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

Harry Brobst provides some evidence of Lovecraft’s awareness of the horrors of Hitler’s Germany toward the very end of his life. He recalls that a Mrs Shepherd (the downstairs neighbour of Lovecraft and Annie Gamwell at 66 College) was a German native and wished to return for a time to Germany. She did so, but (in Brobst’s words) ‘it was at that time that Nazism was beginning to flower, and she saw the Jews beaten, and she was so horrified, upset, distraught that she just left Germany and came back to Providence. And she told Mrs. Gamwell and Lovecraft about her experiences, and they were both very incensed about this.’²⁰ Lovecraft indeed remarks about the departure of Mrs Alice Shepherd in late July 1936. I find, however, no mention in any letters of her abrupt return, nor any expression of horror at any revelations she may have conveyed. But references to Hitler do indeed drop off radically in the last year of Lovecraft’s life, so it is conceivable that Lovecraft, having heard accounts from Mrs Shepherd, simply shut up about the matter in the realization that he had been wrong. It would be a comforting thought.

Lovecraft’s point about Jewish domination of German culture leads directly to his assessment of what he feels is happening in the United States, specifically in its literary and publishing capital, New York:

As for New York—there is no question but that its overwhelming Semitism has totally removed it from the American stream. Regarding its influence on literary & dramatic expression—it is not so much that the country is flooded directly with Jewish authors, as that Jewish publishers determine just which of our Aryan writers shall achieve print & position. That means that those of us who least express our own people have the preference. Taste is insidiously moulded along non-Aryan lines—so that, no matter how intrinsically good the resulting body of literature may be, it is a special, rootless literature which does not represent us.²¹

Lovecraft goes on to mention Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner as writers who, ‘delving in certain restricted strata, seldom touch on any chord to which the reader personally responds’. If this is not a case of generalizing from personal experience, I don’t know what is! Newspaper reporting in New York also angers him:

not a paper in New York dares to call its soul its own in dealing with the Jews & with social & political questions affecting them. The whole press is absolutely enslaved in that direction, so that on the whole length & breadth of the city it is impossible to secure any public American utterance—any frank expression of the typical mind & opinions of the actual American people—on a fairly wide & potentially important range of topics … Gawd knows I have no wish to injure any race under the sun, but I do think that something ought to be done to free American expression from the control of any element which seeks to curtail it, distort it, or remodel it in any direction other than its natural course.²²

But what is the ‘natural course’ of American expression? And why does Lovecraft axiomatically believe that he and people like him are the ‘actual American people’ (which means that others who do not share his views are necessarily ‘un-American’)? Lovecraft is again being haunted by the spectre of change: Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson don’t write the way the more conservative novelists write or used to write, so they are deemed ‘unnatural’ or unrepresentative.

What Lovecraft wanted was simply familiarity—the familiarity of the milieu in a racially and culturally homogeneous Providence that he had experienced in youth. In stating that even art must satisfy our ‘homesickness … for the things we have known’ (‘Heritage or Modernism’), Lovecraft is testifying to the homesickness he himself felt when, as an ‘unassimilated alien’²³ in New York or even in latter-day Providence, he witnessed the increasing urbanization and racial heterogeneity of his region and his country. Racialism was for him a bulwark against acknowledging that his ideal of a purely Anglo-Saxon America no longer had any relevance and could never be recaptured.

More generally, the increasing racial and cultural heterogeneity of his society was for Lovecraft the chief symbol of change—change that was happening too fast for him to accept. The frequency with which, in his later years, he harps on this subject—’change is intrinsically undesirable’;²⁴ ‘Change is the enemy of everything really worth cherishing’²⁵—speaks eloquently of Lovecraft’s frantic desire for social stability and his quite sincere belief (one, indeed, that has something to recommend it) that such stability is a necessary precondition of a vital and profound culture.