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

by Donald R. Burleson

  172 written in November 1935 in response to a story by Robert Bloch (then a young correspondence acquaintance only beginning to write fiction) called “The Shambler from the Stars” and published in the September 1935 Weird Tales. Bloch used Lovecraft, a New England “mystic dreamer,” as a character who gets seized by a frightful monster, held in the air, and sucked dry of blood; but first the young Bloch asked the Providence gentleman’s permission to destroy him fictionally in this manner. Lovecraft responded with a letter authorising Bloch to “portray, murder, annihilate, disintegrate, transfigure, metamorphose, or otherwise manhandle the undersigned,”

  173 only objecting (in another letter) to Bloch’s portraying him as smoking a pipe! (Frank Belknap Long had previously “murdered” Lovecraft in his story “The Space Eaters. “) Lovecraft was diffident about” “The Haunter of the Dark,” remarking that it was an unsuccessful attempt

  to crystallise (a) the feeling of strangeness in a distant view, and (b) the feeling of latent horror in an old, deserted edifice . . .. I’m farther from doing what I want to do than I was 20 years ago.

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  Nevertheless, the story, if not so impressive as “The Shadow out of Time,” contains much of merit, and Weird Tales promptly accepted it in spite of Lovecraft’s submitting it simultaneously with “The Thing on the Doorstep” accompanied by a letter to Farnsworth Wright remarking that he did not expect either story to be acceptable. Lovecraft later said that he considered “The Thing on the Doorstep” to be somewhat the better of the two tales. He later defended “The Haunter of the Dark,” however, against a Vermont reader who felt that the story’s protagonist was too passive and helpless, on the basis that such a protagonist in the face of approaching horrors makes a story more genuinely nightmare-like:

  Indeed, the secret of all dream-literature is to have the central figure largely passive (symbolising the dreamer himself), with the events floating more or less detachedly & uncontrolled by him.

  175

  The story, carrying a dedication to Robert Bloch, and an epigraph quoted from Lovecraft’s 1918 poem “Nemesis,” is told by an omniscient narrator, and describes the fate of Robert Blake (a thinly veiled Robert Bloch, whom Lovecraft will tit-for-tat destroy in the end), from whose diary the tale is said to be derived. Blake returns to Providence Rhode Island, after a previous tragic visit to a “strange old man” who is, of course, Lovecraft himself in Bloch’s story, to write and paint in a “venerable dwelling” behind the John Hay Library. The house, faithfully described, was Lovecraft’s own residence on College Hill at the time, 66 College Street, a house eventually moved to 65 Prospect. Blake falls into the habit of staring out his westward study window at Federal Hill across town, and has the curious feeling that he is looking on ‘some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream” if he ever should try to visit it; Lovecraft’s own lifelong sense of “adventurous expectancy” and his cherished theme of elusiveness are much in evidence here. In particular, Blake is fascinated by a great, dark stone church whose smoky eaves the birds, seen through his binoculars, seem to shun.

  At length Blake walks to Federal Hill, finding it a brooding maze of obscure alleys and lanes, where his questions about the church are met with nervousness and reticence. Finally, he finds the church—based on the real St. John’s on Federal Hill in Providence, though its fictional description closeup is not so bound by actuality as is its largely accurate description as seen from across town. It is an ancient stone bulk standing on an iron-railed plateau six feet above a “wind-swept open square” at the end of an alley. (In reality the church less ominously fronts on Atwells Avenue, the main Federal Hill thoroughfare.) An Irish policeman tells Blake that in the old days there had been a “bad sect” in the church” “that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night.” Gradually and effectively, an aura of dread is built up about the place; and the motif of forbidden knowledge enters with the policeman’s warning to Blake to leave the church alone lest (in the narrator’s words) “things be stirred that ought to rest for ever in their black abyss.”

  Like many another Lovecraft protagonist, Blake has a self-annihilating inability to avoid rushing into his fate, and he gains entry to the ill-regarded church in spite of the warning. In a ground-level rear room, he finds a rotting pile of such ancient books as the Liber Ivonis (Clark Ashton Smith’s creation), Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis (contributed to the Mythos bibliography by Bloch), and, of course, the Necronomicon. Blake concludes: “This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.” Thus, Lovecraft reiterates the contentions of his Mythos: the reference to “evil” appears to be a curious departure from his usual mythic unconcern with good and evil, except that one may take the reference to be a moral judgment echoing Blake’s own limited viewpoint, not the narrator’s. Another common Lovecraftian motif here surfaces, too, for among the books, Blake finds and carries away, for attempted solution, a record-book in cryptographic form. Lovecraft’s early fascination with the cryptography motif in Poe’s “The Gold Bug” has persisted throughout his writing career. This recurrent motif may be taken, perhaps, as symbolic of the attitude, or narrative stance, that existence itself is a cryptogram, a cipher concealing underlying and unknown strata of meaning in reality.

  Blake ascends to a dust-laden tower chamber with a “curiously angled stone pillar” in the centre bearing a metal box of “peculiarly asymmetrical form—again, as in “The Call of Cthulhu,” the notion of geometric abnormality—and in the box is suspended an irregularly shaped stone-like object. Blake also notes a ladder “leading up to the closed trapdoor of the windowless steeple above.”

  176 Blake becomes oddly fascinated with the stone in the box, which when gazed upon seeks to evoke mental images of alien scenes.

  He finds, in the dust of the chamber, a skeleton which attendant items identify as Edwin M. Lillibridge, a late nineteenth-century reporter for the Providence Telegram. A paper of pencilled memoranda reveals that the reporter has collected data on a Starry Wisdom sect which calls something up “that can’t exist in light,” by means of a “shining Trapezohedron” brought from Egyptian ruins; the notes also imply that the area’s residents have driven the cult away and closed the church.

  Looking at the stone again, Blake once more has visions of alien landscapes and distant gulfs of space, and is seized with “an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear” when he becomes “conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness”—something “which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him.” He snaps the lid down and leaves, tom between a fancy that the imagined presence will somehow follow him and a more rational feeling that the place is simply getting on his nerves. As usual, Lovecraft begins to play on the tension of fictive belief versus doubt.

  Blake is thereafter increasingly haunted by the distant church as he works on the cryptogram. Finally, he solves it, determining it to be in “the dark Aklo language”—Lovecraft’s borrowing from Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” also mentioned in “The Dunwich Horror”—and reading of the Shining Trapezohedron as being “a window on all time and space” fashioned on the planet Yuggoth and treasured by various early cultures, including that of “the crinoid things of Antarctica.”

  From this point Lovecraft makes the tale one of progressive fear and dread, as Blake’s trepidations grow ever greater; the Italians on Federal Hill are whispering about “unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings” in the dark windowless steeple; Blake fears that he has indeed called up something best left unstirred. When a thunderstorm extinguishes some of the city lights, the Italians, frantic to stop the emergence from the church of something that they say can only exist in darkness, hold vigil around the edifice with lamps and candles; Lovecraft enhances credibility simply by having such a group of people believe so unswervingly in the horror. As he always does at his best, he tastefully lea
ves the nature of the thing open to the reader’s imaginative speculation, and tantalisingly mentions that the bumping heard within the church is “viscous.”

  Finally, a great storm breaks, and lights go out all over the city. Blake’s diary exhibits pitiable fear at this time, for he knows that the Haunter of the Dark can find him. Indeed, he is becoming one with the thing—there are various expressions of this fact in the final entries in his diary, scrawled in the dark, at the time when a “formless cloud of smoke” has been seen bursting from the church and shooting eastward, toward College Hill. He writes: “those people on the hill . . . guards . . . candles and charms . . . their priests” as if he were across town at the church instead of cringing in his study, and finally even says, “I am it and it is I—I want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces . . .. It knows where I am . . . ,” showing that his and the Haunter’s consciousnesses have coalesced. It is interesting that the story hints symbolically in other ways of the fact that Blake and the Haunter are bipolarities of the same entity; if one compares the church and Blake’s house, one sees that whereas Blake’s attic studio under the monitor roof is the only part of the house with sufficient light for painting, the windowless steeple is the only part of the church without light. Blake also at the end scribbles “Roderick Usher,” reflecting Lovecraft’s view of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” to the effect that the Usher house and the collective soul of the Usher family are one unifiedly doomed entity, just as Blake, in unity with the very thing that stalks him, is doomed. Later investigators find Blake wide-eyed, dead at his window.

  The tale is a fitting swan song of significant horror fiction for Lovecraft, exhibiting as it does a finely suspenseful narration and an intriguingly veiled horror whose impact and cosmic implications the reader is unlikely to forget; and in its central character, even though he is derived spoofingly in response to another writer’s effusions, one remarks a striking study in the psychology of fear.

  Other Writings

  In spite of the fact that he vowed, after the writing of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” never to engage in another literary collaboration, Lovecraft in January 1936 collaborated with young Kenneth Sterling on the story “In the Walls of Eryx,”

  177 a science-fiction-horror tale set, in uncharacteristic fashion for Lovecraft, on Venus in an age of terrestrial exploration of that planet. To judge from points of style and diction, the weight of Lovecraft’s own hand on the writing was considerable; one notes in the tale such common Lovecraftian tags as a paragraph beginning, “I have said that . . . ,” and indeed most of the prose rhythm has a Lovecraftian ring to it, despite the uncommon setting and the theme of the wages of greed. The story is a memorable one, dealing with an earthling who, in quest of a giant energy-yielding Venusian crystal revered as a religious object by the planet’s snouted and reptile-like denizens, finds himself lost in a large invisible maze—a most striking idea—on a muddy plain. The reader follows him through days of fruitless and ever more poignantly maddening attempts to find his way out, until the hapless explorer expires, his reptilian tormenters looking on outside the maze in ironic mirth. One of the features of the tale is the use of various punning in-jokes; there is an obnoxious insect, for example, called the “farnoth-fly,” and one can only conclude that at some point Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright must have sent Lovecraft one rejection too many.

  In the winter 1936 issue of the amateur press journal The Californian, edited by Hyman Bradofsky, there appeared a remarkably haunting story titled “The Night Ocean,”

  178 carrying the byline of Robert H. Barlow but “revised” by Lovecraft. The question of how heavy a hand Lovecraft laid on the piece is highly problematical. An unpublished Lovecraft letter to Bradofsky speaks as if he wrote virtually all of the story; yet in another unpublished letter Lovecraft says: “Hope you got the winter CALIFORNIAN with Barlow’s magnificent Night Ocean. That kid is coming along—indeed, the N. O. is one of the most truly artistic weird tales I’ve ever read.”

  179 This is scarcely an appropriate or characteristic bit of praise if Lovecraft himself essentially wrote the work.

  In any case, “The Night Ocean” is narrated in beautiful prose style, in a manner quite worthy of Lovecraft but somewhat unlike him in its introspective pensiveness; in tone and mood it rather resembles Algernon Blackwood’s” “The Willows,” which Lovecraft greatly admired, though in general Blackwood can scarcely be said to have influenced Lovecraft significantly. The present tale deals with an artist, the narrator, who comes to a lonely sea resort (in a way reminiscent of protagonists of Thomas Mann’s) “to rest a weary mind” but finds himself progressively taken with the notion that the sea holds some ominous secret in store, and finally that something “has settled out of the night—somethig forever undefined, but stirring a latent sense” within the artist; certainly, this motif of something latent, elusive, almost remembered is consistent with Lovecraft’s mindset. There are thematic echoes of earlier works; when the artist recoils from vacationers in the village who are oblivious to those things to which the artist is sensitive—“unseeing, unwilling to see what lay above them and about” in the immensities of sky and ocean—one is put in mind, despite differences, of the narrator m He, who sees those about him as “shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them.”

  However, in many ways, even if many passages in the tale have rhythm and syntax like Lovecraft’s (especially in his prose poems), “The Night Ocean” yet differs from the usual Lovecraftian manner. Chiefly, the tale is very rich in simile, a device that does, of course, appear in Lovecraft’s style but not so heavily as in this work, and not so often as metaphor in Lovecraft’s acknowledged works. The lighted windows of houses, for example, are described as being “like goblin-eyes reflected in an oily forest pool,” repeating the window-eye imagery often employed by Lovecraft but doing so in simile rather than metaphor. Then, too, the narrator is a much more deeply developed character than was usually produced by Lovecraft, who ever prized mood and atmosphere over characterisation and plot. The reader is reminded of the narrator’s artistic frame of mind when he thinks of the cottage roof as being “painted upon” the storm scene, and ponders how well a watercolour might have captured the lighting of the sea and sand. This character, though, does at moments seem rather (auto?)biographical of Lovecraft, as when he remarks, “I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and ponderer on seeking and dreaming . . . .” In a wistful and philosophical manner that rather reminds one of the opening paragraphs of “The Silver Key,” he ponders the role of the artist. In a beautifully metaphorical statement on creativity, he reflects that the paradox of art is that it requires expressing the ineffable, and can be approached only by rare individuals: “For although dreams are in all, of us, few hands may grasp their moth-wings without tearing them.” This is certainly not inconsistent with Lovecraft’s view of art. It is a pity that we shall probably never know the precise extent of Lovecraft’s contribution to this poetic and haunting piece; but whatever he gave to it, the work is a worthy one to stand at the close of his fictional career and to bear, in part, his name.

  During his final period, Lovecraft wrote a small amount of poetry, from an elegy to a departed cat to an acrostic for Poe to an encomium for Clark Ashton Smith. In 1934 when a beloved neighbourhood cat (whom Lovecraft dubbed Sam Perkins) suddenly died, Lovecraft penned a poignant eight-line poem in a letter to James F. Morton, touchingly describing the deepened gloom of the garden and the grief-swayed grasses that must be

  Remembering from yesterday

  The little paws that stirred them.

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  This from the hand that traced the horrors of Dunwich and Innsmouth! The lines are a testimony to the variegation of the author’s emotionalities.

  In August 1936 Lovecraft sat with Robert Barlow and revision client Adolphe de Castro (an acquaintance of Ambrose Bierce) in the churchyard of St. John’s below Benefit Street in Pro
vidence, where they composed acrostics on the name of Edgar Allan Poe, who had trod those very grounds. Lovecraft’s composition, fully titled “In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d,” is a capable and sombrely moving piece resembling a sonnet in form except for its thirteen lines, and ending with the couplet

  Only the few who sorcery’s secret know

  Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.

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  The poem deftly mentions that Poe’s “song / Peals down through time . . . ,” a nicely wrought reference to Poe’s “The Bells.”

  Lovecraft’s last poem, so far as is known, was “To Klarkash-Ton, Lord of Averoigne,”

  182 written for Clark Ashton Smith very late in 1936 only a few weeks before Lovecraft’s death. The poem is, unlike some of Lovecraft’s earlier poetic encomia, a very well-modulated sonnet evoking a mood of dark wonder most effectively, and ending with the couplet

  Dark Lord of Averoigne—whose windows stare

  On pits of dream no other gaze could bear.

  This final poetic utterance is one that might just as well describe the Providence gentleman himself.

  8. Major Literary Influences on Lovecraft

  Poe and Hawthorne

  Lovecraft was a largely self-educated but exceedingly widely read author, and his writing shows, in varying amounts and different patterns at various states of his career, the clear influence of a number of writers whom he studied and admired. He is, however, not a “derivative” writer producing works that merely amount to collages of those influences; rather, his writings reveal that he assimilated such influences, transmuting and developing them for artistic purposes that are highly individual. Lovecraft may be said to have been influenced to some degree by virtually everyone whom he perused, from Virgil to Shakespeare to Milton to Samuel Johnson to Thomas Moore to a wealth of modem writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, M. R. James, William Butler Yeats, and Ambrose Bierce. However, the major influences are those of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lord Dunsany, with a rather more restricted but still very significant influence deriving from Arthur Machen.