Most people returning from New England in autumn think pleasant
recollections of yellow-red leaves, apple pie, white church steeples against
blue heavens, maple syrup, quaint covered bridges, and rolling hills of
brightly colored trees.
But I think of H.P. Lovecraft.
It doesn’t matter that the sun shone for the two days I
was there (in Vermont, in October at peak foliage intensity), that all the
people I met were friendly, that the town where I stayed (Woodstock) was lovely
and welcoming, and that the forest trails to the nearby mountain tops provided
delightful and peaceful excursions.
None of that counts.
When I come home from an autumn trip, the first thing I want are the
gloomy, mysterious, lurking, frightful, and threatening words of H.P.
Lovecraft. Like the start of “The
Dunwich Horror” where a man takes a wrong turn in New England and—
. . . he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the
brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty,
curving road. The trees of the frequent
forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a
luxuriance not often found in settled regions. . . . When a rise in the road
brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange
uneasiness is increased. The summits are
too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness . . .
The objects seen are not frightening in
themselves—the ground, the stone walls, the curving road, the trees, the
grasses, the mountains, the summits.
It’s the way they’re
described, the words chosen: “lonely and
curious,” “press closer and closer,” “too large,” “wild,” “not often found,”
“deep,” “strange uneasiness.” Lovecraft
is famous for taking objects that normally have standard “comfort and
naturalness,” but then layering them with emotional adjectives that spawn an
inescapable tension and fear. Nothing really threatening appears, but the
perception of it, the emotional reaction to it, makes the mood so uneasy. Mountain
tops being “rounded and symmetrical” are harmless, but if they’re “too” rounded
and symmetrical, then just that one word makes things suddenly weird.
For
me, this stylistic game-playing is the great attraction to Lovecraft. Even if such impressions are forced, a
product of imposing emotional reactions onto harmless objects, the overall mood
is still convincing. His New England is not the one I
encountered, but I still like to read of it—imagine it, feel it—when I get back home from it. Keep the maple sugar! In autumn, I want hints of cosmic terror, a lurking
shadow of something not right behind the landscape—an ambiguity, a touch of
vast and sinister presences “out there.”
As said in “The Colour
Out of Space,” “It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or
handled, but because of something that is imagined.”
When
I was a kid, my family used to go for weekends to a hunting camp in northern
Pennsylvania, and my favorite time was in the fall. Of course, there was all that color and
scenery, but what struck me more was the sense of decay. Of fleeting time, of
all that you see accelerating into an unreachable past. Change is so obvious in autumn—each day
brings more leaves to the ground. And it
produces a sense of growing vulnerability:
the trees become more bare, the woods open and reveal themselves, lose
their protection, lose their cover. And since the nights grow longer, and the
camp was near the top of a mountain, the night skies seemed closer, to the
point where we could almost touch them—and if we could touch the stars, then they
could reach down and touch us.
The bunk
I slept in was on top, close to the ceiling . . . closer to the sky.
Can you
feel that Lovecraft mood creeping in?
As said in “The Colour Out of Space,” “at twilight . . . I vaguely wished some
clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had
crept into my soul.” And: “I hurried back before sunset to my hotel,
unwilling to have the stars come out above me . . . the sinister stars.”
While I was lying in the bunk alone and listening to the
wind outside in the dark, another Lovecraft quote would be appropriate: “in the autumn of the year, when the winds
from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter
things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning
moon” (“Polaris”).
The season of fall always brings impressions of
Lovecraft. In Vermont I saw Halloween
decorations, even a shish-kabob totem tree of pumpkins on top of each other. But I felt no feelings of ominous haunts. I crossed and photographed a covered bridge,
but the sun was glorious and no headless horseman seemed near. I even saw a lurking full moon pass in and
out of clouds and paint baleful glows on white churches, but no hidden demons
emerged. And though the woods were
sometimes quite dark with un-illuminated black hemlocks, and though the skies did
become overcast and make the hills seem to close in with hidden threats, any
sense of menace didn’t stay long.
Still, I’ll take Lovecraft’s moods. They bring back what always
made autumn so attractive and so haunting to me. They capture what hides around the corners—even
if nothing hides there at all, it’s
still here in my mind. While I download pleasant photographs of
tinted leaves and nestled farms, I can’t help imposing my own imaginative excess,
and realize I walked on what Lovecraft called “the wild domed hills of Vermont”
(“The Whisperer in Darkness”), and that, who knows, just maybe, I unknowingly came
near “Unseen things not of earth—or at least not of tri-dimensional
earth—[that] rushed foetid and horrible through New England’s glens, and
brooded obscenely on the mountain-tops” (“The Dunwich Horror”).
And thus that kid from long ago, in the upper bunk that
was too close to the sky, draws his tightly closed eyes a bit further under the
blanket, realizing he’s in the scary state of “awed listening, as if for the
beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the
known universe’s utmost rim” (Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in
Literature”).
Ugh! The delight!
An example of "the wild domed hills of Vermont."
