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

by Donald R. Burleson

  166 Bertrand Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, had spoofingly chided Lovecraft for using Hart’s former Providence residence at 7 Thomas Street as the sculptor Wilcox’s address in “The Call of Cthulhu,” and threatened to send a monstrous visitor to see Lovecraft at 3 a.m. for revenge. Lovecraft dashed off the sonnet as an impromptu response, and it is remarkably good to be such a toss-off. The poet broods over the promised coming of the wraith “from the old churchyard on the hill below” (St. John’s, mentioned in “The Shunned House”), rationalising desperately that the sender (Hart, unnamed of course)

  . . . did not truly know

  The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,

  That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.

  Finally, the poet must succumb, for there is a rattling at the door. In its tasteful alliterations and dark assonances, the poem, though only a lark for Lovecraft, manages to create a powerfully horrific mood.

  Lovecraft wrote, for January 1929 publication in the amateur press magazine The Tryout, an imagistically memorable poem in five quatrains called “The Wood.”

  167 The piece speaks of an ancient and tenebrous wood cut down to make way for a city of wine and revelling, a fabulous place with “pinnacles that bore unmelting snows.” The wood is forgotten by the uncaring revellers, until on one “purple night” a drunken minstrel speaks “vile words” that carry an ancient curse. The ending is most intriguing:

  Forests may fall, but not the dusk they shield.

  So on the spot where that proud city stood,

  The shuddering dawn no single stone revealed,

  But fled the blackness of a primal wood.

  The line “Forests may fall . . .” is one of the most Jungian of all Lovecraft’s utterances, suggesting as it does (and as the whole poem does) that there is an underlying blackness, the Shadow, that no amount of jaunty facade can banish. The poem’s ending is delectably ambiguous and interpretable, for one is not certain whether the “shuddering dawn” encounters the “primal wood” grown back in triumph over the blasphemous city, or only the blackness of the wood, a separately returning entity, undying in itself. This poem, and others here cited, have much to say about how far Lovecraft by this time had come since the days of his early imitative verse. Consistently—for one sees much to admire even in the early “Nemesis” of 1918—Lovecraft is the better poet when he eschews nature poetry and personal commemoratives and turns his poetic talents to themes of horror.

  7. Final Years: Powers Undiminished (1934–1937)

  “The Shadow out of Time”

  During the years from 1934 to 1937, in the period of his final decline in health, Lovecraft wrote only sparsely, producing in fact only two major stories—aside from his collaboration “In the Walls of Eryx” (January 1936, with Kenneth Sterling), his involvement in Robert Barlow’s “The Night Ocean” (1936), and a substandard fragment, not intended for publication, called” “The Evil Clergyman,” extracted from a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer and published posthumously in Weird Tales in 1939 as “The Wicked Clergyman.” Nevertheless, the two major stories produced by Lovecraft during this period show clearly that his narrative and imaginative powers were strong to the end of his life.

  Particularly remarkable, both in its conceptualisation and in its craft, is the novelette” “The Shadow out of Time,”

  168 written from November 1934 to March 1935. This was not an easy birth; Lovecraft agonised at great length over the composition of this piece, attempting to write it as a short story but finding that its proper emotional development required greater length; he destroyed several drafts before settling on the final version. He was toying with the story’s main ideas years earlier, specifically mentioning them in detail as early as 1930 in a letter

  169 and jotting down adumbrations of them several years before that in his commonplace-book; clearly, the work was many years in mental incubation, and the result was a richness and intrigue scarcely paralleled anywhere in the Lovecraft canon, in spite of the fact that he was sufficiently dissatisfied with the work to remark, “I am so uncertain about its merit that I may destroy it.” However, the story was published, as was the Antarctica novel, in Astounding Stories.

  170

  The first-person narrator, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, opens the tale with a statement to the effect that he desperately hopes that what he thinks he has experienced is all hallucination; immediately, Lovecraft begins to build in the reader’s mind his usual tension, the tension between belief and disbelief; the reader is offered a mundane and rational “out,” but the entire crafting of the tale is designed to make him not want to avail himself of it. The story’s implications are cosmic. The true horror is not the cone-shaped Great Race beings at all, but rather the implications for mankind and for the mind-shattered narrator,

  171 for: “If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing.”

  Peaslee is from Boardman Street in Haverhill, Massachusetts, an echo of the real neighbourhood in which Lovecraft’s old amateur press friend “Tryout” Smith lived, and teaches political economy at Miskatonic University in Arkham; Lovecraft again chooses a rather prosaic vocation for his narrator to enhance credibility, and in this case to bolster the fittingness of the narrator’s understanding of the Great Race’s politico-economic way of life. Peaslee has experienced a weird bout of amnesia lasting from 14 May 1908 until 27 September 19l3—interestingly enough, a period of time corresponding almost exactly to Lovecraft’s own post–high school period of nonsocial “hermitage” and self-education.

  During this amnesia, Peaslee seems to be animated by another, alien personality. (Lovecraft has previously, but differently and less cosmically, explored the theme of alteration in the contents of one’s mind in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and the theme of personality displacement in “The Thing on the Doorstep.”) This usurping personality is avid for knowledge about “history, art, science, language, and folklore”; the altered Peaslee engages in “odd travels,” takes special courses, and consults obscure and ill-regarded books, including, of course, the Necronomicon. Finally, Peaslee’s ordinary personality returns, and he can remember nothing of the period in question.

  However, Peaslee’s troubles only begin with his painful reabsorption into normal life, abandoned by all of his family except his son Wingate. Peaslee is haunted by the notion that “some unholy sort of exchange” has taken place during his amnesia, and he begins to have dreams that reinforce this idea; the dreams gradually take on more and more focus, and Peaslee’s tension between fancy and reality, belief and disbelief, is one that Lovecraft masterfully allows to grow throughout the story until it swells into magnificent crescendo of resolution in the final line. Like Walter Gilman in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” but more significantly, Peaslee must struggle with the maddeningly ambiguous relation between dream and reality, fearing all the while to discover that what he has taken for dream is unthinkable actuality. He begins a psychological study of amnesia cases, finding that although counterparts to his dreams are rare, “a tiny residue of accounts” does exist, as if whatever has happened to him has happened to others at long intervals throughout history; this fact assumes ominous importance in light of later developments. The theme of an inescapable obtrusion of the past on the present—the old Lovecraftian theme that the present is no place in which certain hapless souls can hide from an overwhelming past—surfaces with much impact and foreshadowing when Peaslee asks himself: “Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in nature?” Some of the kindred dreams in other cases have a “ring of blasphemous familiarity,” as if Peaslee has” “heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate.”

  Peaslee’s own dreams involve a horror concerning his own appearance, and a sense of being a sort of prisoner in some primordially ancient setting where he
roams through enormous, arched chambers replete with unplaceable hieroglyphs. The tension of the tale grows when the dreams begin “so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories,” and when Peaslee has the sensation that what he is experiencing is really a mass of memories deliberately but imperfectly expunged from his mind. As Lovecraft’s best protagonists so often do, Peaslee rationalises furiously, telling himself that myth patterns he has absorbed from the secondary personality’s outre readings have coloured his pseudomemories. In particular, he uncovers a myth cycle concerning a pre-human Great Race that came down from the stars and was “as old as the cosmos itself,” a race of “immense rugose cones” (actually preexisting corporeal forms commandeered by the Great Race on their arrival on earth aeons ago) who compiled libraries of all the earth’s history through the power of projecting their minds into the past and future, forcing exchanges with minds in other ages. Lovecraft makes bold to suggest that from this race’s mental abilities “arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.” The suggestion that “the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form” “—that this intelligence came in a fabulous past from yet older and unthinkable phases of existence—well illustrates the extent of the cosmicism to which Lovecraft fictionally aspired. Peaslee in his dreams is obliged to write a history of his own age for the Great Race. In waking hours he continues to tell himself that his dreams are mere echoes of assimilated mythological lore.

  The Great Race is said to have had a sort of socialistic economic system, reflecting Lovecraft’s own shifting political and economic preferences late in life, and to have had wars with the Old Ones of the Antarctic. Lovecraft links his Mythos works together and daringly treats the assumptions of the Mythos as if they were naturally embedded in the real mythology that Peaslee would have read. Also, the notion, so powerful in Lovecraft’s best works, that there is always a “further horror”—a horror that even the horrors dread—comes into play here; for the Great Race morbidly fears a “horrible elder race of half polypous, utterly alien entities” which the cone-beings have driven underground. The leitmotif for these “only partly material” other beings are the black basalt towers that they have left behind, and the sealed trapdoors leading to their nether realms. Peaslee’s dreams gradually focus on these details and on the cone-beings themselves, until he wakes half of Arkham with his screaming, having looked down, in a dream, to discover that he inhabits a tentacled Great Race body. Lovecraft handles this passage delectably.

  A turning point in this tale comes when Peaslee, who has published illustrated accounts of his dreams in a journal of psychology, receives a letter, with snapshots, from a mining engineer in Western Australia, telling of strange stone blocks, bearing unreadable inscriptions, encountered in the desert; the photographs show the stones to be identical to objects seen in Peaslee’s dreams and sketched for the journal articles. Stunningly, Lovecraft begins to make the dreams come true, though the Australian letter furnishes Peaslee with yet another way to explain the dreams away; the letter in effect punningly states:

  Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. [Emphasis added.]

  Thus, Lovecraft deftly allows Peaslee to move from one level of rationalisation to another; beyond his earlier explanation that assimilated mythic lore has caused his dreams, he now can tell himself, and believe almost until the end, that there really was a primal race, and that this race generated mythology which in turn (because of his reading, not because of any actual contact) caused his dreams. [The letter mentions that the aboriginal people have myths about “enormous underground huts” dating to the immeasurable past; and Lovecraft may well have been aware that the Australians have referred, in their actual mythology, to the distant past as “the dream-time” (aljira), though the term is not mentioned in the text.]

  Peaslee, of course, assembles a team of explorers, with university backing, to sojourn to Western Australia; the team includes, besides Peaslee’s son and some other people, Professor William Dyer, the geologist-narrator of At the Mountains of Madness. (One has to wonder about Dyer’s frame of mind, after the Antarctic experience, embarking on this second unearthing of primal secrets; but he is largely effaced in the present tale.)

  The Peaslee expedition does encounter the stone fragments in the Australian desert, and with typically Lovecraftian zeal for “adventurous expectancy,” here tinged with foreboding, Peaslee says, “I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream building.” The explorers find that, although they continually encounter these blocks, the shifting sands rebury them and complicate any attempt at systematic study of their pattern of distribution; the shifting sand is an effective, stark metaphor for the elusiveness of Peaslee’s “pseudomemories” and what they portend. He even finds a piece of “basaltic elder masonry” and flees the spot, unconsciously connecting it with its meaning in his dreams; the block is, of course, later impossible to find again.

  In a stupendously powerful final episode, Peaslee wanders away from camp under a “bloated, fungoid moon” of much symbolic significance. In Jungian terms Peaslee is on a quest to the depths of his being, where he must meet and reconcile himself with the darkest, most profound aspect of his psyche, here symbolised by the reality of his dream experience. Typically, there must be an anima-figure, a female element, to mediate between the questing outward-turned ego and its dark brother, the Shadow. The moon, commonly associated with the goddess Diana, serves as such an anima-figure; but it is a “bloated, fungoid” moon, an unwholesome mediator, and appropriately so, for Peaslee finds no reconciliation in the depths of his quest, but only awful confirmation and despair. (This baleful moon sinks to the horizon when Peaslee emerges, decimated by his discovery underground, for it has done its job, so to speak.) A typical post-Renaissance questing hero, he does not return whole and balanced and integrated from the quest.

  As he wanders on the sand, Peaslee has a growing sensation of tugging and urging onward, as if the region itself pulls at his brain, enjoining him finally to remember what has been suppressed. In one of the most impressive metaphors in all the Lovecraft oeuvre, the narrator says: “something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.” There is repeated “fumbling at the latch” imagery in Lovecraft’s fiction, but never with greater power than this.

  At length Peaslee, of course, stumbles on a passage leading underground, where he finds the age-wracked vaulted chambers of his dreams in stark and undeniable reality. In an effective display of anaphora, Peaslee asks himself a string of questions beginning “How did I know . . .” —how does he know each turn, each detail, each spatial relationship of the chambers? Sometimes the best literary effect is brought about by skillful choosing and emotionally effective manipulating of small, simple words, and Lovecraft does this memorably when he makes Peaslee admit to himself, at long last, simply but potently: “I knew this place.” Inevitably, Peaslee finds the storage case in the central archives containing, he fears, an awesomely implicative object that he has been expecting all along. He even manages to open the combination lock from memory, taking down the object sought and sitting in the dark with it open before him, dreading to switch on his lamp again to see it; probably nowhere else does Lovecraft make the reader so poignantly empathise with the protagonist. Herein lies the grand Lovecraftian irony, not the simple irony of “The Terrible Old Man,” but a subtle and cosmic irony: man, represented by Peaslee, is a creature just sufficiently developed to be made to perceive his own essentially meaningless position in the universe; for Peaslee’s discovery demolishes all thoughts of human supremacy even in the local history of the earth.

  Peaslee finally does look, and sees what he has dreaded all along, an object whose implications for mankind and his place in the sc
heme of things is terrible because the object proves Peaslee’s dreams and “pseudomemories” inescapably true. In a mad scramble to get back up to the outside world, however, he drops the object—possibly Lovecraft’s most effective use of his frequent “lost evidence” motif. Nevertheless, he knows what he has seen. The reader, of course, has long since guessed what it is, and the story’s ending, though containing nothing of revelation, is as a stunning confirmation one of the most powerful endings in all of fantasy literature. The final paragraph is a model of masterful and poetic denouement:

  No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.

  In this unforgettable ending (to which the tension, focus, and emotional buildup of the story has been pointing from the first line), in the richness of imagination in the tale’s conception, and in the admirably metaphorical and stylistically well-modulated narration throughout, one finds certainly a finely wrought work of fiction. The gentleman from Providence has come an immensely long way since the days of such relative crudities as “Herbert West—Reanimator,” and as an artist of cosmic horror he is probably nowhere more capable, nowhere more stunning in his fictive implications, than in “The Shadow out of Time.”

  “The Haunter of the Dark”

  Lovecraft’s last major story was” “The Haunter of the Dark,”