by Colin Wilson
I found the address of Arkham House in a bookseller’s catalogue, and wrote to enquire what books of Lovecraft were still available. The result was a friendly letter back from August Derleth, who knew my work. As a result of some of Derleth’s comments, I made several alterations of the Lovecraft sections in the American edition of The Strength to Dream, (although he still considered it unfair to Lovecraft). And, at some point in our correspondence, Derleth said: ‘Well, if you’re so critical about Lovecraft, why don’t you write a fantasy novel, and see whether it’s any good…’
For a long time, it was only an idea floating in the back of my mind. Whenever I thought about it, I always came up against the same problem—a problem that has also given some trouble to Derleth, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, and various other writers in the Lovecraft tradition. It is this. You begin your story with the old house or farm or whatever it is, and its queer goings-on. Then the narrator goes to investigate. Then Something Awful Happens—a rotting corpse knocks on the front door, a monster with tentacles on its belly tears down the wall, etc. This is inevitably the climax of the story, and it is hard to think up something that really terrifies you enough to make you terrify the reader.
And then one day, when writing a chapter on phenomenology in a book about my own kind of existentialism, I saw the solution—monsters inside the mind… The result is my first fantasy novel—and probably the only one I shall ever write.
But to return to Lovecraft. I am now willing to admit that my assessment of him in The Strength to Dream was unduly harsh. But I am still no nearer to understanding why Lovecraft exercises such a curious hold upon my imagination, when the work of Arthur Machen, for example, strikes me as only mildly interesting.
I suppose what makes Lovecraft both good and bad is the fact that he was an obsessed writer. And this is also the reason that so few of the works in the Lovecraft tradition have touched the same level of imaginative power. August Derleth or Robert Bloch can capture the Arkham atmosphere and style excellently, but it doesn’t express their true centre of gravity as writers. Bloch is really himself in the all-too-possible horrors of Psycho, with its motel rooms and atmosphere of realistic nastiness such as you might find in the pages of any True Detective magazine. As to Derleth, his finest work is in a sphere far removed from horror or fantasy—books about everyday life in Sac Prairie, about the changes of season, the animals and birds. (His work reminds me in many ways of that of a much underrated English novelist, Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, as well as of that strange nature mystic, Richard Jeffries.) He is a writer in the great American tradition of Thoreau and Whitman—even, to some extent, of Sinclair Lewis.
This explains why Lovecraft has remained unique, in spite of the number of writers who have been fascinated by his mythical world and by his style. He created the Cthulhu Mythos out of inner necessity, as Blake created the Prophetic books out of inner necessity.
All of this amounts to admitting that Lovecraft possessed genius. And it is this, I think, that makes him basically a tragic figure. It also links him with my own ‘Outsider’ thesis, and with the present novel.
My starting point in The Outsider was that, round about the year 1800, a strange change came over the human race—or over an important part of it. Quite suddenly, there appeared a new sort of man,—romantic man. In the days before the ancient Greeks, romantic man would have been regarded as wicked and dangerous. Because some deep instinct tells him that man is not a mere insect, a ‘creature’, but is, in some important sense, a god. The Greeks called this sin hubris, and it was punishable by madness and death. And that is why the fate of so many of the romantics would have confirmed the Greeks in their view that these men were wicked and dangerous. When you come to think of it, the list of men of genius who died insane, or in accidents, or of tuberculosis, or committed suicide, is terrifying and impressive. Shelley, Keats, Poe, Beddoes, Holderlin, Hoffmann, Schiller, Kleist, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Dowson, Johnson, Francis Thompson, James Thomson . . . the list could be extended for pages. And these are only some of the famous ones. How about all the would-be poets and artists who never made the grade and died quietly in some dirty lodging house?
Now all romantics have one thing in common. They are like those Greek sailors who heard the Syrens’s song, and prefer to fling themselves overboard rather than return to the dull world of everyday existence. Or like the lame child in the Pied Piper who describes how, when the Piper played, he heard of a ‘joyous land’, ‘where everything was strange and new’, and who now spends the rest of his life mourning for the lost vision. Most people seem contented to plod through commonplace lives; the romantic has glimpsed something beyond the commonplace. All romanticism is summed up in that great sentence of Axel (in the play by Villiers de Lisle Adam), ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’.
There is a great novel by the British writer L. H. Myers (who committed suicide in the 1940’s) called The Near and the Far, and its opening chapter has the perfect symbol of the romantic longing. It takes place in India in the 16th century, and opens with the young Prince Jali standing on the top of a palace, looking out across the desert—over which he has travelled that day. As he looks at a magnificent sunset, he reflects that there are two deserts; one is a glory to the eye; the other is agony to the feet as you plod across it. And the two deserts never come together; if Jali goes out of the palace, seeking the desert that is so beautiful to the eye, he will encounter the other desert, the one that is a weariness to trudge. The near and the far… this is the basic problem of the romantics. As Yeats once said:
‘Nothing that we love overmuch
Is ponderable to the touch’.
This is why romantics find the real world so dreary and unpleasant. Sometimes they loathe this real world so much that their work becomes a paean of blasphemy, like the work of De Sade or Lautreamont.
It is a story that is repeated over and over again. I am acquainted with the author of one of the finest supernatural novels ever written: E. H. Visiak—an old man now approaching his nineties. His Medusa is a novel of such strange power that it haunts the mind for years after one has read it. A few weeks ago, Visiak sent me the manuscript of his autobiography to read. And I had not read more than ten pages before I thought: ‘Yes, it’s the same thing all over again…’ That strange curse of the 19th century. Visiak was a shy, quiet boy, the son of middle class parents, and the world of his childhood was a world of enchantment. Then came his teens, and the necessity to work for a living, and ‘the shades of the prison house begin to close’. He spent the next twenty years of his life in the telegraph office of a news agency, not very happy, leading a lonely, bookish existence. During his childhood, his happiest times had been when staying by the sea. So Visiak began to write poetry about pirates and secret islands, then produced his first novel, The Haunted Island, and then, many years later, his masterpiece, Medusa. And now, in his eighties, he is an old man whose life has not been tremendously happy, although he has had a few remarkable visions and experiences. He is a haunted man, another victim of the syrens’s song.
Visiak’s closest friend was the novelist David Lindsay, whose A Voyage to Arcturus seems to me perhaps the greatest novel of the 20th century. (This has recently been reissued in America by Macmillan.) Lindsay’s story was much the same as Visiak’s—a tremendous vision, expressed in A Voyage to Arcturus and The Haunted Woman. But his contemporaries were not ready for it; he lived a life of poverty and neglect in Cornwall, and died in the forties. Lindsay possessed towering genius; Visiak’s genius is of an altogether more gentle and romantic nature. Yet both are victims of this ‘outsider tragedy’ that is so common to our time: men whose vision makes them unfitted for the struggle for everyday existence, but whose genius is not of a ‘commercial’ nature.
These outsiders live like hermits in the midst of modern cities. If they are lucky—like Kierkegaard—they have a private income, and can write their strange, contempla
tive books in peace. If they are not lucky—like Lovecraft—their fate is the saddest in the world.
In Heartbreak House, Shaw makes Ellie Dunne state an important truth. Shotover asks her how much her soul eats, and she replies:
‘Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this country, you can’t have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved.’
This is true. The outsider-poet is not a hermit by choice. Love-craft declares in one of his letters that he would like to lounge in the sun on the deck of a yacht, looking at the shore line of Greek islands. Men hunger for experience as they hunger for food and drink. And how can a man express what is best in him without a certain amount of cooperation from fate? Can you imagine a Shelley born in a London slum? Can you imagine a Byron born in the Gorbals of Glasgow or the Bowery in Lower Manhattan? It might seem that the lives of Keats, Shelley and Byron were tragic enough in their way. But at least Keats somehow managed to avoid working for a living, and spent much of his time on tours of England and Scotland. At least Shelley went to Eton and Oxford, and spent the next ten years wandering around Europe. At least Byron had an income and was never short of beautiful mistresses. What about the ‘outsiders’ who are not so lucky? The declaration of rights declares that all men have a right to a certain freedom. But there is no declaration of rights for Outsiders that declares that they all have a right to the experiences that will feed their souls and allow them to realise their potentialities.
This was Lovecraft’s problem. He was born into a dreary provincial city—attractive enough in its way, but as painfully narrow and dull as the Norway in which Henrik Ibsen grew up. In the northern states of America, as in England, you cannot have ‘beautiful things’ without having lots of money. What is more, America has always been one of the worst places in the world for an outsider to be born into. This is gradually ceasing to be true as America pours some of its surplus income into education and the encouragement of the arts, but it was true for Lovecraft, as it had been true for Poe and Melville. What is more, Lovecraft was urgently in need of a private income or of patronage; the only patronage he received was that of Weird Tales and, to a lesser extent, of his wife during their brief marriage.
We might raise the interesting question: what would have happened if Lovecraft had possessed a private income—enough, say, to allow him to spend his winters in Italy and his summers in Greece or Switzerland? My own suspicion is that he would have developed certain traits which are already apparent in his work. He would undoubtedly have produced less, but what he did produce would have been highly polished, without the pulp magazine clichés that disfigure so much of his work. And he would have given free rein to his love of curious and remote erudition, so that his work would have been, in some respects, closer to that of Anatole France or the contemporary Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. (I myself have only recently discovered the tales of Borges—collected in Labyrinths and Ficciones, both available in paperbacks—and am amazed to find a living writer so close to Lovecraft in spirit.) I suspect that some of the more horrific aspects of his work would never have developed—the actual physical horrors of the stories dealing with necrophilia or cannibalism—but that there would have been an increasing emphasis on imaginative fantasy—as typified in The Shadow Out of Time or The Call of Cthulhu.
What I am suggesting is that the emphasis upon the gruesome and violent was, to a large extent, Lovecraft’s way of keeping himself mentally healthy in the dull, stifling atmosphere of Providence. This not to dismiss it as some form of ‘compensation’; all art is the artist’s way of keeping himself mentally healthy. But then again, the same is true of crime and sadistic violence. Blake says: ‘When thought is closed in caves, then love shall show its root in deepest hell’. In other words, when creativeness and vitality are frustrated, they rage and become violent. Peter Kurten, the Düsseldorf sadist who killed eleven people between 1927 and 1929, admitted that his sadism had first had time to develop in long periods of solitary confinement in prison. To save himself from total boredom and the degradation that comes with stagnation, he developed sexual fantasies, which had to become more and more powerful as time went by—for the mind’s images tend to fade, like bad carbon copies, when not stimulated by a certain amount of reality. The same is true of De Sade. It is all very well to condemn De Sade for the nightmare horrors of Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom, but we have to remember that there is no evidence that he ever tried to put them into practice; they were the work of a man of enormous vitality who spent much of his adult life in jail.
Lovecraft also lived in a kind of jail for much of his life. It is a sign of his genius that, in spite of lack of money, of ill health and frustration, he still managed to create a world of such haunting poetic power.
For Lovecraft was far more than a frustrated product of a rainy provincial town. He was a man whose struggle to find self-expression turned him into a kind of a prophet or magician. In this respect, he reminds me of the Swedish dramatist Strindberg. Strindberg was also born into a frustrating provincial backwater; he also spent his life struggling against neglect, misunderstanding and poverty; at one point in his career, he went completely insane. Like Lovecraft, Strindberg was fascinated by the past, and by such subjects as alchemy and black magic. And towards the end of his life, he made a series of oddly accurate predictions about the 20th century, which he saw as a time of torment for the human race, particularly for the ‘outsiders’. In his last play, written in 1910, he has a Japanese who wants to commit suicide to atone for his sins, and who has decided to take a drug that will make him appear to be dead, and then leave a note asking to be cremated. When someone asks: ‘But supposing you wake up in the furnace’, he says, ‘I want to wake up; I want to feel the purifying flames…’. But the most hair-raising part of all this is that the name of the Japanese is Hiroshima…
Lovecraft also seemed to have this strange insight into the future. In The Call of Cthulhu, he talks about a time when a large part of the human race seems to go insane, when nightmarish things happen, unexplainable and horrible crimes. Thirty years after Lovecraft’s death, such a time has arrived. In England, a young man and woman kidnap children, torture them, and bury their bodies on the moors; in Chicago, a man forces his way into a hostel and kills eight nurses in a long night of terror; another youth enters a hairdresser’s shop, makes women and children lie on the floor, and shoots them one by one in the back of the head with a revolver. When asked why he did it, he replies: ‘I wanted to get known’… Similar ‘motiveless’ crimes are happening in every country of the world. Here in Roanoke, Virginia, where I happen to be writing this, the body of a young woman was discovered a few weeks ago. She was a Catholic door to door worker, helping to take a census. Her murderer had cut open her stomach, stuffed it with kerosene-soaked rags, and set them alight. He had apparently done this quite openly, close to a public highway, ignoring the risk of being caught. One can imagine a man having various motives for killing a girl, including the obvious one of rape; but why stuff her with rags and set fire to her?
I am not, of course, claiming that Lovecraft was actually prophetic, in the sense that Nostradamus apparently was. It was simply that he was a man of genius and intelligence, who experienced the worst fevers of the 20th century in a particularly virulent form. If he had been born in England a century earlier, his name could have been John Keats. He was a man whose soul needed music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes. He would also have certainly been happier if he had lived in Soho or Vienna or Prague, where he could have met other writers over a glass of cheap wine in a sidewalk cafe. His letters to Derleth, Robert Blocb, and various other young writers who needed advice, reveal that he was a highly social man who longed for the company of his equals. But he was also something of a natural aristocrat, and would have found the dreary humiliations of poverty in New York or London unbearable; he preferred the
second best of his own home in Providence, where at least he could be poor with a certain amount of dignity and solitude. All this meant that he was experiencing with peculiar intensity the miseries that would be experienced by millions of other ‘outsiders’ in the course of the next hundred years. 1 This is why his work has a fascination that goes beyond its actual literary qualities, and perhaps even beyond Lovecraft’s intentions. Far more than Hemingway or Faulkner, or even Kafka, he is a symbol of the outsider-artist in the 20th century.