A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

This and other passages can be seen as virtually identical to those in Lovecraft’s later letters on the subject and with ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’. The note about ‘highly mechanised’ industry is important in showing that Lovecraft has at last—as he had not done when he wrote ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) and even At the Mountains of Madness—fully accepted mechanization as an ineradicable aspect of modern society, and has devised a social system that will accommodate it.

The one area of Lovecraft’s thought that has—justifiably—aroused the greatest outrage among later commentators is his attitude on race. My contention is, however, both that Lovecraft has been criticized for the wrong reasons and that, even though he clearly espoused views that are illiberal, intolerant, or plain wrong scientifically, his racism is at least logically separable from the rest of his philosophical and even political thought.

Lovecraft retained to the end of his days a belief in the biological inferiority of blacks and also of Australian aborigines, although it is not clear why he singled out this latter group. In any event, Lovecraft advocated an absolutely rigid colour line against intermarriage between blacks and whites, so as to guard against ‘miscegenation’. This view was by no means uncommon in the 1920s, and many leading American biologists and psychologists wrote forebodingly about the possibility that racial intermixture could lead to biological abnormalities. Of course, laws against interracial marriage survived in the United States until an embarrassingly recent time.

But Lovecraft in the course of time was forced to back down increasingly from his claims to the superiority of the Aryan (or Nordic or Teuton) over other groups aside from blacks and aborigines. How, then, can he continue to defend segregation? He does so simply by asserting—from an illegitimate generalization of his own prejudices—a wildly exaggerated degree of incompatibility and hostility amongst different cultural groups. And there is a subtle but profound hypocrisy here also: Lovecraft trumpets ‘Aryan’ conquests over other races (European conquest of the American continent, to name only one example) as justified by the inherent strength and prowess of the race, but, when other ‘races’ or cultures—the French-Canadians in Woonsocket, the Italians and Portuguese in Providence, the Jews in New York—make analogous incursions into ‘Aryan’ territory, Lovecraft sees it as somehow contrary to Nature. He is backed into this corner by his claim that the Nordic is ’a master in the art of orderly living and group preservation’¹⁸—and he therefore cannot account for the increasing heterogeneity of ‘Nordic’ culture.

Lovecraft is, of course, entirely at liberty to feel personally uncomfortable in the presence of aliens; he is even, I believe, at liberty to wish for a culturally and racially homogeneous society. This wish is in itself not pernicious, just as the wish for a racially and culturally diverse society—such as the United States has now become—is not in itself self-evidently virtuous. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks, and Lovecraft clearly preferred the advantages of homogeneity (cultural unanimity and continuity, respect for tradition) to its drawbacks (prejudice, cultural isolationism, fossilization). Where Lovecraft goes astray philosophically is in attributing his own sentiments to his ‘race’ or culture at large.

In my view, Lovecraft leaves himself most open to criticism on the issue of race not by the mere espousal of such views but by his lack of openmindedness on the issue, and more particularly his resolute unwillingness to study the most up-to-date findings on the subject from biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of unquestioned authority who were, through the early decades of the century, systematically destroying each and every pseudoscientific ‘proof’ of racialist theories. In every other aspect of his thought—metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics—Lovecraft was constantly digesting new information (even if only through newspaper reports, magazine articles, and other informal sources) and readjusting his views accordingly. Only on the issue of race did his thinking remain relatively static. He never realized that his beliefs had been largely shaped by parental and societal influence, early reading, and outmoded late nineteenth-century science. The mere fact that he had to defend his views so vigorously and argumentatively in letters—especially to younger correspondents like Frank Long and J. Vernon Shea—should have encouraged him to rethink his position; but he never did so in any significant way.