I had originally intended to write a lighter post with a collection of witty and delightful anecdotes for my reader's amusement. Since arriving, I have taken note of many things that have interested me, highlights and the occasional lowlight (healthcare I'm looking at you) of living in the US however as I was finishing up last week's post, an old friend and former boss of mine highlighted an interesting article though his own G+ feed. The Wikihole that I followed in trying to verify the contents of that blog is what led me to write the addendum to my last post and this revelation (to me at least) of the depth and malice of Lovecraft's racism is what has lead me to this post.
I was not a huge reader as a young child, TV was a lot easier and I have always been lazy. Being a little too old to be among the generation that discovered Harry Potter as the gateway drug to literacy, and finding Tolkien hard to read at that age, it was actually Poe and Lovecraft that gave me the entrance to this paper world. I had plenty of imagination as a youngster and whilst TV and Films attempted to scare in rubber suits, loud noises and rapid camera changes that left me more frustrated and occasionally deafened than actually scared. These techniques have been refined since but they still have noting on the suggestions and fears that are born of the darker corners of ones own mind and this is what Poe and Lovecraft (and to a lesser extent Stephenson, Shelley & Wilde) shone. Their writing contained just enough detail to let your brain take over and fill in the gaps with tailor-made fear inducing thoughts that no celluloid craft can do.
The revelation that Lovecraft was a racist was not a revelation to me, in fact I had taken it for granted that both Poe and Lovecraft were racist and this in part allowed them to form these visions of horror that are so visceral but my further reading, inspired by this article really changed the light in which I see these stories and made me question how I should judge these things and to what extent it should influence my opinion of the author's output. This is a really difficult thing to answer and speculations as well as facts have plagued many notable creator's reputations - Walt Disney is another example. However in the case of both Poe and Disney, it seems that these speculations really were largely unfounded and biased more around the culture of the time than any actual underlying sentiment of religious or racial hatred. Poe is known to have freed a slave under his ownership and Disney has been widely exonerated by the numerous peers and employees that knew him. Lovecraft however is far from a 'victim of the era' or misunderstood. The Horror at Red Hook is the most widely know example of this racial hatred in writing but the poem that Nnedi cites in her article is far beyond even this in the depth and malice of Lovecraft's hatred. This writing is much more akin to something you would see from a white supremacist or Neo-Nazi than an intelligent man that shaped an entire genre of fiction.
So where does this leave me and my opinion of Lovecraft's work? Well I didn't feel ready to come to any definitive answer so trawled the web for some more articles that explore this topic in more depth and with differing perspectives. In particular I found this article by David Nickle and this article by Bruce Lord which look at the realities of Lovecraft's world and opinions, how his poverty and experiences had some part in shaping his views but also that there are no small number of examples of his excessive racism directed not just at black people but anyone not conforming to a Eugenically clean heritage. My own background as a 'mongrel' seems particularly bilious to him.
All of this has definitely darkened my view of Lovecraft as a role model, as a figure of respect however in someways it is clear to me that this deepset hatred is a primal former of the writings and ideas that he generated and for that I am glad of everything that Lovecraft was, for all my childhood, my love of books and the wider mythos that his writings have inspired. Lovecraft is a dick, but it hasn't stopped him writing great works.
Please subscribe and let me know your thoughts on Lovecraft, his beliefs and his writing.
Coming next week... something with a lighter tone, I promise.
No comments:
Post a Comment