On H.P. Lovecraft’s literature of genealogical terror.
Ooze, Seep and Trickle
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I was on a train going through Connecticut once, sort of writing a short story but really eavesdropping on a conversation between an excruciatingly proper old woman and an eager young reporter. "What," the reporter wanted to know, "is the main emotion that inspires you to write the books you write?"
The woman paused; I wondered who she was, if I'd read any of her books. The reporter leaned in. I stopped even pretending to be in my notebook and listened.
"Disgust," she finally croaked. "Disgust."
If any writer can be described as rooting his work in the inspiration of disgust, it is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Here he is in a letter written during his traumatizing and highly inspiring stay in Brooklyn during the mid-1920s:
The organic things inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call'd human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of the earth's corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They — or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed — seem'd to ooze, seep and trickle thro' the gaping cracks in the horrible houses ... and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness. From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid soul of disintegration and decay ... a yellow leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point…
The paragraph is worth mentioning in its entirety both for its sheer racist bombast and for how strikingly reminiscent it is of his fiction. Lovecraft, the ornery, peculiar literary godson of Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker, is widely considered to be the father of the subgenre "weird fiction." Weird fiction could be placed somewhere between fantasy, horror, and science fiction — a pulpy combination of the three that generally is grounded in the real world. Between 1917 and 1935, he published an almost encyclopedic array of short stories, mostly in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, that grow from general morbid absurdity to dreamtime hyperballads to detailed, collage-like dispatches of our crooked world's disastrous run-ins with the tentacled elder gods of a vast, highly conceptualized alternate universe. The mythos he created persists to this day in the movies, comic books, novels, video games, RPGs, and, most recently, a Thanksgiving struggle plate that went viral.
That Lovecraft was racist beyond even the excessive racism exhibited by other white writers of his time is not in question. The above paragraph is far from an aberration among his over 100,000 pages of letters, and he populates his fictional universe with slithering, swarthy-faced mongoloids and idiot, infanticidal black men (he almost never wrote about women of any race — an erasure that warrants an essay unto itself). As writer Phenderson Djèlí Clark points out in his excellent essay on Lovecraft, "It's always perplexing to watch the gymnastics of mental obfuscation that occur as fans of Lovecraft attempt to rationalize his racism." Responses tend to write off his racism as a product of his times and then be paradoxically surprised that it didn't hinder his success. "In spite of […] his overt racism," biographer Donald Tyson tells us, "he created a mythic world that continues to captivate the imagination of millions of readers." The phrase "in spite of" comes up a lot, as well as allusions to a vaguely presumed-to-be anti-racist, first-person plural that is of course appalled by such bigotry.
"Paradoxically," writes French critic Michel Houellebecq in one of the more head-on takes on the H.P. Lovecraft racism issue, "the character of Lovecraft fascinates us partly because his system of values is entirely opposed to ours. Fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorifies puritan inhibition." It is the presumptive we that bothers me most here. This was written in 1991, the year of Rodney King, when black income in the U.S. was 57% of white income and race riots exploded in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as well as the Parisian suburb Val-Fourré. Ten years later, Houellebecq himself will be brought up on charges of inciting racial hatred by the French Human Rights League and a variety of mosques for his novel Plateforme; what magical post-racial we are we dealing with?
Here we have the one hand correctly contextualizing Lovecraft within a society that was founded on and thrives on racism, while the other hand is shocked that such an overt racist could endure in the collective imagination. The subtext here is, "anyway, moving on to brighter topics." Meanwhile, the only modern myths that have captivated the imagination of millions of white readers have been crouched in white supremacy. The "in spite of" phrase is a myopic, ahistorical fallacy. The Cthulhu Mythos endures not in spite of Lovecraft's racism but because of it.
Lovecraft wrote weird racist fiction in a racist time, and he did it extremely well. Of course it took hold. As a country, a planet even, we've still never truly reckoned with this past. But in the glossy white-empowered rewrite of modern times, racism becomes something that happened and then ended except for a few irritating little incidents in flyover states and the occasional massacre.
No Sleep Since Brooklyn
Writing pulled Lovecraft from the agoraphobic mire of a nervous breakdown. He hadn't written much until that point, a few short stories, though he always showed signs of an active imagination. In the early 1910s he became involved with some amateur writers associations, eventually putting pen to paper — he abhorred the typewriter — to contribute his own stories and then rising to prominence among his peers. His first submission letter to Weird Tales could be used as a tip sheet on what not to do when approaching editors: He's self-deprecating, and not humorously so; he's demanding, he's fussy, and everything is handwritten. When he got rejections he would immediately shelf the story and never send it out again. He felt that getting paid was beneath him, even as he slid into abject poverty toward the end of his life. He never wrote about sex or money in a corner of the industry where the magazine covers were splattered with naked women and hidden treasures. In spite of all this (yes, in this case, in spite of), Lovecraft got himself published regularly in the pages of Weird Tales and several other major pulp magazines.
These early and mid-career stories, "The Music of Erich Zann" and "Herbert West – Reanimator" for example, already show a masterful commitment to the sinister crossroads of imagination and the modern world, a quirkiness beyond the average pulp writer. But the experience of living in Brooklyn was a painful turning point. Lovecraft came to New York in 1922 with a swoon of "aesthetic exaltation" at the "innumerable lights of the skyscrapers, the mirrored reflections and the lights of the boats bobbing on the water, at the extreme left the sparkling statue of Liberty, and on the right the scintillating arch of the Brooklyn bridge." His seemingly loveless marriage disintegrated and his attempts to find a job failed at every turn. Lovecraft ended up alone and miserable in a boarding house on Clinton Street, not far from Red Hook, surrounded by the very immigrants he already harbored deep prejudices against.
Brooklyn is where Lovecraft's literature of disgust becomes rooted in something much closer to the human heart: fear. Aristotle says the two main emotions of drama are fear and empathy. In his seminal essay, "Notes on Weird Fiction," Lovecraft simplifies it to one:
Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or "outsideness" without laying stress on the emotion of fear.
His stories had always been creepy, but in Brooklyn all the writer's inner neuroses take human shape, outnumber him, interact with him on a daily basis and occasionally, steal his shit. Having lived fear, this intense, creeping claustrophobia and slow-gathering terror take new life in the later works. Lovecraft's melodramatic few years in Brooklyn are equivalent to Dante's first sighting of Beatrice: The writer has a vision; the vision is transformative, it does something to him on the inside. The writer will never be the same.
Lovecraft wrote "The Horror at Red Hook" in a fevered all-nighter after having his favorite overcoat lifted from his room. It's almost universally disliked; Lovecraft said it was "rather long and rambling. And I don't think it is very good," and critics don't include it in the final phase of his "major works," but here we have the seeds of the Cthulhu Mythos, even if the old gods themselves are not mentioned by name. I actually found this one of his more compelling works; the sinister plot unravels in a noir-like, slow-building frenzy. A burned-out Brooklyn detective with a "Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing," looks into the suspicious doings of an eccentric millionaire and discovers an underground network of immigrants worshiping the goddess Lilith. There are nods to Stoker and the gumshoe masters and it all climaxes with a horrific mass slaughter of women and children in a Red Hook basement, which burns down, sparing only the deeply traumatized Detective Malone. It is appallingly racist, the "swarthy" immigrant cult members are preparing a massive child sacrifice to their devilish god, and the precursor to supernatural sleuths like Harry Blackstone and Dirk Gently.
