H.P. Lovecraft: Haunted by History

Fear does not begin in the unknown. Just as we cannot see what lies beyond our field of vision, so we cannot fear what is outside our experience. A child who has never been burned will reach trustingly for the flame; and no innocent mind ever sees evil coming. Rather, it is the familiar which teaches us the meaning of horror. It is when we realise that our safe lives might not be as they seem that we first feel the ice creeping into our veins. Everything we once took for granted suddenly becomes uncertain; and through that chink of doubt come streaming nameless terrors.

For H.P. Lovecraft there was nothing as familiar – or as frightening – as the past. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, he was raised in the fading glow of America’s ‘Gilded Age’. It was a time of ‘progress’, energy, and hope – a time of ‘today’. Railways reached from coast to coast, industry flourished, and fabulous fortunes were there for the taking. From the first, however, Lovecraft was at odds with his day. Although he was passionate about science, he was prevented by poor health from completing his education, disoriented by his family’s growing penury, and seemingly incapable of earning a living.

He found a refuge in the past. The history of New England gave him a sense of who he was, of belonging. He would spend hours wandering around Providence in search of colonial houses, or grubbing through books in search of genealogical details. It also dominated his fiction. Most, if not all, of his stories are framed by the past, even when they are set in the present. For each of the imaginary New England towns he created – Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth – he invented a rich backstory, plausibly interwoven with details from history. He peppered his fantasies with names and dates that any reader would easily have recognised. And he gave many of his characters his own passion for genealogy and antiquarianism.

Yet Lovecraft was tormented by the possibility – even probability – that the past was not quite as historians liked to portray it. The problem was modernity. Although he never doubted that humanity had ‘progressed’, he came to believe that the ‘achievements’ of the 20th century were not only more fragile than they seemed, but had also been purchased at the price of a terrible forgetting.

Death is not the end

As Lovecraft saw it, the past was never ‘over’ – least of all for individuals. Contrary to the evidence of modern science, death was not inevitable. It could be pushed back almost indefinitely, provided, of course, you were willing to adopt some rather unsavoury methods. In ‘The Picture in the House’ (1920), for example, a cyclist happens upon a dilapidated house outside Arkham in which he encounters a man born in the 18th century who has lengthened his life through cannibalism. Nor was death final. Lovecraft was especially fond of stories that involved people either coming back to life – ‘The Tomb’ (1917); ‘In the Vault’ (1925) – or living on inside their graves, usually in some particularly nightmarish form, as in ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ (1919).

The past also lived on in our genes. Like many other Americans of his generation, Lovecraft was fascinated by pseudo-Darwinian ideas. He was convinced that social ‘progress’ was achieved when ‘superior’ families passed on ‘civilised’ traits to their children through selective breeding. But there was a tremendous danger in this. Within even the most ‘advanced’ humans, Lovecraft believed, there were atavistic tendencies that could spontaneously cause people to revert to more ‘primitive’ states. In ‘The Lurking Fear’ (1922), isolation and inbreeding transform the family of Jan Martenese from upstanding Dutch settlers into a clan of cannibalistic, mole-like monsters, tunnelling horribly beneath the Catskill mountains; while in ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1923), an American named Delapore instantly slides back down the evolutionary scale on discovering the ghastly crimes committed by his English ancestors, and is later found crouching, bloody and insensate, over the half-eaten body of his friend.

Lovecraft also thought that genetic ‘progress’ could be undone through miscegenation. This was often the excuse for thinly veiled racism. ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’ (1920) is a case in point. Sir Arthur Jermyn is a British aristocrat who discovers that one of his ancestors had married a ‘white ape’ from the Belgian Congo and begotten a succession of hybrids, who displayed progressively more violent, animalistic traits. The same idea later appeared in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1931), albeit with a fish-like people from the South Seas taking the place of simians.

Blinded by science

But there was also a much deeper, richer past, lying hidden all around us. That most of us never see it, Lovecraft believed, was the fault of modern science. Thanks in no small part to American philosophers such as Charles Pierce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910), most of his contemporaries took it for granted that knowledge should be grounded in empirical evidence. This had the effect of limiting people’s sense of the possible to the physical and the observable. It also prevented them from recognising the true nature of the past in two different ways.

On the one hand, modern science had obscured the profundity of previous generations. As Lovecraft saw it, his contemporaries had been so seduced by the empiricism of modern science that they instinctively tended to overlook anything in the past that appeared to conflict with it. They dismissed the Salem witch trials as mere superstition, laughed at alchemy, and scorned the very idea of magic. Lovecraft was not so sure, though. Why shouldn’t these practices also have been valid? What if they were capable not only of delivering a true knowledge of the world, but also of reaching through the fabric of our reality into a dimension more terrifying than anything modern science could imagine?

Lovecraft explored this idea in ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ (1927), the story of a young antiquarian who comes across a sinister ancestor named Joseph Curwen, who lived to an unnaturally advanced age before being murdered by a violent mob shortly before the American War of Independence. After much research, Ward eventually learns that Curwen had perfected the art of bringing the dead back to life and had used this to interrogate the learned men of the past in the hope of extracting information of a yet more terrible kind. Unable to suppress his curiosity, Ward resurrects Curwen in the same way. Curwen then kills Ward and tries to take his place, helped by the fact that he bears an uncanny resemblance to his descendant. Only thanks to the timely intervention of Ward’s family doctor is he consigned to the grave once again.

The Old Ones

On the other hand, Lovecraft also felt that modern science had blinded people to the full extent of humanity’s past. Precisely because empiricism placed such a heavy emphasis on observation, it was impossible for most people to conceive of any history beyond the limits of physical evidence. But what if there were a past for which there was no evidence, or of which the remains were hidden? What if all the human history we know is just flotsam and jetsam bobbing on the surface of a much greater tide, the depths and darkness of which most of us are blessed never to suspect?

In stories such as ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, Lovecraft hinted that horrible, inhuman creatures might lurk beyond our reality, and could be summoned to Earth using the right magic. Elsewhere he explained that these entities (known as ‘the Old Ones’ or ‘Elder Things’) had already travelled here millions of years ago, and had played a crucial role in the Earth’s history.

In ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1931), a group of Antarctic explorers discover that the Old Ones originally came as colonisers and enjoyed unchallenged dominion over the world, until a succession of bitter conflicts – some with other extraterrestrial races – compelled them to retreat to a handful of now-lost cities. Lovecraft even hints that humanity may actually have evolved from the material left over from the creation of their rebellious helpmates, the shoggoths.

At least one of the Old Ones – known as Cthulhu – is still here. A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an ‘octopus-like head … a scaly, rubbery-looking body’, and ‘prodigious claws’, Cthulhu had come from the stars millions of years ago and built the nightmare city of R’lyeh. This had later sunk to the bottom of the ocean, taking Cthulhu with it; but it is said that ‘when the stars are right’ it will rise again and Cthulhu will conquer the world. When that moment eventually comes, it is only by great good fortune that the sailors who are present manage to escape before he is plunged once again beneath the waves.

Curiously, testaments to the Old Ones’ history do survive. They are preserved by Cthulhu’s cultic devotees, in the hieroglyphic murals of their abandoned Antarctic city, and in books, such as the Necronomicon of the ‘mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’. They are communicated enigmatically by the malign messenger Nyarlathotep. And just occasionally – as in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1928) – one of the Old Ones even manages to beget half-human children. But most people, seduced by the certainties of modern life, remain blissfully oblivious to the terrible truth.

It is a nightmarish thought, too fanciful and absurd for any reasonable person to entertain. But if our dreams are merely ‘the sum of what [we have] seen and loved in youth’ – as Lovecraft put it in ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (1926-27) – then it is surely worth remembering that nightmares, too, begin in what we know, and what we secretly suspect might be.

• Born 20 August 1890, Providence, Rhode Island

• Died 15 March 1937, Providence, Rhode Island 

• Notable works ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) l ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ (1927) l ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ (1919)

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick.