The explorers ask themselves an ominous question: “How long had the new sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness?” In addition, a cherished Lovecraftian theme surfaces: the theme of unthinkable continuity between the present and a past which should be dead, but may not be: “Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day . . . ?”
Exploring further, Dyer and Danforth find a sort of indoor camp consisting of items from the Lake encampment; there they find crumpled papers with hastily sketched maps in the style of the Old Ones—not the later, decadent style, but the earlier style. Slowly the two are forced to admit to themselves—Lovecraft’s characteristic device of wearing character skepticism down so gradually that great tension is built up in the mind of the reader, who has already surmised much of the truth—to admit that the Old Ones exhumed at the Lake camp are alive, that they must have made the trek across the mountain range (perhaps in a rather unrealistically brief time), and must themselves have been obliged to read that part of their own race’s mural history that they had not lived to see played out. Elsewhere Dyer and Danforth find the body of the missing Gedney, and yet a much more disturbing sight—decapitated bodies of Old Ones from the Lake camp, left just as the murals have depicted earlier victims “whom the frightful Shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness” and left coated with slime. They finally understand “what must have triumphed and survived down there,” just in time to hear a piping sound from below, repeating Poe’s famous “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” from Arthur Gordon Pym; Lovecraft has the delectable audacity to suggest that Poe in so writing must have had access to “unsuspected and forbidden sources.” It is the Shoggoths who have prevailed, and Dyer’s attitude toward the star-headed Old Ones turns from horror to compassion: “. . . poor Old Ones! . . . Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!”
Finally, the explorers are pursued through the tunnels by an entity only too identifiable. It pushes the mist ahead of it, and Danforth, deranged with fear, finds himself calling out the station-stops of his old familiar Boston-to-Cambridge subway tunnel. What is pressing its way through this tunnel is no train, but a “nightmare, plastic column of foetid black iridescence” oozing “tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus,” with “temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light”—a kind of reverse-parody of a pursuing Cyclops, the still-surviving Shoggoths imitating the voices of their bygone masters. The reader is left to ponder the Shoggoth’s size by the fact that the mist pushed ahead of them has been seen issuing even from the cave mouths near the tops of the tunnel-honeycombed mountains.
Regaining their airplane, Dyer and Danforth flee, seeing as they do a distant, larger mountain range. Danforth espies some additional horror reflected from that direction in the ice clouds, but will never disclose to Dyer what he has seen, only muttering such disjointed expressions as “Yog-Sothoth,” “the proto-Shoggoths,” “the primal white jelly”—even “the colour out of space.” Characteristically, Lovecraft has kept his suggested final horror tastefully veiled.
Altogether, despite minor flaws—the matter of the “musical piping over a wide range” is repeated in a somewhat overly obvious way at times, and one wonders how the Old Ones made so fast a sledge-trek across the mountains—At the Mountains of Madness is a remarkable kind of watershed in Lovecraft’s writing career, a work in which the cosmicism of his Mythos conception takes clearer and more haunting form than ever before, a work in which Lovecraft proves himself a master of imagistically powerful and stylistically polished narration, narration in which tensions are deftly created and maintained and in which revelation stunningly follows revelation until the hapless characters involved are left mentally and emotionally decimated by their forced reassessment of all they have ever cherished as knowledge about man’s place in the world. Conceptually and artistically the novel stands among the most successful works in the Lovecraft canon.
“The Shadow over Innsmouth”
By late 1931 Lovecraft had been through a period of several months’ depression over Farnsworth Wright’s rejection of At the Mountains of Madness—depression exacerbated by the fact that G. P. Putnam’s Sons had asked Lovecraft for a book-length collection of stories and then decided against publishing it—and in consequence he had not been writing. The rejection of the Antarctica novel in particular left him deeply shaken as to his ability to win the approval of editors while writing as he wished to write. However, the October 1931 reconsideration and acceptance by Weird Tales of his once-rejected story “In the Vault” seems to have provided him with some considerable encouragement, for on 3 December he completed a highly remarkable story, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
150 He agonised over the tale, destroying at least three drafts before settling on the final version, and was so diffident about the literary quality of the work that he was only with difficulty persuaded (by August Derleth) to type it, and declined to offer it to Weird Tales, himself making the “editorial decision” that the story’s length and slowness of buildup would render it commercially unacceptable.
151 Considering his recent experiences with editors, his suspicions may well have been correct, but this then is a comment on the marketplace and not on the story, and in no way detracts from the true value of the tale; for it is a work rich in symbolism, imagery, and suspenseful plotting.
Based on Lovecraft’s impressions of Newburyport, Massachusetts (prior to grand-scale renovations and restorations that made the town far less suggestive of the decay of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth), the story is told by a first-person narrator whom Lovecraft named Robert Martin Olmstead in his early drafts but allowed to remain unnamed in the final version. Thematically, the story deals with “decay,” according to the author himself, but actually also with a sort of atavism, with elusive tauntings of ancestral memory, and with the ineluctability of one’s own heritage reaching out of the past to be reckoned with in the present. Lovecraft explored this last theme, in a less cosmically implicative fashion, as early as 1923 in “The Rats in the Walls.” It may be speculated that the fact that Lovecraft’s father died of syphilis, probably leaving the son to wonder if he would inherit it, may have had something to do with the theme of progressive, inherited degenerative change, given that the tale’s narrator himself comes to have the inherited qualities that he so loathes in the Innsmouth natives.
The narrator tells of his “sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical” tour of New England; he has just come of age, and this fact and the genealogical nature of his quest are faint foreshadowings of what is to become of him. The telling of the tale, he says, helps him make up his mind regarding “a certain terrible step” lying ahead for him. Planning to travel from Newburyport down the Massachusetts seacoast to Arkham (Salem), he learns from a ticket agent in Newburyport that the cheapest way is by bus through Innsmouth, a crumbling old town not even shown on his maps. The agent tells him that the Innsmouth people are very ill-regarded, apparently suffering from some degenerative disease producing a physical appearance that the narrator comes to call the “Innsmouth look”: “bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut,” rough, creased skin, and generally a fish-like physiognomy. Both Lovecraft’s fascination with the sea (a pervasive imagery in the tale, symbolically suggestive of the past as parent to the present) and his abhorrence of seafood are well represented thematically.
Reportedly because of an epidemic in 1846 (Newburyport really had a smallpox epidemic, but in the late 1700s), the town’s population has been decimated. Strange stories of “devil worship” and human sacrifices in Innsmouth have been told, though the ticket agent is skeptical of them; and the town’s one hotel, Gilman House, is not recommended, a previous visitor having reported weird voices in the night, “slopping-like” and apparently in an unplaceable language. Innsmouthians are unfriendly to outsiders, and one should not stop overnight there. The narrator is shown a peculia
r tiara from the Marsh Refinery in Innsmouth, and its alien ichthyic and batrachian designs give him “a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral.” One thinks of Wilmarth’s impressions, in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” of the Vermont scenery, “touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion.” Clearly, however much Lovecraft personally disbelieved in inherited memory, he found it an irresistible fictional device.
The narrator takes the bus ride to Innsmouth. One may trace the route on a map down the coastline from Newburyport, by references to Plum Island and Cape Ann, and Lovecraft’s Innsmouth comes out to be approximately at the mouth of the Ipswich River; Ipswich is mentioned as being nearby. (The river is called the Manuxet in the story; in terms of Lovecraft’s travel impressions this probably reflects the Merrimack River in Newburyport.) Coming over a rise, the narrator sees the decaying town outspread below him: “I had, I realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.” There is much irony in this wording; for whereas one might ordinarily say that “face to face” is a poor metaphor because a town does not have a face, Innsmouth does have a face (the characteristic Innsmouth look of its denizens), and the term face to face adumbrates the final developments regarding the narrator’s own face. On his way to the hotel, the narrator sees the former Masonic Hall (Lovecraft’s reflection of the one in Newburyport), now labelled the Esoteric Order of Dagon; a fleeting glimpse of a “robed, shambling form” wearing a tiara burns itself into his brain.
Checking his valise at Gilman House, the narrator strolls out into the town square and talks with a normal-looking young boy at the First National grocery store. The boy advises him not to make himself too conspicuous and not to wander into certain parts of town (the boy draws him a map—Lovecraft on the back of one of the handwritten manuscript pages drew a detailed map of Innsmouth, apparently for his own guidance and consistency). The boy remarks that “one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth”—a contextually grotesque parody of the oft-repeated homily that one is never “accepted” in some New England towns if one’s great-great grandfather was not born there; this is particularly ironic considering later disclosures about the narrator’s family background. Some Innsmouth families are reputed to be concealing living kinfolk of extremely repellent aspect, and to have claimed them deceased. The lad also tells more of the Innsmouth natives’ odd physical “affliction,” which progressively worsens with age, and mentions the ninety-six-year-old town drunkard, a physically normal man named Zadok Allen, known for telling wild stories, and not safe to be seen engaging in conversation.
The narrator takes a long walk around town; Lovecraft’s description of the town’s decayed neighbourhoods skillfully evokes and sustains a mood of exceeding sombreness. The visitor at length encounters Zadok Allen
152 and, ensconced in a seemingly private spot by the sea, plies him with liquor. The old man tells him the story of old Captain Obed Marsh (grandfather of the current “old man Marsh” of the refinery), who encountered a bizarre sacrificial religion among the natives of the Caroline Islands and brought it home to Innsmouth, enjoining the townspeople to curry the favour of “gods as ud bring ’em good fishin’ in return for their sacrifices, an’ ud reely answer folks’s prayers.” These Deep Ones were immemorially old as a race, and possessed of immortality as individuals, and they finally came out of the sea to spread death and to mate with the surviving humans of the town, producing offspring that started out in life normally human-looking but turned progressively ichthyic in later years and finally took to the water—Lovecraft’s ironic parody of immortality by baptism. Lovecraft intriguingly has Zadok speculate, “Mebbe they was the kind o’ critters as got all the mermaid stories an’ sech started,” daring to mix established legendry with his own fictive creations. Zadok himself has survived in Innsmouth because he has taken certain oaths of secrecy from the Order of Dagon. He remarks—an ominous foreshadowing—that the young narrator has the Marsh eyes, and intimates that the hybrid Innsmouth spawn are harbouring grander schemes of conquest; without elaborating, he asks: “ever hear tell of a shoggoth?” The conversation is cut short, however, when Allen screams, “They seen us” and flees mad-eyed.
The narrator, a typical Lovecraft protagonist who has to have his skepticism worn down, returns to the hotel pondering Allen’s tale—“I fancied there was contained in it a sort of crude allegory”—to find that the bus has supposedly broken down and that he must spend the night. The web of character isolation draws around him, and is effectively tightened when he seeks to talk with the grocery youth again, his only link with sanity and the outside world, but finds the store closed.
In the night, his brooding but suppressed suspicions are confirmed when someone or something tries the bolted door of his room. In an intensely dramatic escape scene, in which Lovecraft gives the lie to his own claim of being unable to write “eckshun” scenes, the narrator flees from room to room, finally escaping via the roof of an adjacent building. His darting and dodging through the streets, pursued by crowds of “doubtful shapes,” is masterfully suspenseful. At length he takes the abandoned railway route toward Rowley (a real Massachusetts town near Ipswich), morbidly wondering of the town’s reportedly tunnel-connected houses: “Did those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and unsuspected life?” In a magnificently powerful scene, he hides in the brush to watch the passing, at a road crossing, of his “croaking, baying, and barking” pursuers, at first resolving to close his eyes but finally, in a memorable instant of attraction-repulsion, opening them to see, amidst the “flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating” saraband, the unthinkable thing that old man Marsh has become: “. . . one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.” Lovecraft’s descriptive powers here are outstanding, both in what they tell and in what they leave to the imagination.
The escape, however, is made good; but we have here no “premature climax” with considerable text following the escape, for as usual in Lovecraft’s world, there is a worse horror waiting. The narrator, returning home to Ohio, ultimately discovers that the Innsmouth Marshes lie hidden in his own family background; Captain Obed Marsh was his great-great-grandfather, and he asks himself: “Who—or what—then, was my great-great-grandmother?” After a bout with portentous ancestral-memory dreams, he realises that he himself is coming to have the Innsmouth look; this revelation is one of the most powerful in all of Lovecraft’s fiction. The narrator, however, finally accepts his identity and, making the decision that the telling of the tale was to help him make, resolves to return to Innsmouth with an unseen cousin whose escape from a madhouse he will arrange; and:
We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
Amen! This ending is a delectable parody of the ending of the 23rd Psalm—appropriately, since the narrator will thus achieve his own baptism and immortality.
“The Shadow over Innsmouth” (finally published as a small book, by printer William Crawford, with little distribution) not only delivers one of the most memorably horrific power-punches in all of Lovecraft’s works, but does so with narration that is impressively replete with pertinent symbolism. When the narrator first comes to Innsmouth, he sees three tall, crumbling steeples, two of which have “only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been.” These steeples, bereft of their means of measuring merely human time, are seen outlined against the sea, a symbol of cosmically old cycles of time transcending human affairs. Similarly, of the narrator’s talk with Zadok Allen, he remarks: “My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it”—symbolically suggesting that while All
en has faced the truth about the town’s denizens and the implications of that truth, the narrator has yet to do so. Allen hints of the narrator’s yet-undiscovered linkage with the Marshes, and one has to wonder—the point is effectively left open to speculation—what the Innsmouth denizen’s motive for pursuing the narrator was; perhaps they simply recognised him as one of their own. Altogether, this haunting story, which gives further outline to the Lovecraft Mythos view of man’s place in the world, comprises a wealth of imagistic and symbolic potential for interpretation, and, despite his own diffidence about it, stands quite high among Lovecraft’ s works of fiction.
“The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Thing on the Doorstep”
Early in 1932, two months after writing “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft produced “The Dreams in the Witch House,”
153 a story providing considerable interest and appeal but falling somewhat short of his usual level for this later period; Lovecraft was himself not satisfied with the work, which indeed in spots does reveal that his fear of being contaminated by the stylistic demands of the marketplace was not entirely unfounded; it was August Derleth who finally showed the story to the editor of Weird Tales, who bought it. Interestingly enough, though, Lovecraft declined to give up radio dramatisation rights to the tale, citing the tendency of such treatment to do violence to the “atmosphere and artistic integrity of a seriously written story,” and remarking, “I shall never permit anything bearing my signature to be banalised and vulgarised into the kind of flat infantile twaddle which passes for ‘horror tales’ amongst radio and cinema audiences.”
H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Page 22