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1. An Amateur
I think that, like Jorge Luis Borges, H.P. Lovecraft was an antiquarian and dreamer above all else. The old stories of his native surroundings and the old books read as a child were not separated from his fiction but fused with it. He seemed to derive considerable pleasure and consolation from the imagining and re-enactment of all his interests. His rambles into the ancient towns of New England and the oldest towns of the South were given a kind of negatively imaged remembrance and tribute in “The Colour out of Space” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” And so on through his stories, his love of classicism, classical mythology, science, dreams and history are remembered in the company of even the most horrible imagery.
This unstinting expression of so many other personal interests in the separate but related activity of storytelling reflects, perhaps as much as anything else, his unapologetic status as an amateur—as someone who wrote for the love of his vocation rather than with a special tolerance or concerted will to be guided by professionalism or money-making.
But even amateurs have to eat. So it is not surprising that he attempted to make some separate use of his talent in ghost-writing or revising the stories of others. The concessions he made were relatively small. He was not willing to entirely remake himself to obtain a commission, and the ghost-written stories are not so different from those written at his own inward prompting as to cause confusion about who wrote them.
So Lovecraft tried to make a living in the ways he thought best suited to him but he lived by his ideals, his memories and his dreams. In fact, much in the description of his horrors verges on intellectual biography. The art of the Great Old Ones is said by the narrator of “At the Mountains of Madness” to have been infused by history, not unlike Lovecraft’s own history-laden tales. Great Cthulhu is described as a dreamer—the ultimate dreamer, perhaps, since his sleep limits or outlasts the epoch of man’s existence and since his dreams are made the dreams of others, infecting the sleep of the most sensitive human dreamers during the periods of Cthulhu’s nearest approach to wakefulness. And the half-amphibian inhabitants of Innsmouth are connected with the most elaborate and impressive art. The monsters of his stories have a kinship with their creator and his tastes are in great measure their own.
2. War in Heaven
If it seems strange that Lovecraft’s greatest affinities should be expressed through the images of his stories’ terrors, it is no less paradoxical than the nature of the Mythos itself. August Derleth interpreted these stories as a kind of war in Heaven between good and evil gods, and this interpretation is generally derided as the false imposition of Derleth’s religious belief on Lovecraft’s own atheism.
It is certainly true that Lovecraft was an atheist. Nor did he believe in any absolute moral good*, although he believed that it was possible to pursue a kind of arbitrated good through the benevolent guidance and common agreement of the leaders of society. He called himself an indifferentist, because the universe as he conceived it was utterly indifferent to the condition or existence of man—that life was an inconsequential pandemonium, except for physical laws and the intellectual order imposed upon it by enlightened people.
But it is not a denial or ignorance of Lovecraft’s beliefs merely to remember that he did indeed read the old tales of the Roman and Greek gods; that those stories, however shaded in ambiguity or reversal, did partake of perceived goods and evils; that the mortals who wandered into the abodes of the monsters or trod the threshold of the netherworld wondered and trembled in their encounters much as did Lovecraft’s own, more bookish protagonists. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how Lovecraft might have arrived at the backgrounds and descriptions characteristic of his Mythos stories without reference to the very kinds of scenarios that Derleth wrongly imposed on them.
The connection, then, between the Mythos and a war of good and evil gods over the doings of mortals is not theological or even philosophical but aesthetic. It is the form that is similar and that draws legitimate comparison; it requires no contradiction or even assertion about Lovecraft’s beliefs. I have nothing at hand to prove what I am about to suggest (though such a proof may be well-known to others), but would it surprise any reader of this essay to learn that Lovecraft’s long-slumbering Cthulhu, believed by his followers to be destined to return, is modelled in this respect on the Christian account of the Christ?** Lovecraft investigated a variety of religions—a variety of mythologies—and so far as his investigation of them, like his investigation of architecture, local history and science, was deliberate, then we might well think it formative of the imagery of his stories.
3. The Power of the Past
Among the ideas reiterated in Lovecraft’s stories is the power of the past. This power presents an equivocal face—is it mad like primal Azathoth, orderly and intellectual like the Great Old Ones or merely bestial like the ape-things by which the Great Old Ones were entertained and from which humanity arose?
The past is certainly a vector of revelations. To go backward in time is to see what otherwise can only be guessed. It is to travel to another world, but one more easily imagined than a planet newly discovered through a telescope since we have archeological and geological records from which to form plausible conjectures. And unlike the worlds of other galaxies, the past holds out the promise of the recovery of things lost. We may hope more definitively from palpable relics than from suppositions about properties never seen, however reasonable our suppositions about them.
Even so, the past is unknown. With evidence and authorities, it remains unknown. The 19th century raised archeology to a science and its speculations to a fever pitch. But many of its speculations were disproven, as Lovecraft no doubt knew, and although the historians and archeologists of his time may have speculated more prudently than their forebears, they still did not do so without a generous capacity for error. Those things alone that might be classed as inevitable unknowns—the wealth of unfossilized human acts, the unfalsifiable acts of natural law—leave the living with so much range for mystery that we may think that almost anything could be imagined of the past, as one of Lovecraft’s narrator’s thought of the mountains of madness.
4. The Use of Realism and the Inevitability of Mystery
From Lovecraft’s earlier stories of the realms of dreaming to the intermediate stories of half-dreamt or might-have-dreamt episodes such as “Erich Zann,” there is a shift not so much in purpose as in means from the literalization of dream-fantasies to dreams or dreamlike images sublimated in the evidently real and commonplace. The voice of skepticism is heard more often in his tales to give veracity, as though by an internal peer-review, to the wonders that ensue. There are times when Lovecraft seemed to take a genuine delight in dwelling on mundane and everyday details precisely for the purpose of crediting the incredible.
Then again, he was although an amateur a creature of his time. One can resist but not be invulnerable to the character of an age. And just as Borges absorbed the growing tendencies toward what came to be called magical realism and postmodernism without shedding his essentially classical and antiquarian impulses, Lovecraft also realized in his work the timely love of realism and materialism.
How far Lovecraft was a materialist in affinity rather than conviction may be arguable. There is nothing precisely materialistic about dreams, although one may dwell on them without believing that they have logic, purpose or consequence. But it is more difficult to deny that some sense of the immaterial and of mystery is useful, if not necessary, to the sort of literary work that Lovecraft pursued.
Through all the rationalist objections, through the painstaking explanations of the arrival and affairs of otherworldly beings in our world, through even the scientific investigation of the meteor that caused so much trouble in “Colour out of Space,” there is mystery, for which Lovecraft was compelled to keep his respect. The unknown could be removed to a distance, shaded into the background, surrounded in its foremost manifestations by banalities and practical details. But it must somewhere confess itself as mystery or else undo the intention of the author.
So I think that Lovecraft never abandoned the dreaming lands so thoroughly described in his early tales. But seeing as they could not be brought so near to the present and waking world and still be fully preserved in their effects—or else finding that he had not yet struck on the method to make their description as effective as he intended—he carried them forward in masks and shadows into more familiar scenes, let them live in distantly conceived and ambiguously depicted horrors. They slept a great sleep under the surface of the world, not dead but dreaming, and remained preserved in secret places that mere earthbound investigators could discover.
5. That is Not Dead
Lovecraft’s reputation also slept while he was alive. But something in its quality or character has drawn his work inexorably to the attention of the world. Something in his sensibility or preoccupations has chimed in with those of this generation and caused it to be more familiar, more congenial than it was to his own.
However it may be, he has given a wealth of enjoyment to those who have read his stories purely for their literary merit as well as to those who have known them primarily through the strength of imagery and basic narrative thrust retained in the pastiches.
I am approaching the twentieth year since I discovered Lovecraft’s work and have not yet exhausted my interest in it. He took great care to invest his stories with a wide variety of ordered elements, tried them in a wide range of treatments and tones, suffered the destruction that is necessary to stylistic adaptation and—in short—piped over a wide range in the hope of charming the fellow travelers of this world into the dreaming lands of his own. And he wrote to remember what anyone may find himself in danger of losing: the language and symbols, the essence and images of the things that make life worth living.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. . . . Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
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| Notes |
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| * |
I mean, an objective morality—one that could not be voted on, negotiated or vetoed because of the power that upheld it. What could such a power be but what we call God? |
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| ** |
It could be modelled on what is written of the twelfth Imam or on one or several of numerous other figures. But I suppose that it was drawn from Christianity because that is the religion that Lovecraft should have known best. |
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