Crypt of cosmic carnage, p.1
Crypt of Cosmic Carnage, page 1
credits
CRYPT OF COSMIC CARNAGE
BY H P LOVECRAFT
AN EBOOK
ISBN 978-1-908694-84-3
PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS
COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
www.elektron-ebooks.com
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INTRODUCTION
I think I can probably claim some of the credit for introducing H. P. Lovecraft to the British reading public. After his death from cancer in 1937, Lovecraft was in danger of being totally forgotten.
Fortunately, his friends – and disciples – August Derleth and Donald Wandrei decided to launch a small publishing firm, simply to keep his work in print. During his lifetime, it had appeared in pulp magazines – mostly Weird Tales – and his efforts to issue a hardcover volume of his works were a failure, with the exception of a short novel called The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which appeared in the year before his death, and which sold only 150 copies before the publisher went bankrupt. Arkham House, founded by Derleth and Wandrei, issued the first collection of Lovecraft, The Outsider And Others, in 1939, and two more volumes over the following ten years. Outside America, Lovecraft remained unknown.
In 1959, I stayed overnight at a farm in Corfe Castle, Dorset, with my friend Mark Helfer, an American who had married the farmer’s daughter. It was on his bookshelf that I found the volume The Outsider And Others, the cheap paper already yellow and smelling of mould. Since my own first book had been called The Outsider, I was intrigued, and before I fell asleep, read its opening story, “In The Vault”, a gruesome little tale about a mortuary keeper who hacks off a corpse’s feet to make it fit the coffin, and whose own feet are gnawed by a vengeful corpse as he tries to escape from a burial vault.
It brought back powerfully the atmosphere of old copies of Weird Tales that I had read while staying with an aunt in Doncaster at the age of ten or so. Weird Tales, published in Chicago, was not devoted to the usual stories of mystery and imagination in the manner of Poe and Le Fanu; although the title was inspired by Poe, its editor preferred crude physical horror – the first issue (1923) had a cover illustration of a man and woman writhing in the grip of a giant octopus. I recall a story called “Cats Are Uncanny”, about someone who does something horrible to a cat, and who ends floating in the lily pond with his throat torn out and claw marks all over his chest. And I can remember feeling equally nauseated at a story called “The Mound”, about an underground realm peopled by descendants of the Aztecs, and guarded by disfigured surface-dwellers who have made the mistake of seeking treasure in the mound that forms the entrance to the underworld – horrible creatures with stumps of arms and legs. This, I learned later, was written by a friend of Lovecraft called Zealia Bishop, and revised by him.
Now I have to admit that, as I renewed acquaintance with Lovecraft’s work – Mark Helfer was kind enough to lend me the book – I found myself experiencing some of the rather queasy misgivings that I had felt eighteen years earlier. At the age of ten I had felt instinctively that this was a kind of pornography of violence that was designed to appeal to a kind of sickness in the reader. Now I felt much the same – that Lovecraft was a “case history” rather than a literary figure. Yet it was obvious that the peculiar violence and morbidity of his work was a typical “outsider”’s reaction against a world he found crude and unbearable. In the 19th Century, the romantic poets had dreamed of fairyland, and wilted away (or even committed suicide) because they were unable to find it. You might say that Lovecraft had given up feeling sad about the failure of his dreams and turned nasty.
As we left Mark Helfer’s, I began talking to my wife Joy about Lovecraft and the psychology of horror stories, comparing him with Thomas Lovell Beddoes (who wrote imitation Elizabethan tragedies full of gruesome horrors, and committed suicide), Sheridan Le Fanu and M. R. James. Suddenly, I saw that I had the material for a new book. The result was The Strength To Dream, written in 1961 and published the following year. It was, as far as I know, the first time anyone had published anything about Lovecraft in England. Lovecraft paperbacks began to appear in the mid-sixties, and soon he was a cult among the young.
The Strength To Dream begins with Lovecraft, but the opinion I express of him is not high. “He began as one of the worst and most florid writers of the 20th Century, but finally developed a certain discipline and economy.” Yet in spite of my irritation with his overblown style, there was something about him that continued to fascinate me. When I was in Providence, Rhode Island, in the autumn of 1961, I spent some hours in the library at Brown University (which Lovecraft calls Miskatonic) reading Lovecraft’s journals and letters, then went back to look at the house where he had lived. I also found the address of Arkham House in a book catalogue, and wrote to ask them what books by Lovecraft were still in print. I received back a friendly letter from August Derleth, who had read my Outsider, and entered into a correspondence with him. As a result, I toned down some of the harsher comments about Lovecraft in the American edition of The Strength To Dream. And when Derleth suggested I should write a “Lovecraft novel” for Arkham House, I produced The Mind Parasites, which has been in print ever since.
Howard Philips Lovecraft was born on 20 August, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island – a small provincial town of the type guaranteed to suffocate any person of talent. He was a nervous and delicate only child, whose father died of syphilis when Howard was seven.
Lovecraft spent most of his childhood in bed, reading. His mother withdrew him from school at the age of eight, and he devoted the next two years to devouring every book he could lay his hands on – with particular attention to writers of horror like “Monk” Lewis. He also began writing stories with titles like “The Mystery Of The Graveyard”.
Finally back at school, he developed a passionate interest in science, and began reading books on astronomy. Paradoxically, he did not believe in the ’occult’ or supernatural, regarding it throughout his life as superstitious nonsense. His later work was a kind of self-created mythology aimed at expressing his dislike of modern civilisation. (When in New York in the 1920s he talked indignantly about the “loathsome Asiatic hordes who drag their dirty carcasses over streets where white men once moved”; but his disgust applied to the whole human race, and he talked about the “miserable vermin called human beings”.)
After two and a half years of high school he had another “nervous collapse”, and spent the next five years at home suffering from headaches, indigestion and boredom – which induced a permanent state of lethargy. The writings of Nietzsche – another sick recluse – aroused his admiration. But, like Nietzsche, he lacked the “joyful wisdom” of the “Overman”; all the photographs show the same pale, unhappy face – there is not one with a smile.
And he was twenty-seven years old before he wrote his first typically “Lovecraftian” story, “Dagon”, in which a shipwrecked mariner finds himself on an island that has been created in some recent seismic convulsion, thrown up from the seabed; there he sees an enormous monolith with strange carvings, and is horrified when a scaly humanoid creature emerges from the sea and flings its arms around the monument. Lovecraft had finally created his own distinctive realm, where strange ancient civilisations lie buried under layers of mud and slime, and their sinister former inhabitants stir uneasily in their sleep...
Two years later, influenced by Lord Dunsany (a now forgotten fantasist), he began writing tales about strange cities that sound not unlike Rider Haggard, and have more than a touch of science fiction. But the most typical story of this early period is “The Outsider”, about a man who grows up alone in an underground den, and only discovers – when he finally encounters a mirror – that he is a horrible, misshapen monster. (Lovecraft’s mother had often told him he was ugly.)
In 1924, when he was thirty-four, he married and moved to New York. He had met Sonia Greene, seven years his senior, at a writers’ convention; she was a Russian Jewess, and took the initiative in the courtship. But the shrinking recluse found married life too much for him, and after two years, fled back to Providence.
By now he had become a regular contributor to Weird Tales, and in fact, was at one point responsible for the magazine’s survival.
In 1924 sales were so poor that it was about to cease publication. Then a sinister little story called “The Loved Dead” – written by C. M. Eddy and revised by Lovecraft – caused such an outcry that the magazine was withdrawn from the bookstalls, and sales of the next issue rocketed. It was a tale about a necrophile who ends as a sex killer, and the erotic overtones are as powerful as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It makes it suddenly clear that the basic force behind all Lovecraft’s work is disguised sexual frustration, which emerges in a form of violent or sadistic fantasy, in which horrible, sinister creatures wreak havoc in the daylight world of boredom and ordinariness.
“The Call Of Cthulhu”, still his most famous story, was written in 1926. It was in this tale that Lovecraft found his true voice and his true subject; like William Blake, he had finally created his own mythology. He was to work within this mythology for the remainder of his short life. Together with “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour Out Of Space”, it is among his fines
In the early 1930s he became so discouraged at his lack of success that he decided to give up writing; Derleth cheered him up by getting one of his stories accepted, and he pressed on. But there was another and deeper problem. In his forties, Lovecraft was recovering from the adolescent fever that had produced the Cthulhu mythos; he was growing up, and the thought of slimy horrors that chewed off people’s head no longer made his flesh creep. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” reveals this increasing conflict; it is an attempt to extend the concept of the early story “Dagon” to the Cthulhu Mythos, but Lovecraft was no longer able to immerse himself in that twilight realm of sinister corruption and degeneration; he was ceasing to believe in his own “nasties”. A long fantasy called “Through The Gates Of The Silver Key”, in which his hero Randolph Carter visits a planet of “squamous” creatures, actually sounds like tongue-in-cheek self-parody. And in “The Shadow Out Of Time”, written in 1934, it finally becomes clear that Lovecraft has outgrown his morbidity, and turned into a science fiction writer who can be compared with Wells and Verne.
It could be said that Lovecraft had finally achieved what he had aimed at all his life. Because he found the real world so boring, he had attempted to create his own private hothouse in which his soul could blossom like an exotic flower. He succeeded so well that he ceased to be a world-weary “outsider”, and became a widely admired writer with dozens of friends and correspondents; he even began to enjoy travel. Ironically, this new success undermined his creative impulse, which had been based on sickness and rebellion. “The Shadow Out Of Time” was to my mind his last major work. It is arguable that the cancer that killed him three years later sprang out of a sense of confusion and bewilderment, a failure to grasp what had happened.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the term “deficiency needs” to explain the problem of characters like Lovecraft. A child who lacks certain vitamins will grow up stunted and undernourished, perhaps with some bone disease like rickets.
A human being who lacks certain mental vitamins will grow up suffering from spiritual undernourishment. The novels of the Brontë sisters sprang out of their loneliness and frustration in a moorland parsonage, with no close male companionship except their alcoholic brother. If Emily had been seduced by the local blacksmith’s assistant at the age of sixteen, she would have felt no need to create Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
On the other hand, the creative impulse that led Dostoevsky to create Crime And Punishment was not based on “deficiency needs”, but on a deep sensitivity to human misery, and a craving to understand, the most powerful of human drives. Tolstoy once called him “the hospital muse”, but there can be no doubt that his sickness is founded on a kind of strength.
There is no point in denying that most of Lovecraft’s work sprang out of deficiency needs, and that for that reason, has a narrow and suffocating quality. Yet it is impossible not to admire the sheer toughness that enabled him to survive years of invalidism and loneliness, and to leave behind such a powerful body of work.
He is the last of the great romantic “outsiders”, and his work marks the end of an era. There can be no doubt that, in spite of his obvious faults, we have to classify Lovecraft as a man of genius.
COLIN WILSON
1. CTHULHU MYTHOS
FOREWORD
From around 1925 H P Lovecraft’s stories appeared to be taking a different direction from those prior to that period. Whereas earlier the structure of his tales had shown a deeply influence by the styles of Poe, Machen and Dunsany, he now began to abandon the claustrophobic Gothicism inherent in his ‘macabre’ pieces and the otherworldly fantasy of his dreamworlds, and started to construct more extroverted narratives of dizzying and expansive cosmicism painted against a backdrop of ‘weird science’. Brief allusions to bizarre deities and forbidden grimoires in the earlier works began to be fleshed out, pointing to a star-spawned genealogy which would latterly be termed the “Cthulhu Mythos”.
Lovecraft’s own view of science was as nihilistic (or cosmically indifferent as he would have preferred it) as his views about anything else, whether it be religion, philosophy or civilisation itself. At the turn of the 20th century, man's increased reliance upon science was both opening new worlds and solidifying the manners by which he could understand them.
Lovecraft portrayed this potential for a growing gap of man's understanding of the universe as a potential for horror. Lovecraft actually saw Einstein's theory of general relativity as throwing the world into chaos and making the cosmos a joke. Non-Euclidean geometry is the mathematical language and background of Einstein's General Theory Of Relativity, and Lovecraft referenced it repeatedly in exploring alien archaeology as in “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Shadow Out of Time” and “At The Mountains of Madness”.
Perhaps the most prominent theme in Lovecraft’s cosmicism is the utter insignificance of humanity. Lovecraft believed that "the human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear.”
By extension, what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Whatever meaning or purpose may or may not be invested in the actions of the cosmic beings in Lovecraft's stories is completely inaccessible to the human characters, in the way an amoeba (for example) is completely unequipped to grasp the concepts that drive human behaviour. It is all a matter of scale.
One of Lovecraft’s main targets in his work was to stretch imagination to the very border of the presentable, an aim in which he often fell short, hence the proliferation of ‘unnamable’ or ‘indescribable’ monstrosities scattered throughout his pages. We can find this procedure defined in Lovecraft’s own statement concerning the particular task of weird fiction: The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality – when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt – as well as to gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?
Lovecraft mediated this suspension of natural law by forcing a pass through the avant-gardes of his time, in both art and science resulting in the emergence of a new ontology of nature as chaotic or even as “hyper-chaos”.
Although the common, and false, image of Lovecraft has generally been of a reclusive antiquarian obsessed by a heavily idealised New England past, it is easy to discern how he was actually very familiar with the most advanced and experimental currents of his time in the arts and sciences. His relation to these currents was, of course, a reactionary one. Lovecraft’s identifiable stlye was something artistically “new” while at the same time “politically” reactionary (and reactionary against other artistic innovations); and it was actually this frisson that ultimately enabled him to achieve his goal of alluding to ‘that whereof one cannot speak’ (Wittgenstein).
Lovecraft’s later stories retained the trappings of his innovations within a Gothic literary framework but took on board as well a broader connection to the “outside” of modernism, non-Euclidean mathematics and quantum physics, and the problematic of mass democracy.
Lovecraft’s essential Puritanism and conservatism meant that it was inevitable that he would react against the very innate core drives that spurred his imagination – an erotic yearning for the jouissance of ‘otherness’ of the cosmic Other. In his Seminar “Encore” (1972–1973) Jacques Lacan states that jouissance is essentially phallic but admits, however, that there is a specifically feminine jouissance, a supplementary jouissance, which is beyond the phallus, a jouissance of the Other. This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for both women and men may experience it but know nothing about it. Lovecraft’s yearning for the Cosmic Other is the basic male yearning for dissolution in the chaotic indeterminacy which he perceived as underlying the facade of Order erected by the human mind. At the same time, he recoiled from this dissolution, and the retreat of his ego naturally took the form of racism, misogyny and reactionary politics. Nonetheless, it is the vision of that Cosmic Otherness that exerts its siren-like fascination over generations of readers and draws them irresistibly to the lower slopes of the Mountains of Madness.
