ€- as if one were to say, “I am Heavenâ€, or even “I am God.“ A better title, surely, for a new biography of HPL, would be “Twentieth Century Puritanâ€; or perhaps “Rhode Island Anachronismâ€.
The (apparently still-ongoing!) debate on the value of L. Sprague de Camp’s biography of HPL is, I think, another aspect of this “hero-worship.†This debate is an old one, as testified by E. Hoffmann Price’s account in his Arkham House memoir, Book of the Dead (pp. 335-341).
Of course, one does not have to be a Lovecraft “fan†to find faults with de Camp’s method and reasoning. I tend to give de Camp’s books very high marks, however, for paving the way. Though apparently loathe to admit it (Joshi does not even mention de Camp’s From Quebec to the Stars, for example, in his notices of previous Lovecraft-publications at the end of his Miscellaneous Writings), Joshi’s HPL: A Life largely builds upon what de Camp first started.
True, de Camp’s biography is highly critical of Lovecraft- but then that is the biographer’s job. If a biographer were ever to unilaterally adopt the point of view of his subject, he would be remiss in performing his function.
One also needs to understand that de Camp, in criticizing Lovecraft, was also being just as hard, in a way, upon HIMSELF. As de Camp points out himself in his book, he delved into Lovecraft’s life with a very definite feeling of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.†De Camp made a living as a professional writer- a very risky business, but he succeeded- and he did so mainly by writing non-fiction historical work with a rigorously logical and scientific viewpoint -not very easy in a time when pseudo-scientific works on “Chariots of the Gods†and “Jesus was an Alienâ€, etc., were the main bill-of-fare.
De Camp is unintentionally ridiculous on some points, of course- his criticism of Lovecraft for being too attached to his hometown is rightly challenged by Joshi as absurd. De Camp’s criticism of Lovecraft for being an “amateurâ€, too, is silly -as if nearly every important writer known to history were not also an “amateur†of some sort or another. Of course, in attacking Lovecraft as an “amateurâ€, De Camp is basically criticizing himself, and the life he feared he himself would have led, if he had not chosen the professional road.
I find it interesting, in this connection, that some on this thread would think to raise the issue of “amateur scholarship†in relation to S.T. Joshi, when the same could just as well be said of H. P. Lovecraft and his vaunted “philosophyâ€. In truth, of course, some of the greatest scholars and academics never had a proper degree in their chosen fields- John Kenneth Gailbraith comes to mind; Richard Leakey, the famed hominid paleontologist, is another. The nineteenth century is replete with many such “amateur scholarsâ€, though admittedly by now they are becoming, regrettably, more and more rare.
Kyberean Wrote:
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> "To state that neither CAS nor Lovecraft is ‘much of a philosopher’ by the standards of what passes for philosophy today is to pay these men an unintentional compliment.â€
As a philosopher, HPL is entirely without value, except perhaps as a psychological case study, and as an example of what Marx and Engels identified as the last-stand of aristocracy, as embodied in such things as “Feudal Socialismâ€.
Kyberean Wrote:
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>“And please, since you seem to have it all figured out, by all means tell us what exactly the ‘real world’ is.â€
Reality is the universe of observable facts- facts which exist independent of all group consensus, of all democracy, of all wish, of all emotion, of all personal whim, of all tyrant’s force, and of all religious dogma. One really has to wonder about Kyberean’s point of view, if it requires that he change the whole nature of reality simply in order to prove his point.
Science is a method of investigation, nothing more. It derives facts from reality via observation, logic, and deduction. As such, science is cumulative, and therefore measurable. That "mutability" of science, at which Kyberean scoffs, is thus, in reality, perhaps science’s greatest strength.
Kyberean Wrote:
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>“but some of us really can and do consciously distance ourselves from consensus reality … That few are capable of doing so really doesn't concern me, since my world is as ‘real’ as theirs.“
There is only one reality. Anything else is delusion.
There is a name, however, for “Kyberean’s world“: a world in which Boyd Rice is a harmless Merovingian scholar, Nicholas Schrek is a misunderstood practitioner of Tantric sex-magic, and H. P. Lovecraft is a “great philosopher“- it’s called “La-La Land.â€
Kyberean Wrote:
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>"We've come a long way since the Ancient Greeks--in the wrong direction.â€
Kyberean says as he types into a computer keyboard, and then (instantaneously) uploads his post onto the Internet. That modern technology allows for the viral transmission of archaic or retrograde views is ironic, to say the least. But it is also to be expected, until such time as mankind finally lives up to the technology we have created.
It is ironic, too, that Kyberean would cite the Greeks in this instance, given HPL’s own unflattering view of Hellas. “Hairyâ€, “effeminateâ€, clever, subtle, chattering, Oriental, and “foreignersâ€, are some of HPL’s kinder remarks regarding the Greeks.
Kyberean Wrote:
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>“Lovecraft, in particular, seems to loom as a threatening figure to certain individuals, who then feel compelled, Oedipus-like, to ‘cut him down to size‘.â€
If Kyberean wishes to misrepresent legitimate criticisms of Lovecraft as having some personal animus or basis, he is welcome to do so. But he is also wrong. For my part, my criticisms of HPL have one basis alone: facts.
But then, if Kyberean needs to change the facts of reality to suit his thesis, clearly, he is capable of doing so. Even if he is just living in a world "all his own."