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

by Donald R. Burleson

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  Thus, unlike the “Yig” story, this work shows Lovecraft operating on a cosmic Mythos level and infusing the tale with bits of real history. The setting of Binger, Oklahoma, is a real town in that state’s Caddo County. Lovecraft explains the subterranean race further as

  the primal proto-humans brought down from the stars by Great Cthulhu—a forgotten, decadent race who cut themselves off from the upper world when Atlantis & Lemuria sank. But there was a race of beings in the earth infinitely older than they—the saurian quadrupeds of the red-litten caverns of Yoth which yawn underneath the blue-litten caverns of K’n-yan.

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  The tale incorporates a borrowing of Clark Ashton Smith’s subterranean toad-god Tsathoggua, inhabiting a dark realm called N’kai beneath even red-litten Yoth; Lovecraft here puts his fascination with underground regions to highly imaginative use. (These realms were also mentioned in passing in “The Whisperer in Darkness.”)

  The story’s first-person narrator is an archaeologist who goes to Binger, Oklahoma, to research an old Indian legend concerning a great mound about a third of a mile west of the town; the inhabitants of Binger have long and regularly seen two sentry-like figures pacing the top of the mound: a vaguely Indian-looking man by day and a headless Indian squaw with a blue torch by night. People have at times gone to investigate; some have disappeared, some have come back mad—one who returned could only moan “Old! Old! Old!” Going to the mound himself, the narrator digs up a mould-encrusted cylinder containing the manuscript story in archaic Spanish of one Panfilo de Zamacona, who came with Coronado to seek the fabulous land of Quivira and deserted from the party to search for a much more intriguing realm whispered about by the Indians. The story at this point becomes a “frame story” flashback to the experiences of Zamacona, who with the aid of an Indian guide finds a passageway supposed to lead underground to the legendary abode of certain Old Ones—yet another Lovecraftian use of the term, different from the Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness and the Old Ones of “The Dunwich Horror.”

  160 (Curiously, they are said to have “had some remarkable surface civilisations, especially one at the South Pole near the mountain Kadath.” Lovecraft’s near-consistency sometimes seems to suggest a kind of mythic substratum of fictive “truth” which gets reported in various forms as it touches human experience in different ways.) These Old Ones are the ancestors of all humans, and have evolved to the point of communicating by telepathy. They worship the snake-god Yig and the octopus-headed entity Tulu (a linguistic cognate of the name Cthulhu; as it turns out, this being lies dreaming in a watery tomb at “Relex,” a variation on “R’lyeh”).

  After climbing downward for about three days, the narrator emerges from his tunnel onto a hillside overlooking a subterranean plain “shrouded in bluish mist,” a plain on which, he finally discerns, there are towns. While inspecting a temple covered with loathsome bas-reliefs, he encounters a group of Indian-like people who tell him, by telepathy, that he must now live out the rest of his life with them in their city of Tsath in blue-litten K’n-yan, for they cannot abide the disclosure of their existence to the outer world. These people have achieved physical immortality, a common theme with Lovecraft, and have the ability to dematerialise and rematerialise themselves at will.

  Lovecraft’s secondary narrator Zamacona describes the life and customs of the people of K’n-yan at some length, portraying them as a sort of ennui-ridden race whose chief concern is to provide sufficient amusement for itself—“the modem tendency was to feel rather than to think.” In this and other respects it rather seems that Lovecraft is indulging in parody of modem American life; Zamacona “felt that the people of Tsath were a lost and dangerous race—more dangerous to themselves than they knew—and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and novelty-quest was leading them rapidly toward a precipice of disintegration and utter horror.” Lovecraft even has the narrator, reading the manuscript, notice the appearance of social satire in it. The denizens of Tsath have a religion, chiefly practiced out of love of ritual, based on Yig and Tulu; the pious Zamacona never loses an opportunity “to try to convert the people to that faith of the Cross which the Spaniards hoped to make universal,” a notion that must have been enormously amusing for Lovecraft. There are also temples to Shub-Niggurath the “All-Mother,” wife of the “Not-to-be-Named One.”

  Zamacona is taken to Tsath, given an apartment, and initiated into an “affection group,” the chief goal of the natives’ lives being “pleasure-seeking and emotional titillation.” He is promised unlimited Tsathic history and lore in exchange for information about the outside world. (This information-exchange motif recurs a few years later in “The Shadow out of Time. “) Lovecraft cleverly keeps some details of Zamacona’s experience out of sight to the reader, thus enhancing their suggestiveness, by making the pious Spaniard reticent about some things when he tries to write about them in his diary. Lovecraft has thus found a new way to employ the device of the diary, differently used in the Curwen affair of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, as a conduit of partially veiled information. There are references to public amusements in the amphitheatre, involving torture and mutilation of slaves; but Zamacona refuses to attend these demonstrations. In time, of course, he grows eager to escape, and he tries to do so with a woman of Tsath named T’la-yub, but they are caught. Zamacona is let off with a warning, but the woman is taken to the amphitheatre, beheaded, and reanimated to serve as a mound-sentry by night.

  The manuscript ends with Zamacona’s planning a second time to escape. At this point the narration reverts to the archaeologist in the present time, who surmises that if the account is true—which like a typical Lovecraftian protagonist he desperately rationalises to avoid believing—then Zamacona must have been captured again and taken back for dire treatment in the amphitheatre. Returning to the mound, the narrator uncovers a long-closed passageway leading downward, and encounters all that he needs to see to believe the Zamacona manuscript—a tunnel leading to unthinkably ancient statues of Yig and Cthulhu (Tulu); his own missing pick and shovel, which could be there only by dematerialisation and rematerialisation; and, most horribly, a reanimated-corpse sentry, headless, armless, and walking on stumps of legs, with a crude legend emblazoned in ironically mimicked Spanish on its white chest: “Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the headless body of T’la-yub.”

  The reader, of course, has been willing all along to “believe,” or suspend disbelief in, the Zamacona account, and the ending is one of confirmation and conversion of the skeptic. The immediate implication is a terrible one to ponder; on Zamacona’s recapture he must have been subjected to a most ironically fitting treatment. The Spanish emblazonment must mean that the collective will of the amphitheatre onlookers was projected into the already mutilated form of T’la-yub, who then performed the mutilation of the hapless Spaniard. As usual with Lovecraft’s mature works, however, the more cosmic implications are even worse—the implications surrounding the existence and the awesome age of all that Zamacona describes. Furthermore, as so often happens, the evidence is lost, for the narrator, in fleeing from the mound, leaves behind the Zamacona manuscript.

  Altogether, the tale is one of striking conception and tensely suspenseful narration, employing as it does the device of keeping the horrors at a “remove,” described only indirectly and (because of the Spaniard’s piety) incompletely through secondary or “frame” narration, until the primary narrator’s final direct encounter, which then brings to focus a massive amount of confirmed horror. The work is certainly among Lovecraft’s most successful “revision” or ghostwriting pieces, and is indeed remarkable for the amount of artistry and imagination invested in it, under the circumstances of its writing.

  Between October 1932 and April 1933 (with the writing mostly concentrated into the latter part of that period) Lovecraft wrote with E. Hoffmann Price “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,”

  161 a sort of collaborative sequel to Lovecraft’
s 1926 story “The Silver Key.” Price wrote a sketch of such a sequel, entitled “The Lord of Illusion,” and sent it to Lovecraft for revision; Lovecraft, who felt in general that collaboration was a poor way to produce anything of artistic value, was somewhat reluctant but not unwilling to give the project a try. Although he admired the mathematically multidimensional concepts in Price’s attempt at the sequel, he found much to change with regard to the handling of these concepts (Price’s version being too pedantically technical and intellectual in tone) and to the way in which the sequel should “fit” the original story generally. In the end, Lovecraft considerably extended the sequel in length, producing a story that retained much of Price’s mathematical conceptualisation but employed new plot details, with prose throughout that was virtually all Lovecraft’s own. In his deft handling of the multidimensionality, which though originating with Price, had to be perceptively and convincingly recast into Lovecraftian prose, Lovecraft demonstrated that his well-known disinclination toward mathematical concepts was one much more of temperament than of intellectual ability. Lovecraft, however, was never fully satisfied with the sequel, complaining that collaboration was a restriction on the free hand he needed in writing fiction. Nevertheless, he gives the work a Mythos flavour which greatly enlarges on his own primal god-entity Yog-Sothoth.

  The tale is another “frame-story,” told by a heavily swathed Swami Chandraputra to three other men gathered in New Orleans (in a room patterned on Price’s apartment at 305 Royal Street, which Lovecraft had visited) to settle the estate of the vanished Randolph Carter. The three men are Etienne de Marigny, a mystical-minded Orientalist and mathematician based on Price himself and serving as host to the meeting; Aspinwall, a hardboiled, “apoplectic-faced” attorney representing the Carter heirs; and a distant Carter relative Ward Phillips, an old man whose real-life prototype scarcely needs explanation, and who argues against apportionment of the estate on the grounds that Carter is still alive. The characters are arrayed and balanced off against each other, Aspinwall providing a skeptical foil to the credulous mysticism of the others. The Swami tells a tale of what has happened to Carter since his disappearance with the silver key.

  Carter, having doubled back in time to visit the “snake’s den” site of his childhood, has passed through a “gate” leading to an extension of earth outside time. There is, further, an Ultimate Gate which leads to “the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter,” the Necronomicon having suggested that there is a guide to this gate: ’UMR AT-TAWIL, “the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE.” In a scene in which he finds himself among strange figures on pedestals, Carter accepts this guide. This scene contains an important statement of the independence of the Lovecraft Mythos from such human concerns as good and evil; for Carter

  wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath upon mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm.

  (Interestingly, though, the wording of this passage is very little changed from the wording put forth by Price.)

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  Carter is led into “the hush of the abyss” and into a terrifying condition of loss of unity and identity; he becomes many Randolph Carters existing at different places and times, “a legion of selves.” He perceives a “force of personality” at once confronting and pervading him, “co-existent with all time and coterminous with all space,” that which secret cults have whispered of as Yog-Sothoth, which “has been a deity under other names,” and which thunders with a primal rhythm lying behind all reality (compare the Walpurgis rhythm in “The Dreams in the Witch House”). This being communicates wordlessly to Carter an astonishing view of reality, incorporating the notion that just as two-dimensional things are embedded in three-dimensional things (a circle is cut from a sphere), three-dimensional things are merely local projections of four-dimensional things, which in turn are embedded in five-dimensional things, “and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity.” At the limit of these embedding processes lie archetypal objects of which all else is lower-dimensional projection produced by the tilting of “consciousness-planes.” The most astonishing revelation is that Randolph Carter, in all his countless forms and like all thinkers and artists, has Yog-Sothoth himself as his ultimate “archetype.” Thus, Lovecraft’s primal entity, as an infinite-dimensional archetypal being, takes on a mind-boggling cosmicism exceeding even its earlier treatment.

  Carter gains permission to enter one of his many forms, that of a clawed and snouted wizard called Zkauba on the planet Yaddith, where he dwells for thousands of terrestrial years, finally escaping back to earth and the present time, but he is able to do so only in his alien body. As the reader has surmised, the Swami himself is Randolph Carter, in this repulsive form. When this is revealed, the Zkauba-aspect of his will regains dominance, and he disappears into the abnormal-rhythmed clock in the room. This ending and the entire Zkauba sequence are wholly Lovecraft’s invention; Price’s draft had Randolph Carter coalesce with and return as a certain Geoffrey Carter, one of Randolph’s other selves. The reworked sequel in Lovecraft’s hands is decidedly stronger than Price’s version, especially in the ending; but although Lovecraft greatly altered the conversation with the ultimate archetypal being, identifying it as Yog-Sothoth and revising and cutting down on Price’s classroom-lecture-like presentation, Lovecraft’s final version owes much in conceptualisation to the mathematical notions suggested by Price.

  In late 1930 and early 1931, Lovecraft spent about five months writing a book-length nonfiction work called A Description of the Town of Quebeck,

  163 a travelogue based on his Canadian travel experience and researches into Quebec history. The work is the longest piece that Lovecraft ever wrote—ironically, for as he expressly never intended to seek its publication or any other use, it really represents an impressively scholarly but curious indulgence, consuming as it did much time and effort which, one could wish, Lovecraft might have spent writing more fiction. The piece does further illuminate Lovecraft the man, who lavished his preferred eighteenth-century diction and spelling on it, and in its writing made clear his admiration for the rootedness and continuity of Quebec’s French culture. As a nonfiction work, the travelogue is mentioned here chiefly for this reason and because it took up so much of Lovecraft’s time and energy as a labour of love.

  During the 1929–1933 period, Lovecraft produced several other pieces, including such ghostwritten stories for Hazel Heald as “The Man of Stone,” “The Horror in the Museum,” “Winged Death,” “Out of the Eons,” and “The Horror in the Burying Ground.” While some of these tales have their merits (particularly “The Horror in the Museum”), none of them comes up to the level of characteristically Lovecraftian prose and cosmic conceptualisation exhibited in “The Mound.”

  During this same period Lovecraft wrote some of his best poetry, dwelling on themes of strangeness and horror. In particular, in a week-long burst of poetic creativity from 27 December 1929 to 4 January 1930, he produced thirty-five of the thirty-six pieces in his sonnet sequence “Fungi from Yuggoth.”

  164 (The remaining one, which ended up being numbered XXXIV, was written in November 1929). In the sonnets—which deal with imageries of pursuit by nameless horrors, of shocking discoveries made in out-of-the-way places, and the like—there may be discerned some very broad thematic bases for grouping and sequentiality,

  165 but they may well be read as individual, largely independent poems. They vary somewhat in quality but overall are quite striking as imagistically suggestive and interpretable verse clearly superior to most of Lovecraft’s earlier experiments in poetic form.

  While it is unrealistic to entertain an idea of analysing all thirty-six sonnets here, an example of their general nature and quality can be found in examination of sonnet XIX, “The Bells,” a splendi
d and haunting piece recording the elusiveness of certain pealing bells heard “year after year” by the persona: “Peals from no steeple I could ever find . . ..” The poet has searched his dreams and memories for a clue to the mysterious bells, suggesting that intriguing Lovecraftian motif of almost being able to recall some hidden facet of reality, as in the pseudomemory notion of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and, later, “The Shadow out of Time.” At length the “bleak rain splashing cold” beckons the poet “back through gateways of recalling / To elder towers where the mad clappers tolled.” The couplet delivers the punch:

  They tolled-- but from the sunless tides that pour

  Through sunken valleys on the sea’s dead floor.

  The sea, of course, may be taken as a symbol of the collective unconscious, the common and unremembered past, the deepest psychic identity of us all, the region of archetypes that obtrude on us in the form of dreams whose symbolic patterns are, like the sea, immemorially ancient. The mad clappers toll, exhorting us from this deep realm of the mind, because the clappers are archetypal, leading their own unconscious existence and “mad” to the conscious mind—who can predict, for example, exactly what he will dream, or explain exactly why?—whatever its own inscrutable patternings may be. The poem is an effective and hauntingly sombre journey inward to the depths of the psyche.

  On 30 November 1929, just before writing the “Fungi” sequence, Lovecraft penned an ad hoc sonnet called “The Messenger.”