Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

On his death certificate, his demise was attributed to “general paresis.”

General paresis was first identified as a phenomenon in 1822, and was originally believed to be a psychological disorder arising from an innate weakness in the sufferer’s character. By 1857, the possibility had been raised that it was in fact an effect of late-stage syphilis, but it was not until 1913 that this hypothesis was confirmed, when Hideyo Noguchi demonstrated the presence of the syphilis spirochete in the brains of the afflicted.

Noguchi himself was diagnosed with syphilis in 1913, after a few years of unethical human experimentation. He died, however, of yellow fever that same year.

Between 1857 and 1913, however, despite the medical community’s uncertainty, the specter of syphilis could not be dismissed. We now know syphilis to be caused by the bacterium Treponema palledum , a spirochete, and the disease’s progression can be divided into four stages. Spirochetes are shaped like microscopic corkscrews, and move by twisting and boring. Syphilis is, the vast majority of the time, sexually transmitted.

I expect you already knew that last part.

Primary syphilis usually occurs around five weeks after exposure to the bacterium, when a chancre — a firm, painless lesion — forms at the point of contact. In men, this is usually the penis.

Secondary syphilis develops a couple of months later and presents as a rash, which can be red or white, and is usually raised. The rash may occur anywhere on the body, but it usually erupts on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. This stage can also involve fever, sore throat, weight loss, and hair loss. More severe symptoms are also possible.

After this, the disease goes dormant. This may occur early (prior to a year after infection) or late (after a year). During this period, the sufferer is asymptomatic — no doubt a relief.

Latency can last up to thirty years.

A lot can happen in thirty years. A man can marry, father a son. One is less contagious during latency, and one’s wife might escape infection, one’s son avoid the congenital syphilis that deformed and blinded Gerard de Lairesse, remembered for his painting as well as his theory of art, whose deformities were immortalized by Rembrandt.

A man might die in the course of thirty years.

But Winfield Scott Lovecraft did not die during the latent phase of syphilis.

General paresis is a feature of tertiary stage syphilis, rarely seen in the developed world nowadays, thanks to antibiotics. It involves psychotic delusions that appear quite suddenly and unmistakably. Concentration and short-term memory are affected, and social inhibitions are lost.

In Lovecraft père ’s case, he was in Chicago when he burst into the common room of the boarding house in which he was staying shouting that “a Negro and two white men” were upstairs violating his wife.

There are physical symptoms as well — pupils that do not respond to light; a loss of the motor control needed to speak; tremors; seizures; and cachexia — a wasting syndrome. By this stage, the progress of the disease can be halted using antibiotics, but the damage already done cannot be reversed. Without antibiotics, death is unavoidable.

In the five years that Lovecraft spent in Butler Hospital, his son was not brought to see him, not once.

Syphilis is caused by spirochetes, bacteria. Once in a host, they replicate until they have consumed all nutrients possible, and then die. A man in the final stages of syphilis is housing multitudes of Treponema pallidum in his body, all moving like deadly little corkscrews through his circulatory system, dividing once every thirty hours, colonizing his tissues and fluids, until at last there is nothing left to consume.

You might think that a syphilitically psychotic father dying in a mental hospital could cast a pall over a boy, that the thought of such a parent might prey upon a young man’s mind. But, if so, Lovecraft and his biographers have not made much of it, and indeed, the true cause of his father’s death may never have been known by the child. Instead, Lovecraft and his chroniclers focus on Winfield’s partner in monstrous generation, Sarah Susan Lovecraft, née Phillips.

An indulgent mother, was Susan, indulgent to a fault, purchasing for her son all the books, astronomy and printing equipment any young boy could wish for. Was she monstrously indulgent? Accounts oscillate between blaming her for being “oversolicitous” and castigating her for trying to “mold” young Howard according to her own desires rather than his: dressing him in curls and skirts as a small child (not actually unusual at the time), attempting to make him attend dancing lessons, and, at his initial request, inflicting violin lessons on him. Monstrous, indeed; it is so easy to blame Mother.

Apparently, after two years, the horrific experience of practicing the violin became too much for young Howard’s nerves, and, on medical advice, he was allowed to quit.

Poor Mrs. Lovecraft. It seems that almost every aspect of her mothering was lacking. She and her sister danced endless attendance on the grown Howard, who presumably could have stopped it if he had wanted, bringing him milk and ferociously guarding his rest, and in return? They are held responsible for Lovecraft considering himself an invalid, frail in health and nerves. Never mind the doctor who ended the violin lessons.

But Mrs. Lovecraft did undeniably take a very strange turn as young Howard entered adolescence, convincing herself as well as him that he was hideous beyond all compare, so hideous that he should hide his face from the world at large. Strange behavior, and devastating to a growing boy, no doubt. Even stranger is that Howard wore an almost exact copy of his mother’s face, and Susan had been considered a beauty.

One wonders if Susan was projecting some self-loathing onto her son.

Poor Mrs. Lovecraft, indeed. In March 1919, she followed in her husband’s footsteps, entering Butler Hospital for the Insane, never again to know another home. A family friend reported Susan had spoken to her of “weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark,” and that she gave every evidence of true anxiety and fear during this confidence.

Was she haunted by her son’s creations even this early, Cthulhu and his minions casting their shadows before they arrived? Or were these nightmares her own creation, her own monstrous generations, bursting from her brain to dwell in dark corners of the world around her?

She died in 1921, following a gallbladder operation.

Her son was devastated.

I wonder, with both parents breathing their last in the same asylum, with his mother’s delusions (presumably) of being haunted by demonic creatures, whether Lovecraft himself ever feared such an end. Certainly enough of his characters lose their faculties as a result of forbidden, dreadful knowledge or hereditary weakness or both to suggest that madness was not beyond the scope of his imagination.

The mind can generate monsters, and then be consumed by its own creations.

Did Lovecraft, like Swift, fear becoming “dead at the top”? Surely a man so concerned with nervous strain, so given to depressive crises, must have considered the possibility.

The true threat is never external — it’s not the dreadful non-Aryan immigrants flooding into the United States; it’s not the inhuman alien beings, worshipped as gods, who would barely notice humanity as they crushed it. The true threat always comes from the inside, the self rising up beyond all reason, beyond even survival. In the end, the most monstrous growth is always already one’s own.