He told me that he had seen Sonia Greene, who had been Lovecraft’s wife, when she came to New York, in 1945, to shop around an idea for a book called The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft. She had somehow just learned that Lovecraft was dead, and in the freshness of her grief, she was unloading stories about him in every direction. So she confided in Loveman that Howard had been an anti-semite. He had always disparaged the Jews, but at first Sonia had imagines that he was repeating thoughtlessly what so many other people had said. Over the years, though, she became convinced that Howard wasn’t speaking thoughtlessly at all. He never spoke thoughtlessly about anything. Howard hated the Jews: he had told Belknap, in her hearing, that he wished a whiff of cyanogen gas from the tail of some passing comet would exterminate the inhabitants of the Lower East Side.
“That’s horrible!” Sonia had said. “You can’t mean it.”
“Why not?” Howard had asked, mildly.
“But Howard…” Sonia hadn’t been able to understand him.
“Do you want me dead?” she had asked.
“Certainly not,” Howard had said. “I am speaking of a population, not of individual people.”
“But Howard,” she had said, making the obvious point, “what do you think the population is?”
By the time Sonia told Loveman, she was already worried about Howard’s mental stability. “But I don’t think his stability has anything to do with it,” she had said. “I think that was what eh really believed.” Loveman, for his part, was horrified by the personal betrayal. Loveman could no longer support Howard or his work, not even in the form of a used book. I, too was horrified. From Luiza, I knew that the Germans had used a cyanogen gas in Auschwitz. There might have been a big gap, an enormous gap, between wishing the Jews dead and actually building the gas chambers, between the words cyanogen gas and the barrels of Zyklon B that the Nazis put to their inhuman purpose, but I didn’t see it. From that moment on, I could only think of Lovecraft’s work as evil, and I was ashamed that I had ever admired him.
The Night Ocean~ Paul La Farge
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