H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1)
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It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.
These pipes exude exotic incenses: “sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!—the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.” The melodrama and extravagance of diction notwithstanding, this descriptive passage with its alliterations and assonances and stark images does command attention; if it purports to shock rather than to imbue the reader with the more subtle horrors of Lovecraft’s more mature works, it succeeds at least in doing so. Further, in referring to “red charnel things” without waxing more specific, Lovecraft in spite of everything is practicing a little of the narrative restraint and technique of veiled descriptive reference that he would so cultivate in later writings.
The ghouls, ironically (but the irony is of that early, heavy-handed type again), have a sense of the aesthetic in their monstrous work: “We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight.” During each of their grisly expeditions, they seek unmarred artistic effect in “the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth.” The visual and ironic imagery of “grinning” here is most potent.
The ghouls decide, again with rather gross-fibred irony, to rob the grave of one who himself, in Holland, has been a notable ghoul and has “stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre,” a green jade amulet bearing the likeness of a crouching winged hound. The amulet has been described in the Necronomicon; this is Lovecraft’s first mention, by title, of his fictive grimoire, though he earlier quotes the Alhazred couplet in “The Nameless City.” The ghouls know the amulet as “the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in central Asia.” (Later, in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Lovecraft makes the Plateau of Leng a part of dreamland, and still later, in At the Mountains of Madness, he establishes it in Antarctica.) Naturally, the ghouls steal the amulet, but are thereafter haunted by the baying of some distant hound, which follows them back home to England, where finally the narrator’s colleague St. John is “seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and tom to ribbons.” The narrator, terrified, sails for Holland to return the amulet to the grave, but at an inn the object is stolen from him. Not knowing why he does so, the narrator returns to and reopens the grave, to find within the coffin a corpse not “clean and placid” but covered with caked blood; it opens its jaws and emits a “deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound,” and it clutches the stolen amulet. The narrator goes mad and, ever pursued by baying and by flapping of web-wings, seeks oblivion with his revolver. The ending development of “The Hound” seems somewhat confused in its apparent identification of the old ghoul in the coffin with the hound itself, which presumably is an entity surviving from ancient times; one notes that the old ghoul himself has stolen the amulet in his time and has, unlike the hunted pair from England, rested in the grave with it—there is much unexplained here, much open to speculation. In any case, “The Hound” is a descriptively striking if melodramatic and overwritten tale that hints, in its mention of Leng and the Necronomicon, of future development of the Lovecraft Mythos.
In November 1922 Lovecraft again honoured a request from George Julian Houtain to produce a story for serialisation in Home Brew as he had done several months earlier in the case of “Herbert West—Reanimator”: this time the result was “The Lurking Fear,”
79 a story in four installments illustrated in the magazine by Clark Ashton Smith and later reprinted in Weird Tales. Although never disparaging this tale so roundly as he did the Herbert West series, Lovecraft chafed at the restrictions of so mechanical and unartistic a mode of composition, citing the necessity of sectional climaxes as a serious impediment; but this time he was able to work within this format considerably better. The sections of the new work exhibit virtually none of the reiteration resorted to in the less satisfactory earlier serialisation, and although the new tale suffers somewhat from conventionality, there is in place of heavy reliance on “stock” gruesome imageries as in “Herbert West—Reanimator” a more original thematic development, in the form of the motif of family degeneracy in an extreme and loathsome form.
The first installment, “The Shadow on the Chimney,” begins: “There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear.” It is established from the outset that thunderstorms will play an important role as a story element, and indeed “The Lurking Fear” is the only Lovecraft tale to employ the effects of weather in so centrally mood-sustaining a fashion; the device is conventional but, in Lovecraft’s hands, not so wearisome as it could have been.
80 The tale is set in the Catskills, in a region of “degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes,” a region on which Lovecraft lavishes his power to make place almost sentient—the vegetation is “unnaturally thick and feverish,” and curious, snake-like mounds and hummocks abound. The first-person narrator, “a connoisseur in horrors,” has come to investigate a local horror vaguely associated with the Martense mansion atop the mountain; something seems to emanate from the old house to spread fear and death among the squatters, “carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of dismemberment.” The centrality of the fictional device of violent weather is pointed up by the local folklore about the lurking fear: “Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.” Accompanied by two burly cohorts, the narrator resolves, in rather the manner of the conventional “haunted house” motif of common horror stories, to spend the night in the deserted mansion sleeping in the old room of Jan Martense, who was murdered on the premises; in the night, the burly associates, one sleeping on each side of the narrator, are carried off amid titanic claps of thunder.
In the second installment, “A Passer in the Storm,” the narrator, convalescing in his hotel at the village, takes into his confidence a sympathetic reporter named Arthur Munroe (Lovecraft had childhood friends named Chester and Harold Munroe). Together they investigate the house and its environs, in particular the recently devastated and now deserted squatter hamlet a little over two miles from the mansion and connected to it by open country streaked with the snake-like mounds. They minutely search every cottage, subject to “vague new fears” which turn out to be justified. Munroe and the narrator, caught in a torrential rainstorm, take refuge in one of the cabins, and smoking their pipes (witness how the narrator-persona and the real author can differ; Lovecraft detested smoking) they wait the storm out. Munroe leans out a window and, when the rain and lightning have abated, fails to respond to the narrator’s remarks. When he turns Munroe around, the narrator discovers that “Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.”
The third installment, “What the Red Glare Meant,” opens with the narrator “digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense,” with, of course, another thunderstorm brewing. From his research into the Martense family, he has learned that Jan Martense left home during the American Revolution to come back hated as an outsider by his family, though he was a Martense and had the characteristically dissimilar family eyes, one brown and one blue, the finally conclusive leitmotif of the tale. Jan was murdered and buried on the grounds of the house. From rumours of the unproven murder, the Martense family was shunned by the populace and left to degenerate. The narrator, digging in Jan’s grave, not only finds the coffin but breaks through into a tunnel beneath, which he follows toward the house and finally upward. He glimpses a pair of eyes “provoking maddeningly nebulous memories”—sometimes Lovecraft’s protagonists at various moments have oddly deficient powers of recall—just as a lightning bolt overhead causes an earthslide through wh
ich he barely manages to claw his way to the surface, to see a red glare which later turns out to be a fire in a hamlet twenty miles away, where the horror has struck again. (“What the Red Glare Meant” is a rather oblique title for this section.)
In the fourth and final installment, “The Horror in the Eyes,” the leitmotif of the mismatched eyes is played with crescendo. The narrator finally notices that the ophidian mounds radiate from a centre, the Martense mansion, like tentacles thrown out, and that the whole region must be honeycombed with them. (The notion of such a system of connecting tunnels was an obsessive one with Lovecraft, a motif put to much fictional use.) The narrator discovers a hole at the base of the Martense chimney, the hub of the radiating mound-passages. Hiding to see what the thunder would call forth, he witnesses an outpouring of dwarfed, apelike, cannibal fiends, “a loathsome, night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity.” The final several paragraphs of the tale are similarly colourful—overwritten but undeniably powerful and image-evoking. The narrator arranges for the top of Tempest Mountain to be dynamited, for what he has glimpsed has told the story of unthinkable family degeneration—the filthy, fanged creatures have the Martense eyes. Altogether, the story is remarkably good, in terms of general conception and narrative power, for the artificial circumstances under which it had to be written, certainly surpassing “Herbert West—Reanimator”; but undeniably it lacks the descriptive restraint and the cosmicism of scope of most of the later works.
In 1923 Lovecraft wrote “The Unnamable,”
81 a mediocre but interesting tale set in the really existing Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem (“Arkham”), Massachusetts; the burying ground is not named in the story, but Lovecraft identifies it in his letters. The story is germinally based on an actual passage in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, of which Lovecraft owned an ancestral copy.
82 The tale’s first-person narrator is this time not nameless; he is (Randolph) Carter, a recurrent fictive reflection of Lovecraft. The tale is written in what is for Lovecraft an unusually laboured and syntactically complex style, with such sentences as
That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escape from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic re-combinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect.
The narrator argues about the proper subjects of literary creation with a more prosaic friend, Joel Manton; they sit on a tombstone that has been almost grown over by a tree—there is in the Charter Street cemetery in Salem really such a spot—and it gets dark as Carter tells Manton of the Cotton Mather legend on which (mirroring Lovecraft himself writing this story) he has based a horror tale about a monstrous thing with a blemished eye, a frightful anomaly kept locked in an attic. Significantly, he speculates that the apparitions associated with the house in question have largely been forgotten by the last two generations, “perhaps dying for lack of being thought about.” Being thought about in the present by Carter and Manton seems to be sufficient for the emanations to be revivified, for from a nearby house (the house, it turns out, in the Mather legend) comes a creaking of an attic windowframe, and the two are attacked by something powerful. When they awake in the hospital, Manton, his skepticism gone, describes the thing:
It was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes—and a blemish. It was the pit—the maelstrom—the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!
Besides being melodramatic, this ending is a rather facile portrayal of a converted skeptic, a sort of contrived opportunity for the narrator to have his case made for him. The story does have the interesting quality of being an embellishment (as the narrator’s fictive story is said to be) of a real Colonial legend, and does employ the later much-developed Lovecraft theme of unthinkable continuity with a past which should have died but which survives; but the tale is thinly developed, the reader being inadequately prepared for the circumstances of Manton’s reversal of attitude. Lovecraft was to discover that he needed much more length of text to develop such a theme in a manner guaranteeing that the reader would be ready to “suspend disbelief” at the proper time.
Also in 1923, Lovecraft wrote his “Christmas story,” a little tale set in Kingsport (Marblehead), Massachusetts, and called “The Festival.”
83 Lovecraft, years later, would say of the work:
As for “The Festival”—after all these years it rather disappoints me. It sounds crude and forced and overcoloured—although it formed a sincere attempt to capture the feeling that Marblehead gave me when I saw it for the first time—at sunset under the snow, Dec. 17, 1922.
84
This self-criticism, though not without some truth, is rather too harsh, for the tale does seem to “capture the feeling” more ably than Lovecraft appears to have thought. The narration has a poetic and tastefully alliterative quality and a sustaining of mood that decidedly show progress in Lovecraft’s gradually maturing style. Also, the tale serves to enlarge the reader’s acquaintance with the abhorrent Necronomicon, in that Lovecraft provides a long quotation from it, in a final passage not to be rivalled until the writing in 1928 of “The Dunwich Horror,” in which Lovecraft again allows the reader a substantial look inside the tome.
The narrator comes to Kingsport—“I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me”—at the winter solstice or Yuletide, “that men call Christmas, though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.” The narrator is the modem scion of a family enjoined to return once a century to Kingsport to “keep festival,” though he comes alone, “for only the poor and the lonely remember.” He encounters a town—“Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming”—of incredibly unbroken antiquity, “antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs,” and passes a hill burial ground, “where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.” (In a 1923 letter Lovecraft describes his visit to Marblehead, mentioning “Old Burying Hill, where the dark headstones clawed up thro’ the virgin snow like the decay’d fingernails of some gigantick corpse.”
85 This shows the extent to which impressions of the town were incubating in his mind.)
Finding the house of his people, the narrator is admitted, by a waxen-masked old man, to an interior of seventeenth-century style, and is left to read among the ancient books present, soon finding himself absorbed in the Necronomicon. An old woman in a poke-bonnet sits at a spinning wheel nearby, “spinning, spinning” as Lovecraft hypnotically puts it. At length the people of the town take him along for a walk through the town; people are streaming out of the houses, forming processions in the tortuous network of narrow streets, and “gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.” The narrator is pressed by “preternaturally soft” elbows and stomachs “abnormally pulpy” as the crowd proceeds to the great central church (which Lovecraft modelled on St. Michael’s in Marblehead) and files inside and down a trapdoor yawning” loathsomely open” to regions beneath—again, Lovecraft artfully indulges in his obsession with the notion of passages leading underground. The narrator observes a repellent rite far beneath the town, “the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music.” Finally, when his host dislodges the waxen mask “from what should have been his head,” the narrator flings himself screaming into an underground river and is later found floating in Kingsport Harbour, half-frozen but alive. He is told that he must have “fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point”—Lovecraft enjoys a quiet little joke here, for there really is a Peach Point in Marblehead—and t
hat he has been mistaken about everything; the town is not by any means entirely ancient. Given the Miskatonic University copy of the Necronomicon, borrowed to relieve his “harassing obsessions,” he reads a long, sonorous passage with which the story ends, a passage hinting of survivals of ancient horrors and rites, and ending with: “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” Lovecraft fairly outdoes himself in the prose of this passage, and has employed colourful and imagistically striking prose throughout, though he is correct in assessing that his style here is heavier and less restrained than that of his later years. “The Festival,” like “The Rats in the Walls,” deals with the theme of unwholesome continuity with the past, the notion of horrific survival of things unsuspected or long thought to be dead and forgotten—here again a sort of family cult, but of an “extended” family—thus thematically anticipating such later and more thorough developments of the theme as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Indeed, the buried but undead horrors in a family’s past seem to have been much in Lovecraft’s thoughts.
During the period of 1920–1923, and mostly during the early part of that period, Lovecraft wrote a modest amount of poetry, much of it light dedicatory verse, metrically competent but generally of little poetic value, honouring various individuals. This was not a time of horror poetry for Lovecraft, though he had recently written such poems as “Nemesis” (1918). Notable among the poems of this period is “On Reading Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder” (March 1920),
86 a tribute to the Irish master far exceeding in poetic quality the slightly earlier “To Edward Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany” (November 1919), an apparently heartfelt but sophomoric piece of doggerel with such wretched lines as “In solar state see shining PLUNKETT rise!” It is astonishing to see, a mere four months later, these relative crudities give way to such superior lines (describing the poet’s nocturnal readings of Dunsany but not mentioning him by name) as