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

by Donald R. Burleson

  A few weeks after writing “The Nameless City,” Lovecraft attended a 10 March 1921 meeting of the amateur press group called the Hub Club; the celebrants, in honour of St. Patrick, were each enjoined to contribute something Irish, and Lovecraft wrote “The Moon-Bog”

  69 for the occasion, reading it to the gathering at 20 Webster Street in Allston, Massachusetts. Although written “to order,” the story does not read as if it were merely written that way; and although lacking the vast cosmic scope of the later and more significant tales, the work manages to portray a “local” horror sufficiently rooted in antiquity to make it ponderous and haunting. Lovecraft’s descriptive prose and mood-sustaining narration in the tale are quite worthy of him.

  The first-person narrator of “The Moon-Bog” has gone from America to Ireland to be with his old friend Denys Barry, who has restored his ancestral castle (thematically anticipating “The Rats in the Walls”) and, to the horror of the local peasantry, is about to drain the nearby bog, which the natives of the region regard as possessing a “grim guardian spirit” that will mightily resent this action. There is in the bog a “far islet” on which stands a “strange olden ruin” that glistens spectrally in the moonlight—significantly, for the ruin, by implication, is the remains of a temple of the Greek moon-goddess Artemis, and is the only above-ground remnant of an ancient stone city rumoured to be beneath the bog. (The Greek element stems from Lovecraft’s use of the legendary early colonisation of part of Ireland under the leadership of Partholan from Middle Greece; as suggested in the story, his descendants were reportedly all carried off by a plague. The Book of Invaders mentioned is a reference to the Leabhar Gabhdla or Book of Invasions, an ancient work actually existing in twelfth-century manuscript.)

  In his castle tower, the narrator’s sleep is troubled by piping “half musical” sounds as of flutes, and by strange dreams treating of the demise of a great ancient city; and he sees, or thinks he sees, wraith-like dancers on the bog under his tower window. On the final night he awakes to a flood of crimson light from the ruin on the islet, and to the sight of his host Barry’s seemingly entranced labourers being led like lemmings into the bog by the wraiths. In a particularly memorable bit of imagery, the narrator sees a familiar figure: “I recognised the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic.” Fleeing from the castle, the narrator has his senses addled by two further sights: “one very fat and ugly frog” among frogs newly present on the bog—an obvious metamorphosis—and, being drawn from the islet ruin up a moonbeam, “a monstrous resemblance—a nauseous, unbelievable caricature—a blasphemous effigy of him who had been Denys Barry.” Lovecraft’s narrative and descriptive style here, and his manner of ending the tale, are somewhat suggestive of the mature style to be found later in “The Colour out of Space” (1927); “The Moon-Bog” is thematically incidental but artistically quite competent, especially considering the rather artificial circumstances under which it was penned. It is impressive, too, that in a story written to be read at a party, Lovecraft goes to the trouble of displaying some of his erudition by making artful use of some relatively little-known Irish legendry.

  Over a period of several months between 1921 and 1922 Lovecraft wrote, for amateur press associate George Julian Houtain and for serialisation in the latter’s magazine Home Brew (a professional magazine, not a “fanzine;” though Lovecraft later called it a “vile rag”), a connected series of six little episodic stories collectively titled “Herbert West—Reanimator,”

  70 notable as Lovecraft’s first professionally published work, and obviously owing much to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The writing of these little pieces “to order,” of course, was done under requirements least likely to produce good writing—the segments, though they had to be connected and tell a coherent tale together, had also to be readable separately, so that each one was required to have a horrific little “climax” and (except for the first piece) a certain amount of explanatory reiteration of the piece or pieces preceding it. Naturally, Lovecraft himself was painfully aware of the artistic hopelessness of such a format: “All series are inartistic, since they involve tedious repetition, and weak stretching out of the idea.”

  71 He would later even remark, “‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ represents my poorest work—stuff done to order for a vulgar magazine, & written down to the herd’s level.”

  72 The work does indeed suffer in the writing, but is not without a certain light appeal, being rather more readable than its method of composition would ordinarily allow, and it does serve to introduce Lovecraft’s semi-mythical Miskatonic University (essentially inspired by Brown, though placed in “Arkham,” or Salem, Massachusetts), which figures into so many later and better works.

  In the first installment, “From the Dark,” the first-person narrator introduces his fellow medical student Herbert West, whose obsession with the notion of bringing dead organisms back to life has made him unpopular with the college authorities, particularly the dean of the medical school, Dr. Allan Halsey, a character type rather foreshadowing Henry Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror.”

  73 West is reduced to carrying on his work in secret, in a deserted farmhouse, stealing corpses to experiment on; the narrator serves as his assistant. The two exhume the fresh corpse of a “brawny young workman,” into which West injects his experimental fluid. The corpse does not at first respond, but while the experimenters are preparing fresh fluid with a blast-lamp in an adjacent room, an “appalling and daemoniac succession of cries” bursts forth; the two flee, to learn the next day that the farmhouse has burned down—Lovecraft, playing indeed to an unimaginative audience, adds: “that we could understand because of the upset lamp.” An attempt has been made to disturb a new grave in the potter’s field “as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth.” From this time onward, West has the feeling that something is stalking him.

  In the second installment, “The Plague-Daemon,” a typhoid epidemic has come to Arkham; West and the narrator, now doctors, are pressed into service. West’s old opponent Dr. Halsey dies at the peak of the plague. Soon after the funeral a commotion breaks out in West’s boardinghouse room, and the two young doctors are found beaten and bloody amid a wreckage of scientific apparati; a strange, anthropomorphic, carnivorous fiend is loose upon the town, clawing its victims to death. The mindless thing is finally captured and taken to an asylum; predictably, it bears a “mocking, unbelievable resemblance” to the late Dr. Halsey. As in “The Terrible Old Man,” Lovecraft’s irony here, unlike the subtlety of his later works, is plain and heavy-handed, but is entertaining nonetheless.

  In “Six Shots by Moonlight,” the third installment, West and the narrator set up a practice in Bolton (Massachusetts),

  74 living in a house near the potter’s field, naturally enough. Experimenting on a gorilla-like black boxer who has been killed in an illicit fight, but failing to evoke any response, they bury the corpse. Soon thereafter a child is missing in the town. Answering a late-night rattling at their door, the doctors are met by

  a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares—a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.

  Even here, in a story written on assignment, Lovecraft is ably, if somewhat excessively, flexing his descriptive muscles; the scene, though conceptually crude, is unforgettably vivid.

  The fourth installment is titled “The Scream of the Dead,” in which West, injecting a new elixir into a body he claims is that of a traveller having succumbed to a heart attack, manages to revivify the body only long enough for it to reveal that West must really have murdered the traveller to provide a specimen.

  The fifth and perhaps most grotesque installment is “The Horror from the Shadows,” in which West and the narrator are serving in 1915 as military surgeons
in Flanders; West has been hardened by his previous deeds, so that there is at least a modicum of character development. Amid the routine medical work, West continues his experiments, now interested in revitalisation of detached parts of bodies, using cultivated reptile embryo tissue which he keeps in a large vat where it “multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.” West places the severed head of a fresh casualty (ironically, a physician major) in the vat for preservation, operates on the headless body to close the aperture at the neck, and injects the body with fluid. The narrator observes that

  there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far comer of black shadows.

  However crass the imagery here, Lovecraft’s word choices and modulation of tone are effective. At length, the headless trunk is reanimated, gesturing in mute desperation, and the head in the vat screams; at that moment, melodramatically enough, the building is destroyed by German shell-fire, though the doctors conveniently survive. All of this is, of course, puerile and pseudoscientific nonsense, and only Lovecraft’s competent (if excessively colourful) narrative style saves the piece, which at best is gruesomely entertaining but lacking in the careful emotional preparation (preparation to “suspend disbelief”), and certainly lacking in the restraint, characterising the better works.

  In the sixth and final installment, “The Tomb-Legions,” West has come horribly to dread something that he feels is pursuing him; he is haunted by his past experiments. He has come to live in an old Boston house overlooking a Colonial cemetery, “for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons.” The cellar of the house is connected with the burying ground, which, however, holds only ancient interments. In the end, a legion of figures led by the surgeon major (who has carried his head about in a box, and wears a wax head) swarms out of the passage into the cellar; West is seized, tom to pieces, and carried off. Altogether, Lovecraft’s descriptive skills place “Herbert West—Reanimator” a notch above mere hack-work, but, written as it was under impossible circumstances, there is no question that the piece is conceptually and stylistically inferior not only to later, more mature works, but also to such pieces, of the same period, as “The Music of Erich Zann.”

  In May 1922 Lovecraft wrote a rather Poesque tale called “Hypnos,”

  75 which enjoyed considerable praise from others, but which Lovecraft himself later came to think little of. The story is one of a tragically divided personality, that of the first-person narrator, a sculptor. He meets, or fancies that he meets, a strikingly Hellenic youth—“a faun’s statue out of antique Hellas”—whom he takes as his only friend, and of whom he carves numerous likenesses. The two engage in bizarre studies of arcane matters, of “that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space,” realms accessible only in certain forms of sleep, realms holding secrets that language is unable to describe. The nature of these perceptions is rather Oriental in flavour, and Einstein, who spoke of the relativity of time and space, is mentioned as “one man with Oriental eyes.” Lovecraft here imbues his tale with a certain cosmicism and with tantalisingly ineffable horrors, so that “Hypnos” is rather well in keeping with the general nature of his later and more adequately developed works. The dreamers come to dread the revelations of their oneiric sojourns, finally struggling not to sleep, and they grow rapidly and prematurely old. After one memorable scene in which a shaft of red-gold light streams on the head of the narrator’s friend, the haggard narrator is told by others that he never has had such a friend, for all that has been found on the sleeper’s couch is a marvellously executed marble head bearing the inscription HYPNOS, the Greek god of sleep, and resembling the narrator in his youth. Thus, one sees that the sculptor’s friend has been a poignant projection of himself and his art, a tragic quest for friendship by one tormented by philosophy, art, loneliness, and the phantasms of dream. In place of friendship he has found only the frozen forms of his art, popularly praised but ultimately unfulfilling to his psyche.

  In June 1922, shortly after “Hypnos,” Lovecraft wrote the fourth of his four known prose poems, “What the Moon Brings.”

  76 This little piece, perhaps the best—written and most imagistically and conceptually striking of the prose poems, is narrated in a dreamy and beautifully poetic style; it is best read aloud, for every syllable then seems in place and the effect is sonorous. The narrator begins by exclaiming, “I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.” He wanders, or dreams that he wanders, in an old garden of narcotic flowers, where he sees the moonlit waters of a crystal stream and fancies that they flow “to strange oceans that are not in the world.” Lotus-blossoms fall into the stream to be swirled away, “staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.” Following the stream, the narrator finds that nocturnally, like dream itself, the garden does not have its usual walls, but stretches ever onward into new vistas of paths and trees and stone idols and pagodas. In the “yellow-litten” crystal stream “the lips of the dead lotus faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow.” The stream becomes a river which flows to the shore of “a vast and nameless sea” on which the moon spreads its radiance, and into which the lotus faces vanish. The tide ebbs to reveal “old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed.” The narrator realises that this is the place to which have come all of the world’s dead; a black condor swoops to rest on a far reef, and the narrator yearns to ask him of those souls now dead whom he has known in life. As the tide continues to ebb, the “dead, dripping city” is further revealed, along with the stench of the dead, “for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.” Finally, when the water is sufficiently low, the narrator perceives the truth about the vast reef: that it “was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shown in dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below.” The narrator shrieks, “lest the hidden face rise above the waters . . . . to escape this relentless thing [he 1 plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the stinking shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world’s dead.”

  This prose poem is stylistically a most impressive display, a vivid collage of images, a worthy mirroring of nightmare; and readings and interpretations may abound. The “nameless sea,” of course, may stand as a symbol for the primordial past of man, or the void from which we issue and to which (as the lotus-faces) we return. In Jungian terms the ocean is a common symbol for the collective unconscious, the archetypally “remembered” origins common to us all and dormantly awash in our cells. The narrator, one may say, has been led deep into the psyche to confront his Shadow, the horror of his darker self and of all mankind collectively—the “shocking eikon” that is only partly visible, in dream symbolism, above the “waves” of the ineffably deep psyche which holds immemorial “secrets” or archetypal patterns harking back to the dim beginnings of man. The Shadow has “hooves,” archetypal roots, that “paw the hellish ooze miles below” in the sable depths of the collective unconscious. Mediating between the narrator’s outward-turned ego (persona) and the dreaded Shadow, is the anima-figure implicit in the symbolism of the moon, or Diana; she leads him to the Shadow, though he rebukes her as “treacherous” for doing so. The narrator, like the Outsider and like de la Poer in “The Rats in the Walls,” cannot come to terms with the darker side of truth and is destroyed. Whatever reading one may choose, “What the Moon Brings” is a haunting piece, a verbal canvas on which the brush-strokes are sensitively chosen and deftly rendered.

  In September 1922 Lovecraft wrote “The Hound,”

  77 an exceeding
ly Poesque tale that he himself came to disparage mightily:

  I consider this one of the poorest jumbles I ever produced. It was written in 1922, before I had begun to prune down the verbal extravagances of my earlier prose. There is too much sonorous rhetoric & stock imagery, & not enough substance, in this piece of junk.

  78

  Some, at least, of this self-criticism may well be justified, especially in view of the relative narrative restraint and broadening of thematic scope characterising most of the later tales, from, say, 1927 on. To call the tale a “piece of junk,” however, is excessively harsh, for the work does provide some memorable, if overly graphic, scenes and images, and remains a much-read Lovecraft work.

  The first-person narrator of “The Hound” is one of a pair of ghouls, jaded decadents whose ennui at the lesser forms of morbid titillation has led them to “that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.” The two live alone in a great stone edifice housing their museum of ghoulish horrors: