Political Correction...

Recent discussions about the suitability of HPL’s bust serving as an award for a fantasy writing award in the US have impelled me to look once more at the writings of Lovecraft and see to what extent his racism affected his works. It’s true that there is a degree of automatically-assumed superiority in his writing, of the Briton generally, and of the white American over the United States immigrant, the settler of foreign stock; however, I have a sense that this strain is not any worse than that displayed by other writers of the period, and that, while it might well have been worse in his private correspondence, it was a relatively bland element of his published oeuvre. It’s true that HPL made several unfortunate comments about ‘foreign races’ in his letters and that he even championed some of the aims of the nascent powers growing in Europe during the 1930s; but many of these sentiments were abandoned in his later life, or even retracted. HPL lived an incredibly sheltered life, by the standards of any modern period, travelling little and gaining most of his experience vicariously, by reading the works of others. His time living in New York represents the one period when he left his cocoon and tried to gain first-hand knowledge of the modern world: it backfired upon him, forcing him to return to Providence, but the experience also paved the way for him to be able to undertake further journeys away from his nest, at least as much as his flagging fortunes allowed him.

It’s easy to perceive HPL as a rabid anomaly amongst the writers of his time, but that perception is flawed in the extreme. Other writers were as much or even more racist than Lovecraft and, it can be argued, their works have fallen by the wayside as a result of this blatant bigotry running up against changing social values. Any fan of Agatha Christie knows that her work is peppered with backhand references to Jews and that the presence of “people of colour” in her works is rare in the extreme. However, her touch in these matters is light and remains a major reason that her body of work continues to be published today. Other authors like Dorothy L. Sayers whose statements in the matter of race are less oblique, are certainly less popular nowadays. The general quality of Christie’s writing is the reason that she was able to write a novel entitled Ten Little Niggers and still have that book published well into the 1970s before the title was changed, first to Ten Little Indians and then to And Then There Were None. Along with Joseph Conrad she remains one of only two still-published authors who wrote books with that egregious word in the title.

Other authors, whose attitude to matters of race were less charitable (or at least, more obviously stated) have not survived to the current day, apart from low quantity reprints for a select market. The best example is “Sax” Rohmer and his Fu Manchu novels which, in their day, were best-sellers. His books are rife with derogatory caricatures of ‘foreigners’ and their stereotypical qualities, against which the stolid resistance of the British gentleman is the only safeguard. Another writer is John Masters – his best-remembered book is the Thuggee mystery, “The Deceivers” – whose works based in India at the end of the Raj, have long since ceased to have been put into production. His books are nowhere near as poisonous as Rohmer’s, but their raison d’être as part of the continuing colonial British Empire made them less than socially acceptable after Indian Independence. So too, Arthur Upfield’s series of Australian potboilers, focussing on the endeavours of half-Aboriginal detective Napoleon “Boney” Bonaparte, ceased being published in the 1970s – even after being filmed for television – due to a sense that the content was no longer politically acceptable.

It must be said that the books of these last two writers are nowhere near as politically incorrect as commentators would like us to think. Certainly, in the countries where they were based, they became an embarrassment and an obstacle against the emancipation of certain sectors of the community, and for that reason alone, they were justly removed from circulation. Upfield’s popularity – at least amongst the collectors’ market – is on the rise and Masters may well also enjoy such a resurgence. Nothing, however, will save Rohmer from being regarded as the tawdry and backward-looking symbol of a best-forgotten age.

In the case of HPL, I think that many detractors fail to look at his works in context. They cry “Racist!” upon hearing the fact that his favourite pet cat was called “Nigger-Man” and pore over his texts to find justification for their views. To my mind, their time would be better served by looking at the individual magazines in which his works were published and comparing the levels of toxic racism in those offerings vis-à-vis Lovecraft’s own relatively mild examples. Many of HPL’s contemporary contributors are forgotten today - many indeed were forgotten during their own lifetimes - but Lovecraft’s name lives on. Lovecraft’s work, in comparison to that with which it was published alongside, is notable for being less pejorative and of better quality in terms of writing and of ideas, than that of his peers.

In fact, speaking of writers who were published along with HPL, no greater example can be found than a writer who is considered one of the “Lovecraft Circle” and whose impact upon popular fiction is touted as the equal of Lovecraft’s own. That author is Robert E. Howard, whose creation, Conan the Barbarian, is said to be the fore-runner of all the ‘swords and sorcery’ fiction that proliferated in his wake. It seems strange to me that Lovecraft receives such vicious acrimony for describing a negligible, offhand character as a “low caste half-breed”, when Howard receives no such treatment despite offering paragraphs of racially-supremacist drivel in the midst of his phantasmagoria. It seems that four words from Lovecraft somehow more than counterbalance an entire manifesto from REH.

Is this fair? I think not.

There is a disjunction between the private life of the writer and the words that they choose to put into print. Some critics feel that the life of the author is fundamental to the understanding of their works; others feel that the work must speak for itself. Even skating a middle road between these two extremes, it would seem that HPL’s personal views about race are largely irrelevant to the points which he was trying to make. This must be so, or else we should all summarily disregard the body of work created by T.S. Eliot, whose private opinions concerning race and politics were vastly more poisonous than anything Lovecraft came up with. No human being is a perfect exemplar of the social ideals of the zeitgeist in which they emerged; if they were, then they would not be human.

It’s easy to place artists and their works upon pedestals; it’s just as easy to demonise them and cast them into obscurity. Either extreme however, implies a wilful blindness on the part of the judge, either to ignore good where it was present, or to turn a blind eye to base desires and crimes. Hemingway was a violent drunk and a womaniser; Twain kept a harem of barely-legal girls as “companions”; Yeats was a gullible junkie. Lovecraft, on the other hand, was a polite, self-effacing, kind and engaging semi-recluse, whose abiding failing seemed to be that he was a bit tight with his cash. And all of these writers wrote racially-regrettable statements, either in their private correspondence or their published works, simply because they were products of their time. Why is it that Lovecraft is vilified on this score more than these others?

The answer to that question must, inevitably, force us to look at those who make these observations – ourselves, as a society – and to own up to some hard truths. The short answer is that HPL was never one of the ‘cool kids’. Hemingway and Twain were gung-ho types; Yeats and Eliot were well-heeled socialites and Yeats had political motivations on his side. In reply, Lovecraft is a dorky-looking dweeb, out-gunned and out-manned by the opposition. The general populace was willing to let Hemingway act out as long as the terse prose kept on coming. Even the ultimate misanthrope, Ambrose Bierce, gets cut a huge amount of slack because he was a two-fisted fighter who was man enough to vanish mysteriously in the Spanish American War. Lovecraft, on the other hand, looks like a wimp; and wimps get sand kicked in their faces.

We live in a patriarchal society in which good-looking, and generally young, white men get to do whatever the hell they want; our society’s heroes conform to this model or at least toe the line, and those who flout this principle get barred from positive exposure. Kurt Cobain is an example of the latter effect: until his pointless death, no-one in power knew how to handle him; since then he’s become highly marketable. It’s easy to object to HPL’s head being used as a trophy for a fantasy writing award because he’s also dead and, as a bonus, his fans are all perceived to be emasculated geeks who are too disorganised to mount a coherent response. Fish in a barrel, folks; fish in a barrel. Personally, I think there are many more compelling reasons for changing this particular award to something that more adequately symbolises the genre, and none of them involve rummaging through the dirty linen of any particular author.

There are some who would see this as a win for racial equality and a blow to the patriarchy. Well, yes it is, but it’s a poor one and probably counter-productive in the long run. Surely there are bigger targets out there? Well, here’s one:

Robert Erwin Howard was a man’s man, good-looking by his day’s standards and burly, trained by working the land and sparring in the boxing ring. He was polite, learned and articulate; unlike HPL, he was able to make a living from his writing and unwilling to see it as a mere “gentleman’s pursuit” as Lovecraft did. He lived an orderly life with his parents and wooed the girl of his dreams (although, unsuccessfully). His failing was that he was depressive, too much under his mother’s influence, and he committed suicide shortly after she succumbed to a debilitating illness. It must be said that the bottom was falling out of the magazine writing business at the time of his death, but whether this was a factor in his decision to kill himself hasn’t been adequately ascertained.

Howard’s stories are all muscular tales of derring-do and two-fisted mayhem. He began writing fantastic stories of the Conan variety, but later turned his hand to material about which he had some first-hand knowledge: cowboys of the Wild West and sailors of the merchant marine. His style perfectly suited the pulp magazines with his hard-drinking, hard-bitten heroes and their wilting damsels in distress. If you think of Indiana Jones, you are thinking of one of REH’s heroes made flesh.

Compared to HPL, whose fans must desperately scrape together cash to make movies of his material, Howard’s works have spawned multi-million dollar, big screen productions, most of which are now reviled but which – at the time – were box-office successes. “Conan the Barbarian” has been made twice, “Kull” sprang from REH’s King Kull stories and even “Red Sonja” can be called a Howard vehicle. On top of these, hundreds of other swords and sandals flicks came out of the 1980s, more or less directly based on REH’s works. Even the character of Solomon Kane popped up in the most recent season of “Sleepy Hollow” (re-named to void copyright, obviously). Universal couldn’t even get HPL’s “At the Mountains of Madness” to the green light stage.

If Howards’s material could be summed up in a single descriptor, then “doom-laden” fits the bill. None of his heroes are happy-go-lucky types; they are all grimly determined, or prepared to die trying. Every time they win, it’s at some great personal cost. Even his funny stories are heavy on the cynicism. A frequent motif is the notion of ancient bloodlines emerging atavistically into the present: the number of times a protagonist gets hit on the head and experiences the manful strivings of a distant eon are too frequent to mention. And always the Anglo-Saxon, muscularly-bulging hero wins the day, even if they die in the attempt.

In Howard’s most directly Cthulhu Mythos based works, his loathing of the foreign is made overtly manifest. Most often he uses the horror of the re-awakened ancient aboriginal race – or its traits in a modern individual – as the focus of his story. In many of these tales, young educated men sit around and discuss theories of anthropology and the manifest superiority of the “Aryan race”. Given that most of these stories were in print in the early 1930s it’s scary to contemplate just how touch-and-go America’s siding with the Allied forces in World War Two actually was. I’m not saying that REH was a proselytizer for Adolf Hitler, but if he was thinking along these lines down in west Texas and magazines were blithely printing his cogitations, then the market must have been all over the notion and ready to read about it.

And of course, they were: eugenics was medical practice at this time; theories of racial segregation and hygiene held a lot of sway during the period. In fact, the Second World War was the crucible in which these theories were put to the test and where they ultimately failed to pass muster.

And yet, HPL gets tarred with the ‘racist brush’.

Hygiene – especially the racial sort – is a big focus of Howard’s Mythos stories. The heroes talk repeatedly about “cleaning the earth”, of returning to the “clean sea”, or of eradicating the unfit with “clean steel”. Discussions of genocide are stated matter-of-factly; other races denounced as “vermin”. And, unlike HPL where such matters are expressed as an aside if at all, these notions form the bulk and essence of the stories. The best example of this comes in “The Children of the Night”, one of many atavistic resurgences stemming from a blow to the head in REH’s oeuvre. It begins with a coterie of young men discussing anthropology:

“Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock – possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.”

So much for theory; the protagonist then puts the notions into a practical application, highlighting the fact that one of their number is found genetically wanting:

“And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of us was of the same breed – that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s.”

One of the group then pronounces judgement on an absent acquaintance:

“Again Clemants shook his head. ‘When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had as a room-mate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.’”

The insidious Ketrick then contrives to hit our observer on the head, knocking him unconscious and back into an atavistic past. From this new perspective, as the Celtic “Aryara”, he discusses the various races with which he had interactions:

“The Picts were different from us in general appearance, being shorter of stature and dark of hair, eyes and skin, whereas we were tall and powerful, with yellow hair and light eyes. But they were cast in the same mould, for all of that. These Children of the Night seemed not human to us, with their deformed dwarfish bodies, yellow skin and hideous faces. Aye, they were reptiles...vermin.”

Returning to the present after some manful striving, our hero awakens in the study amongst his friends and realises that miscegenation of the pure race has perverted the one called Ketrick, and that there is only one cure for what ails him:

“...‘You fools, he is marked with the brand of the beast – the reptile – the vermin we exterminated centuries ago! I must crush him, stamp him out, rid the clean earth of his accursed pollution!’”

What follows are several pages of the protagonist’s musing about the nature of racial purity, what might have happened to muddy the gene pool, and what must be done to restore things to order:

“But let me speak of Ketrick. Ha – the short hairs at the back of my neck bristle at the very mention of his name. A reversion to type – but not to the type of some cleanly Chinaman or Mongol of recent times. The Danes drove his ancestors into the hills of Wales; and there, in what medieval century, and in what foul way did that cursed aboriginal taint creep into the clean Saxon blood of the Celtic line there to lie dormant so long? The Celtic Welsh never mated with the Children any more than the Picts did. But there must have been survivals – vermin lurking in those grim hills, that had outlasted their time and age. In Aryara’s day they were scarcely human. What must a thousand years of retrogression have done to the breed?

What foul shape stole into the Ketrick castle on some forgotten night, or rose out of the dusk to grip some woman of the line, straying in the hills?”

Thus, charged by these hateful notions of rape-fantasy, he takes a stroll out onto the moors where he knows Ketrick will be walking alone, in order to strangle him to death for the sake of the many, despite knowing that the pathetic notions of modern justice will doom him to the gallows. 

And yet – I ask again – Lovecraft is the racist?

This is one of the worst of REH’s atavism musings and the most poisonous of the lot. That’s not to say that such ideas are not embodied in all his works, or that there are some which can be read without encountering such material. No – they all partake of the same poison chalice in one form or another.

But what makes Lovecraft the target and not Howard? Some would say that genre fiction – fantasy, science fiction, historical romance – all owe a debt to Howard, so maybe it gets him a “Get out of Jail Free” card. The bald truth is that sword-and-sorcery stories play to the patriarchy – bulgingly muscular, phallic symbol brandishing, rape fantasies, meant to soothe the angst of pubescent readers. Men grunt and throb and sweat; women swoon and get ‘rescued’. In a competitively capitalist society, the readers are taught that fighting to succeed is good and will gain them the prize.

On the other hand, Lovecraft’s heroes are bookish nerds who discover that the universe is cosmically indifferent to their presence before they die. Or go mad. Or both.

On balance, who do you think is closer to the mark?