Weird Tales, Volume 352
Page 15
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LOST IN LOVECRAFT
A Guided Tour of the Dark Master's World | by Kenneth Hite
“One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not—despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review—even write a truly interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook”
Lovecraft famously set three stories—“The Horror at Red Hook,” “He,” and “Cool Air”—in New York City. He wrote all three while living there, between the spring of 1924 and the spring of 1926. The “location-minded” Lovecraft resolved, as he wrote to Frank Belknap Long in August of 1925, to “attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness.” The attempt was at best an indifferent success: in April of 1926, revolted and frustrated beyond measure, Lovecraft fled the deadly lights of New York for the peace and safety of his ancestral Providence. But … just perhaps … New York pursued him to Rhode Island, just as it did Thomas Malone, all the way from Red Hook.
“My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “He”
“If you want to know what I think of New York,” Lovecraft wrote to Donald Wandrei in 1927, “read ‘He'.” Michel Houellebecq has aptly described “He” as Lovecraft's “rejection letter to New York,” and since it begins with a writer coming to New York in hope, and fleeing to New England in terror, the autobiographical element seems unmistakable. “Cool Air” notably pits its shabby-genteel “magazine work” narrator (“unable to pay any substantial rent”) against foreign madness. Even Thomas Malone, the detective in “Red Hook,” is a literary man, and Malone, too, leaves New York for Rhode Island at the end of his ordeal. Rounding off this line of country, Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn when he wrote the tale, a mile and a half from the Red Hook neighborhood it literally demonizes.
It's interesting to note, however, that the trend in Lovecraft's fictional New York runs the other direction from his life experience: “Red Hook” (written first) is horrified and disgusted, “He” is elegiac if not bittersweet, and “Cool Air” (written only six weeks before Lovecraft left for Providence) is sardonic, knowing, and not a little romantic. They run on different levels, too: “Red Hook” delves into cellars and sewers; “He” wanders through courtyards and a second-floor room; “Cool Air” lurks higher yet, on the fourth floor of a brownstone. Unexpectedly, we go further up as we go further in, not deeper into the Pickmaniacal depths. Lovecraft's New York is no mere simple setting for a disguised autobiography.
“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house …”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “Cool Air”
If the nested tales of Arthur Machen's Three Impostors were, in Lin Carter's crystalline phrase, set in “Baghdad-on-the-Thames,” then “Cool Air” posits New York as “Baghdad-on-the-Hudson.” Machen took his idea from Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights; Lovecraft took the idea for “Cool Air” from Arthur Machen's Three Impostors tale “Novel of the White Powder”—and, of course, from Poe's “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which as it happens is set in New York City as well. (In Harlem, rather than the West Village of “Cool Air”.) The idea of the modern city—anonymous, bustling, crowded with mysterious foreigners—as a secret garden of wonders and terrors may well originate (like so much else) with Poe.
For Lovecraft, New York was Baghdad in more than just metaphor: he had a Syrian neighbor in Brooklyn, and his New York fiction and letters swarm with Near Eastern references. Suydam's cultists are Kurds who worship Hebrew demons in a “Babylonish court” and write in “Chaldee letters.” “He” begins by comparing New York (of the “blackly Babylonian pinnacles”) to, among other legendary cities, Samarcand, and ends (less specifically) predicting its decadence under “yellow, squint-eyed” swarms. And in a 1930 letter to James F. Morton, HPL populates New York with “pouring tides” from two dozen Middle Eastern sources ranging from Antioch to Ophir, including Babylon, Ur, and Irem of the Pillars!
“[T]he gracious, glamorous elder New York of dignity & poise, which lies stark & horrible & ghoul-gnawed today beneath the foul claws of the mongrel & misshapen foreign colossus that gibbers & howls vulgarly & dreamlessly on its site.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Donald Wandrei (February 10, 1927)
All those Syrians and such, of course, were “squat, swarthy strangers … without kinship to the scenes about them,” as Lovecraft writes in “He.” His letters are even more fraught, howling with fear of the “monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal” throngs “slithering and oozing … in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities,” as he ranted to Frank Belknap Long in 1924. This foreign corruption besieged, eroded, and doomed what little of New York Lovecraft found to love: the “relics of this former happiness” as he says in “Red Hook,” the “unexpected bits of square and court” the narrator seeks out in “He.” Both once separate Georgian towns from Lovecraft's prized 18th century—Flatbush and Greenwich—swallowed by the city. Once, to Lovecraft, New York was a congeries of simple Georgian “Arkhams.” But like Arkham (or worse, Dunwich), it has fallen to degeneration and invasion from Outside. The siege is over, and the “infesting worms” have won.
“I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York … but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “He”
New York is no city for men, but a necropolis, as foreign and as dead as the Nameless City or the Pyramids. In “Cool Air,” good old Dr. Muñoz blends our New York tropes of the necropolis and the Near East, pumping “exotic spices and Egyptian incense till his room smelled like the vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings.” All three New York stories are tales of unnatural survival: Suydam is reanimated in “Red Hook,” the Georgian magus lives in the time-bubble of Perry Court in “He,” and Dr. Muñoz is as “imperfectly embalmed” as the city itself. Suydam and the magus in “He” are both representatives of Old New York, of the Dutch and English aristocracies respectively, and both have fallen into madness and succumbed to the foreign, the Outside. Both learn their magics from foreigners (the Kurds and the “half-breed red Indians”), and Dr. Muñoz is himself a foreigner, even if a cultivated one. Not even such cultivation, or ancestry, or (in the final analysis) the “will of mankind” (as we learn in “He”) can stave off New York's inevitable demise.
“There are really two New-Yorks: the increasingly Georgian New-York of the ground, which passengers on the streets see … and the elfin, heav'n-scaling New-York of the air – the New York which rears Babylonian pinnacles for admiration afar off …”
—H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Frank Belknap Long (February, 1924)
Lovecraft casts New York as another of his “double cities” (in Robert H. Waugh's apt phrase), with an “elfin” (or Georgian) ideal and a “hellish” (or foreign) shadow. It is both Arkham and Dunwich, both Sarnath and Ib: its glory contains its own doom.
In the letter above, written to Frank Belknap Long before his move and prefiguring the “sunset city”-Boston duality of the Dream-Quest, Lovecraft cites two cities in New York, both magical. Then, once he grew to hate the place, both New Yorks became monstrous: the “too white” squire in “He” and the “swarthy, sin-pitted faces” of “Red Hook.” But even in “He,” the double city still lingers: “at night … darkness calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about.” New York, “in fact quite dead,” thus becomes rather the opposite: an Arkham cemetery, infested by the unnamable perhaps, but still bearing the spirit of its past.
“Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images …”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Lovecraft didn't just write three tales in New York. He also wrote two New England stories: the thrilling “Shunned House” and the formulaic “In the Vault.” And he plotted, in detail, “The Call of Cthulhu,” as we learn from his diary for August 12-13, 1925—immediately after writing “Red Hook” and “He,” in fact. So is there a fourth “New York tale,” of an unnatural survival in an “imperfectly embalmed” necropolis, a scion of the dead past attended by Oriental cultists, a magus dwelling outside time and history? True, all of Lovecraft's necropoleis—the Nameless City, Kadath, Pnakotus -- are “imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things.” But read Johansen's description of R'lyeh again, and tell me that's not Manhattan, busy drowning Lovecraft's Georgian fantasies beneath Modernist monstrosities. Even Wilcox's “Cyclopean [city] of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths” sounds mighty like the New York of “He,” with its “Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles.” R'lyeh becomes the New York that Lovecraft hated, with “vast angles” and “improper surfaces.” Massimo Berruti notes that the geometry—and perhaps the actual physicality—of R'lyeh is always changing; that nothing is ever as it was. Is this not Lovecraft's great indictment of New York? Nothing is as it was, and it throngs with “deep-sea unnamabilities” to boot. There's even a connection between R'lyeh and Red Hook in the story itself: Angell's clipping file reveals that “New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines” when Cthulhu's citadel surfaces. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu New York wgah'nagl fhtagn? It is the city that never sleeps, after all.
Next Stop on the Tour: Antarctica
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