Hi, everyone, thanks for reading! This is the first in a series of entries that I hope to write on H.P. Lovecraft and those inspired by his works. While I will eventually get to his better known (and, quite frankly, better all around) works later, I decided to begin by examining one of his less-known pieces of short fiction — for reasons that I will explain at the end. I hope you enjoy.
“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer demoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species – if separate species we be – for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.”
With that glorious bit of prose begins “Facts concerning the late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” a 1920 story in which we can see several of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's key themes at work – shocking hidden knowledge, mysterious ancient civilizations, the dark secrets that lurk in hidden corners of the Earth, family history and degeneracy, a puritanical disdain for anything remotely fun, and starkly unforgivable racism. As is the case with many of his stories, there is a lot to talk about, but in this post I’ll be focusing on the idea of The Secret Man Was Not Meant to Know and how, in this story, it merged rather oddly with his deeply embedded racism.
Let's begin with a quick plot summary. The unidentified narrator, closer in feel to an omniscient storyteller than any embodied character, tells the history of the Jermyn family. The Jermyn family had been forever affected deeply by the travels and research of its greatest member, Sir Wade Jermyn, who had traveled on an archaeological expedition in the mid 1700's, and returned with a native bride. His descendants were various degrees of not right, either drawn to “low pursuits,” mad, or both. The cycle seemed to have run its course by the time of Arthur Jermyn, who was strikingly ugly yet possessed of a delicate artistic nature, a solid intellect, and the moral fiber appropriate to one of his class and station – or at least it seemed that way, until he burned himself to death in a fit of madness, after opening a rather peculiar package.
Lovecraft sets the story up with mysterious hints at a dark secrets to be revealed, and slowly reveals the facts of the case one after the other, coyly avoiding the direct reveal until the moment the truth is revealed to doomed Arthur Jermyn himself. The disembodied third-person investigator is one of Lovecraft’s favorite perspectives, allowing him to focus entirely on the details of history and the process of the investigation without letting messy things like character and dialog to get in his way. The mystery slowly revealed is one of his favorite structures, hooking the reader with a grisly promise and building suspensefully towards the mind-shattering reveal. And yet, in this particular story, that very reveal falls a bit flat for modern readers -- for reasons that are particularly revealing.
If you want to read the story with a clean slate, do so before reading on.
Here is my unkind summary of what was really going on. Old Sir Wade had discovered a lost city in the Congo, built by an ancient white civilization, in the 1700’s. Those whites have degenerated into some odd sort of white ape, and Sir Wade marries one of their princesses and sires a family of half-breed children. The family line is tainted by this miscegenation, turning out several generations of heirs who are unfit for their station in life in various ways, until Arthur Jermyn. He alone of the line has the brains and the mental stability to assemble the clues left by his distant ancestor, and to figure out the truth. Arthur goes to the Congo himself, finds the city again, and hears the local legends about it. This leads him to acquire a bizarre idol from the kindly Belgian colonial government (ha!), an idol that had formerly been worshiped by the city's ape-like residents. The idol is shipped to him in England, and when he opens the box, he quickly realizes THE HORRIBLE TRUTH – his distant grandmother had been a monkey! Oh noes! Clearly, the only thing left to do is to commit suicide by immolation, because that horrible truth is one which the mind simply cannot contain, or something.
So, yeah, this story is easy to dismiss as racist trash. Its key plot points and the climax only gain their full meaning if read with a racist mental framework. OF COURSE the lost city could not have been built by the African people – just look at them! OF COURSE the whites there had degenerated into strange half-apes – few in number, they would have had no choice but to interbreed with their black neighbors, which we all know does not end well. (If you are having trouble making the leap between “white apes” and a racist fear of miscegenation, just remember that when the good folks over at Stormfront post a Harambe meme, it is not because of they support animal rights.) OF COURSE the Jermyn family had been irrevocably damaged by Sir Wade's insane disregard for racial purity, and OF COURSE this would result in strikingly ugly features and a taste for classless pursuits such as the music hall, drinking and gambling. And OF COURSE good Arthur, a delicate and artistic soul, would be shattered by the knowledge that his family line had been adulterated. With his opening statement, Lovecraft is implying that one of the demoniacal truths that will ultimately be revealed by science is that there is only one human species, and that this is one of those un-guessed horrors which the human brain cannot bear.
The “Secret Man is Not Meant to Know” is a classic Lovecraftian trope, and let’s think about the nature of that secret for a moment. What does it really say, that for Lovecraft the fact of miscegenation, and thus the proof of the unity of the human species, (something that was actively contested by the scientific racism of his day,) is a Secret Man is Not Meant to Know? What does it say, that Arthur found the fact of his mixed ancestry so horrible that it drove him to suicide, mentally crushed by unbearable knowledge? Well, it says that Lovecraft was deeply racist, yes, but it also points to a strand in Lovecraft's work that is, perhaps, somewhat different than in later “Lovecraftian” works. As the opening quote states, the true horrors that will be unleashed by science are not something that will actually physically destroy us. They are secrets that will destroy our will to live, that will break our faith in civilization, in progress, and in everything good and true in this world, and thereby leave us with nothing. Lovecraft proposes that it is our faith in order, in progress, in science, in white racial superiority, and in civilization that keeps us going in the modern era, and that if our faith in these things should be shattered than we will be unable to cope, and we will not be able to go on living our lives as normal. After learning a Secret Man was Not Meant to Know, Lovecraft’s protagonists cannot simply accept that everything they believed about white civilization and humanity was wrong, and move on, and they cannot simply forget about the unknowable secret because it is too shocking and immense to bear. Arthur's response is typical in the Lovecraftian cannon, though Arthur was a bit more decisive than most in choosing the quick death, without even taking time to write a blood-curdling narrative justifying the act.
And what is it here that breaks Arthur's will to live, that thing which is too horrible to contemplate? Is it just the fact that his family is tainted, or is it the much greater horror of the unity of the human species? The idea that we are all equally human, and that the so-called savages of Africa are really no different from an English lord? That our (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) civilization might one day collapse, and that we might degenerate to the level of the savages mercifully kept under the heel of Empire? That the whole Imperial project is fundamentally misguided, and that racism and segregation are not right and proper but rather a baseless expression of cruelty? If all that was revealed to one, in a single moment, how could one go on living? Ahem. This was a secret so horrible that it not only drove Arthur Jermyn to suicide, but which prompted his colleagues at the University to destroy the box, its contents, and all records explaining its significance. After all, how could they ever admit that they had treated a half-breed freak as an equal? No, better to deny that there had ever been an Arthur Jermyn, and hope the world forgets.
So, the wages of whiteness were suddenly revealed to Arthur, and it killed him. Well, probably not in Lovecraft's mind, but it's an interesting way to think about it.
Why dwell on this story, when there are so many other, clearly better examples of Lovecraft’s writing? Why not jump straight to At the Mountains of Madness, or The Color out of Space, or The Call of Cthulhu? Why dwell on his racism at all, when it is so obvious and well known? Well, that racism is exactly the reason. It is far to easy to ignore it when looking at something like At the Mountains of Madness, where it is a tangential strand in a larger and much more interesting narrative. By looking at a story where it is front and center, and examining it closely, it will be easier to tease apart the strains in his better work that are clearly derived from this racism, and those which are far more interesting and worthwhile. There are aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction that have proven to be incredibly enduring and influential, and because of that it is tempting to focus in entirely on those more interesting bits, and forget about the other, more troubling aspects of his writing. I do not intend to do this, and I want that to be clear right from the start.