Day 2 saw some of the best writing that I've seen so far in Lovecraft, but also some of the worst. Read on, dear reader, if you dare!The day's reading started with the piece that intrigued me the most, that being Memory. Memory is a prose poem, and I loved it so much that I have recorded a reading of it.
As much as I like reading things, I found an absolutely brilliant recording of it on YouTube. Do give it a listen.
This was some of Lovecraft's first writing that really made me sit up and pay attention to him. It's a short piece, only a page long. But, the mood evoked, the imagery, it's all so perfect. It also ties into one of my favorite themes in literature: the impermanence of man. It helps that I had taught Ozymandias earlier in the day, my favorite poem on the topic. In case you're more of an audio person, here is Bryan Cranston performing a reading of it for the show Breaking Bad.
I love the image in the poem, of the fallen statue proclaiming eternal glory, but the only thing that remains of the civilization or society is sand, the desert reclaiming what man had built.
For Lovecraft, it's not just the Earth that will be here after we're gone. It is also Man. But, our existence is so fleeting, so ultimately non-important, that the immortal Daemon of the Valley knows nothing of us, except our name, and that only because Man rhymes with Than. It's a gothic twist to the whole motif, and it works brilliantly.
While I'm gushing about Lovecraft, let's also talk about "The Cats of Unthar" which is the first story of Lovecraft's that made me audibly gasp. Cats is a delightful tale that begins with a person thinking about the city of Unthar, in which it is forbidden to kill a cat. Turns out, this is because while under the spell of a mysterious traveler, the cats in the town did some sort of ritualistic killing and eating of a couple that killed cats for fun. The story is kind of cute and at times funny, right until the townspeople go to this couple's house and find their skeletons. Lovecraft turns the entire story on its head in a matter of sentences. Cats was one of his favorites, and its one of mine as well, in my very limited amount of reading (I'm 90 pages into the anthology).
Other musings: I really enjoyed "The Terrible Old Man". In the story, three young people are going to go beat the location of a treasure out of an old person. One of them serves as watch and hears, "hideous screams" from inside the house. of course, the Terrible Old Man is something not quite a man and the three robbers get more than they bargained for. More on this story later.
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" was pretty good, in which the being encountered is so vile that Lovecraft only refers to it as a thing, and you get the sense that the narrator feels like if he were to describe it in anyway, it might call it.
Madness Meter: Mainly from "The Statement of Randolph Carter" in which the narrator kind of goes mad/refuses to answer the police's questions about the disappearance of Harley Warren as account of keeping some thing beneath the Earth. Not many people go mad in this section, honestly.
Is that racist? I wonder if, when compiling an anthology of Lovecraft's works, if it isn't tempting to try and clean it up, or omit some works. Clearly, someone who edits and writes an introduction for an anthology, like S.T. Joshi has done, loves the works and wants other readers to love it. Full credit to Joshi to be very upfront in his introduction to "The Street". Joshi writes, "Lovecraft's own tale is a somewhat xenophobic allegory about the overrunning of America by seditious immigrants, and therefore does not rank his output."
(Aside: I was curious about Joshi, as his introduction to the book said nothing of Lovecraft's racism and the above is kind of putting it mildly about The Street. He has a blog on his site, and I found an entry from November 2016 where he describes Donald Trump as a, "vile, despicable, ignorant, narcissistic, racist/misogynistic/xenophobe." The title of the post is "The bad guys won". Combine that with the fact that he is a native of India, and it it is safe to assume that he does not share Lovecraft's racial philosophies.)
So, The Street, I would say goes well beyond "somewhat xenophobic". It's downright racist. I read the titular Street (always capitalized) as a stand-in for America. It's populated by good, hard working people. And then, well..."Then came days of evil, when many who had known The Street of old knew it no more, and many knew it, who had not known it before. And those who came were never as those who went away; for their accents were coarse and strident, and their mien and faces unpleasing." These new people are so bad, the trees on The Street die, and nothing is the same.
In case you didn't pick up on the fact that Lovecraft is right there with Tucker Carlson in stating that diversity is not our strength, "Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death-blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins; even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in The Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed day of blood, flame, and crime."
Yeah....
You know how I said I would talk more on "The Terrible Old Man"? The three robbers are named Ricci, Cznaek, and Silva. Yeah, they are robbers, but Lovecraft goes out of his way to say that they are, "...not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions..."
And here is where Lovecraft really makes you feel kind of icky for liking it, because the story is brilliant. The turn is great, the payoff is great, and in a strange sense the story is funny in a, "they had it coming" kind of way. But, then you remember that Lovecraft made them immigrants, probably the same immigrants that are now living on The Street, and that he probably took joy in killing off these three characters and he wants you to take joy in their demise as well.
At least Lovecraft wants you to have sympathy for Juan Romero in "The Transition of Juan Romero" even though he's an unkempt Mexican" and is "Ignorant and dirty, he was home amongst the other brown-skinned Mexicans." He still befalls a tragedy and the narrator comments at the end that it was "a terrible one indeed."
I often tell my students when analyzing literature to keep in mind that an author has total control of their work. If the curtains are blue, they're probably blue for a reason. If the three robbers that get killed are immigrants, they're immigrants for a reason. If Lovecraft is adding in unnecessary details about a character, he's doing it for a reason. He wants you to at least acknowledge that position, and maybe even agree with you.
I would imagine for Joshi, there's a temptation in the anthology to skip over "The Street" or to maybe take out the anti-Mexican lines, or even the line about how the three robbers are "of alien stock". Edit it, sanitize it. Because, you get to The Street on page 65 of an over 1,000 page anthology. The Terrible Old Man is on page 81. These are among the first stories a reader will come to, and you probably wouldn't be surprised if a reader put down the book after that.
But, as tempting as that might be, I think it is right to leave the stories in tact and to give us everything. It is far worse to try and cover up Lovecraft's racism, to pretend it doesn't exist, than to expose people to it. At the end of the day, a person's thoughts on race probably won't be decided by a long-dead fiction writer. It is better to take his work, the good and the bad, and to see what we can learn from it, good and bad.
Up next: The Temple, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family, Celephais, From Beyond, Nyarlathotep, The Picture in the House, Ex Oblivione, Sweet Ermengarde.
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