The New Yorker Radio Hour - N. K. Jemisin on H. P. Lovecraft, and Jill Lepore on the End of a Pandemic

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

N. K. Jemisin has faced down a racist backlash to her success in the science-fiction community. But white supremacy in the genre is nothing new, she tells Raffi Khatchadourian. Her recent novel “The City We Became” explicitly addresses the legacy of the genre pioneer H. P. Lovecraft, whose racism was virulent even by the standards of the early twentieth century. It’s not possible, Jemisin says, to separate Lovecraft’s ideology from his greatness as a fantasy writer: his view of nonwhite peoples as monstrous informed the way he wrote about monsters. Rather than try to ignore or cancel Lovecraft, Jemisin felt compelled to engage with him. Plus, the historian and staff writer Jill Lepore describes the desperate measures taken to protect children from polio during a pandemic no less frightening than our own, and how the disease was then forgotten. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. What is he? He said he found out where her family came from. He wanted me to come home so I could go there with him. He's still obsessing over her ancestry. I thought he'd given all that up when she passed. I know that like your mother.

You think that you can find her. forget the past. He can't. The past is a living thing. You own it, owe it. Now, I have found something about your mother's forebearers. You have a sacred, secret legacy, a birthright that's been kept from you. That's strange. That doesn't really even sound like your father. I haven't even gotten to the strange part. The place he wants me to go with them is in Lovecraft Country. The new show, Lovecraft Country, is not exactly about the writer H.P. Lovecraft Country. It's not exactly about the writer H.P. Lovecraft. But it's set in the kind of fictional world that Lovecraft pioneered, a world of horror and fantastical beings, and ancient evil. Lovecraft died in 1937, but it's getting a lot of attention

in 2020. In addition to this new show that bears his name, the science fiction writer N.K. Jemison published a book this year that's very much a response to H.P. Lovecraft. It's called The City We Became. On a very windy day last winter, N.K. Jemison met up with staff writer Rafi Kach Dorian on the pedestrian walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, because the city we became has a key scene that takes place there. So Nora, in the opening of your book, you have set upon this bridge a giant tentacle, bioluminescent, interdimensional creature to tear it apart. Basically, yeah.

Well, I mean, no one can see it except for a few. select individuals for reasons that will become clear in the book. But, you know, it just sort of is a giant tentacle that smashes out of nowhere, shatters half the bridge, causes massive destruction and damage all over the East River. And no one really knows why except for a few people. But what it means is that half this beautiful old bridge gets torn apart and smash into the water, and I laughed while I did it. we ducked into a bar on the Brooklyn side of the bridge

to talk out of the wind. Science fiction is transporting, it's whimsical. It can go in many different directions. It can be apocalyptic. To say that you were interested in science fiction opens up the question, what kind as a kid interested you

and in which of these directions do you feel yourself being pulled as a reader? I really didn't start to engage with science fiction until I kind of hit my teens and started to find different voices out there. Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, stories that also ranged beyond the very traditional confines that I had seen for fantasy and science fiction at that point. And I wanted to kind of know what else fantasy could do. And then along comes Le Guin, who was doing it before it was cool. You mentioned that it took a while to find some of these other authors.

and my understanding is that wasn't accidental because science fiction publishing when you were a reader as a kid in the 80s almost went out of its way to mask the identity of writers of color. Octavia Butler's Dawn is an example of a book that we both owned. Yeah. The protagonist is described in the book as a tall, very dark-skinned black woman. with like a cloud of hair. And I don't think Butler ever actually uses the word black, but there's so many other indicators in there. And then the addition put a white woman with black hair on the cover. And there were no author photos of Butler. There was no mention in her bio in that edition that she was black. It really was like hidden. And yet despite all the attempts

to hide it, I realized basically within the first few pages, oh my God, I think she's black. And that was just like earth-shattering. This cultural invisibility that the system of publishing engendered had a personal impact on you, because when you were, as I understand it, growing up and thinking about considering possible careers for yourself, I didn't consider writing. You didn't consider writing. You didn't think it would be possible to make it work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, and that was. coming from a lot of different directions. I don't want to make it sound like it was coming strictly from within the industry. You know, I can remember having conversations with relatives other than my father

about the fact that I love to write and, you know, them then handing me a Tony Morrison book and saying, do you write like this? And when I said, no, you know, the response was always, well, you need to write like this. You need to write realist mainstream oriented fiction that will, you know, kind of focus on life in America today as a black person or oppression or something like that. And I was just like, but I want to write about black people in space. And for a lot of times when I would say that, the response would be, well, you can't. And why in the black community do you think that was the case? Well, I mean, you, it is the nature of any group of people that you,

understand you are capable of what you see. Role models operate on lots of levels. If you never see a black person in a particular space, then you get the really clear message that you're not welcome in that space. And so I got that message loud and clear when I was young. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to grad school for psychology. You know, the writing is a fun hobby, but it's clear that that field is not one that I can be successful in without, you know, a lot of trouble and drama and stress. And I don't know that I want that in my life. And then, you know, basically I hit a point where I realized I was just not happy. You know, the writing bug had been in me since I was a child. I'd always done it. I'd read many books that had been published that I felt,

you know, I can do that. I can do at least that good. And, you know, I, I, you know, I, I, hit a point where I decided that it was worth the danger or worth the trouble and the stress and the drama. And it sure has been some trouble and stress and drama. But, you know, the rewards have been commensurate. When Jemison talks about the trouble and the stress and the drama, she's partly referring to a backlash from conservative science fiction writers and readers, among them, people associated with the alt-right. They claim, and this will sound familiar, that the success of non-white authors and women in science fiction has somehow been undeserving, a form of identity politics.

It's been very, very ugly, and Jemison's new book, The City We Became, addresses the legacy of racism in the genre. And in fact, the book that's coming out in March continues to speak to those issues. In some ways. So one of the inspirations for the city we became was the controversy surrounding the World Fantasy Award. Until maybe two or three years ago,

the World Fantasy Award was the stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft's head. And the controversy about this started when a black writer, Nettie Okoraphore, who's a friend of mine, Nettie won the World Fantasy Award, and they handed her Lovecraft's head, and she was like, you can find her words online about it. She did, she most definitely pointed out that Lovecraft is an inappropriate way to honor a black writer's success, let's just say. Nora, so who is HP Lovecraft? Okay, so Lovecraft is probably one of the most seminal writers in American modern fantasy. You know, he wrote at the turn of the century, but a lot of the ways in which American fantasy and American horror engages with subcultures, cults, religion, and so forth were all influenced by Lovecraft.

So you saw, you know, sort of sinister cults that had taken over towns, and there's echoes of that in the Stepford Wives, for example. You saw tentacled monsters that sort of didn't come at you roaring or strong. screaming, but sort of slithered into your life and integrated themselves into your community and then slowly destroyed you from within. You see aspects of that in things like aliens, you know, in the alien films. So, you know, Lovecraft may not be very well known, but you see elements of Lovecraft in nearly all dark, fantastical American media these days. So he's that influential. And he was exceptionally racist. Lovecraft had a poem, and I cannot speak the title because I don't use the N-word,

but the title of the poem is on the creation of N-words. And his cat was named the N-word. He was like, even by the standards of the racist era in which he lived, he was huge, hella-racist. But do you think that there is a way to separate whatever his creativity, whatever his skills were at evoke horror from his fears from no his biases no his biases were the basis of his horror the monsters came from his own fear of brown people of immigrants of Jewish people of whatever in several of his stories particularly one said in New York lovecraft spends a lot of time sort of lavish's description on how terrifying it is to do something like walk through Chinatown and look at these

alien, frightening, faces speaking in this terrible language. And you feel his fear as you read these passages. You feel his disgust. You feel his unease at being surrounded by people who don't look like him. There's a scene in the city we became in which the minions of the woman in white The woman in white being the chief manifestation of these aliens that come to invade New York City. Yeah, basically. In effect, the embodiment of the lovecraftian enemy, let's say, that the protagonists are taking on. Yeah, the antagonist of the story. The woman in white has many forms and many faces.

And one of the ways through which she works is through like-minded people who she infects with her ideology. literally in some ways, some cases. And so she infects a group of artists who call themselves the alt-artists and who present to one of the characters this painting called Dangerous Mental Machines. And the painting... You didn't make up the title of that painting,

that's something that comes from Lovecraft. Yeah, Dangerous Mental Machines is what he called Chinese Americans because he believed that Asian people were equal, equivalent to white people because they at least knew how to work and make money, but he didn't think that they had souls. He thought that they were machines that could, they were good at calculation, but there was no humanity in there. And Nora, I remember this passage of the book. It's vivid in my mind because you describe the painting as both being incredibly seductive of it being beautiful. In fact, one of the chief protagonists almost falls into a trance while looking at it. It's good art. It's good art, even though it has this undeniably horrific component to it. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's, you know, I mean, I'm not good at sort of analyzing my own work, but with Lovecraft, the balance and the struggle is always between appreciating the fact that there's some good stuff here. He does some incredible imagery. It's powerful work, but it's frightening. And it's frightening not always for the reasons that he meant it to be frightening. It's frightening because it's a way to look into the mind of a true bigot and realize just how alien their thinking is,

just how disturbing their ability to dehumanize their fellow human beings is. This man literally saw the people of New York as monsters. So that's what I decided to write against. And so what do you think as a society or community of readers the response to Lovecraft should be today? To put it in a box and send it down to the bottom of the sea? There's too much to learn from examining that tension between the power and the impact of the art and realizing where that art comes from and what the impetus behind that art is. The best way to engage with twisted or otherwise problematic art, in my opinion, is to first off, acknowledge that that art has an impact, hurts people, and understand that engaging with it could

perpetuate some of the harm that that art is capable of doing. But flag it, warn it, put it off to the side where people, you know, can engage with it at their leisure, at their choice, or at a point where they're strong enough or capable of doing so, but then engage with it. There's a line between respecting the work and honoring the person. You can respect the craft. You don't have to put that person on a pedestal. You know, artists are human beings. And that means you need to examine them in all their facets. You have to recognize that these are people and that the things that make them sometimes horrible people are sometimes the things that make them good writers or good artists. And that's what you want to engage with. N. K. Jemison, author of The City We Became,

and also of the Broken Earth Trilogy, which received three Hugo Awards. She talked early this year with staff writer Rafi Hach Dorian. This is the New York Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As summer draws to an end and schools attempt to reopen, it's becoming very clear that pandemic restrictions will extend through the fall and perhaps well into next year. And the prospect of that is daunting for everybody,

not least for anyone with kids in the house. After months without summer camps or team sports or scouting trips, the idea of keeping kids indoors seems like more than a parent could bear. But it's happened before and not that long ago. I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a professor of history at Harvard. I'm also a staff writer at The New Yorker. And as a historian, I always think a lot about,

well, is there comfort to be found in times in the past when people have had harder struggles and gotten through things? and immediately comes to mind for me the stay-at-home campaigns that were run during the polio years. For all the boys and girls of the Northwest during radio's stay-at-home campaign. Now, listen. Polio had first hit the U.S. in 1916, and some years were worse than others. A lot of viruses abate in the hotter months. But with polio, the warmer the weather, the virus spread fast.

but also polio was most effectively transmitted by water. So in the summer when it got hot, this is before the age of air conditioning. Kids would be outside wanting to go to swimming pools, jump in the river. And it's not like they have homeschooling assignments. It's this summer. They're supposed to be outside playing catch and playing baseball and drawing hopscotch with chalk on the sidewalk. And it was really hard to keep them inside.

And I came across this incredibly charming clip. from WCCO in Minneapolis, which had a Sunday morning program called Fun at Home during the stay-at-home campaign. Well, it's 9-5, and time for all you kids to gather on your radios and listen to the funnies. This morning we have an extra special yet. And they would do anything to be entertaining to kids.

So this clip is from 1946, and it's the fairly young Democratic mayor, Hubert Humphrey. I mean, think of him maybe as the Andrew Cuomo of the moment, although more charming. He comes in, volunteers to come into the radio station on Sunday, to read the funnies out. We start right off with Blondie, and you know what? It looks like Blondie and Dagwood are going to go out in a fishing party. Toby, you got any fishing music over there?

Yeah, a little bit of five of the seat. Yeah, that's good. That's fine. Oh, listen to that. Now, just take a look at that. There's Dagwood kids, and there's Dagwood right alongside the lake shore there, and he says, I don't know why it is I can't catch a fish. Doesn't he look?

Oh, he just looks all down in the dumps, you know. So, and he loves it. I mean, you can tell, because he brings his kids with him. Like, he does voices, and he tries to be Dagwood and Blondie. And his kids keep asking questions, and they want him to read Popeye instead. A can of worms there. And look at that funny hat on there, just like he's hunting lion. Do you see that, Skip?

And he says, Oh, do you have, sure, you have a hat like that. And then Dagwood says, they pull out fishes fast as they throw up. And when I first listened to this clip, maybe in the fall sometime. I was like, it's so adorable and it's so sweet and it's so quaint. But somehow the pathos of it didn't strike me. One of the strange, maybe only blessings of the COVID pandemic is that kids seem to be so far less vulnerable to it. But with polio is exactly the opposite.

For a long time, polio was called the baby plague, which is just this heartbreaking. name just to think about that. What it does to know that your children, babies, toddlers, preschoolers, are the most vulnerable. Fishing on private property, huh? Without a license, huh? Is that a policeman? Oh, that's a policeman, you bet you. Without a license.

Oh, he's a long nose. Oh, he's got a long nose, yeah. I wonder who that's a funny-looking guy are, right? Like, I just, it didn't really hit me that this was a desperate measure. It just seemed to me adorable. And I listen to it again. I almost listen to Hubert Humphrey with what I think of as COVID ears. And it's still sweet, it's still charming.

I still love listening to it. But it's also quietly desperate. Mr. Humphrey, we're going to have a song by Toby Prince. The original sad sax song. Toby, take over with Put Your Arms Around me. Cattle up a little closer. One of the reasons I study history is I like to see how things began so that I can imagine how bad things end.

So there were good polio years and bad polio years, but the worst polio year in the United States was 1952. So a few years after Hubert Humphrey made that recording, reading the funnies. 58,000 Americans got infected. And it was also the year, though, that a young epidemiologist named Jonas Sock developed a vaccine. A virus that causes polio has been successfully grown inside chicken eggs. This may lead to the development of a potent vaccine to prevent the dreaded disease.

A really promising vaccine. A really controversial vaccine. And it had to be tested. And then he began what became the largest field trial in the history of public health. And finally, in this momentous day, April 12th, 195, you know, at the beginning of spring. Heading the medical men was Dr. Jonas Soff. Summer's coming. It's going to be another hard polio year. People expected it to be a very hard polio year. The clock is ticking. The calendar is turning. Everybody wants that polio vaccine before the summer of 1955. And there's this quite incredible announcement it's made at the University of Michigan.

Hundreds of reporters go there, and they printed out these press reports with all the details of the results of the field trial that they're going to announce. Reporters pressed forward to get the results the whole world was waiting for. And the reporters are literally climbing over each other, trying to get to the copies of the press release. Like so, I mean, you can imagine that now. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagining to imagine that now. If someone had a vaccine and we'd waited 18 months to know if it worked and it works. An historic victory over a dread disease is dramatically unfolded at the University of Michigan. Here scientists usher in a new medical age with the monumental report.

You picture sort of a medieval turdid castle and the trumpeteers blowing their horns and the flags are, you know, the standards are being unfurled. The vaccine works. You know, this kind of... And it's the relief, the joy, the exultation, the exhilaration, the knowledge that this thing could end. 90% effective and modest Dr. Salk answers newsman's questions. The great wealth of events that is accumulated and the experiences of so many

is well represented in the report made this morning. You often notice that people from different generations have these different time stamps in their early memories, like there are people whose first memory is of 1969 and watching the Apollo moon landing or whose first memory is of 1963 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I remember for years when I would ask students

with their first memory, that was of an event of global significance. It was 9-11. I grew up with the vaccine, but people not very much older than I am, suffered from polio, watched polio, new people who suffered from polio. But my kids don't know anyone has had polio.

I don't think they know how it works or how terrifying it was. And that's the great blessing of a vaccination program. Like, we forget how bad the disease was. But there's a generation of Americans whose most significant early memory is of waiting in line to get the SOC vaccine. I have a colleague who I once asked about this, and he said, oh, I can remember the taste of it in my mind. mouth, it was like a sugar drop. It was almost like a lollipop. And my mother said, this will save your

life. You will have a life. And I think about that. And I think about the generation of kids who we can only hope will remember the day that they go to get the coronavirus vaccine. And it'll be their timestamp. Staff writer and professor of history, Jill Lippoor. Jill's just written about the science of spending most of your life in Dore. and you can find it at New Yorker.com. This has been a summer of reckoning with our past. Confederate monuments have come down in Charleston, Richmond, Jacksonville, and many other places. Mississippi has removed the stars and bars from its flag at long last.

There's just one Confederate monument left on public land in the state of Maryland. It's a statue that honors soldiers who died fighting for the Confederacy. Some were said to have fought against their own neighbors and cousins who served for the union. but removing that statue has proved to be much more complicated than you might guess. On our program next week, Casey Sepp brings us the story of the Talbot Boys Monument and one small town struggle over its history. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrars. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calalea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Monkfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.