Early
in his career, H.P. Lovecraft wrote three prose poems in close succession that are
similar in theme and imagery. They are The Green Meadow (1919), Nyarlathotep (1920), and The Crawling Chaos (1921). The first and second were discussed in
earlier posts, (see A
Lovecraftian Vision of the Afterlife
and Some
Recommended Graphics).
All three are about the end of the world, and are remarkable for their
religious content, given Lovecraft’s supposedly materialist world view. What was happening in the author’s life at that
time which led to such a preoccupation with apocalyptic visions?
Though
one can make too much of biographical details and their impact on an author’s
work, it is noteworthy that his mother’s mental health markedly declined at
this time. Her hysteria and depression had increased significantly towards the
end of the First World War. She was
hospitalized in 1919, at the same facility where Lovecraft’s father died, and
passed away in 1921. The loss of his
mother was devastating, despite his ambivalence about the role she had played
in his own emotional difficulties. In some sense the familial world he had
known had come to an end, though he strove to replace his mother with his
maternal aunts, and not long after, with his unsuccessful marriage to Sonia
Greene.
These
three early works by Lovecraft, two of them collaborations, all began as
recorded dream material that was later partially transformed into something
resembling a narrative. None of them really
rise to the level of story, being absent of conflict, characterization or plot. They read like elaborate dream journal
entries, yet are effective as prose poems.
Interestingly, erosion by
turbulent water, and the ever present threat of drowning, (or being
overwhelmed, as in Nyarlathotep), is a
common image in them. In darker, more
despairing moments of his life, Lovecraft’s suicidal ideation usually involved
death by drowning. Typical of much of
his fiction, the narrator in each piece is a passive and impotent observer of
his and the world’s fate.
All
three are apocalyptic in nature, with different perspectives on ‘the end’. In The
Green Meadow, the dreamer seeks a personal salvation on what appears to be an
attractive island in a turbulent stream. Instead, he finds an eternity of terrifying
primordial religious ritual, and realizes that he will never return to the
mainland—that is, he has died. Nyarlathotep describes the collapse of both
Western civilization and individual sanity at the hands of an Antichrist: “And
it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt…” Finally, The
Crawling Chaos depicts the dramatic end of the physical earth, but—amazingly
for Lovecraft—includes the appearance of angels and a version of the holy
family. Certainly the end of the world was
on Lovecraft’s mind circa the early 1920s, and perhaps the faint hope of some sort of religious deliverance.
The Crawling Chaos (1921) was written by Lewis
Theobald, Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley, pseudonyms for H.P. Lovecraft and
Winifred Virginia Jackson. Lovecraft and
Johnson had also collaborated on the earlier story, The Green Meadow. According
to L. Sprague de Camp, Jackson had no talent for writing in Lovecraft’s view,
though she may have been a superior poet. She supplied him with dream imagery which he then
elaborated into prose poems.
S.T. Joshi
notes that even the title links this piece to the opening lines of Nyarlathotep: “Nyarlathotep…the crawling chaos...I am the
last…I will tell the audient void…” The
cadence of this pronouncement also sounds very similar to the closing lines of The Green Meadow: “The Green Meadow…I
will send a message across the horrible immeasurable abyss…” It seems likely that these three stories form
a thematic trilogy.
The
dream-like events of The Crawling Chaos
are precipitated by an overdose of opium.
Use of mind altering substances appears surprisingly often in early 20th
century horror, science fiction and fantasy.
For example, mind altering substances are used or referenced in Clark
Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla (1933) and
Beyond the Singing Flame (1931), as
well as Frank Belknap Long’s The Hounds
of Tindalos (1929), among others.
In
these stories, the effect of the substance is to take its user back in time to
the primordial chaos, where a soul shattering revelation awaits. In The
Crawling Chaos, an opiate vision takes the narrator far into the future, to
observe the last day of planet Earth.
True to his prudish, abstinent nature, Lovecraft’s character does not
actively seek inebriation; he is the passive victim of a physician’s
inattentiveness. The overdose is
accidental, intended as a treatment for plague symptoms, which also justify use
of the drug.
The
vision he experiences is initially similar in some ways to that in The Green Meadow. He awakes in an ornate interior that
suspiciously resembles the lavish rooms of Roderick Usher’s doomed residence,
or perhaps the phantasmagoric bridal chamber in Ligeia. (In the latter the narrator is also under the influence of
opium.) Lovecraft’s dreamer may not be
suffering from an opium overdose so much as from excessive consumption of Edgar
Allan Poe.
Stepping
outside, his worst fears are confirmed: the
narrow isthmus on which house sits is being relentlessly worn away by ocean
waves. Fleeing inland, he is strangely drawn
to an enormous palm tree, under which he rests.
He is soon visited by a young child, who “bore the features of a faun or
demigod” and who sports “an aureola of lambent light’ encircling his head. He
hears sweet angelic singing, and is then joined by a “god and goddess”. This is obviously a transmogrified version of
the Holy Family, replete with minions of angelic creatures.
All three beings want to take him “beyond the
Arinurian streams” to “dwell blissfully in Teloe.” Teloe is described as a Dunsanian-inspired
heaven where “abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any sounds heard,
save of laughter, song, and the lute.”
Moreover,
Teloe is up, where heaven is traditionally
located. The narrator and his new
celestial acquaintances commence elevating in that direction—raptured, as it were, in the parlance of
evangelical Christians—to the sounds of lute playing and an angelic choir. Lovecraft, an avowed atheist, distances
himself from this excruciating event by paganizing the attributes of the holy
family and angels, and exchanging the usual harps for lutes.
Heathen Baby Jesus warns the narrator not to
look backward, but like Lot’s wife, he must gaze once more on the home he is leaving. Salvation is aborted—he wakes from his opiate
dream—but not before he sees the destruction of the earth, first by flood, and
then by cosmic explosion.
S.T. Joshi
describes The Crawling Chaos as
“insubstantial”, and being an enthusiastic atheist himself, may have been
dismayed by the overt religiosity of the piece.
This is uncharacteristic of Lovecraft, at least as he presented himself
in his voluminous correspondence. Yet
this trilogy of prose poems, created during a very dark period in Lovecraft’s
life, show the beginnings of a lifelong preoccupation with religious and supernatural
ideas. These emerge later on in much of his subsequent fiction and poetry.
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