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

by Donald R. Burleson

  More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows—an’ that grows faster. It’ll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth . . .. [But] dun’t let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it’s all over an’ no use. Only them beyont kin make it multiply an’ work . . . . Only them, the old uns as wants to come back.

  He dies. Thus grows not only the implied monstrosity upstairs but also the Lovecraft Mythos itself; the notion (first glimpsed in “The Call of Cthulhu”) is more firmly established that there are primordial entities (ultimately symbolic of chaos) lying in the great Outside who must once have held sway and now want to re-establish their dominion, aided by sorcery. Soon afterward Wilbur is busy removing timbres from the house, gradually turning it into a hollow shell to hold what is growmg inside it—Lovecaft keeps the creature tantalisingly hidden—and is off to Miskatonic University to consult their complete text of the Latin Necronomicon for chants needed. By this time he is almost eight feet tall and he is met at the university library by a naturally apprehensive librarian, Henry Armitage, who grudgingly allows him to look at the forbidden volume but refuses to let him take it home. Wilbur reads a long passage which Lovecraft makes Biblically sonorous, the most impressive and substantially illuminative peek inside the tome to be found anywhere in the Lovecraft oeuvre:

  Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters . . . . The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know but between them, They walk serene and primal undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth . . . . Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä, Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them . . . . Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer.

  With this passage, so poetically balanced by the device of chiasmus, Lovecraft implies the cyclic cosmicism of his Mythos conception.

  Later Wilbur tries to steal the forbidden book but is tom to shreds by the guard dog. Lovecraft describes what is found, in great detail;

  128 “one might be tempted to say too much detail, but it should be kept in mind that the tentacled, saurian horror that lies turning into whitish ichor on the library floor is not the horror of the tale—that horror Lovecraft’s eternal “something worse waiting,” is yet to come, and will be kept more tastefully vague. When Wilbur dies, Lovecraft gives a nice twist to the whippoorwill legend; the birds chirp in anticipation of the departure of Wilbur’s soul, but are panic-stricken when they behold it: “Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.” The narrator remarks that “the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small.”

  In Wilbur’s absence the horror back at the Whateley farmhouse in Dunwich bursts forth to scatter death and terror through the region. The monstrosity is invisible—Lovecraft continues to make the reader wonder about its exact nature. It descends into Cold Spring Glen, a “great sinister ravine,” as a sort of lair, emerging from time to time to attack the farm families. Lovecraft based his Cold Spring Glen on a real ravine that he visited with H. Warner Munn in North New Salem, Massachusetts, near Athol; one of the Dunwich inhabitants says of the place:

  I allus says, Col’ Spring Glen ain’t no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o’ Gawd an’ they’s them as says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin’ an’ a-talkin in the air daown thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an’ Bear’s Den.

  The description is faithful in every physical detail to the real ravine which does feature a rock falls and “Bear’s Den”—a natural shallow fissure in the face of the ravine wall, tapering off after a few feet to an unpassable narrowness but suggesting cavernous regions beyond—and is indeed a sinister-looking spot. Lovecraft, visiting the place with Munn, remarked playfully that what one had to fear there was not the hypothetical bears but rather what might come out of the deeper recesses beyond the rock fissure to eat the bears.

  129

  Henry Armitage, deciphering a Wilbur Whateley diary—once again, the cryptography motif in Lovecraft—devises some counter-sorcery, aided by a chemical spray to make the monstrous entity visible. He engages two colleagues, Professors Morgan and Rice, to accompany him to Dunwich to put down the horror. Lovecraft is here indulging in a quiet in-joke (so “in” that probably only he understood it) by borrowing names from a bit of Athol, Massachusetts, history; in a locally well-remembered land transaction that Lovecraft must have learned of in soaking up (as he customarily did) the history of the region that he was visiting, a certain wealthy landowner H. H. Rice had sold the power mill in town to the Morgan Memorial; there is a Rice Hill close to the Morgan Memorial in South Athol. (The fact that Lovecraft came away from his Athol stay in the mood to make quiet use of its local colour is indicated not only by the matters of the Bear’s Den and of Morgan and Rice, but also by the fact that most of the Dunwich family names in the story are prominent in Athol history—Wheeler, Farr, Sawyer, Bishop; even Houghton, the doctor, in that there was once in the 1800s an entire Houghton Block named after prominent townsman Alvin Houghton—and by the fact that when he later ghostwrote “The Mound,” in early 1930, for Zealia Bishop, he named one of his hideous subterranean regions L’thaa, which is Athol phonetically backwards.)

  Armitage and his cohorts follow the enormous invisible entity up Sentinel Hill, leaving the townsfolk to watch through a telescope; Lovecraft thus arranges effective distance between the reader and the horror. The delegation from Miskatonic intones a chant designed to send the creature back to Yog-Sothoth, its father, and the monstrosity bellows:

  Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah-e’yayayayaaaa . . . ngh’ aaaa . . . ngh’ aaaa . . . h’yuh . .. h’yuh . . . HELP! HELP! . . . ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!

  One almost expects, “Why has thou forsaken me?” The scene is a clear tongue-in-cheek parody of the crucifixion; the monstrous entity returns to the father. Below, the farmers have espied the thing fleetingly, describing it as “a octopus, centipede, spider kind 0’ thing [but] they was a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, an’ it looked like Wizard Whateley’s only it was yards an’ yards acrost.”

  Armitage lectures the men about the thing called out of external spheres and sent back, finally giving utterance to the revelation: “You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”

  Despite this powerful ending, Armitage comes off in the end as a curiously hokey and seemingly un-Lovecraftian character, mouthing such corny lines as “But what, in God’s name, can we do?” and giving utterance to a sort of moralising good-versus-evil mentality that seems to run mawkishly contrary to the precepts of the Lovecraft Mythos: “We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to.” But to read the story only on this level is to miss much of its interpretative potential, because the most compelling view of the tale is that which emerges in terms of myth and the mythic motif of the questioning hero. Seen in such terms, the story undergoes a startling reversal in meaning.

  The question arises: who is the hero? In mythic terms it turns out that only one character has all the requisite characteristics: Wilbur Whateley and his twin brother, regarded—as is commonly done in such contexts as the Twin Cycle of the hero myth in Winnebago Indian mythology—as one entity. Typically, the twins in such hero mythology seem invincible at first, but eventually succumb to an overreaching hubris or ambitious pride; this is clearly the case with the Whateley twins. Typically, also, the twins are separated, and it is difficult to reunite them; witness the separation of Wilbur a
nd his brother in the quest for the Necronomicon.

  Thought of as a unified entity, the Whateley twins remarkably well fit the mythic pattern known as the hero monomyth, an archetypal pattern present in varying degrees in all hero mythology. The monomyth consists of eight stages:

  (1) Miraculous conception or birth, as in traditional accounts of the virgin birth of Quetzalcoatl and Jesus, or of the immaculate conception of Buddha, Lao-Tzu, and Horus.

  (2) Initiation of the hero, who commonly evinces uncannv wisdom as a child, as in the case of Jesus or Buddha; frequently a disguised god sires the hero, who is threatened and must be hidden.

  (3) Preparation, meditation, and withdrawal of the hero, as in the withdrawal of Buddha to the Bodhi tree, or Moses to his mountain, or Jesus to the wilderness, or Mohammed to his cave.

  (4) Trial and quest; the hero embarks on some such quest as that of Gilgamesh for the plant of life, or Percival for the Holy Grail, or Sir Gawain for the chapel of the Green Knight.

  (5) Death of the hero because of his quest, often by dismemberment as in the cases of Osiris, Dionysos, and Orpheus.

  (6) Descent to the underworld, as in the case of Jesus; typically, one sees here the theme of overcoming the forces of death, as in the case of Hercules and Cerberus.

  (7) Resurrection and rebirth, as in the cases of Dionysos, Buddha, Adonis, Osiris, and Jesus.

  (8) Ascension, as in the case of Jesus.

  It is generally significant to find even half of these things in any one account; Wilbur Whateley and his twin brother fit all eight stages quite closely:

  (1) The twins are products of a sort of miraculous conception and birth, sired by the “god” Yog-Sothoth in May-Eve rites on Sentinel Hill; Wilbur is shunned by townsfolk and threatened by dogs, and must conceal his teratological form under his clothing, while the brother is hidden in the farmhouse, a symbolic second womb in which he grows and prepares for “rebirth.”

  (2) Wilbur is “initiated” by being allowed to take part in the Sentinel Hill rites at May Eve and All Hallows Eve with his mother and grandfather. As is typical in myth, we are told little of his childhood; here, the narration skips from Wilbur’s fourth to tenth year. Wilbur exhibits uncanny early wisdom and growth, developing rapidly both in physical and mental stature, beginning to talk at the age of eleven months, becoming a “fluent and incredibly intelligent talker” by nineteen months, and reading fluently and avidly by the age of four.

  (3) Wilbur’s withdrawal and “meditation” consist of his studies out of ancient books with his grandfather “through long, hushed afternoons” ensconced in the farmhouse. The grandfather acts as the sort of “tutelary figure” common in hero mythology, a guardian or mentor who offsets the hero’s early inability to act independently; in “The Dunwich Horror” he is protector to the twin upstairs as well.

  (4) Wilbur’s trial or quest ensues, after his intellectual preparations under the tutelage of the old wizard, when he sets out to obtain the full Latin text of the Necronomicon to aid in his sorcery; this quest, beset with difficulties in the form of Armitage and the guard dog, is embedded in the grander quest to open the gates to Yog-Sothoth.

  (5) Wilbur’s death comes as a direct consequence of his quest, when he is ripped to pieces by the university guard dog. Ironically, it is really this dog that saves the world from unthinkable horrors, for in Wilbur’s absence, the twin, though capable of much local mischief, is essentially ineffectual in cosmic terms. The dog has saved the world—so much for the messianic vision in Lovecraft’s fictive cosmos.

  (6) The descent to the underworld is suggested symbolically by the descent of Wilbur’s twin into Cold Spring Glen, the “great sinister ravine” described in such hellish terms.

  (7) Rebirth, when Wilbur and his brother are regarded as one entity, is symbolically but clearly given by the emergence of the monstrous twin from the “womb” of the farmhouse when Wilbur dies; the Yog-Sothoth spawn is not only reborn, but reborn in stronger form. The notion of death and rebirth is also suggested and reinforced by the descent into and emergence from the ravine, like the symbolically significant leap of Hamlet into and out of the grave.

  (8) Ascension comes when the twin returns to his place of conception, the great table-rock atop Sentinel Hill, and is returned to the father.

  Thus, the Whateley twins have all the characteristics of the mythic-archetypal hero. Armitage, whom one might have supposed to be a “hero,” has none of these qualities, and operates essentially as a sort of fictional prop; his corny utterances are thus quite befitting. Although he has rushed in to “save the day,” it is quite clear from the quotation from the Necronomicon that the Old Ones are eventually to regain dominance; there are cosmic cycles not to be denied, and Armitage’s local “victory” is in larger terms a hollow and meaningless one indeed. It is not humankind but the ineluctable forces of the outer spheres that will prevail; man cannot forever resist the onslaught of a universe that is chaotic from his point of view because indifferent to his wellbeing.

  Thus, regardless of the question of how much of the mythic-level meaning Lovecraft consciously contrived, the story when viewed mythically forms a sardonic reversal of its surface reading. It is as if Lovecraft had said to himself, “All right; if the readers of Weird Tales want a ‘good guys versus bad guys’ action-packed potboiler, I’ll give them what they will think is such a story—but it will have saving stylistic passages, and it will not mean what one might suppose. Something for everyone!” The twins, for whom one is presumably to feel loathing, are archetypally heroic; Armitage, whom one is presumably supposed to admire, is essentially a cipher; and thematically the tale gives articulation to the Lovecraftian view that man is but an evanescent mote in the universe of stars. Seen in this way, “The Dunwich Horror” ceases to appear to be a “good versus evil” moralising tale that fits only awkwardly into the Lovecraft canon, and becomes a work centrally expressive of the Weltanschauung underlying all of the Lovecraft Mythos.

  Other Writings

  During the period of 1926–1928, Lovecraft wrote several other pieces, including a notable “revision” (ghostwriting) “The Curse of Yig,” some stories of his own, a spoof called “History of the Necronomicon,” and a small amount of poetry.

  Late in 1926 Lovecraft produced a story rather less impressive than many of his works, yet not without its descriptive charms: “Pickman’s Model.”

  130 Set in Boston’s North End, the story is told by a first-person narrator named Thurber, narrated conversationally as if spoken to a friend named Eliot. Thurber tells of a morbidly eccentric artist named Richard Upton Pickman (the name Pickman being a common family name in the history of Salem, Massachusetts) who has earned the disdain of his art club with his horrific canvasses. Of Pickman’s dark genius the narrator remarks that

  only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sorts of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir up the dormant sense of strangeness.

  Lovecraft by analogy might well be describing his attitude toward weird fiction here; one must be slow, however, as always, to equate author entirely with persona, for Lovecraft makes it quite clear in his letters that he does not really believe in hereditary memory.

  The narrator, having visited Pickman’s ancient studio-house in the North End, describes some of Pickman’s most revolting paintings, with such titles as “Ghoul Feeding,” “The Lesson” (“nameless doglike things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves”), “Subway Accident” (whence the narrator’s professed fear of subways; “vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb”), and “Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn” (a derisive echo of ghouls’ supposed knowledge that it is no longer really so). In a reprehensibly melodramatic remembered scene, the narrator has screamed aloud—scarcely a reaction that the reader can deem believa
ble—at being shown a painting of a “colossal and nameless blasphemy” gnawing on a human form; this image is patently a Lovecraftian reflection of Goya’ s celebrated painting” II Saturno,” or “Saturn Devouring his Children.”

  There is a circular well in the cellar floor of Pickman’s house, and Pickman suggests in his paintings the existence of a house-connecting honeycomb of tunnels beneath Boston; Lovecraft was much taken with this notion, later using it yet again in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” with a different locale. Ultimately, Pickman vanishes, presumably down the cellar shaft—he later reappears in the company of his beloved ghouls in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath—and the narrator discloses that Pickman has painted one of his ghoulish monstrosities from an actual photograph. The ending, of course, is confirmational, since the reader has had abundant reason to anticipate it. Altogether the story is imagistically vivid, but is marred by the theatrical and melodramatic overreactions of its narrator.