The baffling bigotry of HP Lovecraft​

1925 Letter from HP Lovecraft to AEP Gamewell said: Of course they can’t let niggers use the beach at a Southern resort – can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of greasy chimpanzees? The only thing that makes life endurable where blacks abound is the Jim Crow principle, & I wish they’d apply it in N.Y. both to niggers & to the more Asiatic type of puffy, rat-faced Jew. Either stow em out of sight or kill em off – anything so that a white man may walk along the streets without shuddering nausea. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

1926 Letter from HP Lovecraft to LD Clark said: The mass of contemporary Jews are hopeless as far as America is concerned. They are the product of alien blood, & inherit alien ideals, impulses, & emotions which forever preclude the possibility of wholesale assimilation… On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types…so that wherever the Wandering Jew wanders, he will have to content himself with his own society till he disappears or is killed off in some sudden outburst of mad physical loathing on our part. I’ve easily felt able to slaughter a score or two when jammed in a N.Y. subway train. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Aestheticism and Revulsion

Dagon said: It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.



Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Dagon said: This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.



The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window! Click to expand... Click to shrink...

A Guilty Conscience: America, Sarnath, and the Old Wizard

The Doom that Came to Sarnath said: As the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of Ib their hate grew, and it was not less because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of stones and spears and arrows. So one day the young warriors, the slingers and the spearmen and the bowmen, marched against Ib and slew all the inhabitants thereof, pushing the queer bodies into the lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them. And because they did not like the grey sculptured monoliths of Ib they cast these also into the lake; wondering from the greatness of the labour how ever the stones were brought from afar, as they must have been, since there is naught like them in all the land of Mnar or in the lands adjacent. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

He said: “The full moon—damn ye—ye . . . ye yelping dog—ye called ’em, and they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet—dead men—Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours—han’t I kept your pox-rotted magic safe?—ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs blame the squire—let go, you! Unhand that latch—I’ve naught for ye here—” Click to expand... Click to shrink...



Future New York, complete with Fry and Bender on the lower left walkway. ​

The Horror at Red Hook said: Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist’s shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

The Horror at Red Hook said: To this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as arch-fiend and adversary. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

The Brides of Robert Suydam

The Allure of the Kitten-Burners

Genius, Madness, and the Bedroom Window

It's funny that I stumbled onto this topic when I did. Within the past couple of years, the character of Howard Phillips Lovecraft has fallen under mainstream scrutiny, with the controversial removal of his face from the World Fantasy Award being a major catalyst. On one hand, I'm pretty sure that no one human being has been more influential throughout the past hundred years of genre fiction than Lovecraft. No face should be more synonymous with fantasy and science fiction than his. On the other, I can hardly fault modern authors - particularly those from the ethnic backgrounds toward which Lovecraft was most venomous - for being uncomfortable with receiving the "honor" of his likeness. This article will focus on the nature, context, and manifestations of Lovecraft's bigotry, particularly as expressed in his infamous (though in my opinion, overly maligned) Red Hook stories.Some have defended Lovecraft by pointing to his Jewish wife and multicultural social group in New York as proof of him getting over his bigotry later in life. Others have dismissed it as a mere product of his time and place. Based on my own research, neither of these defenses really hold water. Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia fluctuated greatly throughout his life, before, during, and after his time in New York; there wasn't anyimprovement. Likewise, Lovecraft's views were extreme even by the standards of his historical context.I'm not sure how many other New Englanders vocally wished that Jim Crow would spread north of the Mason-Dixon line. I doubt it was many.At the same time though, I feel that Lovecraft's critics are making similarly reductive and misleading claims. Particularly, that Lovecraft was just a garden-variety white supremacist who happened to also be an author. This might be an easy mistake to make. After all, the story "The Street," the article "The Crime of the Century," and several of his letters seem like something that any old Ku Klux Klan sympathizer could have written. But a closer examination of Lovecraft - both his writings and his life story - paints a much more complicated picture, not only of the degree of the man's racism, but also the nature of it. Lovecraft's brand of racism was certainlyby the more typical xenophobes of his day, and by the worldview of his haughty, elitist family, but I don't think it ultimately came from the same place.For example, take this passage from a letter he wrote to one of his aunts in Providence a year later.I've encountered a lot of explanations for Euro-American antisemitism in my time. I've read theories by historians and anthropologists, bewildered musings by Jewish victims, and self-serving justifications by antisemites. HP Lovecraft might just be the only person to have ever suggested that the cause of European Jew-hatred, with all its repeated oppressions, ethnic cleansings, and outright genocides, is that. This assertion goes from laughable to absolutely mind-boggling when one remembers that Lovecraft not only married and slept with one of these allegedly hideous creatures, but never married or even dated anyone else.That's not just racism, or fetishization, or any of the other usual "isms." I don't think there's even a word for whatever the hell that is.Further, many of those who denounce Lovecraft are glossing over the oddof his racism, or at least of its manifestation in many of his works. Some of his more offensive tales - especially the infamous Red Hook stories - read like an exploration of racjust as much as a rant against certain. Lovecraft gives the impression of knowing he was racist, and knowing that racism was wrong, but still being viciously determined to cling to it. How he did this, andhe did this, are both heavy enough questions that I think we would do ourselves a disservice by dismissing him as just another white supremacist.Lovecraft's prejudices cannot be separated from his works. Not only because some of his most well known stories are actively prejudiced, but because those bigotries and double-edged hatreds seem to be ontologically related to the themes and insights that eventually made him famous. If we're to take his work seriously, which we have little choice in given the breadth of its influence, we need to take its racism seriously as well. I'm going to try not to let this article become either a defense or a condemnation of Lovecraft. The man is a century dead, after all, and there's little to gain by attacking or defending him. My goal is not to pass judgement, but to gain understanding of this confused, complicated, and quite possibly crazy person.One of the first things any reader will notice about Lovecraft - in virtually everything he ever wrote - is his emphasis on physical appearances. Lovecraft seems to have been obsessed with beauty, and equally obsessed with ugliness. The paradisaical descriptions he lavished on the glory of Sarnath or Celaphais and the luminous waters plied by the White Ship are matched only by the hellish ones he devoted to his villains and monsters. In many of his letters, Lovecraft openly identified himself as an “aesthete,” and seemed to regard aestheticism – the ability to appreciate beauty – as an almost moral imperative (the one instance I could ever find of him using the word “aesthete” with a negative connotation was in a 1921 letter in which he also claimed to see himself as a Viking warrior thirsty for human blood; I think we can assume that Lovecraft was either joking or running a very high fever when he wrote that letter).The equivocation of aesthetics with goodness (or, at least, with rightness) is itself quite explicit in Lovecraft’s work, especially his earlier work. I would say that rather than his most famously racist stories like “Red Hook” or “The Street,” the closest that Lovecraft’s fiction came to expressing the sentiment displayed in those anti-Semitic letters was “Dagon.” I actually think that “Dagon,” due to holding this attitude toward a non-human creature of Lovecraft’s own creation rather than a human ethnicity, might be a purer example of Lovecraft’s intolerance in action, since there can be no cross-pollination from preexisting racist beliefs or stereotypes of his time.Unlike the titular monster of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the creature that the protagonist saw in “Dagon” is never said to have a telepathic aura that causes madness. No explanation for the protagonist’s mental breakdown is ever given besides the ugliness of the mermen depicted on the icon, and of the live specimen that appeared shortly thereafter. So horrible is the very existence of creatures who are this ugly and strange looking, that the protagonist is later compelled to end his own life rather than live with the knowledge of it.The character does, briefly, speculate that the mermen may be plotting an invasion of humanity’s world in our moment of vulnerability after the end of World War I. There’s a hint ofkind of rational fear. But that hint is, as far as the reader is told or even hinted toward, completely pulled out of the protagonist’s ass. He didn’t see the mermen preparing an invasion. He didn’t experience any sort of prophetic or telepathic event that would relay that knowledge to him. He just “knew,” on an emotional, instinctual, almost animalistic level, that because they were strange and ugly, they therefore must be hostile and evil.Rereading Lovecraft’s account of the “mad, physical revulsion” that allegedly motivates Anglo-Saxxons to murder the more foreign looking Jewish subgroups, I also have to wonder if there’s a bit of projection going on. After all, if the mermen are revoltingly ugly to human (or at least, this particular human’s) sensibilities, it stands to reason that we might be equally ugly to them. What happens to ugly creatures in a world written by H. P. Lovecraft, especially a younger H. P. Lovecraft who has yet to master the art of writing characters who think differently from himself?Of course, however irrational or neurotic Lovecraft’s impulses could be, he was a very intelligent man. His intellect, while held back by a lack of formal education and a healthy dose of the Dunning-Krueger effect when he tried to tackle academic topics, is plainly visible to anyone who reads a sample of his work. He also, I believe, was fairly self aware and self critical. The predicament of an intelligent, self aware man being confronted with his own mockably childish prejudices seem to be part of the “bedrock” on which Lovecraft’s strangest idiosyncrasies were built.In some of his works, Lovecraft seems to harshly rebuke representations of his own bigotry. In others, he seems to forget all about that self-criticism and doubles down on those prejudices with barely a hint of shame.Among his early works, “Dagon” and “The Doom that Came to Sarnath” form a pretty clear example of this duality. In “Dagon,” as described above, the protagonist falls into a nihilistic death spiral of existential angst just from learning that fish people exist, and the story does nothing to suggest that his reaction to that knowledge is unreasonable. In “Sarnath,” a human society reacts with similar disgust to the existence offishlike creatures, but instory they face merciless divine judgement for their intolerance. Lovecraft doesn’t seem to have undergone any major personal changes in the time between penning these two. “Dagon” and “The Doom that Came to Sarnath” were written within just two years of each other. “The Street,” hands down Lovecraft’s most overtly and unironically racist story, was written just shortly after “Sarnath.” While circumstances seem to have brought out the best or worst of Lovecraft’s attitudes at different times, its hard to avoid the conclusion that he held contradictory views simultaneously; a case of cognitive dissonance that he seemed to be aware of, but was unable or unwilling to resolve.What makes the Red Hook stories so fascinating is that while they are indisputably racist, they almost seem to be morethe author’s own racism than they areby it. Let’s start with “He.” In addition to being the shorter of the two, its also the one that seems to go the furthest out of its way to call attention to its racism being an intentional theme rather than simply an authorial bias.The protagonist - a thinly veiled self-insert of Lovecraft’s – comes to New York City from upstate New England expecting to fall in love with it. He is unhappy with what he sees, as he had apparently been expecting to find a richer, more grandiose version of his own whitebread New England, but instead sees a city with economic and social problems that he describes in what can best be described as “a series of short, piercing, and high-pitched racist dogwhistles.” After being disheartened by this, he encounters the old wizard who offers to show him the true New York, and the protagonist agrees, probably still hoping to find his elusive post-Puritan utopia. Instead, he is shown a future in which all traces of white New England culture have been swept away and replaced by a foreign one, and then – most importantly – a past in which the white European settlers swept away and replaced the Native American culture that came before them. This scene ends with the old wizard, whorepresents the protagonist’s hopes of finding a wholesome and magical white Americana, growing slowly more sinister in description and demeanor until finally being revealed to be a thief and a murderer in disguise, and he ends up killed by the ghosts of his Manhattan victims.If the yellow-skinned and saffron-robed inhabitants of Future New York are in any way at fault for the disappearance of their white precursors, then – at worst – they are just repeating a cycle that the whites themselves took gleeful part in.Lovecraft did not do this by accident. In previous stories, he’s been more than willing to pretend the Native Americans never existed, or to whitewash their ethnic cleansing as the justified removal of inferior savages by superior civilized Europeans. He didn’t have to include the angry Native American ghosts at the end of “He,” and he certainly didn’t have to tell the story of how the old wizard betrayed and murdered them in a way that clearly makes him out to be the bad guy.But here’s the confusing part of “He.” In the hands of most authors, the story would end with the protagonist engaging in some self-reflection about how he reacted to the Asian character of Future New York, and his disgust at Modern New York’s multiculturalism. He’d also realize that rather than being a unique incidence of this, the history of New York is just a scaled up version of the rest of America’s, and leaving it for another American town would be no escape from the truth. He’d perhaps come to the conclusion that attitudes like his own are what allows the cycle of murder and replacement to continue, and try to become a better person and encourage others to do likewise in hopes of preventing or at least postponing the next genocide.But he doesn’t.Instead, he leaves New York City behind him and goes back to Massachusetts while carefully avoiding any analysis of what he’s seen and learned. He never apologizes for his racism and xenophobia. Never does anything to indicate that he’s learned from any of this. He just leaves New York for a more ethnically homogenous - but equally blood-stained, in truth - corner of the east coast where he doesn’t have to be reminded of it. Likewise, there’s no indication anywhere in the text that the readerexpected to be horrified at the glimpse of Future New York just as the protagonist is; there are no tells that we’re meant to find his reaction pathetic or comical.This ending could have worked very well as a kind of tragedy, the protagonist being unable to learn from his mistakes and condemning himself to repeat them. But the story justto make it clear whose side it’s on. To the point where it’s not clear if the tragedy is meant to be the main character’s inability to properly learn from his experience, or the fact that his views are ultimately justified by the revelation that it really is such a dog-eat-dog world. Although, in the latter case, the text’scondemnation of the old wizard – who simply would have been acting out the same morbid drama as all other humans, within such a worldview – feels completely out of place.It’s a confusing story. And, I suspect, aone as well. Reportedly, Lovecraft wrote it on a park bench after a frenzied midnight jog around the city, shortly before his return to Providence. Psychoanalyzing an author based on their work isn’t something to be encouraged, butdoes Lovecraft make it hard to avoid sometimes.This dichotomy – of Lovecraft’s stories indulging in virulent racism on one hand, and then occasionally condemning that same kind of racism in over-the-top calamities of divine retribution on the other – isn’t a one-off event. It’s happened over and over throughout Lovecraft’s body of work thus far. The Ibian spirits or god destroying the genocidal humans in “The Doom that Came to Sarnath.” The secretly unapologetic ex-confederate in “The Rats in the Walls” being driven insane when the generations of ancestral guilt come crashing down. The destruction of the old wizard in “He” at the hands of the Indian spirits. Lovecraft constantly punishes bigots, while in other stories (and even moreso in his letters, in which he fantasizes about outright mass murder of Jews and African Americans) engages in the most over-the-top bigotry imaginable. In “He,” he manages to do both at once, and I don’t think he was unconscious of it.The relationship between “He” and “The Horror at Red Hook” is also a confusing one. “He” seems to be much more apologetic about its racism - even if it’s a limp, self-hating apology rather than any promise to try and do better in the future – than “Red Hook.” It was also written slightly afterward. It might be tempting to see “He” as a sort of apology for “Red Hook,” but that interpretation is dashed by the fact that Lovecraft then went on to publish both stories long after the fact, and indeed “He” was printed“The Horror at Red Hook.” However ashamed Lovecraft might have been of “The Horror at Red Hook,” it wasn’t enough for him to not publish it, or even for him to hold “He” in reserve as a corollary to it.As for “The Horror at Red Hook” itself, now. Critics have called it Lovecraft’s most racist story. It’s certainly one of them. But even “Red Hook,” I believe, is much more self-aware about its bigotry, and about the ultimate wrongness of that bigotry, than the earlier cringe-inducers like “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Street.” Every other section in “Red Hook” begins with a reminder that what Detective Malone sees and what the rest of the NYPD sees is not one and the same, and no satisfying explanation is ever given for why Malone,, should be able to see the truth. It’s even more telling that Malone’s initial suspicions about Robert Suydam and his friends – suspicions that he made on a completely bizarre intuitive leap with zero evidence whatsoever – turn out to be so completely true, but the story never gives him the opportunity to say “See! I told you!” To the very end of the tale, the “truth” of what we are told and the reliability of Malone as a (sort-of) viewpoint character are called into question.While Lovecraft is fond of attributing his characters’ revelations to inexplicable insights and feelings, he repeats words like “felt” and “seemed to” and “imagined” with regards to Detective Malone much more often than his usual. Likewise, throughout the story, Lovecraft constantly comes back to the juxtaposition between the story as Malone sees it, and the story as the rest of the police and citizens see it. The story retains that duality until the very end, when the hidden entrance that Malone discovered to be a portal to the underworld is revealed, in the light of day, to be a simple smuggler tunnel.I’m not saying that “The Horror at Red Hook” is intended to all be a delusion of Malone’s. There’s not nearly enough evidence to draw that conclusion. But at the same time, Lovecraft never seems to condemn the rest of the policemen for failing to see what Malone saw, or not drawing the conclusions that Malone drew. There’s no sense that Malone is the only sane man struggling against a world of the willfully blind. Lovecraft HAD written narratives like that by this point (“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “Celephais” both contain strong elements of it), and in this case he chose not to. The duality isn’t between the horrible truth and a comforting lie, or between paranoid delusion and mundane reality; its more like two different, equally valid perspectives fighting over who gets to be real.Another strange duality in “Red Hook” is its seeming inability to decide on a protagonist. The story opens with Malone, and closes with Malone, but aside from the occasional police interlude theof the story is spent describing the life and actions of Robert Suydam. Malone receives barely any characterization, takes little initiative, and has a “backstory” that reads like it was invented to retroactively justify the min-maxed skillset of an RPG character. Suydam, on the other hand, is the lone, aging heir to an old blood European family fallen on hard times who turns to occult mysteries to spice up his depressing existence. Which of those two sounds like a more typical Lovecraft protagonist? Who is the story actuallyBy the end of the story, Malone seems less like an independent character and more like a detached (and really neurotic) superego for Suydam. A watchman trying and failing to keep him from falling into a corruption that may or may not exist.So, let’s talk about Robert Suydam and his double marriages now. More importantly, lets talk about how “The Horror at Red Hook” is the only Lovecraft story so far to feature female characters in an active role, and how it was written on the eve of his breakup with Sonya Greene.Just about everyone who’s analyzed “The Horror at Red Hook” has pointed out that Lilith (or whoever the bioluminescent toad-demoness was supposed to be) might represent Lovecraft’s resentment of Sonya, who brought him to the New York City he would come to hate. I’d normally dismiss that as reading far too much into things, but when you consider the near total absence of female characters in Lovecraft’s other works, and the shamelessness with which Lovecraft was openly channeling his frustration with his lower class New York life into “He” and “Red Hook,” the argument becomes far more convincing.Less has been written of Cornelia Gerritsen, Suydam’s human bride who – while far less visible and active in the story than Lilith - is described in positive terms. Personally, I can’t help but see a parallel between their duality and that of Malone’s reality versus the rest of the NYPD’s. The fair maiden, and the hideous demoness. The beautiful, artistic Sonya Greene who Lovecraft loved, and the “puffy, rat-faced Jews” who he despised.Suydam’s arc in “The Horror at Red Hook” is highly ambiguous, especially toward the end. Why did he turn against Lilith and throw her icon into the depths? Was the sacrifice of himself and Cornelia to her something he had planned on, or not? At this point, looking back on the story as a whole, Iwhat Lovecraft was going for is that Suydam promised his hand to Lilith, but didn’t realize what that actually meant for him, and thought he could get away with two timing on her with a human bride as well. Lilith broke this illusion by way of claws and bloodlust, and when Suydam realized what he had actually gotten himself into he fought back. Its not afit for the events of the story (in particular, Suydam’s letter that he wrote pre-murder seems wrong), but its probably thecontradictory reading, so it’s the one I’ll be going with for the purposes of this analysis. So, within the framework of “Red Hook” being an outlet for Lovecraft’s frustration with his new life, what does this tell us?In “He,” the self-insert protagonist explains that he came to New York seeking promises of beauty and harmony, but found only squalor, ugliness, and brown people. Considering that Sonya was theLovecraft came to New York, well, this question answers itself pretty handily. Lovecraft fell in love with Sonya, and was drawn in by the progressive politics of his other New York friends like James Morton, to the point where he thought he could overcome his bigoted aversions. He moved to New York, was happy for a short while, but then – when Sonya’s business failed – was forced to adopt a miserably poor lifestyle in a neighborhood ridden with immigrant crime that reinforced all of his worst beliefs and tendencies. He married Cornelia, but ended up with Lilith. Even more than that, Lilith KILLED AND ATE Cornelia. When confronted by the horrors that he truly condemned himself to by entering into this double marriage, Suydam rejects Lilith and flees, even though it means his end. Just like the unnamed self-insert of “He,” this ending is strongly predictive of Lovecraft’s return to Providence and effective divorce (which was made legal not long afterward).That returns us to the initial duality of “Red Hook,” with Malone’s supernatural horror take on events, and the rest of the police department’s mundane criminal investigation one. There is no doubt, in either version of events, as to whether Cornelia was a real person. Her existence isn’t in doubt. Lilith, however, existsin the more fanciful version of the story that may just be taking place inside of Malone’s head. The woman is real. The demoness, the story admits, may be pure paranoid delusion.Once again. Lovecraft could have given Malone an “I told you so” scene at the end, or he could have changed the tone and narration throughout to make Malone seem like the one perceptive man in a world of the willfully blind.. Just like he could have made the protagonist of “He” learn one lesson or another from the things he beheld (either “racism and genocide are bad” or “it’s a dog eat dog world”), butThe impression I’m getting, looking at these stories together in the context of Lovecraft’s life, is that they’re just as much a condemnation of himself as they are of New York. Are they racist? Undoubtedly. Xenophobic? You betcha. But they also seem to be very aware of the fact that their own racist and xenophobic politics are a result of the author’s personal failings rather than an objective assessment of reality. There’s a part of the narration thatthe protagonist of “He” is a coward and a hypocrite. There’s a part of the narration thatthat the Middle Eastern immigrants aren’t a satanic cult and that multiculturalism isn’t a ploy to trick respectable white men into marrying disgusting toad-demons. Both stories end on a note of shame and failure. The protagonist of “He” and Detective Malone from “Red Hook” both retreat from their misadventures, broken and unfulfilled, without even having gained the shocking answers to their questions that most Lovecraft protagonists end up getting. They both just kind of give up. There’s a sense of failure.When someone remains committed to a belief that theyis irrational, it stands to wonder why they’re so attached to it. Its pretty clear at this point that Lovecraft’s racism made him miserable. It undermined his relationships with Sonya and many others. It made his poverty-stricken time at New York even more ghastly than it had to be, and fed his social alienation. Just about the only self-interested gains that he could have had from clinging to it is keeping up appearances for his bigoted Providence family, but he had had little to do with them during his New York stay either. So, if Lovecraft knew that racism was wrong, knew that foreigners weren’t subhuman, and only suffered from denying that knowledge and clinging to his childish aesthetics-based hatred, why did he keep on doing it?I was linked to an interesting series articles of some time ago concerning the popular outcry against a completely phantasmal epidemic of people setting fire to kittens. To make a long and very well written series short, a non-negligible number of people somehow convinced themselves that someone is out there setting kittens on fire left and right, that no one besides themselves cares or is doing anything about it, and that by expressing their disgust and condemnation for the kitten-burners they were elevating themselves to a higher moral status. A world in which kittens are frequently burned is obviously inferior to one in which they are not. And yet, the hysteria of the anti-kitten-burning-coalition had all the hallmarks of wishful thinking. Why would you choose to hang onto the irrational belief that the world is full of flaming kittens when the truth is so much less disturbing?It reminds me of the bizarre subculture of zombie-preppers that was nourished into existence by the glut of zombiepocalypse media in the late 2000's. You had these lunatics eagerly looking forward to a zombie apocalypse, so that they could have glamorous, adventurous, hypermasculine lives like those of their fictional heroes. To be fair to these strange individuals, I don't think their enthusiasm would have outlived the first of their friends or loved ones who died in such an event, and I'm pretty sure that deep down they all knew that a zombie apocalypse is scientifically impossible. But the fantasy of it was so seductive to them that they gleefully stocked up on canned food and ammunition and communicated endlessly back and forth about their plans for the coming Z-day. If only civilization was in ruins. If only 99% of the human population was dead, or suffering from a fate worse than death. If only the world really was. Why, how amazing would that make them by comparison?What validation could Lovecraft have gotten by hanging onto his view of a horrifying world where white civilization was being devoured by subhuman others, despite him ultimately knowing that the truth was far less dire than that? I think that there are two answers to that question. One, which he had in common with more typical racists, is the simple smug satisfaction of believing that you're better than someone else. The other, seemingly stronger, aspect I believe was more unique to Lovecraft. By entertaining the illusion that nonwhites were monstrous, he could justify his atavistic revulsion toward the different. Lovecraft admits, in the letter to LD Clark that I quoted previously, that his hatred for the more foreign-looking type of Jew stems from a "mad physical revulsion" on his own part. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the ugly Jews actuallyto be slaughtered? How much better would it be if everything that Lovecraft thought was ugly actually was,, ugly, and if his irrational hatred for it was rendered rational? If the world really was full of evil monsters plotting to destroy white civilization, then that would make Lovecraftto despise them.Lovecraft was smart enough and self-aware enough that he understood what he was doing. If he actually believed all of the terrible things that he sometimes claimed to believe about foreigners, he never would have moved to New York, and he certainly never would have married a (very Caucasian-looking, so no irrational physical revulsion) Jewish woman. But sadly, he wasn'tenough to cast off these comforting racist fantasies and put in the hard work of overcoming his irrational aesthetic hatreds.Between the ages of four and seven years old, I had a recurring dream. I looked out my bedroom window, and saw that my family's backyard had been replaced with a forest, or a swamp, or an unfamiliar city. The scenes I saw through the window weren't usually dangerous or threatening, just different. And I was. Terrified in a paralytic, reptilian way that i think only children are really capable of being. It was different, and I didn't understand it, and that was terrifying. I haven't had that dream, or any closely comparable experiences, since then, but when I think of "irrational fear" its still the first thing that comes to mind. This is the kind of fear that seemed to define the life and works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The creature in "Dagon" looked different, therefore it was terrifying. Beings from worlds beyond human understanding are malevolent, because they are unknown. The sight of future New York was nightmarish, because it didn't look the way you expect New York to look. Blacks and Asians are horrible because they look different. This is a kind of fear that I suspect every human has experienced at some point in their lives, either during childhood or at moments of semiconsciousness or delirium during adulthood. Hell, when I was four years old and first met a black person after living in an almost completely white town, I was - though not terrified - pretty weirded out. This, I think, is the kind of overwhelming emotional reaction that Lovecraft had to mere aesthetics.Now, what kind of man was Howard Philips Lovecraft? Separate from his legacy, his fame, and his creations, how would you describe Lovecraft as a person if he lived in your neighborhood?A man who went straight from extended adolescence, to idle and childless house-husband for a hardworking wife, to early retirement living off of his older relatives.A man who would rather live in a tiny apartment, on just bread and canned beans, on an allowance from his wife than put any serious effort into finding a job of his own.A man who refused to travel to Chicago for a chance at his dream job editing for his favorite weird fiction magazine with the claim that he was too old and frail for such a move...at age 34.A man whose response to (unfounded) suspicions that his apartment was burgled by his Syrian neighbors was to write a story about how Syrian immigrants all worship Satan.There is a word for this kind of person, and that word is "manchild." Lovecraft, in many ways, seems to have refused to ever grow up. And this, I believe, was the source of both Lovecraft's genius, and his madness.With his keen intelligence, self-awareness, and articulation, Lovecraft was able to capture childhood fear in text to a degree that few other authors before or since have managed. Not evoking it in the, necessary (though a few of his best stories managed that as well!), but creating worlds so fundamentallyon it that the reader can't help but feel a primal connection even as they scoff at the obvious immaturity. The unrestrained creativity of childhood is likewise present in Lovecraft's works; the raw imagination and unwillingness to be bound by convention that allowed him to create so much of what we now know as the modern science fiction and horror genres, rather than simply expanding on existing genres as most authors do. The mind of an adult paired with the soul of a child.The same intelligence and introspection that allowed Lovecraft to harness his childishness for artistic purposes, however, also made him grimly aware of how that childishness undermined him. He knew that his personal failure to grow up and accept that the different doesn't have to be scary was just that; a personal failure. Likewise, he must have known that heget a job and help pull himself out of poverty - either during his married life in New York, or after his return to Providence - if only he could get over himself and learn some basic responsibility. He knew it, but he wouldn't or couldn't act on that knowledge...at least, not strongly enough or consistently enough to ever really grow past these issues.Maybe his writing would have lost some of its wild creativity and maniacal fear if he had forced himself to grow up and get a day job.Or, maybe he would have been able to hang ontoof his old neoteny to keep creating those wonders and horrors, while reigning it in with enough maturity to keep the puerile xenophobia out.In the former case, a happy, healthy, functional Lovecraft would have been a weird fiction author of, at best, minor historical importance. But in the latter case, maybe we could have gotten a Lovecraft who, rather than casting different-looking humans as part of the hideous unknown, depicted a world in which all humankind were struggling together against that unknown. I don't think his work would have lost any of its creativity or evocative, irrational fear if you just reigned in that one aspect. And, based on the guilty conscious Lovecraft seemed to carry about his own bigotry in stories like "He," "The Rats in the Walls," "The Doom that Came to Sarnath," and (in a more muddled way) "The Horror at Red Hook," I think its one of the first things he would haveto change if he had only had the personal strength. MaybeLovecraft's face would still have been commemorated in the World Fantasy Award, and this version of him would be one whose presence no one objected to.I don't know. I don't even know if I'm barking up the wrong tree on the whole with this analysis. Maybe I'm just one more navel-gazer who thinks she can psychoanalyze a man a century dead from his stories and letters.