Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,701

This is the grave of H.P. Lovecraft.

Born in 1890 in Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft grew up in a family that was pretty wealthy, but with severe mental issues. His father (named for Winfield Scott like any good man of his era) had a “psychotic episode” while staying in a Chicago hotel in 1893. He spent the next five years in the Butler mental hospital in Providence (which is still open and has a nice campus for a stroll, public welcome) before dying of syphilis. Lovecraft either didn’t know this about his father or lied about it, because he always claimed he had worked himself to death. Of course, it’s not as if our young chap here wasn’t capable of creating stories….

In any case, Lovecraft grew up around women–his mother moved in with her sisters and his grandparents. He was their pet. His grandfather proved to be what father figure he would have. His grandfather was a big early 19th century gothic story type of a guy, big fan of Edgar Allan Poe and the like. He really wanted to educate the boy and so encouraged him to read, which included history and the like but especially the stories he had liked as a kid. Now this was not so popular at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the age of William Dean Howells and the like. moving toward the rise of the naturalism and realism of authors such as Theodore Dreiser. That was very much not where Lovecraft would go. He loved those old scary stories too.

Lovecraft started writing himself. Most of this early work was hack stuff, stories for the pulp magazines, not that there is anything wrong with that. That started in 1913. He moved to New York and married Sonia Greene, a pulp writer herself who funded a lot of this work, in 1924. But their marriage kind of fell apart. She lost her once successful hat shop that had funded so much of this, he couldn’t make enough money on his work to support them both, and then she left for Cleveland where she found a job. He could have joined her, but he didn’t. He moved back to Providence.

It was during his later Rhode Island years that Lovecraft published his most famous work. Weird Tales published “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1928 that helped establish the Cthulhu Universe that so many readers still love today, for whatever reason. He built upon this with 1931’s The Shadow over Innsmouth, a full novella that continues with the Cthulhu thing. Other key stories from this era include “At the Mountains of Madness,” a longer piece serialized in Astounding Stories in 1936 after five years of not being able to get it published. Also in 1936 was The Shadow Out of Time, another novella published in 1936.

I have never read a single word of Lovecraft. Don’t much intend to either. I am sure that will cause all sort of kerfuffling in the comments, but just because I haven’t read someone doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their grave post. But I also basically hate fantasy, science fiction, “world-building” and all that modern stuff that people like these days. I didn’t watch Game of Thrones either for instance, figuring the combination of medievalesque world building and a lot of violent rape wasn’t going to warm my heart. but whatever, all good. I’ve never really even read any Poe, or not that I can really remember. That whole way of writing just leaves me ice cold. I feel that people who still are into Lovecraft are mostly middle aged white men who wear their hair in a ponytail for god’s sake, and go to sleep dreaming of a 37-sided dice. But again, I can poke a bit of fun at all this but not really care. Read what you want!

What is not all good is Lovecraft’s racism. Let’s just lay it out–Lovecraft was a horrible racist, I mean this is a guy who wrote an early poem actually called “On the Creation of Niggers.” Classy! But then there’s his more well known anti-immigrant screeds. Vox had a good piece about this a few years ago, when HBO made Lovecraft Country. Let’s quote it:

One of the problems with Lovecraft is that his work and influence was everywhere before most people knew he was anywhere. Despite the spread of his ideas among genre fans and writers, Lovecraft himself didn’t become more widely known outside of a cult following until the late 1980s and ’90s. Consequently, the popular culture he so thoroughly left his mark on was slow to really parse where that influence came from — or address the fact that the man at the center of it was an extreme racist.

And let’s make no bones about it. Lovecraft was an avid, loud, horrific racist — suffice it to say you’ll probably fail this “Hitler or Lovecraft?” quiz — and on top of his frequent racist rants in letters and discussions with friends, his racist fears infuse and inform nearly all of his work. Famous Lovecraft short stories like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (about a seaport town of murderous cultists who are secretly mating with terrifying fish people) and “The Horror of Red Hook” (a story full of textual xenophobia and horror at New York’s immigration influx and the “primitive half-ape savagery” of nonwhite New Yorkers) may be beloved and hugely influential, but they’re also built on overt racist metaphors. Often these metaphors involve his deep fear of miscegenation (race-mixing), hereditary evil, and his concern that he himself might have an impure bloodline, which all takes his “monster is me” trope in a terrible direction.

Throughout the decades, many of his fans have attempted to argue that actually, Lovecraft wasn’t that racist, and that he would have eventually turned away from his beliefs if he’d only lived longer. This is a terrible argument; Lovecraft’s form of racism was already profoundly more extreme than the “typical” racism of his time, and the assumption that he was growing more tolerant in his beliefs is based on wishful thinking. And as the genre has begun to diversify its scope over the past decade or so, more people have realized that.

This debate about how racist Lovecraft actually was, and what to do about it, has played out directly among the community of the World Fantasy Award — which traditionally, from its founding in 1975, awarded a bust of Lovecraft’s head as its trophy. In 2011, the Black writer Nnedi Okorafor won the annual honor, and only realized Lovecraft’s legacy after a horrified friend pointed out to her that the man whose head sat upon her mantle was a lifelong, virulent racist.

When Okorafor wrote a blog post about how conflicted she felt that “a statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer,” including in it Lovecraft’s most overtly racist piece of writing, she drew inescapable new attention to a subject that had largely been buried and forgotten.

In 2014, writer Daniel José Older began a petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Black writer Octavia Butler. That same year, Black writer Sofia Samatar won the honor, and said in her acceptance speech, “I can’t sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award.” The following year, in 2015, the awards finally retired Lovecraft’s image — which caused controversy both because many people felt the move was years overdue and because some were furious at what they saw as the erasure of Lovecraft’s legacy.

The conversations have been ongoing among horror fans ever since. Speaking at the “Shadow Over Lovecraft” discussion on Lovecraft’s racism, held in New York in 2019 by the Miskatonic Institute (a recurring panel series named for Lovecraft’s fictional university), Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff discussed the ways Lovecraft’s fear of the other, even though it was rooted in racism, was also relatable on a basic level.

“In giving vent to his bigotry, he taps into a larger fear that I think we all have of people who are different from us and mean us no good,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons you can take his stories and repurpose them. … He may not have realized the universalism of some of what he was writing about, but I can take that away from his work.”

In other words, there’s something timeless and universally appealing about much of Lovecraft’s fiction that keeps even reluctant readers coming back to him. That doesn’t mean one has to overindulge; “not reading Lovecraft’s letters is a form of self-care,” writer Ruthanna Emrys quipped on the same panel.

Still, there’s an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft’s niche community of genre writers — still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO’s Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author’s racist legacy — but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape.

“He’s so woven in, I think for horror as a whole, it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm,” Black horror writer Victor LaValle, who often writes Lovecraftian fiction, told me. “And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm.”

Now, people in the past are flawed. They are in the present too. I get that. That’s why I don’t evaluate my art based on the politics of the creator. All I have to say is this–enjoy Lovecraft if you want. But if you do enjoy Lovecraft, I don’t want to hear a goddamn word about Philip Roth, D.W. Griffith, J.K. Rowling, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Roger Waters, or so many other artists over the years who treated people poorly or had really bad politics. If you don’t draw this line, you are a stone cold hypocrite. I’m not going to enjoy Lovecraft but not because of his politics. I might watch Birth of a Nation though. I most certainly will watch Chinatown but I’m not going to watch Pirates. Rowling has turned into an awful person, but if I was into fantasy stuff, I’d still read the Harry Potter books. I’m certainly not going to attend a Roger Waters show and listen to him rant about the Jews (and really, fuck that guy), but I am still going to listen to Wish You Were Here.

So yeah, at least be consistent about this stuff. Given that I know there’s a lot of Lovecraft fandom out there, I’d like to hear from said readers of his work how they feel on this issue and how they feel about not only reading Lovecraft with his history, but about the more contemporary bad people who are really good artists. Once, a perceptive LGM commenter (can’t remind the name, sorry!) noted that these debates always come down to the same thing–if you like the artist, you make excuses and if you don’t, you use it as an excuse to damn them. That’s indeed how it usually goes. I’d like to move past that if we can, but at least we can admit it I hope.

And if you are on the “I Only Consume Art from People Who Meet My Political Standard” train, then I’d like to know who you like and why. Who meets these standards and where do you draw the line?

Of course feel free to discuss his art in any way if you want, even if you are a middle-aged man with a ponytail (though again, really?). I don’t have too much of offer on that. But of course that’s what the comments are for.

Lovecraft was almost as sacred of doctors as he was of Italians and Jews, so he refused to see doctors as his health deteriorated. As it turned out, he had intestinal cancer, so probably not much could have been done anyway. He died in 1937. He was 46 years old.

H.P. Lovecraft is buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island.

Lovecraft is in the Library of America, in Volume 155. If you would like this series to visit other authors collected by the Library of America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I’ve done Louisa May Alcott (156) and Philip Roth (157,158). James Agee is Volume 159 and 160 and he is in Hillsdale, New York. Richard Henry Dana at 161 is in Rome, and not the New York town, so that one seems less likely unless you all are feeling generous. Henry James is 162 and I’ve long ago checked him off. Arthur Miller is Volume 163 and he is in Roxbury, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.