Sir Wade described, which—in a constant char- acteristic of HPL’s lost cities—has passageways that ‘[seemed] to lead down into a system of vaults,’ perhaps hiding horrors unrevealed on the surface. In June, 1913, back in England, Sir Arthur is in- formed by a letter from Monsieur Verhaeren, his Belgian contact in the Congo, that a certain stuffed goddess from the lost city had been found in the keeping of the now-peaceful N’bangu tribe. Sir Arthur receives the mummified relic in a box on August 13, 1913, and opens it privately. The box, he instantly understood, contained the withered and battered corpse of his great-great-great-grand- mother, ‘a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely near mankind—quite shockingly so.’ Then, with a scream, he races out of the room, douses himself with flammable liquid, and sets fire to himself on the moors beyond Jermyn House. His remains were not collected and buried, and some of the Royal Anthropological Institute burn the mummy and afterwards refuse to admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed” (pp. 238-39). It’s interesting to note that the fear of discov- ering that one’s ancestry can be traced back to far less than “noble” origins lay at the core of another classic Lovecraft story, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” in which the nameless protagonist discovers that he’s descended from a long line of “fish-men” who have lived off the coast of Massa- chusetts for generations. Lovecraft, like many people in the early 20th century, was haunted by the notion that the veneer of genteel civilization could be wiped out by a single moment of “dis- covery”... perhaps a metaphor for the advance- ments of the biological sciences at that time. As Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi writes in H.P. LOVECRAFT: A LIFE (Necronomicon Press, 1996): “[W]hat Lovecraft is suggesting is that the inhabitants of this city are not only the ‘missing link’ between ape and human but also the ulti- mate source for all white civilization. For some- one of Lovecraft’s well-known racialist bent, such a thing would be a horror surpassing any isolated case of miscegenation.” (p. 236) Robert Florey’s MURDERS IN THE RUE
MORGUE, under the guise of being a mere piece of popular entertainment (just as Dr. Mirakle him- self disguised his scientific lectures as a sideshow attraction), rubs the faces of its audience in the “demoniacal hints of truth” which caused Sir Jermyn to snuff out his own life. Unlike Lovecraft, however, Florey sometimes transforms this fear into opportunities for dark comedy. Perhaps this should be expected, as Florey also directed the
Marx Brothers’ first film, THE COCOANUTS, for Paramount Studios three years before. In one of the only scenes in the book derived directly from Poe’s short story, three “witnesses” to a murder— in truth, they only overheard the murder from the hall downstairs—attempt to identify the strange language spoken by the assailant. Of course, none of them realize that the assailant was speaking a completely inhuman language, that of an ape. The German witness insists he heard Italian being spo- ken. The Italian insists it was Danish. A native of Denmark insists it was German. Their disagree- ment descends into a heated argument during which none of them can be understood. Their ir- rational debate makes them seem more like chat- tering apes in a zoo rather than civilized human beings.
This scene has taken a beating from many re- cent critics, perhaps because it detracts from the cheap thrills they’re so conditioned to expect from a film of this type, but Florey’s darkly humorous point (as well as Poe’s before him) should be obvi- ous when looking at the story as a whole: Human beings of different races are so alienated from one another that they perceive each other as being nothing more than animals; conversely, they do not realize that their language sounds just as bes- tial to a member of a different race. We can per- ceive the beast in others, but not in ourselves. It’s easy to imagine the human race, in abstract form, being descended from primates, but when the logi- cal implications of this discovery are taken to their ultimate conclusion, one is likely to reject it and instead remain sanguine in the belief that God cre- ated Mankind in His own exalted image. When Erik the Ape first speaks in grunts and growls at the sideshow, Mirakle turns to the audi- ence and says, “Listen to him, brothers and sis- ters! He’s speaking to you! Can you understand what he says, or have you forgotten?” Again, the implication is that humans have forgotten their primate roots and Mirakle’s goal is to rub their faces in the ugly truth.
Arthur Jermyn was willing to accept this truth, but he felt his only way to deal with it was to wipe himself out, for living with the knowledge would require readjusting his myopic world view and see- ing himself on the same level as the “inferior” races he, much like Lovecraft himself, had been brought up to despise.
Lovecraft’s extreme xenophobia and racism, which rendered him incapable of functioning within a metropolis like New York, has already been ana- lyzed by a number of writers. In 1912, eight years before he wrote “Arthur Jermyn,” Lovecraft
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