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

by Donald R. Burleson

  The Terrible Old Man, the reader is told, is so old and so taciturn that few even know his real name, and in a house surrounded with strange stone idols he lives amid peculiar bottles, each of which contains a string pendulum dangling a small piece of lead; when he talks to a bottle, calling it by some seafaring name, the pendulum vibrates as if in response. “Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations do not watch him again.” The three robbers, however, do not partake of this respectful distance, for they are “of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions.” It has been claimed that this remark constitutes a “hostile snarl” at aliens on Lovecraft’s part,

  31 but such is obviously not the case; the narrator could not be serious in using the term “charmed circle” to describe a circle of living that encompasses the ill-famed Terrible Old Man, the remark clearly being ironic.

  The three robbers select a night on which to “interview” the old man; Mr. Ricci and Mr. Silva resolve to do the interviewing while Mr. Czanek waits nearby in a car. During the interview the waiting Czanek hears screams from the house and assumes that his companions are having difficulty persuading the old man to tell the whereabouts of his hoarded gold and silver; he is “more than ordinarily tender-hearted” and dislikes the screaming, but watches the gate “very nervously.” The narrator has been dissembling as to Czanek’s real thoughts, for they clearly centre about his doubts as to who is doing the screaming. Hearing a tapping on the walk and “a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch” (fumbling at latches is a common imagery in Lovecraft’s fiction) he finds himself facing not the robbers returning, but the Terrible Old Man, who is “smiling hideously.” It is interesting that in terms of narrative point of view the story itself, in keeping with the old man’s bottles, is “bottle-shaped” or hourglass-shaped; it opens with an editorialising omniscient narrator (a broad point of view), narrows to the central intelligence of Czanek’s thoughts, and expands back to general omniscient narration.

  The story closes with further sarcasm. “Little things make considerable excitement in little towns,” little things like “the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels.” The townspeople indulge in “idle gossip” about these things, things of little interest to the Terrible Old Man, who “must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.”

  The story carries an evenness of ironic tone throughout, always bordering on true sarcasm, and in this regard is a successful exercise in control of authorial tone and singleness of effect. The omniscient narrator editorialises freely but consistently upon his attitudes. The irony is so heavy, however, that one is all the more impressed with how subtle a technique irony is for Lovecraft later on. The tale does thematically foreshadow later developments in Lovecraft’s fiction, for the motif of an incredibly aged man shunned and held in fearful suspicion by his spying neighbours, an old man who succeeds in communicating with the long-dead, is later worked out in a much more thoroughly developed manner in the character of Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927). The Terrible Old Man seems to be a character type inchoate for Lovecraft at this point but much on his mind.

  The same motif, or one very similar, the motif of an unnaturally ancient recluse who draws suspicion down on himself, is employed in “The Picture in the House,” which Lovecraft wrote in late 1920.

  32 The story is as different in tone and style from “The Terrible Old Man” as anything could be, showing the variegation of mood and effect of which Lovecraft’s mind was capable at any given time. This tale is the first in which Lovecraft mentions his fictional Arkham (roughly corresponding to Salem, Massachusetts) and is the one in which Lovecraft first postulates New England as a unique setting of horror. Years later, in 1935, he would remark:

  “The Picture in the House” expresses my feeling of horror at the curious air of mystery and alienage which pervades certain backwoods New England houses I have seen. Many people wonder why I don’t exploit the traditional element of weirdness in the South . . . . The fact is . . . that I can’t feel the same deep, Gothic horror in any mild and genial region that I can in the rock-strewn, ice-bound, elm-shaded hillsides of my own New England.

  33

  The story, told by a first-person narrator quite unlike the disembodied and uninvolved narrator of “The Terrible Old Man,” opens with philosophical observations on the finding of true horror:

  Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.

  However, the narrator significantly asserts,

  the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

  Consciously or not, Lovecraft here seems in the voice of his narrator to be making an observation about the very art of horror—to the implied effect that with such settings as “the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries,” horror tales often depend on traditionally eerie locales for their effects, settings which themselves almost tell the tale; whereas the really perceptive seeker after horrific mood need not look so far afield, but rather must demonstrate or convince the reader of the existence of horror in places where most people do not primarily expect to find it. In particular, New England for Lovecraft is clearly a sufficient, even a superior, repository of horror; in this regard Lovecraft has learned much from Hawthorne.

  The narrator continues with a description of the sort of “little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways” which can most readily turn out to be concealing unthinkable things; his handling of the description shows Lovecraft to be developing into a master of narrative evocation of mood. Of the lonely backwoods of New England farmhouses in question, he says:

  They are hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

  This charmingly alliterative and darkly mood-building passage must be read aloud to be best appreciated; Lovecraft chooses his alliterative consonants and his dark and resonant vowels in such a way as to paint a most effectively gloomy scene on the canvas of the reader’s imagination; “The Picture in the House” is in many ways a picture in the mind. It begins to be clear, with this story, that place was sentient for Lovecraft—that for him a place so redolent of powerful impressions could function practically at the level of significance of an actual character in a story. The passage quoted illustrates, too, a developing tendency in Lovecraft to personify his houses horrifically; the windows “stare” metaphorically as eyes, and the house itself is a metaphorical image of a furtive and gloomy mind. Of these houses, Lovecraft’s narrator even remarks, “Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.”

  Lovecraft, in this story’s early paragraphs, explores the notion that the rigidity of Puritanical repression in early New England history was inevitably bound to produce outrageous secret behaviour and furtively concealed horrors within the walls of houses in which such people lived in isolation and “in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds.” Of these fanatical hermits Lovecraft says:

  Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in t
heir isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stem, these folks were not beautiful in their sins.

  Like Hawthorne, Lovecraft obviously found the implications of Puritanical fervor much on his mind; in 1930 one finds him discussing these same ideas in a letter, eruditely quoting from the 1642 writings of Governor Bradford of Massachusetts to support his argument.

  34 The impact of the story, however, lies in the fact that these Puritanical horrors, born of repression and isolation, turn out, for the narrator, to be no mere gruesome accounts of the past, but horrors that obtrude unexpectedly on the present, surviving the passage of centuries that should have eradicated them. (This theme of tragic linkages through time, of ghastly survivals from the past, comes to be a notion much employed by Lovecraft, notably in his novels The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness, where he took advantage of greater narrative length to develop the notion and its implications fully.)

  The narrator in “The Picture in the House” (like the later narrator in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”) is a young man in search of genealogical data, and while touring on bicycle he is caught in a rainstorm, from which he takes refuge in an old farmhouse that he supposes to be deserted. He finds the interior to be an unrelieved mass of antiquity, and rummaging among the books he finds a copy of Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region, printed in Frankfort in 1598; this is a book actually familiar to Lovecraft in real life. The volume falls ominously open at Plate XII to reveal a picture of a cannibal’s butcher shop, with human limbs lying about. While inspecting this repellent book he is startled to hear footsteps overhead and then on the stairs, and a large, stout man with the air of greatly advanced age enters to greet him with the words, “Ketched in the rain, be ye?”

  A comparison of the printed story at this point with the original rough-draft manuscript in Lovecraft’s hand reveals an interesting fact about the composition of the tale.

  35 As finally revised by Lovecraft, the pertinent passage of description of the old man reads:

  But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.

  At this point Lovecraft had written, but scratched out:

  On a beard which might have been patriarchal were unsightly stains, some of them disgustingly suggestive of blood.

  In deleting this additional sentence Lovecraft shows himself capable of wise artistic restraint, for clearly the sentence would have prematurely and unsubtly disclosed points only later to be gleaned by inference. Avoidance of excessively photographic and revelatory description comes to be a very strong point in Lovecraft’s fiction, which derives much of its potency and durability, its re-readability, from the fact that generally its horrors are subtly suggested and not painted in sharp or garish detail.

  The old man startles the narrator both by the totality and consistency of his eighteenth-century speech and by references to matters that make for disturbing speculations about the man’s age. As usual in Lovecraft’s writing, there is no true dialogue here. The narrator says that he speaks to the old man, but does not directly relate his speech to him; to emphasise the character of the old man, the narrator is thus somewhat self-effacing, except for his emotional responses, which serve to bring further focus to the more colourful character. Asked about the Congo book, the old man replies, “Oh, that Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ’sixty eight—him as was kilt in the war.” The narrator, disturbed, reflects that he has seen the name in his genealogical work, “but not in any record since the Revolution.” Thus, the idea must be dawning on him that the old man means 1768, not 1868 as one would more naturally infer in 1896 when the story’s action occurs, and that the war referred to is the Revolutionary War; the old man is a full century older than he should be. Thus, again Lovecraft is experimenting with a character type that will come to grand fruition later on, in the person of Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

  The old man inspires quick revulsion in the narrator with his remarks over the cannibalistic scene of Plate XII. Cleverly, Lovecraft manages to keep the focus on the old man while still letting the reader know of the narrator’s emotional responses; the old man says such things as “here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?” The old man expresses, in his crude way, great titillation over the scene in Plate XII, along with a certain Puritanical ambivalence and rationalisation: “I s’pose ‘tis sinful, but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin?” He finally discloses, “I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy,” and says, “They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—” (he means flesh more like the man that is consuming it). Upon hearing this eerily suggestive phrase, the narrator, seeing a drop of red liquid fall onto the page, looks up to see a spreading spot of wet crimson on the ceiling, presumably soaking through from the room above. “A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.”

  The narrator presumably survives to tell the tale; the reader must suspend his skepticism over the narrator’s survival chances to suppose so. In any case, the ending is somewhat enigmatic. A reader unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s religious skepticism might suppose, especially given the old man’s mention of “livin’ in sin,” that the thunderbolt was a sort of divine retribution for the old man’s implied cannibalistic outrages; and since Lovecraft’s biographical facts should perhaps not be called in to explain a story that should be thought of as self-contained, such a view might well be able to stand as a tenable interpretation. It seems more likely, however, that the thunderbolt either comes as a final chapter in the old Puritan’s “struggle for life with relentless Nature,” as at most a comment from Nature viewed as sentient without traditional religious overtones; or comes at random, a fortuitous effacing of the horror and a salvaging of the narrator’s sanity, however much this view leans on the expediency of coincidence, which does play a large role in the tale, for one may ask why the narrator happens to be present when the old man’s long-standing career in unwholesome nourishment comes to an end.

  At any rate, the story demonstrates that as early as 1920 Lovecraft was capable of weaving a powerful tale of horror—capable of evoking and sustaining mood through highly artful use of language, capable of exercising control of focus in handling his characters, and capable of using his native New England as a locale for horrors as potent as those to be entertained in more conventional settings.

  Dunsanian Tales

  During the period of 1920–1923, Lovecraft continued to evince the sort of interest in Lord Dunsany’s writing that had earlier led him to pen such tales as “The White Ship.” His new Dunsanian fantasy efforts were interspersed with his tales of pure horror, so that he cannot ever be said to be immersed in an exclusively Dunsanian “period,” but the hand of Dunsany rests heavily on several important works of this period nonetheless.

  In early summer of 1920 Lovecraft wrote a charming little story called “The Cats of Ulthar.”

  36 He would later call it his best Dunsanian or “quasi-folklore” tale. In the opening lines, Lovecraft indulges in his love of cats and of archaic diction:

  It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sits purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten
cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

  Lovecraft, in referring to Ulthar “beyond the river Skai,” is here making early use of part of his later “dreamland.”

  The reader is told that in Ulthar, before the injunction against killing cats, there dwelled an old cotter and his wife “who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours.” Their cottage in the story lies “darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard,” and the two are feared by their neighbours, who are simple people and “knew not whence it is all cats first came.” (The narrator does not enlighten the reader further on this point, but leaves the matter open to speculation, the suggestion merely being that the race of cats is immemorially old.) The tension is brought to a point by the arrival in town of “a caravan of strange wanderers from the South,” including a small orphan boy named Menes who has only a tiny black kitten to cherish; the imagery of a gypsy caravan coming to such a town is, of course, very Dunsanian. The inevitable happens; on the third day the boy’s kitten is missing. The boy, overcome at first with grief, prays in a strange language, whereupon the clouds assume peculiar shapes reminiscent of things painted on the wanderers’ wagons. Lovecraft’s narrator here intrudes, editorially but dissemblingly, to remark that “Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.”