Canon Fodder is anoccasional seriesin which I write about classic works of horror fiction. This particular part of the series is devoted to the complete published works ofH.P. Lovecraft, which I will slowly be working my way through.
By far and away Lovecraft’s best known work: A globe-trotting adventure story full of mystery, intrigue, yacht-battles and big rubbery monsters on a slimy modernist island. However, look beyond all of these well-known and oft-borrowed tropes and you will find a story about generations of humans trying to make sense of a world that will remain forever beyond their ken and a much sadder story about a man retreating into racist paranoia when the world turned out to be a lot weirder than he’d imagined.
On Production
In March 1926, H.P. Lovecraft received a letter from his aunts inviting him to leave New York and move in with them in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. Lovecraft responded with a combination of joy and relief that lead him to accept his aunts’ invitation in a letter that included the strikingly non-Lovecraftian word “hooray”. Lovecraft would leave behind him the tatters of not only a fledgling literary career but also a marriage. By the time he returned to Rhode Island, Lovecraft was a broken man… he was gaunt, impoverished, miserable but inspired.
Lovecraft’s first summer back in Rhode Island saw him produce “The Call of Cthulhu” (full text), a story that remains his best known and most influential work despite Lovecraft himself considering it little more than “middling”.
Lovecraft submitted the story to Weird Tales only for it to be knocked back by the editor Farnsworth Wright who seemed to either dislike Lovecraft’s work or bear him some sort of weird grudge over the minor moral panic that had nearly seen Weird Tales pulled from news-stands as a result of a story about necrophilia written under the name of an established author but ghost-written by Lovecraft.
In fact, despite “The Call of Cthulhu” being the best known work to ever appear in the pages of Weird Tales, the piece only ever made it to print because Lovecraft’s friend Donald Wandrei (who would later go on to co-found Arkham House with August Derleth) talked up the story to the editor of Weird Tales and claimed that Lovecraft was on the cusp of selling it to a rival magazine. It is not clear why this lie should have made Farnsworth Wright more inclined to buy one of Lovecraft’s stories given that he had turned down pretty much everything submitted since becoming editor but to seek logic in such decisions would involve assuming Farnsworth Wright to be a man of taste or good sense and I would say that the jury is still very much out on that one…
“The Call of Cthulhu” was first published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales whose cover story was “The Ghost Table” by the legitimately well-respected Anglo-Irish ghost story specialist Elliott O’Donnel.
On Influences
As you might expect, there has been quite a bit of speculation as to the exact lines of influence and inspiration that fed into the writing of this story. As someone who is not that widely-read in early Weird Fiction, I’m not really in a position to engage with the question of whether “The Call of Cthulhu” was inspired by works like de Maupassant’s “The Horla” or Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” but I can certainly see the similarities and Machen’s ideas about Deep Time underpin pretty much everything that Lovecraft wrote about the horrors of pre-history.
To be honest, I’m never too sure about the utility of such comparisons as Lovecraft’s literary ancestry was always masked by the fact that even his earliest stories spoke directly to his thematic obsessions in a voice that was recognisably his own. For example, it is taken for granted that much of the so-called Dreamlands cycle was inspired by the work of Lord Dunsany but many people who have scrutinised Lovecraft’s correspondence seem to think that Lovecraft only encountered Dunsany some time after he began to write Dunsanian Fantasy.
Due to both my ignorance and the gradualist method I’ve adopted in writing about Lovecraft’s work, I tend to find it a lot more useful and illuminating to consider Lovecraft in terms of the influence he wielded over himself as a writer who would quite often re-visit old images and story ideas. Filtered through the lens of Lovecraft’s propensity for productive self-plagiarism, I think that the roots of “The Call of Cthulhu” lie in one specific story and one specific story idea.
The first Lovecraftian precursor to this story is “Dagon” from 1917. First published in an amateur magazine named The Vagrant in 1919 and later republished by Weird Tales in 1923, “Dagon” features both a god-like sea monster and a “Cyclopean monolith” so ancient that it seems to predate all known systems of language and artistic expression:
“Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books”
The story also features a sinister cult with a global reach as the story’s narrator escapes the island only for the cult to follow him and murder him in the safety of his own home. A further interesting similarity that I will be returning to in due course is the fact that “Dagon” was written at a time when Lovecraft’s primary source of inspiration was his own dreams.
The second Lovecraftian precursor to this story was a note scribbled in what Lovecraft famously referred to as his ‘Commonplace Book’. The name is evidently something of a New England expression but it basically means notebook and it refers to the fact that Lovecraft spent a number of years scribbling all of his story ideas down into a single notebook that has miraculously been passed down to us. The correlation is not perfect but it is enlightening, consider entry ‘25’ from 1919:
“Man visits museum of antiquities—asks that it accept a bas-relief he has just made—old and learned curator laughs and says he cannot accept anything so modern. Man says that
‘dreams are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx or garden-girdled Babylonia’
and that he had fashioned the sculpture in his dreams. Curator bids him shew his product, and when he does so curator shews horror. Asks who the man may be. He tells modern name. “No—before that” says curator. Man does not remember except in dreams. Then curator offers high price, but man fears he means to destroy sculpture. Asks fabulous price—curator will consult directors.
Add good development and describe nature of bas-relief.”
Lovecraft clearly ‘recycled’ the idea of the bas-relief as well as the antiquarians being confronted by an object so impossibly ancient as to be almost incomprehensible to them, and then sampled some of the language verbatim. Combine “Dagon” with that entry from the Commonplace book and you have about 70% of the plot of “The Call of Cthulhu”.
For the rest of it, about 25% comes from Margaret Murray’s immensely influential (and now largely discredited) anthropology text The Witch Cult in Western Europe (which Lovecraft directly cites) and the final 5% is pure literary swagger as “The Call of Cthulhu” turns out to be a far more subtle and cleverly-constructed story than even Lovecraft seemed to realise. This story contains not only the seeds of both the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ and many of the tropes that we now associate with Sandy Pertersen’s titular roleplaying game, it also contains gestures towards the sense of cosmic horror and existential unease that would secure Lovecraft’s literary reputation to this day.
On Structure
“The Call of Cthulhu” is one of Lovecraft’s longer stories and a naive reading of the text might conclude that its episodic structure was down to Lovecraft’s lack of experience writing at this sort of length. In fairness, Lovecraft not only includes chapter breaks, he actually goes so far as to give each separate chapter it’s own name and then produces a story-of-sorts about a man sorting through his late uncle’s research that serves as a kind of framing device that pulls the three fragments together into one cohesive story. While I think that you can read the story in such terms, I think that a deeper understanding of this story requires you to listen to the instructions that Lovecraft gives the reader in the opening paragraph.
Now… one of Lovecraft’s signature literary moves is to open a story with an incredibly resonant and striking piece of prose that basically grabs you by the lapels and demands your attention. A century later and people are still grabbing these introductory orations and using them as quotes and front-pieces for for all sorts of dark-themed books . The opening to “The Call of Cthulhu” is particularly famous for a reason:
“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.”
Let’s be honest, the only opening passage that slaps as hard as this one is the opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and even that feels like a somewhat over-ornate retread of Lovecraft’s profound epistemic pessimism:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
I’m not generally one for memorising literary bon-mots but I have known that Lovecraft quote by heart since the age of about 16 and it is never far from my thoughts. Indeed, while I have been writing a lot about Lovecraft over the last few years, I have also written quite a bit about Thomas Ligotti and it is my contention that most of the stories in Ligotti’s second collection Grimscribe are an extended literary conversation with the epistemic pessimism expressed by Lovecraft in that quote and through such stories as “The Rats in the Walls”, “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family” and “The Outsider”. Ligotti being a man with direct lived experience of madness and an author whose career began four or five decades after the death of Lovecraft means that he has a somewhat more subtle appreciation of the line between truth, madness, and enlightenment. In truth, I suspect that reading a load of Ligotti stories about this very question has served to boost my sensitivity to the nuances of Lovecraft’s vision.
The final section of “The Call of Cthulhu” features a bunch of sailors who see Cthulhu and are instantly driven mad but the second section features a police inspector who sees all sorts of hair-raising shit without any apparent long-term impact upon his mental health. The Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game takes its cues from the third rather than either of the earlier sections and presents sanity as something that crumbles before reality unmasked. However, if you re-read the first and the second sections you will discover that loads of people catch glimpses of Mythos critters without losing their shit. The reading encoded in the Call of Cthulhu game interprets these unequal outcomes through the dubiously pulpy lens of assuming that some people are just less intellectually fragile than others but the source of Lovecraftian madness is made obvious in that opening passage:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
According to Lovecraft, witnessing the true horror at the heart of existence is not something that will drive you mad… it might scare you and it might traumatise you but it will not drive you mad. What drives you mad is the attempt to correlate the contents of your mind; to take all of your pre-conceived notions of how the world operates and to try and reconcile them with the fact that we inhabit a planet that was once colonised by god-like aliens whose psychic powers allow them to exert pressure on humans across the globe. It’s not the fall that kills you… it’s the landing.
The key to understanding “The Call of Cthulhu” as a story is to realise that the entire narrative revolves around precisely the kind of correlation that Lovecraft warns us about in the opening line of the story:
- The narrator is correlating his late uncle’s research in order to produce a book.
- The dead anthropologist tried to correlate the contents of various press clippings and reports of weird dreams.
- The sculptor is correlating the contents of his dreams to produce a bas-relief.
- The inspector is trying to correlate what he saw with interrogations to make sense of the rituals.
- The academics are correlating different pieces of field-work to try and see the connections between seemingly isolated acts of cultish worship.
- The cultists are trying to correlate the contents of what has been handed down to them in order to please the Old Ones through acts of horrific sacrifice and veneration.
I didn’t read that much Lovecraft scholarship before undertaking this project but I wanted to read all of Lovecraft in the order it was written because I wanted to see how certain ideas developed over time. One of the first conclusions I reached was the fundamental correctness of 1970s Lovecraft scholars who pushed back against August Derleth’s editorial assumption that all of Lovecraft’s stories were inter-connected and amounted to a coherent body of lore comparable to that of someone like J.R.R. Tolkien. King of the Lovecraft nerds S.T. Joshi has written an excellent book debunking the very concept of a ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ but cultural inertia is a thing and I would argue that he could have gone further…
Lovecraft used and re-used what I have come to refer to as Named Entities like Cthulhu, Azathoth and the Necronomicon. He even encouraged his friends to make use of these same Named Entities as the goal was to present the reader with familiar names that gave the impression of depth and inter-connectedness when in fact none of the pipes linked up behind the scenes. The Cthulhu Mythos was the result of August Derleth (illegally as it happens) assuming editorial control over Lovecraft’s literary estate and using his editorial power to forge connections between the various pipes.
My interpretation of “The Call of Cthulhu” is that the various characters and factions in the story are all desperately trying to correlate the contents of their minds but none of these acts of correlation are in any way successful because the ‘Real World of the Story’ is existentially and horrifyingly absurd. My reading of “The Call of Cthulhu” is that, in addition to revisiting stories like “Dagon”, it is also revisiting stories like “The Lurking Horror” where the truth of what is actually going on in the ‘Real World of the Story’ is only intermitently accessible to us through the incomplete and ideologically overloaded ‘reckonings’ of our fellow human beings. “The Call of Cthulhu” is Weird Fiction’s equivalent of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon… you can investigate all you want and interview as many witnesses as you like on but the truth will always remain elusive.
While Lovecraft scholarship has long turned its back on the idea of a formalised ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, fannish muscle memory remains and many Lovecraft scholars would have first encountered these works at a time when Derleth emphasised the coherence and interconnectedness of the mythos. Indeed, take a look at any wikipedia article devoted to a Lovecraft story and you’ll find a section full of suggested connections between stories and the overwhelming majority of these connections will rest upon an act of speculative projection that assumes that an unnamed creature from one story is actually an appearance by a Named Entity from a completely different story. Lest we forget, Lovecraft named his aborted first novel “Azathoth” because he thought it was a cool and hideous name and while the name would later get re-cycled to describe the babbling chaos at the heart of existence, nothing in the original novel makes reference to any of that and various fans and Lovecraftian scholars took it upon themselves to forge retroactive connections (retcons) that were not even alluded to let alone present in the original text.
Nowadays, we use the term ‘transformative works’ to refer to pieces of fan-fiction that make substantive additions or changes to the core texts. This piece of terminology did not really exist in the days of August Derleth and a lot of the energy from the boom in 1970s Lovecraft scholarship came from the desire to draw a line between Derlethian fan-fiction and the original texts. The problem is that reading is an act of interpretation; to read a text is not only to decode the letters on the page but also to take the ideas embedded in those words and filter them through the contents of our minds in an effort to have them make sense. Many fans find transformative works to be emancipatory because fan-fiction encourages people to be creative in their acts of interpretation. They not only uncover hidden patterns in the text, they also forge new patterns that serve to make the text more relevant and interesting to different groups of people. Different interpretations scratch different itches in the heads of different kinds of readers and that is also evident in the way that certain interpretations come to be seen as so correct and grounded that they can obscure ambiguities that are undoubtedly present in the original text.
I can understand why people (particularly people who were reading Lovecraft in the days of Derleth) would read “The Call of Cthulhu” and assume that the (white male) narrator’s act of correlation is definitive and complete. I can even see how someone might leap from that interpretation to Brian Lumley’s decision to re-invent the Cult of Cthulhu as some sort of SPECTRE-like global conspiracy that needs to be attacked with shotguns and sticks of dynamite. I can see how you would arrive at that interpretation… I just don’t think it is as much fun as an interpretation suggesting that the narrator is just another in a long line of psychically-attuned weirdos who have tried to make sense of the vast, gaping, implacable horror that lurks at the heart of reality.
At this point, you might very well raise an eyebrow and question my suggestion that ‘fun’ is a reasonable goal for critical engagement with a text and I would respond that this is precisely the point that “The Call of Cthulhu” is trying to get across: We all bring our own baggage to our attempts to make sense of the world and that baggage, though deeply precious to us, is ultimately of no consequence to the harshness of the world. We gaze at the horror that is reality and we try to reconcile what we see with what we deeply hope to be true and the pipes never quite line up. In fact, any attempts to make the pipes connect up at the back is liable to drive you insane or, as is the case in this story, paranoid and racist.
On The Horror in Clay
The narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu” is both the nephew of a celebrated anthropologist and an anthropologist of sorts in his own right. As his uncle’s heir and executor, he is expected to go through his uncle’s papers and (Lovecraft literally uses the word) correlate the notes into papers that might be published. The narrator has all of his uncle’s affairs shipped to his home in Boston and he begins correlating the data by opening a box and this leads him to discover another locked box “which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes”.
So we have a load of data that the narrator is expected to correlate and within this data we have a locked box that contains a mysterious object:
“The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing.”
This is a mystery (the object) within a mystery (why was the box locked?) within a mystery (what was the uncle working on?) within the broader mystery of the uncle’s unexpected death:
“Interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street.”
This is quite a fascinating piece of writing. First and foremost, it is technically quite interesting as we have the tendency to locate events in very specific real-world locations that started to creep into Lovecraft’s writing after he started getting out more following the illness and then death of his mother Susie. You can see this tendency starting to creep into Lovecraft’s work with “The Hound” though it was arguably perfected with “The Festival” as you can literally go onto google maps and follow the instructions embedded in the story to retrace the steps of the story’s narrator. Secondly, we have a continuation of the overt and unapologetic racism that makes “The Horror at Red Hook” such an unpleasant read.
Lovecraft was always a racist and you can see that in early Dreamlands stories like “Polaris” as well as later, pre-Mythos stories like “The Street” and “Herbert West – Re-Animator” but early Lovecraft often deploys the racism at either a metaphorical level or positions it so close to a character that you could almost view it as a character beat. After New York, Lovecraft simply stopped bothering trying to hide those impulses resulting in “The Call of Cthulhu” being absolutely shot through with vile racist stereotypes and preposterously ignorant bigotry directed at pretty much every ethnic group under the Sun.
The racism is so blatant and unhinged that it is almost impossible to disentangle it from the fabric of the story and were you inclined to read “The Call of Cthulhu” as a White Supremacist masturbatory fantasy about how all non-whites are conspiring to bring down civilisation in an orgy of violent revelling then I would find it very difficult to disagree with your reading. In fact, one of the weirdest things about the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is that earlier generations of fans and critics somehow managed to read this story and accept the idea of a sinister global conspiracy whilst also failing to notice that all of the conspirators are coincidentally non-white. Something, Something, we see what we choose to see. Something, Something, trying to correlate the entire contents of your mind is probably a bad idea.
Beyond these technical considerations, it is also worth considering the fact that the story’s narrator is in the process of either grieving for his uncle or puzzling over the man’s unexpected death. This is one of those details that points to a broader philosophical point as seeking a deeper significance to the death of an old man who walked up a big hill while unfit can be viewed as an emotive rejection of reality born of the fact that it is quite distressing to dwell on the possibility that one’s loved ones could theoretically drop dead at any moment.
I mention this as it is interesting to consider the narrator’s obsessive quest for truth as part of a broader psychological mood: He is sad, he is distressed, and he is desperate for it all the make sense and thus he starts correlating the details of his uncle’s life leading him into a doomed attempt to correlate his uncle’s understanding of the Cult of Cthulhu.
Another significant detail pops up in the passage where the narrator comments that his uncle had been not only using an international newspaper clippings service to collect stories of weird events, he had also been travelling about the place interviewing artists and ‘sensitive’ people about a series of mysterious dreams that they all appear to have had at the same time. Tellingly, the narrator admits that his uncle failed to keep all of the associated correspondence and so he was not able to ask anyone any follow-up questions. All that he had was some raw data and his uncle’s exegetic attempts to correlate significant details:
“My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest.”
The only person that the narrator is able to talk to about these mysterious dreams is the man who sucked the anthropologist into the story to begin with, a local sculptor by the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox who was responsible for making the bas-relief that the narrator discovered in a locked box amongst his uncle’s possessions.
Wilcox describes himself as psychically hyper-sensitive and claims that the vision of the bas-relief came to him in a dream:
“Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.”
This is one of those passages so hyper-connected to Lovecraft’s life and work that you could probably devote an entire chapter of a book to teasing out the allusions. Firstly, Lovecraft nerds (and Lovecraft himself) have made great hay out of the similarities between the sunken city of R’Lyeh and the sunken cities of Atlantis and Lemuria but when I read this initial description of R’Lyeh, I am reminded of the vision of a Futuristic New York that appears towards the end of “He”:
“I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.”
While the black Cyclopean city with towers ‘flung’ into the sky may be reminiscent of New York, the dripping ooze rather reminds me of the weird island in the middle of the Ocean where the narrator of “Dagon” uncovers a Cyclopean monolith with artwork so reminiscent of that bas-relief:
“Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths.”
The dreamer too turns out to be quite an interesting figure as Lovecraft presents him as a somewhat Bohemian artist whose dreamlike-imagery is just a bit too avant-garde for the artistic establishment. This rather reminded me of the way that both “He” and “Cool Air” feature these well-bred, intelligent, but unsuccessful intellectuals who appear to function as stand-ins for Lovecraft himself, which is really interesting as “Dagon” was quite literally based upon a dream that Lovecraft happened to have.
The figure of Wilcox is somewhat complicated by Lovecraft’s ideas about race and the presence of one particular adjective in the description of the sculptor:
“a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect”
For ages, I assumed that the presence of “dark” in that description meant that Lovecraft had imagined Wilcox as a person of colour but he also describes him as being from a good family and, given that Lovecraft spends a lot of this story ranting about “mongrels”, I doubt he’d suddenly decide to do some progressive rep and include a black sculptor in an otherwise overtly racist story.
Another reason for my assuming that Wilcox was a POC is that Lovecraft has a tendency to present psychic sensitivity as something that is inversely related to social status. He acknowledges that certain scientists might have shared the weird dreams that inspired Wilcox but one of the reasons why the cultists in this story all happen to be non-white is that non-white people are presented as being more psychically sensitive than well-educated white men from good families. The fact that Wilcox is can be viewed as white not only complicated the story’s implied psychic hierarchy, it also complicates the fact that Wilcox resembles the kinds of characters that often serve as stand-ins for Lovecraft himself. This social ambiguity reminds me quite a bit of the way that the early story entitled “Beyond the Walls of Sleep” features a (white) inbred rustic whose psychic hyper-sensitivity leads to his becoming possessed by a figure from the distant future. In that story, a white intern from a good family who uses a weird machine to forge a psychic connection with the rustic and begins to share his visions. This intern reads like a Lovecraft stand-in in much the same way as Wilcox and you can sense Lovecraft trying to reconcile the tension between psychic sensitivity being a characteristic of the lower orders and psychic sensitivity being the type of thing that would explain Lovecraft’s own creative talents.
The sculpture as well as the content of the sculptor’s dreams turn out to resemble not only the content of dreams experienced by local artists and poets but also to visions experienced by ‘primitive’ groups around the world as revealed in the professor’s press clippings:
“A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions.”
The resemblance is so striking that the narrator initially assumes that the professor must have either asked the sculptor leading questions or somehow allowed him to learn of the weird events that appear to have been triggered by a distant earthquake. This theory lingers in the story until close to the end when the drip-drip-drip of similar partial truths come to force uncomfortable acts of correlation.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
I mentioned above that Lovecraft considered “The Call of Cthulhu” to be somewhat middling and resented the taste of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright as they compelled him to write stories that were more two-fisted and pulpish than he might otherwise want to tell. Indeed, while many Derlethian pieces and the Call of Cthulhu RPG came to focus on stories of people shouldering their elephant guns and taking the good fight to swarthy cultists, most of Lovecraft’s output revolves around quiet, introspective men having their minds shredded by the cognitive dissonance between their understandings of the world and the truths that are revealed to them. Lovecraft departed from this approach when writing “The Horror at Red Hook” and it is interesting to see him revisit his experiment with more hands-on characters.
Legrasse is a police inspector who reaches out to the archaeological community after conducting a raid on a bunch of voodoo cultists operating in the swamps of Louisiana. After the raid, the police confiscated the group’s idol from which we get not only our idea of what Cthulhu is supposed to look like but also the basis for Lovecraft’s own drawings of Cthulhu:
“The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.”
This adds yet another layer to the mystery as now we have a near-recreation of Wilcox’s dream-image in a material suggesting not only impossible age but also unknown provenance. The raid that captured the statue also predates the dreams that swept the globe suggesting that we are dealing with more than a set of shared dreams.
Lovecraft’s description of the raid is astonishingly vivid and full of really memorable imagery but it is also poses questions:
“Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell.”
Again, Lovecraft makes it clear that the events that took place in the swamp defy correlation as only poetry or madness can do justice to it. Legrasse turns up at a meeting of the American Archaeological Association decades after the raid because the things he saw on the raid have played upon him and refused to make sense. Legrasse presents the statuette and his memories of the raid because he hopes that the academics will have some insight into the nature of the cult and be able to tell him how to pursue his investigation but the closest an academic comes to filling in the gaps is when someone starts talking about a strangely savage cult encountered in Greenland but this only poses more questions as the Greenland cult seems unconnected to the swamp cult and the only real similarities in their practices are the savage, violent tone and the repetition of a certain phrase:
Both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn’
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
‘In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’
The similarities between the two cults naturally dominates the narrative as it sets up the third part of the story where people travel to R’Lyeh and encounter Cthulhu himself. However, I am struck not by the similarities in the two stories but in the weird gaps in the narrative, I mean… what is the deal with the weird white creature that lives in the lake?
“There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight”
And what is the deal with the weird ritual that seems to be taking place in a deeper set of woods located behind the deep woods containing the ritual that is raided by the police?
“It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.”
Legrasse and his men never investigate whatever it was that was lurking deeper in the forest, instead he arrests as many cultists as he can, drags them back to prison, and sets about interrogating them in an effort to correlate the madness that he and his men happened upon:
“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.”
Legrasse becomes particularly obsessed with the stories told by an older man named Castro who talks about Cthulhu sleeping in R’Lyeh and explains about the global cult that is waiting to help set him free. He then goes on to explain the secret history of Earth and mentions not only the Necronomicon but also a pillared city in the deserts of Arabia. This makes perfect sense to our narrator who sees an explanation not only for the arty people picking up what appeared to be ‘shared vibrations’ but also the similarity between the cults of Greenland and the cults of Louisiana and the death of the narrator’s uncle:
“One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs.”
Of course! It all makes sense now! If an unfit elderly man drops dead after walking up a large hill then it must be as a result of plots hatched by an international conspiracy of black people! The pieces are all falling into place!
Hilariously, the narrator concedes that the cult appears to have taken absolutely no action against the police inspector who busted up their ritual, but they are almost certainly responsible for the death of an academic who was slowly disappearing beneath a sea of seemingly unconnected press clippings.
For me, this is where “The Cult of Cthulhu” gets really interesting as there is a clear sense in which the narrator is accepting the first theory that accounts for the death of his uncle, the content of his uncle’s work, a load of unrelated weird shit happening across the globe, and his own racist beliefs about the sinister nature of non-white people.
The really interesting thing to me is the way that everyone from the narrator to the police inspector accept the words of the cultists entirely at face value without dwelling on either the weird inconsistencies or the holes in their story: If the cults in Greenland and the cults in Louisiana are part of the same religious body then why are their practices not identical? How are a bunch of weird native Greenlanders supposed to help awaken a god-like monster entombed deep beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean? What were the Louisiana cultists trying to accomplish if the awakening of Cthulhu is dependent upon some sort of celestial event? If Cthulhu is some sort of god-like presence pulling the strings on a global conspiracy using telepathy, then why does he react to the presence of humans in his city by eating them and stomping about the place like Godzilla?
On one level, we are clearly talking about a lack of world-building and holes in the fabric of the plot as Lovecraft is trying to draw a line between these impossibly ancient inhuman processes and a bunch of weirdos kidnapping people in a swamp. On another level, the holes in the fabric of the plot are also holes in the fabric of the fictional world and if things don’t line up in the narrative then the implication is that the Real World of the Story is in some sense absurd or inherrently hostile to human understanding.
The weird tensions and incongruities in the fabric of the story are also a product of Lovecraft’s ignorance and racism as the depiction of the cultists draws upon the stereotypical absurdity that racial Others are both animalistic sub-humans who can’t be allowed anywhere near polite society and magical supervillains who can murder their enemies at will without ever leaving a trace.
These tensions and incongruities are also due to the fact that one of the major inspirations for Lovecraft’s Cult of Cthulhu was Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which argued that pre-Christian religions had continued to function in Europe until after the reformation and that the religion’s lore was passed around by marginalised figures who were forever on the run from local authorities and spent their time setting up networks of cell-like organisations with such good operational security that they passed under the radar of Christian institutions for many centuries.
An interesting kink to this line of inspiration is that, according to Ronald Hutton a contemporary historian specialising in Paganism and Witchcraft, Murray’s theories relied heavily upon the testimonies of people accused at witch trials and so her theory was shaped not by the reality of religious practice but by the stories that practicing witches told about themselves. A similar accusation could be levelled at the impression of the Cthulhu Cult that emerges from Legrasse’s interrogation of the swamp cultists: They might very well see themselves as part of an international conspiracy stretching back beyond the dawn of civilisation and backed-up by an impossibly ancient squid-faced deity but that doesn’t make it anymore real than the derranged old ladies who got burned at the stake after claiming to be in cahoots with the Devil.
There’s an interesting tension at work here as Lovecraft was himself an atheist and much of his literary reputation rests on an interpretation of his work that draws on existential moods and themes. In effect, Cthulhu and Pals are not just big rubbery kaijus, they’re also metaphorical representations of a universe that is both impossible to understand and implacably cruel in its indifference to human concerns. This does not sit comfortably with the idea that the Cthulhu cultists should have perfect access to the objective truth about reality and the history of the world. Is it it not perhaps more likely that the stories that the cultists tell the inspector are their own flawed attempts at correlation?
I admit that this is the point at which my interpretation of “The Call of Cthulhu” starts to cross the line into a fully-fledged transformative work…
The Madness from the Sea
The final section of “The Call of Cthulhu” is undoubtedly the most memorable part and that is because it is absolutely fucking mental.
One of the really lovely things about working my way through all of Lovecraft’s stories in chronological order is seeing him develop as a literary stylist. If you should happen to take a look at any of Lovecraft’s correspondence, you’ll note that he naturally favours ornate sentence structures and archaic, anglicised spellings and it is no surprise that someone who writes informally in such an affected manner should have become a prose-stylist with a tendency towards the purple and the over-driven.
By the time Lovecraft progressed past the Dreamlands stories, it was obvious that he was learning to reign himself in and excessively purple prose stylings tended to be an indication of weak ideas; as though Lovecraft were trying to compensate for an under-developed story idea by swinging for the fences at the level of prose. This effect is really evident if you look at stories like “On What the Moon Brings”.
Lovecraft’s ability to reign himself in and develop a sense of light-and-shade can be seen as a result from his transition from writing about weird dream-worlds to something resembling the Real World, a change that was signalled and addressed in “The Picture in the House” but only really acted upon some time later. One of the techniques that Lovecraft developed to help ground his stories and develop a sense of light-and-shade was the use of framing narratives and narrators who might describe the story in (relatively) restrained prose only to drop some heavy purple while quoting someone else. Obviously, the use of this technique goes some way towards explaining the use of a framing narrative in “The Call of Cthulhu” and the first two sections stick to the plan by only flashing a bit of purple when transcribing the experiences of the sculptor and the police detective.
The third section of the story starts quite calmly with the narrator discovering a picture of a statue that resembles the statue discovered in the swamp. The narrator reads the article in which the picture appears and discovers that is part of a report in an Australian newspaper about a Norwegian sailor who encountered a strange island in the middle of the ocean.
The narrator travels first to Australia and then to Norway only to discover that the sailor died in circumstances strikingly similar to those of the uncle:
“He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.”
Again, there’s no evidence linking the death of the sailor to the presence of two Lascar sailors who apparently tried to help the man to his feet but the narrator correlates the information and yet again sees evidence of a conspiracy to threaten the future of the white race. Indeed, the narrator’s descent into racist paranoia will feel all too real to anyone who has seen an elderly relative become radicalised by Facebook as the story ends on a note of life-destroying racist paranoia:
“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.”
I mean… beautifully written but completely unmerited by the events of the story as there are loads of people who have rubbed up against the so-called cult and lived to speak of it. The ending to “The Call of Cthulhu” reads like a man descending into racially-inflected madness.
Another lovely detail is the way that the Norwegian sailor chose to conceal his account of what happened in a journal written in English and filled with ‘technical details’ in the hope that his wife would never learn of what happened to him. Again, secrets within secrets.
What happened is a bit of a boy’s own adventure followed by what can only be described as ‘dungeon delving’ as a group of adventurers descend into a sinister ruined city, encounter a load of traps, and try to escape with some treasure in the form of a statue. One of the most lovely things about the history of the Call of Cthulhu RPG is the way that the game’s starter scenario “The Haunting” is a perfect training tool that teaches both GMs and players how to move from a dungeon-based adventure to an investigation-based adventure and I can imagine old Sandy Petersen reading “The Call of Cthulhu” and chuckling to himself about how much the bit on R’Lyeh resembles a dungeon-crawl.
The first bit of adventure happens when the Norwegian ship is blown off-course by a storm into the path of what is described as an armed yacht. This ship is crewed by non-white people and they attack the Norwegian’s ship with such savagery that the Norwegian and his crew kill them all to the last man and when questioned about the violence of their response, the Norwegian simply shrugs his shoulders and explains that he had no option but to kill everyone on the ship. This rather reminded me of Stephen King’s lesser-known novel From a Buick 8 in which a bunch of local cops find themselves in possession of a car that seems to come from another universe. As the novel progresses, the car produces a number of strange artefacts from this other world until, one day, a humanoid figure appears in the yard where the coppers keep the car. Immediately, the cops pick up rakes, hammers, and sticks that they use to club the figure to death in the most brutal manner possible and the suggestion is that, just as there are creatures whose very existence can drive humans insane, there are creatures whose very existence can drive otherwise normal people to fits of psychotic violence.
The survivors take possession of the steam yacht and wind up landing on a weird rocky promontory that turns out to be R’Lyeh risen from the depths. Re-reading “The Call of Cthulhu”, I was rather unclear on the implied cause-and-effect that lead to the appearance of the city: There is talk of an Earthquake and there is talk of a great tempest, and it is suggested that the waves of madness that inspired both the spasms of religious violence and the work of various artists across the world were a result of Cthulhu leaving the city to chase after the steam yacht. Having re-read the story a couple of times, I am still not completely clear on what mechanism caused Cthulhu to wake as Lovecraft seems to suggest a) The stars aligned and set Cthulhu free, b) Cthulhu was defeated by a ship to the head, and c) the stars will align again. I originally assumed that Cthulhu had been awoken by accident as a result of an earthquake and/or tempest and that he was forced back to his watery abyss because the stars were not yet right but then Lovecraft literally says:
“The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”
So… were the stars right or not? Because EITHER the stars aligning signals the end of the world, in which case why didn’t Cthulhu end the world OR the stars were not aligned and Cthulhu was somehow unready to return and a yacht to the face was enough to put him back to bed.
Once the sailors land on the island, the prose gets progressively more and more insane:
“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.”
The sailors flee back to their ship with old squid-face hot on their tails; some of them are swept up in its mighty claws (and presumably devoured) while others are driven insane on the spot. The Norwegian sailor cranks the steam engine up to maximum and manages to get out. When a ship returns to check the coordinates they find nothing at all… humanity has been granted a reprieve… the stars are not yet right.
So What’s it All About?
Aside from being a really effective piece of horror fiction, “The Call of Cthulhu” is also a story that is laced with mystery and contradiction. The opening line of the story warns us about the dangers of trying to correlate the contents of our minds by forcing our existing ideas to fit with truths perceived in the world and literally every character we meet is in the process of doing exactly that: Uneducated swamp-dwellers build religions, academics produce papers, and police officers run investigations. The problem is that, for all the effort and persistence that goes into trying to make sense of the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of the world, nobody manages to explain the world and produce a theory where all the pipes connect up around the back. While characters like the sculptor and the inspector walk away from their encounters with the supernatural relatively unscathed, many characters seem to become obsessed with collating the facts of the case resulting in their going slowly mad.
One of the most striking things about Lovecraft as a person is that he both incredibly affected and seemingly aware of his own levels of affectation. Early stories such as “The Alchemist” and “The Tomb” are about people who, though near-penniless, build their identities around the fact that they are descended from people who were once wealthy and powerful. This certainly maps onto the details of Lovecraft’s life as, despite adopting the persona of a wealthy and well-educated Yankee gentleman, Lovecraft never finished high-school, never held down a regular job, and spent years of his life boasting about his ability to survive on little more than a daily can of baked beans.
The tension between the identity that Lovecraft assumed and the reality of his lived existence forms the thematic backbone to much of the man’s literary output: Look beyond the monsters and you’ll find a succession of stories about quietly intellectual men who are driven mad by the realisation their entire identities were houses built on sand. While the primary source of this tension was undoubtedly the fact that Lovecraft’s entire life was lived on a downward social trajectory, it was also fed by the fact that both of Lovecraft’s parents ended their lives in mental institutions. When Lovecraft worries about scientists asking too many questions, he is not worrying about nuclear bombs or genetic engineering, he is worrying about the possibility of someone telling him that he’s a weird unemployable loser with a genetic predisposition towards madness. There is a very real sense in which the entirety of Lovecraft’s output is about a man refusing to go to the doctor because he’d rather spend his life wrapped in ego-boosting fantasies of racial, social, and intellectual superiority.
While all of the pulpish theatrics happening in this story’s foreground may serve to distract us from its actual themes, I would argue that “The Call of Cthulhu” is fuelled by the same tension that animates most of Lovecraft’s fiction. Strip away the fist-fights and the big rubbery monsters and what you have is a story about a man who has been placed into a state of psychological distress by the death of a relative that he clearly admired. Desperate for answers, the narrator starts to dig through his uncle’s affairs in search of something that might explain the traumatic death of a loved one. What the narrator finds is not only an explanation for his uncle’s death but a series of facts which, though weirdly incomplete and contradictory, suggest that the world is considerably weirder than the narrator had heretofore imagined. The narrator soon discovers that he is not the first person to stumble upon these truths and so he starts trying to correlate not only what he ‘knows’ and what he has seen for himself but also the contents of other people’s attempts at correlation stretching back decades and centuries. However, the more information the narrator tries to correlate, the more the known facts seem to coincide with these (decidedly Lovecraftian) fantasies of racial persecution that see the narrator spiral down into depressive paranoid madness at the story’s end. The tension that animates the story is the same as the one that defined Lovecraft’s creative life and the narrator’s descent into racist paranoia certainly seems to coincide with Lovecraft’s descent into deranged racism following the death of his mother and the collapse of his new life in New York.
Like many Lovecraftian characters, the narrator of “The Cult of Cthulhu” is presented with a choice between reality and delusion. Like Lovecraft himself, the narrator chooses to remain wedded to his ego-protecting fantasies. To my mind, “The Call of Cthulhu” is a story about someone struggling with not only their mental illness but also feelings of intense self-loathing. Unable to reconcile his fantasies with the harsh truths of an intractable reality, the narrator of this story flees into fantasy in much the same way as Lovecraft scuttled back to Providence to live with his aunts. “The Call of Cthulhu” is a deeply sad story… it invokes feelings of fear, loathing, and ultimately pity.
