The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”

This opening serves as a great synthesis of a recurrent theme in Lovecraft’s work: to know is to despair. Ignorance is lauded for its safety, while knowledge is cursed for its dangers: information can alter our worldview, but a fresh perspective may be too unbearable, demolishing our most firm beliefs.

This passage states that life is already brimming with horror on the surface, but it’s when we lift its veil and try to peer beneath it, looking directly at what it was hiding, that we truly come across its most repulsive elements.  This “peering” beneath the veil here represents the acquisition of knowledge.

It’s no wonder that, in the first paragraph, there’s already an attack on science, which is presented as a force that is bound to doom us all: “Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species,” the narrator says. To peer beneath the surface, to discover how the world truly works, is to come across a truth that we – as human beings – are not equipped to handle. Death, then, becomes the only recourse: “If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.”

This opening works because it’s still talking in abstract terms, building up this general theme of “knowledge is cursed” while setting up the mystery about its central character: Arthur Jermyn. This short story is structured as a third-person account of what led to his suicide, with the narrator using a matter-of-fact voice. But when the narrative starts to offer explanations and reveals its specific theme, everything crumbles down under the weight of unabashed racism.

It all starts with a bit of Orientalism – more specifically, the depiction of the Orient as a land of magic and superstition –, which immediately appears in the first line of the second paragraph. The thing that opened Arthur Jermyn’s eyes to a hidden and abject truth, leading to his death, was an object (it often appears in italics to suggest its strange nature) that came from… Africa.

When the story opened by saying that life was already too hideous on the surface, among other things it was talking about Arthur Jermyn’s appearance: it’s said that “Many would have disliked to live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn.” But he was a poet and a scholar and didn’t mind too much his repulsive appearance. In other words, his death was due to the presence of the object and nothing else.

As it has already been established, being a scholar – the pursuit of knowledge – is a damnable occupation. So, when the narrator says that “learning was in his blood,” they are framing Arthur’s death in a way that imbues it with fatalism. It presents a hereditary issue that has condemned the character to a terrible fate from the very start: since learning was in his blood, he could not have been anything but a scholar, doomed to uncover a truth that would lead him to madness. The “facts” exposed in the story are about Arthur, but also his family. The issue becomes a genealogical one when the narrator points out how madness “was in all Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them.”

The story is beginning to circle around the heart of the problem that afflicts Arthur’s family. It establishes that Africa is the origin of this evil influence that is grabbing hold of the Jermyns. The fact that Sir Wade Jermyn – Arthur’s great-great-great-grandfather – met his wife there (and that she didn’t even approve of English ways) is more than a red flag: her characterization as a problematic woman (a violent one) is intrinsic to her ties to this foreign land.

The omen regarding his son is even graver, as the boy was born in Africa – he has the same cursed origin as the object – and was also cared for by a “loathsome black woman from Guinea” – the adjective here serving as an evident mark of racism. This son, for having been born in Africa, consequently shares with his mother a tendency to display aggressive behavior, being “densely stupid and given to brief periods of uncontrollable violence.”

According to the narrator, however, Sir Wade Jermyn’s main crime was not only that he visited this terrible place and brought its relics and people home, but that he dared speak of it at the dinner table as well. England was supposed to be a bastion of civilization and reason, but Sir Wade was there talking about monsters and lost cities, speaking of irrational and dangerous things. In other words, just by speaking of Africa, Sir Wade Jermyn was corrupting what his country stood for, foregoing the very values that made them superior to the “imaginative blacks” of Africa.

At this point in the narrative, we are beginning to understand what there was of so hideous in Arthur’s appearance. The narrator remarks how the grandson of Sir Wade already exhibited “weird Eastern” traits, so we can conclude that from generation to generation, Africa started to become more and more manifest in the Jermyns appearance, making them – in the eyes of the narrator – more and more “odd and repellent.”

Due to their connection to Africa, the Jermyns became fascinated with… apes. Arthur’s father joined a circus and used to stare at the eyes of this gorilla, who he ended up even brawling with. Another Jermyn strangled a man who told him about the “legends of a grey city of white apes ruled by a white god.” And Sir Wade himself used to talk about “fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism; things that might have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings.”

After this brief exposition about his family, the story goes on to focus on Arthur Jermyn himself. The narrator recalls how Arthur is a poet and wonders if his connection with art would make Wade’s Portuguese wife rattle on her grave – because, apparently, art and “Latin blood” are at odds with each other.

Just like Sir Wade, Arthur too was interested in the strange tales of the grey cities and ape-like creatures of the Congo. He sold his estate, traveled there, and met an old man called Mwanu, whose mind stood out from the others of his people, for he “possessed not only a highly retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and interest in the old legends.”

Mwanu tells Arthur that the people of the grey city in Congo worshipped an ape-goddess, who “became the consort of a great white god who had come from the West. For a long time, they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son all three went away.”

This is the turning point in the narrative, as this tale mirrors the life of Sir Wade Jermyn, who married a woman in Africa and came back to England alongside her and their son. The passage about “a white god among apes”, then, speaks for itself, reinforcing a strong notion of white supremacy. And the tale continues, predicting the “return of the son, grown to manhood […] yet unconscious of his identity.”

To build up suspense regarding the incoming revelation, the narrator goes on to say that Arthur managed to acquire the mummy of the ape-goddess, since the tribe in Congo that had it became “submissive servants of King Albert.” While he was waiting for this object to arrive, he started to wonder why there was no painting of Wade’s Portuguese wife in the house and no one knew what she was like.

Then comes the twist: it is said that Arthur opened the box that contained the stuffed ape-goddess, cried in horror, and proceeded to set himself on fire. He commits suicide because the ape-goddess was Wade’s wife and still wore a golden locket bearing the Jermyn coat of arms. The hidden, abject, unbearable truth that Arthur Jermyn discovered was his ancestry, that he descended not only from an African woman – instead of a Portuguese one – but also from a creature that was half ape. His ancestor was an African monster.

There’s a passage in the first paragraph (“If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did.”) that is crucial to the central theme of the story, as it acquires a specific meaning after the final twist: ancestry is not only a matter of identity, but also a question of honor and pride. It’s better to die by fire than to live with the eternal shame of being of tainted blood – blood that both damned Arthur and twisted his body, turning him into a hideous man: he descends from an African monster and his appearance mirrors that of a monster as well, causing disgust.

In other words, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family is a short story that condemns miscegenation, depicting it as a horrible, unspeakable crime. The narrator extends Arthur’s fate to a general audience (“If we knew what we are”) as if saying that if people start digging into the past to uncover the truth about their genealogy tree, they will find similar answers.

The United States, the birthplace of H. P. Lovecraft, was once famously described as a melting pot of people, and there’s nothing more abhorrent to the narrator and characters of this story than a heterogeneous society where you can’t be sure of the purity of your blood. The characters here even prefer to erase Arthur Jermyn from existence and live in denial and ignorance rather than face the terrible truth that there are African descendants among their ranks: “Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed.”

Despite its strong opening, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family turns into a very blunt tale with a very reproachable message, working as a horror story only to conservative racists that foolishly believe their origin makes them better than others: if not even an Englishman can be sure of their ancestry, what can you say about someone who lives in a country in the Americas.

July 19, 2022.

—> You can read or listen to Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family here.