Having (finally!) a day off which isn't overloaded with "catch-up" work, the promised reply:
nigourath: Once again, you are restricting the term "racism" beyond all legitimate reason. What you are describing is
a very limited use of the term; essentially a technical,
clinical usage. This is comparable to saying that, because someone has not been diagnosed as clnically depressed, they don't suffer from depression. While I do not doubt that the sort of definition (and study of the condition) you speak of is quite proper, it by no means constitutes the entirety of what the term "racism" signifies, or the actions, ideas, or statements which constitute "racism". It is only one,
very limited, aspect, not the whole; and by any
less limited definition, Lovecraft
was a racist.
Once again, the definition given is generally: "The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others" -- this is taken from the American Heritage Dictionary; and suits HPL to a "t", including the final part; with a secondary definition of: "Discrimination or prejudice based on race" (same source), again fitting HPL's ideas and behaviors.
He distinctly believed in the biological inferiority of various races (he flatly stated that both blacks and Australian aborigines were biologically inferior -- these were his very words) and argued this point with his correspondents. He was a full supporter of the "Jim Crow" principle in the South, and felt it would be much better were it adopted across the nation, and in fact in any place where blacks and other "races" existed together. He consistently used offensive racial epithets in describing members of other ethnic groups (non-Aryans, as he often referred to them), terms which did not have to do with their culture or societal differences, but their biological and physical differences, which in themselves made them, in his eyes, inferior.
One of his most famous (or infamous) passages of this nature can be found in volume 1 of the
Selected Letters:
Your slum travelogue interested me vastly, and I hope you will take me to this hideous cesspool some day soon. Whether I have ever beheld any place of equal putrefaction remains to be seen -- at present I find it hard to conceive of anything more utterly and ultimately loathsome than certain streets of the lower East Side where Kleiner took Loveman and me in April 1922. [Note: this was two years before HPL took up residence in New York, so long before he was competing with these "aliens" for jobs, as you had claimed earlier.] The organic things -- Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid -- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call'd human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations fo the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth's corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion sugestive of nothing but infesting worms and deep-sea unnamabilities. They -- or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed -- seem'd to ooze, seep and trickle thro' the gaping cracks in the horrible houses ... and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprou cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay ... a yellow leering mask with sour sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point.
-- SLI.333-334
He goes on to remark that he insisted that they walk in the middle of the street to avoid coming into contact with the contamination.
This is only
one such instance in his correspondence, and just about every critical reader has seen in this a close relationship with descriptions in his tales of various sites, from the xenophobic visions of "He" and "The Horror at Red Hook", to the more subtilized but no less xenophobic descriptions of "Innsmouth" (especially given some of the descriptives above). There are many other passages which either come close, equal, or even excel the pungently racist tone of that just quoted. Again, the easiest way to
begin to get an idea of how pervasive this is is by looking at Barry L. Bender's article, though even it only scratches the surface. And, of course, this sort of thing has been dealt with in just about every general critical piece on Lovecraft, at some point.
Which brings me to the final point. You say in your post:
You say ,that being a racist doesn"t or souldn"t actually detract, anything from a great author ,as it has happened with many great authors ,that have shown certain idiosynracies- like sexual specificities or violent behaviour or habitational self-destructive urges .J.d,most of the great writers had some of those and of course these, more, contribute to their legend as writers ,than detract.I am fully agreed ,that these
shouldn't influence the general acclaim upon a writers work,but you must understand, that the same cannot be said about Racism.
I mentioned the writers I did
because I was talking about their racism, not their sexual proclivities, drug-abuse, or any other foible they may have had. This is a well-known aspect of the writings and pronouncements of Eliot, Pound, and Mencken (not to mention Buchan, Cutliffe Hyne, etc., etc., etc.) Nor has this harmed their reputation or acceptance into the canon one whit. It is taken in stride in looking at their views, their attitudes, their strengths and weaknesses as artists and human beings, and viewed through the lens of historical perspective as well as how they trasmuted even the ugliest of human ideas and behaviors into great art. While on a popular level, Lovecraft has taken a black eye now and again from this, his acceptance in critical terms has hardly been affected by it, as such perspectives are used in critical reading; and even in the popular front, it at worst delayed his acceptance for a relatively brief time. Now it seems to be taken into consideration and accepted, even by the general readership, as one of many factors to be considered; regrettable from the standpoint of Howard Phillips Lovecraft the man, but most acknowledge that without it, and the way he used these views to inform his work, it would lack some of the power it has. That is very often what great art does, and this has long been an acknowledged fact.
So once again, I repeat: An honest, critical view of Lovecraft's writing will recognize that there is indeed a great deal of racism in what he writes; that Lovecraft himself was, by any accepted definition of the term beyond that of the very limited one you describe -- certainly by any definition commonly used even by the most intelligent, erudite, and conscientious commentators on such matters -- a racist. It is high time we stopped arguing about whether or not he was, as the evidence is all in support of a resounding affirmative, and moved into accepting this as one of the factors in considering his art, and how he used his
Weltanschauung (whether on the cosmic or the human level) to
inform that art. As I said, in the main, this has long been the practice when it comes to critical readings of his work (e.g.,
The Roots of Horror in the Fiction H. P. Lovecraft, by Prof. Barton L. St. Armand;
Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, by Maurice Levy;
The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft, by Prof. Robert Waugh;
The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, by Prof. Timo Airaksinen; various pieces by S. T. Joshi, including a fair amount in his biography, etc.); and as such, it has proved considerably more fruitful of discussion and insight than any continued denial of the facts can ever be.
And yes, STJ has done a piece on racism in America:
Documents of American Prejudice (1999). I have not had a chance to read this one, either, though at some point I'd like to, as I find Joshi's books on just about any topic well worth the time....
)
