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A LITERARY COPERNICUS, by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the Copernicus of the horror story. He shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his lit­tle world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space. To do this effectively, he created a new kind of horror story and new methods for telling it.

During the Middle Ages and long afterwards, the object of man’s supernatural fear was the Devil, together with the legions of the damned and the hosts of the dead, earthbound and anthropomorphic creatures all. Writers as diverse as Dante and Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer, were able to rouse terror in their readers by exploiting this fear.

With the rise of scientific materialism and the decline of at least naive belief in Christian theology, the Devil’s dreadfulness quickly paled. Man’s supernatural fear was left without a definite object. Writers seeking to awaken supernatural fear restlessly turned to other objects, some old, some new.

Horror of the dead proved to be a somewhat hardier feeling than dread of the Devil and the damned. This provided the necessary ground for the genre of the ghost story, ably exploited by Montague Rhodes James and others.

Arthur Machen briefly directed man’s Supernatural dread to­ward Pan, the satyrs, and other strange races and divinities who sym­bolized for him the Darwinian-Freudian “beast” in man.

Earlier, Edgar Allan Poe had focused supernatural dread on the monstrous in man and nature. Abnormal mental and physiological states fascinated him, as did the awesome might of the elements, natural catastrophes, and the geographic unknown.

Algernon Blackwood sought an object for horror especially in the new cults of occultism and spiritualism, with their assertion of the preternatural power of thoughts and feelings.

Meanwhile, however, a new source of literary material had come into being: the terrifying vast and mysterious universe revealed by the swiftly developing sciences, in particular astronomy. A universe consisting of light-years and light-millenia of black emptiness. A uni­verse containing billions of suns, many of them presumably attended by planets housing forms of life shockingly alien to man and, likely enough in some instances, infinitely more powerful. A universe shot through with invisible forces, hitherto unsuspected by man, such as the ultraviolet X-ray, the X-ray—and who can say how many more? In short, a universe in which the unknown had vastly greater scope than in the little crystal-sphered glove of Aristotle and Ptolemy. And yet a real universe, attested by scientifically weighed facts, no mere nightmare of mystics.

Writers such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne found a potent source of literary inspiration in the simple presentation of man against the background of this new universe. From their efforts arose the genre of science fiction.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was not the first author to see in this new universe a highly suitable object for man’s supernatural fear. W.H. Hodgson, Poe, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Wells too had glimpses of that possibility and made use of it in a few of their tales. But the main and systematic achievement was Lovecraft’s. When he completed the body of his writings, he had firmly attached the emotion of spectral dread to such concepts as outer space, the rim of the cosmos, alien be­ings, unsuspected dimensions, and the conceivable universes lying out­side our own space-time continuum.

Lovecraft’s achievement did not come overnight. The new concept of the horror story did not spring full-grown from his mind. In his earlier tales he experimented with the Dunsanian strain and also wrote a number of effective stories in the vein of Poe, such as “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” The Outsider,” “Cool Air,” and “The Hound.” He shared Machen’s horror of the human beast and expressed it in “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” and “Arthur Jermyn.” Though even in these briefer tales we find broad hints of the new concept: vast life-forms from Earth’s past in “Dagon” and a linkage of a human being’s insanity with the appear­ance of a new star in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” But with “The Call of Cthulhu” the line of development becomes clearly marked, as shown by the opening sentences: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of in­finity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

For a while Lovecraft tended to mix black magic and other tra­ditional sources of dread with the horrors stemming purely from sci­ence’s new universe. In “The Dunwich Horror” the other-dimensional creatures are thwarted by the proper incantations, while witchcraft and the new Einsteinian universe appear cheek-by-jowl in “Dreams in the Witch House.” But when we arrive at “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time,” we find that the extra-terrestrial entities are quite enough in themselves to awaken all our supernatural dread, without any medieval trappings whatsoever. White magic and the sign of the cross are powerless against them and only the accidents of space and time—in short, sheer chance—save humanity.

In passing, it is to be noted that Lovecraft, like Poe, was fasci­nated by great natural catastrophes and new scientific discoveries and explorations, as is understandable in one who chose cosmic horror for his theme. It is likely that reports of such events engendered many of his stories. “The Whisperer in Darkness” begins with the Vermont floods of 1927 and one notes other possible linkages: reports of oceanic earthquakes and upheavals and “Dagon” and “The Call of Cthulhu”; the inundation of acres of woodland by a man-made reservoir and “The Colour Out of Space”; threat of demolition of some old ware­houses on South Water Street, Providence, and the poem “Brick Row” which is dated December 7, 1929, and may have been the germ of Lovecraft’s great sonnet cycle “Fungi From Yuggoth,” written between December 27, 1929, and January 4, 1930; regional decay and degener­ation and “The Lurking Fear” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; rav­ages of German submarine warfare and “The Temple”; polar explo­ration and “At the Mountains of Madness”; discovery of the planet Pluto by C.W. Tombaugh in 1930 and “The Whisperer in Darkness,” featuring that discovery and written in the same year.

It is a great pity that Lovecraft did not live to experience the unparalleled New England hurricane of 1938, when the downtown heart of his own Providence was invaded by the sea, to the accompaniment of terrific wind and downpour. What a story that would eventually have gotten out of him!

2.

The universe of modern science engendered a profounder hor­ror in Lovecraft’s writings than that stemming solely from its tremen­dous distances and its highly probably alien and powerful non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key,” man can hardly bear the realization that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor know­ing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”

In his personal life Lovecraft met the challenge of this hideous realization by taking refuge in traditionalism, in the cultivation of mankind’s time-honored manners and myths, not because they are true, but because man’s mind is habituated to them and therefore finds in them some comfort and support. Recognizing that the only meaning in the cosmos is that which man dreams into it, Lovecraft treasured beauti­ful human dreams, all age-worn things, and the untainted memories of childhood. This is set forth clearly in “The Silver Key,” the story in which Lovecraft presents his personal philosophy of life.

In the main current of Lovecraft’s supernatural tales, horror of the mechanistic universe gave shape to that impressive hierarchy of alien creatures and gods generally referred to as “the Cthulhu mythos,” an assemblage of beings whose weird attributes reflect the universe’s multitudinous environments and whose fantastic names are suggestive renderings of non-human words and sounds. They include the Elder Gods or Gods of Earth, the Other Gods or Ultimate Gods, and a variety of entities from distant times, planets, and dimensions.

Although they stem from that period in which Lovecraft mixed black magic in his takes and was attracted to Dunsanian pantheons, I believe it is a mistake to regard the beings of the Cthulhu Mythos as sophisticated equivalents of the entities, of Christian demonology, or to attempt to divide them into balancing Zoroastrian hierarchies of good and evil.

Most of the entities in the Cthulhu mythos are malevolent or, at best, cruelly indifferent to mankind. The perhaps benevolent Gods of Earth are never mentioned directly, except for Nodens, and gradually fade from the tales. In “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” they are pictured as relatively weak and feeble, symbols of the ultimate weakness of even mankind’s traditions and dreams. It is likely that Lovecraft employed them only to explain why the more numerous malevolent entities had not long ago overrun mankind, and to provide a source of incantations whereby Earthlings could to some degree defend themselves, as in “The Dunwich Horror” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In the later tales, as we have mentioned, Lovecraft per­mitted mankind no defense, except luck, against the unknown.

In contrast to the Elder Gods, the Other Gods are presented as powerful and terrible, yet also—strange paradox!—”…blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless…” (“The Dream-Quest”).

Of the Other Gods, Azathoth is the supreme diety, occupying the top-most throne in the Cthulhu hierarchy, There is never any ques­tion of his being merely an alien entity from some distant planet or di­mension, like Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth. He is unquestionably “god,” and also the greatest god. Yet when we ask what sort of god, we dis­cover that he is the blind, idiot god, “…the mindless daemon-sultan…,” “…the monstrous nuclear chaos….”

Such a pantheon and such a chief diety can symbolize only one thing: the purposeless, mindless, yet all-powerful universe of materi­alistic belief.

And Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos, is his messenger—not mindless like his master, but evilly intelligent, pictured in “The Dream-Quest” in the form of a suave pharaoh. The Nyarlathotep legend is one of Lovecraft’s most interesting creations. It appears both in the prose poem and in the sonnet of that name. In a time of widespread social upheaval and nervous tension, one looking like a pharaoh appears out of Egypt. He is worshipped by the fellahin, “wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.” He visits many lands and gives lectures with queer pseudo-scientific demonstrations, obtaining a great follow­ing—rather like Cagliostro or some similarcharlatan. A progressive disintegration of man’s mind and world follows. There are purposeless panics and wanderings. Nature breaks loose. There are earthquakes, weedy cities are revealed by receding seas, an ultimate putrescence and disintegration sets in. Earth ends.

Just what does Nyarlathotep “mean”? That is, what meanings can most suitably be read into him, granting that, by him, Lovecraft may not consciously have “meant” anything. One possibility is that the pharaoh-charlatan expresses the mockery of a universe man can never understand or master. Another is that he symbolizes the blatantly commercial, self-advertising, acquisitive world that Lovecraft loathed (Nyarlathotep always has that aura of the salesman, that brash con­temptuousness). Yet a third possibility is that Nyarlathotep stands for man’s self-destructive intellectuality, his awful ability to see the uni­verse for what it is and thereby kill in himself all naive and beautiful dreams.

In this connection it is to be noted that Lovecraft, to his last month a tireless scholar and questioner, was the embodiment of the one noble feeling scientific materialism grants man: intellectual curiosity. He also expressed this passion in his supernatural tales. His protago­nists are often drawn to the unknown as much as they dread it. Quak­ing at the horrors that may lurk there, they yet cannot resist the urge to peer beyond the rim of space. “The Whisperer in Darkness,” perhaps his greatest story, is remarkable for the way in which the horror and fascination of the alien are equally maintained until almost the very end.

3.

Lovecraft’s matured method of telling a horror story was a natural consequence of the importance of the new universe of’ science in his writings, for it was the method of scientific realism, approaching in some of his last tales (“At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”) the precision, objectivity, and attention to detail of a report in a scientific journal. Most of his stories are purported documents and necessarily written in the first person. This device is common in weird literature, as witness Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” Haggard’s She, Stoker’s Dracula, and many others, but few writers have taken it quite as seriously as did Lovecraft.

He set great store by the narrator having some vitally pressing motive for recounting his experiences, and was ingenious at devising such motives: justificatory confession in “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter”; warning, in “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “At the Mountains of Madness”; attempt by the nar­rator to clarify his own ideas and come to a decision, in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; scholarly summing up a weird series of events, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Haunter of the Dark.”

The scientifically realistic element in Lovecraft’s style was a thing of slow growth in a writer early inclined to a sonorous and poetic prose with an almost Byzantine use of adjectives. The transition was never wholly completed, and like all advances, it was attended by losses and limitations. Disappointingly to some readers, who may also expe­rience impatience at the growing length of the stories (inevitable in sci­entific reports), there is notably less witchery of words in, say, “The Shadow Out of Time” than in “The Dunwich Horror,” though the for­mer story has greater unity and technical perfection. And Lovecraft’s own restricted and scholarly life hardly fitted him to be an all-over re­alist. He always observed a gentlemanly reserve in his writings and de­picted best those types of characters which he understood and respected, such as scholars, New England farmers and townsmen, and sincere and lonely artists; while showing less sympathy (consider “He”) and pene­tration in the presentation of business men, intellectuals, factory work­ers, “toughs,” and other admittedly brash, uninhibited, and often crude denizens of our modern cities.

There were three important elements in Lovecraft’s style which he was able to use effectively in both his earlier poetic period and later, more objective style.

The first is the device of confirmation rather than revelation. (I am indebted to Henry Kuttner for this neat phrase.) In other words, the story-ending does not come as a surprise but as a final, long-antici­pated “convincer.” The reader knows, and is supposed to know, what is coming, but this only prepares and adds to his shivers when the nar­rator supplies the last and incontrovertible piece of evidence. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward the reader knows from almost the first page that Ward has been supplanted by Joseph Curwen, yet the narrator does not state this unequivocally until the last sentence of the book. This does not mean that Lovecraft never wrote the revelatory type of story, with its surprise ending. On the contrary, he used it in “The Lurking Fear” and handled it most effectively in “The Outsider.” But he did come more and more to favor the less startling but sometimes more impressive confirmatory type.

So closely related to his use of confirmation as to be only an­other aspect of it, is Lovecraft’s employment of the terminal cli­max—that is, the story in which the high point and the final sentence coincide. Who can forget the supreme chill of: “But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life,” or “It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did,” or “They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting,” or “…the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley?” Use of the terminal climax made it necessary for Lovecraft to develop a special type of story-telling, in which the explanatory and return-to-equilibrium material is all deftly inserted before the finish and while the tension is still mounting. It also necessitated a very careful structure, with everything building from the first word to the last.

Lovecraft reinforced this structure with what may be called or­chestrated prose—sentences that are repeated with a constant addition of more potent adjectives, adverbs, and phrases, just as in a symphony a melody introduced by a single woodwind is at last thundered by the whole orchestra. “The Statement of Randolph Carter” provides one of the simplest examples. In it, in order, the following phrases occur con­cerning the moon: “…waning crescent moon…wan, waning crescent moon…pallid, peering crescent moon…accursed waning moon…” Sub­tler and more complex examples can be found in the longer stories.

Not only sentences, but whole sections, are sometimes re­peated, with a growing cloud of atmosphere and detail∙ The story may first be briefly sketched, then told in part with some reservations, then related more fully as the narrator finally conquers his disinclination or repugnance toward stating the exact details of the horror he experi­enced.

All these stylistic elements naturally worked to make Love­craft’s stories longer and longer, with a growing complexity in the sources of horror. In “Dreams in the Witch House” the sources of hor­ror are multiple: “…Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—a pull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of in­sane sleepwalking…” “while in “At the Mountains of Madness” there is a transition whereby the feared entities become the fearing; the author shows us horrors and then pulls back the curtain a little farther, letting us glimpse the horrors of which even the horrors are afraid!

An urge to increase the length and complexity of tales is not uncommon among the writers of horror stories. It can be compared to the drug addict’s craving for larger and larger doses—and this compari­son is not fanciful, since the chief purpose of the supernatural tale is to arouse the single feeling of spectral terror in the reader rather than to delineate character or comment on life. Devotees of this genre of liter­ature are at times able to take doses which might exhaust or sicken the average person. Each reader must decide for himself just how long a story he can stand without his sense of terror flagging. For me, all of Lovecraft, including the lengthy “At the Mountains of Madness,” can be read with ever-mounting excitement.

For it must be kept in mind that no matter how greatly Love­craft increased the length, scope, complexity, and power of his tales, he never once lost control or gave way to the impulse to write wildly and pile one blood-curdling incident on another without the proper prepara­tion and attention to mood. Rather, he tended to write with greater re­straint, to perfect the internal coherence and logic of his stories, and often to provide alternate everyday explanations for the supernatural terrors he invoked, letting the reader infer the horror rather than see it face to face, so that most of his stories fulfill the conditions set down by the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness”: “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end… I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference,” or by the narrator of “The Shadow Out of Time”: “There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed.”

4.

Strangely paralleling the development of Lovecraft’s scientific realism was an apparently conflicting trend: the development of an imaginary background for his stories, including New England cities such as Arkham and Innsmouth, institutions such as Miskatonic Univer­sity in Arkham, semi-secret and monstrous cults, and a growing library of “forbidden” books, such as the Necronomicon, containing monstrous secrets about the present, future, and past of earth and the universe.

Any writer, even a thoroughgoing realist, may invent the names of persons and places, either to avoid libel or because his cre­ations are hybrid ones, combining the qualities of many persons or places. Some of Lovecraft’s inventions are of a most serious sort alto­gether, definitely distorting the “real” world that forms the background for many of his later supernatural tales. Not only are the Necronomi­con, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt and other volumes pre­sumed to have a real existence (in a few copies and under lock and key, rather closely guarded secrets), but the astounding and somewhat theo­sophical tale they have to tell of non-human civilizations in earth’s past and of the frightful denizens of other planets and dimensions, is taken seriously by the scholars and scientists who people Lovecraft’s stories. These individuals are in all other ways very realistically-minded indeed, but having glimpsed the forbidden knowledge, they are generally more susceptible to cosmic terror than ordinary people. Sober and staid re­alists, they yet know that they live on the brink of a horrid and ravening abyss unsuspected by ordinary folk. This knowledge does not come to them solely as the result of the weird experiences in which the stories involve them, but is part of their intellectual background.

These “awakened” scholars are chiefly on the faculty of imagi­nary Miskatonic University. Indeed, the fabulous history of that insti­tution, insofar as it can be traced from Lovecraft’s stories, throws an interesting light on the development of this trend in his writing.

In June 1882 a peculiar meteor fell near Arkham. Three pro­fessors from Miskatonic came to investigate and found it composed of an evanescent substance defying analysis. Despite this experience, they were highly skeptical when later on they heard of eerie changes occur­ring on the farm where the meteor fell and, contemptuous of what they considered folk superstitions, they stayed away during the year-long pe­riod∙ in which a hideous decay gradually wiped out the farm and its in­habitants. In other words, they behaved as professors are convention­ally supposed to behave, intolerant of ghostly events and occult theo­ries—and certainly showing no signs of having read the Necronomicon, if there was a copy at Miskatonic at that date, with any sympathy. It is significant that the story in which these events occur, “The Color Out of Space,” is praised by Edmund Wilson, a generally adverse critic.

But in the course of the next twenty-five years, perhaps as an insidious result of the strange meteor fall, a change took place in Miskatonic University and in the intellectual equipment of at least some of its faculty members. For when the child prodigy Edward Pickman Derby entered Miskatonic he was able to gain access for a time to the copy of the Necronomicon in the library; and Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, the political economist, during his five-year amnesia which be­gan May 14, 1908, made indecipherable marginal notes in the same volume. Still later, a stranger who was picked up near-dead in Kingsport harbor on Christmas (in 1920, I think) was allowed to view the dread book in St. Mary’s Hospital at Arkham.

During the ‘twenties there was a wild, decadent set among the students (Miskatonic’s lost generation, apparently), who were of dubi­ous morality and were reputed to practice black magic. And in 1925 the Necronomicon was consulted yet again, this time by the uncouth and precocious giant Wilbur Whately. He sought to borrow it, but Henry Armitage, the librarian, wisely refused.

In 1927 (the year they were surveying for a new reservoir for Arkham) the talented young mathematician Walter Gilman also obtained temporary access to the volume. He came to a hideous end in a haunted rooming house, but not before he had presented to Miskatonic a queer, spiky image formed of unknown elements and later placed on display in the Mis-katonic museum, which also boasted some strangely alloyed and fantastically piscine gold jewelry from Innsmouth.

In the late ‘twenties Asenath Waite, fascinating daughter of a reputed Innsmouth sorcerer, took a course in medieval metaphysics at Miskatonic, and we can be sure she did not lose the opportunity of prying into even more dubious branches of knowledge.

On the whole, the late ‘twenties were a period particularly productive of spectral occurrences in and around Arkham; in particular the year 1928; which can in this connected be termed “The Great Year,” and in even greater particular September 1928, which may be titled “The Great Month.”

We can presume that the unfortunate Gilman perished that year and that Asenath Waite was one of the student body, but those assump­tions are only a beginning. Consultation of the Journal of the American Psychological Society shows N.W. Peaslee than began to publish a se­ries of articles describing his strange dreams of earth’s non-human past. And on May sixth Albert N. Wilmarth, an instructor in literature, re­ceived a disquieting letter from the Vermont scholar Henry A. Akeley about extra-terrestrial creatures lurking in his native woodlands. In August Wilbur Whateley died horrifyingly while attempting to bur­glarize the Miskatonic library and steal the Necronomicon. On Septem­ber ninth Wilbur’s twin brother, who took after his non-human father to an even greater extent, broke loose near Dunwich, Massachusetts.

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.