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Lovecraft's racism is evident in his works, in his frequent depictions of foreign countries and immigrants as the source of supernatural evil reaching out to engulf the white protagonists. I recently finished reading L. Sprague de Camp's essay Lovecraft and the Aryans (1975). While this is not an academic essay by any means, and is fairly unreconstructed by today's standards (holding out, for example, the possibility that one day science may find a difference in intelligence between races), the essay has a lot to offer to the reader with more than a passing interest in Lovecraft, but without the time to wade through his voluminous correspondence and other sources such as his amateur periodical The Conservative.
Sprague de Camp argues that Lovecraft's nativism was a view widespread and respectable among persons of long-settled North-European Protestant descent, particularly those belonging to Lovecraft's shabby-genteel class who felt that newcomers had robbed them of the prosperity which should have been their birthright. However, Lovecraft, who took antiquarianism to dificult-to-imagine extremes, continued to hold this position until the mid-30s, long after it had been rejected by the mainstream. On Hitler, for example: 'I know he's a clown, but by God I like the boy!'
Sprague de Camp argues that Lovecraft's xenophobia was a result of his feelings of inadequacy and failure; it was necessary to use the accident of his heritage to create feelings of self-worth which he could not construct through his actions. He also notes that despite Lovecraft's erudition he was, intellectually, a jack of all trades and master of none; despite being a scientific materialist, his knowledge of the human sciences was too shallow to expose the pseudo-scientific nature of racial theory and the polemics of racialist and antisemitic authors such as de Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. While Sprague de Camp's arguments at times verge on apologetics, they are interesting as explanations which may cast light on where and why Lovecraft adopted such views.
Lovecraft was a mass of contradictions. Some of his pronunciations are repellent in their violent extremity: 'Either stow 'em out of sight or kill 'em off - anything so that a white man may walk along the streets without shuddering nausea!'. But, according to Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft was unfailingly polite in his language and in his personal contacts with 'non-Aryans'; one of his most loved and admired friends, Samuel Loveman, was Jewish, as was Sonia Greene, who he married in 1924 (the marriage would only last a few years). When Sonia reminded him that she came from the 'alien hordes' against which he railed, he would complacently reply: 'You are now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft of 598 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island.'
By 1935, however, according to Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft was cured of right-wing and Fascistic leanings due to various factors: the Depression, which disillusioned him with conservatism; the Nazi suppression of artists and use of art as propaganda; his more extensive travel, and resulting real experience of different peoples; Sinclair Lewis's novel of a Fascist America, It Can't Happen Here along with H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells' The Science of Life; and the experiences of his neighbour, a rabid Germanophile who returned from a 1936 visit to the Reich with appalling stories of Nazi cruelty. By 1936 he was urging the assimilation of America's Jewish minority and warning against crypto-Fascist 'reactionaries'.
Overall, a fascinating if sometimes frustrating examination not only of Lovecraft's own racism and his changes in self-perception over time, but of the background to scientific racism and antisemitism and to changing racial attitudes in the U.S. throughout the 20th century.
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arkham_nights
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