Lovecraft comfort food

[Extollager]

What I'm about to offer is meant sincerely and appreciatively, although I fear, a little, that some readers, if I have any, may find this comment a bit threatening.

I'm guessing that, if anyone finds himself inclined to agree with me, he will be, like me, someone who first read HPL while a youngster.*

I think Lovecraft can and should be discussed, at times, with reference to his opinions, artistry, etc.

But if I am honest with myself, I think he belongs with, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his stories with the Sherlock Holmes stories, as writing that is particularly attractive when I am a bit tired and perhaps feeling a bit worn around the edges by life. In such moods I want something familiar, something on the creepy side but never intended to harrow the reader's nerves, something that is easy to read. And I do contend that Lovecraft is an easy read, like "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" or The Sign of Four, etc. With both authors the story is not basically one of character but one invoking curiosity and suspense. The settings are ones it is pleasurable to return to again and again: Holmes's London or the Gothic countryside, etc., or Lovecraft's haunted New England. You almost always know where you are going to go whether you remember the details or not. Perhaps a few of Lovecraft's endings were surprising the first time we read them, but usually we have a pretty good sense of what's going to develop, and generally Sherlock Holmes will solve the case. (He doesn't always: vide "The Engineer's Thumb," and note that he got very lucky when Irene Adler outsmarted him in "Scandal in Bohemia.") But this is all to the good. When we (or anyway I) want this type of literary comfort food, I don't particularly want something that requires me to think very much. And with this type of story, often the reader will spot problems with the tale if he does read it truly alertly. In "The Speckled Band," it is really preposterous that Roylott's scheme requires a well-trained snake, a dummy bell-pull, a ventilator, and a bed bolted to the floor. Obviously it was all too likely that one of the Stoner girls would have questions about the bed and the bell-pull, and would be awakened when the snake touched her skin in the dark. "All right, stepdad, so what's with the exotic reptiles?" Similarly, readers have often objected to the obtuseness of Lovecraft's protagonists. But these things don't really matter when it's a question of literary comfort food.

And with the wear and tear of the workplace lately, I have certainly been able to appreciate this quality in HPL.

*My first "Lovecraftian" story was probably Bloch's "The Mannikin" in Robert Arthur's anthology Monster Mix. My first Lovecraft stories may have been "The Cats of Ulthar" and "The Quest of Iranon" in Lin Carter's Young Magicians anthology, bought new off the stands, around 1969.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I both agree and disagree.

Sheer familiarity and fond memories of enjoying these stories so many times before has made them tested favourites that I can depend on. And yet, even with their occasional flaws, I can't really subside into equanimity on re-reading HPL; not if I am really reading them as an attentive reader and not simply letting the familiar verbiage slip past my eyes.

Time has made me more alert to the limitations present in many a favourite writer's works. I think it has also made me more sensitive to their virtues.

So maybe more a case of familiar discomfort food?

 

[Extollager]

Thanks for your comments, Jayaprakash.

I had a personal experience of the "comfort food" effect within the past few days, with Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House." At one point I became conscious of some probability flaw in the plot, on the story's own terms. But I kept reading, enjoyed the story, and have already forgotten what the difficulty was. Such things hardly matter when we are reading for "comfort."

I would say that some stories, to be enjoyed -- unless in an almost malicious way -- can be read with enjoyment only if we read them somewhat inattentively, and in that mood they can be good fun. My favorite example of such a story is O'Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game," the familiar story of big game hunter Rainsford and the villainous Zaroff. It's a classic of literary suspense and excitement, but it neither requires nor "rewards" reading that is attentive to detail. Zaroff lives on an ill-regarded island. Occasionally ships, misled by his deceptive "warning" lights, run aground. Zaroff takes the sailors captive and hunts them on his island, since even the craftiest animals no longer give him a kick. Well, who built these lights? Would the engineers not have gone back to the mainland and blabbed about their peculiar project, setting up lights that will inevitably lead to shipwrecks? Okay, so Zaroff kills them all when they are done, so that they can't talk. Won't their families miss them after a while and investigate? But one doesn't notice such things as one reads, and the story can be read repeatedly as "comfort food."

I see something similar to this in the various Lovecraft stories that use the convention of a house or a region with a weird reputation: Lovecraft is pat to say that people "whisper" about such matters. Of course if you stop to think about it, you'll realize people wouldn't just whisper, they'd demand investigation by the authorities. Lovecraft realized that himself, with "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," one of my favorites, but in other stories he uses the "affrighted whispering for generations" convention freely. Again, when we read for comfort, such things hardly matter. In "The Picture in the House," the crazy old coot has apparently been cheerfully supplying himself with human meat for generations, and nobody's ever caught him or even tried to. But who thinks of this when reading the story? Basically the story uses the haunted house convention, except instead of a ghost the bad thing is an ancient cannibal. But when we read comfort food, we like haunted house stories (cf. "The Shunned House," "Dreams in the Witch House," etc.). Even much of the racial stuff in the Lovecraft stories doesn't, I think, much trouble us; it fits with the conventions of much comfort food fiction.

The comfort food story generally doesn't trouble us with the complexities of life. For example, the comfort food story, like the Sherlock Holmes stories, is generally free of the complications of sexuality, except perhaps as motive for a crime. The sexlessness of the Lovecraft canon (except for "The Thing on the Doorstep") is notorious. I'm saying that this sexlessness is a good quality for this type of story. It is fine that the Lovecraft universe seems populated largely by celibate bachelors.

When we read for comfort, we don't mind when inconsistent details jostle together. Quite likely we don't notice. How many times had I read Doyle's famous "Red-Headed League" before I noticed a pretty blatant chronological discrepancy? (Do yourself a favor and read the story! It is delightful.) In stories we read for comfort, details are given for their own right or for a just-enough "authenticity." It doesn't matter much, or at all, if they don't quite work together. Thus in Lovecraft's stories the Necronomicon and other tomes can be fabulously rare and also pretty easy to get hold of, for those who want them.

Comfort food stories do not typically have a religious dimension. Obviously Lovecraft's atheism is well known and is implied by the stories. But I don't think readers really feel challenged by them to think about profound issuhes unless they are already minded to do so. Similarly, I don't think readers of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories will find themselves thinking seriously about religious issues unless they want to.

 

[Nesacat]

I too must agree and disagree but it's definitely comfort food. I suspect I'll be reading some Lovecraft when I eventually get home tonight. He's someone I reach for when I'm exhausted, upset, sad or even angry.

He's like a very good friend. Yes, he's familiar and for the most part I know what I will find. But again, like a very good friend, he invariably has something new to show. Or perhaps a new perspective. For me that is what keeps me going back.

And yes, while the flaws and limitations do become clearer so do the wonders and virtues. Yet again, like old friends and so we forgive and learn a greater level of appreciation.

 

[Extollager]

I wrote:

--Lovecraft is pat to say that people "whisper"--

I meant "apt to say." Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to edit the posting.

When we eat edible comfort food, we are not highly attentive to the flavor, texture, etc. of the Almond Joy candy bar or the bowl of breakfast cereal. It's like that with literary comfort food.

Some works of real literary merit may, if we wish, be read for "comfort," just as, I suppose, if we had to we could eat gourmet fare as if it were comfort food. (It is in such situations that, perhaps, the diner puts ketchup on a beautifully grilled steak [and I don't mean to distress any vegetarians!]). In such cases we are not highly attentive readers, just as, Perhaps Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is an example. It may be read as a femme-fatale story with a twist, as a weird tale related in a perhaps too sophisticated diction, although I would enjoy hearing from admirers of Clark Ashton Smith as to whether they feel there's something here akin to the writings of CAS. But it invites and rewards a type of reading much more attentive than that which we exercise when reading for comfort. It really is probably a bit too rich to be "comfortable."

I'm not, here, discussing which Lovecraft stories, or whether most of them, or any of them, are works of real literary depth, richness, insight, etc. that could not be read as comfort food. When we read for "comfort," we don't really want to have to deal with depth, richness, insight. If you just want a pleasantly spooky yarn to make the blustery cold evening all the cosier, you probably will not turn to "The Turn of the Screw" for a good ghost story. It invites, demands, and perhaps requires a level of attentiveness to diction, symbol, narrative devices, and much more, that is incommensurate with reading for "comfort." Readers may argue that some HPL stories are like this, and that they can be enjoyed only when read with much attention, i.e. that they can't be enjoyed if read as "comfort food." But I think many of them can be read as "comfort food," and that some of them probably must be read with a relaxed degree of attentiveness, because to read them the way we would read "The Turn of the Screw" will uncover various sources of dissatisfaction. "The Picture in the House" may be instanced, as I have done above.

My point? I think sometimes our writing about Lovecraft falsely expresses what we have actually experienced. We love his stuff and we verbalize our appreciation as if he wrote a corpus of works that invite, even require, the kind of reading we bring to works of complexity, depth, meaning. But I think that, if we are honest, at least some of what he wrote is work about which we feel fondly because it is reliable comfort food -- like the Sherlock Holmes stories and other classic works.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

That's probably true of August Derleth's mythos tales, but in the sense that you've elaborated on comfort vs. depth in your latest post, no, Lovecraft's tales don't strike me that way at all.

 

[Extollager]

Jayaprakash, thanks once again for commenting.

I'm driving at this:

A book called An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis is regarded as a precursor of the "reader-response theory" approach to criticism. What kinds of reading are invited, required, rewarded by a literary work? Can we verbalize honestly our experience of reading Lovecraft's stories?

Now when I read Lovecraft, I find that the kind of reading his stories solicit is closer akin to to the kind of reading that Doyle's best Sherlock Holmes stories solicit, than it is to the kind of reading solicited by, say, Joseph Conrad. Conrad is closer than Doyle to Lovecraft in spirit. Conrad and Lovecraft are, I take it, atheists and conservatives. But Doyle and Lovecraft wrote literary comfort food in a way that Conrad didn't. Lovecraft does not transcend the conventions of the popular weird tale, for all that he appropriates for it a science-fictional sensibility and an exceptional ability to evoke an imaginary locale. I would contend that Lovecraft's New England has more in common with Doyle's London (Sherlock's) than with Conrad's London (The Secret Agent). Lovecraft's New England is fundamentally familiar within the conventions of weird fiction (e.g. Poe, Le Fanu, et al.), although he certainly has made his own world. Similarly with Doyle's London. One thing that shows this point to be true is that many readers respond to Doyle and to Lovecraft by writing their own stories set in those authors' locales. Readers appropriate Doyle's and Lovecraft's characters, or ones more or less cloned from them, for their own stories. Readers do not write their own stories set in Conrad's London and they do not write their own continuations of Mr. Verloc's adventures. The writing of Doylean and Lovecraftian pastiches or hommages prolongs the comfort-food experience.

 

[j d worthington]

There is some truth in what you say, but I think it varies considerably for different readers, and even at times for the same reader at different ages. Lovecraft appeals to readers for many different reasons, on many different levels. Neil Gaiman tells the story of being at a convention where the panel (made of Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, and several other notables, including some artists) were discussing what it was about Lovecraft which made him still so popular, and what they personally thought it was which attracted them to his work. Several responded with deep philosophical or aesthetic discussions, as one would expect; and then one of the artists (I can't recall the name off-hand), who had spent most of the session quite inarticulate (due to being inebriated), raised his head from the table, said loudly and distinctly: "I like Lovecraft because I get to draw f***in' great monsters!"... at which point his head hit the table again.

Joshi has expressed this same thought in different words, but I think it is this wide variety of levels which allows many of us to enjoy his work so much when we are young, and to find deeper, more challenging (and often disturbing) levels in it when we are older.

For myself, I do find Lovecraft "comfort food", in a very real way... yet the same can be said for Poe, Hawthorne, and even Joyce. In each of these cases, this only extends so far; if I am totally exhausted, then I won't get much out of them, so I go to something much simpler. But if I am tired -- even quite tired -- I find reading the work of any of these frequently recharges me and stimulates me, as well as relaxing me and (paradoxically with at least three of these writers) soothing my nerves at the same time it may disturb me in other ways. Reason for that dichotomy is the prose of each of these writers, for beautiful prose, especially prose with a poetic sensibility, acts upon me like great music, and becomes a very fulfilling experience.

As for some of the objections you raise earlier to taking Lovecraft's work more seriously when it comes to certain conventions.... Again, there is some truth to this, but with some things it goes beyond following conventions. The whispering, for example. Lovecraft himself, in one of his letters (I forget exactly where, and don't have the time at present to look it up) addresses this aspect, talking about the very real tendency of New Englanders of his and earlier generations toward this sort of behavior, and the fact that they seldom would look to the authorities for any action; both because they tended to be an insular lot, and for fear of ridicule (cf. "The Dunwich Horror", "The Colour Out of Space"), as well as simply to avoid unnecessary trouble and the danger of drawing unfavorable attention to themselves or their communities. This was the sort of thing which went hand-in-hand with the very real practice of some to keep their mentally-ill relatives locked in attic rooms and the like, rather than seeking medical treatment for them. Those conventions, at least, he took from real life; things which either he or people he himself knew, had encountered.

But for me, at least, I almost never read Lovecraft these days as "comfort food" in the sense you describe; perhaps because I am intent on reading it on so many levels at once, paying close attention to so many different aspects of it. I don't just read his work to relax; I read it critically at all times now. Flaws and inconsistencies do exist there, yes, but often fewer than a casual reading might indicate. ("The Picture in the House" is one example of this, with that ending especially; however, I have a theory about that one which ties it in with some of his other works as a sort of not-quite-thoroughly-developed theme which was growing in his work at the time, and which is adumbrated in that tale by reference to the sorts of houses where the tale takes place, and the fact that they themselves are given a sentience, and even a tendency to dream -- what I have come to call the "oneirodynia of the inanimate".)

 

[Extollager]

Thank you also, Nesacat and JDW, for your comments.