Correspondence; Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft

Correspondence; Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Setiya, Kieran et al. "Correspondence; Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft." The Yale Review 108, 3 (September 2020): 135-152. © 2020 Yale University As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/yrev.13676 Publisher Wiley Version Author's final manuscript Citable link https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130173 Terms of Use Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Detailed Terms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Correspondence Revisiting H. P. Lovecraft Kieran Setiya THE PACKAGE NEVER PROPERLY ARRIVED. Instead, there was a brown note stuck to my front door saying that it couldn’t be delivered. When I recovered it from the post office, the box was shipwrecked, cardboard burst and buckled. Inside, some of the books had turned to pulp; others had been soaked and slowly dried, their pages curled arthritically. Tucked among them was a green folder, the papers within damp but legible. I’d mailed the box to my home in Brookline, Massachusetts, from my parents’ house in the suburbs of Hull, the industrial city in East Yorkshire where I grew up. Twenty years earlier, I had come to the U.S. for graduate school, met my future wife, and stayed. These days, I teach philosophy at MIT. The house my parents live in now is not my childhood home. But there is a room in it that they call mine, where the relics of my life sink beneath the sediment of theirs. On my last visit, I had mined the box’s contents from the bottom drawer of a dresser filled with books and papers dating from my teen infatuation with the author H. P. Lovecraft, who fused horror with sci-fi in “The Call of Cthulhu” and other stories. For more than a year after it came, the folder lay unopened on my bedside table. I would glance at it occasionally, sidelong, as if it held some terrible secret, like a forbidden book in one of Lovecraft’s tales. Of course I knew in outline what the documents were. But when I tried to recall the passion that went into them, the dedication of weeks and months absorbed in Lovecraft’s work, I met an almost total blank. There was a void where memory should have been. For the most part, I am happy not to think about my childhood; those are years I am glad to have left behind. A lot of what I can recall I wish I could forget. What I want now to remember, I cannot: the liberating fervor of obsession. Reading Lovecraft changed my life. I was a solitary, introspective child. Through Lovecraft, I escaped into melodrama: a myth of alien beings whose capacities dwarf our own and whose intentions threaten all of life on earth. And I found a way into philosophy. Lovecraft used the trappings of pulp fiction to philosophical ends. He wrote allegories of human insignificance, of the limits of knowledge, of mechanism and a world without purpose. These were problems in which I was already, inarticulately, lost. It was as if he could read my mind. HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT WAS BORN IN PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island, August 20, 1890, in the house of his maternal grandfather. His childhood reads like the blueprint for an author of weird fiction: an attic library of old books; a father who goes insane and winds up in a lunatic asylum; a mother so protective that she monitors her one son’s every move, so doting she believes he will be “a poet of the highest order,” so critical she tells him he is physically repulsive. The child is, of course, a prodigy but a high school dropout; he has a nervous breakdown. A decade later, the mother goes insane and is sent to the same asylum where the father died; she dies there, too. We don’t know how much Lovecraft knew about his father. Winfield Lovecraft was a commercial traveler for a Providence silversmith. When Lovecraft was three, Winfield was diagnosed with “general paresis”—known to us now as syphilis, which in its tertiary stage can 1 lead to madness. He would remain in Butler Hospital until his death five years later. Was all of this kept from his young son? Or did the child witness symptoms of insanity, erratic behavior, changes in personality? “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” Lovecraft would later write, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” The boy was a precocious reader, graduating around age five from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Arabian Nights to Samuel Garth’s 1717 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At six or seven, he wrote an eighty-eight-line rendering of Homer’s Odyssey in verse, which he “published” in a booklet for his family, advertising more to come. “The later works may be much better than this,” his ad copy read, “because the author will have more practice.” If Lovecraft’s first obsession was literature—fantasy, myth, adventure—his second was science. He took up chemistry at age seven, followed by astronomy at twelve. From an early age, he combined these interests: Lovecraft’s self-published juvenilia would range from his own partial translation of Ovid to nine volumes of The Science Library, an “encyclopedia” of astronomy composed in the archaic eighteenth-century English he picked up from his grandfather’s books. In 1906, he acquired a three-inch telescope, a rebuilt Remington typewriter, and his first authentic publication: a letter on astronomy in the Providence Sunday Journal. His note on the existence of planets beyond Neptune appeared in Scientific American later that year. By the end of 1906, Lovecraft was writing regular columns of popular astronomy for the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and the Providence Tribune. He was just sixteen. IN RETROSPECT, IT SEEMS INEVITABLE. Lovecraft became an author, splicing speculative fiction with fantasy and horror. He pioneered the now-pervasive trope in which the seeming supernatural turns out to be the work of aliens. The eldritch gods of his nefarious cults are beings from outer space, not hostile but indifferent to us. In the mythology that emerged across Lovecraft’s best-known tales, the aliens came to earth millennia ago, created human life by accident, and lurk in hidden places—oceans, deserts, backwaters in a fictionalized New England—waiting to return. Though Lovecraft died in relative obscurity, his influence has been vast. You can see it in movies, books, and TV shows from Alien and The X-Files to Stranger Things, from Ramsey Campbell and Caitlín Kiernan to Stephen King. In 1999, Penguin Classics recognized Lovecraft with the first of three volumes collecting his fiction, and in 2005, he was inducted into the Library of America. Last year, a friend gave me a stuffed toy modeled on Cthulhu, Lovecraft’s gargantuan winged octopus, buried under the Pacific Ocean, dead but dreaming. In 1988, though, Lovecraft wasn’t so well known. Like a lot of twelve-year-old boys, I discovered him through Call of Cthulhu, a role-playing game based on the “Cthulhu Mythos,” Lovecraft’s pantheon of extraterrestrial “gods.” (I must have found a copy alongside Dungeons & Dragons in the local game store.) The game confronts a team of investigators with a succession of supernatural mysteries, which they must solve without going insane. Though I rarely had friends to play with, I loved the intricate rules, the gamification of fear. As well as “hit points” for physical health, there are “sanity points,” subtracted in each fraught encounter. I think I found this comforting: horror reduced to a roll of the dice. It was Call of Cthulhu that sent me looking for Lovecraft’s literary work. I found a collection of his stories in the local library in Longhill, on the outskirts of Hull, but was bored by 2 them at first. Months later, I tried again at school, where I chanced upon an ominous breezeblock of a book: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The volume ends with “The Dunwich Horror,” one of Lovecraft’s more sensational works. An extraterrestrial being impregnates the uneducated daughter of a sinister yokel in rural Massachusetts. She has two children: a prodigious youth who grows to nine feet tall and hides a skirt of tentacles in his trousers, and an invisible monster with an insatiable appetite for cattle. The bad guys are defeated by a trio of professors from nearby Arkham University with the aid of a magic spell. I was enthralled by the adventure but I sensed something beyond it, something profound about our place in the universe, our ignorance and impermanence. To my teenage self, Lovecraft felt deep; for grown-ups, he is easy to dismiss. His plots are sometimes operatic and his prose hysterical. Looking back, it’s hard to ignore the disgust at miscegenation that informs “The Dunwich Horror.” Some of Lovecraft’s fiction is overtly racist or xenophobic; elsewhere, one might find at work a sublimated fear of what is alien or other. His prejudice encompassed not just Blacks but the influx of immigrants in New York City, which both frightened and revolted him. After protests, Lovecraft’s image was removed from the World Fantasy Award in 2016. But his cultural presence endures, as a new generation reckons with his legacy. The HBO series, Lovecraft Country, based on a novel by Matt Ruff, takes place in a Jim Crow America full of horrors, human and otherwise. Victor LaValle’s searing novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, rewrites one of Lovecraft’s most offensive tales from the perspective of a Black street musician who appears in its sinister backdrop.

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