by Paula Guran
“In my book, true horror is already inside the house.”
Schanoes is a writer and scholar living in New York City. Her fiction has most recently appeared on Tor.com and in The Doll Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow, and Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Queens College-CUNY, and her first book, a monograph about feminist revisions of fairy tales called Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale appeared from Ashgate Publishing in 2014.
Variations on Lovecraftian Themes
Veronica Schanoes
——
1. Monstrous Generation
By 1898, Winfield Scott Lovecraft had been in the Butler hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, for five years, ever since a delusional breakdown occurring in Chicago during April 1893. His delusions were paranoid in nature, and included the persistent beliefs that men – notably black men – were violating his wife, that his food was being poisoned, and that his belongings were being stolen by hospital attendants, who were understood to be his enemies. (Given the treatment those with persistent mental illness receive all too often in such facilities even today, this last may not have been so far-fetched.)
On his death certificate, his demise was attributed to “general paresis.”
General paresis was first identified as a phenomenon in 1822, and was originally believed to be a psychological disorder arising from an innate weakness in the sufferer’s character. By 1857, the possibility had been raised that it was in fact an effect of late-stage syphilis, but it was not until 1913 that this hypothesis was confirmed, when Hideyo Noguchi demonstrated the presence of the syphilis spirochete in the brains of the afflicted.
Noguchi himself was diagnosed with syphilis in 1913, after a few years of unethical human experimentation. He died, however, of yellow fever that same year.
Between 1857 and 1913, however, despite the medical community’s uncertainty, the specter of syphilis could not be dismissed. We now know syphilis to be caused by the bacterium Treponema palledum, a spirochete, and the disease’s progression can be divided into four stages. Spirochetes are shaped like microscopic corkscrews, and move by twisting and boring. Syphilis is, the vast majority of the time, sexually transmitted.
I expect you already knew that last part.
Primary syphilis usually occurs around five weeks after exposure to the bacterium, when a chancre – a firm, painless lesion – forms at the point of contact. In men, this is usually the penis.
Secondary syphilis develops a couple of months later and presents as a rash, which can be red or white, and is usually raised. The rash may occur anywhere on the body, but it usually erupts on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. This stage can also involve fever, sore throat, weight loss, and hair loss. More severe symptoms are also possible.
After this, the disease goes dormant. This may occur early (prior to a year after infection) or late (after a year). During this period, the sufferer is asymptomatic – no doubt a relief.
Latency can last up to thirty years.
A lot can happen in thirty years. A man can marry, father a son. One is less contagious during latency, and one’s wife might escape infection, one’s son avoid the congenital syphilis that deformed and blinded Gerard de Lairesse, remembered for his painting as well as his theory of art, whose deformities were immortalized by Rembrandt.
A man might die in the course of thirty years.
But Winfield Scott Lovecraft did not die during the latent phase of syphilis.
General paresis is a feature of tertiary stage syphilis, rarely seen in the developed world nowadays, thanks to antibiotics. It involves psychotic delusions that appear quite suddenly and unmistakably. Concentration and short-term memory are affected, and social inhibitions are lost.
In Lovecraft père’s case, he was in Chicago when he burst into the common room of the boarding house in which he was staying shouting that “a Negro and two white men” were upstairs violating his wife.
There are physical symptoms as well – pupils that do not respond to light; a loss of the motor control needed to speak; tremors; seizures; and cachexia – a wasting syndrome. By this stage, the progress of the disease can be halted using antibiotics, but the damage already done cannot be reversed. Without antibiotics, death is unavoidable.
In the five years that Lovecraft spent in Butler Hospital, his son was not brought to see him, not once.
Syphilis is caused by spirochetes, bacteria. Once in a host, they replicate until they have consumed all nutrients possible, and then die. A man in the final stages of syphilis is housing multitudes of Treponema pallidum in his body, all moving like deadly little corkscrews through his circulatory system, dividing once every thirty hours, colonizing his tissues and fluids, until at last there is nothing left to consume.
You might think that a syphilitically psychotic father dying in a mental hospital could cast a pall over a boy, that the thought of such a parent might prey upon a young man’s mind. But, if so, Lovecraft and his biographers have not made much of it, and indeed, the true cause of his father’s death may never have been known by the child. Instead, Lovecraft and his chroniclers focus on Winfield’s partner in monstrous generation, Sarah Susan Lovecraft, née Phillips.
An indulgent mother, was Susan, indulgent to a fault, purchasing for her son all the books, astronomy and printing equipment any young boy could wish for. Was she monstrously indulgent? Accounts oscillate between blaming her for being “oversolicitous” and castigating her for trying to “mold” young Howard according to her own desires rather than his: dressing him in curls and skirts as a small child (not actually unusual at the time), attempting to make him attend dancing lessons, and, at his initial request, inflicting violin lessons on him. Monstrous, indeed; it is so easy to blame Mother.
Apparently, after two years, the horrific experience of practicing the violin became too much for young Howard’s nerves, and, on medical advice, he was allowed to quit.
Poor Mrs. Lovecraft. It seems that almost every aspect of her mothering was lacking. She and her sister danced endless attendance on the grown Howard, who presumably could have stopped it if he had wanted, bringing him milk and ferociously guarding his rest, and in return? They are held responsible for Lovecraft considering himself an invalid, frail in health and nerves. Never mind the doctor who ended the violin lessons.
But Mrs. Lovecraft did undeniably take a very strange turn as young Howard entered adolescence, convincing herself as well as him that he was hideous beyond all compare, so hideous that he should hide his face from the world at large. Strange behavior, and devastating to a growing boy, no doubt. Even stranger is that Howard wore an almost exact copy of his mother’s face, and Susan had been considered a beauty.
One wonders if Susan was projecting some self-loathing onto her son.
Poor Mrs. Lovecraft, indeed. In March 1919, she followed in her husband’s footsteps, entering Butler Hospital for the Insane, never again to know another home. A family friend reported Susan had spoken to her of “weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark,” and that she gave every evidence of true anxiety and fear during this confidence.
Was she haunted by her son’s creations even this early, Cthulhu and his minions casting their shadows before they arrived? Or were these nightmares her own creation, her own monstrous generations, bursting from her brain to dwell in dark corners of the world around her?
She died in 1921, following a gallbladder operation.
Her son was devastated.
I wonder, with both parents breathing their last in the same asylum, with his mother’s delusions (presumably) of being haunted by demonic creatures, whether Lovecraft himself ever feared such an end. Certainly enough of his characters lose their faculties as a result of forbidden, dreadful knowledge or hereditary weakness or both to suggest that madness was not beyond the scope
of his imagination.
The mind can generate monsters, and then be consumed by its own creations.
Did Lovecraft, like Swift, fear becoming “dead at the top”? Surely a man so concerned with nervous strain, so given to depressive crises, must have considered the possibility.
The true threat is never external – it’s not the dreadful non-Aryan immigrants flooding into the United States; it’s not the inhuman alien beings, worshipped as gods, who would barely notice humanity as they crushed it. The true threat always comes from the inside, the self rising up beyond all reason, beyond even survival. In the end, the most monstrous growth is always already one’s own.
2. Inherited Guilt
“Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do.”
– “The Rats in the Walls,” H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, and he considered himself the very model of a genteel American. Perhaps in this he was correct. On his mother’s side, his ancestry can be traced back to John Field, one of the signatories of the Providence Covenant in the first half of the seventeenth century. Field could not actually sign, but made an X.
Like many of his characters, Lovecraft was pre-occupied with his lineage and his ancestors, many times stating his preference for the eighteenth century over the degenerate age in which he found himself.
Ah, eighteenth-century America, what wert thou?
For Lovecraft? The eighteenth century he adored was metered rhyme, neo-classical architecture, Enlightenment values of restraint and balance in all things.
But what if we were to dig more deeply into Providence’s eighteenth century, ducking below the surface of self-presentation, of self-professed values?
Rhode Island had been one corner of the Atlantic Triangle trade, perhaps better known as the Atlantic slave trade. Despite a 1652 law banning slavery in the state, apparently never enforced, there were more slaves per capita in Rhode Island than in any other state in New England. Of the 600,000 Africans who were forcibly brought to North America, about 100,000 were carried in Rhode Island ships, and the state was responsible for half of all United States slave voyages.
In Rhode Island’s corner of the triangle trade, molasses, produced in the West Indies with slave labor, and transformed into rum, which was then sent to West Africa and used to buy more slaves, who were then taken to the West Indies, where they were bought and forced to grow more sugar cane, which was turned into molasses and sent north to Rhode Island.
West Indies sugar plantations were particularly brutal places, where it was cheaper to work black people to death and then buy new slaves than it was to maintain slaves’ lives even in the meager and appalling way done in other contexts.
Rhode Island rum was made from the sweat and lifeblood of black men, women, and children, all being deliberately murdered, faster or slower, but no less certainly. Distillation can effect marvelous transformations indeed.
I am Providence, Lovecraft wrote.
What is Providence, then, but the gothic house, built on the bones of the Wampanoag, the Narragansett, and the Niantic people killed by European disease and European settlers?
So. Consider this fable, then. We can call it “The Horror Beneath Providence.”
This house – its occupants liked to speak and act as if it was as old as the bones of the Earth on which it rested, but this was only a charade. True, every surface had been lovingly distressed, genealogies carefully traced, distinctions painstakingly made between old money and new, old families and outsiders. But it was all only a show; nothing was truly old. Even the dust had been lovingly placed, particle by particle, to create the illusion of undisturbed stillness, stultifying tradition, utter respectability. In reality, nothing, not the dust, not the money, not the families, and certainly not the house, could claim a tenure of longer than a couple hundred years.
And no matter how much dust was laid down, how many rooms were constructed, how much furniture distressed, this house could never be older than that.
Into this house was born a child who loved it so much that for most of his life he rarely left it. And he believed even more completely and fervently than most of his generation in the illusion of age that his forebears had worked so steadily to cultivate. He felt himself older than his years would grant him and spent his happiest days rummaging in the very “oldest” cellars and basement, caressing the supposed antiquities he found there, studying the manuscript histories of this home, and working back through the plans and blueprints.
It was when he found the recipe used for dyeing the mortar holding the house’s bricks in place that the child, now a youth, quirked an eyebrow. For, from what he could read in the self-consciously antique script, the mortar in its natural state was the deep red of spilled blood.
He spent yet further afternoons in the cellars, spelunking in tunnels behind barred doors and chained gates. And during these expeditions, he began to hear sounds, faintly at first, the aural equivalent of a breeze so gentle that it cannot stir even a leaf. Just whispers. Not screams. Not yet.
As he wound his way deeper into the cellars, the sounds got louder. Nasty sounds. Cruel Sounds.
The youth stuffed his ears with cotton and pressed on.
But the cotton served only to keep the sounds inside his head, where they echoed and reverberated, and soon, all that was left in his head were the sounds, suffusing every squamous cell of this brain. And the sounds inhabited every thought he had, even the tears in his eyes, so he saw the world through their haze.
And that world became narrower and narrower, even while the youth believed in the expansiveness of his vision, thought he saw himself as an infinitesimal speck in a cold and infinite cosmos, even while he proclaimed himself lord of all he surveyed, and cast a contemptuous eye over all other models of humanity as weaker, lesser, cruder, worse.
They found him, eventually, the search parties. They were not looking for him in particular, but they found him nonetheless. Their peregrinations were the purposeful journeys of detectives re-examining cold cases, recognizing as murders deaths long dismissed as in the inevitable course of nature.
And they found the youth, now ossified into middle age. He was sitting on a throne built of human bone, his feet propped upon the dying. Blood ran down his face, out of his mouth, and onto his hands as he raved and gibbered, proclaiming himself the pinnacle of humanity and evolution, the society from which he sprang the acme of civilization.
Around him the flies buzzed and maggots crawled.
3. The New York Horror
“As for New York – there is no question but that its overwhelming Semitism has totally removed it from the American stream. Regarding its influence on literary and dramatic expression – it is not so much that the country is flooded with Jewish authors, as that Jewish publishers determine just which of our Aryan writers shall achieve print and position . . . Taste is insidiously moulded along non-Aryan lines – so that, no matter how intrinsically good the resulting body of literature may be, it is a special, rootless literature which does not represent us.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, 1933
I write and publish about Jews. Most of my protagonists, unless otherwise specified, are Ashkenazi Jews. Well, why should the goyim have all the fantastic, the speculative, the future imperfect? My editors have mostly been Jewish, too.
Are my sensibilities out of touch with those of true Americans?
I suppose so. Certainly John Rocker of the Cleveland Indians thought so when he told Sports Illustrated: “Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some twenty-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing . . . The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vi
etnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”
I used to live on the 7 line; I used to have purple hair. I don’t have AIDS, but I’ve known plenty of queers who do. And when I used to live in Philly I’d go entire days without hearing anybody speaking anything but English, and I found it depressing.
Whenever a politician starts rabbiting on about “real Americans,” I know that whatever they’re about to say is going to be completely antithetical to the values I was raised to hold dear.
I love New York City more than I can say, but more and more I wonder if the city I know and love, the city in which I grew up, the city I am a part of, even exists anymore. Inflation and gentrification – maybe that’s the real America.
“The population [of New York City]is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, 1931
“Although he once said he loved New York and that henceforth it would be his ‘adopted state,’ I soon learned that he hated it and all its ‘alien hordes.’ When I protested that I too was one of them, he’d tell me that I ‘no longer belonged to those mongrels.’ ‘You are now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft!’”
– Sonia Davis, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft