A week or so ago, I referenced Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, and how it deals with some of the more unsavory aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s personality and writings, and I promised we’d be dealing with this more in the future.

So here goes.  H.P. Lovecraft was a virulent racist.  And was also exceptionally prejudiced against Jewish people, women, and homosexuals.  He wrote in letters to friends that he supported the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the Nazi Party, even if he wasn’t exactly in support of their actions.  He supported the eugenics movement, which advocated exterminating “undesirable” people from the human population.  He wrote poetry comparing non-white people to animals, which you can find very easily.  I’m not posting the them here, because they make my skin crawl.

Last November, the World Fantasy Awards (finally) agreed to change their awards from a caricature of Lovecraft’s face (the award is colloquially known as a ‘Howard’) as a result of a petition begun by Daniel José Older.*  The petition came after several years of protest from fantasy and horror writers around the world–especially recipients of ‘Howards’.  Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor (photo at left), who won for her stunning novel Who Fears Death, wrote a blog post about having Lovecraft’s face in her home:

Anyway, a statuette of this racist man’s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man’s head  is one of my greatest honors as a writer…Do I want “The Howard” …replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe…What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it.

Free-For-All favorite author China Miéville (also left) has also weighed in on this debate.  There is no doubt at all that Miéville’s work is deeply inspired by Lovecraft, as well as plenty other greats of the ‘weird fiction’ genre.  But he also has acknowledged that “Yes, indeed, the depth and viciousness of Lovecraft’s racism is known to me…Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred.”  He goes on to say:

…I was very honoured to receive the award as representative of a particular field of literature. And the award itself, the statuette of the man himself? I put it out of sight, in my study, where only I can see it, and I have turned it to face the wall. So I am punishing [Lovecraft] like the malevolent clown he was, I can look at it and remember the honour, and above all I am writing behind Lovecraft’s back.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who agree with Lovecraft’s biographer, S.T. Joshi, who bashed the decision as “a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness.”  There are plenty of people who say that Lovecraft was a product of his times, and that his opinions were the result of an insulated upbringing, or poor education.

But to cling to this argument utterly overlooks people’s inherent ability to grow, to change, and to empathize.  Lovecraft showed a remarkable inability to do either of these, which makes him a man worthy of scorn and pity at the same time, not a figure to be revered.

But then, what do we do about his books?  Lovecraft was not well-known or well-liked during his own time–he died penniless in Providence, Rhode Island in 1937 at the age of 46 as much a victim of the Depression as the intestinal cancer that claimed his life.  He wrote to a friend about eating expired canned food to survive, and acknowledged that “I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales, and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.”  His afterlife, however, has been nothing short of miraculous.  There are region of Pluto named after Lovecraft’s elder god, “Cthulu“.  His face, and his creations, appear on everything from craft beers to clothing to jewelry.  A number of credible and venerated institutions hail him as a father of science fiction, and the “King of Weird“.   Lovecraft’s influence in literature is unquestionable.

In large part, this is because he was exceptionally good at harnessing the very human reaction of fear.  At the heart of all his wildly camp, ridiculously over-the-top stories is Lovecraft’s belief that  “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”  And in emphasizing human’s incredible smallness within the vast scope of a terrifying world (and a terrifying universe), Lovecraft opened up a world (and a universe of wild creatures, gods, and magical powers that have kept our imaginations spinning for generations.

But the other truth is that, when we stop getting all excited about those elder gods and the potential of all those worlds he describes, the fear that Lovecraft is describing is the fear of other human people.  His fear was that of a very ordinary, very nervous white man who blamed his lack of financial and social success on other people, for no other reason than that they didn’t look like him.  As Alan Moore (author of the League of Extraordinary Gentleman) wrote, “it is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread….in his frights and panics he reveals himself as…the absolutely average man, an entrenched social insider unnerved by new and alien influences from without.”

So yes, if Lovecraft’s descriptions of ancient civilizations inhabiting Antarctica makes your imagination sizzle, then by all means, read it.  And enjoy it.  I know I did.  But we can’t afford to pretend that he wasn’t a really reprehensible human being, and we can’t afford to overlook his irredeemable qualities because we like his books. What we can do it realize that literature isn’t like a wall.  It doesn’t have to follow straight lines and right angles.  It’s more like a tree.  Branches can bend and twist, and, eventually, the weak and dead spots can be replaced by new, healthy growth.  There are any number of authors who have used Lovecraft’s ideas and used them to make the science fiction genre into a stronger, brave, and more inclusive place.  Some of them are listed above.  There are a load of others at the Library, and we’ll be talking about them this week.  Feel free to read them, too.  Fearlessly.  That is the best thing we can do to make sure that Lovecraft’s legacy is better than his life.  And better, ultimately, than him.

* A note: The World Fantasy Award is accepting suggestions for its new award until April 2, 2016.