The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, and more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

The Street

“There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.”

So starts The Street, a short story about the dangers of leaving foreigners running amok in your own backyard. One could say that, just like things and places, stories also have souls: it’s in their themes, the character arcs, the prevailing perspectives, in the emotions they try to evoke. If that is true, the soul of The Street is a cruel and rotten one, based on fear, entitlement, and hatred.

The narrator begins his tale by presenting the first people that passed through “The Street”, painting them in the most favorable colors. They are simple, hard-working folk, the “good valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea.” The “our blood” part is key here, as this notion of purity and heritage will become the bedrock of the narrative: the goodness of the first settlers is paramount to the construction of a feeling of nostalgia. The narrator idealizes the past so it can serve later as a counterpoint to the tainted present and become the thing that must be rescued.

The settlers, therefore, are depicted as simple people that just like to read simple things and live simple lives. There’s no mention of religious persecution, the massacre of indigenous populations, or any crimes whatsoever. They are pure in every sense of the word and also deemed the rightful owners of The Street.

This story being what it is, of course Native Americans would not be considered the first people to dwell in The Street. Here, they are depicted as dangerous beasts that lurk in the shadows of the nearby forest, threatening the kind-hearted settlers with fire-arrows. The settlers must “subdue” the forest, bend nature to their will, and establish dominion over the land. Native Americans are framed as a surmountable obstacle and then promptly discarded.

The use of capital letters when referring to The Street guides us to see it as more than just a street. It’s a proper place, a country. This short story, after all, is an allegory: the story that is being told about The Street is a linear account of the history of The United States.

“There was war, and thereafter no more Indians troubled The Street. The men, busy with labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortably, and more families came from the Mother Land to dwell on The Street,” the narrator explains, later even pointing out how the inhabitants of The Street put up a flag of stripes and stars.

A simple street is standing for the whole country of The United States to reflect its humble origins, to remind us of how small it began, so we can marvel at how fast it developed and how vast it grew to be. The narrative focuses on technological progress, highlighting the great changes that happened to the landscape: “The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses; simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railing and fanlights over the doors.”

The Street is described as an idyllic place, full of “elms and oaks and maples of dignity.” This being a conservative story, tradition is much valued. That is why, despite progress and change, it’s stated that the people of The Street have remained exactly the same over the years, “speaking of the old familiar things in the old familiar accents. And the trees still sheltered singing birds, and at the evening the moon and stars looked down upon dewy blossoms in the walled rose-gardens.”

Technological progress didn’t alter the soul of The Street. This is a crucial point for the story because it establishes how the “good Americans of today” are just like their ancestors: their superiority is a matter of blood, of history and tradition. Their values are supposed to be ancient ones so to give them more weight and power. To admit that time and circumstance have made them distinct from the first settlers is to hurt the basis of their rhetoric: what they want to fight against, after all, is precisely people that are different from their ancestors. They hate difference because they think themselves pure.

And so “came the days of evil.”

What is this evil? People that come to The Street with “coarse and strident” accents and “unpleasing” faces. They are rude, loud, and ugly, and they intend to lead the country to its downfall. The environment changes to reflect their distasteful nature: the houses start to decay, the trees begin to die, and the rose gardens become filled with weeds. They are framed as a pestilence that spoils even nature. They bring a whole new set of words to the descriptions of The Street: “rotten”, “filthy”, “hideous”, “sordid”, and “sinister” are just some of them.

Events finally reach the present day (to Lovecraft) and things take a turn for the worse. The narrator comments on the October Revolution, calling the Russians that come to The Street as “degenerates subjects” of a collapsed dynasty: “New kind of faces appeared in The Street; swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words, and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses.”

These horrible immigrants taint The Street with “a sordid, undefinable stench.” Their foreignness is a big part of the problem: we are led to think they’re evil because they speak unfamiliar words and use unknown characters. The things that reinforce their alterity are the things that make them wicked and dangerous.

The narrator warns us that, although some of these immigrants may look like good folk – wicked as they are – you can still identify their real nature, for in their eyes there’s always an “unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal.” Some of them are even blatantly called “evil” by the narrator, or referred to as “assassins.”

The future of The Street is indeed bleak, as some of these immigrants also come packed with socialist ideas, spreading lies and inciting unrest. Their words are treasonous. They’re immediately linked to chaos and ruin, crime and rebellion, appearing to plot to “strike the Western Land its death-blow.” These awful socialist immigrants, because they were left unchecked for too long, have now placed themselves in the heart of The Street, “whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed day of blood, flame, and crime.” They are not even considered people anymore, being referred to as “aliens.”

The Street was once teeming with simple, God-fearing folk; people that enforced family values, people that were courageous and hard-working. Now, there are terrorists everywhere, planning to “launch an orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which The Street loved.”

On the one side of the battlefield, there’s evil and crime; degenerates that want to tear down tradition, putting in jeopardy the very soul of The Street, corrupting the spirit of The United States, which was built with “a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and (please gasp) moderation.” These alien makers of discord are described as stupid, brainless beasts that – given the chance – will scorch the foundations of what once made America great.  Their houses are full of worms, ravaged over the years. Look at the difference, the story pleads, between the immigrants and the true Americans. These foreign trouble-makers are only “skilled in subtlety and concealment.” If they can’t take care of their own homes, what will happen if they take control of the whole country?

The Street is a cautionary tale, so it answers this question with an apocalyptic ending. The Street is utterly destroyed. There is nothing left standing in the end, “save two ancient chimneys and part of a stout brick wall.” If you let immigrants in, if you let them unchecked, if you let them take power, this is what will happen: The United States will become a place of death and ruin.

On the crumbled remains of The Street, some say that poets and travelers could still feel the scent of the old rose gardens and have glimpses of the fair houses of the good white folk that first lived there. Look at how things used to be swell, the narrative reminds us again at the end. Now, after the immigrants and the communists, look at how there is nothing left here. Travelers and poets may say otherwise, “But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travelers notoriously false?”

Some say places have souls and The Street is concerned with the soul of The United States. In 2018, now president Joe Biden condemned Trump’s policies on immigration, which formed concentration camps and separated children from their parents. He wrote, “This is not who we are. America is better than this.” The nature of The United States is exactly what’s at stake in this story, which argues that this is not only who the Americans are but also who they need to be: a group of entitled white people in love with the past, being urged to take up arms and do whatever it takes to remain in power and uphold their bigoted traditions.

The Street is a well-written piece of right-wing propaganda. It’s rage-inducing and repulsive and everything a white supremacist would love to read to his children as a bedtime story. The tale is carefully constructed to make people afraid of his enemies while fomenting a certain nostalgia for a past that never existed in that glorious form.

After all, it’s not only the dreams of poets and tales of travelers that are notoriously false. The United States is not built on values such as honesty and hard work. It’s built on slavery, the genocide of the indigenous people, and the constant exploitation of labor. It’s built on religious persecution, racism, and xenophobia. When Biden denies this history, he’s maintaining the illusion that feeds the rhetoric of the very people he ran against. America may one day become better than this, but it’s certainly not at the moment.

Written by H. P. Lovecraft, The Street is a cautionary tale about the dangers of immigrants and socialism, which are sordid things that go against everything that The United States stands for – whatever that is.

March 14, 2021.

—> Read or listen to The Street here.