Lovecraft had long been inclined to accept Spengler’s basic thesis of the successive rise and fall of civilizations as each passes through a period of youth, adulthood, and old age. He later expressed reservations, as many others did, on the degree to which this biological analogy could be pressed; but otherwise he accepted Spengler enthusiastically, coming to believe that one particular phase of Western culture was coming to an end—the agrarian and early industrial phase, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, that had in his view seen the greatest flowering of Western culture. Whatever the future held in store, it would no longer be a part of his culture, but some other, alien culture with which he could not possibly identify.
Lovecraft’s reading of Krutch’s The Modern Temper made him face the situation of art and culture in the modern world. Krutch’s book is a lugubrious but chillingly compelling work that particularly addresses itself to the question of what intellectual and aesthetic possibilities remain in an age in which so many illusions—in particular the illusions of our importance in the cosmos and of the ‘sanctity’ or even validity of our emotional life—have been shattered by science. This is a theme on which Lovecraft had been expatiating since at least 1922, with ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’. Indeed, I believe Krutch’s work was instrumental in helping Lovecraft to effect a further evolution of his aesthetic theory. He had already passed from classicism to Decadence to a sort of antiquarian regionalism. But he knew that the past—that is, prior modes of behaviour, thought, and aesthetic expression—could be preserved only up to a point. The new realities revealed by modern science had to be faced. Around this time he began some further ruminations on art and its place in society, in particular weird art; and in so doing he produced a radical change in his theory of weird fiction that would affect much of what he would subsequently write.
Frank Long was again, somehow, the catalyst for the expression of these views. Long was lamenting the rapid rate of cultural change and was advocating a return to ‘splendid and traditional ways of life’—a view Lovecraft rightly regarded as somewhat sophomoric in someone who did not know much about what these traditional ways actually were. In an immense letter written in late February 1931, Lovecraft begins by repeating Krutch’s argument that much of prior literature has ceased to be vital to us because we can no longer share, and in some cases can only remotely understand, the values that produced it; he then writes: ‘Some former art attitudes—like sentimental romance, loud heroics, ethical didacticism, &c.—are so patently hollow as to be visibly absurd & nonusable from the start.’ Some attitudes, however, may still be viable:
Fantastic literature cannot be treated as a single unit, because it is a composite resting on widely divergent bases. I really agree that ‘Yog-Sothoth’ is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached serious literature as yet … The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or assocative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation. The reasonable permanence of this phase of poetic phantasy as a possible art form (whether or not favoured by current fashion) seems to me a highly strong probability.
I do not know what exactly Lovecraft means by ‘Yog-Sothothery’ here. My feeling is that it may refer to Dunsany’s prodigal invention of gods in The Gods of Pegana, which we have already seen Lovecraft to have repudiated as far as his own creative expression is concerned; indeed, he says here of this type of material that ‘I hardly expect to produce anything even remotely approaching it myself’. He continues:
But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitation regarding the sense of outsideness. I refer to the aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast & provocative abyss of the unknown. This has always been the chief emotion in my psychology; & whilst it obviously figures less in the psychology of the majority, it is clearly a well-defined & permanent factor from which very few sensitive persons are wholly free.
Now we are getting more to the crux of the matter: Lovecraft is beginning to provide a rationale for the type of weird fiction he has been writing for the past few years, which is a fundamentally realistic approach to the ‘sense of outsideness’ by the suggestion of the vast gulfs of space and time—in short, cosmicism. There is nothing here that is different from prior utterances of this idea; but Lovecraft now continues:
The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt —as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?10
This renunciation of the supernatural, as well as the need to offer supplements rather than contradictions to known phenomena, make it clear that Lovecraft was now consciously moving toward a union of weird fiction and science fiction (although perhaps not the science fiction published in the pulp magazines). Indeed, in formal terms nearly all his work subsequent to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is science fiction, in that it supplies a scientific justification for the purportedly ‘supernatural’ events; it is only in his manifest wish to terrify that his work remains on the borderline of science fiction rather than being wholly within its parameters. Lovecraft’s work had been inexorably moving in this direction since at least the writing of ‘The Shunned House’, and such things as At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ (1934– 35) are only the pinnacles in this development.
At the Mountains of Madness , written in early 1931 (the autograph manuscript declares it to have been begun on 24 February and completed on 22 March), is Lovecraft’s most ambitious attempt at ‘non-supernatural cosmic art’; it is a triumph in almost every way. At forty thousand words it is his longest work of fiction save The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Just as his other two novels represent apotheoses of earlier phases of his career—The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath the culmination of Dunsanianism, Ward the pinnacle of pure supernaturalism—so is At the Mountains of Madness the greatest of his attempts to fuse weird fiction and science fiction.
The basic plot of the novel—the discovery by the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 of the frozen remains of bizarre barrel-shaped entities from the depths of space, and their even more terrifying ‘slaves’, the shoggoths, who ultimately overwhelmed their mastersmed the셀is elementary; but no synopsis can even begin to convey the rich, detailed, and utterly convincing scientific erudition that creates the sense of verisimilitude so necessary in a tale so otherwise outré. We have already seen how Lovecraft’s fascination with the Antarctic dated to as early as his tenth year; indeed, as Jason C. Eckhardt has demonstrated,11 the early parts of Lovecraft’s tale clearly show the influence of Admiral Byrd’s expedition of 1928–30, as well as other contemporary expeditions. And, of course, Lovecraft’s sight of the spectacular paintings of the Himalayas by Nicholas Roerich—mentioned a total of six times in the novel—played a role in the genesis of the work.