Lovecraft the uncancellable
Despite his shocking racism, the great horror writer is still inexplicably with us.
Canceling writers has become something of a pastime these days, reaching its nadir when a book by Dr. Seuss was pulled from circulation due to a single unfortunate ethnic caricature. Publishing companies now have full-time employees who do nothing but review manuscripts for appropriate “sensitivity,” meaning we are unlikely to encounter anything but the anodyne and bathetic for years to come. Only the most highbrow and revered of writers, such as the genocidally antisemitic Louis-Ferdinand Celine, have so far ridden out the storm, though one imagines they will not be safe for long.
One writer, however, has inexplicably eluded cancellation despite being something like the perfect candidate for it: The great 20th century horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
But then, H.P. Lovecraft has always been a strange case. A determined shut-in, recluse, and introvert who spearheaded the genre of “weird literature,” Lovecraft wrote short tales of horrific encounters between humans and hideous otherworldly beings from beyond the stars.
In works like “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” Lovecraft both redefined what the horror tale could accomplish and expressed what might be called a worldview, one in which mankind stands alone in a vast and hostile cosmos, unable to accept this terrifying isolation without going mad.
In “The Shadow Out of Time,” Lovecraft warned, “Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralyzing.”
He opened “The Call of Cthulhu” by observing, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Lovecraft died young, obscure, and almost penniless in 1937, but later staged one of the most stunning and perhaps unlikely posthumous comebacks in modern literary history. Seized upon by a small group of ardent admirers who kept his stories in print and expanded on the “mythos” he had vaguely sketched out in his own work, Lovecraft moved out of the pulp magazine ghetto and seized the heights of genre literature.
But his influence went beyond the literary. In many ways, Lovecraft is more famous today for his cultural aftereffects than for his writings. His “mythos” has inspired video and role-playing games, comic books, visual artwork, television series, and movies of all kinds, with such masterpieces of horror as the Alien films—with their atmosphere of terrifying cosmic solitude and insidious bio-monsters—showing his clear and obvious influence. In the recent and very underrated film Underwater, the Lovecraftian imagery is ubiquitous, including a climactic appearance by Cthulhu, one of Lovecraft’s demiurgic and unremittingly evil “gods.”
A real life “Cthulhu Cult” has even sprung up that worships the titular monster, though as leading Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has pointed out, a confirmed atheist like Lovecraft would probably find this amusing at best.
It is surprising, however, that Lovecraft has yet to really run into the problem of today’s modern hyper-sensitivities, because while he was indeed a great writer, he was also, in his political and social opinions at least, utterly deplorable.
First and foremost, Lovecraft was an uncompromising and particularly virulent racist. This is not entirely evident at first glance, but hints are dropped throughout his writing.
In “The Rats in the Walls,” the protagonist owns a black cat named “N****r-Man,” which might be put down to the idiocies of Lovecraft’s era had he not written an unpublished piece of particularly odious verse called “On the Creation of N****rs.”
“Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan,” he wrote in a nasty passage. “A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure / Fill’d it with vice, and call’d the thing a N****R.” Lovecraft also spoke, with some but not much ambivalence, of his admiration for Hitler.
Lovecraft’s hatreds were not confined to black people. He loathed Jews, the Irish, Italians, Latins of all races, Asians, and more or less everybody who was not a pure-blooded Mayflower New England WASP.
In his story “The Horror at Red Hook,” Lovecraft made this near-universal racism explicit.
“Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island,” he wrote of the Brooklyn neighborhood. “The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbor whistles.”
He laments a “tangle of material and spiritual putrescence” where “the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion.”
As the great French novelist Michel Houellebecq has pointed out, this racism permeates Lovecraft’s work, with its terrified fantasies of humans interbred with otherworldly horrors, disgusting tentacle-laden and wormlike biological monsters, and lionization of alien races dedicated to slavery and oppression. There is not a trace of tolerance in Lovecraft’s writing. He despises everything that is different and other from him, and views it as wholly inhuman and evil.
In some ways, this is why Lovecraft’s work is so compelling. It is filled with ferocious, passionate intensity, but it is the ferocity and passion of hate and fear.
Naturally, many of Lovecraft’s admirers have attempted to mount some kind of defense against all of this. The usual apologia is the expected one: Lovecraft was a “man of his time” and cannot be expected to have transcended the prejudices of his era.
In many cases, this argument is a fair one, but it cannot be applied to Lovecraft. The truth is that Lovecraft was abnormally racist for his time. Most Americans harbored race prejudice in the 1920s and ‘30s, but most of them did not admire Hitler. Even Lovecraft’s contemporaries and correspondents were often shocked by the intensity of his race hate, and found it deeply disturbing.
The second apologia is that, while Lovecraft was ideologically racist, he did not put his beliefs into practice. It is true that Lovecraft never joined the Ku Klux Klan or the like. Nor, so far as we know, did he involve himself in any racist activity or activism. Also oft-mentioned is the fact that, despite his antisemitism, he married (and later divorced) a Jewish woman, who he seems to have genuinely loved.
This is a somewhat more effective argument, but it speaks less to Lovecraft’s ideological virtue than to his personal idiosyncrasies. Put simply, Lovecraft was a very strange man. He was a genuine, deeply troubled eccentric and an artist to his fingertips. We cannot expect consistency from such people. While this may be a saving grace in terms of his character, it cannot absolve him of his personal ideology.
Given all this, it is worth asking how Lovecraft has thus far avoided cancellation. By rights, the Woke mob should have driven a lawnmower through his manuscripts by now.
There are probably several reasons for Lovecraft’s current salvation. First, most of today’s self-appointed censors have no idea who he is. They concentrate mostly on the higher realms of literary fiction or children’s books. Like other politically incorrect genre writers, such as the sci-fi giant Heinlein, Lovecraft has been saved by his confinement to the realms of horror and weird literature. Those who would censor him have never read him, and have thus been deprived of the chance to be outraged.
Cancelling Lovecraft would probably be impossible in any case. His devotees would not stand for it. Like it or not, he is the object of a passionate cult of readers and admirers who will forgive him almost any sin. Moreover, given that Lovecraft’s writings are mostly in the public domain and readily available online, there is no chance whatsoever that they would be unable, let alone unwilling, to continue reading him. Nor would they forgo the innumerable films and other media that continue to display his influence. Lovecraft, much like J.K. Rowling, can always stand safe behind the wall of his immense fandom. Any attempt at censorship would only expose the censors’ essential impotence.
In the end, this is probably a good thing. Lovecraft was, in many ways, a deplorable, but he was also one of the most unique writers America has ever produced, and certainly one of the most influential. To cancel Lovecraft would be to cancel not only a remarkable artist, but also a century’s worth of genre literature and other media he inadvertently created. If we were to erase him, a large piece of pop culture history would be erased as well, and its development rendered incomprehensible.
Most importantly, the case of old H.P. teaches us an important lesson, one we must learn to accept: It is often the worst aspects of an artist that propel him to create his greatest work. The intensity of Lovecraft’s unpardonable hatreds, his uncompromising fear and loathing of others, gave him the concentration of forces necessary to produce his masterpieces. And in their greatness, these masterpieces transcend their creator. They have become more than the sum of their deplorable origins. If we cannot allow such transcendence to take place, and if we cannot accept it after the fact, we may doom ourselves to live without art itself.