H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator, and Boxing
James Reich
April 25th, 2014
Of the grotesqueries depicted in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, beyond the ambivalent reclamation by the Anglo-Saxon war dead of Herbert West the Aryan “scientific automaton”, the “ice-cold intellectual machine”, the most appalling is the appearance of the boxer Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke.” Lovecraft shuffles through his routine racist clichés: “He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.” Robinson, who is the most chthonic of the reanimated, is also a cannibal, and a child-killer: “Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares – a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition, nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.”
Buck Robinson’s white opponent is Kid O’Brien. O’Brien kills Robinson in the match. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi makes the point that O’Brien has a “most un-Hibernian hooked nose” suggesting that the Kid is a Jewish fighter posing as Irish, as Joshi puts it: “to capitalize on the fame of the great Irish-American boxer of the 1880s, John L. Sullivan.” Joshi is missing a trick here. Lovecraft’s serial was published in the early 1920s, the boxing match is set in 1910, and by footnoting the speculative identity of O’Brien and ignoring the historical reference in the opposite corner, Joshi covers up Lovecraft’s more virulent racism. Into the corpse of Buck Robinson, Lovecraft injected a more contemporary and resonant reference: Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson, the Galveston Giant, held the title from 1908 – 1915. The white opponent, Kid O’Brien, is not a remote reference to John Sullivan, who effectively retired in 1892, but to one of Johnson’s rivals: Philadelphia Jack O’Brien. Johnson and O’Brien fought in May 1909; Johnson retained the title after a 6-round draw. The episode in the serial of Herbert West: Reanimator where the death and reanimation of Robinson/Johnson occurs is titled Six Shots By Midnight.
Lovecraft, spiteful bastard that he was, vengefully recast Johnson as a titanic child-eating Saturn, after Goya. It has become customary to excuse Lovecraft’s pernicious racism as a symptom of his era, as if he lacked agency in that regard. To let Lovecraft off the hook so easily is to suggest that he had no opportunity to be influenced by the abolitionist movement, by the arguments of the Civil War, or even of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No, Lovecraft was a post-bellum northerner who aligned himself with the gentleman fascists of ante-bellum romance. Through Herbert West, the Great White Hope, Lovecraft expresses the very contemporary racism of Jack Johnson’s detractors.