H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Providence, August 20, 1890-Providence, March 15, 1937) better known as H. P. Lovecraft, was an American writer, author of horror and science fiction stories and novels. He is considered a great innovator of the horror story, to which he contributed his own mythology —the Cthulhu Mythos—, developed in collaboration with other authors, currently in force. His work constitutes a classic of cosmic horror, a narrative line that it departs from the traditional stories of supernatural horror - satanism, ghosts -, including science fiction elements such as alien races, time travel or the existence of other dimensions.
His family came from a distinguished bourgeois tradition in decline, a reason that marked, to a large extent, the elitist personality of the author of Providence. His father died when he was still very young and her mother overprotected him, trying to keep him from associating with people she considered to be of an inferior class. In 1921, when the author was thirty-one years old, the death of his mother affected him deeply. Later, he met the writer and merchant Sonia Greene, whom he married and moved to New York, but failed in her marriage. After feeling a deep aversion for New York life —where his racism increased— Lovecraft decided to return to his native Providence where he lived with his aunts until the end of his days. During his stay in New York, Lovecraft continued to correspond with authors such as Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith or August Derleth, for whom he worked as a ghostwriter with some of them forming what was later called the Lovecraft Circle. These authors collaborated to a large extent in the development of his own literature and saved Lovecraft's work from oblivion. He took long night walks and was invaded by a deep feeling of loneliness and frustration. During that time he developed his most representative works such as The Call of Cthulhu — The Call of Cthulhu— (1926), At the Mountains of Madness —En las montañas de la locura— (1931) o The Case of Charles Dexter Ward —The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—(1941).
He published several of his works during his lifetime thanks to the American pulp magazine Weird Tales, the first of which was Dagon. Likewise, Lovecraft cultivated poetry, essays, and epistolary literature. He corresponded with his professional colleagues for years and wrote a correspondence numbering 100,000 letters, 1,000 of which were published in five volumes by Arkham House, the publishing house founded by two Lovecraft followers, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. His literary style is unmistakable and very personal. It is characterized by an excess of polysyllabic words and cultured adjectives such as "atavistic", "numinous", "immemorial", "arcane". His always serious and solemn tone has been copied on countless occasions by many horror writers, such as, by the authors of the Circle of Lovecraft. His creations have become very popular, such as the gods Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, the fictional book Necronomicon or characters like Erich Zann or Herbert West, who have appeared in various film adaptations.
Lovecraft's legacy is extensive, spanning literature, essays, comics, film, music, board games, and video games. Some of the most notable examples are, in literature, Stephen King's short stories based on Lovecraft's mythology, such as Jerusalem's Lot and Nightmares and Hallucinations ; the essay written by H. P. Lovecraft himself, Supernatural horror in literature —which is also one of the best-regarded essays on the literary horror genre—; some comics scripted by the writer Alan Moore, such as Providence; rock and roll and heavy metal groups such as Metallica or Iron Maiden, who have mentioned the name of the author of Providence on some of their main albums; role-playing games like The Call of Cthulhu, published by the publisher Chaosium, or video games like Alone in the Dark or Prisoner of Ice, which have based their themes on the mythology of the Cthulhu Mythos. Likewise, the seventh art has brought Lovecraft's work to the big screen on numerous occasions, such as Re- Animator (198 5) by Stuart Gordon, The Color of Outer Space (2019) by Richard Stanley and, even, the director Guillermo del Toro has been wanting to adapt the novel At the Mountains of Madness.
Barely recognized in life, to this day his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and his name is one of the most relevant as far as fictional horror is concerned. He died of intestinal cancer, virtually penniless, in 1937. Beyond his work, he is considered a genius of horror literature and one of the most influential fantasy writers of the 20th century.
Semblance
The psychiatrist, essayist and translator Rafael Llopis, the main disseminator of Lovecraft in Spain, wrote about the author: «Educated in a holy fear of the human race —with the exception of “good families” of Anglo-Saxon origin—, he believed that no one is capable of understanding or loving anyone and he felt like a foreigner in his homeland. For him "human thought [...] is perhaps the funniest and most discouraging spectacle on the globe."
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural —Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural— states about the writer: «Some have criticized his works for his bombastic style, full of adjectives, but the harmony and balance in his best stories fully justify such a practice as deliberate." Lovecraft initiated a new literary style by reformulating many of the horror genre's clichés and giving them new meaning in his particular way of narrating.. He put great dedication to it and, from his aesthetic ideas about horror stories, his essay The supernatural horror in literature (1927, revised in 1936) was born, which is a rigorous and fundamental study on the principles of the story of supernatural theme. In it, the author of Providence defines that in any horror story "there must be present a certain atmosphere of unexpected deadly terror to unknown external forces", describing the development of the Gothic novel through the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis and Maturin.
In his study Danse Macabre —Dance Macabre— (1981), writer Stephen King states that Lovecraft is “the dark and baroque prince of the horror story of the 20th century". Furthermore, as opposed to internal or psychological evil, "the concept of external evil is more far-reaching, more impressive. Lovecraft understood it that way, and it is what makes his stories of extraordinary, cyclopean evil, so effective when they are good. [Her best tales of him] of him make us feel the weight of the universe suspended above our heads, they suggest shadowy forces capable of destroying us all just by grunting in our sleep ».
For his biographer S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft "was not a 'stranger in this century,'" as the protagonist of his short story The Stranger affirms of himself. If you study their stories carefully, you will see in them something more than the escapist dreams of an out-of-date antiquarian: we soon find data such as the discovery of Pluto, cited in The Whisperer in Darkness —The Whisperer in the dark— (1930), or the then still controversial theory of continental drift, in the novel At the Mountains of Madness —En las montañas de la locura i>—(1931). And delving deeper, in later fiction, we repeatedly and significantly run into Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. Likewise, the metaphors about the future aesthetic, political and economic development of humanity are transparent in the alien civilizations that appear in The Mound —El mónculo— (1929-1930; published 1940 as the work of Zealia Bishop), In the Mountains of Madness (1931; published 1932) and The Shadow Out of Time —The Shadow from another time— (1935; published 1936).
According to American writer Joyce Carol Oates, "Lovecraft's mystical identification with his settings of rural Massachusetts and the former colonies of Salem, Marblehead, and Providence, suggests a parodic transcendentalism in which 'spirit' resides everywhere except possibly in humans. Lovecraft, in short, like Edgar Allan Poe since the 19th century, has exerted "an incalculable influence on successive generations of writers of horror fiction".
For his part, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq declared: «I discovered H.P.L. at sixteen thanks to a "friend". As an impact, it was one of the strong ones. I didn't know literature could do that. And besides, I'm still not sure he can. There is something about Lovecraft that is not entirely literary [emphasis added]".
Biography
Early Years
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 at 9 a.m. in the family home located at 194—today 454—Angell Street, in Providence, the capital of the state of Rhode Island. The house was torn down in 1961. H.P. was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853-1898)—a sales representative for the Gorham Silver Company, a silver, precious metals, and jewelry trade—and Sarah Susan Phillips (1857- 1921), the second of four children born to Whipple Van Buren Phillips and Rhoby Alzada Place. For both it was their first marriage, although they were both over thirty when they signed their wedding.
Lovecraft came from distinguished ancestry; as for his maternal line, the Phillips, their lineage could be traced almost to the Mayflower, since maternal ancestors dated back to the arrival of George Phillips in Massachusetts in 1630. When the author visited Some of his ancestral lands in eastern Rhode Island, the Phillips surname was remembered with fondness and respect. His paternal line was also of British origin, and the writer was able to trace his surname—Lovecraft or Lovecroft—back to the 18th century. xv.
Lonely little Howard liked to frequent strange and out-of-the-way places to give free rein to his wild imagination. In those places —caves, remote groves, etc.— he recreated historical situations or became absorbed in the observation of small details that went unnoticed by the rest of the people, but which fascinated him, such as stopping to listen to the fairies of the forest or imagining what might exist in outer space. Perhaps one of the reasons why he liked to escape so much was because of the strict bondage to which his mother subjected him, telling him that he should not play with lesser children or insisting that he was ugly and that he would never live up to it. succeed.
When Lovecraft was almost three years old, his father suffered a nervous breakdown in a Chicago hotel room, where he was staying for work. He was admitted to Butler Hospital, a Providence psychiatric facility, and he was legally incapacitated due to a series of neurological disorders. From that moment and for the next five years, he remained admitted to that hospital, where he died on July 19, 1898 with a diagnosis of general paresis, a terminal phase of neurosyphilis. Although some biographers claim that the Lovecraft boy was told that his father was paralyzed and comatose during this period, all the evidence seems to show that this was not the case. With the death of Lovecraft's father, the boy's upbringing fell to his father. mother, her two aunts - Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips - and, especially, about her maternal grandfather, an important businessman named Whipple Van Buren Phillips; all of them resided in the family home.
Lovecraft was a child prodigy. He recited poetry at the age of two, read at three and began writing at six, and by the age of eight had already read a large number of books from his grandfather's private library. One of the genres that he was most passionate about in his childhood was that of detective novels, and being an avid reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories, he founded the "Providence Detective Agency" together with his friends at the age of thirteen, taking the association so seriously that they even carried identification cards, police badges, a magnifying glass, a whistle, etc. At fifteen he wrote his first story as such, The Beast in the Cave —La bestia en la cueva—, an imitation of Gothic horror tales. At sixteen he wrote an astronomy column for the Providence Tribune.
Due to the high rank of his mother, who did not want little Howard to mix with children "inferior" to him, Lovecraft's primary education was eminently self-taught. His maternal grandfather encouraged him to read, this being one of his favorite hobbies. In his grandfather's immense library he discovered —with a copy of the Iliad for children in his hands— Greco-Roman paganism and The Thousand and One Nights, although at a very young age. early - at the age of five - he declared himself an atheist, a conviction he maintained until his death. This helped his imagination develop rapidly compared to the rest of the boys his age, which caused him a lack of adaptation with these. When they wanted to play swordplay or primarily physical games, he preferred more leisurely and imaginative entertainment, such as historical reenactments.
Lack of perseverance and poor health kept Lovecraft from school until he was eight, and he had to drop out after a year. During his truancy, he continued to read voraciously. He acquired knowledge of chemistry and astronomy, even writing as an amateur for some scientific journals. He published several limited-circulation magazines, beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette. Four years later, he returned to Hope Street Public School, where he attended two and a half years of secondary education, until he dropped out permanently.
Youth and early failures
In 1904, his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, died, greatly affecting the young Lovecraft —fourteen years old. Mismanagement of the family's estates and money left the family in such poor financial condition that they were forced to move to 598 (now a maisonette at 598–600) Angell Street. Lovecraft was so affected by the loss of his grandfather and the house where he was born, who considered suicide for a while. He even stopped attending school for a year. However, in 1906 he had the first appearance of it in print, when the Providence Journal published a letter of his in which, as a scientific materialist, he openly rejected astrology. This publication was followed by several others in Rhode Island and Providence weekly newspapers. By his return to school, these columns had already brought him some fame among his peers and schoolteachers.In 1908, before his graduation, he suffered a nervous breakdown and did not receive his diploma. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's biographer, suggests that this collapse may have been due to his difficulties with mathematics, a subject he needed to master to become a professional astronomer. This failure in his education—Lovecraft wanted to study at Brown University—was a source of shame and disappointment until the end of his days. Although his mentality responded to an empiricist rationalism, the author of Providence was attracted to imaginative literature, surely influenced by his skepticism; locked in the pessimism of loneliness and considering that "human thought is the funniest and most discouraging spectacle on Earth".
From 1908 to 1913 he dealt mainly with poetry, but it was then that Lovecraft discovered Edgar Allan Poe's gothic literature and wrote some fictional stories heavily influenced by this author, especially his short story The Tell-Tale Heart —The tell-tale heart— He lived as a hermit and had little contact with the outside world, except for his mother and aunts. This situation changed when he wrote a letter to Argosy magazine, complaining about the insipid love stories of one of the publication's most popular writers, Fred Jackson. The debate between Jackson's defenders and Lovecraft in the opinion column caught the attention of Edward F. Daas, president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited him to join them in 1914. UAPA infused new vigor to Lovecraft, bringing him out of his voluntary seclusion and inciting him to contribute his poems and essays. Some time later, he became president of UAPA, and even became acting president of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA), UAPA's rival, from 1922 to 1923.
Around those same years, he edited his own amateur magazine, The Conservative. In 1917, at the request of some friends, he returned to fiction with stories much more polished, such as The Tomb —La tumba— (1922) and Dagon —Dagón— (1919). The latter was his first professionally published work, appearing in Weird Tales in 1923. Around this time, he gradually developed a huge network of admirers and friends, including Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, the latter creator of Conan the Barbarian. The length and frequency of his letters to those friends made him one of the most prolific writers in the epistolary genre. According to his biographer L. Sprague de Camp, throughout his life, Lovecraft wrote over one hundred thousand letters.
Lovecraft and his mother
The death of his father had few repercussions on the Lovecraft boy, since he was practically unable to meet him. However, that of his mother, in 1921, was a great shock to him, since it occurred after a long illness. Some biographers often associate her with her father's syphilis. In any case, the truth is that the immediate cause was a poor postoperative period after gallbladder surgery. She was admitted, like her husband before her, at Butler Hospital. During it, she frequently wrote letters to her son, with whom she remained very close until her death on May 21, 1921. Lovecraft adored her mother, and when she died, he had thirty-one years.
Many critics consider Lovecraft's mother to be the cause of all the peculiar and somewhat bizarre behaviors that the writer exhibited during his lifetime. It seems that after the death of her husband Winfield, Sarah, a traditional and puritanical woman, unloaded all the frustrations of a run-down bourgeoisie on her only son, whom she overprotected to insane limits and treated as if he were her only asset on earth.. In this way, he favored the development of certain personality characteristics, common in these cases, which conditioned his behavior pattern while he lived. Among other outstanding aspects, he preferred human relationships with his small environment that offered him greater security, before from a broader and unknown social environment that he did not control, due to this deficit in optimal social skills due to lack of adequate learning during his childhood and adolescence.
Wedding and New York
The death of his mother and the depletion of what little remained of the family wealth led him to abandon the idea of leading an idle life, forcing him to work on small assignments as a ghostwriter and proofreader for other authors' writings. Thanks to this type of work, he met many of those who would later form the so-called Lovecraft Circle, including Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth and others. To these writers and "friends," Lovecraft presented a stark difference between his erudite, introverted loner persona through letters and the way he was in person. They defined him as enthusiastic and generous, creative, an intelligence prodigy and with a racist side that he did not abandon until the last months of his life.
When it came to women, Lovecraft had not led a lifetime of many relationships with the opposite sex. In fact, the author is remembered for his "apparent lack of masculinity" as explained by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro in the documentary about his life and work Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown . The aforementioned film director's portrayal of the author of Providence is that of an "Anglophile guy who seemed to have arrived in America on the Mayflower: a weird guy who didn't sleep with many women".
Two months after his mother's death, Lovecraft attended an amateur writers' convention in Boston, where he met Sonia H. Greene. She was born in 1883, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, she was a widow and seven years older than him. They married in 1924 and moved to the Borough of Brooklyn, in New York City. Lovecraft's aunts, very traditional, did not look kindly on this wedding, since her spouse was a strong-willed, independent woman, owner of a hat shop and amateur writer for the United Amateur Press Association. Initially H. P. L. was enthralled with New York, but soon the couple found themselves in financial difficulties. Sonia lost her shop and Lovecraft couldn't find a job. Added to this were his wife's health problems, who had to move to Cleveland because of a job that came up, while he stayed in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he developed a deep aversion to New York life. Indeed, the discouraging reality of the impossibility of finding a job in a place whose majority population was immigrants entered into an irreconcilable conflict with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon gentleman, for which his racism was galvanized to the point of fear.
In 1926, still living separately, they agreed to an amicable divorce, where the writer alleged "the great differences between them and the economic problems", although it never took place. Due to the failure of their marriage, some biographers have speculated that Lovecraft was asexual, although Sonia later said of him that she was a "proper and excellent lover".
Return to Providence
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Back in Providence on April 17, 1927, she lived with her aunts for the next few years, in a "spacious brown Victorian frame house" at 10 Barnes Street—Dr. Willett's address in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (The case of Charles Dexter Ward)—until 1933. That is where he is overcome by the feeling of failure that invades him, abandoning himself to the loneliness and frustration. At this time he enjoys night walks, which have an impact on his personal collapse, and create an invisible sphere of fears that will never allow him to recover, although, at the same time, they contribute to his maximum literary splendor. In these fruitful years he wrote the vast majority of his best-known works, such as The Call of Cthulhu —La calla de Cthulhu— (1926), At the Mountains of Madness —In the mountains of madness— (1931) or The case of Charles Dexter Ward —composed in 1927, but not released until 1941 —, published in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
During these years he visited various antique dealers living in Quebec, Philadelphia and some places in New England, such as Vermont and Massachusetts, while continuing to maintain his enormous correspondence. To his old friends he added many other young writers, such as D. W. Rimmel, R. H. Barlow or Robert Bloch, to whom he advised and supervised works. He showed concern with the political and economic conditions in his country. During the Great Depression, he showed his support for Roosevelt and became a moderate socialist, abandoning his conservatism, while continuing to study a wide variety of subjects, from philosophy to literature to architectural history.
Last years
The last two or three years of his life were hard pressed financially. Despite his hard work and his efforts as a writer, the poverty in which he lived increased. In 1932 his dear aunt, Mrs. Clark, died and Lovecraft was forced to move in 1933 to a cramped little room to rent with his other aunt, Mrs. Gamwell, located at 66 College Street, behind the John Hay Library. The current address of this house is 65 Prospect Street. In addition, his close friend Robert E. Howard, whom he never met in person, committed suicide on June 11, 1936, leaving him bewildered and deeply grieved.
His latest works were increasing in length and complexity, which made it difficult to sell as pulp magazines rejected long texts. Because of this, Lovecraft found it necessary to return to work as a ghostwriter for other authors such as The Diary of Alonzo Typer —The Diary of Alonzo Typer— (1938) by William Lumley, The Mound —El mound— (1940) by Zealia Bishop and Winged Death —Winged Death— (1940) by Hazel Heald, also in poetry and other literary styles.
About the economic problems the writer suffered throughout his life, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq wrote:
"As for his works, they did not report anything to him. However, it did not seem convenient to make literature a profession. According to his own words: "A gentleman does not try to make himself known, he leaves him for the selfish arrhythists and petty people." Of course, it may be difficult to appreciate the sincerity of this statement; it may seem to us the product of a huge tissue of inhibitions, but at the same time we must consider it as the strict application of a code of deciduous conduct to which Lovecraft clings with all its forces. He always wanted to see himself as a gentle man of provinces, who cultivates literature as one of the beautiful arts, for his own delight and that of some friends, without worrying about the tastes of the great public, the themes of fashion or anything else for the style. A similar character no longer has room in our societies [...]. In a time of mad commercialism, it is comforting to find someone who refuses to “becoming” with such obstination.Michel Houellebecq
In his later years, his unhealthy nature and malnutrition undermined his health. His abnormal sensitivity to any temperature below 20°C became acute to the point that he felt really ill at such temperatures.During the last year of his life, his letters were full of allusions to the aches and pains from him. In late February 1937, when he was forty-six years old, he was admitted to the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence. There he died in the early hours of the morning of March 15, 1937 of intestinal cancer complicated by the so-called Bright's disease. Although this term is not commonly used today, it refers to a series of inflammatory diseases of the kidneys. That is, it seems that Lovecraft had a complication of his intestinal tumor disease with severe kidney failure that caused his death. The diagnosis of his disease took place just a month before his death.
He was buried three days later in his grandfather Phillips' grave at Swan Point Cemetery; Although his name is inscribed on the central column, no slab marks his grave. Many years after his death, on the tombstone erected for him by a group of fans, can be read a line taken from one of the thousands of letters he wrote to his correspondents: "I am Providence."
Creative background
Dissemination
Lovecraft was an almost unknown writer in his own day. Although her stories had found a place in pulp publications such as Weird Tales, only fans of this type of literature knew her name. Among them, she maintained a prolific correspondence with other contemporary writers, such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, with whom he forged a great friendship, even without ever having met in person. It is estimated that during his lifetime he wrote 100,000 letters, as noted by L. Sprague de Camp. On some occasions he dated them 200 years before the date they had been written, thus dating them to colonial times, before the war. of Independence of the United States (a war that hurt him because of his Anglophilia). He explains that, according to him, the 18th and xx centuries had been the top; the first being the century of nobility and grace and the second of science, while the 19th century, particularly the Victorian era, would have been a mistake.
This large group of writers became known as Lovecraft's Circle, as they borrowed elements from H. P. L.'s stories—mysterious books with eerie names, pantheons of alien gods like Cthulhu and Azathoth, and places like Miskatonic and Arkham—for use in your own stories, with the author's own blessing and encouragement; even at times with his help, which often went beyond the role of editor to that of reworking the stories. It was the efforts of the Circle—particularly those of August Derleth and Donald Wandrei—that prevented Lovecraft's name and stories from disappeared completely into obscurity after his death. For this, they created the Arkham House publishing house with which they published most of the Providence writer's work. About Derleth, the Lovecraftian scholar, Rafael Llopis, defines this author as "[...] not only the San Pablo of the Cthulhian religion, but also the one who sells relics from the outskirts of the great official sanctuary".
After his passing, the Lovecraft Circle continued to contribute to his legend. August Derleth was probably the most prolific of them all, as he broadened and extended the writer's vision. Derleth's contributions have been the subject of much controversy, for while Lovecraft never considered his pantheon of extraterrestrial gods as more than part of the storyline, Derleth created a complete cosmology with a war between the Old Ones or archetypal Gods—such as Hypnos or Ulthar—, and the Primal Gods —such as Cthulhu, Dagon or Nyarlathotep. Furthermore, he associated the Primal Gods with the four elements.
Some Lovecrafters have frowned on such modifications, since they seem to contradict the author's vision of a messy, planless universe, where less malevolent beings simply weren't interested in humanity. Many fans wonder whether H. P. L. himself would have approved Derleth's extensions. It is speculated that he was very understanding of these kinds of additions and modifications, so he would probably have given Derleth the thumbs up, but not adopted him for his own stories. If there was a Circle of Lovecraft, then Derleth's version would be an interesting addition, but not part of it.
Classification of his work
Lovecraft's work has been grouped into three categories by some critics. While Lovecraft preferred not to refer to these categories himself, he did write on occasion: "There are my Poean works and my Dunsanian works [but] where are my Lovecraftian works?"
- Macabre Stories (c. 1905-1920)
- Historys of the Cycle (c. 1920-1927)
- The Myths of Cthulhu / Lovecraft (c. 1925-1935)
Some critics fail to see the difference between the Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos, often pointing to the recurrence of the Necronomicon and subsequent gods. A frequently argued explanation is that the Dream Cycle belongs more to a fantasy genre while the Cthulhu Mythos corresponds to science fiction.
Influences
Lovecraft's nightmares provided direct inspiration for his work, and perhaps a direct insight into his unconscious and symbolism explains his continuing stir and popularity. All these interests led him to appreciate in a special way the work of Edgar Allan Poe, who strongly influenced his early stories, with their macabre atmosphere and hidden fears lurking in the dark. Lovecraft's discovery of the stories of Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany, took his writing to a new level, resulting in a series of fantasies that took place in the land of dreams. It was probably influenced by Arthur Machen's tales of the survival of ancient evil and his mystical beliefs in hidden mysteries that lay behind reality, which ultimately helped inspire Lovecraft to find himself beginning in 1923.
Another inspiration came from an unsuspected source: scientific advances in areas such as biology, astronomy, geology and physics, which reduced the human being to something insignificant, powerless and condemned in a mechanical and materialistic universe, a very small point in the infinite vastness of the cosmos. These ideas were instrumental in contributing to a movement called cosmicism and provided Lovecraft with compelling reasons for his atheism.
On this matter, Rafael Llopis, probably the best connoisseur of the figure and the work of Lovecraft in the context of the Spanish language, states in the prologue to the fundamental anthology The Cthulhu Myths:
"The fundamental element of the Myths, its raw material—both generically and structurally—is the cosmic atheist anguish Lovecraft and its symbolic, dreamy expression. It is evident," says George W. Wetzel, "behind the formation of the Myths of Cthulhu there was a profound psychological motivation. (...) In discovering that religion was absurd, there was a vacuum in it that tried to fill with an imaginary mystical world”. This frustrated religious yearning, determined by the circumstances of his real life, [...] acts as a totalizing project around which various elements are to be structured and even contradictory to give origin to the Myths».
Llopis further notes how he recalls the sinister mysticism of Lovecraftian myths, the «biblical style, the sonorous and exotic names, the dreamlike unrealism, the numinous background of archaic religion» that impregnates Poean stories such as Silence, A Sonnet —“Silence, a sonnet”— or Shadow, A Parable —“Sombra, una parábola”—, or also A Dreamer's Tales > —Tales of a Dreamer—, by another Lovecraft precursor, Lord Dunsany.
On this matter, Llopis —also a psychiatrist— affirms in his Natural history of scary tales (2013) that: «Thus, Lovecraft's work contains the germ of a primitive religion barbarous and cruel, full of primordial horror. And that horror also derives from the dialectical game between the fascination that the chaos of the prehuman subconscious exerted on him and his own rationalist terror of the regression of the mind, of the loss of conscious control of his thoughts and actions. For his rigid and strictly logical mind, chaos represented mortal danger, but at the same time it was liberation from a tyrannical superego and surrender to an intimate and ancestral world that attracted him like a forbidden abyss. Another important contradiction, closely linked to the previous one, is the one that arises in Lovecraft between his love and his horror of the past ».
Origin of the Cthulhu Mythos
The Cthulhu Mythos is a pantheon of extradimensional alien deities and horrors that feed on humanity and bear traces of ancient myth and legend. The term "Cthulhu Mythos" was embraced by author August Derleth after Lovecraft's death, while the Providence author referred to his artificial mythology as "Yog-Sothotheria".
Their stories created one of the most influential elements in the horror genre: the Necronomicon, the secret writing of the Arab Abdul Alhazred. The impact and strength of the concept of myth has led some to conclude that Lovecraft based his work on pre-existing myth and occult beliefs. Apocryphal editions of the Necronomicon have also been published over the years.
His prose is old-fashioned, frequently using archaic vocabulary or obsolete spelling, as well as unusually used adjectives such as "gibbous", "cyclopean" or "atavistic", with frequent attempts to transcribe dialects, which have been described as imprecise. His work, Lovecraft being an Anglophile, is rendered in British English commonly using anachronistic writing.
Stages
In Lovecraft's literary evolution, various stages marked by the influence of his favorite authors in those times are usually pointed out. Each phase had its peak period, but it is not possible to specify an exact start and end date since overlap.
- Gothic stage (1905-1920), in which the Magisterium of Edgar Allan Poe prevails. Composes stories with the classic elements of horror: large and ancient castles, distant and desolate moors, the night as a liberator of evil. Stress The Beast in the Cave -The beast in the cave— (1905) or The Outsider -The stranger- (1921).
- Onirical stage (1920-1927), deeply influenced by Lord Dunsany. His stories now develop in the fantastic Dreamlands, describing in detail the landscapes of dream visited. Following the Lord, both Lovecraft and his friend and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) created stories set in ancient and magical worlds, close to the Mediterranean culture and legends, in front of which he reinvented the Nordic mythologies and tales, whose highest representative would be J. R. Tolkien (1892-1973): The Cats of Ulthar -The cats of Ulthar- (1920), The Silver Key -The silver key— (1926) or, its summit, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath -The search in dreams of the ignota Kadath— (1926-1927; published in 1943).
- Myths of Cthulhu (1927-1937), in which the imprint of Arthur Machen is perceived. In the accounts of this period he develops the myths of his imagination around the primordial gods and describes countless creatures that haunt the Earth. Stress The Call of Cthulhu -Cthulhu's call- (1926), The Dunwich's Horror -The horror of Dunwich- (1928) and The Shadow over Innsmouth -The shadow over Innsmouth— (1931), among others.
On the contrary, other authors distinguish cycles or more specific narrative projects grouped by theme instead of bringing them together chronologically, as is the case above. The different thematic cycles are:
- Cycle, stories based on the Earth of sleep like, for example, The White Ship -The White Ship-
- Cycle of New Englandwhere we find stories like The Colour Out of Space -The color of outer space-
- Cycle of lost civilizationslike, for example, The Nameless City -The city without name-
- Randolph Carter Cycle, recurring character in some works of the author as in The Statement of Randolph Carter -Randolph Carter's testimony-
- Cycle of the Myths of Cthulhu, stories in which there is a broad cosmogony of gods and originals created by Lovecraft as well as by his cohort of followers, such as Robert Bloch, in narratives such as, for example, Dagon -Dagon-
Themes
In Lovecraft's literature—stories, novels, and novelettes—various themes that are characteristic of his work often recur. For example, forbidden knowledge, the influence of extraterrestrial races, atavistic guilt, the impossibility of escaping fatal destiny, racism, a certain aversion towards women - although not to be confused with misogynistic sentiments - and the increasing risks of the science; These topics are discussed in more detail below:
Forbidden Knowledge
"There is no greater fortune in the world, I believe, that the inability of the human mind to relate to each other everything in it. We live on an island of placid ignorance, surrounded by black seas of the infinite, and it is not our destiny to undertake long journeys. The sciences, which follow their own paths, have not caused much damage so far; but someday the union of these dissociated knowledge will open us to reality, and to the endeatable position that we occupy in it, so terrible prospects that we will be mad at revelation, or we will flee from that evil light, refusing us in the security and peace of a new age of darkness."H. P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu's call (1928)
The protagonists of Lovecraft's stories are always led to the "union of these dissociated knowledges," and so too many of his stories begin. When such a thing happens, the mind of the protagonist or researcher, in general, is destroyed by the abysmal enormity of what has been discovered, being unable to assimilate such knowledge. Those who come across "living" manifestations of the incomprehensible go mad. Those characters who attempt to make use of this knowledge are invariably doomed. Sometimes his work attracts the attention of malevolent beings; occasionally, they are slain by monsters of their own creation.
Alien influences on humanity
The beings of Lovecraft's Mythos often make use of humans. Cthulhu, for example, is worshiped under different names by different cults around the world, such as the Inuit of Greenland and the voodoo practitioners of Louisiana.. Sometimes they intervene directly in the action.
Most of the beings of the Mythos are extremely powerful to be defeated by humans, and their direct knowledge usually means that the victim goes mad. When an agreement is reached with them, Lovecraft needs a way to provide dramatic structure to build the tension without bringing the story to a premature end. The worshipers offer him the way to reveal information about his "gods" in small doses, and making it possible for the protagonists to win temporary battles. Lovecraft, like his contemporaries, imagined "savages" closer to supernatural knowledge, unknown to civilized man.
In the same vein, for the author, the gods that he embodies in his works are older than humanity itself and even than the Earth itself and they observe the human being with indifference and, in most cases, with cruelty.
Atavistic guilt
Another recurring theme in Lovecraft's stories is the idea that descendants in a bloodline can never escape the crimes committed by their ancestors, if these were heinous enough. The descendants may be removed in time and space—and, moreover, in guilt—from the act itself, but the blood will reveal it to them.
Stories that show this theme are The Rats in the Walls —Las ratas de las paredes— (1924), The Lurking Fear — The Fear That Lurks— (1923), Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family —Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family— (1921), The Alchemist —The Alchemist— (1916), The Shadow over Innsmouth —La sombra sobre Innsmouth (1936)— and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward —El caso de Charles Dexter Ward— (1927, published 1941). Examples of crimes that Lovecraft considers heinous enough to have this kind of consequence are examples of the cannibalism found in The Picture in the House —The Picture in the House— (1921) and in The rats on the walls.
Impossibility of escaping fate
Often in Lovecraft's stories, the protagonist is unable to control his own actions, or finds it impossible to change the course of events. Many of these characters would escape danger if they simply ran in the opposite direction, though this possibility never arises or is in any way subdued by an outside entity, as in The Color Out of Space —The Color from outer space— (1927). Often these subjects are under the influence of some malevolent being or other beings.
With the same inevitability as the fate of the ancestor, fleeing or committing suicide does not provide the complete assurance of escape as in The Thing on the Doorstep —The Being of the Threshold— (1937), The Outsider —El extraño— (1926), The case of Charles Dexter Ward, etc.
In some cases, this fate manifests itself for all mankind, and there is no possible escape as in The Shadow Out of Time —La sombra de otro tiempo— (1936) and in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In stories such as The Dreams in the Witch House —Los sueños en la casa de la bruja— (1933), Lovecraft's poetics points to the impossibility of the triumph of knowledge popular and scientific—legends and science—in the face of the horror of the unknown.
Civilization threatened
Lovecraft often plays with the idea of civilization struggling painfully against barbaric and primitive elements. In some stories this fight is on an individual level; most of its protagonists are highly educated and educated, but are gradually corrupted by an evil influence.
In these stories, the "curse" is usually hereditary, or through interbreeding with non-human beings as in Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family and The Shadow Over Innsmouth or through some magical influence as in The case of Charles Dexter Ward. Physical and mental degradation appear together. The theme of "rotten blood" may represent Lovecraft's concern about his family history, particularly the death of his father, which Lovecraft suspected was from a syphilitic disorder.
In other stories, an entire society is threatened by barbarism. Sometimes such barbarism is represented by an external threat, with a civilization destroyed by war as in Polaris (1920). From time to time, a small group of people falls into decline and an atavism arises spontaneously as in The lurking fear. Far more frequently, such stories involve a civilized culture being gradually undermined by a marginal underclass, uneducated and unentitled, who find themselves influenced by inhuman forces.
Women
Women in Lovecraft's work are rare and often neither compassionate nor understanding nor kind. The few female characters in his stories, such as Asenath Waite—although in fact she was an evil sorcerer who had taken over the body of an innocent girl—in The Being on the Threshold and Lavinia Whateley in The Dunwich's Horror (The Dunwich Horror, 1929) they are, invariably, servants of the forces of evil.
Romance is almost absent from his stories; when love appears, it is usually in a platonic form —The Tree, Ashes (Cenizas) —. His characters live in a world where sexuality has negative connotations; if reproductive, it often gives birth to subhuman beings, as in The Dunwich Horror. In this context, it may be helpful to pay attention to the scale of Lovecraft's horror, which is frequently described as " cosmic horror. Operating on cosmic scales, as these stories operate, they assign humanity an insignificant role, so it is not female sexuality that these stories deny its positive and vital role, it is human sexuality in general.
In addition, Lovecraft maintains in a private letter, sent to one of his writer and poet friends, that discrimination against women is an Eastern superstition, from which Aryans should be freed. Racism aside, the letter seems to rule out conscious misogyny, as indeed it seems to rule out her private life.
Science and its risks
Lovecraft accepted with resignation the realities that science was revealing in the course of the early twentieth century. The Earth and the human race occupied an infinitesimal and insignificant place in the cosmic scheme of the universe. Among the various responses to the modern and incipient scientific cosmology, Lovecraft chose the path of horror. He instilled metaphysical uncertainty in his work and generated a powerful emotional charge to the whole, close to hysteria.Lovecraft took advantage of holes, gaps in the knowledge of the universe, and turned them into dark swamps of horror. The work The Color of Outer Space reveals the inability of science to understand a strange meteorite, which leads to an insane paroxysm.
Immersed, therefore, in his mature stage, he definitively abandoned superstition to adopt a scientific language. Two opinions have been raised regarding his relationship between science and literature:
- H.P.L.'s narrative strategy as a defense of the supernatural and a rejection of science, identified as a mere exchange of theories and checks through tanteos.
- Contrary to this, the new lovecraftian monsters, from different spaces and times, were upheld precisely from the new scientific findings.
Lovecraft showed an early interest in science, beginning with chemistry at the age of nine, which would be followed by astronomy three years later, the main influence in the first stage of his life. In fact, between 1902-1903 he published his own textbooks in both disciplines as well as a scientific newspaper among his relatives, deriving in 1906 as a columnist on astronomy, already in local newspapers. He gradually expanded his encyclopedic knowledge, becoming familiar with Darwinism and psychoanalysis, and kept up to date with the scientific discoveries of the time.
The list of scientists alluded to in Lovecraft's work is extensive: from classics such as Euclid, the chemists Van Helmont, Le Boë, Glauber, Becher or Stahl, the astronomers Serviss and De Sitter, the geologists Taylor and Osborn, to the contemporary physicists Einstein, Planck, Wegener and Heisenberg, the mathematician Riemann, the neurologist Freud, the psychologists Watson and Pavlov, the physician Adler, the psychiatrist Jung, as well as the anthropologists Quatrefages, Taylor, Boule or Keith or the paleontologists Elliot Smith, Woodward or the aforementioned Sir Arthur Keith.
In a letter written on November 9, 1929, to Harris Woodburn, Lovecraft speculates on the comfort provided by science and the risk of its collapse. Furthermore, at a time when humans viewed science as tremendously powerful and limitless, Lovecraft realized its alternative potential and dark results.
Einstein
Lovecraft was very aware of the new and revolutionary scientific discoveries, including and mentioning in his work numerous scientific representatives of the time, among which Albert Einstein stands out. Alluded to in 1920 in a letter to a group of correspondents, three years later H. P. L. would react with horror, bewilderment and astonishment to his theory of relativity. On May 26, 1923, he wrote these words to James F. Morton:
"My cynicism and my skepticism are increasing and all this motivated by something completely new: Einstein's theory. [...] Everything is casual, fortuitous, an ephemeral illusion [...]».
However, after 1929 he forgot his naive views on Einstein, admitting that "relativity and curved space are immutable realities, without which it would be impossible to form any kind of true conception of the cosmos" and recognizing his valuable support materialism. Valued as the scientist par excellence among the "true brains of the modern world", he would be mentioned in several of his stories: The Avoided House, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Whisperer in the Dark, In the Mountains of Madness, Dreams in the Witch's House and The Shadow of Another time.
In any case, even accepting general relativity, its treatment in his work was divergent, appearing "transcended, disrupted", mixing Einstein's laws with extensions or violations of them from his imagination.
"My conception of fantasy, as a genuine artistic form, is an extension more than a denial of reality."
In The Call of Cthulhu it is alluded to that "the geometry of the place dreamed by him was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and of disgusting spheres and dimensions different from ours." Non-Euclidean geometry it is the mathematical language and background of Einstein's general theory of relativity, to which Lovecraft repeatedly refers when exploring extraterrestrial archaeology.
Freud
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H.P. Lovecraft did not hold the ideas of the father of psychoanalysis in high esteem, especially his system of interpreting dreams. All mentions of the "Viennese quack" in his accounts and correspondence were pejorative. Lovecraft read Freud extensively and concluded in a rejection of his theoretical framework.
A good connoisseur of the world of dreams, they are in a way his hunting ground, H. P. L. made systematic and extensive use of them both experientially and transliterated in his works, especially in his second dream stage. As his biographer Houellebecq states, Lovecraft «classifies the [dream] material, he works on it; he sometimes gets excited and writes the story on the fly, without even waking up completely —this is the case of Nyarlathotep —; at other times he only keeps some elements to insert them into a new plot; but, be that as it may, he takes dreams very seriously ».
I have often wondered whether the majority of humanity ever stops to reflect on the immense importance that dreams once in a while have, and the dark world they belong to. While most of our night visions are perhaps more than vague and fantastic reflections of our experiences when we are awake — contrary to what Freud affirms with his puerile symbolism — there are, however, some others whose extramundane and ethereal character does not allow for an ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and worrying effect suggests possible leaking glimpses of a sphere of mental existence no less important than that.
In this quote at the beginning of On the Other Side of the Dream Barrier (1919), Lovecraft later (1934) adds the clause referring to Freud, since he did not know the work of the Viennese until 1921, the date on which he mentions it for the first time in his article The Defense Reopens!.
However, the American writer held psychology in high esteem, especially the psychology of dreams. He has however been accused of a superficial understanding of Freudian theories. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi notes that “it is unclear which work of Freud (if any) Lovecraft had actually read; in fact, it is more likely that he has read several of his explanations in books or magazines." In a letter from Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge, written in 1930, the author of Call of Cthulhu concludes by saying that "There is no such thing as "love" in no unified, permanent or important sense» as inferred from the work of Freud and the analysis of contemporaries in the field of psychology such as Pavlov, Jung, Adler or Watson. In the same letter, he assures that, taking into account these conclusions, together with the lack of scientific knowledge and poetic and mystical-religious delusions, talking about "love" lacks any meaning because it is totally illusory.
Other interpretations allude to the fact that, although Lovecraft exhaustively rejected the psychological role played by psychoanalysis, it is evident that he departs contrary from said conceptions about the configuration and mechanisms of the human mind, defending that the processes of the psyche are very more complex than those described by psychoanalysis, compressing the possibilities and intrinsic richness of the unconscious.
He has also been accused of an incisive criticism that appealed to the necessary validation of the then incipient hypotheses —beginning of the 20th century— of both Freud and Einstein himself. In fact, although he is contemptuous in On the Other Side of the Dream Barrier (1919) and also in From Beyond (1920): «Have you heard anything about of the pineal gland? I laugh at the superficial endocrinological science, on which the false and upstart Freudians are based", Freudian concepts disappear and reappear later, especially in collaborative works, but already with a greater acceptance free of criticism. To the progressive maturation and verification of psychological science was also added the fact that Lovecraft entered a new stage already far from the dreamlike imprint.
In addition to Freud, Lovecraft also frequently quotes Watson, Pavlov, Jung, and Adler, among others, in his letters. Lovecraft mentions Jung by name and occasionally cites controversial ideas espoused by him, giving him credit even directly Unlike Freud, the similarity between Jung's analytical psychology and Lovecraft's work has been noted.
Style
Lovecraft's style is very personal and unmistakable, characterized by an always serious and solemn tone. Compared, for example, with another master of the horror genre, M. R. James, he lacked irony and created atmospheres from the beginning, unlike the previous one, who gradually raised them. Conversely, however, Lovecraft was a master of tone; he used many adjectives and polysyllabic words and a slow, detailed tempo narrative. He also used a certain vocabulary to gradually predispose the reader's sensitivity to the atmosphere of the story —with words like "atavistic", "numinous", "arcane"... -.
He used to narrate his stories in the first person and from the point of view of a scholar using an archaic English that served him to firmly establish an environment according to his idiosyncrasies and, he even came to invent a fictional bibliography of grimoires in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew —the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Liber Ivonis contributed by his disciple Robert Bloch, the Cultes de Goules of Count D'Erlette, etcetera.
About his use of the first person, he fused the reader and the protagonist, but with the peculiarity that the latter used to be an individual distanced from society, without ordinary life or social needs or confessed pleasures, a tool that Lovecraft used for the reader to assimilate his tormented psychology and thus increase his fear. She described everything neatly, but never, except at the end of her career, the monster, which she left at work on a much more ominous abstract plane. She liked to spread vague and indefinable sensations to create effects of insecurity and transcendence, messing up space-time reality. His writing tended towards a kind of ritual religiosity with pagan echoes, but non-religious, since the author was an atheist: Lovecraft consciously excluded religion.
Another characteristic of the Lovecraftian style, as pointed out by the master of literary horror Stephen King, is that Lovecraft placed his horror stories in everyday situations and set them at the same time —most of them took place in the 1920s and 1930—, where the frightful hatches in the ordinary life of its protagonists, who leave their daily life to penetrate the unknown. The references that the author made to the past were somewhat vintage in a way.
Realism in Lovecraft's work
Although it may seem like a contradiction, Lovecraft's literature is considered one of the ones that best reflects the realism of his time. This is what one of his followers and friends, Robert Bloch, points out in one of his quotes:
«Realism in the work of H. P. Lovecraft? Of course it is! Who as he has described so accurately and so convincingly the rural areas of his state? Who but he has been able to paint the decay of the people and the customs of this region with great clarity?"Robert Bloch
S. T. Joshi, one of the major biographers and a devotee of the Providence author's work, specifically described the role of "realism" in Lovecraft's style:
"Reality, therefore, is not a goal but a function in Lovecraft. It facilitates the perception that “something that could not happen in any way” is, in fact, happening. The same happens with his style. This is dense and rich in textures that tends to help in creating that “atmosphere” that worked so hard to create. His style, of course, has been very criticized, and there is no doubt that his early works are “overwritten” in a way that he later despised. But the late Lovecraft prose is precise, musical, and as evocative as any work written by Dunsany or Machen, their examples to follow in the stylistic field. Of course, you have total freedom, like Edmund Wilson or Jacques Barzun, that you don't like it. But condemning an Asian style simply for being Asian (and that is, frankly, all I can deduce from most of these criticisms) does not seem to me a particularly solid methodology."S. T. Joshi
According to Graham Harman in his work Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, in which he makes a detailed study of «realism» in the work of the author from Providence, if there is something essential that The term "Lovecraftian" embodies the idea that "reality is much stranger and more frightening than it is possible to comprehend, and even more so than it is possible to describe." Harman refers to this as "strange realism", since the idea of realism itself in Lovecraft's literature is, in fact, "immeasurable". According to Harman, access to the realism described by Lovecraft can only be done obliquely to reality itself.
Personal opinions
Politics
Lovecraft began life as a curator. This is probably the result of his conservative upbringing. His family supported the Republican Party throughout his life. While it is unclear how consistently he voted, he did vote for Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election. Rhode Island as a whole remained politically conservative and Republican until the 1930s. Lovecraft himself was an Anglophile who supported the british monarchy. He opposed democracy and thought that the United States should be ruled by an aristocracy.His personal justification for his views was based primarily on tradition and aesthetics.
As a result of the Great Depression, Lovecraft reexamined his political views. Initially, she thought that wealthy people would assume the characteristics of her ideal aristocracy and solve America's problems. When this did not happen, she became a socialist. This change was brought about not by a change in her standard of living but by the rise in the political capital of socialism during the 1930s. It was also caused by her observation that the Depression was damaging American society. One of the main points of Lovecraft's socialism was her opposition to communism. She thought that a communist revolution would bring about the destruction of American civilization. Lovecraft believed that it was necessary to form an intellectual aristocracy to preserve the United States.
His ideal political system is described in his essay "Some repetitions of the times". Lovecraft used it to echo the political proposals that had been made over the past decades. In it he defended government control of the distribution of resources, fewer working hours and a higher salary, and unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. He also stressed the need for an oligarchy of intellectuals. In his opinion, power should be restricted to those who are intelligent and educated enough, she frequently used the term "fascism"; to describe this form of government, but bears little resemblance to that ideology.
Lovecraft had mixed opinions about the political figures of his day. He was an ardent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He saw that it was trying to take a middle path between the conservatives and the revolutionaries, which he approved. While he thought he should have enacted more progressive policies, she concluded that the New Deal was the only realistic option for reform. She considered that voting for his opponents on the political left would be a waste.Internationally, like many Americans, she expressed his initial support for Adolf Hitler. More specifically, she thought the president would preserve German culture. However, she pointed out that Hitler's racial policies should have been based more on culture than ancestry. There is evidence that, late in his life, Lovecraft began to oppose Hitler. According to Harry K. Brobst, the downstairs neighbor of Lovecraft and Annie Gamwell's residence at 66 College returned to Germany and witnessed Jews being beaten. Lovecraft and his aunt got angry about it. Their discussions of Hitler subside after this point.
Atheism
Lovecraft was an atheist. His views on religion are outlined in his 1922 essay "A Confession of Infidelity." In it he describes his change from the Protestantism of his parents to the atheism of his adulthood. Lovecraft was raised in a conservative Protestant family. He was introduced to the Bible and the myths of Saint Nicholas when he was two years old. He passively accepted them both. Over the next few years, he discovered the Tales of Childhood and Home and The Thousand and One Nights , favoring the latter. In response, Lovecraft assumed the identity of "Abdul Alhazred," a name he would later use for the author of the Necronomicon. By his own account, his first moment of skepticism occurred before her fifth birthday, when she heard that Santa Claus wasn't real. He wondered if God was also a myth. In 1896, he was introduced to Greco-Roman myths and became "a genuine pagan."
This came to an end in 1902, when Lovecraft was introduced to the study of outer space. He later described this event as the most moving of his life. In response to this, Lovecraft began to study astronomy and described his observations in the local newspaper. Before he was thirteen, he had become convinced of the impermanence of humanity. By the time he was seventeen, he had read detailed writings that matched his worldview. Lovecraft stopped writing positively about progress, developing instead the later cosmic philosophy of it. Despite his interest in science, he had an aversion to realistic literature, so he turned to fantasy fiction. This did not diminish his views. Lovecraft turned pessimistic when he entered amateur journalism in 1914. The Great War seemed to confirm his views. He began to despise philosophical idealism. Lovecraft discussed and debated his pessimism with his peers, which allowed her to solidify his philosophy. His readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and H. L. Mencken, among other pessimistic writers, favored this development. At the end of his essay, Lovecraft states that all he wanted was oblivion. He was willing to cast aside any delusions he might still have had.
Race
A common component in Lovecraft's early work is to associate virtue, intellect, high class, civilization and rationality with the white race, which he often contrasted with the corrupt, intellectually inferior, uncivilized and irrational, which he associated with low-class, racially impure or non-European, dark-skinned people who were often the villains in his stories. From the beginning, however, Lovecraft did not hold all whites in high esteem, but esteemed Englishmen. and those of English descent.
In his first published essays, private letters, and personal statements, he advocated a strong color line to preserve race and culture. His arguments were justified by disparaging various races in his journalism and correspondence, and perhaps allegorically in his fiction about non-human races.
Some of his most bloody racist views can be traced to his early poetry written in his youth, particularly On the Creation of Niggers and New England Fallen, both from 1912 In On the Creation of Niggers, Lovecraft crudely portrays his prejudices, explicitly characterizing black people as subhuman:
When, long ago, the gods created Earth;
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were designed;
Yet were too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest of 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.When time ago, the gods created the Earth;
In the image and likeness of Jupiter the incipient Man moulded.
For minor tasks the beasts were created;
Although they were far away from the human species.
To fill the void and unite them to the rest of Humanity,
The Olympic hosts engineered a clever plan.
A beast would forge, a semi-human figure,
Colmada de vicios, and "black", was called.
In The Call of Cthulhu —La calla de Cthulhu— (1928), Lovecraft describes a mixed-race group of Cthulhu worshippers:
"Examined at the police barracks, after an exhausting journey, the prisoners proved to be mixed with very low rash, and mentally weak. They were mostly sailors, and there were some blacks and mulattos, coming from almost all the islands of Cape Verde, who gave a certain voodoo nuance to that heterogeneous cult. But many questions were not needed to prove that it was something older and deeper than an African fetishism. Although degraded and ignorant, the prisoners remained faithful, with surprising consistency, to the central idea of their abhorrent worship."
Lovecraft also expressed racist and ethnocentric beliefs on occasion in his personal letters. In a letter dated January 23, 1920, he wrote:
"For the evolved man—the summit of organic development on Earth—what branch of thought is better adjusted than that which conquers the highest and most exclusive human faculties? The primitive savage, or ape, simply rebukes in the jungle to find a companion; the eminent arium must raise its eyes to the worlds beyond and consider its relationship with infinity!"
In Herbert West–Reanimator —Herbert West: reanimador— (1922), Lovecraft describes a man of African descent who has just died:
"It was a repugnant being, with gorilla-painted, abnormally long arms that seemed inevitable to me earlier legs, and a face that irremediably made to think of the unfathomable secrets of the Congo and the calls of tam-tam under a mysterious moon. The body must have looked worse in life, but the world contains a lot of ugliness."
In The Horror at Red Hook (1927), a character is described as "an Arab with a hateful Negroid mouth". In the play Medusa's Hair, written for Zealia Bishop, the final surprise of the story —after revealing that the villain of the story is a vampiric jellyfish— is that she:
"...was weak, and subtly, even in the eyes of the genius, the undisputed stem of the first inhabitants of Zimbabwe. It is not surprising that he had a tie with the old witch Sophonisba... since, in a diluted proportion, Marceline was black."
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, an Afro-descendant couple is condescendingly introduced: "He knew the black family who inhabited the house and was politely invited to visit the interior by the old man Asa and his chunky wife, Hannah. In clear contrast to the owner, apparently a foreigner: "... a man with mousy features and a guttural accent...".
The Narrators in The Street —The Street— (1920), Herbert West: Revival, He —Him— (1926), The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Horror of Red Hook, and in many other stories, express sentiments that could be considered hostile towards Jews. He married a Ukrainian woman of Jewish ancestry, Sonia Greene, who later commented that she had to constantly remind him of her roots when she made any anti-Semitic remarks. "Whenever we found ourselves on the streets of New York, crowded with people of different nationalities and creeds," Greene wrote after her divorce, Howard would be livid with rage. He looked like he was going to lose his mind ».
Initially, however, Lovecraft was sympathetic to minorities who embraced Western culture, and regarded his Jewish wife as "well assimilated." that the ethnic groups preserve their native cultures; for example, she thought that "a true friend of civilization wishes simply to make the Germans more German, the French more French, the Spanish more Spanish, etc.". This represented a change from her prior support of cultural assimilation.
To some extent, Lovecraft's ideas regarding race reflected common attitudes at the time, especially in the New England in which he grew up. In particular, racial segregation laws were enforced in most of the United States and many states enacted eugenic laws and prohibitions against miscegenation, which were also common in non-Catholic areas of Europe. A popular movement during the 1920s resulted in a drastic restriction of immigration to the United States, culminating in the 1924 immigration law, which featured expert testimony before the United States Congress on the threat directed toward American society due to the assimilation of "low cultured people" from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Lovecraft was originally an avowed Anglophile and held that English culture was the comparative pinnacle of civilization. He regarded the descendants of the early English in America as a second-class branch, and everyone else below them—for example, his poem An American to Mother England —. His love of English history and culture is often reflected in his work, such as King Kuranes' nostalgia for England in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath —The Dream-Quest of the unknown Kadath— (1927, published 1943).
Lovecraft's ideas on eugenics were often extended to his white characters. He showed greater sympathy for Caucasian and European cultural groups. The narrator of Cool Air —Aire frío— (1928) speaks disparagingly of the poor Hispanic Americans in his neighborhood, but he respects the rich and aristocratic Dr. Muñoz, because of his Celtiberian origins, and because he is "a man of cradle, cultured and of good taste". The degenerate descendants of Dutch immigrants in the Catskill Mountains, "who exactly match the white trash in the South," as it says in Beyond the Wall of Sleep — Across the Wall dream barrier— (1919), are common elements. In The Temple —El templo— (1925), the narrator is a World War I U-boat captain whose faith in his “unwavering Germanic will” and the superiority of his homeland led him to machine-gun the survivors who were in lifeboats; later, she murders his own crew, blinded by the curse she has brought upon him. In fact, according to Lovecraft: A Biography, by L. Sprague de Camp, the Providence author was horrified by reports of anti-Semitic violence in Germany—before World War II, which he would not live to see. —suggesting that the writer, despite everything, was opposed to the extermination of those he considered "inferior."
Lovecraft's racism has been a continuing focus of scholarly and interpretive interest. S. T. Joshi, one of the earliest Lovecraft scholars, observes that "there is no denial of racism in Lovecraft, nor can it be interpreted simply as 'typical of his time', since Lovecraft seems to have expressed his views more pronouncedly—although generally not for publication—than many other contemporaries. It is also absurd to deny that racism enters into her fiction ». Michel Houellebecq argues that "racial hatred" provided the force and emotional inspiration for many of Lovecraft's best works.
Lovecraft's racist antagonism is a corollary to his nihilistic notion of biological determinism: In the Mountains of Madness, where explorers discover evidence of an entirely extraterrestrial race—Ancients—who created human beings through bioengineering, but was ultimately destroyed by its brutal slaves, the Shoggoth. Even after several members of the expedition die at the hands of the Ancients and the Shoggoth, there is some sympathy on the part of the narrator towards these beings:
"Poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Primordials! Scientists to the end. What did they do that we wouldn't have done instead? Holy God, what intelligence and what tenacity! What a way to deal with the incredible, just like those relatives and ancestors of yours who had also faced almost equally strange things! Radiated animals, plants, monsters, seed of stars, I don't know what they were, but now they were men."
These lines of thought in Lovecraft's worldview—racism and a romantic reactionary defense of the cultural order in the face of the degeneracy of the modern world—have led some scholars to establish a special affinity with the aristocratic, anti-modernist, and traditionalist Julius Evola:
«Certainly, The search in dreams of the ignota Kadath, with his great representation of his city, Onyx, radiates the fresh and elegant spirit of Tradition, which enters into contrast to that which in many stories is the well of decay, Innsmouth, whose endogámica population is partly composed by the countervailing conception of lusty sailors with sea monsters; the negative force of Tradition. The eternal struggle between the titanic force of light and the theoluric forces of chaos is reflected in their work and their racism."
On the other hand, some authors consider that Lovecraft's racism was more of a cultural and intellectual nature, passive and introverted —as evidenced by the fact that the poet Samuel Loveman, one of his best friends, who was Jewish and homosexual, he would not learn of Lovecraft's anti-Semitism and homophobia until several years after his death through Sonia Greene—rather than brutally biological, proactive and extroverted—like the Nazis of that time who already promoted hate and the aggression against other races in an active and ruthless way-, being that Lovecraft expresses in some of his stories a certain admiration for people of different origins who have assimilated the customs, good manners and Anglo-Saxon arts and for the fact of having married a Jew whom he himself considered a highly intelligent and "well-assimilated" woman.
In his later years Lovecraft's antipathy for certain races and specific cultures was sublimated into a contempt for the ignorance, arrogance and selfishness of the human species in general—including the Saxons—and the laughable and ironic insignificance of humanity and his vices before the magnificence and mystery of the unknown universe, evident in the development and outcome of most of his latest works of cosmic horror.
Legacy
The work of the author of Providence has been translated into twenty-five languages throughout the world, and the name of Lovecraft, to this day, is one of the most relevant in terms of horror fiction, despite the fact that he died a virtually unknown author. His writings, particularly the Cthulhu Mythos, have influenced fiction authors throughout the world since the 1960s, and Lovecraftian elements can be found in novels, films, and movies., music, video games, comics and cartoons. For example, the villains of Gotham City in the Batman universe are imprisoned in Arkham Asylum, in the fictional city of Arkham, a Lovecraftian invention. Many modern horror writers such as Stephen King, Bentley Little, or Joe R. Lansdale, to name a few, have cited Lovecraft as one of their most important influences.
Literature
Lovecraft is considered one of the most influential fantasy writers of the xx century and a master of horror writing.
Over the years, Lovecraft's work has inspired numerous writers who, sometimes with the approval of Providence's author himself, have published short stories related in some way to his themes, often included in collections called the Cthulhu Mythos.
Direct inspiration
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In the early 1920s, Clark Ashton Smith began a close epistolary relationship with Lovecraft, which lasted until the mid-1930s. This bond often led them to collaborate on the creation of place names and fantastical deities for their stories; Some of Ashton Smith's short stories that were directly influenced by Lovecraft's work were published in Weird Tales magazine, such as Ubbo-Sathla, He Who Walks on the Dust, The Sorcerer's Revenge and The Nameless Spawn.
August Derleth, another correspondent and friend of Lovecraft's, largely based his literary production on the worldview of "grandfather" —one of the many nicknames used by Howard in their epistolary exchange—, as The inhabitant of The Darkness, The Guardian of the Threshold, The Attic Window, and The Thing That Came in on the Wind. Later, after the death of his fellow writer from Providence, he founded Arkham House publishing house with Donald Wandrei in order to safeguard Lovecraft's literary legacy.
In addition to Smith and Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber stand out.
After inspiration
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There are many authors who, although they did not have a direct relationship with H. P. L., also used part of the characteristics of her works; among them the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, the horror author Stephen King, the latter with two short stories: Jerusalem's Lot, published in the collection The Threshold of Night, and Crouch End, which is part of Nightmares and Hallucinations , the writer and artist Clive Barker, or the author of several Old Brian novels Keene.
In the Illuminatus Trilogy! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, allusions to the works of Lovecraft are frequent, both in the characters (for example, Robert Harrison Blake and Henry Armitage), in the creatures (Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth), as in the books (Necronomicon, Nameless Cults).
Jorge Luis Borges wrote the short story There Are More Things, included in the volume El libro de arena, as a tribute to Lovecraft; however, the Argentine author called Providence's "mediocre". Contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq wrote a literary biography of Lovecraft entitled H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote an introduction to a collection of Lovecraft stories. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to Lovecraft in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, calling his short story Through the Gates of the Silver Key one of his masterpieces.
Essay
Fear is one of the oldest and most powerful emotions of humanity and the oldest and most powerful fear is fear of the
unknown. —H. P. Lovecraft |
In 1927, H. P. Lovecraft published his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, which is considered one of the most valuable studies about the horror genre.
It was written between November 1925 and May 1927 and was first published in The Recluse magazine. In 1965 it was included in Lovecraft's book of short stories entitled Dagon and other macabre tales. During the essay, the author of Providence reviews the references to supernatural fiction in antiquity, focusing on the Gothic novel and, more specifically, in the figure of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, whom he considers the true initiator of a completely innovative current in horror stories. From Bram Stoker to its most influential authors such as Algernon Blackwood or Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft analyzes, chapter after chapter, the mechanisms of literary terror. Many critics have called it "the most important essay in horror literature".
Comics
From the 1960s, Lovecraft's work, apart from enjoying more or less reliable adaptations to comics, would inspire original works. This is the case of Lone Sloane (1966) of which its author, Philippe Druillet, said:
"It is very lovecraftian, except in that the human protagonists of Lovecraft are always overcome while Lone Sloane is always well delivered. It seems passive, but it is he who actually leads the game».
Many other works, such as Tales Of Peter Hypnos (1975-1976) by Josep Maria Beà, are also indebted to the work of the Providence writer.
The prestigious screenwriter Alan Moore —author, for example, of Watchmen or V for Vendetta—, wrote several comics based on the Lovecraftian universe, drawn by Jacen Burrows, titled The Courtyard, Neonomicon and Providence, and published by Avatar Press between 2003 and 2017.
On the other hand, in the popular Batman comics, the protagonist's enemies are imprisoned in Arkham Asylum in Gotham City, a name inspired by its cartoonist Dennis O'Neil by taking as a reference the city of Arkham that emerged from Lovecraft's imagination.
Cinema
In the world of cinema, particularly horror films, Lovecraft's cosmology has been a continuous source of inspiration in many films, such as The Haunted Palace (1963) by Roger Corman, which was one of his first film adaptations and version of the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; Howard's The Enigma of Another World (1951) Hawks, the remake The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter or Alien: The Eighth Passenger (1979) by Ridley Scott —including Prometheus by the same director, as well as the artist involved in both films H. R. Giger)— inspired by the novel At the Mountains of Madness; Re-Animator (1985) by Stuart Gordon based on the Lovecraftian story Herbert West: Reanimator; The Army of Darkness (1992) by Sam Raimi with numerous references to the famous Necronomicon or The Color of Outer Space (2019) by Richard Stanley, update of his homonymous story cheer up.
Notable as a pending film project is the adaptation of Lovecraft's novel At the Mountains of Madness from a 2006 script by director Guillermo del Toro and screenwriter Matthew Robbins, successively canceled due to high budget and at del Toro's insistence that it be released with an R rating to do justice to the author's vision. The script for the adaptation was leaked on March 6, 2020, 108 pages available online, and in December 2020 2021, the director declared that he remained committed to bringing H. P. Lovecraft's imaginary to the cinema, rescuing In the Mountains of Madness for Netflix, since this was one of the first projects he presented to the platform after closing a multi-year deal with her in 2020. Adding that if it goes ahead, the adaptation would include changes tailored to her current vision.
Music
In addition to being the inspiration for literary works, the world of music has also been heavily influenced by Lovecraft. The lyrics of some of the songs of extreme metal groups (genres such as black metal, death metal, etc.) have covered passages from some of the author's works, as well as addressed in the same way lovecraftian mythology. Some groups are Morbid Angel, Uriel, Mercyful Fate, Metallica, Draconian, Cradle of Filth, Internal Suffering, Tiamat and Iron Maiden.The Argentine musician Claudio Gabis composed what in his discography is known as Fantastic Trilogy . The songs "Beyond the Valley of Time", "Road Fever" and "Lord Dunsany's Journey" are based on Lovecraft's literature.
In addition to the aforementioned groups that received direct influence from Lovecraftian literature in some of their compositions, it is worth noting the psychedelic rock group active during the sixties and seventies that was baptized with the name of H. P. Lovecraft and that released two self-titled studio albums.
In the field of orchestral music there are several authors such as Chad Fifer, Cryo Chamber and Graham Plowman who compose ambient and evocative scores inspired by the mythologies fabled by Lovecraft.
Games and Video Games
The role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, published by Chaosium, where players play investigators of the occult, was very popular in the early 1990s. Chaosium created a supplement to interpret Call of Cthulhu in a contemporary setting called Cthulhu Now. Similar settings, typical of the Providence writer's style, can also be found in the trading card game Call of Cthulhu, published by Fantasy Flight Games. In addition, some races in Dungeons & Dragons refer to creatures from Lovecraft's mythology.
In the field of video games, although their stories contain very little action, emphasizing atmosphere and places, there are many titles that were inspired by the Cthulhu Cycle. The software company Infogrames has produced several games inspired by the Lovecraft universe. For example, the series Alone in the Dark, particularly the first episode, has included several references to the works of the Providence author. Another game with purely Lovecraftian settings and themes is Shadow of the Comet, also from Infogrames, followed by Prisoner of Ice, as well as the Penumbra series.
Bethesda Softworks also produced a first-person shooter called Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, primarily inspired by the short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In 2018, Cyanide Studio produced Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game, an interactive RPG developed for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Correspondence
Although Lovecraft is known primarily for his works of supernatural fiction, the bulk of his writing consists of voluminous letters on a wide variety of subjects, from supernatural fiction and art criticism to politics and history. Lovecraft's biographers L Sprague de Camp and S. T. Joshi have estimated that he wrote 100,000 letters during his lifetime, with one-fifth believed to have survived. These letters were addressed to fellow writers and members of the amateur press. His involvement in the latter was what led him to begin writing them, including comic elements in these missives, such as posing as an 18th-century gentleman and signing them with pseudonyms, most commonly "Grandpa Theobald"; and "E'ch-Pi-El". According to Joshi, the most important sets of letters were those written to Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and James F. Morton. He attributes this importance to its content. With Long, Lovecraft argued for and against many of his views. The letters to Clark Ashton Smith are noted for their focus on supernatural fiction. Lovecraft and Morton debated many academic issues in their letters, resulting in what Joshi has called "the largest correspondence Lovecraft has ever written".
Edition of the Letters in Spanish
On February 23, 2023, the Spanish edition of Lovecraft's Letters began, whose first volume of three screened was entitled Letters (I). Writing against men. The selection, translation and edition was carried out by Javier Calvo for the Aristas Martínez publishing house.
It represented the first publication in Spanish of Lovecraft's correspondence, which also included unpublished material with letters that had not yet been published in the US. The material is so extensive that the publisher considered a third volume dedicated to dreams of the writer, since many of his epistles address this topic.
Works
Full narrative in chronological order:
Movie adaptations
Movies based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft include the following.
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- The Haunted Palace (1963), led by Roger Corman and starred at Vincent Price along with Lon Chaney Jr. Commercialized as "Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace", the film is based on The case of Charles Dexter Ward and also includes elements taken from The shadow over Innsmouth and The horror of Dunwich.
- Die, Monster, Die! (1965), led by Daniel Haller and starred at Boris Karloff and Nick Adams. Adaptation The color of outer space.
- The Dunwich Horror (1970), led by Daniel Haller and starred at Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell and Ed Begley. Based on the short story homonymous.
- Re-Animator (1985), led by Stuart Gordon and starred at Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton and David Gale. Adaptation Herbert West: reviver.
- From Beyond (1986), led by Stuart Gordon and starred at Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton and Ken Foree. Based on From beyond.
- The Curse (1987), led by David Keith and starred at Wil Wheaton. Based on The color of outer space.
- The Unnamable (1988), led by Jean-Paul Ouellette and starred at Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Based on The unnominable.
- The Resurrected (1991), led by Dan O'Bannon and starred at John Terry, Jane Sibbett and Chris Sarandon. Based on The case of Charles Dexter Ward.
- The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1992), led by Jean-Paul Ouellette and starred at Mark Kinsey Stephenson. The film combines elements of the story The unnominable and Randolph Carter's testimony.
- Necronomicon (1993), anthology of three stories based on The rats of the walls, Cold air and The one who whispers in the darkwith an enveloping story that presents a fictitious H. P. Lovecraft.
- Castle Freak (1995), led by Stuart Gordon and starred at Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. Inspired by The stranger.
- Dagon (2001), led by Stuart Gordon and starred at Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal and Raquel Meroño. Based on The shadow over Innsmouth.
- The Call of Cthulhu (2005), a black and white mute film designed to appear to be premiered in the late 1920s, when the short story was published Cthulhu's call.
- Cthulhu (2007), directed by Daniel Gildark and starring Jason Cottle, Cara Buono and Tori Spelling. Based on The shadow over Innsmouth.
- The Whisperer in Darkness (2011), a black and white film designed to appear to be premiered in the 1930s. Based on the short story of the same name.
- Color Out of Space (2020), led by Richard Stanley and starred at Nicolas Cage. Based on The color of outer space.
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