[In the following essay, Cox discusses the frequent criticism of Lovecraft's literary craftsmanship.]

1.

“Lovecraft was not a good writer.” This blunt judgement by Edmund Wilson in his New Yorker essay, “Tales of the Marvelous and the Ridiculous,” has lodged itself, like an inextricable and uncomfortable foreign object, in the body of Lovecraftian discussion. “One of Lovecraft's worst faults,” says Wilson, “is his incessant effort to work up the expectations of the reader by sprinkling his stories” with certain adjectives, of which he gives a long-enough list but to which we might nevertheless add two more, “eldritch” and “unutterable,” He goes on to say, “Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words. … I happened to read a horror story by Merimee, La Venus d'Ille, just after I had been investigating Lovecraft, and was relieved to find it narrated—though it was almost as fantastic as Lovecraft—with the prosaic objectivity of an anecdote of travel.”¹

All this is true, but it is not enough. Any criticism of Lovecraft, after making these observations, should go on to note that his stories are, for the most part, carefully written, and that their objectionable qualities—the over-loaded and too-insistent adjectives, the ludicrous touches which don't quite make us laugh, the italicized last sentences—are not so much lapses as intentional literary devices. Lovecraft is not nodding when he writes them. Rather, he is deliberately employing the jargon and stilted mannerisms of a kind of writing so specialized as to be almost his personal creation, his task and pleasure being the extension and elaboration of a few conventions (that is, phrases, characters, settings and ideas, repeated from story to story) into a self-conscious genre or tradition. He means these words, such as Wilson particularized, these phrases and ideas, to be loved and relished for their own sakes. Judged seriously, they must be considered faults of taste; but Lovecraft did not mean for them to be judged seriously—an observation which we make not from motives of charity but in the interests of accuracy. The element of play is very prominent in any Lovecraft story, much more so than in any similar narrative by Merimee (or by Poe, whom Wilson almost mentions); and it is to this element that his many admirers and friends have most happily responded, some of them taking up its most elaborate manifestation, the “Cthulhu Mythos,” and adding their own fancies and conceits.

Perhaps that is why, judging by the testimony of my own nerves, there is little real horror in any of Lovecraft's fiction (apart from a moment here and there, such as in “The Color Out of Space”). Horror is constantly touched upon but it is conventionalized and sentimentalized. If we make the expected comparison with Kafka, we cannot help but see that Kafka is disturbing where Lovecraft is not—“The Metamorphosis” causes anxiety, and nothing in Lovecraft ever does that. In fact, it is when we think of Kafka that we recognize that Lovecraft's work is somehow comforting and cozy. He is (to let the thought take another step) an ideal writer for those who dread terror, metaphysical and moral terror; for he evokes fear but playfully renders it harmless. If his stories were truly horrifying, it is probable that they wouldn't be very popular—at least, not with many who are now his most ardent admirers.

2.

Why do certain of Lovecraft's phrases almost make us laugh? It is because they are incongruous with the rest of the writing, especially in the shorter pieces. They don't matter much in a story like “Pickman's Model,” where the submerged humor lies closer to the surface, but “Cool Air,” for instance, would have been more effectively developed with such expressions omitted. “Fled screaming and mad-eyed”—that raises an embarrassed smile, because the circumstantiality with which the story is otherwise told creates a prosaic realism not in keeping with the hollow solemnity of the phrase. Why don't we actually laugh? Because the incongruity is not great enough: we have been forewarned by various hints. What these little shocks and jars mean is that the stories are marred by the author's wish to graft them onto a literary tradition narrower than that to which they might freely belong.

This disadvantage does not weigh so heavily on some of the longer stories, such as those of the Cthulhu Mythos, which are his most popular productions and form the main grounds of his reputation. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” for instance, the writing is of a piece with the whole conception. The expressions and touches embody the same spirit as the general story-line and atmosphere, and the resultant lack of any embarrassment or inhibition—in other words, of any internal retardation in the writing—makes possible, in the climatic scene, its peculiar tone of abstract exultation. The emergence of Cthulhu from his slimy lair, “ravening for delight,” is a triumph of excess.²

However, is some of the later and still longer works, such as “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and At the Mountains of Madness—this last being, I think, his masterpiece—the Cthulhu mythology, far from justifying and liberating the style and story-movement, becomes itself obstructive. The buzzing cry of “Iâ! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! is completely irrelevant to “The Whisperer in Darkness.” It is an interjection, whose only function is to connect the story with those of the Cthulhu series. the natural development of the later fiction would seem to be away from this pantheon of ungainly gods and in the direction of something recognizable as science fiction. The author, anyway, must have been keenly conscious that these later stories are most effective precisely where they are unambiguously naturalistic; and we might speculate, as Fritz Leiber once speculated,³ that Lovecraft by this time would have liked to give up the Cthulhu tradition, or at least to adapt it to new purposes. There is more than one hint of this, such as the reference in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” to “that nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth,”⁴ suggesting that he was tempted by the possibility of translating the Cthulhu lexicon into a quasi-scientific vocabulary. But I think he would have found it very hard to give up the mythology he had created, or to seriously alter it. It would have seemed an act of disloyalty, perhaps to the past and certainly to that circle of friends who had so elaborately and admiringly followed his example. This may be one of the reasons why he wrote so little during the last two or three years of his life.

3.

If we glance in the direction of the general dramatic character of the stories, what do we see? We see a desire for a protective enclosure (an enclave of any sort: a well of houses, a New England town, a familiar rustic countryside) troubled by a fear that the enclosure will be disturbed by something from the outside. This is particularly so of the longer stories, but we see it in at least one of the shorter, “The Music of Erich Zann.” In most of the shorter tales, though, the valence is reversed: the enclosure is small, confining, oppressive, and there is a longing for the freedom outside, as “In the Vault,” “The Outsider,” “The Picture in the House,” and such variations as “Pickman's Model” (with its fear of subways and cellars) and “Cool Air.” Roughly, in the longer stories the horror consists of a familiar and comfortably home-like world, usually the Arkham country, penetrated by awesome forces from Outside—forces made terrible by their destructiveness and horrible by their association with family and race degeneracy and with madness.

But it will be noted that the settings of these longer stories are not unqualifiedly loved. This is partly because, in their vulnerability, they are “shadowed,” and partly because there is not enough to them—that is, the environment is insufficiently supportive. The New England countryside and towns have beauty but are pathetically subject to decay. They have a past and therefore a prideful antiquarian and historical interest, but no future. There is some comfort in them but no encouragement. They are not enough … but what else is there? The only presented alternative is the forces from the Outside. These forces, though ostensibly fearful, are nevertheless attractive. When the supposed Henry Ackeley, in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” writes exultingly of his old conversion to sympathy with the visitors from Yuggoth, the narrator comments, “… I felt myself touched by the contagion of the morbid barrierbreaking. To shake off the maddening and weary limitations of time and space and natural law … surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul and sanity!”⁵ Surely … but, still, the temptation is resisted. The forces from Outside, with their “utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry” (p. 262) are absolutely destructive of everything. The lavish particularity of the story is perhaps not only a necessary complement of this abstractness but also an anxious clinging to the skirts of actuality.

The natural tendency of any growing body of literary work (to lay down one of my basic critical assumptions) is in the direction of the working out of the basic contraries of the fiction, which, if it is ever successfully done at all, is usually done by way of a transcendence: that is, the characteristic opposites in the writer's work are finally seen as parts of a larger unity. It is curious to consider what this working out might have been like in the present case, if there had been more of the stories. I think we see in “The Shadow Out of Time” one of the latest of the stories and surely one of the best, a foreshadowing of how this resolution might have been worked. Here, there is no inside or Outside—except in the sense in which the narrator uses the latter work when, remarking that “there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life,”⁶ he insists that the shadow which fell so suddenly upon him came “from outside sources” (the emphasis of course being his). For the first time, the other world—that other world which has so threateningly lurked in the offing previous stories; the world of the Great Race in the present instance—is metaphysically identical with this one: it is discovered to be continuous with this one and just as solid. In other words, the Alien has been admitted and the world hasn't fallen to pieces. And for the first time there is a future; though, unfortunately, not an open future but one as congealed and fated as the past.

4.

We might now risk some connecting of the literary character, the dramatic character, of the stories with the personal character of the man whose named is signed to them. Our first guess would be that he conservatively sought a resigned security as a precaution against the pressure of some inward wildness, which he thought would destroy his world if it should ever slip through unguardedly—possibly thinking that it was a premonitory hint of that madness which had infected his parents, when, poor fellow, it was most likely nothing more than a natural desire for release from some internal constraint.

More fully and accurately, the situation looks like this: Something has blocked up the prospect. There is no future, no possibility of open and unlimited development. So the man allows himself only modest ambitions, the writer falls back upon regionalism and a slight literary mode. But his animal spirits are too great for such a restrictive way of life—look again at those photographs of the bouncing baby Lovecraft and his parents, which seem to me among the saddest family pictures ever published—and so a “wildness” constantly threatens the domestication, a wildness which is of course identified by the more deliberate self with whatever it is that has darkened the prospect. So even the resignation is not safe. It is pressured by energies that are feared because they are dangerous and which are yet attractive because they promise release from the self-imprisonment: they are partly submitted to and welcomed. The curious result is a writer who is both resigned and fatalistic (most writers, and most men, being merely one or the other). Life, viewed from such a position, cannot be completely serious and yet it is grim; which, we may observe, is an ideal philosophy for a writer of melodrama, but hardly a happy one for a man.

But these remarks must be qualified by our observations above on “The Shadow Out of Time,” which suggest how close Lovecraft had come to accepting the “forces from outside” as his own and to recognizing that they would not destroy his world if he allowed them expression.

Notes

1. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), pp. 288–89.

2. I make a few remarks, from a different standpoint, on this story in “The Call of Nature: A Note on ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Science Fiction Review no. 40 (October, 1970), p. 35.

3. In a letter in Fantasy Commentator, I (Summer, 1945), p. 163.

4. The Dunwich Horror and Others (Sauk City, Wis., Arkham House, 1963), p. 262.

5. Ibid., pp. 248–49.

6. Ibid., p. 371.