In yesterday’s post, I rambled for a few paragraphs about how Lovecraft’s racist fears of miscegenation at times produced fiction that expressed those fears in terms of a dim outlook for the survival of the entire human species. Bruce Lord’s essay, which along with Lovecraft’s birthday on the 20th served as a springboard for the discussion, explores an additional piece of the puzzle. If Lovecraft was horrified at the prospect of racial degeneration via interbreeding, he was appalled at the very mechanics of breeding.

It wasn’t just that sex was, in Lovecraft’s eyes, the door by which the immigrant cuckoo is let into the pure white colonial nest. He shied away from that physical necessity for its very animality–it was an expression of humanity’s animal nature, which to Lovecraft was abhorrent. Lord cites an earlier essay which points to a symbolic example of this in “Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family.” The title character, upon discovering that his great-great-grandmother was a “white ape Goddess,” and that this is the source of the family tree’s longish arms and tendency towards violence, commits suicide by gasoline and match. His self-immolation puts an end to the genetic curse of his line, but it also can be seen as the logical outcome of the burning, animal passion to which his great-great-grandfather succumbed. Sexual desire incinerates the family.

But we needn’t stop at the symbolic level here. Lovecraft admitted this attitude quite plainly in his letters. Lord’s essay quotes one in which the author described sex as “a mechanism which I rather despised or at least thought non-glamourous because of its purely animal nature & separation from such things as intellect & beauty….” Lord links Lovecraft’s distaste for sex with his apparent fear of women, or at the very least their virtual non-existence as characters in his fiction.

To return briefly to Lovecraft’s portrayal of sex as vector of degeneration, I’ve noticed a similar theme in Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. In A Spell For Chameleon, the first book of the series, the borders of Xanth are closed up tight. A line of force kills any living thing that tries to cross from the magical peninsula onto the mundane mainland or vice-versa. Our hero, Bink, is the first character to twig to an implication of this policy: with no new humans entering Xanth, and cross-species breeding resulting in viable half-human offspring thanks to the magic of the realm, the pure-bred human population is dwindling.

Like Lovecraft, Anthony wants his readers to share in the horror of that realization that inspires Bink’s urgent conviction that the border must be thrown open. This would allow new humans in to keep the pure-bred population viable, but, because magic only exists on the Xanthian peninsula, would not put the rest of the world in danger of being overrun genetically by centaurs, harpies, and ogres.

Unfortunately, this particular reader didn’t see what the big deal was. Who cares about keeping pure-bred humans in Xanth? Humans are boring. They’ve monopolized the rest of the globe. Why not let these fantastic, magical cross-breeds dominate Xanth? Centaurs are cool!

It’s a much different reaction to the one evoked by Lovecraft’s tales of humanity’s genetic peril. Lovecraft, you see, had known better than to make mermaids out of his Deep Ones. There’s nothing beautiful, majestic, or sexually arousing about the Deep Ones in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” As successors to the human species, they lack any redeeming quality. The idea of mating with them is horrific, and the thought of humanity being assimilated by their appetites is terrifying.

Which leads me to wonder: do the inhabitants of Innsmouth liaise with the Deep Ones due to some unnatural attraction to the grotesque monsters of the deep? Or has the blood intermingled due to rape? Film adaptations of Lovecraft’s opus have made much of both these sources of horror. In Dagon, a movie based on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as much or more than on the short story from which it takes its title, the main character finds himself deeply attracted to a woman who turns out to be squid beneath the waist. The attraction terrifies him. Later, he watches his wife become the unwilling mate of Dagon itself; she pleads for death rather than give birth to an atrocity. But I think neither of these tropes would have interested Lovecraft one whit. To him, sex itself was already a bestial horror. To portray it as literal bestiality was merely to make plain what he already felt about the act. And to portray sex as non-consensual violence would have been redundant to a man who felt that all sexual desire was an act of rape perpetrated by the body’s animal nature upon the vulnerable purity of the spirit.
OK. One more post along these lines, and then the Cracker Jacks prize. Hang in there.