Do you like classic supernatural tales, those from the late Victorian period to the inter-war years? Good. For today, dear listener, that’s where we’re going. Specifically, to the tales of Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, an English writer of ghostly fiction. That we know of her at all is entirely due to one volume of seven stories, for despite rumours of another book, entitled Rosemary, there seems to be no record of her producing anything else. In fact, there’s little record of Bessie Kyffin-Taylor (d.1922) herself.
Only the male line of her husband has much written about it – predominantly the sons of William Francis Taylor, Archdeacon of Liverpool. Bessie, also Liverpool born, was married to Gerald Kyffin Taylor, one of the Archdeacon’s son, in 1892. Gerald became a Brigadier-General and Member of Parliament. His brother Austin also became an MP, whilst another brother ended up in the legal profession, William Francis Kyffin Taylor, 1st (and last) Baron Maenan.
William Francis Kyffin Taylor (c) Shropshire Council; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
That some sources call her Lady Bessie Kyffin-Taylor is a puzzle, and we wonder if this is an error due to the family connection with Baron Maenan. Although Gerald had a CBE, we don’t think that would have entitled the couple to the titles Sir or Lady.
(The name Kyffin is likely of Welsh origin, related to boundary or border, and as Maenan is in Conwy, North Wales – not so very far from Liverpool- we can assume a Welsh lineage somewhere in the family. Wales as landscape also turns up in some of the stories.)
So, her collection From Out of the Silence survives as the only witness to her interests or her talents, which is a shame, because there’s some good stuff in there. And one or two duds, but the high spots make them irrelevant. Not that we know where the comment comes from, but E F Bleiler, editor and bibliographer, is supposed to have said that her work reminded him of E F Benson, who will be known to many enthusiasts.
Should you read this collection? Yes, you should, for at least a couple of reasons, and we’ll explain in a moment. The seven stories in From Out of the Silence are:
Room No. Ten
Two Little Red Shoes
Outside the House
The Winds in the Woods
The Twins
Sylvia
The Star Inn
These are genuine ghost stories in one way or another, all of them, and include a number of physical manifestations, not only misty figures. You might also note that the supernatural element in almost all the stories is tied to a time of day or a time of the year. This is a conventional old device, but fortunately Kyffin-Taylor makes good use of it in places. And ‘Outside the House’ which we’ll mention at the end, is a truly dark and disturbing story which does her great credit as a writer. But we shall run through the rest of the collection first…
‘Room No. Ten’ is an over-tortuous tale of a ghostly curse. The characters encountered by the protagonist are a bit of a pain, and keep crucial information from the protagonist for thin reasons. We did at one point want to smack them for not explaining what was going on, as their reticence leads to a number of somewhat pointless conversations without real content. The central ‘secret’ of the curse is tolerable, but in a sort of manufactured way, and the resolution isn’t terrific.
Readable, but don’t judge Bessie Kyffin-Taylor on this first one.
red door audiobook
(Ironically, in the wide-ranging audio collection by Red Door Audiobooks, Supernatural Stories by Wome Writers, ‘Room No. 10’ is the choice to represent Bessie Kyffin-Taylor. Perhaps others will have more affection for it than we do.)
‘The Wind in the Woods’ is satisfactory and has a nice use of landscape and mood, though there’s nothing very new in it. It revolves around a calendrical re-enactment of a very dark deed, and some additional touches. Worth a look for those who like their psychogeography.
‘Sylvia’, on the other hand, is the duffer of the collection, a typical tale of gypsies, abductions, lost heirs and so forth. It’s somewhat out of place, with the slimmest of ghostly connections and more of the Gothic feel of the early 19th Century, long abandoned by this point.
Of the four remaining stories, there’s happily much more to be said.
‘Two Little Red Shoes’ is fascinating in that it is one of only two stories with a female protagonist, and a novel one at that. This is a woman who loves and explores empty dwellings. This could easily have been some sort of ghost-hunting codswallop, but she simply loves the feel of them, and sees them as places where her own imagination can be free. It’s a story so closely written from the viewpoint of the protagonist that it makes you wonder if you are ‘hearing’ Bessie Kyffin-Taylor herself.
“All my life, or at least as far back as I can remember, empty houses have always had an irresistible attraction for me… In spite of passing years, in spite of work, in spite of all, I have never outgrown my fondness for empty houses and uninhabited gardens, and to this day I am known to visit a tenantless house, light a fire, from a hidden store of coal and wood, seat myself in an old broken-down chair, and there, in the silence—a silence unbroken by the ring of telephone or any other bells—I dream my dreams and revel in unbroken solitude—with every nerve at rest, sure in the knowledge that none can disturb my peace, since none know my whereabouts…”
The plot itself is an unashamed ghost tale, and has both neat and nasty touches, resulting in an unexpected justice. It has in its main character a noteworthy portrait of an individual, which makes it a little different.
‘The Twins’ is a passable story. The haunting within has some interesting elements as far as the supernatural manifestations go, as one brother plagues his twin after death. We found a few passages towards the end which veer into the more cloying aspects of spiritualism, and would have preferred a brisker handling, but it’s not uninteresting.
‘The Star Inn’ on the other hand is more engaging, primarily again for its protagonists, a sister and brother who end up staying at an inn despite guarded comments by the locals.
“A low rambling building with a similar roof and very neat windows, most of them full of scarlet geraniums. Blackened oak beams seemed to support two big gabled windows, a long verandah reaching nearly the entire length, and a white cat on the step washing its face. Such was my first impression of the ‘Star Inn.’
“I looked at Dick, and Tim looked at the cat; presumably they spoke, for the cat after one scornful glance, fled precipitantly, and we rang the bell. A little old woman answered it. She had a face like a russet apple, snow-white hair, eyes like little blue beads, and not any teeth; she was dressed in a lavender print frock, and wore clogs.
“‘Well, what do you want?’ she asked.
“‘We want two bedrooms and a sitting-room, some food and a wash, and we want to stay here for our holidays,’ was my brother’s terse reply.
“‘Well, I never did!’ quoth the old dame; ‘I never did!’
“‘Neither did we, I’m sure of that.’”
The two siblings come over as real characters, with a rare amount of wry commentary and humour (for Bessie Kyffin-Taylor) in this tale. The narrator/protagonist is the sister, which works nicely; the haunting (with its associated white cat) is satisfactory, and the conclusion is reasonable.
Which brings us to a more remarkable story, ‘Outside the House’. We don’t want to spoil it, so must be careful. Clearly written with reflections of the Great War in mind, the story conveys an unusual sense of threat and initially intangible horror. It’s as if a ‘haunted house’ story became entangled with something out of the Weird Tales submissions pile. We wouldn’t say it’s at all Lovecraftian, but it could be called Hodgsonian. It contains her most striking imagery, and justifies the collection.
“I had been in France some two and a half years before the bit of shell met me, which landed me back in Blighty, with a leg that was not going to be of much more service to me. I had had many and varied experiences in France—horrors, of course—but of these we do not often speak, much of deep interest, and much which goes to the furthering of knowledge of many kinds—knowledge which has led thousands of men to get down to realities—and to shun for evermore the superficial shams which made up their existences before 1914…”
Having been nursed back to health by a young woman who becomes his fiancée, the soldier visits the house of her family, and has tea on the Low Lawn. She is to join them a few days later. Yet there are hints of something wrong, and at 5pm, the tea party breaks up with some haste. This is nicely done, even down to the nervousness of the butler. He is then shown the most peculiar way in which the house has been adapted – the Indoor Garden:
“It was immense, having a dome- shaped roof, painted a clear pale blue. Three sides of the place were of glass, through which lovely views were seen, the fourth side was an exquisitely painted landscape of a hayfield and trees stretching away into the distance. For a moment one scarcely realised whether one was looking at real scenes or painted ones, or where one began and the other ended. Clumps of shrubs here and there made secluded corners, where cosy chairs and couches were placed.
“A hammock was slung under another tree—one side of the place was trellis-work, with glorious roses rambling over it, and everywhere were flowers or flowering plants. The ground was dull green, like a solid linoleum; in one corner clock golf was marked out; Badminton occupied another place, and under an orange tree was a large round table, with writing materials and many magazines; the dome top could be worked by pulleys and rolled back, the whole idea giving one the atmosphere of a lovely foreign garden.
“All the family were present, though each seemed intent on his or her occupation and no one seemed to have the remotest thought of leaving it for a stroll in the garden outside, though a most perfect summer evening was vainly calling.”
He finds a strict curfew in place. No one must be outside the house after 5pm, but none of the family will explain why, and he is told plainly by the matriarch that he must abide by their rules without question. The Low Lawn is apparently a place to be particularly feared after dark.
What follows – his obstinate attempts to discover the family secret, his explorations outside and so forth – we leave to you to discover. There is something appalling in what he experiences, and it contains touches of true weird fiction. There is an explanation, and a very dark ending. We read a comment elsewhere that if the mystery had not been explained, then this might have ranked as an even greater story. We agree. Distinctly shivery, and not to be missed.
You can get hold of a very modestly priced Kindle edition (Leonaur, 2016), or you can find Bessie Kyffin-Taylor’s collection online if you dig around.
You don’t have to read the article on Lovecraft’s legacy below. You may not want to read it, which is fair enough. You didn’t have to pay for it, and you may need to go and put the badger out. But we’re going to print it, because we don’t agree with ‘camps’ on these matters, only with individuals informing themselves. It is possible to read something and make a decision as to whether or not you agree, without exploding or lashing out like an irritated shoggoth. It is possible to consider which parts of an argument you believe have merit, and which don’t.
Nor does discussing problematic areas concerning H P Lovecraft ruin fandom, or stop you being able to appreciate much of his fiction. We get much the same thrill from reading ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ now as we did forty years ago – but we’re better informed as to some of its nuances and interconnectivity with other ideas. We don’t actually think that HPL was “a horrible person”, we see him as a problematic figure , and would have considered a similar guest article on Rudyard Kipling. You might also look at writers such as M P Shiel, who had some funny views of his own, and acted on certain of them.
H P Lovecraft’s fiction itself is still influential, but that influence can have implications for weird fiction writers now, complex ones. Some start in a haze of Lovecraft and Weird Tales memories, and move away, by active choice or by general inclination. Others seek to recapture the essential cosmic horror and strangeness of work from back then. New expressions, interpretations, pastiches and parodies abound. There are also those who write to challenge some of the less savoury aspects of early weird and speculative fiction (as we say, HPL is not alone in being open to debate)
As a site fascinated by much of what came out of the early Twentieth Century Britain, good and bad, we have our own issues. To write about late Victorian and Edwardian times makes it necessary to go into places which are not exactly jolly flag-waving ones. Those places contain misery, oppression and yes, unconscionable examples of racial, religious and sexual discrimination (only last night, for example, we read a supernatural tale by an Edwardian English writer which conceded that a particular family were all right “considering they were Jews”).
Before we hand you over to our guest writer, we’ll note that this is not a piece edited to ‘suit’ us. It’s what he wanted to say, and contains a number of reflections which are to do with broader aspects of Lovecraft’s legacy and work than racism.
We have our own concerns about the current arguments in the field. Apart from anything else, those discussions should be conducted without so much vitriol and shrieking. And we notice four points coming up often, but without entirely convincing us as yet:
1) All this happened a long time ago, so let it go. But Lovecraft’s time is not so far away. Our own parents were children when Lovecraft was writing in the 1930s. As were the parents of a few other writers of weird fiction today (grandparents and great grandparents for some of you, we concede). This is not some curiosity arising from the 1500s, the days of Byzantium, or prehistory. greydog’s grandfather was a German prisoner of war when Lovecraft’s first story appeared – and grandfather was considerably more respectful of non-white peoples than HPL. Violet Brown of Jamaica, still alive today at the age of 117, was thirty three years old when HPL expressed that view of the “negro” as “a vastly inferior biological variant1” To put this in a very personal dimension, do you think that hearing your own grandmother, for example, being referred to like that is something you would easily pass over?
2) The continued unease over HPL’s views on race is mostly a white liberal product. Given the readership, it’s hardly surprising that much concern over his views comes from such quarters, and hopefully from white conservative ones as well. But it’s also hardly difficult to find black readers and creators who have serious concerns – and yes, their parents or grandparents would have lived through those times. In terms of writers speaking out, are black creators’ views less important because white creators recognise their validity?
“..such a suggestion–that I overlook HPL’s racial hatred– (is) borderline abusive and is a perfect example of racist gaslighting. However, I am a fan of the recent flood of revisionist Lovecrafian mythos. They make me a Lovecraft fan-by-proxy.2”
Craig Laurance Gidney
3) The ‘Oh, people were like that back then’ argument concerning authors of the period. Perhaps there is more relevance to that one, as individuals often conform to dominant cultures and the examples set around them. However, Lovecraft and his fellow authors were writing at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance, when it was easy to read work by black writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. White writers and publishers did engage with this ‘movement’ and its many strands (and in some cases sought to exploit it). Choices could be made. A creator in the 1920s and 1930s wouldn’t have had to look far to find examples of powerful black prose, poetry and commentary.
4) It’s far more important to discuss his literary influences and sources. Well we do, and find them interesting and intriguing. That’s something greydogtales has explored a few times. But in what way is that more important than some of the questions raised here? What happened, and what was said and written, eighty years ago matters today, because we not only have Lovecraft’s legacy of striking fiction, but also the societal legacy of those times.
“If The Ballad of Black Tom is resonating with readers I think it’s because the ideas at the heart of it remain relevant. I hoped to connect Tommy’s problems with obvious, and ongoing, problems of racism today and I’ve been gratified to see that so many readers have felt the connection is real.3”
Victor LaValle
NOTE: We have tried where possible to include footnotes indicating the origin of quotations etc. As we’re not entirely sure how to do this in a blog post, we apologise for any errors.
Lovecraft’s Legacy
Paul StJohn Mackintosh
“It’s exactly when Lovecraft didn’t express his own racism and prejudices in print, when he abstracted them into symbols with broader signification and resonance, when he actually transmuted them through imagination and art, that he achieved his most enduring work.”
A week after returning from Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, where N.K. Jemisin received her second Hugo Award for Best Novel, I made the mistake of sharing the Tor.com post about Jemisin’s interview with Playboy, where she announced her planned New York trilogy, which would “kind of mess with the Lovecraft legacy,” on a Facebook Lovecraft fandom group. Cue much – and intermittently venomous – reaction. Yes, Jemisin had stated that Lovecraft “was a notorious racist and horrible human being” – which may be both part true and part unfair. But various posters accused her of being a “hack,” “in it for the money” and “making money off Lovecraft.” And this for a two-times Hugo winner, whose seed story for her proposed Lovecraftian trilogy, “The City Born Great,” was also in the running for a 2017 Hugo for Best Short Story.
n k jemisin
There were also two other Lovecraftian works in the 2017 Hugo running for Best Novella, one also by a black author: The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle, and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson. Yet one critic of Jemisin said: “since she’s black, she’s gotta write about ‘race.’ Way to escape the ghetto…” One other poster – though not in that thread – who said Jemisin should “stick to writing ghetto fiction” turned out to be a Sandy Hook Truther. Fandoms of any kind may attract obsessive cranks. But it’s not an edifying experience to see (primarily) white writers and posters criticizing a black author’s problems with their idol’s racism.
Comparing Lovecraft to Poe in her New York Review of Books review article on the various Necronomicon Press and Arkham House volumes edited by noted Lovecraft scholar S T Joshi, Joyce Carol Oates has written that “both writers have had an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction, and Lovecraft is arguably the more beloved by contemporary gothic aficionados.4” Obviously, that kind of legacy is not going to go away. It also is robust enough to survive personal dislike and antipathy towards Lovecraft’s own views. So why the shrill defensiveness of its self-styled guardians?
All this, along with the recent public statements around NecronomiCon 2017 by S T Joshi (of which more below), merits a re-examination of the Lovecraft legacy itself. What is the Lovecraft legacy? What are its merits? Why does it attract such polarizing comment? I don’t claim to bring anything specially new or insightful to the table about these questions except in one respect – Lovecraft in the context of the mainstream literature and intellectual culture of his time. Apologists for Lovecraft’s racism have consistently emphasized that he was simply a man of his time. Fine: in what respect? Because Lovecraft, to my mind, slots right into some of the intellectual and cultural currents of his time, and our time, that give a far better explanatory perspective on his attitudes and work than the nascent pulp genres of the 1920s and 30s. That context requires engaging with his racism, because racism and anxieties about threats to Western civilization and the world order were among their core tenets.
First, though, I’d like to go right to the horse’s mouth – what Lovecraft said about why he wrote what he wrote. It’s reasonable to assume that one of the most insightful critics of weird literature knew what he was on about when writing his own work, and about his own writing. And Lovecraft began his ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’ by declaring:
“My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best – one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear.5”
Now, “vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy” and “suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law” suggest at the very least an ambivalent attitude towards alienage and outsideness – certainly not a wholly negative one. Perhaps that passage merits more notice than “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” – not least as it came later in Lovecraft’s life.
And again, from his letters, “Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relations to the cosmos – to the unknown – which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.6” If there was a huge racial component to Lovecraft’s definition of “unknown,” then you could almost read into such remarks a frustrated longing to engage with other unknown peoples, as much as fear and distaste towards them. That’s as plausible an interpretation as any claim that Lovecraft’s mature work is some kind of systematic dog-whistling for underlying racism, with Deep Ones and ocean-going cultists standing in for black Americans and Catholic immigrants. Other writers, notably Nick Mamatas7, have written stories about it. As per ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, “in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.”
Yet lest anyone doubt that Lovecraft was, and remained, an actual, committed racist, here’s a letter from him to James F. Morton from March 23, 1931: “What I was really laughing at was no [Franz] Boas himself – whom I freely gave a place among the first-rate anthropologists – but the naïve way in which all nigger-lovers turn to him first of all when trying to scrape up a background of scientific support. He is the only first rate living anthropologist to overlook the obvious primitiveness of the negro & the australoid, hence the equalitarian Utopians have to play him up for all he’s worth & forget the great bulk of outstanding European opinion.”
Of course, that’s just one of Lovecraft’s many racist comments from throughout his life, but it’s worth highlighting because Boas was one of the founding proponents of cultural relativism. Not only does that letter brand Lovecraft a consistent racist, it also makes it very clear – if clarity were needed – that Lovecraft knew full well there were other scientifically endorsed ways to look at ethnic difference, but consciously persisted in his racism in spite of them. If you’re among the group who Lovecraft dismissed for your “obvious primitiveness,” then “horrible human being” doesn’t seem too harsh a riposte, especially given that Lovecraft, the self-avowed scientific rationalist, was choosing only the science that suited his prejudices. It certainly doesn’t impugn him as a writer. But it does call him out as a private individual for his private views.
craig l gidney
As Craig Gidney wrote after NecronomiCon 2017, “I have a new appreciation for Cosmic Horror and Lovecraft after last weekend. He turned his eugenic/racist/misanthropic beliefs into art. Uncomfortable ugly art, but art none the less. It’s a great way to stroll in the mindset of a racist. Fear of the Other is the thematic that comes across in Lovecraft’s work. It should be taught in class. If you’ve read other white supremacist texts, full of pseudoscience and bizarre taxonomies, you’ll be bored to death.”
It’s exactly when Lovecraft didn’t express his own racism and prejudices in print, when he abstracted them into symbols with broader signification and resonance, when he actually transmuted them through imagination and art, that he achieved his most enduring work. Does that make his mature work worthy of respect as an act of self-transcendence or even self-redemption? Possibly. Does it make his private attitudes and his personal character worthy of veneration? Hardly. But contrast a writer like Sax Rohmer, whose major success came from overt racism, and who, personally, was an occultist and orientalist decadent as well. Rohmer attracted complaint in his lifetime from the Chinese government: he also is now largely unread. Lovecraft could have followed his inclinations that way and become a D W Griffith in prose: the example was open to him, and he did defend Birth of A Nation as a celebration of “that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War.8” Even if Lovecraft was young when writing it, that apology on behalf of the KKK should be more than enough reason for Jemisin to dislike him. Yet when he came to Sax Rohmer, Lovecraft only singled one work out for praise: the occultist Brood of the Witch Queen.
My view is that the more telling critique of Lovecraft as a thinker and a writer, rather than a private individual, is in his pessimistic, even nihilistic world-view and conscious philosophy. This, to my mind, makes racism inseparable from his work – but also gives it its enduring value. Edmund Wilson and others have argued interminably about the limitations of Lovecraft’s style and prose. No one seems to have denied that Lovecraft’s cosmicism, indifferentism, cosmic horror, or whatever epithet it wears, is a genuine and enduring aesthetic. It certainly underwrites whole swathes of modern weird fiction.
Lovecraft’s intellectual position drew heavily both on fin-de-siècle decadence and aestheticism, and the various theories of Western civilization in crisis from Nietzsche to Spengler – although omitting, as far as all the sources can confirm, the direct heritage of explicit racial theory stemming from Arthur de Gobineau and adopted by Josiah Clark Nott, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Lothrop Stoddard and their ilk. Lovecraft c.1921 was already a well-informed enough reader of Friedrich Nietzsche to be able to cite, from the German and with understanding, key concepts such as the ewige wiederkunft (Eternal Recurrence), Wille zur Macht (Will to Power), and sklavmoral (slave morality). “There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature – nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view,” Lovecraft proclaimed in 1921 in ‘Nietzscheism and Realism.’ His debt to Spengler is so well rehearsed by Joshi and others that it hardly needs mentioning. Joshi himself wrote in his book on the subject that “Lovecraft was obsessed by the idea of decadence in all its aspects for much of his life. If there is one idea that cuts across all the facets of his philosophy and even unites them, it is the idea of the decline of the West.”
And as another sometime Lovecraftian creator, Alan Moore, wrote in his introduction to Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: “it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world.9” Those were Lovecraft’s contemporaries who made Spengler a best seller.
I’m not mentioning Nietszche as some kind of immediate condemnation of Lovecraft. I’m not for one moment jumping on the facile identification of Nietszche, the ardent anti-anti-Semite, anti-nationalist and “good European,” as some kind of proto-fascist à la Gabriele d’Annunzio. But time and again, Lovecraft’s declarations about Nietzsche and other intellectual forebears bracket him with the “philosophy of pessimism” and “delight in doom” that Hannah Arendt identified in The Origins of Totalitarianism as “the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligensia10.”
Lovecraft writes in a letter of 1918 that “I am only about half alive – a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.” Ringing with Baudelarian spleen and ennui, that comment is absolutely of a piece with his remarks that “it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world.” Or with the kickoff sentence from ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’, that “Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”
It also chimes in with aesthetic morality, now associated with many who’ve gone into a Nietzschean devaluation of all values and come out the other side. “I have a marked distaste for immoral and unlawful acts which contravene the harmonious traditions and standards of beautiful living developed by a culture during its long history. This, however, is not ethics but aesthetics,” Lovecraft proclaimed. “For example, I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either.11” I’ll go back to the significant point about “gentleman” shortly. But the other point here is that the linkage of blind amoral forces with a pleasure principle is all too obvious in Lovecraft’s work. Cthulhu is the ultimate aesthete, the flâneur “ravening for delight,” “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside.” Mussolini, who declared himself at once “aristocrat and democrat, revolutionary and reactionary, proletarian and antiproletarian, pacifist and antipacifist,” would have recognized a kindred spirit.
Nihilism alone is obviously not in itself a symptom of systematic prejudice or racism. But nihilism allied with schemata of cultural and civilizational decay is a lot more suspect. Hannah Arendt again: “Doctrines of decay seem to have some very intimate connection with race-thinking.” Anyone with the time can read Arendt’s genealogy of theories of social and historical decadence, and their intimate, indissoluble association with doctrines of imperialism, racism, and the special pleading of marginalized or insecure groups like Gobineau’s pro-Bourbon post-Revolutionary aristos. The points of comparison with Lovecraft’s social and intellectual position come crowding in.
arthur de gobineau
Arendt wrote: “Gobineau’s ‘fils des rois’ were close relatives of the romantic heroes, saints, geniuses and supermen of the late nineteenth century, all of whom can hardly hide their German romantic origin. The inherent irresponsibility of romantic opinions received a new stimulant from Gobineau’s mixture of races.” Again, that sounds all too like the combination of amorality, aestheticism, and blind assertion beyond good and evil that crops up so often throughout the Lovecraft heritage.
Any sceptic, like Lovecraft, who had every reason, from his own social situation and the spectacle of the First World War, to doubt positivistic valorization of human reason, and of all humans endowed with that faculty, was potentially open to obscurantist elitism and discrimination. Post-Enlightenment theories of equal rights stem from the equal value of the light of reason, and of all reasoning beings. If Lovecraft dissented from that viewpoint, little wonder that he dissented from its practical application in a democracy. (“Any indignation I may feel… is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses.12”) That’s not to endorse, or disprove, his perspective – only to emphasize its consequences. And readers may argue that it doesn’t matter what a pulp writer with no influence on his time thought. There’s two answers to that. One is that, in that case, it doesn’t matter what another genre writer thinks about him. And for the other one, read on to the end of the essay.
Lovecraft did have plenty of personal reasons for concern with generational and social decadence and decay – one and eventually both parents institutionalized, poverty, inability to find a proper job, painful alienation from the society of his time, poor health. From ‘The Outsider’ to ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, heredity and breeding aren’t exactly a blessing for most Lovecraftian protagonists – but that’s very much of a piece with the racial pessimism of a Gobineau (forever fearful of racial decadence or insecure about possible black blood in his wife’s or mother’s family) or a Spengler, and all the polemical alarmist tracts of their popularizers and defenders.
Founding articulators of reactionary philosophies like de Maistre and Gobineau, whose family and social background were as marginalized and trauma-ridden as Lovecraft’s own, showed a similar eagerness to root themselves in hallowed lineages: Gobineau invented an absurd pedigree from Odin; Guido von List, Austrian neo-pagan occultist and pioneer of pan-German nationalism, was called before magistrates to defend his appropriation of the aristocratic “von” in his name. Personal aspirational snobbery can be one individual quirk that is strongly reinforced if you believe in an authoritarian, anti-democratic creed where blood lineage, breeding, and personal charisma are set up as superior to shared humanity and equal rights.
Lovecraft’s Old Gentleman status has become a staple of Lovecraftian fandom, and part of his personal myth as a paradigm of distressed gentlefolk – though used with less irony by his fans than he did. Whatever his solid New England ancestry, though, Lovecraft was the son of a travelling salesman, who lived in poverty most of his life. The “Old Gentleman” status of Lovecraft, in short, may be as much of a giveaway as a defence. As Oates also wrote: “To love the past, to extol the past, to yearn in some way to inhabit the past is surely to misread the past, purposefully or otherwise; above all, it is to select from the past only those aspects that accommodate a self-protective and nourishing fantasy.”
Lovecraft also erected that fantasy into a fictional world that many fans apparently enjoy living in. Jemisin said in a 2015 Electric Literature interview about writing The Fifth Season: “Worldbuilding is a central tenet within any secondary world fantasy, and a certain subset of science fiction, too. The readership expects and demands that level of detail13. There are people who will make role-playing games in a heartbeat out of your books, and if you have not provided them with predictable structures and things like that, they are going to get really pissed at you. And that can be helpful, because it makes you drill down to a level of verisimilitude that most people don’t want to think about; that can create a world with a really great lived-in feel, if you do it right.”
Obviously, Lovecraft did that. Unintentionally, perhaps, but Call of Cthulhu is now the Pepsi of RPG franchises, alongside D&D’s Coke, and the game’s success is part of the revival of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction. The Cthulhu Mythos is obviously by definition an exercise in world-building across multiple tales, “unlike Poe’s fevered tales which appear unrelated to one another, isolated in essential ways,” as Oates remarks. And I’m not mocking this at all as a component of the Lovecraft legacy. Spawning a hugely successful RPG franchise is a contribution – of a kind. Bringing much-needed convention revenue to Providence, RI with NecronomiCon is a contribution – of a kind. Cthulhu plushies and tentacle masks are a contribution – of a kind. They’re also great fun.
For a writer who drew on the most advanced science and latest exploration of his day, Lovecraft did a surprisingly good job of creating an alternative escapist fantasy world, where many Lovecraftians obviously enjoy sojourning. I certainly do. And one of that fantasy world’s central landmarks is Lovecraft Country – his beloved Anglo-Saxon gambrel-roofed weatherboarded New England – under threat from dark alien forces. As he wrote, “I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions – & in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat.14”
I do suspect that many Lovecraft fans identify with what he held dear – it’s not hard to feel the allure, when he expressed it so well and fondly. Do they correspondingly flip over into fear and hatred of what he feared and hated? I’d like to think not, but then you have Robert M. Price’s keynote speech at NecronomiCon 2015. As well as protesting against “the rising tide of atheism and rationalism,” he spoke as follows:
“If we can manage to look past [Lovecraft’s] racism, we will manage to see something deeper and quite valid. Lovecraft envisioned not only the threat that science posed to our anthropomorphic smugness, but also the ineluctable advance of the hordes of non-Western anti-rationalism to consume a decadent, eurocentric West. Superstition, barbarism and fanaticism would sooner or later devour us. It appears now that we’re in the midst of this very assault. The blood lust of jihadists threatens Western Civilization and the effete senescent West seems all too eager to go gently into that endless night. Our centers of learning have converted to power politics and an affirmative action epistemology cynically redefining truth as ideology. Logic is undermined by the new axiom of the ad hominem. If white males formulated logic, then logic must be regarded as an instrument of oppression. Lovecraft was wrong about many things, but not, I think, this one. It’s the real-life horror of Red Hook.”
Not only does that sound like the starkest possible confirmation of Jemisin’s worst fears about Lovecraft’s legacy, and his attitudes towards “the ‘chattering’ hordes… the horrifying brown people of New York that terrified him15,” it also reads like a page torn straight from the playbook of Gobineau, Lothrop Stoddard, Steve Bannon, and all the theorists of racial hierarchies and Western decadence.
Some defenders of the Lovecraft legacy might argue that Lovecraft doesn’t deserve to be held to account as a proponent of such ideas – while other defenders are enlisting him to endorse them. And I’ve already gone into the probable linkages between his thinking and theirs. “Only a cynic can create horror – for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them,” Lovecraft wrote to Edwin Baird in March 1924. That’s not exactly the point of view one would hope to see in one’s legislators. But cynical disdain for humanity abounds in authoritarians of every stripe.
Faced with an argument like Price’s, what is a writer like Nadia Bulkin, from a Muslim majority country and the author of some fine Lovecraftian fiction, supposed to make of the Lovecraft legacy and its self-styled advocates? Advocates who don’t simply assess and analyze extreme ethnic nationalist attitudes as a key to understanding aspects of Lovecraft’s work, but who explicitly endorse and buy into those attitudes – and who cite ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, the one Lovecraft story usually cited as the closest HPL got to making racism the overt basis of a tale. And enlisting Lovecraft’s legacy for an alt-right stance on the political, and even ethnic, struggles of our time does nothing to exonerate him as an innocuous man of his time. It does reinforce Moore’s analysis, though. Does it matter what a pulp writer thought? It matters to Price. It also matters to Jemisin. Or if he was such an insignificant writer that his thought and opinions don’t matter, then Price and Joshi have nothing to pride themselves on. Can’t have it both ways.
S.T. Joshi (Photo by Emily Marija Kurmis)
In the aftermath of Price’s statement, Joshi had a very public meltdown over the programming for Necronomicon 2017, where he accused the organizers of being “captured (and, indeed, rather willingly) by the forces of political correctness” and “swayed by various forces hostile to Lovecraft.” Joshi foregrounded his own “attempt to save the convention from being polluted by the Lovecraft-haters.” Obviously, those hostile forces didn’t exactly capture or sway the 2017 Hugos.
It also helps make sure that the issue of Lovecraft’s racism absolutely will not go away. S.T. Joshi did criticize Price’s remarks shortly after as “a rather windy and confused polemic,” but c. NecronomiCon 2017, judging by his blog posts, he seems to have sided with Price against the organizers who excluded him from the con. “There must be something wrong with a Lovecraft convention that has alienated the two figures – Robert M. Price and myself – who, over the past forty years, have done more to promote Lovecraft scholarship than any individuals on the planet.16” You have to ask who alienated who first.
Oates praises: “a melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft’s most passionate work, like ‘The Outsider’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair, and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the reader’s memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded.” She also sums up his character as follows: “How strange to know that Lovecraft was unfailingly kind, patient, generous, unassuming, and gentlemanly in his personal relations; yet, in keeping with his Tory sensibility, an anti-Semite (despite his deep affection for Sonia Greene and other Jewish friends), racist, and all-purpose Aryan bigot.”
Oates doesn’t seem to have any problem holding the balance between those polarities of attraction and repulsion in her judgement of Lovecraft as a man and a writer. For authorities on his work to claim that there is no polar opposition, or to demonize others for even alluding to its existence, though, doesn’t sound like a mature approach to actually understanding the man and the work. The Lovecraft legacy may survive Lovecraft’s detractors: his defenders are a different question.
6 Lovecraft, in “The Defence Remains Open!” (April 1921)
7See, for instance, Jitterbuggin’, which is based around a (fictional) Lovecraft letter in which he has a prophetic dream of witnessing the multiracial birth of rock and roll and being sickened by it even as he found himself dancing to it (PStJM).
8 Lovecraft ‘In a Major Key’, The Conservative, Vol. I, No. 2, (1915)
Next time – Thank the gods, an author of supernatural fiction from the 1920s, with very few biographical traces and no personal controversies. Bessie Kyffin-Taylor…
The weird world is all about lurchers, when you get down to it. We finish off our second anniversary with some of the most popular lurcher and longdog photographs. And in between, some more generous words from guests we’ve had on during that time – two writer/publishers, Neil Baker of April Moon Books and Sam Gafford of Ulthar Press, plus writer/journalist Paul StJohn Mackintosh. Pleasingly, all three of them get the crucial importance of lurchers to our modest enterprise…
chilli, by neil bakernot real, sadly
Neil Baker
Neil is a stalwart member of the small and micro-press community, those who labour to publish the stories they love. His Canadian press April Moon has released some great books, and this year he’s shooting three at the moon – Patrick Loveland’s novel A Tear in the Veil, SF with a positive twist in the collection The Stars at My Door, and a soon-to-arrive 007 spectacular, Bond Unknown, containing two novellas by Edward M Erdelac and Willie Meikle.
After being made to talk about garden furniture for some time, he relented and gave us this:
“It was with mixed emotions that I submitted to a gentle probing from JLG. He had contacted me out of the blue to ask if he could interview me for an article on small/micro/failing presses and I agreed, desperate to shill my newest book, Spawn of the Ripper. When the interview questions arrived however, I was delighted to learn that there was a dark humour behind it all, and I knew from that moment onward we would become BFFs.
Since then, I have thoroughly enjoyed the greydogtales blog. It is as eclectic as it is hilarious, and never grows stale. If it ever threatens to do so, John just chucks in an article about his dogs shitting on daffodils, and all is right again. I am delighted to finally publish one of John’s short stories in my new anthology, The Stars at my Door, and I look forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration, or at the very least, some more daffodil violation.”
— Neil Baker, author of A Picnic at the Mountains of Madness
We never expected more than mild amusement from a few listeners when we launched ‘Lurchers for Beginners’ in September 2015. And we were shocked when the series went virtually viral – it’s now had hundreds of thousands of views, and been shared all over the world.
One of the strangest aspects has been finding out that many people really don’t know what a lurcher is, especially outside the UK and Eire. We even have to explain every so often that it’s not another word for ‘lurker’.
Anyway, here are a few portraits from those two years, some ours and some from friends, to celebrate and remind our listeners that lurchers and longdogs will always be at the heart of greydogtales…
hunting for pilchardsevathe explorersann’s roxy (louise kingston)hungery now!tripods have fun too – michaela’s nickydjango relaxesour late grinny jadelizzie and roxi, from katrinadjango among the flowers
our research team considering their response to the latest dan brown novelodin and scully, from gina and mandy
Poet, fearless fictioneer and reviewer/journalist on many subjects, the multi-talented Mr Mackintosh joined us a while back for a discussion on his collection Blowback, stories where evocative writing meets strange subjects – ritual, sadism and masochism, Lovecraftian darkness and other corners of weird fiction. He’s also a fairly outspoken commentator on the weird scene as a whole. He kindly offered this reflection for our celebration:
“More weird than Theakston’s Old Peculier. More lugubrious than the Lyke Wake Dirge. More garrulous than Mrs E, as she stood lurcher-backed at-your-servile-sir before Sir Henry Rawlinson. More farsighted than the sightliest sighthound. More contorted than a Henry Moore figure. It’s Greydogtales, bringing wuthering to the Weird, and horror to the Heights.”
Blowback, the collection we discussed in the feature, is available in Kindle http://amzn.eu/94O2bWf or in paperback under its other title Black Propagandahttp://amzn.eu/9JtuqNN
chilli surveys the sand for spare fish
Sam Gafford
We’ve mentioned Sam a number of times on greydogtales, partly for his love of William Hope Hodgson, and partly for his crucial involvement in the whole Occult Detective Quarterly project. He’s also runs Ulthar Press, and his fiction has been published widely over the years. He has three – yes three – books out this year.
“When John Linwood Grant sent Gafford that innocent little email over two years ago, he’d had no idea of the horror he would end up releasing! Soon after, the poor man began a blog that grew and grew like Godzilla with a glandular problem. More and more people contacted him wanting tales of supernatural horror, to be interviewed on the blog or just demanding forever new tales of lurchers and strange, odd churches in the wilds of Yorkshire.
“Then, in the ultimate affront to his sanity, Gafford made him into that most dreadful and haunted of beings… an editor! “Clearly,” Grant thought, “the source of my pain resides with Gafford. HE is the architect of my agony. Upon him I shall centre my wrath… as soon as I finish this blog post. And then there’s that story I promised for the anthology about Medieval Clowns and those dozen new submissions calls I found this morning and the lurchers need a walk and is that the time already?
“Greydogtales is a blog that, quite frankly, has become an indispensable resource for those interested in the weird and is one that is already taking its rightful place as legendary. I owe greydogtales an unpayable debt not only for the information and knowledge it brings but for introducing me to someone who has become more than a friend. I speak, of course, of Django. I don’t know what the hell Grant does all day.”
And… breathe. In September we should have an interview with author Philip Fracassi, more on classic supernatural writers, a discussion of H P Lovecraft controversies, another chapter in Lurchers for Beginners itself, and some stunning folk horror photography. Amongst many other things. And next time we’ll announce the winners from our A Persistence of Geraniums competition…
Harrumble! It’s the Top Ten Features from two years of greydogtales, as part of our anniversary. So check out some cool features, including Fritz Leiber, H P Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and William Hope Hodgson, plus some folk who are neither dead nor white. Read the astounding plaudits of actually-alive authors Joshua M Reynolds, Brandon Barrows and Anita Stewart. See unusual weird fantasy from the past, lots more art – and the sheer excitement of trying to make sense of theosophy. It’s all here.
another wonderful piece from sebastian cabrol
No one does it like us, though there’s probably a reason for that. And a Top Ten of features may be counter-intuitive, because you may have read them already. What the heck, we’ve done it now. Plus, you still have a chance to win a free copy of A Persistence of Geraniums, the new collection from greydog himself. And for puzzled dog enthusiasts, a celebration of lurcherness comes in September, the second anniversary of our series Lurchers for Beginners.
Joshua M Reynolds
First we have a delightful offering from Joshua M Reynolds, the Master of the Black Library and all things Warhammer-ish, as well as the author of those cunning Royal Occultist adventures.
“It’s hard to describe greydogtales. It is a place for tales of madness and intrigue. The lair of the Deptford Assassin. A mouldering record of strange, spindle-legged quadrupeds, stagger-dancing down remote country-lanes beneath the light of a leprous moon. What words can describe these things to the satisfaction of the idle eye? It is as it is, always has been and must be. Indescribable. Undeniable. And utterly inescapable. Visit, and be lost. But be warned, dear reader – there are lurchers in the angles, and they are lean and a-thirst!”
— Josh Reynolds, author of Fabius Bile: Primogenitor, and The Jade Suit of Death. You can find out more about Josh if you visit his Patreon page.
Another of our occasional guests, who we’ll be interviewing in depth later this year, is author Brandon Barrows. We sent wasps, snakes and other little friends to get this out of him:
“Greydogtales has a unique place on the web in that it seeks to spotlight weird fiction specifically, recognizing it as its own genre, rather than just lumping it in with horror as many sites do. By putting that spotlight on works that might otherwise fly under the radar or get lost amidst the ranks of horror or fantasy reviews on other websites, John is doing the community, its authors and fans, a huge service. Congrats on the anniversary and here’s to many more!”
— Brandon Barrows, author of The Castle-Town Tragedy and (with artist Hugo Petrus) the illustrated Mythos graphic stories.
Some sidetracking into the historical origins of Carcosa the city, Ambrose Bierce, even a little poetry, and an interview with German artist Michael Hutter.
A shocking mixture of literary history, Fritz Leiber trivia, and notice of Swan River Press’s release of The Pale Brown Thing, the antecedent to Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness.
The most unexpected hit, really. A detailed and illustrated feature on the Edwardian artist Florence Briscoe, by James Bojaciuk of 18thWall Productions.
A greydogtales special on Lovecraft’s influences – or not – plus the Book of Dzan, and Helena Blavatsky. Were E Hoffman Price and Talbot Mundy the reincarnations of Atlantean mystics? We so love these murky trails…
A return to folk horror and the ancient corpse roads of Europe, where bodies were taken on their final journey, with extracts from the FHR book Corpse Roads.
We’ll add two more long articles for very different reasons. ‘An Appropriate Conscience – Writing Black Characters’was probably our most serious piece, and not easy to write:
Whilst the feature which we most enjoyed writing, as it wanders between parody, history and some serious points, was probably ‘The History of Women in Horror: A Man Explains’, for the 2017 Women in Horror Month.
To end with, another anniversary comment. Because we can.
Anita Stewart
Anita Stewart (A F Stewart) is a writer and poet, and also active in promoting other writers. She was with us, alongside Clarissa Johal, for our first Scary Women feature, where we asked about gender, genre and writing.
“Happy Two Year Anniversary to greydogtales, home to all kinds of delightful monsters and strange sorts, and a haven for lurchers. As an erstwhile guest and frequent reader, I can say with all sincerity this small spot on the internet is a treasure, a wondrous trove of the weird, the occult, and agreeable peculiarity. Yes, in an ever conforming world, greydogtales is a bastion of delightful madness, strange horrors and man’s best friend (that would be the dogs, not Cthulhu).”
We’ve mentioned Anita’s Horror Haiku and Other Poems here before. Until 30th September, you can also download a free copy of her Killers and Demons two book set:
Our modest extra offer – We have 3 advance pdf copies of John Linwood Grant’sA Persistence of Geraniums on offer for free. The book will be coming out soon, in print format only initially, from Electric Pentacle Press, written and designed by JLG and illustrated by Paul Boswell.
To win one, simply email the NAME of JLG’s novella, which entangles a famous fictional detective with his series Tales of the Last Edwardian, to carfanel@greydogtales.com by 1st September 2017. The winners will be picked out of a dog bowl by Django.
We thank you for your kind attention, dear listener, and assure you that our anniversary messing about is almost done. Our top ten madness is over, bar a few closing comments. A whole new programme of features on weird books, pictures and pups starts up in September…
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