Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
and feelings.
Meanwhile, however, a new source of literary material had come into being: the terrifying vast and mysterious universe revealed by the swiftly developing sciences, in particular astronomy. A universe consisting of light-years and light-millenia of black emptiness. A universe containing billions of suns, many of them presumably attended by planets housing forms of life shockingly alien to man and, likely enough in some instances, infinitely more powerful. A universe shot through with invisible forces, hitherto unsuspected by man, such as the ultraviolet X-ray, the X-ray—and who can say how many more? In short, a universe in which the unknown had vastly greater scope than in the little crystal-sphered glove of Aristotle and Ptolemy. And yet a real universe, attested by scientifically weighed facts, no mere nightmare of mystics.
Writers such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne found a potent source of literary inspiration in the simple presentation of man against the background of this new universe. From their efforts arose the genre of science fiction.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was not the first author to see in this new universe a highly suitable object for man’s supernatural fear. W.H. Hodgson, Poe, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Wells too had glimpses of that possibility and made use of it in a few of their tales. But the main and systematic achievement was Lovecraft’s. When he completed the body of his writings, he had firmly attached the emotion of spectral dread to such concepts as outer space, the rim of the cosmos, alien beings, unsuspected dimensions, and the conceivable universes lying outside our own space-time continuum.
Lovecraft’s achievement did not come overnight. The new concept of the horror story did not spring full-grown from his mind. In his earlier tales he experimented with the Dunsanian strain and also wrote a number of effective stories in the vein of Poe, such as “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” The Outsider,” “Cool Air,” and “The Hound.” He shared Machen’s horror of the human beast and expressed it in “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” and “Arthur Jermyn.” Though even in these briefer tales we find broad hints of the new concept: vast life-forms from Earth’s past in “Dagon” and a linkage of a human being’s insanity with the appearance of a new star in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” But with “The Call of Cthulhu” the line of development becomes clearly marked, as shown by the opening sentences: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
For a while Lovecraft tended to mix black magic and other traditional sources of dread with the horrors stemming purely from science’s new universe. In “The Dunwich Horror” the other-dimensional creatures are thwarted by the proper incantations, while witchcraft and the new Einsteinian universe appear cheek-by-jowl in “Dreams in the Witch House.” But when we arrive at “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time,” we find that the extra-terrestrial entities are quite enough in themselves to awaken all our supernatural dread, without any medieval trappings whatsoever. White magic and the sign of the cross are powerless against them and only the accidents of space and time—in short, sheer chance—save humanity.
In passing, it is to be noted that Lovecraft, like Poe, was fascinated by great natural catastrophes and new scientific discoveries and explorations, as is understandable in one who chose cosmic horror for his theme. It is likely that reports of such events engendered many of his stories. “The Whisperer in Darkness” begins with the Vermont floods of 1927 and one notes other possible linkages: reports of oceanic earthquakes and upheavals and “Dagon” and “The Call of Cthulhu”; the inundation of acres of woodland by a man-made reservoir and “The Colour Out of Space”; threat of demolition of some old warehouses on South Water Street, Providence, and the poem “Brick Row” which is dated December 7, 1929, and may have been the germ of Lovecraft’s great sonnet cycle “Fungi From Yuggoth,” written between December 27, 1929, and January 4, 1930; regional decay and degeneration and “The Lurking Fear” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; ravages of German submarine warfare and “The Temple”; polar exploration and “At the Mountains of Madness”; discovery of the planet Pluto by C.W. Tombaugh in 1930 and “The Whisperer in Darkness,” featuring that discovery and written in the same year.
It is a great pity that Lovecraft did not live to experience the unparalleled New England hurricane of 1938, when the downtown heart of his own Providence was invaded by the sea, to the accompaniment of terrific wind and downpour. What a story that would eventually have gotten out of him!
2.
The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft’s writings than that stemming solely from its tremendous distances and its highly probably alien and powerful non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key,” man can hardly bear the realization that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”
In his personal life Lovecraft met the challenge of this hideous realization by taking refuge in traditionalism, in the cultivation of mankind’s time-honored manners and myths, not because they are true, but because man’s mind is habituated to them and therefore finds in them some comfort and support. Recognizing that the only meaning in the cosmos is that which man dreams into it, Lovecraft treasured beautiful human dreams, all age-worn things, and the untainted memories of childhood. This is set forth clearly in “The Silver Key,” the story in which Lovecraft presents his personal philosophy of life.
In the main current of Lovecraft’s supernatural tales, horror of the mechanistic universe gave shape to that impressive hierarchy of alien creatures and gods generally referred to as “the Cthulhu mythos,” an assemblage of beings whose weird attributes reflect the universe’s multitudinous environments and whose fantastic names are suggestive renderings of non-human words and sounds. They include the Elder Gods or Gods of Earth, the Other Gods or Ultimate Gods, and a variety of entities from distant times, planets, and dimensions.
Although they stem from that period in which Lovecraft mixed black magic in his takes and was attracted to Dunsanian pantheons, I believe it is a mistake to regard the beings of the Cthulhu Mythos as sophisticated equivalents of the entities, of Christian demonology, or to attempt to divide them into balancing Zoroastrian hierarchies of good and evil.
Most of the entities in the Cthulhu mythos are malevolent or, at best, cruelly indifferent to mankind. The perhaps benevolent Gods of Earth are never mentioned directly, except for Nodens, and gradually fade from the tales. In “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” they are pictured as relatively weak and feeble, symbols of the ultimate weakness of even mankind’s traditions and dreams. It is likely that Lovecraft employed them only to explain why the more numerous malevolent entities had not long ago overrun mankind, and to provide a source of incantations whereby Earthlings could to some degree defend themselves, as in “The Dunwich Horror” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In the later tales, as we have mentioned, Lovecraft permitted mankind no defense, except luck, against the unknown.
In contrast to the Elder Gods, the Other Gods are presented as powerful and terrible, yet also—strange paradox!—”…blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless…” (“The Dream-Quest”).
Of the Other Gods, Azathoth is the supreme diety, occupying the top-most throne in the Cthulhu hierarchy, There is never any question of his being merely an alien entity from some distant planet or dimension, like Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth. He is unquestionably “god,” and also the greatest god. Yet when we ask what sort of god, we discover that he is the blind, idiot god, “…the