Category: Culture

Lovecraft describes some pretty weird monsters in his fiction. The most famous is Cthulhu, which he describes as looking like a cross between a man, a dragon, and an octopus.

In the story The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft mentions an apparent voodoo cult in Lousiana that has a small, pre-human statuette of Cthulhu that they use in their rites. When the police bust up and arrest members of the group, they get the statuette, which is then taken to a meeting of archaeologists in a vain attempt to identify it.

Lovecraft describes the statue this way:

The figure . . . was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way clown toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees.

The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth – or indeed to any other time.

Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.

The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it. something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

Now, since reading the story, I’ve had my own mental image of what the statuette looks like (though I must say that I have a tendency to forget that it’s supposed to be made of greenish-black stone and imagine it as being made of straight black stone instead).

I’ve wondered, though, what mental image Lovecraft had of the statue. He was no artist (despite the fact I just said he was in the title of this post), but he did once draw a picture of it in a letter to his friend F. Lee Baldwin. Here it is:

WARNING! IMPENDING VISAGE OF ELDER COSMIC MADNSS THAT MAY SHATTER YOUR SANITY! VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED! THIS IMAGE CONTAINS MATERIAL KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE INSANITY!

Continue reading “H. P. LOVECRAFT: Artist!”

The mad Arab Abdul Alhazred (a.k.a. H. P. Lovecraft) has had a volume published by the Library of America, a prestigious non-profit publisher devoted to preserving the works of America’s greatest writers.

In the judgment of author Michael Dirda, that means he’s entered the American canon.

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who pointed it out!)

Excerpts:

NO FULL UNDERSTANDING OF MODERN literature is possible without taking into account an exceedingly peculiar, self-educated, semi-recluse from Providence named Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

That is a conclusion no one, including Lovecraft himself, would have predicted. As he was dying in 1937 at age forty-six, he may well have felt he had lived in vain. His stories–sixty or seventy works of various lengths and completeness–resided in scattered notebooks and throwaway pulp magazines, uncollected and unlikely to be remembered.

But it now seems beyond dispute that H.P. Lovecraft is the most important American writer of weird fiction in the twentieth century–and one of the century’s most influential writers of any kind of fiction. His admirers range from the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges to such contemporary masters of darkness as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. Each year winners of the "World Fantasy Award" take home a trophy modeled on Lovecraft’s gaunt, lantern-jawed face. Nearly every author of supernatural fiction and dark fantasy sooner or later tries his hand at a Lovecraftian homage or pastiche.

The article contains some good analysis of Lovecraft’s literary work, but it also contains information on Lovecraft’s private side:

Lovecraft–under-sexed, neurasthenic, a Mama’s boy–actually got married in 1924, to a Jewish woman who described him, mirabile dictu, as "an adequately excellent lover." The couple resided in hated New York City for two years, until the marriage broke up and Lovecraft happily moved back home to Providence. In his later years, this once wholly introspective voyager traveled all around eastern America, from Quebec to New Orleans, from Cleveland to Key West.

He actually competed in an ice-cream eating contest and was reportedly offered the editorship of a periodical called the Magazine of Fun. He remained an almost literally starving writer, however, with so little income at one point that he ate his suppers out of cans, being unable to afford a stove. A typical dinner might consist of cold hot dogs, biscuits, and mayonnaise. Lovecraft died from cancer in 1937: forty-six years old and apparently doomed to be forgotten.

I can sympathize with Lovecraft’s poverty, as there was a time in grad school when I was so dirt poor in Arkansas that we were in constant danger of being evicted from our apartment, we couldn’t afford much-needed medicine, dollar packs of hot dogs were a principle means of subsistence, and cheese was something I regarded as "rich man’s food." I well remember picking loose change out of the couch to try to get enough coins that my wife and I could go to the market for a pack of hot dogs and a can of frozen lemonade, which would represent all the food we’d have to eat, ’cause the cupboard was bare.

Another summer (before I was married), I was so poor that all I could afford to eat was 17 cent boxes of low-quality, generic, Always Save Macaroni & Cheese–every single day. While macaroni & cheese had previously been a favorite dish, I couldn’t stand the thought of eating it for several years afterward.

Something that the article doesn’t mention is that Lovecraft’s friend, correspondent, and fellow weird fiction author Clark Ashton Smith (whom Lovecraft referred to as Klarkash-Ton) attributed Lovecraft’s death to malnutrition. Apparently Lovecraft was so impoverished that at certain points he was subsisting on food costing only $1.40 a week (a ridiculously small sum even in the 1930s).

Perhaps it was severe malnutrition that weakened his immune system enough to allow his stomach cancer to develop.

Bitterly ironic that a man who ate so little would be killed by a disease that gave him intense stomach pains.

Even more bitter is the fact that Lovecraft would have made more money if he had written more fiction, but criticism of his work demoralized him as a writer, keeping him from writing as much as he otherwise would have.

Now he’s considered one of the giants of 20th century American literature.

I still don’t buy his thesis that the universe is vast and uncaring and doesn’t give a whit about puny men.

God still loves H. P. Lovecraft.

One of the books I’m currently reading is titled The King In Yellow. It was first published in 1895, which makes it young in comparison to some of the books I read.

What’s interesting about it (among other things) is that it’s a kind of sci-fi/horror anthology of stories that are all loosely connected by a play they all mention. The title of the play is "The King In Yellow," and it is a most remarkable play. We only get a few snatches of dialogue from it and only the vaguest hints of what it is about, but the characters who read it in the stories have the unfortunate tendency to either go completely insane or suffer a horrible doom of some sort.

The author of The King In Yellow was Robert W. Chambers. It is his best-remembered book and is highly thought of by horror authors, some of whom included references to it and things it mentions in their own works. Unfortunately, they have somewhat less regard for some of Chambers’ later works. Apparently he decided that it was better to be a well-fed best-selling author rather than a starving artist, and he ended up turning his literary output in a more commercial direction.

I don’t know what Chambers’ religion was, but there is a surprising amount of positive material in it about the Catholic Church (so far), and Catholic themes are prominent in several stories (including, obviously, "The Street of Our Lady of the Fields").

It’s interesting reading sci-fi from 1895. The first story in the collection ("The Rapairer of Reputations") is set in 1920, and it’s interesting to see a turn-of-the-century perception of what the futuristic year 1920 would be like. (Among other things, they have euthanasia chambers on public streets in major cities.)

It’s kind of interesting, though, that everybody in 1920 is still riding horses. Chambers didn’t anticipate Henry Ford’s unleashing of the automobile on America. Which brings to mind some

REMARKS MICHAEL CRICHTON MADE.

Chambers also probably didn’t envision (a) that someone in 2005 would be reading his book and (b) that they would be reading it in the way I am: I downloaded the text from the Internet and ran it through my speech-synthesizer to output it as .mp3 files that I can now listen to on my computer or via my iPod or in my . . . pickup. (Sorry; horses don’t typically have .mp3 players installed on them.)

READ THE KING IN YELLOW–IF YOU DARE! (WARNING: There is some material in it that can offend modern sensibilities.)