[....]Lovecraft's fiction is haunted by the spectre of cosmic fatalism: the idea that human beings can never possibly fathom the mysteries of the universe and that the universe, in turn, remains indifferent to humanity. To Lovecraft, human beings had as little chance of understanding the inner mechanisations of hyperspace as an ant does planet Earth. It's a viewpoint that chimes perfectly with the lumbering, misanthropic gait of Electric Wizard: the world cast as a pitiless void, life a cosmic accident.
-- Sword, H. (2022). Monolithic undertow: In search of sonic oblivion. White Rabbit.
[....] There they were—the three sledges missing from Lake's camp—shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough—the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents—everything derived from Lake's equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens....
-- end of chapter nine, Lovecraft, H. P. (2005). At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. Modern Library.
* * *
[....]Lovecraft was notoriously not only an elitist and a reactionary, but a bilious lifelong racist. His idiot and disgraceful pronouncements on racial themes range from pompous pseudoscience—"The Negro is fundamentally the biologically inferior of all White and even Mongolian races"—to monstrous endorsements—"[Hitler's] vision is . . . romantic and immature . . . yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man's basic urge . . . I know he's a clown, but by God, I like the boy!"
-- excerpt from China Miéville's 2005 introduction to: Lovecraft, H. P. (2005). At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. Modern Library.
❖
Several days ago I woke at 2 a.m. to find myself listening to the end of chapter nine of HorrorBabble's audiobook of At the Mountains of Madness. An enchanting experience: akin to reading a page without being given the title, date, plot or author's name.
As a Marxist I'm passionate about context: dates of both production and reception are crucial. Production of what? Production of anything whose use-value is the product of human labor.
Free of accreted layers of literary and historical context, listening to At the Mountains of Madness in this way was an uncanny and sublime experience.
* * *
At the Mountains of Madness (1936)
My first reading of ATMM was in one of the early-1980s Del Rey / Ballantine paperback reprints: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror. This was Christmas money well-spent by my sixteen year old self, and undoubtedly a peak instance of reception, as I read ATMM during the cold and snowy final week of December 1982.
To the first-time reader ATMM is a staunchly distanced story. Dramatized action does not begin until the halfway point; prior to that, we might be reading a report by one of J. G. Ballard's corporate or civil service psychiatrists. Only after reading another late Lovecraft novella are we able to deduce the first-person narrator's name: geologist William Dyer of Miskatonic U.
Such distancing, such absolute absence of conventional melodrama, makes for a beautifully concise piece of fiction. The later toing and froing of stories like "Who Goes There?" is absent: there is no genre veil between readers and protagonists as Dwyer and Danforth climb up through millenia of levels from an underground labyrinth toward daylight and salvation in the city of the Old Ones:
So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping— "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li !"
I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct—in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through—perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and—thank God—through the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once—else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.
"South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harard. . . ." The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it....
All respect to Dwyer's conclusion, but I would also propose that Danforth's action in counting-off the subway stops presents a mind desperate for "home-feeling," fumbling at a last means to preserve sanity and keep running.
* * *
What Dwyer and Danforth found under the mountains of madness in the seemingly uninhabited city of the Old Ones was exotic, but not unknown in earth's history. Hydraulic and agricultural societies built on slave labor have not been rare. Lovecraft's exoticism is in creating a civilization so ancient its artworks and preserved knowledge have withstood and depicted ice ages, warming ages, and physical ravages today understood as the action of plate tectonics.
The Old Ones, keepers of the flame, preservers of splendor and learning, lost the class war against slaves they themselves created. A few slaves apparently remain, inquisitive in their own way (or simply aping their rulers?), but the first contact between them and human explorers follows a familiar pattern to other encounters in history.
The "flight by night" out of the labyrinth as Dwyer and Danforth race to their aircraft recapitulates many similar night journeys in world literature. The two men are committed to warning the world. Many individuals over millenia were probably similarly motivated to halt the development of evident catastrophes. Certainly, we know they all failed in their efforts.
* * *
In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition, UK petty bourgeois socialist China Miéville claims that for all H. P. Lovecraft's reactionary opinions, "he became a socialist, advocating some social programs and government control of the economy." (This smacks of Miéville trying to have his cake and eat it, too. JR)
No political opinions expressed by Lovecraft during his adulthood were unusual for a man or woman of his class. Many men and women left similar circumstances behind when they joined the labor movement and its revolutionary socialist vanguard. Alas, Lovecraft was not won to Bolshevism, or even by an electoral brand of social democracy. Instead, his tendency was toward a US version of National Socialism, a mystifying sop designed to preserve the dictatorship of capital.
Fear of social degeneration/decline was the pauperized Lovecraft's motivation. He apparently did not show any interest in joining Pelley's Silver Shirts or the Coughlin organization, but many with similar backgrounds and skills did.
Miéville correctly points out Lovecraft's adaptation to Spengler's geopolitical rationalizations. It strikes me that Lovecraft might have also been a passionate reader of pseudoscience books like Degeneration by Max Nordau, a best seller in the fin de siècle middle class milieu of Europe.
In his superb 2018 study Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, James Machin writes:
[....]in Degeneration (1892), the German sociologist Max Nordau made explicit links between Decadent literature and actual social and biological decline, evoking pseudoscientific and garbled Darwinism in his use of the term 'degeneration' and propagating the specious sub-Lamarckian notion that moral recidivism and physical dissolution could be inherited and could fatally weaken a bloodline within generations.
For Nordau , the fin de siècle and Decadence became pejorative synonyms for an amorality, morbidity, and incontinence that threatened not only the social fabric but the future of civilization itself. Atavism was evidenced by physical, cultural, and psychological symptoms, and manifestations of degeneracy were to be found in the 'stigmata' of misshapen physiognomy ('disproportionate growth of particular parts'), the 'inchoate liminal presentations' of degenerate contemporary art, and the 'mental imbalance' of the artist (Nordau 1895, 23, 1895, 61). According to Nordau , some figures, such as Paul Verlaine, had the dubious honour of exhibiting all these symptoms simultaneously (Nordau1895, 119–120). Over the course of nearly 600 pages, Nordau details a bewildering quantity and variety of symptoms of degeneration, including 'emotionalism', being 'tormented by doubts', the seeking after 'the basis of all phenomena', revolutionary and anarchist activity, political inclination, Buddhism, and pessimism. Even the tendency to 'associate in groups' is included on a charge sheet that seems to encompass the sum of all human activity, and Nordau identifies figures as disparate as Wagner, the children's illustrator Kate Greenaway, furniture-designer Rupert Carabin, and Oscar Wilde as all exhibiting the atavistic neurological disorders of the degenerate mind.
The absurd reach of Nordau's thesis was certainly identified and criticized at the time, although typically with a concession to the ambition of Nordau's vision: Israel Zangwill described it as being 'as brilliant as it is wrong-headed' and the Review of Reviews called it a 'bad but interesting book' in which Nordau's 'idea' is 'pressed home unsparingly with manifold examples, and with a continuous vigour of writing' (Zangwill 1895, 160). George Bernard Shaw was moved to write a lengthy riposte for the American journal Liberty , and although he would later claim that with his rebuttal of Nordau the ' Degeneration boom was exhausted', Nordau's treatise still ran into seven editions in the year of its publication alone in Britain. Moreover, his perception that some contemporary cultural trends were predicated upon a 'contempt for traditional views of custom and morality' certainly resonated with more reactionary commentators (Shaw 1919, 12; Nordau1895, 5). The influence of Degeneration was also intensified by the concurrency of its popularity with the Wilde trial, the first British edition being published four days after 'the Marquess of Queensbury left his libellous card at the Albemarle' (Söder 2009, 63).
* * *
H. P. Lovecraft was never a socialist.
Many revolutionary socialists like myself don't demand Lovecraft and other 20th century writers pass a political purity test before we purchase and enjoy their work.
A mainstream writer who shared many of Lovecraft's political rationalizations and habits of petty bourgeois moralizing until his death in 2012, Gore Vidal is another example from my reading list. (John Buchan, Evelyn Waugh, Simone Weil, Flannery O'Connor, and Simon Raven: the list quickly grows.)
Lovecraft's class, the petty bourgeoisie, lost all remaining social and political independence in the 20th century. In the 1930s, the best and brightest were won to the working class movement. Sadly, at that time a growing bureaucratic caste internationally made a treacherous counterfeit of that movement; counterrevolutionary Stalinism led the working class world-wide into one defeat and bloodbath after another.
In response, many 1930s radicals turned to the right by 1949. Authors like Robert Heinlein were part of a sociological cohort that became the initial cadre of cold war publicists. James Burnham, a 1930s Trotskyist leader, would have found nothing objectionable in a novel like 1964's Farnham's Freehold.
* * *
The "mountains" in question in ATMM are a conscious symbol for disaster. They strike a chord similar to the blasted landscape of Nahum Gardner's farm in "The Colour Out of Space" (1927) and the subterranean Chesuncook, Maine section of "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933).
Lovecraft's skill, his aesthetic of pleasing remoteness and formal distancing, becomes the objective correlative for what Joshi and others have called his "cosmic indifferentism."
[....]Throughout his life Lovecraft wavered between (validly) recommending tradition for himself and (invalidly) recommending it for everyone. In 1928 he had properly asserted the relativity of values (the only thing possible in a universe that has no governing deity): "Value is wholly relative, and the very idea of such a thing as meaning postulates a symmetrical relation to something else. No one thing, cosmically speaking, can be either good or evil, beautiful or unbeautiful; for entity is simply entity."[15] To Derleth in 1930 he wrote: "Each person lives in his own world of values, and can obviously (except for a few generalities based on essential similarities in human nature) speak only for himself when he calls this thing 'silly and irrelevant' and that thing 'vital and significant', as the case may be. We are all meaningless atoms adrift in the void."
Harold Bloom's summation of Ernest Hemingway's impact is useful to remember: "....he alone
in this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth."
Jay
10 May 2022
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