Thoughts on HP Lovecraft and his works?

Not quite. August Derleth has come up in this thread, but there's also Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow which predates Lovecraft by about twenty years.

In addition to his blatant racism though, there's another chapter in history that informs Lovecraft's work. During the time he was writing, the known universe expanded greatly: galaxies were discovered. Rather than paraphrasing like a madman, I'll just refer you this article which I believe is where I learned about it. That's a lot for a sensitive mind to take in.

 

I'll add to that in a somewhat different way, by quoting the relevant parts of a Wikipedia article on The Sublime. It refers to that feeling when you reach the top of a mountain and suddenly can look out and see the vast panorama spread out below you, or the vastness of the sky and the stars:

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.

Edmund Burke developed his conception of sublimity in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1756.[2]

What is "dark, uncertain, and confused"[5] moves the imagination to awe and a degree of horror. While the relationship of sublimity and beauty is one of mutual exclusivity, either can provide pleasure. Sublimity may evoke horror, but knowledge that the perception is a fiction is pleasureful.[6]

Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects of sublimity, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction that other authors noted. Burke described the sensation attributed to sublimity as a negative pain, which he denominated "delight" and which is distinct from positive pleasure. "Delight" is thought to result from the removal of pain, caused by confronting a sublime object, and supposedly is more intense than positive pleasure.
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The combination of fear and attraction is that sudden desire, while looking off a high cliff, to hurl yourself into the abyss, so overpowering that you feel you could easily do it.

The things in Lovecraft and other Weird authors that drove people mad were often direct confrontations with the sublime that were just too vast and powerful for the human mind to conceive of, experienced as Iain said above, by someone of a sensitive mind and a certain kind of delicate inner constitution.

 

Yeah, I'd say that's hyperbolic. If "Tolkien of X" is supposed to mean somebody who codified or popularized a genre, I'd think of somebody like Poe or Shelley for horror and Jules Verne or HG Wells for science fiction. Calling Lovecraft the "Tolkien of Cosmic Horror" is fair, though; although he might not be the first to write in the subgenre, he did shape it into the form we recognize today.

 

I didn't know that house, but thanks for showing it to me! From where I stand with Lovecraft, it should have suited him very well!

I also have the impression that it is darker and with more greys areas. It's a nice touch. But I think that's also one of the reasons why Lovecraft is less popular than Tolkien. Tolkien's world is indeed multifaceted, but the protagonists are always recognizable as good or bad, which probably makes reading it easier and more enjoyable for many.

 

Allow me to be the heretic here. I've never found HP Lovecraft all that engaging. He had some good ideas, and I enjoyed the Dunwich Horror, but I've never found the idea of eldritch horror all that interesting. It conjures up the image of tentacle monsters to me, and they have a... uhh... slightly different connotation.

I mean, the idea of all these great and terrible aliens for whom we are nothing but little motes of dust is great and all, but if that's the case, what are they doing on our little backwater planet, other than impregnating and sending a few yokels mad?

The sheer scale of the universe, as discussed in another thread is already enough to blow the mind. You don't need Nyarlothep to do that.

As for people going mad from encountering horrors, I get PTSD and all that, but that's not the immediate reaction that springs to mind.

And I find eldritch horror subculture pretentious - like I do most subcultures, even those I'm a part of.

 

I wouldn't want this thread to go off on some tangent, but you are right. It comes down to their very different purposes for their writing, I think. The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Christian, fundamentally Catholic work (Tolkien himself said so) and while it's not an allegory like Sauron is Hitler, and the whole thing is one long extended metaphor for WW2 or whatever - it is a Christian allegory of a battle between good vs. evil - I don't think it would be fair to call it a simpler world view, but it is one that's probably more familiar.

Lovecraft was an atheist, his worldview was much less settled and more cold, and one that could put people off. Both on the surface and on the fundamental assumptions he makes about the world.

 

Absolutely love what I've read by him, he was ahead of his time and transcended the genre he was in

 

Big fan of HPL here, though I recognize his writing is very uneven. Sometimes I think his forays into pure fantasy (like the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath) are his most thoroughly successful works, though I still find many of the Cthulhu Mythos stories essential.

But his greatest gift to the world, IMO, might have been his conception of a collective mythos. He invited his writer-friends- Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, etc.- to borrow wantonly from his mythos, add to it, reshape it. The Cthulhu Mythos, instead of being just one man's brainchild, is a collective game. There is really no Lovecraft "fanfic" because everyone comes to the field an equal player in the mythos. To me, this is what popular culture should really be. Nowadays so much of "popular culture" is imprisoned in franchises owned and controlled by a handful of corporations, who jealously enforce copyrights and consequent ideas of "canon."

 

As far As Lovecraft's racism goes, I find that this part of Chinua Achebe's critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness applies to Lovecraft in spades, particularly the parts in bold:

Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world."

Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth." It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.

These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness . In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b ) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.

The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery." That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well -- one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.

 

He didn't actually live at that house, he just complained about it as a hideous monstrosity in The Call of Cthulhu

 

not during his lifetime. Lovecraft had status in the amateur press scene (think science fiction fanzines, but not usually focussed on that as a topic; science fiction fandom had only just gotten started at the time of his death) and had just two of his works (maybe three?) published in book form during his lifetime. ("The Call of Cthulhu", which had appeared in Weird Tales reappeared in an anthology entitled Beware After Dark! in 1929. and a semi-professional chapbook containing "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" appeared as a chapbook in 1935 or '6. I think another one of his may have gotten republished in a best short stories of the collection, but I couldn't find that out.) HPL, I think, even had trouble selling to his main market, Weird Tales, at times.

as an aside, beware of H.P. Lovecraft books which he did not actually write. Lovecraft's posthumous literary executor August Derleth had published short story collections and one novel (The Lurker on the Threshold) which Lovecraft did not write. instead, Derleth wrote new stories based on Lovecraft's notes for abandoned story ideas. you can, at most, call these H.P. Lovecraft fanfic.

 

I love Eldritch horror. Vast unknowns and the fear of your own mind, that which in the end is all you really have. Some of H.P.'s work really hit the mark for me, others bore me to tears. Some are laughably racist (like the name of a specific cat...) and others are less laughably racist.

Personally I'm still struggling on how to handle consuming "problematic" creator's works. :B I say, find viable alternatives who deserve it. That being said, who are some contemporary Eldritch horror authors who should get some new eyes?

 

I have much the same opinion of Lovecraft's works. I think that he was a much better generator of ideas than of putting them down on paper; if he'd found someone with the knack for prose to collaborate with we'd have had some much better work.

As far as his attitudes on race though, I just always preface my introductions to his stories with a note on them where necessary. Since he died in 1937, however, I don't worry about him getting any sort of reward or anything. I understand Wagner's music has never been formally performed in Israel, and I get it, but the work of people long dead with problematic attitudes just don't bother me much.

Now canned beans...

 

That's pretty much my thinking as well. Lovecraft himself might have been a racist, and his racism does come into his stories, but I'm not going to spend my life hating a writer who has been such a long time when their writing has other merits. I think it's a good idea to be mature and accept that stuff is there, and kind of look past it.

That and, and I'm not making excuses for the guy, but his personal life was miserable and really stuffy. I think his racism was in part (I'm not going to lie, it was also genuine too) living up to some ideal of an English gentleman from 200 years before his own time. He was a larper, basically, and he got a bit cringy in that. But it is what it is, we can't change that.

 

Personally I think his racism was a psychological issue. I did a big writeup about it on the previous page—for anybody who might not have seen it here's the link.

 

Also, to mention something specific about his writing: his writing is also very old fashioned, and intentionally so because of his love of the 18th century. And hated anything modern. Anyone who wants to see this should look up 'Waste Paper - A Poem of Profound Insignificance' that was a parody of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. I like The Waste Land a lot, and didn't quite find it funny, but there are lines in there that show he had the talent to be a decent modern poet. Lines like:

'Because he played "Three O'Clock in the Morning" in the flat above me...
Three O'Clock in the morning, I've danc'd the whole night through
Dancing on the graves in the graveyard
Where life is buried; life and beauty
Life and art and love and duty'

Or

'In ev'ry flash of lurid light
To be continued.
No smoking.
Smoking on four rear seats.
Fare win return to 5 cents after August 1st
Except outside the Cleveland city limits.'

His work is flawed in that way, he wasn't fantastically versatile in style. He had the talent to be more than he was, but was happy to keep on writing like Poe or Pope.

That's not to say he didn't become more modern as he went along, he did. Especially in his last story, 'The Thing on the Door Step' which has a lot of cars, driving, and is written in a style that feels even a little Hemmingway, but by then the cancer that killed him was too advanced. It was too late by then.

Just read that again, and yeah you could be right about that. There was a big deal in the Victorian era, and I suppose the earlier era that Lovecraft was more a fan of, of 'degeneration' and racial theories like that that probably had some psychological effects on him. He was a damaged person.

 

Well, I'm thinking he was already damaged in such a way that he became very anxious, paranoid and fearful, and conditions like this can often express themselves as racism or sexism or xenophobia of various kinds. I think a lot of people join radical groups or cults driven by these kinds of issues. For instance think about some of the really vengeful and nasty 'feminazis' and how they project their own deep seated psychological issues out onto an entire gender and scapegoat it. Or the Salem witch trials and other mass delusions that were caused by projection of people's own fears out onto an entire group. This stuff is very common—if someone's issues are severe and overpowering enough they can't bear to accept that the problem is with them, it must be other people.

 

Yeah, I can certainly see the logic there. This is a man who had frequent nightmares from an early age, 'night terrors' he called, like imagining strange beasts coming to take him away at times every night. And would often fail to be able to go to school because of 'break downs'. I don't think it's really known what they were, he never talked about the symptoms - not in anything I've read anyway - but yeah. He never painted his childhood as a particularly happy one, and it clearly wasn't from other records.

 

Wow, these Weird writers really were weird, some of them. That reminds me of Robert E Howard writing Conan driven by intense terror, believing Conan himself stood behind him all night with a raised axe or sword, ready to cleave him in two if he stopped writing. If I understand right, he would write only at night and sleep in the day, and collected weapons because he was so fearful.

Not sure how accurate that is, I heard it from John Milius, the director of Conan The Barbarian, on the special features for the movie.

EDIT—It sounds like it was a complete fabrication, or at least heavily distorted, according to this post: Robert E. Howard and the Ghost of Conan. Would be pretty cool if it were true though.

Now that I think about it, Milius himself was pretty weird, and obsessed with weapons. The John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski was in fact a parody of him. Lol, he may have been projecting a bit of himself into Howard.

 

Lay something on the grave for me if you would, choose it yourself. I would be honored.

 

Yeah if you could throw a coin or a bottlecap or something on there for me I'd appreciate it.

 

Lovecraft wrote in the 1910s-30s, the era of Modernism. Poe was at least 70 years before him.

I guess it depends on the audience they wrote for, but Robert E. Howard, who was one of Lovecraft's best friends, had (generally, I'm not talking about his horror stories which are more consciously Lovecraftian) a far more direct and rugged style:

'Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of a veritable labyrinth of mysterious winding ways, four masked figures came hurriedly from a door which a dusky hand furtively opened. They spoke not but went swiftly into the gloom, cloaks wrapped closely about them; as silently as the ghosts of murdered men they disappeared in the darkness. Behind them a sardonic countenance was framed in the partly opened door; a pair of evil eyes glittered malevolently in the gloom.'
(From 'The Phoenix on the Sword' a Conan story)

That's nowhere near as wordy or purple as:

'I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.'
(Lovecraft, 'Mountains of Madness')

The effect is also pretty different obviously, Conan stories are trying to get to the fantasy as quickly as possible. Lovecraft was never about that, he was a tone sort of guy, and yeah - I agree, his stories are probably weaker in pure story telling levels. His best stories are probably The Music of Eric Zaan, or The Outsider where the story is pretty simple really. It's the other stuff that interests Lovecraft.

I'm not going to say he wore out a thesaurus or anything, but he has a lot of purple prose and very archaic use of language even for the time. And in the same era as Hemmingway starting up, and James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Lovecraft stands out in that regard.