Book cover (image courtesy of McFarland Publishers)

My weird odyssey into the mind of H. P. Lovecraft started approximately seven years ago, when I began an in-depth study of his works; eventually culminating in my writing a book of essays, shortly to be published by McFarland, under the title H. P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction (2013). Most of my book deals with the classical Greek and Roman underpinnings of HPL’s writings, such as the pastoral Arcadian language and imagery to be found in HPL‘s poems and stories, as well as HPL‘s lifelong engagement with the Theseus myth. (The second half of my book, dealing with Lovecraft’s dreams, economic theory, and other miscellaneous matters, proved to be too long to include in the present volume, and will hopefully be published later.)

The genesis of my book began when, much like Phillip A. Ellis–who argued in the 2008 Lovecraft Annual that it was time to look at Lovecraft’s early poems and “create somewhat of a critical dialogue about them” (LA 2:48)–I was struck by the lingering classical presence in HPL’s weird fiction, forming a clear continuity with his earlier, pastoral poetry: all in apparent contradiction to HPL‘s famous “cosmic outlook“. Why, for example, were satyrs included amongst the otherwise cosmic horrors of “The Horror at Red Hook”? Why, too, were dryads and whispering woodland spirits mentioned in “The Tomb”? How to explain the procession of classical sea gods in “The Strange High House in the Mist”, or the classical Greek aspects of “The Temple“ or “The Green Meadow“? A horror rooted in the animalistic savagery of the satyrs, fauns, and dryads is more mundane and bestial than cosmic; but this was merely one of many misconceptions about HPL that my researches were to unveil.

True, none of the above tales stories are typically considered to represent HPL at his best–but such forest spirits later find their clear descendents in the unseen spirits of meadow and field invoked in “The Dunwich Horror”; in the anarchic mutations of Mother Nature on display in “The Colour Out of Space”; in the Poseidonic and vengeful aspects of Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu”; and in the feminine machinations of HPL’s mysterious “moon-ladder.” Needless to say, all of this is very far removed from the traditional characterization of HPL as a purveyor–nay, even a creator–of unalloyed cosmic horror. Nor, as my research proceeded, was I the only critic to raise such issues: the essays of Phillip Ellis, with his research into HPL‘s early poetry; of Dennis Quinn, with his research into HPL’s use of classical bacchanalian imagery; and of Cesar Guarde Paz, with his realization of the importance of HPL‘s “Poetry and the Gods” in prefiguring the form of the later Lovecraft Mythos, all paralleling my own findings, and helping to further confirm me and cement me in my views.

Clearly, HPL’s later weird fiction seemed to be rooted in a direct inversion of his previous pastoral, Arcadian imagery: a dark Arcadia, if you will, (a conception which I feel also, at least partially, underlies his formulation of the word “Arkham” itself), in which HPL was able to embody his larger conservative, satirical, and neo-Puritan critique of modern culture.

In the end, however, such a purely literary analysis of HPL’s weird fiction left me unsatisfied. Literary and aesthetic analysis were not enough. I was continually running into recurring themes and symbols in his stories which had no apparent precursors or antecedents in HPL’s earlier reading, and which were not susceptible to purely literary exegesis. How to explain, for instance, the constant and recurring presence of married male-female couples, both benevolent and malevolent, throughout his weird fiction (often in direct contradiction to the truism that HPL “never wrote about women?”) How to explain, too, the recurring, and seemingly compulsive presence of old and gigantic entities throughout his weird fiction, often in both malevolent and benevolent guises? HPL’s frequent nightmare imagery, too, with its recurring and obsessive descriptions of night flights, also cried out for an explanation. Ultimately, however, no purely literary explanation seemed possible, and only a psychological and parental relation provided any answers.

Unfortunately, this necessitated a psychological analysis of HPL’s writings: which is an unenviable position for an amateur writer to be in for a number of reasons.

On the one hand, as early Lovecraft scholar Maurice Levy once observed, a psychological analysis of Lovecraft’s weird fiction cannot be improvised. On the other hand, (and given the readiness with which psychological theory can be, and often is, abused in the realm of aesthetics by many Leftist critics), there are others only too willing to reflexively attack at any sign of psychological (read Freudian) analysis. Indeed, as some of the responses to my tentative theories on the Eldritch Dark website forum clearly demonstrate, such attacks have already begun in earnest, often in the mistaken belief, it would seem, that I was led by theory, rather than symptoms, in my analysis of HPL’s works.

As Roger Kimball observes in his book The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, it has become all too common for leftist academia to use psychological doubletalk to undermine European art. On the other hand, however, such rampant abuse of psychological terms in no way renders the terms themselves null and void. Just because some doctors are guilty of malpractice, does not mean that all of medicine is a fraud.

It was HPL’s nightmare-symptoms themselves, for instance, and not any predetermined theory, which first led me to consult Dr. Ernest Jones’ seminal work On the Nightmare. It was HPL’s chorea and tic symptoms, too, which led me to consult the papers of Dr. Margaret Mahler on childhood tic symptoms. I was led by symptoms, not by theory. Mahler, Jones, Neumann, Jung, and Freud, interested me only as authorities with clinical experience (indeed, vast clinical experience) with the symptoms experienced by Lovecraft, or adduced by his works; and I have never adopted, or required the reader to adopt, the tenets of any specific theory. Accepting Freudian theory is not a necessity for making use of various case studies which parallel HPL’s own–any more than one must believe that Neumann and Jung’s “collective unconscious” exists, in order to acknowledge the verifiable existence of recurring archetypal symbols across widely disparate cultures, (however these are to be explained.) (It is amazing, indeed, how many of those who reflexively attack Freudian psychology never seem to acknowledge, much less succeed in refuting, the huge number of factual clinical cases and source documents cited by its authorities, let alone the reality of the symptoms themselves, which persist in crying out for an explanation.) And in the end, I think I succeeded in maintaining a heuristic approach to the authorities I cite in my book.

(I will note, simply as an aside, that many of the disagreements provoked by my posts on the above website, seem to be simply knee-jerk reactions to my brief mention of Freud in my works. Freud is invoked simply as a popular bogey-man. I doubt any of my critics have ever read Freud; for if they had, they would have seen that Freud is in no way the monolithic entity that they apparently suppose. Indeed, they would realize that Freud consistently engages in a dialogue with his critics [of whom Freud is very much and continually aware]; and that Freud only adduces the theories which he does because he feels constrained to do so by the clinical evidence before him. As Freud writes, he must “stick to [his] guns–there is nothing else for it-…” [The Wolfman and Other Cases, Penguin Books, {2003}, p. 255.])

The truth is that we now live in a post-Freudian world, just as we live in a post-Darwinian one. And just as Darwin’s theory has undergone numerous modifications, alterations, etc., as new evidence has come forward, so too have Freud’s ideas undergone an evolution, reinterpretation, and change. But the larger, more basic ideas of Freud: the existence of the unconscious; the importance of childhood experiences and infantile libidinal drives and desires; the interpretation of dreams; the role of repression in the development of hysteria and neuroses; are rarely questioned by anyone.

At any rate, it would seem that the numerous married male-female couples in HPL’s weird fiction possess a parental basis, as do the numerous giants, Old Ones, and intimations of a childhood spying on the primal scene of parental intercourse (what Freud called the “Urzene”): from Jervas Dudley’s voyeuristic/necrophilic staring into the portal of “The Tomb”, to Atal’s voyeuristic spying on the bacchanalian mountaintop revels of the gigantic Other Gods, to Danforth’s final forbidden backward glance in At the Mountains of Madness. (Nor is HPL‘s young age at the time of his father‘s hospitalization and confinement sufficient reason to invalidate such a notion. True, HPL apparently possessed only the vaguest memories of his father, and only lived with him until the age of three; on the other hand, this is precisely the period, according to Freud [up to age five, in fact], when those experiences seem to occur which later typically develop into neurosis: including observation of the primal scene. As Freud pointed out, parental coitus is most frequently observed mainly during earliest childhood, since it is at this time that fewer pains are taken by the parents to conceal their sexual behavior.

Indeed, the importance of HPL’s parents in his later fiction eventually led me to formulate and adopt some firm conclusions: 1) that HPL was very much aware of the sexual nature of his father’s illness, and 2) that his relationship with his mother had incestuous overtones, (and perhaps even incestuous actions.)

Naturally, Lovecraft did not speak explicitly about either. After all, there are certain things A Gentleman does not discuss. But the vast majority of HPL’s weird fiction embodies a form of confession of both these two “unnamable“ crimes: from the unheroic end of so many of HPL‘s protagonists (many in ways which directly parallel the illness of his father), to the maternal anxieties which haunt his protagonists, from the restless ghoul fleeing the maternal nest in “the Outsider“, to the hapless student struggling in the old witch‘s grasp in “The Dreams in the Witch House“.

Certainly, either circumstance: a father succumbing to VD, and a mother crossing the forbidden line of affection, would have been adequate to explain Lovecraft‘s later hysterical and neo-Puritan sexual anesthesia–as well as the curious failure of his relationship with his wife. (True, the Lovecraft marriage was beset by financial woes; but Lovecraft also broke off engaging in sexual relations with his wife, for no economic reason whatsoever.)

The publication of my work (slated for Spring/Early Summer 2013), has not been without some hurdles. The publishers, for example, have decided to spell the word “shoggoth” with a lowercase “s” throughout, (as being more true to HPL’s intentions), rather than uppercase, despite my vigorous objections.

I feel that this violates the need for a critical distance from the Lovecraft’s own views, in which “shoggoths” are used to embody his various polemical, social, and racial hatreds in caricatural form.

An argument that has been made by some (like scholar David E. Schultz), that the “shoggoths” are little more than animals, and thus not deserving of an uppercase designation. But to me, that is like accepting HPL’s earlier estimation of Blacks as being little more than subhuman beasts, as expressed in HPL’s poem “On the Creation of N——”. Shoggoths have a mind, and a will, and possess enough expertise to have built the Old Ones’ mighty cities. HPL depicts them as beasts solely because they are slaves–i.e., for reasons of class. It is HPL’s aristocratic and neo-Puritan reification of the erroneous 18th-century belief that farmers were farmers simply because their minds were suited solely to the yoke and the plow. Nor do the tactics used by others (Fritz Leiber, for instance) in calling the Shoggoths “machines” succeed in convincingly obscuring the basic issue here: HPL’s preference for, and his identification of himself with, the Masters rather than with their Slaves.