Lovecraft Was Racist. Now What?
It’s time to grapple with the facts
Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s evil star has continued to shine more brightly since his death in 1937. The current wave of interest, however, is less adulatory than critical as works building on the author’s cosmicism force his racist views back into the spotlight. What are we to do when one of the greatest horror writers ever faces horrifying accusations?
Condemning Lovecraft
We can start by recognizing Lovecraft’s racism. The author’s views were first brought to my attention years ago by a friend and fellow reader of Lovecraft’s fiction as we were settling in for a session of the board game Arkham Horror. He said he’d been reading a biography of Lovecraft and learned that Lovecraft considered himself superior due to his WASP background. Simply put, Lovecraft was racist. My friend related this fact as unfortunate and I accepted it as such. It didn’t occur to either of us, any more than I assume it does to many people, to dispute it. As recent debates illustrate, however, not everyone is a fan of facts.
Recent articles accompanying the success of HBO’s television series Lovecraft Country often raise two works by Lovecraft as evidence of his racism and xenophobia. One is a poem whose title uses a racial epithet so offensive that I can’t quote it here without having my account banned. The other is the short story “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927), which is full of loathing for New York City’s immigrant population, especially those who aren’t white. After page upon page identifying the immigrants of Red Hook, Brooklyn with squalor, crime and barbarism, Lovecraft finally connects them to pure evil:
. . . here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court . . .
The two oft-cited works are clear examples of racism in Lovecraft’s work, and there are more, but many critics feel it’s bare throughout his oeuvre, even in stories that on a casual reading appear to be mere weird fiction about monsters and madness, such as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936). This novella, one of Lovecraft’s most well-known, is about a New England town where the residents have interbred with an aquatic race known as the Deep Ones, producing amphibian offspring. Many see this as an expression of Lovecraft’s stance against interracial couples in the real world.
And that’s just the beginning. Lovecraft had an active life of the mind that expressed itself through voluminous literary correspondence. His letters detail his beliefs on literary, scientific, philosophical, social and political matters, and while some of his views weren’t static, his views on racism changed little. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi’s book H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (2016) devotes a section to Lovecraft’s racialism with numerous quotes from Lovecraft himself insisting on the inferiority of races other than his own. This isn’t a case of snowflakes magnifying minor or imaginary offenses. In many ways, Lovecraft was explicitly and inveterately racist.
That doesn’t mean we can’t characterize Lovecraft’s racism. Biographical, social and historical factors contributed to Lovecraft’s racism and he expressed his racism through specific views and behaviors. An investigation of his life and work even turns up personality traits and events that mitigate or run contrary to his racism, such as his distaste for many types of white people (obvious in his fiction), his squeamishness about the human species in general, and his marriage to Sonia Greene, a woman of Ukrainian-Jewish descent whom Lovecraft exempted from his anti-Semitism. These and other considerations present lines of thought that help us understand Lovecraft and how racism operates, but they don’t remove, much less justify, his racism.
Preserving Lovecraft
Yet Lovecraft’s legacy is worth keeping. This gets complicated, but if it’s possible for figures like Thomas Jefferson, who proclaimed the equality of all “men” while owning slaves, and Richard Wagner, who composed sublime music while writing anti-Semitic tracts, then it’s also possible for H.P. Lovecraft.
After all, there are positive aspects to Lovecraft’s work. Some of the charges of racism leveled at his fiction are valid, and some are strained, but it’s simply a fact that many readers have never even noticed it. They turn to celebrated stories such as “The Outsider” (1926), “The Rats in the Walls” (1923), and “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), the freakouts of the Dream Cycle, the famed Cthulhu Mythos and minor gems like “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920) for weirdness, and they get it and they thrill to it.
That’s why people around the world love Lovecraft. In Japan, I often run across translations and literary analysis of Lovecraft’s work as well as works of fiction paying homage to him, even though his racism didn’t spare Asians. Masaki Yamada’s Cthulhu Shojo Warriors (2014), for example, is about young girls who fight beings meta-evolved from a monstrous Cthulhu Gene. People do evolve on issues, so who knows what Howard would think of such a book were he alive today, but readers of Cthulhu Shojo Warriors could care less about his racism.
A legacy can also be negative. The legacy of American slavery is one of enduring racism, yet we preserve the memory of it and all the rest of America’s troubled history with regard to race up to the present so we know better and avoid making the same mistakes. Thus, preservation in Lovecraft’s case also means keeping a record so we can hold ourselves accountable for building a better society.
That endeavor includes challenging Lovecraft’s legacy. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) tells the story of “The Horror at Red Hook” from the point of view of a black man. Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, the basis for the TV series, follows a number of African-American characters as they encounter Lovecraftian villains in Jim Crow America. Ruthanna Emrys’s Winter Tide (2017) recasts the amphibian hybrids in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as victims not monsters. In an interview with Vox, N.K. Jemisin described her novel The City We Became (2020), which features a Lovecraftian threat in the form of giant white tentacles, as a response to Lovecraft’s legacy. These aren’t merely challenges to Lovecraft’s legacy, they’re challenges from within it and wouldn’t be possible if he were canceled.
Debating Lovecraft
Finally, we must behave like adults. Discussions of Lovecraft’s racism I’ve run across online have been predictable in their awfulness, dominated as they are by two groups of people more interested in opining than mature thought and dialogue. One consists of critics who have never read Lovecraft’s work but are unrestrained in their condemnation of him, his work and his readers. The other is comprised of defenders who are familiar with Lovecraft’s work but refuse to take his racism seriously. Better to engage with each other on the basis of knowledge and in a spirit of good will.
No one has to read Lovecraft any more than they have to read any other author. Not everyone loves horror, not everyone likes Lovecraft’s style, and now that his racist views are under increased scrutiny, many will simply feel turned off and read something else. For fans and literary critics, however, Lovecraft’s racism presents a dilemma.
Lovecraft was racist. Now what?
I suggest we continue to do the work of interpretation, of the man and his work, wherever it leads. That’s not always easy or comfortable, but it’s the only responsible way to deal with our literary heritage.
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