Lovecraft was far more than a frustrated product of a rainy provincial town. He was a man whose struggle to find self-expression turned him into a kind of a prophet or magician. In this respect, he reminds me of the Swedish dramatist Strindberg. Strindberg was also born into a frustrating provincial backwater; he also spent his life struggling against neglect, misunderstanding and poverty; at one point in his career, he went completely insane. Like Lovecraft, Strindberg was fascinated by the past, and by such subjects as alchemy and black magic. And towards the end of his life, he made a series of oddly accurate predictions about the 20th century, which he saw as a time of torment for the human race, particularly for the ‘outsiders’. In his last play, written in 1910, he has a Japanese who wants to commit suicide to atone for his sins, and who has decided to take a drug that will make him appear to be dead, and then leave a note asking to be cremated. When someone asks: ‘But supposing you wake up in the furnace’, he says, ‘I want to wake up; I want to feel the purifying flames…’. But the most hair-raising part of all this is that the name of the Japanese is Hiroshima…
Lovecraft also seemed to have this strange insight into the future. In The Call of Cthulhu, he talks about a time when a large part of the human race seems to go insane, when nightmarish things happen, unexplainable and horrible crimes. Thirty years after Lovecraft’s death, such a time has arrived. In England, a young man and woman kidnap children, torture them, and bury their bodies on the moors; in Chicago, a man forces his way into a hostel and kills eight nurses in a long night of terror; another youth enters a hairdresser’s shop, makes women and children lie on the floor, and shoots them one by one in the back of the head with a revolver. When asked why he did it, he replies: ‘I wanted to get known’… Similar ‘motiveless’ crimes are happening in every country of the world. Here in Roanoke, Virginia, where I happen to be writing this, the body of a young woman was discovered a few weeks ago. She was a Catholic door to door worker, helping to take a census. Her murderer had cut open her stomach, stuffed it with kerosene-soaked rags, and set them alight. He had apparently done this quite openly, close to a public highway, ignoring the risk of being caught. One can imagine a man having various motives for killing a girl, including the obvious one of rape; but why stuff her with rags and set fire to her?
I am not, of course, claiming that Lovecraft was actually prophetic, in the sense that Nostradamus apparently was. It was simply that he was a man of genius and intelligence, who experienced the worst fevers of the 20th century in a particularly virulent form. If he had been born in England a century earlier, his name could have been John Keats. He was a man whose soul needed music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes. He would also have certainly been happier if he had lived in Soho or Vienna or Prague, where he could have met other writers over a glass of cheap wine in a sidewalk cafe. His letters to Derleth, Robert Blocb, and various other young writers who needed advice, reveal that he was a highly social man who longed for the company of his equals. But he was also something of a natural aristocrat, and would have found the dreary humiliations of poverty in New York or London unbearable; he preferred the second best of his own home in Providence, where at least he could be poor with a certain amount of dignity and solitude. All this meant that he was experiencing with peculiar intensity the miseries that would be experienced by millions of other ‘outsiders’ in the course of the next hundred years. 1 This is why his work has a fascination that goes beyond its actual literary qualities, and perhaps even beyond Lovecraft’s intentions. Far more than Hemingway or Faulkner, or even Kafka, he is a symbol of the outsider-artist in the 20th century.
Now that I have tried to explain my attitude to Lovecraft, it should be easier to understand what I tried to do in writing The Mind Parasites. There are obvious profound differences between my own temperament and Lovecraft’s. I am an Englishman; I was born into a working class background in the midlands—the English equivalent of America’s midwest. At the age of ten, I found my outlet in science, and then, later, in the plays of Bernard Shaw and the work of T. S. Eliot and Joyce. I started writing horror stories—much influenced by Poe and Hoffmann—at the age of fourteen. I had no alternative but to work in factories or offices after the age of sixteen. I much preferred factories—they left my mind free to think—and later on, farm labouring or ditch digging. All this, I suppose, toughened me and freed me from the outsider’s greatest enemy—his tendency to morbid self-pity. I was always as voracious a reader as Lovecraft, but my training in science—I meant to go into atomic physics at one time—gave me a tendency to look for essentials in the books I read, and to retain these in memory. The problem that interested me mainly was the problem of the outsider-artist in the 20th century, and of the violence that results when a stupid and materialistic society denies outlet to such men—and sometimes even the right to live. There were also deeper aspects of the problem that intrigued me: for example, the strange weakness of the human mind that means that although the outsider-artist longs for freedom, he often doesn’t know what to do with it when he gets it. In fact, undiluted freedom is one of the most destructive corrosives ever known; it can eat away a soul in months. Spengler was right when he called our age Faustian.
I brought together all my researches in The Outsider, and was lucky enough to make enough money and reputation to be able to devote my full time to writing, with a certainty of an audience. This made no kind of difference to my basic obsessions. In books like Religion and the Rebel and Beyond the Outsider I continued to explore the question of the outsider-artist in the 20th century, and the deeper philosophical implications of the problem. And my novels have continued to show what my critics sometimes call my ‘unhealthy preoccupation with violence’. My first, Ritual in the Dark, was a study of a sadistic killer based on Jack the Ripper and Peter Kurten. A more recent one, The Glass Cage, deals with the confrontation of a Blakeian mystic and a murderer whose crimes are based on the Cleveland Torso murders of 1935-37, and our own Thames Nude Murders of the past three years.
I have always believed that a good serious writer can use any convenient form to express his ideas. Shakespeare could write popular comedies; Dostoievsky produced romans policiers; Balzac launched his career with a series of crude ‘shockers’. I have used the crime novel—Ritual and The Glass Cage—the detective story—Necessary Doubt—science fiction—The Mind Parasites—and even the spy story in my latest novel The Black Room. In every case, it has been my aim to raise the form to a level of intellectual seriousness not usually found in the genre, but never to lose sight of the need to entertain. (I have even written a volume of tongue-in-cheek pornography and diabolism—The Sex Diary of Garard Sorme—which embodies, in fictional form, the ideas I expound in my phenomenological study, Origins of the Sexual Impulse.)
All of this should make clear why I feel such affinities with Lovecraft, and why the present volume contains my own partly tongue-in-cheek, partly affectionate tribute to him. It so happens that the Lovecraft tradition is largely my own. I feel more at home with books than with people. I take a great delight in adding authenticity to my fiction by piling—in the results of my reading, and by working out elaborate myths of metaphysical systems. So in this book I have combined Lovecraft’s preoccupation with strange unknown forces with my own interest in the problem of why the human race suddenly began to produce ‘outsiders’ in such quantity after the French Revolution.
I also realised, after I had finished the book, that I had stolen its central idea—of mind parasites—from a science fiction story I once read. In this story, the first man to travel to Mars suddenly has an experience of some strange creature wrenching itself out of his mind, and hurtling itself back screaming towards the earth, which is its home. Unfortunately, this story ended, in the rather ‘smart’ manner so characteristic of pulp science fiction, with the man landing on Mars, and immediately being possessed again by the same parasites. For some reason, writers of science fiction take a delight in pessimistic endings. (My friend A. E. Van Vogt is a remarkable exception; this is because he never ceases to be preoccupied with the problem of the superman which, like myself, he inherited from Nietzsche and Shaw.) And while I am admitting to theft (something that never bothers me since I feel that, like Shakespeare, I improve everything I steal), I may as well mention being impressed by a film called Forbidden Planet, which I saw in 1956, in which a scientist, (played by Walter Pidgeon) conjures up—without knowing it—monsters from his ‘id’,