Another difference that I find between Lovecraft and Ligotti, and one whose significance is even more foundational, is that Lovecraft, as both a human being and an artist, was powerfully shaped by a lifelong experience of sehnsucht, whereas in Ligotti this quality, while present, is overshadowed or even overpowered by stark, staring horror and a desperate bleakness. Lovecraft’s poignant yearning after an experience of absolute beauty can be seen in many of his stories, such as “The Silver Key,” where young Randolph Carter, Lovecraft’s fictional alter ego, yearns for a return to the reimagined supernal peace and beauty of his childhood world; and also in his letters and essays, where he speaks repeatedly of finding himself overcome by aesthetic rapture and a sense of longing and “adventurous expectancy” at the sight of sunsets, cloudscapes, winding streets, rooftops angled in certain suggestive arrangements, and the like. The following passage from a 1927 letter to Donald Wandrei is typical:
Sometimes I stumble accidentally on rare combinations of slope, curved street-line, roofs & gables & chimneys, & accessory details of verdure & background, which in the magic of late afternoon assume a mystic majesty and exotic significance beyond the power of words to describe. Absolutely nothing else in life now has the power to move me so much; for in these momentary vistas there seem to open before me bewildering avenues to all the wonders & lovelinesses I have ever sought, & to all those gardens of eld whose memory trembles just beyond the rim of conscious recollection, yet close enough to lend to life all the significance it possesses. (SL 2.125–26)
Or again, from a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith:
My most vivid experiences are efforts to recapture fleeting & tantalising mnemonic fragments expressed in unknown or half-known architectural or landscape vistas, especially in connexion with a sunset. Some instantaneous fragment of a picture will well up suddenly through some chain of subconscious association—the immediate excitant being usually half-irrelevant on the surface—& fill me with a sense of wistful memory & bafflement; with the impression that the scene in question represents something I have seen & visited before under circumstances of superhuman liberation & adventurous expectancy, yet which I have almost completely forgotten, & which is so bewilderingly uncorrelated & unoriented as to be forever inaccessible in the future. (SL 3.197)
Additional examples could be multiplied at length, and all would show, like the above passages, that Lovecraft was gripped by an ingrained and, we might say, “classical” sense of sehnsucht, the “infinite longing that is the essence of romanticism,” as E. T. A. Hoffmann famously formulated it. It was precisely this faculty that led him to respond with such intense delight to the mystically charged writings of Lord Dunsany, which exerted an enormous influence on his own subsequent work. Lovecraft’s Dunsanian stories can and should be read not only as outflowings of his love for Dunsany’s aesthetic vision, but as expressions of his own personal sense of infinite longing.
Lovecraft even went so far as to assert that this feeling of longing, this heightened responsiveness to beauty that seems to hint at a transcendent world of absolute aesthetic fulfillment, is the impulse which justifies authorship. . . . The time to begin writing is when the events of the world seem to suggest things larger than the world—strangenesses and patterns and rhythms and uniquities of combination which no one ever saw or heard before, but which are so vast and marvellous and beautiful that they absolutely demand
proclamation with a fanfare of silver trumpets. Space and time become vitalised with literary significance when they begin to make us subtly homesick for something ‘out of space, out of time.’ . . . To find those other lives, other worlds, and other dreamlands, is the true author’s task. That is what literature is; and if any piece of writing is motivated by anything apart from this mystic and never-finished quest, it is base and unjustified imitation (SL 2.142–43)
The fact that he made all of these statements after his 1926 conversion (as we might call it) to supernatural realism demonstrates beyond all doubt that the longings and mood-based authorial motivations he experienced during his earlier period were still in full force later on. And this provides still further explanation for why those later, more realistic stories, with their tendency toward narrative over-explicitness and a certain clinical, “scientific” coldness of style, while they may constitute significant literary works in their own right, appeared to him a deviations from his true path and desire.
Ligotti is fully aware of all this, of course. No one who has made even a casual study of Lovecraft’s life and works can be unaware of this aspect of his character, and Ligotti has studied him more seriously and extensively than most. He has read Lovecraft’s stories, essays, and letters, and has seen his repeated claim that his life was made bearable solely by virtue of those transcendent intimations of a supernal beauty. And Ligotti has, I think, responded to this after his own fashion. At the very least, he has recognized that even in a horror story like “The Music of Erich Zann,” Lovecraft “captured at least a fragment of the desired object [i.e., the unattainable goal of that burning sehnsucht] and delivered it to his readers” (Ligotti 2003, 84). But as mentioned above, in Ligotti’s fictional world this yearning after beauty ends up being utterly subjugated to the experience of cosmic horror. I think it might even be possible to do a chronological study of the appearance and eventual complete submergence or subversion of this impulse in his stories. Early on, in such tales as “Les Fleurs,” “The Frolic,” “The Chymist,” and “The Lost Art of Twilight,” one can sense a world of suggestive beauties, laced with horrors (or vice versa), being painted in the descriptive passages, and in the hints of an alternate realm that borders the normal world: the “blasphemous fairyland” where John Doe frolics with his young victims (cf. SDD 12–13), the “opulent kingdom of glittering colors and velvety jungle-shapes, a realm of contorted rainbows and twisted auroras” where the narrator of “Les Fleurs” dwells amidst a riotous floral beauty of hideous luxuriance (SDD 25). The emotional center of this subset of tales is summed up in a single sentence from “Vastarien,” which itself stands as Ligotti’s most singular, unified expression of this sort of longing: “Victor Keirion belonged to that wretched sect of souls who believe that the only value of this world lies in its power—at certain times—to suggest another world” (SDD 263). The very wording, aside from the description of those who are subject to this longing as “wretched,” recalls some of the Lovecraft passages quoted above.
But as Ligotti’s art progresses, the longing expressed in his stories mutates, until we are presented with such grim spectacles as “The Tsalal,” in which protagonist Andrew Maness’s longing is described in terms that subvert and transmute the desire for beauty into a desire for gothic horror and bleakness. Andrew, the story informs us, was conceived as part of a sinister mystical rite that was intended to bring the Tsalal, a god or principle of ultimate darkness, into this world. As “the seed of that one,” he will find that throughout his life he “will be drawn to a place that reveals the sign of the Tsalal—an aspect of the unreal, a forlorn glamour in things” (Ligotti 1995, 93). This attraction takes the form of a longing that still bears certain similarities to Lovecraft’s, since it is still based on the desire to see and experience another world—and yet for Andrew Maness, the sights and scenes that evoke the longing, and the fundamental character of the other world that he desires, have nothing whatsoever to do with sunsets or mystical vistas, or indeed with any sort of beauty at all:
Perhaps he would come upon an abandoned house standing shattered and bent in an isolated landscape—a raw skeleton in a boneyard. But this dilapidated structure would seem to him a temple, a wayside shrine to that dark presence with which he sought union, and also a doorway to the dark world in which it dwelled. Nothing can convey those sensations, the countless nuances of trembling excitement, as he approached such a decomposed edifice whose skewed and ragged outline suggested another order of existence, the truest order of existence, as though such places as this house were only
wavering shadows cast down to earth by a distant, unseen realm of entity.
For this narrator, such grim and spectral scenes inspire the sense of an imminent, nightmarish transformation being worked upon the world through the agency of his own being, and this in turn “overwhelm[s] him with a black intoxication and suggest[s] his life’s goal: to work the great wheel that turns in darkness, and to be broken upon it” (N 83). Obviously, this is light years from Lovecraft’s “vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory— impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future” (SL 3.243). This difference, not incidentally, has resulted in dramatic differences in the two men’s fictional representations of longing. One need only compare any of the above-quoted Ligotti passages, or any of a dozen others, to analogous descriptive passages from Lovecraft’s dream stories in order to see the difference.3
Ligotti has inadvertently given us a clue as to how to articulate this particular distinction between Lovecraft and himself. He has written, “Like Erich Zann’s ‘world of beauty,’ Lovecraft’s ‘lay in some far cosmos of the imagination,’ and like that of another artist, it is a “beauty that hath horror in it’” (Ligotti 2003, 84). For Ligotti, the order of primacy is reversed: his other-world is a horror that hath beauty in it. It is world of horror first and foremost, with its undeniable, intermittent beauty standing only as an accident or epiphenomenon—and perhaps as a kind of deadly lure. Understanding this, we will not wonder at the fact that his oeuvre contains nothing even remotely resembling Lovecraft’s Dunsanian stories. He has never written, or at least never published, anything like Lovecraft’s “The Quest of Iranon” or “Celephaïs,” the first of which is entirely lacking in horror and the second of which only lightly brushes past it, and both of which take for their primary themes not gothic darkness but ethereal beauty and bittersweet poignancy.
The thematic progression of Ligotti’s fiction away from any sort of expressed longing and toward a zenith, which is to say an emotional nadir, of despair and horror is completed in “The Bungalow House,” which portrays the miserable death of the very capacity to yearn. The protagonist of the story, a solitary librarian, becomes infatuated with a series of bizarre audio performance tapes that he discovers at a local art gallery. These tapes contain first person “dream monologues” narrated by an oddly familiar voice, and the bleak, surreal scenes they describe touch an emotional chord deep within him, causing him to respond with the same feeling of “euphoric hopelessness” described by the taped voice. Expressing a sentiment that rather recalls Ligotti’s closing words in his essay “The Consolations of Horror,”4 the narrator of “The Bungalow House” says he feels comforted by the tapes, since they demonstrate that someone else has shared his most private and powerful insights and emotions. “To think,” he says with rhetorical emphasis, “that another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things” (NF 523). But by the story’s end, he has been emotionally devastated by a personal confrontation with the owner of the anonymous voice, and by a “twist” that has revealed a depth to his own wretchedness that he had not previously suspected. The result is that he has been robbed of that selfsame ability to feel “the intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things” that had initially attracted him to the tapes (NF 531). The story’s closing lines explicitly describe the nature of his loss:
I try to experience the infinite terror and dreariness of a bungalow universe in the way I once did, but it is not the same as it once was. There is no comfort in it, even though the vision and the underlying principles are still the same. . . . More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement—anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know. (NF 532)
This emotional death signals a lasting shift in Ligotti’s writing; in his post–“Bungalow House” stories, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find evidence of the same yearning, however dark its character by the time of “The Tsalal,” that informed much of his earlier work. This leads us to suspect a strong autobiographical component to this thematic arc, and we are confirmed in our suspicions by Ligotti’s nonfictional description of his agonized struggles with anhedonia in The Conspiracy against the Human Race (q.v.).
One of the most fundamental elements of any writer’s psychological makeup is the central impulse that motivates him to write at all. When we compare Ligotti’s expressed motivations with Lovecraft’s, we find that this dividing line between them—Lovecraft’s golden longing contrasting with Ligotti’s gloomy one that eventually dies in desolation—extends all the way inward to that foundational level. We have already seen that Lovecraft said he wrote directly out of his sehnsucht, “to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy” that he derived from various sources. In the same essay, he went on to explain why he wrote the particular kind of story that his readers have come to associate him with, and his words are of paramount significance to our concerns here:
I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasize the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. (MW 113; emphasis added)
The import of this statement for Lovecraft’s status as a horror writer is obvious: he was saying, circa 1933, that he only wrote horror because it was efficacious for achieving another effect that is not intrinsically horrific. In other words, for him, horror was a means and not an end. It was his poignant, wistful longing after transcendent beauty and cosmic freedom that animated his authorial life—and not only that, but his life in general: in the same letter where he described his “vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory,” he claimed that this intense emotional experience was chief amongst the reasons why he did not commit suicide—“the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthernsome quality” (SL 3.243).
Such an attitude contrasts sharply with the reason, quoted earlier, that Ligotti has given for going on with life: “to communicate, in the form of horror stories, the outrage and panic at being alive in the world.” He frames this as “following Lovecraft’s way,” and to a degree he is correct, since the horror Lovecraft expressed in his stories was entirely authentic. But as we have seen, it was not the whole of his subjective reality, nor, by his own account, was it the ultimate end of his creative endeavors. This means it is just one more indication of Ligotti’s radical emotional and intellectual appropriation of Lovecraft when he holds up horror as Lovecraft’s real message and meaning, and for the most part relegates every other aspect of his life, writings, and character to peripheral status. For Ligotti, horror—the kind he experienced at the age of seventeen in that Lovecraftian epiphany of a meaningless, menacing cosmos—is all that is “really real,” and whenever he, Lovecraft, or anybody else departs from living in the full nightmarish intensity of it, this equates with “think[ing] and act[ing] like every other goof and sucker on this planet” (Bee).5
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So we are left with a kind of paradox or contradiction, in that Ligotti identifies strongly with Lovecraft as a writer and human being, and has modeled his own life and writings upon Lovecraft’s example, and yet the aesthetic longing that was central to Lovecraft’s character and writings, and which comes out most clearly in the early stories Ligotti so greatly admires, is something that Ligotti is forced, by virtue of his own personal vision and experience, to view as peripheral. A likely explanation for this fact is that when Ligotti first discovered Lovecraft and fastened upon his writings as expressions of the emotional and philosophical horror that he (Ligotti) was experiencing, this resulted in his gaining a one-sided understanding. His private predisposition illuminated with stunning intensity an important facet of Lovecraft’s vision, but at the same time it relegated equally important facets to secondary status. We may view the overall result as ironic, since the part of Lovecraft’s life and work that has hitherto been overlooked by the reading public at large—his longing after beauty— in favor of framing him purely and solely as a horror writer (witness the contents of the 2005 Library of America volume, which omit entirely the dream and Dunsanian stories), is also obscured by the overwhelming horrific focus of Ligotti, who is widely recognized as one of Lovecraft’s most prominent literary heirs.
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