HATECRAFT

Seriously? Maybe it’s just me.

I’m always a little suspicious of people who profess not to be offended by Lovecraft’s racism. Come on. This really doesn’t bother you? You can just overlook it?

I’ll never be able to. For one thing, I’ve seldom met a member of a minority who shared this tolerance. No, it’s pretty much a white thing and usually preceded by a complaint about “pretentious” snobs, you know, them with their fancy grammar and their punctuation. Loud factions within the genre are nothing if not anti-literary.

That’s part of it.

But… why aren’t more people offended? I just don’t get this. Why does old HPL get a free pass when it comes to hate speech? Is it because of the genius of his prose style?

“Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come – but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”

Does that passage truly inspire anyone to read further? Anyone who hasn’t sustained a cranial injury? Brought into contact with Lovecraft’s writing, even the most erudite scholars fairly gibber. Peter Damien’s recent comments on Book Riot (which nearly caused an actual riot) are not atypical: “A godawful writer. He was so bad. I really cannot stress this enough.” Nor was Edmund Wilson’s famous remark about HPL: “The only real horror in these fictions is the horror of bad taste.” Academics just can’t seem to believe that adults read this sort of thing. I have the same problem.

There must be some reason people support it, because support it they do. Rabidly. A few months ago, someone in the Literary Darkness group made a dismissive remark about Lovecraft and “casual racism.” Leaving aside (for the moment) that the phrase itself is appalling, does this sound casual to anyone?

“The only thing that makes life endurable where Blacks abound is the Jim Crow principle, and I wish they'd apply it in New York both to Niggers and to the more Asiatic types of puffy, ratfaced Jews!”

Or this?

“Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, and always in the direction of the lower primates.”

Both examples are from HPL’s voluminous letters to editors. (He apparently wrote thousands of these, like some troll who never logged off.) And it’s not as though these attitudes did not bleed over into his fiction. They gushed.

“The negro had been knocked out, and moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets…”

What about this do people admire? And, please, don’t anyone start going on about his “ideas” again. Which inventions seem so brilliant? The giant elbow? The invisible whistling octopus?

In a recent New York Review of Books article, regarding “The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft,” edited by Leslie S. Klinger, Charles Baxter raises several interesting points. This one in particular struck me: “Klinger notes that Lovecraft’s “support of Hitler’s eugenic programs, including the ‘racial cleansing’ advocated by Ernst Rüdin and others, is well known.” This reader had not known it but upon being informed was not particularly surprised.”

Nor was I. It seems very much in character.

The problem is not that HPL was a product of his time – an excuse I’m also sick of hearing – but that he was a vile product of his time. Sadly, that time seems not to have passed so much as cycled back. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked nearly a thousand active hate groups in the US last year. Sorry, but I will never not mind. I will remain outraged and disgusted. And that but everybody was a racist back then argument is unpersuasive. Other writers of the period committed themselves to passionate anti-Fascism. Why does Horror continue to make a patron saint of this creep? I can’t help feeling he’s not just getting a pass. It’s almost as though Lovecraft’s bigotry somehow excuses his terrible writing, even justifies it.

I know many people agree: you should see all the private messages praising my courage. Not that I don’t appreciate the support, but come on already. My courage? In voicing an opinion? They have a point though, all these oh, you're so brave to say this out loud folks. To publicly express such sentiments is to antagonize the zealots, and they will come after you. This remains in many ways a cult, complete with an elaborately delusional belief system. For instance, accepted dogma holds that HPL eventually repudiated his fondness for the Nazis.

"By God, I like the boy!"
~ H.P. Lovecraft (about Adolf Hitler), November 1936

HPL died in March of 1937, just a few months after making that statement, so the spasm of sanity must have been brief, if it occurred at all, but pointing this out provokes the fanatics to renewed levels of frenzy, so be careful. These are the same people who claim that his lifelong demented hatefulness has no relevance to his "art." Why then do they insist on painting him as a reformed character? Logic is not the order of the day. Also beware of experts who hyperventilate over HPL's supposed literary merits. Such individuals have an agenda.

Not convinced about the political connection? Check out some of the people who become incensed over any criticism of their idol. Any moment now, comments are sure to start piling up. Just wait. Look at who their other favorite authors are. How shocked will you be? Oh, and don’t forget to check out the list of books they hate as well.

Try to act surprised.

Trust me, it only gets uglier. Fan culture can be deeply reactionary, and the genre has catered to this particular contingent for a very long time. No, I’m sticking with the disgust. Plus there’s that aspect where this is all just so fucking embarrassing. Horror writers often complain about the lack of respect accorded us by the rest of the literary community. Ever think maybe there’s a reason? Or that it might be time for Horror to grow up?

Shudder.

"Of course they can’t let niggers use the beach at a Southern resort – can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of greasy chimpanzees?" ~ HPL

Any questions?

* * * * *

Martin Luther King Jr. Day (and the recent epidemic of racist violence) prompted me to post this blog. It seems fitting to conclude with this quote.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.


Notes & Links:

For more information, see this article by Charles Baxter in the New York Review of Books:
"Racism is not incidental to Lovecraft’s vision but is persistent and essential to it."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...






And don't overlook this essay by Laura Miller in Salon:
"His venomous racism is self-evident; it’s right there on the page."
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/11/its_o...

An "in-defense-of" article by Samuel Goldman appears in (where else?) The American Conservative:
"To criticize his stilted dialogue or Gothic affectations is to miss the point."
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

Also Phenderson Djeli Clark's article – THE ‘N’ WORD THROUGH THE AGES – at Racialicious should not be missed:
"It’s always perplexing to watch the gymnastics of mental obfuscation that occur as fans of Lovecraft attempt to rationalize his racism."
http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/2...

Daniel José Older's passionate and insightful piece in The Guardian constitutes required reading:
"The fantasy community cannot embrace its growing fanbase of color with one hand while deifying a writer who happily advocated for our extermination with the other."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...

Readers might also enjoy taking this quiz.
Who said it? Hitler or Lovecraft?
http://www.beesgo.biz/horp.html
Some of the answers may surprise you.

This bit is from CREATING A DISTURBANCE, my article about the reactionary forces still so prevalent within the genre. It’s in the current issue of Primeval, a Journal of the Uncanny.

“Everything is political, every aspect of life, and all forms of dissent begin in misery. No individual secure within a free society ever hurled a brick at a tank. Only the oppressed know this kind of rage. There are many ways to resist, large ones and small ones, and even reading can be an act of rebellion. The immersion of the self in forbidden thought manifests a quiet defiance. Often, this constitutes the first step… and a dangerously liberating one. On a basic level, horror fiction suggests an exploration of the unknown, but other impulses often dominate, among them a regressive factor apparently built into the foundation of the genre, an aspect grounded in both fear of the unfamiliar and hysterical loathing of difference.”
http://www.amazon.com/Primeval-Journa...







And this is from my introduction to Enter at Your Own Risk: Fires and Phantoms, a queer-themed anthology of horror stories from Firbolg Publishing.

“There existed a whole universe of such material hidden in plain sight upon the dustiest of library shelves. Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, for instance, fairly vibrated with sexual tensions, even when all the characters were men. As a child, I devoured it all, impressing the hell out of the local librarian and quickly learning to eschew more obvious fare, like H.P. Lovecraft’s luridly paranoid ravings. After all, I empathized only too strongly with the “other” that so terrified him. Plus his prose style always seemed more suggestive of mental illness than artistry.”
http://www.amazon.com/Enter-Your-Own-...