Tales of H. P. Lovecraft

Contents

Introduction
The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
The Rats in the Walls
The Shunned House
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time

Reviews

• Atlantic Monthly, September 1, 1997, p118
• Washington Post, October 26, 1997, pX6

Other Editions

Introduction

The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

—H.P. LOVECRAFT, THE CALL OF CTHULHU

In writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, the gothic tale may compensate a conventional, restrictive life; in others, notably Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the gothic tale would seem to be a form of psychic autobiography.

The American writer of the twentieth century most frequently compared with Poe, both in the quality of his art (bizarre, brilliant, inspired and original yet frequently hackneyed, derivative and repetitive), its thematic preoccupations (the obsessive depiction of psychic disintegration in the face of cosmic horror perceived as "truth"), and its critical and commercial reception during the writer's truncated lifetime (dismal), is H. P. Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island (1890-1937). Like Poe, Lovecraft created a small but highly distinctive body of work carved by monomaniac passion out of a gothic tradition already ossified in the mid-nineteenth century; like Poe, though more systematically than Poe, Lovecraft set forth an aesthetics of the art to which, by temperament and family history, he was fated. (Lovecraft's frequently updated essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," 1927, is a pioneering effort.) Both tried to sell their writing and editing skills in a debased and demeaning marketplace, with little financial reward, burning themselves out in the process. Both were beset by dreams, nightmares, visions. Both entered upon brief, disastrous marriages (though there are bleakly comical overtones to Lovecraft's marriage to a woman seven years his elder). Both left no heirs. Both died prematurely, Poe at forty, Lovecraft at forty-seven, having egregiously mistreated their bodies.

Though Poe is far more renowned than Lovecraft, indeed, and ironically, now a canonical figure in American literature—he who had died penniless and scorned!—both writers have had an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction, and Lovecraft is arguably the more beloved by contemporary gothic aficionados. Poe is credited with the invention of the mystery-detective story and with the perfection of a certain species of surreal ahistoric, claustrophobic and boldly surreal monologue (of which "The Tell-Tale Heart" is the masterwork); Lovecraft with the fusion of the gothic tale and what would come to be defined as science fiction, and with the development of a species of horror fantasy set in meticulously described, historically grounded places (predominantly, in Lovecraft, Providence, Rhode Island; Salem, Massachusetts; and a region in northern central Massachusetts to which he gave the name "the Miskatonic Valley") in which a seemingly normal, intelligent scholar or professor, usually a celibate bachelor, pursues a mystery it would wiser for him to flee. (The remarkably detailed, intensely imagined "The Dreams in the Witch-House," set in "Arkham"/Salem, "The Colour Out of Space," set in the "blasted heath" west of Arkham, and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," set in "Innsmouth"/Newburyport, Massachusetts, are of this type, in which place itself would seem to generate horror.) Where Poe's settings are minimally if hysterically depicted, like brushstrokes laid on with a trowel, Lovecraft's most evocative stories are set in regions that seem real enough at the outset, like photographs just perceptibly blurred. Lovecraft's mystical identification with his settings in rural Massachusetts and colonial-antiquarian towns like Salem, Marblehead, and Providence suggests a mock transcendentalism in which "spirit" resides everywhere except possibly in human beings.

To all intents & purposes I am more naturally isolated from mankind than Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, who dwelt alone in the midst of crowds. . . . The people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape & scenery. . . . My life lies not in among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical & architectural. . . . It is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence.

—FROM A LETTER OF 1926

In this celebrated opening of "The Picture in the House" (1920), the nature of Lovecraft's infatuation with landscape is vividly rendered:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down through cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and desolate mountain are their shrines. . . . But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who boasted of having descended from "unmixed English gentry," was the only son of an ill-fated marriage between a traveling salesman (for a Providence silversmith company) and the daughter of a well-to-do Providence businessman. His father began to exhibit symptoms of dementia, paranoia, mania and depression when Lovecraft was two years old; a victim of untreated syphilis, he died in an insane asylum when Lovecraft was seven. Lovecraft's mother was an emotionally unstable person who seems to have been, according to biographers, both abnormally attached to her only child and critical of him; her fear of change, and of the world beyond her household, was extreme. Already in early childhood, Lovecraft suffered from violent dreams and nightmares; he called these afflictions, to which he would give minute expression in his tales, the "night-gaunts." Many of Lovecraft's stories read like pitilessly transcribed dreams, of which "The Dreams in the Witch-House" is the most elaborate account of a descent into hallucinatory madness. (In this nightmare fantasy, a student of mathematics and folklore rents a room once inhabited by a witch fleeing the Salem Gaol in 1692. Lovecraft seems to have taken for granted that Salem "witches" existed, not considering if perhaps they were simply victims of others' malevolent misuse of power. )

Like Poe, Lovecraft focuses upon interiors, the interior of the soul: his subject is the continuous assault of unconscious forces of dissolution, disintegration; the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaos; the triumph of mindless entities like the subterranean deities Azathoth and Nyarlathotep and the "mad faceless god [who] howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players" ("The Rats in the Walls"). It was Lovecraft's observation that the successful gothic tale replicates the paralysis and horror of a certain kind of dream:

I believe that—because of the foundation of most weird concepts in dreamphenomena—the best weird tales are those in which the narrator or central figure remains (as in actual dreams) largely passive, & witnesses or experiences a stream of bizarre events which . . . flows past him, just touches him, or engulfs him entirely.

—FROM A LETTER OF 1936

Yet this matter-of-fact statement gives no idea of the remarkable simulacra Lovecraft frequently evokes in his dreamscapes, which linger in the reader's visual memory like those horrific yet somehow natural-seeming monsters of Hieronymus Bosch.

Bravely Lovecraft claimed that his dreams were not personal but "cosmic," just as his tales drew upon no personal experience. Again like Poe, Lovecraft had a mind too pure to be violated by any idea of mere mundane reality. S.T. Joshi's meticulously researched H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) suggests that Lovecraft, for all his championing of independent thinking, was much in thrall to his widowed, ailing mother Susie, who seems to have made of her son's personal appearance (tall, gaunt, with a long, prognathous jaw and a frequently blemished skin) an image of moral degeneracy. A neighbor recounted that Mrs. Lovecraft spoke continuously of her son who was so "hideous" that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people would gaze at him—a statement the neighbor considered exaggerated. (Mrs. Lovecraft was believed not to have been told the specific cause of her husband's syphilitic dementia and death, and associated Lovecraft with his father. Yet it must have been she who encouraged her son to wear his deceased father's clothes as a young man.) It would not be until Mrs. Lovecraft died while institutionalized, when Lovecraft was thirty-one years old, that he would try to free himself, at least sporadically, of his housebound, claustrophobic existence.

Yet few fathers or mothers appear in Lovecraft's work, with the notable exception of the comically grotesque Mr. Whateley of "The Dunwich Horror," who consorts with daemonic forces and arranges for his daughter to mate with a creature named Yog-Sothoth. Virtually no women appear in the work, for to Lovecraft, the most asexual of men, for whom Eros manifested itself primarily in landscape and architecture, "male" and "female" have no more vital relationship with one another than atoms.

Is Lovecraft's life a tragedy of a stunted, broken-off personality, severely traumatized in childhood and never to mature, or is there a poignant triumph of a kind in the way in which the aggrieved, terrorized child refashions himself, through countless nocturnal-insomniac sessions of writing, into a purely cerebral metaphysician?

I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man s relations to the cosmos—to the unknown— which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.

—FROM A LETTER OF 1921

This is the resolute, defiant note so frequently struck in the American visionary imagination: the very voice, surely, of Edgar Allan Poe; but also that of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson; the voice we might well imagine of Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson, even exuberant Walt Whitman ("one of the roughs, a kosmos"). For how can the merely personal be of galvanizing interest to the imagination?

The fascination for the historical past we might interpret, in Lovecraft, as a profound wish that the present might not yet have happened; that something that did happen in the past might not yet have happened, if the clock and calendar be turned back far enough. To love the past, to extol the past, to yearn in some way to inhabit the past is surely to misread the past, purposefully or otherwise; above all, it's to select from the past only those aspects that accommodate a self-protective and self-nourishing fantasy. What is "past" tempts us to reconstruct a world rather like a walled city, finite and contained and in the most literal sense predictable. For the writer, the (selected, edited) "past" is in itself a form of fiction though the writer will set as his idealized task its coming to life and credulous readers will respond to its authenticity.

Already as a child of eight, by his own account Lovecraft perceived of time as "some especial enemy of mine." Repeatedly he speaks of his art as a "defeat of time"; as an adult he was irresistibly drawn to those cityscapes (particularly Quebec City) and landscapes in which the past seemed to coexist, dreamlike, with the present. The "continuity from the past" was, for Lovecraft, the defeat of time. Yet in many Lovecraft tales the intellectual protagonist is lured to his doom or disintegration by the prospect of transcending time, attempting a Faustian "entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the spacetime continuum." (Despite Lovecraft's ardent proselytizing for the weird fiction of Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and Ambrose Bierce, he acknowledged Proust as the greatest contemporary writer for the subtlety and beauty of his treatment of time.) Such extended adventures as "The Shadow Out of Time" and the novella-length "At the Mountains of Madness" collapse millennia within the cataclysmic experience of individuals whose lives intersect with those of the Great Old Ones. In the former, a professor at Miskatonic University deduces that he was kidnapped psychically by aliens for purposes of research and hurtled back into prehistory, and in the latter, the surviving members of an expedition to Antarctica, fellow faculty members of Miskatonic, discover the mummified bodies of these fantastical aliens as well as the awesome ruins of their lost civilization. "The Rats in the Walls," Lovecraft's most frequently reprinted tale, ironically reverses the much-lauded progress of Homo sapiens, as the civilized American hero helplessly descends the evolutionary ladder to become, like his despised ancestors, a cannibal.

In attempting to defeat time, such protagonists are defeated by it; they may discover to their horror, or mad glee, that they are in fact related genetically ("by blood") to monster-ancestors and that these ancestors live in them. The ponderous, meandering yet riveting long story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" ends with the student-hero turning by degrees into a subhuman Innsmouth being (a sort of humanoid fish, or fishy humanoid), as one might succumb to madness. Investigating the ancient seaport of Innsmouth, repulsed by its inhabitants, the young man pushes too far: "This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look." By the story's end, however, the mesmerized young man has become converted to Innsmouth ideology, so to speak, rejoicing in his subhuman state.

I shall plan my cousin's escape from the Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through the black abysses . . . and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.

(The inhabitants of Innsmouth had sacrificed human beings to "god-things that lived under the sea" for bounties of fish and gold.)

In such a reversal, the tension of resisting madness is abruptly eased; the dreaded night-gaunts may be embraced like literal kin. To expunge the drama of having witnessed a parent's descent into madness one may join the madness oneself. And perhaps time can be defeated only by madness.

Unlike Poe's fevered tales, which appear unrelated to one another, isolated in essential ways, Lovecraft's mature work, the cycle of horror/science fiction tales to which his disciples have given the title the "Cthulhu Mythos," springs from a common source of invented legend. Lovecraft was one of those accursed, or blessed, writers who ceaselessly work and rework a small nuclei of scenarios, as if to force a mastery over the unconscious compulsions that guide them; such "mastery' for the writer may exist during the composition of the work, but fades immediately afterward, so that a new work, a new effort of organization and control, must be undertaken.

For the Enlightenment-rationalist Lovecraft, proud of his lifelong atheism, the Cthulhu Mythos was an "anti-mythology"; an ironic inversion of traditional religious faith. (As a child, according to his own account, Lovecraft repudiated his mother's family's Baptist faith.) The CthulLu Mythos constitutes an elaborate, detailed working-out of an early recurring fantasy of Lovecraft's that an entire alien civilization lurks on the underside of our known world, as a night-gaunt may lurk beneath a child's bed in the darkness, or as mankind's tragically divided nature may lurk beneath civilization's veneer. (Lovecraft's era was that of World War I and its aftermath.) In the Mythos, there are no gods but only displaced extra-terrestrial beings, The Great Old Ones, who journeyed to Earth many millions of years ago, bringing with them, disastrously, their slaves, called "shoggoths," protoplasmic creatures that gradually overpower and defeat their masters; deluded human beings mistake The Great Old Ones and their descendants for gods, worshipping them out of ignorance; and there exists that lust for power by the powerless which Nietzsche named the subterranean motive of "slave-morality"—our Judeo-Christian Western heritage. Among the sacred (and forbidden) texts that chronicle the history of The Great Old Ones is the Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, so frequently cited in Lovecraft that the title becomes a sort of running joke. (One can see why Jorge Luis Borges was drawn to Lovecraft and inspired, in such Lovecraftian tales as "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius" and "Funes the Memorious," to create his own library of mythical, cross-referenced ancient cabbalistic texts.)

In the frequently anthologized Grand Guignol "The Dunwich Horror," we learn by degrees that the virgin Lavinia Whateley has been forced by her brutal father to mate with a god-creature from another dimension, giving birth to male twins. One of them seems initially a self-parody of the young Lovecraft, seven feet tall by the age of thirteen and haplessly bookish, doomed to be killed by a ferocious guard dog while breaking into the Miskatonic University library in his search for such classified texts as the Necronomicon. The other, for a time invisible, grows enormous as a barn, an obscene ravenously hungry ropy-tentacled monstrosity that shouts, in its death throes atop Sentinel Hill, " . . . ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!" This colorful redeemer, however, fails to be resurrected.

Most of Lovecraft's tales are not so luridly sensational as "The Dunwich Horror," but rather develop by way of incremental detail, beginning with quite plausible situations—an expedition to Antarctica, a trip to an ancient seaside town, an investigation of an abandoned eighteenth-century house in Providence that still stood in Lovecraft's time ("The Shunned House"—a novelty in Lovecraft's oeuvre in that it ends happily, with "one of the earth's nethermost terrors perished forever" and ordinary springtime commencing). One is drawn into Lovecraft by the very air of plausibility and characteristic understatement of the prose, the question being When will weirdness strike? Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call "literary fiction," assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved, while literary fiction makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, "about" its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.

Lovecraft's simulation of reality was deliberate. In the essay In Defense of Dagon (1930) he divides literature into romantic, realistic, and imaginative, placing "weird fiction" in the last category, aligned with realism in terms of human psychology and emotion; in technique, "a tale should be plausible even a bizarre tale except for the single element where supernaturalism is involved" (p. 318). Romance is pointedly unreal,

But fantasy is something altogether different. Here we have an art based on the imaginative life of the human mind, frankly recognized as such; and in its way as natural and scientific—as truly related to natural (even if uncommon and delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism.

Despite Lovecraft's reiterated disclaimers that his work was wholly of the imagination, there have been cultists among his readers who insist upon believing in the literal truth of the Cthulhu Mythos, arguing that while Lovecraft believed he was writing fiction, he was in fact transcribing history, or prehistory. 'Weird fiction" can only be a product, Lovecraft saw, of an age that has ceased to believe collectively in the supernatural while retaining the primitive instinct to do so, in eccentric, atomized ways. Lovecraft would hardly have been surprised, but rather confirmed in his cynicism regarding human intelligence, could he have foreseen how, from the 1950s onward, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of purportedly sane Americans would come to believe in UFOs and extraterrestrial beings with particular, often erotic designs upon them.

For all his intelligence and aesthetic theorizing, Lovecraft was, like Poe, a remarkably uneven writer. Read chronologically, his tales stand in bewildering juxtapositions: the inspired "The Call of Cthulhu" followed by the trashy "Pickman's Model," both of 1926; the subtly modulated "The Colour Out of Space" followed by the overwrought sensationalism of "The Dunwich Horror." Like Melville, Lovecraft was "damned by dollars" except, in Lovecraft's case, the writer was forced to sell his stories, first-rate and otherwise, usually for no more than one cent a word, to the pulp magazine Weird Tales (launched in 1923, and destined to survive for a surprising thirty-one years). His work would never be published in book form during his lifetime.

Lovecraft's most enduring and haunting tales are those in which atmosphere is predominant and plot subordinate; in which a richly detailed, layered narrative circles about a luminous, indefinable image. In the early, Poe-inspired "The Outsider," the unwittingly monstrous speaker moves as through a dream to confront his own reflection inside "a cold and unyielding surface of glass"; even should we know nothing of the thirty-one-year-old author's bleakly cramped life, we respond to the story as a codified cri de coeur: "Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with . . . maddening rows of antique books." Despite Lovecraft's expressed contempt for mysticism, clearly he was a kind of mystic, drawing intuitively upon a cosmology of images that came to him unbidden, from the "underside" of his life: all that was repressed, denied, defeated. There is a melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft's most passionate work, like "The Outsider" and "At the Mountains of Madness"; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the reader's memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded. A hybrid of the traditional gothic and science fiction, Lovecraft is clearly gothic in temperament; his science is plausible enough, as fictitious science goes, but it is never future-oriented, always directed obsessively into the distant past. In Lovecraft's cosmos, some tragic conjunction of the human and the nonhuman has contaminated what should have been natural life; there is no logic, no reason for such a fate, any more than there is reason for lightning to strike.

In one of Lovecraft's best stories, the parable-like "The Colour Out of Space," with its vivid rendering of a once-fertile and now etiolated New England landscape, we see the obverse of American destiny; the repudiation of American-transcendentalism optimism, in which the individual participates in the divine and shares in nature's divinity. And how prophetic the story seems to us decades later, in its depiction of ecological disaster as a powerful, seemingly nuclear/toxic force emanating from a meteor fallen to earth on a farmer's land, utterly mysterious and unknowingly deadly.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the [meteor]. The colour, which resembled some of the bands of the meteors strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe. . . . Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever. . . . It was nothing of the earth, but a piece of the great outside.

In the gothic imagination there is a profound and irreconcilable split between mankind and nature in the romantic sense, and a tragic division between what we wish to know and what may be staring us in the face. So "The Colour Out of Space" ends, not melodramatically, but elegiacally: "It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of all Nature as we know it."

Lovecraft's fame is entirely, perhaps appropriately, posthumous. No hardcover collection of his tales was published during his lifetime, though Lovecraft had acquired, by the time of his premature death at the age of forty-seven, a reputation as the leading gothic writer of the era. Like Poe, he died tragically, believing himself an ignominious failure. In his most fantastical musings this artist of "cosmic pessimism" could not have foreseen his posthumous renown; still less that, within a decade of his premature death, the very book he could not get published, Lovecraft's Best Supernatural Tales, would sell more than 67,000 copies in hardcover in a single year.

Of the major tales gathered in this volume, it was "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror" I first encountered at about the age of thirteen and seem not to have forgotten in the intervening years, in the way that recurring nightmares of childhood are never wholly forgotten. Whatever the mythic underpinnings of such wild tales, whatever symbolic and thematic meanings the author may have intended, it can be argued that the surface of a tale is the tale; "myth" is its residue, its penumbra. The immediate appeal of the successful gothic tale is visceral for, as Lovecraft observed: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

—JOYCE CAROL OATES