Post by Dante on Feb 6, 2011 17:13:29 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/17HANDLER.html?_r=1
'H. P. Lovecraft': Unnatural Selection
By DANIEL HANDLER
Published: April 17, 2005
IT'S impossible to read the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) without experiencing a familiar sensation. The throat constricts. The lips purse. A shudder goes through your body, and the hands rise involuntarily to the mouth. But all resistance is futile, and you must succumb -- to a profound case of the giggles.
Of course, this is not the effect to which Lovecraft aspires. ''The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind,'' rumbles his famous credo, ''is fear,'' and the author intended from the very start -- his first story, completed when he was 14, was ''The Beast in the Cave'' -- to carry on in the grand literary tradition of making adults wonder if that slight creaking sound is the claw of some sinister beast finding its slimy way into, say, the walk-in closet in my bedroom.
This is a fine tradition, and Lovecraft's shadow looms large in it. But like so many seminal influences -- modern practitioners, from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates, hail him as a crucial figure -- he's not read nearly as widely as he is regarded, and frankly it's not difficult to see why. Just as Oscar Wilde noted that ''one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,'' it's tough to venture into a Lovecraft story with a straight face, let alone with chattering teeth. Lovecraft's stories are so overwrought that they make Jules Verne look like a homebody and Edgar Allan Poe a well-adjusted realist; he pushes at the already extreme boundaries of the Gothic, horror and science fiction genres -- not so much in the way that John Ashbery pushes at the boundaries of poetic form but more as Spinal Tap pushes at the boundaries of heavy metal: by turning the volume up to 11.
A scientist in a tale by M. R. James might stumble into strange circumstances that grow more and more sinister; in Lovecraft's ''Statement of Randolph Carter'' he lowers himself into a forbidden crypt in the dead of night to discover the source of a ghastly noise. A Wilkie Collins character might find a curious document in a locked drawer; in Lovecraft's ''Dunwich Horror'' the document has been passed between various shadowy figures, all of whom were either driven to death via madness or, it can sometimes seem, vice versa. While watching a John Carpenter movie, you long to ask a character, ''Why are you going outside in your nightgown when you've heard there's a killer lurking nearby?'' In Lovecraft's ''Shadow Out of Time,'' you hardly know what to say to Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who is suffering from five years of amnesia due to a mental takeover by invisible beings from another, unearthly dimension.
This unearthly dimension, appropriately, adds an unearthly dimension to Lovecraft's world. A good deal of space is devoted to concocting and exploring a mythology of his own devising, if ''mythology'' is indeed the term for something so utterly removed from quotidian reason. Whereas Bram Stoker and Poppy Z. Brite made hay with Transylvanian legends of yore, Lovecraft created a mythos out of whole cloth -- or, more precisely, whole fungus. Mi-Go, the Fungi of Yuggoth, is one of the slimier attractions in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, named after Cthulhu, a sort of dragon-octopus-human combo who skulks around driving men mad. Mi-Go is one of the less maddening creatures in the world of Cthulhu, although Lovecraft's description is hardly reassuring:
''They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.'' Passers-by are ''quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont.''
I should say not. While the notion of an unseen world is hardly unique to Lovecraft -- fantasists from Coleridge to Rowling have enjoyed peeking under earthly rocks -- one can hardly imagine a universe more removed from our own than that of Cthulhu. Biologically impossible, logistically unplumbable and linguistically unpronounceable, it's a world that makes you want to lock up all the wardrobes rather than venturing inside them. It is little wonder that the scarred witnesses of Cthulhan excursions talk to us in language as unspeakably florid as the universe they're attempting to describe. Lovecraft's narrators are all desperate with misery, and it is worth quoting several of these hysterics as they begin their tales, to approximate the accumulated tone of so much hand-wringing:
''Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me -- to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken.''
''Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. . . . Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.''
''I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze and annihilate me.''
Have you tried looking in Brooklyn, sir? The level of anguish, just in these few sentences, is so overdone -- a sense of horror and oppression threatening to master, paralyze and annihilate you? -- that when the climax of a story arrives, the narrator seems to be protesting too much. ''There are horrors beyond horrors,'' one such trembler says, just as the beast is arriving at last, ''and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.'' Oh, come on, this reader couldn't help thinking. Tell me what the monster looks like already. Tucked in an anthology, between the cloaks and daggers of Bram Stoker and the ravenous monsters of Dean Koontz, Lovecraft out-cloaks, out-daggers and out-ravenous-monsters them all, but after four or five of these stories the effect is bludgeoning. Lovecraft has mastered, paralyzed and annihilated the reader, and now the reader's ready for a little P. G. Wodehouse, thank you very much.
It is here, however -- perhaps 50 pages into this 800-plus page anthology -- that something begins to shift, and what was supposed to be sublime (but is actually ridiculous) becomes something that was supposed to be ridiculous, but is actually sublime. Part of this is simply getting accustomed to so melodramatic a prose style, but there is also, undeniably, a cumulative emotional weight. One hysterical narrator is off-putting; four is a running gag; but 22 is something else entirely, and over the course of this collection -- well chosen by Peter Straub -- Lovecraft's credo becomes quite clear. Arguably, the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind isn't fear. The first emotional state, if you consult the Bible, appears to be loneliness. After a day naming the animals, Adam is willing to give up one of his brand-new ribs for a little companionship, and the heroes of Lovecraft stories are similarly bereft.
In Poe, there's usually an innocent young woman who serves both as savior from and victim of the horrors at large, but in Lovecraft the men are isolated students or overdedicated scientists whose families and loved ones have receded in the wake of these men's sinister fixations -- and the Lovecraft chronology tucked at the back of the book gives us a similar picture of their creator. ''Suffers another 'near breakdown,' '' an entry reads, when the author is just 10 years old. ''Develops an interest in the Antarctic.'' His gaze continues to fix on empty, cold horizons; his health continues to fail; so too his brief marriage to a woman whose distinguishing characteristic appears to be a need for a ''rest cure.'' His philosophies on race and immigration, to put it mildly, do not show a great appreciation of other cultures. For all of their professed interest in the sciences, his characters have little faith it will bring the light of reason: ''The sciences,'' one narrator warns, ''have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.'' Indeed, people seem to be fleeing in Lovecraft's stories even before anything unnatural arrives. ''The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there,'' Lovecraft writes, by way of setting the scene. ''French Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined.''
If you spend enough time in Lovecraft's lonely landscapes, fear really does develop: not the fear that you will come across unearthly creatures, but the fear that you will come across little else. And what first seems horridly overdone accumulates a creepy minimalism. Taken as a whole, Lovecraft's work exhibits a hopeless isolation not unlike that of Samuel Beckett: lonely man after lonely man, wandering aimlessly through a shadowy city or holing up in rural emptiness, pursuing unspeakable secrets or being pursued by secret unspeakables, all to little avail and to no comfort. There is something funny about this -- in small doses. But by the end of this collection, one does not hear giggling so much as the echoes of those giggles as they vanish into the ether -- lonely, desperate and, yes, very, very scary.
Daniel Handler writes novels under his own name and as Lemony Snicket.
'H. P. Lovecraft': Unnatural Selection
By DANIEL HANDLER
Published: April 17, 2005
IT'S impossible to read the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) without experiencing a familiar sensation. The throat constricts. The lips purse. A shudder goes through your body, and the hands rise involuntarily to the mouth. But all resistance is futile, and you must succumb -- to a profound case of the giggles.
Of course, this is not the effect to which Lovecraft aspires. ''The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind,'' rumbles his famous credo, ''is fear,'' and the author intended from the very start -- his first story, completed when he was 14, was ''The Beast in the Cave'' -- to carry on in the grand literary tradition of making adults wonder if that slight creaking sound is the claw of some sinister beast finding its slimy way into, say, the walk-in closet in my bedroom.
This is a fine tradition, and Lovecraft's shadow looms large in it. But like so many seminal influences -- modern practitioners, from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates, hail him as a crucial figure -- he's not read nearly as widely as he is regarded, and frankly it's not difficult to see why. Just as Oscar Wilde noted that ''one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,'' it's tough to venture into a Lovecraft story with a straight face, let alone with chattering teeth. Lovecraft's stories are so overwrought that they make Jules Verne look like a homebody and Edgar Allan Poe a well-adjusted realist; he pushes at the already extreme boundaries of the Gothic, horror and science fiction genres -- not so much in the way that John Ashbery pushes at the boundaries of poetic form but more as Spinal Tap pushes at the boundaries of heavy metal: by turning the volume up to 11.
A scientist in a tale by M. R. James might stumble into strange circumstances that grow more and more sinister; in Lovecraft's ''Statement of Randolph Carter'' he lowers himself into a forbidden crypt in the dead of night to discover the source of a ghastly noise. A Wilkie Collins character might find a curious document in a locked drawer; in Lovecraft's ''Dunwich Horror'' the document has been passed between various shadowy figures, all of whom were either driven to death via madness or, it can sometimes seem, vice versa. While watching a John Carpenter movie, you long to ask a character, ''Why are you going outside in your nightgown when you've heard there's a killer lurking nearby?'' In Lovecraft's ''Shadow Out of Time,'' you hardly know what to say to Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who is suffering from five years of amnesia due to a mental takeover by invisible beings from another, unearthly dimension.
This unearthly dimension, appropriately, adds an unearthly dimension to Lovecraft's world. A good deal of space is devoted to concocting and exploring a mythology of his own devising, if ''mythology'' is indeed the term for something so utterly removed from quotidian reason. Whereas Bram Stoker and Poppy Z. Brite made hay with Transylvanian legends of yore, Lovecraft created a mythos out of whole cloth -- or, more precisely, whole fungus. Mi-Go, the Fungi of Yuggoth, is one of the slimier attractions in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, named after Cthulhu, a sort of dragon-octopus-human combo who skulks around driving men mad. Mi-Go is one of the less maddening creatures in the world of Cthulhu, although Lovecraft's description is hardly reassuring:
''They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.'' Passers-by are ''quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont.''
I should say not. While the notion of an unseen world is hardly unique to Lovecraft -- fantasists from Coleridge to Rowling have enjoyed peeking under earthly rocks -- one can hardly imagine a universe more removed from our own than that of Cthulhu. Biologically impossible, logistically unplumbable and linguistically unpronounceable, it's a world that makes you want to lock up all the wardrobes rather than venturing inside them. It is little wonder that the scarred witnesses of Cthulhan excursions talk to us in language as unspeakably florid as the universe they're attempting to describe. Lovecraft's narrators are all desperate with misery, and it is worth quoting several of these hysterics as they begin their tales, to approximate the accumulated tone of so much hand-wringing:
''Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me -- to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken.''
''Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. . . . Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.''
''I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze and annihilate me.''
Have you tried looking in Brooklyn, sir? The level of anguish, just in these few sentences, is so overdone -- a sense of horror and oppression threatening to master, paralyze and annihilate you? -- that when the climax of a story arrives, the narrator seems to be protesting too much. ''There are horrors beyond horrors,'' one such trembler says, just as the beast is arriving at last, ''and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.'' Oh, come on, this reader couldn't help thinking. Tell me what the monster looks like already. Tucked in an anthology, between the cloaks and daggers of Bram Stoker and the ravenous monsters of Dean Koontz, Lovecraft out-cloaks, out-daggers and out-ravenous-monsters them all, but after four or five of these stories the effect is bludgeoning. Lovecraft has mastered, paralyzed and annihilated the reader, and now the reader's ready for a little P. G. Wodehouse, thank you very much.
It is here, however -- perhaps 50 pages into this 800-plus page anthology -- that something begins to shift, and what was supposed to be sublime (but is actually ridiculous) becomes something that was supposed to be ridiculous, but is actually sublime. Part of this is simply getting accustomed to so melodramatic a prose style, but there is also, undeniably, a cumulative emotional weight. One hysterical narrator is off-putting; four is a running gag; but 22 is something else entirely, and over the course of this collection -- well chosen by Peter Straub -- Lovecraft's credo becomes quite clear. Arguably, the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind isn't fear. The first emotional state, if you consult the Bible, appears to be loneliness. After a day naming the animals, Adam is willing to give up one of his brand-new ribs for a little companionship, and the heroes of Lovecraft stories are similarly bereft.
In Poe, there's usually an innocent young woman who serves both as savior from and victim of the horrors at large, but in Lovecraft the men are isolated students or overdedicated scientists whose families and loved ones have receded in the wake of these men's sinister fixations -- and the Lovecraft chronology tucked at the back of the book gives us a similar picture of their creator. ''Suffers another 'near breakdown,' '' an entry reads, when the author is just 10 years old. ''Develops an interest in the Antarctic.'' His gaze continues to fix on empty, cold horizons; his health continues to fail; so too his brief marriage to a woman whose distinguishing characteristic appears to be a need for a ''rest cure.'' His philosophies on race and immigration, to put it mildly, do not show a great appreciation of other cultures. For all of their professed interest in the sciences, his characters have little faith it will bring the light of reason: ''The sciences,'' one narrator warns, ''have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.'' Indeed, people seem to be fleeing in Lovecraft's stories even before anything unnatural arrives. ''The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there,'' Lovecraft writes, by way of setting the scene. ''French Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined.''
If you spend enough time in Lovecraft's lonely landscapes, fear really does develop: not the fear that you will come across unearthly creatures, but the fear that you will come across little else. And what first seems horridly overdone accumulates a creepy minimalism. Taken as a whole, Lovecraft's work exhibits a hopeless isolation not unlike that of Samuel Beckett: lonely man after lonely man, wandering aimlessly through a shadowy city or holing up in rural emptiness, pursuing unspeakable secrets or being pursued by secret unspeakables, all to little avail and to no comfort. There is something funny about this -- in small doses. But by the end of this collection, one does not hear giggling so much as the echoes of those giggles as they vanish into the ether -- lonely, desperate and, yes, very, very scary.
Daniel Handler writes novels under his own name and as Lemony Snicket.
