Was HPL really a racist?

Especially after seeing the white ape comment, I guess we can summarize the answer by saying that Lovecraft doesn't exactly have much hope for humanity in general.

To Cthulhu, we probably all taste the same.
 
People need to consider the culture of the times when calling someone a racist.

That is all I have to contribute.
 
Just a side note, I have an essay on race in the early poetry of Lovecraft, that may be published later in Lovecraft Annual.
 
To me, it's not so much that he was racist as that he was xenophobic. This is really obvious from his writing. Anything that deviates from everyday experience is generally depicted as dangerous or scary. Racism can be seen as part of that, but just a small part. I think Lovecraft basically had a fear of that which he did not understand. So much of his writing points to this. He saw science as a tool for better understanding things, but he was even afraid of that in some ways. He seemed to have a deep-set idea that anything outside his own regular experience was something not as good.

I love his writing, but to me this is one thing about it that has always bothered me.
 
The interesting thing about this is that HPL began more this way than he would later be; not so much the racism issue (which did modify, but not always that much), but in general. He opened up more, and began to take in more and more experiences, and altered his opinions and discarded a lot of his pricklier attitudes. Even when he was more prone to resist the new, if it was something that was of worth, once he was exposed to it, he usually set about understanding and assimilating it into his worldview. Quantum physics was one such (as was relativity)... though this did not mean he always took such things to heart, so to speak. But I'm not sure fear fits him during his last decade or so; although he certainly emphasized that in his writing, it being the sort of writing it was. However, even there, you'll find it moved increasingly into awe, wonder, mystery, and the feeling of the supernal and sublime, rather than simple fear itself.
 
j. d. worthington said:
The interesting thing about this is that HPL began more this way than he would later be; not so much the racism issue (which did modify, but not always that much), but in general. He opened up more, and began to take in more and more experiences, and altered his opinions and discarded a lot of his pricklier attitudes. Even when he was more prone to resist the new, if it was something that was of worth, once he was exposed to it, he usually set about understanding and assimilating it into his worldview. Quantum physics was one such (as was relativity)... though this did not mean he always took such things to heart, so to speak. But I'm not sure fear fits him during his last decade or so; although he certainly emphasized that in his writing, it being the sort of writing it was. However, even there, you'll find it moved increasingly into awe, wonder, mystery, and the feeling of the supernal and sublime, rather than simple fear itself.
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That's a good point. Actually, the story you can most see his change of heart in (and one of his most underrated stories IMO) is "In the Walls of Eryx". It's one of the rare times he evokes some sort of sympathy for the monsters. This also happens a bit in At the Mountains of Madness, in which the shoggoths are seen somewhat sympathetically in the end, even if they are kind of scary.
 
kaelcarp said:
That's a good point. Actually, the story you can most see his change of heart in (and one of his most underrated stories IMO) is "In the Walls of Eryx". It's one of the rare times he evokes some sort of sympathy for the monsters. This also happens a bit in At the Mountains of Madness, in which the shoggoths are seen somewhat sympathetically in the end, even if they are kind of scary.
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Hmmm... I've never seen the shoggoths as sympathetic; the Old Ones, yes, but not their protean protoplasmic replacements. Actually, the Great Race are presented with a fairly sympathetic eye, as the civililzation they have is the highest ideal of such Lovecraft ever expressed, either in his fiction or his essays and letters.

Speaking of which, flipping through The H. P. Lovecraft Dream Book last night, I came across this quote from one of his letters, which may throw some light on why, even as he expanded and became increasingly more open to experiences, places, and people, fear still played such a large factor in his fictional work. This is in a letter to Harry Otto Fischer (the original, incidentally, of Leiber's Grey Mouser), on the subject of fears and phobias. After relating the sorts of problems he had with this growing up (Lovecraft really was one of the great dreamers or, to use Joshi's phrase, "nightmarers", in literary history), he concludes:

Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none ever approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!
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I actually meant that the elder things, not the shoggoths, are sympathetic. My fingers and my brain were out of sync, I guess.

The quoted letter is interesting. I think Lovecraft went through what most adults go through in that regard, except that 2 or 3 nightmares a year is probably more than most average adults!

While reading Lovecraft, I've sometimes thought his characters reacted with too much fear or revulsion to things. I have always kind of chalked this up to Lovecraft's own xenophobia coming through in the way his characters act. If he was much more open and less fearful by the end of his life (and by fearful I partially mean something more like tentativeness or great reluctance to accept new ideas), he often still depicted characters who experienced fear as he once had.
 
I'd say that's partly it. Partly it's also a philosophical stance, as a lot of what he's depicting is based on the "decline of the West" idea (which, with reservations, he had an affinity with), along with the idea set forth in the opening sentence of Supernatural Horror in Literature, that "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

When it comes to race, however, that's the sticking point with Lovecraft. Though he did modify many of his views on this to varying degrees, he never truly let go of his ethnocentric views; and in the case of blacks and Australian aborigines, even there what modification there was was minimal... though he did become less vitriolic and a bit more paternalistic in his descriptions of them in his last years.
 
You may remember the "The oldest etc. emotion" quote from his Supernatural Horror essay, of course. So that he may very well be working with the essence of the human condition in the face of an overwhelming, mechanistic and uncaring universe, for ordinary people unlike himself.
 
Well,he seemed to never show it in public to anyone and his being an anti-semite is at leats questionable (look at whom he maried-a Ukrainian (slav ,ergo:non aryan) JEW) .

Plus,Stoker is just as violent a racist in "The lair o the white worm"-in fact,I'd say he went farther then HPL ever did.When the black guy died,I was reliev I wouldnt have to read it anymore.

Cline also has undertones in "The dark chambr" which make you kinda twitch.
 
Oh, when you see the letters he wrote to his aunt -- especially Lillian -- or to Rheinhart Kleiner, you see quite a bit of anti-Semitism. This doesn't even take into account his comments concerning fellow amateur Charles D. Isaacson, both in correspondence and (albeit in somewhat toned-down form) in essays -- let alone his pungent satire "The Isaacsonio-Mortoniad". Lovecraft made no bones about the fact he was an anti-Semite; there were times, in fact, when he seemed genuinely proud of being so....
 
houdini was jewish as well wasn't he?
i wonder if he [lovecraft] would have ruined his reputation had he lived through ww2.
 
I guess we'll never know. What can be said is that the war years and after were a wake up call to many early 20th century intelligentsia who'd found antisemitism a fashionable attitude, TS Eliot being one example.
 
wizardsbeard said:
houdini was jewish as well wasn't he?
i wonder if he [lovecraft] would have ruined his reputation had he lived through ww2.
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That is impossible to say, really... but such attitudes didn't actually come into disrepute in general until well into the 1960s or after; they were still quite prevalent when I was growing up in that era, for instance, and can be found throughout popular literature and even a fair amount of the higher-grade publications.

However, there is some evidence that Lovecraft was slowly evolving in his views. There is a late letter in which, though he makes paternalistic statements, his references to a group of black children has a rather kindly tone quite at variance with many of his earlier comments (such as that he made about Braithwaite in his letters to Rheinhart Kleiner). He also had a neighbor who visited Nazi Germany prior to the war, but after much of the various anti-Jewish programs were in effect, and when she returned and was recounting her experiences to Lovecraft and his aunt, he was reputedly appalled by what was being done.

As for Houdini... his references to him in his correspondence -- save for somewhat mildly disparaging the "cheap" nature of the showmanship inevitably connected to Houdini's career -- is usually very warm and almost glowing. He apparently quite liked the man and thought highly of his intelligence, generosity, and general personality and demeanor; and the two of them did stay in touch until Houdini's death.
 
On the topic of whether Lovecraft was a racist or not....

Was anyone NOT a racist in early 1900's world? No. While segregatioin wasn't a big thing in the north, they certainly weren't placing non-whites in government or giving them housing loans. Heck we didn't get a non-English heritage president until JFK and a non-white president until...2010. In fact, most companies today will automatically deny a loan regardless of credit history based solely on the majority ethnic make-up of the location.

My great-great aunt was still alive when I was little, and she was not fond of Jews as a people. She called second hand stores Jew stores, and didn't care who heard her.

I'm not advocating that behavior, but think of the era the person lived in.

In this era, its perfectly acceptable to be anti-Mulsim.....but not anti-Jewish....not sure why that is.

And that was my off-topic tangent.
 
dustinzgirl said:
On the topic of whether Lovecraft was a racist or not....

Was anyone NOT a racist in early 1900's world? No.
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Just to be pedantic (now, Dustie, you just knew I had to call you on this, didn't you? 'Twouldn't be me otherwise....:p)... actually, YES. In fact, one of Lovecraft's friends, James Ferdinand Morton, would very likely appear as a left-wing liberal even by today's standards; he also wrote broadsides attacking race prejudice and related issues. This caused more than a little friction between the two of them, but they nonetheless remained fast friends.

As for Sonia's letter... I have no doubt that had a fair amount to do with it, yes. Especially during his New York years, his antisemitism reached egregious depths, and some of his comments on the subject made even his conservative Providence aunt apparently blench. So I'm afraid that, while you have it right that "racist" views were quite common in his day, Lovecraft at times showed such extremes of this that it made even other ethnophobes uncomfortable.

There really is no way to "whitewash" HPL's failing in this area. He simply refused to budge from the opinions he acquired at a very early age when it came to race. In this, I tend to chime in with Joshi to a fair degree, that it was (given the tenor of the times, certainly) less a moral failing than an intellectual one, as this was the one area in which he simply refused to look at the evidence contrary to his views, choosing instead to dismiss it with the weakest sort of codswallop, such as comparing racial intermingling to chemical reactions, or stretching the Darwinian model out of all recognizable shape in order to support views which were coming under heavy attack from various scientific fronts. (They were not by any means dismantled even in scientific circles for a long time to come; but the cracks were not only showing, but requiring larger and larger repairs to make them appear even faintly viable.)

As I said, the one ray of light here is that he did gradually soften some of these views in his last years, but only to a degree and with many a reversion to his harsher views of earlier times.

However, to give some perspective (which backs Dustie to some degree):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz6B8BFkb4
 
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