Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
atmosphere which would otherwise have had to be built afresh with each story. It pictured vividly his Copernican conception of the vastness, strangeness, and infinite eerie possibilities of the new universe of science. And finally, it was the key to a more frightening, yet more fascinating “real” world than the blind and purposeless cosmos in which he had to live his life.
THE FOUR FACES OF THE OUTSIDER, by Dirk W. Mosig
H. P. Lovecraft did not write to entertain, nor did he tailor his impressive fiction with the paying market in mind. Instead, he relied on his work as a revisionist or ghost-writer, and on the meager proceedings of the rapidly vanishing Phillips estate, for the small but regular income which allowed him to lead a frugal existence. When Lovecraft turned his encyclopedic mind to the careful craftsmanship of one of his memorable tales, he did so to attain a measure of artistic self-expression. As becomes obvious from even a superficial reading of his published letters, he did not care if his work found an appreciative public. A perfectionist, he was never satisfied, even with his greatest masterpieces. Nevertheless, he never abandoned completely his attempts at creative self-expression—at communication. His works posses remarkable depth, and it is up to us to attempt to understand the message of the gentleman from Providence.
“The Outsider” is undoubtedly one of the finest tales to come out of Lovecraft’s pen. It is also one of the most profoundly meaningful and symbolic, albeit often baffling and enigmatic for the critic. Working under the assumption that there is no such thing as “correct” interpretation, the present study attempts to investigate the “message” in Lovecraft’s powerful story from four different viewpoints. “The Outsider” lends itself quite readily to a psychoanalytic interpretation, but it also becomes meaningful when viewed from a more metaphysical frame of reference. Its autobiographical overtones have been discussed by many, while it is also possible to translate this narrative in terms of Lovecraft’s philosophical Weltanschauung. Finally, there is also the traditional interpretation within the context provided by other Lovecraftian tales (such as “Pickman’s Model,” “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” etc.) identifying the outsider as a human child kidnapped by ghouls and growing up in their subterranean abode. An unusual variant of this type of interpretation was offered by David Brown (Nyctalops 8) who suggests that the outsider’s identity is Richard Upton Pickman, antihero of “Pickman’s Model,” who is changing into a ghoul. But even if Lovecraft’s Mephistophelic characterization of the ultimate artist were indeed the true fictional identity of the outsider, this would tell us little about the meaning, the implications, the message that Lovecraft is trying to communicate in his paroxysm of ecstatic self-expression.
In the following pages we will attempt to present the main outlines of the four interpretations mentioned above. No claim is made as to the validity or exhaustiveness of any of these different appreciations of the same tale. Naturally, alternative explanations are also possible, and may be equally valid. Nevertheless, in our conclusion we will attempt to evaluate the four suggested views on their merits, that is, their ability to account for available data on Lovecraft, his works, and his views. Finally the personal preference of the author will be stated, a view necessitated by his personal bias and perhaps not arrived at in complete objectivity.
1. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIC INTERPRETATION: H. P. LOVECRAFT, OUTSIDER
Taken as an autobiographic statement, the tale begins as a relation of Lovecraft’s unhappy childhood, full of “fear and sadness.” The anxiety and depression of the child, deprived of a paternal figure at the age of three, controlled by an over-protective mother, and rejected by his peers because of the unique interests generated by his precocious genius, are easily understood.
Lovecraft spent countless of the “lone hours” of his childhood in the “vast and dismal chambers” of his grandfather’s library, whose “maddening rows of antique books” provided the main source of entertainment in his solitude. From such books he “learned all that (he) knew,” without the urging or guidance of any teacher.
Such was the lot of this “dazed” twentieth century Poe, this genius destined to meet a “barren” existence, full of disappointments and unfulfilled expectations which would leave him “broken” and eternally dissatisfied with even his most brilliant creations.
And yet, as shown by the letters in which he referred to this period as the happiest of his life, Lovecraft was “strangely content” (proof of the relativity of all things) and clung desperately to the “sere memories” of his childhood, when his mind threatened to sink into the pits of melancholy and despair that moved him to repeatedly consider and defend the idea of suicide, even though he was only thirty-one years old when this tale was written.
In a continuous stream of morbid childhood memories, Lovecraft continues to describe the dampness of his abode and the peculiar odor of the gigantic library room, always producing an atmosphere of “brooding and fear” and shadows…to the extent that the child had to light candles for relief. Perhaps we can even trace Lovecraft’s preference for the nocturnal hours to this unique early development.
He refers to his thirst for acceptance, his desire to belong, his need for warmth, affection, and friendship, and compares his goal to the “black inaccessible tower” that reaches into the “unknown outer sky,” the heaven of social acceptance, but which “cannot be ascended save by a well nigh impossible climb….”
The period of isolation and solitude is perceived by the child’s mind as countless years slowly and agonizingly grinding by, and no memory is kept of the adults that cared for him, particularly of the father he hardly knew…. In his neurotic mother he only could see a distorted, shriveled image of himself.
As a child, Lovecraft naturally considered himself as akin to other children, whose youthful pictures he saw in the books—at least until his mother told him that he was utterly hideous, ugly, and different from all other children…and that other youngsters would probably be repelled and horrified by his mere appearance. Sarah Phillips Lovecraft, who died a diagnosed psychotic the same year “The Outsider” was written (1921), deeply resented her husband’s general paresis, a hatred that was displaced to the child, only to produce deep guilt feelings and anxiety to the troubled woman. The reaction formation which followed her inability to cope with her neurotic and moral anxiety resulted in the compulsive overprotection that characterized her relationship with the child. But her deep hostility toward her son occasionally broke through her defense mechanism, as when she succeeded in making him feel ugly and distorted (a feeling that he was never able to completely overcome)—all the while rationalizing that she was doing this for the child’s own good, keeping him close to her, under he “protection,” and away from other children and the rest of the world that might try to hurt him. The added imminence of financial disintegration was the final stress she could not endure, the straw that broke the remaining thread of sanity in a wretched woman who was to spend her last years in the insane asylum. And her son was not by her death bed when she was stricken by her final illness….
In his abysmal solitude, the child would often lie, outside, under the “dark, mute trees,” and “dream for hours about what (he) read in the books,” picturing himself among the “gay crowds” that must exist in the “sunny world” beyond his “infinitely old and infinitely horrible” prison-home. He tried to escape, but as he moved away from the house, his anxiety and his insecurity became unendurable, the air became “filled with brooding fear,” and he ran swiftly back in defeat. So, through what to him appeared to be endless twilights, he “waited and dreamed, not knowing what (he) waited for.” Finally, his longing for light, for happiness and acceptance, “grew so frantic, that (he) resolved to scale the tower,” fall thought he might, in his desperate attempt to reach out and attain his impossible dream. Life was not worth living any longer “without ever beholding light,” without joining the illusive world of gaity, of belongingness, of love.
The decision to reach out to others was not an easy one, and is represented in the story as the perilous, slow, and arduous ascent of the tower, with frantic hope mixed with mounting anxiety and incertitude. But finally, coming out of his shell, he emerged from his precocious seclusion.
The realization