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

by Donald R. Burleson

  Other Writings

  From 1920 to 1923 Lovecraft produced a wide variety of other works, including two stories written “to order” for serialisation, an impromptu story written to be read aloud at an amateur press gathering, and a number of other things, including three of the four prose poems. Some of the miscellaneous works of this period—in particular, “The Nameless City” and “The Festival”—thematically serve to adumbrate the later development of the Lovecraft Mythos, at least faintly.

  In 1920 Lovecraft’s fondness for the lore of ancient Greece found expression in a little tale called “The Tree,”

  58 set in Arcadia and treating of two gifted sculptors, Kalos and Musides; though “no shadow of artistic jealousy cooled the warmth of their brotherly friendship,” their natures differ, in that while Musides is a socially active fellow, Kalos is fond of retiring to an olive grove to meditate and converse with the spirits of the grove—much as Lovecraft himself imagined seeing fauns and dryads in the woods near his childhood home. Kalos and Musides are drawn into competition to produce the official statue of the goddess Tyche; Kalos, however, falls ill and dies, having asked Musides to place twigs from “certain olive trees” near his head in the tomb, which Musides does. When the officials eventually come to carry away Musides’ finished statue of Tyche, they find that the heavy overhanging bough of an olive tree (which has grown out of Kalos’ tomb) has fallen on the hall where Musides has worked, leaving no trace of the sculptor or his Tyche. The strong indication, of course, is that Musides has poisoned Kalos—Lovecraft even says in an unpublished essay called “The Defence Remains Open!” that this is the intended suggestion—but this cannot be proven from the text alone, strictly speaking. The interesting thing is that if Musides did indeed poison Kalos, perhaps the only hypothesis sufficiently accounting for Kalos’ apparent posthumous vengeance in the end, then we have in “The Tree” one of Lovecraft’s most unreliable or dissembling narrators. This omniscient, or supposedly omniscient, narrator describes Musides as “stricken” and weeping for his ailing friend Kalos; if the narrator is not being ironic, “stricken” would have to amount to a punning adumbration of Musides’ ultimate fate. Similarly, the narrator repeatedly refers, in a straight-faced way, to the love and mutual respect between the two sculptors. The resulting question of narrator reliability gives this stylistically pleasing but otherwise little-distinguished tale a rather intriguing twist of ambiguity.

  In the same year (1920) Lovecraft wrote “The Temple,”

  59 a rather lustreless story of a pompous and cruel first-person narrator of “iron German will” who has commanded a World War I German submarine and has left the story as the traditional manuscript-in-a-bottle cast into the sea. As an extreme instance of Lovecraftian character isolation (which he will come to arrange for in far more subtle ways in later works), the narrator finds himself alone on the ocean floor after mechanical failure of the submarine and various mutinous uprisings of his crew. He espies there a mass of ruins deemed to be the fabled Atlantis and, in particular, is intrigued by an ancient temple seen in his searchlight beams. At length he hears rhythmic sounds like a chant or choral hymn, and descries a flickering light in the temple’s door and windows; he becomes obsessed with the necessity of donning his diving gear to “walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine, that silent secret of un fathomed waters and uncounted years.” The narrator is, of course, a highly stereotypic character, exclusively patriotic and largely unimaginative; he attributes to madness his urge to enter the temple and is an ironically insensitive character to be in such a position. The story, although containing some admirable passages of description, contains less of distinction or critical interest than do most Lovecraft works, and can scarcely be said to be among Lovecraft’s best efforts.

  Also in 1920 Lovecraft wrote a story which in manuscript bears the rather Poesque title “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn & His Family,”

  60 but which appears in published collections with the shortened title “Arthur Jermyn.” (When Weird Tales bought the story, editor Edwin Baird changed the title to “The White Ape,” infuriating Lovecraft because the new title would give away the story’s final revelation, which, however, it is not difficult to guess anyway.) The story opens with the striking statement: “Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.” We would destroy ourselves, the narrator says, “if we knew what we are” or if the “unguessed horrors” that science can reveal are actually pressed upon us. Philosophically, this notion of the hideousness concealed just beneath the surface of things—our ignorance of which keeps us sane—is reasserted six years later in the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” and seems to have been much on Lovecraft’s mind in terms of a narrative stance. The story deals with a theme much used by Lovecraft, that of a character’s horrible discovery of the secrets of his family’s past as they affect him in the present; however, with the tale’s reliance on the rather mundane notion of relationship with apes, Lovecraft here does not treat the theme with the kind of originality and breadth of scope that he later develops around the theme in such tales as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931). Too, the tale’s narration is somewhat dry compared to Lovecraft’s more mature style. The protagonist Arthur Jermyn, a man ugly almost to the point of deformity but of a poetic and intellectual cast of mind, discovers that the “Portuguese wife” of an ancestor who explored the Congo was actually a great white ape; this creature turns out to have been Arthur’s great-great-great grandmother, and upon this disclosure Arthur commits suicide. Like “The Temple,” the story thematically anticipates later Lovecraft efforts, but without their sophistication of conception and handling, their originality and cosmicism.

  The year 1920 also saw Lovecraft produce, in November, a story called “From Beyond,”

  61 a work stylistically mediocre for Lovecraft, but one containing some interesting speculations. The narrator visits his friend Crawford Tillinghast after a lapse of two and a half months and finds him haggard and emaciated from strain, and without his servants, who have vanished; Tillinghast has been engaged in certain bizarre experiments, and in a previous conversation has asked:

  What do we know of the world and the universe around us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We can see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers.

  Thus, Lovecraft makes early, if somewhat unsophisticated, use of a theme much in his thoughts: the notion that hidden horrors lie just beneath the surface of everyday things, just eluding our perceptions. The notion, too, that human senses have access only to a narrow interval on the spectrum of reality is an idea both intriguing and, up to a point, scientifically sound.

  The narrator has expressed skepticism, and Tillinghast has driven him from the house in rage; but now he has returned. Tillinghast activates a machine, and the narrator first sees an unplaceable colour which Tillinghast tells him is ultraviolet. Tillinghast warns him that they must be quiet and still, for—an eerie thought—they can not only see but be seen in the enlarged realm. The room is soon filled with overlapping, amoeba-like gliding entities, “jellyish monstrosities” that live unseen in the surrounding air. Tillinghast grows hostile to the narrator, who has a revolver, and a shot is fired; the narrator is absolved of guilt, however, for the coroner later reports that Tillinghast, who must have “hypnotised” the narrator, has died
of apoplexy; the shot has hit and destroyed the machine. The story’s final paragraph (“I wish 1 could believe that doctor”) is almost sophomoric in style, quite out of keeping with Lovecraft’s usual narrative ability; it is there stated that the doctor is not to be believed because the bodies of the servants are never found. The ending is very weak in impact, and the theme of hidden strata of reality is insufficiently developed to be very effective. Altogether the tale, though thematically related to later works, is inferior to the general run of Lovecraft’s stories; his own later opinion of the story was not high.

  In December 1920 Lovecraft wrote the second of his four prose poems, “Nyarlathotep.”

  62 the first having been “Memory” (1919). Of this second vignette Lovecraft says, in a letter written shortly after composing the piece,” ‘Nyarlathotep’ is a nightmare—an actual phantasm of my own, with the first paragraphs written before I fully awaked.”

  63 He goes on to relate that in the dream he received a letter from his friend Samuel Loveman saying:

  “Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.”

  “I had never heard the name NYARLATHOTEP before,” Lovecraft writes, “but seemed to understand the allusion.” The further details closely parallel the piece as written, and Lovecraft says that he awoke with a headache and “had only one automatic impulse—to write, and preserve the atmosphere of unparalleled fright; and before 1 knew it 1 had pulled on the light and was scribbling desperately.”

  Nyarlathotep—later to be transmuted into one of Lovecraft’s elder god-entities, a sort of messenger like Mercury but with ghastly and transcendently cosmic overtones—here is characterised as an itinerant showman out of Egypt, lecturing and giving exhibitions apparently implying some sort of ominous foreboding for mankind; even here he is a kind of cosmic messenger, for when he comes, “out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places.” The first-person narrator observes his lecture and spark-spewing demonstration, and mutters some skeptical protest, whereupon Nyarlathotep drives the crowd out into the midnight streets, where they march in long files unquestioningly. They see about them a scene of desolation as if centuries of decay had transpired, and the narrator’s group of marchers proceeds helplessly into a black rift or vortex alive with “corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities” and “the thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes” in the realm where “dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.” The piece is written in a powerfully mood-evoking style well worthy of Lovecraft, and has all the open vagueness of meaning and all the surrealism of the sort of dream-vision that must have inspired it.

  In 1920 or 1921 Lovecraft wrote another of his prose poems, “Ex Oblivione,”

  64 the statement of a deep dreamer whose nocturnal visions, a refuge from the overpowering ennui of waking life, show him a golden valley ending in an ivied wall pierced by a little bronze gate; the dreamer often revisits the spot and longs to pass through the gate into realms of beauty beyond. In other dreams he finds an ancient papyrus which speaks of the tantalising gate, though ambiguously; some accounts dwell on the gorgeousness of what lies beyond the gate, some on the horrors of that same region, but all agree that the gate is irrepassable. When the dreamer swallows a drug that will unlock the gate, and passes through, he finds “only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space.” The narrator concludes the piece: “So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.” The piece is impressive in its appropriately dreamy, floating manner of narration, and in the Oriental sort of view of life and death expressed at the end—the notion that one comes out of the unified field of the cosmos for a brief sojourn in conscious existence and goes back into the cosmos again, ex oblivione: passing out of the “oblivion” of life (which by self-consciousness effaces one’s identity with all the universe) into the field of unity once more. The piece is somewhat Dunsanian in manner and theme, but is sufficiently individual in style to make it characteristically Lovecraftian. Philosophically, it is not a surprising statement from the pen of one who often spoke casually of suicide and of the tedium and essential meaninglessness of life, though as always one must be slow in automatically identifying the flesh-and-blood author with the persona through whose narrative stance the tale is told.

  In January 1921 Lovecraft wrote “The Nameless City”

  65 a story that at least in some incidental ways is germinal to the development of the Lovecraft Mythos. Immediately after the writing of the tale, Lovecraft remarked of it:

  This had its basis in a dream, which in tum was probably caused by contemplation of the peculiar suggestiveness of a phrase in Dunsany’s Book of Wonder—“the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.” The character of the “mad Arab Alhazred” is fictitious. The lines are mine—written especially for this story—and Abdul Alhazred is a pseudonym I took when I was about five years old and crazy about the Arabian Nights.

  66

  The first-person narrator, travelling in remote parts of “the desert of Araby,” finds a nameless and immemorially ancient city which is described, through a vivid and effective simile, as “protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave.” The place, the narrator senses, holds “antique and sinister secrets that no man should see.” It was of the nameless city that the mad poet Abdul Alhazred dreamed when inspired to write his unexplainable couplet:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.

  67

  Lovecraft does not mention the Necronomicon here, his fictive ancient grimoire of primordial secrets—and indeed at this point has never mentioned it in a story—but the couplet is a quotation from that tome, as is made clear later in “The Call of Cthulhu.”

  Waiting for dawn, the narrator fancies that he hears “from some remote depth” a mighty “crash of musical metal” to hail the sunrise “as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.” Entering the city, he wonders if it was built by men, for the “antiquity of the spot was unwholesome”; exploring, he finds nothing definite at first. The place makes him think of the ancient cities of Samarth and Ib, echoing Lovecraft’s “The Doom that Came to Samarth,” and one sees, some inconsistencies notwithstanding, that there is a substratum of unity in Lovecraft’s effusions.

  The narrator uncovers apparent chambers of worship and marvels at their lowness of proportion; in one such temple he discovers a flight of stone steps leading steeply downward—an early instance of the Lovecraftian fascination with this motif—and although night is coming on, he descends into the earth beneath the city: “It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.” Crawling seemingly endlessly downward in the dark, the distraught narrator mutters the phrase from Dunsany, “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss,” and finds himself reciting in sing-song fashion from Thomas Moore about a “reservoir of darkness” (the poem turns out to be “Alciphron”

  68 ) until, with pun intended or otherwise, “I feared to recite more.”

  He reaches a rather low-ceiled, dark, level passage which his sense of touch tells him is replete with coffin-like cases of wood with glass fronts. He follows the passage at great length in the blackness, then suddenly comes upon “some unknown subterraneous phosphorescence” by which he can see the passage to be lined with exotic mural art; and he sees that the cases of wood and glass contain “mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.” They are reptilian, somewhat crocodile-like but blending impressions in such a way as to defy classification. The
murals depict the creatures as inhabiting a world of cities and gardens of their own, and the narrator—rationalising desperately to avoid thinking the murals literally reflective of some unthinkable chapter in earth’s prehistoric past—deems the art allegorical, in that the city’s builders must have worshipped the beasts as totems, carving their primal temples low and perhaps themselves crawling ritualistically in deference to their reptile deities. Such a rationalising protagonist, hoping against hope not to have to face a dreadful revelation, comes to be common in Lovecraft’s later works. Here, the narrator follows the passage to a great gate containing an immovably heavy brass door open against the passage wall; symbolically, the narrator, unable to manipulate the door, is up against matters too old and ponderous for human management. The narrator is shocked to hear “a deep, low moaning” and suddenly to feel a draught of cold air flowing from the tunnel into the abyss, a current so strong that he fears being swept through the gate, and a current that finally contains a visual impression of the reptilian creatures in the coffins. Behind them, the brass door clangs shut deafeningly, “to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.” Thus, the tale ends, with a poetic repetition to explain the earlier peal of metallic clangour.

  “The Nameless City” thematically anticipates much of Lovecraft’s later fictional ideology, in that the more mature tales of the Lovecraft Mythos concern themselves—albeit with more cosmic scope—with the implications for man of unguessed epochs in the earth’s past; and specifically, the notion of the “mad Arab” poet will come to be more interestingly developed in later tales in which the Necronomicon, here so fleetingly and namelessly glimpsed, figures more centrally. The narration of “The Nameless City” is skillful and potent; the reader feels the narrator’s fear, shares his haunting and unforgettable descent, shares his dreadful speculations—indeed, probably guesses the truth about the mummified reptiles before the narrator does, so that there is the familiar Lovecraftian tension between the minds of the protagonist and the reader. Stylistically, and in the scope of its thematic implications, the story incipiently but worthily adumbrates kindred things to come.