The Fiction of Harold Covington, Part One
Posted By Steven Clark On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]4,030 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here [2])
Harold Armstead Covington (1953-2018), to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt’s mellifluous rhetoric regarding Pearl Harbor, is a man of infamy. A White Nationalist extraordinaire, National Socialist (as Harold once told me, he was no “neo-Nazi”; he was an old-school Sturmer), and enemy of the Jew and his hangers-on, Harold was as much an enemy to White Nationalism, judging by the vitriol poured on him by the National Alliance, VNN, and several other White Nationalist institutions — and I’m certain a few here at Counter-Currents as well.
I’m not going to talk about that Harold. Instead, I’ll focus on Harold Covington the writer. His notoriety rests on his Northwest novels, a series of five books dealing with his — as well as that of many others in the White Nationalist community — dream of a separate white homeland. But he offered a diverse oeuvre of other works that are quite equal to the Northwest novels.
I first came to know about Harold in 2005, when I heard of a book called The Hill of the Ravens (THOR), the first of his Northwest novels. I had been writing a White Nationalist novel of my own for some years before that, Man and Nation. Reading THOR, I finally abandoned my work, realizing Harold was doing it far better than I was. I read a number of his other novels, was impressed, and wrote Harold to inquire about them. He gladly sent me copies of two of them, replying on March 18 in a very attractive cursive:
Dear Mr. Clark:
I deeply appreciate your periodic review of my fiction. I am sorry I’m unable to provide you with any more copies of my various books, but the fact is I am just plain, flat broke and these things are almost as difficult as medieval incubuses to bring into being.
88! Harold A. Covington
Harold grew up in Burlington, North Carolina in a semi-upper class family, at least by Tarheel standards, but his childhood was troubled. His father was abusive and unstable. Harold learned to maneuver around him, and his brother had his own emotional difficulties. He was stern about not wanting to dwell on his childhood, however, saying that he’d spent the previous three decades trying to forget it, so much so that he scorned the idea of writing memoirs: “I have no intention of going back there and wallowing in the mud for the titillation of Morris Dees, armchair Jewish psychologists, and other such slimy voyeurs . . . So there will be no My Life In A Looney Bin by Harold A. Covington.”
Harold enjoyed fantasy and writing from an early age. In a 2010 interview in the Historical Review Press, Harold recalled his father’s cardboard cartons of old sci-fi novels, pulp fiction which he devoured, with all the greats: Robert A. Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Phillip K. Dick. Harold read them in bulk. At 14 he discovered H. P. Lovecraft; “love at first sight” was how he described it, and Harold always carried the three-volume Arkham House set of Lovecraft’s works wherever he went.
He wrote his first short story when he was 11. It was rejected by an editor when he was 12 — a Jewish editor. As Harold described it in A Revolution in Fiction:
The short story in question was a very bad H. P. Lovecraft knock-off. Okay, I have to admit that there are few things more ridiculous than an eleven year-old trying to write like a 19th century Victorian . . . the Jew in question was one Mrs. Feldman, who was “adviser” to the junior high school newspaper. She said my story was too long to publish in a sheet mimeographed on construction paper (well, fair enough, it was) but she also accused me of being “pretentious.”
Why? How can an eleven-year-old be pretentious? . . . I don’t think it was some big kosher conspiracy to deny publication to my childish Lovecraft pastiche. I think she did it by simple Hebraic instinct. It’s just what Jews do, like baby alligators seek water when they hatch.
After trying to get involved in theater, which he found too full of experimentalism and free-form, Harold went back to fiction and, at 16, wrote The Rose of Honor, his first novel. Yes, it was rejected by another Jew, a literary agent who claimed Harold had a chip on his shoulder. Harold had one anti-Semitic reference in the novel, which is set during the War of the Roses in the fifteenth century — although his reference was historically accurate. As Harold described it:
I wasn’t even an anti-Semite when I wrote the book, I was a teenaged kid with a Byron complex projecting his own mixed-up adolescent experiences onto a historical fictional backdrop, convinced I was doing the most clever and original thing in the world. My guess is that Fierst (The agent) picked up on little things in the book that even I didn’t know or understand myself. He instinctively understood that here was a goy mind that was not under control and he’d better stomp on it. Again, that irresistible Jewish urge to denigrate, to disrespect, to insult.
Harold admitted that a crucial part of his maturation was the integration of his school in Chapel Hill, with the resultant racial strife that forever influenced his views of blacks. It was, he said, his first view of racial reality, having to deal with blacks flashing knives. Harold refused to divulge what happened, but wrote that “on the day I finally left there, I looked back and made a silent personal vow that I would devote my life somehow to making sure that no young white person ever again had to go through what I went through in that place.
[3]You can buy Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right here [4].
Another view of Harold’s racial education came in a very denunciatory interview that Harold’s brother gave to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) newsletter, recalling that Harold had in fact, been insulting black students, and had been cornered by a gang of them. They harassed him and he fell to his knees, beginning to be left alone. When he appealed to the Principal, the man took the side of the blacks, and said Harold had it coming. (We should bear in mind that Harold described his brother as having mental problems, and the SPLC is, at the very least, a highly prejudicial organization that has been found guilty of laundering money for Left-wing groups.)
By his own account, once he finished school Harold was kicked out of the house by his father and he joined the US Army, receiving infantry and Ranger training. While in the Army, Harold widened his reading to include such books as The Order of the Death’s Head by Heinz Höhne, a reasonably objective history of the SS. It influenced Harold to join George Lincoln Rockwell’s National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP). Stationed in Hawaii, Harold formed a local serviceman’s branch and ended up getting discharged early under honorable conditions.
After working with the NSWPP staff, Harold went to South Africa to work for a construction company, and then joined the army of Rhodesia, which was then under attack for its white-controlled government. Deported from there in 1976, Harold wandered from England to Ireland, and then back to America. He says he was always writing:
More than once I have tromped through Heathrow airport in London, or the ferry terminal at Dun Laoghaire, or Jan Smuts International in Johannesburg, or elsewhere, staggering out into the early morning of a foreign country with no place to go, lugging a suitcase that weighed about 60 pounds containing a dozen typed manuscripts and bits and pieces of manuscripts, a Sears portable manual typewriter, and a few changes of socks and underwear — all my worldly possessions along with the clothes I had on my back.
Nevertheless, Harold admitted he was a hack: “Charles Dickens I ain’t. Ernest Hemingway I ain’t. Robert A. Heinlein, not by a long shot.”
He ruminated that all of his wandering and involvement in White Nationalism kept him from getting down to working on his fiction and, as he put it, fleshing out his works more properly. Nevertheless, he left behind a good body of fiction — his original decompositions, as he put it: ten novels and a volume of short stories.
Harold’s fiction was a mix of the usual genres of murder mystery, action-adventure, and forays into the supernatural, the latter no doubt being the result of H. P. Lovecraft’s influence, but offering Harold’s own unique interpretations. The SPLC described Harold as an “occult” novelist, but this is too narrow and is meant to be derogatory. Harold remained unpublished for much of his life in part due to the demands of his activism, but also because of his inability to find a publisher, as he recalled in A Revolution in Fiction. He later praised the rise of print-on-demand self-publishing via the internet. It was, Harold observed, a great way to break the domination of the Jew-controlled publishing houses.
The Rose of Honor, his youthful first novel, was a medieval swashbuckler that had been revised from an earlier draft. In its pages Harold begins a lifelong chronicle of the Redmond family, whose members appear in his works across the centuries. Fascinated by the medieval period, Harold went on to write The Black Flame, a murder mystery pitting Sir Thomas Clave against witches, corrupt clergymen, and a demon. Harold described this work as “lots of gratuitous violence and perverted sex, sword fights, torture, looting and pillaging, strong White men, beautiful and evil White women, and general swashbuckling.” It is, however, very historically accurate, and Clave is a dynamic hero, ready to take on all to get to the truth. As Harold recounts, it sent Morris Dees into conniptions.
Harold moved on to Vindictus, which is set in the seventeenth century and depicts the first true gunfighter in Cromwell’s England. Denzil Redmond returns after fighting for King Charles’ army, unwilling to accept the Puritan edict that had led to his property being taken over by the state. Is it, as a reviewer put it on Amazon, an evil Three Musketeers? It is violent and nasty, but again, Harold’s depiction of the times is realistic, and Redmond is a cunning and courtly foe, ready to even up the score over the indignity his estate suffered from Puritanism’s presumed righteous mendacity.
While the story’s revenge story has a brutality that may cause some readers to blanch, Harold offers a softer, compassionate side of the character when Redmond winds up in Ireland during the gruesome Cromwellian excesses and saves Mary, an Irish woman from rape and death, and then makes her his wife. The story of Redmond and Mary is that of a war-weary man seeking redemption, demonstrating a continual theme through all of Covington’s fiction:a man seeking justice for a lost woman, even unto death. There is a binding, spiritual union between the sexes that is a constant leitmotif in his works. One wonders if it is a reflection of literary styles he admired, or perhaps a way of compensating for the death of his first wife, who had died in Rhodesia. Again, Harold chose silence on this issue.
Denzil and Mary’s struggle to overcome savagery and double-dealing and continue as a loyal couple adds a great deal of moral strength to the story, and belies Covington’s own notion that he was merely a hack. One feels a genuine pain requiring catharsis in his life. In the end, when Denzil deals with Kate, one of the last Puritans he takes vengeance on, he counters her charges that he is a madman by saying that, on the contrary, he is merely persistent in his methodical destruction of her usurping family. Satisfied at last, Denzil leaves for America to begin a new life and continue the Redmond family’s adventures in the new world.
Harold was especially amused by a feminist editor who accused him of having “a cavalier attitude towards women” in his works. Since Denzil was a cavalier, her rage was ludicrous. There is another example of this is in Other Voices, Darker Rooms, his volume of collected short stories. Most are supernatural. Some Harold’s of earliest work is here, where he begins with Lovecraft imitations but quickly develops his own voice. “Bringing Mary Home” is a third Matt Redmond story where he teams up with Irish detective Donovan to look for a killer and silence the sadness of a murdered girl. His story “Whisper Her Name on the Wind” deals with Beit Efrat, a Jewish community in Napoleonic Russia that must decide how to deal with Barmine, a ruthless Cossack officer who demands they return gold stolen from the Czar. It is also about how Hadass, one of the women , becomes involved in a gritty way to assert her independence in the avaricious and stratified Jewish world she grew up in. It was, Harold explained, the fruit of his lifelong ambition to deconstruct and lampoon Fiddler on the Roof, ending in an appropriately grim form of justice via the slow hiss of drawn sabers in a bleak Russian winter.
The pride of this collection is “The Madman and Marina,” which deals with Ivan Vasilievitch Yesenin, a state-sponsored killer in Stalin’s Soviet Union who is haunted by Marina, a woman he killed, and is compelled to find justice for her by searching out those whom she had lived around. The story features her ghostly voice while capturing a quick sketch of Soviet society, as well as an almost endearing miniature portrait of Stalin, the Father of the Peoples. Stalin observes that an interesting man is more appealing to him than a useful one — and thus Yesenin survives. Harold called this one his best work of fiction. He was honored when a Russian reader from St. Petersburg wrote to say that he had initially thought Harold was a Russian, as it was so authentic in depicting the people and period.
It’s likewise very intriguing that Ellen Sturgis Hooper, the Transcendentalist poet, provided Harold with one of her most inspirational lines:
I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty.
I woke, and found that life was duty.
This appeared in Other Voices, Darker Rooms, and Harold referred to it many times in his rallying cry to join the White Nationalist movement. The rest of the poem is equally a touchstone to Harold’s spirit:
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.
His fiction is suffused with a struggle involving both inner and social strife between what must be done and what one wants to do. There is little romance in his novels and stories, but always a sense of duty. The Covington hero always has a divided, unfinished task, almost always seeking justice or trying to save a lost woman. This is displayed most openly in Fire and Rain, the novel where Matt Redmond meets Heather Lindstrom, and they are drawn together to become a detective team. There is a happy meeting, as Matt needs Heather to solve an unsolved murder from the radical circles of the 1960s. Matt, in his fedora and pipe, is an investigator for the North Carolina State Police and is a stand-in for Harold.
Heather gladly joins him in casting out her middle-of-the-road politics and helping to track down those Leftist radicals who had played a part in the gruesome murder of two girls. As Harold described it:
. . . It has a lot of anti-lefty stuff and some anti-Jew for those who can read between the lines. This one seems popular with older coots like myself who remember all that hippy-dippy crap in the Sixties. This one has some gruesome murders, some raunchy sex in by way of ‘commercial dirt,’ and a ghost.
He claimed he had created some black characters to help give agents the slip by demonstrating approved social behavior, but they are nevertheless well-drawn minor characters and help illustrate the locale and period. The ghost of one of the girl is the lost woman Harold always has in his works, and his way of involving her in the case is ingenious and never dull. There are also Russian agents, but they are hardly the usual Cold War types. Indeed, Harold’s foreigners are never stereotypical, but rather are well-rounded characters.
Harold’s spiritual and cosmological views are strongly on display here as the search for the murderer becomes a struggle against a greater, historical evil. As Matt explains:
But I’ve become convinced down through the years there’s kind of a pendulum swing of history between good and evil, and that whether we like it or not, we are living in one of those epochs which sees the near triumph of evil, a new Dark Age.
One of the villains of the story reveals a coldness infected by ideology when she reminds Heather that Lenin defined death as the permanent cessation of political activity, nothing more and nothing less.
Harold admitted that he doesn’t like to let go of his characters, and his theme of taking on liberal policies and acolytes was pursued in his second Matt and Heather novel, Slow Coming Dark. Matt’s nemesis here is the Clintons, and as Harold said, this book is a must for all Clinton-haters. He received a lot of praise from the Right, but also some criticism for his foul-mouthed Italian mobsters. One of Harold’s rules of writing was complete realism no matter what, and he claimed that this was simply the way real mobsters talk. It’s intriguing that in the book, Hilary emerges as both the brains and chief villainess of the duo from Arkansas, while Bill Clinton is a barely coherent druggie.
An even better sinister female nemesis appears in Bonnie Blue Murder, a murder mystery set in Charleston, South Carolina just after Fort Sumter has been fired upon at the start of the Civil War. Captain James Redmond, one of the Redmond clan’s Irish kin, is prevented from leading his regiment north to take on Lincoln’s army until the murder of a Confederate officer can be accounted for. This means following a wild, intricate trail involving the privileged and wealthy Jewish community, missing documents that jeopardize the Confederacy, and the need to clear a Jew who has joined the volunteers and has been accused of murder. Redmond must solve the murder after teaming up with the worldly Hugo Legare, a police inspector. Naomi Mendoza, the beautiful and much-desired belle of a Jewish community engaged in a deep cultural war, thwarts and entices Redmond at every turn, and the story is a delightful escapade through antebellum Charleston. Harold said of this work:
It said some very unkind things things about the the Chosen Ones. I was actually offered establishment publication if I would remove all Jewish references, which I declined to do.
He actually had a literary agent who was very keen on selling the book and tried to market it because he liked the Civil War detective mystery, but Harold said of it:
After a year he came back and reported failure. It wasn’t even the Jew thing, according to him. None of the readers or editors he tried to push my novel to even let him get that far. The problem with Bonnie Blue Flag was that no one in the Establishment publishing was even willing to consider a novel with a Confederate hero.
Harold said that the book is cerebral and written in a Victorian style, but it is nevertheless stylish and paints scenes of an antebellum Charleston that, Redmond admits to himself, was alrdoomed at the time.
Harold’s spiritual ideas were most fully realized in The Stars In Their Path, a novel dealing with reincarnation. When I bought a copy from Harold, he inscribed it thusly:
To Steven Clark,
Job 14:14 (look it up)
88! Harold A. Covington
The verse is: “If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.”
In this book Covington depicts a couple throughout history who are continuously reborn and must connect with each other, but fail to — yet in their most recent incarnation it is vital they do so to save humanity. It is a story of love through the ages, but love for a moral purpose rather than mere sentimentality or personal satisfaction. He uses a variety of styles to great effect, starting in 1572 France just before the massacre of the Huguenots. In The Devil’s Work, he depicts a witchcraft trial in 1692 Massachusetts that includes a stern courtroom testimony recalling John Fowles’s 1985 novel A Maggot. In Her Name Was Julie Ann he imitates an Appalachian ballad, slips in an 1889 Wild West tone for Laughing Jack, and concludes with Her Best and Strongest Friend in 2001 Seattle, where Sam and Margarita, the present incarnation of the lovers, must come to terms. The series is always full of twists and surprises, and I’m in awe of Harold’s ability to set historical scenes.
[5]You can buy Tito Perdue’s Love Song of the Australopiths here [6].
Sam must exchange Margarita’s affection for that of a dangerous, inevitably diabolical man, but as Nostradamus, a kind of spirit guide, tells Sam, Margarita’s failures in the past have much to do with her judgements: “Women may admire courage, but it is the rare woman indeed in whom courage can prevail over charm.” Sam, the usual gruff and plainspoken Covington hero, must ensure that Margarita makes the right decision or else humanity will suffer.
Harold sad that “[m]y personal pick for the best novel I’ve ever done and book that ranks neck in neck for The Madman and Marina.” Harold admitted that it has been described as his “chick book” in that it resembles romance fiction. This was another work Morris Dees slimed, incidentally.
In a 2009 interview in The Occidental Quarterly, Harold, in response to the interviewer saying that he regarded The Stars In Their Path as a metaphysical novel, shared his spiritual views:
I believe in reincarnation because I myself have witnessed and experienced events that indicate to me that it is at least part of the process that happens to the human soul or personality after death . . . we are meant to live our lives in this world, not the next. My metaphysical world view has provided me with one invaluable spiritual asset, in that I do not fear death, although admittedly any Islamic suicide bomber can say the same.
Harold produced two works that he ranked as lesser efforts. Revelation 9 was a haunted house story, admittedly a Stephen King knockoff. He said it was the only story he wrote featuring a female protagonist, and believed part of its failure was due to the fact that he doesn’t write female characters well. As I’ve demonstrated, Harold actually did very well with his female characters.
One of his later novels was The Renegade, written in Ireland and dealing with an Irish vampire. It reads like a novelistic retelling of his Redmond story, Bringing Mary Home. That being said, it has a strong, understated energy set in a well-drawn Irish setting and containing a sense of the land of a country that had an enormous influence on Covington, especially when he started to work on his Northwest novels.
Reincarnation and spiritual rejuvenation of the human spirit over time is a strong Covington characteristic. He applied it to race in a thoughtful, humane manner. Harold was a great believer in spiritual power; to deny this is a misjudgment. He once told me that he considered Hitler to be an avatar, and he consistently urged the White Nationalist movement to seek a spiritual sense of continuity while at the same time openly struggling for solid social dominance. His use of the “occult” is more thoughtful and ennobling than, say, that of Stephen King, who dwells upon terror and evil with little balance. King’s protagonists barely survive their struggle with the darkness; Harold’s characters generally become enlightened, hoping for a progression of their souls to the next stage of spiritual unity.
Despite the violence and rancor in his stories, they always end in a sense of calmness and cosmic unity. This spiritual unity was pressed into the cause of White Nationalism and was best fulfilled in his Northwest novels, which I will comment on in the subsequent parts of this essay.
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