Eating Forbidden Things

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Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls, 1924[1]

 

Fear of the secret and forbidden runs through Lovecraft’s work. His self-image and anxieties about the world around him were driven- whether consciously or not- by an intense, deep-seated shame about his own family history.

 

Lovecraft’s deep sense of shame about the past is linked to the fact that both his parents, Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Susie Phillips Lovecraft, died after being committed, decades apart, to Butler Hospital, a psychiatric institution[2]. ST Joshi indicates that ‘it is virtually certain that Winfield had syphilis’[3]. To a man of Lovecraft’s generation, syphilis was more than just a bacterial infection, it was ‘a disease and a metaphor for disease...a trope for social and cultural degeneration’[4]. Its progression in an age before antibiotics was relentless and terrible. The disease presents sores and rashes in the primary and secondary stages, followed by a latent period before the tertiary stage, neurosyphilis[5].  Up to the early 20th century, neurosyphilis was described as General Paresis of the Insane, and was inevitably terminal[6]. It was this syphilitic insanity that Winfield Lovecraft died from. Arguably after Winfield’s ignominious death, Susie projected her fears and anxieties about his sexual contamination onto Lovecraft ‘[talking] continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone’[7]. In Susie’s mind, Lovecraft was, perhaps, the visible reminder of Winfield’s latent syphilis.

 

A Peculiarly Composite Architecture

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Lovecraft’s 1924 short story, The Rats in the Walls, bears the scars of this syphilitic anxiety. Rats is one of the most conventionally Gothic of Lovecraft’s works. The narrator, a wealthy American businessman named Delapore, buys the estate of his Anglo-Norman de la Poer ancestors. Bereaved by the death of his son- literally stripped of his family’s future- Delapore throws himself into his family’s past- Exham Priory.

Exham is cast in the classic Gothic mode, reflecting the mental and moral depths of the inhabitants. The hint of a strange blending- or perhaps contamination- creeps in here with the Priory described as having:

 

peculiarly composite architecture...involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order...Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly.[8]

 

Lovecraft utilises vertical space as a motif to reflect both the passage of time and cultural change, back into the depths of not only history but prehistory. The surface rooms of the priory are lavishly restored to their former glory, and ‘although Exham Priory was mediaevally fitted, its interior was in truth wholly new and free from old vermin and old ghosts alike.’[9]

 

However, like latent syphilis, there is more to Exham and Delapore than meets the eye. In a sub-cellar, Delapore and his neighbour, Captain Norrys, discover a vault built in ‘the severe and harmonious classicism of the age of the Caesars’[10]. This seemingly sound and civilised foundation, however, also bears inscriptions to the Magna Mater- originally the Anatolian deity Cybele whose worship was adopted by Classical civilisation. Here, we see the Lovecraftian anxiety about the sins of one’s father- a foreign taint in the foundation of Western civilisation and the foundation of Exham Priory alike. This taint, however, is not merely limited to architecture.

 

Daemon Swineherds

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It is significant that before the granting of Exham to the de la Poers, ‘there is no evil report, but something strange must have happened then’[11] as Delapore writes. The place itself is tainted and thus taints its owners. The corruption at Exham is ended in the 17th century, when a de la Pore murders the rest of the family and escapes to Virginia. The perpetrator begins anew, changing the family name to Delapore, and founding a prosperous plantation, Carfax[12].

 

But while Delapore seems to think that the Virginian branch of the family had escaped corruption, it is evident that he is mistaken. There are references to Delapore’s cousin, ‘young Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest’. But this may be merely a distraction from the true taint, as even though Delapore cannot see it, his family’s prosperity in Virginia was built on slavery, the raising of human flesh.

 

Delapore can recall his grandfather’s death in the burning of Carfax with ‘the Federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the negroes howling and praying’ but does not seem to realise that the howling negroes are actually being freed from Delapore slavery. But the cultivation of human flesh is not something limited to the Delapores as Virginia slaveholders.  Just as the destruction of Carfax spelled liberation for those under its dominion, so did the abandonment of Exham for the villagers the de la Poers had preyed upon.

 

Delapore himself is plagued by invisible rats seeming to run within the walls of his chamber and behind tapestries, and strange dreams where he:

 

seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled [him] with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike[13].

 

Once again, across vertical space, Delapore looks downward, the plummeting rats linking the sane surface world to the unseen depths below the priory.

 

This mental descent is physically repeated in the climax of the narrative, where Delapore and his neighbour Captain Norrys find a chamber far below the sub-cellar with pens containing not animal bones but those of degenerate humans, kept for feasting and sacrifice to Cybele. It is clear that the rites went on for so long that some of the breeding stock ‘must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more generations.’[14] The de la Poers are not only guilty of cannibalism but of the degradation of the very human species. Does Delapore recognise that his supposedly respectable slaveholding Virginia ancestors were merely engaging, in an attenuated manner, in their family’s ancestral husbandry?

 

What My Family Do

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Delapore himself rejects the suggestion of his own contamination, presenting the taint as lying with Randolph the voodoo priest, not the respectable planters of Carfax, but this is fitting. Lovecraft may never have wanted to closely consider the possibility that his father had died of a venereal disease, acquired through adultery. Rejection of the past, then, is in keeping with Lovecraft’s anxieties.

To Lovecraft, giving in to the hunger of the past is to regress, and this is made clear in Delapore’s breakdown.

 

It must have been the rats; ... Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?... The war ate my boy, damn them all... and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret... No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’ fat face on that flabby, fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died!... Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la Poer?... It’s voodoo, I tell you... that spotted snake... Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do!... ’Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust... wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?... Magna Mater! Magna Mater!... Atys... Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann... agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa!... Ungl...ungl...rrrlh...chchch...[15]

 

This regression takes place on multiple levels. Most obviously, Delapore’s speech regresses from Modern to cod-Middle English, to Latin, pseudo-Celtic, and finally to bestial noises. Furthermore, throughout the text he has maintained the distinction between the modern, American Delapores, and the sinister ancestral de la Poers. Here, however he blurs this distinction, questioning if ‘[he is] a de la Poer’ but immediately acting in ancestral pride to assert his ancestral claim against Norrys. The assertion of this ancestral claim is gruesomely hinted at as rescuers find Delapore ‘crouching in the blackness, over the plump, half-eaten body of Captain Norrys’[16]. Delapore has truly reclaimed his ancestral, cannibalistic heritage.

Is Delapore’s loss of control a reflection of Lovecraft’s own fears? His regression into the past is especially interesting considering Lovecraft’s affectation of himself as ‘the only living person to whom the ancient 18th century idiom is...a mother-tongue...the accepted norm’[17]. Ostensibly, this was meant as rejection of the modern world, but it is clear from the Rats in the Walls that such regression might have its price.

 

By 1924, of course, Susie Philips had died in Butler Hospital, as her husband had over two decades earlier. While there is no evidence that she had neurosyphilis, Joshi asserts that Philips’ doctor ‘found disorder had been evidenced for fifteen years; that in all abnormality had existed for twenty six years,’[18] that is, since Winfield’s 1893 committal to Butler. While Susie may not have contracted the disease, it is clear that Winfield’s illness and death took a definite psychological toll upon her; and Lovecraft, the boy whom she had called too hideous to go out in public, had clearly become the focus of her anxieties about her husband. 

 

With both his parents having succumbed directly or indirectly to neurosyphilis, it is no surprise that Lovecraft writing in 1924, three years after Susie’s death in 1921, was so concerned with the hidden secrets in a family’s history. Winfield, through forbidden extramarital adventure, brought the taint of syphilis into his home, and even in death drove his wife to obsess over Lovecraft. Here is the source of that fear of the foreign lurking within the familiar, of Anatolian Cybele infiltrating the Roman pantheon, of the secrets behind what ‘[his] family do’. It is this anxiety that haunts the gothic halls and Roman cellars of Exham, and Lovecraft’s own obsession with the twilit grottoes of the past.

 

 

Bibliography

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Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, “Syphilis- CDC Fact Sheet”, accessed                                  

           May 5, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stdfact-syphilis.htm

Joshi, Sunand Tryambak, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time,

           Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001

Joshi, Sunand Tryambak, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P.

           Lovecraft. Gillette:Wildside Press, 1996

Kragh, Jesper Vagczy, “Neurosyphilis. Historical Perspectives on General Paresis

           of the Insane”. JSM, Schizophrenia no 2, vol 2, 2017

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931, edited by August

           Derleth & Donald Wandrei. Sauk City:Arkham House, 1971

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. New York:   

           Chartwell Books, 2016

Smith, Andrew, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the  

           Fin-de-Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004

 

Endnotes

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[1] H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, New York: Chartwell Books, 272

[2] Winfield died in 1898, five years after being committed in 1893, and Susie died in 1921, after being committed in 1919.

[3] S.T. Joshi, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft, (Gillette: Wildside Press, 1996), 14

[4] Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siècle, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 95

[5] “Syphilis- CDC Fact Sheet”, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed May 5, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stdfact-syphilis.htm

[6] JV Kragh, ‘Neurosyphilis. Historical Perspectives on General Paresis of the Insane’. JSM Schizophrenia 2(2): 1013.

[7] S.T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 68

[8] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 257

[9] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 262

[10] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 266

[11] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 260

[12] A wry allusion on the part of Lovecraft, as Carfax Abbey, of course, was Dracula’s property in England.

[13] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 264

[14] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 270

[15] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 272

[16] Lovecraft, Complete Fiction, 272

[17] H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931, ed. August Derleth & Donald Wandrei, (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1971) 407

[18] Joshi, Dreamer and Visionary, 14