Also in 1926 Lovecraft wrote “The Silver Key,”
131 a Randolph Carter tale of which he later remarked:
“The Silver Key” was a symbolic, dreamy, quasi-poetic study of a mood representing the final phase of my Dunsany-influenced period. It was not only non-intellectual, but anti-intellectual.
132
The omniscient narrator of the tale describes Carter’s state of mind as one of disenchantment with “things as they are”—with the mysticism of religion (which has assumed a “misplaced seriousness”), with the prosaic, wonder-killing nature of science, and with the artificial freedom and garishness of modem life and its lack of beauty. In a dream his grandfather reminds him of a silver key to be found in the great attic in a “carved oak box of archaic wonder”; he recognises the hieroglyphs on the accompanying parchment as being parallel to those on a scroll once owned by a friend who has “vanished one midnight in a nameless cemetery”—the Harley Warren (Samuel Loveman) of Lovecraft’s early tale “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” described here as “that terrible scholar of the South.”
Returning to his ancestral home in Arkham, where as a child he was wont to spend long hours in a remote and shunned cave called the “snake-den,” Carter slips back in time, finding himself once again a child among his old family members. (Lovecraft himself often wished to do the same.) As of old, he slips off to the cave, this time with the silver key in his pocket but only a vague recollection of finding it “in a box somewhere.” Thereafter, he seems to have the gift of prophecy, “remembering” his future as if he had already lived it. Coming back to the present time, the narrator discloses that Carter “has lately disappeared” after driving off to Arkham. At this point the narrator focusses into a first-person commentator who refuses to believe that Carter is dead: “There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes.” Carter, the narrator speculates, has longed for his lost land of dreams and somehow, with the key, regained it. He is rumoured to reign as a new king in “Ulthar, beyond the river Skai.”
“The Silver Key” is not stylistically an especially distinguished tale, containing as it does little of the vivid imagery and description of most of Lovecraft’s works; but it stands as a kind of philosophical compendium, a statement of the ennui and the dream-wonder of Lovecraft himself (whom this time there is no danger in equating with the protagonist), whose fancies and memories of childhood were indeed a silver key to happier realms.
In November 1926 Lovecraft wrote “The Strange High House in the Mist,”
133 of which he remarked shortly after the writing that it was
by all odds my favourite among my recent yarns. The two elements in all existence which are most fascinating to me are strangeness and antiquity; and when I can combine the two in one tale I always feel that the result is better than as though I had only one of them. It remains to be seen how successful this bizarrerie can be when extended to novel length.
134
(He refers to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, his novel then in progress.) Elsewhere, Lovecraft remarked that the tale was prompted by seeing the high cliffs of Magnolia, Massachusetts, and that he wrote the tale as one of his last efforts in the semi-poetic Dunsanian manner. In fact, the piece is one of the most gracefully poetic efforts in the canon of Lovecraft’s works.
The opening paragraph dreamily and colourfully sets the story in a familiar Lovecraftian locale: “In the morning mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan.” North of Kingsport, we are told, “the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud.” This verbal painting rather reminds one of an Oriental canvas, and Lovecraft makes use of the engaging conceit that it is as if the cliff’s rim were “the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.”
135 In this charming expression one finds not only assonance but, in the repetition of the configuration ae, a visual balance as well, much like Chinese poetry written in characters. The sonorous phrase cited, in various rewordings, recurs throughout the tale, and is effectively used for the ending; it stands as a verbal echo, in a fusing of sense and form, of the ringing buoy-bells themselves.
Atop the uncannily high crag there perches an immemorially old house, in whose window lights are seen at night, though the door of the house is flush with the vertical cliff on the side facing the sea. The town’s Terrible Old Man—Lovecraft is fond of echoing or embedding one story in another—relates that the house was there when his grandfather was a boy.
A mystically inclined college professor named Thomas Olney comes to town and, listening to town legendry about the strange high house, decides to scale the cliff and visit it. When he does so, he is invited in through a window by a sort of young-old black-bearded man who regales him with tales of the sea and the Elder Gods and, before them, the other gods. A knock comes at the door, and the frightened host locks all the windows, while a “queer black outline” is glimpsed behind the opaque windows. Later a sort of coded rapping sounds at the ancient door, and this time the host readily flings the door “wide to the stars and the mist” to admit “all the dreams and memories of earth’s sunken Mighty Ones”—Neptune, tritons, nereids, and, riding in “a vast crenuline shell,” primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, who helps them into the shell for a ride out into the “limitless aether.”
When Olney has come down from the cliff, he “could not recall what he had dreamed in the sky-perched hut of that still nameless hermit”—one is reminded of the remark in “The Silver Key” that “all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreaming, and no cause to value the one above the other.” Whether Olney has really had his experience or only dreamed it, he returns bereft of his mystical spirit, and able to be interested only in prosaic things.
His lost spirit seems to have been transmuted into sounds of laughter that now fill the heavens around the lonely crag, and Kingsporters fear that the youth of the town will similarly look skyward and lose the mystery and the wonder in their own spirits. As Nietzsche says, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Altogether “The Strange High House in the Mist,” with its beautifully poetic narration and with the mingled sadness and mysticism of its denouement, may well be Lovecraft’s most stylistically successful effort in the Dunsanian vein.
Late in 1927 Lovecraft penned an engaging spoof titled “History of the Necronomicon,”
136 purporting to trace the abhorred volume from its inception through various translations and bannings. The fictive volume is said to have been written in Arabic circa 700 A.D. by Abdul Alhazred, and originally titled Al Azif, meaning “that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of daemons.” Alhazred is said ultimately “to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses.” The book was translated into Greek in 950 A.D., into Latin in 1228 A.D., and into English at some date by Dr. John Dee (the real Elizabethan necromancer). Lovecraft records various burnings and suppressions, and mentions copies of the Latin text existing at certain libraries, including the Widener Library at Harvard. Finally, he mentions that Necronomicon lore probably gave Robert W. Chambers the idea for his novel The King in Yellow.
137 This pseudohistory not only exhibits the Lovecraftian sense of humour but also shows the extent to which he was capable of going to embellish, and imbue with realism, his fictive creations.
During the spring of 1928 Lovecraft wrote a “revision” piece for his client Zealia Bishop: “The Curse of Yig.”
138 Lovecraft chose the title himself and did all of the writing and
most of the plotting, sending his client a questionnaire about local atmosphere, colour, and geography of Oklahoma, and incorporating her responses. He wrote to her:
Enclosed . . . is the completed snake-tale . . . . The diety in question is entirely a product of my own imaginative theogony—for like Dunsany, I love to invent gods and devils and kindred marvellous things . . . . I took a great deal of care with this tale.
139
The story deals with an Arkansas family named Davis migrating to Oklahoma; the husband Walker Davis is morbidly afraid of snakes, and when the wife Audrey kills a nest of baby rattlesnakes Walker is sure that, true to local Indian lore, the snake-god Yig (Lovecraft plays on the idea that the Aztec god Quetza1coatl was represented as a feathered serpent) will come to bring vengeance on her. One night the couple awakes to a cabin full of writhing rattlers; Walker faints and falls onto the floor among them, extinguishing his lantern, and Audrey, remembering a story in which a man bitten by many snakes explodes with the venom, hears an obscenely suggestive pop from the direction in which Walker has fallen. She screams, and sees a shape against the window; taking it to be Yig come to change her into a spotted snake for vengeance, she hacks at it with an ax. Callers the next morning find Walker himself (having been aroused by her screams) hacked to death; it was the dog that exploded with a pop, bitten by the rattlers, and Audrey is “a mad mute caricature” of a woman, hissing on the floor. The first-person narrator has heard this tale from a local doctor, who, problematically, could most likely not have known all these details, and he shows the narrator a snake-like thing that was born to Audrey before she died. The tale is deftly plotted, with the confusion of identities in the ax scene an effective twist; and although the problem of the doctor’s knowledge of the facts is a decided flaw, the total effect is memorable. Lovecraft maintains the suspense in a powerful way, and the story is one of his better revisions—not, however, so well done as “The Mound,” written also for Zealia Bishop almost two years later.
In June 1927 Lovecraft essentially completed his critical study Supernatural Horror in Literature,
140 a work spread over two years and compiled for W. Paul Cook’s amateur press journal The Recluse. Far from being a “piece of frivolous self-indulgence,” as has been said;”
141 this long essay was the first critical survey of its kind in the field of horror fantasy. It stands as a work illuminating not only the critical powers of its author and the works dealt with thereby, but also areas of concern that can readily lead to fruitful investigations into matters of influence. For example, Lovecraft’s remarks there about Thomas Moore have led to the present study’s comments on Moore’s influence on Lovecraft; the essay is replete with such starting points for specialised influence studies.
The work begins with the observation, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Lovecraft traces the development of the horror tale from its earliest thematic stirrings up to modem times, devoting full chapters to (among other things) the early Gothic novel, works of later periods, Edgar Allan Poe, and the “weird traditions” of America and the British Isles. Despite some omissions, the study is thorough-going and highly perceptive, and amounts to a bellwether in the field of fantasy criticism. It is beyond the purview of the present study to attempt to delve into the wealth of critical issues raised by Lovecraft in his essay; the interested reader should, of course, consult the essay itself. It must suffice here to say that the work shows Lovecraft to have been well ahead of his time in his critical perceptions of the value of horror fantasy literature; in his well-reasoned championing of Poe, in particular, he flew in the face of then-current critical minimisation of Poe’s genius, anticipating the more enlightened general assessments of that artist by many years.
During the 1926–1928 period, Lovecraft’s output of poetry was light, but in December 1926 he did produce one notable effort in verse. Just as he has one “Christmas story” (“The Festival”), he also has one “Christmas poem,” a little piece published in an abridged form in Weird Tales under the title “Yule Horror.”
142 As in “The Festival,” the term Yule in the poem refers not to Christmas in any Christian sense, but to the ancient winter solstice festival, with dark and Druidic overtones. The poem’s metre is interesting; each of the three stanzas consists of four lines of anapaestic dimeter followed (as in the earlier “Nemesis”) by one long line of anapaestic hexameter, with rhyme scheme ababb. The second stanza, for example, reads:
There is death in the clouds,
There is fear in the night,
For the dead in their shrouds
Hail the sun’s turning flight;
And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a
Yule-altar fungous and white.
With its alliteration and its assonance (“death,” “dead” repeated at points of parallel stress), its haunting rhythm, and its imagery (used elsewhere, in the fiction, as well) of whiteness as a species of horror, the poem is darkly mood-evoking and represents one of Lovecraft’s more successful experiments in verse, ringing true to his own artistic canon that a true poem must say something, and say it in such a way that its effect cannot be exactly duplicated in prose.
6. Sporadic Inspiration: Growth of the Mythos (1929–1933)
“The Whisperer in Darkness”
Following his writing of “The Dunwich Horror” during the summer of 1928, Lovecraft entered a period during which his output of fiction was, compared with (say) the 1920–1923 period, relatively sparse. He wrote no fiction of his own at all during 1929, so far as is known, yet for the most part the products of this period, few as they may be, are of high quality.
In an evidently agonising writing effort (exacerbated by heavy demands for “revision” work) spread from February to September of 1930, Lovecraft produced his Vermont story “The Whisperer in Darkness.”
143 The story had apparently been incubating in his mind for two years since the 1928 Vermont visit from which the story’s setting is derived; the birth was not an easy one, but the result was a most memorable tale, standing among Lovecraft’s best and further embellishing the Mythos. Of the work, which he seemed to regard as only mildly successful even though Weird Tales promptly accepted it, Lovecraft remarked:
“The Whisperer in Darkness” will reflect a Vermont visit made in the same year. I am very fond of giving weird tales a minutely realistic setting as a sort of foil for the unreal extravagancies of the central theme.
144
Lovecraft’s cited Vermont visit consisted of a fortnight in mid-June of 1928 spent at the rented summer home of his friend Vrest Orton before proceeding to the Athol and Wilbraham, Massachusetts, stops, which found such striking artistic lodgment in “The Dunwich Horror.” It is evident, both from his letters and from the extent to which he borrowed from the locale for fictional purposes in writing the Vermont tale, that the visit left deep impressions on his mind.
145 Orton’s house in Guilford, Vermont (near Brattleboro, but to the southwest, not to the northwest as textual details would imply) was built, as it turns out, by one Samuel Akeley in the early 1820s, so that behind the character name Henry Wentworth Akeley lies a real Vermont family; the “old Akeley place” of the tale is precisely that. When Lovecraft plays on the spelling of the name in the story—Akeley’s alien abductors forge his name on a telegram as Akely—he is echoing the fact that the real family in Guilford, Vermont, did entertain two spellings of the name: Akeley and Akley, for both of these names appear on the Akeley–Lee family cemetery near the Orton house on Lee Road.
146 Lovecraft, who absorbed much local folklore and history during his visit by chatting with the Lee family down the road, and who pertinently mentions “Pennacook myth” in the tale, was most likely aware that as Western Abnakis, the Pennacook Indians had a myth concerning a dreadful flying creature (named bmola)—hence, in all likelihood, the genesis of the Winged Ones of the story.
/> “The Whisperer in Darkness” is told by a first-person narrator named Albert N. Wilmarth, a Miskatonic University literature professor whose amateur interest in folklore draws him into the story’s events. After the November 1927 (actual) Vermont floods, stories about pinkish, crustaceous bodies, floating in the West River and other Vermont rivers, touch off arguments between Wilmarth, who belittles the reawakened Vermont folktales about alien presences in the woods, and others more credulous of these accounts; Akeley, a Vermont scholar and recluse, notices the verbal altercation in the press and writes to Wilmarth to tell him that he indeed has evidence of “monstrous things” living in the Vermont woods and watching the human inhabitants of the region. These creatures, Akeley claims, are likely to take him off the earth “to where they come from” if they think he suspects too much. Wilmarth, though skeptical, replies affably, and Akeley sends him photographs of a curious clawprint with saw-toothed nippers, a remote circle of standing stones, and a stone with hieroglyphs vaguely familiar to Wilmarth as having parallels in the Necronomicon; Akeley will try, unsuccessfully, to send the stone itself by train to Wilmarth for help in deciphering its inscription—hence again the cryptography motif in Lovecraft, perhaps symbolic of the mystery of life in the universe itself, and of the hidden layers of meaning beneath the surface of things.
H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Page 20