In this thread I will post quotations about H.P. Lovecraft.
If this thread interests you please bump to keep it alive.
The first quotations are from "Against the World, Against Life" by Michel Houellebecq, which is a study of Lovecraft's life and writing.
On Lovecraft's fondness for Puritanism and his hatred for life
>"Dressed in rigid and somewhat mean costumes, habitually refraining from expressing their emotions and desires, the protestant puritans of New England may occasionally lose sight of their animal origins. Hence Lovecraft accepts their company, even if only in moderate doses. Their insignificance itself reassures him. But, in the presence of "blacks" he is in the grip of an uncontrollable nervous reaction. Their vitality, their apparent absence of complexes and inhibitions terrifies and disgusts him. They dance in the street, they listen to rhythmic music...They speak loudly. They laugh in public. Life seems to amuse them; which is disquieting. Because life is no good"
p.34
On Lovecraft's desire to deport all "mongoloids" and non-whites
>"The more prolonged is Lovecraft's enforced sojourn in New York, the more his repulsion and terror grows until it attains alarming proportions. As he wrote to Belknap Long, "one cannot speak calmly about the mongoloid problem of New York". Later on in the letter, he declares: "I hope the end will be warfare -- but not till such a time as our own minds are fully freed of humanitarian hindrances of the Syrian superstition imposed upon us by Constantinus. Then let us show our physical power as men and Aryans, and conduct a scientific wholesale deportation from which there will be neither flinching nor retreating."
p.31 / 32
BUMP.
I've never read his stuff but seen what he has done emulated in films. I also heard of his red pilled views. Wasn't he forced to "apologise" later on?
>>70351358
I don't give a fuck about Lovecraft but Bloodborne is amazing, and since it's mostly inspired by Lovecraft's work, I'll bump.
>>70352110
>>>/v/
faggot
>>70351358
you just gotta love this guy.
I enjoyed reading Shadows over Innsmouth
>>70351358
Just finished my first Lovecraft story yesterday. Guy was based
I present you, based Jonathan Bowden talking about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMqgEb7XxB0
When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers
bump
>>70352110
excellent way of showing approval, by inserting aggression for no reason
OP here. Shit sorry I thought the thread had died.
On Lovecraft as a gentleman
>"He wholeheartedly believed it unsuitable to pursue literature as a profession. As he wrote: "a gentleman doesn't try to become famous, but leaves that to the little parvenu egoists". It's obviously difficult to appreciate the sincerity of this declaration; it might appear to us to be the result of a formidable mass of inhibitions, but it must equally be considered as the strict application of an obsolete code of behaviour, to which Lovecraft adhered with all his might. He always wanted to be seen as a provincial gentleman, studying literature as one of the fine arts, for his own pleasure and that of a few friends, without care for public tastes, fashionable themes, or anything of that sort. Such a person has no place in our societies; he knew this, but he always refused to take account of it. And, ultimately, all that distinguished him from a true 'country gentleman' was that he possessed nothing; but even so, he didn't want to take account of it"
p.26
On Lovecraft's disgust for society
>"Today more than ever, Lovecraft would be a misfit and a recluse. Born in 1890, he appeared already to his contemporaries, in his younger years, an out-of-date reactionary. One can easily guess what he would have thought of today's society. After his death, it hasn't stopped evolving in directions that would have made him detest it more than ever. Mechanisation and modernization have ineluctably destroyed the way of life to which he was attached with every fibre of his being [...] The ideas of liberty and democracy, which he abhorred, have spread over the planet. The idea of progress has become an uncontested credo, almost unconscious, which can only bristle at a man who declares: "What we detest, is simply change in and of itself". Liberal capitalism has exerted its dominance over consciousness; marching in time with it have been commercialism, advertising, the absurd grinning cult of economic efficiency, the exclusive and immoderate appetite for material riches. Even worse, liberation has reached from the economic to the sexual domain. All sentimental fictions have been shattered into a thousand pieces. Purity, chastity, fidelity, decency, have become ridiculous stigmata. The value of a human being is measured today by his economic efficiency and his erotic potency: so, exactly the two things that Lovecraft hated the most strongly."
p.34
On Lovecraft's growing racism while living in poverty in New York
>"It is no longer a matter of the well-bred racism of the WASP; this is brutal hatred, that of the trapped animal made to share its cage with beasts of a different, and formidable, species. And yet, ultimately, his hypocrisy and his good education bore up; as he wrote to his aunt: "It does not behove individuals of our class to make ourselves conspicuous by our speech or inconsiderate actions." After the example of his neighbours, whenever he comes across representatives of other races, Lovecraft grits his teeth, blanches slightly, but keeps his cool. His exasperation is given free rein only in his letters - before being released in his stories. It transforms little by little into a phobia. His vision, nourished by hatred, is elevated to naked paranoia, and higher still, to absolute distraction, foreshadowing the verbal derangements of the "major works"
p.31
Based as fuck, but a lot of people choose to dislike him or ignore his works because he was openly racist. Our American Literature class in college originally The Dunwich Horror and The Color Out of Space as required reading, but the SJW professor in charge of the class complained about how the author was racist and they changed it instead to Beloved by famous authornigger Toni Morrison. It was such a blow, because Lovecraft was actually a pretty good writer. There's a whole chapter in Beloved that isn't even full sentences, just random words.
On the type of man Lovecraft respects
>""And as for Puritan inhibitions - I admire them more every day. They are attempts to make of life a work of art - to fashion a pattern of beauty in the hog-wallow that is animal existence - and they spring out of that divine hatred for life which marks the deepest and most sensitive soul...An intellectual Puritan is a fool - almost as much of a fool is an anti-Puritan - but a Puritan in the conduct of life is the only kind of man one may honestly respect. I have no respect or reverence whatever for any person who does not live abstemiously and purely"
p.35
On Lovecraft's failure to find a job despite his best efforts
>"This task would prove absolutely impossible. He would try, though, responding to hundreds of job advertisements, writing to employers speculatively... Total failure. Certainly, he had no idea of the realities indicated by words like dynamism, competitivity, commercial sense, efficiency... But all the same, in an economy which wasn't even in crisis at the time, it would surely be possible for him to find some junior position... But no. Nothing whatsoever. There was no conceivable place, in the American economy of his epoch, for an individual like Lovecraft. There is here a sort of mystery; and he himself, fully aware of his maladaption and shortcomings, doesn't wholly understand it."
p.29
On puritan Lovecraft's behaviour around black people
>"Dressed in rigid and somewhat mean costumes, habitually refraining from expressing their emotions and desires, the protestant puritans of New England may occasionally lose sight of their animal origins. Hence Lovecraft accepts their company, even if only in moderate doses. Their insignificance itself reassures him. But, in the presence of “blacks” he is in the grip of an uncontrollable nervous reaction. Their vitality, their apparent absence of complexes and inhibitions terrifies and disgusts him. They dance in the street, they listen to rhythmic music…They speak loudly. They laugh in public. Life seems to amuse them; which is disquieting. Because life is no good"
p.34
>>70351358
bump
On Lovecraft as a young hermit
>"Lovecraft was a bit more than a bit troubled. In 1908, at the age of 18, he was the victim of what we might describe as a "nervous breakdown", and sank into a lethargy that was to last for a dozen years. At the age when his old classmates, impatiently crossing the bridge of childhood, threw themselves into life like a marvelous adventure into the unknown, he cloistered himself in his home, did not speak to his mother, refused to get up all day, shuffling about in his dressing gown all night."
p.3
>>70351358
Bumper
On Lovecraft's hatred of life and final days
>"That the world is miserable, intrinsically miserable, miserable in essence, is a conclusion that doesn’t worry him in the least; and this is the deepest sense of his admiration for the Puritans: What amazes him about them is that “they hated life and scorned the platitude that it is worth living”. We pass over this valley of tears which separates birth from death; but we must stay pure. HPL doesn’t share any of the hopes of the Puritans; but he shares their denial. [...] At the end of his days, he would come to voice regrets, sometimes poignant, before the solitude and failure of his existence. But these regrets remain, if one can express it thus, theoretical. He can recollect well enough the times in his life (the end of adolescence, the brief and decisive interlude of marriage) when he could have taken a different path, towards that which one calls happiness. But he knows that, in all probability, he was incapable of behaving differently."
p.35
On Lovecraft's feelings towards his wife and her efforts to help him while he is unemployed
>"I have never seen a more admirable attitude, full of disinterested consideration and solicitude; each financial difficulty that I face is accepted and excused as soon as it becomes obvious that it is inevitable... A devotion capable of accepting without a murmur this combination of incompetence and egoism, so contrary as it might be to everything one could hope for at first, is assuredly a phenomenon so rare, so close to saintliness in its historical sense, that it is enough to have the least sense of artistic proportion to respond with the warmest reciprocal esteem, with admiration and with affection."
p.30
>>70353463
He was a NEET before it was a thing. Amazing.
>>70354621
Where do you find these?
>>70354621
I hope she made him happy back than or something that's close to what he could experience about that.
>>70355004
Indeed. cause FUCK normies.
>>70355006
The first source I am using is "Against the world, against life" by Michel Houellebecq [>>70351423]
On Lovecraft as depressed 'loser'
>"Adulthood is hell. Faced with a position this stubborn, the "moralists" of our time grumble in a vaguely disapproving manner, waiting for the moment to float their obscene subtexts. Maybe Lovecraft really couldn't become an adult; but what is certain is that he did not want to. And considering the values which rule the adult world, it's difficult to argue the case. The reality principle, the pleasure principle, competition, permanent challenge, sex and work...nothing to sing Hallelujah about. Lovecraft knows there's nothing to this world. And he plays the role of the loser every time. In theory as in practice. He has lost his childhood, he has equally lost his faith. The world disgusts him, and he sees no reason to suppose that things could be presented otherwise, by 'looking on the bright side'. [...] Very few will have been at this point of saturation, penetrated right to the marrow by the absolute void of every human aspiration.The universe is merely a chance arrangement of elementary particles. A transitory image in the midst of chaos. [...] Lovecraft is well aware of the depressing nature of these conclusions. As he wrote in 1918, "all rationalism tends to minimize the value and importance of life, and to diminish the total quantity of human happiness. In some cases the truth could cause suicide, or at least precipitate a near-suicidal depression.""
p.4
>>70355305
There's a small book of memoirs written by Sonia Green but the only copies I can find are over $50 unfortunately. I'd love to read them though.
On Lovecraft's contradictions
>"Paradoxically, the character of Lovecraft fascinates us partly because his system of values is entirely opposed to ours. Fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorifies puritan inhibition and quite evidently finds repellent any "open display of eroticism". Resolutely anti-commercial, he despises money, considers democracy to be pure folly, progress an illusion. The word "liberty", so dear to Americans, elicits from him only a gloomy sneer. All his life he maintained a typically aristocratic attitude of scorn for humanity in general, together with an extreme solicitude toward individuals in person. What is agreed is that all those who knew Lovecraft in person felt an immense sadness at the announcement of his death. Robert Bloch, for example, wrote: "If I had known the truth about the state of his health, I would have run to Providence to see him." August Derleth dedicated the rest of his life to collating, editing and publishing the posthumous fragments of his absent friend."
p.7
Michel Houellebecq"s bio is full of inaccuracies and is regarded as garbage.
Lovecraft is my favorite author, I've read more than two thirds of his stories, down to the T's alphabetically. He hated degenerates, both whites minorities but he respected refined ones of both.
>>70356086
What makes you say that? He lists his references, which include all of Lovecraft's fiction, all of his thousands of letters and the various biographies written about him so far (which he largely condemns).
On the development of Lovecraft's racist views in New York
>"We see here manifested the first traces of a racism that afterwards nourished the work of HPL. It presented itself from the start in a banal enough form: unemployed, menaced by poverty, Lovecraft could stand less and less an aggressive and hard urban environment. In addition he feels a certain aggrievement in considering that immigrants of every provenance are swallowed up without difficulty in the bustling melting-pot which is the America of the 20s, whereas he himself, despite his pure anglo-saxon heritage, is permanently in search of employment. [...] His hatred for the "stinking, amorphous hybridity" of this modern Babel, for the "giant strangers, ill-born and deformed, who gabble and shout vulgarly, destitute of dreams, within its confines" did not cease, during the course of 1925 , to exasperate him to the point of delirium. Once might even say that one of the fundamental figures of his work -0 the idea of a titanic and grandiose city, in the fundaments of which swarm repugnant creatures of nightmare - was inspired directly by his experience of New York."
p.29 / 30
>>70351358
Didn't he marry a jew?
>>70357096
Yes, Sonia Green was Jewish. She often had to remind him that she was whenever he began to rant in her company about the jews, the blacks etc.
On Sonia and Lovecraft's relationship
>"Sonia seems to have understood Lovecraft very well, his frigidity, his inhibition, his denial and his disgust for life. As for him, who considered himself an old man at thirty, one is still surprised that he could envisage union with this dynamic, vivacious creature. A divorced jewess, what’s more; which, for a conservative antisemite like him would seem to constitute an insurmountable obstacle. [...] But it is perhaps the most unlikely explanation that seems the best: Lovecraft really seems to have, in a certain manner, loved Sonia, as Sonia loved him. And these two, so different from each other, but who loved each other, were to be joined in marriage on the 3rd March 1924."
p.28
Sounds like a fucking beta. You only get credit for rejecting sexual liberation, vice, mindless work etc if you're actually capable of exploiting it in the first place otherwise it's just sour grapes
On Lovecraft's feelings towards black people and his thoughts on segregation
>As he wrote in a letter, "Either stow 'em out of sight or kill 'em off" ; and he came progressively to consider the former solution as preferable, particularly in the wake of some time spent in the South, at the home of writer Robert Barlow, where he observed with wonder that the maintenance of a strict racial segregation could allow a white, educated American to feel at ease in the middle of a population with a high density of blacks. Naturally, he states precisely to his aunt, "they can't let niggers use the beach as a Southern resort - can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of greasy chimpanzees?"
p.32
Read the Mountain of Madness, didn't like it at all. It actually annoyed me.
>Not posting his cats vs dogs essay
>>70357512
Green is a common surname for English Jews, for some reason.
As is Berry.
His work was ahead of its time. God, why didn't anybody listen to his warnings?
OP here. I will not quote from "A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time"by S. T. Joshi.
On Lovecraft's childhood
>"All this may seem to give the impression that Lovecraft, in spite of his precociousness, his early health problems, his solitude as a very young boy, and his unsettled nervous condition, was evolving into an entirely "normal" youth with vigorous teenage interests (except sports and girls, in which he never took any interest). [...] But how normal, really, was he? The later testimony of Stuart Coleman is striking: 'from the age of 8 to 18, I saw quite a bit of him as we went to schools together [...] I won't say I knew him "well" as I doubt if any of his contemporaries at the time did. He was definitely not a normal child and his companions were few.'"
p.46
>>70358998
*now quote
On one girl's memory of the young Lovecraft
>"Clara Hess, the same age as Lovecraft, supplies a telling and poignant memory of Lovecraft's devotion to astronomy [...] "Howard used to go out into the fields in back of my home to study the stars. One early fall evening several of the children in the vicinity assembled to watch him from a distance. Feeling sorry for his loneliness I went up to him and asked him about his telescope and was permitted to look through it. But his language was so technical that I could not understand it and I returned to my group and left him to his lonely study of the heavens."
p.46
On the two great tragedies of Lovecraft's childhood
>"because of the mismanagement of of Whipple's estate after his death, relatively little was left of his property and funds; so Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of 454 Angell Street and occupy a smaller house at 598 Angell Street. This was probably the most traumatic event Lovecraft experienced prior to the death of his mother in 1921. [...] psychologically the loss of his birthplace, to one so endowed with a sense of place, was shattering. To compound the tragedy, Lovecraft's beloved cat, Nigger-Man, disappeared sometime in 1904. [...] Nigger-Man's loss perhaps symbolised the loss of his birthplace as no other event would."
p.47
>>70351358
>H.P. (((Lovecraft)))
/pol/ is always right
>>70351358
Dat typical Negroe-Saxon face
On Lovecraft's temper and fights
>"He admits to having an 'ungovernable temper' and being 'decidedly pugnacious': "Any affront - especially any reflection on my truthfulness or honour as an 18th century gentleman - roused in me tremendous fury, & I would always start a fight if an immediate retraction were not furnished. Being of scant physical strength, I did not fare well in these encounters; though I would never ask for their termination."
p.50 / 51
Its so rare to find good quality lovecraftian content nowadays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57WKwg
>"Jeez, I fucking hate niggers"
On Lovecraft's lonely childhood
>"Lovecraft led a comparatively solitary young childhood, with only his adult family members as his companions. Many of his childhood activities - reading, writing, scientific work, practising music, even attending the theatre - are primarily or exclusively solitary, and we do not hear much about any boyhood friends until his entrance into grade school. All his letters discuss his childhood stress his relative isolation and loneliness: "You will notice that I have made no reference to childish friends & playmates - I had none! The children I knew disliked me & I disliked them. [...] Their romping & shouting puzzled me. I hated mere play & dancing about""
p.36
On Lovecraft's cousin's memory of him as a boy
>"Ethel M. Phillips [...] was sent over to play with young Howard. She confessed in an interview conducted in 1977 that she did not much care for her cousin, finding him eccentric and aloof. She was particularly vexed because Lovecraft did not know how a swing worked."
p.36
His cat was named Nigger Man. Because it was black.
On Lovecraft's sexuality
>"The matter of Lovecraft's sexual conduct must inevitably be addressed, although the information we have on the subject is very sparse. We learn from R. Alain Everts, who interviewed Sonia on the matter, that: first, he was a virgin at the time he married; second, prior to his marriage he had read several books on sex; and third, he never initiated sexual relations, but would respond when Sonia did so. [...] Sonia herself has only two comments on the matter. 'As a married man he was an adequately excellent lover, but refused to show his feelings in the presence of others. He shunned promiscuous association with women before his marriage. [...] H.P. was inarticulate in expressions of love except to his mother and to his aunts, to whom he expressed himself quite vigorously [...] One way of expression of H.P.'s sentiment was to wrap his "pinkey" finger around mine and say "Umph!""
p.202
>>70351925
>1930's
>forced to apologise for racism
After reading through lovecrafts anthology twice and running Call of Cthulhu, Acthung! Cthulhu and Delta Green games for 4 years, Lovecraft is easily the most misunderstood author in terms of his works.
>>70351358
that guy looks like me before I got my jaw surgery
>>70358158
I'm not a huge fan of that story either, and I've read 90%+ of them. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and Herbert West Re-animator are great. Every movie I've seen that attempts to use a Lovecraft story is pure trash.
OP here. This is my final post this evening. I hope this thread has been worthwhile.
On Lovecraft in his final days
>"Lovecraft's final years were characterised both by much hardship (painful rejections of his best tales and concomitant depression over the merit of his work; increasing poverty; and, toward the very end, the onset of his terminal illness) and by moments of joy (travels all along the eastern seaboard; the intellectual stimulus of correspondence with a variety of distinctive colleagues; increasing adulation in the tiny worlds of amateur journalism and fantasy fandom). But to the end, Lovecraft continued to wrestle, mostly in letters, with the fundamental issues of politics, economics, society, and culture, with a breadth of learning, acuity of logic, and a deep humanity born of wide observation and experience that could not have been conceived by the 'eccentric recluse' who had so timidly emerged from self-imposed hermitry in 1914. That his largely private discussions did not have any influence on the intellectual temper of the age is unfortunate; but his unceasing intellectual vigour, even as he was descending into the final stages of cancer, is as poignant a testimonial to his courage and his devotion to the life of the mind as anyone could wish. Lovecraft himself, at any rate, certainly did not think the effort wasted."
p.363
Thanks, good reads.
