A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

One hopes, however, that Clark did not have any influence on the only surviving poem by Lovecraft between Poemata Minora and the several poems written in 1912: ‘De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature over Northern Ignorance’ (July 1905). This poem, dedicated to William Benjamin Smith, author of The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905), is the first explicitly racist document Lovecraft ever produced; but it was not to be the last. In twenty-four lines Lovecraft paraphrases several central arguments out of Smith’s book: that the Civil War was a tragic mistake; that freeing blacks and granting them civil and political rights is folly; and that in so doing the abolitionists have actually ensured the extinction of the black race in America. How will that occur? The argument expressed in the poem is a little cryptic, and cannot be understood without recourse to Smith’s book. Smith maintains that the inherent biological inferiority of blacks, their physiological and psychological weaknesses, will cause them to perish over time. This allows Smith to conclude that the blacks will simply wither and die. All that can be said in defence of ‘De Triumpho Naturae’ is that it is a little less virulent than Smith.

The whole issue of Lovecraft’s racism is one I shall have to treat throughout this book. It is not likely that at the age of fifteen Lovecraft had formulated clear views on the matter of race, and his attitudes were surely influenced by his environment and upbringing. Recall Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s hallucinations regarding a ‘negro’ who was molesting his wife; it is conceivable that he could have passed on his prejudice against blacks even to his two-yearold son. Lovecraft’s most virulently prejudiced letters were written in the 1920s to his aunt Lillian, who in all likelihood shared his sentiments, as probably did most of the other members of his family.

Lovecraft himself supplies a highly illuminating account of his early views on the subject when he notes his reaction to entering Hope Street High School in 1904:

But Hope Street is near enough to the ‘North End’ to have a considerable Jewish attendance. It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly and schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid and their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semite before I had been at Hope Street many days.³⁰

Lovecraft appears to make that last utterance with some pride. This whole passage is considerably embarrassing to those who wish to exculpate Lovecraft on the ground that he never took any direct actions against the racial or ethnic groups he despised but merely confined his remarks to paper.

‘De Triumpho Naturae’ appears to be an isolated example of this ugly strain in Lovecraft’s early thought and writing; in other regards he continued to pursue abstract intellectual endeavour. A more significant literary product of 1905—one for which Franklin Chase Clark probably provided impetus and guidance—was A Manual of Roman Antiquities. This work very likely gave Lovecraft much-needed practice in sustained prose composition; certainly his prose needed work, if ‘The Mysterious Ship’ was the best he could do in 1902. Something remarkable certainly seems to have happened in the three years subsequent to the writing of ‘The Mysterious Ship’, and it is highly unfortunate that we have no tales from this period. We accordingly find ourselves wholly unprepared for the surprising competence and maturity of the tale entitled ‘The Beast in the Cave’.

The first draft of this tale was written prior to the move from 454 Angell Street in the spring of 1904, and the finished version dates to 21 April 1905. Lovecraft reports having spent ‘days of boning at the library’³¹ (i.e., the Providence Public Library) in researching the locale of the tale, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. It would take Lovecraft quite some time to learn the wisdom of basing a tale’s locale on first-hand, rather than second-hand, information.

‘The Beast in the Cave’ deals with a man who, lost in Mammoth Cave, comes upon a creature whom he initially takes to be an ape but who proves to be a man who has been lost in the cave for years. The tale is admirably well told and suspenseful, although not many will have failed to guess the conclusion. In spite of Lovecraft’s later dismissal of it as ‘ineffably pompous and Johnsonese’,³² ‘The Beast in the Cave’ is a remarkable story for a fourteen-year-old, and represents a quantum leap over the crudeness of ‘The Mysterious Ship’. Lovecraft is right to declare that in it ‘I first wrote a story worth reading’.³³