Maybe not his dog, mind.
doesn’t make it ok
Funnily enough, he agrees with you.
That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get out more around 1920, is hardly much of an excuse.
Yeah it's kind of hard to not admit that he was a racist given all his various elements in his works as well as the name he bestowed his cat. I wonder though if factor in this sentiment was due to his self imposed isolation and likely untreated manic depressive moods (given that his mother was lobotomized Lovecraft feared any kind of psychological aid and is likely why he portrays madhouses as such hellscapes).
I mean toward the end of his life he decried the New Deal for not being leftist enough. That last sentence above is him stating his understanding of reactionaries from "having been one" so I get the impression he was trying to express regret for his prior beliefs.
did he literally drop dead after becoming some kind of leftist?
Redeem? That’s up to you to decide. But he died having thoroughly renounced his past views.
We only know of his changes in sentiment because of his private letters. He didn’t announce it to the world afaik. He did, however, in one of the letters, make reference to telling a magazine editor not to publish some of his more vitriolic work anymore.
In short, it doesn’t feel like an economic calculus. Coming out as a socialist is rarely a good grift.
Still had some stunningly bad takes about things like inter-racial marriage, but he mellowed for the most part to something more typical of the period. Marrying a Jewish woman, living in New York for awhile, and having leftist friends went a long way.
Still had some stunningly bad takes about things like inter-racial marriage, but he mellowed for the most part to something more typical of the period. Marrying a Jewish woman,
Looking at the amount of white nationalist uber-chuds pining for Asian waifus or being married to Asian women should tell us that marrying a minority and being a huge racist are not mutually exclusive.
What were those dated at?
I only ask because he did a full 180 shortly before he died.
tbf that was probably partyl because his wife fucking ditched him for going on about it all the time.
Critical support.
Very very critical.
Way to predict the prison industrial complex. wow.
Chapo.chat: "Wow, the libs are trying to rehabilitate Bush, can you believe this shit?"
Also Chapo.chat: "Huh, I guess old timey racist man is good."
He also renounced his racism thoroughly.
Well if this is true than I would be open to changing my mind. Can you link me to where he said these things?
Hmm this does really cast the guy in a new light. I'm going to have a think and reassess my opinion of him.
Thank you for the link!
Also wasn’t he isolated and had a fucked up upbringing? I’m also pretty sure he had some kind of mental illness.
His father died in a mental hospital (probably from late-stage syphilis) when Howard was a young child, so he was raised by his mother, grandparents, and aunts. His grandfather taught him old Victorian English literature and ghost stories and his aunts kept him isolated because he was sick with some unspecified disease (possibly Sydenham's chorea and/or atypical depression). He probably had some kind of anxiety disorder too but that's just my speculation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Early_life_and_family_tragedies
Maybe both are bad but in different ways and to different degrees.
Oh fuck, did I just do a "both sides"?
Well, I guess I'm a centrist now.
i mean there was some letters by him that were published recently and he did a total 180 and was talking about how socialism was fucking awesome so idk
He had a real cat with the same name. Apparently it was a common name for black cats back then (yikes)
You’d be right—he was a virulent racist, and only got better later on in his life.
In his own words, “It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”
Wasn’t the early socialist movement in America basically strasserist? Can’t say I know much about Lovecraft’s politics beyond the whole naming his dog the n-word thing, but come on, there are other past leftists we can talk about who weren’t nearly as problematic. A broken clock is right twice a day and all, yknow?
In Lovecraft’s case, his period of (incredibly vitriolic, yes-even-for-the-times) racism was separate from his period of socialism. He realised he’d been a dumbass a few years before he died and pivoted.
Personally, I’m a sucker for these sorts of cases. Converts, even deathbed ones, should be celebrated, not condemned. We want people to change their minds.
More importantly, he’s dead and gone. He’s not receiving any benefit from his increased online clout. On the other hand, if we claim him, we deny the other side a hero, and get one of our own.
One of the things that get overlooked due to the racism is the classism. Poor people are seen as a threat and the protagonists tend to be upper class. He used to be a monarchist in his younger days.
Depends on how much we relax the definition. For example even H. G. Wells, Jack London, Aldous Huxley and I think Douglas Adams were some kind of socialists. Charles Dickens was at the very least a social democrat.
In terms of explicit Communists you'd find quite a lot of Russian ones post and pre-revolution:Maxim Gorky, Alexandr Bogdanov, Arkady Gaidar, Alexandr Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshenko and my fave Vladimir Mayakovsky, among many others. In terms of children's literature the Soviet writers Samuil Marshak and Korney Chukovsky, and the one and only Gianni Rodari from Italy (seriously if you have kids have them read his stories and short novels).
The great Rabindranath Tagore also had at the very least communist sympathies and highly praised Soviet society (especially in terms of education and child care) after his visit to the USSR.
Here's also a helpful Wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarian_literature
That would be news to me considering his close friendship with Lenin, his material support to the Bolsheviks pre revolution and being the most celebrated Soviet author while alive. There are rumours he was poisoned by Stalin and some evidence to suggest at least a mild personal antipathy toward Stalin on Gorky's behalf, but unless the entirety of Bolshevism=Stalin that's neither here nor there. Oh and do check out the hilarious Ilf & Petrov and Yuri Olesha (not sure if there are English translations of Olesha though) even if their communist credentials are shaky.
There are many good communist authors but they're mainly European, and especially Russian (especially Maxim Gorky etc). But also you can bet that almost any French writer (or intellectual in general) post WWII was some kind of leftist at the very least, and Germany had some good writers too (Bertolt Brecht for example). Lots of good poets too (Ritsos, Kavadias and many others in Greece, Mayakovsky in Russia, and more I can't bother to write out now).
there's a few communist authors I hear people talk about. A few are Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao
Just off the top of my head:
- Picasso
- Einstein
- Vonnegut
- Kafka
- Steinbeck
- Asimov
- Orwell (even if he was a snitch and a rapist)
Honestly, if you think of a writer in the last century or two and search, chances are they have expressed socialist leanings.
- Orwell
And wrote one of the most reprinted, popular, impactful, damaging anti-communist works of all time? I don't think so.
If that man is to be considered a socialist then the term loses all meaning. Traitors do not get to be called the thing they betray in memoriam and he hardly did anything significant for the cause in his life to justify overlooking his attacks. He did not die anything but a bitter anti-communist.
Apologies for this lengthy reply but I really must try and disabuse people of claiming him.
And playing that game with liberals as a gotcha is fruitless, 1984 is transparently an attack on the USSR (and the notion of a DoTP in general) and any attempt to make it into anything else is pointless, millions of people have been taught to interpret it as an anti-communist work and been able to to the point it is mandatory school curriculum in the imperial core. He fought with leftists in Spain but he was at the end of the day an anti-communist as because the communist faction supported by the USSR gained the upper hand he fled and waged for the rest of his life a private war against communism and the Soviet Union, trying to destroy it in favor of a kind of gentlemanly "English Socialism" which would conform with his bourgeois morals (he was after all bred as a member of the upper class in the bosom of British imperialism). Whatever he might have been when he picked up a gun in Spain, by the time he did anything of note (publishing his book) he was a rabid anti-communist willing to snitch to British authorities and should be remembered and roundly condemned as such. We must remember this man lived through the rise of fascism, fought it as a youth, and came to know of its atrocities and what did he write a book repudiating? The force that stopped it.
He is not a socialist who:
- repudiates actually existing socialism,
- endorses the foremost imperialist nation and oppressor (at the time of his writing while the US was an ascendant power it cannot be argued that Britain was along with other European powers like France still the slavemaster of the global south, still the foremost colonizer, the heart of empire, an empire admittedly that did begin to fall apart thanks to the Axis powers invasions which precipitated many independence movements),
- snitches to that foremost anti-communist power,
- is homophobic and bigoted in other ways,
- writes a famous anti-communist work cited so much and poisoning so many brains that his name has come to be a term for liberals representing a controlling system.
Yeah, he’s an anti-communist, and his socialism is bitter and twisted. But even Asimov commented that he had all the energy of a sectarian leftist.
Also, if you twist your head and squint your eyes, 1984 is a communist utopia.
all dead men are redeemed in the eyes of God. I guess here's an example. lib shit.
