Credit where credit is due, though: near the end of his life, Lovecraft wrote a letter to a fan wherein he appeared to regret and repudiate at least some of his earlier bigoted and racist opinions:
«“Shortly before he died of cancer in 1937 he wrote a touching letter to a fan in which he regretted his earlier social and cultural views and said, “what a complacent, self-assured, egocentric jackass I was in those days!” He went on to write, “I can the better understand the inert blindness and defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was.”»
He really, really hated Jews, and thought miscegenation the worst of horrors; all of which bleeds out into his stories. Association with Jews was “intolerable”!
And then, he went and married a Jewish woman.
Consistency was, evidently, not his strongest suit.
Given the date of the letter, I think that it was possibly because he knew he was about to die (he had terminal intestinal cancer)… That kind of situation makes you look at things in a different way.
It should be pointed out that the film Dagon (which I’ve seen many times and need to get on DVD) is based on Shadow Over Innsmouth. I could go on and on about this if there are any doubters. Yes Dagon takes place on the Spanish coast instead of New England. There are some other changes. But let’s start with the name of the decrepit town on the Spanish coast- Imboca. Imboca is Spanish for Innsmouth.
RE Racism
HP was a HUGE racist, even for his time. I’m currently reading HP Lovecraft The Mysterious Man Behind The Darkness. The letters reprinted therein are my cite.
I’ve seen Dagon. There are some good things about it, but for the most part it seems to be Here’s what Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth” would be if he wrote graphic gory horror instead of literate moody horror. It’s not the only movie based all or in part on Innsmouth. The IMDB lists four movies :“inspired by” it, and doesn’t include the Night Gallery episode “Pickman’s Model”, which morphs at the end into another adaptation of Innsmouth (THis seems to be a common thing, mixing Lovecraft stories for the movies. “Dagon” itself does this, mixing Innsmouth with the story Dagon).
I refer to Lovecraft’s xenophobia in my first post, and have known of his racism in the easily available stories, but have to admit that I was unaware of the poem dropzone quotes.
Fortunately, Lovecraft has redeeming qualities – Iwouldn’t keep re-reading his stuff if it didn’t. Even though it’s also about humans interbreeding with evil otherworldly creatures, it’s hard to make a case of The Dunwich Horror being thinly disguised racism, and even less room to make things like At the Mountains of Madness about that.
I didn’t like it (and I’m a total Moore fanboy, including his porn comics) It wasn’t that it was rapey (which it totally was) it was that it wasn’t Lovecraftian (where the man-fish miscegenation is painted as consensual)
No brain bleach necessary, though - I mean, compared to some Japanese stuff, it’s even tame.
