00:00:05:22 - 00:00:09:07 Sean Welcome to Voluminous the letters of H.P. Lovecraft. 00:00:09:09 - 00:00:15:06 Andrew In addition to classic works of gothic horror fiction, HPL wrote thousands of fascinating letters. 00:00:15:07 - 00:00:18:18 Sean In each episode, we'll read and discuss one of them. I'm Sean Branney. 00:00:18:19 - 00:00:23:18 Andrew And I'm Andrew Leman. Together, we run the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. 00:00:23:21 - 00:00:31:24 Sean For today's letter, we're going to dive into part two of a letter that Lovecraft wrote to his friend Robert E. Howard on the 8th of June 1932. 00:00:32:22 - 00:00:41:24 Andrew Part one was upsetting, and we had to prepare ourselves to discuss some really hard stuff. Part two is even worse 00:00:41:24 - 00:00:50:17 Sean and quite a bit worse. So if you're uncomfortable with the themes of racism and the language that goes with it, you might want to give this episode a miss. 00:00:50:18 - 00:00:52:02 Andrew Yeah, I wouldn't blame you. 00:00:52:11 - 00:00:56:03 Sean On the other hand, there is a bunch of interesting stuff in the episode. Absolutely in that game for taking it on 00:00:56:03 - 00:01:02:11 Andrew It's kind of what it's kind of the point of of this enterprise. Absolutely. 00:01:02:13 - 00:01:04:12 Sean If you've got it in, you stick with us. Yeah. 00:01:04:17 - 00:01:08:06 Andrew Thanks. Okay, Sean, let's hear the second part of this letter. 00:01:08:07 - 00:01:31:19 Sean Here we go. Speculations on historic might have been certainly interesting in the extreme. And I imagine you are largely right about the probable effect of a mongol conquest of the Western world today. The basically Mongol stocks, which, of course, after much admixture are classed as white, are the Finns whose Mongol heritage is residual and not a matter of conquest. 00:01:32:04 - 00:01:55:23 Sean The Magyars of Hungary and the Turks, the Finns and the Magyars have done pretty well in the matter of civilization. But the Turks, in spite of Mustafa Kemal, remain to prove their capacity for Europeanization. Yes, Alexandria was thoroughly Greek to the last. That is, till the Muslim invasion of the seventh century, and was indisputably the successor of Athens as the cultural center of the Hellenistic world. 00:01:56:10 - 00:02:26:19 Sean In the Hellenistic era, Athens itself was out of the running, except as a center of rhetorical scholarship. And Antioch was a soft, decadent place. Never a serious contender for cultural honors. The one possible rival of Alexander was Pergamon on the coast of Asia minor, which developed a marvelous culture under the Italian sovereigns. Ptolemy Philadelphus was so concerned over the rivalry of Pergamon that he for be the exportation of papyrus, thither thinking to cripple the literary growth of the rival in a basic material way. 00:02:27:09 - 00:02:49:04 Sean The proof of means, however, got around this difficulty by using sheepskin for writing so that to this day their name survives in an almost unrecognizable corrupted form in the word parchment. Syracuse had a high Greek culture, but remained subordinate to Alexandria. Many Syracuse and men of science and letters moving to the great Ptolemy capital when they became famous. 00:02:49:14 - 00:03:15:18 Sean The Alexandrian era was really a great age, although it was, of course, critical and scholarly rather than creative. The Arabs, although they seemed to destroy this mellow culture, really absorbed a lot of it and transmitted it to us across those dark ages in which we ourselves had relapsed largely into ignorant barbarism. As for the cracked and ubiquitous OLSSEN, Clark Ashton Smith has been hearing from him now. 00:03:16:02 - 00:03:38:18 Sean He is fairly frothing at the mouth over what he considers Smith's disrespectful treatment of vampires, who he argues are the saviors of the world because they take away the blood which forms the death of us all. Obviously, the poor fellow's epistle admits of no reply. All one can do is let him keep on writing, which doubtless relieves his agitated and disordered emotions. 00:03:39:05 - 00:04:05:10 Sean Now, this fellow Lumley, on the other hand, is a really fascinating character, in a way a sort of thwarted poet. It is very hard to tell where his sense of fact begins to give way to imaginative embroidery, but I think he usually enlarges on some actual nucleus. He has, I imagine, really knocked about the world quite a bit, hence his dreams of visiting Nepal's darkest Africa, the interior of China, and so on. 00:04:05:16 - 00:04:35:12 Sean I fancy there is some old fellow corresponding to his idealized figure of the Oriental, ancient, perhaps aged and talkative, a Chinese laundry man, or perhaps some swami of the sort now found in increasing numbers wherever the field of fattest cult organization seems promising. Providence, for example, has several of these suave Eastern ascetics nowadays. Lumley is naturally in touch with all sorts of freak cults from Rose, accretions to philosophers. 00:04:35:18 - 00:05:07:20 Sean I surely hope he will finish his city of dim faces for anything written commercially from the pure self-expression motive is a welcome rarity these days. There is surely, as you say, a tremendous pathos in the case of those who clutch at unreality as compensation for inadequate or unkind, genial realities. The fortunate man is he who can take his fantasy lightly, getting a certain amount of kick from it, yet never actually believing in it, and thus being immune from the possibility of devastating delusion. 00:05:08:20 - 00:05:34:16 Sean Your remarks on Southwestern Cloud and Sky effects interest me exceedingly, and I know that you must appreciate such things to the full both their weirdly beautiful and their menacingly makkar examples. Sandstorms are something of which I have always read, yet I have never witnessed. They must have a majesty and a terror of their own. As I may learn someday firsthand, if I am able to keep on with my present expanding travel program. 00:05:35:19 - 00:06:01:19 Sean Too bad the magazine field is getting curtailed, but that's the universal story and Depression days. I hope weird Tales will be able to carry on. It ought to, if any weird magazine does. For it is the first and most deeply entrenched of all the periodicals in its field. A discreetly abridged Necronomicon black book or a book of Ibadan might be quite a thing if one had the energy and inspiration to go all out at just the right way. 00:06:02:01 - 00:06:33:21 Sean Put me down for a copy. If there was ever a fresh edition of unaussprechliche kulte. Certainly the recent Hawaiian Affair shows a most singular, a lowering of racial morale on the part of local American officialdom. In fact, I have heard it stated that the Hawaiian Islands are developing a kind of soft, easy going, laissez faire American type prone to accept all sorts of exotic conditions complacently and more resentful of Washington oversight than of internal disorder of even the gravest sort. 00:06:34:05 - 00:06:58:20 Sean If this is so, then the only logical government for that island territory is a strict naval or military administration with orders coming from the mainland. I don't think Oriental interests actually control things for the bulk of money power is centered in large American fruit interests, but the oriental population predominates and lacks. Officials like to cater to it for the sake of popularity and easy management. 00:06:59:04 - 00:07:20:24 Sean Surely the situation is repugnant enough to any American of the older school, and I doubt if the present incident could be paralleled in continental America despite all the undeniable softening everywhere observable. Of course, in a Japanese war, Hawaii would be the second objective of the enemy, the Philippines being the first that the vast horde of Japanese Hawaiians would aid their ancestors 00:07:20:24 - 00:07:53:15 Sean country is almost beyond dispute, and I imagine that American military authorities would take extreme precautions with them. The moment such a conflict became really imminent. As usual, your observations on the Southwest and its people interested me extremely. The occasional decadence of the pioneer stock, which, you know, too has its parallel everywhere in the U.S., especially in Rhode Island, which as early as 1905, it was stated by an historian that the rural population of some of the Western townships were lapsing into the poor white state. In the East 00:07:53:16 - 00:08:18:00 Sean this apparent decadence does not so much imply a decay of the biological stock as it implies a sifting with the poorer elements, unfortunately predominating on the original soil of the sounder mainstream lives elsewhere in cities or in the West. Undeniably, the New England old stock has become almost exclusively urban, except when wealth sends it back to the soil on summer estates. 00:08:18:11 - 00:08:41:00 Sean What is left on the farms, with a few happy exceptions everywhere and with many exceptions in northern New England, is a distinctly shiftless and inferior strain. When the urban trend began around the 1850s, it was always the more alert and competent who went to the city and founded urban families, while the weaker brothers stayed behind and bred increasingly decadent posterity. 00:08:41:11 - 00:09:04:22 Sean Then, when the foreigners began to invade the countryside, the natives doom was sealed. French, Canadians, Poles Italians can extract from the soil by virtue of their peasant heritage and low standard of living a livelihood beyond the power of New Englanders to obtain. So everything is slowly passing into their hands. But just the same it is a mistake to say that the old Yankee stock has gone to seed. 00:09:05:01 - 00:09:37:18 Sean It hasn't, but it has gone to the city and to the west. And it's new habitants will be found just as sound as ever still displaying many of the especial aptitudes for which it has always been traditionally distinguished. Too bad so many of the poorer whites have drifted into the Southwest. Their biological heritage probably anticipates their advent to this continent, for they seem to represent the London jail scouring sent over as indentured servants and later liberated on the land when black labor became universal. 00:09:38:04 - 00:09:58:06 Sean We had some of these types in New England, especially a lot sent over to Boston around 1640. They form the subject of considerable lugubrious correspondence between the governors of Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay. Your mention of Pretty boy floyld both surprised and interested me since I did not know that any of the old time desperadoes were left nowadays. 00:09:58:12 - 00:10:21:12 Sean Such gentry have obvious enough faults, yet even so, they show up very favorably beside the modern product. The slinking urban gangster of South Italian derivation that has usurped the title of gunmen. It is curious to see how the zones of physical violence and nonviolence shade into one another as the West and East meet in the east,+ as I have said. 00:10:21:15 - 00:10:49:06 Sean Anglo-Saxons hardly know what physical conflict is like. They are bred to certain inhibitions of order which prove really effective so that the occasional infractions always seem startling in their crudity and savagery. Basically, this is the result of the triumph of the urban upper class ideal of good manners and discipline made possible by the fact that the native rough and ready element is in a minority being supplanted by foreigners in the North and Negros in the south. 00:10:49:19 - 00:11:19:07 Sean The instinctive code which has survived, therefore, is that of the city and the manor house, not that of the frontier. There has been a return to the ancestral European attitude, the attitude of an old and settled civilization rather than that of a new country. Personal differences are generally marked merely by severed relations, and of course, the provocations for such differences are infinitely lessened under a settled social order with a deep seated and valid code of manners. 00:11:19:17 - 00:11:45:00 Sean Unceremonious violence, far from winning approval here, is almost a cause for ostracism among gentlemen, although of course, the challenge to a formal duel served as a safety valve until about 1840 or 1850. Sometimes I am half inclined to regret the total disappearance of the duels, since the lack of an organized outlet for violated feelings often works much psychological harm and leads to indirect sneaking types of revenge. 00:11:45:14 - 00:12:08:10 Sean But of course, certain exceptions to the rule of nonviolence do exist here. Extreme types of insult always call for a well-directed fist blow, although the use of any but nature's weapons would be frowned upon. And naturally, no man is expected to receive a physical blow without replying vigorously in kind. In general, however, violence and the use of weapons are left to the foreigner in the cast. 00:12:09:08 - 00:12:33:08 Sean Now it is interesting to see where this code begins to change and give way to the frontier a code in which lightning quick struggle of the old Homeric order has a place. In general, I think that the third zone of settlement, the region populated from around 1770 onward, is the First district where going westward one finds a disposition to the frontier methods on the part of the better grade native population. 00:12:33:17 - 00:12:59:19 Sean But in the northern part of this zone, this tendency has been obliterated through the intensive Europeanization brought about by commercial prosperity. You won't find the primitive spirit in western New York states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or northern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. But you will in southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois And in Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi And possibly Alabama and western Georgia. 00:13:00:00 - 00:13:23:24 Sean Even in the zone, though, there is still no early Arian Battle spirit to compare with that of the Southwest. Still, the frontier trend is unmistakable. In Natchez, I met a civil engineer from Kentucky who spoke of the degree of physical violence to which he is accustomed in various Anglo-Saxon milieu and who regarded himself as exceptional because he always goes unarmed. 00:13:23:24 - 00:13:50:14 Sean And he is probably a very good representative of the transitional type, a type whose pioneer instincts of direct physical struggle with nature and enemies are not yet subconsciously obliterated by security and the codes of settled civilization. We of the East have probably lost something of the obsolescence of the already combative instinct. This obsolescence admirably fitted us for the law abiding conditions of the 19th century Atlantic seaboard. 00:13:50:22 - 00:14:15:22 Sean But it counts against us when we are suddenly faced by primitive menaces, such as that presented by Italian racketeering. It would also count against us in the case of a communist uprising. However, it would be less of a social drawback if our social system were really as mature as that of the old world. For in England, the enforcement of law is so relentless and effective as to cover almost any possible situation. 00:14:16:05 - 00:14:45:06 Sean What a drama there is in this constant struggle of two groups of instincts, the egoistic and individual and the diffusive and social. The dramatic quality is especially brought out when one single racial cultural group like the Anglo-Saxon is spread out so widely and diversely that its members are divided between different zones of instincts. In New York a couple of weeks ago, Long took me to see a cinema which displayed the Western psychology of violence very vividly. 00:14:45:12 - 00:15:06:12 Sean A film called "Law and Order" with Walter Houston in the leading role. I wondered how authentic a real Westerner would find it, and finally decided that it was probably not an exaggeration, melodramatic, though it seemed at the given time and place. The career of that Pennsylvania Irishman and of the oil country, he certainly teams with both drama and pathos. 00:15:07:03 - 00:15:34:20 Sean The pair of paragraph fiend also must have been an interesting specimen. I agree with you that most cases of human disintegration are the result of gradual chance incidents. Little things acting on a more or less weak hereditary fiber rather than the product of sudden and overwhelming disasters. As for the chances of mishap, as very graphically outlined in one of your paragraphs, I am inclined to think that you overstress the picture as force of adverse faced just a trifle. 00:15:35:04 - 00:15:59:20 Sean Actually, nature is supremely impersonal. The cosmos is neither a for nor against the tiny and momentary accident of cold organic life and the still tinier and more momentary accident called mankind. What happens to a man is simply the result of chance. His environment is perfectly neutral and amiss, neither to harm nor to help him. The environment does not take man and his needs into consideration at all. 00:16:00:00 - 00:16:23:19 Sean It is wholly man's own outlook, how well he can fit himself into the general unchangeable environment, and how much he can change the immediate details of the environment to suit his needs more closely. Turning to your illustration, For every man who stubs his toe on a single rock in a ten acre tract at night, there are a dozen or two men who cross the same tract under similar conditions without stubbing their toes at all. 00:16:24:06 - 00:16:47:01 Sean There are hundreds of weak spots in the ice frozen rivers where no one happens to be injured. And the man who falls in at last may have narrowly escaped a dozen times before with a chance of 17 roads and only one wrong one. The vast majority of travelers will indeed get a right road when, according to the laws of chance, some poor devil actually does take the wrong road out of 17 00:16:47:06 - 00:17:09:00 Sean He naturally remembers and emphasizes the fact for it is always the exceptional which sticks in our consciousness. The incident of the signboard, which you cite, would seem externally to argue some malignant ruling power. But as a matter of fact, these occasional coincidences hardly count as evidence. That sign would have fallen just the same if no natty stranger had been walking under it. 00:17:09:04 - 00:17:31:11 Sean There are thousands of times when objects fall with no one under them, and thousands of times when they don't fall with the people under them. Once in a while, a rare combination of falling and a person beneath will occur but no general law is reducible from this. Such cases are extremely exceptional, their very rarity being an indication of their lack of significance. 00:17:32:04 - 00:18:02:13 Sean The incident of your boyhood fight is extremely interesting psychologically. There would seem to be, but little doubt that your anomalous and unexpected defeat was wholly due to the divided state of your mind. Your acute consciousness of the audience and your deep subconscious desire to make a good impression upon it. This distracting element unquestionably sapped away something of the complete single minded devotion to the immediate fight issue, which generally brings victory to the combatant. 00:18:03:01 - 00:18:29:16 Sean All of you was not in the fight, but it must have been an exasperating event for you nonetheless. Sorry, the other boy met such an untimely end. Your observations on the unreliability of the human senses confirm a principle long pointed out by historians and folklorist. As a matter of fact, it is only with great difficulty and through a large amount of comparison and coordination that we are able to get any sort of dependable picture of the external world which stretches around us. 00:18:30:00 - 00:18:57:08 Sean The moment we rely on one man's evidence, however bona fide, we are lost. The best illustration of this sort of thing is the vast body of perfectly honest testimony in behalf of a phenomenon collected by serious students like Chevrolet and Flammarion. On its face, this testimony regarding haunted houses, premonitions of death, supernatural visitations, etc., etc., would be more than enough to establish the occult as truth of science. 00:18:57:13 - 00:19:28:11 Sean Yet we know that it does nothing of the kind among conservative scholars. As a matter of fact, each soberly related incident involves some basic error of perception or some inventive magnification in the course of narration and repetition so that any one of them ultimately boils down either to a misrepresentation or a misinterpretation of something which did occur, or to an unconscious explanation of a folklore pattern involving the serious assertion of something which never occurred. 00:19:28:22 - 00:19:55:24 Sean But there are many who cannot and will not take this unreliability of the senses into account. Among such stubborn persons is our youthful colleague August W. Derleth, who persistently believes in telepathy and allied phenomena on evidence which no scientifically minded thinker could accept for even a moment. As for Wandrei is weird novel Dead Titan's weakened. It was finished some time ago and I read it before departing on my trip. 00:19:56:10 - 00:20:15:11 Sean It is really powerful and excellent, especially in its later chapters, but I doubt the chances of publication are very good. Wandrei has submitted it to several publishers with only negative results. This is just as bad a time in the book world as it is in the magazine world. Yes, there must be a good deal of fascination in the Minnesota milieu. 00:20:15:12 - 00:20:45:03 Sean although Saint Paul and Minneapolis are probably too metropolitan to be very colorful, that whole Northwestern region has a definite atmosphere all its own, so far as I can judge from the outside with Scandinavian influences always perceptible outside the larger towns. Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana. But beginning with Idaho, another regional culture, more purely Anglo-Saxon, seems to be in. the Pacific northwestern culture, which centers in Washington and Oregon. 00:20:45:12 - 00:21:08:18 Sean I used to hear a good deal about Idaho at second hand because my maternal grandfather, with whom I lived, was a president and treasurer of the Hawaii Land and Irrigation Company, which had a dam on the snake River and dealt extensively in irrigated Idaho fruit lands. He often visited the company's holdings in Idaho and used to bring back specimens of minerals, etc., which made me feel very close to that distant realm. 00:21:09:06 - 00:21:32:19 Sean Hope your rains have by this time, abated. I've had marvelous luck with weather during the strip street, sunshine till the day before yesterday and even then the occasional rains didn't wet me because of the almost universally arcade and sidewalks of New Orleans vieux carré. Glad that the increased cultivation of land is ridding Texas of its worst sandstorms. Yet they certainly must have been stupendously impressive phenomenon in their heyday. 00:21:33:00 - 00:21:55:14 Sean Your description of one is a masterpiece of vividness. Sorry, your health has been giving you so much trouble and hope you can somehow manage to get more exercise and outdoor air despite commercial exigencies. Can't you do more of your writing in the open as I do? I've probably mentioned it before that no fine summer afternoon ever finds me under a roof. 00:21:55:19 - 00:22:16:03 Sean Current work and reading all go into a black leatherette bag and accompany me to whatever neighboring woodland retreat I choose. Likewise, when I'm away, I always choose some picturesque park or other outdoor spot to do my reading and writing. Here in New Orleans, as I mentioned before, my headquarters is ancient Jackson Square, where I am at the present moment. 00:22:16:23 - 00:22:37:02 Sean But as for health, I'm only just on my feet again myself. I was slowly recovering from my April cold when I hit New York, but there the unheeded condition of Long's apartment house gave me a hell of a relapse. I used 33 handkerchiefs in the course of only a few days and could not smell or taste a thing from May 23 until three days ago. 00:22:37:22 - 00:22:58:14 Sean All my southward trip, enjoyable as it was, was made under the most distressing nasal and bronchial conditions with a steady headache accompaniment. But the warmth of New Orleans is taking the venom out of me, and I do feel better each day. About quotations I am no authority at all, but I have an impression that copyrighted matter requires permission. 00:22:58:17 - 00:23:24:01 Sean If the extract is of any substantial length, I don't think that a line or two as a motto would require such a formality. Yet here again, I can't be absolutely sure if stuff is copyrighted. You may be sure that the proprietor of the copyright will be designated wherever the substantial extract occurs. Absence of such information would imply that the material is not copyrighted and that you are free to use it. 00:23:24:15 - 00:23:43:15 Sean I never heard of the American Fiction Guild, but would be interested to know what it's like. Yes, but Dwyer's Brooklynites, his real poetry have a source. It is the only thing that ever made me able to see Brooklyn in a favorable light. I hope to see Sowers of Thunder sooner or later when I get home. And so it goes. 00:23:43:23 - 00:24:01:15 Sean Wish I could piece out my trip and get into the Lone Star State. But financial limitations are adamant. Best wishes and hope the summer will bring you perfect health. Yours most sincerely. HPL. 00:24:02:06 - 00:24:11:15 Andrew Sean, are you. Are you ever let me pick back up again? Of course. Of course. Thank you. Thank you for bringing this one to our attention. These two. 00:24:12:07 - 00:24:42:01 Sean Well, the two of them are the world's worst pair of anthropologists. And that's. That's in both. And I read a number of Howard letters and and, you know, obviously, we've read a lot of Lovecraft letters, and they are they're the worst frickin anthropologists in the world because they have this innate need to classify people and go, oh, you know, your your Mongol, you're a maggie are your blah, you're there and in this just pure I'll need to classify. 00:24:42:04 - 00:24:55:09 Sean And then you got to make a hierarchy and who's always going to come out on top me me these pure I a little twits of self-aggrandizing and doing it in the name of science, which are so vexing. 00:24:55:09 - 00:24:56:24 Andrew For Lovecraft, who's a guy who. 00:24:57:09 - 00:25:22:20 Sean Loves and cherishes science so much to buy in to the worst, most stupid hokum Science. . Yeah, you know, and just take it hook, line and sinker to to self-aggrandizing him and his race. And of course, yeah, it's a prevailing academic trend. I mean, he's not alone in doing it. It is part of the early as 20th century, and it did lead to, you know, World War Two. 00:25:22:20 - 00:25:25:05 Sean And we're so, you know, it's a problematic thing. 00:25:25:15 - 00:25:48:19 Andrew There was a little phrase I circled on at this stage of the letter where he talks about they're talking about how Alexandria remained Greek and stuff. And and Lovecraft says the Arabs, although they seem to destroy the smell of culture, really absorbed a lot of it and transmitted it to us across those dark ages in which we ourselves had relapsed largely into ignorant barbarism. 00:25:48:24 - 00:26:12:12 Andrew He you know, he he's talking about a culture that's been gone for millennia as a we as, you know, we ourselves like he considers himself to be part of that thing that's been gone for a very long time. And that's part of, I think, how come he and Howard both get wrapped up in this classification of things because they consider themselves to be part of an ancient culture that. 00:26:12:13 - 00:26:15:07 Sean Oh, they absolutely do. Yeah. And it's and the best. 00:26:15:07 - 00:26:25:03 Andrew One and the best one. And it's like it, it's a it's a strange way of thinking to me. I've never thought of myself that way. And it's hard to understand people who think of themselves that way. 00:26:25:03 - 00:27:01:05 Sean Well, and I think I think you know, the second half of the 20th century a dispelled a lot of the bad anthropology of the first half, a lot of the just plain self-aggrandizing hokum notions of ostensibly what was ostensibly science. Right. Is going okay, there's like phrenology. Like phrenology. Exactly. There's no meaningful basis in it whatsoever. We got to let go of that and realize that that making these social hierarchies based on skull size or brain volume or tooth height or jaw length or whatever is just hogwash. 00:27:01:05 - 00:27:06:15 Sean Unfortunately, fortunately, science managed to do that. Yeah, before the time. And these guys. 00:27:06:15 - 00:27:09:24 Andrew Yeah, we should talk about the Massie affair. 00:27:10:05 - 00:27:18:09 Sean The Massie affair. We've got to talk about the massive debt because that was the biggest rabbit hole I fell into in this letter. And it was absolutely fascinating. 00:27:19:02 - 00:27:23:08 Andrew Because it to me relates directly to the racism and bad anthropology. 00:27:23:08 - 00:27:50:19 Sean Of that. Yeah. And it really, in a lot of ways, the massive fair is a good lens through which for us as modern people to see the world in which these guys are living because clearly their, their opinions are, are very intense and passionate and shared by the bulk of the people in the United States and this is another one where this kind of anthropological history. 00:27:51:01 - 00:27:53:05 Sean Daria. Yeah. Whips into. 00:27:54:00 - 00:27:55:19 Andrew Fatal consequences. Yeah. 00:27:55:20 - 00:28:11:12 Sean Crime novel. And it becomes this this crazy thing. And people hop on board. They hop on board the self-aggrandizing side of the argument instead of actually paying any attention to the facts or thinking through. 00:28:11:12 - 00:28:22:03 Andrew And it's a classic, you know, trial by media situation where they're all reacting to very preliminary reports in the press that do not reflect what was actually happening. Right. Well. 00:28:23:01 - 00:28:26:19 Sean Before reading this, at first they brought up the Hawaiian thing. I didn't know what they're talking about. 00:28:26:19 - 00:28:27:13 Andrew I didn't know either. 00:28:27:14 - 00:28:35:01 Sean Oh, did you know about the Massie affair? Okay. I didn't either. I felt good. I was like, Oh, Andrew's going to know all about this. He probably wrote something about it in college. But no. 00:28:35:14 - 00:28:39:12 Andrew No, but it was like. Like you. It was a dark rabbit hole to go down. 00:28:39:13 - 00:28:48:22 Sean Yeah. So the Massie affair unfolds something like this. I'll try and sum it up. Let me know if I'm leaving out the important parts. But in 19, let's. 00:28:48:22 - 00:29:05:11 Andrew Just to back up for a second. Yeah. The Massie Fair. He in the letter Lovecraft says the recent Hawaiian affair shows a most singular lowering of racial morale on the part of American officialdom. And so the Hawaiian affair that he's referring to, that's that's the Massie trial, correct. 00:29:05:22 - 00:29:30:20 Sean In 1930. Hawaii. Hawaii is not yet a state. It's not officially. It's one of those weird territorial things. But the United States did realize it's an essential military location. So there's a huge population of American servicemen who are in the Hawaiian Islands at this point in time. So among them, there are some Navy guys and there's a couple. 00:29:30:20 - 00:29:46:03 Sean And they're they're not getting along and they're go out to a dance party and the wife and the husband are having a fight and the wife leaves and she goes walking home. And a couple of hours later, the husband calls home to make sure his wife made it okay. And she's like, oh, you need to come home immediately. 00:29:46:03 - 00:30:02:10 Sean Something terrible has happened. So he rushes home and she says, Oh, I was I was attacked by by some Hawaiians. And so over the course of many hours, she eventually relates, they decide they'll contact the police. 00:30:02:19 - 00:30:05:06 Andrew And she originally didn't want to call the cops. 00:30:05:09 - 00:30:08:12 Sean Right. And she originally had nothing to say about her attacker. 00:30:08:12 - 00:30:11:01 Andrew She couldn't identify them. It was a vague story. 00:30:11:02 - 00:30:17:08 Sean She at first she was just roughed up by them. But then later came to the conclusion she was raped. Yeah. So anyway. 00:30:17:13 - 00:30:45:16 Andrew Something happened to her. I mean, we don't we weren't there. It's it's easy to Monday morning quarterback a situation after 80 years. You know, normally when a woman says she's been raped, you should believe her. You should take the claim seriously. And I don't want to assume that the initial accusations were racially motivated, even though the overall prosecution clearly was racially biased. 00:30:46:06 - 00:30:53:15 Andrew Whatever happened to Thalia massey is I don't even know how to put this. Well. 00:30:54:08 - 00:31:14:12 Sean Maybe, you know, look at it this way. I think when somebody, you know, alleges that they are the victim of a violent crime, whether they're a woman or a man, anybody who is alleged to have been the victim of a crime deserves a competent investigation to say, hey, you know, you are the victim until proven otherwise. Somebody is a perpetrator until proven otherwise. 00:31:14:12 - 00:31:24:15 Sean I think the issue here is that as soon as that investigations takes place, it reveals that the facts being alleged and the. 00:31:24:15 - 00:31:25:13 Andrew Explanations. 00:31:25:13 - 00:31:45:21 Sean For them that everyone singles on at all remotely. And that's, you know, what's frustrating. So I get, you know, not wanting to wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I also feel like subsequent facts forfeit that benefit for for that benefit and bring a whole lot more doubt. Yeah. 00:31:45:23 - 00:31:46:21 Andrew Okay. Fair enough. 00:31:47:02 - 00:32:10:08 Sean So they basically pin this crime on a group of five native Hawaiians and they get charged for having having assaulted this woman. So the trial comes about and there's a quite a bit of furor because it's a bunch of brown skinned people who attacked a white skin lady. 00:32:11:03 - 00:32:13:14 Andrew You know, wife of a naval officer. Upstanding. 00:32:13:23 - 00:32:27:00 Sean Right. It's people people are outraged by it. But when confronted with the big facts, these guys have a pretty terrific alibi. They clearly weren't there. They could not have done what they were accused of and they're acquitted. 00:32:27:07 - 00:32:28:15 Andrew Well, it was a deadlocked jury. 00:32:28:17 - 00:32:29:04 Sean Oh, that's right. 00:32:29:13 - 00:32:37:10 Andrew It was a hung jury. So the trial ended with no resolution. And the woman's mother was not happy with no resolution. 00:32:37:14 - 00:32:43:20 Sean And not not the woman's mother alone, but the husband of the woman who was attacked and other naval friends. 00:32:43:20 - 00:32:53:05 Andrew So the woman's mother get a bunch of her friends together and they go after the five guys who had not been convicted. Right. And decide to beat a confession out of them. 00:32:53:06 - 00:33:03:01 Sean So that doesn't work. They do end up beating one of them fairly horrendously. And then they take another one who's a professional boxer, try to get a confession out of him, and they end up shooting and killing him. Right. 00:33:03:18 - 00:33:21:13 Andrew And and then they go on trial. The white folks go on trial for having murdered this this guy. Right. And that's the trial that Robert Howard so bitterly objected to that these white people ever should have been put on trial was to him an absolute outrage. 00:33:21:13 - 00:33:26:12 Sean He actually asserts with horrific language that they should have simply been lynched. 00:33:26:13 - 00:33:42:18 Andrew Do you mind if I read that section? This is this is what Robert E Howard wrote: "that Hawaii business is a rotten reek in the nostrils of decent men. I agree with you in believing that the island should be put under military or naval rule and in hoping that the dirty yellow bellies that committed the crime will be put away properly. I know what would have happened to them in Texas. I don't know whether an Oriental smells any different than "beep" when he's roasting, but I'm willing to bet the aroma of scorching heid would have this would have the same chastening effect on his surviving tribesmen. Instead of a boycott, a noose should have been used wholesale as for the attorney, for any white man who is low enough to crucify an outrage child of his own color before a mongrel swarm a roll down a hill in a barrel full of safety razor blades is too good for him. It is my ardent hope that he will come to his end at the hands of some of his yellow bellied pets and that his demise will be neither swift nor painless." 00:34:22:08 - 00:34:24:02 Sean Yeah, that's. That's Robert. 00:34:24:03 - 00:34:26:12 Andrew Howard. Yeah, that was really so. 00:34:27:19 - 00:34:44:03 Sean So that's the Massey affair. Another element of it. It is one of these trial of the century type situations is the attorney who is who is defending the the white attackers is Clarence Darrow. 00:34:44:03 - 00:34:46:06 Andrew Yeah. Who came out of retirement to take the case. 00:34:46:06 - 00:34:57:02 Sean Right. And for those who might not remember, Clarence Darrow was the attorney in the Scopes Monkey trial. Yeah. These are famous, famous civil libertarian. Generally. 00:34:57:20 - 00:34:59:08 Andrew Generally, the. 00:34:59:17 - 00:35:19:08 Sean The good guys representing the downtrodden, representing Leopold Loeb was another one. Well, they're they're he's not representing the good guys, but certainly certainly using his skills as an attorney to change the way that the public thought about a crazy crime like the Leopold Oh, murders. 00:35:19:08 - 00:35:22:13 Andrew Yeah. Especially one that had broader social implications. 00:35:22:14 - 00:35:53:10 Sean Like, yeah. Oh well, of course the outcome is highly important. So. So the vigilante, the vigilantes are deemed guilty, Right? And this creates outrage. Now, the entire national media, the United States is paying attention to this story. So he wasn't didn't have a governor yet. He was like the administrator general, whoever was in charge and had the power to do it, basically vacated the sentences and made them serve one hour each in his office for the murder of this man. 00:35:53:15 - 00:36:20:23 Sean One hour each. Yeah, it's it's man welcome to the 1930s, you know. And and for people who pined for the good old days. Yeah. You know, for the people who bemoan the term social justice, you know. Oh, social justice. Warriors are bad or something, man. You got to look at a thing. A situation like the Massie affair and go. 00:36:21:05 - 00:36:53:07 Sean Justice is a good thing. Social justice is a good thing. And this whole thing is so poisoned by this crazed racism, you know, And he's clearly trumped up charges the whole thing, when you look at it with any scrutiny, is just this ugly, ugly reflection of who we as Americans were as a nation in in the early 1930s. 00:36:53:13 - 00:37:13:13 Andrew Lovecraft gets close maybe to the heart of it later, a little bit later in the letter. And when he just observes sort of casually what a drama there is in this constant struggle of two groups of instincts, the egoistic and individual and diffusive and social. You know, it's it's that sort of at the heart of the whole figure. 00:37:13:13 - 00:37:35:00 Andrew Lovecraft and Howard, it's, you know, that's barbarianism versus civilized nation. But it also it sure reminded me of, you know, Republicans versus Democrats or right wingers versus left wingers. It's, you know, this tension between whose interests is it your own personal or is it society's society's interests at large, you know, which are the most important ones to defend. 00:37:35:00 - 00:37:39:17 Andrew And that's a lot of that's percolating at the back at things like this. 00:37:39:17 - 00:37:46:20 Sean Well, and at the end of the day, you know, our collective rights are our individual rights. They are one and the same. I think. 00:37:46:20 - 00:37:53:05 Andrew They are. But it's easy to forget that. Yeah. And man, a lot of people seem to be forgetting it all the time. Yeah. 00:37:53:05 - 00:37:58:20 Sean And because so many people paid such horrific prices for, for these kinds of attitudes. 00:37:58:20 - 00:38:16:21 Andrew So I did I did enjoy very much when they're talking about they should, you know, write a discretely abridged Necronomicon black book or a book of airborne might be quite a thing if one had the energy and inspiration to go on about it in the right way. Put me down for a for a copy. If there's ever a fresh edition of unaussprechliche kulte 00:38:16:21 - 00:38:19:02 Andrew reminded me of Christian Motzko. 00:38:19:11 - 00:38:28:06 Sean I think the exact same thing. And quite rightly he pointed out, it would be very hard to sustain that. You know, we've written our own sections of the Necronomicon and and. 00:38:28:08 - 00:38:30:05 Andrew We had big plans to do the whole thing. 00:38:30:05 - 00:38:54:15 Sean Yeah. And it's, it's, it's not that hard to write, you know, ten maybe 20 pages of stuff that's really compelling. But boy, you want to sustain that interest across 800 pages where you got, you know, no plot. You can only take, you know, look at the Simon Necronomicon. You know, it's a 200 page paperback and six pages and you're like, I've had enough of the Sumerian gobbledygook, you know, you know, Marduk, blah, blah. 00:38:54:20 - 00:38:56:19 Andrew But Christians pulling it off is his. 00:38:56:19 - 00:38:57:11 Sean Sure looks good. 00:38:57:12 - 00:38:58:11 Andrew So on his way. 00:38:58:11 - 00:39:19:21 Sean But I, you know, I suspect he's feeling the weight of I'm not sure he's even through a hundred pages yet and go on boy you know how how much time will it take and you know how how what a challenge to continue to be in of a keep the project interesting and innovative when you're on page 617 going what am I going to do for the next one. 00:39:19:23 - 00:39:23:06 Andrew Takes true madness to be able to to keep going. 00:39:23:06 - 00:39:35:13 Sean But but we applaud him. Christian is an old friend and a terrific prop maker. And and if anybody's going to pull it off, it's going to be him. And he's he's well on his way. It's better him than us. Yeah. If you haven't if you haven't checked it out. 00:39:35:19 - 00:39:36:16 Andrew You absolutely sure. 00:39:36:17 - 00:39:38:18 Sean Will. We'll we'll put a little plug. 00:39:38:18 - 00:39:42:03 Andrew In the show notes. Absolutely. And speaking of true madness, how about Olsen? 00:39:42:10 - 00:40:02:03 Sean Olsen. Yeah. A crazy fans. I thought you and I were the only guys having crazy fans write to us. But yeah, some of our our favorite letters that we get here at the HBO Max come from people who are either in prison or in insane asylums. But. Olsen Yeah, apparently, you know, he's just some guy who had written to Robert E. Howard and had. 00:40:02:03 - 00:40:05:14 Andrew Written to Lovecraft, and he was mad. Clark Ashton Smith And there's a lot of them. 00:40:05:14 - 00:40:11:02 Sean He's so nuts that nobody's even writing him back because they can't they can't handle them. But then there's William one way. 00:40:11:19 - 00:40:19:07 Andrew Yeah. Who is also arguably crazy, but his crazy has a kind of focus that Lovecraft finds very interesting. 00:40:19:07 - 00:40:46:13 Sean Yeah, there's some kind of allure. And and, you know, it's this interesting situation where where Lumley writes to Lovecraft and says, Yes, yes, you're onto it. You're telling the truth. And Lovecraft's like, No, no, I'm not. I'm just making up stories. And he's like, Oh, you just say that. But really, you're on to the truth. And Lovecraft at this point seems very dismissive of him, but he ends up going on to take Lumley's manuscript for the diary of Alonzo Typer and and reworks it as a collaborate. 00:40:46:13 - 00:41:09:06 Sean I guess it's called a collaboration. The original draft he got is a very rudimentary sort of punctuation free document. Yeah, and Lovecraft did his best to make it into a story. It does have one of the worst endings of of perhaps all Lovecraft stories of one of these where the protagonist is writing out in his diary and he's like, Oh, the monster's dragging me down the stairs. 00:41:09:06 - 00:41:11:13 Sean You know, it really is downright silly. 00:41:11:13 - 00:41:29:07 Andrew But I thought it was interesting, though, that, you know, even Lovecraft, even back then, Lovecraft and Smith and all these guys are saying all you can do with these guys is just ignore them. Just don't write back. And it's like we should all learn that lesson. Do not engage with YouTube commenters, do not engage with the Facebook malcontents. 00:41:29:11 - 00:41:33:04 Andrew Just ignore them. Don't answer them, do not feed the trolls. 00:41:33:14 - 00:41:47:02 Sean Well, but think think back now, because there's also Lovecraft did choose to engage with Lumley and years ago, you know, we had he who for legal reasons must not be named was a friendship of sorts. 00:41:47:04 - 00:41:52:20 Andrew They were those those he who, for legal reasons, must not be named, was a very charming lunatic. 00:41:53:17 - 00:42:00:12 Sean Well, I think that's what Lumley's got going for him, too. That there's something in the writing that that makes it makes it okay by Lovecraft. 00:42:00:12 - 00:42:12:21 Andrew So, yeah, I'm imagining Lovecraft on that bus. And then the person sitting next to him, I wonder. I wonder. I wonder if Lovecraft was one of those guys you do not want to end up sitting next to on the Greyhound. 00:42:13:13 - 00:42:23:02 Sean There's probably some guy writing a letter just like that. He complained about Olson some guy's writing about this guy from Providence who sat next to me on the on the bus and would not shut up about. 00:42:24:15 - 00:42:25:23 Andrew About Spanish moss. 00:42:26:07 - 00:42:47:15 Sean That but all right. Our thanks today to the lovely folks at Hippocampus Press for publishing the two volume set of a means to freedom. The letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E Howard. This this letter we did today came from the volume one, which is the years 1932 1932, which answers our question for before of when they started writing in 1930. 00:42:47:15 - 00:43:13:16 Andrew The lovely folks at Hippocampus Press are specifically ST Joshi and David E Schultz. And I'd like to also thank those guys for the the Lovecraft Encyclopedia, without which we would have a much harder job getting ready for these podcast recordings. And also to Steve for he did an index of selected letters and we've been relying on it and I just it's high time we called out those two things and said, Thanks 00:43:13:16 - 00:43:14:18 Andrew ST And thanks, David. 00:43:14:19 - 00:43:25:06 Sean Well, you've left off Rusty Burke and I don't know Rusty Burke, but he is one of the editors of this collection of Robert E Howard letters. So thank you, Rusty, whoever you are, you for bringing us all together. 00:43:25:09 - 00:43:29:08 Andrew You can learn more about hippocampus At hippocampuspress.com. 00:43:29:15 - 00:43:31:20 Sean I'm your obedient servant, Sean Branney. 00:43:32:00 - 00:43:34:08 Andrew And I am cordially and respectfully yours. 00:43:34:08 - 00:43:40:08 Sean Andrew Leman You've been listening to a very challenging episode of Voluminous The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft. 00:43:40:09 - 00:43:46:03 Andrew If you've enjoyed the show, bless you and please give us a rating or a review. That would be very helpful. 00:43:46:23 - 00:43:49:23 Sean Or even better, tell a friend or two about voluminous. 00:43:49:23 - 00:44:22:16 Andrew Brought to you by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Come check out all we have to offer at HPLHS.org