R'lyeh Review 029

R'LYEH REVIEW

Issue 029

H. P. Lovecraft: Juvenalia, 1895-1905
edited by S. T. Joshi
Necronomicon Press, 1984, 40 pp. $4.95

(Reviewed by Robert M. Price)

Joshi and Michaud over at Necronomicon Press have apparently decided to give young writers a break and provide a showcase for their alleged talents. In this strange collection we are introduced to some 15-year old kid and his execrable fiction and poetry. It is like having to sit, skin-acrawling, through a violin recital by your little nephew. Who can endure it with sanity intact? And you wonder: who is this kid? Some relation of Michaud or Joshi? Why else would they print this drivel? What potential they see in him escapes me. As a writer this lad'll never amount to anything. Mark my words.

. . . huh? What's that you say? Oh, well now, that changes things considerably! It seems this is a collection of the childhood writings of H. P. Lovecraft himself! Now you tell me! As I was saying, these little gems of childish wit and insight amply display the genius that would later come to fruition in the adult works of The Master. Every page shines with that sense of adventurous expectancy that makes HPL's fiction so deservedly worshipped.

Seriously, folks, this is an amusing and impressive little sheaf of literary curiosities, sort of like looking at Lovecraft on a bear-skin rug. You can see the early roots of his interest in the classics, his love of all things English, and even his hatred of all things not English. De Triumpho Naturae, a poem written to lament the freeing of black slaves ("The savage black, the ape-resembling beast"), and an anti-Semitic cartoon and diatribe ("This man is a very avaricious and filthy Jew") show what a bigot the young Lovecraft was. In light of such evidence, how seriously can we take the claim of Lovecraftian apologists that HPL's "racialist" views were considered and sophisticated, albeit mistaken, opinions derived from the best of contemporary anthropological scholarship? Poliakov in his The Aryan Myth and Stephen Jay Gould in recent journal articles have indicated that all such "scholarship" was either after-the-fact rationalization of racist bigotry, or was subconsciously but radically warped by racist presuppositions. Lovecraft's defenders would like to forgive his biased rantlngs as if the views of fellow-bigots in his day gave him permission to hate and denigrate. But the presence of such racist venom in even his very early jottings (see also the gleeful racist hatred of "On the Creation of Niggers" in Saturnalia, Crypt of Cthulhu #21) strongly suggests that Lovecraft first imbibed the prejudice of his culture and then began to rationalize as was customary.

On a more trivial note, it is mildly interesting to see how in his little tale "The Mysterious Ship", young Howard introduces an idea that he would often use later: "At the North Pole there exists a vast continent composed of volcanic soil, a portion of which is open to explorers. It is called 'No-Mans Land'" (p. 27). Not quite as catchy a name as "Lomar" or "Hyperborea", is it?