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

‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, being one of the longest stories Lovecraft actually bothered to type and submit to a publisher, brought corresponding proceeds. It was readily accepted by Farnsworth Wright, who paid Lovecraft $350.00 for it—the largest cheque he had ever received and, indeed, ever would receive for a single work of fiction. Wright planned to run it as a two-part serial; but early in 1931 Weird Tales was forced into publication every two months for about half a year, so that the story appeared complete in the August 1931 issue.

The period from 1928 to 1930 saw Lovecraft write only two original weird tales (the severely flawed ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and the somewhat flawed but otherwise monumental ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’) along with three revisions for Zealia Bishop: one highly significant (‘The Mound’), another fair to middling (‘The Curse of Yig’), and one totally forgettable (‘Medusa’s Coil’). But to measure Lovecraft solely on his weird output would be an injustice both to the man and to the writer. His travels to Vermont, Virginia, Charleston, Quebec, and other antiquarian oases provided much imaginative nourishment, and his accounts of his journeys, both in letters and in travel essays, are among his most heartwarming pieces. His correspondence continued to increase as he gained new acquaintances, and their differing views—as well as his constant absorption of new information and new perspectives through books and through observation of the world around him—allowed him considerably to refine his philosophical thought. By 1930 he had resolved many issues to his satisfaction, and in later years only his political and economic views would undergo extensive revision. It is, then, appropriate to examine his thought before proceeding to the examination of the subsequent literary work based upon it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Non-supernatural Cosmic Art (1930–31)

By the early 1930s Lovecraft had resolved many of the philosophical issues that had concerned him in prior years; in particular, he had come to terms with the Einstein theory and managed to incorporate it into what was still a dominantly materialistic system. In so doing, he evolved a system of thought not unlike that of his later philosophical mentors, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana.

It appears that Lovecraft first read both these thinkers between 1927 and 1929. He clearly found Russell’s reliance on science and his secular ethics to his liking, although Russell was not exactly an atheist. In 1927 Russell encapsulated his philosophical outlook in terms Lovecraft would have welcomed:

I still believe that the major processes of the universe proceed according to the laws of physics; that they have no reference to our wishes, and are likely to involve the extinction of life on this planet; that there is no good reason for expecting life after death; and that good and evil are ideas which throw no light upon the nonhuman world.¹

What Lovecraft had come to realize about the Einstein theory— in particular, its bearing on the three principles of materialism emphasized by Hugh Elliot (the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology, and the denial of substances not envisaged by physics and chemistry)—is that Newtonian laws of physics still work entirely adequately in the immediate universe around us: ‘The given area isn’t big enough to let relativity get in its major effects— hence we can rely on the never-failing laws of earth to give absolutely reliable results in the nearer heavens

.’.² This allows Lovecraft to preserve at least the first of Elliot’s principles. As for the second:

All we can say of [the cosmos], is that it contains no visible central principle so like the physical brains of terrestrial mammals that we may reasonably attribute to it the purely terrestrial and biological phaenomenon call’d conscious purpose; and that we form, even allowing for the most radical conceptions of the relativist, so insignificant and temporary a part of it … that all notions of special relationships and names and destinities expressed in human conduct must necessarily be vestigial myths..³

This passage reveals how intimately the denial of teleology is, for Lovecraft, connected with the idea of human insignificance: each really entails the other. If human beings are insignificant, there is no reason why some cosmic force (whether we identify it with God or not) should be leading the universe in any given direction for the benefit of humanity; conversely, the evident absence of conscious purpose in the universe at large is one more—and perhaps the most important—indication of the triviality and evanescence of the human species. Lovecraft is still more emphatic on the third point (denial of spirit):