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

by Donald R. Burleson

  Lovecraft read Poe from the age of eight, and early in his writing career, in 1922, he remarked:

  To me Poe is the apex of fantastic art—there was in him a vast and cosmic vision which no imitator has been able to parallel. . . . this terrible realisation of the mysteries beyond the stars. I do find it in Dunsany, though in much weaker form, and diluted with a certain shrewd self-consciousness which Poe sublimely lacked. There may be something rather sophomoric in my intense and unalterable devotion to Poe . . . but I do not think it so far amiss as the average ultra-modem would hasten to pronounce it.

  183

  He goes on to cite the “ultra-human point of view” in Poe, and one recognises that this fictional stance has become an integral part of the Lovecraft Mythos itself, which indeed sustains the viewpoint more tenaciously than Poe’ s works do. Several years later, in 1931, Lovecraft was still able to remark, “Poe has probably influenced me more than any one person,”

  184 despite the fact that Lovecraft eventually reestimated Dunsany’s comparative cosmicism upward and came to write less in the actual diction and general manner of Poe as time went on. What Lovecraft derived of permanence from Poe was an abiding tone of darkness, a concern with gloomy and ponderous themes and images, and the strength of basing the crafting of horror tales on a working knowledge of the psychology of fear rather than on “stock” and empty narrative devices purporting to produce shudders without the requisite emotional base.

  Early in Lovecraft’s writing career, his devotion to Poe could at times run to the extent of almost slavish imitation; the story “The Hound” (1922) is a prime example, with its starkness of imagery—the amulet, the baying hound itself, the “nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats”—and with an emotional outburst from its brooding and morbidly disturbed narrator: “—how I shudder to recall it!” The tale “The Outsider” of the previous year also shows a heavy Poe influence; its opening is, in terms of imagery and diction alike, a virtual paraphrase of the opening of Poe’s “Berenice”:

  there are no towers in the land more time-honoured than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls . . .. The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes—of which latter I will say no more. Herein was I born. . . into a place of imagination—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition.

  185

  Lovecraft’s tale also imagistically reflects Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” in its ballroom scene. Yet the tale develops along very different thematic lines from those explored by Poe, and indeed one cannot say that Lovecraft even during this period was exclusively devoted to Poe, for he produced also such tales as “The Quest of Iranon” and “The Other Gods” (both in 1(21) showing more than anything else the influence of Dunsany. It is simplistic to try to carve Lovecraft’s writing career up into a “Poe period,” “Dunsany period,” and the like, for one finds the influences temporarily interspersed and irregularly recurrent.

  One finds Poesque themes and images cropping up in Lovecraft’s works at widely separated intervals. Perhaps the last story that one could call overtly Poe-imitative is “Cool Air” (1926), in which the imagery of liquescent dissolution in the end is (besides being perhaps reflective of the similar scene in Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder”) a clear echo of the ending of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”: “his whole frame at once . . . absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome-- of detestable putrescence.”

  186 Even after Lovecraft grew out of this direct imagistic echoing of Poe—certainly by the writing of “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1926 he was finding his own identity as an artist—even after his dependence on Poe ceased to be so obvious, he continued to reflect Poe in somewhat less visible ways. His novel At the Mountains of Madness (1931) still exhibits a clear connexion with Poe, with its reiteration of Poe’s “Tekeli-li!” and concern with Antarctica as in Narrative of A. Gordon Pym—not to the extent, however, that Lovecraft’s novel can in any real sense be described as a sequel to the Poe novel, for Lovecraft strikes out in directions wholly unanticipated by Poe’s account. The Poe novel evidently influenced Lovecraft in other ways. On a point of diction, it contains the expression “exceedingly singular” employed in the opening paragraph of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, as well as other stylistic points. More significantly, there is in “The Whisperer in Darkness” a loose but clear borrowing of Poe’s motif of the chasms in the island of Tsalal, which are found to spell out in huge letters a message in ancient Egyptian; Lovecraft has his narrator in the Vermont tale feel “that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race.”

  Other such parallel motifs may be traced, as in the case of Poe’s “Ligeia,” where the theme of possession by a departed woman cannot fail to make the reader think of Lovecraft’s Asenath Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Poe dwells at length on the woman’s eyes:

  The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! . . . What was it—that something more profound than the well of Democritus—which lay far within the eyes of my beloved? What was it”

  187

  One notes a parallel concern with Asenath’ s hypnotic eyes and the secret that lies within them, a secret, like Ligeia’s, destined to outlive life itself through possession from beyond the grave; indeed, the conquering of death is a frequent Lovecraftian theme, as in the case of Joseph Curwen. “Ligeia” also deals with the theme of elusiveness; its narrator remarks that “we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.”

  188 Lovecraft’s use of this notion is widespread and basic to his work, finding great articulation in “The Shadow out of Time,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and other works.

  “Ligeia” affords as well a pertinent imagery concerning draperies:

  The phantasmagoric effect was greatly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.

  189

  Certainly, this is reflected in Lovecraft’ s description of the arras in “The Rats in the Walls.” In Poe’s tale, Lady Rowena, the narrator says, speaks of “sounds which she then heard, but which I could not perceive” in connexion with the shifting tapestries; one is ineluctably put in mind of Lovecraft’s de la Poer.

  As time went on, Lovecraft did largely cease to emulate Poe in any such obvious fashion as diction or borrowing of motifs and imageries, though his constant use of the motif of cryptogram-solving—see “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Haunter of the Dark,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—is a testimony to his lasting indebtedness to Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” More broadly speaking, what lingers of Poe in Lovecraft is his psychological concern, his working artistic acquaintance with the nature of fear; as Lovecraft put it in Supernatural Horror in Literature (where Poe alone has an entire chapter devoted to him), Poe, unlike earlier writers of gothic or horror fiction, possessed “an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal” leading to “a new standard of realism” in the realm of horror. Pee’s protagonists are often mentally tormented individuals facing the insupportably bleak facts of their existence and circumstances; they find themselves alone with their inner horrors, bereft even of any hope of being believed, or of being themselves able to believe their own experiences. See, for example, the opening lines of Poe’s “The Black Cat”:

  For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.

  190

  One finds this sort of opening statement even in some of Lovecraft’s later works, particularly “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Shadow out of Time.” Similarly, Poe’s narrator desperately tries to defend his sanity
in “The Tell-Tale Heart” (in which there is the motif of hyper-sensitive hearing—see Lovecraft’s Walter Gilman in “The Dreams in the Witch House”), and Lovecraft derives from Poe a sort of general character type, many times reworked by both authors, in which there is a brooding inner horror that swells to dreadful proportions and envelops the unfortunate protagonist, whose horror, whatever other implications there are, is a private and inescapable one. Thus, although Lovecraft progressively dropped his facile imitation of Poe, there lingers in Lovecraft’s literary career a general backdrop of darkness, a pervasive psychological frame of reference or mindset which Lovecraft learned early at the feet of his master but came to develop along lines highly original and characteristically Lovecraftian.

  Although Lovecraft did not seem to regard Nathaniel Hawthorne as a major influence on him, nevertheless there is to be found a Hawthorne influence that is quite considerable.

  191 At the age of seven Lovecraft read Hawthorne’s Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, deriving from them an enduring interest in classical mythology which makes itself evident in Lovecraft’s work not only in the form of the Mythos itself (which directly owes more to the Dunsany influence) but in the form of a lasting concern with beauty and propriety of language inspired by classical models whom Lovecraft came to read and admire.

  However, Hawthorne influenced Lovecraft in far more specific ways, in terms more thematic than stylistic. Although Lovecraft disapproved of Hawthorne’s literary didacticism-preferring Poe’s critical theory ‘that literature should move us emotionally rather than instruct us—and although such Hawthornian concerns as the Unpardonable Sin were virtually meaningless in Lovecraft’s world-view, Lovecraft derived a lasting influence from Hawthorne ranging over a wide variety of themes and motifs.

  On a general level, one may say that Lovecraft found in Hawthorne a fascination with the shadowy side of New England history and culture; the fact that Lovecraft came to prefer setting horror tales in his native region, rather than in such “stock” settings as eastern European castles and the like, is largely due to Hawthorne. (Hawthorne’s concern with gloom in New England simply reinforces the predilection that Lovecraft had already largely derived from Poe.) Lovecraft’s earliest works show no particular tendency to concentrate on New England; but by the mid-1920s—Lovecraft intensively reread Hawthorne for his critical project Supernatural Horror in Literature—Lovecraft came to weave New England into the fabric even of his most stunningly cosmic narratives.

  More specifically, there is a wealth of imagery and thematic concern common to Hawthorne and Lovecraft despite the differences in their philosophical viewpoints. Even as early as 1920 Lovecraft, in writing “The Picture in the House,” reflects Hawthorne’s personification of the House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne says of his celebrated Salem edifice:

  The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive, also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within. . . . you could not pass it without the idea that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to meditate upon.

  192

  One can scarcely avoid making the connexion between this imagery and that of Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” where it is said of the farmhouse:

  the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things . . .. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

  193

  Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables also influenced Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House,” to the point of closely parallel passages. Hawthorne says of his house that “the street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable was now precisely on a line with it.”

  194 Similarly, at the Shunned House, “a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space” between the house and the road so that the cellar wall was exposed to the sidewalk. Hawthorne’s novel also adumbrates another image used (in transmuted form) by Lovecraft: the image of the Pyncheon looking-glass, said to be influenced by the Maule family in such a way that “they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons.”

  195 One is reminded of the scene in “The Shunned House” in which Elihu Whipple, attacked by the vampiric presence beneath the house, becomes a shifting pageant of the faces of the departed in the house’s history. Hawthorne even says of the Salem house that Colonel Pyncheon “was about to build his house over an unquiet grave,”

  196 and the same is literally true of Lovecraft’s Shunned House. Lovecraft in his critical essay noted the psychopomp motif in Hawthorne’s novel (in the form of the cat keeping vigil at the window when Judge Pyncheon dies

  197 ), and, of course, this same motif—in the form of whippoorwills, after a local legend encountered in Wilbraham, Massachusetts—appears in “The Dunwich Horror.” Perhaps the most striking motif borrowed from the Hawthorne novel is that of the discovery, in a recess in the wall behind the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, of long-lost family papers; Lovecraft repeats this pattern in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, in which Joseph Curwen’s papers are found in a wall-cache behind his portrait. In both novels there is the notion of a modem character having an ancestor, whom the character resembles, reach forward from the family past to engulf the current scion.

  Lovecraft derives various other motifs and images from assorted Hawthorne works. Surely the god-face carved on Mount Ngranek in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a reflection of Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face,” derived in turn from the Old Man of the Mountains of Franconia, New Hampshire. This Lovecraft novel also would appear to owe something to Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun with its hints of deific blood in mortal veins, for in the Lovecraft work we find the notion that the Great Ones in disguise often consort with human women to produce offspring whose features resemble those of the gods; of course, this has inspiration from Greek mythology as well.

  Lovecraft even borrows from Hawthorne’s unfinished novels. Septimius Felton has a character named Aunt Keziah, who boasts of her resistance of the temptations of the Black Man of witchcraft lore, and the influence on Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” is obvious. The same novel speaks of a silver key which leads to ancestral papers in an old chest, and again the influence is obvious, with respect to “The Silver Key,” though Lovecraft’s work involves a cosmicism far beyond anything suggested by Hawthorne. Lovecraft’s tale “The Unnamable,” with its cloven hoofprint, echoes the bloody footprint of Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, and indeed the Lovecraft story has its setting in Salem’s Charter Street cemetery, the adjacent “Grimshawe House” being by Lovecraft’s own account the real prototype of the fictive house; Hawthorne’s wife Sophia once lived there.

  Some of the most striking influence is to be found in connexion with Hawthorne’s American Notebooks. It is clear that Lovecraft read these notebooks at an early date, for in his own commonplace book he writes, in 1919 or 1920, but sufficiently early despite the dating ambiguities involved, “Hawthorne—unwritten plot. Visitor from tomb. Stranger at some public concourse followed at midnight to graveyard where he descends into the earth.”

  198 This note not only makes it clear that Lovecraft had read Hawthorne thoroughly at the time—otherwise he could not identify a Hawthorne plot idea as “unwritten”—but shows also that Lovecraft, well in advance of writing “The Nameless City” in 1921, could scarcely have missed the following remarkable Hawthorne notebook entry of 17 October 1835: “An old volume in a large library—everyone to be afraid to unclasp and open it, because it was said to be a book of magic.”

  199 Lovecraft’s discovery of this note is early enough for it to be the inspiration for his mythical tome, the Necronomicon (first quoted in “The Nameless City,” first named in “The Hound” in 19
22), which is characterised as being shunned and guardedly ensconced in libraries as described. Lovecraft is quite likely to have drawn thematic inspiration from at least one other Hawthorne notebook entry, that of 4 January 1839:

  A mortal symptom for a person being to lose his own aspect and to take the family lineaments, which were hidden deep in the healthful visage. Perhaps a seeker might thus recognise the man he had sought, after long intercourse with him unknowingly.

  200

  This notion is clearly suggestive of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” in which indeed—Lovecraft’s preter-Hawthornian twist-- there is just such a delayed recognition, the narrator’s recognition of his own monstrous heritage and nature when he begins himself to assume the “Innsmouth look.” Indeed, the general notion of being haunted by the past is common in Hawthorne; Lovecraft’s works are full of the notion, though he develops it in vastly different ways.