The horror, the horror

Edmund Wilson’s famous put-down of H. P. Lovecraft – writing in 1945 that the only real horror in his work was “the horror of bad taste and bad art” – now seems to be missing something. Increasingly the real horror is felt to be Lovecraft’s racism, extending well beyond a dislike of black people to a loathing of Poles, Finns and French Canadians. David J. Goodwin’s study of Lovecraft’s embattled time in ethnically diverse New York, from 1924 to 1926, goes beyond the title’s emphasis on topography to give a full account of those two years, and centres on his ill-fated marriage to Sonia Greene, a Jewish woman some years his senior; many readers will sympathize with her and be glad she found happiness in a later marriage. Like other Lovecraft biographers Goodwin draws on the quantity of available correspondence. Lovecraft wrote as many as 100,000 letters and cards, so it is unfortunate that Sonia burnt about 400 of them – the ones to her. Their marriage keeps its inscrutability.

Lovecraft enjoyed finding traces of a bygone, colonial New York in Greenwich Village and Chelsea. A Georgian fanlight or a picturesque old alley helped to allay the revulsion he felt towards much of the city’s population, expressed in stories such as “The Horror at Red Hook” (a part of Brooklyn). It is a work of what we might call demographic horror, with its “newcomers … flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers”, like a plaint of “there goes the neighbourhood” cranked up to supernatural intensity. Yet despite calling for the use of “poison gas” and lauding the Ku Klux Klan, Lovecraft was no monster: his unworldliness is striking, and Goodwin resists the temptation to make him into a bogey figure or score easy points. Goodwin himself is a humane and unpretentious writer, and this is a usefully focused study, appropriate to a man who by his own admission preferred scenes, places and atmospheres to people.

John L. Steadman is less forgiving, referring at one point to “the man that we have come to know and dislike in this book”. His arrestingly subtitled study is indebted to Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018), titled for the term she uses for the embarrassment and denial (turning to anger) that white people allegedly experience when there is any attempt to make them understand their racism or challenge their world-view. There is no such denial here: Lovecraft seems to have been an unrepentant bigot who saw his racism as a means of protecting civilization.

That racism is extreme, and I found myself blinking at his description in one of his Herbert West stories, “Six Shots by Moonlight”, of a black person’s arms as akin to “front legs”. Yet, given the manifest nature of the material, Steadman’s attempts to explicate it methodically can seem heavy-handed and his belabouring of the author unconvincing. Saying, for example, that Lovecraft’s early life was “as perfect an example of a privileged, white, upper-class upbringing as could be imagined” just isn’t true. His father was a commercial traveller and both parents died insane. And why call Thomas F. Malone the “privileged, white, Anglo-Saxon protagonist” of “The Horror at Red Hook”, when he is an Irish-American policeman, described as “the sensitive Celt”?

Lovecraft has become a major figure in American popular culture, but the redemptive case for him as a great writer, a bigot of genius, is far from settled. He is no Céline. Steadman’s Lovecraft, meanwhile, can do nothing right (his mother’s mental state is blamed on the fourteen-year-old Lovecraft’s inability to get a job), though the power of the best work is acknowledged, along with the suggestion that racism itself, “transformed and sublimated [into] compelling fantasy and horror”, gave Lovecraft’s writing a twisted intensity and conviction that helped it to transcend its “pulp” origins.

Some of the best material in Horror and Racism in H. P. Lovecraft comes in the author’s canny treatment of other critics. Graham Harman’s Weird Realism (2012) saw Lovecraft as a “Husserlian-Heideggerian” and a “hero” of “object-oriented philosophy” (the descriptions are Harman’s), but this pales beside the advocacy of Patricia MacCormack, who has John L. Steadman’s backhanded admiration as the “most spectacularly ‘out there’” Lovecraft critic. In her essay “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” she argues that he offers “entryways into feminist, ecosophical, queer, and mystical … configurations of difference”. It seems those newcomers “flooding” in were only ever “a wondrous celebration of otherness”.

Phil Baker’s books include City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley, 2022

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post The horror, the horror appeared first on TLS.