Wed 11 May 2016
JONATHAN LEWIS: Stories I’m Reading — H. P. LOVECRAFT “The Terrible Old Man.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews , Stories I'm Reading[2] Comments
H. P. LOVECRAFT “The Terrible Old Man.” Written January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout, an amateur press publication, July 1921. Appeared in Weird Tales, August 1926. Reprinted many times.
Although there really isn’t that much literary value in the story, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man†could certainly be built upon and skillfully adapted into a truly captivating Gothic horror film. Originally published in the amateur journal Tryout (1921) and subsequently reprinted many times, including Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast (1988), the very brief story is notable for its New England coastline setting, one that Lovecraft would return to time and again in his more sophisticated writings.
The plot is simple, but loaded with noticeable xenophobic undertones that make this little known story even less valuable than it otherwise would have been in light of Lovecraft’s far more historically significant later works. While the titular character, the Terrible Old Man, is never given an identifying name, the men who plot to steal from the old mysterious pirate are most explicitly marked by their “ethnic†sounding names: Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva.
Not only am I guessing Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, but that these three aforementioned nationalities were among Lovecraft’s least favorite immigrant groups in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. For it is this gang of three men – three “foreigners†in Protestant New England – who seek to rob the story’s old man – a former sea captain – of his treasure.
Yet, it is the sea captain who has the last laugh. For he is terrible indeed! Although the supernatural elements in the story are relatively attenuated, at least for an H.P. Lovecraft story, the reader learns that the three would be robbers are found murdered. The old man, clearly the responsible party, is said to have yellow eyes. Is he a ghost or a zombie? We never learn, which allows our imaginations to run wild.
As I said at the outset, this is hardly a commendable work of literary fiction; in many ways, it is amateurish in the extreme. But there’s something there, some genuine imaginary terror lurking behind the terrible old man’s eyes. It’s a chilling little tale, one that I thought I’d soon forget after reading it, but oddly enough one that has stuck in my mind for a while.
May 12th, 2016 at 1:09 pm
Lovecraft is difficult to embrace in todays politically correct world, even for the most forgiving of readers. His xenophobia is only matched by his misogyny and insularity, and yet, like Poe, with less genius justifying him, he remains a powerful writer.
I was torn by the controversy over calling the horror awards after him last year. While he deserves the recognition as the most important figure in American horror between Poe and King I certainly understand how it must feel to be an ethnic writer or woman and to receive an award named for an avowed racist and misogynst who once supported Nazism, even if he later recanted the latter.
But, if you can set aside that aspect of his work and his personality and some of the notable weaknesses he has as a writer, few reach the heights of sheer awe and terror he does at his best. I’m always reminded of a line from Thomas Hardy reading HPL: “At some point sheer magnitude becomes terrible.”
No one ever implied the horror and terror of the vast unknown quite like HPL, and a few of his fantasy tales, notably “The Cats of Ulthar,” rival Dunsany at his best.
Love him or loathe him or somewhere in between you can’t discard HPL from the American horror scene or deny his influence on better writers, that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
May 13th, 2016 at 1:11 am
The character of Howard Lovecraft is difficult to dissect especially when we are looking at him nearly a hundred years later. Â
     Certainly racism was rampant in pulp-magazine fiction so prejudices were part and parcel of the metier.  Lovecraft’s nativist views were not that unique when considered that he roughly lived in the middle of that period between the Know-Nothing party and the groundbreaking election of John Kennedy as the first Catholic president.  The problem with an outstanding writer during a time when bigotry was not unusual is that in retrospect he becomes an outstanding bigot whereas to his contemporary audience he was an outstanding writer who espoused views that were not that uncommon.
    I am not agreeing with prejudices exhibited in pulp-magazine fiction and the work of Lovecraft in particular but the time period and the surrounding culture has to be taken into account.
     That said, I have a couple items that I have difficulty fitting into this image of Lovecraft’s xenophobic personality.
    In the late 1970s, I was talking to Julie Schwartz about his time as an agent for pulp-magazine writers and I asked about Lovecraft.  Schwartz more or less said, Everyone thinks Lovecraft was a weird guy but he was a regular guy.  This opinion came from a person with the un-WASPy name, Julius Schwartz.
     If Lovecraft were an overt bigot, Schwartz would not likely come so readily to his defense.
     The other bit is Lovecraft’s Yankee-phobia.  Situated on the eastern cusp of the Connecticut River Valley; New Salem, Massachusetts, is generally believed to be the location of Arkham. In the area of Boston, a person is more likely to attend Harvard and in Connecticut and the Connecticut River Valley a person is more likely to attend Yale; but college educated or not, their ancestors arrived at the Plymouth Colony or the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the same ships.  What makes the people of Arkham sinister is not their ethnicity but their location in a rural area.
     The conclusion that I reached was to be weary of conclusions about Howard Lovecraft