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

by Donald R. Burleson

  when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway. . . . What wonder that across the earth . . . poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? . . . The stars were right again. . . . After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

  Johansen and one companion reached the ship and prepared to get under way, and “the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus,” and gave pursuit. Johansen rammed the monstrosity with the ship; here Lovecraft indulges in extravagant yet controlled description by simile: “There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and [the effective modicum of restraint] a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper.” However, Cthulhu’s “scattered plasticity” recombined as the ship fled. The narrator ends the tale in a potently suggestive and alliteratively poetic fashion:

  I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, and poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives. Cthulhu still lives too . . . . What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

  Following this sonorous chiasmus, the narrator expresses the final hope that “if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”

  Although “The Call of Cthulhu” is marred by some minor problems of credibility—ironically, the reader is probably more willing to “believe” in Cthulhu and the momentary surfacing of R’lyeh than to believe that the narrator was allowed to depart with Johansen’s manuscript—it is a tale of skillfully balanced realism and fantasy, of carefully prepared horrors which (unlike the vampiric horror of “The Shunned House” on both counts) have awesomely cosmic implications and which ominously survive beyond story’s end. Clearly, Lovecraft by this point has enlarged his fictive stage to astronomical extent with respect both to space and to time; “The Call of Cthulhu” marks a distinct turning-point, a turning toward the precepts of the now-developing Lovecraft Mythos, by which man is a helpless and insignificant newcomer in a cosmos too old and too vastly unplumbed to be other than indifferent at best, to his wellbeing.

  The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

  During the period of late 1926 to late January 1927, Lovecraft wrote his first fullblown experiment in novel length, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,

  108 a rather rambling and episodic fantasy that defies facile attempts at classification—it is at once a Dunsanian fantasy, a horror tale, a tale reflective of love of New England, a dream-narrative, and a work in which the Lovecraft Mythos further develops. It is as if Lovecraft sought to experess all his major emotionalities, from his love of cats and New England and Lord Dunsany to his fascination with dreams and his sense of the horror underlying man’s precarious position in the cosmos, within one work whose chapterless fluidity suggests a confluence of all his own fondest thoughts, and whose ambitious inclusiveness is perhaps a phenomenon parallel to the ambition of the novel’s god-confronting protagonist himself. Of the work, Lovecraft remarked while it was in progress:

  it is a picaresque chronicle of impossible adventures in dreamland, and it is composed under no illusion of professional acceptance There is certainly nothing of popular or best-seller psychology in it—although, in consonance with the mood in which it was conceived, it contains more of the naive fairy-tale wonder-spirit than of actual Baudelairian decadence. Actually, it isn’t much good; but forms useful practice for later and more authentic attempts in the novel form.

  109

  Later he said:

  All genuine art, I think, is local and rooted in the soil; for even when one sings of far incredible twilight lands he is merely singing of his homeland in some gorgeous and exotic mantle. It is this point which I seek to emphasise in my 110-page effort The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

  110

  Indeed, Lovecraft had already foreshadowed the fictional development of his notion in his early Dunsanian tales “Celephaïs” and “The Quest of Iranon.” Its further working out in the Dream-Quest novel was an expression of his recent experience of “exile” in New York, in that upon his return home the artistic significance of Providence was all the more central to him.

  The novel

  111 —if novel it may be called, with so loose a structure—relates the variegated dream-wanderings of Randolph Carter, a character drawn on Lovecraft himself and familiar from the earlier tale “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” The setting of dreamland functions in the novel, as in “Celephaïs,” as an independently existing realm to which deep dreamers have access, a realm continuously existing and containing definite, named features, much as in the Jungian view of the psyche the collective unconscious is postulated as being “down there” for us all and leading an independent life of its own, an existence studded with archetypal patterns just as Lovecraft’s dreamland has its cities, its mountains, its mighty rivers. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, with its sonorous and (in spots) nearly Biblical language and its concern with man’s relation to primordial gods, is a work in the vein of Lord Dunsany; but it was written several years after Lovecraft’s main period of Dunsanian experimentation, and it represents not merely a late-arriving emulation of Dunsany, but rather an assimilation of him for purposes individually Lovecraftian—an illumination of the world of dreams, an enlargement upon the dawning mythic notions of the Lovecraft canon with its pantheon of timelessly ancient gods.

  The novel is a deeply interpretable work; in particular, it lends itself to Jungian reading, and in this light the work takes on a unique quality, the quality of displaying literally what most such works portray only symbolically. It is commonplace in literature for some journey or quest to be a symbolic odyssey through the human psyche in search of fulfillment; typically, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the literal events of the narrative are symbolic or allegorical parallels to the details of the psychic quest for the Self. In Lovecraft’s novel, however, set as it is in the world of dreams, the quest through the universe of the unconscious psyche is literal.

  The protagonist Randolph Carter, who is “old in the land of dream,” has glimpsed in his dreams the possibility of psychic wholeness, of ultimate balance and contentment, in the form of a marvellous “sunset city.” However, further glimpses are denied; the archetypal mechanisms of wholeness are too deeply rooted in the collective unconscious ever to be made conscious, and obtrude on the personal unconscious only rarely and unpredictably in the mythically old and pervasive symbolism of dreams. Carter chafes at “the bondage of dream’s tyrannous gods” who have denied him repetitions of his vision, and with an astonishing hubris, an overweaning and persistent pride that pales even that of Barzai the Wise in “The Other Gods,” he resolves to make entreaty to the Great Ones, who dwell in an onyx castle beyond human accessibility in Kadath in the Cold Waste. Carter, in effect, declares war on the limitations of the structure of the psyche; to satisfy his craving for the elusive sunset city, he will sway the gods, he will be privy to the ineffable secrets of the profound unconscious. It is significant, however, that although his quest is exceedingly prideful, his motives, far from being those of greed and other such impulses, are wholly aesthetic. His sunset city is “a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals”—that is, it is archetypal and eternal—yet he yearns for the city not with pride for pride’s sake but rather with a poet’s love for the city’s beauty, a beauty by whose descriptions Lovecraft reflects alike New England, the delicate gracefulness of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and the dream-places of Dunsanian wonder.

  The novel deals episodically with Carter’s odyssey from peril to peril in dreamland; he does battle with Gugs, Ghasts, and a variety of other denizens of dark
ness, to such an extent that after a while, as Lovecraft himself feared would happen, the reader is hard put to sustain enthusiasm. Nevertheless, there are moments of black, exquisite horror, as when Carter, sailing in a dream-galley past the Basalt Pillars of the West into an amorphous abyss, glimpses “the nameless larvae of the Other Gods”; or when he meets “the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no faces” (derived from Lovecraft’s own childhood dreams); or when Carter confronts the yellow-masked “high-priest not to be described” in the Plateau of Leng, and the mask (as Lovecraftian masks so often do) slips a little to reveal what is beneath it; or when Carter finds himself in “the Vale of Pnath, where crawl and burrow the enormous bholes,”

  112 the spot “into which all the ghouls of the waking world cast the refuse of their feastings.” Carter forms an alliance with the ghouls of the dream realm, one of which is a hideously transmuted Richard Upton Pickman, the artist who vanishes at the end of Lovecraft’s tale “Pickman’s Model.”

  The novel, too, is replete with symbolism that reinforces the propriety of a Jungian interpretation, as when Carter, entering the Enchanted Wood of the creatures called Zoogs, finds “a circle of great mossy stones” left by “older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten.” The circle readily suggests the mandala (an archetypal symbol, in fact, often occurring in dreams and in children’s art), the Jungian circle of individuation, the nature of Carter’s approaching quest for psychic oneness; Carter must confront the Shadow, the gods of Kadath, and must by reconciling this Dark Brother with his outward-turned ego, complete the circle to achieve balance. The necessity of this reconciliation is suggested as well by the imagery of the great carven stone face on the side of Mount Ngranek in dreamland (probably inspired by Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face,” based in turn on New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountains). Carter must look upon the stone face—which is turned away from the side of the mountain accessible to human dream-wanderers, just as the Shadow or counter-ego is “pointed away” in the deep psyche—in order to know the lineaments of the Great Ones and to hope ultimately to come to terms with them and find his contentment. That is, he must confront the dark side of himself, in the deep “Kadath” of his own immemorially old psyche, whose bipolarities are suggested in the opposing sides of Mount Ngranek.

  Finally wafted into the onyx castle of the Great Ones atop Kadath, Carter meets Nyarlathotep—now not a mere waking-world horror as in the prose poem, but a Mythos-connected entity identified as the Crawling Chaos—who discloses to him the truth about the object of the quest: that the marvellous sunset city is “only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth,” the accumulated memories of New England byways as seen in the unsullied charm of childhood: “These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself.” Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, or like the Zen monk who, upon asking how to search for his Buddha-nature, is told by his master that to search for it is to ride off on an ox in search of the ox, Carter learns that he has carried his ultimate contentment, his potential for psychic harmony, within him all along. Thus, despite its rambling lack of focus and its tendency to weary the reader, the novel provides an ending of philosophical insight. With its oneiric imagery, its archetypal levels of meaning, and its various forms of narrative appeal, the work stands, if not as the best Lovecraftian experiment in novel length, certainly as a striking fictional confluence of his thoughts, dreams, and enthusiasms, a prismatic self-portrait of the artist.

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

  Immediately after the Dream-Quest experiment, Lovecraft was again working in the novel form, but this time with an intricately conceived and well-orchestrated plot, and with a Providence, Rhode Island setting. In early 1927 he wrote The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,

  113 a novel of forward-reaching horror from out of the past, of death and rebirth, of unthinkable threads of continuity linking the present family scion with a past that should be still, but will not. The novel’s protagonist learns what such past protagonists as de la Poer (in “The Rats in the Walls”) have learned, and what still other protagonists will learn in such works as “The Shadow over Innsrnouth” and “The Shadow out of Time”—the Lovecraftian lesson that for some hapless souls the present is no place in which one can hide from the past.

  Lovecraft playfully wrote to Frank Belknap Long of the new novel, reproducing the two Curwen magic formulae and saying:

  You don’t know what these twin formulae mean? Ah, you are fortunate! Dr. Willett would give every hair of his well-trimmed white beard if he could only say the same—but God! He knows! He has seen! It all comes out on p. 112 of the tale now drawing toward its close, and which I shall call either The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or The Madness out of Time. Like Midas of old, curs’d by the turning to gold of everything he touch’d, I am this year curs’d by the turning into a young novel of every story I begin.

  114

  Lovecraft, however enthusiastic he sounded at first, soon came to regard the novel as less than successful; he could never quite bring himself to type the manuscript—much of which was scribbled on hotel stationery, advertising circulars, and assorted envelopes—even when in 1930 he received a letter from Clifton Fadiman of Simon & Schuster encouraging him to submit a novel.

  Lovecraft’s essential disavowal of the work notwithstanding, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a remarkable novel, deftly interweaving fantasy with scholarly amounts of Rhode Island history in such a way as to provide realism perhaps unexcelled in all of Lovecraft’s works.

  The novel begins with a thematically important epigraph which Lovecraft ascribes to Borellus, but actually quotes from his ancestral copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, with only slight changes to make the passage seem even more archaic:

  The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the 1yke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.

  The novel’s protagonist, Charles Dexter Ward, will of course learn the price to be paid for forbidden knowledge, for the stirring up of things best left unstirred. In Chapter 1, “A Result and a Prologue,” the reader is told of Ward in the opening paragraph, and Lovecraft plays a quiet little joke:

  From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint by the grieving father.

  What the reader learns only much later is that the patient bears only the name of Charles, but is not Charles; Lovecraft is careful to say “the grieving father” and not “his grieving father.” The patient, as the omniscient narrator relates, seems to have undergone a “profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind”

  115 and presents a baffling case of “dark mania.” Charles Ward has been (like Lovecraft) “an antiquarian from infancy” and now seems to have had much information about the modem world displaced from his mind by uncannily thorough knowledge of bygone matters, particularly Colonial New England times. The chief conduit of information about Ward’s case has been his family physician Dr. Willett, who, however, as it turns out, passes off explanations that do not partake of the deep and horrific truths that he alone knows about the case.

  The narrator indulges in a history of Ward’s early life, a history replete with faithful details of the College Hill area of Providence as Lovecraft (later in life, not as an infant) knew and loved it—the Ward house is 140 Prospect Street, really the Halsey mansion, reputed in Lovecraft’s day to be haunted, and there are mentions of “sleepy Congdon Street” and the park at Prospect Terrace, as well as details from the young Ward’s walks which are close reproductions of Lovecraft’s own walks down “vertical Jen
ckes Street” to “the shady Benefit Street comer” and beyond—throughout, specific houses, streets, and historical sites described are true to life, and there is no question that Charles Ward, with his love of old Providence, is a closely autobiographical figure. (The name Ward could be derived from Howard, though there are prominent Wards in Providence history whose name Lovecraft may have borrowed just as well; there is a Ward house on Benefit Street.) Ward’s antiquarian rambles, as the narrator metaphorically puts it, in part formed “the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter of 1919–20, the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition.”

  Ward’s interest in the past was “free from every trace of the morbid” until his discovery of an ill-famed ancestor named Joseph Curwen—the name is based on Judge Corwin of Salem witch trial fame, or infamy—who fled to Providence from Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and lived unnaturally long. The theme of unwholesome longevity and the associated character type, adumbrated in such earlier works as “The Terrible Old Man,” “The Picture in the House,” and “The Horror at Red Hook,” now come into full development in Joseph Curwen, Ward’s great-great-great-grandfather, all records of whom had been earnestly (but imperfectly) expunged by Curwen’s horrified townspeople.