The Legacy of H. P. Lovecraft from an Identitarian Perspective: Part One

by Andrej Sekulović

Andrej Sekulović discusses the complex legacy of H. P. Lovecraft, exploring how the renowned horror and science-fiction author’s personal political views, particularly on race and multiculturalism, have become a subject of controversy in our liberal times.

Also read parts two and three.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is considered to be one of the biggest names in horror literature. His influence in the horror and science-fiction genres, both in literature and the movie industry, remains of great importance. However, as Dr. Kerry Bolton has pointed out in his essay “Lovecraft’s Politics,” for many of his admirers, the scariest things that Lovecraft wrote were not about the ancient creatures out of space but his political views. The modern reader may be left speechless after reading Lovecraft’s letters and opinions, where he discusses the inequality of races, the rising decadence of the liberal democratic system, and even the much dreaded “Jewish question,” just as his characters are left on the brink of madness after discovering the existence of the ancient alien beings inhabiting our planet, or the ruins of their colossal cities hidden under the seas or beneath the Arctic ice.

There are many works of various writers and thinkers that were cast into oblivion and ostracized after the triumph of liberal democracies in 1945. The reason for this was that their authors were labeled as sympathizers or supporters of the “dangerous fascist ideology.” But there are also those whose impact on Western literature and culture was too great to be swept under the carpet, those whose works remained important milestones and influences in different literary fields. Among them is Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer and Nobel Prize winner, who was an ardent supporter of National Socialist Germany and even wrote an obituary for Adolf Hitler after his suicide in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, calling him “a warrior for mankind and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations.” Albeit to a lesser extent, H. P. Lovecraft, who passed away in 1937, before World War Two, could also be counted among those writers. His legacy remains relevant today because of its influence, but his political and personal views are highly “inconvenient” for modern academia and the literary world.

The most common way in which modern critics, academics, and even ordinary readers handle such situations is that they try to separate the man and his work. In other words, they condemn and disavow the writer’s “appalling” and “outdated” views, claiming that in this regard he was a “product of his times,” when “bigotry” and “backward thinking” were more prevalent, while still praising his work and talent. But, of course, such an approach is in many ways superficial and deficient, as the writer’s work is usually heavily influenced by and intermingled with his own moral values and worldviews. Taking this into account, we can notice how one of the main themes in Knut Hamsun’s famous novel The Growth of Soil, published in 1917, is the deep and even ancient connection between people and the soil they live and toil on, which echoes the later principle of “blood and soil” formulated by the agricultural minister of National Socialist Germany, Richard Walter Darré. One of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich, Alfred Rosenberg, praised the novel in his magnum opus, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, as “the great present-day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal primordial form.”

Aversion towards Miscegenation

In the case of H. P. Lovecraft, such connections between one’s personal views and his works of fiction are even more apparent. One important aspect of his tales is the “cosmic dread” felt by men who discover the truth about the insignificance of humanity in the grand cosmic scheme of things, and the fact that it can be swept away at any moment by the reappearance or unleashing of the archaic beings from the distant parts of the universe, who had inhabited the Earth in the distant eons before life on our planet as we know it even began. But another important part of his canon is the almost primal aversion towards the abnormality and “otherness” of both the alien beings who “came from the stars,” and men who are born out of incest, as in “The Lurking Fear,” or out of miscegenation with the mysterious alien beings, as is the case in The Dunwich Horror or in The Shadow over Innsmouth. In many ways, this disgust with the “degeneration” of those who were tainted by “foreign blood” came from Lovecraft’s own aversion towards racial miscegenation and the growing decadence within the urban multicultural America. This becomes so obvious in some of his writings, such as the already mentioned The Shadow over Innsmouth or “The Horror at Red Hook,” that even some of his admirers have to admit that his personal beliefs about race and civilization played a part in his fiction.

Incidentally, in his book Cultural Life in Modern America, which was published in 1889, a year before Lovecraft was born, Hamsun wrote that the United States was creating a “mullatto stud farm.” It was something that deeply troubled Lovecraft, and he abhorred the prospect of the “products” of such “stud farms” becoming an increasing percentage of the U.S. population. In his essay titled “Americanism,” published in July 1919 in the United Amateur, which was the official publication of the United Amateur Press Association, he wrote that the “most dangerous and fallacious of the several misconceptions of Americanism is that of the so-called ‘melting-pot’ of races and traditions,” while claiming that “Americanism is expanded Anglo-Saxonism.” He also outlined his views on immigration, writing that it “cannot, perhaps, be cut off altogether, but it should be understood that aliens who choose America as their residence must accept the prevailing language and culture as their own.” It seems that in terms of accepting foreigners, he believed that only certain nations, which shared enough kinship with the prevailing Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic-Celtic ethnic fabric of the majority population of the USA, should be even considered. Later on, in a letter written on December 13, 1925, he returned to the issue of immigration, stating that he certainly hoped to see “promiscuous immigration permanently curtailed soon,” adding that the admission of “the ignorant, superstitious and biologically inferior” limitless hordes have already caused enough damage to America. In a letter dated January 18, 1919, he offers the following criticism of what we call multiculturalism today, stating that “if racial amalgamation were to occur, the net level of American civilisation would perceptibly fall, as in such mongrel nations as Mexico, and several South American near-republics.” He adds that “the much-abused ‘colour line’ is a self-protective measure of the white American people to keep the blood of their descendants pure, and the institutions and greatness of their country unimpaired.” In his opinion, such a “colour line” should be “maintained in spite of the ranting and preaching of fanatical and ill-informed philanthropists.” In the same letter, he writes that for him “racial prejudice is not irrational or unexplainable; nor in any way unjustifiable. It has awkward phases, but its benefits immeasurably outweigh its disadvantages.”

For Lovecraft, the “mixture of really alien blood or ideas” could only cause damage. But while his views on such matters may cause a modern leftist or liberal to start shaking uncontrollably, some of his opinions regarding the peoples of Southern and Eastern Europe also wouldn’t bode too well with the current Identitarian or nationalist circles that focus on “pan-European” cooperation and solidarity among white people. When contemplating the negative consequences of migrations and miscegenation, Lovecraft, who considered himself a 99.9% Teuton, didn’t only have in mind the non-white populations but also held predominantly “Nordicist” views towards some European nations outside of the northwestern part of the old continent. Nonetheless, even if we may have reservations regarding his more chauvinistic views about certain Southern and Eastern European ethnicities, we can acknowledge — while witnessing the current state of affairs in Europe and America, including mass immigration, the demographic replacement of native European populations, and the overwhelming consequences of the decadent false liberal morals — that his general criticism towards multiculturalism, equality, racial color blindness and the rising decay of the modern democratic societies was well justified.

Lovecraft, a Racial Realist

By outlining the general views of H. P. Lovecraft towards multiculturalism and immigration, we can confirm that he was essentially a man of the Right, or even “Radical Right,” judging by today’s standards. Many of the issues that he discussed, and demographic and cultural trends that he opposed, have only intensified in the present time. Some of his modern readers, who try to absolve him of the sin of having politically incorrect opinions, may point out that in the later years of his life, he softened his views and even denounced his “reactionary” attitudes in a letter from 1937, the last year of his life. But it seems that this was mostly related to his growing contempt for plutocratic capitalism and his sympathies for socialism. It should be noted that to have socialist leanings in the late 19th- and early 20th-century America did not necessarily mean supporting racial egalitarianism or proletarian internationalism, as is evident in the case of another American writer, Jack London, who once famously proclaimed, “I am first of all a white man, and only then a Socialist.” Lovecraft’s attitudes towards race stayed more or less the same throughout his life, as can be concluded from his later letters. In a letter dated February 13, 1934, he criticized Adolf Hitler’s policies as being “extremes of pure racialism,” which seemed to him “absurd and grotesque,” but at the same time he pointed out the following, “I think any nation ought to keep close to its original dominant race-stock — remaining largely Nordic if it started that way; largely Latin if it started that way, and so on. Only in this manner can comfortable cultural homogeneity and continuity be secured.” In a letter from November 22, 1934, he discussed the “desperate and ingenious” brutal means that “white minorities” have to adopt to “preserve their Caucasian integrity.” He confirmed his previous views, by exclaiming that “anything is better than the mongrelisation which would mean the hopeless deterioration of a great nation.” The fact that he remained a racial realist until the end of his life can also be deduced from his letter, written on June 13, 1936, where he put more emphasis on culture than on race by writing that “conscious, objective interests tend to follow the line of culture rather than of race,” but then added that “inward mental and emotional processes (ethical concepts and compulsions, social-political preferences, trends of imagination, modes of every-day living, &c) gravitate toward the line of race.”