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

One of the finest tales—or, perhaps, vignettes—of Lovecraft’s early period is the prose poem ‘Nyarlathotep’, written in late 1920. This brief story is nothing more than an allegory on the decline of civilization. The mysterious Nyarlathotep is a kind of itinerant showman whose displays of bizarre phenomena involving light and electricity fascinate the public, but he appears to be a harbinger for the downfall of all human culture. Will Murray has made the plausible conjecture that the figure of Nyarlathotep in this tale may have been based on the eccentric scientist (and part charlatan) Nikola Tesla.²²

Another strong tale is ‘The Picture in the House’, written on 12 December 1920. This simple tale of what a young man travelling through backwoods New England discovers in an apparently abandoned house makes mention of Lovecraft’s second, and most famous, fictional town, Arkham. Beyond that, the story is the first of Lovecraft’s tales not merely to utilize an authentic New England setting but to draw upon what Lovecraft himself clearly felt to be the weird heritage of New England history, specifically the history of Massachusetts. To Lovecraft, the seventeenth century, with its Puritan theocracy, represented a kind of American ‘dark ages’ precisely analogous to the medieval period, and its culminating event—the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692—only confirmed Lovecraft’s impression of it as an epoch of ignorance, darkness, and potential terror. ‘The Picture in the House’ only broaches some of these issues, but later works would elaborate upon them considerably.

‘The Nameless City’, written in January 1921, is, conversely, one of Lovecraft’s poorest tales, but one for which he himself retained an inexplicable fondness. This wild, implausible, histrionic tale of an explorer who tunnels beneath the sands of the Arabian desert and discovers a city formerly inhabited by alien creatures (preserved like mummies in upright coffins) has little to recommend it. It is, however, the first time that Abdul Alhazred is mentioned in Lovecraft’s fiction. ‘The Moon-Bog’, written for that St Patrick’s meeting in March 1921, is similarly a conventional tale of supernatural revenge.

Of ‘The Outsider’—which many believe to be Lovecraft’s signature tale—it is difficult to speak in small compass. To be sure, its depiction of a strange individual who burrows out of what appears to be a subterranean castle and, entering a brightly lit mansion, discovers that he himself is the horrible, decaying monster that has frightened off a band of merry-makers is a poignant exemplar of ‘the soul-shattering consequences of self-knowledge’;²³ but its excessive reliance on Poe-esque diction makes one wonder whether it is much more than an exercise in pastiche. Lovecraft himself came to such a judgment:

Others … agree with you in liking ‘The Outsider’, but I can’t say that I share this opinion. To my mind this tale—written a decade ago—is too glibly mechanical in its climactic effect, & almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of its language. As I re-read it, I can hardly understand how I could have let myself be tangled up in such baroque & windy rhetoric as recently as ten years ago. It represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.²⁴

Many have conjectured on the influences behind the tale, specifically the culminating image of the entity seeing himself in a mirror. The most plausible suggestion, I believe, is that Lovecraft is borrowing from the scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when the monster first sees himself in a pool of water.

It is, however, now time to examine the question of the story’s autobiographical character. The opening sentence reads: ‘Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.’ One of the Outsider’s final remarks—’I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men’—has been taken, perhaps not unjustly, as prototypical of Lovecraft’s entire life, the life of an ‘eccentric recluse’ who wished himself intellectually, aesthetically, and spiritually in the rational haven of the eighteenth century. I think we have already learnt enough about Lovecraft to know that such an interpretation greatly overstates the case: without denying his emphatic and sincere fondness, and even to some degree nostalgia, for the eighteenth century, he was also very much a part of his time, and was an ‘outsider’ only in the sense that most writers and intellectuals find a gulf between themselves and the commonality of citizens. Lovecraft’s childhood was by no means unhappy, and he frequently looked back upon it as idyllic, carefree, and full of pleasurable intellectual stimulation and the close friendship of at least a small band of peers.