H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1)
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Astonishingly, though, after providing a work that deftly adapts Egyptian lore to horrific purposes, and does so with unforgettably powerful descriptive passages well prepared by careful buildup of realism, Lovecraft rather spoils the tale with the closing sentence: “But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.” In a letter he remarks, “To square it with the character of a popular showman, I tacked on the ‘it was all a dream’ bromide,”
100 so that he did have his reasons for the ending; the writing of the piece was so assignment-bound, after all, that in the opening paragraph Lovecraft even has his narrator refer to “the publishers of this magazine” (meaning Weird Tales). Nevertheless, in artistic terms the ending borders on puerility, both in its sound and in its weakening effect on the impressions immediately preceding it. Employing the same theme of unthinkable survivals from the dim past, Lovecraft would later tantalisingly set up effective tensions in such stories as “The Shadow out of Time,” and in fact had already done so earlier, in “The Rats in the Walls,” by teasing the reader with some doubt as to the narrator’s reliability; but in the Houdini story, the disclaimer is total, and unfortunately the tension is lost.
During the New York period Lovecraft also wrote a small amount of miscellaneous poetry, though little that could be called impressive. One notable poem, however, is “Primavera,”
101 April 1925, in which Lovecraft gives dark overtones even to the advent of spring, suggesting that the season is redolent of ancient influences which call eerily to the poet. In sound, “Primavera” somewhat suggests a Poe influence, but only peripherally—one can ultimately only say that the piece is Lovecraftian. It begins:
There is wonder on land and billow,
And a strangeness in bough and vein,
For the brook and the budded willow
Feel the Presence walking again.
Mention is made of the “far Walpurgis flame.” Part of what calls the poet is memory of rustic beauty:
I am called where the vales are dreaming
In golden, celestial light,
With the gables of castles gleaming,
And village roofs steep and bright . . .
but the enchanted vision darkens somewhat:
I am called where a twilight ocean
Laps the piers of an ancient town
And dream-ships in ghostly motion
Ride at anchor up and down . . .
and in increasingly striking lines the vision grows primordially cosmic:
And when o’er the waves enchanted
The moon and the stars appear,
I am haunted—haunted—haunted—
By dreams of a mystic year;
Of a year long lost in the dawning,
When the planets were vague and pale,
And the chasms of space were yawning
To vistas that fade and fail.
The poet feels “called to those reachless regions” though “the spell is a charm swift-fleeting” and he has never “heeded the springtime’s call.” Imbued with a sort of graceful hauntingness of imagery, an effective metre, and tastefully employed alliteration and anaphora, “Primavera,” very reminiscent of Lovecraft’s “Nemesis” of 1918, shows the gentleman from Providence to be, at his better times, a poet both technically competent and haunted by long-standing impressions and images clamouring for expression and re-expression. Lovecraft’s poetry overall may not be great, but, as evidenced by pieces like this, neither should it be ignored by any means.
5. Homecoming Burst of Creativity: The Lovecraft Mythos (1926–1928)
“The Call of Cthulhu”
It is clear that Lovecraft’s uncomfortable “period of exile” in New York did little for his creativity; for although he did write some worthy things during that period, notably “The Shunned House,” his output overall was meagre in quantity and, in quality, not up to the level either of some earlier works (like “The Music of Erich Zann”) or most of the later works. Indeed, it can scarcely fail to be significant that his happy homecoming to Providence in April 1926 coincided perfectly with a great burst of creativity that would result in not only stylistically improved works, but works that also conceptually take on the unique character of the Lovecraft Mythos.
During the summer of 1926 Lovecraft wrote a story which, considering the directions of his work from this point on, was to be of great importance in the Lovecraft canon, “The Call of Cthulhu,”
102 a tale with interesting mythic overtones. Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, rejected the story, and Lovecraft chafed: “Little Farnie rejected Grandpa’s Cthulhu story on the ground that it was too slow and obscure for his zippy morons.”
103 A year later Wright asked to see the story again. Lovecraft, on resubmitting the tale, enclosed the letter to Wright in which he spells out his fictional credo—“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large”—and remarked, in creditably unyielding defence of his theme of externality, that the story must stand as written, whether Wright found it acceptable or not: “I am the last one to urge the acceptance of material of doubtful value to the magazine’s particular purpose.”
104 Wright, however, accepted the story this time. Lovecraft’s own later assessment of it was that it was “so-so” but “cumbrous.”
In manuscript, the story provides a colophon after the title: “(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston).” This has been omitted in most printed texts of the story, and the first-person narrator is not otherwise named. The story, in part set in Lovecraft’s College Hill area of Providence, is divided into three titled sections, and in the first, “The Horror in Clay,” the narrator opens with a philosophical statement embodying what may be called Lovecraft’s “forbidden knowledge” or “merciful ignorance” motif:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Science, he continues, may someday usher in our collective madness by piecing together for us the underlying horror of reality, only our ignorance of which keeps us sane. (Lovecraft has previously, though far less effectively, suggested this notion in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.”) The narrator has himself stumbled on the dreadful truths of the story by “an accidental piecing together of separated things . . . an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.” The professor was the narrator’s nonagenarian grand-uncle Professor Angell of Brown University, who has died “after being jostled by a nautical-looking negro” but whose death has officially been ascribed to natural causes. The narrator, as his uncle’s executor, finds among his possessions a box of exceedingly curious things, including a bas-relief in clay, and various “cuttings” (Lovecraft’s habitual term for “clippings”) and other papers. The bas-relief features a monstrous form “which only a diseased fancy could conceive”—a sort of octopus-dragon-and the accompanying papers bear the title “CTHULHU CULT.”
Lovecraft, in discussing his devising of the name Cthulhu for his monster-entity, says that it is designed to represent sounds appropriate only to certain non-human vocal apparati: “The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlûl’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutterally and very thickly.”
105 Later Lovecraft, obviously having some fun with his young correspondents’ questions about the pronunciation, wrote:
The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly-formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different.
106
The narrator finds the “Cthulhu cult” manuscript divided into two secti
ons. The first tells the story of a study related to the dreams of a young artist named Wilcox; the second relates the experiences of a New Orleans police inspector named Legrasse. Throughout, Lovecraft maintains a high level of realism by making the narrative rely heavily on newspaper items, scholarly notes, and the like.
Wilcox, it seems, had come to Professor Angell seeking identification of the strange hieroglyphs on a bas-relief which he himself has just sculpted. When the professor upbraided him for the obvious newness of a tablet claimed to be old, the youth replied, “It is new indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
107 The night before, or 28 February 1925, there had been an earthquake tremor—Lovecraft here makes use of a real New England event—and Wilcox had dreamt of horrible Cyclopean cities, and of a voice from below “that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, ‘Cthulhu fhtagn,’” It is this mysterious utterance that has excited the professor’s recollection of the Legrasse affair of seventeen years before. The professor has undertaken a study of the young Wilcox’s dreams; but from the night of 22 March until 2 April Wilcox has been delirious. The professor has recorded, from 28 February to 2 April, a global pattern, one not widely noticed, of bizarre behaviour on the part of artists, poets, and other particularly sensitive people; Lovecraft includes such colourful examples as voodoo orgies and isolated suicides. The narrator, however, is skeptical; the tale’s events constitute a gradual wearing down of his skepticism.
In the story’s second section, “The Tale of Inspector Legrasse,” the reader is made aware of the Legrasse data; again the narrative milieu is one of control and scholarly verisimilitude for heightened realism, the realism needed to serve as a balance or foil for the fantastic disclosures to come. Professor Angell, we are told, attended the 1908 annual meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, meeting Inspector Legrasse, who carried with him “a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette” which he sought to identify. In this story within a story, there is related a story within a story within a story—perhaps part of what Lovecraft meant by “cumbrous”—of how Legrasse came to possess the statuette, which represented “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers”; the thing sat on a “pedestal covered with undecipherable characters” of which even the grand assembly of scholars found it impossible to “form the least notion of even their remotest kinship.” Thus, Lovecraft cleverly establishes the absolute externality of the thing, which is seen as “frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.” Only one of the scholars attending had something to put forward—that he had once encountered a degenerate cult in Greenland worshipping a fetish essentially like the Legrasse image. When the two compared notes, they were startled to find that both the Greenland Eskimos and the Louisiana cultists had chanted the same syllables:
“Ph’ nglui mglw’ nafh Cthulhu R’ lyeh wgah’ nagl fhtagn.” Legrasse had learned from his Louisiana prisoners what the chant meant: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Legrasse related a long tale of his investigating a bizarre sacrificial cult ritual in voodoo country, breaking up the rites, seizing the idol, and questioning the prisoners: “Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.” From this questioning the reader learns an essential notion underlying the Lovecraft Mythos:
They worshipped . . . the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was the cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Someday he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
Thus, Lovecraft begins to develop in earnest a central idea hinted at as long ago as “Dagon” and “The Doom that Came to Sarnath”—that man is relatively recent among earth’s lords and holds but a tenuous position in the cosmic scheme of things. The Lovecraft Mythos makes its debut firmly rooted, as all substantial literature must be, in myth, for clearly Cthulhu is Lovecraft’s expression of the archetypal motif of death and rebirth of a god, the mythic motif of the god whose return is gloriously awaited. Cthulhu, not a “water elemental” of the Poseidon type as August Derleth has claimed, has been trapped in his watery tomb by the sinking of the primordial temple-city of R’lyeh in the Pacific, and his death is not true death; for Lovecraft now revives with a vengeance the Necronomicon couplet from “The Nameless City”:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The narrator, digesting all these records, interviews the artist Wilcox at the youth’s lodgings in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street (7 Thomas Street, a real Providence locale faithfully described); Wilcox’s dream of a slimy Cyclopean city parallels the accounts of R’lyeh, “whose geometry . . . was all wrong.” Lovecraft places his fictive events outside of all human comprehension by denying them a part in the familiar world so basic as traditional geometry.
In the tale’s third and decisive section, “The Madness from the Sea,” the narrator experiences the coincidental piecing-together of things destined to be the end of him. He visits a “learned friend of Paterson New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note”—this is patently Lovecraft’s old friend James F. Morton—and sees among the shelf-papers an article from the Australian Sydney Bulletin. Lovecraft gives the text of this article in full for considerable realism, though one may notice that the style in which the supposedly journalistic piece is written is not sufficiently different from the Lovecraftian style of narration of the story itself. At any rate, the article tells the tale of a Norwegian sailor, Gustav Johansen, who has survived some horrendous incident at sea involving “a horrible stone idol of unknown origin” and a calamity on an uncharted island. (Lovecraft’s choice of Norway is probably significant in that his description of Cthulhu would appear to owe much to Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken,” based in turn on a Norwegian myth.) The narrator draws correlations from the dates mentioned, noting parallels with Wilcox’s period of delirium. Eventually he visits Johansen’s home in Oslo, finding that the sailor has died rather mysteriously; Johansen’s wife discloses that he has left a long manuscript “written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal.” The reader’s credulity is somewhat strained here—the narrator could not have read the document m Norwegian; the English is a trifle too convenient. It is strained even more by the fact that the narrator is allowed to carry the manuscript away; Lovecraft could have made this detail more persuasive.
The diary, like the later Smith diary in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, is a good device, nonetheless, for keeping distance between the reader and the horror. According to Johansen’s account, he and his men encountered the mysteriously upheaved island and “nightmare corpse-city” (R’lyeh) in S. Latitude 47°9′, W. Longitude 126°43′—in keeping with Lovecraft’s penchant for realistic detail, indeed a forsaken spot in the Pacific, and one south of the Valparaiso ocean route as stated. Like the locale of Wilcox’s dreams, the place was one whose geometry was “abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.” The sailors found a vast door; effectively, Lovecraft says that “they could not decide wh
ether it lay flat like a trap door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door,” but they managed to get it open, only to hear “a nasty, slopping sound down there.” And they were listening still