The Surrealists were the cutting edge of wild living and the Avant Garde during the 1920s and 1930s. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was perhaps the most physically conservative and simply materialistic human being on the planet, creating the persona of a literary gentleman two centuries earlier. Lovecraft despised the Surrealists as degenerates with the venom of the Nazis. The Surrealists would have considered Lovecraft beneath their contempt. So how do these two unlikely opposites come to the same conclusions about the modern world between World Wars?
The Dadaist, from which the Surrealist group sprang, were a revolt against the horror of the First World War, where every bit on human invention and progress was turned into creating a better way to kill. A group of deserters formed in Zurich and started attacking art through art. To their surprise, it proved successful, at lest in attracting the attention of the critics, who were desperate to find the Next Big Thing. Too insane for their own good, they were in perpetual self-destruct mode until Andre Breton joined and took over as leader around 1924.
Lovecraft was the crustiest of old New Englanders, from Rhode Island, with a (probably) syphilitic father and insane mother. His self-loathing seem to know no bounds, and he created the first true body horror. A terminally lonely child, he devoured the literature of the 17th and early 18th centuries. He fancied himself a man of leisure despite a bankrupt family fortune, but he did have a natural talent for science, especially astronomy. Amateur journalism, the blogging of the early 20th century, gave him an outlet and a reputation, although it would haunt him until today. HP loved a good flame war, and racially charged subject matter seemed a specialty in his earliest days.
Lovecraft's eventual salvation came from the most unlikely of pulp sources, 'Weird Tales'. He had turned to writing horror stories, mostly in imitation of Edgar Poe and other favorites, but he survived meagerly on ghost writing fiction. 'The Loved Dead', one of his grisliest rewrites, created a sensation of bad publicity for the mag in 1924, helping it maintain its unsteady financial situation. Farnsworth Wright, the terminally unhealthy editor, wanted Lovecraft to take over the publication, but since it would mean a move away from Rhode Island, it was never seriously considered.
In Paris, Breton managed to harness the disparate Dadaists into a powerhouse new group, the Surrealists. It has always seemed strange that this group of insanely individualist artists and writers would allow themselves to succumb to the fascist leadership of Breton, who held congresses, demanded communist affiliation, and would resort to 'exiling' members, but there it is. The Surrealist went through European history and re-wrote it to their specification, and they created plays and films as well a literature and poetry. But it is mostly the paintings that we remember today.
Mostly forgotten today, the Surrealists were really a literary movement away from all of the standards of the previous generations, including logic and taste. The goal was to go beyond where so-called 'civilization' and logic, leading human thought to a new place, where random thoughts and items would spark completely new associations. Freud and psychoanalysis was still pretty fresh, so it was from the unconscious and dreams that these Continentals wanted to find their inspiration. Automatic writing, trance states, and the recording of dreams upon awakening were just some of the techniques used to capture the unconscious.
The Second World War wasn't kind to the Surrealist as a group, although Andre Breton worked hard to rally the troops despite being branded as a money-hungry traitor who ran at the first sign of trouble. Surrealist techniques did start slowly spreading into fiction outside the group, most notably in the works of William Burroughs. He devised cut-up techniques, throwing words in a bad and pulling them out at random to find new connections without use of his conscious intellect. Burroughs was one of the key Beats, although his influence became more pronounced in the 1960s.
J. G. Ballard, subject of a previous post on this blog, was an English author who managed to bring the techniques of the Surrealists and Burroughs into a pulp based genre, science fiction. Starting in 1966 with 'The Atrocity Exhibit', Ballard threw out the idea of a linear narrative or logical progression. Even though his fiction was classified as speculative, not a space ship is in sight, at least not one in working order. Vast desolate landscapes offer his protagonists the room to move around their interior spaces.
What Lovecraft had in common with all the above writers was a rigid scientific skepticism with no room for religion or the supernatural. It was ironic that he found his home in 'Weird Tales', because he never used any of the normal baggage of a horror writer. Instead, it was the fear of knowledge that was at the root of every story that HP ever wrote. Dream states also played a huge part in his work
'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.' That is the first line of perhaps Lovecraft's most famous story, 'The Call of Cthulhu'. The real monster is not the vague, huge alien entities used as the deux ex machina in some of his more popular fiction, but the human brain's insistence on logic and making connections. Too many of the writers who followed Lovecraft have obsessed on his trivia while missing the boat completely on the horror; mankind is heading for a cataclysm due to the search for new progress. This is the exact same viewpoint as the Surrealists.
"Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all'; that was Andre Breton's famous one line definition of Surrealism. To Lovecraft, horror was beauty, for why else would he devote so much of his life convincing his readers that he was genuinely afraid of those things that he was writing of? Notice how many times, by the end of the story, the very speech pattern of the protagonist has been reduced to incoherence, not to mention the physical state. "Rats in the Walls', 'The Thing on the Doorstep', 'The Haunter of the Dark' and so many others have narrators that have transcended being human, instead reduced to a primal state.
How many times does knowledge lead to madness or worse in the works of Lovecraft? That was perhaps his greatest theme; time and again, the natural curiosity of his characters reveals some fact that shakes the very foundation of time and space. Lovecraft was in fact a science fiction writer, just so ahead of his time that there wasn't any real market for what he was creating. 'Weird Tales' grew tired of his long, verbose and carefully crafted work, although after his death in 1937 they scored his estate for any scrap to publish.
Curiously, like Breton, Lovecraft had a great many disciples, although in his case there was no tyrannical set of rules. Generations of young writers have been captivated by some essence of Lovecraft, usually only partially understood, a sense of foreboding as the human race marches blindly into the future. Unlike Breton, his influence has only grown over time, going from relative obscurity at death to dismissal during his first revival. Now, Lovecraft is a firm part of popular culture, influencing film and gaming as much as literature. He has even infiltrated politics, perhaps the greatest act of Surrealism related to his life.
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