lovecraft's ?racism?

i always had read , and even to this day read what people write about reading h. p. lovecraft's weird tales and not having been aware of the racism in lovecraft's weird tales with a grain of disbelief , especially if they be a person of race . it remained a print phenomena for me until one day when i was talking to an acquaintance and she brought up out of the outopia of the moment the subject of h. p. lovecraft's writing . she told me how her brother had read all of lovecraft's writing when he was a teenager and had gifted her with some of lovecraft's weird tales . familiar with lovecraft's writings from reading his fiction and nonfiction and because the person i was talking to is canadian by birth though of asian heritage , the first thing that came to mind was the racism of lovecraft's writing . both what i had noticed in his writing and what i read of mentioned in criticisms and biographical works .

when i voiced the question "can i ask you something? , with you being of japanese background what do you think of the racism in his writing?" , i got an uncomfortable look from her ("what does he mean racism in lovecraft's writing?, is he talking about the same author as me?") , and then the response "no" she hadn't noticed it and she couldnt think of any sample at the moment . no , i thought that interesting and said it wasn't only my opinion, there are critics of his oeuvre who have written of his literary racisms and mentioned realistic examples and figurative ways lovecraft introduced races in to his tales and then showed those races in a negative way compared to characters of euroese races in his stories , specifically characters of british euroese decent . she said she would have to reread some of the stories and maybe ask her brother if he noticed it and would let me know . i can not recall if she ever got back to me about it .

 

 

undimensioned threshold

nor is it to be thought, (ran the text as armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earths masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. the old ones were, the old ones are, and the old ones shall be. not in the spaces we know, but between them.

they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. yog-sothoth knows the gate. yog-sothoth is the gate. yog-sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. past, present, future all are one in yog-sothoth. he knows where the old ones broke through of old, and where they shall break through again. he knows where they have trod earths fields and where they still tread them, and why know one can behold them as they tread.

by their smell can men sometimes know them near, but of their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those they have begotten on mankind; and of those there are many sorts, differing in likeness from mans truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is them.

they walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the words have been spoken and the rites howled through at their seasons. the wind gibbers with their voices, and the earth mutters with their consciousness. they bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites.

kadath in the cold waste hath known them, and what man knows kadath? the ice deserts of the south and the sunken isles of the ocean hold stones wherein their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? great Cthulhu is their cousin, yet can he spy them only dimly.

ial shrub-niggurath! as a foulness shall ye know them. their hand is at your throats, yet ye see them not; and their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. yog-sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet.

man rules now where they ruled once; they shall soon rule where man rules now. after summer is winter, and after winter summer. they wait patient and potent, for here shall they reign again.

h.p.lovecraft, the dunwich horror.

cult of c(thul)hu

''they worshiped , so they said, the great old ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ...

''those first men formed the cult around small idols which the great ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. ... meanwhile the cult, by approriate rites, must keep the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophesy of their return.''

h.p.lovecraft; the call of cthulhu.

book of characters

''the weird studies of harley warren were well known to me, ... of his vast collection of strange rare books on forbidden subjects i have read all that are written in the languages of which i am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages i cannot understand ... and the fiend inspired book which he carried in his pocket out of the world---the book which warren carried with him---that ancient book ... was written in characters whose like i never saw elsewhere.'' 

h.p.lovecraft, the statement of randolph carter.

low-pulp tentacles

'' if i say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human charicature, i shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing ... a pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful ... ''


h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

freakish curvatures

a demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain crochet doilies.

''he was getting an intuitive knack for solving reimannian equations, and astonished professor upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored the rest of the class. one afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalatic gulfs themselves ...

''gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. what made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might--given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement--step deliberately from earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.

''such a step he said would require only two stages; first, a passage out of three dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. ... gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. professor upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity--human or prehuman--whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

body of mythos

''no book had ever really hinted of it. though the deathless chinamen said the there were double meanings in the necronomicon of the mad arab abdul alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet; "that is not dead which, can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

lovecraft's orthography

''it happened on a summer's holiday that past a mad-house gate i took my way. within the bedlam was a sage confin'd who from too much study lost his mind. now strolling out, in watchful keeper's care, with childish sounds the madman fill'd the air. still dreaming of his letter'd days of yore, his ravings on remember'd subjects bore; dim came the thoughts of what he us'd to teach, and he began to curse our english speech.

"aha!" quoth he, "the men that made our tongue were arrant rogues, and i shall have them hung. for long establish'd custom what care have we? come, let us tear down etymology. let spelling fly, and naught but sound remain; the world is mad, and i alone am sane!"

''thus rav'd the sage; inventing, as he walk'd, a hundred ways to spell our words as talk'd. he simplify'd until his fancy bred a system quite as simple as his head. in scholarship disasterous change he wrought, and alter'd as he went, for want of thought.''

h.p.lovecraft, the simple speller's tale.

wilburmas

''it was in the township of dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farm house set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that wilbur whately was born at 5am on sunday, the second of febuary, 1913. this date was recalled because it was candlemas, which people in dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the country side had barked persistently, throughout the night before. ...

''there was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking on the night wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. neighbors knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when old whateley drove his sleigh through the snow into dunwich village and discoursed incoherantly to the group of loungers at osborn's general store. ... "i dun't keer what folks think--ef lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nuthin' ye expeck. ye needn't think the only folks is the folks here abouts ... let me tell ye suthin'--some day yew folks'll hear a child o' lavinny's a-callin its faher's name on the top o' sentinel hill!"

''the only persons who saw wilbur during the first month of his life were old zechariah whately, of the undecayed whateleys' and earl sawyers common-law wife, mammie bishop. mammie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; ... public interest in the whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which the newcomer seemed everyday to exhibit ... his motiions and even his vocal sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months he began to walk unassisted, whith falterings which another month was sufficient to remove...

''the next january gossips were mildly interested in the fact that "lavviny's black brat" had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months ... his facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well nigh preternatural intelligence. he was, however, excedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy, ... he was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, ... dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace ...

''when wilbur was a year and seven months old--in september of 1914--his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. he had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker ... at home he would pore diligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while old whateley would instruct and catachise him through long, hushed afternoons ... wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. he read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly ... the aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. his occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine guardians ...

''it had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole whately place as violently as they hated and feared young wilbur personally ... about 1923, when wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, ... wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept . he was more and more hated and dreaded around dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door, ... he was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure ... his height had increased to more than seven feet, and shewed no signs of ceasing its development.

''the following winter brought an event no less strange than wilbur's first trip outside the dunwich region ... almost eight feet tall and carrying a cheap new valise from osborn's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in arkham ... he had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at it stout chain ... deep and terrible the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. then there rang out a scream from a wholly different throat--a scream as roused half the sleepers of arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterward.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dunwich horror.

cooking for ghouls

''the ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.


''no i dont know what's become of pickman, and i dont like to guess. you might have surmized i had some inside information when i dropped him--and thats why i dont want to think where he's gone. i should think you'd have known i didn't drop pickman for the same silly reasons that fussy old women lik dr. reid or joe minot or rosworth did. morbid art dosn't shock me, and when a man has the genius pickman had i feel it an honour to know him, no matter what direction his work takes. boston never had a greater painter than richard upton pickman. i said it at first and i say it still, and i never sweerved an inch, either, when he showed that "ghoul feeding". that you remember, was when minot cut him.


''i remember your asking pickman yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions. wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? it was partly because of that laugh reid dropped him. he said pickman repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him toward the last. but keep in mind that i didn't drop pickman for anything like this. on the contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that "ghoul feeding" was a tremendous achievement. as you know the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the museum of fine arts wouldnt accept it as a gift, and i can add nobody would buy it ...


''i got into the habit of calling on pickman quite often, especially after i began making notes for a monograph on weird art. probably it was his work which put the idea into my head, and anyhow, i found him a mine of data and suggestions when i came to develop it. he showed me all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some pen-and-ink sketches that would, i verily believe, have got him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. now, eliiot, im what the man in the street would call fairly "hard boiled", but i'll confess that what i saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. they were his pictures, you know--the ones he couldnt paint or even show in newbury street-- ...


''there was one thing called "the lesson"--heaven pity me, that i ever saw it! listen--can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless doglike things in a church yard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? the price of a changeling i suppose--you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes--how they grow up--and no sooner had i wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eyes caught a picture embodying that very thought... it was their changeling--and in a spirit of supreme irony pickman had given the features a very perceptable resemblance to his own.


''richard upton pickman, the greatest artist i have ever known--and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. eliot--old reid was right. he wasn't strictly human. either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. its all the same now for he's gone-back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt.''

h.p.lovecraft, pickman's model.

winter's soul

''ye winter gusts that round my casement blow and pile in drifts the palid demon snow; ye cruel frosts, that numb with poison breath a suff'ring world, and serve the will of death! grant me, ye gods , a dome of crystal glass, through whose clear surface sun and stars might blaze, ...

''here let me dwell, and in december sing midst balmy zephyrs of eternal spring! ... through mossy meads a limped stream might run, ... a floral train the rolling green might bear, ... unusual flow'rs the well plac'd urns might fill, ... here might the studious mind at ease expand, nor fear the woes that fret a wintery land. ...

''but see--alas--the pleasing picture fades--and icy field displaces the vernal shades! yet when indeed does life reward or please with truer things than visions such a these? our struggling years too little bliss could own were they confin'd to genuine joys alone! ... though changing seasons o'er the mead may roll, spring reigns perpetual in the smiling soul!''

h.p.lovecraft, a winters wish.

which came first ...

'' whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams walter gilman did not know ... possibly gilman should not have studied so hard. non euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folk lore, ... one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension ...

'' the professors at miskatonic had urged him to slacken, and had voluntarily cut down his courses at several points. moreover they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library ...

'' the touch of brain fever and the dreams began in febuary ... about this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute ...

'' the dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and gilman felt they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore ... he had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, ...

'' gilmans dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably colored twilight ... he did not walk or climb fly, or swim, crawl or wriggle ... the abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others appeared to be inorganic ... all the objects--organic and inorganic alike--were totally beyond description or even comprehension. ...

'' in the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct and gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

this decay of cities

''on one of my early travels in the libyan sahara, i nearly passed by an abandoned and nameless city which i would never have known had existed if my guide, a tuareg camel-man had not pointed it out. it was a rock-built city enclosed within a high wall buttressed with round turrets and pierced by a single gate way. ...

''i was unable to find a single clue as to who built this place, for there was nothing resembling a domestic artefact to be seen, ... my experiance in the fezzan goes to show that there are still corners of this teeming world where the modern traveler can share, if only in a modest manner, the personal thrill of those early explorers who first saw the magnificent lost cities of antiquity; ...

''whether this decay of cities and of the civilizations they represented is an inevitable law of history is, of course debatable, and it would be rash to jump to conclusions, although where there is a contemporary account of what life was like at the end of an era, we are in a better position to see the forces of change and decay at work. ...

''this book is largely the result of my travels, which have in many cases been journeys of exploration. what struck me most forcibly on the very earliest of my expeditions and what eventually led me to read the works of my predecessors was the strangeness of large and manifestly once populous cities standing in ruins in the middle of nowhere. ...

''these are questions which the thoughtful traveller, whether standing in the midst of the ruins of timgad in algeria, or of verulainium britian, is bound to ask himself; ...

''it is in this spirit of a search rather than of an archaeological tour that i have tried to describe the following ten cities, two each in the five main historic areas of the world and each typifying the rise and fall of a vanished civilization.''

james wellard, the search for lost cities.

abandoned and nameless city via dailygrail.

autumn poison

''dear a.w.:--what you say of the fascination of autumn is very true--and i have always felt it despite the menace of physical discomfort it brings ... the woods, the fields, the hillside orchards laden with fruit, the fields of sheaved corn, the old stone walls overgrown with flaming vines, ... at this second i am sitting on an old new england stone wall under an ancient elm, with a squirrel chattering nearby and a lovely profusion of poison ivy [to which i am oddly immune despite a cuticular hypersensitiveness in other directions] climbing among the mossy rocks. ... it has been this way for 250 years--and may the gods keep it so [by virtue of ownership by large, conservative institutions] as many more.''


h.p.lovecraft, selected letters--iii.

landscape piece

''the scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain.

''beyond the scarred trunks in the background illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight.

''and nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, i could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.''

h.p.lovecraft, the lurking fear.

demeaculumn

[john pawson]

"and i saw that all the travellers were converging ... at the top of a high hill, ... where perched a great white church ... the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church ... to the trap door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit ... i followed dumbly down the foot worn steps and into the dark suffocating crypt ... into a venerable tomb ... and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase ... a narrow spiral staircase ... that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill ... it was a silent shocking descent ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the festival.

ibid theobroma

'' his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

chocolatey skull of ibid.

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

ibid's obituary.

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

st.ibid the sweet.

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

st.ibids day cakes.

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.

body of mythos

'' trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visable, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. '' h.p.lovecraft, dream quest of unknown kadath.

'' original title al azif--azif being the word used by arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons. '' h.p.lovecraft, history of the necronomicon.

'' the good mussulmans fancied that they heard the sullen hum of those nocturnal insects which presage evil, and importuned vathek to beware how he ventured his sacred person. '' william beckford, vathek.

'' both the veda and maitriya upansad of the ancient hindus, who were indo europeans, tell of how the universe was created by sabda brahman, the "eternal sound" that created everything--and still inheres in everything--but is itself uncreated: "begotten, not made," '' j.nigro sansonese, the body of myth.