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

by Donald R. Burleson

  For to the sight in pomp appear

  Temples and cities pois’d in air

  And blazing glories—sphere on sphere.

  Lovecraft in his better moments was not merely capable of producing accurate metre imitative of his beloved eighteenth-century verse, but capable of meeting his own primary criterion for good poetry: that it must express something that could not with equivalent effect have been said in prose. This particular piece serves to show, of course, the extent to which Lovecraft was fascinated by Dunsany’s work, and it does so with grace and euphony. Nevertheless, Lovecraft at this point was several years away from producing his best poems. Such poems as “Lament for the Vanished Spider” (January 1920) have, with their quaint charm, the effect of illuminating another facet of the complex man who was Lovecraft, but are of little literary interest and do not belong to the mainstream of his work.

  4. New York: Writing in Exile (1924–1926)

  “The Shunned House”

  During Lovecraft’s two-year “period of exile” from Providence, when he lived in New York City and was married to Sonia, he wrote only a small handful of stories, the most impressive of which is “The Shunned House” (October 1924).

  87 The story was indirectly inspired by Lovecraft’s October 1924 visit to Elizabeth (originally Elizabethtown), New Jersey, where he was impressed with the ghoulish-looking Andrew Joline house (1735); this house strongly reminded him of the house at 135 Benefit Street (built in 1764) in Providence, on which Lovecraft directly based the story—clearly, his heart was in Providence all along. The house was one in which Lovecraft’s aunt Lillian had lived at one time, and about which curious stories were told in Providence. The site, as in the tale, had been a burying ground in early Colonial times, and when the graves were removed to North Burial Ground, the remains of a French couple were left behind; legend has it that the wife of the builder Stephen Harris (thinly veiled as William Harris in the story) went mad at the death of her children and screamed hideously in French from an upstairs window. Lovecraft here shows his knowledge of local folklore and his ability to transmute it imaginatively for literary use. “The Shunned House” shows Lovecraft’s growing need for increased textual length to develop his themes adequately, and is the closest that he ever came to writing a vampire story, though his use of the theme of vampirism is quite different from the usual.

  The story begins with a statement that may be viewed as an expression of a philosophical undertone to the Lovecraft canon of fiction: “From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.” The irony to which this first-person narrator refers is that Edgar Allan Poe (as is historically true) frequently walked past the house on Benefit Street, probably without giving it a thought, unaware of the eerie decrepitude and ill fame of the house, in which people have died in unusually large numbers because, perhaps, of some vague sickishness about the place. The narrator has learned more, however, from the notebooks of his aged and scholarly uncle Dr. Elihu Whipple, a character probably inspired by Dr. Franklin Chase Clark, Lovecraft’s aunt Lillian’s husband, Whipple also being an ancestral name to Lovecraft. Whipple’s notebooks indicate that people have died or grown weak in the house as if having their vitality sapped by the place itself, with its “barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered.” Lovecraft here makes use of the conventional notion that animals “know better” because they are acutely sensitive to underlying horrors. The house’s ill effects seem to be centred in the “dank, humid cellar,” where grotesque fungi (“detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes”) spring up in rainy weather, and where a “vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre” sometimes assumes anthropomorphic outlines and exudes” a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace.” Lovecraft skillfully maintains a feeling of decay and morbidity about the house.

  The narrator indulges in a lengthy historical and genealogical account of the house, rather reminiscent of the manner of Hawthorne’s narration in The House of the Seven Gables.

  88 The annals of the Harris family are given in detail, replete with deaths or enfeeblements of children, adults, and servants alike in the house. William Harris’s wife Rhoby Dexter Harris is said to have gone mad and, though knowing no French, to have screamed for hours “in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language,” sometimes also complaining of “a staring thing which bit and chewed at her.” Thus, Lovecraft embellishes actual local legends about the house.

  The Harris family, after the death of William Harris himself, perforce has hired servants from out of town, notably one Ann White from Exeter, Rhode Island, where as late as 1892 “an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart” on suspicion of vampirism. (Lovecraft here is making use of an actual historical event, and having some fun with character names. The real “vampire” was one Mercy Brown, which Lovecraft transmutes to White, and he uses the name Mercy Dexter for Mrs. Harris’s sister.) It is Ann White who has suggested that there must be a vampiric entity buried beneath the house and exerting its influence on all who dwell within; she has been discharged for insisting too vehemently on a thorough search under the cellar.

  The narrator, researching the case, finally finds the French connexion in the house’s history, in that a family named Roulet had resided on the site in a cottage long since vanished, leaving behind remains not moved in the general transfer of bodies to North Burial Ground; of Paul Roulet the narrator suggestively remarks that “his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object.”

  At length the narrator and his uncle Elihu Whipple resolve to spend a night of vigil in the dreaded cellar, fortified with a Crookes tube apparatus and a pair of flamethrowers which, rather less than credibly, Dr. Whipple has procured. The narrator’s remarks about their attitudes toward the unknown entity constitute an interesting bit of characterisation, in that the narrator, evincing a sort of scientific realism like Lovecraft’s own, seems trapped between the inevitability of admitting the truth and a feeling of awkwardness in doing so:

  To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter.

  He hedges by using the rhetorical device of litotes (“not prepared to deny,” a less than committal double negative). Lovecraft enjoys success here not only with the psychology of characterisation but with the striking of a balance between realism and fantasy, between rational credibility and the necessity of suspending disbelief. The narrator, like so many Lovecraft protagonists, rationalises desperately, comforting himself, when in a spasm of dream the uncle mutters in French, by reflecting that Dr. Whipple does read and write the language in his scholarly endeavours.

  In a powerful scene near the story’s end, the thing beneath the cellar floor seizes the uncle—logically, since in his old age he is the weaker of the two. Lovecraft’s narration waxes highly colourful: “There are horrors beyond horrors”—wittingly or not, this is a statement centrally expressive of Lovecraft’s conceptual approach to fiction—“and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.” (The narrator’s feeling of being victimised by a sentient and malign cosmos is somewhat out of keeping with the primary assumption of the Lovecraft Mythos, that the cosmos is chaotic and indifferent to human interests. Thus, the tale lies somewhat outside the mainstream of Lovecraft’s general fictive philosophy.) The appearing horror is “a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, [with a] rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney.” The thing envelops and dissolves “to an abhorrent plasticity” the uncle, who undergoes a “nauseous liquefaction” in
which all the past victims of the horror are mirrored: “He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant,” and finally there remains only a pool of green slime. Surely the vampire tale has received ingenious and imagistically original treatment at Lovecraft’s hands.

  The narrator flees, to return with six carboys of sulphuric acid. Digging in the stinking earth with dread—“Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind”—he uncovers “a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly,” something “like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two,” and pours acid on “this unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.” The choice of anatomical detail here seems, at this crucial moment, a bit jarring, even a little comic. In any case, the tale ends with the assurance that the horror is gone: “The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.” In comparison with some of Lovecraft’s later work in which the horror lingers at the story’s closing, making the account open-ended and suggestive of later revivals, this ending is in a sense a little weak; there is nothing left to dread, but only a horrible memory. Nevertheless, the story is powerfully and skillfully narrated, with fantasy interwoven with Rhode Island history in such a way as to promote considerable realism, much as Lovecraft would later do in a more thorough fashion in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

  “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He”

  Early in August 1925, during his period of residence in New York, Lovecraft wrote “The Horror at Red Hook”

  89 in his apartment at 169 Clinton Street at the edge of Brooklyn’s Red Hook district. The story had an epigraph from Arthur Machen stating that “it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead,” a central fictive assumption in the Lovecraft canon, though developed here with a weakening reliance on the hackneyed and conventional theme of devil-worship. The story was Lovecraft’s first appearance between cloth covers, for after its acceptance by Weird Tales it was included in an anthology Not at Night! from Selwyn and Blount. Immediately after the writing, Lovecraft said of the tale, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, that

  it deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much. The tale is rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good; but it represents at least an attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness.

  90

  (Lovecraft’s wife Sonia later remarked that the story was inspired by Lovecraft’s outrage at the behaviour of a gang of young Brooklyn ruffians that invaded a restaurant where he was eating.) By 1931 Lovecraft, ever the harsh self-critic, had come to call both “The Horror at Red Hook” and (especially) “He” the “mawkish drivel” of his immature style. Certainly, he is somewhat correct in disparaging these tales in comparison to his later accomplishments, but they are not without their stylistic niceties and elements of incidental appeal.

  Told by an omniscient narrator, the Red Hook story opens with an introduction to Thomas F. Malone, a New York police detective on convalescent leave in Rhode Island following a “gruesome local case” which has left him neurotically afraid; the rest of the tale is a flashback relating the details. Malone is an Irish mystic-intellectual who has “the Celt’s far vision of weird and hidden things,” and he is fascinated with what is a cornerstone of the Lovecraftian response to the world, “the sense of latent mystery in existence.” In particular, he suspects that the street squalor of the Red Hook district in Brooklyn is really only the outward facade of a deeper horror, a survival of ancient daemonic cult activity. Describing the area, the narrator says, “It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles,” metaphorically foreshadowing the discovery of the great organ hidden underground at the centre of the cult’s ritualism. In describing the district, the narrator reflects a well-known conviction of Lovecraft’s, that the former beauty and cultural integrity of the area has been spoiled by the influx of foreign elements of great variegation.

  Malone, a reader of Murray’s Witch Cult of Western Europe, is convinced that the lawless and leering gangs of street youths are “the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind,” so that the story is thematically rooted in the distant but surviving past, much like “The Festival” and other works.

  Malone is concerned with the case of Robert Suydam, a “lettered recluse” whose association with disreputable street denizens and illegal aliens has led his relatives to seek a court pronouncement on his sanity—unsuccessfully, for Suydam convinces the court that his activities are necessitated by scholarly research in the area of folklore. Suydam keeps up, in addition to his Flatbush home, a basement flat in Red Hook, and the place is the haunt of ever-growing masses of questionable characters (“noxious life”) who also attend an old stone church from which are heard bizarre services and “terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far underground,” symbolically, the ancient cult itself. There are kidnappings and disappearances suggestive of cultish human sacrifices. Suddenly the normally unkempt Suydam undergoes a startling metamorphosis, cleaning himself up, losing weight, dressing immaculately, assuming an air of retrieved social respectability, throwing open his Flatbush mansion to receive old acquaintances, and announcing plans to marry a certain “young woman of excellent position”; clearly, Suydam is a character type anticipating Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The sordidness of Red Hook persists, nevertheless, and in a raid on the old church Malone finds, among other things, a Greek inscription on the wall reading, in translation:

  O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!

  But no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing is found.

  When Suydam marries his young lady, they embark on a honeymoon sea voyage, but on the ship they are murdered, and a “horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers’ dress” board the ship and claim Suydam’s body; rather incredibly, they are allowed to depart with it. On the same day, Malone and his fellow policemen descend in a raid on the Parker Place, the locale of Suydam’s basement flat, and during the search Malone is pulled underground by “a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven.” In the nether realm he is witness to a strikingly described though rather over-ambitious array of horrors, such as “those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness.” Despite this impressive imagery, Lovecraft here becomes distressingly conventional by saying that “Satan here held his Babylonish court” and the like.

  From a hidden channel from the harbour a boat appears, bearing Suydam’s body, unaccountably unkempt, fat, and stubbly-bearded as before, and said to be “gangrenous”—surely a lapse of logic, in that Suydam had only just been killed. At any rate, the feet are ceremonially bathed in blood, and Suydam, snatched back from his merely earthly bride, is ritualistically offered in marriage to Lilith, to the cracked strains of the great underground organ. The corpse is reanimated—the reader’s credulity is greatly strained here—and Suydam flees, collapsing in an unexplainably quick putrefaction into “jellyish dissolution” in the heroic act of pushing the cult’s idol into the black waters below as the old houses above collapse to bring the whole scene to chaotic ruin. The story ends with rather hackneyed suggestions of the persistence of the cult—“The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant”—and, in the antepenultimate paragraph, the intrusive narrator’s rhetorical question, “Who are we to combat poisons older than manki
nd?” The story does have, unlike “The Shunned House,” the strong point that the horror survives, and contains much vividness of description; but it is marred by the weak logic of a number of unaccountable details of plot, and by reliance, not characteristic of Lovecraft even during this period, on such conventional or “stock” motifs as traditional daemonism and Lilith-worship. It shares, though, with numerous other Lovecraft works that develop the idea with more originality, the theme of unwholesome survival of the past, and affords some insight into the effects on Lovecraft of his New York “exile.”

  Even stronger such insights are given, however, by the story “He,”

  91 which Lovecraft wrote on 11 August 1925 (nine days after writing the Red Hook tale) while sitting in a park. He would later disparage the story as “mawkish drivel” even worse, in his view, than “The Horror at Red Hook,” but he did once acknowledge that the tale gives an accurate reflection of some of his feelings:

  If you want to know what I think of New York, read “He.” I was living there when I wrote it—& I had to get out of town to the quiet colonial shades of a New Jersey village in order to put it into coherent words. No—New York is dead, & the brilliancy which so impresses one from outside is the phosphorescence of a maggoty corpse.