There is a great novel by the British writer L. H. Myers (who committed suicide in the 1940’s) called The Near and the Far, and its opening chapter has the perfect symbol of the romantic longing. It takes place in India in the 16th century, and opens with the young Prince Jali standing on the top of a palace, looking out across the desert—over which he has travelled that day. As he looks at a magnificent sunset, he reflects that there are two deserts; one is a glory to the eye; the other is agony to the feet as you plod across it. And the two deserts never come together; if Jali goes out of the palace, seeking the desert that is so beautiful to the eye, he will encounter the other desert, the one that is a weariness to trudge. The near and the far… this is the basic problem of the romantics. As Yeats once said:
‘Nothing that we love overmuch
Is ponderable to the touch’.
This is why romantics find the real world so dreary and unpleasant. Sometimes they loathe this real world so much that their work becomes a paean of blasphemy, like the work of De Sade or Lautreamont.
It is a story that is repeated over and over again. I am acquainted with the author of one of the finest supernatural novels ever written: E. H. Visiak—an old man now approaching his nineties. His Medusa is a novel of such strange power that it haunts the mind for years after one has read it. A few weeks ago, Visiak sent me the manuscript of his autobiography to read. And I had not read more than ten pages before I thought: ‘Yes, it’s the same thing all over again…’ That strange curse of the 19th century. Visiak was a shy, quiet boy, the son of middle class parents, and the world of his childhood was a world of enchantment. Then came his teens, and the necessity to work for a living, and ‘the shades of the prison house begin to close’. He spent the next twenty years of his life in the telegraph office of a news agency, not very happy, leading a lonely, bookish existence. During his childhood, his happiest times had been when staying by the sea. So Visiak began to write poetry about pirates and secret islands, then produced his first novel, The Haunted Island, and then, many years later, his masterpiece, Medusa. And now, in his eighties, he is an old man whose life has not been tremendously happy, although he has had a few remarkable visions and experiences. He is a haunted man, another victim of the syrens’s song.
Visiak’s closest friend was the novelist David Lindsay, whose A Voyage to Arcturus seems to me perhaps the greatest novel of the 20th century. (This has recently been reissued in America by Macmillan.) Lindsay’s story was much the same as Visiak’s—a tremendous vision, expressed in A Voyage to Arcturus and The Haunted Woman. But his contemporaries were not ready for it; he lived a life of poverty and neglect in Cornwall, and died in the forties. Lindsay possessed towering genius; Visiak’s genius is of an altogether more gentle and romantic nature. Yet both are victims of this ‘outsider tragedy’ that is so common to our time: men whose vision makes them unfitted for the struggle for everyday existence, but whose genius is not of a ‘commercial’ nature.
These outsiders live like hermits in the midst of modern cities. If they are lucky—like Kierkegaard—they have a private income, and can write their strange, contemplative books in peace. If they are not lucky—like Lovecraft—their fate is the saddest in the world.
In Heartbreak House, Shaw makes Ellie Dunne state an important truth. Shotover asks her how much her soul eats, and she replies:
‘Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this country, you can’t have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved.’
This is true. The outsider-poet is not a hermit by choice. Love-craft declares in one of his letters that he would like to lounge in the sun on the deck of a yacht, looking at the shore line of Greek islands. Men hunger for experience as they hunger for food and drink. And how can a man express what is best in him without a certain amount of cooperation from fate? Can you imagine a Shelley born in a London slum? Can you imagine a Byron born in the Gorbals of Glasgow or the Bowery in Lower Manhattan? It might seem that the lives of Keats, Shelley and Byron were tragic enough in their way. But at least Keats somehow managed to avoid working for a living, and spent much of his time on tours of England and Scotland. At least Shelley went to Eton and Oxford, and spent the next ten years wandering around Europe. At least Byron had an income and was never short of beautiful mistresses. What about the ‘outsiders’ who are not so lucky? The declaration of rights declares that all men have a right to a certain freedom. But there is no declaration of rights for Outsiders that declares that they all have a right to the experiences that will feed their souls and allow them to realise their potentialities.
This was Lovecraft’s problem. He was born into a dreary provincial city—attractive enough in its way, but as painfully narrow and dull as the Norway in which Henrik Ibsen grew up. In the northern states of America, as in England, you cannot have ‘beautiful things’ without having lots of money. What is more, America has always been one of the worst places in the world for an outsider to be born into. This is gradually ceasing to be true as America pours some of its surplus income into education and the encouragement of the arts, but it was true for Lovecraft, as it had been true for Poe and Melville. What is more, Lovecraft was urgently in need of a private income or of patronage; the only patronage he received was that of Weird Tales and, to a lesser extent, of his wife during their brief marriage.
We might raise the interesting question: what would have happened if Lovecraft had possessed a private income—enough, say, to allow him to spend his winters in Italy and his summers in Greece or Switzerland? My own suspicion is that he would have developed certain traits which are already apparent in his work. He would undoubtedly have produced less, but what he did produce would have been highly polished, without the pulp magazine clichés that disfigure so much of his work. And he would have given free rein to his love of curious and remote erudition, so that his work would have been, in some respects, closer to that of Anatole France or the contemporary Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. (I myself have only recently discovered the tales of Borges—collected in Labyrinths and Ficciones, both available in paperbacks—and am amazed to find a living writer so close to Lovecraft in spirit.) I suspect that some of the more horrific aspects of his work would never have developed—the actual physical horrors of the stories dealing with necrophilia or cannibalism—but that there would have been an increasing emphasis on imaginative fantasy—as typified in The Shadow Out of Time or The Call of Cthulhu.
What I am suggesting is that the emphasis upon the gruesome and violent was, to a large extent, Lovecraft’s way of keeping himself mentally healthy in the dull, stifling atmosphere of Providence. This not to dismiss it as some form of ‘compensation’; all art is the artist’s way of keeping himself mentally healthy. But then again, the same is true of crime and sadistic violence. Blake says: ‘When thought is closed in caves, then love shall show its root in deepest hell’. In other words, when creativeness and vitality are frustrated, they rage and become violent. Peter Kurten, the Düsseldorf sadist who killed eleven people between 1927 and 1929, admitted that his sadism had first had time to develop in long periods of solitary confinement in prison. To save himself from total boredom and the degradation that comes with stagnation, he developed sexual fantasies, which had to become more and more powerful as time went by—for the mind’s images tend to fade, like bad carbon copies, when not stimulated by a certain amount of reality. The same is true of De Sade. It is all very well to condemn De Sade for the nightmare horrors of Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom, but we have to remember that there is no evidence that he ever tried to put them into practice; they were the work of a man of enormous vitality who spent much of his adult life in jail.
Lovecraft also lived in a kind of jail for much of his life. It is a sign of his genius that, in spite of lack of money, of ill health and frustration,