00:00:06:06 - 00:00:09:15 Andrew Welcome to Voluminous, the letters of H.P. Lovecraft. 00:00:09:15 - 00:00:14:19 Sean In addition to classic works of Gothic horror fiction, HPL wrote thousands of fascinating letters. 00:00:14:21 - 00:00:18:22 Andrew In each episode, we'll read one and discuss it. I'm Andrew Leman, 00:00:18:22 - 00:00:22:13 Sean and I'm Sean Branney. Together, we run the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. 00:00:22:14 - 00:00:26:15 Andrew Today we are going to tackle the fourth part. And for us, the final part. 00:00:26:15 - 00:00:27:00 Sean oh yeah 00:00:27:24 - 00:00:51:11 Andrew Of the letter that Lovecraft wrote to his friend Frank Belknap Long on February 27th, 1931. We've done three parts before, and some of them have been fascinating and some of them have been upsetting. This letter's really long, and I kept going because it kept staying interesting to me. And in this fourth part, he's going to start talking about history and art. 00:00:51:18 - 00:00:54:18 Sean And enough of your wild foreshadowing. Let the people hear the letter. 00:00:54:19 - 00:01:26:13 Andrew Here it comes. We stand back. As for your artificial conception of, quote, splendid and traditional ways of life, end quote, I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealization of something which never truly existed. A conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments and situations, and which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they profess to depict. 00:01:27:06 - 00:01:53:16 Andrew There are many reasons to believe that standard literature is superficial and misleading in the extreme. It is not check very well with the actual early life clues, which we encounter through realistic history and documentary research. Literature seldom portrayed real emotions and motivations till the opening of the 20th century, so that older specimens, except in a decorative way, leave one curiously cold and unimpressed with the sense of reality. 00:01:54:05 - 00:02:19:22 Andrew There are, however, notable exceptions, most of which depart as far as possible from the conventional great tradition. In some ways, the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency and squalor, which we would find insupportable. 00:02:20:04 - 00:02:55:16 Andrew The Elizabethan age, admittedly supreme as to art, would probably alternately debase and disgust a gentleman to death. Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods and used them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stir and actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me. Only I am fully aware of it, except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow and artificial. 00:02:56:05 - 00:03:33:20 Andrew What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream world which I invented at the age of four. From picture books and the Georgian hill streets of old Providence. No, young man, your splendid traditionalism is just as meaningless to me as my abstract cosmic is or isn't this is to you. I have my own use for elements drawn from elder traditions, but do not make the error of swallowing whole streams of outmoded folkways or folkways, which in some cases seem to us pitifully tawdry and extravagant and unmotivated as we view them out of their natural, chronological and psychological settings. 00:03:34:10 - 00:04:02:23 Andrew There is something artificial and hollow and unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism. This being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy going, eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pole motor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation, bequeathing such elements as really are sound losing, such as have lost value and adding any which new conditions may make necessary. 00:04:03:13 - 00:04:37:07 Andrew What we want from life beyond animal gratification is a mixture of symbolic ego expansion, beauty, rhythm, recapture of lost moods or experience, curiosity, gratification and adventurous expectancy regarding wonders which the future may have in store. The ego expansion demand usually includes subtle transcending of the limitations of time, space and natural law, things which only fantasy can supply. This fantasy may be either religious fakery or conscious art, and I certainly prefer the latter. 00:04:37:20 - 00:05:03:06 Andrew Candidly, I think a Yog-Sothoth in whom one does not pretend to believe is less pure oil than a traditional Jehovah or Jesus or Buddha in whom one does pretend to believe. Adulthood will probably eliminate both in favor of a subtler kind of imaginative attitude toward the black unknown. I may or may not live to see such a thing, but you and little Augie Delerth will. 00:05:04:02 - 00:05:29:15 Andrew In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such. But I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate and disproportionate for these qualities mean ugliness and weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life and feelings of the past, which they claim to represent. 00:05:30:06 - 00:05:53:01 Andrew Poor little apes. They are fascinated by a glitter of sound and color which represents nothing real to them, but which they love to juggle childishly and superficially as a baby juggles its rattle. Or Gertrude Stein juggles empty words. I am not saying that your case is as extreme as all this, but no professional traditionalist can help being tortured to some extent with this brush. 00:05:53:15 - 00:06:20:04 Andrew If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different. But almost invariably, the neo traditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experiences with life and actually ignorant of the normal persons reactions toward the impinging events constituting a genuine life stream. The varied interchanges of idea will action, emotion, etc. and the relentless struggle underlying the whole. 00:06:20:14 - 00:06:47:08 Andrew All this forming a pattern vastly varied in different ages, according to geographical, intellectual, topographical, political and economic setting, hence possessing only a few elements of real permanence in conjunction with other elements dependent on transitory phenomena. For any person today to fancy, he can truly enter into the life and feelings of another period. It's really nothing but a confession of ignorance, of the depth, the nature of life and its full sense. 00:06:47:08 - 00:07:17:14 Andrew this is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century though my objective judgment knows better and realizes the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life and remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it. Hence, in the last few years, make allowances for it and do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. 00:07:18:04 - 00:07:48:15 Andrew The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, etc. etc. so different from our own that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them or enter warmly and subjectively into all phases of their esthetic expression. There are, of course, vast areas of experience and feeling in common based on physical impulse and other identical stimuli so that we cannot call all phases of elder art obsolete. 00:07:49:05 - 00:08:19:19 Andrew But once we get outside these areas, we encounter sterile ground upon which we stand as unmoved and largely uncomprehending strangers. This, of course, is most obvious in connection with the art and literature directly connected with the more secondary and derivative emotions, emotions fairly remote from physical impulse and largely conditioned by intellectual opinions and artificial modes of life. For example, you couldn't possibly duplicate your great grandfather's feelings towards such things as war. 00:08:19:22 - 00:08:45:22 Andrew Paris The U.S. Senate Sabbath observance, etc. etc., etc. Probably you could not even understand them. I doubt whether I could. Yet you fancy you can absorb the literature of his time dictated by such emotions with the same emotional receptiveness that he himself possessed. God, God, the superficiality of youth who can read the Iliad through today with any real interest or emotional response. 00:08:46:11 - 00:09:11:19 Andrew The Odyssey, on the other hand, is a far more permanent stuff and wears very well. But even The Odyssey does not begin to mean to us what it meant to Greek or Roman or even a medieval person. You know perfectly well that to us Dante is only a conjuring of powerful pictorial glimpses weighted down with prose dullness and emotional ballast is meaningless to us as a fly paper sails talk in Chinese. 00:09:12:09 - 00:09:39:21 Andrew There really is no, quote, great tradition, end quote, except as to certain elements of mannerism and approach. And even this much as a pure accident, depending on the chance persistence of certain basic social, economic and intellectual conditions. This persistence has now come to a close. We are all, as little Alfie expresses it, epic all nigh now. And to fail to recognize the fact is merely to play the ostrich. 00:09:40:11 - 00:10:02:07 Andrew When we come to analyze what you from your remote and sheltered perspective call, quote, splendid and traditional ways of life, end quote. We see only a procession of grotesque phantoms coupled with irrelevant acts and gestures, which have no power to do anything except make us feel foolish. And very largely, we find such things to be a myth and exaggeration. 00:10:02:07 - 00:10:37:19 Andrew An artificial convention in the past and today only an escape symbol for those unable to adjust themselves to the rapidly changing contemporary scene. Actually, if one forgets about self-conscious literary poses, one can individually manage to achieve a surprising degree of community with certain phases of the real, not the theatrically exploited past. What the Romanticist dreams about the past is usually hollow and unsound, and many of the things he admires have no conceivable place in contemporary life and feeling other than an ugly, awkward and intrusive one. 00:10:38:01 - 00:11:05:08 Andrew The dreamer is not philosopher enough to realize that the apparent beauty of certain things in the past lay not in their intrinsic nature, but in their relative co-location, as reckoned with reference to their envisioning scene and to the psychology of one born in that scene. Without the jarring impressions of subsequent periods, one may state almost dogmatically that the life of one of your little renaissance Degas today would appear tawdry, cheap, vulgar and essentially plebeian. 00:11:06:01 - 00:11:27:03 Andrew There is nothing of beauty as beauty exists for us. In his clownish extravagances. On the other hand, he is a rather tiresome, pathetic and ignominious figure. What he got out of life by his heavy, pure elegies was probably far less than a sensitive and observant modern gentleman can get through travel, reading, conversation in the contacts of good society. 00:11:27:21 - 00:11:54:00 Andrew I state this intrinsically. I believe that a cultivated Englishman of 1910. We concede the restless discomfort of the immediate present could get far more actual pleasure quantitatively out of life than any hysterical Mediterranean of the 15th or 16th century. The general proportions of pleasure sources would be different, but the net total would be higher as to quote, intuitive convictions regarding values. 00:11:54:12 - 00:12:26:06 Andrew Surely by this time you ought to realize that there are no unanimous intuitive convictions, except so far as accidentally created by physical instinct and similarity of experience. The deep, intuitive impulses and value feelings of yourself and myself, for example, are so widely divergent in a vast number of fields that the words good and bad, superior and inferior, noble and admirable and ignominious and despicable have almost opposite meanings in our respective vocabularies. 00:12:26:11 - 00:12:57:13 Andrew Loveman has still a third world of intuition. Morton A fourth. Kirk a fifth, leads a sixth, and so on. And good old Mac had still another. If there be occasional points of coincidence, we may easily see the effect of physical instinct and of certain strong formative influences artificially exerted in identical fashion in all cases. It amuses me to see how seriously you take the artificial value concept which differentiates betwixt Jack the Ripper, Keats, Beethoven, Plato and the mythical Christus. 00:12:57:17 - 00:13:23:07 Andrew Cosmically speaking. You exaggerate the intensity and universality of this feeling because you apparently possess it yourself and in an exaggerated degree, or rather because you confuse it with the genuine and legitimate feeling which gives objects a relative appraisal according to social value and the esthetics of tradition conformity. Of course, we would rather have Keats or Plato around the house as a guest than Jack the Ripper. 00:13:23:19 - 00:13:48:06 Andrew But I do not think there are many people under 40 now who imagine that as railed against infinity Jack and Jesus, a rat and an elephant, Confucius and a monkey, a ton of coal and an electron. Phyllis and a colonial doorway, a banana and George Santayana, Jupiter and a meteor. And Tori's and the Great Nebula in Andromeda are all impersonal and negligible. 00:13:48:06 - 00:14:17:08 Andrew Subdivisions of a sand grain whose existence or nonexistence is absolutely immaterial to the sum total of cosmic energy, except in the most infinitesimal technical way. Nobody outside the Earth knows whether any organic life has ever existed on it, and nobody outside the galaxy knows whether there is any solar system or not. We take all this for granted nowadays so that there is a faint aura of mothballs in the museum about people who get excited and rhetorical about such matters. 00:14:17:19 - 00:14:44:03 Andrew The point is wholly negligible because nobody on the earth has anything to do with cosmic totality. It is sufficient to recognize that Jack the Ripper is indeed tangibly and relatively different from Keats and Plato from the standpoint of terrestrial society and tradition conformity, this recognition being an adequate basis for genuinely intense preferential feelings which are nonetheless valid because of their lack of cosmic implications. 00:14:45:04 - 00:15:18:00 Andrew Your portrait of Grandpa Theobald is highly interesting, more so than the old man himself, and is especially notable for that unconscious self-revelation common to all biographers of distinction. For Young Belknap, you have revealed your one philosophical weakness conventional artificiality of classification to perfection in formulating in a charge of inconsistency from data, I would be the last to deny you and James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion and irrelevant instinctive emotion. 00:15:18:03 - 00:15:47:01 Andrew He's as bad as you are. For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational, subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellect. You will brief for George in days and that I freely own the vast literary superiority of the Elizabethan age and the vast scientific and philosophic superiority of Victoria's reign. 00:15:47:12 - 00:16:15:03 Andrew But do you know that that rascal simply can't keep the straight facts in his head from one month to another? The idea of a man's being able to see beyond his own emotional biases is so alien to his Orthodox Harvard training that he keeps forgetting my real attitude as often as I tell him. In one letter, I'll carefully explain the whole thing over again, and then in a couple of months, that curly headed Falstaff will be accusing me again of harboring the same biased perspective which I've just shown him. 00:16:15:05 - 00:16:37:12 Andrew I don't possess or champion. He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period, among others. An age to which random early impressions of so closely bound my emotions and sense of identity. Well, young man, that's the way with you and my Roman loyalties. I've never in my life tried to defend the personal adherence to the art life of power and integrity. 00:16:37:24 - 00:17:03:18 Andrew I freely admitted his weakness and imitative this in literature and have lamented those colossal tease and standardizing tendencies which give him so startling a similarity to the modern neo American. Time and time again, I've testified my clear belief in the intellectual and esthetic superiority of the Greek. And yet, recalling my merely personal emotions, you come forth and claim that I champion the Roman as a civilizing leader. 00:17:04:07 - 00:17:29:18 Andrew The fact is that my overpowering sense of Roman identity and patriotism in all periods anterior to the Saxon conquest of England is a phenomenon even more irrelevant and fortuitous than my parallel sense of membership in the 18th century. It is more puzzling because I have not yet traced the cause in full, whereas I have traced the cause of my Georgianism to childish picture books and old Providence Hill streets. 00:17:30:14 - 00:17:55:14 Andrew But at any rate, it is merely a juvenile psychological accident occurring prior to my eighth year. For its seven, I sported the adopted name of L Valerius Messala and tortured imaginary Christians in amphitheaters. Probably what appeals to me in the Roman is the esthetic of power for my test of human character is masculine strength, freedom, and above all things unbrokeness. 00:17:55:14 - 00:18:38:03 Andrew That life is itself an art few can deny. And in that art, I think we must admit that pattern and haughty and brokenness are the supreme elements. The Roman, though weak as a conscious artist, was himself an art factor in the height to which he raised the crucial qualities of manhood biologically as a member of the species, Homo sapiens, physically and emotionally equipped for the acid test of survival and dominance and importance in determining the flow of the historic stream, the Roman and the Teuton stand out so majestically by all the esthetic laws which concede the quality of majesty to mountains, men and monuments, that it is impossible not to thrill at their names 00:18:38:03 - 00:19:07:20 Andrew and symbols and feel that the chief joy in being a man at all is belonging to the species which has produced Romans and to Toms. Well, anyway, the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times, like everybody else in his respective way, a mere product of my background, and do not consider the values of that background as it all applicable to outsiders. 00:19:08:13 - 00:19:30:03 Andrew The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally, his. And that is what I am doing. Others, I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds and traditions, however remote from mine these may be. Wwhen I venture now and then to suggest values of a more general kind. 00:19:30:08 - 00:19:56:02 Andrew I approach the problem in an entirely different way, speaking not as old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode Island colony, but as the cosmic and impersonal HPL denizen of the invisible world Yulu Lou in the second zone of curved space, outside angled space. It is wholly possible, of course, that emotional biases get carried over, and if so, I duly apologize for the errors. 00:19:56:18 - 00:20:21:12 Andrew But before shooting, be sure that there is a real conflict involved. There is no point in pouncing on an instinctive personal bias of mine, of which I have hundreds. All of local and fortuitous origin. Unless you see me trying to put it over as a general truth or precept. If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos, or at least on this planet, then this is it. 00:20:21:24 - 00:20:49:09 Andrew Sincerity is or isn't nice. Technical perfection, harmony, coherence, consistency, symmetry. All these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy and general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, and that is why to me, one Newton or Einstein, one and Metellus Regulus in Portia's Cato or P Cornelius Scipio. 00:20:49:14 - 00:21:13:11 Andrew Seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keats's in Baudelaire's. If this be mere morality, make the most of it. I can't see that the point has any save esthetic bearing. I think that in the single quality of sincerity or truth adherence, there is involved a basal form of artistic symmetry so universal as to be potentially superior to any other. 00:21:14:07 - 00:21:48:19 Andrew Of course, all violations of this principle are not even approximately equal. The harmless personal white lie is just that. But when lying gets to involve larger units so that it actually obscures our correct perspective of the balanced forces around us, it has reached such proportions as to be intolerable. That is why I hate and despise religion. You can't seriously maintain that a child's curb stone scrawl is as significant a work of art as a painting of Rembrandt's and the silly gestures of posers and rebels bear just about the same relation to the coordinated art of living 00:21:48:19 - 00:22:10:01 Andrew as such a scrawl bears to such a painting to interpret the precious and inalienable imaginative freedom and adventurousness of the artist as the right to wear pajamas to the theater, or to turn handsprings on Boston Common is to introduce an element of falseness and be little man so gross as to constitute a real insult in the deepest sense to the esthetic faculty. 00:22:10:01 - 00:22:35:05 Andrew Every so-called esthete who makes an ass of himself in the name of art is, in truth, insulting the ethereal realities of art so flagrantly that he ought to be placard it is a traitor to beauty. No man worships the secret harmonies of nature with decently appropriate reverence till he is pushed his ugly carcass out of the limelight and settled down to project his true mental ego into the sunset ether of liberation and adventure. 00:22:35:22 - 00:22:58:23 Andrew So it is. I despise freaks because they are mockery, irrelevancies and degradations because they offer a cheap, physical, clownishness as the symbol of a poignant and delicate emotional harmony. But don't fancy. I condemn such beings. I merely despise and ridicule them. They are not offenders, merely inferiors. 00:22:59:08 - 00:23:09:03 Sean Okay, Andrew. So you stuck with this monster letter for so long as we get into the final quarter of it, then what? What about this section floated your boat? 00:23:09:03 - 00:23:32:09 Andrew Well, because in this section, I thought he was actually talking about us. Really? In some ways because he talks about people who try to enter the emotions and life of the past. And here at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, that's kind of what we do. You know, we've produced the movies and the radio shows and other things that we've done, you know, with myth often and myth, the scope. 00:23:32:09 - 00:23:51:09 Andrew And we've tried to imagine what would it have been like to be alive in the twenties and thirties with our live action role playing games? You know, for the last 30 some years, you and I and our friends have been casting our minds back to a previous time and trying to recreate it in some way. And here's Lovecraft talking about that very. 00:23:51:13 - 00:24:01:11 Andrew Practice and how stupid it is. And and he addresses it with scorn and contempt. Oh, well, I can't win them all. I just thought I mean, that's one of the 00:24:01:11 - 00:24:20:17 Andrew Reasons that I kept going on this letter, because I. Oh, now he's talking about stuff that I do. And Lovecraft sort of throughout this whole letter from beginning to end, sort of I think has a can't win don't try mentality. You know, you can't you can't possibly put yourself in the mind or the feelings of someone from the past. 00:24:20:23 - 00:24:38:02 Andrew And the implication is that therefore you should not try. And I, I don't agree with that point of view. I mean, he may be right. Maybe we can't ever maybe we're kidding ourselves to think that we can understand the 1920s or the 1930s or imagine ourselves in that time period. But that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. 00:24:38:03 - 00:25:05:16 Sean Well, absolutely. And I think that's really on a fundamental level where his argument sort of falls apart. And there seems so so much in this section and really throughout the whole letter that's kind of self-contradictory and just makes me want to hold a mirror up in front of Lovecraft's face. And, you know, when right at the start of the section, he says, you know, I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealization of something which never truly existed. 00:25:05:22 - 00:25:10:18 Sean And this for the guy who who longs for the era of Perry wigs and frock coats and. 00:25:10:19 - 00:25:15:22 Andrew But he does cop to that in this letter. He says that's the case with me, only I'm aware of it. 00:25:15:22 - 00:25:32:19 Sean Yes, because he gives himself a pass and that's what he does all the time. And he's go, Oh, but I am intellectually superior enough. The way I think about it makes it okay. But you Long oh, you're falling into the pitfalls, right. And coming at it with this just horrific level of snobbery. 00:25:32:19 - 00:25:41:03 Andrew And his his presumption that he knows what other people are thinking or feeling and that therefore he is in a position to judge what they are doing. 00:25:41:03 - 00:26:03:20 Sean And is incredibly judgmental. Is is a drag. Yeah, it is a drag. And it's in this the section has a whole lot of that particular quality that he's exonerating his own point of view and even exalting his own point of view because it's driven by, you know, his own intellect that he holds in such esteem and then is just so dismissive of both his friend Long and the rest of the world here. 00:26:03:20 - 00:26:08:18 Andrew I thought you'd like the fact that he admitted that he was wrong sometimes, but you actually find it even more annoying. 00:26:08:22 - 00:26:24:17 Sean I kind of do. I mean, there's some self-awareness. I'm glad that he's not just delusional, and I just don't go, Oh, my God, you do this all the time. Do you not realize that he does realize it? But then he writes himself this a little permission slips to say, Oh, it's okay, because I'm smarter than you are. And I just. 00:26:26:15 - 00:26:27:03 Andrew Yeah. 00:26:27:15 - 00:26:38:08 Andrew One of the most egregious pot calling the kettle black moments I found in this part was where he says, You exaggerate the intensity and universality of this feeling because you apparently possess it yourself. 00:26:39:24 - 00:26:44:19 Andrew Absolutely. If that's not what you're doing, Howard, I don't know what is. 00:26:44:19 - 00:26:47:09 Sean And he does it all the time throughout his creative life. 00:26:48:03 - 00:26:49:06 Andrew I also found is. 00:26:49:15 - 00:26:50:10 Andrew His grudging. 00:26:50:10 - 00:26:53:10 Andrew Admission that Plato would be a better houseguest than 00:26:53:10 - 00:27:00:12 Andrew Jack the Ripper. Yeah, it was pretty funny. Grudging admission. I've got to say. 00:27:01:08 - 00:27:09:15 Sean When you tell it, tell us how you really feel about Plato. Yeah, it is funny I going into this. I would never have thought that Lovecraft had a. 00:27:09:19 - 00:27:12:09 Andrew Seething contempt for Plato. Yeah. 00:27:12:24 - 00:27:14:19 Sean But, boy, he does that. 00:27:14:19 - 00:27:33:17 Andrew Section of the letter. It's. It took me by surprise in a couple of ways, but one is that he seems to sort of reverse his own position in the middle of the letter. He's, you know, normally he talks about how, you know, if you scale all these you scale Jack the Ripper in Keats and Plato against Infinity, there's no difference between them. 00:27:33:17 - 00:27:54:03 Andrew And then he goes on to say there's a difference between them, and it's a perfectly valid reason for preferring Plato to Jack the Ripper. Right. And so I was like, What? Didn't you just argue the exact opposite in the previous page? And that, again, maybe it's him writing himself a permission slip, or maybe it's just indicative of his own inherent internal contradictions. 00:27:54:03 - 00:27:54:16 Andrew I don't know. 00:27:55:00 - 00:27:57:08 Sean Yeah, he did seem to turn on a dime on that one. Yeah. 00:27:57:18 - 00:28:08:10 Andrew I also thought he was talking to us again towards later in the letter where he says, Your portrait of Grandpa Theobald is highly interesting more so than the old man himself. 00:28:08:10 - 00:28:08:18 Sean Yeah. 00:28:08:24 - 00:28:25:17 Andrew You know, we're kind of in a position now of trying to paint a portrait of Lovecraft, and it's. It gets to the art versus artist issue and it gets to the you know, trying to understand him is not to lionize him. It's trying to understand ourselves and. 00:28:26:19 - 00:28:27:00 Sean The. 00:28:27:00 - 00:28:28:10 Andrew Work that he created. 00:28:28:18 - 00:28:48:19 Sean Right? It's to give it a deeper and richer and more meaningful context. Yeah, I saw that that somebody had had posted a one star review of our show, and I'm pretty sure they didn't listen to it because it was coming back to that point of, Oh, no, not something, you know, where you guys are talking about that horrible racist again, you know, give it up. 00:28:48:19 - 00:29:10:15 Sean I'm I'm tired of it. And, you know, I think if you're if you're if you've listened to our show through part four of a very, very long Frank Belknap Long letter, you first of all. Thank you. Thank you. Indeed. You've got to be a little bit on board with us and, you know, hopefully are aware that that is in no way are we trying to give him a pass for saying, you know what, he believed was okay. 00:29:10:17 - 00:29:26:04 Sean You know, it just simply was what he believed. And if you're going to accept Shakespeare and his work, you got to accept the guy who wrote it. And if you're going to accept Howard and his work, you've got to you don't have to like it. You don't have to approve of it. You don't have to agree with it. 00:29:26:10 - 00:29:48:05 Sean And the better you can understand it, the more you can and make an informed choice of and perhaps you want to throw in the towel and say, Harrumph no more Lovecraft. I don't want any more. And perhaps you'll go, Huh? What? What an interesting, complicated guy whom I disagree with a lot, and yet I can still appreciate, you know, his his, his, his literary achievements. 00:29:48:05 - 00:30:11:22 Andrew And for me, at least a little bit in this letter, it kind of helps me do that or shows me a way to do it where he says he's talking about how long and James Ferdinand Morton can't distinguish between intellectual opinion and irrelevant instinctive emotion. Lovecraft, for himself, clearly makes a distinction between how he thinks about things and how he feels about things. 00:30:12:04 - 00:30:22:24 Andrew And maybe because he's, you know, a very messed up, repressed guy, he considers all the feelings completely irrelevant and the ideas as all that really matters. 00:30:23:00 - 00:30:24:15 Sean Oh, I think that's completely how he sees it. 00:30:24:18 - 00:30:49:20 Andrew And and so I think when he utters these things that we find so emotionally upsetting, it's because to him they're not upsetting because he he's just squashed his emotions so completely and all he cares about. He's going to say what he thinks without caring about how it makes anybody feel. Because to him, sincerity as he goes on to say later in the letter, sincerity is the most important thing. 00:30:49:20 - 00:31:03:17 Andrew To his credit, he felt the same way about writing. He wrote what he when he was writing fiction, he did it the way he thought it should be done. And he didn't care whether Farnsworth Wright was going to buy it or the readers of Weird Tales were going to like it. Of course he did. 00:31:03:17 - 00:31:05:03 Sean Care, right? Of course. 00:31:05:03 - 00:31:06:03 Andrew He did. But that's the. 00:31:06:03 - 00:31:26:16 Sean Irony is, is that he never succeeded in in trying to do it. And I did. And I completely agree with you that that was what the intent was. And to try and live this emotion free life where intellect is king But but it never is that that's not what human beings are. That's not what he is. And he may, you know, on the on the spectrum. 00:31:26:23 - 00:31:51:12 Sean And, boy, that's an interesting word with Howard, but we'll get to that another day. But on the spectrum. Yeah, okay. He's more tilted towards the, the you know, Apollonian and intellectual side of the spectrum than the, the emotional and an easy one. But still you know he's not it's not that he doesn't have an emotional life. And that emotional life reveals itself all over the place and frankly in. 00:31:51:24 - 00:31:52:14 Andrew In spite of. 00:31:52:14 - 00:32:20:06 Sean Him and in some of the vitriol and the intensity with which he expresses his feelings are not intellectual at all. They're they're driven by, you know, whatever long, whatever assertion, long made, as we'd said when we set out on this, really pushed some of Lovecraft's buttons and he comes back pushing hard on this, driven, I think not from a purely intellectual place that he would wish, but I think there's a lot of emotion fueling how Lovecraft writes this letter. 00:32:20:06 - 00:32:20:17 Sean I think it's. 00:32:20:17 - 00:32:39:05 Andrew Useful for you and me and anybody who's a fan of Lovecraft to remember the sort of thing that he says here where, you know, I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days. I feel emotionally attached to them because when I was four, I imagined this world. 00:32:39:05 - 00:32:42:02 Sean It has the Georgian life. 00:32:42:02 - 00:32:51:11 Andrew You know, he has engendered strong feelings in him, but mentally he recognizes that the Georgian age was probably terrible and he would not want to live in it. 00:32:51:11 - 00:33:01:15 Sean Right. As he says, the same about the Elizabethan age, which, you know, again, it's a it's a wonderful, furtive place for creativity and literature and stuff. But, oh, as a gentleman, I wouldn't I wouldn't want to live there. 00:33:01:15 - 00:33:34:10 Andrew And it's it's easy. Obviously, it was easy for his friends Long and Morton and it's easy for us to keep getting confused about to keep thinking that his his emotional statements and have the same weight for him as his intellectual statements because he and maybe he's kidding himself, but he doesn't think they do. It's good for us to remember his compartmentalization of emotion and intellect, because as he says in this thing, it's wholly possible that emotional biases get carried over. 00:33:34:10 - 00:33:58:16 Andrew And if so, I duly apologize for the errors. Make sure that before you shoot that, you know, I'm really saying what you think I'm saying. And that's worth as we continue to read letters which may upset us, I'm going to try to keep in mind that, you know, maybe he's just running off at the mouth. And if he had a minute to think and he did write, he obviously wrote this letter in one blah. 00:33:58:20 - 00:34:05:08 Sean Yeah, this is stream of consciousness. Now, this is I don't think there are multiple drafts of this letter. And the phrases weren't reconsidered. 00:34:05:13 - 00:34:23:04 Andrew If he went back to edit it for actual public consumption, he might well modify some of what he's saying. So it's I'm going to try to keep in mind as we read more letters that upset me, these facts that it's like, just don't shoot before asking if that's if he's really doing what you think he's doing. 00:34:23:05 - 00:34:27:19 Sean Yeah. And then it's hard to it's hard to know for sure, but I'd like everybody to give me the. 00:34:27:19 - 00:34:29:00 Andrew Benefit of that doubt. 00:34:29:22 - 00:34:32:24 Sean When I when I published the Collected emails and Andrew Leman. 00:34:33:05 - 00:34:35:18 Andrew When I write inflammatory emails that. 00:34:35:18 - 00:34:39:02 Andrew Maybe I just had a really splitting headache that day and, you know, give me a break. 00:34:39:05 - 00:35:04:04 Sean Oh, yeah. Obviously everybody's got a, you know, a spectrum of how they represent themselves and the intensity which with which with which they go after things. On the other side too, though, I don't I'm going to try and keep you in check from going too far down that path of going, oh, well, he wrote, you know, that potpourri is hellish, but he didn't mean that he just had a potpourri. 00:35:04:04 - 00:35:41:10 Sean Yes, it was potpourri. It's alleged. It's true. But one one phrase I wanted to talk about a little bit at the end to his love. Crafty. Well, let me read the sentence, then. I'll talk about Why it and why I found it challenging, he said, to interpret the precious and inalienable imaginative freedom as adventurousness of the artist and as the right to wear pajamas to the theater or turn handsprings on Boston Commons is to introduce an element of falseness and belittle meant so gross as to constitute a real insult in the deepest sense to the to the esthetic faculty. 00:35:41:10 - 00:35:45:03 Andrew I knew that's why there was a good stopping place. And I went. 00:35:45:03 - 00:35:50:07 Andrew Right past it because I wanted to get to this part because I knew it would. I knew you'd have. 00:35:50:07 - 00:35:52:14 Andrew A thought about this as someone who went to Cal Arts. 00:35:52:14 - 00:36:09:03 Sean Well, that's that's kind of it exactly as I went to Cal Arts. So I did my master's degree at Cal Arts and studied studied theater there. And if you don't know it, Cal Arts is perhaps one of the nation's most liberal, most out there, most. 00:36:10:14 - 00:36:11:13 Andrew Whack a doodle. 00:36:11:22 - 00:36:41:12 Sean Whack it all. This is a pretty fair description. There's Harvard and then there's like a doodle. And I went to whack a doodle. But my first weeks there, my mind was just like blown on a daily basis. And my mind was blown by the fact that going to this, you know, graduate school at an art institute every day I was challenged about what art itself was. 00:36:41:12 - 00:37:14:20 Sean And I came to realize, you know, I grew up my my stepmother is a professional artist. I grew up in a house with a lot of my dad was an art collector. Art was a big part of my life prior to going to graduate school. And then I it took, you know, weeks, months, years while I was there to realize how small and provincial and lame my own conception of art was when I walked in the doors of that place and living there for three years to get my degree completely changed my understanding of what art is. 00:37:14:20 - 00:37:29:08 Sean And so I read Lovecraft espousing this theory and I'm like, You should go to CalArts for three years, Howard, because I at least know, you know, he's like, oh, you know, it's it's beyond scandalous. It's an insult for an artist to wear pajamas. I'm like. 00:37:29:18 - 00:37:32:14 Andrew You should be branded a traitor to beauty. Yes. 00:37:32:14 - 00:37:51:24 Sean As says, you, you know, art is not there to serve you, Howard, and it's not there to serve you. Andrew is not there to serve me. It's not there to serve anybody. Art's job is not to make anybody happy. It's not. It's not to be beautiful. That is such. Oh, you know. Yeah. At a point in the history of. 00:37:52:07 - 00:38:21:00 Sean Of art, that was the goal. Can I render something beautiful? But I think, you know, we our art collectively across cultures has progressed to mean something more than just going. It's pretty, therefore it's good or I like it. Therefore it's good. Whether you like it or not is completely irrelevant to the value of art. And so many great pieces of art, whether it's an Ibsen play, that people are rioting outside the theater because they find it so upsetting and outrageous. 00:38:21:00 - 00:38:46:20 Sean It's the work it's not done to make you happy. It's not done to protect and glorify the status quo. Art's about breaking down the boundaries. And, you know, so when you know, I first went to a class and there was a tampon nailed to the wall, I was horrified and angry like Lovecraft. And it took me a long time to realize, yeah, that's that's valid art. 00:38:46:20 - 00:39:05:06 Sean I don't like it. I wouldn't buy it for my house. But but it's art and it's every bit as valid as. The art which I do like, in which I do find beautiful, that's just my subjective judgment. And my subjective judgment doesn't really mean squat. At the end of the day. That's my tirade on art. I don't know. 00:39:05:06 - 00:39:05:19 Sean What do you think? 00:39:06:00 - 00:39:35:14 Andrew Well, I don't disagree with you at all. I was struck by his. He says life in itself is an art. Few can deny that life itself is an art. And in that art, I think we must admit that pattern and haughty, unbroken. This are the supreme elements. And I thought I agree with the first half of that sentence, but I haughty, unbroken brokenness I don't think is the supreme element of any particular art. 00:39:35:16 - 00:39:41:13 Andrew But it got me thinking, what are the supreme elements of if life is an art, what are its supreme elements? 00:39:41:13 - 00:39:58:15 Sean Yeah, I'm not even sure I'm going to sign up for life as life is an art. Oh, no, no, I don't think so. And that was if you really stop and think about it. Art is a really difficult thing to to define. You know? It really is, because it's something where it's like, well, it's like. It's like porn. 00:39:58:15 - 00:40:16:01 Sean I know it when I see it. You know what? What is it? We all I think, have that notion of I know it when I see it. But but boy, to write a good, all encompassing definition, one of the best ones I ever heard. I have to watch all offer. And the first one is the most inclusive which is art has edges. 00:40:16:07 - 00:40:40:21 Sean Yeah, I remember. You tell me. And and which means art can't just be life. Life just isn't art, because life doesn't really have edges unless you want to call it the action. Not depends on what you mean life or being alive, but end by saying art has edges. You know, there has there's a point at which the art begins and a point at which the art stops, whether it's a smear of paint on a sidewalk or it's a poem or a performance art or whatever, the frame. 00:40:40:21 - 00:40:41:04 Andrew Around the. 00:40:41:04 - 00:41:02:22 Sean Can, a frame around the canvas or someplace where it's in game on, man, and someplace where it ends or stops and goes from there. And so that's that's a very lofty concept of what art is, but it's certainly inclusive in a way that certainly is that our tardiness is not the my preferred definition I settle on is art is the instruction guide for being a human being. 00:41:04:09 - 00:41:22:14 Sean It's what helps us understand and process what the experience of humanity itself is. And it can come in, you know, all kinds of different forms. And it may be about moody, it may be about ugliness. But both can inform our experiences and. 00:41:22:17 - 00:41:24:03 Andrew Be about what not to do. 00:41:24:07 - 00:41:44:03 Sean No, that's what I say about it. You know, it can be ugliness. It can be it can be absolutely a cautionary tale. You know, lots of, you know, bunch of Shakespeare plays that are written exactly to be that don't be like this, because look at what happens to this guy, you know. But that's that's I think, the the most satisfactory definition I've ever landed on. 00:41:44:03 - 00:41:47:00 Sean But I'm game to hear others if you kind of get together. 00:41:47:01 - 00:42:23:15 Andrew Well I'm not about to define art, but I was contemplating if life is an art, what are its supreme elements? And before haughty and brokenness, I would have positioned, you know, like creativity and and originality and generosity and sincerity. And that, I think, is one I think sincerity clearly is one. Clearly one of the reasons Lovecraft hates, you know, Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara and all the crazy people who are turning handsprings on Boston Common is because he thought they were insincere in the way they did it. 00:42:23:15 - 00:42:49:05 Andrew He thought they're making art about themselves, and art isn't supposed to be about the artist. It's supposed to be about beauty and truth and cosmic concepts. You're supposed to take yourself out of it. So I think the reason he clearly hates those guys is because he thinks that they're doing it as an act, as a pose. And that, I think, is why he hates it. 00:42:49:24 - 00:42:57:24 Sean Yeah, And I think as the recipient, he's the wrong person to be making that judgment. Right. I agree with that. 00:42:57:24 - 00:43:05:00 Andrew That's where he gets into the his presumptuousness in thinking that he knows their intention better than they do. 00:43:05:00 - 00:43:11:10 Sean Right. Right. And that's that's there's this sort of and he self-aggrandizing side of Lovecraft that's really kind of infuriated and he. 00:43:11:10 - 00:43:13:22 Andrew Falls into it all the time about all kinds of. 00:43:13:22 - 00:43:37:02 Sean Things. And because he makes these grand assertions and and and like I said, he makes little carve outs for himself. But but it's okay because I'm Nordic. Oh, it's okay because I can intellectually understand deep time. It's okay because, you know, I felt bad for long. I got back to the I think we talked about this and I'm one of the first two sections about how long I might have felt in reading this letter. 00:43:37:02 - 00:43:57:14 Sean And and I don't know if he could just go, oh, you know, that's that's Howard And our good point. Oh, I don't agree with that, you know, and just let it roll off his back because there is such a dominant versus submissive bearing in it here where it's all, you know, Howard saying I am right and you are wrong, I am wise and you are childish. 00:43:57:14 - 00:44:00:01 Sean I am when he is. And it's a lot of that. 00:44:00:03 - 00:44:21:24 Andrew And he shouts about, Oh, youth, youth. And I think Love Lovecraft is so committed to his his own pose of being the grandpa figure that he forgets he is only 40 something, right? He forgets that he is the sequestered, clueless person that he's complaining about. 00:44:21:24 - 00:44:25:05 Sean Doesn't get out in the world, is not sophisticated, not cosmopolitan. 00:44:25:05 - 00:44:35:22 Andrew He forgets that he is guilty of all the same things that he is blaming other people for. So, you know, you can't blame us for for thinking You mean it. 00:44:36:01 - 00:44:37:13 Andrew When you say what you say. 00:44:37:13 - 00:44:53:24 Sean Well, and that's what it was earlier when you were trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I agree. I'm not ill disposed towards him. But yet at some point on some of these issues, we have to say, boy, you you're you're saying it again. You're making these assertions again. We got to start feeling that, okay, this is a reflection of how you really feel. 00:44:53:24 - 00:44:54:11 Sean I did. 00:44:55:08 - 00:45:00:18 Andrew I don't know if this is changing the subject or continuing it, but I did find it hilarious to think of seven year old Lovecraft. 00:45:01:04 - 00:45:12:21 Andrew Playing Let's Let's torture the Christians in the amphitheater is good. Good times. At the age of seven, he's he's playing Romans verses Christian. I just thought that was kind of hilarious. Yeah. 00:45:12:21 - 00:45:17:08 Sean Little Bobby is no longer allowed to come over to Howard's house to play after. 00:45:17:08 - 00:45:17:24 Andrew What are you guys going to? 00:45:18:01 - 00:45:18:18 Sean What do you guys plan? 00:45:18:18 - 00:45:22:16 Andrew Gladiators, no doubt. 00:45:22:16 - 00:45:27:15 Sean Well, maybe that's a merciful note to to finally put the Frank Belknap long letter to bore. 00:45:27:23 - 00:45:50:22 Andrew For those of you who have listened to all four of these, thank you very much. This letter we've only covered actually about half of it. This letter goes on and on and on. And there's lots more interesting stuff in it. So if if we haven't already completely turned you off this letter, it's in selected letters three, and there's more. 00:45:50:22 - 00:46:03:09 Andrew There's more. If you keep reading, you'll finally get to the part where he mentions Jack Dempsey, which was the reason I started reading this letter in the first place. Our thanks today to Arkham House for making this letter available in Selected Letters three. 00:46:03:17 - 00:46:07:06 Sean You can get a copy from them at ArkhamHouse.com 00:46:07:18 - 00:46:09:18 Andrew I'm your obedient servant, Andrew Leman. 00:46:09:18 - 00:46:13:02 Sean and cordially and respectfully yours. Sean Branney. 00:46:13:05 - 00:46:18:14 Andrew You've been listening and how to voluminous the letters of H.P. Lovecraft. 00:46:18:18 - 00:46:22:20 Sean If you actually have enjoyed the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to post a review. 00:46:23:04 - 00:46:26:09 Andrew And come back and listen to more. We're going to we're going to ease up now for. 00:46:26:10 - 00:46:28:11 Sean Shorter letter, shorter letters, Shorter letters. 00:46:29:14 - 00:46:32:09 Andrew Come back and listen to more of voluminous. 00:46:32:09 - 00:47:03:18 Sean Brought to you by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Please come and check out all we have to offer at HPLHS.com