H. P. Lovecraft Page 5

  So, Lovecraft’s comportment toward Freud can actually be considered rather mild—he only insulted him two or three times in the course of all his correspondence—but he felt there was only so much to be said, and that the psychoanalytic phenomenon would crumble on its own. Nonetheless, he found time to summarize the fundamentals of Freudian theory in two words: “puerile symbolism.” Hundreds of pages may be written on the subject without substantially improving upon this analysis.

  Lovecraft didn’t really have a novelist’s attitude. Most novelists consider it their duty to present an exhaustive picture of life; their mission is to cast it in a different light, but where the facts themselves are concerned, they cannot exercise absolute choice. Sex, money, religion, technology, ideology, the distribution of wealth… a good novelist must not ignore any of these. And everything must take place inside a more or less coherent rendition of the world. Such a task is, of course, humanly impossible, and the outcome is almost always disappointing. Tough line of work!

  Obscurely and unpleasantly, there is also the fact that a novelist tackling the subject of life in general will necessarily discover himself to be more or less compromised by it. This was not a problem Lovecraft experienced. One might well object that the very realities, “animal biology,” that so bored him play an integral part in human existence, and that they in fact let the species survive. But he could not have cared less about the survival of the species. “Why worry so much about the future of a doomed world?” was Oppenheimer’s reply to a journalist asking him about the long-term consequences of technological progress.

  Uninterested as he was in creating a coherent or acceptable picture of the world, Lovecraft had no reason to make any concessions to life, to phantoms, or to netherworlds. Nor to anyone at all. He deliberately chose to ignore what he considered uninteresting or artistically inferior. And this very limitation gives him power and distinction.

  This bias toward creative limitation, to reiterate, had nothing to do with any sort of traffic in ideology. When Lovecraft expressed his scorn for “Victorian fictions,” for edifying novels that attributed false or pompous motivations to human actions, he was being perfectly sincere. Nor would Sade have found any greater favor in his eyes. His work too is a kind of traffic in ideology. An attempt to make reality fit a prefabricated schema. Nonsense! Lovecraft does not try to repaint the elements of reality that displease him; he resolutely ignores them.

  He justified his position quickly in a letter: “In art there is no use in heeding the chaos of the universe; for so complete is this chaos, that no piece writ in words cou’d even so much as hint at it. I can conceive of no true image of the pattern of life and cosmic force, unless it be a jumble of mean dots arrang’d in directionless spirals.”

  But Lovecraft’s point of view cannot be fully understood if the self-imposed limitation is simply seen as a philosophical bias, without the understanding that it is also a technical imperative. In fact, there are forms of human motivation that do not belong in his work; one of the first choices architects make is what materials to use.

  Then You Will See a Magnificent Cathedral

  A traditional novel may be usefully compared to an old air chamber deflating after being placed in an ocean. A generalized and rather weak flow of air, like a trickle of pus, ends in arbitrary and indistinct nothingness.

  Lovecraft, by contrast, places his hand forcefully on certain parts of the air chamber (sex, money…) from which he wishes to see nothing escape. This is a technique of constriction. The result, in the areas he chooses, is a powerful gush, an extraordinary efflorescence of images.

  When first reading Lovecraft’s stories, the architectural descriptions in “The Shadow Out of Time” and in “At the Mountains of Madness” make a profound impression. Here more so than elsewhere, we find ourselves before a new world. Fear itself disappears. All human sentiments disappear save fascination, never before so purely isolated.

  Nonetheless, in the foundations of the gigantic citadels conjured by HPL lie hidden nightmare beings. We know this, but tend to forget it, not unlike his heroes who walk toward their catastrophic destiny as if in a dream, carried forth by aesthetic exaltation alone.

  Reading these descriptions is at first stimulating, but then discourages any attempt at visual adaptation (pictorial or cinematographic). Images graze the consciousness but none appear sufficiently sublime, sufficiently fantastic; none come close to the pinnacle of dreams. As for actual architectural adaptations, none have as yet been undertaken.

  It would not be rash to imagine a young man emerging enthusiastically from a reading of Lovecraft’s tales and deciding to pursue a study of architecture. Failure and disappointment would lie in wait. The insipid and dull functionality of modern architecture, its zeal to use simple, meager forms and cold, haphazard materials, are too distinctive to be a product of chance. And no one, at least not for generations to come, will rebuild the faerie lace of the palace of Irem.

  One discovers architecture progressively and from a variety of angles; one moves within it. This is an element that can never be reproduced in a painting nor even in a film; it is an element Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s stories successfully reproduced in somewhat stupefying fashion.

  An architect by nature, Lovecraft was not much of a painter. His colors are not really colors; rather, they are moods, or to be exact, lighting, whose only function is to offset the architecture he describes. He has a particular predilection for the pallid light of a gibbous, waning moon, but he is also partial to the bloody explosion of a crimson, romantic sunset or the limpid crystalline of inaccessible azures.

  The demented Cyclopean structures envisioned by HPL shock the spirit violently and definitively, more so even than (and this is paradoxical) the magnificent architectural drawings of Piranesi or Monsu Desiderio. We feel we have already visited these gigantic cities in our dreams. In fact, Lovecraft is only transcribing his own dreams as faithfully as he can. Later on, when looking at a particularly grand architectural monument, we find ourselves thinking, “this is rather Lovecraftian.”

  The first of the reasons for the writer’s success becomes apparent immediately upon perusing his correspondence. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was amongst those few men who experience a violent trancelike state when they look at beautiful architecture. His descriptions of sunrise on the venerable steeples of Providence or the crazy alleys of Marblehead are hyperbolic. Adjectives and exclamations accumulate; he recalls incantatory fragments, as his chest swells with enthusiasm, and images pile, one upon another in his mind; he plunges into a true delirium of ecstasy.

  Describing his first impressions of New York to his aunt, he claims he almost fainted with “aesthetic exaltation.”

  Similarly, when he first looked upon the ridged rooftops of Salem, he saw looming processions of puritans in black robes, with stern faces and strange conical with stern faces and strange conical hats, dragging a howling old woman to the pyre.

  Throughout his life Lovecraft dreamed of traveling to Europe; it was something he was never able to do. And yet, if there was one man in America born to appreciate the architectural treasures of the Old World, it was him. When he wrote “faint[ing] with aesthetic exaltation,” he was not exaggerating. And it was in all seriousness that he told Kleiner that a man is like a coral insect—that his only destiny is to “build vast beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.”

  For want of money, Lovecraft never left America—he barely left New England. But, given the intensity of his reactions upon first seeing Kingsport or Marblehead, one can only wonder what he would have felt had he been transported to Salamanca or to Notre-Dame of Chartres.

  For, like the great gothic or baroque cathedrals, the dream architecture he describes is a total architecture. In it, the heroic harmony of planes and volumes can be experienced viscerally; but in contrast to the gigantic, smooth, bare stone surfaces, are the bell towers, the minarets, the bridges overhanging chasms wrought with ornat
e exuberance. Bas-reliefs, haut-reliefs and frescos decorate the titanic vaults that lead from one inclined plane to another inclined plane deep in the earth’s entrails. Many delineate the grandeur and decadence of an entire race; others that are simpler and more geometric seem to suggest disquieting mystical notions.

  H. P. Lovecraft’s architecture, like that of great cathedrals, like that of Hindu temples, is much more than a three-dimensional mathematical puzzle. It is entirely imbued with an essential dramaturgy that gives meaning to the edifice, that dramatizes the smallest spaces, that uses the conjoint resources of the various plastic arts, that annexes the magic play of light to its own ends. It is living architecture because at its foundation lies a living and emotional concept of the world. In other words, it is sacred architecture.

  And Your Senses, Vectors of Unutterable Derangement

  “The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable…”

  The world stinks. The stench of cadavers and of fish blends together. A sense of failure, a hideous degeneration. The world stinks. There are no ghosts under the tumescent moon; there are only bloated cadavers, swollen and black, about to explode in pestilential vomiting.

  As for the sense of touch. To touch other beings, other living entities, is an impious, repugnant experience. Their skin bloated with blisters that ooze putrid pus. Their sucking tentacles, their clutching and chewing appendages, all constitute a constant menace. Beings and their hideous corporeal vigor. A simmering, stinking Nemesis of semi-aborted chimeras, amorphous and nauseating: a sacrilege.

  Sight at times delivers terror, but can also transport us before wondrous faeric architecture. But, alas, we do have five senses. And the others converge to prove that the universe is something decidedly disgusting.

  * * *

  It has often been noted that Lovecraft’s characters, who, especially in the “great texts,” are almost indistinguishable from one another, are merely so many projections of Lovecraft himself. Indeed—only so long as we confine the word “projection” to its simplest meaning. They are projections of the true personality of Lovecraft in much the same way that a plane surface can be the orthogonal projection of a volume. True, the general form is distinct. Usually students or professors at a New England university (preferably, Miskatonic University) who specialize in anthropology or folklore, or sometimes in political economy or in non-Euclidean geometry; discreet and reserved by nature, with long emaciated faces and who by profession and temperament lean more toward the satisfactions of the mind. This is a sort of outline, a robotic-portrait—and for the most part it is all we will ever know.

  In the beginning, Lovecraft did not choose to portray interchangeable flat characters. In the stories of his youth, he seems to have made an effort each time to depict a different narrator with a social milieu, a personal story, and even a psychological profile. At times, this narrator was a poet or a man animated by poetic sentiment; this vein actually produced HPL’s most indisputable flops.

  Only progressively did he come to see the futility of all psychological differentiation. His characters no longer required it; all they needed was functional sensory equipment. Their sole function, in fact, would be to perceive.

  It might even be said that the deliberate banality of his characters contributes to reinforcing the compelling nature of Lovecraft’s universe. A more obtrusive psychological brushstroke would have only detracted from their testimony and diminished its transparency; we would have left the domain of material horror to enter that of psychological horror. And Lovecraft did not wish to describe psychoses, but repugnant realities.

  Nonetheless, his heroes succumb to the stylistic device so cherished by horror writers that consists of the claim that their story might simply be a nightmare, bred by an overly inflamed imagination, inspired by the reading of impious books. That’s fine; we don’t believe it for an instant.

  Assailed by abominable perceptions, Lovecraft’s characters function as silent, motionless, utterly powerless, paralyzed observers. They would like nothing more than to escape, or to plumb the deep torpor of a merciful faint. No such luck. They will remain glued in place, while around them the nightmare begins to unravel, while visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile perceptions accumulate, and are deployed in a hideous crescendo.

  Lovecraft’s literature gives precise and alarming meaning to the celebrated dictum, “a deliberate disordering of all the senses.” Few individuals will, for example, find the iodized smell of the sea to be repugnant and foul; few, save of course those who have read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; likewise, it’s hard to think of a batrachian with any degree of calm after reading HPL. All this makes an intensive reading of his work something of an ordeal.

  To transform perceptions of ordinary life into an infinite source of nightmares is the wild hope of every writer of weird fiction. Lovecraft succeeds magnificently by injecting all his descriptions with a unique dash of degenerate drooling. When we set aside his stories, we may leave behind the half-caste, semi-amorphous cretinous beings that populate them, the humanoids with their flopping, loping gait, their scaly, rough skin, flat, dilated nostrils and stertorous breathing; sooner or later they shall reenter our lives.

  In Lovecraft’s universe, auditory perception merits a place all its own; HPL did not much care for music, and his tastes veered rather toward Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. But in his stories, he demonstrates a particularly fine-tuned ear; when a character sitting across from you places his hands on the table and emits a weak sucking noise, or when in another character’s laugh you discern the nuance of a cackle, or bizarre insect stridulation, you know you are inside a Lovecraftian story. The maniacal precision with which HPL organizes the soundtrack to his tales certainly plays an important part in the success of the most frightening of them. I don’t mean to allude only to “The Music of Erich Zann,” where, exceptionally, it is music alone that provokes cosmic horror; but to all the others where, by subtly alternating visual and auditory perceptions, by at times bringing them together, and then by a sudden, bizarre divergence, he brings us to a definite pitch of abject anxiety.

  Here, for example, is a description extracted from “Under the Pyramids,” a minor tale he ghostwrote for the magician Harry Houdini, that nonetheless contains some of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s most beautiful verbal extravagances:

  “… suddenly my attention was captured by the realization of something which must have been impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense was aware of it. From some still lower chasm in earth’s bowels were proceeding certain sounds measure and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth—a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies. The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then—and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again—I began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

  It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm. The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of earth’s inmost monstrosities… Padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling… and all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments. And then…”

  The passage is not a paroxysm. At this stage in the story nothing has really happened. These clicking, crawling, rumbling things will come closer still. You will, finally, see them. “Later, at night, at the hour when everything sleeps, you will likely hear the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.” Th
is shouldn’t surprise you. It was the plan all along.

  Will Map Out an Integral Delirium

  “Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in sac-like swellings of same colour which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices 2 inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp white tooth-like projections. Probable mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish-head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.

  At bottom of torso rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-grey pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions holds greenish five-pointed starfish-arrangement. Tough muscular arms 4 feet long and tapering from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle 8 inches long and 6 wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old… As found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudo-neck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.”

  The description of the “The Great Old Ones” from which this passage is extracted has remained a classic. If there is a tone one does not expect to find in the horror story, it’s that of a dissection report. Other than Lautréamont, who copied the pages of an encyclopedia of animal behavior, it is hard to identify anyone as a predecessor to Lovecraft. And the latter had most certainly never even heard of Maldoror. It would seem to be a discovery he made alone: that using science’s vocabulary can serve as an extraordinary stimulant to the poetic imagination. The precise, minutely detailed content, dense and theoretical, encyclopedic in its perspective, produces a hallucinatory and thrilling effect.