by S. T. Joshi
Leland Boylston Hall (1883–1957) is certainly an unlikely figure to write a work of supernatural horror. After receiving a B.A. from Harvard in 1905, Hall obtained an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1912 and began a long career as a professor of music. He taught at Columbia (1913–17), Harvard (1920–22), and Smith College (1930f.). Many of his early publications were in the realm of music. As a student at Harvard he actually wrote the music for an opera, Machiavelli (1905);[186] it was produced by the Hasty Pudding Club of Harvard. He went on to edit a large volume of Pianoforte and Chamber Music (1915) and to coedit A Narrative History of Music (1915). The pinnacle of his work in this field was the well-received treatise Listeners’ Music (1937).
During his own time, Hall’s chief claim to literary celebrity rested not upon his musicological writing nor upon Sinister House but upon the autobiographical volume Salah and His American (1933), an affecting account of his voyage to Morocco in the company of a native servant, a former slave. Chapters of this book were serialised in such magazines as Asia, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly. An earlier travel volume, Timbuctoo (1927), had also been well received. Hall was the author of only one other work of fiction, They Seldom Speak (1936), a grim novel of New England farm life.
What impelled him to write Sinister House is a mystery. A well-crafted ghost story written in a compact 40,000 words (about the length of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness), it combines the richness of character portrayal of the novel with the concentrated emotive impact of a short story. The novel was reviewed on the whole favourably, even enthusiastically. The New York Times Book Review observed: “This is a mystery story of a strangely appealing quality. Against the background of a typical American suburb, . . . the author has managed to project a genuine atmosphere of horror.” In noting the clever use Hall makes of an automobile in the story, the review stated: “It is somewhat of a triumph to make this unromantic vehicle a factor in a mystery story, but it is characteristic of the author’s method. He has managed to evoke horror with the use of commonplace materials.” The review concludes: “The story is just the right length; mystery stories should not be too long to read at one sitting. And it is safe to say that no reader will postpone ‘Sinister House’ to a second.”[187]
Somewhat less charitable was the reviewer in the Nation. Comparing the novel to another work, E. R. Punshon’s The Solitary House, the reviewer maintained that these two works “gain their effect by cumulative means, piling up, as it were, stratum on stratum of horror and suspense until the breaking-point is reached. They miss the highest possible effectiveness by failing to ‘time’ that breaking-point.”[188] H. W. Boynton, however, came to a much different conclusion in his review in the Bookman:
. . . the author has the advantage of no exotic atmosphere. He has set his little stage of terror as close as possible to the world of every day. It is at commuter’s distance from the big city (say New York), up the famous river (say the Hudson), a neighbor’s walk from “Forsby”—that snug, leveled, concrete-built suburb produced for the good of the race by a Common Sense Realty Company, and peopled by honest young couples with lawn-mowers and Fords and baby-carriages and very decent prospects of moving on in due time to more spacious quarters and methods elsewhere. . . . The drama that ensues we watch through the eyes of a Forsby neighbor and friend. The weak point about the story is the narrator’s wavering between a bookish and rather sophisticated style, and the blunt colloquialism proper to him as a “man in the street”. But it is one of the best ghost stories of recent years.[189]
But even this praise, qualified as it is, is eclipsed by a review in the Dial:
Perhaps never since the Turn of the Screw have ghosts been evoked so successfully as in Sinister House. . . . Mr. Hall understands the artistic value of contrasts in building up his atmosphere. Days of bright autumn sun and family picnics precede nights that are black with great winds blowing. Comfortable fires and pleasant food—and then ghostly fingers at one’s neck. The style is manipulated toward the same end: Pierre Smith, the narrator, talks in commonplace colloquialisms, except at the high moments of the story; there the colloquialisms give place to clear, distinct, sometimes powerful phrasing.[190]
While it may be quite a stretch to compare Sinister House with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the novel clearly impressed a sufficiently wide array of reviewers that it should have urged Hall to try his hand once again at supernatural fiction. But he apparently never did so.
Lovecraft’s own remark about the novel’s “mediocre romanticism” deserves some comment. This appears to reveal once again Lovecraft’s prejudice against the mingling of the love story with the horror tale, as numerous strictures in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” attest; perhaps most flagrant was his condemnation of the “artificial and nauseatingly sticky romantic sentimentality” of Hodgson’s The Night Land, when in fact that romance element is a central driving force in the novel. In Sinister House, the romance element is gradually and effectively revealed as intimately connected with the supernatural phenomenon, and in fact it is the very basis of the novel’s supernatural premise.
Lovecraft did not read Sinister House on or near the date of its original appearance; if he had, he presumably would have mentioned it in the original appearance of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (Recluse, 1927). The book was lent to him in the spring of 1932 by Bernard Austin Dwyer.[191] His reading of the novel so relatively late in life appears to have precluded its influencing his own writing to any significant degree. Lovecraft’s his citation of Sinister House in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is almost a kind of afterthought or annotation, but it exhibits the diligence with which he combed contemporary literature for instances of meritorious supernatural work. That he chose to cite this novel in his treatise, when his letters reveal many other contemporaneous works that failed to meet his criteria of excellence, suggests that Sinister House had attained a threshold of merit that justified bringing it to the attention of the devotee. Nearly ninety years after its initial publication, this reprint seeks to do the same.
Eleanor M. Ingram, The Thing from the Lake (1921)
Extravagant claims have occasionally been made about the influence on H. P. Lovecraft of The Thing from the Lake (1921) by Eleanor M. Ingram. D. H. Olson, in a recent reference work, states that the novel “anticipated the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft by several years” and that “similarities between this novel and the later works of H. P. Lovecraft are striking.”[192] If we examine random passages from the novel, such claims seem superficially plausible. We find here a creature in a small lake (really nothing more than a large pond) in Connecticut that appears to harbour a monster that makes a “sound like the smacking of soft, glutinous lips,” that has “tentacles of evil,” and knowledge of which is found in books, as the protagonist declares: “There was a book that held all I longed to know, It [the monster] whispered to me.” But a systematic and holistic reading of this most interesting novel may cause us to be a little more circumspect in our claims of Lovecraftian influence.
Very little is known about the life of Eleanor Marie Ingram (1886–1921), and what information there is has been graciously provided to me by Robert Reginald. Ingram was the daughter of John Wharton Ingram (1861–1937), an attorney in New York City, and Anna A. Shields (1857–1937). She was never married, but she was apparently engaged to or involved with a man who enlisted in the U.S. Army and was killed in France during World War I. Otherwise, all that is known of her is the fact that she published eight novels over a twelve-year period.[193] None of the novels preceding The Thing from the Lake carried the least suggestion that Ingram would produce a minor classic of supernatural fiction. The Game and the Candle (1909) is a political novel and love story set in an imaginary European nation; The Flying Mercury (1910), Stanton Wins (1911), and From the Car Behind (1912) are all racing car novels, a genre that enjoyed brief popularity at the onset of the automobile age; The Unafraid (1913; filmed in 1915 by
Cecil B. DeMille) is a melodrama set in the Balkans; A Man’s Hearth (1915) is another melodrama, this time set among the millionaires of New York City; and The Twice American (1917) is a romance focusing around a man with dual United States and Brazilian citizenship. The four-year gap between this novel and The Thing from the Lake is unexplained, unless Ingram was somehow involved in the world war or in postwar work. She died on March 25, 1921, of breast or ovarian cancer, and her final novel appeared posthumously in the fall of that year.
What is noteworthy about The Thing from the Lake, aside from the smoothness of its prose and its crisp delineation of character, is that for much of its length it operates on a dual level of supernaturalism. The protagonist, Roger Locke, has purchased an old house in Connecticut—one that proves to be a house once belonging to the Michell family, one of whom, Desire Michell, was accused of witchcraft. In a striking tableau early in the novel, Locke wakes up in the dark in his bed and finds a thick strand of hair draped over his hand. An ambiguous conversation with the owner of this flowing lock of hair creates the impression that she may be the ghost, or at the very least the reincarnation, of the centuries-old witch; indeed, the terror and fascination surrounding this woman significantly dwarfs the terror of the thing from the lake, since the latter entity is never clearly seen or described and its properties and very existence remain in doubt to the end.
The most extensive discussion of the nature of the thing from the lake occurs about a third of the way through the novel:
Were there other races between earth and heaven; strange tribes of the middle spaces whose destinies were fixed and complete as our own, but between whose lives and ours were fixed barriers not to be crossed? Had I met one of these beings, inimical to man as a cobra, intelligent as man, hunting Its victim by methods unknown to us?
This passage does indeed sound proto-Lovecraftian; but we must now face the fact that Lovecraft did not read the novel until June 1927, after he had written such seminal stories as “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), and “The Colour out of Space” (1927), where the basic outlines of the Cthulhu Mythos had already been thoroughly established. Lovecraft had been lent the book, perhaps by W. Paul Cook, in May 1927[194] and read it the next month, remarking: “Eleanor M. Ingram’s ‘Thing from the Lake’[195] is a really good story—with a genuine thread of horror despite best-seller form.”
It may then be possible that the novel inspired one element of “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), written about a year later. Note that it is stated there, in the famous passage from the Necronomicon, that “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.” Later, Henry Armitage refers “to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension.” Some of these conceptions may have been partially influenced by Lovecraft’s reading of The Thing from the Lake, but in my view these parallels are too general and imprecise to make a compelling case for direct literary influence.
A thoroughgoing reading of The Thing from the Lake makes it clear that the central issue in the novel is not the titular Thing, but the love and passion that develop between Roger Locke and Desire Michell, who proves to be an emphatically real human being—the fourth in a line of Desire Michells, and whom Locke marries at the end. We also learn that an earlier Desire Michell had somehow unwittingly summoned the Thing in the course of exacting vengeance upon a lover who had jilted her. But in reality, the nature and properties of the Thing are very imprecisely sketched: It does seem to have some kind of telepathic powers (it appears to communicate with Locke in some fashion), but its very shape, aside from those tentacles, is a matter of doubt. And the fact that it appears to harbour a sense of jealousy against Locke for his increasing fancy to Desire, and that it is apparently banished by another character’s prayer to God, makes it a very un-Lovecraftian monster indeed.
Nevertheless, The Thing from the Lake is an able venture into supernaturalism, even if a natural explanation—regarding hallucinations produced by marsh gas—is unconvincingly offered at the end. The essence of the novel may have very little to do with Lovecraft, but the fact that Lovecraft read and relished it, and may have been influenced by it, is sufficient reason for us to enjoy it ourselves.
Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour (1924)
In referring to an array of horror novels from the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, H. P. Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” observes:
Much subtler and more artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni type of early Gothic “villain”, but is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keeps this tale from approaching absolute perfection.
The length of this description—as long as his earlier account of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—and his suggestion that the novel was even close to the realm of “absolute perfection” might well invite scepticism, even incredulity, in the modern devotee of supernatural literature: Cold Harbour (1924) has been virtally forgotten in the more than eighty years since its initial publication—indeed, it probably would have been entirely forgotten had Lovecraft not mentioned it in his treatise—and has never been reprinted until this edition.
And yet, at the time of its publication, Francis Brett Young (1884–1954) was one of the more notable young British authors, and he had already published an array of fiction, poetry, and drama that earned him widespread respect. Even today he still commands a few paragraphs in standard histories or encyclopedias of English literature. Young had received a medical degree from the University of Birmingham and begun practicing medicine in Brixham, Surrey, in 1907. Serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War I, he contracted malaria and found himself unable to continue his practice. He and his wife, Jessie Hankinson, moved to Capri, where they lived until 1929.
Young’s first novel, Undergrowth (1913; cowritten with his brother, Eric Brett Young), has been described by one critic as “strongly reminiscent of Arthur Machen.”[196] The reference is probably to the depiction of landscape, and Young went on to write several novels that richly portray the history and topography of the British countryside, as Cold Harbour itself does. His 1927 novel Portrait of Claire won the prestigious James Tait Black Prize. His poetry was praised by John Masefield, and his work as a whole won the esteem of Compton Mackenzie and other critics.
Possibly Young’s prior reputation had something to do with the relatively cool reception that Cold Harbour received among reviewers. The reviewer of the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post made a pointed comparison of the novel with two other works by Young, Woodsmoke (a tale of Africa that, as the reviewer noted, was “damaged a little by the introduction of the supernatural near its close”) and Sea Horses (a Conradian novel of sea life), remarking:
“Cold Harbour” falls a long way below either of these. Mr. Young has gone back to one of the oldest devices for getting a story told; he invokes a little group of friends and has a man and his wife relate their strange adventures in an English country house, with a fiend incarnate as the principal figure. Husband and wife divide the story amicably, which married readers will recognize at once as utterly impossible. . . .
It is not a bad novel, but it is far inferior to Mr. Young’s best work. I found it tiresome at times and that with the memory still fresh of the pleaure I had from both “Woodsmoke” and “Sea Horses.”[197]
One suspects in this rather captious criticism a prejudice against supernatural fiction—a prejudice that woul
d become all too prevalent among critics and literary scholars as the century advanced. Much more enthusiastic was John W. Crawford’s review:
Francis Brett Young’s new novel is a ghost-story warranted to chill the most blasé spine. Honors in weirdness are evenly divided between a sinister house and a sardonic man, its tenant. . . .
The somber mood of cumulative horror in the story itself is tellingly contrasted with the contemplative expansiveness of an after-dinner chat in twilight Italy. The story is related by involuntary witnesses of its concluding chapters to a host who knows the country and retains a boyhood memory of Furnival and his ménage. The situation gains in power through this allusive, oblique method of presentation. The periodic returns to the quiet of the Italian landscape serve to heighten the sense of the feverish, inhuman atmosphere of the narrative.
. . . One is left with a cleansing tremor of horror and pity and wonder. “Cold Harbour” has broken casings and lifted the vision to new spiritual horizons.[198]
Somewhere between these extremes is the Times Literary Supplement review, published when the novel first appeared in England toward the end of 1924:
Mr. Francis Brett Young has struck out a new line in Cold Harbour. It is a ghost story, and its object is to make the reader’s flesh creep. The question to be decided is whether it succeeds in its aim; on this point, we fancy, not all readers will think alike. . . . It is hardly necessary to add that Mr. Brett Young’s powers of description are used to great advantage in conveying to readers the remoteness of the old house, its position upon a lonely verge of the Black Country, the circle of blackened beech trees round it, the startling apperance of Mr. Furnival, the misery in Mrs. Furnival’s eyes, and so on. But there are two weaknesses which saved us from bad dreams. The first is that all the authentic details of horror are contained in what Mrs. Furnival told Mrs. Wake in one hour—we get half a lifetime’s horror, but at second hand. The second is that all the suggestion of ancient and awful cults as the root of the evil inhabiting Cold Harbour turns out in the end to have been little more than a decoration.[199]