Hildegarde

I have absolutely no way of knowing how this blog post is going to work.  The computer is behaving oddly.  The Internet connection is behaving oddly.  The morning has been chaotic.

On top of that, I meant to post this yesterday.

We are, however, at the end of the term.  Virtually every person I talk to seems to be in one kind of crisis or the other.

That said:  I’ve spent the last week reading through a set of short stories (long stories?  novellas?) by H.P. Lovecraft, at the suggestion of somebody who told me I ought to know them because they were very “New England” and I claimed to be interested in all things New England.

That last thing is sort of, kind of, mostly true.  What I’m interested in is what I think of as distinctly New England, which seems to end just after the Civil War.  After that, we begin to become a national culture instead of a group of regional ones. 

These days, even writers who were born and brought up in New England do not write specifically or noticeably as New Englanders.  Stephen King, for instance, although he was  born and brought up in Maine and lives there still, and although he sets a lot of what he writes in Maine or New Hampshire, has a notably New England sensibility in only one book of his I’ve read:  Cujo.

Still, the stories were so recommended to me, and I read them.

They were:

       f) H.P. Lovecraft.  “The Dunwich Horror.”

      g) H.P. Lovecraft.  “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

      h) H. P. Lovecraft.  “The Colour Out of Space.”

I also read a long, rambling biographical/bibliographical essay at the back of the volume of Lovecraft stories I borrowed from my sons.  It was more annoying than helpful, so I’ll let that go.

Before I get to specifics here, I need to fill in some background.

I tried reading Lovecraft in my twenties or so, and I absolutely  hated the one thing I tried.

I can’t remember the title of that thing, although I think I’d be able to recognize it if I saw it.  The Lovecraft collection my sons gave me doesn’t have anything in it that I recognize.

But I do remember what it was I didn’t like about it:  the constant use of phonetic spellings meant to imitate dialect.

Now, I have to admit that this is a matter of taste, and some people don’t mind it at all.

It drives me absolutely bonkers. It’s why I don’t ever read Mark Twain. 

I don’t like it no matter who does it, and I find it almost impossible to read.

Unfortunately, in these stories, Lovecraft does a lot of it.  In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” there’s an eight page section of nothing else, and it gives you the most important information in the story.  It took me almost four hours to decipher it, and by the time I was done I was furious.

 So, keeping in mind that there were some barriers for  me in this stuff that may not be there for  you:

1) “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” seem to me to be the same underlying story:  there’s something evil and horrible out there that existed long before humans.  The evil and horribleness consist of the nonhumanness, probably subhumanness, of the creatures involved.  These creatures are mating with/assimilating with present day humans and turning those humans into creatures like themselves.

“The Colour Out of Space” seemed to me to be more straightforward science fiction of a type I’m used to, where an invasion from outer space is in the end lethal to  us.

And yes, I know all sf is not like that, but there’s a fair amount of it that is.  So can we just get past this?

2) “The Colour Out of Space’ did not seem to me to have a particularly New England sensibility, but the other two did. 

It’s a sensibility of a kind I haven’t seen much of in a long time, and I hadn’t known that anybody was writing it as late as Lovecraft.

Let’s just say that there are people up here who have always been abnormally obsessed with their ancestry, and that was true going all the way back to the Puritans.  And it’s a peculiar kind of ancestor obsession, not at all always the kind that celebrates our ancestors as wonderful people we’ll never be able to live up to.

There is, also, the Puritan obsession with “degeneration”–that is, the way, not only the way human beings go to hell in a handbasket, but the way in which they become deeply and foully corrupted.

Lovecraft is very good with that last one.

3) What Lovecraft was not, for me, was particularly suspenseful.  It seemed to  me that I could see the endings coming long before they got there, so that getting to those endings was largely anticlimactic.

What fascination consisted of for me in these stories came with the atmosphere and the  very strong sense of place, along with the picture of a particular take on human life and human meaning.

And I’ve got no problem with that.  I don’t read fiction for plot or story, and I’ve discussed this here before.

What surprises me is that these stories were given to me by someone who says he does read for plot and story. 

I’m a little nonplussed about what somebody who DOES read for plot and story sees in at least these three Lovecrafts.  Maybe the answer is that other Lovecrafts are very different,  but I can’t know that at the moment.

3) After reading these three, I went digging around on the Internet, looking for information, and what I came up with was this:

This was a very, very strange man.

Freud would have had a field day on the sexual issues alone.  The racial issues run from the casual racism of the time to the truly bizarre. 

And the racial issues, especially, seemed to me to have a direct connection to the Dunwich and Innsmouth stories. 

I don’t know what I think of that. 

I do not require my fiction to mirror the politic pieties of my time, and I really don’t require my fiction writer to agree with  me politically.  If I did, I’d have virtually nothing to read.

Even so, some of the things in the letters are beyond just normal weird.

4) On the basis of two of the three of these stories, I’d say that Lovecraft was a New England writer at least some of the tim e.

Maybe it took a first class case of weird to maintain that regionality in an era when America was already well on its way to an  homogenized national culture.