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

by Donald R. Burleson

  Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that Lovecraft, while preferring the philosophical stance of Poe and retaining much of that master’s psychological approach to horror fiction, derives much imagistic and thematic influence from Hawthorne, influence that ranges over a variety of works in the canons of both authors. Even Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, so central to the Lovecraft Mythos, is virtually certain to have been germinally inspired by Hawthorne’s notebook jottings. Lovecraft developed his materials, of course, in a cosmic, trans-human way very unlike the allegorical moralising of Hawthorne, but the imprint of the dark side of Hawthorne’s New England and the commonality of numerous motifs and images is clear and lasting in the Lovecraft oeuvre. The influence of Hawthorne on Lovecraft is altogether one of the most striking instances of (largely) unrecognised influence likely to be encountered in the field of fantasy literature.

  Dunsany and Machen

  It is well known that Lovecraft, especially from 1919 to 1921, though not exclusively so, was significantly influenced by the work of Lord Dunsany. The sonorous, quasi-Biblical style of Dunsany, with its dreaminess of mood and its many sentences beginning with And, is clearly reflected in the prose of such Lovecraft stories as “The White Ship,” “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” “Celephaïs;’ “The Quest of lranon,” and “The Other Gods,” as well as the later hybrid novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Lovecraft was by no means unaware of the Dunsany influence as apparently in the case of Hawthorne; in 1920 he said:

  The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose and in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me.

  201

  In 1923 he remarked:

  Truly, Dunsany has influenced me more than anyone else except Poe—his rich language, his cosmic point of view, his remote dream-world, & his exquisite sense of the fantastic, all appeal to me more than anything else in modem literature.

  202

  Indeed, Lovecraft was so predisposed to be receptive to Dunsany’s style that he wrote the remarkably “Dunsaniari” story “Polaris” in 1918, before discovering Dunsany in 1919; of “Celephaïs;’ written afterward, he therefore remarked: “I will leave to the critic the question of just how much of the style is due to Dunsany’s influence, and how much to my own independently similar cast of imagination.”

  203 In light of the different directions that Lovecraft’s own mind was to take later on, it would appear that the Dunsany influence in question at that time was great. Lovecraft later even feared that he was utterly overshadowed by his admired prose models; in 1929 he lamented, “There are my ‘Poe’ pieces and my ‘Dunsany’ pieces—but alas—where are any Lovecraft pieces?”

  204 This outburst of diffidence is clearly an unduly harsh selfassessment, an exaggerated view of his literary indebtedness to others, for even by 1927 Lovecraft’s own distinctive style was emerging strongly; neither Poe nor Dunsany nor anyone else could have written ‘The Colour out of Space.” In any case, Lovecraft in the 1930s came to regard most of his Dunsanian pieces as vapidly imitative and inferior, belonging to an artistic phase that he had outgrown.

  Nevertheless, Lovecraft acknowledged a certain lingering Dunsanian impact on his own mind. Near the end of his life, he remarked:

  Dunsany has a peculiar appeal for me. Casual and tenuous though anyone of his fantastic flights may seem, the massed effect of his whole cycle of theogony, myth, legend, fable, hero-epic and dream-chronicle on my consciousness is that of a most potent and particular sort of cosmic liberation.

  205

  Indeed, Dunsany’s fictive pantheon and attendant mythology, his invented gods of Pegāna, are clearly a major influence on the Lovecraft Mythos with its own “gods” or ultimate primordial entities—Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, and the like. It is probably this particular influence—Lovecraft’s admiration, seasoned by a love of classical antiquity and mythology, of Dunsany ‘s sweepingly cosmic conception of ancient gods—that forms the most lasting effect of Dunsany on Lovecraft. (Interestingly enough, Dunsany himself abandoned his created mythology fairly early in his career; it was up to Lovecraft to develop the notion further.) Dunsany in The Gods of Pegāna postulated an ultimate god called Mana-Yood-Sushai, who cyclically dream-creates and destroys other gods and whole worlds; in Dunsany’s description of his prophets’ remote temple

  beyond all the plains . . . there lie before thee many peaks . . .. if thou shalt climb these and cross their valleys . . . thou shalt come at last to the forgotten hills, where amid many valleys and white snow there standeth the “Great Temple of One God Only,”

  206

  one discerns source-images lying behind Lovecraft’s Plateau of Leng, peaks of Kadath, and monastery image in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

  Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegāna contains other probable influences as well. Of Skarl, the drummer, Dunsany says:

  Skarl sitteth upon the mist before the feet of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, above the gods of Pegāna, and there he beateth his drum. Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl.

  207

  This is reminiscent, in Lovecraft, not only of Azathoth’s retinue of drummers and flute-players, but also of the ultimate cosmic rhythms and pulses described in “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” Dunsany’s work also brings up the motif of forbidden knowledge; when man, in Dunsany’s mythic scheme, was created, “the gods feared greatly for the Secret of the gods, and set a veil between Man and his ignorance that he might not understand.”

  208 Similarly, Dunsany’s prophet Yonath (Lovecraft derives from Dunsany his fondness for names ending in -th

  209 ) says, “Seek not to know” about the gods. This is patently a source of Lovecraft’s “The Other Gods,” in which the prideful Barzai the Wise pays dearly for his curiosity about the hidden gods—indeed, the Barzai episode rather closely parallels the Dunsanian account of Arb-Rin-Hadith, who (with others watching from below) makes bold to climb up to the abode of Mana-Yood-Sushai, and vanishes. The difference is, however, that he goes not in prideful quest but in supplication. (Also, Dunsany’s notion of veiled truths and human ignorance may well be echoed thematically even in such Lovecraftian places as the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” with its remarks about merciful ignorance.)

  Lovecraft also admired Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder, having by his own account drawn germinal inspiration for his 1921 story “The Nameless City” from pondering Dunsany’s phrase “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss”

  210 in that volume; Lovecraft even mentions the phrase in his story, a sonorous and cosmically suggestive expression which, in so impressing itself upon Lovecraft’s mind, had much to do with the birth of the Lovecraft Mythos. The Dunsany story “Probable Adventure of Three Literary Men,” in which the phrase in question occurs at the end, concerns the stealing of a treasure; one thief waits outside while the other two enter to find horror within, and surely this pattern is reflected in Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man.” Dunsany’s tale carries, in its purporting to make the thieves “respectable,” a tone of irony similar to, but not so heavy as, the ironic tone of “The Terrible Old Man.” The same Dunsany volume clearly influenced Lovecraft in other ways. Dunsany’s City of Never, in “How One Came, as was Foretold, to the City of Never,” is an obvious prototype of Lovecraft’s long-sought “sunset city” in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. In Dunsany’s tale the visitor sees, far away, another and greater city, an “unmeasured home of unknown colossi,”

  211 and one is reminded in general of Lovecraft’s penchant for the “further wonders waiting” pattern, and specifically of the realm of Kadath. Other pertinent motifs and images abound; in Dunsany’s “The Coronation of M. Thomas Shap,” for example, a man becomes king of a daydream kingdom, and one thinks of the ending of Lovecraft’s “Celephaïs,” where Kuranes, similarl
y devoted to dream as opposed to the waking world, comes to reign over the dream-realm of Ooth-Nargai, a very Dunsanian name. (The Dunsany story uses the names Nith and Thul, both occurring in Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar.”)

  Lovecraft’s favourite Dunsany story-collection was A Dreamer’s Tales. The story “Bethmoora” in that volume affected Lovecraft deeply; it is thematically related to “The Nameless City” in its treatment of an abandoned and mysterious desert city, and a number of images in the Dunsany tale are echoed in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and “The Quest of Iranon.” Similarly, in “Idle Days on the Yann,” when the narrator strikes a bargain with a ship’s captain for passage, one can scarcely doubt that the story influenced the similar scene in the Kadath novel. The story “The Hashish Man” in the same volume mentions “the Mountains of Madness”

  212 (hence Lovecraft’s title for his Antarctica novel) and features a monstrous emperor named Thuba Mleen who never blinks, bringing to mind Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth look”; it would appear that the influence of Dunsany on Lovecraft is not restricted to those Lovecraft tales commonly regarded as “Dunsanian.” Indeed, given that Dunsany’s most significant and lasting influences on Lovecraft are concerned with the notion of an artificially created mythology and with a grand cosmicism of scope, concepts that Lovecraft further developed for purposes very much his own, one readily concludes that the imitative language and tone of such early tales as “Celephaïs” and “The Quest of Iranon” are the lesser ways in which Lovecraft emulated the Irish master. Much more significantly, Lovecraft found in Dunsany an intriguing imaginative scheme (the notion of pantheons of elder gods) and a cosmic point of view, both of which he retained over the years and transmuted into facets of an art that came to range, in Lovecraft’s own way, far beyond the effusions of Dunsany.

  Lovecraft’s work also reflects the influence of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen,

  213 in a manner less extensive than in the cases of influence by Poe, Hawthorne, and Dunsany, but still of significance. Lovecraft discovered Machen in 1923 and remarked, of Machen and Dunsany:

  Machen is a titan—perhaps the greatest living author—and I must read everything of his. But Dunsany is closer to my own personality and understanding. Machen has an hysterical intensity which I neither experience nor understand—a seriousness which is a philosophical limitation.

  214

  Lovecraft’s letters reveal that, although he at first did not greatly admire Machen’s style, he came to think ever more highly of it as time went on, to the point where in 1931 he could call it “certainly one of the most fluent & harmonious imaginable.”

  215 Lovecraft greatly admired Machen’s “The White People,” deeming it not only Machen’s best work but the second best weird tale ever written—a close second, in Lovecraft’s opinion, behind Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” It is revealing to note exactly what most appealed to Lovecraft about Machen’s story:

  The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. In Machen, the subtlest story—“The White People”—is undoubtedly the greatest, even though it hasn’t the tangible, visible terrors of “The Great God Pan” or “The White Powder”. . .. the skilled author who knows what he is doing can often hint a thing much better than it can be told.

  216

  “The lack of anything concrete,” Lovecraft says of the Machen tale, “is the great asset of the story. A weird tale is not an account of things & happenings, but a skillful transcript of a certain sort of human mood.

  217 Certainly, one of the chief tenets in Lovecraft’s view of the art of fiction is precisely this realization—that it is more powerful to hint than to describe photographically, that a horror suspected is more lasting than a horror seen; or as Servius would have it, “Ars poetica est non omnia dicere” [The secret of poetic art is not to tell everything]. While Lovecraft seems to have been inclined to practice this dictum anyway, the inclination was most probably strengthened by his exposure to Machen. Indeed, one finds in Machen generally a certain mindset which, though Machen and Lovecraft differed significantly in their world-views, Lovecraft must have found in consonance with his own mind and emotionalities. Machen was taken all his life with the feeling that in some mystical way the world is not ultimately what it appears to be, that there lies beneath the surface of things some secret, inner world not evident to the common eye. While it is obvious from Lovecraft’s letters that he, too, had this feeling from childhood, prior to and independently of his reading of Machen, it seems highly likely that Lovecraft’s sense of hidden substrata of reality and his fictional articulation of that feeling were magnified by his pondering of Machen’s writings. Just as he found in Dunsany, Lovecraft found in Machen patterns of thought and feeling that he himself was already naturally inclined to embrace.

  One may find specific areas of probable influence in some of the Machen works that Lovecraft most admired. Machen gives an account, in “The Great God Pan,”

  218 of a young woman who by experimental brain surgery is made to see the god Pan, and who in consequence gives birth to a normal-looking but inwardly horrible child, Helen Vaughan. Surely this notion of a child sired by a god is a source of Lovecraft’s account, in “The Dunwich Horror,” of the Whateley twins sired by Yog-Sothoth; Lovecraft rather appears to wish the reader to know of this influence, for he actually has Henry Armitage in the story remark, “Great God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal!” Further, Wilbur Whateley’s deciphered diary speaks of the Voorish sign, a borrowing from Machen, and mentions the ancient Aklo language (in which also is couched the deciphered text in “The Haunter of the Dark”), derived from Machen’s “Aklo letters” in “The White People.”

  219 In Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder,”

  220 one finds a marvellous scene in which a young law student, who has in error been given a drug transmuted by chemical imperfection into dreaded Vinum Sabbati, suffers a horrible dissolution:

  There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch.

  221

  The ending of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” may well owe as much to this scene as it does to Poe’s “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

  More significant than single instances of parallel imagery is the fact that Lovecraft seems to have found in Machen a notion of lasting impression—the notion of myth-connected but real survivals from the past. (Lovecraft, of course, also saw this notion in Algernon Blackwood and Charles Lamb, as the epigraphs to “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror” attest.) Machen continually refers to his “little people” and other entities still dwelling in lonely places, and not only does this idea find lodgment in such specific Lovecraft tales as “The Whisperer in Darkness” (in which the Vermont woods are infested with long-surviving and myth-prefigured beings, and in which Lovecraft again actually mentions Machen and the “little people”)—the notion of unthinkable present continuity with the past is one that becomes central to the whole development of the Lovecraft Mythos. The Providence master carries his conceptions to cosmic levels, of course, unattempted by Machen; but the imprint of the Machen influence with regard to the survival motif is clear, an influence more pervasive and consequential than any merely stylistic influence could have been.

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  Epilogue: General Conclusions

  The corpus of his work in the field of horror fantasy establishes Howard Phillips Lovecraft as a unique figure in literature. Lovecraft grows out of an exceedingly rich literary background, reflecting the linguistic integrity and beauty of his beloved Graeco-Rornan classical authors, the tasteful sense of proportion and restraint of his admired eighteenth-century masters of the language, and the thematic, imagistic,
and conceptual influence of a host of worthy writers, chief among them Poe, Hawthorne, Dunsany, and Machen. Above all, Lovecraft is an original thinker whose best brush-strokes on the canvas of dream are unmistakably his own style.

  Lovecraft derives from Poe a lasting concern with tenebrous themes and a psychological frame of reference in which the fictive protagonist is tragically alone with overwhelming private horrors. From Hawthorne, Lovecraft derives a pervasive sense of the appropriateness of his own legend-haunted New England as a setting for horrific fancies. Lovecraft derives from Dunsany the notion, already prefigured in his mind by classical studies, of pantheons of primordial, ultimate gods whose implications are sweepingly cosmic. From Machen, Lovecraft derives a lingering concern with survivals from a distant past thought long dead or of concern only in mythic terms, but which impinges unthinkably upon the present in stark reality. Lovecraft, however, is no merely “derivative” writer. He is much more than the sum of these parts, for in reflecting the various influences, far from merely emulating his models, he assimilates them for his own distinctive purposes, transcends and transmutes them, blends them with the fecundity of his own imagination to produce works that are highly original and characteristic of Lovecraft alone. His tales may be set in Hawthorne’s New England, but in the preter-Dunsanian cosmicism of their implications they reach to the stars and beyond, to the nebulous realms outside of all being. Lovecraft’s Machenesque survivals from the past are no mere fairies of the wood; they are the untold universal past itself, in all its mind-shattering significance for man. In the psychology of Lovecraft’s narrative stance, man is Poe’s sufferer of the torments of private horrors—but the horrors are those of the ultimate abyss, on a level of cosmic awe unhinted at by Poe. Lovecraft creates a fictional universe in which man lives only in circumstances of irony, the supreme irony of being just sufficiently sensitive to feel the poignancy of his own mote-like evanescence in the grand scheme of things; this “ironic impressionism” is what is unique in Lovecraft. The horrors that unfold through the medium of human perceptions and responses are horrors that reduce the very perceiver to utter insignificance. As the past reveals itself to man’s hapless eyes, he finds that while his feet are on New England soil and his eyes are on the stars, his soul is nowhere at all, for the cosmos is uncaring; ultimately, the gods of the Lovecraft Mythos are the gods of chaos.