The Consolation of Decay

A Review of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

© Edward Moore 2015

patristics@gmail.com

Perhaps I am not the only reader of literature in this age of boilerplated textese writing who has grown tired of reading about persons. Contemporary literature abounds in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tragedy-surviving, disease-overcoming, marginalized, disenfranchised, and sometimes petrified (to the point of needing a ghost writer) authors who feel -- rightly or wrongly -- that their story needs to be told. At the level of the purely fictional we have a few bright lights: Donna Tartt, Michael Gruber, and the protean Thomas Ligotti are the three that immediately come to my rather selective and eclectic mind. These writers manage the rare feat of utilizing atmosphere as much as characters for the impact of their tales. They waste little time (for the most part) dwelling on the minor details of their characters' lives, demonstrating instead the manner in which actions that culminate in an almost fateful or -- shall I say it? -- predestined outcome resonate not only within the climate of a single character's life, but extend to all of humanity, even the cosmos. In Ligotti's case (and I am speaking of his tales of horror or dark fantasy) the actual character(s) in his tales very rarely gain our sympathy; instead, Ligotti's focus is on what Lovecraft has termed the "cosmic" element, that overwhelming violation of the natural order that renders the august person as insignificant as a grub being stung to death by a predatory wasp. Such pessimistic writing appeals, alas, to very few people these days. As humanity, instead of maturing, seems to remain in a perpetual state of pre-adolescence, tales that express a genuine philosophical pessimism, a bold atheistic gaze at the face of a blind cosmos that fascinates even as it devours, are a rare find in today's literary stockpile. Therefore, the recent publication of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (ed. Leslie S. Klinger 2014, with introduction by Alan Moore [New York: Liveright]) is a most welcome publication.

I must mention at the outset that I am irritated by references to Lovecraft as a "pulp" writer who somehow managed to gain "staying power" despite his numerous literary shortcomings. Complaints abound over his excessive use of adjectives, for example. But is this technique really "unliterary"? The overrated twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson, for example, summed up Lovecraft's achievement with these words: "Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of the many sad signs [sic] that almost nobody any more [sic] pays real attention to writing." Wilson, apparently, was among that group of "almost nobodys." Indeed, this syntactically challenged "dean of American critics" dismissed, with a shocking lack of prescience, the first volume of Tolkien's magisterial Lord of the Rings, preferring instead some now forgotten work by James Branch Cabell. When we recognize that English is a gloriously polyphonic, or perhaps polylogoic, language, capable of sustaining several moods and meanings in a single line or phrase, Lovecraft's love of the evocative adjective seems less a fault than a maximum utilization of the power of our most poetic language. Take, as a random example, this passage from Lovecraft's early tale, "The Hound," about two ghoulish connoisseurs of the morbid:

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes -- how I shudder to recall it! -- the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.

Not a single false note is struck here. The prose scans in places like poetry; certain phrases ("neurotic virtuosi"; "kaleidoscopic dances of death") lend a feverish, maniacal atmosphere that is not mere description but an actual state of claustrophobic obsession captured in words that the reader cannot escape. It is, indeed, all about atmosphere, as Lovecraft himself declared, in his essay "Some Notes on a Nonentity" (1933): "Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric -- confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot."

Very few writers are capable of holding their reader's attention when the tale is not focused on a central character, for whom we are meant to care, or somehow develop an interest or fascination. As a reader, I find it very difficult to care about a character with whom I am unable to identify, or at least empathize. I found myself identifying with Durtal in Là-Bas by Huysmans, a novel that is more about atmosphere and phenomena than persons. And a more recent work -- and of a very different type -- Michael Gruber's The Return had me empathizing with the main character, Richard Marder. This latter work, however, was expertly plotted, with well-developed characters, fine dialogue, vivid scene-painting, and genuine suspense (not the telegraphed suspense of "junk lit"). Yet as much as I enjoyed Gruber's novel, I will not return to it -- for the tale has been told and there is no more to tell. To Huysmans, on the other hand, I have returned time and again, for the atmosphere is such that I find a temporary home in its pages, with characters who represent ideas far less than actions. The novel (or story) of ideas finds few readers in our age, for voyeurism has replaced genuine human interest, as witnessed not only in the realm of entertainment ("reality" shows and the like) but also in our "culture" at large, from rampant recording of every minor detail of one's life through digital media, to NSA spying, to police surveillance cameras being installed -- with very little protest from the zombified public -- in towns across this never-very-great nation. For a sensitive few, this inescapable world demands more than just a philosophical critique, even if the critique comes from decent or fine writers. What is really needed is an authentic escape -- by which I mean a responsible escape -- from what should be viewed as an intolerable mode of existence.

Escape into a realm of fantasy, like Middle Earth, is an uplifting experience, promoting optimism and the core virtues of loyalty, honor, and friendship. But as much as we love Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and company, we know that they do not represent life in our age. Rather, they give us humanity (including hobbits, elves, dwarfs, all of whom are human types) not as we are, but as we ought to be. As much as I love Lord of the Rings, I am aware that as literature it is not authentic escape, for its origin (as Tolkien himself pointed out) is in the "fairy story," which inevitably contains allegorical elements, going back to Spenser's Faerie Queene and other mediaeval morality tales. In the work of Lovecraft, we get a heavy dark dose of cosmic reality. We are alone in this universe (at least for the time being, until we encounter life elsewhere), and unless we subscribe to the obsolete but unfortunately still thriving religio-superstition of our anachronistic age we have nothing to hope for, nor to fear, after death. The existential anguish produced by this realization either leads one to make the Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" or to simply accept life as "absurd"; and the only escape from anguish born of absurdity is to embrace the freedom of that situation. As Sartre put it, in Being and Nothingness: "In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself." Such anarchic solipsism is unsustainable, and we know that Sartre eventually found his own answer to the problem of an existentialist ethics by converting to Marxism. With better faith, I think, Lovecraft converted his view of the aimlessness of life and the random combustions of the cosmos to the realm of dreams, where amoralism coupled with a creativity in league with ontological chaos produced a dark literature that is not pessimistic but, to use Lovecraft's own term, "indifferentist."

Lovecraft was very clear about his lack of concern with morality and ethics. In the cosmos at large, he stated many times, human laws, emotions, desires have no significance; "good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have [no] existence at all" (letter to Farnsworth Wright, July 5, 1927). Many will likely consider this a disturbingly irresponsible stance; especially in our own time, and in this country, where mass incarceration, police brutality, erosion of privacy, the barbarism of capital punishment, theocratic politicians, and a continuous defecation on our Constitution and the natural environment -- to list just a few "ills" -- have all made it difficult to utter the word "democracy" without a cynical smirk. Yet that magic word art -- spoken at the right moment, when nerves are raw and minds are ravaged or else numbed by the blind perpetuation of those who think with and through glands and cloaca -- still has the power to remind us, however dimly, of the great light of intellect that has burned throughout ages darker than our own. All great art is simultaeously an escape from the self and into the self -- or rather, into those parts of the self that all-too-often remain in shadow. Lovecraft confronted his shadow self in dreams and waking reveries, and was able to sense the dark substrata of mundane existence. But it was not enough for him to merely sense a "crawling chaos" beneath the apparent solidity of human lives and institutions. The challenge was to create art out of this cacademoniac hupokeimenon. Far from being the "hack-writer" that the grammatically aggrieving Wilson claimed he was, Lovecraft had a very clear sense of his mission as an artist. In "The Defense Reopens" (1921) he wrote:

It is not [the artist's] business to fashion a pretty trifle to please the children, to point a useful moral, to concoct superficial 'uplift' stuff ... or to rehash insolvable human problems didactically. He is the painter of moods and mind-pictures -- a capturer and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies -- a voyager into those unheard of lands which are glimpsed through the veil of actuality but rarely, and only by the most sensitive.

Lovecraft's sensitivity to landscape and architecture is well-known. As Klinger points out in his forward to The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, in "The Festival" "the town of Kingsport becomes an even more important 'character' then the nameless narrator" (xlvii). Written in 1925, this tale still has the cadences of some of the earlier prose poems, like "Ex Oblivione" or "Celephaïs" and opens with a lush, almost sublime atmospheric evocation:

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

Note here the use of the verb "writhed" in reference to the willow trees, already lending ominous sentience to an otherwise commonplace natures scene. Also, the road "soared" up to where Aldebaran (or Alpha Tauri, as the note helpfully explains) twinkles among the trees. Lovecraft has subtly blurred the distinction between land and sky, placing us, as it were, directly in a dreamlike state. This is exquisite writing, and compares favorably with the disorienting perspectival shifts and non sequiturs one encounters in Kafka, for example (I am thinking especially of his barely readable The Castle).

Lest one think that indifference to petty human concerns in favor of poetic devotion to dreams and fancies is the sum of Lovecraft's contribution to literature, I would draw attention to his masterpiece, the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, exhaustively and accurately annotated by Klinger, and provided with some beautiful photographs of the relevant sites mentioned in the story. In Part II: An Antecedent and a Horror, Lovecraft displays more than a layperson's knowledge of colonial American history, as well as the literature of alchemy, sorcery, and astronomy/astrology circulating in that period. I have heard several readers of Lovecraft say that they simply skip over the long lists of books with Latin titles that he includes for "verisimilitude." As the notes amply show, these books are not mentioned haphazardly, but reflect the type of alchemical or pseudo-scientific interests of not a few people in that age, and help the reader to get a sense of just what was happening in Curwen's catacombs. One note that I would have liked to see expanded a bit is 46, on Hermes Trismegistus. There were two types of Hermetica, the "scientific" or "astrological," and the "philosophical." The latter contains several texts of a Gnostic nature, notably the Poimandres, dealing with a disruption in the intellectual godhead from which darkness descended upon the world. Whatever entity Curwen called upon at his last extremity may have been one of the products of the Gnostic Demiurge, the ignorant and imitative craftsman of the material cosmos, estranged from the intellectual realm because of his arrogance. In fact, it seems likely that Lovecraft had at least a rudimentary knowledge of Gnosticism (from the texts available during his time) reflected in the "blind, idiot god" Azathoth.

On a personal note, it was pleasant to recall my first visit to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, on a quest for the sites mentioned in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, most of which I located without any guidance. And what a thrill it was, as I strolled along Benefit Street, to recognize "The Shunned House," with its high cellar and steep lawn! I took the very same walk that Charles took, pausing near the river to gaze upon Stamper's Hill as the last rays of the dying sun cast its majestic glow on that mystical old town. Strolling back up the hill to the Bed & Breakfast where I was staying, I felt at one with Lovecraft, as lame as that might sound. But I was young, only nineteen, and reveling in the joy of discovering the first author from whom I gained inspiration. From the very first tale I read by Lovecraft -- "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" -- I knew that I was destined to become a writer. Examining his manuscripts and typescripts at the John Hay Library, under the watchful eye of a very pretty librarian, I discovered just how romantic scholarship can be. The life of a writer and academician need not be a lonely one. Indeed, the notion that Lovecraft was a recluse is not entirely accurate. He may have had his reclusive moments, especially during intense periods of creativity, but he admitted at one point to "finding psychological solitude more or less of a handicap" (letter to F. C. Clark, March 9, 1924). How true that is! As I had dinner with that lovely librarian at the fine seafood restaurant on the river, talking enthusiastically of Lovecraft, Providence, Renaissance art, and many other things, I found it hard to imagine that there is a "crawling chaos" beneath the bright solid earth upon which we all tread. It took many years -- and many heartbreaks -- to find out that Lovecraft was right. "Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men" ("The Call of Cthulhu").

* * * * *

In addition to the copious and ever-helpful notes by Leslie S. Klinger, this volume contains a useful little Introduction by Alan Moore, for the sake of those who require a bit of preparation and perhaps a touch of warning before delving into this remarkable American literary genius. The selection of stories is not disappointing, but as is to be expected, there are some that I was sorry to se excluded; for example, "He," and "The Rats in the Walls." But that is a minor complaint. In any case, one can easily find these stories online, and it might be rewarding to do some research for one's own annotations. The Appendices are helpful and fun -- The Faculty of Miskatonic University -- and the budding Lovecraft scholar will benefit from the Works and Revisions appendices. This hefty tome belongs on the shelf -- or better yet, open on the desk -- of every Lovecraft enthusiast, and indeed, anyone interested in true literary dark fantasy -- or "horror," if you must.