Lovecraft and Influence by Waugh Robert H.;

Author:Waugh, Robert H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

II

Lovecraft’s Successors

Chapter 9

What Stays in Lovecraft’s Sieve Once Frank Belknap Long Is Strained Through It

Norm Gayford

Sieves are used to remove the larger, used items that have contributed to a broth, and to put pressure on vegetables to extrude a thick delicacy from rougher material. Let’s sieve some of Frank Belknap Long’s material to discover Lovecraftian elements and influence.

By sending a correspondent an epistolary manifesto calling for a new, more complex view of art, one demonstrates hope that the correspondent is receptive. Frank Belknap Long was close to Lovecraft for years. He helped Lovecraft survive New York and endure a rather ill-fitting marriage; they worked in a loose partnership as revisionists, sometimes bouncing clients back and forth. The mutual influences, while not quantifiable, can nonetheless be felt holistically, every bit as much as the shadowed presences in their tales. Sometimes the turn of phrase, the combination of adjective and noun, adverb and verb, brings an echo.

Inflections and innuendoes exert narrative pressures. Long’s Journey into Darkness is one of the most direct and mature fusions of Lovecraft and Long. Journey into Darkness suggests to me that Lovecraft’s influence stayed with Long even as Long continued discoursing, through narrative, about the weird tale’s evolution.

Let’s start with the “blues” trope. Long often dropped “blue” into otherworldly incursions, or iterations of the weird, especially in Journey into Darkness. The first paragraph is full of such references: “blue-and-white counterpane . . . dark blue vase . . . blinds, which were of the same color . . . much lighter blue of the walls,”[1] and this is what Kilmer, the hesitant protagonist, wakes into, fearful at first that he is back in childhood, where his “bedroom . . . had . . . the same pervasive blueness.”[2] Already we have the floor dropped out from beneath us, not unlike the traveler on deck in “Second Night Out.”[3] Kilmer finds no psychological anchors—he wants to be dislodged from the illusion: “the skepticism which might have dispelled it [the illusion] had nothing to fasten on.”[4] Skepticism needs grounding, foundation, as does a weird tale itself. Yet the foundation becomes process rather than object, the process—by the protagonists—of constantly re-seeing, recontextualizing, and qualifying their perceptions. Finally, reality comes home for Kilmer: “Then his vision steadied and objects that had been vague and indefinite stood out with an extraordinary sharpness.”[5] The novel is about seeing clearly what we initially perceive as tenuous, tenebrous reality.

Kilmer calls himself “alienated and . . . preferred to think of himself as emotionally mature enough to be no more than slightly estranged.”[6] First Kilmer is “alienated,” and then, in more modified fashion, “estranged.” While both words denote feeling that one does not belong to a group or community, “alienation” is more connotatively acute. Correspondence mitigates the alienation, especially in a character such as Howland, who lives at a remove from common practice. About isolation and the need for correspondence, Lovecraft writes:

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see

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