Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories.
Today we’re looking at “The Horror at Red Hook,” written in August 1-2 1925 and first published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. We read it so you don’t have to, but if you really want to it’s here. Spoilers ahead, and also bigotry.
“Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding.”
Dublin-born Thomas Malone is a writer playing at detective work in New York when a nasty case in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook earns him a rest cure in bucolic Pascoag, Rhode Island. Unfortunately he wanders into a village with one commercial street. Its brick buildings, reminiscent of Red Hook, send him into shrieking panic. Locals wonder that a fellow so robust should succumb to hysterics. What happened in Red Hook?
Well, first off, Syrian and Spanish, Italian and negro “elements” have turned the trim resort of sea captains into a “maze of hybrid squalor,” and a “tangle of material and spiritual putrescence.“ The newcomers smuggle rum! They harbor illegal aliens! They commit murder and mutilation! Police have given up keeping order and work instead to confine the foreign contagion. Malone, however, senses more than mundane lawlessness afoot. He’s read Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe and knows that hellish vestiges of old magic survive among degraded and furtive folk.
Ironically, it’s Robert Suydam, a “lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family” who stirs up big trouble. He’s a corpulent and unkempt old fellow who’s read himself into a “really profound authority on medieval superstition.” Suydam’s relations endure his eccentricities until they blossom into wild pronouncements, occult tomes and a house in Red Hook, where Suydam entertains foreigners and participates in secret nocturnal rites! But Suydam impresses judges with his reasonable manner and explains his oddities as the result of folklore studies. He retains his freedom, but the police, Malone included, keep close watch on him.
It seems Suydam associates with illegal “Asian dregs” who turn out to be Kurds, probably Yezidis, the “last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.“ They attend a tumble-down church and do much shrieking and drumming. Malone thinks he hears an organ, too, but muffled, as if underground. Informants say the Kurds use a hidden canal leading to a subterranean pool. They’ve come because some god or priesthood has promised them that the streets in America are paved with supernatural glories, about which the informants remain tremulously vague.
A bureaucratic conflict takes Malone off the case. He nevertheless follows Suydam’s astonishing metamorphosis, parallel to a wave of kidnappings. The old recluse sheds poundage, slovenliness and (seemingly) years to become a dapper social presence. He refurbishes his mansion and hosts estranged relatives and acquaintances.
Shortly after Suydam’s engagement to the socially impeccable Cornelia Gerritsen, Malone investigates the Red Hook church. He doesn’t like the Greek inscription over the pulpit, which concludes “Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!”
Suydam marries and departs with his bride on a Cunard liner. The first night, screams erupt from their stateroom. An investigating sailor runs out of the room mad. The ship’s doctor sees the open porthole clouded by a strange tittering phosphorescence. Mrs. Suydam lies strangled, with claw marks on her throat. On the wall the word LILITH flickers and vanishes. Soon after, a tramp steamer approaches the liner. Its “swart, insolent” crew have a letter from Suydam, demanding that his body be turned over in case of accident. They bear off Suydam’s corpse, and bottles evidently full of Mrs. Suydam’s blood—the undertaker will find her drained to the last drop.
Simultaneous with this tragedy, three more children disappear. The excitement in Red Hook grows palpable, and Malone leads a raid on Suydam’s house. It disgorges “throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes.” Spattered blood is everywhere. Malone descends to the basement and finds outre books, a charnel odor, and a cat of such peculiarity that one glimpse haunts his future nightmares. He batters open a locked door, only to be sucked inside by an icy wind “filled with whistles and wails and gusts of mocking laughter.”
What follows must be a dream. So say all the psychiatrists. Malone enters an otherworldly space where sticky water laps onyx piers and where a tittering phosphorescent thing swims ashore to squat on a gold pedestal. Every blasphemy of legend comes to a “Walpurgis-riot of horror.” Then a boat rowed by dark men approaches. The phosphorescent thing paws their bedding-wrapped gift, and the men unswath the again corpulent and aged corpse of Robert Suydam.
An organ sounds in the blackness, and the thing leads off the abhorrent company, carrying Suydam’s corpse. Malone staggers only briefly after them, but he still hears the distant ceremony. It ends with the shout “Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!” Moments later Suydam’s corpse, gangrenous but animated, runs into view, chased by the phosphorescent titterer. Suydam gets to the golden pedestal first, obviously the center of the dark magic. He shoves the pedestal into the water, then collapses into a “muddy blotch of corruption.” Malone finally faints.
The last thunderous crash he hears must be the collapse of three buildings overhead. Raiders and prisoners die, but searchers find Malone alive deep below, by the edge of a black pool. Dental work identifies the nearby jumbled decay as Robert Suydam.
Later searchers find a crypt under the tumble-down church, with an organ, chapel and seventeen maddened prisoners. Among them are four mothers with deformed infants who die when exposed to light. The golden pedestal goes unfound—it probably sank into a well too deep for dredging.
Malone departs to his rustic retreat, but he doesn’t suppose the horror’s over in Red Hook. “Apes,” he believes, “danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.”
What’s Cyclopean: Nothing—for Howard, New York’s grand architecture inspires disgust rather than terrified awe. The relatively pedestrian word of the day, appearing no less than four times, is “squalid.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Where to begin? Suydam is in fact Dutch, and apparently degenerate—a degeneracy made clear by his association with a ring of foreigners who help illegal immigrants past Ellis Island. Devil worshipping illegal immigrants, no less, who speak many languages. Beyond that, approximately 60% of Horror’s word count consists of purple, paranoid rants about New York and its inhabitants. Random sample: “the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors.” In context, one suspects that “varied” is intended to be the nastiest word in that passage.
Mythos Making: All immigrants worship an amorphous pantheon of dark gods who seem to get along remarkably well.
Libronomicon: We get quotes from Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies, and Martin Anton Del Rio’s Disquisitionum Magicarum: Libri Sex, Quibus Continetur Accurata Curiosarum. Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe is mentioned as an authority. Suydam apparently wrote a pamphlet on Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which sounds fascinating though it’s not at all clear that Lovecraft knows anything of Kabbalah beyond “scary Jewish magic.”
Madness Takes Its Toll: Malone suffers from cosmic-horror-induced PTSD and a phobia of tall buildings. We also get a rare instance of a clear “sanity points” calculation in an original Lovecraft story: the doctor who enters Suydam’s honeymoon stateroom is quite certain he didn’t see the figure of the demonic killer, and for proof points to his continued mental equilibrium.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
The things I do for you guys, man. This is another first read for me: up until this point I avoided “Horror” based on its (as it turns out, well-deserved) reputation. I want a cookie (and maybe the previously offered Lilith scholarship rant?), for getting through this squalid and batrachian monstrosity that not even S. T. Joshi can love. Red Hook’s horrors include: illegal immigration, people who don’t speak English, skyscrapers, music, and people of good birth who spend too much time around illegal immigrants who don’t speak English. Dead babies, apparently, are just a relief once they’ve been mutated by exposure to said horrors.
I take this story a little personally. My grandparents and great-grandparents were immigrants in New York about this time, living in run-down tenements and eking out a living and generally speaking not worshipping eldritch horrors from beyond space and time, nor kidnapping and sacrificing small children. I love New York even though I don’t live there myself, and what I love about it is everything Lovecraft hates.
He’s not the only one—Lovecraft’s racism may stand out from his peers, but such extremities are of course far from dead in the modern day. A story about an “imaginative, sensitive” cop who looks at people with brown skin and sees nothing but the face of horror… let’s just say it’s hard to dismiss this as merely a revolting period piece.
I read this on the DC metro, surrounded by a crowd worthy of New York—except for the height limit on the buildings, Lovecraft would have despised modern Washington every bit as much as he did Red Hook. He sees wild diversity as a front for the monolithic Other, all part of the same dark and dangerous conspiracy. Everyone who doesn’t share his culture, class, and looks, must be collaborating behind closed doors, sharing the same sordid mélange of half-understood eldritch myth, making blood sacrifices to dread and ancient gods. It’s hard to fit in around getting the laundry done, but we persevere.
Here we get the nadir of Lovecraft’s nastiest themes. Civilization—modern, Aryan civilization—is the only bulwark against primitive (but all-too-accurate) cults and superstitions and sacrifices—and the least tolerance of variation will let those things slip into the cracks and destroy the world. “Superior minds” are best kept ignorant of this stuff entirely, lest their understanding “threaten the very integrity of the universe.” Not to mention the horrible traffic.
There’s also a bit of… not even sure whether to call it sexism. But I can’t help suspecting that Lilith (assuming that’s what the tittering creature is supposed to be) is some weird expression of resentment at Sonia Greene for her role in getting him to the Big Apple. Very weird—I’m still not sure what Lovecraft thought he was doing with that final scene in the (notably cross-cultural) demon realm, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to know. I’ll leave exploration of the story’s pseudosexual aspects to Anne, below—I keep getting distracted by the gibbering.
I can find something to like in most of these stories. I appreciate Shadow Over Innsmouth’s clever biblical allusions and its ultimate sympathy with the monstrous viewpoint, even if my sympathy is considerably greater than the author’s. I enjoyed the manic energy of The Lurking Fear even while hating the premise (as an aside, is it a coincidence that Suydam lives on Martense Street?) But I can’t find anything to forgive about this one. It’s just a splorch of puked-up fear and bigotry. Cookie. Now.
Anne’s Commentary
My favorite part of this story is the incantation: “O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!” Though reminiscent of the Necronomicon snippets with which Lovecraft favors us, the incantation isn’t his—he evidently scavenged it from an article on magic in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its original source is Refutation of All Heresies by the 3rd century Christian theologian, Hippolytus. Gorgo, Mormo and thousand-faced moon may refer to the tri-partite version of Hecate, though it’s the demon Lilith who dominates “Red Hook.”
Jason Colavito discusses the incantation in fascinating detail in his blog.
I first read “Red Hook” in grade school, and I didn’t reread it until preparing this post. Apart from the obvious nastiness—nowhere is Lovecraft’s racism more blatant—I remember finding the story muddled. It does read like the sweaty outpouring of two summer days (August 1-2, 1925), and the author himself thought it rambling.
Yet there’s something deeply scary here. The xenophobia is in your face, crawling all over the surface. In a way it distracts from a less strident, dare we say furtive anxiety, and that is one based in the shadowy realms of the psychosexual. Ah ha! An early companion piece for ”The Thing on the Doorstep?“
Among the many offenses of Red Hook’s residents are “obscure vice,” the “indecent dialogues” of the loungers, the orgies Malone associates with fertility cults. No details, but much is implied. Parker Place, Suydam’s Red Hook address, is a ”teeming rookery,“ and what happens in rookeries if not animal reproduction? The evil church doubles as a dance hall, and even its religious rites are marked by ecstatic shouts and drumming. The secret vault beneath is found to imprison four women with monstrous infants, and where do infants come from? From sex, that’s what! Maybe even incubus sex!
Then there’s Robert Suydam. If there’s a degenerate Dutchman to match the Martenses, it’s him. He proves Malone’s theory that it’s a mercy most highly intelligent people scoff at the occult. Bad enough “varied dregs” indulge in sorcery (you’d expect it of them), but a “superior mind” could take it to the point of threatening “the integrity of the universe.” Yes, superior minds like those of Joseph Curwen and his friends! Like those of Ephraim Waite and even the Whateleys! Is it a double-edged racism that only white men can cause epic Mythos trouble? Even in “The Call of Cthulhu,” where dark men play the biggest roles, they’re basically glorified (or to-be-glorified) door-openers.
We’ve got to wonder how Suydam rejuvenates himself from unsavory old guy to suave man-about-town. Lovecraft associates his metamorphosis with kidnappings, so child sacrifice? What can you put past someone who’d marry a high-born virgin in order to let Lilith ravage her on the wedding night?
Lilith, supposedly Adam’s first wife and the consort of archangels! Here she’s sexuality in its most terrifying and least sensuous guise—she has become it, not even female, a naked and leprous thing. That titters. A lot. And paws. And quaffs virgin blood. And hauls male corpses around with insolent ease. Plus phosphorescent is so not the same as radiant or beaming, as a bride should be. Phosphorescence is what mushrooms put out, or rotting things, a fungal light.
Sex is death. In fact, the bridegroom’s a rotting corpse that goes to pieces at the climax, like Edward Derby in Asenath’s long-buried body.
Imagery. The phallic gold pedestal on which Lilith squats is the center of Red Hook sorcery. What does it mean when Suydam’s corpse rushes from his second “wedding” to tackle the pedestal into a well too deep for dredging? Is this a consummation of his union with Lilith, or is it a last-second repudiation of it, a breaking of magic that would have consumed the world, or at least Brooklyn? Lilith and buddies don’t seem to want Suydam to reach the pedestal first, to cast it from erect pride of place into sinking impotency, eventually to be given a cement chastity belt.
Another Lovecraft marriage that doesn’t work out, that’s for sure. “Blind laws of biology” may lead others to finish what Suydam started, however. Probably those virile young loungers, who don’t get the danger Machen mentions in the epigraph, that “man may sometimes return on the track of evolution.”
Which is a whole other, if related, anxiety!
Next week, we appreciate the morbid artistry of “Pickman’s Model.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land.” Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. She lives in a large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” is published on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
“The Horror at Red Hook” is a relatively conventional black-magic story,
with only token “cosmic” hints, and notable mainly for Lovecraft’s selection
of the immigrant “Yezidi devil-worshippers” as degenerate Dutchman Suydam’s
sidekicks. I’d never thought to read up on Yezidis until now. In calling
them “devil-worhippers,” HPL was parroting the more sensationalist travel and
occult writers of his time. Unlike, say, the fictional “wholly abominable
Tcho-Tcho people,” the Yezidis are a genuine ethnic minority, an ancient and
interesting folk whose unfortunate homeland is largely in the contested lands
of Kurdish Iraq and Syria, and who are presently being “ethnically cleansed”
by the ISIL Islamic radicals.
Are they devil worshippers? Yes and no, depending on who’s judging.
They practice a syncretic religion that worships an archangel whom their
detractors identify with Satan, but they don’t venerate evil. Certain Yezidi
rituals are rather like those of Islam. Their practices include praying
facing toward Lalish, a holy place of pilgrimage in northern Iraq, that may be
seen as their equivalent of Mecca, and have little in common with the demonic
magic in “The Horror at Red Hook.” However, some Yezidis have been in the
news in recent years for shooting and stoning to death hapless young women in
the barbaric custom of “honor killing,” showing that Yezidis can be evilly
cruel enough to qualify as Lovecraft’s depraved cultists. But so can the more
backward elements among various other peoples in the Islamic sphere.
This was my second read: this time round, it wasn’t the racism that irritated me (it’s much as I remembered it) but the fact that “The Horror at Red Hook” is simply a dreadful story on various levels. The mythology is … incoherent at best, you don’t get the sense of place found in, say, “Cool Air”, there’s no plot worth speaking of, it’s a good deal too long, there’s no sense of the cosmic … I could go on. Good points? Well, Alan Moore wrote “The Courtyard” a few decades down the line.
Weird Tales: January 1927, first of all, with August Derleth’s “The Night Rider” and Robert E. Howard’s “The Lost Race”. It was reprinted in March 1952, along with Derleth’s “The Place of Desolation” and Clark Ashton Smith’s “O Golden-Tongued Romance”. Bizarrely, it was reprinted twice in Lovecraft’s lifetime: the two anthologies were You’ll Need a Nightlight and Not at Night!.
It’s really hard to know what to say about this one. The xenophobia is almost overwhelming, and yet in many ways the story works. Despite the occasional purple passage, this is another example of the rather cool reportorial style that we also see in Charles Dexter Ward or The Haunter of the Dark. It’s not what one expects from Lovecraft based on his reputation and it provides an interesting flavor to the horror, giving it a touch of believability.
But then there’s the problematic aspects of the thing. Red Hook was considered one of the worst neighborhoods in the greater NYC area, from around the time HPL wrote this until the very end of the century. It was a busy port, so there probably was a fair amount of bootlegging and human trafficking going on. But I suspect that the real source of this outpouring of classism, xenophobia, racism, and hate is this: When Sonia moved out west for work, Howard took a single-room apartment in Red Hook. The apartment was burgled, leaving HPL with nothing more than the clothes on his back. I think a lot of this is his reaction to that event (yes, filtered through his racism), which might also explain the speed with which he wrote it.
The view presented here of the Yezidis is pretty standard for the day. I think just about the only positive presentation of them as a group in literature is in the work of German adventure writer Karl May, writing about 30 years earlier than Lovecraft. In fact, I’m a bit surprised a lot of that devil-worship stuff didn’t get dragged up a few months ago when the Yezidi were in the news.
I tend to take people’s own word about whether or not they’re worshipping the devil–most Satanists are pretty open about it and happy to go on at length, in my experience.
“Honor killing” and related atrocities are awful and evil–and are unfortunately carried out by people of many religions. I’m totally willing to call anyone who does so “backward” (and worse), but I hereby declare a proactive moratorium, in this comment thread, on accusing people from specific backgrounds of being particularly prone to atrocity. It would simply be too embarrassing and ironic given the context. If anyone wants to debate with me the relative ethics of various primate identity groups, please contact me privately or at least take it over to Twitter.
SchuylerH @@@@@ 2: It also annoyed me enough to move the setting of my in-progress story to New York City, which made everything suddenly come together thematically. So there’s that, too.
I’m definitely going to be a minority here: I love this story. I think it’s creepy and an effective detective/thriller.
However, I wholeheartedly agree that the racism is blatantly obvious and repulsive in this story. But Lovecraft’s xenophobia really feeds into a legitimate, and I believe universal, human fear: fear of the alien, the different, the unknown. Lovecraft really captures that sort of fear; and it seems clear to me that his racism often motivates it.
That being said, I think this sort of fear can be accomplished in literature apart from such immoral attitudes though. For instance, Laird Barron does an excellent job of this in his stories and there’s no xenophobia to speak of there.
As commented above, The Shadow over Innsmouth takes the ideas of Red Hook and executes them far better and with less in-your-face racism, which should’ve given Lovecraft a clue that racism or xenophobia are not necessary elements to capturing a fear of the utterly alien and unknown.
Thanks for chugging through these abhorrent (in more ways than one) Lovecraft stories. I think these posts have shown that there’s still more treasure than junk in the Lovecraft vault.
For an interesting modern attempt to both exploit and subvert Lovecraftian New York xenophobia, see T.E.D. Klein’s “Children of the Kingdom.” It’s got a narrator who thinks upper Manhattan is the creepiest place ever because it’s full of non-white people, but the inhabitants thereof are actually the only people who know what the real creepiness is: subterranean monsters (possibly an exiled offshoot of humanity) who terrorize the neighborhood during blackouts.
Dangit, Lovecraft. Way to besmirch the literary reputations of underground lakes and phosphorescent, creatures.
*offers koi-shaped cookies to Ruthanna and anyone else who needs them*
Pickman’s Model, yaaay!
I come bearing cookies! :)
Ugh, this story. When I first read it I was more confused than anything else. I think there are creepy elements that would work a heck of a lot better if Lovecraft wasn’t stereotyping and writing hate speech against actual real-life groups of people. I think “The Horror at Red Hook” would work reasonably well as a Satanism/black witchcraft-type horror story if the human “dregs” and “dark, subtle foreigners” were instead LITERAL aliens from Yuggoth, or something. From a critical perspective, this story is just about a textbook example of the dominant hegemony’s fear of the Other.
I NEVER connected Lilith in this story to the real-life Sonia Greene; thanks, Ruthanna! That final scene IS really strange and I too am not sure what to take away from it. Female characters are so rare in Lovecraft’s work that, whenever one shows up, it’s pretty significant. I will include my Lilith rant in a separate post; it’s rather long. I agree that the mythological/magickal elements of the story are basically a mess. This, to me, seems unusual for Lovecraft. It almost reads like he was just inserting random “scary” words and names into the tale.
I’m a New Yorker, so it’s kind of funny to read this in 2015. The Red Hook neighborhood now has been gentrified so it’s a very expensive place to live and is inhabited by a lot of rich Brooklyn hipsters. These days “The Horror at Red Hook” would more likely be a hipster who couldn’t fit into his favourite skinny jeans or shaved off his moustache by accident! :D
This story has one of my favorite unintentionally-funny bits. At least, that’s how it works for me, a lifelong teacher. I refer to the line, “Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent.” That always makes me thing of a teacher calling roll: “Moloch?” “Here!” “Ashtaroth?” “Here!” ….Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent. However, Moloch got sent to the principal’s office for dipping Ashtaroth’s pigtails in his inkwell.
Below is a commentary on Lilith that I cut and pasted from my Ph.D. dissertation (the text is copyrighted to me, so please no one plagiarize it!). I STRONGLY recommend the book The Book of Lilith by Barbara Black Koltuv as a good scholarly feminist source on Lilith.
Now that I’m thinking about the Sonia Greene/Lilith connexion, it definitely seems like Lovecraft was in dialogue with the dominant Lilith narrative and may have chosen it as a way to criticize his wife. Does that make Lovecraft Suydam then? That’s just…weird. For a character so associated with male objectification of female sexuality, Lovecraft does a good job of making Lilith thoroughly unappealing. Again, it seems to me like he’s saying something about his own perspective on heteronormative sexuality here (I’m also thinking of Asenath Mason, who, despite the narrator telling us is very attractive, comes off in the story as distinctly physically UNATRRACTIVE). It kind of makes me wonder if Lovecraft would identify on the asexual spectrum were he alive today.
I also wonder to what degree Lovecraft was in dialogue with George MacDonald’s novel Lilith. I don’t know for sure that he read it but it seems almost impossible to me that he wasn’t aware of it. While Lilith’s role in MacDonald’s book is somewhat ambiguous, it isn’t as openly damning of her as Lovecraft’s story is.
Sorry for the long post!
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In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Eve was not the first wife of Adam. Instead, according to The Alphabet of Ben Sira and the Midrash, he was formed back-to-back with his equal female opposite, Lilith. The medieval Judeo-Christian story of Lilith depicts her as a disobedient woman who was thrown out of the Garden of Eden because she refused to lie beneath Adam in the subservient position during sexual intercourse. After leaving the Garden, she became a malevolent being, a succubus who preyed sexually upon men in their sleep and killed infants in their cradles. In fact, there are numerous ancient and contemporary European charms and amulets with the purpose of protecting young children from Lilith’s depredations.
Yet other sources such as texts on Kabbalistic mysticism, including the Treatise on the Left Emanation, while contradictory, tell a very different story. Some say that she refused to submit to Adam’s authority (of which her position during sex is only a metaphor) because she was created of the same flesh and blood and at the same time as him and was thus his equal Adam would not consent to taking a mate who would not obey him. According to many of the stories, Lilith left the Garden of her own volition and went to a desolate place by the Red Sea where she learned wisdom. Other tales tell of her becoming the consort of Leviathan, or Sammael. In some versions of the story Lilith speaks the secret forbidden name of God and flies into the air, thus escaping the Garden, which raises interesting implications about her own power and agency even over the Judeo-Christian deity. There are some scholars who even believe that she appears in the pre-Christian Epic of Gilgamesh as living in the trunk of the world-tree with the owl above her and the snake below her as her animal avatars, which obviously ties her mythos to the serpent in the Garden of Eden (Please note that the inclusion of Lilith in The Epic of Gilgamesh depends upon a translation from the Sumerian text, on which contemporary scholars do not agree).
Many contemporary feminist groups have adopted Lilith as a symbol of liberated womanhood and there is even a long-running all-female American musical festival called Lilith Fair. Lilith may thus be seen as an archetype of powerful and autonomous feminine agency.
@3: I didn’t know about the burglary. That would explain a few things.
@7: We all worship Dark Gods here.
(collects cookies from @8 & @9)
@11: Lovecraft did read Lilith at some point: in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” Lovecraft says it “has a compelling bizarrerie all its own” and expresses a preference for the first version. I remain unsure whether he had read it at the time of this story.
JaimeChris @@@@@ 11: Awesome–thank you! The thought of chewy Lilith scholarship is, I’ll admit, much of what moved this story from “oh god do I have to” into the reading queue.
Going off happily on the tangent: you use the term Judeo-Christian, and I presume you don’t do so lightly. I’m a lot more familiar with the Jewish stories of Lilith, both the older ones and modern interpretations (in addition to the Lilith Fair, there’s also a Jewish feminist magazine called Lilith). I’m always fascinated to learn how myths get interpreted through other lenses–do you have a feel for how Christians handle her story differently?
It had honestly never occured to me before that Christians thought about Lilith at all, even though it should be obvious from this story and from the fact that she gets enough name recognition for “Lilith Fair” to be a reasonable thing to call a giant music festival. But I always thought of her as a midrashic creation.
A sexy woman in a tree in Gilgamesh almost has to be Inanna, but there’s nothing to say that Lilith wasn’t originally intended in part to coopt/reject earlier deities.
@SchuylerH: You’re right! I’d TOTALLY forgotten about that (and have no excuse, as I’ve read that essay a bunch of times). I actually agree with Lovecraft’s statement about MacDonald’s story being “compelling.” However, I do NOT agree with Lovecraft’s depiction of Lilith. I basically see it as part of the overarching trope of men demonizing women – and, to me, Lovecraft takes it one step further, as his demon woman isn’t even allowed to be sexy (although, again, this may say much about Lovecraft’s own sexual identity).
Although I know it’s “unfashionable” these days, I’m a fan of the Carl Jung/Joseph Campbell theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes. (What can I say? I’m somewhat old-fashioned. In class last night I landed up talking about the id and Sigmund Freud). I’ve gone through some really complex mental gyrations to divorce the archetypal concept of “darkness” from the literal skin tones of people of colour. The way I choose to understand it (and I am REALLY trying to avoid being racist here – I apologize in advance if I at all come off that way) is that the physical absence of light is a completely different thing from lighter or darker human skin and we shouldn’t make that equivalence. From an atavistic perspective, the darkness of nighttime was once and can still be a time of danger. Even now people in developed countries fear blackouts and power outages. I know people in the city where I live who are scared to go out at night. To me, Darth Vader or the archetypal black-clad movie villian isn’t referencing people of colour; they are referencing that primal fear of the night.
However, all that being said, I don’t think that we can separate Lovecraft’s fearsome “dark gods” from his own fear of anyone who wasn’t white-skinned. This is the same fear we see in his contemporaries T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and even (to some extent) Virginia Woolf. Yet that doesn’t mean we should excuse it. If Lovecraft has a saving grace here, I guess it might be that at least he’s a lot more open about his hatred of the racially/culturally diverse “modern waste land” than Eliot was.
@R.Emrys: while I agree that Lilith in her present form is basically associated with the Hebrew faith and the Midrash. However, my understanding is that she DOES show up in the Apocrypha to the Christian Bible (I haven’t got a good source on this; it’s been a number of years since I’ve plowed through the Apocrypha.) She also appears in The Book of Isaiah very briefly. Here is a good article about Lilith:
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/
She CERTAINLY has ties to older goddess figures in Mesopotamia and Sumeria, as well as elsewhere. “Lilitu” (and variations thereof) refers to female demons in many different pre-Christian Middle Eastern belief systems. She’s also tied to the Triple Goddess archetype as she is the first of Adam’s three wives. I first encountered the story of Adam having two wives before Eve in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and, according to what I’ve read since, Gaiman actually really did get the story mostly right!
I’m not a Christian so I can’t speak with any authority about the Christian view of Lilith. I was baptized into the Moravian religion (although I don’t currently practice it), which is a very female and pagan-centric branch of Christianity. (H.D. was Moravian and you can really see that influence in her work.) I also grew up with a mother who always tried to de-center the patriarchal view of history, mythology, and religion, so it’s not surprising that I’d identify with the figure of Lilith.
Now here is where I start getting a bit ranty – I identify as female, and I have grown up and live with a dearth of positive and powerful female role models as compared to male role models. And when there ARE good female role models, they are often stereotyped, attacked, or forced to conform to the “male gaze” – I’m thinking here of the recent outcry when Wonder Woman “dared” to start wearing pants and the current incarnation of Starfire in the DC universe. While I DO love Lovecraft’s work and admire his imagination and literary skill, he, like so many people throughout history, is consciously interacting with an ideology that strips women of power and agency. As I said in my last post, he goes even a step further – his Lilith is repulsive and horrible. With Lilith and Sudyam he is perverting the heirogamos to an extent that’s disgusting. Again, I’m aware that this may say a lot about Lovecraft’s own sexual identity. I always warn my own students away from biographical critique but, especially thinking about the possible connexion between Lovecraft’s Lilith and his real-life wife Sonia Greene, it almost seems impossible to forgo biographical critique here.
Although I DO have to admit that I haven’t thought this carefully about this story before. When I first read it, my reaction was basically “Yuck!” and I filed it away in my mental folder of Things I Don’t Like. However, as abhorrent as it is, there may be more going on there than I first realized. A lot has been written and said about Lovecraft’s attitudes regarding women and maybe this story is kind of the pinnacle of his prejudices – just as it may be regarding his prejudices about race/culture. I also think it can be seen as regional literature; the committed New Englander/Bostonian encountering NYC. I used to live in Boston and I have to say that, while the vast majority of Bostonians don’t subscribe to the degree of bigotry that Lovecraft does, there is an undercurrent of American-European elitism that underlies the society of the city. (This is just my take on it. I’m not trying to anger any New Englanders or Bostonians, I promise!) The “feud” between Boston and NYC is long-running and maybe “The Horror at Red Hook” is Lovecraft’s dubious contribution to that.
Another one here who found the story enjoyable, even though I knew the xenophobia was insane. I don’t know if HPL was using Lilith to get back at Sonia or not, just as I would not assume that the imagery in the climax was sexual, nor would I fall into the dodge of saying that stuff was subconscious–anyone who thinks they can say what’s in another person’s subconscious is really overstepping it. It was a bizarre and memorable enough scene without sexual interpretations. Anyway, the settings were the main characters for me.
Note that Suydam is described as fat, until Lilith gives him a makeover, or whatever the heck it was that happened. Prejudice against fat people goes back that far, though perhaps not so virulent as today.
I wonder if the mutated cat was a refugee from “Colour out of Space”?
As for phosphorescence, I couldn’t help but wonder what excited the atoms. I think most bioluminescence is powered by energy gotten from food, not incident radiation. The term bioluminescent was not known then, I don’t think, but he could have just said luminous.
Finally, the detail of the zombie Suydam reaching triumph and dissolution at once is an interesting combination. I am familiar with how a decaying carcass goes shquoinch and comes apart if you try to move it away from the walkway, and I concluded that the job of ID’ing dental work in bodies in that state is not one that I covet.
While his treatment of Lilith is particularly nasty given her usual associations (both positive and negative), I would feel a little reluctant to say that he specifically withholds sexuality from her–given that I’m not sure I could name a place in his oevre where he gives it to anyone else. Asenath Waite comes closest, and as here sexual attraction isn’t something that happens to the narrator, but something observed from a distance that has bad consequences for someone else.
Anne’s fond of finding deep psychosexual themes in this stuff, and I agree that it’s under the surface–but it never feels like a temptation being rejected so much as yet another weird alien scary thing. Only less secretly intriguing than the weird alien scary things that want to share eldritch cosmic secrets or engage you in multicultural community formation.
I’m very prone to biographical critique, but then I’m a doctor (of psychology), not a doctor (of literary analysis).
@Angiportus: I totally agree that trying to “personalize” a story in terms of its author is dodgy at best. However, the dearth of female characters in Lovecraft’s work suggests that the inclusion of Lilith here is significant. Why not have Nyarlathotep or Yog-Sothoth presiding over the rites? While I said that the mytholgy/magick in this story seems careless, Lovecraft in general, despite his other flaws, never struck me as a careless writer. If we take Lilith as a conscious addition to the story, we also have to take her as a traditionally sexual figure – especially given the fact that when Lovecraft wrote this story Lilith hadn’t yet been “reclaimed” as a feminist icon.
I’m aware I’m coming from a Freudian background here (I grew up with a mom who is a Freudian psychologist) but the sexual elements of the story seem, to me, to be inescapable. Sudyam’s mortal bride is killed on her wedding night (shades of Frankenstein here). [Also, as a side-note, Sudyam and his bride took a cruise on a Cunard ship and Nancy Cunard was a modernist poet who wrote “Parallax” and was basically driven out of the U.S. because Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot attacked her for supposed plagiarism and basically destroyed her literary identity! She also worked on the anthology “Negro,” which was a collection of African-American literature and she was very active in the beginnings of the civil rights movement – something Lovecraft probably wouldn’t have liked.]
I am with Anne regarding the phallic symbolism of the golden pillar – really, it it so over-the-top that it seems almost over-obvious. There are two wedding nights in this story that fail to come to fruition; while I’m still kind of confused about the final outcome of this story, Sudyam toppling the pillar DOES seem to me to be a rejection of heteronormative sex and, perhaps, a kind of medieval/extreme religious attitude that sex for men = weakness.
While I’m not particularly squeamish, I DO NOT WANT TO WORK WITH DECAYING BODIES. ICK. I think Lovecraft tapped into the common fear of bodily decay quite well.
@REmrys: That’s so cool! In what branch of psychology do you work? My mom has her doctorate in clinical physchology and (as you could probably tell) she very much works within the Freudian theory. She specializes in the most seriuously mentally ill patients and also currently work as a forensic psychologist. I was a teenager when she earned her doctorate and I was kind of her “research assistant,” which was great fun! I got to wander around her university’s library and read some of Freud’s original case studies, which made me realize that the popular conception of Freud is VERY different from his actual work.
My Ph.D. is in literature and my area of interest includes horror and speculative fiction. I’ve taught Lovecraft in some of my classes! One of my favoured theoretical modes is feminist theory (if you couldn’t tell). I agree that the connexion between Lilith/Lovecraft/sexuality is ambiguous. But again, as I said in my last post, I think Lovecraft picked such an archetypal symbol of female sexuality for a REASON. Why not another character in his rich mythos? I can only conclude that there is something really significant in his choice of Lilith. While I said that it seemed like he was just randomly throwing “scary” names into this story, Lilith plays a large enough role that her inclusion doesn’t seem random.
There has been a lot written about Lovecraft and sex and I kind of don’t know where to go with that. I have heard Cthulhu described as the ultimate “vagina dentata” (which is NOT a term Freud ever used, thankyouverymuch). Yet I think the presence (or active absence) of women in his tales is problematical at best.
@16 Angiptorus
RE: Suydam’s Weight,
Lovecraft packed on quite a bit of weight during his time in New York.He noted that after he got up to 193 pounds, he vowed to never go on a scale again (Joshi, LIFE, 359).In 1925, however, he went on a reducing program and got back down to 146 pounds (Joshi, 359).Interestingly, given all the talk about Lilith’s relationship to Sonia, Sonia was quite upset about HPL’s weight loss, seeing it as an “alarming decline” (359)
Lilith: Interesting to set her beside Nitocris as an example of HPL using a legendary female figure
Supernatural horror vs Lovecraftian Horror:
I don’t have my volumes of HPL’s Selected Letters handy (having to leave precious books behind is one of the more upsetting issues that one must confront when moving cross-country to attend grad school), but I remember him telling one of his younger proteges that conventional supernatural lore was quite boring and played out.Indeed, one of the reasons why he created his own arcane texts is because he found the real thing (The Key of Solomon, etc) terribly uninspiring.
Bearing this in mind, HPL’s use of stock supernatural figures in “Red Hook” seems to be a kind of red flag, particularly as the supernatural figures are not transformed/adjusted.To see what I mean, compare this tale to “The Shunned House.” In that tale, HPL lifted werewolf lore from Fiske’s “Myths and Myth-Makers.” However, he transformed the material in the process, turning a conventional werewolf-vampire story into quasi-science fiction (Seeing as how we haven’t reached “SH” yet on the re-read, I won’t specify the precise nature of HPL’s altering of the traditional myths).Here, he just regurgitates stuff on magic and demonology from the Britannica.Not a good sign.
Irish cop: Interesting to see Lovecraft having an Irishman as the hero.Of course, he’s not a “typical” Irishman (cf how HPL makes sure to tell us that he was born in a Georgian villa and is a graduate of Dublin University).
“Suydam apparently wrote a pamphlet on Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which sounds fascinating though it’s not at all clear that Lovecraft knows anything of Kabbalah beyond “scary Jewish magic.””
Well, Joshi notes that Lovecraft owned a set of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Joshi, LIFE, 367), and it does have an article on the Kabbalah*.Given that HPL made liberal use of its articles on “Magic” and “Demonology” for “Red Hook,” I think that HPL probably read the Kabbalah article as well.
And for the Lilith-minded, here’s an interesting bit from the Ninth’s article on Adam:
“In these Adam is said to have been made as a man-woman out of dust collected from every part of the earth; his head reached to heaven, and the splendour of his face surpassed the sun. the very angels feared him, and all creatures hastened to pay him devotion. The Lord, in order to display his power before the angels, caused a sleep to fall upon him, took away something from all his members, and when he awoke commanded the parts that had been removed to be dispersed over the globe, that the whole earth might be inhabited by his seed. Thus Adam lost his size, but not his completeness. His first wife was Lilith, mother of the demons. But she flew away through the air; and then the Lord created Eve from his rib, brought her to Adam in the most beautiful dress, and angels descending from heaven played on heavenly instruments; sun, moon, and stars dancing. He blessed the pair, and gave her them a feast upon a table of precious stone. Angels prepared the most costly viands. But Adam’s glory was envied by the angels; and the seraph Sammael succeeded in seducing him. The pair were driven out of paradise into the place of darkness, and wandered through the earth .”
Interesting to speculate on HPL reading that article….
*http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/K/KAB/kabbalah.html
I do wish people would lay off the Yezidis. They have been persecuted for almost the entirety of the sect’s existence, right up to the present, and their mosaics of Lucifer as the Peacock Angel are beautiful. Those interested in a relatively cool-headed view (i.e. not assuming them to be Satanists), albeit by a rather racist writer, should consult Agatha Christie’s first volume of autobiography, Come, Tell Me How You Live, in which she visited the Yezidi religious center at Lalish, and also employed several Yezidi workmen at her husband’s archaeological site. They had constant trouble in protecting the Yezidi workmen from harassment by workers of other religions. And the ongoing attempts at genocide by ISIS/ISIL are being pretty much ignored by the rest of the world, too.
The one part of this story that has always fascinated me is the incantation, and I am glad to have its origins explained, as it has always struck me as a highly peculiar element for a Lovecraft story. To be specific, those corners of Greek religion from which that incantation comes tend to be extremely esoteric, infrequently translated, and fragmentary when not downright scholastically dubious, but Lovecraft shows no signs in the rest of his work of the sort of detailed knowledge of Greek classical studies that leads one to unearth this sort of thing. I had forgotten how very erudite the early editions of the Britannica could get, and that serves as an explanation; in general Lovecraft is not fond of and does not use Greco-Roman allusions (except in ‘The Rats in the Walls’, where it is structurally necessary), so I think it is safe to assume that the motif here is meant to be tied in with Lilith and the general idea of the Magna Mater as seen in Murray’s Witch-Cult. I think that a bit more explicit syncretism would have been needed to make the myth-background of the story hold together, especially as Lovecraft’s conception of Lilith seems very like the traditional Jewish window-vampire and stealer of children, who is honestly not all that much like Hecate.
It’s a great incantation, though, isn’t it? Beautiful ring to it, and it just sounds creepy. It’s the only reason I ever reread the story.
Jaime Chris @@@@@ 19: Experimental cognitive, specializing in memory and decision making–which makes it not as good an excuse for biographical critiques as it might be, but I still enjoy gossip as much as the next person and I recognize it as a form of social grooming, because science.
And as straightforward as it is, I do suspect he picked Lilith because he was mad at his wife. Although I’m willing to be proven wrong, I’m not certain any man has ever been inspired to write a good story by that particular impetus.
Trajn23 @@@@@ 20 & 21: The lack of Lovecraft’s usual imagination… this really does feel like a story slammed out in a fit of anger and fear over a couple of days, grabbing names associated with his immediate upset. I’ve done those (although of course they’re informed by my own biases)–but happily editors are picky these days.
Shunned House is coming in a couple of weeks, and yes, it does make for a noticable contrast.
I’m a big fan of the Encyclopedia, but it’s never been the place to go for a thorough explanation of anything–especially not a mystical system with (at the time more enforced) strictures on who can learn and when, and that usually takes years to master. So yeah, he knew enough to use the word as set dressing, probably little more.
…although that is, as Rush suggests, a surprisingly erudite article. I take back my dismissal, and now I wonder what Lovecraft made of it as well.
By the way, many thanks to everyone who’s been laying out the history of the Yezidi and the prejudices against them, with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar.
Parker Place, Suydam’s Red Hook address, is a “teeming rookery,” and what happens in rookeries if not animal reproduction?
“Rookery” doesn’t just mean a place where rooks live. It can also mean a crowded (and generally poor) tenement building, or an area inhabited by thieves (to ‘rook’ someone is to rob them by deception, or to cheat them).
There’s be some mention of the Yezidis and their persecution by ISIS/ISIL/Daesh in the UK media recently, but unsurprisingly no in depth discussion of their religious beliefs.
From what I can tell, the Peacock Angel is not the devil/Satan/Lucifer as far as the Yezidis are concerned, but the stories have similarities that cause most outsiders to make that connection.
Either way, it does seem like they have always been persecuted for their religion.
@15: Lilith’s reference in the Bible is translated in a variety of ways: in KJV Isa 34:14, Lilith is strangely rendered as “screech-owl”, which I think are New World owls, rather than the traditional “lamia”. I appreciate that the translators were here trying to produce a work of verse and I wonder whether they were here referring to the “Strix”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strix_(mythology)
@22: I found this article and now I wonder whether Lovecraft either got his not-exactly-balanced information on Yezidis from Seabrook (or, more likely, Seabrook filtered through E. Hoffmann Price): http://lovecraftzine.com/2015/02/19/weird-acquaintances-william-seabrook-and-h-p-lovecraft/
I had never really considered viewing Lilith in this story as having a connection with Sonia. It is tempting, what with Lilith being a largely Jewish figure, but I’m not sure I can really accept it. He and Sonia seem to have gotten on fairly well, but it’s also possible he resented her departure to earn money after the failure of the hat shop.
His sexuality is impossible to determine at this remove. He may have been borderline asexual or perhaps severely repressed. According to Sonia he was adequate as a lover, but she always had to initiate things. That sounds more like repression to me, and considering his upbringing by his maiden aunts, seems fairly plausible.
Given the frequent mention of Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe, I wondered if she had anything to say about Lilith that might have influenced this, but a quick search of the text on-line doesn’t turn up a single mention. Maybe she wrote about Lilith elsewhere, but it looks like the Britannica was HPL’s primary source for this one. (As a side note, Murray wrote the witchcraft article for the 1929 edition of the encyclopedia.)
A carved golden pedestal still doesn’t seem very phallic to me, especially since it was at one point also called a throne. Achieving a triumph and dissolution simultaneously is a lot closer… The underground scene still doesn’t quite make sense for me, even aside from the mythological cleaning-out-the-refrigerator.
From what I’ve read, HPL seems to have been physically normal but with a low “drive”–he could function sexually as needed but could also get along fine without it. Sort of bimodal while still being (so far as I know) straight. As to his weight, 146 might have been low for someone of his height, I am not sure. He apparently did not nourish himself well when alone. At least he is dead now and doesn’t have to listen to all the stuff people are saying about him.
If people are still speculating about your neuroses and sexuality after almost a century, I think you win at writing.
The multiple meanings of “rookery” are apparently interesting to architects as well as writers. There’s a building in Chicago by that name. If I recall the story correctly (this is from a tour a few years ago, and the internet fails to provide a good memory supplement), the building owners told the renovating designers–either Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905 or his student who did the next round in the 30s–that they were sick of the building going by that name, due precisely to the connotations Lovecraft invokes here, and could the designer please stop calling it that. Designer got shirty at being told what to do, and integrated carvings of rooks–mostly ravens, but a few chess pieces too–into every surface where they could be made to fit.
@DemetriosX: I’ve read Murray and I don’t recall any mention of Lilith in her work.
@Angiportus: Perhaps growing up with a mom who could find phallic symbols in everything has biased me; however, as I said before, I don’t think Lovecraft was a careless writer. If it was a throne, why didn’t he use that word? Lilith squatting atop it and Sudyam toppling it seems quite Freudian to me. I like your phrase “cleaning out the refrigerator” for the final scene in the story; it IS kind of a strange mess.
@R.Emrys: I TOTALLY agree with you that “If people are still speculating about your neuroses and sexuality after almost a century, I think you win at writing.” Do you mind if I share that with my students? Despite my posts on this thread, I AM a big Lovecraft fan (although I find a lot of aspects of his writing really problematical). There is just something so COMPELLING about his work that I haven’t found in other horror stories/novels. Stephen King, in “Danse Macabre,” openly admitted that Lovecraft basically inspired his entire career. I was introduced to Lovecraft by my mom; when I was a teenager she saw me reading King’s work and said, “If you like King, you MUST read Lovecraft.” I’ve taught some of Lovecraft’s stories in my English classes and students are inevitably drawn to the power of his prose. Despite everything I find objectionable about his work, he really DID tap into something fundamental about fear and the human psyche.
Jaime Chris @@@@@ 32: Go for it; I basically never mind being quoted. :)
My admiration for Freud is largely based on his being the first modern theorist to realize that not everything was conscious, an insight on which the bulk of modern cognitive psychology rests. But I also think he offers a lot of fodder for the oversensitivity of the basic human pattern recognition system. Tall thin things and round hollow things are common, functional forms, and human obsessions and fears are pretty wide-ranging. A golden pedestal may not just be a golden pedestal, but it could as easily be an idealized situation that suddenly seems less awesome, or an idealized person who runs you directly into your biggest terrors, or the edifice of modern art, as a sexual symbol. Or it could be a sexual symbol–that is one of the big obsessions after all, just not the only one.
@22: “The Rats in the Walls” is by no means Lovecraft’s only story that makes Greco-Roman allusions. Peaslee converses with the mind of a Roman quaestor in “The Shadow Out of Time.” Other brief Roman allusions occur in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” “The Descendant,” and “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.” He wrote an entire story, “The Very Old Folk,” set in Roman Spain and thoroughly Roman in tone (not, however, published in his own time, if I recall correctly). And two of his stories (“The Tree” and “Hypnos”) are explicitly based on Grecian themes, which also occur more than passingly in “The Temple.”
@31: Sounds a lot like Ayn Rand’s petulant architect in The Fountainhead!
@R.Emrys: “My admiration for Freud is largely based on his being the first modern theorist to realize that not everything was conscious, an insight on which the bulk of modern cognitive psychology rests.”
I am TOTALLY with you there. My mom is fond of saying that Freud was the first major theorist to treat mental illness as an ILLNESS from a scientific perspective, rather than espousing the old-fashioned theories of trepanning and demon exorcism. As a woman, I have a LOT of problems with his theories about women but I do have to admit that he said he didn’t really understand the female psyche (“What do women want?”) and, like I just said, he treated mental illness women as a legitimate mental problem and not the “wandering womb” of ancient and medieval theory. In his “Three Lectures” he also posited the idea that all humans are ultimately bisexual in the early stages of their development, which is important to me as a Queer person.
I agree that sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar.” Yet as someone who reads and writes and thinks about horror literature for a living, there are SO many Freudian elements in what we call “classic” horror. “Oedipus Rex?” I’m not EVEN going there. “Frankenstein,” in which the moster says to his maker that “I shall be with you on your wedding night?” “Dracula,” in which Johnathan Harker basically gets oral sex from female vampires? Should I even bring up the sex-and-violence fest that is “The Monk?” These days we have “The Human Centipede” and “V/H/S” which are basically both about non-normative sex (I especially refer to the last episode in “V/H/S” here).
The humanities, like everything else, go though cycles of what is and isn’t “popular.” In literature, right now relativism and post-deconstructionism and post-structualism is really a thing (please don’t ask me to define any of these terms because I’m not sure I can!). Yet that doesn’t mean that older theories are necessarily WRONG. Again, I’m kind of old-fashioned and may abscribe to theories that many of my colleagues think are “out-dated.” Yet I don’t think those theories – or, for that matter, Lovecraft himself, are “out-dated. As Stephen King wrote, “I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it’s just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it’s nice to think so for a while in the morning’s clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.”
Everything is infinite and King and Freud and Lovecraft understood that.
This one has never worked for me, not even when I was young and naive and too stupid to see the racism in it. It just seems ramshackle, disorganised, incoherent, like a kid describing a nightmare he never had to his bored buddies, making up one thing after another in a vain effort to somehow dispel the tedium with terror. “And then the monster came, and it was a glowing monster, and the dead man came in and joined it while the devil worshippers, uh, worshipped the devil…”
Not relevant to this story (yet), but I just discovered Underwhelming Lovecraft. Mostly six panel summaries of stories told to make them seem really silly. The guy did start off with silly drawings of HPL monsters, which are also fairly amusing.
@37: Thanks for the link! Those are hilarious.
as expected you extrapolate a lot here. Was the author racist? Almost certainly, but then so was most everyone at the time. As well the poverty stricken New York that he talks about was pretty terrible. Not as bad as you make it out to be the story is pretty forgetable. The real reason it is’t included in most collections of his work.
Jaime Chris @@@@@ 35: That’s cool–most of the clinicians I know are extremely post-Freudian, so I rarely get to hear much about his positive contributions from that perspective.
He does make for good literary criticism–in part because he’s deeply embedded in the time when both science and literature were starting to really explore internal mental and emotional dynamics.
DemetriosX @@@@@ 37: Thanks for linking–I’d seen Underwhelming Lovecraft before, but not recently enough for his recaps of either “The Unnamable” or “Whisperer in Darkness.” The fanboy expressions on Carter & friend’s face are priceless.
Speaking of things we haven’t linked to in a while, I’m sad to see that Beauty By Lovecraft is about to go on hiatus.
zaldar @@@@@ 39: Also because of the nefarious cabal of Jewish conspirators that controls the publishing world, don’t forget about that.
More seriously, plenty of people have made the case that Lovecraft was unusually racist even for his time. Over the course of this reread, I’ve come to the hypothesis that Lovecraft was less self-conscious about his racism. He rarely feels the need gloss it over even to the extent that was common at the time, and rarely seems aware that others might not share his so-obviously justified and instinctive revulsion. When he does try to justify, it seems more like a desperate argument for the advantages of WASP culture–he seems rather less secure in his people’s superiority than in everyone else’s inferiority.
His racism also informs his writing more pervasively than many other authors whose papers reveal them to have been horrible bigots. Fear of the Other is one of his central themes; take away that xenophobia and most of these stories would be extremely different, if they existed at all. One of the things I do with Lovecraft–in part because he wears his fears and prejudices so openly–is to try and figure out why people are afraid of me, and why they were afraid of the poor 20’s New Yorkers from whom I’m descended.
I said at the start of this reread that I’m a Lovecraftian monster; it’s Lovecraft (here and elsewhere) who identified me as such, and I cannot read these stories without taking that into account.
Incidentally, would this story have been where the writers (for lack of a better word) of “Touch of Satan” got the bit about Gorgo and Mormo and so on?
so i know it’s years later, but i just discovered this reread several months ago (yay!) and am going through it as i have the time.
i guess i have always read this story differently than anybody else here, in that i assumed that the last scene with the pillar-toppling was a reveal that suydam had been deliberately infiltrating the cult in order to subvert its ultimate goals all along. he had found in his initial investigations in red hook the cult’s quest for a suitable “bridegroom” and, being of “superior” stock (racism ew), was able to set himself up as the cult leader and worship figure which would be the eventual sacrifice/resurrected god/consort to lilith. whether that was actually lovecraft’s intent or not i have no idea, but given his penchant for the twist ending, it makes sense to me? of course, even in that reading suydam is still a horrific person, because his quest to destroy the cult still required things like condoning slavery and using human sacrifice of children to make himself appear young so he could trap an innocent fiancée who he would *also* sacrifice for her blood in order to get his corpse reanimated. but it does at least lend some structure to the mythology/plot that is somewhat lacking otherwise in terms of suydam’s motivation to topple the pillar and bring down the neighborhood, when for most of the story, the guy seems pretty down with the sickness.
@SimplE Desultory Philip — i think that makes a lot of sense. suydam then becomes a figure who sacrifices himself (and his soul/goodness) in doing evil acts for the (supposed) greater good. that is, he is a good white guy who has to commit evil acts to earn the trust of the bad brown people/jews before he can destroy their evil shenanigans. if we read it that way, then lovecraft gets to make suydam (like all of the white people) ultimately good/on the side of whiteness in the war against Bad Foreigners and clear the name of suydam (whiteness)’s involvement. suydam’s evil acts (the kidnappings and such) become necessary sacrifices that make the Good White Guys Very Sad but are justifiable. very white man’s burden.
My own take was that Suydam was motivated by gaining advantages in this world – physical rejuvenation and a worthy young bride. He intended, as he said, to enjoy life from that point on. He did not intend for himself or his bride to be killed on the yacht. Then the members of the cult felt they were being betrayed and went after the Suydams. His re-animated corpse destroyed the golden pedestal because the alternative was a “marriage” that was a fate worse than death.