Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer
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it must be kept in mind that no matter how greatly Lovecraft increased the length, scope, complexity, and power of his tales, he never once lost control or gave way to the impulse to write wildly and pile one blood-curdling incident on another without the proper preparation and attention to mood. Rather, he tended to write with greater restraint, to perfect the internal coherence and logic of his stories, and often to provide alternate everyday explanations for the supernatural terrors he invoked, letting the reader infer the horror rather than see it face to face, so that most of his stories fulfill the conditions set down by the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness”: “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end… I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference,” or by the narrator of “The Shadow Out of Time”: “There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed.”
4.
Strangely paralleling the development of Lovecraft’s scientific realism was an apparently conflicting trend: the development of an imaginary background for his stories, including New England cities such as Arkham and Innsmouth, institutions such as Miskatonic University in Arkham, semi-secret and monstrous cults, and a growing library of “forbidden” books, such as the Necronomicon, containing monstrous secrets about the present, future, and past of earth and the universe.
Any writer, even a thoroughgoing realist, may invent the names of persons and places, either to avoid libel or because his creations are hybrid ones, combining the qualities of many persons or places. Some of Lovecraft’s inventions are of a most serious sort altogether, definitely distorting the “real” world that forms the background for many of his later supernatural tales. Not only are the Necronomicon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt and other volumes presumed to have a real existence (in a few copies and under lock and key, rather closely guarded secrets), but the astounding and somewhat theosophical tale they have to tell of non-human civilizations in earth’s past and of the frightful denizens of other planets and dimensions, is taken seriously by the scholars and scientists who people Lovecraft’s stories. These individuals are in all other ways very realistically-minded indeed, but having glimpsed the forbidden knowledge, they are generally more susceptible to cosmic terror than ordinary people. Sober and staid realists, they yet know that they live on the brink of a horrid and ravening abyss unsuspected by ordinary folk. This knowledge does not come to them solely as the result of the weird experiences in which the stories involve them, but is part of their intellectual background.
These “awakened” scholars are chiefly on the faculty of imaginary Miskatonic University. Indeed, the fabulous history of that institution, insofar as it can be traced from Lovecraft’s stories, throws an interesting light on the development of this trend in his writing.
In June 1882 a peculiar meteor fell near Arkham. Three professors from Miskatonic came to investigate and found it composed of an evanescent substance defying analysis. Despite this experience, they were highly skeptical when later on they heard of eerie changes occurring on the farm where the meteor fell and, contemptuous of what they considered folk superstitions, they stayed away during the year-long period∙ in which a hideous decay gradually wiped out the farm and its inhabitants. In other words, they behaved as professors are conventionally supposed to behave, intolerant of ghostly events and occult theories—and certainly showing no signs of having read the Necronomicon, if there was a copy at Miskatonic at that date, with any sympathy. It is significant that the story in which these events occur, “The Color Out of Space,” is praised by Edmund Wilson, a generally adverse critic.
But in the course of the next twenty-five years, perhaps as an insidious result of the strange meteor fall, a change took place in Miskatonic University and in the intellectual equipment of at least some of its faculty members. For when the child prodigy Edward Pickman Derby entered Miskatonic he was able to gain access for a time to the copy of the Necronomicon in the library; and Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, the political economist, during his five-year amnesia which began May 14, 1908, made indecipherable marginal notes in the same volume. Still later, a stranger who was picked up near-dead in Kingsport harbor on Christmas (in 1920, I think) was allowed to view the dread book in St. Mary’s Hospital at Arkham.
During the ‘twenties there was a wild, decadent set among the students (Miskatonic’s lost generation, apparently), who were of dubious morality and were reputed to practice black magic. And in 1925 the Necronomicon was consulted yet again, this time by the uncouth and precocious giant Wilbur Whately. He sought to borrow it, but Henry Armitage, the librarian, wisely refused.
In 1927 (the year they were surveying for a new reservoir for Arkham) the talented young mathematician Walter Gilman also obtained temporary access to the volume. He came to a hideous end in a haunted rooming house, but not before he had presented to Miskatonic a queer, spiky image formed of unknown elements and later placed on display in the Mis-katonic museum, which also boasted some strangely alloyed and fantastically piscine gold jewelry from Innsmouth.
In the late ‘twenties Asenath Waite, fascinating daughter of a reputed Innsmouth sorcerer, took a course in medieval metaphysics at Miskatonic, and we can be sure she did not lose the opportunity of prying into even more dubious branches of knowledge.
On the whole, the late ‘twenties were a period particularly productive of spectral occurrences in and around Arkham; in particular the year 1928; which can in this connected be termed “The Great Year,” and in even greater particular September 1928, which may be titled “The Great Month.”
We can presume that the unfortunate Gilman perished that year and that Asenath Waite was one of the student body, but those assumptions are only a beginning. Consultation of the Journal of the American Psychological Society shows N.W. Peaslee than began to publish a series of articles describing his strange dreams of earth’s non-human past. And on May sixth Albert N. Wilmarth, an instructor in literature, received a disquieting letter from the Vermont scholar Henry A. Akeley about extra-terrestrial creatures lurking in his native woodlands. In August Wilbur Whateley died horrifyingly while attempting to burglarize the Miskatonic library and steal the Necronomicon. On September ninth Wilbur’s twin brother, who took after his non-human father to an even greater extent, broke loose near Dunwich, Massachusetts.
On September twelfth, Wilmarth, lured by a forged letter, set out to visit Akeley in Vermont. On the same day Dr. Armirage learned of the eruption of Wilbur’s twin brother.
That night Wilmarth fled in horror from Akeley’s farm. On the fourteenth Armitage set out for Dunwich with two of his colleagues, and next day managed to destroy the Dunwich horror.
It is startling indeed to think of two such tremendous sequences of supernatural events reaching their crisis at almost precisely the same time. One likes to think of the frantic Armitage passing the apprehensive Wilmarth as the latter hurried to catch his train. (The most obvious explanation is that Lovecraft prepared a rather elaborate chronology for “The Dunwich Horror,” written in 1928, and then made use of the same chart in laying out the plot of “The Whisperer in Darkness,” written in 1930 with no other tales intervening.)
After the excitement of The Great Month, almost any events seem anticlimatic. However, one should mention the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930-31; the discovery of the secrets of the Witch-House in March 1931, with further accessions to the museum; and the Australian expedition of 1935. Both expeditions included Professor William Dyer of the geology department, who also knew something of Wilmarth’s dreadful experience and who can perhaps therefore lay claim to having been involved in more preternatural events than anyone else on the faculty.
One can only speculate as to why Lovecraft created and made such intensive use of Miskatonic University and the Necronomicon. Certainly the Miskatonic faculty constitutes a kind of Lovecraftian utopia of highly intelligent, aesthetically sensitive, yet tradition-minded scholars.
As for the Necronomicon, it appears that Lovecraft used it as a back door or postern gate to realms of wonder and myth, the main approaches to which had been blocked off by his acceptance of the new universe of materialistic science. It permitted him to maintain in