by Kenneth Hite
Far more interestingly, George Wetzel takes “The Tree” as an example of the unsung influence of the Greek myths on the Cthulhu Mythos, along with other early efforts such as “Hypnos,” “The Moon-Bog,” “The Crawling Chaos,” “The Green Meadow,” and the word ‘Necronomicon,’ which is, at the very least, a Greek-ism of arcane antecedents if debatable quality. Wetzel has ahold of something there, specifically when he cites the rarely seen 1920 Lovecraft collaboration “Poetry and the Gods,” from which I quote thusly:
In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotos gardens beyond the sunset.
Wetzel likewise suggests that Lovecraft the Epicurean modelled his Cthulhoid gods on Epicurus’ deities, who remain blissfully unconcerned with—or even unconscious of—human affairs. (This, I think, would be the middle position between the generally upbeat apocalypse of “Poetry and the Gods” and the more familiar degeneracy-and-devastation eschaton of “Nyarlathotep,” written about the same time.) Wetzel draws a number of specific parallels between Lovecraft’s horror and fantasy worlds and the Greek myths, and I think in general he’s correct to do so, if only because a) we know, from his own testimony, that HPL modelled his mythos on historical myth patterns, and b) almost the only historical myth pattern that Lovecraft understood in any sophistication was the Greek.
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Myself, I’ve found reading Greek myths, and reading about Greek myths, to be particularly useful in constructing horror mythologies and secret histories, including and especially Lovecraftian ones. Although Robert Graves is a howling crazy person whose footnotes should not be trusted one iota, his anthology The Greek Myths will rapidly undo a great deal of the false certainty one gets from one’s childhood reading of Hamilton, Bulfinch, D’Aulaire, et al. (I also recommend hitting the very fine Theoi.com website for a first cut at comparative Greek mythology.) The Greek mythic tradition extends over at least 900 years (and at least four geographically and culturally separate matrices: Ionia, Classical Greece, Hellenistic Egypt, and Rome) in written works alone, and as a body of worship it goes back another thousand years or so. The earliest work of Greek mythology, Hesiod’s Theogony, is an attempt to rationalize and unify a hugely disparate body of pre-existing myths. (Hesiod was the Lin Carter, if you will, of the Greek mythos.) There is a palpable change (or rather, many palpable changes) since Hesiod in the whole tenor and character of written Greek myth, as well as in the patterns of worship and lived experience of Greek pagan religion.
Jane Ellen Harrison and F.M. Cornford and their ilk likewise went far too far, especially in imagining that they could suss out the “primitive” versions of the myths, but reading them is likewise a corrective to collapsing Hesiod and Ovid into one story, as well as a great way to creep yourself the hell out. I recommend E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational as another study in that corrective tradition, and usefully, one that doesn’t happen to be full of Frazerian bilge.
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
[early 1920?]
This will do as well as anywhere as a place to remind a 21st century readership that Lovecraft’s racism is not somehow “separate” from his other thought, for all that it seldom takes the front row in his fictional themes. Lovecraft described himself as a blend of three streams of thought: antiquarianism, scientism, and the weird. His racism fully partakes of the first two. He clearly believed that the Anglo-Saxon culture of roughly the 18th-century “Augustan Era” was the high point of human aesthetic achievement, and strongly self-identified with it. He was a “cultural” racist, who believed that cultural admixture (and even assimilation) of foreigners, and especially Jews, was polluting what remained of that culture in New England, and in Anglo-Saxondom generally.
At the same time, his racism was thoroughly scientific. Lovecraft was an eager devotee of Ernst Haeckel, one of the leading lights of scientific racism. It’s important to remember that in the 1920s biological racism was as much a scientific consensus as mitochondrial DNA counts are in our day. Lovecraft was not a crank, at least not as far as his science went. Indeed, his one “crank” belief, in Wegener’s continental drift hypothesis, turned out to be correct. His cultural biases and his scientific knowledge didn’t contradict each other, but instead reinforced each other, so he never had to pick one over the other.
Which leaves the weird—and the fraught (and oft-plumbed) question: Just how much of Lovecraft’s sense of the weird and uncanny is, to say the least, racially charged? We’re not going to be able to answer that question here, not more specifically than “some of it.”
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With all that under our belt: Okay, so Lovecraft was a racist. (And very much an anti-Semite, although to the atheist HPL, it was pretty much the same thing.) No question. He was probably more racist even than the average Yankee of his generation, and if not, he was certainly far more articulate in his racism. If you find that an insuperable problem—well, good luck reading Lovecraft. (Or pretty much anything else written between, say, 1700 and 1950.) That said, although “Arthur Jermyn” has some typically repellent Lovecraftian grace notes (“a loathsome black woman from Guinea”) it’s not actually about race per se.7 It’s the first example, rather, of Lovecraft’s constant theme of miscegenation. Miscegenation is a big, honking part of the Gothic tradition from which HPL sprang. We have a hard time reading the Gothics this way, because (for the most part) we no longer instinctively recoil from Southern European Catholics in the way that English (and German) women of the 18th-19th centuries did (or at least thought they were supposed to). But much of the frisson of Wuthering Heights, for example, comes from Heathcliff’s “gipsy” blood mingling with Catherine’s “fair” self. If you can’t (or won’t) read it that way, you’re missing out on some of its power—unless you consciously inflate Heathcliff’s demonic monstrosity over and above his ethnicity. So it is with Lovecraft, who clearly consciously makes the same decision about his stories, to subsume any racial questions in the larger issues of monstrosity.
Thus, Lovecraft almost invariably codes miscegenation as intermixing between human and alien blood, rather than simple race-mixing, which becomes a signifier (albeit a racist signifier, obviously) of a deeper taint (often demon-worship) somewhere else. (Race-mixing can also become, as in “Arthur Jermyn” or “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a red herring for the monstrous truth.) Now, obviously it’s quite defensible to read Lovecraft’s concern with miscegenation as tied in to his racism, and in the case of “Arthur Jermyn” specifically, coding apes as blacks, and vice versa, has a long and inglorious history before and after HPL. But that said, for all his w
himpering about “mongrels,” for HPL— as an artist, anyway—miscegenation is bigger than race.
Thus, a key element of “Arthur Jermyn” is the way that it implicates everyone, Lovecraft very much included (“If we knew what we are, we should do as Arthur Jermyn did…”) in the taint of ape blood. (Joshi points out the coincidences between the Jermyn and Lovecraft lineages in his Penguin notes.) It may seem odd—heck, it is odd—that an atheist mechanist like HPL believed he could wring horror out of, essentially, an excitable travesty of Darwin, but there you have it. In general, HPL’s miscegenation-horror (unlike, say, Poe’s) isn’t the fear of the Other per se, or even of the Other threatening to violate our blood, but the fear that the Other is already inside us. (Having a father who dies a syphilitic madman will do that to you, I imagine.) This recurs not just in “The Outsider” but in HPL’s unquestioned masterpieces: “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, and “The Shadow Out of Time” especially. The theme is a constant, and a different thing entirely from the purse-lipped descriptions of “polyglot swarming” neighborhoods we associate with HPL’s race discourse. It almost seems as if Lovecraft talks himself into believing his code entirely—by his last story, “The Haunter of the Dark,” the evil cult is held at bay by the kinds of people (southern Italians) he used to regard as symptomatic of corruption.
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In our Oh So Enlightened Times, of course, we merely exoticize the Other instead of both demonizing it and exoticizing it, so I’ll close with the notion that the gorilla-charming (and gorilla-fighting) circus baronet Sir Alfred Jermyn would make a fine member of the League of Eldritch Gentlemen.
The Cats of Ulthar
[June 15, 1920]
Another great story. Only its lightness of tone, in my opinion, keeps it from the utter perfection of “Sarnath,” but this could be a sheerly personal judgement. I like my Lovecraft (and my horror) heavy, and lightness isn’t Lovecraft’s natural metier, although you certainly couldn’t determine that from this story alone. No doubt his great, great love for Felis d. helped impel HPL to a deftness and playfulness of tone in this story that he seems unable to quite reach before or after.
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When re-reading it in the Penguin edition for this entry, I noted Joshi’s note no. 6, saying that young Menes’ name is “probably derived from Dunsany’s play King Argimenes.” Perhaps I’m crazy, here, but doesn’t it make far more sense that young Menes is derived from, indeed is supposed to be, Menes the (historical) first Pharaoh of the Two Lands of Egypt? Note the Egyptian motifs on his cart and amongst his entourage, and that Menes’ people are “dark” compared to the Ultharians. (This, by the way, would be a reverse of “Terrible Old Man”—dark people use the Outside to punish lighter-skinned evildoers.)
If Menes is the future Pharaoh Menes, that means:
a) Ulthar is a historical city, and the story takes place around 3100 B.C., when Menes would have been a young boy, or:
b) Menes and the priest-magicians who would eventually found Memphis and unite Egypt spent some time in the Otherworld/Dreamlands/distant past/Faërie, where they had adventures and gained knowledge necessary to unite Egypt, or:
c) The Pharaoh Menes is a small, wonder-working boy in the Dreamlands, much as Kuranes is a mundane writer in the waking world and a mighty pharaoh in Dreaming—which he might continue to inhabit in that form after his death, as does King Kuranes.
The preponderance of evidence would tend toward b), as the general tenor of Ulthar seems more cod-medieval than pre-Bronze Age, since there are inns and blacksmiths in Ulthar. Also, since Menes’ folk come “from the South,” that would imply that Ulthar is somewhere on the upper Nile Valley (later tales state that Ulthar is on the River Skai) if it’s a historical location, and it’s unlikely that a town in Nubia or Abyssinia would consider Egyptians “dark.” Of course, Lovecraft could be gaming the situation; reversing the sojourn of Israel (with Menes as a kind of parallel to Joseph) by inventing a sojourn of proto-Egypt in the north. Or Ulthar could be a city north of the Sudan, in the future Egypt, settled by the Berbers or some “lost white race” of the primordial Saharan grassland.
The story, meanwhile, presents Menes’ folk as Romany, or Gypsies, as much as anything else: their fortunetelling habits, itinerant lifestyle, decorated carts, and ethnic markers indicate as much. At the time, the Romany claimed to be exiles from Egypt (hence the name ‘Gypsy’), and 19th century occultists decided that ‘Gypsy fortunetelling’ was actually lost (and debased) Egyptian wisdom. It would be a typically arch Lovecraftian touch to imply that ‘Egyptian wisdom’ began as Gypsy fortunetelling, cloud-magic, and cat-cursing, and that the whole thing turned in cycles.
Or, of course, c) might be the correct answer, and Menes, like Randolph Carter, was self-created by his dreams of boyhood. Pharaoh dreaming of a boy whose wonders would unite Egypt and make him Pharaoh. Or perhaps, pace “Polaris,” Ulthar is the real city, and Egypt is just the cloud-mirage.
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Like “The Terrible Old Man,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” and “The Tree,” this story has a pretty straightforward “punishment of the sinner” message that many critics find uncongenial. Lovecraft, too, seems to have found it so: “In the Vault,” a 1925 story, is the last one in this direct mode. Most sufferers in Lovecraft after 1925 (as well as a goodly number before that date, of course) commit only the sin of Faust, that of seeking knowledge beyond their power, and such Faustian dreams often have a sort of doomed nobility to them (Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness). We can, however, read “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) as a kind of last gasp of the “sinner narrative,” a sort of Rosetta stone linking it to the more orthodox Lovecraftian message of inevitable cosmic doom.
The Temple
[Summer/fall 1920?]
A fine little tale, and another example of the Lovecraftian “Otherworld/Underworld” motif. This motif recurs from “Dagon” through (among others) “White Ship,” “Celephaïs,” “Festival” and Dream-Quest through the Johansen narrative in “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. In it, a dreaming, hallucinating, mad, or otherwise unreliable narrator travels across (or, often, explicitly under) the ocean to the Other/Underworld, usually through a stretch of phosphorescence or other witch-light, usually with fatal or near-fatal consequences.
Likewise, the cursed figurine is another bead on the string of Lovecraft’s “cursed sculpture” topoi: the idols of Bokrug and Cthulhu from “Sarnath” and “Call,” the amulet in “The Hound,” the tiara in “Innsmouth,” and finally the Shining Trapezohedron that summons “The Haunter of the Dark.” All open the holder or viewer to the Outside, usually with unfortunate consequences. (The bust in “Hypnos” is kind of the reverse—like the wax mask in “Whisperer” it serves to confirm an encounter as definitively one with the Outside.) The positive version, the “magic artifact,” happens almost never in Lovecraft, outside the titular “Silver Key,” although that may be prefigured by the key in “The Tomb.”
The “cursed artifact” moves from sculpture through bas-relief (in “Nameless City” and At the Mountains of Madness), two-dimensional image (the titular “Picture in the House,” both paintings and photograph in “Pickman’s Model,” the portrait in Charles Dexter Ward), through lines of text (the Necronomicon, Pnakotic Manuscripts, et al. down to the drifts of tomes in “Haunter”), to a mere geometrical figure (“Dreams in the Witch House”). Or the sculpture can move outward, to architecture that opens the way Outside, as do Exham Priory in “Rats in the Walls” and the titular structures in “The Shunned House” and “The Strange High House in the Mist,” as well as the various necropoleis from the Nameless City to R’lyeh to Kadath to Pnakotus. The third direction—from art to science—leads our “cursed artifact” toward, say, the core-sampling drills in At the Mountains of Madness or better still, the resonator in “From Beyond,” which literally opens the way to the Outside for its unfortunate possessor.
An early Lovecraftian attempt at character study, too; marred for some by excessive jingoism, but you can’t say that Lieutenant-Commander Karl Heinrich’s voice doesn’t stand out amid Lovecraft’s other narrators.
But the real question is this—this story was written in 1920. Is it the first literary “haunted submarine” tale? If not, it’s darned close to it. People often think of Lovecraft as a quaint, period-piece, pulp writer, but at the time he was writing, he was writing some cutting-edge techno-horror.
Celephaïs
[early November 1920]
I confess that I find most of HPL’s ‘Dunsanian’ works second-rate, except for “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” which latter is almost perfect pastiche.
But in service to our project, I re-read “Celephaïs” and found that it makes a whole lot more sense, or is at least a whole lot more fun, if you treat Ooth-Nargai, et al., as Faërie. Then, it’s the fairly creepy (not least because quasi-sympathetic) story of a man seduced by the Other Side, not a mawkish exercise in artistic self-pity and whining. Indeed, read thusly, it merits comparison with Machen’s “The White People,” which is not something I would have thought remotely plausible before now. Of course, even read as a faerie story, “Celephaïs” isn’t nearly as strong as “The White People.” But it can be defensibly considered to be playing in the same ballpark, or at least in the same league.
That said, I think HPL intended it to be artistic criticism as much as anything, and it fails at that resoundingly, not least because the story doesn’t actually obey its own dictates, striving far too clumsily for effect rather than acheiving effortless transmission of antique beauty. But again, it was a very early, very amateurish effort.