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

Lovecraft could not abide Americans not standing with their English brethren to battle the Huns, and it must have infuriated him not merely that the government failed to intervene in the European war but that American public opinion was resolutely against such intervention. Even the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915—resulting in the loss of 128 Americans in its death toll of more than 1200–only began a slow change in people’s minds against Germany. The incident led Lovecraft to write a thunderous polemic in verse, ‘The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania, 1915’. There is no question of Lovecraft’s burning sincerity in this poem; but the antiquated metre and diction he has used here makes it difficult to take the poem seriously, and it gains an unintentional air of frivolity, almost of self-parody. This could be said for much of Lovecraft’s political verse.

‘The Crime of Crimes’ has the distinction of being Lovecraft’s first separately published work. It appeared in a Welsh amateur journal, Interesting Items, for July 1915, and apparently at about the same time was issued as a four-page pamphlet by the editor of the paper, Arthur Harris of Llandudno, Wales. This item is now one of the rarest of Lovecraft’s publications; only three copies are known to exist. I do not know how Lovecraft came in touch with Harris; perhaps he sent him the first issue of the Conservative. In any event, Lovecraft stayed sporadically in touch with Harris for the rest of his life.

The Lusitania incident led to President Woodrow Wilson’s celebrated utterance, ‘There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight’, something that infuriated Lovecraft and which he threw back in Wilson’s teeth at every opportunity, especially in poems. Lovecraft published an array of anti-pacifist poems (‘Pacifist War Song—1917’, Tryout, March 1917; ‘The Peace Advocate’, Tryout, May 1917) and articles (‘The Renaissance of Manhood’, Conservative, October 1915), along with any number of truly awful poems expressing loyalty to England (‘1914’, Interesting Items, March 1915; ‘An American to Mother England’, Poesy, January 1916; ‘The Rose of England’, Scot, October 1916; ‘Britannia Victura’, Inspiration, April 1917; ‘An American to the British Flag’, Little Budget, December 1917).

Lovecraft’s immediate reaction to the war, however, was a curious one. He did not care what the actual causes of the war were, or who was to blame; his prime concern was in stopping what he saw was a suicidal racial civil war between the two sides of ‘Anglo-Saxondom’. It is here that Lovecraft’s racism comes fully to the forefront: ‘In the unnatural racial alignment of the various warring powers we behold a defiance of anthropological principles that cannot but bode ill for the future of the world.’ This is from ‘The Crime of the Century’, one of the salvoes in Lovecraft’s first issue (April 1915) of the Conservative. What makes the war so appalling for Lovecraft is that England and Germany (as well as Belgium, Holland, Austria, Scandinavia, and Switzerland) are all part of the Teutonic race, and therefore should on no account be battling each other. Political enemies though they may be, England and Germany are racially one:

The Teuton is the summit of evolution. That we may consider intelligently his place in history we must cast aside the popular nomenclature which would confuse the names ‘Teuton’ and ‘German’, and view him not nationally but racially, identifying his fundamental stock with the tall, pale, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, long-headed ‘Xanthochroi’ as described by Huxley, amongst whom the class of languages we call ‘Teutonic’ arose, and who today constitute the majority of the Teutonic-speaking population of our globe.