Tour de Lovecraft- The Tales

by Kenneth Hite

  This is much, much more than the reflexive racism we often find in Lovecraft—the cat’s name in “Rats in the Walls,” for instance, or even the “nautical-looking Negro” in “Call of Cthulhu”—or in most any popular writer of the period (or in comic books and movies, among other pop-culture art forms, well into the 1960s and 1970s).

  No, in “Red Hook” the racism is fully intentional, just like the romance is in “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s the entire theme of the story. The question becomes, what do we do about it? Certainly it’s possible for an individual reader to be more repulsed than horrified by “Red Hook,” just as it’s possible for an individual reader to find nothing appealing about Juliet, but I think it’s less-than-honest criticism to pretend that such is the inevitable effect of the story.

  Because that sheer drive, to indict his neighbors for the crime of inspiring his hatred, makes the story just compelling reading, in much the same way that Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels are. This is what happens when Lovecraft joins his eye for setting to a setting he simply despises; the power is unmistakable, even if (especially because, I’d say) the matter is unpleasant. Not for this story the arch rodomontades of “Cool Air,” or the distant antiquarianism of “He.” This is a story about New York, in the raw, if not cut remotely on our bias.

  ****

  Are we entitled to dismiss horror on topics, and from perspectives, that we find objectionable? Obviously, we’re entitled to read or not read whatever we wish. But it seems a little pecksniffy to dismiss some topics as not merely “not my cup of tea,” but to attempt to read them out of the genre as essentially “too unpleasant for horror.” In what sense, then, are we really interested in horror, if not in the transgressive power of it? I’m no more delighted with Lovecraft’s “Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth” and the rest of that ugliness than I imagine most of you good people are, but it seems to me that if we consider real, urgent horror—the shock of cold water, the punch in the stomach, the sheer gut-wrench—to be a desideratum, we are cutting ourselves off if we say “Please, only give me horror that transgresses sexual boundaries I’m more titillated by than scared of” or “Please, only give me horror that transgresses categories set down by medieval Catholics I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t give two hoots for if I had.” Don’t mistake my meaning: Caitlin Kiernan and Russell Kirk have produced some great, great horror tales, and their horrors are no less real for being less than universally shared, or even for appealing primarily to the conscience or the intellect, as they so often do. But it’s also important for horror to, well, horrify, from the gut, and I think it’s best when it such horror horrifies honestly, and as fully as possible.

  This is urban horror. Swallow it, or move back to Providence.

  ****

  That said, although I’m normally the one wishing for a better version of Lovecraft’s more promising early tales, I’m (perhaps hypocritically, by my own indictment) just as glad that he never reworked this particular vein of urban horror into a true masterpiece.

  He

  [August 10-11, 1925]

  “He” is another example of Lovecraft’s preferring, even privileging, incident over action in weird fiction. It’s very like “Nyarlathotep,” albeit with a merely personal apocalypse at the coda of the general one revealed in the windows. There are also structural and topical similarities to “Erich Zann,” including the sorcerous window, the musical theme (it’s the hellish music of the future that drives our narrator mad), and the insistence on silence during the revelation.

  ****

  “He” is firmly, inextricably rooted in New York history and topography—like many other great ghost stories, it’s about a place more than it is anything else. Hence, this is one of those stories I had to re-read after leaving Oklahoma City in order to fully appreciate it. For me, Chicago is Lovecraft’s New York and Lovecraft’s Providence in one. This passage, in particular, is exactly how Chicago hit me when I first crossed the Michigan Avenue bridge:

  I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities.

  For me, then, “He” is a profoundly true story. However, I differ from Lovecraft’s narrator, or perhaps Chicago differs from New York:

  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 as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, 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.

  One of the many wonderful, terrifying things about Chicago is the degree to which Chicago is, indeed, a sentient perpetuation of its past.

  Not that Chicago doesn’t have its “imperfectly embalmed” bits, too.

  ****

  The description of Lovecraftian magic in this tale is one of the best:

  To—my ancestor…there appeared to reside some very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one’s self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature herself.

  It is my profound hope that between “He” and “Dreams in the Witch House” it will be possible to determine just what Lovecraftian sorcery is good for besides summoning things that will eat you.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  ****

  Joshi, at least, thinks there might be a shoggoth foreshadowed there at the end: “a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred with shining, malevolent eyes,” although the story makes it fairly clear that it is the vengeance-spirit (the ghastly soul-symbol?) of the “half-breed red Indians” coming after the squire. (But see Robert Waugh and China Miéville for differing interpretations of the shoggoth as Semitic horde or urban lumpenproletariat.) This is not one of those stories that particularly refutes Lovecraft’s racism, although he interestingly borrows from Poe by describing the squire as “too white.”

  ****

  As I’ve mentioned in my collection of Mythos miscellanea, Dubious Shards, I basically agree with Houellebecq’s assessment of “He” as Lovecraft’s autobiographical rejection letter to New York City. This is probably where I should grudgingly admit that H.P. Lovecraft would likely have made himself miserable in Chicago, if he’d taken the offer to become editor of Weird Tales in March of 1924. He certainly would have hated the weather, and sad to say, he might well have been blind to the glories of Chicago architecture. But still…Competent editing for Weird Tales! Lovecraft in Chicago! If only …

  In the Vault

  [September 18, 1925]

  This is Lovecraft’s last truly bad story, and it’s one of his worst. Even Lovecraft’s language, which normally has its delights even in the most tiresome moments, is seemingly purposely flat and bald while still wrapped around an interminable series of narrative switchbacks. The setting is nowhere, and there aren’t even any of those weird Lovecraftian bits that make you wish he’d written a different story that day. Nope, this is a day you wish he’d written a long, whiny letter to his aunts about those bastard Syrians next door, or maybe just spent the day inventing new spellings for “foetor” or patronizingly explaining Nietzsche to Frank Belknap Long.

  Do me a favor: You get a time machine, you go back to September 18, 1925, you knock on Lovecraft’s door and say “Hey, they’re giving away free ice cream at this place on Sixth and Ninety-Third to anyone who ca
n name all of Hawthorne’s novels!” Then you can go off and kill Hitler or whatever, satisfied with a job well done.

  Seriously, Al Feldstein would have been embarrassed to write something this pointless on deadline day for Tales From the Crypt in 1953. “Too obvious,” he’d say. “Just run a house ad or something.” And he’d be right.

  Cool Air

  [February 1926]

  An innocuous piece of urban horror:

  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…

  “Cool Air” is good, but not great, a story from the Machen-Stevenson “Baghdad-on-the-Thames” (or in this case, “-Hudson”) tradition. I disagree with Joshi and Cannon, who rank it above Lovecraft’s other urban-horror tale, “The Horror at Red Hook.” I liked it better, as the man says, when it was called “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” or “The Novel of the White Powder.”

  ****

  I’m fairly sure that Lovecraft was having his little joke when he describes Dr. Muñoz as “obviously of superior blood,” given what we later find out about the good doctor’s blood. This brings up the possibility that he contrasts Dr. Muñoz intentionally with, and thus purposely denigrates, the other lodgers, “mostly Spaniard a little above the coarsest and crudest grade.” The same can be said of the contrast between Muñoz’ cultured Lovecraftian tones with the stereotyped diction of the landlady, Mrs. Herrero. I’m not sure if it makes it better, or worse, that HPL is consciously using racial or ethnic stereotypes to improve his fiction, and that it works.

  ****

  Note that we have entered the realm of the dead—not just the cold, but the “room smelled like a vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings.” Note that workmen and laborers (what HPL would no doubt consider “the lower orders”) instinctively fear the doctor, just as animals do a vampire or werewolf. In the absence of animal life, Lovecraft (and other writers of urban fantasy or horror) need some sort of spoor denoting a disturbance of the natural order.

  Because Muñoz is not merely a scientist, but a magus. Just as alchemists used highly technical equipment in magical pursuits, so the doctor uses not just “an absorption system of ammonia cooling” and “a scientific enhancement of will and consciousness” (mesmerism? psychic powers?) but “exotic spices and Egyptian incense,” and “the incantations of the mediaevalists.” We have another note about how Lovecraftian magic functions:

  [H]e believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which organic pulsations had fled.

  We’re more than halfway to the Essential Saltes already.

  ****

  And just what awesome story hooks lie under this section?

  He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he carefully sealed and filled with injunctions that I transmit them after his death to certain persons whom he named—for the most part lettered East Indians, but including a once celebrated French physician now generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable things had been whispered.

  And this is just an average Lovecraft story.

  The Call of Cthulhu

  [plotted August 12-13, 1925; written August 1926]

  The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

  — Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful

  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

  — H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature

  The story “The Call of Cthulhu” is essentially about the collision between these two first lines, these two truths, from its own immortal first line about the merciful failure of human comprehension to almost the last: “A time will come—but I must and cannot think!” Curiosity—the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge”—causes terror. The fear of the unknown drives us to investigate it, revealing that the truth is even worse. In Lovecraft’s epistemology, just like his mythology, we begin and end with fear and loathing.

  Lovecraft wrote from the Gothic tradition, but for the twentieth century; the threat to order isn’t villainous, swarthy Catholics (although …) but the actual circumstances of reality. Lovecraft has taken all the core Gothic tropes—the alien (but powerful) Outsider, the threat of miscegenation, the inevitably corrupt ancient wisdom, the symptomatic disorder of Nature, the “haunted castle” or ruin, even the insipid hero, and—often literally—enlarged upon them. Made them vaster. And brought them out of the “shudder tale” and into the world of science, and hence into science fiction. For Lovecraft, the Gothic ruin is the universe, and vice versa. Reality—Rutherford’s primordial rocks and Shapley’s unimaginably vast (and hence ancient) cosmos—is itself the dead, “Gothic” survival intruding on our transient joys. Discovering that, seeing the huge ruins in which we dwell (and beneath which we will decay and become as nothing) is the climax, the anagnorisis, the “big reveal.” As Stefan Dziemianowicz puts it, “The unique effect he reaches for here is not so much fright, but a sort of intellectual shock.” But where in a standard Gothic, we ease the tension, punish the villain, and marry the couple off, Lovecraft ends the action with the villains uncompromisingly in charge—“forget about it, Jake, it’s R’lyeh.”

  In short, Lovecraft is working the Burkean Sublime for all he’s worth. Note that this could be either because Burke is right about the Sublime, or because Lovecraft was a Burkean. Honesty compels me to admit that as far as I can determine, Lovecraft doesn’t seem to have owned a copy of Burke, and he doesn’t mention his aesthetics in the Selected Letters or Supernatural Horror, but I refuse to believe that the conservative horrorist HPL never read Burke’s Enquiry.

  Burke says, essentially, that the Sublime is different from the Beautiful, arising in not love and delight but in fear (especially the fear of death): “Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the Sublime.” The Sublime manifests in (or is materially caused by) such aspects or concepts as vastness, infinity, obscurity, and power. Burke notes qualities such as unfinishedness (or ruination), magnitude, difficulty or impossibility, and even “sad and fuscous colours” as symptomatic of the Sublime. Sound familiar yet?

  Another quote from Burke’s Enquiry to seal the deal:

  The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature…is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.

  This Astonishment is one of the effects, of course, of seeing Cthulhu, whether in dreams or (as the unfortunate Johansen did) awake. Even language becomes deranged—Lovecraft repeatedly resorts to seemingly weak similes and metaphors to describe Cthulhu or R’lyeh. (“A mountain walked or stumbled.”) This is not because Lovecraft is a weak writer, but because describing Cthulhu is supposed to be sheerly impossible—the mind keeps asymptotically shooting off before it can fully connect. (This is also the role played by all that “non-Euclidean geometry”—R’lyeh is simultaneously unfinished and ruined, ever-changing and extra-dimensional, too Sublime for comprehension within Reason.) Robert M. Price is fond of calling the Lovecraft Mythos an “anti-mythology”—this, then, is anti-scripture. It’s scripture that does not reveal the Divine, but cloak it. It even ends with the opposite of an evangelist Call—Thurston urges his heirs to destroy the manuscript rather than promulgate it. Just as the divine Word of infinite meaning, the LOGOS, begins Creation, the anti-LOGOS of infinite un-meaning, “Cthulhu fhtagn,” ends it. But creepily, “Cthulhu fhtagn” also begins each testament of the tale, sparking the Creation (of the sculpture) in Wilcox’ dream, r
evealing itself as Prophecy in the cries of the Louisiana bayou cultists inspiring Legrasse to track their theology down, and (inferentially) announcing itself in the dreams of the “Kanakas and half-castes” (the Magi?) that the Alert accidentally intercepts in the South Pacific on their way to the Nativity/Incarnation.

  And yes, Burke notes that the Divine is a lot more Sublime, at least as we experience it, than it is Beautiful.

  ****

  I haven’t even touched on the brilliantly complex, almost archaeological structure of the story, how it formally recapitulates its own telling by piecing together seemingly unrelated narratives, with Thurston almost vanishing into transparency as a reader-surrogate.

  ****

  Or mentioned the weird black-winged things in the Louisiana swamp that “Old Castro” claims did all the actual killing for the Cult.

  ****

  But instead I’ll close with another observation lifted from Stefan Dziemianowicz. The three sub-narrators in the tale recapitulate previous Lovecraftian protagonists. The sculptor Wilcox is a “neurotic and excited” Poe-narrator as found in “The Hound,” “Hypnos,” and so forth. Inspector Legrasse is a tough-minded adventurer in the mold of Harley Warren, Harry Houdini, Detective Malone, the junior Whipple from “The Shunned House,” and the quester “for strange horrors in literature and life” from “The Lurking Fear.” Finally, the sailor Johansen is a blend of the narrators of “Dagon” and “The Temple” (sailors who come to misadventure) with the narrator of “The Nameless City” (someone who explores a ruin in the distant waste). As Dziemianowicz puts it: