Quote:While I think there is little doubt that Lovecraft was a anti-Semite, I've always felt (perhaps naively) that his racism was more theoretical than applied as such.
Your view is not naive; it is precisely right. Let's not forget that Lovecraft also merely held and parroted the conventional views of his era and his social class. Unfortunately, Lovecraft happened to be more articulate and voluble on the subject than others, and he also became famous. These facts about Lovecraft--that Lovecraft was almost always courteous, kind, and personally inoffensive in his dealings with others, and the fact that he merely held the prejudices of his time----are why I find Gavin's anti-Lovecraft campaign so ludicrous.
Further, anyone who considers himself (as Gavin appears to) as some kind of lone iconoclast, bravely breasting a tsunami of uncritical Lovecraft idolaters, is simply delusional.
For a much more critical, but also much more superficial and inaccurate biography of Lovecraft, see Sprague de Camp.
As to your remarks about Lovecraft's anti-Semitism (a sentiment shared by Clark Ashton Smith, by the way), Joshi, I believe, relates an anecdote about Lovecraft's hearing from a neighbor who visited Germany about the persecutions occurring in that country. According to Joshi, Lovecraft found all of this very disturbing, and there were no further "I like the boy"-type comments forthcoming from Lovecraft on the subject of Hitler and the Nazis.
With regard to Lovecraft's alleged complete fear of "otherness", this is a point about which I'd quibble. The matter is much more complex than that. Lovecraft held such a fear, to be sure, but otherness also held an attraction for Lovecraft. Where I differ with the PC Gestapo, led by types such as Gavin, is the
weight I would accord Lovecraft's xenophobia in the construction of both his character and his fiction. There are many who feel the defining and motivating feature of the work is Lovecraft's horror of the alien in any form. I don't think, however, that Lovecraft's work can be
reduced to that dimension.
One aspect, in particular, that such a reductive view overlooks is perhaps an even stronger motivational force in Lovecraft: His sense of wonder at the extra-terrestrial and the extra-human, which is the root of the cosmic dimension of his horror (As you know, Lovecraft also wrote a fair number of non-horror fantasies--though some have horrific elements--in the Dunsanian vein). I would even call it a compensating
xenophilia. Forgive the length of the following quotation from a letter by Lovecraft, but it gives, I think, a far more nuanced idea of Lovecraft's emotional motivations and his attraction to horror, wonder, and fantasy as a means of expressing himself:
"The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, & to satisfy aesthetically the sincere & burning curiosity & sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring & provocative abysses of unplumbed space & unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities & in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, & consciousness. This curiosity & sense of awe, I believe, are quite basic amongst the sensitive minority in question; & I see no reason to think that they will decline in the future—for as you point out, the frontier of the unknown can never do more than scratch the surface of eternally unknowable infinity. But the truly sensitive will never be more than a minority, because most persons—even those of the keenest possible intellect & aesthetic ability—simply have not the psychological equipment or adjustment to feel that way. I have taken some pains to sound various persons as to their capacity to feel profoundly regarding the cosmos & the disturbing & fascinating quality of the extra-terrestrial & perpetually unknown; & my results reveal a surprisingly small quota. [...] It is not every [...] writer who feels poignantly & almost intolerably the pressure of cryptic & unbounded outer space. [...]
As for me, I think I have the actual cosmic feeling very strongly. In fact I know that my most poignant emotional experiences are those which concern the lure of unplumbed space, the terror of the encroaching outer void, & the struggle of the ego to transcend the known & established order of time, (time, indeed, above all else, & nearly always in a backward direction) space, matter, force, geometry, & natural law in general".
--H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930
These are hardly the remarks of a simple xenophobe, on any level.
Finally, if, as it appears, Loveman's memoir of Lovecraft was little more than a personal attack based primarily on hurt feelings, then Cannon was right to omit it from his collection. Indeed, let that essay be part of a compilation containing the bilge and bile of others, such as LeGuin, Edmund Wilson, and the like. Such a collection would at least have the merit of stripping the scales from the eyes of those who feel that Lovecraft's reception has been unthinkingly and unanimously positive.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12 Nov 09 | 03:29PM by Kyberean.