Current mood:	thoughtful
Current music:	Tricky- "Overcome"

H.P. Lovecraft
This has been bubbling for a while, and I think I found an entry in it.

I'm a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft.

I've long said that a good movie transcends plot- just a clever phrase that sprung to mind after the first time I saw "Psycho". I was about 19, but I knew every plot point to the movie, because... well, I live in America and watch tv. "Psycho" has turned into one of those classic stories that get parodied and referenced by everyone; a cultural touchstone you can use to reference something quickly. So nothing in "Psycho" was really a surprise. But it still scared the hell out of me. Because Hitchcock had built the mood, and the drive, so well that it didn't matter whether I knew from the first frame that the main character I was seeing would be dead before the film was half over, and that her killer was Anthony Perkins' "mother" personality. Big whoop. The surprise twist ending isn't what makes that movie great. It's the atmosphere.

Lovecraft is the same way. 9 times out of 10, his stories have a twist ending. Sometimes the entire final paragraph is in [i]surprised italics, with an exclamation point driving the surprise home![/i] Sometimes it's just the last sentence, or phrase. But the twist gets saved for the very end. And 99 times out of a hundred, you can see that twist coming from miles away. Hell, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is one of his longest stories, nearly novel length, and I saw the twist coming about a quarter of the way through. And, as with Hitchcock, that isn't the point, and it isn't what makes his stories good.

He created his own genre, in a way. The reality is that he didn't invent weird fiction, any more than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented detective drama, or Euripides invented Greek tragedy, or Tennessee Williams invented depression. But his work defined it, set the standards, to such an extent that people don't use the term 'weird fiction' anymore. They call a story 'Lovecraftian'. Those stories are usually horror, although some of Lovecraft's best work would more accurately be called science fiction. They involve the crumbling ruins of the past; old architecture, ancient gods and rituals, crumbling manuscripts, dark deeds forgotten long before men walked on two legs, but whose effects and horror reach forward to today. They are terrifying not because of a wolfman or vampire or serial killer running through dark woods to catch us, but because of the sheer immensity of time and space, and the overwhelming likelihood of some vast horror swallowing us up without even realizing it. Cthulhu isn't an evil god who will come to earth to torture men for fun. He's an ancient, madness-inducing being who will sweep the earth clean without really caring. It isn't that the Big Bad Guys are our enemies; they aren't. They don't even notice us. We are Nothing compared to them, and if they crush us under their weight, they won't even notice. It's our Insignificance that's frightening.

Lovecraft was the king of the genre. Even though he wrote at the same time as a half dozen other authors, and even though they all traded stories and names to link all their works together into one huge united world (hell, Lovecraft's second most famous ancient book of horror, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, was invented by someone else), Lovecraft was the master. I've read all the fiction Lovecraft ever wrote, and all but one of the stories he 'revised' (basically rewrote from scratch). Naturally, I heard quite a bit about his personal life from collected volumes' introductions, and that made me curious for more.

Basically, he was a sad, sad man. Born into wealth, which vanished fairly quickly. His father died in a sanitarium when he was little, either of nervous exhaustion or syphilis, depending on who you believe. His mother also died when he was young, leaving him in the care of two aunts. He was sickly all his life, never finished high school because of nervous breakdowns, hardly ever got out. He built up an impressive number of correspondents, became an amateur journalist, eventually president of an amateur journalist society. In the course of that, he met a woman and married her, moving to New York City, where he spent two years miserable and unemployed. He moved back to Providence, left his wife behind, and they eventually divorced. He was a little more worldly now; had many more correspondents, a pretty good reputation as a writer, and went on country explorations throughout New England. He did things he loved, but his life always seemed limited to me, and as good as his reputation was in certain circles, his writing never paid well. And he didn't become renowned until decades after he died at age 46 of cancer and malnutrition. So yeah. Sad, sad man.

Here's the problem. He was a racist bastard.

And not just a little. He viewed Caucasians, especially people of English ancestry, as superior people. Lesser Europeans, like Hispanics and Gypsies, were uncivilized thieves and vandals. Africans were one step above monkeys. He wrote praising poems to the Confederacy, thought that immigrants were ruining the country, and so on and so on. He was a huge social conservative; viewing families of old money as noble aristocracy, and viewed himself as the final member of a fallen, noble lineage. Poor people were degenerate, country folk were backwards and uneducated. And it's not like he kept these beliefs to himself. Read any of his stories, and chances are good you'll run across a passage where the distaste for nonwhite folks will show itself like a neon sign.

So I had to put Lovecraft in a small group of artists whose art I loved, but whose personal views I hated. Or in Lovecraft's case, pitied. Disney with his Nazi sympathizing. Orson Scott Card and his homophobia. Lovecraft and his rampant racism. It isn't easy to deal with sometimes, but what can I do? Boycott his stuff? He's dead. Has been a long time. Orson Scott Card's still around, so maybe there's a case there, but do his backward views on gay marriage make "Ender's Game" any less good? At some point you have to accept that there are bastards out there doing great art, and appreciate the art on its own.

Then I found this quote, and although it doesn't forgive him entirely, it leaves me hope that maybe, by the end of his life, he figured out how things really are. Even by itself, it's well put. He died the next year.

"I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons- and because I had never done any real THINKING on civics and industry and the future. The depression- and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems- jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reexamine the facts of history in the long light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right- for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past." --H.P. Lovecraft, private correspondence, 1936