Two Early Readings of Lovecraft
and their Consequences

A dozen years went by. I published the first book of the Vrénalik trilogy, pursued studies in math, got married, and had two kids. Around 1976, before starting to write the final version of the second book, I took a long break and did reading and reflecting about writing and life. In particular, I reread Lovecraft. Reading him in English was slow; in French it was frustrating. I alternated.

By then, my questions about reality were no more on the nature of time and life experience, as when I had been a teenager, but more basic. Something like: "What am I doing here?" or, more precisely: "What is all this?" I was spending my days with my toddlers. Some evenings, my husband would take over and I would go out to write or read, or to walk around the city. My lifestyle was completely different from anything I had known before. I was out of the rat race, finding the necessary isolation to get down to questions that really mattered to me.

At that time I read Lovecraft as I would read our best poets, aware of what the text evokes in me, being carried away by the images into my own vision. I did not try to force my attention on any text that I would not feel drawn to. Sometimes I would go off on a paragraph or a sentence. Whatever I did not like from him, whatever left me indifferent, I brushed aside. On the contrary, I would reflect about what I considered the heart of his writings, finding there the sincerity and depth of thinking I needed.

Whether he had liked the eighteenth century, or ice cream, I couldn't have cared less. His considerations on race, breed, and stock I ignored, while muting on my side conflicting thoughts on culture, language, and society. Often what he described as frightening, such as the ocean, I was finding attractive. Sometimes his fright would just make me laugh—and here I prefer not to give any examples. Nonetheless, here was someone I still genuinely trusted.

My main connection with Lovecraft had not changed. There were a number of his texts I found excellent, from the point of view of imagination, intelligence, and the deep emotion carried within, in that kind of subdued fashion which is so effective. However, it was from the two "Silver Key" texts and the end of the Dream-Quest that I was finding the most evocative passages, those that seemed richer in the kind of teaching by analogy, by poetry, that I was seeking.

What was clear to me about these three main brilliant texts is that they had been written in a state of hopelessness. Not much expectation of sweet feedback had been involved. It was contained, trustworthy, the kind of strong vision that dawns when hope is exhausted. When Randolph Carter jumps into space, he is described in the text as "the doomed and desperate dreamer". These I felt were not empty words, but useful data describing a particular state of mind needed for imagination to arise. If not for more.

These texts were as awesome as their subject. They had a kind of sacred quality without dogma. The point was not to believe literally what they said or to study them intellectually, but to experience point blank what they were hinting at.

There was a truer world just here, beyond crazy social convention and conditioned reflexes. I could feel it some nights. I could not share it, no one near me looked interested. I did not need any company.

This period only lasted so long. Questions about the meaning of life were not totally resolved by resorting to this kind of experience or, if so, I was not trusting it to that degree. The people who shared my life were obviously not seeing things as I did, and it would have been foolish to dismiss completely the messages I was getting from them.

Moreover, I had no reliable method on how to get into the dark living space of reality, and no philosophical architecture to withstand the pressure of argumentation from other points of view. It was like in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", where rationalist Aspinwall and visionary Carter-Zkauba are at odds, Aspinwall challenging the other's right to own anything. In the story, he dies and the other vanishes, a dramatic display. Whereas I had to find how they could work as a team, how A and Z could be joined, reason and insight, with insight leading, of course. Then I could present my vision to the outside world in a convincing way.

This is the kind of truth I found in Lovecraft when I needed it. I am ever grateful to him. As for my own questioning, it led me in 1977 to discover Buddhist thought and meditation. I needed not merely ideas, but an actual practice, to get my answers.

This way of thinking is at the root of writing part two of Vrénalik, L'Epuisement du soleil. Part three, a utopia, was done ten years after. In the two books, one can find many arguments between reason and insight; in the utopia, in particular, the issue of how they work with each other is important.

It is difficult to assess whether certain of my images come from Lovecraft: I read so many books, saw so many films. Difficult also to ascertain whether some of my ideas are in reaction to him, or evolved independently. If I play at "Find Lovecraft in the picture" with my stories, I can discover him anywhere and everywhere, but what does that mean? I was surprised when an American reader said my novel Coquillage was Lovecraftian: I had never seen it that way. Actually, yes, it is. However, I don't recall thinking often about Lovecraft's works when in the process of writing. Except in order not to copy, of course, which holds for any other writer.

A few of his main images indeed have echoes in my perception of the world. My feelings about the ocean, or moonlight, have enriched themselves from reading him. The ocean theme is interesting. I crossed the Atlantic four times when I was young, with my parents, to accompany my father on a year grant or to see friends. I do recall the impressions, the changing colours of water, the movement of the ship over the waves, and, most wonderful of all, the vast windswept horizon. This had nothing to do with lurking fears from underneath. But after having read Lovecraft, I evolved from one of my dreams a kind of ocean deity, a fixated view of the ocean, that has lethal aspects. It is the Océan-Haztlén, important in all three books of the Vrénalik trilogy. I did mention its relation to Lovecraft in my "Notes sur L'Epuisement du soleil" in 1980.

More important is this. From the start, I took from Lovecraft one technique, that of using dreams extensively in fiction. Within all my novels or series, within a good third of my short stories, are embedded one or several dreams I had. I enjoy using dreams because they look as if they come from elsewhere than my own personality, while retaining a deeply personal aspect.

How do I work with dreams as a technique? First, I'm happy I dreamt something suitable, which does not happen often. A suitable dream is vivid, hints at the profound, and shows potential for linking pertinently with some waking-life situation which is more than strictly personal, but social, or showing how something works, etc. I must feel at least an interest for what I dreamt; usually I'm plain scared, which is a good sign. I must also feel some need to share that dream vision as well as it deserves. Writing is hard work; if I did not feel an urge to communicate something worth the effort, why bother?

Follows a long, traceless transmutation process from the dream to what will evolve from its memory, as it is tested against whole other trains of thought to see how they match up. This might take years for novels, less for short stories, and is done off and on with pausees of several months, anytime in the day where I do not have to talk. All the while, I hardly take any notes; if I do take some, I rarely bother to read them later. I have a good memory, which I also trust to erase unnecessary developments as the project matures.

I start writing when characters and plot have reached a stable point in my musings. I stand under no obligation towards anything I considered before; my state of mind, emotions, priorities at the time of writing prevail upon past ideas, which act more like a suggested canvas and a set of pungent images. It is like in Lovecraft's "Commonplace Book" (MW 87), plain good sense indeed as far as I can see: if I cannot trust my mind at the moment I write, what can I trust? In this, I have evolved from the teenager I was, who had not yet seen ideas to be less important than an open mind.

The magisterial statement from "The Silver Key" also applies for writing. Constantly changing gears between streams of imagination, sensory perceptions, and social exchanges is made easier by not having any internal hierarchy between these, "no cause to value the one above the other". To be honest, this reading of the statement comes from my acquaintance with Buddhism.

I work until the text "vibrates" right. A proper text has a good internal rhythm among its parts, says things I mean to say, is fit for public use, hopefully pertinent to many people and not too difficult to read. All through the revision, the dream from the beginning of the process stands in my memory as an unfurled flag by which the rest of the development flows, defines itself, or with which it at least does not clash.

An example of this is available in English. My novel Coquillage has been translated (The Shell); my "Notes sur Coquillage", explaining how I wrote it, have appeared in Science Fiction Studies. It contains the charts of chronology and sequences I used, similar again to those Lovecraft was advising in his "Commonplace Book": there are no thirty different ways to write a complex story. A relation of the dream in two scenes which led to the novel is also presented there.

Here is the opening description of the shell, as one instance where I remembered having read Lovecraft:

At high tide, the shell sits on an island, the waves glittering about the cone of crystalline mother-of-pearl. At such moments, the mighty structure of its spiral becomes visible, underlining the rythmical oscillations of its opulent curves and spikes. The lines of the round and oval windows form an ascending helix that is irradiated in the entire river, beneath whose surface, in the oblique light, veins of amber sand form a gigantic wheel, its multiple spokes wed to the hills and valleys of the watery depths. These spokes are hollow tubes into which the creator of the shell—a monster to some, a nautilus to those who loved it—inserted feelers, rods and fans, through which it fed and observed the world about it. Sometimes circling the beds of seaweed, sometimes extending through them, they pass diagonally beneath the undulating sand banks, bearing testimony to the inhuman intelligence that for centuries contemplated the river. (The Shell, p. 7)

Finally, there is something else I learnt from Lovecraft. Death. Lovecraft being dead when I read him was actually my first encounter with what death is. My enthusiasm met head on with the wall of time between us. It was a strong experience of sadness and vastness together. He had relentlessly pointed out the restrictive power of time in his texts, whereas I was green about death, having never given it much thought. What a teaching! Work with it with imagination, philosophy about equality of dream and fact, whatever, death remains. Communication is forever banned. Yet something did get through from him to me, for example in terms of my confidence as a writer.

Wasn't it one of his wishes to educate minds? It is interesting to remark that, in my case, this seems to have happened despite the distance in time. The strong dynamics of my emotions meeting with the silence of his death were essential.

(From Lovecraft Studies 35, Fall 1996, pp. 1-8.)