Dustie: I meant to add this note earlier, but was running late in getting off to work: The reason I included that link to the Dawkins speech was that he was dealing with examples of what we are talking about here -- the shift in perception as to what is "racist" and what is not, what is morally acceptable in views of various ethnologies, and what is now considered in quite a different light; and he gives specific examples of very intelligent, even progressive, thinkers who held some views which we would call simply appalling. As I said, in partial support of your point, in fact.
As for it being "one person"... in the context of this thread, as I have noted, several of HPL's acquaintances, friends, or relatives, called him on his views, so they were not infrequently extreme even given the period he lived. In part, they came from his early reading of such classical writers as Juvenal, in part from William Benjamin Smith's racist tract,
The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn, which he read (apparently) shortly after it came out. (For anyone interested, I provide a link to this book below. We know that Lovecraft read this one, as he dedicated a poem, "De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature Over Northern Ignorance", in which he took the position that blacks were better off as slaves and that by freeing them the North had condemned them to extinction, to Smith, citing him as the author of this piece.) And, in part, it came from his early adoption of the Aryan myth, which he held to to the end of his days.
Which brings me to nigourath's point. No, his views were, when it comes to this, hardly as objective and cosmic as those of his Old Ones. He made it enormously plain throughout his letters that he viewed the white as the supreme evolutionary achievement when it came to humankind, and bluntly stated on more than one occasion that he saw the African negro and Australian aborigine as halted somewhere on the evolutionary ladder between apedom and humanity. His description of Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke", in "Herbert West -- Reanimator", follows this view:
He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
And, while he was much gentler in his mention of "Old Asa and his stout wife Hannah" in
Ward, nonetheless the best that can be said for this is that it is paternalistic rather than simply vitriolic. Ditto for the Italians in "The Haunter of the Dark", where, while they are a benevolent influence, they are nonetheless viewed as superstitious, ignorant, and little above the level of sensitive beasts, as opposed to, say, the protagonist Robert Blake, or the "charmed circle" of the Yankees in old Providence. Then there are the decidedly racist terms used throughout "The Call of Cthulhu", "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", the descriptions of the men of Parg in
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, the relationship between blacks and shoggoths, especially concerning the slaves' uprising, in
At the Mountains of Madness... the list goes on and on.
This is not a cosmic view at all, but a distinctly human one, and one which draws harshly invidious distinctions between the various ethnic categories of the species Homo sapiens. It is obvious that Lovecraft, whether using the voice of first-person or omniscient narrators, sympathizes with his old Yankee stock, and, more broadly, English, Nordic, or "Aryan" (by which he meant the classic Teutonic image so familiar to us all), over all the other subdivisions of humankind. Those which had the misfortune to be isolated and retrogress (like Joe Slater, the inhabitants of Dunwich, or the shanty-dwellers of "The Lurking Fear"), are viewed as "simple animals", only barely accorded the categorization of humanity, though not without a rather concescending sort of sympathy.
And all this is in the fiction alone. When one includes his poetry, there are even stronger bigoted terms; ditto for some of his essays; and his letters fairly teem at times with things which would make him a total social outcast these days. His comments on Jews, blacks, Italians, Finns, French-Canadians (until he had traveled in Canada at least, at which point he gained a much higher respect and even a degree of liking for them), Mexicans, Indians (eastern, not Native Americans, for whom he did evince a -- again, condescending -- sympathy, interestingly enough), Poles, Slavs, and just about any other ethnic grouping one can name, ranged from amused to contemptuous to (at his worst) outright virulent hatred.
He did not tend to put these views into action (save through supporting immigration restrictions), but he was very much outspoken, admitting -- somewhat proudly, in fact -- in an early letter that he had gained a reputation as an anti-Semite during his school years. And, even though he did indeed soften quite a bit toward his final years, he continued to rant and rail against various ethnic groups off and on, and frequently in extremely pejorative terms. I'm sorry, but that is anything but as removed and "godlike" a view as his alien entities might (with considerable justice) view the human race as a whole as little better than bacteria or upstart bipeds.
I don't wish to bash HPL on this; I don't see any purpose in that. But I do think it is important to stop whitewashing him and pretending that these ethnophobic views, which were a very important part of his personality and which in fact in one way or another (and in conjunction with his views on evolution) drove no little of his creative output, were either not there or have been exaggerated by those with negative feelings toward the man. As I have made abundantly clear time and again, Lovecraft remains my favorite writer; in most ways I admire him as a human being as well; he was, generally speaking, truthful, kind, enormously generous, intelligent, as fast a friend as one could ask for, and simply, in the main, a good person. But he did have some very unpalatable views, and held to them like grim death, even in the face of evidence to the contrary -- this being about the
only case in which he did so. It should also be said that, despite his views, if he were to see any member of these various ethnos in need, he would quite likely be among the first to render whatever aid he could. That may seem contradictory, but as history has shown us time and again, the human mind is more than capable of simultaneously holding many mutually contradictory ideas or impulses; Lovecraft, in this case, was no different.
But I would urge those who qualify, deny, or ignore this aspect and then choose to argue that he didn't hold such views, to take off the blinders and actually read his works fresh, with open eyes. Once one has done that, such a position simply can't be held with any degree of justice whatsoever.
And here is the link to Smith's treatise:
http://www.archive.org/details/colorlinethe00smitrich
)... actually, YES. In fact, one of Lovecraft's friends, James Ferdinand Morton, would very likely appear as a left-wing liberal even by today's standards; he also wrote broadsides attacking race prejudice and related issues. This caused more than a little friction between the two of them, but they nonetheless remained fast friends.
