Re: HPL & Nightmares -my essay
Posted by:
Gavin Callaghan (IP Logged)
Date: 23 October, 2011 04:58PM
Like Lovecraft, too, who, while not shy as a child, was certainly alienated from his fellows (“As a child I was very peculiar and sensitive, always preferring the society of grown persons to that of other children“ [SL I:6]; “Amongst my few playmates I was very unpopular… […] Thus repelled by humans, I sought out refuge and companionship in books“ [SL I:7]; I was “an awkward, nervous and retiring youth†[SL I:9], who was “forced by ill health to absent myself for long periods“ [I:9] from school; “The children I knew disliked me, & I disliked them†[SL I:35], etc.), one notes that Margaret Mahler’s case-study Henry is described by Mahler as being “’shy and timid’†(MAHLER 60), and as being “‘fearful of other children’†(MAHLER 60), as well as being prone to temper tantrums. (As was Lovecraft, during his younger period; as Lovecraft observed in 1919: I “hardly know what an emotion is like [outside of a few bursts of honest anger once in a while!]…†[SL I:87-88] -Lovecraft further admitting that he was “considered a bad boy“ [SL I:38] as a child, with an “ungovernable temperament“. [SL I:39]) Henry was also, one notes, like many of the male children in Mahler’s study, of “superior†(MAHLER 59) intelligence, obese in stature (Mahler calls him “flabby-looking“ [MAHLER 58]) -while “The mother and child‘s interdependence seemed to have been quite extreme at all times.†[italics Mahler‘s] (MAHLER 60) As we shall see, all of these traits -shyness, high intelligence, a temper, obesity, and an overt/ambivalent maternal bond- tend to be typical of many male tiqueurs -and they were also representative of Lovecraft. (One also notes here the marked excremental obsessions shared by Henry and his mother; as Mahler writes:
“…But in the area of anal habit training the mother also infantilized and overprotected the child. Fixation in the anal sphere was indicated by the mother’s constant watching over her son’s excretory functions. She used suppositories almost daily to ‘give him the habit of moving his bowels once a day.’ The patient would sit on the toilet from a half an hour to an hour at a time, and even when he was seven his mother would accompany him to the toilet and forbid him to flush the water before she inspected the bowel movement, The boy stated, ‘Mother always wants to see if I make enough.’†[MAHLER 59-60]
One thinks here, again, of Lovecraft‘s own excremental obsessions, and wonders if it shares a similar origin in maternal oversolicitude.)
Lovecraft’s pitiable lament, too, that “the more I was urged to stop them [the tics], the more frequent they becameâ€, Lovecraft stressing the “‘unconscious & involuntary’†(JOSHI 41) nature of his spasms, also mirrors what Mahler notes regarding the etiology of the tic, in a vicious cycle fueled by parental control. As Mahler observes, the “child becomes aware of his parents’ disapproval of the motor expression…by which he has been acting out certain impulses and affective problems. He then tends to suppress or disguise the free expression of these desires. He tries to hide his gestures and actions by automatically speeding up the sequence of motions, and/or by executing the innervations surreptitiously†(MAHLER 45-46) -after which, however, the motion “loses its discharge function†(MAHLER 46) in a relief of tensions, and becomes “a mere symbol of motions.†(MAHLER 46) Discharge often leads to punishment- which only leads to more tics. As one boy studied by Mahler pathetically observed regarding his own inability to stifle what Mahler calls his “compulsive tics†(MAHLER 80) -in this case, compulsive blinking: “’…later I couldn’t help blinking any more’†(MAHLER 80), while another boy, Mahler writes, “…felt very guilty about his coprolalic tics, and felt them to be ego-alien and overwhelming… ‘Sometimes I can hear myself saying it but sometimes it sounds so low that I don’t even hear myself saying it.’†(MAHLER 64-65)
In Lovecraft’s weird-fiction, too, this same issue of a loss of bodily control -whether as a result of feminine, lunar, or bacchanalian hypnotism, or as a result of beheading (either of the Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness; of the old gentleman by the Native Americans in “Heâ€; of Herbert West at the hands of his creations in “Reanimatorâ€; or of the masters at the hands of the peasant rabble in Lovecraft’s political essays on Bolshevism, etc.), representing a loss of voluntary mental control over the rest of the body- will reappear consistently and regularly. As ever, Lovecraft’s conservative ethos, and his obsession with hierarchy, whether of race or class, would seem to have had an ultimate psychological motivation. One thinks here, again, too, of Lovecraft’s recurring themes of mind-body transference in his dreams and stories (“The Shadow Out of Time“, “The Evil Clergyman“, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key“, “The Thing on the Doorstepâ€, etc.) Significantly in this regard, Victoria Nelson in her book The Secret Life of Puppets (2001), will likewise note what she sees as a parallel between Lovecraft’s weird-fiction, and the case-history of a German madman named Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903), whose psychosis, interestingly, also involved the same issues of bodily control by external alien powers. According to Nelson, Schreber believed he was under “continual bombardment by God’s rays†(NELSON 109), while paranoid “voices from inside told him†(109) he was the victim of an act of “‘soul murder’†(109) by his doctor; “‘No wall however thick,’ Schreber complained, ‘no closed window can prevent the ray filaments penetrating in a way incomprehensible to man and so reaching any part of my body, particularly my head.’†(NELSON 110) In much the same way, Margaret Mahler writes, children overwhelmed by tics also “constantly had to bear the experience of being overwhelmed by ego-alien unpredictable forces†(MAHLER 70-71); as Mahler goes on: “Tics are motor automatisms, which the child tiqueur considers ego-alien. Hence he constantly struggles with them by watching his bodily sensations, particularly those of his musculature, and his attitude toward his motor impulses is a mixture of awe and submission, with uncertainty as to which element will emerge victorious.†(MAHLER 104) Of course, later on in puberty and adulthood, sexuality and orgasm will be characterized by a similar such involuntary/automatic condition, especially with regard to those night flights and voluptuous dreams which so haunted Lovecraft.
Tic syndrome symptoms, according to Mahler, can usually involve “the entire striate musculature†(MAHLER 39), including “the face, neck, arms, hands, legs, abdominal wall, and the trunk. They may also involve the muscle of phonation and vocalization, resulting in grunting, barking and yelling tics, which are path gnomonic of the disease†[emphasis mine] (MAHLER 39) -all of which, of course, recalls the degenerative tics and odd behavior of Mrs. Gardner in “The Colour Out of Spaceâ€; Lovecraft, typically, inverting the symptoms of his disease by transferring them from the child onto the parent (in this case, significantly, the mother), by speaking of how Mrs. Gardner’s son “Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, …†[emphasis mine] (DH 65) Elsewhere, Mahler describes a male child she studied, whose tics developed from blinking, to arm movements, and finally to “vocal tics- animal-like grunting, barking, and squealing noises- as well as echolalia and echopraxia.“ (MAHLER 81) One thinks here, too, of such things as the “dog-like†(DH 356) gait and sub-human “bayings†(DH 360) of the batrachian Deep Ones in “The Shadow Over Innsmouthâ€, as well as the animalistic “howls and squawking ecstasies†(DH 137) of the Cthulhu cult-voodoo worshippers during the orgy-scene in “The Call of Cthulhuâ€. (Indeed, what William Seabrook, Robert Eisler and others have described as the animalistic aspects of voodoo and Dionysian ceremonies would seem to reflect a tribal/communal form of release for such unconscious animalistic behaviorisms, much in the same way that Dionysian human sacrifice reflected a communal manifestation of the homicidal instinct.) Other tics, Mahler goes on, manifest themselves in the form of “echo phenomena†(MAHLER 81), so much so that Mahler feels compelled to speak of the “tiqueur’s tendency to imitate.†Indeed, Mahler will observe that the child tiqueur is often “a talented actor†(MAHLER 83), commenting upon how “children with a disposition to a tic are commonly known as imitative and particularly talented in dramatics and otherwise†(MAHLER 85) -which further suggests the imitative aspects of the Shoggoths in Lovecraft’s weird-fiction.
The tic “movement†(MAHLER 38), according to Mahler, contains both “elements of discharge gratification and of punishment†[emphasis mine] (MAHLER 38) (cf. here, again, Lovecraft’s being “urged to stop“, which suggests some punitive measures or threats), originating from an “original, instinctual impulse†(MAHLER 38) which is being unconsciously “censored†by the child’s “superego†(i.e., the internalized restraints of society -in this case, as implemented by Lovecraft’s mother/aunts/grandmother), resulting in “a quick, more or less involuntary, repetitious gesture or movement.†(38) In many ways, indeed, Mahler goes on, the symptoms of tic syndrome represent an “attempt at relief†(MAHLER 66) from what she calls “unbearable emotion†(MAHLER 66) -emotions which, in the adult, usually find relief in sexual activity (or, in more dubious cases, sadism)- and while, as Mahler observes, the adult’s “principal organ of discharge of instinctual tension is the genital, the child’s principal means of discharge is actionâ€. (MAHLER 42) Tic syndrome, in fact, is associated by Mahler with “a chronic state of affective tension†(MAHLER 67), the tics thus representing “an attempted drainage- of the emotional tensions with a (secondary?) symbolic meaningâ€. (MAHLER 67) (Cf. here the similarly unbearable, uncontainable emotions suffered by the protagonists of Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls†and “The Loved Dead†-not to mention Lovecraft himself, who even as a young man was characterized by what friend Rheinhart Kleiner called “a certain tenseness of manner, which a stranger might have taken, in some of its manifestations, as a desire for argument.†[KLEINER 195])
Indeed, the parallels here with Lovecraft’s later weird-fiction -with its “unnamableâ€, “forbiddenâ€, unmentionable themes- are clear. Lovecraft, in other words, continued the “censoring†initially exercised by his own mother’s superego- even while the fictional medium still allowed him a certain amount of relief from the strictures which she (and later he himself) imposed. Of course, since Lovecraft would have been denied any sexual/autoerotic outlet for relief at the advent of adolescence, due to both his family’s and his own Puritanical prohibitions, one can well understand the reasons behind, and the nature of, that mental/physical implosion suffered by Lovecraft at the onset of puberty (what Lovecraft calls his “general nervous breakdown of 1908-1909†[SL I:30]), which entailed his long withdrawal from the world -Lovecraft, like his fictional Outsider, feeling himself to be guilty of some crime which he could not accept (in Lovecraft’s case, feelings of sexual desire, and perhaps furtive and ambivalent attempts at masturbation -which Lovecraft, recalling his maternal prohibitions, possibly connected with the sexuality associated with his father‘s illness.) As Lovecraft writes in a 1915 letter, “In 1908 [at age 18] I should have entered Brown University, but the broken state of my health rendered the idea absurd. I was and am prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness…†(SL I: 9) -this despite the fact that, as Lovecraft elsewhere admits, “I have no actual disease or abnormal organs†(SL I:47), and was later pronounced “so sound organically, that I fear I have many weary years to drag out, …†(SL I:47) Lovecraft’s mother, too, suffered from psychosomatic illness -as Lovecraft admitted, “Nerves have always been the bane of the Phillips family!†(SL I:83) -Lovecraft even openly observing that “my mother’s state is not dangerous; […] the apparent stomach trouble is neurotic & not organic.†(SL I:78)
Like those dandling, “ticklingâ€, childhood movements, too, which so haunted the nightmares of the young Lovecraft, and which represented stimulations of a pregenital, infantile sexuality, the tic is likewise, Mahler writes, “classified in psychoanalytic literature in the category of a pregenital conversion symptom.†(MAHLER 38) Indeed, Mahler astutely notes a similarity between tic symptoms and autoerotic habits -both of which display the same dynamics of tension and release, jerky discharge and guilty self-punishment (MAHLER 37), so that the tic is often “a masturbation equivalentâ€. (MAHLER 71) Indeed, Mahler writes, tics “frequently coinciding with or followed by a general bodily jerkiness†(MAHLER 86) sometimes appear “a few weeks after the child has given up autoerotic activities†(MAHLER 86) due to parental pressure. (Interestingly in this connection, one notes Lovecraft’s youthful setting of a small fire, which he had supposedly intended to be one foot by one foot square in size [COOK 112] -an effort which suggests both Lovecraft’s early penchant for order and control, as well as that sexual interest in fire found sometimes in children and adults; with Lovecraft’s search for control in this instance perhaps reflecting Lovecraft’s concern with that loss of control which both caused and was exemplified by his spasmodic tic symptoms.) This same concern over Lovecraft’s bodily movements and freedom, as well as Lovecraft’s ambivalent desire for liberation from the maternal hold, would likewise seem to have underlay Lovecraft’s youthful flirtation with suicide while on his exploratory bicycle rides as a youth -Lovecraft fantasizing about drowning himself in the Barrington River. Lovecraft’s bicycle represented freedom, and Lovecraft’s desire for movement -while the desire for death in the river, represented a concurrent fear of this liberation from the maternal leash, as well as a desire for a reabsorption within the mother (here represented as oblivion, whether of death, or the aquatic womb.)
Indeed, with male tiqueurs, such issues of bodily control are most often centered around the female parent. As Margaret Mahler observes, in many of the tic syndrome cases she studied, “There was a prolonged appersonation by and of the mother: a kind of emotional symbiosis between mother and son was marked by reactive overprotection, pampering, and infantilization.†(MAHLER 69) As Mahler goes on, the mother of the tiqueur often reacts to any attempt at emancipation or aggressiveness on the part of her son with a display of separation anxiety, resulting simultaneously in a display of “threats†(MAHLER 70) on the one hand, and “oversolicitude†(MAHLER 70) on the other -a dynamic reflected as much in Lovecraft’s life, as in his writings (particularly his weird-fiction, in which all attempts at parental emancipation are frustrated or stymied.) Indeed, Mahler also speaks of what she calls “the habitual typical affective attitude of the mother and the child tiqueur†(MAHLER 62), which reflects a struggle of wills, and what Mahler calls “an exceptionally violent and complex struggle between the tendency to repetitive and obstinate motor activity (the child’s impulsions), and the external forces in the environment that strive to moderate and restrict†(MAHLER 80) them. And whereas by age three or four a child normally begins attempts at some form of maternal emancipation, in the incipient tiqueur these fledgling attempts are often curtailed, resulting, Mahler writes, in a “state of being damned up†(MAHLER 70) -crystallizing, Mahler writes, “into the involuntary motor symptoms of true tics†(MAHLER 38) “at school age†(38), the very time, again, of the first manifestation of Lovecraft’s tic symptoms.
As Mahler observes, some tiqueurs:
“…from early age on were prohibited from crying, shouting, running, hammering, or playing with abandon, because of over concern for some member of the family or neighbor [in Lovecraft‘s case, perhaps his disturbed father, or his dour grandmother]. More pathogenic still was the indirect and subtle restriction….through the mother’s emotional attitude toward the son‘s motor independence (e.g., constant admonition about all the risks concerned with freedom of activity, watching over every move, etc.)†(MAHLER 68-69)
As Mahler concludes, “The combined effects of their position and their mother’s neuroses resulted in […] an emotional interdependence which made these children peculiarly susceptible to psychosomatic disease†(MAHLER 69) -with the tic sufferer “afraid not only to show aggression, but to move about freely lest they lose their mother’s love, or hurt themselves.“ (MAHLER 70) All of this, of course, more than adequately describes the troubled, overprotective relationship between his mother and Lovecraft; as early Lovecraft-biographer L. Sprague de Camp explains:
“Without her husband, Susie [Lovecraft] became obsessed by the idea that little Howard was all she had. Since her narrow interests were now concentrated on her son, she protected, coddled, pampered, and indulged the boy to a degree that even the staunchest advocate of permissive upbringing might deem excessive. From the Victorian rocking chair in which she used to rock him to sleep while singing airs from Pinafore and The Mikado, she had the ornamental knobs planed off lest he hurt himself on them. Furthermore:
“‘On their summer vacations at Dudley, Massachusetts….Mrs. Lovecraft refused to eat her dinner in the dining room, not to leave her sleeping son alone for an hour on the floor above. When a diminutive teacher friend Mrs. Sweeney, took the rather rangy youngster for a walk, holding his hand, she was enjoined by Howard’s mother to stoop a little lest she pull the boy’s arm from its socket. When Howard pedaled his tricycle along Angell Street, his mother trooped beside him, a guarding hand upon his shoulder.’†(deCAMP 2)
(Cf. here, again, the aged witch Keziah Mason’s seizing of the sleeping Walter Gilman by his “shoulders†[MM 286] at the beginning of a nocturnal/voluptuous night flight, Lovecraft’s maternal bond here being transfigured into a dream of sexual domination and control.)
As Lovecraft observed in 1919, regarding his mother’s sudden absence from their household (right before her final illness), she has left “my younger aunt as autocrat of this dwelling. My aunt does splendidly- …†[emphasis mine] (SL I:78); of course, if Lovecraft’s aunt is only merely now assuming such a position, then it means his mother was likewise an autocrat, as well. Indeed, as Lovecraft elsewhere avers, “I am obliged to look forward to a long & dreary interval wherein home will be but half a home for want of its dominant figure.“ [emphasis mine] (SL I:81) Susan Lovecraft also controlled her son’s friendships, too -Lovecraft referring in 1918 to how, at age fifteen, he had “frequently†(SL I:70) “entertained†(I:70) another young boy in “my libraryâ€, “despite maternal protest.“ [emphasis mine] (SL I:70) Lovecraft’s futile attempt at maternal emancipation in 1917, too, in the form of his abortive enlistment with the Rhode Island National Guard, reveals the extent and nature of his mother’s prohibitions and control. As Lovecraft explains:
“As you may have deduced, I embarked upon this desperate venture without informing my mother; & as you may also have deduced, the sensation created at home was far from slight. In fact, my mother was almost prostrated with the news, … […] Her activities soon brought my military career to a close for the present… […] My mother has threatened to go to any lengths, legal or otherwise, … […] If I had realised to the full how much she would suffer through my enlistment, I should have been less eager to attempt it; … […] Still, I might have known that mothers are always solicitous for their offspring, no matter how worthless said offspring may happen to be!†(SL I:46)
For weeks afterward, Lovecraft would still be writing of what he calls “…the almost frantic attitude of my mother; who makes me promise every time I leave the house that I will not make another attempt at enlistment!†(SL I:48) One thinks here of what Lovecraft calls that “some kind of restlessness†(D 191) of young Jan Martense in “The Lurking Fearâ€, a restlessness which impels Martense to leave his incestuous “paternal roof†(D 191) and join “the colonial army†(D 191), after which he was “hated as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers†(60) -Lovecraft’s racism and his devotion to family coexisting uneasily with an unconscious realization of and revulsion against the taboo of incest, which is closely allied with the error of racism; what Lovecraft here accurately calls the twin “peculiarities and prejudices of the Martenses, …†(60) As ever, incest (peculiarities) and racism (prejudices) go hand in hand. (Interestingly, in her 1946 follow-up study of several male child tiqueurs now entering young adulthood, Mahler found that out of ten males studied, seven had reached military age [MAHLER 91], and that four of the seven had been classified 4F [i.e. unfit], three for mental reasons.) Cf. here, too, the bizarre incident of Lovecraft’s mother and the milk, described by Rheinhart Kleiner as occurring during his first visit to Lovecraft‘s home, “his mother†(KLEINER 196) appearing “in the doorway with a glass of milk†(196) “at every hour†(196), “and Lovecraft forthwith drank it†-an idea perhaps later reflected in the nurse/nursing language in Lovecraft’s weird stories. (DH 47, D 85, DH 277) Indeed, Lovecraft’s weird-fiction, despite what some Lovecraft critics and readers have seen as the lack of female figures in his writings, is replete with images of feminine and maternal domination and control.
And while Lovecraft was able to affirm, elsewhere, that “My family are as delightful and kind as any family could be -my mother is a positive marvel of consideration-†(SL I:69), his mother’s kindness and pampering solicitude were also a prison, which were partially responsible for the psychosomatic illnesses from which Lovecraft suffered, both within and outside her presence. (As Lovecraft observed at the beginning of his mother’s 1919 illness, during her absence: “I cannot eat, nor can I stay up long at a time. Pen-writing or typewriting nearly drives me insane. But my nervous system seems to find its vent in feverish & incessant scribbling with a pencil…†[SL I:78]) One sees a parallel here, between what Mahler terms the alternating and interrelated “threats†and “over solicitude†(MAHLER 70) in the mother-child relationship of tic syndrome sufferers, in which “separation from the mother -amounting to not more than a gradual psychobiological separation tendency on the part of the child- was felt as a threat and reciprocated by threats, on the one hand, and increased oversolicitude on the other.†(MAHLER 70) As Lovecraft’s wife Sonia later observed, Susan Lovecraft “‘lavished both her love and her hate on her only child.‘†(JOSHI 85)
“An only child,†Lovecraft writes in “The Thing on the Doorstepâ€, “he [Edward Derby] had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents [tic symptoms?] and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side.†[emphasis mine] (DH 277) Strong language indeed- “chainedâ€; suggestive of a prison-like atmosphere, perhaps also reflected in the charnel, dungeon-like atmosphere of the childhood-scenes in Lovecraft‘s “The Outsider.†“He [Derby] was never allowed out without his nurse,†Lovecraft goes on, “and seldom had a chance to play unconstrained with other children†(DH 277) -with “imagination†(277) being “his one avenue of freedom.†(That- and perhaps also tic-like seizures.) And, like Lovecraft, who never stayed away from home overnight until well into adulthood, Derby’s “parents would not let him board away from them.†(DH 278) That these issues of dominance and control are primarily associated with Derby’s mother, meanwhile, is demonstrated by the thirty-four-year-old Derby’s eventual reaction to his mother’s death, Derby being “incapacitated†(DH 279) for months “by some odd psychological malady†(279), after which “he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.†(In “The Shunned Houseâ€, too, Lovecraft will prove to be quite acute in his diagnosis of his tic symptoms, and their origin in an interdependent and destructive relationship between his mother and himself: Lovecraft observing how “The boy would seem to improve after these visits [to his cousin], and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with Peleg.†[MM 242])
Later on, too, even after Derby’s mother has been replaced by his sinister wife, Asenath Waite, Derby’s principle complaint about Asenath is the threat of physical control over his body -suggestive as much of the involuntary physical processes of intercourse and orgasm, as of the ineluctable dominance of the parent over the child. “She [Asenath] was getting hold of him,†Lovecraft writes, “and he knew that some day she would never let go†[emphasis mine] (DH 288); Asenath “constantly took his body†(DH 288) Lovecraft tells us, “leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs†(DH 288) (one being reminded, here, of a mother punishing a “bad boy†by locking him in his room.) As Derby complains, Asenath is “stealing my body-crowding me out-making a prisoner of me†(DH 293) -Derby’s complaint eventually dissolving into a delirium, in which the sexual/nocturnal realm of Lovecraft’s nightmares is confused with the unstoppable “force“ of a dominant mother‘s power:
“-Again, again-she’s trying-I might have known-nothing can stop that force; not distance nor magic, nor death-it comes and comes, mostly in the night-I can’t leave-it’s horrible-oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is…†[emphasis mine] (DH 297)
Lovecraft visits this same theme of overt maternal control in his fantasy story “Celephaisâ€, in which Kuranes only finds happiness as a child during one afternoon, “when he had slipt away from his nurse… […] He had protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him home, …†[emphasis mine] (D 85) -much in the same way, again, that the Night Gaunts carried away the hapless sleeping Lovecraft. Cf. here, too, “The Dreams in the Witch Houseâ€, in which “the old woman [witch Keziah Mason] had been†(MM 289) seen “dragging the youth [Walter Gilman]†[emphasis mine] (MM 289) after her through the mud en route to an act of child sacrifice, with Gilman himself being described in infantile terms as “a young white man in his night-clothes.†(MM 289) During the act of sacrifice itself, too, Gilman is described as being “unable to control his own motions†(MM 291) -which, again, recalls Mahler’s association of the origin of tic symptoms in the “parents’ disapproval of the motor expression (in speech and behavior) by which he has been acting out certain impulses and affective problems.†(MAHLER 45) In Lovecraft and C.M. Eddy’s disturbing and necrophilic “The Loved Deadâ€, too, Lovecraft/Eddy will refer to maternal control twice -tantalizingly, in the context of the death of the narrator’s “grandparentâ€. (HM 350) And both times, it is a blow from the mother’s elbow which serves to disturb the son’s nascent sexual/necrophilic reveries: “Roused from my momentary reverie by a nudge from my mother’s sharp elbow, I followed her across the room to the casket where the body of my grandparent lay.†(HM 349-350) While at the coffin, too, it is “the vigorous prod of a maternal elbow†(HM 350) which suddenly “jarred me into activity.â€
In “The Colour Out of Spaceâ€, meanwhile, as we have already seen, Lovecraft will obviously invert/reverse the symptoms of his childhood chorea, instead attributing them to the mother in the story; who is surely, given what Mahler has to say about the origins of male tic syndrome in overt maternal control over the child, an appropriate target for such an inversion. As Lovecraft observes -closely reflecting what Mahler also has to say about the interdependent and ambivalent nature of mother-son relationships in such instances (and incidentally caricaturing and diagnosing his own maternal difficulties as he does so)- “In the twilight he [Ammi] hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears†[emphases mine] (DH 68) -the shared madness of mother and son feeding off of and further reinforcing each other. Despite his fictional medium, Lovecraft was very acute in his diagnosis. Lovecraft also strengthens this connection with his own tic symptoms when he describes how the two Gardner boys, Thaddeus and Merwin, suddenly withdrew from school -closely paralleling Lovecraft’s own withdrawal from school due to tic symptoms: “…the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension,†[emphasis mine] (DH 66) Lovecraft writes; “They shunned people, and when school opened the boys did not go†(66) (Lovecraft’s diagnosis here of “nervous tension†also being surprisingly acute, and further paralleling Margaret Mahler’s own diagnosis of the origins of tic syndrome, in unresolved infantile tensions which have no outlet save for uncontrollable tics.) This pathological interdependence between mother and sons finally culminates in Thaddeus’ eventual madness -Thaddeus being shut “in an attic room across the hall from his mother’s†(DH 66); after which, in an echo of the obscene/coprolalic seizures of some tic syndrome and chorea sufferers, mother and son begin to talk to each other in a glossolalic idiom incomprehensible to everyone else: “The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth.†(DH 66) Later on, after Thaddeus dies, Lovecraft will further connect the madness of Mrs. Gardner with her children, writing of how “Now and then Merwin’s screams were answered faintly from the attic†(DH 67) -suggesting direct connection between the turmoil experienced by Merwin and the mental state of the mother.
It is also possible that Lovecraft’s grandmother was another source of unwanted or overt familial control; certainly, Lovecraft’s fleeting description of Rhoby Place suggests a formidable person -a presumably religious Victorian woman who was educated “at Lapham Seminary†(SL I:7), further described as “a serene, quiet lady of the old school†(SL I:33), who, Lovecraft admits, “did her best to correct my increasingly boorish deportment -for my nervousness made me a very restless & uncontrollable child.†[emphases mine] (SL I:33) Here, just as in “The Dreams in the Witch Houseâ€, in which the crone Keziah Mason controls Gilman’s movements with her grip on his pajamas, we can see an aged, stern female disciplinarian attempting to control Lovecraft’s restless and uncontrollable motions. And, just as in “The Colour Out of Spaceâ€, in “The Shunned House†Lovecraft will invert/reverse his own chorea/tic syndrome symptoms onto a dominant female figure: in this case “The widowed Rhoby Harris†(MM 241), who likewise seems to be suffering from tics involving coprolalic obscenities/vocal paroxysms. As Lovecraft observes here about Rhoby, “Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say†(MM 242), Rhoby giving voice “to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort†(MM 242) during her “long periods“ (MM 243) of “madness†(MM 242) -language as fitting for coprolalic/sexual obscenities as it is for the language of occult transgression.
One discerns an overriding concern with parental/maternal control, too, in Lovecraft’s recurring picture of child sacrifice and child murder throughout his weird canon, often at the hands of a dominant female figure. Cf. here what Lovecraft calls the “small white figure -an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious†(MM 291) (also called “the small white victim†[emphasis mine] [MM 291] -language which presents a startling contrast with Lovecraft’s numerous instances, elsewhere, of parental giganticism), who is sacrificed by “the ancient crone†(MM 291) in “The Dreams in the Witch Houseâ€, and whom Lovecraft pointedly juxtaposes with “the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, …†(MM 291) One thinks here of the Magna Mater in Lovecraft‘s “The Rats in the Wallsâ€, there juxtaposed with the castrative rites of Atys, and associated with an unending ossuary of countless skeletons from millennia of the Delapores’ acts of human sacrifice. And in “The Dreams in the Witch House“, too, Lovecraft ends his story with the shocking discovery in witch Keziah Mason’s former loft of “a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children -some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete†(MM 298) -Lovecraft further refining his ossuary-picture in the latter tale, into an image in closer concordance with the psychological and childhood origins of Lovecraft’s imagery; the Magna Mater kills/castrates her own children. Cf. here, too, what Lovecraft calls “the blood of stainless childhood†(D 260) which is spilled to satisfy the “phosphorescent Lilith†[emphasis mine] (260) in “The Horror at Red Hook†-a phosphorescence, intriguingly, which is later replicated by Mrs. Gardner in “The Colour Out of Spaceâ€, who is, Lovecraft tells us, seen to be “slightly luminous in the dark†(DH 65) ! (All imagery which represents the malevolent obverse of that divine luminosity which characterizes the “radiant pair†[HM 14] in “The Crawling Chaos.â€)
Margaret Mahler lists a series of very specific traits which are characteristic of the male child tiqueur. The personality of the tiqueur, she writes, presents “very constant and typical traits. It is characterized by a peculiar mixture of high intellectual endowment, emotional immaturity, and proneness to intermittent affect motor outbursts (temper tantrums)†[emphasis mine] (MAHLER 39) -tantrums which Mahler goes on to connect with the same “suppressed aggression†and “affective tension†(MAHLER 52) which supposedly underlie tic syndrome itself. As Mahler goes on elsewhere, “all children with organ neurotic tic syndrome (except those with organic brain damage) had an I.Q. which placed them into the bracket of superior intelligence.†(MAHLER 59) The tiqueur too, Mahler goes on, is typically male (MAHLER 67), (a fact which Mahler associates with the close integration of the male “neuromuscular apparatus†[MAHLER 67] with its function “as the organ of erotic, aggressive attack.†[67]) The tiqueur is likewise, according to Mahler, typically obese (MAHLER 68), with 50% of the male tiqueurs that Mahler studied/treated being overweight (MAHLER 51) -a fact which, again, presents an interesting parallel with both Lovecraft himself, as well as Lovecraft’s fiction.
Early on, indeed, Lovecraft was, as Muriel Eddy observes, “inclined to plumpness†(EDDY 51); he loved fattening foods like ice cream and candy; and the photographs of a young adult Lovecraft in 1922, reprinted on page 84 of Willis Conover’s Lovecraft at Last, do reveal a rather more stout Lovecraft than one is used to from later photographs. As an amused Lovecraft later wrote to Robert Bloch in 1933:
“Someday, when in a comedy mood, I’ll send you a snap or two of Grandpa taken in the 1922-24 period. Can you imagine my trunk hitched to a fat man’s face? Incidentally, it was during my fat period that I had my only personal meeting with our friend Moe- what a mental picture he must carry!†(SL IV:204)
Of course, Lovecraft was in his thirties when these pictures were taken, but it may be that he was also stout during certain periods as a child, especially with his mother plying him with a glass of milk every hour. One recalls here, too, the numerous incidences of corpulence (the plump Norrys in “The Rats in the Wallsâ€; the fat cook in “The Moon Bogâ€; and the corpulent Suydham in “The Horror at Red Hookâ€) in Lovecraft’s weird-fiction -as well as the notable baby fat seen on the precocious but immature Edward Derby in “The Thing on the Doorstepâ€, Lovecraft writing of the “sickly flabbiness caused by his [Derby‘s] indolent habits.†(DH 288) Tellingly, all of these male figures end up being sacrificed to female fertility figures in Lovecraft’s fiction (the Magna Mater in “Ratsâ€; Demeter [i.e., “the motherâ€] in “The Moon Bogâ€, Asenath in “Doorstepâ€, and Lilith in “Red Hookâ€) -a fact which mirrors Mahler’s own supposition that the obesity of such male tiqueurs is seen by them as paralleling female pregnancy and fertility. As Mahler writes, the obesity of certain child tiqueurs would seem to unconsciously reflect “their wanting to have babies, to be pregnant†(MAHLER 68), with the murder of these men in Lovecraft‘s weird-fiction perhaps being an instance of vengeful female deities revenging themselves for the usurpation of their “stolen†procreative function.
The typical tiqueur too, Mahler goes on, is also usually “inhibited, often depressed, anxious†(MAHLER 58), and usually had no “athletic pursuits and avoided the competitive games of contemporaries.†(MAHLER 58) He often suffered from “an accumulation of sicknesses which restricted motor freedom†(MAHLER 68), there often being a “cumulation of childhood diseases at the period of learning to master the independent motility function“. (68) Likewise, the child tiqueur also often demonstrated “a tendency toward accidents†(68), as well as (much like H.P. Lovecraft) a tendency toward “hypochondriacal self-observation.†(MAHLER 87) Much like H.P. Lovecraft, too, the tiqueur often:
“…occupied a position of abnormally increased importance in the family setting. In about 90 percent of our cases tiqueurs occupied an inordinately important or exceptional position within the family group. This position became their either because they were the only children or ‘the baby’, sometimes of old parents; or they were the first living child (in six cases, after miscarriages, death of older siblings or habitual abortions); or they were ‘only sons’ among several sisters.†(MAHLER 69)
Lovecraft, of course, fits this profile precisely. Lovecraft’s high intellect, his aversion to physical sports, and his emotional stuntedness, are easily confirmable. Lovecraft also suffered from numerous bouts of illness and accidents as a child, and apparently fell on his head while exploring a neighboring construction site. As young as seven in 1898, Joshi writes, Lovecraft “had his first nervous breakdown†(JOSHI 40), while “Another ‘near-breakdown’ occurred in 1900†(40), Lovecraft reporting that “‘I didn‘t inherit a very good set of nerves, since near relatives on both sides of my ancestry were prone to headaches, nerve-exhaustion, and breakdowns.’†(JOSHI 40) Lovecraft, indeed, was often inclined, especially in early-life, to hypochondria: describing himself as an “invalid†-an idea which sometimes startled his correspondents when they finally met him in person- and found him (much like Thomas F. Malone in “The Horror at Red