H P Lovecraft\u2019s fiction itself is still influential, but that influence can have implications for weird fiction writers now, complex ones. Some start in a haze of Lovecraft and Weird Tales<\/em> memories, and move away, by active choice or by general inclination. Others seek to recapture the essential cosmic horror and strangeness of work from back then. New expressions, interpretations, pastiches and parodies abound. There are also those who write to challenge some of the less savoury aspects of early weird and speculative fiction (as we say, HPL is not alone in being open to debate)<\/p>\n As a site fascinated by much of what came out of the early Twentieth Century Britain, good and bad, we have our own issues. To write about late Victorian and Edwardian times makes it necessary to go into places which are not exactly jolly flag-waving ones. Those places contain misery, oppression and yes, unconscionable examples of racial, religious and sexual discrimination (only last night, for example, we read a supernatural tale by an Edwardian English writer which conceded that a particular family were all right \u201cconsidering they were Jews\u201d).<\/p>\n Before we hand you over to our guest writer, we\u2019ll note that this is not a piece edited to \u2018suit\u2019 us. It\u2019s what he wanted to say, and contains a number of reflections which are to do with broader aspects of Lovecraft’s legacy and work than racism.<\/p>\n We have our own concerns about the current arguments in the field. Apart from anything else, those discussions should be conducted without so much vitriol and shrieking. And we notice four points coming up often, but without entirely convincing us as yet:<\/p>\n 1) All this happened a long time ago, so let it go.<\/strong> But Lovecraft\u2019s time is not so far away. Our own parents were children when Lovecraft was writing in the 1930s. As were the parents of a few other writers of weird fiction today (grandparents and great grandparents for some of you, we concede). This is not some curiosity arising from the 1500s, the days of Byzantium, or prehistory. greydog\u2019s<\/em> grandfather was a German prisoner of war when Lovecraft\u2019s first story appeared \u2013 and grandfather was considerably more respectful of non-white peoples than HPL. Violet Brown of Jamaica, still alive today at the age of 117, was thirty three years old when HPL expressed that view of the \u201cnegro\u201d as \u201ca vastly inferior biological variant1<\/sup><\/a>\u201d To put this in a very personal dimension, do you think that hearing your own grandmother, for example, being referred to like that is something you would easily pass over?<\/p>\n 2) The continued unease over HPL\u2019s views on race is mostly a white liberal product.<\/strong> Given the readership, it\u2019s hardly surprising that much concern over his views comes from such quarters, and hopefully from white conservative ones as well. But it\u2019s also hardly difficult to find black readers and creators who have serious concerns \u2013 and yes, their parents or grandparents would have lived through those times. In terms of writers speaking out, are black creators\u2019 views less important because white creators recognise their validity?<\/p>\n \u201c..such a suggestion\u2013that I overlook HPL\u2019s racial hatred\u2013 (is) borderline abusive and is a perfect example of racist gaslighting. However, I am a fan of the recent flood of revisionist Lovecrafian mythos. They make me a Lovecraft fan-by-proxy.2<\/sup><\/a>\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Craig Laurance Gidney<\/em><\/p>\n 3) The \u2018Oh, people were like that back then\u2019 argument concerning authors of the period.<\/strong> Perhaps there is more relevance to that one, as individuals often conform to dominant cultures and the examples set around them. However, Lovecraft and his fellow authors were writing at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance, when it was easy to read work by black writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes<\/strong> and Alain Locke<\/strong>. White writers and publishers did engage with this \u2018movement\u2019 and its many strands (and in some cases sought to exploit it). Choices could be made. A creator in the 1920s and 1930s wouldn\u2019t have had to look far to find examples of powerful black prose, poetry and commentary.<\/p>\n 4) It’s far more important to discuss his literary influences and sources.<\/strong> Well we do, and find them interesting and intriguing. That’s something greydogtales<\/em> has explored a few times. But in what way is that more important than some of the questions raised here? What happened, and what was said and written, eighty years ago matters today, because we not only have Lovecraft\u2019s legacy of striking fiction, but also the societal legacy of those times.<\/p>\n \u201cIf The Ballad of Black Tom is resonating with readers I think it\u2019s because the ideas at the heart of it remain relevant. I hoped to connect Tommy\u2019s problems with obvious, and ongoing, problems of racism today and I\u2019ve been gratified to see that so many readers have felt the connection is real.3<\/sup><\/a>\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Victor LaValle<\/em><\/p>\n NOTE: We have tried where possible to include footnotes indicating the origin of quotations etc. As we\u2019re not entirely sure how to do this in a blog post, we apologise for any errors.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exactly when Lovecraft didn\u2019t express his own racism and prejudices in print, when he abstracted them into symbols with broader signification and resonance, when he actually transmuted them through imagination and art, that he achieved his most enduring work.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n A week after returning from Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, where N.K. Jemisin received her second Hugo Award for Best Novel, I made the mistake of sharing the Tor.com post about Jemisin\u2019s interview with Playboy, where she announced her planned New York trilogy, which would \u201ckind of mess with the Lovecraft legacy,\u201d on a Facebook Lovecraft fandom group. Cue much – and intermittently venomous – reaction. Yes, Jemisin had stated that Lovecraft \u201cwas a notorious racist and horrible human being\u201d – which may be both part true and part unfair. But various posters accused her of being a \u201chack,\u201d \u201cin it for the money\u201d and \u201cmaking money off Lovecraft.\u201d And this for a two-times Hugo winner, whose seed story for her proposed Lovecraftian trilogy, \u201cThe City Born Great,\u201d was also in the running for a 2017 Hugo for Best Short Story.<\/p>\n There were also two other Lovecraftian works in the 2017 Hugo running for Best Novella, one also by a black author: The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle, and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson. Yet one critic of Jemisin said: \u201csince she’s black, she’s gotta write about \u2018race.\u2019 Way to escape the ghetto\u2026\u201d One other poster – though not in that thread – who said Jemisin should \u201cstick to writing ghetto fiction\u201d turned out to be a Sandy Hook Truther. Fandoms of any kind may attract obsessive cranks. But it\u2019s not an edifying experience to see (primarily) white writers and posters criticizing a black author\u2019s problems with their idol\u2019s racism.<\/p>\n Comparing Lovecraft to Poe in her New York Review of Books review article on the various Necronomicon Press and Arkham House volumes edited by noted Lovecraft scholar S T Joshi, Joyce Carol Oates has written that \u201cboth writers have had an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction, and Lovecraft is arguably the more beloved by contemporary gothic aficionados.4<\/sup><\/a>\u201d Obviously, that kind of legacy is not going to go away. It also is robust enough to survive personal dislike and antipathy towards Lovecraft\u2019s own views. So why the shrill defensiveness of its self-styled guardians?<\/p>\n All this, along with the recent public statements around NecronomiCon 2017 by S T Joshi (of which more below), merits a re-examination of the Lovecraft legacy itself. What is the Lovecraft legacy? What are its merits? Why does it attract such polarizing comment? I don\u2019t claim to bring anything specially new or insightful to the table about these questions except in one respect – Lovecraft in the context of the mainstream literature and intellectual culture of his time. Apologists for Lovecraft\u2019s racism have consistently emphasized that he was simply a man of his time. Fine: in what respect? Because Lovecraft, to my mind, slots right into some of the intellectual and cultural currents of his time, and our time, that give a far better explanatory perspective on his attitudes and work than the nascent pulp genres of the 1920s and 30s. That context requires engaging with his racism, because racism and anxieties about threats to Western civilization and the world order were among their core tenets.<\/p>\n First, though, I\u2019d like to go right to the horse\u2019s mouth – what Lovecraft said about why he wrote what he wrote. It\u2019s reasonable to assume that one of the most insightful critics of weird literature knew what he was on about when writing his own work, and about his own writing. And Lovecraft began his \u2018Notes on Writing Weird Fiction\u2019 by declaring:<\/p>\n \u201cMy reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best – one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or \u2018outsideness\u2019 without laying stress on the emotion of fear<\/em>.5<\/sup><\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Now, \u201cvague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy\u201d and \u201csuspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law\u201d suggest at the very least an ambivalent attitude towards alienage and outsideness – certainly not a wholly negative one. Perhaps that passage merits more notice than \u201cthe oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown\u201d – not least as it came later in Lovecraft\u2019s life.<\/p>\n And again, from his letters, \u201cMan\u2019s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man\u2019s relations to the cosmos – to the unknown – which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.6<\/sup><\/a>\u201d If there was a huge racial component to Lovecraft\u2019s definition of \u201cunknown,\u201d then you could almost read into such remarks a frustrated longing to engage with other unknown peoples, as much as fear and distaste towards them. That\u2019s as plausible an interpretation as any claim that Lovecraft\u2019s mature work is some kind of systematic dog-whistling for underlying racism, with Deep Ones and ocean-going cultists standing in for black Americans and Catholic immigrants. Other writers, notably Nick Mamatas7<\/sup><\/a>, have written stories about it. As per \u2018The Shadow Over Innsmouth\u2019, \u201cin that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet lest anyone doubt that Lovecraft was, and remained, an actual, committed racist, here\u2019s a letter from him to James F. Morton from March 23, 1931: \u201cWhat I was really laughing at was no [Franz] Boas himself – whom I freely gave a place among the first-rate anthropologists – but the na\u00efve way in which all nigger-lovers turn to him first of all when trying to scrape up a background of scientific support. He is the only first rate living anthropologist to overlook the obvious primitiveness of the negro & the australoid, hence the equalitarian Utopians have to play him up for all he\u2019s worth & forget the great bulk of outstanding European opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, that\u2019s just one of Lovecraft\u2019s many racist comments from throughout his life, but it\u2019s worth highlighting because Boas was one of the founding proponents of cultural relativism. Not only does that letter brand Lovecraft a consistent racist, it also makes it very clear – if clarity were needed – that Lovecraft knew full well there were other scientifically endorsed ways to look at ethnic difference, but consciously persisted in his racism in spite of them. If you\u2019re among the group who Lovecraft dismissed for your \u201cobvious primitiveness,\u201d then \u201chorrible human being\u201d doesn\u2019t seem too harsh a riposte, especially given that Lovecraft, the self-avowed scientific rationalist, was choosing only the science that suited his prejudices. It certainly doesn\u2019t impugn him as a writer. But it does call him out as a private individual for his private views.<\/p>\n As Craig Gidney wrote after NecronomiCon 2017, \u201cI have a new appreciation for Cosmic Horror and Lovecraft after last weekend. He turned his eugenic\/racist\/misanthropic beliefs into art. Uncomfortable ugly art, but art none the less. It’s a great way to stroll in the mindset of a racist. Fear of the Other is the thematic that comes across in Lovecraft’s work. It should be taught in class. If you’ve read other white supremacist texts, full of pseudoscience and bizarre taxonomies, you’ll be bored to death.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s exactly when Lovecraft didn\u2019t express his own racism and prejudices in print, when he abstracted them into symbols with broader signification and resonance, when he actually transmuted them through imagination and art, that he achieved his most enduring work. Does that make his mature work worthy of respect as an act of self-transcendence or even self-redemption? Possibly. Does it make his private attitudes and his personal character worthy of veneration? Hardly. But contrast a writer like Sax Rohmer, whose major success came from overt racism, and who, personally, was an occultist and orientalist decadent as well. Rohmer attracted complaint in his lifetime from the Chinese government: he also is now largely unread. Lovecraft could have followed his inclinations that way and become a D W Griffith in prose: the example was open to him, and he did defend Birth of A Nation as a celebration of \u201cthat noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War.8<\/sup><\/a>\u201d Even if Lovecraft was young when writing it, that apology on behalf of the KKK should be more than enough reason for Jemisin to dislike him. Yet when he came to Sax Rohmer, Lovecraft only singled one work out for praise: the occultist Brood of the Witch Queen.<\/p>\n My view is that the more telling critique of Lovecraft as a thinker and a writer, rather than a private individual, is in his pessimistic, even nihilistic world-view and conscious philosophy. This, to my mind, makes racism inseparable from his work – but also gives it its enduring value. Edmund Wilson and others have argued interminably about the limitations of Lovecraft\u2019s style and prose. No one seems to have denied that Lovecraft\u2019s cosmicism, indifferentism, cosmic horror, or whatever epithet it wears, is a genuine and enduring aesthetic. It certainly underwrites whole swathes of modern weird fiction.<\/p>\n Lovecraft\u2019s intellectual position drew heavily both on fin-de-si\u00e8cle decadence and aestheticism, and the various theories of Western civilization in crisis from Nietzsche to Spengler – although omitting, as far as all the sources can confirm, the direct heritage of explicit racial theory stemming from Arthur de Gobineau and adopted by Josiah Clark Nott, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Lothrop Stoddard and their ilk. Lovecraft c.1921 was already a well-informed enough reader of Friedrich Nietzsche to be able to cite, from the German and with understanding, key concepts such as the ewige wiederkunft (Eternal Recurrence), Wille zur Macht (Will to Power), and sklavmoral (slave morality). \u201cThere are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature – nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view,\u201d Lovecraft proclaimed in 1921 in \u2018Nietzscheism and Realism.\u2019 His debt to Spengler is so well rehearsed by Joshi and others that it hardly needs mentioning. Joshi himself wrote in his book on the subject that \u201cLovecraft was obsessed by the idea of decadence in all its aspects for much of his life. If there is one idea that cuts across all the facets of his philosophy and even unites them, it is the idea of the decline of the West.\u201d<\/p>\n And as another sometime Lovecraftian creator, Alan Moore, wrote in his introduction to Leslie Klinger\u2019s The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: \u201cit is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft\u2019s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world.9<\/sup><\/a>\u201d Those were Lovecraft\u2019s contemporaries who made Spengler a best seller.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not mentioning Nietszche as some kind of immediate condemnation of Lovecraft. I\u2019m not for one moment jumping on the facile identification of Nietszche, the ardent anti-anti-Semite, anti-nationalist and \u201cgood European,\u201d as some kind of proto-fascist \u00e0 la Gabriele d’Annunzio. But time and again, Lovecraft\u2019s declarations about Nietzsche and other intellectual forebears bracket him with the \u201cphilosophy of pessimism\u201d and \u201cdelight in doom\u201d that Hannah Arendt identified in The Origins of Totalitarianism as \u201cthe first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligensia10<\/sup><\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Lovecraft writes in a letter of 1918 that \u201cI am only about half alive – a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.\u201d Ringing with Baudelarian spleen and ennui, that comment is absolutely of a piece with his remarks that \u201cit is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world.\u201d Or with the kickoff sentence from ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family\u2019, that \u201cLife is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.\u201d<\/p>\n It also chimes in with aesthetic morality, now associated with many who\u2019ve gone into a Nietzschean devaluation of all values and come out the other side. \u201cI have a marked distaste for immoral and unlawful acts which contravene the harmonious traditions and standards of beautiful living developed by a culture during its long history. This, however, is not ethics but aesthetics,\u201d Lovecraft proclaimed. \u201cFor example, I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either.11<\/sup><\/a>\u201d I\u2019ll go back to the significant point about \u201cgentleman\u201d shortly. But the other point here is that the linkage of blind amoral forces with a pleasure principle is all too obvious in Lovecraft\u2019s work. Cthulhu is the ultimate aesthete, the fl\u00e2neur \u201cravening for delight,\u201d \u201cfree and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside.\u201d Mussolini, who declared himself at once “aristocrat and democrat, revolutionary and reactionary, proletarian and antiproletarian, pacifist and antipacifist,” would have recognized a kindred spirit.<\/p>\n Nihilism alone is obviously not in itself a symptom of systematic prejudice or racism. But nihilism allied with schemata of cultural and civilizational decay is a lot more suspect. Hannah Arendt again: \u201cDoctrines of decay seem to have some very intimate connection with race-thinking.\u201d Anyone with the time can read Arendt\u2019s genealogy of theories of social and historical decadence, and their intimate, indissoluble association with doctrines of imperialism, racism, and the special pleading of marginalized or insecure groups like Gobineau\u2019s pro-Bourbon post-Revolutionary aristos. The points of comparison with Lovecraft\u2019s social and intellectual position come crowding in.<\/p>\n Arendt wrote: \u201cGobineau’s \u2018fils des rois\u2019 were close relatives of the romantic heroes, saints, geniuses and supermen of the late nineteenth century, all of whom can hardly hide their German romantic origin. The inherent irresponsibility of romantic opinions received a new stimulant from Gobineau\u2019s mixture of races.\u201d Again, that sounds all too like the combination of amorality, aestheticism, and blind assertion beyond good and evil that crops up so often throughout the Lovecraft heritage.<\/p>\n Any sceptic, like Lovecraft, who had every reason, from his own social situation and the spectacle of the First World War, to doubt positivistic valorization of human reason, and of all humans endowed with that faculty, was potentially open to obscurantist elitism and discrimination. Post-Enlightenment theories of equal rights stem from the equal value of the light of reason, and of all reasoning beings. If Lovecraft dissented from that viewpoint, little wonder that he dissented from its practical application in a democracy. (\u201cAny indignation I may feel… is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses.12<\/sup><\/a>\u201d) That\u2019s not to endorse, or disprove, his perspective – only to emphasize its consequences. And readers may argue that it doesn\u2019t matter what a pulp writer with no influence on his time thought. There\u2019s two answers to that. One is that, in that case, it doesn\u2019t matter what another genre writer thinks about him. And for the other one, read on to the end of the essay.<\/p>\n Lovecraft did have plenty of personal reasons for concern with generational and social decadence and decay – one and eventually both parents institutionalized, poverty, inability to find a proper job, painful alienation from the society of his time, poor health. From ‘The Outsider’ to ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, heredity and breeding aren\u2019t exactly a blessing for most Lovecraftian protagonists – but that\u2019s very much of a piece with the racial pessimism of a Gobineau (forever fearful of racial decadence or insecure about possible black blood in his wife\u2019s or mother\u2019s family) or a Spengler, and all the polemical alarmist tracts of their popularizers and defenders.<\/p>\n Founding articulators of reactionary philosophies like de Maistre and Gobineau, whose family and social background were as marginalized and trauma-ridden as Lovecraft\u2019s own, showed a similar eagerness to root themselves in hallowed lineages: Gobineau invented an absurd pedigree from Odin; Guido von List, Austrian neo-pagan occultist and pioneer of pan-German nationalism, was called before magistrates to defend his appropriation of the aristocratic \u201cvon\u201d in his name. Personal aspirational snobbery can be one individual quirk that is strongly reinforced if you believe in an authoritarian, anti-democratic creed where blood lineage, breeding, and personal charisma are set up as superior to shared humanity and equal rights.<\/p>\n Lovecraft\u2019s Old Gentleman status has become a staple of Lovecraftian fandom, and part of his personal myth as a paradigm of distressed gentlefolk – though used with less irony by his fans than he did. Whatever his solid New England ancestry, though, Lovecraft was the son of a travelling salesman, who lived in poverty most of his life. The \u201cOld Gentleman\u201d status of Lovecraft, in short, may be as much of a giveaway as a defence. As Oates also wrote: \u201cTo love the past, to extol the past, to yearn in some way to inhabit the past is surely to misread the past, purposefully or otherwise; above all, it is to select from the past only those aspects that accommodate a self-protective and nourishing fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n Lovecraft also erected that fantasy into a fictional world that many fans apparently enjoy living in. Jemisin said in a 2015 Electric Literature interview about writing The Fifth Season: \u201cWorldbuilding is a central tenet within any secondary world fantasy, and a certain subset of science fiction, too. The readership expects and demands that level of detail13<\/sup><\/a>. There are people who will make role-playing games in a heartbeat out of your books, and if you have not provided them with predictable structures and things like that, they are going to get really pissed at you. And that can be helpful, because it makes you drill down to a level of verisimilitude that most people don\u2019t want to think about; that can create a world with a really great lived-in feel, if you do it right.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously, Lovecraft did that. Unintentionally, perhaps, but Call of Cthulhu is now the Pepsi of RPG franchises, alongside D&D\u2019s Coke, and the game\u2019s success is part of the revival of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction. The Cthulhu Mythos is obviously by definition an exercise in world-building across multiple tales, \u201cunlike Poe\u2019s fevered tales which appear unrelated to one another, isolated in essential ways,\u201d as Oates remarks. And I\u2019m not mocking this at all as a component of the Lovecraft legacy. Spawning a hugely successful RPG franchise is a contribution – of a kind. Bringing much-needed convention revenue to Providence, RI with NecronomiCon is a contribution – of a kind. Cthulhu plushies and tentacle masks are a contribution – of a kind. They\u2019re also great fun.<\/p>\n For a writer who drew on the most advanced science and latest exploration of his day, Lovecraft did a surprisingly good job of creating an alternative escapist fantasy world, where many Lovecraftians obviously enjoy sojourning. I certainly do. And one of that fantasy world\u2019s central landmarks is Lovecraft Country – his beloved Anglo-Saxon gambrel-roofed weatherboarded New England – under threat from dark alien forces. As he wrote, \u201cI want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions – & in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat.14<\/sup><\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n I do suspect that many Lovecraft fans identify with what he held dear – it\u2019s not hard to feel the allure, when he expressed it so well and fondly. Do they correspondingly flip over into fear and hatred of what he feared and hated? I\u2019d like to think not, but then you have Robert M. Price\u2019s keynote speech at NecronomiCon 2015. As well as protesting against \u201cthe rising tide of atheism and rationalism,\u201d he spoke as follows:<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can manage to look past [Lovecraft\u2019s] racism, we will manage to see something deeper and quite valid. Lovecraft envisioned not only the threat that science posed to our anthropomorphic smugness, but also the ineluctable advance of the hordes of non-Western anti-rationalism to consume a decadent, eurocentric West. Superstition, barbarism and fanaticism would sooner or later devour us. It appears now that we\u2019re in the midst of this very assault. The blood lust of jihadists threatens Western Civilization and the effete senescent West seems all too eager to go gently into that endless night. Our centers of learning have converted to power politics and an affirmative action epistemology cynically redefining truth as ideology. Logic is undermined by the new axiom of the ad hominem. If white males formulated logic, then logic must be regarded as an instrument of oppression. Lovecraft was wrong about many things, but not, I think, this one. It\u2019s the real-life horror of Red Hook.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Not only does that sound like the starkest possible confirmation of Jemisin\u2019s worst fears about Lovecraft\u2019s legacy, and his attitudes towards \u201cthe \u2018chattering\u2019 hordes… the horrifying brown people of New York that terrified him15<\/sup><\/a>,\u201d it also reads like a page torn straight from the playbook of Gobineau, Lothrop Stoddard, Steve Bannon, and all the theorists of racial hierarchies and Western decadence.<\/p>\n Some defenders of the Lovecraft legacy might argue that Lovecraft doesn\u2019t deserve to be held to account as a proponent of such ideas – while other defenders are enlisting him to endorse them. And I\u2019ve already gone into the probable linkages between his thinking and theirs. \u201cOnly a cynic can create horror – for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them,\u201d Lovecraft wrote to Edwin Baird in March 1924. That\u2019s not exactly the point of view one would hope to see in one\u2019s legislators. But cynical disdain for humanity abounds in authoritarians of every stripe.<\/p>\n Faced with an argument like Price\u2019s, what is a writer like Nadia Bulkin, from a Muslim majority country and the author of some fine Lovecraftian fiction, supposed to make of the Lovecraft legacy and its self-styled advocates? Advocates who don\u2019t simply assess and analyze extreme ethnic nationalist attitudes as a key to understanding aspects of Lovecraft\u2019s work, but who explicitly endorse and buy into those attitudes – and who cite \u2018The Horror at Red Hook\u2019, the one Lovecraft story usually cited as the closest HPL got to making racism the overt basis of a tale. And enlisting Lovecraft\u2019s legacy for an alt-right stance on the political, and even ethnic, struggles of our time does nothing to exonerate him as an innocuous man of his time. It does reinforce Moore\u2019s analysis, though. Does it matter what a pulp writer thought? It matters to Price. It also matters to Jemisin. Or if he was such an insignificant writer that his thought and opinions don\u2019t matter, then Price and Joshi have nothing to pride themselves on. Can\u2019t have it both ways.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the aftermath of Price’s statement, Joshi had a very public meltdown over the programming for Necronomicon 2017, where he accused the organizers of being \u201ccaptured (and, indeed, rather willingly) by the forces of political correctness\u201d and \u201cswayed by various forces hostile to Lovecraft.\u201d Joshi foregrounded his own \u201cattempt to save the convention from being polluted by the Lovecraft-haters.\u201d Obviously, those hostile forces didn\u2019t exactly capture or sway the 2017 Hugos.<\/p>\n It also helps make sure that the issue of Lovecraft\u2019s racism absolutely will not go away. S.T. Joshi did criticize Price\u2019s remarks shortly after as \u201ca rather windy and confused polemic,\u201d but c. NecronomiCon 2017, judging by his blog posts, he seems to have sided with Price against the organizers who excluded him from the con. \u201cThere must be something wrong with a Lovecraft convention that has alienated the two figures – Robert M. Price and myself – who, over the past forty years, have done more to promote Lovecraft scholarship than any individuals on the planet.16<\/sup><\/a>\u201d You have to ask who alienated who first.<\/p>\n Oates praises: \u201ca melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft\u2019s most passionate work, like \u2018The Outsider\u2019 and \u2018At the Mountains of Madness\u2019; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair, and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the reader\u2019s memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded.\u201d She also sums up his character as follows: \u201cHow strange to know that Lovecraft was unfailingly kind, patient, generous, unassuming, and gentlemanly in his personal relations; yet, in keeping with his Tory sensibility, an anti-Semite (despite his deep affection for Sonia Greene and other Jewish friends), racist, and all-purpose Aryan bigot.\u201d<\/p>\n Oates doesn\u2019t seem to have any problem holding the balance between those polarities of attraction and repulsion in her judgement of Lovecraft as a man and a writer. For authorities on his work to claim that there is no polar opposition, or to demonize others for even alluding to its existence, though, doesn\u2019t sound like a mature approach to actually understanding the man and the work. The Lovecraft legacy may survive Lovecraft\u2019s detractors: his defenders are a different question.<\/p>\n Paul StJohn Mackintosh, August 2017<\/em><\/p>\n 1<\/a>Lovecraft correspondence (May 29 1933)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 2<\/a>https:\/\/craiglaurancegidney.com\/2017\/08\/29\/lovecraft-revisionism-in-the-dream-quest-of-velitt-boe-by-kij-johnson\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 3<\/a> https:\/\/lovecraftzine.com\/2016\/05\/19\/interview-with-victor-lavalle-author-of-the-ballad-of-black-tom\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 4<\/a> New York Book Review 31 Oct 1996 http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/1996\/10\/31\/the-king-of-weird\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 5<\/a> http:\/\/www.hplovecraft.com\/writings\/texts\/essays\/nwwf.aspx<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 6<\/a> Lovecraft, in “The Defence Remains Open!” (April 1921)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 7<\/a> See, for instance, Jitterbuggin\u2019, which is based around a (fictional) Lovecraft letter in which he has a prophetic dream of witnessing the multiracial birth of rock and roll and being sickened by it even as he found himself dancing to it <\/i>(PStJM)<\/i>. <\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 8<\/a> Lovecraft \u2018In a Major Key\u2019, The Conservative, Vol. I, No. 2, (1915)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 9<\/a> The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (2014) http:\/\/amzn.eu\/iBKszm8<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 10<\/a> Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism http:\/\/amzn.eu\/aARreqb<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 11<\/a> Lovecraft, correspondence to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 12<\/a>Lovecraft, correspondence to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 13<\/a>https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/they-are-living-their-own-myths-an-interview-with-n-k-jemisin-author-of-the-fifth-season-3737515bf101<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 14<\/a> Lovecraft, correspondence to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 15<\/a> https:\/\/www.tor.com\/2017\/08\/18\/nk-jemisin-lovecraft-trilogy\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 16<\/a> Joshi – Real and Fake Liberalism http:\/\/stjoshi.org\/news.html<\/a><\/p>\n Next time – Thank the gods, an author of supernatural fiction from the 1920s, with very few biographical traces and no personal controversies. Bessie Kyffin-Taylor…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You don\u2019t have to read the article on Lovecraft’s legacy below. You may not want to read it, which is fair enough. You didn\u2019t have to pay for it, and you may need to go and put the badger out. But we\u2019re going to print it, because we don\u2019t agree with ‘camps’ on these matters, … Continue reading Paul StJohn Mackintosh on Lovecraft\u2019s legacy<\/span>
\nLovecraft\u2019s Legacy<\/h1>\n
Paul StJohn Mackintosh<\/h2>\n
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