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

by Donald R. Burleson

  Letters continue to flow between Akeley and Wilmarth—correspondence friends at a distance, like Lovecraft and most of his friends—and the horror grows. Akeley is privy to unwholesome amounts of information about the Vermont “forest presences” and their connexion with various old bodies of myth, and as his written accounts of encroachment by those presences grow more frenetic, Wilmarth’s skepticism is worn down; yet he feels damnably helpless to do anything to save Akeley. Lovecraft thus turns the screws of tension and suspense ever tighter throughout the story. Akeley sends a recording that he has surreptitiously made of rites overheard in the woods, containing both a human voice (for the aliens are said to have human cohorts) and a revolting buzzing voice which intones such ritualistic utterances as “Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!” in imitation of human speech; Wilmarth, hearing the voice, is stunned with revulsion. Thus enters into the Lovecraft Mythos pantheon its fertility figure, previously mentioned in passing in “The Dunwich Horror.”

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  After a series of letters describing Akeley’s ever closer encounters with his adversaries—Akeley is a remarkable instance of Lovecraft’s penchant for character isolation, for he faces his horrors tragically alone—Wilmarth receives an astonishingly different kind of letter, recanting all that Akeley has written before of the malevolent nature of the woodland presences, with whom he seems to have made peace. The writer has, he says, misjudged these Outer Ones through, Lovecraft cleverly has him say, “an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech—speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds vastly different from anything we dream of.” These Outer Ones are “members of a cosmoswide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants” and are essentially fungi, inhabiting as a sort of outpost an unknown planet, “the object mystically hinted at as ‘Yuggoth’ in certain ancient and forbidden writings,” a nearly lightless planet beyond Neptune which the Outer Ones by collective concentration may allow astronomers to discover. Lovecraft neatly works into the tale the discovery of Pluto, made at the time of the writing. (Lovecraft in 1906 had had a letter published in Scientific American urging astronomers to band together in a search for a trans-Neptunian ninth planet.) The Outer Ones promise great revelations, and the writer urges Wilmarth to come to Vermont, bringing the recording, the Akeley letters, and the photographs as “consultative data”; the letter is type-signed Henry W. Akeley, “as is frequent with beginners in typing.”

  Much speculation can be entertained over Wilmarth’s naiveté in sufficiently believing the letter to travel to Vermont. Indeed, he is somewhat suspicious, sensing from his “academic sensitiveness to prose style” certain “divergences” in the writer’s “rhythm-responses.” (Lovecraft is exceedingly clever on this point. The writer of the letter says, “I admitted to the house a messenger from those outside—a fellow-human, let me hasten to say.” Clearly, the term fellow-human is one that an outsider to that category would be more likely to use; the real Akeley would probably have said simply “human.”) The pressing nature of the requests to bring along all the evidence should certainly have made Wilmarth wonder; but in the end he goes, reasoning with oddly specious logic, “Did not the invitation—the willingness to have me test the truth of the letter in person—prove its genuineness?”

  Travelling to Vermont, Wilmarth finds himself ensconced in Akeley’s study; he has been told that his host is ill, and the figure before him in the dimly lighted room is merely “the white blur of a man’s face and hands”; the reader later learns how much is concealed in this ironically foreshadowing mode of description. Lovecraft cleverly remarks that there must be “something more than asthma” behind the outward “unwinking glassy stare”—something more indeed. The figure in the great easy-chair speaks in a “hacking whisper”—hence the story’s title—and tells of the great revelations in which Wilmarth is to share, including “the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao”: Lovecraft here, as elsewhere, deftly interweaves known bodies of mythic tradition into the flow of his own Mythos. In a particularly significant passage the narrator relates that he “started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth.” Here one finds a centrally illuminating statement of the nature of the” gods” or primal entities of the Lovecraft Mythos. Azathoth is merely a symbolic facade representing something unthinkable, a symbol, evidently, for the chaos of which the cosmos in Lovecraft’s mind ultimately consists, the chaos that gives the lie to man’s illusions of his own importance, of meaning in life. (One is reminded of James Joyce’s term, chaosmos.)

  Wilmarth is told that the Outer Beings “were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over”—Lovecraft sticks to his pseudo-prehistory of the earth—that they traversed space in corporeal form (a highly implausible notion), and that they could take humans into the interstellar void by detaching and preserving their brains; the host shows Wilmarth a sample in the form of a machine containing a human intelligence. Then Wilmarth, whom they have tried to give drugged coffee, retires for the night, still not having caught on.

  He awakes—Lovecraft leaves open the rational “out” that Wilmarth does not really awake then, but dreams the rest, thus establishing the Lovecraftian tension between belief and disbelief—to hear a strange colloquy downstairs, including buzzing voices like the ones on the recording. Afterward, when all is quiet, he comes downstairs to investigate, and ends up fleeing in mindless panic after glimpsing three objects in the easy-chair, “furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture.” These things, “perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.” The power of this ending lies in the fact that it is both confirmational and revelational; the reader has long known what the rather obtuse Wilmarth has seemed unable to guess, but the (probable) use of the actual face as a mask is a grotesque twist. As in other powerful Lovecraft endings, the “evidence” is lost, for the letters, photographs, and recording are left behind. Despite some credibility flaws, such as Wilmarth’s naiveté and his unbelievable ability to reconstruct Akeley’s lost letters from memory, “The Whisperer in Darkness” is a potent and unforgettable story which enlarges on Lovecraft’s Mythos conception, and in which he displays outstanding ability to create and sustain tension and suspense, and to derive fruitful artistic inspiration from the impressions of travel experience.

  At the Mountains of Madness

  During February and March of 1931, Lovecraft wrote perhaps his most powerful and conceptually fascinating novel, At the Mountains of Madness,

  148 a work set in the Antarctic region which had always intrigued Lovecraft, and whose abysmal cold must have seemed to him to constitute a horror in itself almost unparalleled. Lovecraft poured a lot of his soul into the writing, and the typing of the manuscript was a monumental job to him; his disgust may well be imagined when Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales rejected the work; the rejection touched off artistic doldrums and depression, slowing down his writing career for many months. (In 1935 agent Julius Schwartz negotiated the sale of the novel to Astounding Stories, where, however, it appeared in such typographically butchered form that Lovecraft was dismayed.)

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  The novel’s first-person narrator is a geologist named Dyer (an ancestral name of Lovecraft’s); his motive for telling the tale is one of warning against extensive exploration of the Antarctic region, after some singular experiences he has had during the Miskatonic University research expedition of 1930–1931, a trek lasting some five and a half months. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about the novel is its treatment of time; the major portion of the total elapsed time comes from the action of the first 35% of the text, and the remaining 65% of the text deals with the events of a mere sixteen hours—as if, in those brief but portentous hours, time itself has been as fr
ozen as the polar wastes in which the final revelations come. The journey of the sixteen hours is in many ways, compared to the expedition itself, the longer journey, encompassing as it does an awesomely cosmic experience for Dyer and his companion Danforth beyond the mountain range, an experience that forces them to rethink all their cherished notions about the place of man in the world. The central notions of the Lovecraft Mythos are brought devastatingly home in At the Mountains of Madness, whose very narration at points waxes symbolic of the Mythos view—as when the narrator marks the Antarctic “tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void,” suggesting the embedding of the earth and its relatively meagre known history in the affairs of the great Outside, affairs in which man plays only the most evanescent of roles.

  After the expedition has established its main base in Antarctica, a party is sent onward, led by Lake, the biologist, to do new drillings to investigate “certain contradictions in nature and geological period” suggested by earlier borings. In particular, there is evidence of unaccountably advanced organic life from extremely ancient rock strata; Lovecraft indulges in much detail, imbuing the account with scientific realism. Significantly, the narrator stays behind, and the dreadful fate of the Lake party is “seen” only at a distance, as by Dyer himself, by way of the radio messages and their sudden discontinuation. As in the matter of the Smith diary in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, or of the Wilmarth–Akeley correspondence in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Dyer’s account becomes a conduit of information that keeps the actual carnage from the reader and heightens suspense.

  Lake’s party radios back news of the discovery of a cave containing an “osseous medley” of fossil remains arguing “that earth has seen whole cycles of organic life” before the ordinarily recognised early forms. A peculiar, greenish “soapstone fragment” is unearthed, shaped like a five-pointed star—this imagery of the quantity five becomes a leitmotif pervading the novel—and, soon thereafter, “monstrous, barrel-shaped” fossils are found, five-ridged creatures of unknown classification, reminiscent of “certain monsters of primal myth,” particularly the “fabled Elder Things” spoken of in the Necronomicon. These things, described in great detail in keeping with the way scientists would naturally speak of them, “made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old,” arguing their incredibly long tenancy on the earth. The Necronomicon speaks of such things as having created all earth life as a “jest or mistake.” Lake and his colleagues, jocosely dubbing them the Elder Ones, dissect some of the remains found, and deem them “no product of any cell growth science knows about.” Soon, however, the radio messages stop coming, and Dyer fears the worst, though he can scarcely imagine yet what the worst is.

  Flying out to investigate, Dyer and his cohorts find a scene of horror at the Lake camp; they rationalise by saying, and trying to believe, that the “mangling action of the wind” has left eleven bodies “unsuitable for transportation outside,” with one (a graduate student named Gedney) missing; of the bizarre biological specimens, only damaged ones are found, some buried ceremoniously. What the newcomers can only rationalise by assuming an outbreak of madness among Lake’s men is the fact that one man and one dog have been methodically dissected, and that fur suits are found “with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations.” The reader, of course, already suspects what Dyer dares not yet think; as he so often does, Lovecraft has created a supremely effective tension between the reader’s discernment and the protagonists’ limited understanding of the situation.

  The narrator’s scientific curiosity finally triumphs over his grief at the loss of his colleagues, and he and the graduate student Danforth decide on a flight over the mysterious mountain range nearby; they return sixteen hours later shaken by great revelations which they conceal from their fellow explorers. (Danforth has seen an extra horror that has unhinged his mind—the same pattern as in “The Colour out of Space,” where only Ammi Pierce sees the “further horror,” and the narrator’s knowledge of it is secondhand and dependent on his own credulity.) The rest of the Antarctic novel deals with what the two trans-montane delvers have seen.

  On crossing the huge mountain range, they find a seemingly limitless plateau, which comes to be identified with the fabled Plateau of Leng: “Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man—or of his predecessors—is long.” Thus, Lovecraft reconciles his earlier Asian version of Leng and this version. Most strikingly of all, on this plateau stand the remains of an enormous and obviously incomparably ancient stone city, a place adumbrated by a “mirage” seen earlier in the ice clouds: “It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality.” This turning of an ominous mirage into such “stark” reality, especially a reality that comes to have such unsettling implications for all mankind, is an imagery that makes the novel one of highly powerful impact. The city, of course, turns out to have been constructed in an immemorially distant past by the barrel-like creatures, though it takes time and, more importantly, great emotional adjustment for the explorers to realise this. Lovecraft has firmly established himself at a point in his artistic career at which his fictive “horror” is generally not a physical one so much as a horror of implication. Lovecraft’s narrator Dyer goes so far as to remark that the stone city is “potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality.”

  Dyer and Danforth descend to explore the city, which stretches for many miles around, partly buried beneath millions of years’ accumulations of ice, and displaying, in the interiors of its great edifices, carved and banded murals of historical art. The architectural style of the place features a “ceaseless five-pointedness”; the reader realises, before the explorers do, that this is a recurrent leitmotif suggesting that the builders have worked their own physical characteristics into their craft. Lovecraft skillfully practices his own dictum that alienage must really be alienage, with any thoughts of a human-centred point of view cast aside; he says, for example, of the mural carvings, that their style “hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity, . . . [and] gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and poignant significance to us.” (Even Lovecraft nods; there is, logically, no such word as fuller. He likewise elsewhere in the novel uses the nonword fullest).

  The explorers investigate the city with a fascination that gives articulation to Lovecraft’ s own lifelong sense of “adventurous expectancy,” reading a terrestrial prehistory, from the murals, that shatters all thoughts of man’s importance on the earth. The star-headed Old Ones who build the city “filtered down from the stars when the earth was young” after a preterrestrial life “in other galaxies and other universes”—Lovecraft’s cosmicism knows no bounds—which the explorers think possibly belong to the creatures’ own mythology, though this point is left intriguingly open. (The Old Ones is a term variously used; in “The Dunwich Horror” it means primordial godlike entities lying outside our sphere of being and trying to get in; here, it means a specific race of elder creatures once physically living on the earth.) The creatures lived first under the sea, creating life forms that were the origin of all earth life, and in particular manufacturing “certain multicellular protoplasmic masses” known as Shoggoths to the author of the Necronomicon; Lovecraft, thematically anticipating Carlos Castaneda by over forty years, remarks that the existence of any Shoggoths on earth was hinted at only “in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.” The Shoggoths, essentially beasts of burden capable of shifting their forms under hypnotic influence, are revisited in later Lovecraft works, particularly by implication in “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

  The Old Ones attempted to spread their domini
on over the planet, doing battle with other, competing arrivals on earth from space, namely “the Cthulhu spawn” and the “half-fungous, half-crustacean” Mi-Go of the northern regions—respectively echoing Lovecraft’s other bits of pseudo-prehistory from “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” The Shoggoths got out of control at some point and had to be resubjugated. Gradually, the Old Ones were confined to the “sacred” ground of their original point of arrival, in Antarctica—a fictive reflection of Lovecraft’s own topophilia and deep sense of “rootedness” and tradition. The mural histories also disclose to Dyer and Danforth that there is a further mountain range, dwarfing even those nearby “mountains of madness” that hide the stone city; of the larger range, evidently shunned by the Old Ones—Lovecraft at his best provides a horror of which even the horrors of old are afraid—Dyer reflects, “There may be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.” Thus, Lovecraft weaves his various tales together into the fabric of a Mythos world both consistent and intriguingly inconsistent. Kadath is at once a part of dreamland and a physical place, yet one feels that the suggestion is that dreams do have their sources in the collective ancient lore of humankind.

  The Old Ones, the carven histories disclose, were at length driven underground by the coming of the great cold to Antarctica, climbing down into a great abyss beneath their stone city and building a new city there, where their culture suffered a gradual decline; the Shoggoths, by this time, had learned to converse with their masters by mimicking their speech, “a sort of musical piping over a wide range.” (One wonders how much tongue-in-cheek autobiography there may be in these Old Ones, for not only does Lovecraft share their ethnocentrism, their tradition-bound attachment to home, and their being repelled by cold, he also had a “piping” voice.)