A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The origin of the tale goes back even beyond the evidently detailed plot-synopsis of 1925. Its kernel is recorded in an entry in his commonplace book (no. 25) that must date to 1920, about a man visiting a museum of antiquities with a statue he has just made. This is a fairly literal encapsulation of a dream Lovecraft had in early 1920, which he describes at length in two letters of the period.

The dominant literary influence on the tale is Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ Lovecraft writes that it ‘relat[es] the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department’. Cthulhu is not, of course, invisible, but the rest of the description tallies uncannily with the events of the story. Nevertheless, it must frankly be admitted that Lovecraft himself handles the theme with vastly greater subtlety and richness than Maupassant. There may also be a Machen influence; especially relevant is ‘Novel of the Black Seal’, where Professor Gregg, like Thurston, pieces together disparate bits of information that by themselves reveal little but, when taken together, suggest an appalling horror awaiting the human race.

Many of the locales in Providence are real, notably the Fleur-deLys building at 7 Thomas Street, where the artist Wilcox (who fashioned a sculpture of Cthulhu after dreaming about him) resides. The earthquake cited in the story is also a real event. Steven J. Mariconda, who has written exhaustively on the genesis of the tale, notes: ‘In New York, lamps fell from tables and mirrors from walls; walls themselves cracked, and windows shattered; people fled into the street.’¹⁷

Interestingly, the celebrated underwater city of R’lyeh, brought up by this earthquake, was first coined by Lovecraft as L’yeh.¹⁸

The true importance of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, however, lies not in its incorporation of autobiographical details nor even in its intrinsic excellence, but in its being the first significant contribution to what came to be called the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. This tale contains nearly all the elements that would be utilized in subsequent ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ fiction by Lovecraft and others. There is, to be sure, something going on in many of the tales of Lovecraft’s last decade of writing: they are frequently interrelated by a complex series of cross-references to a constantly evolving body of imagined myth, and many of them build upon features—superficial or profound as the case may be—in previous tales. But certain basic points can now be made, although even some of these are not without controversy: first, Lovecraft himself did not coin the term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’; second, Lovecraft felt that all his tales embodied his basic philosophical principles; third, the mythos, if it can be said to be anything, is not the tales themselves nor even the philosophy behind the tales, but a series of plot devices

utilized to convey that philosophy. Let us study each of these points further.

First, the term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ was invented by August Derleth after Lovecraft’s death; of this there is no question. The closest Lovecraft ever came to giving his invented pantheon and related phenomena a name was when he made a casual reference to ‘Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery’,¹⁹ and it is not at all clear what these terms really signify.

Second, Lovecraft utilized his pseudomythology as one (among many) of the ways to convey his fundamental philosophical message, whose chief feature was cosmicism. This point is made clear in a letter written to Farnsworth Wright in July 1927 upon the resubmittal of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to Weird Tales (it had been rejected upon initial submission):

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.²⁰