H. P. Lovecraft

by Michel Houellebecq

  Still, Lovecraft is not entirely indifferent to the question of compositional technique. Like Baudelaire and Edgar Poe, he is fascinated by the idea that through the rigid application of certain schemas, certain formulas, certain symmetries, perfection may be accessed. And he even attempts a first conceptualization in the small thirty-page manuscript entitled The Commonplace Book.

  In its very brief first section, he gives general advice on how to write a story (weird or not). He then attempts to establish a typology of “certain basic underlying horrors effectively used in weird fiction.” As for the book’s last section, by far its longest, it consists of a series of staggered notes made between 1919 and 1935 that for the most part consist of a single sentence, each of which could serve as the starting point for a weird tale.

  With his habitual generosity, Lovecraft was happy to lend out this manuscript to friends, telling them to feel free to use any of the ideas in it to create a vintage brew all their own.

  In fact, above all, this Commonplace Book is a surprising stimulant for the imagination. It contains the seeds of dizzying ideas, nine-tenths of which were never developed by Lovecraft nor by others. And its all too short theoretical section conveys Lovecraft’s high regard for horror literature, his belief in its absolute generality and its close link to the fundamental elements of human consciousness (as a “basic element of horror,” for example, he cites “Any mysterious and irresistible march toward a doom”).

  But where techniques of composition used by HPL are concerned, we haven’t made any more headway. If The Commonplace Book furnishes the building blocks, it gives us no indication of how to assemble them. And perhaps it is asking too much of Lovecraft. It is difficult and may even be impossible to possess his level of genius and, at the same time, to be aware of that genius.

  There is only one way to try to find out more. Besides, it’s the most logical way: to immerse oneself in the texts, the fiction written by HPL. First, one can tackle “the great texts,” those written in the last ten years of his life when he was at the height of his capacities. But one can also embrace the anterior texts, where we see the methods of his art coming to life one by one, like musical instruments, each attempting a fleeting solo before plunging together into the fury of a demented opera.

  Attack the Story Like a Radiant Suicide

  A classic understanding of the weird story might be summarized as follows: At first nothing at all happens. The characters are bathed in banal and beatific happiness, adequately symbolized by the family life of an insurance agent in an American suburb. The kids play baseball, the woman plays piano a little, etc. All is well.

  Then, gradually, almost insignificant incidents accumulate, dangerously reinforcing one another. Cracks appear in the glossy varnish of the ordinary, leaving the field wide open for troublesome hypotheses. Inexorably, the forces of evil enter the setting.

  It must be noted that this approach has produced some truly impressive results. As high points, one can cite the tales of Richard Matheson, who at the peak of his art clearly enjoyed choosing utterly banal settings (supermarkets, gas stations…) and intentionally describing them in a dull and prosaic manner.

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s approach was entirely opposite. For him there were no “cracks in the glossy varnish of the ordinary,” no “almost insignificant incidents.” None of that interested him. He had no wish to spend thirty or even three pages describing an average American family. He was, in fact, willing to document just about anything else—Aztec rituals or the anatomy of batrachians—but certainly not daily life.

  To shed light on the question, let us look at the first few paragraphs of one of the most insidious of Matheson’s successes, Button, Button:

  “The package was lying by the front door—a cube-shaped carton sealed with tape, the name and address printed by hand: MR. AND MRS. ARTHUR LEWIS, 217 E. 37TH STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 10016. Norma picked it up, unlocked the door and went into the apartment. It was just getting dark.

  After she put the lamb chops in the broiler, she made herself a drink and sat down to open the package.

  Inside the carton was a push-button unit fastened to a small wooden box. A glass dome covered the button. Norma tried to lift it off, but it was locked in place. She turned the unit over and saw a folded piece of paper Scotch-taped to the bottom of the box. She pulled it off. ‘Mr. Steward will call on you at eight p.m.’”

  Here now is the assault that opens “The Call of Cthulhu,” the first of Lovecraft’s “great texts”:

  “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.”

  The very least that can be said is that Lovecraft sets the stage. At first glance, this is actually an inconvenience. For indeed it is true that few readers, fans of weird fiction or not, are able to set down Matheson’s story without finding out what happens to the godforsaken button. HPL, on the other hand, tends to pick his readers from the start. He writes for an audience of fanatics—readers he was to finally find only years after his death.

  In a more hidden and profound way, however, there is a shortcoming in the methodology of the horror story that is too slow to start. It only becomes apparent after reading several works written in the same vein. As the ambiguous, rather than terrifying, incidents multiply, the reader’s imagination is titillated but never truly fulfilled. It is propelled into motion. And it is always dangerous to leave the reader’s imagination at liberty, because left alone, it can reach some atrocious conclusions. And when, after fifty laborious pages, the author finally divulges the secret of his ultimate horror, the reader might feel a little disappointed. He had been expecting something more terrifying.

  In his greatest successes, Matheson is able to ward off this danger by introducing a philosophical or moral dimension in the last pages that is so obvious, so poignant and pertinent, that the whole story is suddenly bathed in a different and mortally affecting light. Still, it is his somewhat shorter texts that remain his most beautiful.

  As for Lovecraft, he navigates a fifty- or sixty-page or even longer story with ease. At the height of his artistic abilities, he needed a space vast enough to contain all the elements of his grandiose machinery. The paroxysmal planes that form the architecture of the “great texts” could hardly be satisfied by a mere ten pages. And The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is in fact a short novel.

  As for the “fall” so cherished by Americans, for the most part, he is not very interested in it. None of Lovecraft’s stories are introverted. Each is an open slice of howling fear. The next story picks the reader’s fear up at exactly the same point and nourishes it some more. The great Cthulhu is indestructible, even if peril has been temporarily thwarted. In his home of R’lyeh, under the waters, he will again begin to wait, to sleep and to dream:

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die”

  True to form, it is with disconcerting energy that Lovecraft mounts what could be termed a massive attack. And he also feels a predilection for the variant, that is, the theoretical attack. We cite the opening of “Arthur Jermyn” and of “The Call of Cthulhu.” These are but so many radiant variations on a single theme: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Let us recall once again the justly celebrated opening of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”:

  “I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal v
isions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier.”

  At times he seems to have preferred force to a harmonious arrangement of sentences, as in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” whose opening sentence is: “It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.” But he always chooses style over banality. And the breadth of his methods continues to expand. This is how his 1919 story “The Transition of Juan Romero” begins: “Of the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October eighteenth and nineteenth, 1894, I have no desire to speak.”

  Although it is still a touch dull and prosaic, this attack, nevertheless, heralds the splendid explosion that begins “The Shadow Out of Time,” the last of the “great texts,” written in 1934:

  “After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17–18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.”

  What is astonishing is that after this opening he is able to maintain the narrative on an ever-increasing level of exaltation. But then, even his greatest detractors agree and concede that he had a somewhat extraordinary imagination.

  His characters, on the other hand, do not withstand the assault. And this is the only real shortcoming of his method of massive attack. Often when reading his stories, one wonders why the protagonists are taking so long to understand the nature of the horror menacing them. They appear, frankly, obtuse. And therein lies a real problem. Because if they were to have understood what was going on, no power could prevent them from fleeing, in the grips of the most abject terror. Which event must not occur till the very end of the story.

  Did Lovecraft have a solution? Maybe. One can imagine that his characters, while fully aware of the hideous reality to be confronted, choose nonetheless to do so. Such virile courage was decidedly too foreign to Lovecraft’s own temperament for him to undertake describing it. Graham Masterton and Lin Carter took steps in this direction; the results, admittedly, are unconvincing. Nonetheless it seems conceivable. We can dream of a mysterious adventure novel whose heroes have the mettle, sturdiness, and tenacity of John Buchan characters as they confront the terrifying and marvelous universe of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

  Utter the Great “NO!” to Life Without Weakness

  Absolute hatred of the world in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in particular: this summarizes Lovecraft’s attitude fairly accurately.

  Many authors have dedicated their work to elaborating the reasons for this legitimate aversion. Not Lovecraft. For him, hatred of life precedes all literature. He was to remain steadfast in this regard. The rejection of all forms of realism is a preliminary condition for entering his universe.

  If an author were to be defined, not by the themes he addresses, but by those he avoids, then we would be forced to agree that Lovecraft’s position is rather unique. In his entire body of work, there is not a single allusion to two of the realities to which we generally ascribe great importance: sex and money. Truly not one reference. He writes exactly as though these things did not exist. So much so that when a female character does intervene in a story (which occurs altogether twice) one feels an odd twinge of bizarreness, as if he had suddenly decided to describe a Japanese person.

  In the face of such a radical exclusion, certain critics have concluded that his entire body of work is in fact full of particularly smoldering sexual symbols. Other individuals of a similar intellectual caliber have proffered the diagnosis of “latent homosexuality,” which is supported by nothing in either his correspondence or his life. Yet another useless hypothesis.

  In a letter to the young Belknap Long, Lovecraft expresses his thoughts on these questions very distinctly. Regarding Fielding’s Tom Jones, which he considered (alas, rightly so) to be the summit of realism, that is to say, of mediocrity, he wrote:

  “In a word, Child, I look upon this sort of writing as a mere prying survey of the lowest part of life, and a slavish transcript of simple events made with the crude feelings of a porter or bargeman [and without any native genius or colour of the creative imagination whatever…] ’Fore God, we can see beasts enough in any barnyard and observe all the mysteries of sex in the breeding of calves and colts. When I contemplate man, I wish to contemplate those characteristicks that elevate him to an human state, and those adornments which lend to his actions the symmetry of creative beauty. ’Tis not that I wish false pompous thoughts and motives imputed to him in the Victorian manner, but that I wish his composition justly apprais’d, with stress lay’d upon those qualities which are peculiarly his, and without the silly praise of such beastly things as he holds in common with any hog or stray goat.”

  He ends this long diatribe with the following irrefutable principle: “I do not think that any realism is beautiful.” What we are evidently dealing with is not self-censorship provoked by hidden psychological motives, but an aesthetic conception cleary articulated. This was an important point to establish. Now let’s move on.

  If Lovecraft frequently reiterates his hostility to all forms of eroticism in art, it is because his correspondents (mostly young people, often adolescents even) repeatedly ask him about it. Is it truly certain that erotic or pornographic descriptions can be of no literary interest? Each time he reexamines the question with much good will, but his response never varies: they are of no interest whatsoever. As far as he himself was concerned, he had, by age eight, acquired a complete understanding of the subject, thanks to his perusal of an uncle’s medical texts. He then explains, “… after which curiosity was of course impossible. The entire subject had become merely a tedious detail of animal biology, without interest for one whose tastes led him to faery gardens and golden cities glorified by exotick sunsets.”

  It may be tempting not to take this declaration seriously, or to suspect some kind of obscure underlying moral reticence in Lovecraft’s attitude. This would be a mistake. Lovecraft was perfectly aware of what puritanical inhibitions were. He adhered to them and occasionally glorified them. But he did so on a different plane that he always distinguished from the plane of pure artistic creation. His views on the subject were complex and precise. And if he refused all sexual allusions in his work, it was first and foremost because he felt such allusions had no place in his aesthetic universe.

  On this point, at least, posterity has proven him to be amply justified. There are indeed those who have tried to introduce erotic elements into the framework of a primarily Lovecraftian tale. The results have been absolute failures. Colin Wilson’s attempts in particular tend clearly toward catastrophe; there is a constant feeling that the titillating elements have been added merely to draw in a few additional readers. And in truth it cannot be otherwise. The combination is intrinsically impossible.

  HPL’s writings have but one aim: to bring the reader to a state of fascination. The only human sentiments he is interested in are wonderment and fear. He constructs his universe upon these and these alone. It is clearly a limitation, but a conscious, deliberate one. And authentic creativity cannot exist without a certain degree of self-imposed blindness.

  To understand the origins of Lovecraft’s anti-eroticism, it is perhaps fitting to recall that his era was characterized by a desire to be set free from the constraint of “Victorian prudishness.” It was during these years, 1920-
1930, that stringing a few obscenities together began to be seen as proof of an authentically creative imagination. Lovecraft’s young correspondents were naturally marked by this, which is why they persistently questioned him on the subject. And for his part, he answered. With sincerity.

  At the time Lovecraft was writing, displaying a variety of sexual experiences was beginning to be considered of interest; in other words, tackling the subject “openly and forthrightly.” Such a frank and disengaged attitude did not yet prevail, however, where matters of money, trading transactions, and wealth-management were concerned. It was still customary, when these subjects were brought up, to approach them from a sociological or moral perspective. It was not until the 1960s that true liberation in these matters came about. This is probably why none of his correspondents saw fit to question Lovecraft on this point; money, much like sex, plays no part at all in his stories. There is not the slightest allusion to the financial standing of his characters. This, too, is of no interest to him whatsoever.

  Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that Lovecraft felt no sympathy for the psychologist of the capitalist era, Freud. There was nothing that could seduce him in the “transactional” universe of “transferences” that made you feel you had accidentally stumbled into a business meeting.

  But apart from this aversion to psychoanalysis, which actually is common to many artists, Lovecraft had several additional minor reasons to rail against the “Viennese charlatan.” It turns out, in fact, that Freud took the liberty of addressing the subject of dreams, and not just once. Dreams were what Lovecraft knew well—they were, in a sense, his preserve. Few writers have used their dreams as systematically as he did; he classified the furnished material, he treated it. At times he was enthusiastic and wrote down a story in the immediate aftermath of a dream without even completely waking (this was true of “Nyarlathotep”). Other times he retained certain elements to insert into a new framework, but in any event, he took dreams very seriously.