H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1)

by Donald R. Burleson

21 Beginning, as in the case of a number of Lovecraft works, with philosophical ruminations, the narrator remarks, “I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong.”

  22 He continues by speculating that dreams, beyond anything hinted at by Freud with his “puerile symbolism,” bespeak, perhaps, the existence of a separate realm of being which we can know little of in waking hours. Thus, Lovecraft is toying with the notion of a dream-existence, though making no references here to a well-defined “dreamland” as one would find in “Polaris” or “The White Ship” or, later, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” has, rather than the flavour of Dunsanian fantasy, the flavour of science, or science with some artistic liberties taken, and hints of a cosmicism to become more and more pronounced in Lovecraft’s works.

  The narrator is an interne in a state mental institution, where he meets a strange patient named Joe Slater—Lovecraft convincingly offers the alternative spelling Slaader, for the man is an illiterate from the Catskill Mountains region—who has been brought in after undergoing a bizarre seizure culminating in the murder of a neighbour. Slater is given to spells of leaping in the air and screaming about the desirability of killing some enemy thing “that shines and shakes and laughs.” The narrator comes to understand that Slater, for all his mental inferiority, is privy to visions of a most extraordinary kind; determined to share in Slater’s visions, he rigs up a sort of telepathy-radio device, with which he has previously experimented, to link the two minds. One may well object that Lovecraft’s use of this device is a weak point in the tale, for the invention of such an astounding thing by a humble interne is to be believed only with difficulty, and seems to be a lapse in Lovecraft’s usual policy of strict realism. In any case the device works, and after visions of floating in indefinite regions of space as a sort of disembodied luminosity, the narrator learns that Slater, who is dying, has been the corporeal prison for a high-level cosmic intelligence which vows to be seen, as it departs on a mission of vengeance, as a flash of light near the star Algol. Naturally, the flash, as the new star Nova Persei (Lovecraft is ever faithful to astronomical detail), is indeed observed. While giving some insight into the cosmic scale on which Lovecraft delighted in working, and some notion of the fictional importance that he was inclined to attach to dreams, the story is weak in terms of realism and in terms of its emotional impact—though there are some fairly eerie moments—and can scarcely be classed among Lovecraft’s best. Many years later Lovecraft would redevelop the theme of secondary personality, of alien displacement of a mind, in magnificent form in “The Shadow out of Time.”

  In 1919 Lovecraft also wrote the first of his four prose poems, the one titled “Memory.”

  23 (The other three are “Nyarlathotep,” 1920; “Ex Oblivione,” 1920 or 1921; and “What the Moon Brings,” 1922.) Unlike such fragments as “The Thing in the Moonlight,” the prose poems, though very brief, are complete pieces in themselves and in some ways are quite impressive; they may well show a certain influence of some of the French Decadents, who experimented with the form and whom Lovecraft read. “Memory” is a curious little glimpse, told in dreamy language, of a world in which man has vanished from the earth, and is remembered only with difficulty by the Daemon of the Valley, who is Memory. Man has been replaced by tastefully unspecified creatures, for in the deep valley “move forms not meant to be beheld.” (Lovecraft here makes vagueness a most potent device, showing once again his tendency, in very early writings, already to be capable of strengths that will come to characterise his best-known works later.) Man has left only crumbling ruins, and these are spoken of with quiet irony: “For all time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the grey toad makes his habitation.” Curiously, Lovecraft here seems capable of a more subtle kind of irony than that which he later wields in such tales as “The Terrible Old Man” (1920), the latter irony being decidedly heavy-handed.

  In September 1919 Lovecraft wrote “The Transition of Juan Romero,”

  24 a tale of vague horror set in a mining community. The narrator, who has “been much in India,” and has imbibed undisclosed sorts of strange lore there, meets a Mexican mine worker named Juan Romero, who, though he is unkempt and illiterate, seems unnaturally sensitive to certain strange influences that manifest themselves. (Since this tale was written only shortly after “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” one may suppose that the motif of preternatural sensitivity in a low-order mind is one that Lovecraft in this period had rather much in his thoughts; but in the present story, the motif is much differently used, and one sees here as elsewhere that characteristically when Lovecraft reuses motifs and themes he reworks them with variegation and freshness.)

  After some large-scale blasting to extend the mine in which the workers are employed, an apparently fathomless abyss is opened up underground, and that night Juan Romero wakes the narrator with mutterings of “el ritmo de la tierra—THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!” Lovecraft superbly describes this subterraneous sound or impression as being “like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner” and later as taking on the quality of chanting involving the name of the hideous Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, who demanded human sacrifices. On a stormy night the two men descend the shaft; Juan is swallowed up in the abyss, and the narrator exclaims in typically suggestive Lovecraft fashion, “I saw—was it Juan Romero—but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!” He awakes to the news that Juan lies dead on a nearby table, and that neither of them has left the bunk-house, so that what has happened to Juan is somehow linked to worlds of dream or alternative reality; the abyss has been sealed by cave-ins, and there is no evidence, when further drilling is done, that it ever existed, so that the horror and the mystery have not quite been peculiar to the narrator alone; this is rather different from the sort of thing that Lovecraft will write later in which the horror typically is, entirely, the narrator's private horror. Here the narrator is bewildered and can only feel that “the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.” Interestingly, the motif of an unthinkably enormous and ominously inhabited space underground occurs eleven years later, much differently worked out, in “The Mound,” which Lovecraft ghostwrote for Zealia Bishop and in which he hints of links between his pantheon and the gods of Amerind myth; and in that tale there is also a connexion with Mexican and Aztec culture, myth, and history.

  25 The fact that the “Juan Romero” narrator’s sensitivity to strange lore comes from India, however, shows that Lovecraft was thinking in terms of globally significant phenomena. The pattern of motifs and images in Lovecraft’s work is one scarcely to be explained in simple terms; his was a complex mind.

  In December 1919 Lovecraft produced what can only be described as a pure dream narrative, “The Statement of Randolph Carter.”

  26 12 It is an oft-repeated dictum that Lovecraft wrote from his dreams; this is something of an oblique representation of the fact that Lovecraft, who indeed had remarkably vivid dreams, often made thematic or imagistic use of dream-visions in his stories or wrote in a dreamlike manner of narration; in any case he did not often simply “write his dreams” without considerable elaboration. “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” however, is a direct dream-transcript (another, by Lovecraft’s own account, being “The Doom that Came to Sarnath”), issuing as it does from a dream that Lovecraft had about his poet friend Samuel Loveman, with whom he had been arguing, in letters, about horror fiction. Lovecraft only changed Loveman’s name to Harley Warren; Randolph Carter, the narrator, is a fictional image of Lovecraft himself, one to find much prominence later in other works, notably The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

  The narrator in the tale is by implication undergoing inquisition due to the disappearance of his friend Harley Warren; the story is literally Carter’s “statement.” He tells of visiting an ancient cemetery (the prototype of which, acc
ording to Lovecraft, was St. John’s hidden churchyard below Benefit Street in Providence) with his friend Warren, who carries a “fiend-inspired” old book written in unknown characters, which has come to him from India—Lovecraft in this period (for see also “The Transition of Juan Romero”) makes much of India as a source of awesome and mysterious arcana, fairly well reflecting the popular notions of his day. By removing a slab the two men open up an aperture from which issues a nauseous rush of miasmal odours; there are dripping stone steps leading down into the earth. (The imagery of hidden recesses under the ground is a frequent one with Lovecraft, and coming as it does here from a dream, may well be a sort of dominant archetypal image with him.) Warren, refusing to take along a “bundle of nerves” like the narrator, descends with a portable telephone outfit, sending back messages increasingly alarming, and finally enjoining the narrator to flee: “Curse these hellish things—legions—My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!” After a long silence there comes a voice over the wire that is “deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied”: “You fool, Warren is DEAD!” (In the dream: “You fool, Loveman is DEAD!”)

  Lovecraft’s narration in this story is masterful in its evoking and sustaining of the requisite eerie mood. The story itself, in the telling, is dreamlike, in that the narrator at first seems almost to be a disembodied observer with, in the manner of dreams, no clear idea of what is happening or why. He and Warren, arriving in the ancient cemetery with their telephone outfit, throw down “burdens which we seemed to have been carrying,” reminiscent of the way in which one “arrives” in dreams with no clear notion of how. Of the job of opening the passageway into the ground, the narrator says, “the task seemed known to us.” Throughout, the narrator’s recollection of the events is very much like efforts to reconstruct a dream; sometimes these efforts are unsuccessful, as when the narrator admits, “I no longer know what manner of thing we sought.” Carter even experiences that most familiar of dream-sensations, the lethargic inability to move when the need to move is urgent: “But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark terror.” Lovecraft also maintains the story’s spectral mood by repetition of descriptive imagery, particularly with respect to the moon overlooking the charnel scene; it is successively “a waning crescent moon,” “a wan, waning crescent moon,” “that waning crescent moon,” and finally “an accursed waning moon.” The narrative effect is almost hypnotic, and altogether the story is an impressive example of Lovecraft’s ability to build and sustain a dark fictional atmosphere. The author himself, generally a harsh self-critic, thought highly of the story.

  During the period of 1917–1919, as during most of his literary life, Lovecraft also wrote a certain amount of poetry. Unlike his early imitative eighteenth-century-style verse, which served to make him competent at the mechanics of poetry but which in itself amounts to little of true artistic value, some of Lovecraft’s poetry beginning about 1918 is of real interest, in that it creates some of the same effects as his prose works.

  Particularly noteworthy is the poem “Nemesis” written in June 1918.

  27 The poem is a cosmic vision of the wonders and the horrors of dream and features a metre reminiscent of Poe and Swinburne (see Poe’s “Ulalume”—which uses the term “ghoul-haunted,” where Lovecraft says “ghoul-guarded”—and Swinburne’s “Hertha”). It opens:

  Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,

  Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,

  I have lived o’er my lives without number,

  I have sounded all things with my sight;

  And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak,

  being driven to madness with fright.

  In its reference to “gateways of slumber,” the poem postulates the existence of a separate, continuously present world of dream, foreshadowing the concept of “dreamland” in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Here, however, dreamland seems to be a place in which the dreamer, having lived past lives, is a consciousness immemorially old, consigned to suffer the eternal horrors of nightmare and dream-memory. It is as if the poem’s narrator is an embodiment of the Jungian collective unconscious, with latent memory of things primordial, memory that, in fact, reaches back beyond the beginnings of life itself. The poet relates having experienced a multitude of horrors, which are left tastefully undescribed and only hauntingly suggested (“. . . I have seen things I care not to gaze on again”) by a dreamer who despairs of ever escaping the eternal horrors of timeless memory: “Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.” The poem ends with an eleventh stanza that simply repeats the first, strongly suggesting cyclicity—cosmic cycles of time, the eternally recurrent archetypes of dream. “Nemesis” clearly shows that as early as 1918 Lovecraft had a grandly cosmic scope in mind for the stage upon which his literary effusions would be played out. In its skillfully sustained mood, its grandeur of conception, and its suggestions of linkage between temporal eternities and the “abysses” of dream, the poem stands as one of Lovecraft’s finest.

  One notion prevalent in Lovecraft’s poetry of this period is that of hauntingly elusive memory, a notion that he would use with stunning force later in such prose works as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Shadow out of Time.” This motif is employed in at least two important poems of the period. In the June 1918 poem “The House”

  28 (inspired by the same old Providence edifice about which Lovecraft in 1924 wrote “The Shunned House”), the poet describes an ancient, vine-enshrouded house at the site of which he finally has a revelation of something—what, we are not told—that he has not been able to remember about the place:

  And my age-spanning sight

  Saw the time I had been there before

  flash like fulgary out of the night.

  This notion of the shock of suddenly remembering an earlier (perhaps unthinkably earlier) experience or connexion is repeated in the October 1919 poem “The City,”

  29 in which the poet sees a stately and beautiful dream-city that tantalisingly tugs at his memory, until comes the awesome and soul-annihilating recollection, whose nature is untold:

  Then the horrible warning

  Upon my soul sped

  Like the ominous morning

  That rises in red

  And in panic I flew from the knowledge

  of terrors forgotten and dead.

  By declining to disclose what the poet so shockingly remembers, Lovecraft manages to make the reader experience the same maddening effort to remember, to know what it is, under the surface of things, that one must—yet cannot bear to—remember. A Jungian analysis, of course, would suggest that the poet, in coming to his mysterious realisation, has met the Shadow and recognised it as an unthinkable but undeniable facet of his own psyche. Whatever the interpretation, these poems show an early Lovecraftian obsession with the notion that would come to be central to several important stories later on, the notion that there is something awful that maddeningly eludes the memory but lurks ever close, ever ready to obtrude on the conscious mind and shatter one’s complacency. The most characteristic Lovecraftian notions generally turn out to be products of long mental incubation.

  3. Early Years: Beginnings and Foreshadowings (1920–1923)

  “The Terrible Old Man” and “The Picture in the House”

  Even the very early period of 1917–1919 in Lovecraft’s writing career, the period of “Dagon,” produced works that suggest that some of the major motifs and themes of Lovecraft’s later productions were already stirring, already formative in his mind. However, in the period from 1921 to 1923, he entered a new phase of early creativity, one in which he could truly be said to have embarked on the mainstream of his literary career. His celebrated Mythos was born during this period, and he wrote some tales which, if they are secondary to some of his later works and show the fabric of his conception in only inchoate form, nevertheless remain among his best-known creations. This period reveals a Lovecraft who, if he
was not at the full maturity of his creative powers, exhibited growing control and potency in his work.

  In early 1920 Lovecraft wrote a curious little story called “The Terrible Old Man,”

  30 which first appeared in an amateur press journal published by the elderly “Tryout” Smith of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Lovecraft would later remark that he did not care much for the story, and indeed, although it is competent, it compares in some ways unfavourably with his later work. The story concerns an incredibly aged sea captain residing in a much-shunned little house on Water Street in Kingsport, Massachusetts, Lovecraft’s fictive version of Marblehead, which does have a Water Street like the one in the tale, but which Lovecraft did not visit, oddly enough, until 17 December 1922, almost three years after the writing of this story.

  The pervading tone of the tale is one of irony, very heavy-handed irony, much less refined than the sort of irony that would later come to characterise Lovecraft’s work. In later years, Lovecraft’s irony would become one of a subtle and cosmic sort, an underlying philosophical or cosmological irony suggesting the curious position of man, a thinking and feeling animal capable of pondering his own insignificance in the universe. In “The Terrible Old Man” there is no such cosmicism or subtlety; the irony is cuttingly plain and stark, almost Bierce-like, and the horrific events are local, without far-flung overtones.

  The story opens: “It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man.” The old captain is known to be a wealthy and feeble recluse, “which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.” In titling the men “Messrs.,” and calling their “profession” one that is nothing less dignified than robbery, Lovecraft has set the authorial tone of the tale as one brashly ironic. This tone is, of course, not in itself an artistic fault necessarily; one only notices how much more refined a device irony was to become in Lovecraft’s hands with the passing years.