1. Probably written in October 1923, the story first appeared in Weird Tales 5, no. 1 (January 1925), 169–74.
2. The writer and poet Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lacantius, or Lactantius (ca. 245–325 CE), presumed to have been born in Numidia, North Africa (then a Libyan kingdom, it now straddles Algeria and Tunisia), taught rhetoric and Latin in both Nicomedia, Greece, where he was raised, and, later, in Trier, Germany. He was a convert from paganism to Christianity, and his life was marked by penury. The sentence is translated by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (1702; see “The Picture in the House,” note 12): “It is one of the chief arts of evil spirits, to make things which have no reality seem real to those who witness them.” Cotton Mather borrowed this from Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (1693), a work by his father, Increase Mather. However, Dennis Quinn, in “Endless Bacchanal: Rome, Livy, and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Cult,” casts doubt on the Lactantian source: “[It] may be more correct to say that it is a quotation from Increase Mather misquoting Lactantius. . . .”
3. Aldebaran, or Alpha Tauri, is the brightest star in the constellation Taurus (the Bull) and one of the brighter stars in the northern sky. Orange-yellow in color, it is a “red giant” in age. According to Richard Hinkley Allen (Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, 1899), the name means “the follower.” “Aldebaran was the divine star in the worship of the tribe Misaˉm, who thought that it brought rain, and that its heliacal rising unattended by showers portended a barren year.”
4. The winter solstice, the day on which the earth’s axis tilts farthest away from the Sun (and hence the shortest day of the year), occurs in the Northern Hemisphere on December 21 or 22, and adherents of pagan religions may have celebrated the day. Certainly, the Yule or Yuletide is associated with pagan Scandinavians and is mentioned in the Prose Edda; however, its antiquity is uncertain.
5. The phrase is not very helpful in determining the origin of these “dark furtive folk”: Orchids are found worldwide, although most species originate in the tropics.
6. The first settlers of New England were English Protestants; these were followed by Canadians, Irish, Italian, and East European immigrants.
7. Many scholars, including S. T. Joshi, identify Kingsport as Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Lovecraft himself noted the identification. See “The Picture in the House,” note 7, above. First settled by British colonists in the early seventeenth century, Marblehead has been a fishing port and a launching point for privateers and clipper ships and claims the title of birthplace of the American navy. For a good overview of the points of identification, see Donovan K. Loucks’s “Antique Dreams: Marblehead and Lovecraft’s Kingsport.” However, Salem, Massachusetts, also shares some of the traits of Kingsport (see note 11, below).
8. There is no “peak” in Marblehead; its highest elevation is 42 meters (138 feet) above sea level.
9. As we shall see, the narrator doesn’t mean that “the people” arrived in Marblehead by sea; he means that the people originally lived under the sea.
10. Almost certainly Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, at the intersection of Orne and Pond streets, founded around 1638.
11. The Salem witch trials of 1692 resulted in nineteen hangings, fourteen women and five men (one additional man, who refused to speak at his trial, was executed by the medieval method of peine forte et dure, pressing with heavy rocks). Surprisingly, the exact location of the hangings is controversial. The official Gallows Hill Park in Salem, at the location which Rev. Charles Upham named as the site of the hangings in his 1867 book Salem Witchcraft, has been rejected by many historians as an incorrect identification. The most likely site, credibly asserted by historian Sidney Perley in his 1921 History of Salem, Massachusetts, appears to be a hill at the junction of Boston, Bridge, and Proctor streets in Salem. See http://www .boudillion.com/gallowshill/gallowshill .htm for additional photographs. The historical records agree that the hangings did not take place on a gallows; rather, the convicted were hanged from the branches of trees. Note that there were no witch trials in Marblehead, although one victim, Wilmot Redd, is buried there.
The highest point in Marblehead, Massachusetts, is Abbot Hall, atop Windmill Hill, shown here in 2013. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2013, reprinted with permission
12. S. T. Joshi explains, “The Christian holiday is a mere veneer for a much older festival that reaches back to the agricultural rhythms of primitive man—the winter solstice, whose passing foretells the eventual reawakening of the earth in spring” (I Am Providence, 462).
13. Philip A. Shreffler, in The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (67), suggests that this is the William Waters/Nathan Bowen house (1695), at 1 Mugsford Street, but the evidence is thin, and several points of description fail to match.
14. There is no Back Street or Circle Court; however, Front Street and Circle Street meet in Marblehead, and there is a Green Street, but not nearby. There is also no building known as the “Market House”; however, not far from the intersection of Front and Circle streets is Market Square, near Town House Square, where the Old Town House stands; its first story was used as a market.
15. A woman’s hood-shaped bonnet with a projecting rim.
16. A long high-backed wooden bench, usually with storage beneath the seat.
17. First mentioned in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Man and the Snake” (which first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, June 29, 1890): “‘It is of veritabyll report, and attested of so many that there be nowe of wyse and learned none to gaynsaye it, that ye serpente hys eye hath a magnetick propertie that whosoe falleth into its svasion is drawn forwards in despyte of his wille, and perisheth miserabyll by ye creature hys byte.’
“Stretched at ease upon a sofa, in gown and slippers, Harker Brayton smiled as he read the foregoing sentence in old Morryster’s ‘Marvells of Science’: ‘The only marvel in the matter,’ he said to himself, ‘is that the wise and learned in Morryster’s day should have believed such nonsense as is rejected by most of even the ignorant in ours.’”
18. A book on witchcraft, adducing evidence of its reality. Glanvill (1636–1680) was a clergyman and, although not a scientist himself, an apologist for the natural philosophers of the day; this work was published posthumously. Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), an account of the Salem witch trials, evidences familiarity with the book and in particular its account of earlier Swedish witch trials.
19. French magistrate Nicolas Remy (1530–1616), also known as Remigius, wrote Dæmonolatreiæ Libri Tres (Demonolatry in Three Books), a manual for witch-hunters that eventually replaced the Malleus Maleficarum as the standard work. The Demonolatry included accounts of the capital trials of some nine hundred individuals in Lorraine, France, who, over a fifteen-year period, received the death penalty for commission of the crime of witchcraft.
20. Ole Worm (1588–1655), a Danish physician and scholar, used the Latinized name Olaus Wormius. He was an early embryologist. In “The Dunwich Horror” (here, below), it is recorded that Worm’s translation was printed in Spain in the seventeenth century.
21. Sirius, the Dog Star, also known as Al Shira and Canicula, is among the nearest stars to Earth and the brightest in the sky. Technically, Alpha Canis Majoris is a double star, part of the Canis Major constellation, the large dog following Orion the hunter (and near the constellation of Orion). The name σειρίονς, given by the early Greek authors, meant “bright and sparkly” and, according to Allen’s Star Names, was applied to any bright and sparkling heavenly object but eventually became a proper name for this star. Sirius has long been the subject of worship and is found identified in Chaldean, Babylonian, and Egyptian records. However, it is not associated with the Yuletide or winter solstice.
T. R. Livesey, in “Dispatches from the Providence Observatory” (43–44), notes that the astronomical data regarding the time of sunset, the absence of the moon, and the elevation of Siriu
s is consistent with a date of December 17, 1922 (the new moon occurred only a few minutes later, at 12:20).
22. An archaic form of the word “lanterns.” This is the only story in this volume in which the word appears in that form, and by using it, the narrator has nicely evoked the age of Kingsport (or perhaps revealed something about his own age).
23. Identified by Philip A. Shreffler (in his The H. P. Lovecraft Companion, 67) as St. Michael’s Episcopal Church (1714), at 13 Summer Street in Marblehead; however, St. Michael’s, while it has the requisite crypt, lacks a clock tower and a “half-paved square.” This may well have been the First Meeting House (1648, on Old Burial Hill) or the Second Congregational Church on Mugford Street (1715). Donovan Loucks, in “Antique Dreams: Marblehead and Lovecraft’s Kingsport,” argues for one of the Congregational churches in Marblehead.
Das Irrlicht by Arnold Böcklin (1862), depicting a will-o’-the-wisp.
24. Presumably will-o’-the-wisps, also known as corpse candles, corpse lights, and by countless other names. Coleridge describes death-fires in Part III of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798).
25. This makes no sense. We’re prepared for the lack of others’ footprints (no sounds as the old man approaches the door of his own house, no footprints in the snow outside the houses), but why would the narrator’s own footprints not show? Later, we learn more about the kinship of the narrator and the villagers, but it seems reasonable to expect that the narrator would have noticed earlier that he himself leaves no footprints.
26. The narrator apparently means the word literally—covered with fungi—rather than employing its figurative meaning of “appearing suddenly like mushrooms.” See the sentence following. The geography described here is startling: The narrator ascends the highest hill in Kingsport and then descends a very long staircase, only to come out on a vast ocean shore fed by a wide river that derives from underground sources. This suggests that the town of Kingsport—which is on the edge of the sea—is essentially an enormous thin dome over ocean waters.
27. Brewer describes Erebus as “[t]he gloomy cavern underground through which the Shades had to walk in their passage to Hades” (424).
28. The narrator uses the term “leprous” in a very loose fashion, probably meaning “unnatural,” apparently to emphasize the “sick greenish” color of the flames; there is certainly nothing in the symptoms of leprosy that could be characteristic of a fire.
29. The glittering green “viscous” vegetation, a form of lichen, apparently grows on the shore, amid the mushrooms. Lichen are composite organisms of fungi and algæ and thrive on virtually any surface.
30. Another great word for a sickly green color.
31. So the river comes up out of the depths, and these creatures come out of the same opening. The participants in the festivities mount them and go down into the depths.
32. There is no “Orange Point” in Marblehead or Salem, but there is a “Peach Point” in the former.
33. Whose prints? See note 25, above.
34. In contrast to the narrator’s earlier observation of Kingsport as a sea of ancient structures, with no sign of automobiles or any modern transport.
35. Also mentioned in “The Unnamable,” at note 16, below.
36. This is the first indication that a copy of the Necronomicon is among the university’s holdings. This copy will be central to the story of “The Dunwich Horror,” (here, below).
37. The name “Ibn Schacabao” is mentioned again in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, note 135, below. “Schacabao” is not a proper Arabic name, and the suggestion has been made that it is a corruption of Ibn Shayk Abol (Son of the Sheik Abol) or Ibn Mushacab (Son of the Dweller; shacab means to sit or dwell). It may also be derived from the Hebrew shakhabh (a sexual term connoting homosexuality or bestiality); or it may be a corruption of the Arabic name Schacabac—a poor man who appears in the tale “The Barmecide’s Feast” recorded in The Arabian Nights.
The Unnamable1
“The Unnamable” reads more like a treatise on Lovecraft’s view of supernaturalism and its literature than a story. Setting the tale firmly in New England, however, and much like a great winemaker, Lovecraft creates typicity—the evocation of a specific location, in this case perhaps a real cemetery. The story also features Carter, probably the same person as Randolph Carter, so often identified with Lovecraft himself. This Carter, however, is of quite a different temperament than the bold chronicler of “The Statement” and nothing like the dreamy narrator of “The Silver Key.” The better view is probably that Lovecraft used the name Carter from time to time to speak of certain aspects of his mind and—like most of us—never quite grasped his own contradictions.
We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.2
With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any æsthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs. Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really “unnamable.” It didn’t sound sensible to him.
Though I well realised the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town3 that stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defence of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy’s own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives’ superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying per
sons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives.4 To credit these whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes—or absences of shapes—which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly “unnamable”? “Common sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.
Charter Burial Ground, Salem, Massachusetts, in 2013. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2013, reprinted with permission
Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on about the “unnamable” and after my friend had finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 24