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

by Donald R. Burleson

  154

  This story, told by an omniscient and sometimes intrusive narrator, deals with the theme of the ambiguous relation between the dreaming and waking worlds, and manages in a playful bit of Lovecraftian audacity to swallow up the traditional legendry of Salem witchcraft into the Lovecraft Mythos, as if witch lore were only a special and fragmentary manifestation of more general and sweepingly cosmic horrors involving Azathoth and the outer spheres of the Old Ones. The novelty of this synthesis somewhat offsets the weakening effect of the use of uncharacteristically traditional and conventional images in the tale.

  The protagonist Walter Gilman is a student at Miskatonic University in ancient Arkham (Salem), Massachusetts, studying “non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics” and lodging in a curiously angled attic room in an old house (modelled essentially on the famous Witch House in Salem) where a witch named Keziah Mason once lived.

  Gilman is obsessed with the inaccessible spaces that logically must lie between his room wall and the outer wall, and in the loft overhead; he comes to regard the curious angularity of the place as having mathematical significance connected both with his studies and with witchcraft, recalling that Keziah was said to be able to use such concepts to pass from ordinary space to worlds in other dimensions and realms. “Possibly,” the narrator wryly obtrudes on the story to remark, “Gilman ought not to have studied so hard.”

  Gilman begins to have feverish dreams of moving through some incomprehensible abyss teeming with geometrically bizarre objects resembling “groups of bubbles” and “clusters of cubes and planes”—Lovecraft daringly tries to represent higher-dimensional objects to the senses—and full always of some roaring, half-rhythmic sound. Sometimes the dreams involve Keziah and her “familiar” Brown Jenkin, a little rat-like creature with near-human face and hands; and the two seem to be urging him to go through the roaring abyss with them to keep some awful appointment. During real walks around Arkham, Gilman occasionally glimpses an old crone who disturbingly reminds him of the witch. As he more and more ominously allows mathematics and mysticism to coalesce in his mind, the date of Walpurgis Time (May Eve) draws ever closer; this a tension that Lovecraft slowly tightens like a screw throughout the story. The other lodgers in the house bemoan the approach of the dreaded Witches’ Sabbat, a bad time in Arkham, and a time when, they fear, Keziah will come for the hapless youth once and for all. Gilman confides in a fellow student named Frank Elwood living downstairs, but much of the impact of the tale resides in the fact that the ultimate horrors are Gilman’s alone.

  Eventually the dreams of the seething abyss involve Gilman’s falling out of the abyss in alien places, and he becomes obsessed with a sensation of something tugging at him from some point that seemingly moves as the earth turns and ends up being a point in the sky. In one especially striking dream, Gilman, emerging from the abyss, finds himself on a “high, fantastically balustraded terrace” overlooking an alien landscape; the railing is studded with little metal figures representing “some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring”—compare At the Mountains of Madness—and one of the figures snaps off in his hand. Seeing such a figure in living reality, some eight feet high, approaching him, he faints in the dream and awakes in his bed, where later is found, in physical actuality, the little metal figure. Lovecraft fascinatingly throws open the question here of the relation between dream realms and actual but far-flung and alien realms of being, as if dreams may perhaps be a projection of such other worlds really existing. The witch Keziah has consistently been involved in bringing Gilman through the abyss in such dreams, and Lovecraft imaginatively has Gilman wonder, “[W]ho can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?”

  The dreams focus ever more sharply throughout the story, until Gilman understands that Keziah really intends to take him to meet the Black Man of witchcraft lore; Lovecraft speaks of this motif together with Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, and the Necronomicon, as if they were all equally well known. Gilman fears that the daemonic powers will force him to sign the Black Man’s awful book, and indeed is not certain whether he may not already have done so. Like so many other Lovecraft protagonists, he desperately tries to rationalise, telling himself that reading the Necronomicon has suggested things to him that are not really happening, but when Walpurgis Time comes, he can rationalise no more. Passing through the abyss, he is subjected to the deafening Walpurgis rhythm, “the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter,” and finds himself in the inaccessible loft, or some dream-projection of it.

  The ensuing scene is in some ways artistically a weak point in the story. Gilman waxes heroic in trying to stop the sacrifice of a child, and Lovecraft oddly and unfortunately resorts to the rather plebeian device of having Gilman strangle Keziah with the chain of a crucifix. Lovecraft finds it necessary to say, after the now well-known violet witch-light goes out, “The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death.” Indeed, he has suffered from the demands of the pulp-magazine marketplace, where one must sometimes explain the obvious. In any case, Gilman plunges back into the roaring abyss and finds his way out of it to his room, coming out stone deaf. Brown Jenkin follows him and in a scene astonishingly gory for Lovecraft, in whose works scarcely ever a drop of blood is spilled otherwise, the rat-thing tunnels its way through Gilman’s body and eats his heart. (Even here the bloodshed is somewhat veiled; Gilman is covered with blankets.) Later, when the old house is investigated after being damaged in a gale, an ossuary of small bones is found, including the remains of a “huge, diseased rat.” The story ends with an uncharacteristically weak and awkward sentence:

  The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.

  This ending stylistically borders on being sophomoric, and clearly the tale, both in the weakening conventionalities of its imagery and its occasional stylistic lapses, shows signs of hasty writing, writing that suffers from the necessity of pandering to editors and less than perceptive readers. However, the story does have its strengths also. Mood and tension are skillfully sustained and heightened as the tale unfolds, and Lovecraft does balance off his use of hackneyed motifs with a daring extension and generalisation of those motifs, suggesting as he does that the whole lore of witchcraft is merely a manifestation of infinitely more cosmic horrors—that behind witchcraft is not puerile Satanism but the idiot-god Azathoth of ultimate chaos. “The Dreams in the Witch House,” if artistically somewhat flawed, is conceptually daring.

  After producing this work of only mixed success, Lovecraft rebounded nicely in August 1933 with “The Thing on the Doorstep,”

  155 another tale set in Arkham; it explores, in a finally gruesome but tastefully handled way, the theme of bodily possession by an invading mind, a theme worked out in more cosmic fashion later in “The Shadow out of Time.” Lovecraft was less than confident about the story’s value, even though his correspondence friends made favourable comments on it, and delayed sending it to Weird Tales for fear of rejection, going so far as to suggest to the editor when he did submit it three years later that it would no doubt be rejected. In spite of this incredible display of diffidence and negative salesmanship, Farnsworth Wright accepted the story.

  Told by first-person narrator Daniel Upton, “The Thing on the Doorstep” is a statement of that narrator’s apparent murder of Edward Pickman Derby. The story opens: “It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.” This apparently contradictory remark hides its true meaning in the phrase “the head of” as opposed to “the person of”—for as it turns out, as in the opening of the Charles Ward novel, there is a problem of identity, and the “victim” in the sanitarium is not who he purports to be.

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bsp; Lovecraft again chooses a level-headed and relatively prosaic profession for his narrator, that of architect, to enhance credibility and realism. Narrator Upton has known Edward Derby from youth; he describes him as a “phenomenal child scholar” who “at the age of seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast” and who led a life of seclusion with “doting parents,” due to “organic weaknesses,” with the result that the boy had a “secretive inner life . . . with imagination as his one avenue of freedom.” Much of this could, of course, describe Lovecraft himself, though it is doubtful that this occasional penchant for autobiography could so overpower his modesty and diffidence as to allow him to call himself a “phenomenal child scholar.” As likely as not, if there is any real-life model for this characterisation, it is Lovecraft’s scholarly young friend Alfred Galpin.

  Derby develops along rather outre and occult lines, loving the legend-haunted town of Arkham and attending, predictably, Miskatonic University, where he majors in literature but also delves deeply into “subterranean magical lore,” including the Necronomicon and such other fabulous tomes as the Book of Eibon (a creation of Clark Ashton Smith) and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt (a creation of Robert E. Howard). At the university he meets a girl named Asenath Waite, originally from Innsmouth; Lovecraft is quite consistent in such matters, for in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” one of the prominent Innsmouth families bears the name of Waite. Asenath may well be, obliquely and in part, a fictive reflection of Lovecraft’s wife Sonia, for her influence on Derby “pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness” much as Sonia rather brought Lovecraft out of himself during the New York period.

  Asenath, studying “mediaeval metaphysics” and given to such occult practices as giving fellow students the feeling of exchanging personalities momentarily with her, is said to be the daughter of a sort of wizard named Ephraim Waite, “the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled.” (Clearly, Lovecraft’s fascination with the motifs of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” has not yet played out.) Asenath’s father is said to have died insane. Against the advice of the narrator and his own father, Derby marries Asenath, and they live in “the old Crowninshield place”—a real house in Salem, Massachusetts, which also sports a Derby Street and Derby House.

  The narrator Upton traces certain changes in Derby after the marriage; though Derby still jauntily applies the doorbell or knocker with a three- and-two code known to Upton (this code being a leitmotif in the tale; Lovecraft is fond of numerical leitmotifs, such as the “fiveness” in At the Mountains of Madness), he is pensive, almost sad. The Derby home is a storehouse of arcane books and paraphernalia from Innsmouth, and the couple are devoted to esoteric lore, but at Edward’s personal expense, as the reader soon surmises. After about two years have gone by, Edward is often seen behaving in a way utterly unlike himself; in particular, he drives a car boldly and confidently, though he has generally been thought unable to drive at all. The identifying leitmotif of the three-and-two knock comes into play, for Derby in this” other personality” does not use it. At those moments he looks oddly like Asenath, or even old Ephraim; the reader guesses early that mind transfer is involved in these metamorphoses; when the ending comes it is one of Lovecraft’s confirmational rather than revelational endings, yet is none the less powerful for it.

  The narrator receives a telegram from Chesuncook, Maine (a real place, in the northern, secluded part of the state, a few miles west of Baxter State Park) and has to travel there to retrieve Derby, who although he has driven there, is unable to drive back. During the return ride, Derby pours out a frenetic tale to Upton, muttering such things as

  The pit of the shoggoths!

  156 Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there . . .. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled—The Hooded Thing bleated “Kamog! Kamog!”

  He raves about Asenath’s ability to possess him by transferring her mind into his body and leaving his mind in her body; she can “hold on,” however, only temporarily as yet, though she means to make the transfer permanent in time. Further, Asenath is not Asenath at all, but Ephraim, who effected mind transfer with his own daughter and then locked her up (her mind in his body) and passed himself off as Asenath, still seeking another body (Edward’s) from the desire to have a man’s form: “On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means never to die.” The reader may ponder—for the question is left intriguingly open—who or what “Ephraim” originally was, and how long the process has been going on. Lovecraft, in a different way, has explored the theme of magical immortality previously in the instance of Joseph Curwen, and here illustrates his ability to reuse old themes by so recasting them that they seem new.

  In one of the most strikingly dramatic moments in any Lovecraft story, Derby’s personality reversal “snaps back” while he is riding back through Maine with Upton. Lovecraft handles the scene masterfully:

  through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality . . . there swept over me . . . a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion . . . a freezing sense of utter alienage and abnormality. . . . The figure beside me seemed less like a life-long friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space . . . an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.

  This passage clearly opens up the interpretative possibility that even Ephraim, behind the personality of “Asenath” masquerading as Edward, is himself originally something unthinkable; hence one has a fascinatingly “telescoped” or “nested” sequence of mind transfers leading back and back to anterior sources of which it is sombrely tantalising to speculate. “Derby,” of course, after the snapping-back, hastens to recant to Upton all that he has said of Asenath’s dominance of him. The narrator is thus tom between the horrific impression that he has received and a desire to believe the “rational” explanation; an effective tension is created.

  A few months later, Derby—the real Derby, identified by his three and-two ring of the doorbell—comes to Upton with a tale to the effect that he has, by counter-sorcery, forced Asenath to go away and leave him alone. He further relates Asenath’s (Ephraim’s) occult delvings, suggesting something of “the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way comers with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive”; thus the story has Mythos overtones in the manner of “The Call of Cthulhu.” In a subsequent visit, Derby has a sort of seizure, screaming about something that is “even now” tugging at his brain, and Upton has him committed to the asylum. Soon, however, Derby seems mentally healthy again and fit to be released shortly, but this turns out to be the “other” Derby.

  The story ends with an episode of “black, clutching panic” in which Upton receives a telephone call but hears only “a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise . . . ‘glub . . . glub . . . glub-glub.’” The reader is left entirely to surmise (how different from, and superior to, Lovecraft’s recently overexplained “The Dreams in the Witch House”) that this is poor Derby’s inarticulate attempt to duplicate vocally his old three-and-two pattern of calling at the door. The narration here shifts ahead to disclose that the narrator, now thoroughly cured of his skepticism, has gone to “Derby’s” room in the asylum the next day and shot the occupant dead.

  Flashing back to the previous evening, after the abortive telephone call, the narrator tells of answering a three-and-two knock at his door, to find a foetid-smelling, “dwarfed, humped figure” who thrusts a note at him impaled on a pencil; the note tells all. Derby has lied about making Asenath go away; he has killed “her” and buried “her” body in the cellar, but “Asenath” (Ephraim) has effected, even in death, a mind transfer, pulling Derby’s mind into the rotting corpse in the cellar grave and seizing Derby’s body in the asylum. The tale en
ds: “What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly-assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.” Lovecraft, forsaking his crude lapse of blood-spilling in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” has returned to his much more effective imagery of liquid putrescence. The tale is delectably open-ended, finally, because the narrator himself fears that Ephraim, who in Derby’s body has not been cremated as sorcery calls for, but merely shot, will come after him even in death, to possess him and go on living “body to body to body.” The tale is a conceptually fascinating triumph of subtly narrated, suggestive horror with tastefully vague intimations of the Lovecraft Mythos.

  Other Writings

  During the 1929–1933 period, Lovecraft produced various other works, including one of his most impressive “revision” (ghostwritten) pieces, a collaborative sequel to “The Silver Key,” his Quebec travelogue, and a considerable amount of notable poetry.

  Late in 1929 and early in 1930, Lovecraft ghostwrote a novelette for his client Zealia (Reed) Bishop entitled “The Mound,”

  157 a story set in Oklahoma (like “The Curse of Yig” done for the same client). During the writing Lovecraft remarked:

  the “revision” job I’m doing now is the composition of an original tale from a single paragraph of locale & subject orders—not even a plot germ . . .. My present job is a Reed yarn to be entitled “The Mound”—with the Oklahoma locale of “Yig” but with ramifications extending to blasphemously elder worlds, & a race of beings that came down from the stars with Great Cthulhu. I also bring in a Spaniard who deserted from Coronado’s party in 1541.