What are your thoughts about the Anglo supremacist H.P. Lovecraft, Sup Forums?

What are your thoughts about the Anglo supremacist H.P. Lovecraft, Sup Forums?

He was a massive autist but he hated niggers before it was fashionable. I can also strongly relate to his existential angst and paranoia. Good guy.

Based

Apparently, Lovecraft became a lot less racist towards the end of his life. He ended up being a staunch liberal.

All the smart racist became liberals as a way of tricking the subhumans into loving their servitude.

Very Lovecraftian

LOvecraft was also pretty pro-Aristocracy; he hated the French Revolution and believed in a cast system. He was basically an American Evola.

Huge autist and beta male

cool

>but he hated niggers before it was fashionable

are you stupid?

Maybe, but at least I'm not Canadian

>1,400 children betrayed

fix your teeth

>betrayed
>implying the vast majority weren't just fucking pakis for ciggies and vodka

Shoot the eggs mr snow! No nubian america! No black planet!

The inventor of cthulu and the owner of a cat named niggerman is a friend of mine.

WTF I love Lovecraft now

Quintessential Sup Forumsack

>hugely autistic
>racist
>NEET
>only weakness was a kazar milker

jesus christ dude wash the stale cum off your desk

Same thing happened to Malcolm X.

He was ahead of his time in many ways.

LOL a cat named niggerman.

Unreal.

I have that edition, very nice texturally
Lovecraft was a mystic seer and you should watch Jonathan Bowden's presentation on him
this is untrue, Lovecraft could never be considered liberal

Mountains of madness is pretty dope. Precursor to the thing imo.

The horror was indescribable. Made of impossible angles, from cyclopian depths and unfathomable dimensions.

Boy do I hate niggers.

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

best poem

very lovecraftian

...

August 7, 2016 — Paula Guran on Lovecraft

My attention has been drawn to Paula Guran’s anthology The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu (Running Press, 2016). I will review the actual contents of the book in a separate review; for now I wish to address some peculiar features of her introduction, titled “Introduction: Who, What, When, Where, Why …”

I do not believe Paula Guran is unalterably hostile to Lovecraft; if that were so, it would turn her compilation of several Lovecraftian anthologies into lamentable instances of opportunism; and I would never wish to believe that of her. Her introduction, aside from a fair sprinkling of errors and some hilarious typos (“Lovecraft started school in 1889”—a year before he was born!), is on the whole neutral and generally praiseworthy in singling out Lovecraft’s distinctiveness as a writer of weird fiction.

But, to be honest, it reads largely like a freshman English term paper. Guran dutifully quotes various authorities—real or self-styled—but fails to subject these remarks to any kind of critical scrutiny. It is as if the mere fact that these individuals (I am one of them) said something about Lovecraft makes it true. What is really going on here is that Guran is cherry-picking quotations from “authorities” to bolster her own preconceptions about Lovecraft.

Guran gets herself into trouble when she discusses Lovecraft’s “personal beliefs,” which she finds “racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic.” Let it pass that there are plenty of other “personal beliefs”—atheism, devotion to the past, interest in science, a quest for imaginative liberation—that strike me as far more significant to Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought than those Guran cites. I will address her comments on Lovecraft’s racism presently; what I now wish to focus on is Guran’s fostering of yet another canard about Lovecraft: “He may not have hated women (misogyny), but he does seem to have feared them (gynophobia).”

top lad

During Lovecraft’s early amateur journalism period (1914–25), he fraternised with all manner of women (and men) at various gatherings, including such figures as Winifred Virginia Jackson, Alice Hamlet, Edith Miniter, Myrta Alice Little, and many others. He collaborated on short weird tales with Jackson and with Anna Helen Crofts (whom he probably never met). Not one of those women testified to feeling any hostility or fear emerging from Lovecraft; several, indeed, appear to have had a mildly romantic attraction to him.
Lovecraft would regularly walk 6 miles to North Providence to spend evenings with Clifford and Muriel Eddy, then walk 6 miles back home.
Among Lovecraft’s most regular revision clients were Zealia Bishop and Hazel Heald; the latter treated him to a candelight dinner at her home in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Later in life he corresponded voluminously with Bishop, Natalie H. Wooley, Helen Sully, C. L. Moore, and others; nothing in his letters indicates any fear or hostility.
In his personal relations with women, Lovecraft was of course shy and reserved; but that is surely not in itself a sign of aberrancy, then or now.

Perhaps Guran is thinking of the general absence of women characters in Lovecraft’s work—but if that is so, then many other literary works (such as the Sherlock Holmes tales) would be open to the same criticism. What of films like Twelve Angry Men or John Carpenter’s The Thing, which feature no women characters?

Or is Guran thinking of the few women who do appear in Lovecraft’s fiction? Well, let’s take Lavinia Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror.” It strikes me that in all frankness, Guran doesn’t know enough about Lovecraft to make such a judgment.

Indeed, I cannot imagine what evidence Guran could bring forth to support the charge—for in fact she does not bring forth any. This general opinion has been promulgated lately by others who are not Lovecraft scholars, whether it be openly hostile critics such as Charles Baxter or those who are at least nominally less hostile, such as Joyce Carol Oates. But it is a canard nonetheless, and there are massive amounts of evidence in Lovecraft’s life that militate against it:
Lovecraft extends a certain subdued sympathy toward her: she is clearly the unwilling pawn of her own father, Wizard Whateley, who caused her to be raped by Yog-Sothoth; and her murder at the hands of her own son, Wilbur, is meant to be seen as another black mark on his character.

There is, of course, the infamous comment in “The Thing on the Doorstep” about Asenath Waite: “Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers.” But it should be noted that (a) this comment is uttered by the first-person narrator, Daniel Upton, and it would be an elementary critical error to attribute such a view to the author; (b) Asenath’s body has in fact been taken over by the mind of her own father, Ephraim Waite; and (c) Ephraim/Asenath is not even human, but a denizen of Innsmouth, and this is the real reason why he/she wants a fully human body (as her husband, Edward Derby, states unequivocally later in the story).

But let us move on to the racism issue. It is not sufficient for Guran to state the truth that Lovecraft was a racist; she feels the need to go on to make it a central, indeed an all-encompassing, feature of Lovecraft’s entire literary work. What evidence does she offer for this assertion? Very little, so far as I can see. Instead, she quotes China Miéville quoting Michel Houellebecq. This is part of a quotation from Miéville’s “published correspondence”: “[The] depth and viciousness of Lovecraft’s racism is [sic] known to me…It goes further, in my opinion, than ‘merely’ being a racist—I follow Michel Houellebecq…in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred.”

So there we have it: Guran quoting Miéville citing Houellebecq. If this is anything but an instantiation of the old adage that if you repeat a lie often enough, people start believing it, I don’t know what is. What, in fact, is the evidence that Guran/Miéville/Houellebecq put forth? Well, there’s the racist story “The Horror at Red Hook.” Fine; but Lovecraft wrote sixty-odd stories in his career. I myself can identify only three other tales that are structured on racism: “The Street,” “Arthur Jermyn,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Only the last is a major story of Lovecraft’s—and it has served as a source of inspiration for dozens of writers who are manifestly not racists, ranging from Caitlín R. Kiernan to Ramsey Campbell to Brian Stableford to Brian Hodge.

Here are some other statistics that may be relevant:

Emo autist who wrote childrens bedtime stories. A couple of decent videogames and a metallica song is what he has in his favor

Pulp writer

In the 4 million words of Lovecraft’s correspondence, I would be surprised if more than 5 percent—perhaps more than 2 percent—consists of discussion of racial issues.
Lovecraft wrote 350 poems; perhaps 3 are imbued with racism. That would be less than 1% of his poetic output.
Not one person among Lovecraft’s friends and acquaintances ever heard him utter a racist sentiment in their presence. Frank Belknap Long knew and met Lovecraft repeatedly for 17 years, but never heard him speak an unkind word about any racial minority.

Guran maintains that “Miscegeneation, racial impurity, ethnic xenophobia, ‘mental, moral and physical degeneration’ due to inbreeding, interbreeding with non-human creatures—spawn of degenerate women who consorted with the abhorrent—these were all integral to the fiction Lovecraft produced.” Well, the devil is in the details, isn’t it? Take three tales of “degeneration” and “inbreeding”: “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and “The Dunwich Horror.” Is it not obvious that in each case we are dealing with white families or towns? (There are, so far as I can tell, no ethnic minorities in Dunwich.) On the strength of these stories, a plausible case could be made that Lovecraft was prejuduced against white people.

The miscegenation/inbreeding theme is not at all widespread in Lovecraft’s fiction. Where does it (or racism in general) figure in some of Lovecraft’s greatest narratives—“The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Colour out of Space,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” At the Mountains of Madness, “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “The Shadow out of Time”? Some of these stories may have racist elements in passing—but no more so than, say, the work of Raymond Chandler, in whose stories we can find African Americans compared to gorillas or a character repeatedly referred to as a “little Jap.”

wasn't he permavirgin recluse? He would fit in here

But I hear no towering condemnations of Raymond Chandler as a racist/xenophobe whose work must be banished from the canon of American literature.

Guran also maintains that “Lovecraft’s prejudice seems, at the very least, somewhat more pronounced than many of his contemporaries.” (I will bypass the dubious grammar of that sentence.) This is also a common view among those who don’t know very much about the historical period in question, but it is also false. An examination of my Documents of American Prejudice (Basic Books, 1999) will show conclusively that, in comparison to the astounding vitriol that was produced in his day, Lovecraft’s words are as mild as baby shampoo—and those screeds can be found in books and magazines of very wide distribution, as opposed to the private correspondence where most of Lovecraft’s racist discussions occur.

Guran concludes her discussion with the remarkable utterance that Lovecraft chose to infiltrate his stories with racism “to alarm and distress the primarily male, supposedly ‘superior’ possessors of light-skinned Nordic genes. One must assume Lovecraft never considered anyone else as a potential reader.” So now Guran reveals the enviable ability to read the mind of a dead man! I once again overlook the fact that Lovecraft knew—and appreciated the fact—that he had many female readers. At least two other points can be made:
It defies credulity to believe that Weird Tales, in the fourteen years in which Lovecraft appeared in its pages (1923–37), had an all-male, all-Nordic readership, and nothing in Lovecraft’s letters suggests that he believed in such a fantastic scenario.
Guran does not seem to know the story of Jean Libera (or Libbera), an Italian who was a member of a freak show (Hubert’s Museum in New York).

Lovecraft was delighted when he found that this definitely non-Nordic individual was a devoted reader of Weird Tales and that he was especially fond of Lovecraft’s stories. (See Selected Letters 5.34–35.)

Over the decades Lovecraft was criticised for all manner of things by all manner of critics, ranging from Edmund Wilson to Colin Wilson to Brian W. Aldiss; but none of them, until recently, have focused single-mindedly on Lovecraft’s racism, even though his views have been known since the 1940s. Edmund Wilson, writing his hostile review-article on Lovecraft (“Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous,” New Yorker, November 24, 1945) only a few months after the end of World War II (and the Holocaust), said not one word about Lovecraft the racist. And not one actual Lovecraft scholar—Donald R. Burleson, David E. Schultz, Steven J. Mariconda, Robert H. Waugh, and a dozen others one could name—has interpreted racism as central to Lovecraft’s work. But we are now asked to believe that a Frenchman who has done no original research on Lovecraft and an Englishman in similar circumstances are suddenly endowed with the transcendent insight that allows them to deliver a magisterial condemnation of Lovecraft on this subject. Once again, the mere fact that somebody says something doesn’t make it so.

I am endlessly surprised that commentators don’t pay much attention to Lovecraft’s atheism. This is really the key to understanding both his philosophical thought (mechanistic materialism) and his literary expression of that thought—what we (and he) call cosmicism. It is telling that Guran doesn’t quote Lovecraft’s most famous utterance about his own work—an utterance whose essence is atheism and the rejection of conventional (Christian) morality:

“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. …

To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary species called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.” (Letter to Farnsworth Wright, 5 July 1927; Selected Letters 2.150.)

This passage has been quoted over and over again in many different venues, but Guran does not cite it—presumably because it all but refutes her contention that it is racism (as opposed to atheism) that is at the heart of Lovecraft’s work.

I am not singling out Paula Guran for specific censure; the flaws in her introduction are representative of the flaws in the thinking of many commentators who are forced to rely on second-hand sources for their understanding of Lovecraft. They find the same opinions expressed by a multitude of critics (who are themselves not specialists on Lovecraft), and therefore assume that such views have become self-evident truisms. Because they are not specialists, they do not have the time or resources to conduct original research to verify whether these views are actually sound. That is why so many lies and half-truths and canards about Lovecraft are now abroad. And Lovecraft is not alone in being treated in this fashion; one could just as plausibly maintain that the entirety of T. S. Eliot’s work is defaced by anti-Semitism, or that the entirety of Jack London’s work is defaced by prejudice against Asians, or that the entirety of Roald Dahl’s work is defaced by both racism and anti-Semitism.

The bottom line is this: Racism is not at the root of Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought, and those who attempt to maintain such a thing do so in defiance of the mountains of contrary evidence found in his stories, essays, poems, and letters, and in the accounts of nearly all who actually knew and met him. Whether the Lovecraft-haters (and I certainly do not regard Paula Guran as one of them) can ever consider such evidence in an unbiased and unprejudiced manner is an open question.

I, for one, am beginning to doubt it.

It's 'Phillips'.