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

This passage maintains that all Lovecraft’s tales emphasize cosmicism in some form or another. If, then, we segregate certain of Lovecraft’s tales as employing the framework of his ‘artificial pantheon and myth-background’ (as he writes in ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’), it is purely for convenience, with a full knowledge that Lovecraft’s work is not to be grouped arbitrarily, rigidly, or exclusively into discrete categories (‘New England tales’, ‘Dunsanian tales’, and ‘Cthulhu Mythos tales’, as Derleth decreed), since it is transparently clear that these (or any other) categories are not well-defined or mutually exclusive.

Third, it is careless and inaccurate to say that the Lovecraft Mythos is Lovecraft’s philosophy: his philosophy is mechanistic materialism and all its ramifications, and, if the Lovecraft Mythos is anything, it is a series of plot devices meant to facilitate the expression of this philosophy. These various plot devices need not concern us here except in their broadest features. They can perhaps be placed in three general groups: first, invented ‘gods’ and the cults or worshippers that have grown up around them; second, an ever-increasing library of mythical books of occult lore; and third, a fictitious New England topography (Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, etc.). It will readily be noted that the latter two were already present in nebulous form in much earlier tales; but the three features came together only in Lovecraft’s later work. Indeed, the third feature does not appreciably foster Lovecraft’s cosmic message, and it can be found in tales that are anything but cosmic (e.g., ‘The Picture in the House’); but it is a phenomenon that has exercised much fascination and can still be said to be an important component of the Lovecraft Mythos. It is an unfortunate fact, of course, that these surface features have frequently taken precedence with readers, writers, and even critics, rather than the philosophy of which they are symbols or representations.

It is at this point scarcely profitable to examine some of the misinterpretations foisted upon the Lovecraft Mythos by August Derleth; the only value in so doing is to serve as a prelude to examining what the mythos actually meant to Lovecraft. The principal error is that Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ can be differentiated between ‘Elder Gods’, who represent the forces of good, and the ‘Old Ones’, who are the forces of evil.

Derleth, a practising Catholic, was unable to endure Lovecraft’s bleak atheistic vision, and so he invented out of whole cloth the ‘Elder Gods’ as a counterweight to the ‘evil’ Old Ones, who had been ‘expelled’ from the earth but are eternally preparing to reemerge and destroy humanity. This invention of ‘Elder Gods’ allowed him to maintain that the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is substantially akin to Christianity, therefore making it acceptable to people of his conventional temperament. An important piece of ‘evidence’ that Derleth repeatedly cited to bolster his claims was the following ‘quotation’, presumably from a letter by Lovecraft:

All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.

In spite of its superficial similarity with the ‘Now all my tales …’ quotation previously cited (with which Derleth was familiar), this quotation does not sound at all like Lovecraft—at any rate, it is entirely in conflict with the thrust of his philosophy. When Derleth in later years was asked to produce the actual letter from which this quotation was purportedly taken, he could not do so, and for a very good reason: it does not in fact occur in any letter by Lovecraft. It comes from a letter to Derleth written by Harold S. Farnese, the composer who had corresponded briefly with Lovecraft and who severely misconstrued the direction of Lovecraft’s work and thought very much as Derleth did.²¹ But Derleth seized upon this ‘quotation’ as a trump card for his erroneous views.

There is now little need to rehash this entire matter. There is no cosmic ‘good-versus-evil’ struggle in Lovecraft’s tales; there are no ‘Elder Gods’ whose goal is to protect humanity from the ‘evil’ Old Ones; the Old Ones were not ‘expelled’ by anyone and are not (aside from Cthulhu) ‘trapped’ in the earth or elsewhere. Lovecraft’s vision is far less cheerful: humanity is not at centre stage in the cosmos, and there is no one to help us against the entities who have from time to time descended upon the earth and wreaked havoc; indeed, the ‘gods’ of the Mythos are not really gods at all, but merely extraterrestrials who occasionally manipulate their human followers for their own advantage.