It's no secret that I'm a feminist, but I also grew up reading and adoring the words of Dead White Men, as they're often referred to now. Today, however, I want to focus my gaze on two peculiar bedfellows: Hemingway and H.P. Lovecraft.
When I first read Hemingway - for school, surprisingly enough; most other authors of "Great Literature," I sought out on my own - I was struck by the female protagonist's ferocious personality. In Matilda, Roald Dahl's main character comments to the kindly librarian that she "doesn't understand some of the things he says sometimes about men and women." That stuck with me, and when I got to Hemingway's books years later - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms - I definitely expected them to be, well, more offensive.
Hemingway's women are often scrappy, tough, and give as good as they get - and frankly, the men in his stories are often a pretty ragged, sorry, rather troubled lot. A femme fatale dame may be seen as death walking on a long set of legs, but the fact that she even poses a threat to Man and the Natural Order implies something very interesting about this so-called and imagined "rightness." But let's stick a pin in that discussion of "rightness" and quickly mention my other target: Lovecraft.
A Spooky, Lonely, Racist Old Man
Now, it may surprise my gentle (or not particularly gentle) readers that I still have an abiding fondness for Lovecraft's work. The man himself was a lonely, sad fellow who had so many compulsions and fears that he barely functioned. His phobias - or at least, things he wrote about as being frightful - included dogs, cats, rats, cellars, cold rooms, the ocean, cephalopods, fungus, weird colours, Black people, Native Americans, other Brown people, Jewish people, Mixed people, non-Christian religions, women, mixed neighbourhoods, the dark, mirrors, and of course, madness, ruin, and mutation.
When talking about Lovecraft, some people (like his esteemed but regressive and unmannerly biographer Joshi) try to skirt around the ugly stuff, or downplay it - as in a rather awkward conversation I once had with a publisher in a significant Lovecraftian fiction house that shall remain unnamed. The woman insisted that Lovecraft had married a Jewish woman and therefore could not hate the Jews, and that for the time period, he wasn't that racist...
The counterpoints to this are painfully easy to make, but suffice to say that readers who are not convinced that Lovecraft and Hemingway are assuaging their own fears of other's perceptions and hiding from rather easily-proven points. Both are racist and somewhat misogynistic; both were also rather good writers. We must accept both premises rather than trying to justify or negate one or the other. The world does not always accept easy and comfortable categorization into "good" and "evil" or "bad."
Now, of course, as a white woman, I have a certain amount of societal cushioning that just makes it easier to endure and set aside certain things. And yet, there is a core to these two authors' works that calls me back, even when they surround or allude to rather detestable ideas.
In addition to a sort of mystique and fear around "The Other," whether speaking of women, non-white people, or combinations thereof, there is also a peculiar and almost beautiful longing.
There is something ineluctable about both Lovecraft and Hemingway that compels me deeply. It's the same tendency one can find in, surprisingly enough, such hated halls as the Incel (involuntarily celibate) forums of the latter day. They feel absolutely helpless before what they believe to be the absolutely monumental power of The Feminine, or The Threat of Non-Whiteness, or Pagan Decadence, or Homosexual Weakness. They constantly hint at or state outright that they are fighting these "fallen" influences - as though that's a fight they're constantly losing internally. One is reminded of the erotic angel-wrestling scenes alluded to in Angels of America, when Joe, the Mormon man with a bad case of sexual repression, discusses his gay longings.
The failure fetish
The thing with Hemingway, and often with Lovecraft, is that their stories are often about white men failing. Sometimes their characters die in moral triumph, but they die nonetheless. It's as though they want to fail, or as though the only way to escape the moral question altogether is with death. The striving and inevitable failure is almost compulsive, a kind of "l'apell du vide" (call of the void) where they have an ineluctable longing and tendency towards that which they claim to abhor.
Both men are fascinated with "the Other" even as much as they often abhor The Other's differences. Whether it's femininity, breaking the binary, or things "too horrid to name" (presumably gay stuff and BDSM, one supposes), Lovecraft kept coming back to the strangeness, especially genderless beings. The essential normalization of white, cisgender male masculinity - a completely artificial depiction of it, one might add, which is ahistorical and entirely synthetic, despite the way modern-day "Red pill" types and Republicans fetishize it - is rampant. And yet it is also tremendously fragile, in a way that echoes Christian morality. Even the slightest pleasure is a window through which evil can peer, or whisper, or tempt one from righteousness. And yet, are these evils not rather banal? If one's life and moral uprightness can be destroyed by an incautious application of glitter, is it not a rather sad, hollow life?
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| Extremely mediocre art by Michelle Browne. |
The hidden longing
There is something incredibly empathetic hidden at the core of these works. The "terrible, unknowable" urge compels them to investigate the forbidden - and to understand things beyond their own world of experience. Similarly, in the Warhammer 40K novels and setting books, trying to understand the Chaos Gods or Xeno forces such as the Tau or Eldar can result in being "tainted" - in effect, empathy is both one of the Empire of Man's greatest weapons and greatest weaknesses.
But this longing is always the undoing of characters - when they dare come too close to the things that tempt them, whether those be horrifying powers, immigrant women whose children are going missing, or gods who walk as Black Men (as in Dreams in the Witch-House), all that is "good" and "noble" in these men is destroyed.
It's always because of family influences or heritage or interests, or then their experiences, but even unwillingly, the characters develop empathy and get closer to the cosmic horrors. The guy was racist, but part of him knew, I think, just how wrong he was. Not something he could face down.
In the later years of his life, Lovecraft started to write with more empathy and kindness about the otherworldly cosmic forces and aliens his characters ran into. Ernest Hemingway, who died of depression, met a fate that thousands of men fall prey to each year. One man died of poverty and isolation; the other, of unresolved mental health issues.
That unwilling empathy in these lauded dead white males is often lurking there, and it's so sad that they and other racists effectively cut themselves off from others' human experiences.
And perhaps, that's the greatest lesson - to conform to these artificial standards of masculinity is the real doom. Where a world of wonder and discovery awaits, the real horror comes from living within a prison - and thinking it's the only way and most correct way to live. And that ironic fate is not one I'd wish on anybody, especially now that people have a chance at living differently.
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Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.
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