Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Uh, let's have a brief conversation with our super producer, Max Williams before we pop the top on this one. Max, how you doing?
You know, I'm holding in there. I'm holding in there like you know you're holding in there. Yeah, they're a little troublesome today, but we will push through.
Yeah, we very much, We very much hopefully will now. I am Ben Bullen and my partner in podcast as well as Max's Noel Brown is on Some Adventures will be returning soon and we have in the meantime been cooking up some ridiculous, some bizarre, special historical historical explorations. For this week, we are going to talk about one of the most important figures in all of modern horror fiction, and we are going to do it in a way
to show you how weird this guy is. Now. When we were cooking up the idea for this episode, part of our continuing series on very Weird Authors, we looked around and I was thinking, who is the best guy to hang with us on this story? Now? Since HP Lovecraft is long past beyond the mortal Veil, we went to our second choice. Let us welcome Jonathan Strickland, aka the Quister, back to Ridiculous History. Dude, how are you doing?
Doing pretty good? I'm feeling a bit weird. That's that's just a it's just a shout out to one of my favorite John Candy lines from Little Shop of Ours. Oh yeah, yeah, No, I'm doing okay. I'm glad that you had me on because, uh, listeners probably don't know this, but I have. I have a fairly weird relationship with the subject matter.
With the mythos and and actually in when I was researching this episode, I didn't mention it off air. I was saving it for this. I was researching this episode, one of the first things I do often is go to our alma mater how stuff works, and I want
to give credit where it's due. Although we may not focus too much on Cuthulhu or an ecronomicon for to exploration, I immediately had that meme of a guy like slowly nodding in affirmation when I pulled up how Cthulhu works or how the Call of Cthulhu works, how the necronomicon works and saw that both of those articles were written by none other than you, and I reread them and I want you to know they hold up, They're good.
Thank you. Yeah, that was fun to write. I mean so to kind of give you a quick overview of my own knowledge and experience with Lovecraft. I am the child of authors who have written in many genres, including speculative fiction, and so there's certainly a lovecrafty and influence in some of their works. But it also meant I grew up going to things like science fiction conventions from a very young age, like this is way before there
was a dragon con. But I did all these sort of things and had this experience of being around culture that was certainly inspired by Lovecraft, if not like outwardly worshiping at the feet of this problematic author whom we will talk about extensively today. And my father, even as as an author, has adapted the works of Lovecraft for
audio theater. He has for many, many years participated with a theatrical group here in Atlanta called the Atlanta Radio Theater Company or Artsy, and they've done several adaptations of Lovecraft works, including things like the Call of Cthulhu, the Color out of Space, Shadow over in Smith, done with Horror, Rats in the Walls. Yeah, all of these. And Dad would tell you that there are a couple of very difficult things that you need to do if you're adapting
the works of Lovecraft, like a dialogue. One is one is like trying to, you know, downplay the racism quite a bit.
Yes, okay, I have my priorities wrong. I'm not thinking in the correct the correct order. There any fan of fiction, anybody who is a writer or an author themselves. There are two, uh, there are two extremely interesting or is our pal Chuck would say hinky things about the mechanics of Lovecraft. Whom we are. You know, we'll get into it. But the first thing is, even as a kid, it
always struck me. In multiple Lovecraft stories you will hear about what we call cosmic horror, the great old ones, the elder Gods, something something so eldrich and incomprehensible that the narrator says, there's way I can tell you, or explain or describe this thing to you, except for the next two pages, where I do so an obsessive detail.
Right, The idea being that whatever the narrating protagonist has seen is so beyond human experience and perception that to attempt to contemplate it is to invite madness, which you could argue is either very lazy writing or it's brilliant in the sense of, you know, any good writer knows nothing they write is going to be as effective as the reader's imagination when it comes to conjuring up an
idea of what these things might be. But to your point, the other difficulty my dad ran into was that most of these stories are written where you have a protagonist narrator and have almost no dialogue in them. It's almost all like description of what appen and and like a description of a conversation as opposed to a conversation playing out, which meant my dad had to invent all the conversations
in order to which so they truly were adaptations. It was not like just just porting it wasn't an audiobook or anything like that.
I love that point too, because that is the second point the the trouble with dialogue just from a mechanical perspective, Uh, you you nailed it with a single voice protagonist or narrator describing a conversation with Lovecraft sneaking in some of his own obsessions and be like, oh, Admiral of Staple White, despite being a partially a good old Puritan stock, had a bit of a foreign and cast in his eyes when he alluded to the incidents in Miskatonic University.
Yeah, yeah, And I gotta tell you, when you look in someone's eyes, you see that foreign shining in there.
What is he? Anyway, this is our episode on This may be more than one episode, but this is our exploration. Yeah.
Here, here's the too long didn't listen version. Lovecraft was xenophobic and racist, but we're going to talk more about his life and the sort of things that informed his experience and perhaps shaped his worldview. And this does not excuse anything that he wrote about or said in the in the following years, but perhaps it will give a
greater understanding. And also, like when you start to wrestle with an author's flaws and and you're trying to measure that against either your admiration for their work or your
admiration for the impact that they have had. Because even if you don't like Lovecraft stories, and there are plenty of reasons, not two chances are you have encountered something that directly or indirectly was was the result of Lovecraft's work, right, whether it's the Evil Dead series, which clearly draws from Lovecraft, or Stephen King, Stephen.
King, Yeah, Fallout, Fallout, True True.
True Detective, even though you could argue that that's drawing more from Chambers, who is a predecessor to Lovecraft.
But Robert W. Chambers, the Yellow King.
Yeah, the Yellow King clearly has a huge infam But I would argue that a lot of lovecraft influence goes into True Detective too, not just Chambers.
Yeah, and not just the plagiarism of Thomas Leggatti's work.
Yeah, which story.
For another day. And we want to begin today's exploration with immense thanks to the world's foremost scholar on HP. Lovecraft, an academic professor named st. Joshi st is going to be our go to worse for a lot of the
biographical info here and Jonathan Max. In my mind, after we've done this research, I think we can make a compelling argument that a lot of Lovecraft's work, a lot of his canon is inspired and informed by heartbreaking tragedy in his personal life, by his own mental health struggles and by several I'll say it ridiculous obsessions. So okay, we'll prove the case. HP Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He is born on August twentieth, eighteen ninety and he's born
at his family's house. It's a really nice Victorian home in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft. She comes from an old family. She is I don't know if you want to call her blue blood, but you could trace her ancestry back to the arrival of George F. Phillips in Massachusetts, way back in sixteen thirty.
So this kind of informs Lovecraft's later obsession with the past, right, the history and the importance of lineage and bloodline and is his father is a guy named Winfield Scott Lovecraft, who is a traveling silversmith salesman, which used to be a job.
Yeah, yeah, you could argue Paul Revere was a traveling silversmith, but it was only because he had to go from Plinty to Point B to Warren about the British. But you know, technically he was a traveling silversmith. No, I think you make some good points already been about this concept of lineage and ancestry and that importance, and it kind of is an it's instilling within Lovecraft this idea not just of the importance of lineage, but also a sense of entitlement, which I don't know. I don't know
how strong that was for him. A lot of this is like armchair psychology, you know, a century removed, right, But I feel that there was a sense of an entitlement in that a lot of these families had built up like, oh, we deserve the things that we have,
and when they're taken away, it's an enormous injustice. And as we'll see, like Lovecraft suffered quite a few massive setbacks in his family, massive setbacks, and I get the sense that he felt that that was almost a personal injustice visited upon him and his family.
Oh one hundred percent. Also, one time in I can't remember what course I was taking, but one time I received an a minus on anotherwise perfect essay about Lovecraft because my thesis statement was, ultimately he decided, I did no one was white enough, no one's lineage was, you know, the perfect Anglican or Scandinavian stock. That I don't think he even cared for Scandinavian people.
He just got weird. He did at one point praise Hitler. He said that the guy was kind of an idiot, but he had some good ideas, so.
Very Kanye West of him.
Yeah. Yeah, But one of the earliest setbacks, or earliest tragedies to visit upon him, was the loss of his father when he was just a wee toddler.
Yeah, and this is a heartbreaking story, one of the first tragedies he encounters when he's arguably too young to remember much about the experience. His father, as you said, Jonathan has what contemporary sources describe as a nervous breakdown. Now that's kind of like saying hysteria at this point in history, because it's a vague term that is used
to describe a lot of unrelated things. His father is taken from Chicago back to Butler Hospital in Providence, and his father remains there convalescing or deteriorating for five years before he dies on July nineteenth, eighteen ninety eight. So, now for young Howard Phillips, his father has been in a very bad way, so bad that like something that
a child should not have to witness. That's where his father's been He's told his father is paralyzed in comatose during the entirety of these five years, but later research would verify, with ninety plus accuracy, ninety plus percent accuracy, the Lovecraft's father actually expired due to a form of syphilis.
Yeah. Yeah, and that won't be the last time that syphilis, or as the English used to like to call it, the French disease. Well, we'll factor into this. I mean, I figure, if we're gonna talk about xenophobia and racism, we might as well just sort of pepper it into the conversation.
Let's just yeah, you know what, I think it's good for the structure. I think you're on the money.
Yeah, I think the French called it the English disease to be fair, So it's.
Those guys classic. Yeah. And look, so his father passes his way, his mother is alive, and his guardians then, or like the village that raises him, becomes his mother, his two aunts, and for a time, his grandmother. We may get to that later, but his grandfather is a particular interest to us because he is essentially a character ripped from the pages of Edward Gorey comic strip. You know, he's a prominent industrialist. His name get I know, we
both know this, so silly. His name is Whipper van Buren Phillips.
Oh, good old Whipple, Whipple choice, mister Whipple. I mean, like, okay, that's a reference that none of your listeners are going to know except for the old timers like me. But yeah, I So this is where I've been debating on where to put this particular thing, because I mean, it's something that's famous that a lot of people who are aware of Lovecraft outside of just his fiction, they know about this. But it's probably a good place to put it because
it was the family pet. This This is where we have to mention that that I think Lovecraft he was very fond of cats, and he had he had a cat, a black cat. And I will not say the name of this black cat because it uses a particularly awful racial slur, and a lot of people who talk about Lovecraft mentioned this cat and mentioned the fact that he owned this cat and named this cat this terrible slur. I would contest that somewhat in that we do not
know that it was Lovecraft who named that cat. It may have been, but it may have been one of the members of his family because he was just a child at the time. But I think it's more indicative that the family as a whole had no compunction, no compunction to avoid racial slurs, which, by the time at this time are racial slurs. It's not like, oh, it was a different time and people didn't consider it a slur. No, they did, They fully did. But yes, this would be
right around that time. In fact, when we get to the point where the grandfather exits the picture, he exits the picture the same year that that cat disappears.
And we know cats play a big role in a lot of Lovecrafty and work. Right, even that the parts of the canon or the mythos that he himself generated, which is at this point you could argue a fundamental, yet relatively small percentage of the overall mythos. Lovecraft is
a precocious kid, very much. Yeah, he's reading at age three, around age six or seven, he is also actively writing stuff juvenilia, you know, maybe some nonfiction thoughts on science or paraphrasing of Greek and Arabic based works that he had been exposed to earlier. This is a great anecdote, since we are rightly dunking on some of his evil views. Will give you one very rare story about this guy
being a cute kid. So he reads Arabian Nights when he's around five years old, and this rocks his world, Like this smacks his balls off and he is so into it. You know how when like some kids will watch a movie like Deadpool or Aceventura and then that's their personality for the summer.
Yeah, no, I that's I'm familiar. I can tell you what mine was when I was so I have distinct memories. This does not speak well of me, but I'm going to go ahead and share it anyway, because I mean, I'm almost fifty, so what the heck? Uh? When I was a kid, the game that I would play with my friends was that we would make up stories that exist within the rich mythological world of the Dukes of Hazard, and my designated role was to play the brave officer
of the law, Roscoe P. Coltrane. True God, yeah, absolutely, Like you know, a a an example of what the justice system is, you know what. I wish that were a joke, but it kind of isn't anyway anyway, for for like a summer. Yeah, like that was just like we were because that was a very popular show when I was a kid, and that was something that but like any kid can think about that, like from my dad. The book that got him, uh, kind of inhabiting imaginary
worlds was Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island. So same sort of thing. Like if you had Red Treasure Island as a kid, and that really sparked your imagination, you might invent for yourself a persona related to pirates. So exactly so Lovecraft invents a persona inspired by Arabian nights, and this is one that would actually factor into his literary works. Many years later, he creates a persona named Abdul alhazread now in Lovecraft's later works, that's part of
his title. You usually hear it as the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, which again xenophobia and all that. But his claim to fame within the Lovecraft mythos is this is the author of the infamous Necronomicon.
Yes, yeah, and he has, through madness and through conspiring and parlaying with dark powers beyond the ken of human understanding. He is translated or imparted some very small percentage of knowledge from these other planes to the human world and doing so again. Absolutely, I have some bonkers. Anybody who reads the book runs the risk of going mad or
being waylaid by these evil powers. But the reason we think that Jonathan and Max and I think this is a rare cute story is because you have to picture it in like a ridiculous history cinematic adaptation of Young Lovecraft. It's true, folks, at some point a five year old genuinely woke up one day in his house and walked around and told everyone he could meet. No, no, I'm not Howie anymore, call me Abdul Alhazarin.
In Providence, Rhode Island. An important component of taking that picture into account.
Yes, yeah, yeah, he was not a super diverse place. Uh. Then, like we said, he gets obsessed with Greek mythology, and you can see his You can see his earliest surviving work, The Pull of Ulysses, in eighteen ninety seven. It's pretty much paraphrasing stuff he read earlier. And then his first work we know about is actually weird fiction. It's called The New Bread Eavesdropper. He may have written it in eighteen ninety six, but from what I understand there are
no extant copies, so we really don't know. Maybe it was the best thing he ever wrote.
We have references to this lost story, but we don't have the story itself. It's kind of like the Cardinio with William Shakespeare.
Oh oh, okay, flex and those English lip muscles.
Listen, I get so few opportunities to do it.
Well, well done man. We also know it's strange this concept of what was called weird fiction at the time, because the ideas or stories that had stuff like cosmic horror in it, they already existed. Yes, at this point.
Often we think of Lovecraft as being the creator of weird fiction, but that is that is not correct. Honestly, the more you dive into history in general, and Ben you know this, You've been diving into history for years now. But the more you dive into it, the more you realize, oh, things don't really have a clear cut beginning, middle and end. Usually it's almost always middle. You're almost always middle, and like there might appear to be an end, but then
maybe a generation later, it resurfaces. That sort of think same thing is true of weird fiction in that while certain formats like the novel were relatively young. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, weird fiction was already something that was being explored by authors before Lovecraft was even born.
One hundred percent. Yeah. And really the idea of genres evolving and that kind of method of categorization that is still a continuing thing. You know, how how do we bucket this creative work? Which leads me to one brief soap box complaint that has nothing to do with this. With all due respect to the academics and the hungover substitute teachers in the crowd today, I think postmodern literature as a term is kind of dumb.
I agree. I took a course in postmodern literature, and the the thing I took away from it is, oh, this is what we call stuff that we can't easily classify into some other bucket exactly.
Just call it miscellaneous, yeah, modern miscellaneous.
Anyway, it's it's It's why why I'm glad you use the term specul or we both use the term speculative fiction, right, because because that's something that is it's such a broad category. You could argue it has very little utility because it doesn't give you enough information about what the what what bucket this this story falls into. But it's very useful because the weird fiction genre has elements of science fiction, it has elements of horror, it has elements of psychological
thriller in it. There are a lot of different components that go in together to make weird fiction, and typically you're talking about things that are matters that are much much larger than humans can comprehend, right.
Yes, yeah, that's that. I think that's a great defining characteristic or axiom for what we call speculative or weird fiction. And you can see a bevy of tremendous, fantastic authors who later take up that mantle, in no small way informed by the works of Lovecraft. We're talking folks like Laird Baron. We're talking folks like you know, Roberty too many names, Roberty Howard, Robert Block, you know, Oh, Nathaniel Balingrad is a guy I've been really into.
Got to check out so tons of tons of folks, some of whom actually corresponded with and collaborated with Lovecraft.
Yes, many of whom, And I think that was one of the most progressive aspects of the way that they went about constructing this universe. All of those people that you and I just named, Jonathan, they owe a debt to Lovecraft, for sure, but they also, in doing so, owe a huge and often unacknowledged debt to Howard's very strange grandfather. Would who would grab this little kid, And this is, by the way, in the era where breaching was still a thing. Check out our bothersome episode on that.
He would get young Howard when it was like grandpa time, and instead of telling him fun marry stories of Jack and the Beanstalk or nursery rhymes or grim adaptations or anything, he would tell him very disturbing, strange, Gothic informed stories that were probably not appropriate for a child.
Yeah, keeping in mind that his grandfather would have been probably a contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe at that point, right.
Good point.
So, so, like you think about Poe and Poe's works and the kind of Gothic influence that Poe had, that's sort of what I imagine is him coming up with like ghost stories and things of that nature that really tap into that dark esthetic Leyden genre of Gothic horror. This is where we really talk about the Edward Gorey influence, which is funny because side note, Edward Gorey illustrated one of the books my dad wrote, so oh cool. It was one of the yeah, one of the later ones
of Gory's career. But yeah, it's it's kind of just fun to think about that because you know, I've also had that experience, right, Like I as a kid, I grew up hearing my dad tell all these kind of crazy stories, things that would make it like it's all the all the trimmings, the stuff that hit the cutter room floor that didn't make it into his literary career. I got the benefit of getting to hear those.
Yes, yeah, you were the test audience. Yeah, right, yeah. So it's it's like some dark version of a known comic surprising people at the comedy cellar, right right, right. I don't know if this will make it in the set, but here's.
I'm gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna work out some material here and see how much of this bomb's yeah, they'll tell your mom no.
So this is yeah, this is you know, we're we're mentioning that we're gory stuff. And that's really cool fact that I just learned about you and your dad. But the reason we feel this is so gory esque is because at this point Lovecraft has all the things of a typical pseudo Victorian and gory character, you know, a gashly crumb tiny. He is not just isolated from other people in a very weird mansion. He doesn't just have creepy, somewhat Adams family esque relatives in charge of his upbringing.
He also has a range of Victorian maladies, many of which we would call psychological.
Yeah, yeah, he's somewhat of a sickly child. I'm thinking like like he would have fit right in with the Secret Garden. But but these illnesses are not strictly or not only of the physical variety. As you mentioned, he appeared to exhibit some psychological issues as well, things that we wouldn't have a grander understanding of for many years.
So you know, you have the double negative impact, not double negative in the sense of ain't no, but double negative in the sense of two negative things hitting him at the same time. One, he's the product of a storied family line, where typically that's something you just don't talk about, right If your relatives are a little bit funny,
then you don't talk about that. Very great gardens but secondly, you also have a lack of understanding in general of psychological issues in the human mind, so there's very little recourse you can seek to actually help you. And so this kid has some major strikes against him from the get go.
Yeah, he's often as a result not attending school. He's a very very intelligent person, no one is disputing that. But his grades and his records often indicate his intellectual potential.
Right Individually, He goes and seeks out lots of information about subjects that really interest him. So he does study things like the sciences, particularly chemistry and astronomy. So it's not as if he's going forward ignorant of these things. He is seeking that information out because he found it fascinating on a personal level. So it wasn't necessarily due to the schools he was attending as a small child. It was more his innate curiosity that was fueling this.
Yeah.
Yeah, and we you know you, Max and I being a house of works, folks, we love that. We love oh yeah, self directed learning.
I mean that was that was kind of like the mission statement for the entire website was that it was all about curiosity.
One hundred percent. And that's a lesson that I think holds true. I don't think. It's not my opinion, it holds true in the modern day. One of the best things you can do is be curious. Now, there are some diminishing returns past certain thresholds we've opened there, And maybe that's kind of a parable too that reflects later in Lovecraft's work. His life gets a little bit better when he makes it to high school, place called.
Hope Street High School the fundamental opposite for most people, right right, Yeah, most people would be like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a television series that was built on the premise that high school is hell and that the entire series, or at least the first half of that series, was based on that premise and exploring that in a very literal sense. And it's funny to me, of course, it would be Lovecraft who would find the opposite is true, that hey, things got better in high school.
Yeah right, Wow, being a freshman is awesome. He gets several long lasting friendships from his time in high school, and he also starts exploring the world of communication and publishing with all this knowledge he stored up in his I'll say it, creepy, little head. His first printed work appears so early, and thanks to St. Josie for doing the research work here. It's published in the Providence Sunday Journal in nineteen six, and pretty much immediately after that
he starts writing for other local papers. He does columns on astronomy, he does local human interest stories, and he does something that personally impressed me because I've done something similar when I was a maladjusted younger person. He makes his own scientific journals, you could call them, and he distributes them like mixtapes or zines to his friends. So imagine we're in high school with this guy, you know
what I mean. We want to go play whatever sport there, play stickball or something, and he's like, no, first, please read by scientific journal. We're like, dude, is that handwritten?
I've written a treatise, treat this one chemical reaction that I observed the other day. It's it's so compelling.
He seems like a lot of fun at parties, right, And we're duncating out him out of affection. But we can say at this point, yes, he's eccentric. He's a little scamp, right, He's maybe a bit of a milk toast, bit of a Wallflower, but he seems well set to pursue a path toward wholesome nerdity. I don't know if that's a word. But then Jonathan, everything goes wrong. There's more tragedy ahead, and this is where stuff really goes south for Lovecraft.
Yeah, so it does involve a little bit of backtracking to talk about the tragedies that befell because the first, like we just mentioned, his first work being published in nineteen oh six, well two years previous, nineteen oh four, that's when his grandfather passes and his beloved racist cat disappears.
Yes, yes, that is yeah, and I'm glad to point that out, his beloved racist cat.
To be fair, I don't know that the cat was racist, but we don't know if the cat was racist, Yes, but we do know the name of the cat was very, very racist.
And the environment that approved of that name also.
Extremely undeniably racist. Yes, and unrepentantly. Yes, proudly, one might say, proudly audaciously because because Lovecraft did make mention by name of this cat multiple times once he became an established author, so it's not like he was shying away from it.
And he also wrote some terribly racist poetry. His first loves, indeed were essays and poetry before he got into fiction. Look, and it's quite possible that we would have never heard of Lovecraft as an author. After the death of his grandfather and the mismanagement of his family fortune, their nest egg, they went broke. They got into severe financial difficulties such that Lovecraft and his mom have to move out of
their posh Victorian home. They lose the house. This is devastating, and now you know we're in just a much less well appointed domicile. This depresses Lovecraft so much so that a lot of scholars believe he was contemplating serious self harm. And in nineteen oh eight, right as he set to graduate Hope High School, he has a nervous breakdown, which means he leaves school without his diploma the Domino's fault.
This means he also fails to enter Brown University, which he had always just assumed that he would.
Enter, and he likely would have been able to had he not had his breakdown. Also, you might think, already we're talking nervous breakdown that may bring up echoes of the past due to you know, the passing of his father. And as we will see the mental health issues were not not solely relegated to his father and to himself. You could say that, I'm reminded of a silly line in Arsenic and Old Lace where something along the like insanity doesn't run in my family. It positively gallops.
I remember that one. Yes, and there's there's some disturbing sand to that. You know. After this great failure in the world of the Ivory Tower, Lovecraft is going into self imposed solitude. You could say he's a hermit. You could say, you know, like in Japan, they have the thing called hikiko mori, which is people to simply lock themselves into do a very limited space and check out from the world. And he already had this tendency a lot of lonely children do to lose oneself in film
and in fiction and works of fancy. At this point, he isn't really doing much with his life. He is again, as he said, he is intensely curious. He is a self taught person, so he's still pursuing his astronomical interest, which sometimes border on obsessive. He's still writing poetry. And during this time, as you so stutely eluded, Jonathan, during this time, he and his mom locked in a much smaller place, him not really talking to a lot of other people, they develop what is called what is often
portrayed as an unhealthily close relationship. His mom still very much is distraught with the manner of her husband's death and losing her spouse, and she has what various schol will call a pathological and dangerous love hate relationship with her son. And we've seen it, you know. Sometimes you see somebody and their parents and you're like, you, guys, got a little why do you should move?
Yeah? Interesting little side note here. This is a bit of a tangent, and I apologize, but I am wont to do such things. One of the authors who would eventually correspond with Lovecraft, as we'll mention, Lovecraft was crazy about correspondence. I think he was. It was estimated that he wrote more than one hundred thousand letters in his lifetime. One of those correspondents was Robert Block, who was a teenager when he first reached out to Lovecraft. And this
is when Lovecraft is an established author. So this is further along in our timeline. But the reason I bring this up is Robert Block. You may be familiar with that name. That is the man who wrote the novel Psycho, which obviously then became adapted into a film by now Alfred Hitchcock and became famous. Really, it made Robert Block
go from a notable author to a famous author. And while Block never ever mentioned anything about Lovecraft as an inspiration at all for any elements of Psycho, I think if you start reading about this kind of thing and you realize that Block and Lovecraft had a collaborative relationship and knew each other pretty well when Block was a young man, I think it's easy to draw some lines that may or may not be valid, but draw some lines between Lovecraft's experience and some of the story elements
that you find in Psycho.
That's fascinating. I haven't thought about that. I don't think it's a tangent I would say, I would you know what, I would place it as circumstantial and compelling.
Speculative is perhaps the best kindest word we can use.
Yeah, but I wouldn't say speculative fiction, no, just speculators. It's interesting too, because that is you'll hear us refer to this fairly often, Pepper. Through our exploration here, there are a lot of authors yet to come who, most of whom will readily acknowledge the impact of Lovecraft's work on them, But then there are several who will shy away from that despite compelling speculation.
Right right, And to be clear, Block and Lovecraft there's an undeniable connection because they incorporate elements of one another's work into their works. That's something else we'll chat about a little bit later on. But yes, whether or not Lovecraft's experience with his own mother had anything to do with informing the writing of Psycho that, I mean, it could be that Block was completely unaware of that element of Lovecrafts past. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. I think you're making a really good case here. And then that as to our next question. So at this point, this guy's life is going ridiculously bad. Right. He is a hermit. His closest friend and greatest enemy is his biological mother.
He has no real world skills with which he can use to attain a living like he came from a pampered background that was focused on more academia than any practical skills you might use if you need to, you know, make ends meet.
Right, right, he has a patrician's philosophy and a peasant's pocketbook. And that's that's not an ideal situation, especially if you are forced to find the job and you realize, oh, I can't men shoes, I can't make barrels, I can't do the other what I assume or most popular industries at that time.
Working in a cannery, a cattery.
Yes, being a heneman. So here's the deal it could have. If history went just a little bit differently, we may well live in a world without Lovecraft. He may have just lingered, languish, died obscurity. But he read a He was a voracious reader then, as always, and he read a series of love stories by a pulp author named Fred Jackson, and they pissed him off so much.
He's like, screw this, this ridiculous, sappy love stuff. This isn't even worth putting pen to paper. You should be ashamed of yourself. Hey, Hey, the argacy, the publication that published these, you should be ashamed for carrying this this tripe in your rag of a publication. And I am so angry. I'm going to do what countless YouTube comment
will do in the future. I'm going to write a nasty response to it, except Lovecraft, being well educated and extremely well read, was able to put it into biting and sharp terms that your typical YouTube comment tends to lack.
And he did it in verse just to put a little style on it. And he wrote a series of these things. His letter obviously is great for the argacy. Right, this is cooling because.
They publish it. It's not just otherwise we would never even know about.
This, right, Yeah, they publish it and Jackson's Defenders just like a YouTube comment page. I love the comparison. Jackson's Defenders come out of the woodwork. You know, why are you talking about my boy like this? And Lovecraft responds with yet more poison pen style verses. There's a heated debate that's selling copies left and right for the argus.
People are picking it up to read the column like what are these I don't know if we need to beat me here, Max, but what are these assholes saying about each other at this time?
Yeah? It's essentially the early twentieth century version of a disc track.
Yes, yeah, I think that is a very good comparison. This is a beef, and this beef launches Lovecraft's career it's only because he got so pissed at these love stories. People are reading this, as we said, it's popular. One guy reading this is dude named Edward F. Das the AAS. He is the president of an outfit called United Amateur Press Association or UPA. They just like dropping a glass in a Greek restaurant.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of go go Bardello's kind of kind of exclibs and whenever the song gets a little quiet, whoa bah. Yeah, this is a It's interesting because this is an organization designed for amateur writers. Right, It's not like this isn't like a professional organization. Quite the opposite. It's to it's to encourage amateur writers to pursue the craft and to perhaps make that transition from amateur to professional.
By publishing their own zines.
Which which is again something that we see today now, we see it where people are going through Amazon to self publish and just to bypass the entire publication industry out there, which has its ups and downs. Right, Like there's good and bad of that. Like anyone literally anyone can become a published author. One of the people on this podcast is a published author. I'm not saying that he didn't earn it. I'm just saying, do you hear that?
Next? Anyway, we are looking forward to the next volume of uh Max's comprehensive critical discourse on Star Trek.
Also, if you guys don't mind, I would like to jump in real quick with a completely off topic tangent.
Sure, prepare yourself. It's about it's about.
It's gonna be about football.
Okay.
So I'm a University of Michigan fan. Uh, there's a running back and then a running back coach in Michigan history by the name of Fred Jackson. He's beloved, he's supposed to be a great guy, and uh, he's also known for just being hyperbolic all the time. Like he compared like all of his running back recruits to Mike Hart, who was like the all time leading rusher at Michigan. He's like, yeah, he's Mike Mike Hart, but fast. But that is not the story I want to tell right now.
I want to tell the story about there's a running back by the name of Drake Johnston who goes in the store, goes into like the office Fred Jackson, and Fred Jackson just I guess he has a lot of drinks. So I'm cording this off of a m go blog, my favorite Michigan blog. I'm just gonna read a little bit of it, and I'm gonna see if you guys enjoy it, and then I'll shout so you guys can talk about uh, Lovecraft a little.
More bonus points though, if you can somehow segue it back to Lovecraft. Oh, I see your conversational Parkour.
All right, So I'm gonna read the quote here. I'm sitting in his office and there was a fridge right over there and he's like, you hungry, Johnson said. I'm like, no, man, I'm not hungry. So he's like, okay, I want to go. I'm going to go grab myself a coke. So grab himself a coke and sits down, takes two SIPs, and he's like, hey, Drake, you want something to drink? And I'm like, no, I'm good. He's like, I think I'm gonna get myself an orange juice. I'm like, dude, you
have a coach just in front of you. He says it's fine. So I'm sitting there and maybe two minutes later he's like, I think I'm gonna gonna get myself a drink, and I'm like, coach, you already have two drinks in front of you. Man, your thirst can be quenched by what is in front of you. He's like, he says, I'm just gonna grab myself some water.
You want some water.
I'm like, no, I have my gatoray in my hand. It's fine.
That's that.
That's the whole story I mean. But like you know, Fred Jackson, is this trying to quench the thirst that that that Lovecraft that's actually his real name. That was that was like a made up one, that thirst, but it was that Lovecraft had. But it's a different type of thirst. Love prests. Thirst was for revenge and anger at the inferior Fred Jackson.
Right, well, and he has the name love Craft, so he should know what a good romantic story should how that should be written. And clearly this inferior Fred Jackson had no, no concept of that. But this, this president of this amateur writer's organization, extends a hand to young Lovecraft, who who desperately needs a hand extended to him at this point in his life to join woo ba whoo bah.
Yeah, and Lovecraft takes him up on it because his social dance card is not super crowded. He does this in nineteen fourteen. He will later go on to become the president of OPAH as well as the official editor. Hold the phone, look up into the nights, not just at the stars, but the darkness between the stars, which tells us the time is right for us to end Part one of our exploration on how HP Lovecraft was just so so weird. Thanks again to our super producer
mister Max Williams, to our composer Alex Williams. I did allot the research for this episode, and thanks to aj Bahamas Jacobs of course Jonathan, thank you for hanging out with us. Man, it's been a blast. You were yourself the whole time, and you know, Max and I and Nola as well, vicariously, we really appreciate that.
Absolutely. I appreciate being invited on. I feel like you and I have a lot more to say about this, not just because we already have done that and we're retroactively going back to record this outro and I feel I feel ninety seven percent sure that I will remain myself for the entirety of the part two.
Well, you know, man, this is going to be a trust fall for me, and I'm sure nothing will go wrong, so tune in. Later this week. We'll follow up with part two of HP Lovecraft being so just so very Weird. As my pal Noel always likes to say, We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.