Lovecraft Annual 1
Page 1
THE LOVECRAFT ANNUAL
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Edited by S. T. Joshi
No. 1 (2007)
Contents
Lovecraft Read This
Darrell Schweitzer
Lovecraft and Lawrence Face the Hidden Gods: Transformations of Pan in “The Colour out of Space” and St. Mawr
Robert H. Waugh
Memories of Sonia H. Greene Davis
Martin H. Kopp
Letters to Lee McBride White
H. P. Lovecraft
The Negative Mystics of the Mechanistic Sublime: Walter Benjamin and Lovecraft’s Cosmicism
Jeff Lacy and Steven J. Zani
Unity in Diversity: Fungi from Yuggoth as a Unified Setting
Phillip A. Ellis
“They Have Conquered Dream”: A. Merritt’s “The Face in the Abyss” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Mound”
Peter Levi
The Master’s Eyes Shining with Secrets: H. P. Lovecraft’s Influence on Thomas Ligotti
Matt Cardin
Thomas Ligotti’s Metafictional Mapping: The Allegory of “The Last Feast of Harlequin”
John Langan
Reviews
Briefly Noted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Abbreviations used in the text and notes:
AT The Ancient Track (Night Shade Books, 2001) CE Collected Essays (Hippocampus Press, 2004–06; 5 vols.) D Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Arkham House, 1986) DH The Dunwich Horror and Others (Arkham House, 1984) HM The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (Arkham House, 1989) MM At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House, 1985) MW Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House, 1995) SL Selected Letters (Arkham House, 1965–76; 5 vols.)
Copyright © 2007 by Hippocampus Press
Published by Hippocampus Press, P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156 http://www.hippocampuspress.com
Cover illustration by Allen Koszowski. Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos. Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert.
The Lovecraft Annual is published once a year, in Fall. Articles and letters should be sent to the editor, S. T. Joshi, P.O. Box 66, Moravia, NY 13118, and must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope if return is desired. All reviews are assigned. Literary rights for articles and reviews will reside with The Lovecraft Annual for one year after publication, whereupon they will revert to their respective authors. Payment is in contributor’s copies.
ISSN 1935-6102
Lovecraft Read This
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Darrell Schweitzer
One of the difficulties in the not-always-rewarding art of literary influence-tracing is determining exactly what an author read and when. It is one thing to say that elements in “Shambles of Eldritch Horror” by J. Batrachian Hackwort prefigure a key passage in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, but quite another to prove that Faulkner actually read Hackwort, and did so prior to writing The Sound and the Fury.
In the case of H. P. Lovecraft and his influences, we may often resort to his letters, his essays, and writings about him, which taken together make him one of the most documented literary persons of all time. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that if there is a three-day stretch in Lovecraft’s life in which we do not know what he was reading, who he was with, what they were talking about, and what flavor the ice cream was, that constitutes a “lost period.”
Nowhere does Lovecraft mention The City of the Unseen by James Francis Dwyer, a fantastic adventure novel published in the Argosy for December 1913, but it is still possible to make a strong case not only that Lovecraft read it, but that its central image stayed with him and reappeared in later works. That Lovecraft never mentioned this novel is easily explained by the fact that it isn’t a very good story and might have even inspired Lovecraft to throw the magazine across the room in disgust at some point. But the influence may have lingered.
How do we know he read it? He must have owned a copy of this issue at some point, because the letters column contains the first return volley in the great Fred Jackson War which Lovecraft instigated in the pages of the Argosy.
To reiterate quickly: Lovecraft, in the September 1913 issue, published a tirade against one Fred Jackson, a writer of sappy romantic tales, the likes of which Lovecraft wanted to see considerably less. In the December issue we find one letter headed “Bomb for Lovecraft,” another “Elmira vs. Providence,” yet another “Virginia vs. Providence,” and still another “Agrees with Lovecraft,” and so on. Most readers seemed to be pro-Jackson, anti-Lovecraft. Some of the criticisms parallel much that has been written since. Elizabeth E. Loop, of Elmira, N.Y., wrote: “If he would use a few less adjectives and more words with which the general public are more familiar. . . . Plain English, correctly spoken, sounds better in my estimation. It saves the trouble of a dictionary at one’s elbow” (Joshi 12).
Lovecraft thrived on this sort of controversy. He made himself a personality in the pages of the Argosy (a magazine to which, as a professional writer, he never contributed). The Jackson battle raged for about a year. Much of it, letters from Lovecraft and responses by the Argosy readers, may be found in the short volume H. P. Lovecraft in the Argosy, edited by S. T. Joshi. Here for almost the first time we see Lovecraft displaying his characteristic wit, erudition, and critical ability. There is even a blast in heroic couplets, “Ad Criticos” (January 1914).
He was twenty-three at the time, unemployed, and as much of an invalid recluse as he ever actually was in his life. This was his first real attempt to reach out to anyone, and as a result of it, Edward F. Daas, Official Editor of the United Amateur Press Association, invited Lovecraft to join, and that undeniably changed his life, the amateur-press scene becoming the catalyst for his literary career, marriage, and most of his lifelong friendships.
It is obvious from Lovecraft’s letters to the magazine that he read the Argosy almost cover to cover. He is first quoted in the November 1911 issue praising Albert Payson Terhune, an opinion he does not seem to have sustained in later years.
It is safe to say, then, that Lovecraft read The City of the Unseen. The cover of the December 1913 issue shows a man and a woman, leaning romantically against each other, with a camel towering over them. The blurb says, “A complete book-length novel of adventure in Arabia.” Not too promising, but in the Munsey magazines of this period one can hope for lost-race adventures in the H. Rider Haggard mode, and this is what The City of the Unseen proves to be.
The blurbist either had not read the story or was weak on geography, because it takes place, not in Arabia, but in Somalia, upon the coast of which a cast of stereotyped characters—the hero, the heroine, the hero’s pal and his girlfriend, an eccentric French scientist, a muscle-bound sailor, and a Steppin Fetchit type comic-relief Arab with the unlikely name of Sarb—are shipwrecked. Dwyer (one of those all-purpose pulp hacks like H. Bedford-Jones, widely travelled, hugely prolific, versatile, completely forgotten today) wasn’t very strong on his sense of place either, as he describes cacti growing in the Somali desert. (Then again, the Munsey magazines were not so strong on realism generally. All-Story, the companion to The Argosy, had just let Edgar Rice Burroughs get away with a tiger in Africa when Tarzan of the Apes was published in the October 1912 issue. None other than H. P. Lovecraft wrote in and objected.)
Without supplies or a source of fresh water, and apparently not much worried about it, the survivors set out to walk south along the coast to the nearest outpost. But suddenly they encounter the Frenchman, Leroux, behaving oddly, racing crazily across the desert and scooping up something out of the sand. He tries to discourage the others, but soon the secret is out that he has found a trail of triangular gold coins strung out across the landscape, as if a camel-rider with an impr
essive gold-hoard and a leaky saddlebag had passed that way. The coins are of vast antiquity, supposedly minted in Miletus (an ancient Greek seaport in Asia Minor) many centuries before Christ, bearing the “Eye of Cybele” on one side and the figure of a “gladiator” on the other. (As something of an amateur in ancient numismatics, I can assure you this is nonsense.)
At once, everyone, except for the whining, gibbering Sarb the Arab (who consistently shows a lot more common sense than anyone else in this story), becomes completely crazed with gold fever. Off they go, all considerations of survival forgotten, picking up gold pieces. They come to an oasis, where the camel-rider may have stopped without discovering his bag was leaking. They cross a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon on one of those rickety, swaying rope-and-bamboo bridges so familiar in cliff-hanger movies. (You may reasonably ask where, in a desert, the builders got the bamboo. No one does.)
But never mind that. The cast then comes upon the central mystery, the City of the Unseen itself, the stuff of Arabian legends, a lost and mysterious city of the remote desert, where a massive Black Pillar rises up out of the sand, with a curse written upon it by the armies of the Prophet Mohammed, who were apparently unable to penetrate the City in the seventh century.
Our heroes find their way inside rather quickly. Down they go, into the bowels of the Earth, into black tunnels of ineffable mystery . . . but even the French scientist shows little interest in the discovery itself. He is in it for the money. Soon the vast treasure-hoard is discovered and the maddened characters are literally wallowing in gold. The chamber in which the gold is kept is partially lighted by archways which open into the same chasm over which everybody crossed on the bamboo bridge. Some sunlight filters down from above.
Only cowardly, whiny Sarb thinks to suggest that maybe they should fill their pockets quickly, then get out of there before the sun goes down.
But nobody listens. The sun goes down.
The City of the Unseen proves to be inhabited by . . . the Unseen, slightly built, light-fearing folk a little bit like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, although somewhat less ambitious, at least of late. They have been hoarding that gold all this time, making no use of it whatsoever except for a bit incorporated into an attractive floor design. For all they are apparently responsible for numerous carvings of exquisite quality, the Unseen People seem to possess no edged weapons of any kind at present, or even hammers. They resist the burglarious outsiders with their fists, and also with the curious stratagem of entangling them with ropes in the dark, in an attempt to heave them out the archways and into the chasm. Things look very bad indeed. The little party fights their way back in the dark, misses the stairway, and is trapped in a far room. Their doom seems certain.
Then, somehow, they are befriended by a maiden of the Unseen Folk, who mercifully lets them out. You would think they’d have enough sense to escape at that point, but, no, for all Sarb’s whining, the gold-madness overcomes them yet again and back they go to the gold-vault, where the obsessed French scientist is ultimately killed and entombed. More perils follow, a desperate escape through the chasm and an underground river, while the troglodytes hurl boulders from above. The hero credits his lady-love, Dorothy, with coaxing him back to sanity. No credit is given to Sarb, whose incantations and mysterious circular signs drawn in the sand seem to repel the Unseen Folk and stave off pursuit—at least for a time . . . although the menace remains and eventually Sarb runs away into the desert, gibbering mad. We never do find out about the camel-rider with the leaky saddlebags.
There is no denying this is a rather silly, if sporadically entertaining novel, decently written in parts, verbosely redundant in others. The escape through the chasm at the end is actually exciting.
As in many pulp lost-race novels of the period (Rex Stout’s Under the Andes, published in All-Story for February 1914, comes immediately to mind), once the explorers of The City of the Unseen discover the lost city, the rest is a matter of fights and chases. There is so much action that nothing happens in terms of development of idea or character. And, usually, such stories include a beautiful priestess and a dinosaur. There is only a hint of the priestess here, and no dinosaur, so readers must have felt short-changed.
But there are occasionally effective, atmospheric descriptions of the accursed and legendary Black Pillar, the buried city, and the subterranean depths. One imagines that after Lovecraft tossed the magazine across the room (if he did), some of the images stayed with him. The relationship between this story and “The Nameless City” or even At the Mountains of Madness is rather like that of Anthony M. Rud’s “Ooze” (which Lovecraft undeniably read, in the first issue of Weird Tales) to “The Dunwich Horror.” The Rud story, with its mysterious doings in a remote estate in the Alabama swamps, where something (a gigantic amoeba, we eventually learn) is growing bigger and devouring an uncanny number of cattle, is sort of an idiot’s version of the Lovecraft. Few would dispute that Wilbur Whateley’s “brother” is a tremendous improvement over Rud’s amoeba.
Likewise, Lovecraft, having read The City of the Unseen, would have realized how much more interesting the story could be if the Black Pillar opened to reveal something more than an improbable coin-hoard and troglodytes with ropes, and if the entire ridiculous cast of characters were dispensed with. The carvings on the walls, admired by the hero in moments of lucidity, are enormously suggestive. Lovecraft, who had a far superior imagination to Dwyer, substituted prehuman and cosmic mystery for the mundane melodrama. Lovecraft conveys a sense of increasing awe, as discovery follows discovery, an effect Dwyer is either incapable of or no more than momentarily interested in.
One also cannot overlook poor Sarb with his magical circles in the sand, which seem to repel the menacing Unseen for a while. The Elder Sign, anyone?
There are, very likely, many more such “sources” of Lovecraft’s fiction. We know that he read very widely in the pulp magazines between about 1905 (when he started with the Argosy) and sometime in the 1920s. Like many superior writers, he was no doubt exasperated with the tripe he encountered, particularly when he saw more potential in the material than the authors apparently did. Recall his famous comment about Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin series, that these had managed to bungle so many ideas and situations that a more competent writer ought to get permission to go back and write the stories.
There are other evident cases of this sort of oneupmanship in Lovecraft. Unimpressed with the tame “gossip” of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Lovecraft produced a story with a really shocking family secret in it—“Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.” J. Paul Suter’s “Beyond the Door” (Weird Tales, April 1923), a story Lovecraft actually admired, bears more than a passing resemblance to “The Rats in the Walls” (Weird Tales, March 1924). If there is a link, it is simply that Lovecraft saw the potential in the material and did it better. Such an approach can seem arrogant. One thinks of the possibly apocryphal Beethoven insult, “I liked your opera. I think I’ll set it to music.”
But if the writer can actually pull it off, then he is entitled. That is the difference between mere talent and genius.
Works Cited
Dwyer, James Francis. “The City of the Unseen.” Argosy 74, No. 1 (December 1913): 1–91.
Joshi, S. T., ed. H. P. Lovecraft in the Argosy: Collected Correspondence from the Munsey Magazines. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1994.
Lovecraft and Lawrence Face the Hidden Gods:
Transformations of Pan in “The Colour out of Space” and St. Mawr
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Robert H. Waugh
Recent studies of “The Colour out of Space” have explored its dense literary quality. As a story that alludes to and plays with a variety of texts, it has slowly become as iridescent a work as the stone that it celebrates. First, it contains a network of allusions and parodies of various biblical moments: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; the leading of the children of Israel out of Egypt; the
incarnation, death, resurrection, and second coming of Christ; and the prophecies of the Antichrist.1 Most of these allusions parody the original texts as well as prepare the way for an apocalyptic event. Also, in a complex fashion the story layers allusions to Macbeth with allusions to Paradise Lost.2 What we have not yet recognized is the possibility that some of the imagery of Lovecraft’s story that we have so far ascribed to biblical material and some of its salient themes may have been suggested by Lovecraft’s reading D. H. Lawrence’s long novella St. Mawr, which appeared two years before Lovecraft’s work. Once more, as Gayford and Mariconda have argued, we must consider the extent to which Lovecraft has connections with modernism.
The evidence for this possibility is textual rather than direct. Lovecraft refers to Lawrence only twice in the letters, some three years after the writing of “The Colour out of Space.” The second reference is appreciative, clearly the result of some thought. It begins by contrasting to writers who “violate people’s inherited sensibilities for no adequate reason” other writers “whose affronts to convention are merely incidents in a sincere and praiseworthy struggle to interpret or symbolize life as it is” (SL 3.264). Among these Lovecraft includes Voltaire, Rabelais, Fielding, and Lawrence:
We would be simply foolish not to recognise the vigourously honest intent to see and depict life as a balanced whole, which everywhere animates their productions. When they commit a blunder in technique or proportioning, it is our place to excuse it—whether it concern a difficult or a common theme—and not to adopt a leering or sanctimoniously horrified attitude if the theme happens to be difficult. (SL 3.264–65)
Censorship, so often a question that arose with Lawrence’s career, does not concern Lovecraft because “no censorship law ever kept any high-grade scholar from reading and owning all the books he needs—Bostonians read Dreiser and Lawrence, and Tennesseeans understand the principles of biology” (SL 3.265). Then, as is so often his wont, Lovecraft draws back from the fray: “But life is a bore! And I don’t know but that the frank expressers are about as damned a bore as the vacant-skull’d suppressors! That’s why I light out for the fifth dimension” (SL 3.266). We must wonder, however, whether before he lit out “beyond the rim of Einsteinian space-time” (SL 3.266) Lovecraft had in fact, like those Bostonians, read Lawrence.