Lovecraft Annual 1

by S. T. Joshi (ed. )

  It is possible. The novella was published by Knopf in 1925 and from May through November reviewed in such places as the Saturday Review, the Nation and Athenaeum, the New York Times Book Review, the New Statesman, the New Republic, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Dial (Roberts 75–76). The publication of anything by Lawrence was not a minor event. And it is possible that Lawrence’s repetitive, hypnotic style, exploring in close detail the atmosphere of a landscape, might have appealed to Lovecraft, whose aesthetic depends so much on landscape and atmosphere. Whether Lovecraft had read that story, we do know from a remark in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that he had read Lawrence’s groundbreaking Studies in Classic American Literature (D 402), which had been published in 1923 shortly before the novella. A propos of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun Lovecraft writes that the romance “cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner” (D 402)—perhaps, his memory in this point not being too good, referring to Lawrence’s image of sinful man in The Blithedale Romance dropping his pants for a flogging (111). Lawrence and Lovecraft are interested in different Hawthornes; the Englishman is fascinated by the duplicities of The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance, whereas the American is concerned with The Marble Faun and The House of the Seven Gables. Nevertheless, I think Lawrence did guide Lovecraft’s reading of Hawthorne; and Lawrence’s description of the American attempt to slough off European consciousness and to grow a new consciousness may also have attracted him. Most often, Lawrence writes, the laborious process plunges the American into a profound sickness:

  Out! Out! He cries, in all kinds of euphemisms.

  He’s got to have his new skin on him before ever he can get out.

  And he’s got to get out before his new skin can ever be his own skin.

  So there he is, a torn, divided monster.

  The true American, who writhes and writhes like a snake that is long in sloughing. (62)

  Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror,” trying to introduce an alien monster, his brother, through the means of the Necronomicon, a book of hidden wisdom from the old world, suffers this fate, a “torn, divided monster,” on the floor of Miskatonic Library. The story renders in narrative terms the analysis Lovecraft makes of the contradictions of Puritanism in the early paragraphs of “The Picture in the House.” Lovecraft and Lawrence are not far apart when they consider the dilemma of being an American.

  With all these points in mind, let us consider Lawrence’s novella. St. Mawr relates the story of a young woman who, because of her encounter with a totemic Welsh horse, decides to leave her husband and his shallow English society for the mountains and deserts of Arizona. It is a conversion story that challenges basic assumptions of contemporary life, even the assumption that sexuality and intimacy can save the individual or that individual psychology has any significance whatever. Instead, the novella investigates the kerygma of the horse and of the western landscape. It is the description of that landscape, the climax of the novella, which most concerns Lovecraft; but the work has other moments which must have interested him, and we shall begin with them.

  First we should note the story of the horse itself, staring out of the darkness as a challenging presence that is both solar with its sun-arched neck and chthonic with a neck that starts forth like a snake; he is a stallion, but does not “seem to fancy the mares, for some reason” (12), and his Welsh name means St. Mary. He is phallic, as his “lovely naked head” and his resemblance to a snake indicate, but he is also feminine; opposites coincide in him. When Lou Witt, the protagonist, looks at him that first time he stands there, “his ears back, his face averted, but attending as if he were some lightning-conductor” (12). The crisis of the novella occurs when the horse rears up and falls upon her husband who, not man enough to master it, pulls it back onto himself. One of the uncertainties of the work is whether the horse startles at a whistle or at the sight of a snake that children have stoned to death; but the text makes it most probable that it startles in sympathy with the death of a kindred spirit. That image of the snake is to recur much more forcefully at the end of the novel.

  Horses play a part in Lovecraft’s story. Ammi’s horse is sensitive to the transformation of the landscape (DH 61), breaks loose when the Colour in the well begins to move (DH 71), and in the climax of the story screams and dies: “That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day” (DH 77). The totemic name “Hero” indicates its chthonic aspect, the son of the Great Mother and the snake (Harrison 260–94). In addition, the name is androgynous if we keep in mind the Hero for whom Leander drowns or the Hero of Much Ado about Nothing. And St. Mawr no more endures to the end of Lawrence’s novella than Lovecraft’s Hero does, for before Lou retires to her ranch where she has her climactic vision, her stallion deserts his heroic celibacy to pursue mares. No god is the ultimate god.

  This description of the horses in Lovecraft’s story, however, in no way testifies to the real presence of St. Mawr, for with his androgyny, his power, his hidden threat, and his character as a conductor of lightning, he much more suggests the role of the meteor, that messenger from another world. It is a stone, but with hollows inside. It possesses “a torrid invulnerability” (DH 58) that renders it immune to chemical solvents. Most interestingly, the color of St. Mawr is difficult to fix. At first he is described simply as a bay, but three paragraphs later, when Saintsbury pats him, “Lou saw the brilliant skin of the horse crinkle a little in apprehensive anticipation, like the shadow of the descending hand on a bright red-gold liquid” (11). He emanates “a dark, invisible fire,” an oxymoron related to Milton’s “darkness visible” that indicates how dangerous an animal he is (11); he has already killed two men, Mr. Griffith Edwards’s son who had “his skull smashed in” and a groom “crushed . . . against the side of the stall” (12). The influence from the meteor kills Gardner’s sons, and the horse kills the young also, culminating in the injury he wreaks on Lou’s husband.

  Before Lou’s vision on the ranch another god is introduced, the god Pan. The son of Hermes, himself an ambiguous figure in Greek mythology, Pan is both goat and human, an image that may have influenced the traditional image of the devil with his sharp ears, tail, and cloven hoof. He feeds his flock of goats (Pan may in fact not mean “all” but “the feeder”), plays his panpipes, and sometimes at noon causes a panic in anyone who encounters him. Coleridge, in a proto-Lawrentian mood, read the figure as “intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man” (2.93). Lawrence introduces his Pan through a character that to some extent resembles an ironic self-image of the parody of Lawrence that was beginning to move through the popular press; this character, Cartwright, a man who dabbles in alchemy and the occult, is about thirty-eight years old (49), and Lawrence was almost forty when he began the novella.

  Lawrence, however, may have had someone else in mind, whom Lovecraft would have recognized, Arthur Machen, a Welshman with a taste for the occult who in 1894 published a novella well-known in its day, The Great God Pan. With his eyes “that twinkled and expanded like a goat’s” (50), Cartwright is emblematic of the priapic god, but he argues that Pan is a force beyond the male and the female: “Pan was the hidden mystery—the hidden cause. That’s how it was a Great God. Pan wasn’t he at all” (51). This god transcends the misogyny inherent in Machen’s story, at the conclusion of which a beautiful woman disintegrates into a loathsome jelly: “I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts when it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down into the depths, even to the abyss of all being” (1.65). Finally a form appears that cannot be described, but “the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures . . . as a horrible and indescribable shape, neither man nor beast”
(1.65). Helen Vaughn, however, through whom in this story Pan is incarnated into the world of the fin de siècle, is not monstrous because of her descent to the original protoplasm but because she engages in bisexual relations that transgress gender categories; though Pan is incarnate in a woman, the imagery attempts to suggest a biological force that lies beneath the male and female. And thus we return to Lawrence’s vision.

  A more classical Pan appears in E. M. Forster’s 1902 tale, “The Story of a Panic,” in which an “indescribably repellent” (1) young boy called Eustace becomes the apparent incarnation of the god when on a picnic with his relatives in the hills above Ravello, in a hollow that resembles “a many-fingered green hand, palm upwards, which was clutching convulsively to keep us in its grasp” (2). When everyone runs in a fit of inexplicable animal panic, Eustace remains behind and undergoes a transformation; goat-prints surround him, evidence to his tutor that “the Evil One has been very near us in bodily form” (9). Worse than all this, however, is the sudden friendship that Eustace now feels for an Italian servant, who dies that night as Eustace escapes in a pantheistic ecstasy:

  He spoke first of night and the stars and planets above his head, of the swarms of fireflies below him, of the invisible sea below the fireflies, of the great rocks covered with anemones and shells . . . He spoke of the rivers and waterfalls, of the ripening bunches of grapes, of the smoking cone of Vesuvius and the hidden fire-channels that made the smoke, of the myriads of lizards who were lying curled up in the crannies of the sultry earth . . . (16)

  Like Machen’s Pan, this is a being whose power is inamicable to human life. The lesbian imagery of Machen’s story transforms itself here into gay imagery, but the point of sexual transgression and transformation is the same.

  When Lawrence read Forster’s story in 1915 he objected forcefully: “Don’t you see Pan is the undifferentiated root and stem drawing out of unfathomable darkness, and my Angels and Devils are old-fashioned symbols for the flower into which we strive to burst? . . . But your Pan is a stumping back to the well head, a perverse pushing back the waters to their source, and saying, the source is everything” (Letters 2.275–76). The myth, in Lawrence’s view, is always insufficient; he does not want to examine where Pan came from, as Machen and Forster seem to do, but where the force that he represents is going. Pan needs to disappear back into the landscape, become once more a hidden god, if he is to become potent.

  A more benign Pan appears in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows as a Christ-figure, the true Christ of the animals, following a tradition based upon a story that Plutarch related, one found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Dead Pan,” Friedrich Schiller’s “Die Götter Griechenlands,” and also on the lips of a would-be artist in Forster’s story. A sailor, Thamus, hearing a command in the air “to proclaim that the great god Pan has died” (Plutarch 400), does so and hears a loud lament (Plutarch 400–403). “As this story coincided with the birth (or crucifixion) of Christ it was thought to herald the end of the old world and the beginning of the new”; scholars today connect the story with the traditional lament for the fertility god Tammuz or Adonis (“Pan” 663). Something ambiguous resides, then, in the traditional interpretations of the story; either the voice announced the birth of Christ and the dispersal of the pagan gods, including Pan, or, more interestingly, it implied that Pan, the all who was the logos of the world, had died. In Grahame’s novel Christ manifests himself as the god who cares for every lost creature, “lest the awful remembrance [of death] should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the afterlives of little animals” (77; ch. 7).

  Lawrence and Lovecraft know of another Pan, however, one much more ambiguous than we have observed so far, in Hawthorne’s romance The Marble Faun. The work concerns four friends in Rome, one of whom, a young innocent named Donatello, bears an uncanny resemblance to the statue of a faun, though only a few minutes later they doubt the resemblance because “faces change so much, from hour to hour, that the same set of features has often no keeping with itself” (9.20), any more than the stone out of space has any keeping with itself. Nevertheless, Donatello may more than resemble the faun, since he refuses to allow anyone to touch his ears, which are hidden by his thick hair. But though in the fancy of his friends he seems to incarnate the golden age and Eden, he suffers a fall, throwing a man over a cliff to his death, and Donatello’s guilt infects the innocence of his friends. As one of them says, perhaps meaning more than she realizes, “If there be any such dreadful mixture of good and evil . . ., then the good is turned to poison, not the evil to wholesomeness” (10.244–45). Hawthorne is in some perplexity about such an argument, and his perplexity extends throughout the ambiguous work; but Lovecraft would wholeheartedly agree, and “The Colour out of Space” may be read as a confirmation of that view. The Marble Faun concerns several mixtures, human and animal, natural and supernatural, innocence and guilt, real and fantastic, male and female, European and American, Puritan and Catholic, mixtures by which the characters are attracted and repulsed. However we understand these mixtures, we must take this language almost literally in the case of the innocent Puritan Hilda who witnessed Donatello’s murder: “Poor well-spring of a virgin’s heart, into which a murdered corpse has casually fallen, and whence it could not be drawn forth again, but lay there . . . tainting its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly death” (10.168–69). Machen and Forster suggest something much more sinister about Pan than Grahame or Hawthorne, Lawrence something much more powerful and amoral, and Lovecraft something much more aloof and destructive. For Lovecraft of course knows of Pan. By 1920 he had passed beyond his pretty classicizing and wrote of “dreaded Pan, whose queer companions are many” (D 30). But considering Machen, Forster, Grahame, and Hawthorne we now have a better idea who those queer companions could be.

  Several of these details recur in Lovecraft’s story, the deliquescence, the death of god, the physical and moral fall, the well, and the taint of innocence. The bisexual element does not surprise Lovecraft since he had found in Margaret Murray’s account of the witch-cult a description of its god that contained bisexual elements. Originally “the god of this cult was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal; the animal form being apparently earlier than the human, for the god was often spoken of as wearing the skin or attributes of an animal” (12), not surprisingly of a goat or a horse (68–70). Murray does not suggest that Pan was this god but indicates the two-faced god Janus, Dianus, or Diana (12). So bisexual details find their place in “The Colour out of Space.” The stone and its hollow globules are both male and female, testicles and womb. The lightning-bolt is a male fertility motif, but the iridescence of the Colour suggests Iris, the goddess of the rainbow. It lies in the water of the well, but it ascends to the constellation Cygnus, the swan into which Zeus transformed himself in order to seduce Leda. The Colour manifests itself as both male and female. In this regard it is significant that in St. Mawr two major characters, Lewis and Lou, bear the same name.

  Lawrence hints in a number of ways that Pan, whatever Pan may be, presides over the crisis in which St. Mawr rears back. It is noon, the panic hour, and the whistle indicates the sound of the Panpipe, a detail found in Forster’s story. When the horse rears, “his eyes were arched, his nostrils wide, his face ghastly in a sort of panic . . ., his face in panic, almost like some terrible lizard” (62). St. Mawr becomes the embodiment of the chthonic moment in Pan appears as terror.

  The figure of Pan recurs in Lawrence’s novel when Lewis, the Welsh groom, speaking out of the darkness where Pan lives (95) reacts to a falling star by telling Lou’s mother how it feels to live inside a mythology. For Lewis the trees are alive, watching the humans who move among them and eager to hurt them; the trees watch and listen and will kill the humans if possible (95–96). Lewis reacts in this way because for him the sky is not the empty space suggested by Newtonian science, not like “an empty house with a slate falling from
the roof”; instead, “many things twitch and twitter in the sky, and many things happen beyond us,” and so when a meteor falls from the sky Lewis thinks, “They’re throwing something to us from the distance, and we’ve got to have it, whether we want it or not” (97). Just as Lovecraft animates the universe of Einsteinean space with an indifference that seems malevolent and also describes trees thrashing in a windless night, Lawrence argues for a world where neutral space is filled with a vital life.

  Closely connected with the figure of Pan is the myth of the horse that so much concerns the plot of the novel. When Lou first encounters the horse he already bears a totemic impact, his eyes arching out of the darkness with a challenge that Lou slowly responds to as the novella proceeds. He is demonic, like the classical daemons that encounter mortals in a personal fashion. Half snakelike, though with the sun in his neck, he represents an early version of the divinity that shall appear at the end of the novella. Lovecraft develops very little of this in connection with the horse itself, but it is possible that this imagery combines with the image of the oracular, cannibal horses in Macbeth to produce the horse that takes on an admonitory character in “The Colour out of Space.”

  The climax of Lawrence’s novella occurs in an impassioned description of “the power and the slight horror of the pre-sexual primeval world” that Lou finds in the Arizona landscape. Lawrence’s profound distrust of human individualism expresses itself as the individual vanishes in the animated divine landscape where “pillars of cloud” appear in the desert. This is a divinity, however, which only slowly appears and which explicitly has nothing to do with the Christian god of love. It is a world “before and after the God of Love” (139), a repudiation of Grahame’s Pan which Lovecraft also repudiates. First the “debasing” (133) and “invidious” malevolence of the landscape is once more insisted upon; it eats the soul of anyone who attempts to live within it a life of trade and production (133–34). Especially, it reduces a New England woman who had moved there with her husband. No longer able to speak, she spends her days staring (137), unable to engage “the seething cauldron of lower life, seething on the very tissue of the higher life, seething the soul away, seething at the marrow” (141), a passage that recalls both the disintegration of Helen in Machen’s story and the cauldron of the witches in Macbeth. The landscape, which is also to say the demonic divinity that is slowly becoming manifest within it, transforms her into a corpse that she tries to hide from, “the corpse of her New England belief in a world ultimately all for love” (141). And what happens to the New England woman happens to Lou’s mother: “She sat like a pillar of salt, her face looking what the Indians call a False Face, meaning a mask. She seemed to have crystallized into neutrality” (142). Like Lot’s wife, who looks back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lou’s mother freezes into a mask because she is unable to move into the new world of the Arizona landscape that her daughter finds so meaningful.