Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Darrell Schweitzer

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      On September twelfth, Wilmarth, lured by a forged letter, set out to visit Akeley in Vermont. On the same day Dr. Armirage learned of the eruption of Wilbur’s twin brother.

      That night Wilmarth fled in horror from Akeley’s farm. On the fourteenth Armitage set out for Dunwich with two of his colleagues, and next day managed to destroy the Dunwich horror.

      It is startling indeed to think of two such tremendous sequences of supernatural events reaching their crisis at almost precisely the same time. One likes to think of the frantic Armitage passing the apprehen­sive Wilmarth as the latter hurried to catch his train. (The most obvi­ous explanation is that Lovecraft prepared a rather elaborate chronology for “The Dunwich Horror,” written in 1928, and then made use of the same chart in laying out the plot of “The Whisperer in Darkness,” written in 1930 with no other tales intervening.)

      After the excitement of The Great Month, almost any events seem anticlimatic. However, one should mention the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930-31; the discovery of the secrets of the Witch-House in March 1931, with further accessions to the museum; and the Australian expedition of 1935. Both expeditions included Pro­fessor William Dyer of the geology department, who also knew some­thing of Wilmarth’s dreadful experience and who can perhaps therefore lay claim to having been involved in more preternatural events than anyone else on the faculty.

      One can only speculate as to why Lovecraft created and made such intensive use of Miskatonic University and the Necronomicon. Certainly the Miskatonic faculty constitutes a kind of Lovecraftian utopia of highly intelligent, aesthetically sensitive, yet tradition-minded scholars.

      As for the Necronomicon, it appears that Lovecraft used it as a back door or postern gate to realms of wonder and myth, the main ap­proaches to which had been blocked off by his acceptance of the new universe of materialistic science. It permitted him to maintain in his stories at least occasional sections of the poetic, resonant, and colorful prose which he loved, but which hardly suited his later, scientifically realistic style. It provided him with a cloud of sinister atmosphere which would otherwise have had to be built afresh with each story. It pictured vividly his Copernican conception of the vastness, strangeness, and infinite eerie possibilities of the new universe of science. And fi­nally, it was the key to a more frightening, yet more fascinating “real” world than the blind and purposeless cosmos in which he had to live his life.

      THE FOUR FACES OF THE OUTSIDER, by Dirk W. Mosig

      H. P. Lovecraft did not write to entertain, nor did he tailor his impressive fiction with the paying market in mind. Instead, he relied on his work as a revisionist or ghost-writer, and on the meager pro­ceedings of the rapidly vanishing Phillips estate, for the small but reg­ular income which allowed him to lead a frugal existence. When Love­craft turned his encyclopedic mind to the careful craftsmanship of one of his memorable tales, he did so to attain a measure of artistic self-ex­pression. As becomes obvious from even a superficial reading of his published letters, he did not care if his work found an appreciative pub­lic. A perfectionist, he was never satisfied, even with his greatest masterpieces. Nevertheless, he never abandoned completely his at­tempts at creative self-expression—at communication. His works posses remarkable depth, and it is up to us to attempt to understand the message of the gentleman from Providence.

      “The Outsider” is undoubtedly one of the finest tales to come out of Lovecraft’s pen. It is also one of the most profoundly meaning­ful and symbolic, albeit often baffling and enigmatic for the critic. Working under the assumption that there is no such thing as “correct” interpretation, the present study attempts to investigate the “message” in Lovecraft’s powerful story from four different viewpoints. “The Out­sider” lends itself quite readily to a psychoanalytic interpretation, but it also becomes meaningful when viewed from a more metaphysical frame of reference. Its autobiographical overtones have been discussed by many, while it is also possible to translate this narrative in terms of Lovecraft’s philosophical Weltanschauung. Finally, there is also the traditional interpretation within the context provided by other Love­craftian tales (such as “Pickman’s Model,” “The Dream-Quest of Un­known Kadath,” etc.) identifying the outsider as a human child kid­napped by ghouls and growing up in their subterranean abode. An un­usual variant of this type of interpretation was offered by David Brown (Nyctalops 8) who suggests that the outsider’s identity is Richard Upton Pickman, antihero of “Pickman’s Model,” who is changing into a ghoul. But even if Lovecraft’s Mephistophelic characterization of the ultimate artist were indeed the true fictional identity of the outsider, this would tell us little about the meaning, the implications, the message that Lovecraft is trying to communicate in his paroxysm of ecstatic self-expression.

      In the following pages we will attempt to present the main outlines of the four interpretations mentioned above. No claim is made as to the validity or exhaustiveness of any of these different apprecia­tions of the same tale. Naturally, alternative explanations are also pos­sible, and may be equally valid. Nevertheless, in our conclusion we will attempt to evaluate the four suggested views on their merits, that is, their ability to account for available data on Lovecraft, his works, and his views. Finally the personal preference of the author will be stated, a view necessitated by his personal bias and perhaps not arrived at in complete objectivity.

      1. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIC INTERPRETATION: H. P. LOVECRAFT, OUTSIDER

      Taken as an autobiographic statement, the tale begins as a re­lation of Lovecraft’s unhappy childhood, full of “fear and sadness.” The anxiety and depression of the child, deprived of a paternal figure at the age of three, controlled by an over-protective mother, and rejected by his peers because of the unique interests generated by his precocious genius, are easily understood.

      Lovecraft spent countless of the “lone hours” of his childhood in the “vast and dismal chambers” of his grandfather’s library, whose “maddening rows of antique books” provided the main source of enter­tainment in his solitude. From such books he “learned all that (he) knew,” without the urging or guidance of any teacher.

      Such was the lot of this “dazed” twentieth century Poe, this genius destined to meet a “barren” existence, full of disappointments and unfulfilled expectations which would leave him “broken” and eter­nally dissatisfied with even his most brilliant creations.

      And yet, as shown by the letters in which he referred to this period as the happiest of his life, Lovecraft was “strangely content” (proof of the relativity of all things) and clung desperately to the “sere memories” of his childhood, when his mind threatened to sink into the pits of melancholy and despair that moved him to repeatedly consider and defend the idea of suicide, even though he was only thirty-one years old when this tale was written.

      In a continuous stream of morbid childhood memories, Love­craft continues to describe the dampness of his abode and the peculiar odor of the gigantic library room, always producing an atmosphere of “brooding and fear” and shadows…to the extent that the child had to light candles for relief. Perhaps we can even trace Lovecraft’s prefer­ence for the nocturnal hours to this unique early development.

      He refers to his thirst for acceptance, his desire to belong, his need for warmth, affection, and friendship, and compares his goal to the “black inaccessible tower” that reaches into the “unknown outer sky,” the heaven of social acceptance, but which “cannot be ascended save by a well nigh impossible climb….”

      The period of isolation and solitude is perceived by the child’s mind as countless years slowly and agonizingly grinding by, and no memory is kept of the adults that cared for him, particularly of the fa­ther he hardly knew…. In his neurotic mother he only could see a dis­torted, shriveled image of himself.

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