“We live together, we act
on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by
ourselves...By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and
enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are
private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable...From
family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
-Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.
“Weird
Fiction” is the term that H.P. Lovecraft used to cover his writing and that of
his circle of acquaintance. Since his time, this genre term has altered into a
slew of other sub-genres of fictional writing nowadays referred to – rather
dismissively, it needs to be said – as “Genre Fiction”. This catch-all term
covers Science Fiction, Fantasy writing, Horror, Detective Fiction and
Thrillers, Westerns, Romance and Historical Fiction and all of the sub-genres
depending from these. In the world of academia, these styles are all relegated
to the status of ‘populist writing’ and dismissed as being somehow unworthy of
academic treatment; quite apart from the fact that they represent the most
sought-after and widely-read categories of fiction out there. What most learned
literary critics ignore however, is that these kinds of writing more directly
impact upon the culture of the times and, as decades pass, become lost to view
and leave researchers suddenly unable to find a way back to the zeitgeist of past days. The writings of
Sir Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, or John Galsworthy, are examples of
widely-read authors that are fast fading from popular and academic sight. The Green Hat by Michael Arlen, as a
specific instance, was an international bestseller and by-word for literary chic in the 1920s; it has all but passed
from view and is largely impossible to locate these days.
These days, Fantasy and Science Fiction
are the pigeon-holes under which one can occasionally find the tales of
Lovecraft, Machen, Howard, Blackwood, Leiber, Bloch, Belknap-Long and others.
In these days of high-power marketing, the Horror genre has largely been
re-branded as “Paranormal Fiction” and encompasses such writers as Stephenie
Meyers and Laurell K. Hamilton who, arguably, are more interested in sex than
cathartic nightmares. Writers such as Stephen King seem able to plough onwards
through this morass of lust and bloodthirstiness by sheer dint of past sales,
unit-shifting which occurred when there was still a Horror section in every book
shop selling works by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley and Anne Rice. There are
however, still annual Bram Stoker Awards
and publishing houses which issue compilations of horror stories, so obviously
the market still exists, despite what the large bookstore chains think.
What many people forget however is that
early forms of writing in a genre are more loose and fluid, compared to the
current works in that format, which are mostly dictated by established generic
rule structures. Readers of Anne Rice’s The
Mummy might not enjoy reading The
Jewel of Seven Stars, or The Beetle,
but they ignore the fact that these are the groundbreakers of the ‘mummy genre’
and that, without them, what they know of the genre - those elements which
inform Rice’s book and their enjoyment of it - would not exist. While it’s just
possible that they might come to the book without expectations and find its
contents strange and disturbing, Rice almost certainly wrote the novel with a
view to playing by the rules of her chosen genre, and she would expect her
readers to understand them.
Genre awareness is practically hard-wired
into us as part of our narrative culture: whether we know it or not, we are
aware of the demands and expectations inherent in generic writing. We know
werewolf lore; we understand how vampires work; we know we ought not to descend
into the cellar alone to investigate strange sounds. It’s rare to find a work
of writing that doesn’t follow the rules of its genre. Even literary fiction - much
as they would like us to think otherwise - is its own genre and has its own
rules by which it must play in order to pass muster.
We have become largely aware of various
genres by means of the media industries. Books stores (in English-speaking
countries at least) compartmentalise their stock according to their perceptions
of what the market demands; movie production companies choose what film genres
and how many works in each of these they will fund according to similar data.
Through this process, we have become unable to connect to works which don’t
easily slot into the various zones appointed for them. In this way, we are
slowly losing sight of the early writers and their works, particularly those
who professed to pen Weird Fiction.
*****
Truman
Capote once said that a short story was finished when it attained the sense of
an orange, meaning that it would become whole and complete, in and of itself1.
This idea has become a by-word to students of writing nowadays and is mentioned
by any and all who devote themselves to the craft. Writers tend to work towards
a consummation in their narratives, tying up loose ends, resolving story arcs.
By this very definition, it means that most stories penned by writers – be they
‘literary’ or otherwise – are artificial constructs, since Real Life rarely
wraps up all of its outstanding issues. The writing genre of True Crime is
probably the only one which relates “real” narratives to its audience.
Not every idea becomes a completed short
story. Writers of some standing often leave behind them unfinished concepts
that, for one reason or another, never get fully fleshed out. These are
sometimes published in retrospectives of their work as “fragments”. Readers of
Lovecraft are aware of these unfinished odds and ends, as most printings of his
complete works contain them along with his sketchy poems and juvenilia.
Fragments are thus kept alive as pointers of what might have been, or as
indicators of the mental workings of their authors.
Fragments have an immediacy which more
polished works do not have. Because of their ‘just written’ quality, they feel
fresh and new-formed. Whether penned quickly to capture the essence of a piece
which might be completed later, or stalled due to pressing real world issues
which tear the writer away, it is this haphazardness that implies insecurity –
like a hastily-written note thrust through the bars of a prison cell. In an era
when writing was intensively pored over, edited and perfected, this rude
brashness lent an exciting frisson to
the work; it’s not unreasonable therefore, to assume that some authors
deliberately imposed this technique upon their writing for dramatic effect.
The most famous fragment of all must be “Kubla Khan; or a Vision in a Dream” by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Contemporary commentators on this work reveal that
Coleridge came up with this poem whilst asleep and desperately tried to write
it down upon awakening; disturbed by a visitor, much of the content, direction
and purpose of the poem melted away before he could grasp it entire: all that
was left is the fragment which survives today. (Of course, as taught to
high-school students, this version of the story leaves out the drug subtext
behind these events.) Most people reading this poem for the first time wonder
where it’s going, since it seems to set up a whole bunch of things without
following through on any of them: this, of course, is the very nature of
fragments.
Since the days of Coleridge and his ilk,
there have been novels and other types of story published that have a similar
feel to them as does “Kubla Khan”,
namely, exotic and strange imagery, a sense of portentousness, and a rambling,
ill-directed progress. These tales sometimes deviate into the picaresque,
becoming a clumsy chain of set pieces connected by some narrative thread, which
often resolve (or not) in some grand gesture which attempts to tie off the
plot; more often, they emulate a stream of consciousness writing style, in
which established events and characters disappear, or are forgotten, in favour
of newer, more interesting diversions. It is these vague, half-formed dramas
which have given rise to the Weird Fiction of the Victorian- and Edwardian eras,
and which Lovecraft nurtured and refined as his particular genre of choice.
*****
In
my early days at University, during the hectic socialisation of that time,
certain rules of etiquette were flagged to my attention, as is usual in these
kinds of situations: what is acceptable behaviour and what is not are things
that social animals learn by engaging with each other and human beings are just
this type of animal. I remember a colleague informing me that it was the height
of boorishness to relate one’s drug experience to another party; not that I am,
or have ever been, into drug-taking, but it seemed pretty self-evident at the
time that such a revelation would be less than edifying for one to whom it was
presented. In the same manner, telling another person one’s dreams would seem
to be a futile and time-wasting exercise since those types of visions are
uniquely coded only to make sense to the one experiencing them. However these
are mores of a late Twentieth Century society; things were decidedly different
back in the eighteen-hundreds...
Drugs in the Nineteenth Century were not
the purview of the scientist, the doctor, or the criminal, as they are
nowadays. Rather, they were sources of inspiration and vision, the armaments in
the realm of the poets and the philosophers, which, at that time, included men
of science, or “natural philosophers”. Starting with the distillation of
nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, drugs were the focus of parties and other
gatherings, the purpose of which was to imbibe and to share the experiences
which followed. Some drugs lent themselves to social activity – nitrous; cocaine;
cannabis – others prompted a more introspective and solitary experience, such
as opium, ether, or mescal. Regardless of the agent, the effects were eagerly
noted, compared and contrasted by those who undertook to try them.
And trying them was certainly not difficult.
Many medical treatments - the majority of them sold over-the counter at
pharmacies and grocery stores - contained these drugs. Heroin-infused pastilles
for sore throats; laudanum prescribed as nerve tonics; tinctures of cannabis to
relieve menstrual cramps; even cocaine lozenges to treat toothache; and all of
these freely available. Across the Nineteenth Century, scientists tasked with
the discovery, synthesis and distribution of drugs, went from being liberal dispensers
from the pharmaceutical cornucopia to strict regulators of the flow of chemical
stimulation. The age we live in now, is one built on these restrictions, which
marginalise drug production, raise enormous incomes for the vested few, and
which have created and promoted a worldwide black-market of criminal activity
in opposition. Many have said it before me, but the world governments’
promotion of certain drugs in favour of others - whose production and distribution
is severely restricted - is built on double-standards and sheer monetary greed.
However, far be it for me to get into this argument; it just needs to be made
clear that, once upon a time, drugs which today are considered dangerous and
harmful, were a significant part of people’s daily lives and the recreational
use of them was a shared activity.
That works of literature were created out
of drug use is not limited to the mangled opium-induced imagery of “Kubla Khan”; many highly-considered
works of writing arose from such indulgence. Witness Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, or M.
Ageyev’s Novel With Cocaine. The
frenzied cannabis experiences of Baudelaire are revealed in Le Fleurs du Mal. Even Robert Louis
Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
owes its genesis to the perceived dangers attributed to the unleashing of a
submerged consciousness through the use of drugs. There is a veritable library
of explicit drugs literature dating from this period when drugs were freely
available2; I’d like to posit that there were, as well, rather more
works of literature out there which, if not written under chemical stimulation,
owed something to a drug experience of one kind or another.
*****
Having
defined the Weird Fiction of the Edwardian era (that period which extends from
the year 1899 to the Great War, which same rough period the French call the fin de siecle), revisiting that
definition with the notion of drugged authorship in mind, things become
somewhat revealing. Wandering narratives, obsessive attention to descriptive
details, strange and fantastic subject matter, even terse and abrupt
conclusions become pregnant with the notion of intoxication. It soon becomes
apparent that, not only were the late Victorians and Edwardians experiencing
chemically-induced visions, but they were sharing them by writing them down.
And then publishing them.
Authors were not entirely free however,
to sing the praises of their drug of choice from the mountaintops; while drugs
were certainly unregulated in the Victorian Age, they were not looked
favourably upon by all sectors of the community. Publishers, afraid of being
censured for issuing tracts lauding drug use without adding cautionary
injunctions, tended to insist that the author paint not too bright a picture of
their flirtation with chemical abuse; it is for this reason that de Quincey’s
work is not only entitled “Confessions”
(implying guilt on the part of the writer), but that it also ends with warnings
as to the dangers involved in the addiction. In 1953, Aldous Huxley was also
inclined to curb his enthusiasm about his mescaline trip, by penning “Heaven and Hell” as a cautionary rider
to his “Doors of Perception”. An
author who downplays their enjoyment of recreational drug use in their work
benefits from the perception by the general public as being on the side of
those who deplore recreational drug use; the adoption of this faux moral stance against drugs became a
hallmark of drug fiction, and many ‘drug tales’ thus become stories wherein the
protagonists become object lessons to the readership.
The first fictional narrative that we’ll
look at is The Monk (1796) by Matthew
Lewis. This torrid novel took its line from the giants of Gothic fiction that
went before it, namely The Castle of
Otranto by Horace Walpole and The
Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe. Walpole declared that Otranto came about due to a dream that
he had of a huge and terrifying steel gauntlet at the top of a grand staircase;
there’s no evidence that his dream came about from anything other than a heavy
dinner, so we can probably give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that
there was no post-prandial opium pipe to instigate the story.
The general tenor of the Gothic literary
tradition is that it involves itself with ruins, young lovers, intransigent
older relatives and the contest of wills. Any sense of danger comes about due
to the proximity of Nature in its wildest aspects – untamed animals, night-time
forests and glowering thunderstorms. Any supernatural elements tend to be
harbingers of guilt or of crimes unexposed to the light of day. In The Monk, Lewis took this moody
spookiness and transformed it into a nightmare document of violent
transgression. Blasphemy, rape and murder prevail: the good despair, the evil
rise above them and Satan himself passes judgement on the incestuous villains.
In that the eponymous monk finds his
come-uppance at the tale’s end, we see the requirement of imposing a stern artificial
morality upon the novel’s events thereby allowing the writer to avoid any
censure. While Ambrosio revels in his license and excess (believing himself
free of having sold his soul to the Devil), there is a heavy price to pay for
his indulgence: can this not be read as the crash following the dizzying high?
The narrative itself veers wildly amongst
its long list of characters, following them as they roam across Europe, and
continually being diverted by the stories of passing travellers and tangential
concerns, such as a ghost known as the Bleeding Nun and an encounter with the
Wandering Jew, both familiar proto-urban legends of the time. While these
seemingly random plot elements are later brought more strongly into the
storyline’s context, the vacillating narrative with its constantly brooding
air, its indulgence and its dramatic, and emphatic, ending all beg the question
that this is a beast possibly fuelled on more than imagination alone. Add to
this the fact that the whole book was written in the ten weeks leading up to
Lewis’s twentieth birthday, one gets the sense that this was a Hell of a
bender.
In 1844, William Harrison Ainsworth
published Auriol; or the Elixir of Life.
This is a strange and paranoid work, little known today probably due to the
fact that it is so hard to categorise. It involves a young man (Auriol) who is
rescued in 1599 by his distant relative, a magician who has created the
Philosopher’s Stone and wishes to drink an elixir made from it and live
forever. Before he can do so however, Auriol murders him and drinks the potion
himself. From then on he remains ever young and ageless, free of care but for
the fact that a sinister character follows him throughout history requiring of
him that he provide him with maidens to destroy. True love claims Auriol in the
early 1800s and he begins a race to deter the sinister man from taking his
beloved as his dark payment.
This story is portentous and weird, hazed
over with shifting points of view and extended tangential diversions into the
lives of various side characters. Along with Auriol and the sinister man, the
dwarf familiar of the magician also slides through history without aging and
the narrative never seems to satisfactorily clarify why this should be the
case. Strange tableaux are staged with dangerous surroundings, or intricate and
inexplicable devices (see the illustration above), much time is spent with a ring of petty thieves and their
impenetrable accents and the whole narrative terminates with the grand
revelation that it has all been a dream, or extended cautionary vision.
It’s possible that Ainsworth is writing a
salutary fable about the demons associated with intoxicants. Auriol’s reckless
desire to seize the gifts that the potion offers is rewarded with a stalking
shadow (paranoia?) and a nagging dwarf (his conscience?) and the horrible
knowledge that all the good in his life will be stripped away from him. It’s a
turgid morality tale; however, it’s also one that loses itself in the miasma of
its trappings.
1895 saw the publication of George
MacDonald’s Lilith. In this darkly
dreaming novel we see for the first time the creeping presence of the anima or the feminine aspect of the male
protagonist; also, we see the very roots of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands story-cycle
and the prototype of what, under his pen, would become the City of Ulthar. In Lilith, our protagonist discovers a
point of access in his library which leads to another reality, one dominated by
the sinister and enigmatic figure of the woman Lilith.
Gaining its inspiration from Christian
mysticism, Lilith is a winding narrative
setting the protagonist on a collision course with Adam’s first wife, as she
tries to destroy an otherworld colony of eternal children led by the child she
bore the First Man and whom she believes will be the instrument of her
destruction. Lilith is proud, at once dangerously beautiful and horrid, cloaked
by her beauty which hides her monstrous and bloodsucking nature. Our hero is
schooled by Adam throughout the narrative as to the proper course of action;
however, he eschews the passive-seeming methods of Eve’s husband in favour of ill-advised
and disastrous episodes of he-man adventurousness.
Here we have again the visionary
phantasmagoria of a mystic landscape; here again is the winding narrative, in
this case punctuated by corrections and afterthoughts, as the writer randomly adjusts
the plot elements to suit the needs of the moment. The turgid writing style
does nothing to diminish the psychedelia of the story but there are gems
amongst the haze: in the decadent city of Bulika, dominated by its cat
population, we can see the germ of Ulthar, as re-imagined by Lovecraft in his
own dreamscapes; as well, there is this passage which eerily foreshadows that
of Huxley’s which opens this essay:
“I
am indeed often driven to set down what I know to be but a clumsy and doubtful
representation of the mere feeling aimed at, none of the communicating media of
this world being fit to convey it, in its peculiar strangeness, with even an
approach to clearness or certainty. Even to one who knew the region better than
myself, I should have no assurance of transmitting the reality of my experience
in it. While without a doubt, for instance, that I was actually regarding a
scene of activity, I might be, at the same moment, in my consciousness aware that
I was perusing a metaphysical argument.”
The
House on the Borderland,
written in 1908 by William Hope Hodgson, bears a passing resemblance to Lilith. It too, concerns itself with a
mysterious dwelling wherein strange and unaccountable occurrences have left
their mark, hinting at an uncomfortable point of access between what is real
and what is patently not. Unlike Lilith however, it works with no consensual
framework; rather, it wanders along in a disturbing melange of dark visionary and phantasmagoric spectacle.
The novel begins with the declaration by
the Editor (Hodgson) that the contents are those found within an ancient
manuscript found beneath a crumbling mansion in the west of Ireland. A covering
narrative by one of the manuscript’s discoverers details its finding and then
the journal’s author takes over, outlining his strange experiences. As expected
these are all true to the ‘drugs literature’ formula we have discovered so far:
out-of-body travels; confrontations with alien beings; psychedelic visions of
cosmic events; the serendipitous discovery of a strange female presence, at
once familiar and replete with menace. Despite its overlong and brooding
descriptions of these various incidents, it hangs together somewhat better than
its fellows by means of the air of palpable menace which it conjures. Lovecraft
praised The House on the Borderland
as “a classic of the first water”.
Oddly enough, Hodgson codifies the ‘drug
literature’ formula himself in his opening framing device as the Editor, ending
with this point:
“Of the simple, stiffly given account of
weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The
inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability
and desire. And even should any fail to see, as I now see, the shadowed picture
and conception of that, to which one may well give the accepted titles of
Heaven and Hell, yet can I promise certain thrills, merely taking the story as
a story.”
Again, Mr Huxley’s words have been penned
decades before he thought to write them down.
A late entry in this list is a strange
work penned by Ben Hecht, a writer more famous for his Hollywood screenplays
which include “The Caine Mutiny” and “It’s A Wonderful Life”. The Kingdom of Evil, (part two of Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath), appeared
in 1924, and follows the experiences of Mallare who casts himself into the
eponymous Kingdom and discovers its strange workings.
This tale is explicitly psychological
with characters whom we suspect are sundered portions of the traveller’s own
psyche, and a re-emergence of the brooding anima
nemesis who alternately tortures and tempts the protagonist. The debts to Lilith and The House on the Borderland are clear; however, there is an overt
and explicit psycho-sexuality that dominates the strange dreamscape, separating
it deliberately from its Victorian and Edwardian ancestors. It too, however
ends abruptly, with a stern warning against illicit drug-taking.
For what reason were these tales written?
Unlike many other explicit drug writings, these are fictional, not confessional,
and do not claim to depict reality within their scope. The Monk is sheer indulgence: taking its line from other Gothic
romances, it allows the reader to wallow in potential danger, reporting actions
and behaviour outside of the accepted norm. This is titillation of the highest
order. The Gothic tradition of writing quickly devolved into the “bloods” of
the Victorian period; cheap, quickly-produced “penny dreadfuls”, using familiar
tropes over and over, each attempting to out-do the other in shock value.
Whether penning tales of “Sweeney Todd”,
“Deadwood Dick” or “Spring-Heeled Jack”, this is the
calibre of writing that Lewis produced and these are the tales he would
probably have written if he was born later in the period.
Such license however, is not the sole
reason for writing these fantasies. Lilith
is firmly based in Christian, largely apocryphal, mystical imagery. The
character of Lilith is generally regarded by theologians to be Adam’s first
wife and she is represented as such in this tale, rejecting a life subject to
Adam’s will and cast out to become the mother of monsters. George MacDonald,
better known for his children’s stories, is not alone in producing such
Christian phantasmagoria: C.S. Lewis’s Perelendra
and Narnia series are exemplars of
this genre of fantasy writing, as are the works of Charles Williams, including
the excellent War in Heaven. In this
sense, Lilith might be seen as a
didactic work, explaining theological issues in the form of a parable.
Perhaps though, escapism was the sole and
simplest reason that these novels were published. People have always felt the
need to be entertained, to be ‘drawn away’ from their everyday surroundings, to
experience the strange and the unusual. Cloaking these fantastic tales in a
format that makes them seem real or at least possible, makes suspension of
disbelief that much easier. Dracula,
by Bram Stoker, uses a format of revealing its events through the purported
letters and journal entries of the main characters; this style of writing is
referred to as ‘epistolary’, or ‘contained in letters’, and dates well back to
the Dark Ages as a means of making the substance of a work seem grounded in
fact3. Of our novels, this device is used by William Hope Hodgson in
The House on the Borderlands and by
Ben Hecht in The Kingdom of Evil:
both books claim that their contents are the material discovered in lost or
abandoned journals, along with their covering correspondence.
With the exception of The Kingdom of Evil, these novels were
all produced at a time when psychology was a minor and poorly-understood field of
academic endeavour. The major difference between Ben Hecht and our other
authors, is that he was using a toolbox to which the others were denied access.
Nevertheless, the psychological underpinnings of human beings are able to be
demonstrated without a coherent knowledge of the works of Freud and Jung, since
we are all privy to the human psyche. Hecht is able, with his explicit
understanding of psychological theory, to create a psychedelic world that
strongly symbolises the human mind. In this he foreshadows Alex Comfort’s
psychological fantasy novel Tetrarch
by several decades.
Whether drugs were actually at work in
the writing of these stories will never be known; much is there to speculate
upon but no hard facts are evident. It’s possible that the authors, rather than
indulging in drugs themselves, simply adopted tropes and styles prevalent in
the emerging genre of a ‘drugs literature’ in order to craft their own stories.
I have deliberately avoided looking at the writings of Edgar Alan Poe or Lewis
Carroll, firstly because their works are so well-known and secondly because
their flirtations with drug use have been widely discussed elsewhere. Too, both
of these authors have been tainted with the possibility of madness, which –
along with the likes of Mervyn Peake – opens up worm-cans tangential to this
discussion. With all of this in mind however, I’d like now to turn to H.P.
Lovecraft and try to determine the degree of influence which tales of this kind
had upon his own oeuvre.
*****
To
begin with, let’s deal with the debts to predecessors which Lovecraft
explicitly claimed. The work of Poe, of Machen and Blackwood, he discusses at
length in his correspondence and essays. So far, so obvious. Of particular
interest however, is what elements of these authors’ works were the things
which captured his attention? Taking them one by one we can draft a quick list
of influences:
From Poe we get the horrors of the grave;
the dubious benefits of self-experimentation; the retribution of the deceased
upon the living. These are shown in (amongst others) “The Premature Burial”, “The
Strange Case of M. Valdemar” and “The
Fall of the House of Usher”. These tales and others like them reveal the
DNA of such Lovecraftian confections as “The
Tomb” and “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward”.
Arthur Machen’s fiction concerns itself
with atavistic reversions of the psyche, the dangerous legacies of lost
aboriginal races and the snares which are unearthed in strange books; witness “The Great God Pan”, “The White People”, The Hill of Dreams and The
Novel of the Black Seal. The fingerprints of these stories are all over
Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”,
“The Rats in the Walls” and “The Strange High House in the Mist”, to
name but a few.
Algernon Blackwood’s fiction is intensely
focussed upon the spiritual embodiments of outside forces, often revealing
humans to be – individually or collectively – lesser representatives of the
cosmos, and relatively unevolved at that. “The
Wendigo” was a major influence on Lovecraft and its traces can be found on
many of his works from “The Call of
Cthulhu” to “At the Mountains of
Madness”.
Stylistically also, these writers
influenced the tenor of Lovecraft’s writing. They were all authors of the
Victorian and Edwardian periods and heirs to the affected writing style of the
times, something that Lovecraft adopted instinctively as worthy of emulation.
Lovecraft often felt that he was a person displaced out of time and therefore
fully embraced the writing styles of his forebears.
There’s a further obvious debt as well:
both Blackwood and Machen have a particularly dense and hypnotic style,
obsessive in descriptive flavour and almost psychedelic in quality. A lot of
what transpires in their works is revealed only through implication or
suggestion, something which definitely lends power to their stories. Lovecraft
was right to praise these qualities in their writing and, arguably, although he
aspires to bring these elements to his own work, he never quite pulls it off.
How much of this style was influenced by drugs? Well, Blackwood and Machen were
both members of the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn and acquaintances of W.B. Yeats who is known to have indulged
in mind-altering drugs like hashish and mescal; Machen was also part of Oscar
Wilde’s Aesthetics Movement and possibly influenced by the French Decadents
whom Wilde championed, a circle which included Charles Baudelaire and Rimbaud
both of whose hashish writings were considered notorious; but again, all of
this is merely suggestive and not a ‘smoking gun.’
However, it’s not absolutely necessary to
indulge in narcotics in order to emulate the writing styles of those who do. I
would argue that Lovecraft did just that in penning some of his pieces,
especially those of an explicitly fantastic nature, including all of his
Dreamlands material. Works like “The
Testament of Randolph Carter”, “The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and “Through
the Gates of the Silver Key” all have a distinct affiliation to ‘drugs
literature’ as exemplified by the Victorian- and Edwardian era writers. The
psychedelic imagery, the picaresque plot construction and stream of
consciousness narratives - as we have already seen - are hallmarks of the Weird
Fiction which Lovecraft enjoyed.
Is it possible that Lovecraft himself was
using drugs to formulate his work? I’ve never read anything of him which would
indicate that he was a drug fiend and, on balance, I would argue that he
wasn’t. The community in which he lived and the social strata to which he
aspired, argues against a general acceptance of drugs as a lifestyle choice. I
would suggest that Lovecraft probably was intrigued by the possibilities of
drugs – from having read about them and the writings they generated – but was
too strait-laced and compelled by propriety to explore the subject. It seems
that his only escape from the confines of his social position was his writing
and, given that he turned his hand to ghost-writing and collaborative efforts,
his natural skills of stylistic mimicry stood him in good stead.
The early circle of his acquaintance also
seems unlikely to have been an avenue for the discussion or promulgation of
drug use. Certainly, Lovecraft would have been the fountainhead for those who
followed him, drawing their attention to earlier writers from whom they might
benefit: there is a straight line to be drawn from Arthur Machen, through H.P.
Lovecraft, to Robert E. Howard, for example4. Mention of drug use in
the writings of Lovecraft’s circle seems to have arisen around 1931 with the
publication of “The Hounds of Tindalos”
by Frank Belknap Long, followed by Howard’s “The
Tower of the Elephant” in 1933, which produced the “Plutonian Drug” and the
“Black Lotus” respectively. Certainly, there are references to drug use
throughout the stories that the Lovecraft Circle generated, but these are often
prurient asides indicative of the ‘low habits of the less evolved’, or sometimes
blissful escapes for those who have dabbled with the forces of darkness and who
are now paying the price. There never seems to be an instance of the Lovecraft
Circle sharing their own drug visions. If anything, mental illness would seem
to be the shared psychedelia of the Circle. HPL’s mentally-tortured heroes
speak of his own experiences as a reclusive shut-in, seeking avenues of escape;
and it seems likely that Robert Bloch’s maternally-fixated anti-hero (Norman
Bates in Psycho) owes more than a
little something to the sad facts surrounding Robert E. Howard’s life and
death.
It would seem most likely, therefore,
that the early writers of the Cthulhu Mythos were experts in the production of
drugs literature pastiche, stemming from the works of the previous generations.
These days ‘drugs literature’ conjures thoughts of the cautionary Go Ask Alice, or the over-the-top
indulgence of Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas; however, these works are the spawn of later thinking and of
attitudes towards drug use around which government control has firmly
crystallised, rather than the Victorian social milieu wherein drugs policy was a nascent and largely abstract
concern.
As to the later writers of Cthulhoid
fiction, up to and including today’s authors, the pendulum has swung quite
strongly in tune with the times. From Henry Kuttner’s “Hydra” of 1939, with its specific discussions of hashish abuse, to
Robert M. Price’s “Dope War of the Black
Tong” (1996) on through to the rather more splatterpunk offerings of Poppy
Z. Brite and Willum Hopfrog Pugmire, the discussion of drugs has evolved as a
phenomenon within Mythos writing, in line with the social narrative of drugs
within the culture.
*****
Notes.
1 “Since
each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize
about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for
your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The
test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is
just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence
your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As
an orange is something nature has made just right.”
-Hill, Pati, "Truman Capote, The Art of Fiction No. 17",
The
Paris Review, no.16 (Spring/Summer, 1957).
2 Including (but not limited to): DAVY, Humphry, Researches Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide
or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration (1800); JAMES, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor, The
Pains of Sleep (1803); de QUINCEY,
Thomas, Confessions of an English
Opium Eater (1821); DICKENS,
Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
(1870); DOYLE, Arthur Conan, The Man with the Twisted Lip (1889); WILDE, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); BAUDELAIRE, Charles, The
Artificial Paradises (1860); KANE,
H.H., A Hashish-House in New York
(1888); BLACKWOOD, Algernon, A Psychical Invasion (1910); YEATS, W.B., The Trembling of the Veil (1926); LORRAIN, Jean, Tales of an
Ether-Drinker: An Undiscovered Crime (1895); WELLS, H.G., Under the Knife
(1897); FREUD, Sigmund, Über Coca (“On Cocaine”) (1885); STEVENSON, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886); APULEIUS, The Golden Ass (c.200); LINNAEUS, Inebriantia (1762); LORD
TENNYSON, Alfred, The Lotos-Eaters
(1832); ELLIS, Havelock, Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise
(1898).
3 Specifically, the tendency of writers to
couch philosophical or scientific theories in a series of letters, usually
between Aristotle and Alexander the Great, to add gravitas and legitimacy.
4 Compare Machen’s “The Shining Pyramid”, or “The
Hill of Dreams”, with Howard’s Bran Mak Morn stories; specifically, the
notion of ancient races and their (sometimes atavistic) resurgence.
*****
Bibliography: Readings
& References
AINSWORTH, W. Harrison, Auriol;
or the Elixir of Life, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1844.
de CAMP, L. Sprague, Lovecraft:
A Biography, Doubleday, New York, NY, USA, 1975.
HECHT, Ben, The
Kingdom of Evil – A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare,
Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, NY, USA, 1974 (first published by
P. Covici, Chicago, IL, USA, 1924).
HODGSON, William Hope, The
House on the Borderland, Panther Books, London, 1969 (first published by
Chapman & Hall, London, 1908).
HUXLEY, Aldous, The
Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Vintage/Random House, London,
2004 (first published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1954 & 1956).
JAY, Mike, Emperors
of Dreams – Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, Dedalus Ltd., Sawtry,
Cambridgeshire, UK, 2000.
LEWIS, Matthew, The
Monk, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, USA, 2002 (first published by
J. Saunders, Waterford, UK, 1796).
LOVECRAFT, H.P., H.P.
Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction – “Supernatural Horror in Literature”,
Barnes & Noble Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2011 (first published in The Outsider and Others, Arkham House, Sauk
City, WI, USA, 1939).
MACDONALD, George, Lilith
– A Romance, Dover Publications Inc., Mineola, NY, USA, 2008 (first
published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1895).
MORAES, Francis &
Debra, Opium, Ronin Publishing Inc., Berkeley,
CA, USA, 2003.
TURNER, E.S., Boys Will Be Boys: the story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et.al. - New Edition, Michael Joseph Ltd., London, 1957.
*****
