A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard 1930-1932 (eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke; Hippocampus Press, 2017). In my review of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories I mentioned his two-volume collected correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, for which I was of course not going to shell out the $60.
Great follow up, the Conan piece is your finest so far. Noteworthy that Houellebecq, the best critic of modern France, copped so much of his sound from Lovecraft and is among his more insightful readers.
Thank you for this review... I might now have to pick up a 60$ book (or hope the library network finds a copy).
I have read and re-read Howard's canon 2-3 times in the past year alone. They make great "I need something to read for 30 minutes before I can pass out" fodder, with a great style and prose that is enjoyable even when you know the next line before you read it.* Howard taking his own life was a great loss; one can only imagine what his magnum opus could have been. I don't really feel that anyone since has captured his voice or aesthetic sense quite so well.
*By contrast, "Children of Time" is taking me a long time to get through. Lots of really great ideas, but no characters that make me think "Oh, I wonder what they will do next!"
Wow you really are a fan. I've read almost all of his work, but there's a bit of Conan, some more of Kane, and a lot of Kull that I don't understand why anyone reads. By the ends of their lives Howard and Lovecraft were very close in ability, but Howard seemed to improve with time much more than Lovecraft did.
And of course the obvious conclusion from this is, indeed, that his death was a great literary loss. But there's more than that, because Howard's suicide undermines the themes and messages of his work. His death revealed Howard was never a strong, resolute masculine force, able to endure anything until the struggle finally killed him, but rather a sensitive writer who didn't know how to go on after the loss of his mother. People often dismiss Lovecraft as a shivering coward, and Robert Howard even painted him that way in Pigeons from Hell - but Lovecraft was the one who went down fighting.
I think Kane works if, and possibly only if, you read them in order. Unlike Conan, the stories really need the continuity. Kull just feels like dollar store Conan to me, likewise with the one framed as a guy remembering things from past prehistoric memories. El Borak stories are good, though the boxing stories and eldritch horror stuff I don't care for. Eldritch horror just doesn't click for me at all, no idea why, so your mileage may vary.
I don't know enough about Howard's situation to really make a judgement on how his suicide interacts with the themes and messages of his work, or really about his life in general. I can sympathize with him in some ways, feeling like a permanent outsider and essentially losing interest in the world will put you in some serious depression, and what exactly is one supposed to fight? I think that might be one of the aspects that Howard struggles with that you see in his writing: Conan is kind of a bad guy off camera. He raids and steals and takes from other living people, violently, just not while you are watching; he is practically an exemplar of civilization while the reader is observing. One wonders if that isn't a bit of Howard's frustration with finding appreciation and value for what he considers valuable, wishing he could just fight and take what he could but wanting to be a good person.
I don't know, just speculating here. It does seem true that certain types of people are better or worse build for different times and places, and it kind of feels like Howard was a bad mismatch for his. Had he been born 30 years later he might have done a lot better, but then he might have been an entirely different person, so who knows.
I guess the Psmiths have notifications turned off, because I never realized you wrote this, and now who knows if you'll find this response! But:
I agree Kane works better in order than Conan.
REH's horror wasn't usually well done; if that's the horror you've read, you haven't really read the good stuff. Lovecraftian horror is extremely quiet, a world all about mood. But if you have read it and still don't like it, well... it's no surprise that some people don't like stories that have no plot and no memorable characters!
I don't have a sense of Conan living a double life. I get the impression that he has the same brutal masculine honor leading pirates and raiders off the page as on. Conan usually avoids exploiting women (but "Hey she was really really asking for it" is an excuse, as in Frost Giant's Daughter), he doesn't betray his allies (but delivers swift vengeance against anyone who betrays him, as in God in the Bowl) and he uses trickery and force to line his pockets from the treasure hoards of anyone he doesn't know. As he aged Conan did tend towards more settled and responsible behavior, but overall he was always pretty unscrupulous, and his only loyalties were to his friends and dependants.
Conan was a mismatch for his time and place, so he left. Robert Howard was too soft and sentimental to let things go.
I think I am just not a horror person. The only horror thing I have enjoyed as horror is the movie Event Horizon way back in the day. I don't know if I am just to aware of the work itself to get immersed in the story and empathize fully, or it feels too divorced from my sense of how the world works to trigger anything, or what. The closest I get is that sense of crushing dread and despair from reading Soviet era Russian novels, or Kafka type stuff. I am pretty sure it is me, not the works themselves :)
I think the thing with Conan's double life is that you never see him doing the bad things, it always is off screen as it were. He is Amra who raids and coast of Kush, engaging in piracy and slave trading, but only off screen. We never see him coming up along side a merchant vessel, demanding all their goods, then killing everyone aboard if they don't comply. We don't see him ordering the burning of villages and capture of their people. He hooks up with Belit after his own ship is attacked by the corsairs, and it is said that he does corsair things with them, but we only actually see him treasure hunting in a demon haunted city.
Likewise with the one about the island with the ebony giants who put people into a well that turns them to little wargaming figs. He is a pirate, but the only pirate like thing we see him doing is getting in a fight with the captain (who is clearly a right bastard and has it coming) and promising the crew they are going back to better pirating waters after the adventure is over.
Similarly as a chieftain of Kozaks (spelling here is almost certainly off... my Kindle is out of batteries) we don't see him razing villages of the Hykanians or engaging in piracy on the Sea of Velat. We are told he did and will make the Hyrkanians howl, which as described seems to be wrecking the lives of lots of villagers who are not really to blame for the generalized Hykanian prickishness. We don't see it happen, however.
We are told his mercenary life involved pillaging and raiding, woo hoo spoils of war stuff... but we always see the aftermath, never the events themselves.
What do we see?
Well, with regards to women, he actually treats them pretty well. Often he is a contrast to the cruel and depraved behavior of civilized men. He might be a little handsy and overly forward, but we never see him raping someone on screen, or even implying that he does between cuts, despite having all the opportunity ever. Women in his company are extremely safe, a point often brought up as the reason they decide they want to get into his loin cloth.
We see him protecting random strangers, too. Obviously hot women, sure, but also old peasant women. He goes out of his way to save (Zenoba? The one with the wolf) just because she had been one of his subjects being attacked by invaders, after he had been deposed.
In terms of his other behaviors, we do see him trying to steal from evil wizards (e.g. Tower of the Elephant) or kill them (the one with Thak) but it is made very clear that they are evil wizards. Otherwise he mostly steals from ancient tombs or dead cities; we don't see him mugging people or raiding caravans on screen. When he is violent it is almost entirely in the context of war or other people's behavior, in ways that are contextually without moral fault (brawls over insults and honor not being an issue for most of human history). When he breaks the rules of civilization on screen, it is as often as not the rules of our civilization, not entirely the rules of the civilization he is in. When he is clashing with the civilization he is in it is almost always in ways we moderns would find morally proper (well, some of us anyway.)
Howard is not uniquely doing something special here, I should point out. This is always the problem with the "pirate hero" type characters: they rather gloss over what pirates actually do for a living. Conan is not a good person if all his behaviors are taken as a whole (although his time as king pushes in the other direction) but he is pretty unfailingly heroic on screen, never doing something unjustifiable in front of us. When Conan is on screen it is always clear that he is the good guy, and at the very least those impacted by him deserved a nemesis like him.
El Borak is a good contrast here, as he is basically "Conan the WW1 era American adventurer in Afghanistan", only he is never described doing questionable things off screen. He never described as a bandit or pirate off screen, but always is defending people and seeking peace, just sometimes through superior firepower.
Another contrast, by another author, would be Flashman. He knows he's a scoundrel, we are told he's a scoundrel, and he acts like a scoundrel on screen. He has romantic adventures (also, "romantic" adventures) but when he is being a decent person it is just because that is the norm of how he was brought up; if Flashman is short money and steals a waitresses tip off the tables of a restaurant, we could believe it easily. It is a little hard to imagine Conan doing that on screen, but it is implied or directly stated he does worse off screen.
(Without thinking about it too much, Jack Sparrow might be a good example to contrast with Conan as well. We do see Jack do bad things on screen, to people who don't deserve it, such that we are comfortable that he is doing what he is said to do off screen as well.)
It occurs to me just now that Conan is almost the male version of the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope, like in "Pretty Woman". We are merely told Julia Robert's character is a hooker, but if we ignore that and just look at what she is like on screen, that's not a hooker. I have thought about this for about 3 seconds on a sleep deprived brain, so that might be a terrible point :D
1. I think there is a simple synthesis of both Lovecraft & Howard, an which incidentally presents in my view the best of humanities virtues: The Pioneer. It's the person who was raised in civilization, who brings civilization, but who inevitably grows bored and finds new spaces to conquer. He is never satisfied, in fact by design can never be satisfied. This can take many forms; The purest form of building a colony somewhere nowhere, but scientists, entrepreneurs even revolutionaries against a degenerated civilisation can qualify.
2. The pro-immigration argument put forth here, about America-3 vs America-2, was never very persuasive to me. It feels like one barbarian invader saying to the other: "Well, we killed the romans and took over, so why shouldn't we let ourselves get killed in turn?" As a non-american I'm on neither side of the debate, but if someone likes a society, it's perfectly reasonable to defend it, even if it was build upon a formerly beaten other society. If anything, it's a cautionary tale, pointing out that Lovecraft & Howard were correct, they did get beaten and replaced.
Lovecraft lived for some time in Red Hook Brooklyn, which at that time was an industrial slum full of immigrants. He was in horror of them, and even wrote a story titled "The Monsters of Red Hook".
I found his cosmic horror stories interesting but his writing style puerile. Interesting that his letters are highly literate.
Later in life Lovecraft himself mourned in one of his letters that writing for the pulps had bastardized his style somewhat. Still, I don't think it's for his style that many people read HPL (ST Joshi excepted--he mustered up a defense, not entirely convincing, that HPL's style was a triumph of Oriental style in the old rhetorical classification.)
Very nice! This is one of my favorites of your posts, Jane.
> Who even remembers the names of the people in Lovecraft’s best story?
I wouldn't rank Colour Out of Space among his highest. (See our ranking here https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-hp-lovecraft ) Colour is definitely one of his better works, but what about the Lovecraft stories Robert Howard would have likely rated as most worth rereading, like Shadow Over Innsmouth, or Horror in the Museum, both of which included an actual, physical, life-or-death struggle for survival?
Granted, sword and sorcery and Lovecraftian horror are different genres, but over the years they proved to be surprisingly miscible, considering the frequency with which some nameless horror appeared in the Hyborean Age. I'll grant these inclusions weren't always successful, but the problem, I really think, is that Howard wanted his protagonists to be too strong for horror to really take root. Meanwhile, Lovecraft generally didn't try much to include action in his stories, but the result was almost invariably improved whenever he did.
Although the outcomes may be the same, the struggling, blundering, passionate insect vainly striving is a better horror story than the same insect trapped in a jar and decaying into nothing.
> there are vast swathes of Americans for whom America-1
> is what Rome was to Lovecraft. Maybe it would have reassured him if he knew.
This is more likely true of Robert Howard than Lovecraft, particularly in his earlier and more ethnically motivated phases as an "arch reactionary Tory." This is something I understand very well, because I empathyze with Lovecraft's feeling that America-0 was America at its best. That feeling leads very naturally to an understanding that the essence of America-1 is revealed by the way it grew into America-2. It wasn't pushed, wasn't dragged, wasn't shoved or forced into it; the seeds were already there in the geography, the values, and the bullets those Yanks flung at their English cousins. Nor do I think America-3 can really be a surprise to anyone who knew America-2, though Lovecraft would concur that America-3 is quite livable, so long as you don't mind the soulless nihilism. I only wish the Whigs could have understood *this* is what they were really fighting for.
The present immigration battle is really about illegal immigration. There are still hard limits on legal immigration, which is a necessity in the age of jet travel.
The pro-open borders advocates want to be seen as pushing an inspirational message, but always slip into a repulsive self-hatred. A favorite argument is that the very founding of the country was a crime, and everyone is actually an illegal immigrant, because we're all living on stolen land. Truly amazing that didn't carry the day last November.
"...the saving the pennies and living on bacon-rinds, the use of every inch of land, every blade of grass, every hogs bristle..."
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I remember when many Vietnamese people sought asylum in the US, and American fishermen in the Gulf were complaining that the newcomers were able to undercut them in price because the Vietnamese lived on the scraps left over after they had sold off the shrimp they'd caught.
As an Irish Italian (Shocking given the pfp, I know), I really struggle with being an America-1 Stan. (Truthfully a Britain stan who consider's America-1 the best of their export).
I think the old stock were essentially correct that the catholics were going to destroy functional democracy by flooding it with patronage networks and in-group bias, that they weren't sufficiently WEIRD enough.
I do think a lot of the Mongrels did eventually become WEIRD and America-1 loving in a couple generations, but I think these people are overly represented on the internet, and more of the old school way of doing things persisted in our Northeastern urban cores for a long time.
Funnily enough, The Sopranos seemed to mark the end of Italians being non-WEIRD and able to operate coherently, but by the time they left the scene a bunch of new non-WEIRD immigrant groups (including internal immigrant groups) had flooded the scene and filled that ecological niche, keeping our cities dysfunctional.
Anyway, I don't know how to land this ramble. I do think a combination of immigration restriction, taking assimilation seriously + time will WEIRDify a lot more of our nation back to something more English, but I'm not sure those conditions will persist long enough to see the process complete.
I always wonder as a practical matter how Howard researched all this stuff. Did small Texas towns in the twenties all have well-stocked libraries? Was he constantly sending away for books? Would be interesting to know some of the titles he was actually reading.
I think you could fairly argue that the 20s clampdown on immigration gave America time to assimilate a lot of its new citizens and incorporate them into a national culture. Hard to say what the country would look like if it had kept the borders open for the entire 20th century.
He did send away for books, you had to know the publisher so that you could write to them and ask for a catalogue, and he did travel to major cities often enough that he could have looked at bookstores if he had the money. But he’s also constantly bemoaning his own ignorance. There’s a very sweet letter at one point where he’s asked some question about Germanic linguistics and Lovecraft writes back several pages explaining it all with little hand drawn charts.
That's adorable. These guys were world class posters. The Weird Tales letter circle was really the Something Awful of its day - the secret origin of all popular culture.
Great follow up, the Conan piece is your finest so far. Noteworthy that Houellebecq, the best critic of modern France, copped so much of his sound from Lovecraft and is among his more insightful readers.
Thank you for this review... I might now have to pick up a 60$ book (or hope the library network finds a copy).
I have read and re-read Howard's canon 2-3 times in the past year alone. They make great "I need something to read for 30 minutes before I can pass out" fodder, with a great style and prose that is enjoyable even when you know the next line before you read it.* Howard taking his own life was a great loss; one can only imagine what his magnum opus could have been. I don't really feel that anyone since has captured his voice or aesthetic sense quite so well.
*By contrast, "Children of Time" is taking me a long time to get through. Lots of really great ideas, but no characters that make me think "Oh, I wonder what they will do next!"
Wow you really are a fan. I've read almost all of his work, but there's a bit of Conan, some more of Kane, and a lot of Kull that I don't understand why anyone reads. By the ends of their lives Howard and Lovecraft were very close in ability, but Howard seemed to improve with time much more than Lovecraft did.
And of course the obvious conclusion from this is, indeed, that his death was a great literary loss. But there's more than that, because Howard's suicide undermines the themes and messages of his work. His death revealed Howard was never a strong, resolute masculine force, able to endure anything until the struggle finally killed him, but rather a sensitive writer who didn't know how to go on after the loss of his mother. People often dismiss Lovecraft as a shivering coward, and Robert Howard even painted him that way in Pigeons from Hell - but Lovecraft was the one who went down fighting.
I think Kane works if, and possibly only if, you read them in order. Unlike Conan, the stories really need the continuity. Kull just feels like dollar store Conan to me, likewise with the one framed as a guy remembering things from past prehistoric memories. El Borak stories are good, though the boxing stories and eldritch horror stuff I don't care for. Eldritch horror just doesn't click for me at all, no idea why, so your mileage may vary.
I don't know enough about Howard's situation to really make a judgement on how his suicide interacts with the themes and messages of his work, or really about his life in general. I can sympathize with him in some ways, feeling like a permanent outsider and essentially losing interest in the world will put you in some serious depression, and what exactly is one supposed to fight? I think that might be one of the aspects that Howard struggles with that you see in his writing: Conan is kind of a bad guy off camera. He raids and steals and takes from other living people, violently, just not while you are watching; he is practically an exemplar of civilization while the reader is observing. One wonders if that isn't a bit of Howard's frustration with finding appreciation and value for what he considers valuable, wishing he could just fight and take what he could but wanting to be a good person.
I don't know, just speculating here. It does seem true that certain types of people are better or worse build for different times and places, and it kind of feels like Howard was a bad mismatch for his. Had he been born 30 years later he might have done a lot better, but then he might have been an entirely different person, so who knows.
I guess the Psmiths have notifications turned off, because I never realized you wrote this, and now who knows if you'll find this response! But:
I agree Kane works better in order than Conan.
REH's horror wasn't usually well done; if that's the horror you've read, you haven't really read the good stuff. Lovecraftian horror is extremely quiet, a world all about mood. But if you have read it and still don't like it, well... it's no surprise that some people don't like stories that have no plot and no memorable characters!
I don't have a sense of Conan living a double life. I get the impression that he has the same brutal masculine honor leading pirates and raiders off the page as on. Conan usually avoids exploiting women (but "Hey she was really really asking for it" is an excuse, as in Frost Giant's Daughter), he doesn't betray his allies (but delivers swift vengeance against anyone who betrays him, as in God in the Bowl) and he uses trickery and force to line his pockets from the treasure hoards of anyone he doesn't know. As he aged Conan did tend towards more settled and responsible behavior, but overall he was always pretty unscrupulous, and his only loyalties were to his friends and dependants.
Conan was a mismatch for his time and place, so he left. Robert Howard was too soft and sentimental to let things go.
No worries :)
I think I am just not a horror person. The only horror thing I have enjoyed as horror is the movie Event Horizon way back in the day. I don't know if I am just to aware of the work itself to get immersed in the story and empathize fully, or it feels too divorced from my sense of how the world works to trigger anything, or what. The closest I get is that sense of crushing dread and despair from reading Soviet era Russian novels, or Kafka type stuff. I am pretty sure it is me, not the works themselves :)
I think the thing with Conan's double life is that you never see him doing the bad things, it always is off screen as it were. He is Amra who raids and coast of Kush, engaging in piracy and slave trading, but only off screen. We never see him coming up along side a merchant vessel, demanding all their goods, then killing everyone aboard if they don't comply. We don't see him ordering the burning of villages and capture of their people. He hooks up with Belit after his own ship is attacked by the corsairs, and it is said that he does corsair things with them, but we only actually see him treasure hunting in a demon haunted city.
Likewise with the one about the island with the ebony giants who put people into a well that turns them to little wargaming figs. He is a pirate, but the only pirate like thing we see him doing is getting in a fight with the captain (who is clearly a right bastard and has it coming) and promising the crew they are going back to better pirating waters after the adventure is over.
Similarly as a chieftain of Kozaks (spelling here is almost certainly off... my Kindle is out of batteries) we don't see him razing villages of the Hykanians or engaging in piracy on the Sea of Velat. We are told he did and will make the Hyrkanians howl, which as described seems to be wrecking the lives of lots of villagers who are not really to blame for the generalized Hykanian prickishness. We don't see it happen, however.
We are told his mercenary life involved pillaging and raiding, woo hoo spoils of war stuff... but we always see the aftermath, never the events themselves.
What do we see?
Well, with regards to women, he actually treats them pretty well. Often he is a contrast to the cruel and depraved behavior of civilized men. He might be a little handsy and overly forward, but we never see him raping someone on screen, or even implying that he does between cuts, despite having all the opportunity ever. Women in his company are extremely safe, a point often brought up as the reason they decide they want to get into his loin cloth.
We see him protecting random strangers, too. Obviously hot women, sure, but also old peasant women. He goes out of his way to save (Zenoba? The one with the wolf) just because she had been one of his subjects being attacked by invaders, after he had been deposed.
In terms of his other behaviors, we do see him trying to steal from evil wizards (e.g. Tower of the Elephant) or kill them (the one with Thak) but it is made very clear that they are evil wizards. Otherwise he mostly steals from ancient tombs or dead cities; we don't see him mugging people or raiding caravans on screen. When he is violent it is almost entirely in the context of war or other people's behavior, in ways that are contextually without moral fault (brawls over insults and honor not being an issue for most of human history). When he breaks the rules of civilization on screen, it is as often as not the rules of our civilization, not entirely the rules of the civilization he is in. When he is clashing with the civilization he is in it is almost always in ways we moderns would find morally proper (well, some of us anyway.)
Howard is not uniquely doing something special here, I should point out. This is always the problem with the "pirate hero" type characters: they rather gloss over what pirates actually do for a living. Conan is not a good person if all his behaviors are taken as a whole (although his time as king pushes in the other direction) but he is pretty unfailingly heroic on screen, never doing something unjustifiable in front of us. When Conan is on screen it is always clear that he is the good guy, and at the very least those impacted by him deserved a nemesis like him.
El Borak is a good contrast here, as he is basically "Conan the WW1 era American adventurer in Afghanistan", only he is never described doing questionable things off screen. He never described as a bandit or pirate off screen, but always is defending people and seeking peace, just sometimes through superior firepower.
Another contrast, by another author, would be Flashman. He knows he's a scoundrel, we are told he's a scoundrel, and he acts like a scoundrel on screen. He has romantic adventures (also, "romantic" adventures) but when he is being a decent person it is just because that is the norm of how he was brought up; if Flashman is short money and steals a waitresses tip off the tables of a restaurant, we could believe it easily. It is a little hard to imagine Conan doing that on screen, but it is implied or directly stated he does worse off screen.
(Without thinking about it too much, Jack Sparrow might be a good example to contrast with Conan as well. We do see Jack do bad things on screen, to people who don't deserve it, such that we are comfortable that he is doing what he is said to do off screen as well.)
It occurs to me just now that Conan is almost the male version of the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope, like in "Pretty Woman". We are merely told Julia Robert's character is a hooker, but if we ignore that and just look at what she is like on screen, that's not a hooker. I have thought about this for about 3 seconds on a sleep deprived brain, so that might be a terrible point :D
Two notes:
1. I think there is a simple synthesis of both Lovecraft & Howard, an which incidentally presents in my view the best of humanities virtues: The Pioneer. It's the person who was raised in civilization, who brings civilization, but who inevitably grows bored and finds new spaces to conquer. He is never satisfied, in fact by design can never be satisfied. This can take many forms; The purest form of building a colony somewhere nowhere, but scientists, entrepreneurs even revolutionaries against a degenerated civilisation can qualify.
2. The pro-immigration argument put forth here, about America-3 vs America-2, was never very persuasive to me. It feels like one barbarian invader saying to the other: "Well, we killed the romans and took over, so why shouldn't we let ourselves get killed in turn?" As a non-american I'm on neither side of the debate, but if someone likes a society, it's perfectly reasonable to defend it, even if it was build upon a formerly beaten other society. If anything, it's a cautionary tale, pointing out that Lovecraft & Howard were correct, they did get beaten and replaced.
The psmith's never disappoint!
Lovecraft lived for some time in Red Hook Brooklyn, which at that time was an industrial slum full of immigrants. He was in horror of them, and even wrote a story titled "The Monsters of Red Hook".
I found his cosmic horror stories interesting but his writing style puerile. Interesting that his letters are highly literate.
Later in life Lovecraft himself mourned in one of his letters that writing for the pulps had bastardized his style somewhat. Still, I don't think it's for his style that many people read HPL (ST Joshi excepted--he mustered up a defense, not entirely convincing, that HPL's style was a triumph of Oriental style in the old rhetorical classification.)
Very nice! This is one of my favorites of your posts, Jane.
> Who even remembers the names of the people in Lovecraft’s best story?
I wouldn't rank Colour Out of Space among his highest. (See our ranking here https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-hp-lovecraft ) Colour is definitely one of his better works, but what about the Lovecraft stories Robert Howard would have likely rated as most worth rereading, like Shadow Over Innsmouth, or Horror in the Museum, both of which included an actual, physical, life-or-death struggle for survival?
Granted, sword and sorcery and Lovecraftian horror are different genres, but over the years they proved to be surprisingly miscible, considering the frequency with which some nameless horror appeared in the Hyborean Age. I'll grant these inclusions weren't always successful, but the problem, I really think, is that Howard wanted his protagonists to be too strong for horror to really take root. Meanwhile, Lovecraft generally didn't try much to include action in his stories, but the result was almost invariably improved whenever he did.
Although the outcomes may be the same, the struggling, blundering, passionate insect vainly striving is a better horror story than the same insect trapped in a jar and decaying into nothing.
> there are vast swathes of Americans for whom America-1
> is what Rome was to Lovecraft. Maybe it would have reassured him if he knew.
This is more likely true of Robert Howard than Lovecraft, particularly in his earlier and more ethnically motivated phases as an "arch reactionary Tory." This is something I understand very well, because I empathyze with Lovecraft's feeling that America-0 was America at its best. That feeling leads very naturally to an understanding that the essence of America-1 is revealed by the way it grew into America-2. It wasn't pushed, wasn't dragged, wasn't shoved or forced into it; the seeds were already there in the geography, the values, and the bullets those Yanks flung at their English cousins. Nor do I think America-3 can really be a surprise to anyone who knew America-2, though Lovecraft would concur that America-3 is quite livable, so long as you don't mind the soulless nihilism. I only wish the Whigs could have understood *this* is what they were really fighting for.
The present immigration battle is really about illegal immigration. There are still hard limits on legal immigration, which is a necessity in the age of jet travel.
The pro-open borders advocates want to be seen as pushing an inspirational message, but always slip into a repulsive self-hatred. A favorite argument is that the very founding of the country was a crime, and everyone is actually an illegal immigrant, because we're all living on stolen land. Truly amazing that didn't carry the day last November.
"...the saving the pennies and living on bacon-rinds, the use of every inch of land, every blade of grass, every hogs bristle..."
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I remember when many Vietnamese people sought asylum in the US, and American fishermen in the Gulf were complaining that the newcomers were able to undercut them in price because the Vietnamese lived on the scraps left over after they had sold off the shrimp they'd caught.
As an Irish Italian (Shocking given the pfp, I know), I really struggle with being an America-1 Stan. (Truthfully a Britain stan who consider's America-1 the best of their export).
I think the old stock were essentially correct that the catholics were going to destroy functional democracy by flooding it with patronage networks and in-group bias, that they weren't sufficiently WEIRD enough.
I do think a lot of the Mongrels did eventually become WEIRD and America-1 loving in a couple generations, but I think these people are overly represented on the internet, and more of the old school way of doing things persisted in our Northeastern urban cores for a long time.
Funnily enough, The Sopranos seemed to mark the end of Italians being non-WEIRD and able to operate coherently, but by the time they left the scene a bunch of new non-WEIRD immigrant groups (including internal immigrant groups) had flooded the scene and filled that ecological niche, keeping our cities dysfunctional.
Anyway, I don't know how to land this ramble. I do think a combination of immigration restriction, taking assimilation seriously + time will WEIRDify a lot more of our nation back to something more English, but I'm not sure those conditions will persist long enough to see the process complete.
I always wonder as a practical matter how Howard researched all this stuff. Did small Texas towns in the twenties all have well-stocked libraries? Was he constantly sending away for books? Would be interesting to know some of the titles he was actually reading.
I think you could fairly argue that the 20s clampdown on immigration gave America time to assimilate a lot of its new citizens and incorporate them into a national culture. Hard to say what the country would look like if it had kept the borders open for the entire 20th century.
He did send away for books, you had to know the publisher so that you could write to them and ask for a catalogue, and he did travel to major cities often enough that he could have looked at bookstores if he had the money. But he’s also constantly bemoaning his own ignorance. There’s a very sweet letter at one point where he’s asked some question about Germanic linguistics and Lovecraft writes back several pages explaining it all with little hand drawn charts.
That's adorable. These guys were world class posters. The Weird Tales letter circle was really the Something Awful of its day - the secret origin of all popular culture.