REVIEW - Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic by Maurice Levy (1988)

Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic
by Maurice Levy

Paperback, 147 pages, Out of Print, Wayne State University Press

*
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont

While this is an interesting work on a number of levels, the first of these levels is the fact that it exists at all.  Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic started life as the 1969 Doctoral thesis of Maurice Levy, a French academic critic who would go on to write books about Boswell and the English Gothic novel.  By 1972, the thesis had been published in book form but despite being translated by 1978, it would take ten years for the book to find its way to an English-language publisher.  While Levy’s thesis is undeniably an important work of scholarship dating from a time when Lovecraft was largely overlooked by the literary establishment, it was nearly twenty years old by the time it found its way into the English language prompting questions as to why it was published at all.  Explanations for this sudden interest in French Lovecraft scholarship on the part of Wayne State University Press can perhaps be found in what happened during those twenty years as well as the identity of the book’s translator.

During the 1980s, S.T. Joshi forged a reputation for himself as one of the world’s foremost experts on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.  The decade saw him work tirelessly as a critic, a scholar and an editor to ensure that not only did many of Lovecraft’s old stories find new publishers in their original form, but so did biographical and critical works that served to elevate Lovecraft from the status of a cultish pulp writer to that of a figure of such importance in the history of American literature that he is now frequently mentioned in the same breath as Edgar Allan Poe.  So, without being unkind to Levy, I suspect that this book’s publication owes as much to the rise in Joshi and Lovecraft’s reputations as it does to Levy’s views.  This is perhaps fitting as the book’s introduction informs us that Joshi has extensively re-written Levy’s work; rebuilding the book’s biography and foot-notes and excising a lot of the erroneous ideas about Lovecraft that were put about by his friend and first posthumous publisher August Derleth such as the structuring of Lovecraft’s creations into elemental taxonomies and narratives that reflected Derleth’s own Christian world-view.  Indeed, while Levy evidently re-worked a number of sections of this book for its English publication, it seems not unreasonable to say that Joshi’s role was more akin to that of a collaborator than the traditional translator.

Levy’s book opens with a long chapter about the life and character of H.P. Lovecraft.  “The Outsider” deals not only in biographical facts such as Lovecraft’s infamous racism and his failed marriage, but also with Lovecraft’s literary influences and his nausea upon encountering the smell of fish.  Levy then links many of these facts back to the corpus of Lovecraft’s work :

“His equilibrium threatened, he readjusted to the world by new compensations and took refuge yet more deeply in dream, shifting the responsibility of his daily life to his aunts.  His nightmares became blacker, his tales --‘The Outsider’ (1921), ‘Herbert West -- Reanimator’ (1921-22), ‘The Hound’ (1922)--   became more nocturnal.” [page 21]

and

“We must read ‘He’ (1925) and ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (1925) to fathom the depths of his despair.  In this artificial city, he says, this lonely place removed from the great currents of civilization, in this ‘kennel of feverish mongrels’, he felt himself a rootless stranger.” [page 23]

This unfashionable willingness to crawl inside Lovecraft’s head in order to make sense of his works continues throughout the book and is nowhere more apparent than in Levy’s style of writing. 

Once the enjoyable and illuminating biographical chapter is dealt with, Levy breaks the book up into thematic chapters examining different aspects of Lovecraft’s work such as his treatment of space (“Dwellings and Landscapes”, “The Metamorphoses of Space”), the treatment of time (“The Depths of Horror”, “The Horrors of Heredity”), Language (“Unholy Cults”) and his attitudes towards dream, myth and reality (“In the Chasms of Dream”, “From Fable to Myth”).  As we move into these thematic chapters, the book’s style changes from the mundane and factual to a more poetic and indirect form of expression.

Levy shows in numerous places that he is no enemy of purple prose:

“In ‘The Lurking Fear’, the soil is covered by a fetid and corrupt vegetation, a poisonous mold representing the type of horrible suppuration of the earth; the trees, infested by an unspeakable essence they draw from this decay, take on grotesque and demented forms.” [Page 38]

and again:

“How many Sabbaths, how many Walpurgis-nights, how many blasphemous rites have for their settings these picturesque and many-gabled homes!” [Page 39]

Indeed, far from simply analysing Lovecraft’s style and ideas, Levy seems to internalise them.  As the above quotations suggest, Levy is fond of aping the distinctively verbose nature of Lovecraft’s writing but at times this process of emulation slips over into the actual content of what Levy is arguing.  Indeed, Levy seems to be engaging in a form of Method Criticism whereby Levy channels not only Lovecraft’s prose style but also his beliefs.  For example, when comparing New England with New York, Levy presents us with the idea that New England is full of history and culture while New York is entirely lacking in both.  Going by the biographical details of Lovecraft’s life in New York, this seems a reasonable reading of Lovecraft’s opinions but Levy does not present them as such. 

This lack of clear boundary between biographical details and critical inference makes, at times, for treacherous going as it is at times completely unclear whether Levy’s interpretations rest upon Lovecraft’s occasionally eccentric views or whether they rest upon speculation backed by weak argument.  For example,  at one point Levy states that “the irrational in Lovecraft’s tales seems indissociable from the images of the depths” [page 64].  This would be a reasonable conclusion to draw were it not for Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927) but Levy explains away this counter-example by stating that the cosmos is “a reversed abysm”.  The implication of this argument is that, for Lovecraft horror always comes from the depths, even when it does not, because if something produces the irrational then it must be an abyss.  Had this argument rested upon a quote from Lovecraft then it might well have seemed a touch less circular, but Levy does not attribute this view to Lovecraft or even justify it through argument. 

This tendency to skip over the details is systemic throughout the book.  Levy is swift to invoke Lovecraft’s literary influences but these comparisons rarely form the basis for any sustained argument or analysis.  Instead ideas and themes are introduced and allowed to resurface at different times throughout the book but they are never pulled together.  Nowhere is the laxness of Levy’s argument more obvious than when the book deals with Lovecraft’s attitudes towards science and myth, though one would think this a central question given the title of the book.

At the end of the chapter “The Metamorphoses of Space”, Levy has to deal with Lovecraft’s clearly deeply ambivalent feelings about the fantastic as a mode of expression.  As a reactionary thinker who clearly felt ill at ease in his own era, it was perhaps natural for Lovecraft to want to harken back to some previous point in history that had greater wisdom and knowledge than the modern world in order to downplay the achievements of modernity.  This is a trope that is also present in the works of the cloistered academics, Tolkien and MR James. Tolkien wrote of a by-gone age of superior Elven learning reminiscent of Victorian attitudes towards classical antiquity, while James used his stories to attack academics who failed to conform to the existing orthodoxy (particularly in matters of Biblical scholarship).  Lovecraft, by contrast, seemed to find no consolation in the beliefs of previous generations.  In fact, he embraced new scientific learning from a young age and the philosophy of scientific materialism clearly inspired him greatly.  Levy acknowledges this by claiming that Lovecraft:

“had, in 1923, enthusiastically discovered the theory of relativity, in which he he thought he had found the justification for his absolute pessimism.  He later made frequent allusions to it in his letters, in terms that let us suppose he had a precise enough understanding of these questions.” [Page 51]

a little later Levy adds

“The references to Einstein are there merely to justify crudely and superficially an action whose purpose is the hazardous, hesitant exploration of the utter depths of the psyche.” [Page 53]

So, according to Levy, Lovecraft was a writer who thought about science and was clearly inspired by science but ultimately only used it as crude form of set-dressing for his stories.  This does not ring true.  One might suggest that one of the reasons why Levy struggles with Lovecraft’s attitude to science is because Levy appears to have his own issues with modernity.  Indeed, whenever a science fiction trope is mentioned, Levy quickly defuses it or directs our attention elsewhere.  We can see this in his tautological assertion  that Lovecraft always writes about the depths.  We can also see it more directly in Levy’s decision to quote a remarkable article from 1945 by Matthew H. Onderdonk in which it is suggested that by Lovecraft’s time “science fiction had already seen most of its best days” [Page 130] as well as in Levy’s incomprehensible assertion that the Fantastic “is, on the axis of the imagination, rigorously opposed to science fiction” [Page 80].  Consider too the book’s final paragraph:

“In a society that is becoming each day more anaesthetized and repressive the fantastic is at once an evasion and a mobilization of anguish.  It restores man’s sense of the sacred and the sacrilegious; it above all gives back to him his lost depth.  For the myth of the automobile, the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner, for the modern myths of the new world that are merely surface myths, Lovecraft substituted the Cthulhu Mythos.”  [Page 120].

Not only was Lovecraft an atheist, but he once suggested that black people should be murdered so as to protect white people from nausea.  To enlist him in some battle to not only free society but also to help humanity rediscover its sense of the sacred seems to me more of a reflection of Levy’s views than Lovecraft’s.

Consider, for example, the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926):

“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”

These are not the words of a man who has rejected modern thinking in order to return to the ‘depths’ of the sacred.  This is a man who sees the world as ultimately comprehensible to science because that world is ultimately mechanistic.  The fact that the dark truths of the world are decypherable to science suggests that Lovecraft has little place for the noumenal or even the metaphysical.  In fact, this book’s translator S. T. Joshi has argued that many of Lovecraft’s early stories need to be seen from a far more SFnal perspective in the light of “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936).  Indeed, Joshi’s The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (1998) points out that the story goes some way to explain a lot of the occult elements of Lovecraft’s Mythos in scientific terms.  The story also sees many of the creatures wrenched from the mythological and placed on a more realistic footing as legitimate subjects for archeological research and historical speculation. 

However, while I think that Levy is clearly misreading Lovecraft, I think this confusion would have been impossible to avoid for Levy as Lovecraft not only fails to buy into the optimistic technocracy of much period SF, he also cloaks his materialism in the language of myth and legend.

As a work of scholarship Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic is a strange beast.  Its poetic and direct style make it far more fun and accessible than most works of genre criticism but the lack of sustained argument and qualification that makes much academic prose so difficult to read is also to blame for the book feeling rather insubstantial.  It is undeniably a coherent interpretation of the works of H.P. Lovecraft but its failure to mark a clear line between the views of Levy and those of Lovecraft ultimately weaken it as a work of sustained criticism and fatally undermine the passages in which Levy goes out on a limb.

____________________

Jonathan McCalmont is the editor of Fruitless Recursion.  He lives in London where he teaches and prepares contributions to venues such as NYRSF, Strange Horizons, SF Site and Videovista.