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

by Donald R. Burleson

  “The Colour out of Space”

  In March 1927, immediately upon completion of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Lovecraft wrote one of his stylistically and conceptually finest short stories, “The Colour out of Space.”

  116 Lovecraft referred to it in letters as an “atmospheric study”—aptly, for it is a masterpiece of sustainedly sombre mood. The tale is cited in O’Brien’s Best Short Stories of 1927, with a biographical sketch of Lovecraft. He felt uncommonly pleased with the story, remarking: “Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic—the abnormally chromatic entity in “The Colour out of Space” being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.”

  117 On another occasion, he wrote: “In my opinion, my best tale is ‘The Colour out of Space.’”

  118 His opinion would endure, for even in late 1936, near the end of his life, he would say: “Indeed, nothing but ‘The Colour out of Space’ really satisfies me as a whole.”

  119 The tale was accepted and promptly published by the magazine Amazing Stories under the editorship of Hugo Gernsback; it took several months and much dunning, however, for Lovecraft to be paid for the story, and when his cheque finally came it was for an insultingly ridiculous $25.00. Lovecraft came to refer to Gernsback as “Hugo the Rat.”

  The story, a study in progressive decay and weird externality, begins poetically with an evoking of atmospheric colour:

  West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight.

  To a remarkable degree this opening passage is imagistically parallel to lines 132–141 of Milton’s “II Penseroso”:

  . . . me, Goddess, bring

  To archéd walks of twilight groves,

  And shadows brown that Sylvan loves

  Of pine or monumental oak,

  Where the rude ax with heaved stroke

  Was never heard the nymphs to daunt,

  Or fright them from their hallowed haunt.

  There in close covert by some brook,

  Where no profaner eye may look,

  Hide me from day’s garish eye . . . .

  Whereas Milton makes of his tenebrous woodland haunt a desirable place, Lovecraft employs the same imagery to make of his remote New England region a place of brooding horror, a place that in Lovecraft’s hands becomes sentient and breathing.

  The first-person narrator is a surveyor—Lovecraft in his mature works often gives his narrators fairly prosaic and level-headed occupations, with the effect that they have enhanced credibility and an aura of realism—a surveyor come to survey for a new reservoir whose construction will necessitate flooding the region; Lovecraft’s narrator says with almost Biblical euphony: “And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.” (Lovecraft drew inspiration on this point from his knowledge of plans to build Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts and flood the towns of Dana, Greenwich, Enfield, and others.) The narrator has been told that the region is ill-regarded, particularly in the environs of a five-acre spot of grey, powdery desolation called the “blasted heath.” (This term occurs in the witch scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and also in Book I, line 615 of Milton’s Paradise Lost.) The surveyor ceases to wonder that the spot is shunned when he sees it himself; Lovecraft employs the abba pattern of chiasmus for describing the narrator’s reaction to the blasted heath: “no other name could fit such a thing, nor any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region.” (“The poet” could be either Shakespeare or Milton.) Trees stand crumbling and rotting at the area’s edge, and there is a trace of rubble from a bygone farmhouse and “the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight.”

  Finding the Arkham folk rather reticent about “the strange days” in which the farm and its occupants came to ruin, the narrator seeks out an old man named Ammi Pierce, who knows of the affair and becomes the tale’s subnarrator. Lovecraft builds a mental tension of credibility versus incredibility by having the townspeople think of Pierce as being a little mad.

  According to Pierce’s story, the trouble begins forty-four years earlier, in June 1882, with the fall of a meteorite near the well on the farm grounds of Nahum Gardner. Three professors from Arkham’s Miskatonic University inspect the stone, finding (in a series of chemical tests whose details bespeak Lovecraft’s youthful attainments in the study of chemistry) that the strange object virtually defies analysis, displaying a spectrum with “shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum.” The meteorite, which is continuously shrinking, yields to the investigators an interior globule or bubble, which bursts “with a nervous little pop.” The narrator remarks, “Nothing was emitted,” but the events of the tale speak differently. The professors (whom Lovecraft’s narration treats with a certain veiled disdain) withdraw from the case.

  At the time of harvest, Nahum—who, foreshadowingly, “felt that age was beginning to tell on him”—sees his fruit grow to “phenomenal size and unwonted gloss,” but disappointment follows, for into the flavour of the fruit has crept “a stealthy bitterness and sickishness.” The meteor, Nahum decides, has poisoned the soil. With the onset of winter, aberrant animal footprints appear in the snow, which melts surprisingly fast around Nahum’s place. In the spring the plants and trees all blossom forth in peculiar colours, “hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth.” Lovecraft’s descriptive and suggestive prowess here grows truly impressive as he characterises the bloodroots as being “insolent in their chromatic perversion.” The Gardners, meanwhile, have grown taciturn and have taken to “stealthy listening”; Nahum has a “sense of something near him waiting to be heard.” They begin watching the grounds at night, seeing the maple trees move though there is no wind. A travelling salesman from Bolton

  120 first sees that to which familiarity has dulled them, the fact that there is a dim luminosity in all the farm’s vegetation. Lovecraft, after a fashion, had anticipated the popularisation of the notion of radioactivity by some decades.

  By May and June of 1883, the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, the verdure of the farm is all going grey and brittle—a creeping condition that slowly but inexorably threatens all life on the farm as the tale unfolds—and Mrs. Gardner goes mad and is locked up in the attic. Lovecraft exquisitely pursues the imagery of progressive decay; the vegetation, which successively has displayed strange colours and has turned grey and brittle, crumbles to a “greyish powder” by autumn. Lovecraft effectively isolates his characters the Gardners; the three boys do not return to school when it reopens, and the family has no social contacts except for Ammi Pierce, who comes less and less often. The descriptions of what happens to the farm animals at this time are outstanding for the power of their vague suggestiveness. The grey, brittle condition infests the poultry; the hogs undergo “loathsome changes” (which are wisely left unenlarged upon); the eyes and muzzles of the swine develop “singular alterations”; the cows are afflicted with “atrocious collapses or disintegrations.” The family’s cats—not surprisingly, Lovecraft ascribes uncommon wisdom to them by implication—have “left some time before.”

  One by one the Gardner children are taken. Thaddeus dies (“it had come in a way which could not be told”); little Merwin disappears after a trip to fetch water; and of the missing Zenas the father can only say, “In the well—he lives in the well.” Ammi, coming to the farm for his first visit in over two weeks, finds an astonishing scene, masterfully described:

  The aspect of the whole farm was shocking—greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great b
are trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence.

  Here the greyness of the sky, in parallel imagery with the greyness of the farm’s decay, even seems to reiterate the unearthly source of the curse that has befallen the Gardners. Ammi finds that Nahum is alive but mentally deranged, and goes up to the attic to see about Mrs. Gardner; the scene there is one of the most memorable in all the Lovecraft canon. Ammi is repelled by the unendurable stench in the attic, but:

  As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the live-stock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.

  Ammi, presumably putting Mrs. Gardner out of her misery, starts to descend the stairs, but hears something below, where he has left Nahum: “Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction.” Lovecraft achieves great suggestive power here, for although his descriptive terms are very stark, characteristically enough he has placed the visual horror out of sight. When Ammi finally comes all the way downstairs, the dying Nahum croaks out a long final monologue, disjointed but expressive of the horror, the nameless colour:

  . . . cold an’ wet, but it bums . . . a kind of smoke . . . it beats down your mind an’ then gits ye . . . can’t git away . . . draws ye . . . ye know summ’at’s comin’ but tain’t no use . . . sucks the life out. . . .

  By making the source of information about the horror here a less than articulate individual, Lovecraft establishes further distance between the reader and the horror. “But,” the narrator relates, “that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in.” With a delectable touch of imagistic irony and juxtaposition of the supremely horrific and the wholesomely commonplace, Lovecraft has Ammi cover “what was left” with a red checked tablecloth.

  When Ammi returns with authorities from town, the imagery of creeping decay is continuously heightened even more. Dredging the well, the men find children’s bones and “inexplicably porous and bubbling” ooze and slime, and prodding it with a long pole they can find no bottom—symbolically, for the externality of the horror, the “grey brittle death” that the Gardners have faced, is such that no human reckoning can get to the bottom of it; there is only “the feeling of something lurking under there.” As the party looks on from the house, the farm’s luminescence grows alarmingly. Again Lovecraft’s description waxes eloquent; the very tips of the tree branches are alight, “like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh,” and the branches are straining toward the sky. Leaving the farm and watching from a distance, the group sees a kaleidoscope of strange light burst up and disappear into the sky; as Ammi has remarked earlier, “it come from beyond, whar things ain’t like they be here—now it’s goin’ home.”

  For Ammi, however, is reserved an additional shock, the “further horror” that Lovecraft at his best so often keeps in waiting. When the burst of weird light rises from the farm, only Ammi sees a detached piece of it fall back to earth. The supreme strength of the tale in the end is that the horror survives; the country folk fancy that “the blight is spreading—little by little, perhaps an inch a year.” People say that “the colour of the neighbouring herbage is not quite right.” Thus, besides being a tale narrated with highly controlled and poetically sensitive style, one in which the sombre mood and the imagery of creeping decay are expertly sustained without a false note or jarring effect throughout, “The Colour out of Space” enjoys the great advantage (over such stories as “The Shunned House”) that it is never really finished; the narrator remembers Ammi Pierce, and reflects in the story’s powerful closing lines, “I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.”

  Lovecraft’s own high assessment of the work is difficult to disagree with.

  “The Dunwich Horror”

  During the summer of 1928, a summer of very eventful travel, Lovecraft wrote “The Dunwich Horror,”

  121 one of his most widely read and, as it turns out, most critically problematical works. Lovecraft says of the story just written:

  It covers 48 pages, so that Wright would probably classify it as a “novelette.” I haven’t yet submitted it to him. The title is “The Dunwich Horror,” & it belongs to the Arkham cycle. The Necronomicon figures in it to some extent.

  122

  (Curiously, the term” Arkham cycle” is not one that Lovecraft in other known letters ever employs.) Later he remarks of “The Dunwich Horror”:

  I used considerable realism in developing the locale of that thing—the prototype being the decaying agricultural region N. E. of Springfield, Mass. especially the township of Wilbraham, where I visited for a fortnight in 1928.

  123

  Lovecraft neglects to mention that his travel impressions, transmuted deftly into the fictive Dunwich region, also stemmed from a stay m Athol, Massachusetts, just before visiting Wilbraham; he IS consistently silent on this point, but as will be shown, there can be no doubt that his Dunwich is an imaginative blend of impressions from both Athol and Wilbraham,

  124 or that this story is a striking instance of the extent to which Lovecraft could practice fictional adaptation of his place-impressions.

  On the face of it, “The Dunwich Horror” appears to be a vivid horror tale oddly flawed by certain crudities of characterisation and plot; but there is more than meets the eye. The story deals with the breeding of a monstrous, invisible entity in a decadent Massachusetts backwater, and of the efforts, in the end successful, of Miskatonic University’s Dr. Henry Armitage to put down this local horror. In a surface-level reading, one wonders that the tale can fit at all into a Lovecraft Mythos in which such human concepts as “good” and “evil” are meaningless, and the cosmos is portrayed as awesomely indifferent to human interests, for in “The Dunwich Horror” there appears to be a sort of “stock” struggle between good and evil, between Armitage and the blasphemous monstrosity which he rushes in like a movie hero to quell. Indeed, Armitage comes off as an oddly conventionalised character, with lines so corny that one may wonder how Lovecraft could have suffered such a lapse. However to read the story on this level is to miss much of what it has to offer, for it turns out that with a reading in the light of mythic interpretation, one sees a vastly different picture, one in which Armitage sounds like a buffoon because, in mythic context, he is a buffoon.

  125

  Like “The Colour out of Space,” this work begins (after an epigraph from Charles Lamb suggesting that monstrous traditions are archetypal in the human mind) with an atmospheric study of the locale in which the story will be set: “When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Comers he comes upon a lonely and curious country.” (The reference to “north central” Massachusetts is patently a tip of the Lovecraftian hat to Athol.) This country, the omniscient narrator continues, is singularly wild, remote, and decadent. The description waxes symbolic as well as colourful: “Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety.” The gorges are suggestive of mysterious, untrammeled nature; the bridges are suggestive of the feebleness of human attempts to deal with what cannot be fathomed.

  Dunwich

  126 itself is described as a village having a “cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region.” Its denizens are “a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.” The place is one of much local folklore. In particular, the numerous whippoorwills of the region are said to be “psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying,” timing their cries “in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath.” When
they catch a fleeing soul, they “flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter”; when they fail, “they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.” Lovecraft is here making use of a local legend he imbibed during his stay in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, with his friend Edith Miniter and her cousin Evanore Beebe in their “Maplehurst” family home.

  127 Much Dunwich legendry also centres about Sentinel Hill, atop which the ill-famed Wizard Whateley performs shocking rituals in the midst of a circle of stones. Sentinel Hill is a blended derivation from Lovecraft’s summer 1928 travels in western Massachusetts, for while its topographical and atmospheric qualities reflect those of Wilbraham Mountain, as Lovecraft imaginatively reacted to it, the name echoes the fact that in Athol, where Lovecraft visited his friends W. Paul Cook and H. Warner Munn before proceeding to Wilbraham, there is a local landmark known as the Sentinel Elm Farm, named after a then extant patriarchal elm and positioned on a hill above the town proper.

  The narrator tells of the birth of Wilbur Whateley (the name Wilbur being a probable echo of Wilbraham) on 2 February 1913—“Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name”—born to the unwed, “somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman” Lavinia Whateley, daughter of old Wizard Whateley. The boy’s grandfather utters a prophecy at the general store, that” some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a—callin’ its father’s name on the top of Sentinel Hill!” (The reader may erroneously assume at this point that the child referred to is Wilbur, but there are surprises waiting.) The boy grows and learns at an uncanny rate, and has repellent, “goatish-looking” features. With foreshadowing, the narrator remarks that dogs abhor Wilbur. Old Whateley buys astonishing numbers of cattle, and repairs and locks a long disused toolshed, also boarding up the upper story of the house; a singular stench hangs about the place, quite beyond its simple lack of cleanliness. About ten years later, when the old man dies, the whippoorwills gather and chirp but do not seem to catch his soul and the attending physician hears “a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of waves on some level beach” from the upper portions of the house. The old man, just before dying, enjoins Wilbur: