Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes

 

 

A UNIVERSE SHOT THROUGH WITH INVISIBLE FORCES
Our Lady of Darkness as a Lovecraftian novel

 

Fritz Leiber's novel Our Lady of Darkness operates on several levels, and can be read to achieve a variety of meanings. During successive readings, and enhanced with a knowledge of the author's background, influences, and other circumstances, the book accumulates a depth and impact which can go beyond that experienced on a first or more superficial examination.

So, too, most of the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft have been subjected to a wide variety of interpretation. This article seeks to explore some ways in which Our Lady of Darkness may be referred to as being 'Lovecraftian'. Lovecraft criticism has for many years largely justified itself by the fact that numerous levels of meaning can be discerned in his work, and invoked for all sorts of reasons. Similarly, in his review of Our Lady of Darkness, the author and critic John Clute (1) bases his assessment on the fact that the novel works on at least two levels. For Clute, the surface meaning of the story -- Franz Westen's haunting by an external paramental entity -- is an 'inversion' of its true content and meaning. This is, in reality, Leiber working through his 'haunting' of grief and guilt caused by his wife's death (Jonquil Leiber died in the summer of 1969). The fictional Franz Westen's experiences, his continuing guilt and grief over his dead wife Daisy, do make this reading legitimate. It can be seen as thinly disguised autobiography on Leiber's part, or as a reasonable explanation for character motivation within the world of Our Lady of Darkness.

Of course, on reading of a story does not need to exclude another. The 'inversion' of meaning from the external to the internal does not make the novel any less frightening or harrowing. Perhaps the opposite. But it does call into question definitions of the supernatural, and how it interacts with humanity, and the place of both in the universe. It has been argued, not least by Leiber himself in his essay "A Literary Copernicus", that Lovecraft's works contain similar tensions:

On the surface, much of Lovecraft's fiction deals with the breaking-in of the supernatural, or Other, into the lives and ordinary worlds of identifiably ordinary people. But the stories may also be read as the experiences of people being forced to come to terms with their true place in the universe. Instead of being the 'privileged' victim of something special and unusual, essentially a subjective experience, a character's world-view is inverted to make him the passive and often accidental victim of objectivity. He encounters the cosmos Outside, and the natural transactions of some of its inhabitants, who happen to be far more powerful than humanity.

Lovecraft found no meaning, or possible meaning, in the universe around him:

Such meaning as was perceived was imposed -- a product of human traditions and imagination. As noted above, according to Leiber, Lovecraft was a Copernicus of literature. Like the medieval astronomer who removed the Earth from the centre of the known universe and correctly put the Sun there, Lovecraft inverted the traditional human-centred universe of horror fiction. Instead, he confronted a puny humanity with its rightful place in the cosmos: the reality that people are of no special importance or position. They are marginal, and if they get in the way of the designs of larger entities, then they suffer the consequences, for no other reason. The universe is indifferent, not hostile. Hostility is an anthropomorphic meaning imposed on it.

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Lovecraft's fiction can thus work as a set of 'meditations' on humanity's wider and unrealised status. Our Lady of Darkness can be discussed on this level as well. Franz Westen comes slowly to realise that something lies under his apparently quiet world. While visiting Corona Heights, a hill visible from his home in San Francisco, he experiences this shift or inversion of his world:

Our Lady of Darkness bears other kinships with Lovecraft's works. Leiber put himself and his situation, and his heritage from past experiences, into his work, as did Lovecraft. The parallels between Leiber and Westen are numerous. Like one of Lovecraft's New England scholars and antiquarians, Westen embodies Leiber's own interests and reactions to his world.

Leiber testified that Lovecraft was "the chiefest influence on my literary development after Shakespeare", (5) although this influence was not stylistic (unlike so many other Lovecraftian writers). (6) Rather, it was Lovecraft's attitudes to weird fiction which were important to Leiber:

These views are discernible in much of Leiber's work, and particularly his later fiction including Our Lady of Darkness. Both authors focus on the weird phenomenon, the unknown and strange, and the dislocations that are caused by it. In Our Lady of Darkness, this takes the form of a paramental entity. It is always somehow there, always lurking and threatening, like a spider at the centre of its urban web. Both writers are concerned with the effects of the interaction between the weird phenomenon and human characters, but the characters are usually put in second place to the phenomenon itself.  The human beings have to have their existence justified by their experiences of and reactions to it.

Both authors made use of modern, contemporary settings. Lovecraft used his native city of Providence, as well as wider New England and New York settings (and in "At the Mountains of Madness" he achieved a fine sense of place with Antarctica). Leiber used Chicago, New York, San Francisco and the West Coast. They each refer to places where they have lived, and streets and buildings that they knew, giving their stories a sense of place and immediacy of action.

Leiber and Lovecraft often make their own interests those of their characters. Particularly relevant here is their mutual interest in astronomy.  Astronomical and cosmic references reinforce the smallness of their characters' lives under the vast sky of stars, and the exhilarating fear that is the result.

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Our Lady of Darkness is permeated with literary references, including many connected with Lovecraft and his work.

Corona Heights forms one of the main settings of the novel. It is a 'high place', where the entity first begins to filter into Westen's world:

Similar "rock crowned hills" play parallel roles in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "At the Mountains of Madness". (8) Westen brings these stories to mind as he considers Corona Heights (p.87).

On glimpsing the TV tower on Mount Sutro, Westen recalls a line from Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark":

Lovecraft's Arkham House collection The Outsider and Others (published posthumously in 1939) forms a part of Westen's "Scholar's Mistress" -- a vaguely woman-shaped accretion of books and magazines on his bed (p.68).

Many of Lovecraft's stories involve the Necronomicon, by Abdul Alhazred -- a fictional volume of source texts that Lovecraft (and later, his imitators) made much use of. He evolved a consistent history of the Necronomicon, and the book almost became a character in its own right. In Our Lady of Darkness, Leiber invented the book Megapolisomancy, by Thibaut de Castries. De Castries hurls invective against modern (turn of the 20th century) cities in a way very similar to Lovecraft at his most negative, as in his story "He" (10):

It becomes clear that de Castries' book is to play an 'active' part in Our Lady of Darkness, as Alhazred's does in Lovecraft’s work. The book is a source, and gives clues to what is really going on. De Castries has also hidden a curse, an invocation of the power of the modem 'necropolitan' city. Lovecraft occasionally uses the language and imagery of curse and invocation to summon and banish the godlike entities that threaten his fictional world.  The bringing of apparently dead and hidden things to life, to disturb their contemporary worlds, is a theme which runs through both Lovecraft's and Leiber's work. In Our Lady of Darkness the hidden curse adds to the suspense and expectation of Westen's eventual meeting with the paramental entity itself.

The curse is written out and hidden in the fictional journal of real writer Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), which Westen had bought at the same time as his copy of Megapolisomancy. Leiber has the journal make reference to Lovecraft; another touch of realism, since Smith was a correspondent of Lovecraft's:

Westen also notices the similarity in name between de Castries and Lovecraft's real revision client Adolphe de Castro (p.72). When Westen consults his friend Jaime Donaldus Byers, Byers mentions Lovecraft's prose-poem "Nyarlathotep", and goes on to tell him that de Castries and de Castro could not have been the same person (pp. 104-5).

Much later in Our Lady of Darkness, as the novel nears its climax, the significance of The Outsider and Others being part of the Scholar's Mistress becomes apparent. It is open at the story "The Thing on the Doorstep", which had been quite a departure for Lovecraft in that it has a strong female lead character, Asenath Waite. Her body dies in a repulsive way. In a reverie, Westen begins to think about death, and moves on to consider Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space", in which a New England family succumbs to a rotting illness due to the cosmic 'pollution' of their water supply. (Leiber recalled how much this story depressed him when he first read it in Amazing Stories. (11)) Westen seems to be falling under a malign spell of listlessness -- his will to act to save himself sapped away, in the same way that Asenath Waite grew to dominate her husband's will (12). He tries to hear the music that his friend Cal would be playing at the concert he was due to be attending. Music has the power to save and deliver from chaos, but silence is all that Westen can experience:

Westen has been gazing at the portrait of Daisy, and she begins to resemble the entity that has en stalking him throughout the story. He hears a scuffing sound in the wall (like that in Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls").  Eventually he dreams Daisy is alive again, but that cannot possibly be right. All the horrors of cancer and runaway bodily growths (as in "The Colour Out of Space") burst out briefly in a nightmarish scene in which it becomes clear that Daisy's life is the false life of growing malignant tumours (13). Westen wakes up, and de Castries' curse is activated, as the entity confronts Westen face to face at last.

A Lovecraftian story might end at that point, with a scribbled manuscript, handwriting scrawled until the very last possible moment by the doomed protagonist.  In contrast, Our Lady of Darkness ends happily and gently, after the destruction of the entity by a counter-invasion against the forces of chaos and darkness.

Or is all as it seems?  The final words of the novel, "Everything's very chancy", sums up the book, and Leiber's world-view within it, as well as Lovecraft's attitude in his work. The mystery and danger are still there, after all.

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In many ways both Lovecraft and Leiber were 'outsiders' --Bruce Byfield makes the point that writers tend to he individualists, and somewhat in tension with the people and places around them (14). Lovecraft and Leiber were heavily influenced by their families: Lovecraft had his mother, aunts, and wife, as well as the memory of a father he hardly knew, due to his premature death; Leiber had his parents, women relatives and friends, and in particular his wife.

As he recounts in his autobiography (15), the numerous women in his life served him as anima figures. Women played an ambiguous role in both writers' creative lives, and it is not too fanciful to see reflections of this in their writing. Lovecraft's work flourished after the break-up of his marriage, and return to Providence in 1926; his mother's death in 1921 had liberated him enough to allow the possibility of marriage in the first place (16).

Leiber's writing was interrupted by grief and the resurgence of his alcoholism after Jonquil's death in 1969; his greatest stories date from the 1970s. Women in all of his tales have an ambiguous role as both supporters and stiflers of individuality and creativity. Lovecraft and Leiber used their experiences of women in their work, whether reacting against them, or harnessing their influences. Or, as is more likely, a combination of the two.

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Both writers often adopted the device of "confirmation rather than revelation" in their fiction. The ending is stated, or strongly implied, at the outset, so it comes as no surprise; suspense mounts throughout, to arrive at the known conclusions (17). Lovecraft utilised this technique in such stories as "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Thing on the Doorstep". In Our Lady of Darkness the eruption of the entity comes as no real surprise at all. The reader is expecting it. But as the evidence and expectation mounts, so does the tension. It hardly flags throughout the length of the novel, although the shorter magazine version -- "The Pale Brown Thing" -- may gain further in this respect. As with Lovecraft's late and greatest work from around 1928 onwards, increased length allows the author to plunge the reader into his world, in greater depth, hoping (against hope, perhaps) that what is to be confirmed may still yet not happen. But to no avail.

*****

Lovecraft and Leiber were both 'literary Copernicuses', taking horror fiction beyond traditional notions of supernatural dread, and so effectively ensuring that the genre has a future. The field developed with them, and continues to do so after their deaths.

Lovecraft's work confirms that it is chaos that really rules in the universe, although most people are for most of the time mercifully ignorant of the fact. He left it at that. Lovecraft’s fiction concerns those who find out this truth and have to live the rest of their lives with it, or who die because of the revelation. In Our Lady of Darkness it is only probable that chaos is dispelled by order. But it is still acknowledged at the very end, and may not be dead but only waiting, to be returned to activity again.

Our Lady of Darkness is Lovecraftian on this level at least. People find themselves living on a knife-edge of illusory sanity in an everyday world of chance and cosmic indifference. Only reacting in the right way to this information, plus luck, can enable them to survive. The two writers use the products of their lives and experiences in order to communicate this. H P Lovecraft would have approved of Our Lady of Darkness, and would have agreed that his early estimate of Leiber's talents in 1937 ("his...tales and poems, while not without marks of the beginner, shew infinite insight and promise..." (18)) had been home out.

Our Lady of Darkness can be called a Lovecraftian novel -- but it is still all the more a Leiberian one.

  

NOTES & REFERENCES

1. Foundation 14 (September 1978), p.64.

2. "A Literary Copernicus" (1944) in S T Joshi, H P Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Ohio     University Press, 1980), pp.50-1.

3. "A Confession of Unfaith" (1922) in H P  Lovecraft, Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House,     1995), p.537.

4. Page references are to the UK Millington/Fontana editions.

5. Quoted in Bruce Byfield, Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber (Necronomicon     Press, 1991), p. 11.

6. In 1976 Leiber published one excellent Lovecraft pastiche, "The Terror From the Depths"     (collected in Heroes and Horrors (Whispers Press, 1978), utilizing characters from Lovecraft's     work in a Leiberian California setting.

7. "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" (1932/33) in Miscellaneous Writings, p. 113.

8. For example "The Dunwich Horror" (p. 161) and "The Whisperer in Darkness" (p.245) in The     Dunwich Horror and Others (Arkham House, 1985), and "At the Mountains of Madness"     (pp.103-4) in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House, 1985).

9. "The Haunter of the Dark" (p.95) in The Dunwich Horror

10. "He" (p.266) in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Arkham House, 1986).

11. Byfield, op cit., p.11

12. "The Thing on the Doorstep" (pp.288ff) in The Dunwich Horror

13. Lovecraft himself died of cancer on 15 March 1937.

14. Byfield, op. cit., p.8.

15. "Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex" in Fritz Leiber, The Ghost Light (Berkley, 1984).

16. See L Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), especially chapter 10.

17. "A Literary Copernicus", op. cit., p.56 -- Leiber has always attributed the phrase to fellow writer       Henry Kuttner (1914-58).

18. H P Lovecraft, Selected Letters V (Arkham House, 1976), pp.432-3.

 

(The title of this article comes from “A Literary Copernicus” p. 51)

 

First published in Ghosts & Scholars 20, 1995

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