Zwillinger's Call of (to?) Cthulu

Or "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", the name and specific details of which I was actually wracking my brain to remember before Slick got me googling HPL's racism. So thanks for that, at least

Anyway, I highly recommend Joshi's annotated volumes of Lovecraft, if anyone's interested in getting into him. They're incredibly informative and well-researched. I love the cosmic horror of Lovecraft; it really boils down to the deep terror of insignificance. This universe is so vast and incomprehensible, and really does not give a **** about tiny little creatures on a tiny blue planet. He was deeply preoccupied with this notion.

I also love his Dream Cycle stories; they're more fantastical. "The Cats of Ulthar", "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", "The Doom that Came to Sarnath"...

That story is literally about how the neighborhood is going to hell (literally!) because of "foreigners", which in this context is just a racist dog whistle. So I guess in that sense it serves the ends of the story, but the whole thing is pretty gratuitous, so yeah.

That story has a way of reminding me of a real-life experience I once had, driving randomly out in the countryside some 40 miles or so out of Seattle. The area is the foothills of the Cascades, where Interstate-90 crosses over Snoqualmie Pass and leads down the evergreen slopes of the mountains to the Issaquah plateau and on down to Lake Washington. (Geez, I'm starting to imagine how a Lovecraftian pastiche of this would sound, LMAO.)

My wife and I had taken some random roads out of Issasquah and out into the forest lands where the long roads were surrounded by nothing but forest and the occasional run-down gas station or convenience store. We became rather lost and attempted to retrace our route back to civilization when we made what felt at the time like a startling discovery.

The car came out of the forest into a cul-de-sac, with around six houses on it, no different in appearance than the sort of cul-de-sac you'd find in an ordinary suburban neighborhood, except that it was literally out in the middle of nowhere and there was no other neighborhood within miles of the place. It was unmarked and unnamed.

We drove into it, and a handful of youngsters, ages 8-12 probably, stopped what they were doing to watch us. A few adults likewise came out of their houses and stared as we slowly drove in, drove around the "sac" and then drove out again. There was an unmistakable air of hostility in those glances, and somehow a feeling of something... "unwholesome" is a dramatic word but that's how it struck me.

This is the point where a Lovecraftian protagonist would have stopped for directions or begging a gallon of gasoline and found himself in the middle of something dark and unexpected. As it was, we drove on out without stopping or asking directions and we managed to find our way back to the main highway before the tank reached empty.

It turned out that it was not just me that was creeped out. My wife told me afterwards that she was pretty unsettled by the whole experience and that she too had felt that there was something not quite normal out there in that neighborhood in the woods. Not for any good reason, mind you. Maybe the unexpected transposition of suburban and deep rural combined with the obvious distrust of the inhabitants was all it took to engender feelings of surreality and "discombobulation". I don't know. I just know that I've never felt the urge to go looking for that place again, despite knowing intellectually that it was probably just a normal, if strangely placed, neighborhood of parents who would be shirking their duties if they were NOT suspicious of random people driving out of the forest and into their territory.

Not exactly life imitating art but certainly it taught me that you don't have to look into exotic locales in order to find the weird and the unexpected.

I just want to emphasize that I am not attempting to be combative with anyone. I find this all pretty fascinating so I appreciate the input and the discussion.

Oh, I know, and neither am I. I'm enjoying the discussion, I can talk about HPL for days, and I don't get much of a chance to anymore. I might come across pretty blunt in text, but I'm not angry or upset, just debating!

Yeah, sounds spooky. The Lovecraft story itself is also quite spooky. It actually caused me to cry out a little at the end.

Anyway, then do you recall the part where the protagonist was ******** about how the Africans in the woodcuts looked "too Caucasian?" And the cannibal villain drops an N-bomb as he also ******* about it?

Yeah.

Oh, read that poem I mentioned earlier? Pretty ugly, no?

Nevertheless, the guy just wouldn't have been the same without this embarrassing character flaw. He gave us great stories just because of his xenophobia.

Oh, I envy you that. Innsmouth is my absolute favorite HPL story, and I once (MANY long years ago) heard Ellison read one of his stories aloud at a Star Trek convention in Seattle back when they were still real sci-fi conventions and not media showcases. I guess I was 13 or 14, maybe. The story was "How's the Night Life on Kizalda", which was pretty funny, and quite risque for a young kid to listen to. People demanded that the lights be turned down, so as the facilities people scrambled to do that, Ellison ad-libbed this "story" about a killer who would walk into a bar, sit down next to his target, put an ice pick into his ear, and walk out. Amazing (and sardonic) delivery. I can appreciate how he might have read Lovecraft.

But that's not what anyone is saying. They're saying that Lovecraft was a non-apologetic racist and this racism is reflected in his work. It's obvious, blatant, explicit, and reiterated over and over again. There is no subtext. The racism is all text (as Thessalia pointed out).

Your disagreement over how obvious the racist elements are is not a reflection of how obvious they are, but perhaps a reflection of how little you might actually think about racism, and how little racism you likely notice. If "The Street" can have a passage like this:

And you can't find any racism in the story at all, then you apparently do not know what to look for, and your expertise on identifying racism or the lack thereof is somewhat questionable. Especially given the earlier bit:

And this is what happens in all of his work: Dark skinned "swarthy" people are sinister, smell bad, speak inhuman tongues, and are members of evil cults. There are no positive representations of people of color in Lovecraft's work.

Well, it seems pretty clear that Lovecraft's attitudes on these things were a lot more extreme than I had supposed, so I'm going to have to do some reading up on it all.

I just took a look on hplovecraft.com and I think this is the passage you were referring to earlier:

"The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous."

The picture is of a cannibal in his "butcher shop". Now, I suppose that this could be viewed in racist terms but at face value, it's notable as something queer, and from a plot standpoint it's something that helps explain why the old man might get the feelings that he says he gets from the picture.

HPL's racism seems pretty well established by now, so I wouldn't argue about this being an example but it seems to me that there's more to it than just a comment on inappropriate depictions of Africans.

So if we remove the one word "swarthy" then the story is no longer racist?

Oh, and please don't pass judgement on my ability to "look for" this or that, and I'll extend you the same courtesy for your ideas.

Let me ask you this: If you knew nothing at all about Lovecraft and you read The Street with "virgin" eyes, would you still see "swart sinister men" as some kind of racist comment on the people moving into the neighborhood after the original inhabitants moved out?

Nope. My statement did not hinge upon that one word. Making a point about its removal doesn't really illustrate that the text isn't racist.

I did not pass judgment. I pointed out that you seem to be ignorant about the topic. People in general tend to be ignorant about all kinds of topics. It happens.

The entire story is about white Anglo-Saxon people creating an awesome nation and immigrants tearing it down and ruining it. I am not sure how the racist themes are avoidable. If all of the racist elements were removed you wouldn't even have a story.

You've got to know you're cherry-picking here. No, because removing one word doesn't remove the fact of who he was talking about (immigrants) and why they were characterized that way.

Thats not 100% true. Strangely, there is that family from 'Case of Charles Dexter Ward' are (very briefly) mentioned to be acquaintences of the protangonist and are described in positive terms.

On the other hand, in Polaris he describes the Eskimo as being a race of genocidal monsters.

Back to his writtings, this is one of my favourite parts of Call of Cthulhu (my favourite Lovecraft story)

Blue cries "Foul!" and wants a referee for a flag on the play.

You have here a quote from a wikipedia page. May be true, but also may be complete hogwash.

Second, if true: Your argument seems to be "HPL is a racist against Eastern Europeans" coupled with "HPL married a woman with eastern european heritage and Jewish heritage" Seriously? That's like saying someone is prejudiced against Black people when they are married to a Black person. You get that, right?

Lastly: This may have been raised in discussion already, but let me throw it out there. HPL may have been writing fiction and therefore taking on a tone as an author he did not carry in real life. I write vampire fiction. It can be gruesome. That does not mean I have a dungeon in my basement, blood in my refigerator, or stalk people. It is fiction. We recentlky ran a short campaign where the GM asked for us to play monstrous demons. After 5 gaming sessions the body count was about a hundred. That is not who any of us are in real life (3 copy editors and a bookkeeping mgr) It was FICTION.

It's always easy to say this sort of thing without looking. That quote is a citation from:

1. ^ Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, p. 45.

At least according to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, it appears there is no eBook available, so one would have to find it at a library or a used bookstore, or on Amazon, in order to check the reference.

Or, you can look around. The quote is cited on goodreads in the top review, by Matthew W.:

However, you can always look for yourself. The quote gets 245 hits on google.

The thing about Wikipedia is that while it is not a primary source, it is not always an unreliable source. However, Lovecraft has a pretty loyal fanbase, and unsourced or difficult to confirm claims are likely to be disputed. Looking at the talk page for The Horror at Red Hook, the only comment is a dispute as to whether the story fits into the Cthulhu Mythos.

Perhaps H.P. Lovecraft's page will have a more lively discussion. And interesting, that paragraph about Lovecraft and race, class, and ethnicity has 10 separate citations (some of them cited multiple times for support).

However, the talk page again has no one disputing that Lovecraft expressed these sentiments either in letters or in his writing. And this is something that, if it were remotely controversial, would be argued. The only comment about race was a quote of Joshi's that said race was an unfortunate theme in Lovecraft's writing, disputing that the statement in question is neutral point of view, not questioning its veracity.

"You're citing wikipedia, therefore your points are potentially invalid" doesn't strike me as a particularly interesting or useful counter-argument. Invoking the possibility that it might be false purely on the basis of it being wikipedia is not a compelling argument. It doesn't take much research to confirm whether it is true or false if you're really dedicated to refuting a claim such as the one Golden_Girl posted.

Also, try this link and search for "red hook."

Or you can read the excerpt here:

Actually, I don't find that notion at all difficult to consider. A racist can marry a black person just as easily as a misogynist can marry a woman. In fact, growing up in modern society, it is pretty hard to avoid absorbing at least some racist attitudes.

And it is generally widely accepted that H.P. Lovecraft was anti-Semitic and prejudiced against Eastern Europeans and did marry a woman whose heritage was both Eastern European and Jewish. This is not a remarkable nor controversial fact for many who have studied Lovecraft's life.

The thing is that it is actually well established that Lovecraft was racist to a degree that was extreme even for his time. The Horror at Red Hook was a story about his real life reactions to immigrants in Red Hook (this is also cited in the thread).

And even if he was doing it for thematic purposes, I think that sort of thing done as a thematic thing the way Lovecraft did it would still be racist.

Now, none of this means anyone has to stop reading Lovecraft, hate Lovecraft, repudiate Lovecraft's work, or any other variation of the immediately preceding statements.

Finally, why does Lovecraft need to be defended in the first place? It's not as if any Lovecraftian scholars deny this. Joshi (quoted in this thread and on the page I linked - although Thessalia linked the same page and quoted the same text I just quoted) is a pretty well-known Lovecraftian scholar and is fairly explicit about the racism in Lovecraft's work. This really shouldn't be an issue, let alone provoking emotional response.

There are mountains of evidence of how Lovecraft actually felt about this stuff, because he was a very prolific letter writer, for one. And it's not like he tried to hide his views on race; it's very explicit.

I'm asking whether a story can be divorced from its authors intentions. Unlike _Red Hook_, _The Street_ does not explicitly describe the interlopers as immigrants or foreign aside from describing them as "swart". If you removed those references, it could just as easily be the "white trash" of Innsmouth as be the "slant-eyed" men of Red Hook.

If the evil men of the story were just "men", would the story still be racist or is there simply no way to see the story outside of the context of HPL and his beliefs?

The text clearly IS racist. The question is whether it has any redeeming value beyond that. Since I originally read this story as a young person and found value in it, I believe that it does have some value beyond being a rant by HPL on immigrants.

"There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of The Street."

I disagree with your assessment. The story is contained in that final paragraph.

I guess I don't see the point of these little games of "well if I remove THIS word, is it still racist? How about if I remove THIS word?" The fact is these stories exist with those words in them, that is the reality of them. More to the point that's how he intended them to be read. So playing games about if he hadn't described them as foreigners, or if he hadn't described that black man as an actual ape, etc, don't seem very constructive to me. Yes, indeed, if he had written these stories differently then they might have been very different stories. But the fact is he didn't and they are what they are.

Merit is a different thing and I will give you that. However, I think "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Street" are not particularly good stories of Lovecraft's, and they're not what I like about his writing. Now, again, that's just my opinion; maybe others love them, I don't know. But I will not, nor have I, said that you should hate these stories, or find no merit in them; I am not going to dictate how others should respond to something.

Mmm, maybe. It has been a while since I read the whole thing; I just skimmed it to see if that was the one I was thinking of, but it's possible I misremember it. Most people today think of evolution as having a gravitational pull towards progress: species gradually change to be better and better. (For some definition of better.) Lovecraft seemed to think it was the opposite: that it took careful work, and well arranged matches, in order to have any hope of maintaining one's racial strength. The slightest taint of impurity, marrying below your station, etc, could send a whole family crashing back down the evolutionary tree to simian status.

I sometimes wonder if Tolkein felt the same way, with all that stuff about the race of man growing weaker with every generation. Granted, he probably was thinking of the continued dilution of Elven blood, but it seems to be common among writers in some time periods to believe that everything was better in the past and it's only getting worse. In other time periods, it's more common to believe that the past was dirty and ignorant and the future is bright and shiny.

Agree with you that S.T. Joshi is the go-to guy on Lovecraft, and I'm not denying any of Joshi's conclusions. I just want to temper them with the equally valid observation that Lovecraft had his own idea of who were the peak of human evolution, both biological and social, and it wasn't just "white people" and certainly didn't include any white people living in his own century. Lovecraft, who signed his letters "The Old Puritan" and who constantly complained of having been born too late, thought that Anglo-Puritans of (approximately) Cotton Mather's time were the high-point of human history, and that it's been all downhill since then. Yes, he thought poor people in general and brown-skinned poor people in particular were biological degenerates. He also thought the same thing about Pablo Picasso and Walter Gropius.

If you really like the Dream Cycle (I mostly don't), you might really like the source material; Lovecraft's dream cycle is mostly his homage to Lord Dunsany's six-volume short story collection of pseudo-fairy-tales. There was a lovely collected edition of all six books, under the (somewhat misleading) name Time and the Gods, back in 2000; make sure you get that edition, because if you buy any other edition with that name, you're only buying 1/6th of the stories. Read them to your kids at bedtime if you want to guarantee that they grow up to be perky-goths or goth-romantics.

It's more than that. Like a lot of Victorians, Lovecraft has a very Lysenkoist view of evolution, and that comes with a tremendous fear of degeneration, of literally regressing to a lower form of life ... not just by passing along inferior genes, but by becoming a lower form of life yourself. If you listen to un-enlightening music, or immerse yourself in abstract, non-representational art, you might become an ape-like being. If you practice pre-Christian religions, you almost certainly will become an ape-like being. If you study non-Euclidean geometry enough to actually understand it, you may well become an ape-like being. If you have sex more than a couple of times in your life, if you butcher your own food, if you clean up biological messes as part of your daily job, basically every time you do anything that reminds you that humans are part animal, you increase your risk of becoming an ape-like being. (That's where a lot of the recurring theme of cannibalism in Lovecraft's work comes from: not just the horror of desecrating a corpse, but the mental degradation that comes from thinking about the fact that humans are made out of animal protein.)

Victorian upper classes (which Lovecraft fancied himself to be, even though he just wasn't, and that's what caused most of his life-long financial problems) lived in constant fear of what they called "coarsening;" their belief that people other than the Victorian upper class and upper middle class had been "coarsened" was the primary pseudo-scientific justification for horrific living conditions among the English working class and for imperialism abroad.

Being a reasoning, moral, uplifted human being isn't just a matter of picking the right ancestors, to a pseudo-Puritan Victorian like Lovecraft; you can do that and still end up as an animal if you don't practice the mental habits of rigorous Euclidean logic, and puritan high-church Protestant faith, and Calvinist entrepreneurial capitalism, and bland thoroughly-cooked food, and fanatic hygiene, and abstinence from recreational sex, and mathematically regular harmonic music, and strictly representational art about uplifting subject matter. Every time you expose yourself to non-Euclidean logic or pre-Christian or ecstatic religion or collectivist economics or spicy or raw food or recreational sex or blood or mucous or excrement or syncopated rhythmic music or primitive or abstract art, you're playing Russian roulette with your humanity. Keep doing it, and you'll eventually degenerate from intelligent human to stupid human to pre-sentient humanoid to filthy animal. That's what the "hygienic" scientists of the era (that more or less ended with his childhood) taught.

I won't defend that belief (although quite a few Americans would), but it does bring this to his art: Lovecraft's best literary trick, in stories like "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Lurking Horror" and "Pickman's Model" and "At the Mountains of Madness," is showing what it must feel like to start out sane and slowly go insane, usually from having the props that were keeping you sane kicked out from underneath you. That's the trick that just about every post-Lovecraft horror author copies, the protagonist who knows that he's not living in a horror novel and who loses it when he or she finds out otherwise.

All of the subsequent inside-joke references to shoggoths and to non-human languages with too many consonants and funny punctuation and to fictional grimoires and to certain New England last names and to cyclopean ruggose stygian non-Euclidean sculpture shining with nacreous excrescence are there to acknowledge that debt, mostly. That, and to acknowledge that, if nothing else, Lovecraft rescued horror fiction from the endless repetition of gothic cliches of vampires and werewolves and ghosts and mad scientists and serial killers and witches in abandoned castles on the moors.