Getting myself into trouble, one commit at a time.
I’m working through an audiobook of H. P. Lovecraft’s Weird Tales and it’s been thoroughly entertaining. H. P. habitually broke many canonical rules of style, and he seemed to have particular spite for the old adage about not using three words where one would do. Much like jazz, however, he flouted this to great effect, and the foundation of his work is the mood he crafted in his stories. I’ve always been fascinated by cosmic horror and the Cthulhu mythos, and it’s been really wonderful to go through the omnibus and see how it evolves from start to finish.
I’m also a long-time RPG fan. I got into computers (programming, especially) by trying to mod Baldur’s Gate II into supporting a subset of the 3rd Edition D&D Ruleset. Given that I’m currently on a cosmic horror kick, it’s no surprise that I have also been looking around for YouTube videos of play sessions of the Call of Cthulhu Tabletop RPG.
I came across the Critical Role Call of Cthulhu one-shot, and my goodness, did it ever hit the spot. The storytelling and mood of the story as it was unfolding was utterly captivating. Critical Roll did a spectacular job, the production values were a spectacle to behold, and both the Keeper of Lore (Call of Cthulhu’s equivalent of a Dungeon Master or Game Master), and the players did a masterful job occupying their roles as the scenario unfolded.
However, in the opening remarks, the Keeper made a comment that struck me. Specifically:
Before we begin, it’s worth noting the man behind the name most associated with this genre was a problematic mess, even by the standards of his time.
This is hardly an uncommon sentiment in this field.
I take exception to almost every component of this. First off, Lovecraft’s time was, to put it mildly, not a kind one. Interracial marriage was specifically illegal, women were only just getting the right to vote, Margaret Sanger was advocating eugenics by way of both abortions and compulsory sterilization, Lenin was building the Gulag Archipelago that would lead to the imprisonment or murder of millions, frequently by the self-same state, party, and regime they themselves so ardently supported, Lenin’s successor Joseph Stalin was not only putting said Archipelago to great use, but also blurring the lines between famine and genocide in the Ukraine, and, of course, Adolf Hitler was beginning to advance the political philosophy that would eventually form the backbone of the Nazi party.
This was, to make an understatement of cosmic proportions, not a bright moment in the history of Humanity.
If the point needs to be further made, here’s a sample of adverts that ran from 1910 to 1976, so the argument that this wasn’t commonly the centerpiece of pop culture seems, to again employ understatement, dubious.
As an aside, if you want to get a flavor for what this part of history was like, TimeGhost has an amazing series about this very point – Between Two Wars. I can’t recommend it enough.
To be clear: Lovecraft, especially in his early writing, was very racist, and an antisemite. The first stories in the omnibus feature both repeated comments on people being degenerate, illiterate, and stupid, and these traits being directly, causally linked to their ancestry. Being low-class white trash was not merely an accident of circumstance or geography, but the inevitable consequence of being from low stock. However, as I hope I illustrated above, this is hardly out of place in his time. Furthermore, and I feel most relevant to this discussion, there are some other circumstances of his home and family life that go a long way towards explaining the source.
H. P. grew up in an extremely sheltered and, it must be said, less than ideal household. His father developed some mental disorder (likely untreated syphilis) when Howard was three, and remained in a mental institution until he died in 1898. His mother was, to put it mildly, the overly doting type, who wouldn’t let him out of her sight, and pampered him to the point of excess. She (Susie) also never recovered from the grief of losing her husband. His maternal grandfather, Whipple, was the one that stepped in as a father figure, and was the first to spark Howard’s literary interests, especially in the Weird Tales of the time.
Howard also spent ten years as effective shut-in, and hardly left his home. He spent a lot of time writing out-of-style Georgian poetry, which cropped up in some of his earliest novelettes.
If you are familiar with his work, or indeed, even the broadest themes of the Cosmic Horror genre he created, it hardly even needs mention that all of this had a profound impact on his creative output. Even his racism and classism, much the subject of debate, found ample expression in his earliest work. Beyond the Wall of Sleep is an excellent example. The Temple is another early, interesting example – interesting because it paints the protagonist as deeply racist and classist, even towards his fellow countrymen and brothers in arms, but, significantly, the protagonist is a German Officer aboard a U-boat in world war one. This is not a sympathetic character for a man born and raised in Massachusetts, and importantly, his audience would feel the same way. Indeed, the way the protagonist comes off in the story is decidedly distasteful and unsavory. The officer is not someone we are invited to admire, nor is he portrayed in a heroic light. The most famous example of Lovecraft’s racism is, certainly, is a very unfortunately named poem. Rest assured however, these examples are only a sample, and there are many others.
My point is this: his racism did not persist throughout his life. Notably, he married a Jew (Sonia Green), and began to travel more. This travel necessarily exposed him to more people, which also naturally challenged a lot of the prejudices he inherited from his family and home.
As Mark Twain said:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
However, the biggest point that offends me is not just that Lovecraft’s opinions are getting attacked, nor even that they are being singled out as beyond the pale, ‘even by the standards of his time’. This is patently false, but the exceptional facet to this is this: Howard was a shut-in, fascinated by history, a creative writer, and had a deeply troubled family life.
He was not a fan of games himself, but he obviously had a great deal of common ground with the ‘nerds’ of his time. This implies that he had at least some common ground with the people around the game table who were slagging him off for virtue points, despite the fact that H. P.’s character pushed him to explore, travel, become more worldly, and ultimately challenge and re-evaluate his bigoted opinions.
But! Let’s take the core assertion head-on: Let us say that Lovecraft had some beliefs that were, even by the standards of the time, monstrous and beyond the pale. If he changed those beliefs as he grew in experience, as seems likely, are we to condemn him for this mistake?
The deeper problem, of course, is that we are judging H. P. by the standards of today, ignoring the century of time between now and then (Lovecraft’s first published story was ‘The Tomb’, in 1917). This presupposes that one’s ethics, morality, politics, or religion are not influenced and informed by the time and place we come from. This allows us to get off easy when we judge those who came before us for not being as enlightened by supposing that we have always, or would have always objected to such things, without considering or acknowledging the fact that making moral progress is fantastically difficult, and not to be taken for granted. Just within United States history, moral pioneers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and many others besides are in the canon of heroes and luminaries because they had the clarity of thought, vision, dedication, eloquence, bull-headedness, and in some cases, martial prowess, to leave the world better than they found it.
We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, and we owe them a mighty debt. Not taking this into account is the literal definition of Presentism. You can call it chronocentrism or historical chauvinism, but it’s a vital thing to keep in mind when looking at how people behaved in the past. If nothing else, presentism trivializes the moral struggles and victories of the luminaries that have gone before us – it’s presuming that anyone could have done what they did.
There has to be room in our hearts to forgive someone who was not just a product of their time, but who came of age in a sheltered, mal-adaptive home, especially when their character had enough curiosity to overcome their fear of the surrounding world, go out, explore, and in so doing, challenge his earlier prejudices.
I know for a fact that I held some deeply misguided beliefs when I was growing up, and in my twenties. I’m completely certain that I earnestly hold beliefs today, at thirty-two, that I will consider deeply foolish, misguided, or even harmful (one could even say, problematic), should I reach forty-two or beyond.
For the sake of us all, I hope there’s a path to forgiveness.