Posted: August 22, 1999 at 04:02:09: by James Russell
I think the point you make about your Jewish friend liking Wagner is an exceedingly interesting one, given the stigma still attached to Wagner's name in Israel. Then again, Lovecraft seems to have comported himself differently to Wagner, who was a vocal anti-Semite in person as well as in print, where Lovecraft seems to have expressed himself rather differently in person than on paper. I've recently been reading a new book from Arkham House called "Lovecraft Remembered" in which it says that Samuel Loveman, who was one of Lovecraft's longest-standing Jewish friends and whose work Lovecraft admired greatly, didn't even realise Lovecraft held any particularly anti-Semitic views until the Selected Letters started to finally appear in the 1960s and 1970s, whereupon Loveman became one of Lovecraft's attackers rather than the defender he'd always been. And Kenneth Sterling, who was also Jewish, claimed that if Lovecraft did hold any racist viewpoints he never expressed them in Sterling's presence.I think Edwin's point, about what if the artist is intending to preach, is well made, too, as a lot of Lovecraft's statements on race in his letters do have what might be considered to be an air of preaching. Though if it becomes a question of preaching then you kind of have to look at who the artist intended to preach to. In Lovecraft's case, when he goes off on a racial tangent in one of his letters, you have to consider who was he writing to and why was he doing it and what did they themselves think. It'd be nice to have some of the responses from his correspondents to see exactly how the thread of discussion began and went on. The question of how far Lovecraft may or may not have been a racist is a vexed one which certainly isn't going to leave in a hurry with a definitive yes/no answer attached. But I suppose the issue wouldn't be interesting if it were that easily solved.
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