I’m sure you’ve probably heard the saying,
an artist isn’t truly appreciated until
after he’s dead. Well, this is one of the
times that is actually true.
Even if you haven’t heard of H. P. Lovecraft,
you have undoubtedly heard of the many storytellers
he inspired: people like Guillermo Del Toro,
John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman and Stephen King.
All of these authors have picked up different
Lovecraftian traits. John Carptenter’s The
Thing bears a striking resemblance to Lovecraft’s
short story At the Mountains of Madness, while
Guillermo Del Toro populates many of his movies
with the otherworldly monsters that could
only be called Lovecraftian.
But with his posthumous writing legacy also
comes a swarm of criticism. Many people on
social media have called for Lovecraft to
be banned because he was a racist, and prescribed
to a very narrow view of the world.
So I’ve a couple of examples here. Wagner
was a racist? Lovecraft was a racist? What’s
next, Hitler was a racist too? Well done,
I don’t think any SJW has ever compared
someone to Hitler before. That’s really
creative and original, and there could be
no repercussions there. It’s not like constantly
referencing Hitler diminishes the heinous
acts that he committed. Electing to call Lovecraftian
media cosmic horror instead, because Lovecraft
himself was a f@#king racist!
Yeah, like, we are aware of this fact, but
we will get to why it’s important to acknowledge
his racism and then use it for a model for
other people, but we’ll get to that in a
minute. And lastly, my absolute favourite
is: F@#k H. P. Lovecraft and Mark Twain. F@#kon
racists!
I mean it’s a bit of a conflicting message
because if they do that they’ll only gonna
multiply.
But unlike many other authors that suffer
the same fate, Lovecraft’s beliefs actually
make him, and the progression of his work,
all the more fascinating.
But before we can understand all of this,
we have to go back to the beginning.
August 20th, 1890
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence,
Rhode Island to Scott and Sarah Susan Lovecraft,
but within a few short years, his life took
a dark turn.
In 1893, his father, who was a travelling
salesman, suffered a psychotic episode in
a Chicago hotel room, and spent the last five
years of his life in Butler Hospital in Providence,
before he died in 1898 of general paralysis,
which had only recently been discovered as
the result of syphilis (Up until that point,
they had considered general paralysis to be
a psychological affliction).
After his father’s death, Lovecraft and
his mother lived with her parents. Susan increased
her affection towards her son, but to a fault.
As is true with most people who are faced
with the death of a loved one, she vowed to
tighten her grip on her son, never letting
him out of her sight.
His grandfather tried to toughen his up with
aversion therapy. He was afraid of the dark,
and so his grandfather Whipple made him walk
down darkened corridors to push him from his
comfort zone.
By 1896, Lovecraft’s grandmother passed
away, which had a profound impact on him.
His mother and her sisters would roam around
in black ‘mourning’ clothes, which terrified
Lovecraft, who at the time wasn’t even six
years old. This was when he began to have
nightmares of what he called ‘night gaunts’:
whale skinned devils that stalk the dreamworld
that would appear in his later writing.
But just when you thought his childhood couldn’t
get worse, his grandparent’s household was
falling apart as things took a downward turn
over the next few years. His grandfather took
several blows after some risky business decisions
that fell through, and in 1904, he died of
a stroke at the age 70.
This left Lovecraft and his mother to spiral
out of control financially. Their relationship
became even more toxic, as his mother once
remarked to a friend that he was “so hideous
that he hid from everyone and did not like
to walk upon the streets where people could
gaze on him.” There would also be loud noises
coming from their home late at night. At first
glance, these would seem like domestic disturbances,
but accounts from neighbours recalled it to
be Shakespeare recitations (which would apparently
make his mother very happy).
Under this unhealthy co-dependent relationship,
Lovecraft decided he was going to pursue organic
chemistry. His mother bought him the expensive
chemistry sets, but he struggled with the
mathematics side of things and it would give
him headaches that would leave him incapacitated
for a day or two afterwards. He did however
have minor success with publication. His first
poem appeared in a 1912 newspaper entitled
Providence in 2000 A.D. This poem told the
stories of people of English heritage who
were displaced because of immigrants. This
ignorance could be seen in his unpublished
work such as On the Creation of (N-Words).
This serve as a marker for some of the racism
and intolerance featured in his later work.
Agoraphobia and co-dependence seemed to foster
this prejudice and narrow minded attitude
towards anybody who seemed to be different.
While it absolutely comes from a place of
ignorance, it seems like the motives were
more based on a fear of the unknown, rather
than hatred. This is all conjecture at this
point, and we will never truly know his motives,
but I do think his sheltered relationship
with his mother did spark a fear of anybody
who was different. But despite these xenophobic
attitudes (which were considered outside of
the norm even back then), he did have mild
success with publication, and so his writing
journey began. A journey that would see some
redemption for this tortured soul and his
misguided views about the world.
On May 24th 1921, Lovecraft’s mother passed
away, and quite understandably, Lovecraft
went into what he called “an extremely nervous
sense of shock”. Despite his emotional state,
he still managed to attend journalistic conferences,
and it was here he met Sonia Greene.
Lovecraft married Greene on March 3rd 1924.
She figured he needed to get out of Providence,
and when she moved to Brooklyn after her business
in Providence had failed, she told Lovecraft
she would support him financially.
Though Lovecraft did make the move with his
wife to Brooklyn, he did not enjoy the experience.
Their home was burgled. The criminals took
everything bar some clothes, and this hatred
and regret for moving to New York was reflected
in his stories at the time. This, of course,
only broadened his prejudiced view of anything
outside of Providence, Rhode Island. In Michel
Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the
World, Against Life, he says that Lovecraft
took "racism back to its essential and most
profound core: fear." Lovecraft returned to
Providence and after a long distance relationship
with his wife, they ultimately filed for divorce.
In the final years of his life, Lovecraft
seemed to be making up for lost time and began
to travel around the United States and Canada.
Lovecraft managed to fund this need to expand
his horizons with ghost writing, along with
a few stories that were published under his
name.
This was only compounded by the fact that
Lovecraft was his harshest critics. This constant
self-doubt is true of any creative person,
but Lovecraft felt it particularly hard.
This is probably the cruellest part of Lovecraft’s
tale. Just as he began to expand the horizons
of his mind and expose himself to different
experiences, and his work was beginning to
find success in the publishing industry, he
was struck down with terminal stomach cancer
and died in 1937. By all metrics, he died
a failure.
It wasn’t until after his death that his
work began to gain popularity, and he left
a writing legacy for generations to come.
But he also left another legacy, one that
I would argue is even more important: He showed
that people can change, even those who has
spent most of their life fearing the unknown.
Lovecraft gave us Cthulhu and Night Gaunts,
but he also, in a very small way, offers us
a sign of hope: that ignorance isn’t a life
sentence. People can change for the better,
even later in life.
I can only imagine the change in both attitude
and writing style that would have come from
Lovecraft if he had lived a full life. Many
other writers have picked up the mantle since
his passing, and his horrific worlds have
become one of the most expansive universes
in fiction.
