The winners of the World Fantasy Award for 2015 have just been announced, so if you’re looking for interesting reading, there you go.
The winners are given that hideous statuette to the right, a bust of HP Lovecraft. Now we’re all winners, because it has just been announced that the caricature of the goggle-eyed racist will not be handed out in the future — winners in 2016 will get something that they won’t tuck out of sight and turn towards the wall (and here’s another take on the controversy over HP).
I’ve been a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos, but I agree with this change — if it were a statuette of Cthulhu, I would approve, but a statuette of HP Lovecraft the man is honoring the wrong thing, not the creation, but the horrible complicated twisted creator.
Statement 1: H.P. Lovecraft’s particular blend of sci-fi and existential horror are some of my favorite stories period.
Statement 2: At least one recipient of the WFA was so appalled by the trophy they refused to display it.
Conclusion: Statement 1 has *no bearing whatsoever* on this discussion, no matter *who* or *how many* agree. Statement 2 means the award statue does not represent the award, and should be changed.
Addendum: I will encourage any fan of sci-fi or horror to read Lovecraft’s work, and hope that person will enjoy the stories. I will also warn that fan that Lovecraft’s racism absolutely shows, both overtly and subtly, through all of his stories. Lastly I understand that it’s much easier for some people (especially those like me, a white hetro cis male) to enjoy stories despite racist content; if someone says they don’t or can’t enjoy these stories because of that racism, I *will not argue the point*. There is room in the world for people who do and don’t like Lovecraft! There is room for appreciation of the stories *and* criticism of those same stories and their author!
In an earlier thread here on HPL. someone said that he was terribly racist even for his time period. I’m not so sure about that. I was recently reading some of the chapter on racism in Bill Bryson’s One Summer, all about the summer of 1927. The racism in that decade seems to have been pervasive and baked into large swaths of society, from the president all the way down to the resurgent Klan taking over the political process throughout a whole lot of the country. I’m no longer sure that Lovecraft was all that different from the 1920s man on the street. From the point of view of modern liberals, it seems to have been a low point — a horrible, horrible decade from top to bottom.
In an earlier thread here on HPL. someone said that he was terribly racist even for his time period.
Mm. Not sure about that, can’t find the source at the moment, but I remember reading a quote from his fiance saying something about his racism being considered OTT by their group.
I’ll try and find it…
When mentioning monsters…a TV version of “Preacher” is in the works, with Jesse Custer going after the biggest baddie of hem all….Gawd !!!!!!!!
I didn’t see a link to the announcement PZ mentions in his post; when was it just announced? I did not see anything on the WFC website either.
Silvia Morena-Garcia on Lovecraft and racism:
http://www.silviamoreno-garcia.com/blog/lovecraft-racism-and-literature/
So he, a vicious anti-semite, married a Jew.
It reminds me of furiously anti-southern-Italians leader of the Northern League, married to a woman from Naples.
Or rabid anti-abortionists going to get abortions.
One’s bigotry always applies to *others*.
I remain baffled by the concept of a Lovecraft fan who denies that the man and his work were massively racist/sexist/classist/generally xenophobic. Half of his horror stories wouldn’t be horror if the narrator and protagonists weren’t obsessed with safeguarding their biological and cultural purity. “Arthur Jermyn” isn’t a horror story because Jermyn’s great-great-grandmother was some kind of gorilla critter; it’s a horror story because his intense racism and classism make this discovery an unbearable threat to his self-identity, which he can only resolve by destroying himself. Ignore that element and the story suffers, because his actions no longer make sense.
I enjoy Lovecraft stories in large part because these incredible cosmic revelations are happening to people who are utterly unqualified to deal with them. You have a character who freaks out when he meets a perfectly normal human with a “hatefully negroid mouth”, and then karma drops him in front of a thousand-foot-tall octopus man from space. You have a character who’s struggling with how to properly attribute his fear and disgust toward a woman: is it more of a problem that she’s an undead semi-human priestess of Cthulhu whose severed hair crawls around and kills people, or that she’s part black? It’s as if your elderly relative, who watches Fox News religiously and thinks falafels are a type of IED, got teleported to the Star Trek universe and started sending you letters about everything they couldn’t cope with.
So yeah, for me, the bigotry of HPL and his protagonists makes the stories more interesting. It also makes the stories uninteresting, unpleasant and/or intensely offensive for many other readers and aspiring writers, so there’s clearly no reason to treat him as The Archetypal Fantasy Writer and hand out awards in his image. But people who defend him as a great writer while trying to paper over the bigotry…what’s the point? It just makes it seem like you haven’t actually read the stuff you’re defending.
There are some quotes from Sonia Greene’s letters to Samuel Loveman which bear on HPL’s racial vlews, discussed here. Greene clearly thought that Lovecraft hated Jews to an exceptional degree–which is kind of what you’d expect from someone who said he found Hitler likeable–and when Loveman found this out he felt so betrayed that he burned most of his letters from Lovecraft.
Lovecraft himself said of his entry into high school: “It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes–calculatingly and schemingly brilliant–but their ideals were sordid and their manners coarse. I became rather well-known as an anti-Semite before I had been at Hope Street many days.”
Which is just to say: his racial hatreds were unusually virulent even by the standards of his friends and classmates. Sure, Lovecraft was a man of his place and time in the sense that there were plenty of other raving bigots in the US during his lifetime. But they were recognized as bigots by their contemporaries, and so was he.
I mean, I’m pretty sure the average middle-class New England white kid wasn’t delighting his parents with minstrel shows around age eight. And the average tourist to the lower East Side didn’t refer to the residents of Chinatown as “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose and imagination,” who should all be gassed to death by “a kindly gust of cyanogen.” This was extreme by the standards of any decade.
Good comment, Anton Mates. In fact, it makes me wonder if the reason he’s so successful as a horror writer may actually derive from his intense bigotry. After all, isn’t bigotry essentially fear of The Other writ large? And Horror writers in general seem to often be very fearful people — the more fears they have, the more successful they are. Fear and hatred, after all, are two sides of the same coin.
In my previous comment on the 20s, I was not meaning to defend Lovecraft in any way. It’s just that with lynchings common and Jews and even Catholics constantly vilified, the background level of bigotry must have been pretty high.
What are they replacing it with?
That bust is pretty hideous even without considering how horrifically racist HPL was. It looks more like an award for horror than fantasy. Surely there must be something more representative of fantasy available.
I know, I couldn’t see what they were replacing it with. I was hoping, given the way Dr. Myers introduced it, that it was going to be a Cthulthu sculpture, heh.
Lovecraft’s racism basically undermines the whole “cosmic” viewpoint of his horror: if humans are, as he liked to portray, truly insignificant flotsam adrift in a dark, hazardous but ultimately indifferent universe, then human conceits such as “race” are doubly meaningless. And yet, Lovecraft insists on inserting these grating asides about “hateful hooked noses” and whatnot into his work, robbing them of much of their power, bringing his cosmic vision back to Earth with a crash. If he himself had truly understood the implications of the philosophy he claimed to espouse, he’d have realised his obsessions about skin colour and physiogamy were no more meaningful that one bacterium obsessing about the flagella of another. But I suspect his own pride in his WASP-y lineage was the only thing he had to hold on to, given the extent to which success eluded him in his life.
My god… That face! Those eyes! Aaiii!
I will remain forever baffled how Laughcruft could become so big among nerds, who are supposed to be “smarter” than the general populace. Ol’ Howie’s prose is a turgid, overwritten slog where you have to look up obscure antediluvian terms every two sentences to figure out what’s going on. Is this some kind of Iron Dream deal where the geek masses are drawn to the most reactionary garbage out of their own innermost backwardsness?
Not to mention many nerds and normies never even read the source material, as it’s par for the course among such phenomena. It comes down to pop-cultural osmosis and identity politics imprinting. “Oh man, that Laughcruft man was the bestest horror writer ever and all our bestest writers of today, like Saint King, are directly inspired by his Excellence.”
applehead,
I can only speak for myself, obv., but what I liked about HP was the ideas rather than the execution, I mean the whole idea of an immense abandoned city encased in ice, the tiny human explorers stumbling through it trying to put together a totally alien history – I loved that!
Some of his stuff is interesting from an autobiographical viewpoint too – Arthur Jermyn is for sure all about his horror at the idea of interracial marriage, but I think there are some hints in there too about his disquiet with his own heritage, and especially his relationship with his father. This is not to ignore the fact of the racism, simply to point out that I think there’s some other stuff he reveals about his attitudes and upbringing in his stories.
But yeah, you can’t read HP and *not* recognise that he was massively racist. For example, I liked the ideas of the Horror at Red Hook, but it’s filled with so much racism that I didn’t really enjoy the writing itself. So there’s some stuff where either I feel that the racism is tolerable for the sake of the concept of the story, or where it doesn’t seem as endemic – and there’s some stuff that I won’t touch at any price.
That’s totally a personal judgement of course, everyone has their own tolerances and I certainly would never tell someone that they were wrong for finding HP too problematic to tolerate.
I totally love that shit. Lord Dunsany too. De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess…
There’s also the fact that Lovecraft’s horror is more existential than most… I have absolutely zero interest in the splattergore than commonly seems to pass for horror these days, or mere physical terror – it’s the thing about being a microscopic, insignificant entity in an unimaginably vast, ancient and (at best) entirely uncaring cosmos that I like.
But mainly, it’s the turgid, overwritten prose. I also enjoy extended instrumental Rush tunes in multiple unusual time signatures…
“Lovecraft’s racism basically undermines the whole “cosmic” viewpoint of his horror: if humans are, as he liked to portray, truly insignificant flotsam adrift in a dark, hazardous but ultimately indifferent universe, then human conceits such as “race” are doubly meaningless. And yet, Lovecraft insists on inserting these grating asides about “hateful hooked noses” and whatnot into his work, robbing them of much of their power, bringing his cosmic vision back to Earth with a crash. If he himself had truly understood the implications of the philosophy he claimed to espouse, he’d have realised his obsessions about skin colour and physiogamy were no more meaningful that one bacterium obsessing about the flagella of another. But I suspect his own pride in his WASP-y lineage was the only thing he had to hold on to, given the extent to which success eluded him in his life.”
That’s an interesting question, Lovecraft and Carl Sagan both took essentially the same view of humanity’s place in the cosmos but drew diametrically opposite political conclusions. Fear may play a role, Lovecraft suffered from extreme anxiety from childhood onward and felt daunted by the sense of human insignificance, petty racial prejudice might have formed something of a comfort blanket for him, a meaningless but reassuring illusion. I get the sense in his later writings that he sort of knew racism was bullshit, but that he felt people needed to cling to it nonetheless.
“I will remain forever baffled how Laughcruft could become so big among nerds, who are supposed to be “smarter” than the general populace. Ol’ Howie’s prose is a turgid, overwritten slog where you have to look up obscure antediluvian terms every two sentences to figure out what’s going on. Is this some kind of Iron Dream deal where the geek masses are drawn to the most reactionary garbage out of their own innermost backwardsness?”
His writing dramatically improved throughout his career, works like the call of Cuthulu explore fascinating concepts but aren’t that well written; by contrast I found at the Mountains of Madness to be a fantastic work through and through.
I think it was Teresa Nielsen Hayden who pointed out that if you make a hat out of a sock, the Lovecraft bust can be made to look like Jacques Cousteau. Which is oddly appropriate, now that I think on it.
Dunc,
I agree to a point, but personally I always found HP’s lack of characterisation hindered the existential horror a bit. It’s hard to feel that moment of terrifying insignificance when there’s not an awful lot of significance we’re told about the person. The loss of individual meaning is lessened for me, because there doesn’t seem to be much meaning in the first place.
I mean, it seems to me that all his heroes are largely indistinguishable from one another (maybe as a consequence of that tendancy to autobiography?). We never learn an awful lot about who they are as people before they’re mind blasted into insignificance.
The Toast’s “Texts from H.P. Lovecraft” are hilarious.
@nelliebly: To be honest, I’ve never really been entirely sure what “characterisation” even means. I don’t tend to relate to characters in fiction as anything other than necessary devices to advance the plot, or fill out the setting. Caused me no end of problems in English class at school…
(To continue being honest, I’m not all that sure I to relate to people in real life any differently.)
newenlightenment @ 17
I believe that towards the end of Lovecraft’s life, he began to soften in his attitudes; the Depression and the New Deal may have contributed to that. Lovecraft’s poor health as a young man meant that he never finished high school or went to university and this was a source of embarrassment to him, especially when he moved to New York with his wife and was unable to obtain steady employment. Like you say, he might have clung to his white heritage as a comfort blanket in the face of his lack of material success during his lifetime.
(Incidentally, I am reading a book on Stoic philosophy at the moment and your comment about the Lovecraft’s and Sagan’s different reactions to a notion of a huge, indifferent universe is very interesting to me. I don’t think the Stoics would never ever have believed in a totally indifferent universe, and certainly not Lovecraft’s malevolently indifferent one. The Stoics invoked the Greek gods but in a somewhat abstract way; I suspect they were Deists or pantheists at heart, but it was probably dangerous to say so at the time they were writing. But they were very much of the mindset that one should face up to the negatives of existence so that one can appreciate the positives all the more. For that reason, I imagine that they would have understood Sagan’s joy in his contemplation of the unfolding cosmos.)
I can’t see that statuette without having “Easter Island head statues” just leap to mind.
–
(emphasis mine)
Ah, PZ, this is Lovecraft we’re talking about here. Couldn’t you have been a little more… purple in your description? It’s a “frightful eidolon” at the very least.
“Frightful eidolon” is good, do you think we can work ‘Cyclopean’ or ‘Inchoate’ in there somewhere?
(ahem) (clears throat of phlegm, or possibly ichor)
“Demented, shrieking, drooling madness; only the tenebrous Gods beyond angled space itself could tell of it. An inchoate thing, a shrieking phantasy in brass sculpted by hands that were not hands, a many-angled knick-knack from the Cyclopean sideboard of some nameless, undimensioned deity– Gods! Spittle-flecked, his cracked lips deliriously uttered the fateful words before their ultimate, merciful dissolution, ‘BUT IT LOOKED MORE LIKE THE FATHER THAN HE DID!!’”
I thank you!
H.P. Lovecraft beat poetry nights would be awesome; just sayin’
What I like about Lovecraft isn’t the cosmology — the malevolent deities, insignificant humans, insane Azathoth at the center of the universe, all that jazz.
No, what I like most about him is the idea that the real monster isn’t the shambling creature outside the door, the fish people in the town, the things that live in the sewers, even the vast deities beneath the sea or in the stars. No, the scariest monsters are the ones you can’t run away from — cool air, the corners of rooms, the past, your own face in the mirror, the coming of darkness, dreams, your own ancestors, the hideous contents of the organ that rests inside your skull!
Nobody does that better than he does.
“the scariest monsters are the ones you can’t run away from — cool air, the corners of rooms, the past, your own face in the mirror, the coming of darkness, dreams, your own ancestors, the hideous contents of the organ that rests inside your skull!”
Yep. Especially that last one.
@Cat Mara,
Sure, but meaninglessness carries no intrinsic emotional value. When Lovecraft writes horror, he doesn’t write from the viewpoint of a blind, indifferent universe. He writes from the viewpoint of a biased, parochial human being confronted with that universe, watching it casually crush all his precious, petty loves and hates and ideals. From that perspective, someone obsessed with trivial shit like nose shape and skin color is going to experience the keenest horror, because he has more to lose; his ideal world is defined so narrowly that it can be overturned by a light breeze.
Actually, he did realize that. HPL admitted that his preferences and desires were completely subjective and irrelevant to the rest of the universe. But they were his preferences and desires, and he felt that he had to be true to them.
He makes this very clear in some of his letters, quoted here. Lovecraft was a hardcore biological racist, but there were some “races” (Chinese, Japanese, Italian, possibly Jewish) that he considered to be objectively equal/superior to Anglos. But he still couldn’t accept them as comrades or neighbors, because they didn’t match the faces and the culture he grew up with. And his personal feelings of discomfort and repulsion were all the justification he needed to advocate against multiculturalism:
…
His mistake, of course, was believing that his own level of insularity and xenophobia was an unchangeable human norm. He couldn’t imagine a “new and satisfying equilibrium” that was based on diversity rather than homogeneity, just as he couldn’t imagine Anglo-Americans and Chinese appreciating and empathizing with each other without losing their own cultural identities.
In a contest between Arsehole Writers of the Early Twentieth Century, I’d pick E.R. Eddison over Lovecraft any day, just on the strength of The Worm Ouroboros. Odious worldview, but beautiful language.
Sorry, I meant Arsehole Fantasy Writers. Leaving Fantasy out expands the field far too much.
History will eventually judge all of us to be horribly twisted, while standing on our shoulders.
@Anton Mates Lovecraft’s later views were influenced by Oswald Spengler, who basically viewed cultures as super-organisms, not necessarily inferior to one another but mutually incompatible. A major difference however is that Spengler used ‘race’ as synonym for ‘culture’ and actively rejected biological racism, whereas Lovecraft did not, even in his later, more tolerant years. This latter worldview seams to be the theme of works such as at the Mountains of Madness and the Shadow out of Time the creatures seem monstrous to human eyes, but the narrator points out that they are not evil on their own terms and can even be admired from afar.
@#22, Cat Mara
On another site, someone commented: