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Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born at 9 A.M.[5] on August 20, 1890, at 194 (renumbered 454 in 1895/96) Angell Street on what was then the eastern edge of the East Side of Providence.
When Rome was presented to me from . . . [an] unfavourable angle—the Sunday-School horror of Nero and the persecution of Christians—I could never quite sympathise in the least with the teachers. I felt that one good Roman pagan was worth any six dozen of the cringing scum riff-raff who took up with a fanatical foreign belief, and was frankly sorry that the Syrian superstition was not stamped out. . . . When it came to the repressive measures of Marcus Aurelius and Diocletianus, I was in complete sympathy with the government and had not a shred of use for the Christian herd. To try to get me to
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This leads to the charming admission that “at seven I sported the adopted name of L. VALERIUS MESSALA & tortured imaginary Christians in amphitheatres.”
“Then I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!”
In spite of the above, I see little evidence of gender confusion in Lovecraft’s later life; if anything, he displayed quick and unwavering prejudice against homosexuals.
Sadly, just one of his many prejudices.
In addition to being oversolicitous of her son, Susie also attempted to mould him in ways he found either irritating or repugnant. Around 1898 she tried to enrol him in a children’s dancing class; Lovecraft “abhorred the thought” and, fresh from an initial study of Latin, responded with a line from Cicero: “Nemo fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit!” (“Scarcely any sober person dances, unless by chance he is insane”).
To compound the tragedy, Lovecraft’s beloved black cat, Nigger-Man, disappeared sometime in 1904. This was the only pet Lovecraft ever owned in his life, in spite of his almost idolatrous adoration of the felidae. Its name, it need hardly be pointed out, was not regarded as offensive at the time—or at least not as offensive as it would be now.
And off we go with the race-baiting.
Lovecraft may never have finished high school, may never have attained a degree from Brown University, and may have been eternally ashamed of his lack of formal schooling; but he was one of the most prodigious autodidacts in modern history, and he continued not merely to add to his store of knowledge to the end of his life but to revise his world view in light of that knowledge.
C17H19N O3 + H2O The hapless youth took now and then, And knew De Quincey’s woe.
In 1915 Lovecraft wrote to the amateur G. W. Macauley: “I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility.”
So much, indeed, did Lovecraft customarily acknowledge the Poe influence that he would go to the opposite extreme, as in his famous lament of 1929: “There are my ‘Poe’ pieces & my ‘Dunsany’ pieces—but alas—where are any ‘Lovecraft’ pieces?”
Around 1923 Lovecraft showed “Dagon” to Clark Ashton Smith, who in turn passed it on to his friend and mentor George Sterling. Sterling, while liking the tale, thought the ending needed pepping up a bit, so recommended that the monolith topple over and kill the monster. This piece of advice, Lovecraft wrote in a letter, “makes me feel that poets should stick to their sonneteering
In a letter to Galpin Lovecraft notes in passing that “so far as I know, no feminine freak ever took the trouble to note or recognise my colossal and transcendent intellect.”
And yet you're so self-effacing, Howard. LOL
(“‘I am really sorry to have to ask you to absquatulate’“),
And so you should be! ;p
Some day I shall drown in a sea of cats. I shall go down, smothered by their embraces, feeling their warm breath upon my face, gazing into their large eyes, hearing in my ears their soft purring. I shall sink lazily down through oceans of fur, between myriads of claws, clutching innumerable tails, and I shall surrender my wretched soul to the selfish and insatiate god of felines.
A bit of a cat fan, then. :)
Of course, I am unfamiliar with amatory phenomena save through cursory reading. I always assumed that one waited till he encountered some nymph who seemed radically different to him from the rest of her sex, and without whom he felt he could no longer exist. Then, I fancied, he commenced to lay siege to her heart in businesslike fashion, not desisting till either he won her for life, or was blighted by rejection.
What an incorrigible romantic!
About romance and affection I never have felt the slightest interest; whereas the sky, with its tale of eternities past and to come, and its gorgeous panoply of whirling universes, has always held me enthralled. And in truth, is this not the natural attitude of an analytical mind? What is a beauteous nymph? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, a dash or two of phosphorus and other elements—all to decay soon. But what is the cosmos? What is the secret of time, space, and the things that lie beyond time and space?
No change of faith can dull the colours and magic of spring, or dampen the native exuberance of perfect health; and the consolations of taste and intellect are infinite. It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined mind fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day’s end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I should not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we
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As for Yankee farmers—oddly enough, I haven’t noticed that the majority talk any differently from myself; so that I’ve never regarded them as a separate class to whom one must use a special dialect. If I were to say, “Mornin’, Zeke, haow ye be?” to anybody along the road during my numerous summer walks, I fancy I’d receive an icy stare in return—or perhaps a puzzled inquiry as to what theatrical troupe I had wandered out of!
Or perhaps a "My name ain't Zeke, dickhead!"
There are those who think Lovecraft had too many “climaxes” here;
How prodigious of him.
it is now possible for me to regulate the term of my existence with the assurance that my end would cause no one more than a passing annoyance
“The new suit, worn for the first time, was a work of art, and made me appear as nearly respectable as my face permits—and even the face was almost at its best.”
David V. Bush is a short, plump fellow of about forty-five, with a bland face, bald head, and very fair taste in attire. He is actually an immensely good sort—kindly, affable, winning, and smiling. Probably he has to be in order to induce people to let him live after they have read his verse.
Lovecraft—whose objection to moustaches and beards was unrelenting—would tease Long about his “moustachelet” for years. It really never did seem to get much bigger.
His continued enthusiasm the next day was so genuine and sincere that in appreciation I surprised and shocked him right then and there by kissing him. He was so flustered that he blushed, then he turned pale. When I chaffed him about it he said he had not been kissed since he was a very small child and that he was never kissed by any woman, not even by his mother or aunts, since he grew to manhood, and that he would probably never be kissed again. (But I fooled him.)
“The Hound” has been roundly abused for being wildly overwritten; but it has somehow managed to escape most critics’ attention that the story is an obvious self-parody. Lovecraft has rarely been given credit for being master, not slave, of his prose style:
In order to account for a Greek title to a work by an Arab, Lovecraft later claimed that the Necronomicon was the Greek translation of a work in Arabic entitled Al Azif—a term he cribbed from Samuel Henley’s notes to William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), where azif, referring to the buzzing of insects, is defined as “a nocturnal sound . . . believed to be the howling of demons.”
Later the narrator piquantly “destroy[s] certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemed an insult to sanity.” Presumably at Lovecraft’s request, Clark Ashton Smith was commissioned to illustrate the serial, supplying two illustrations per instalment. They are very curious line drawings. Lovecraft later complained (to others, not to Smith) that Smith had not followed his text very well in the illustrations.[112] Still later Frank Long, probably thinking of these illustrations, pointed out that Smith’s artwork contained systematically sexual implications; Lovecraft pooh-poohed the
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Heh heh heh. Nice one, CAS.
a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. . . . An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work . . . whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public calls an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.
On December 27, Lovecraft gave Eddy and the visiting James F. Morton a tour of colonial Providence; it was on this occasion that the three of them went to the exquisite First Baptist Church (1775) on North Main Street and ascended to the organ loft, where Lovecraft attempted to play “Yes, We Have No Bananas” but was foiled, “since the machine is not a self-starter.”
In early February Lovecraft wrote a long letter to Edwin Baird of Weird Tales, expressing his irritation at the alteration of the titles of some of his stories, notably the retitling of “Arthur Jermyn” to “The White Ape” (“you may be sure that if I ever entitled a story ‘The White Ape’, there would be no ape in it”
perhaps marriage and a move to the big city is better than suicide from poverty or boredom.
Houdini himself is, accordingly, removed from centre stage as an active participant in the narrative, becoming largely an observer of bizarre phenomena; and, in what can only be a tart spoof of one of the most physically robust individuals of his day, he faints on three different occasions during the entire escapade.
One way of expression of H. P.’s sentiment was to wrap his ‘pinkey’ finger around mine and say ‘Umph!’”[94] Move over, Casanova!
What woman could resist? :)
“The population [of New York City] is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight.”
This from a man whose own wife was from a Jewish family.
Lovecraft cannot be acquitted of racism merely because he happened not to insult a Jew to his face or beat a black man with a baseball bat.
Quite.
The Kalem meeting on Wednesday, August 12, broke up at 4 A.M.; Lovecraft immediately went home and mapped out “a new story plot—perhaps a short novel” which he titled “The Call of Cthulhu.”
in mid-November, Lovecraft announced: “W. Paul Cook wants an article from me on the element of terror & weirdness in literature”[106] for his new magazine, the Recluse. He went on to say that “I shall take my time about preparing it,” which was true enough: it would be close to a year and a half before he put the finishing touches on what would become “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
In later years Lovecraft would unhesitatingly (and, I think, correctly) deem “The Willows” the single greatest weird story ever written, followed by Machen’s “The White People.”
Great choices, both.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,”
If only he had applied that awareness to his attitude to non-white people.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” One of the cult members had proffered a translation of this outlandish utterance: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla.”
Terrific story.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignornace in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Shame about the typo there, though.
A rather trivial point, but one that has consumed the interest of readers and scholars alike, is the actual pronunciation of the word Cthulhu.
. the word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man’s, hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats. . . . The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlûl’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very
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“The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.”
Aww, poor old dog.
One does not, in fact, own a cat (as one does a dog); one entertains a cat. It is a guest, not a servant.
“The Colour out of Space,” written in March 1927.
West of Arkham the hills rise wild,
Amusingly homaged by George R.R. Martin in "A Feast for Crows" as "East of Maidenpool the hills rose wild,"
