H. P. Lovecraft was profoundly racist, even for a White New Englander living in the early 1900’s.
Lovecraft is hardly the only racist author in the history of American literature. Yet Lovecraft’s legacy of racism remains at the heart of almost any conversation about the man, while the racist inclinations of many other American writers seem to fade into embarrassing footnotes over the course of time.
How many high schoolers, for instance, learn about Henry David Thoreau’s condescension toward his Irish neighbors while studying Walden? How often do we talk about the embarrassing, stereotypical depiction of Asians in Kurt Vonnegut’s “All the King’s Horses”?
A few factors may contribute to the staying power of Lovecraft’s particular brand of racism.
First and foremost is probably the fact that he himself was so vocal about his attitudes. The author’s preserved letters, journals, and other personal writings offer an unequivocal record of his hatred for non-white people, while the supposed corrupting influence of immigrants and Black people on Anglo-American civilization is a recurring theme in his fiction.
The sinister Black voodoo priests, Indian thuggees, and mixed-race boogeymen who populate Lovecraft’s fiction are deliberate choices, made by a man who saw non-white people as a threat to the way of life he deemed best.
In other words, we know that H. P. Lovecraft was racist because H. P. Lovecraft really wanted us to know how racist he was.
But beyond this self-promotion, there is an element of Lovecraft’s racism which makes it especially egregious and noticeable, even a century after his heyday as a weird fiction writer. Literary critic S. T. Joshi highlights the problem in A Dreamer and a Visionary, an in-depth biography of Lovecraft which analyzes his novels and short stories in the context of the author’s life:
“In my view, Lovecraft leaves himself most open to criticism on the issue of race not by the mere espousal of such views but by his lack of openmindedness on the issue […] In every other aspect of this thought—metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics—Lovecraft was constantly digesting new information […] and readjusting his views accordingly. Only on the issue of race did his thinking remain relatively static. He never realized that his beliefs had been largely shaped by parental and societal influence, early reading, and outmoded late nineteenth-century science.”1
Lovecraft’s racism, in other words, cannot be dismissed as merely a product of his time.
Yes, many of Lovecraft’s White contemporaries would have shared his prejudices towards non-white people—but Lovecraft himself was uniquely positioned to question those prejudices in himself and others. Intelligent and intensely curious, Lovecraft attacked his family’s Christian faith from an early age, and gradually abandoned his obsession with classicism to affirm the value of modern art. In his later years, he even embraced socialism.
That such a man would choose to cling to the racist attitudes of his childhood is especially heartbreaking to fans who love his work for its otherwise sharp insights into the experience of alienation in what often feels like a dead, mechanistic universe.
Such a willful, deliberate turning away from the reality of the other is more than just a character flaw. It is, by at least one definition, the purest kind of sin.
“Willingness to extend oneself”
In her essay collection All About Love, bell hooks cites psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”2
This willingness to “extend one’s self”—to grow and change in response to the deep needs of another—is exactly what Lovecraft lacked when he refused to examine his views on race, despite changing in so many other profound ways over the course of his lifetime.
According to radical theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, such a refusal is the opposite of love—and the most fundamental sin.
“Love,” he says in The Descent Into Hell, “as the Christian has been given it in Christ, is not an acceptance and affirmation of the other. It is rather an attack upon all the distance that creates the alien and the other, an assault upon the actual estrangement of a fallen condition.”3
Earlier in the same text, he defines sin as “a private and isolated state of autonomous existence […] isolation from the actuality of the other[.]”
“Isolation from the actuality of the other” was Lovecraft’s comfort zone. Ironically, he cared little for the craft of love. To love the non-white people in his beloved Providence would have meant extending his self beyond limits to which he was accustomed, and with which he seems to have been content.
He therefore looked at the other, and the possibility of closing the distance between self and other, not as a lover might, but as a sinner would. For Lovecraft, the loss of such distance—the result of the act of loving—could only be perceived as a threat.
The Threat of the Great Old Ones
For Lovecraft, Cthulhu is not primarily a physical threat, but an existential one. His awakening foreshadows the dawn of a mode of being—a complete change in the way humanity relates to the wider cosmos. As he puts it in “The Call of Cthulhu”:
“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”4
Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones frighten Lovecraft because their presence destroys the external “laws and morals” that have previously been the only limits on human behavior, leaving humanity “free and wild and beyond good and evil”—freedom being the ultimate horror.
For Lovecraft, these monsters from outer space are so terrifying because they herald the end of one mode of human consciousness and the birth of another. They are apocalyptic, in the true sense of ‘uncovering’ or ‘revealing’ things best left covered up and well hidden.
This running theme in Lovecraft’s fiction—the retreat from revelation and uncomfortable new truths—lines up neatly with his personal philosophy, which he once summarized in a discussion with his frequent opponent and longtime friend, James F. Morton.
When asked how he could place so much emphasis on the supposed superiority and importance of Anglo-Saxon traditions and values, while at the same time arguing that human values have no ultimate meaning in a mindless, mechanistic cosmos, Lovecraft explained:
“It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which gave us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.”5
In other words, given the choice between being an “Englishman”—a transparently made-up designation granting certain privileges to its holder in the context of human society—and “nothing whatever”—a truly isolated node, drifting aimlessly through an alien cosmos—Lovecraft willfully and openly chooses to embrace the “salutary illusion” and comforting “arbitrary background” provided by his racist, traditionalist beliefs—even as he freely admits that to do so is to turn away from the truth that he himself espouses in his philosophy of “cosmicism.”
A Sinner’s Perspective
Altizer is adamant that radical Christian love cannot manifest itself while an individual is stuck in their own isolated ego-consciousness. For the bonds of love to form between self and other, the self must cease to exist in its purely solitary state—it must change.
As Altizer puts it:
“The compassion of an apocalyptic Christ is inseparable from the advent of an actual disintegration of consciousness and experience. Accordingly, visions of a new apocalyptic compassion must inevitably appear in the form of madness or chaos to all those who can still find life or hope in an individual center of consciousness.”6
Christ-compassion—love—is apocalyptic, or world(view)-ending. It dissolves the isolated self, making it porous and open to the influence, joy, and pain of the other. Such a process naturally appears to be “madness or chaos” to a self that wishes to remain cut off and in control.
In Lovecraft’s work, the Great Old Ones—alien entities that herald, among other things, the end of White domination of non-white races—promise to make non-white cultists “free” through their various gatherings and rituals. In Lovecraft’s imagination, this freedom could only lead to “madness and chaos” on a horrific scale. Cthulhu, and other alien beings like him, threaten to collapse the distance between Lovecraft’s White self and the non-white others encroaching daily on his little world.
In other words, the Great Old Ones are the apocalyptic Christ as perceived by a reactionary consciousness—love for the other seen through a sinner’s eyes.
Joshi puts it mildly when he contends that “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.”7 As literary stand-ins for this process of “change”—this mingling of races and peoples—the Great Old Ones express Lovecraft’s bewilderment and horror in the face of the call to love a growing number of non-white neighbors.
Lovecraft’s character Thurston most clearly expresses the writer’s true feelings about a world in which non-whites might find freedom, and the individual self would face pressure to grow, change, or even dissolve—a world in which the Great Old Ones were ascendent:
“Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.”8
Love—Altizer’s “assault” on the rift between self and other—is “loathsome” to a self that has no interest in changing for the sake of another. The dissolution of the self that love requires is only “decay,” a loss of integrity and life-preserving separation.
From such a point of view, it is only natural that the avatar of love appears as something alien, slimy, and squishy—Christ as Cthulhu. From such an upside-down perspective, the call to love seems to come not from the heavens, but from the deep.
Footnotes
- S. T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time (Oxford University Press, 2001).
- bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (HarperCollins, 2018).
- Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Descent Into Hell: A Study of the Radical Reversal of the Christian Consciousness, 1979.
- H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu.”
- Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.
- Altizer, The Descent Into Hell: A Study of the Radical Reversal of the Christian Consciousness.
- Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.
- Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu.”
