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

by Donald R. Burleson

  127 . Evanore Beebe’s niece Thyra V. Calkins of Ludlow, Massachusetts, verified for me, in a telephone conversation of 20 March 1979, that the whippoorwill legend, though somewhat embellished by Lovecraft, was an actual story told in the Beebe family.

  128 . The Arkham House printing of the story commits a grave textual omission on p. 179. In line 23 between “non-human” and “greenish tinge” should be the words “side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the”—words all clearly present in manuscript, and given correctly in the April 1929 Weird Tales printing.

  129 . Letter from H. Warner Munn to me, 4 October 1977. I am forever indebted to my departed friend Harold Munn for this information, and for the detailed directions by which I was first able to find the “Bear’s Den” ravine, a highly significant site.

  130 . Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 19–32. In July 1927, only a few months after writing “Pickman’s Model,” Lovecraft took his friend Donald Wandrei to the neighbourhood on which the setting was based, but found to his dismay that it had already been torn down to make way for new construction.

  131 . Lovecraft, “The Silver Key,” in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 386–97. This text of the story omits the following passage (present in manuscript) at the beginning of line 20 before “and”: “and he believed it because he could see that they might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish” [comma].

  132 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 4.177, 6 April 1933, to E. Hoffmann Price, discussing their planned sequel to the story, Price’s version of which Lovecraft feared was too intellectualised to match the original story.

  133 . Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 260–68.

  134 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.94, early December 1926, to August Derleth.

  135 . In Arkham House editions, the word is printed with dieresis, “faery”; but in manuscript the dieresis is absent.

  136 . Lovecraft, History of the Necronomicon. A facsimile reprint of Lovecraft’s handwritten draft is reproduced in Willis Conover’s Lovecraft at Last, pp. 104–5.

  137 . Lin Carter has claimed (see his edition of Lovecraft et al., The Spawn of Cthulhu, p. 101) that Lovecraft himself “quite likely” derived the idea for his Necronomicon from reading Chambers’ The King in Yellow; this is chronologically impossible, for Lovecraft’s letters (see Selected Letters, 2.127, 12 May 1927, to Clark Ashton Smith) clearly show that he did not discover Chambers’ horror fiction until six years after his first use of the idea of the Necronomicon. For a plausible possibility concerning the origin, see my discussion of the Hawthorne influence, in Chapter 8.

  138 . Lovecraft, “The Curse of Yig,’ in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, pp. 252–67.

  139 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.232, 9 March 1928, to Zealia Brown Reed (Bishop).

  140 . Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 347–413.

  141 . L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography, p. 245.

  142 . Lovecraft, “Yule Horror,” in Collected Poems, p. 87. The poem in manuscript carried the title “Festival” and contained a fourth stanza deleted by Farnsworth Wright for Weird Tales; see Lovecraft, Uncollected Prose and Poetry, Vol. 3, p. 23.

  143 . H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 212–77. Unfortunately, this edition of the story contains several textual errors which, some of them, seriously distort meaning. In the opening paragraph, line 6 of p. 212, between “deep” and “things” there should be “extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the” as in the manuscript. On p. 220, in the text of Akeley’s first letter to Wilmarth, in the letter’s line 20 “agreeing” should be “arguing” and on the next to last line of that page “would feel” should read “would not feel.” In the first line of p. 246, “we” should be “they.” And, most absurdly, the telegram signature “AKELEY” on line 3 of p. 237 should read “AKELY” to conform to the sense of the following paragraph, and does so read in manuscnpt.

  144 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.379–80,19 June 1931, to J. Vernon Shea. Interestingly enough, Lovecraft, in an unpublished letter of 13 July 1931 to Robert Barlow, remarked, “I had thought of some possible later story dealing with Yuggoth, Akeley, & the Outer Ones, but may never get around to it.” (John Hay Library, Brown University.) It is entirely possible that Lovecraft simply thought better of such a sequel, the open-ended intrigue of the denouement of “The Whisperer in Darkness” probably being best left unenlarged upon.

  145 . See my article “Humour Beneath Horror: Some Sources for ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness,’” in Lovecraft Studies, 1, No.2 (Spring 1980), pp. 5–15.

  146 . I am indebted to Vrest Orton for his letter to me of 21 January 1977, in which he was able to recall that the farm family living near the summer house was named Lee; it was following this thin but crucial lead that enabled me to identify and visit “the old Akeley place,” where the current owners John and Ann Dixon received me and my fellow visitor Tom Fletcher with much hospitality, for which I am eternally grateful. The farm is set in a secluded region which indeed must have worked powerfully on Lovecraft’s imagination.

  147 . Regarding the name Shub-Niggurath, it is perhaps more than coincidence that “Shub” phonetically backwards is precisely “Bush,” calling to mind Lovecraft’s revision client Reverend David Van Bush, whom he expressly detested. Whether the rest of the name is echoic of Lovecraft’s much-discussed collective disliking of black people is open to argument. Lovecraft may have drawn some inspiration for Shub-Niggurath, as described, from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I, where there is a “monster vile,” half serpent and half woman, who has “a thousand yong ones” (I, i, 1. 131).

  148 . Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 1–100.

  149 . Lovecraft would scarcely be happier with the Arkham House editions, in which there are still numerous textual errors. Most notably, two large sections of text are missing entirely. On p. 34 of that edition, line 24, at the end of the paragraph (ending” . . . say”) should be the following: “Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.” On p. 36, line 26, at the end of the paragraph (ending “. . . party”) should be added the following: “Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shocking primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presence of the things must have cooperated with the oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in driving Lake’s party mad.”

  150 . Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 308–69.

  151 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 4.17, 18 February 1932, to Farnsworth Wright. Willis Conover, in Lovecraft at Last, says that Lovecraft said that the story was rejected, but it appears that in fact it was never even submitted; possibly Lovecraft’s remarks to Wright did not elicit any request to see the story, and Lovecraft characterised this as an actual consideration and rejection.

  152 . Zadok Allen is probably based on an old Civil War veteran who once helped the young Lovecraft and his friends build their clubhouse in the woods of Rehoboth, Massachusetts; Allen pronounces chimney a
s “chimbly;” and Lovecraft in letters pointedly records the old veteran as having done so.

  153 . Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House,” in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 248–83. In manuscript there is no hyphen in “Witch House” as in the Arkham House printings.

  154 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 4.154–55, 16 February 1933, to Farnsworth Wright, and p. 156, 27 February 1933, to Richard Ely Morse.

  155 . Lovccraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 281–307.

  156 . The Arkham House text reads “shaggoths” but is in error; Lovecraft wrote “shoggoths’ as usual in manuscript. The passage quoted contains various other orthographical errors, here corrected.

  157 . Lovecraft, “The Mound,” in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, pp. 305–72. By comparison with the manuscript, this text of the story is very badly misprinted.

  158 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.88, 3 December 1929, to Clark Ashton Smith.

  159 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.95, 19 December 1929, to Clark Ashton Smith.

  160 . Hilariously enough, the Arkham House text, on p. 327, by way of a bizarre typo, refers to the beings as the “Old Bones.” One wishes that Lovecraft could have seen it.

  161 . Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 398–432.

  162 . Price’s manuscript of “The Lord of Illusion” survives in the Lovecraft collection at the John Hay Library, Brown University.

  163 . Lovecraft, A History of the Town of Quebeck, in To Quebec and the Stars, ed. L. Sprague de Camp, pp. 111–309.

  164 . Lovecraft, “Fungi from Yuggoth,” in Collected Poems, pp. 109–34.

  165 . See R. Boerem, “The Continuity of the Fungi from Yuggoth,” in H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, pp. 222–25. Boerem classifies the sonnets into seven sequential groups (I–III, IV–VI, VII–XII, XIII–XXI, XXII–XXVII, XXVIII–XXXIII, XXXIV–XXXVI), citing broad thematic commonalities, respectively: introduction and anticipation of escape from the present, transition to dream scenes, mental images showing effect of the unearthly on the earthly, the ancestral earth, the void outside time and matter, the sense of the marvellous, and return from the dream-spheres.

  166 . Lovecraft, “The Messenger,” in Collected Poems, p. 91.

  167 . Lovecraft, “The Wood,” in Collected Poems, pp. 71–72.

  168 . H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow out of Time,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 370–431. The Arkham House text follows the text as printed in Astounding Stories, where editor F. Orlin Tremaine and his colleagues butchered it by senselessly and arbitrarily chopping Lovecraft’s paragraphs up into shorter “paragraphs” to produce more “white space” for a more attractive appearance on the page. Lovecraft’s friend Donald Wandrei mentioned to me (telephone conversation, 22 March 1981) that when he took the manuscript of “The Shadow out of Time” to Tremaine, the latter, not having time to read it, published it solely on Wandrei’s recommendation; Wandrei mentioned that the misparagraphing was not personally Tremaine’s fault, but was due to certain printers’ conventions of the day. Wandrei also told me, however (telephone conversation, 22 February 1981), that Lovecraft was so disgusted at the misprinting both of At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” that he considered them both to be unpublished works! Unfortunately, the manuscript of “The Shadow out of Time,” though it was supposed to reside with Robert Barlow (who gave his Lovecraft papers to the John Hay Library at Brown University), is missing. Only a small scrap of typescript survives, and its paragraphing, compared with the printed text, strongly suggests that the entire text is indeed thus mutilated-- but to any discerning reader, no such proof is required. A good example is the idiotic “paragraph” on p. 382 of the Arkham House text beginning “Flowers. . . .”

  169 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.217, 11 November 1930, to Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft here suggests for Smith’s use the notion of a man finding an ancient parchment penned in his own hand, with time-travel implications.

  170 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.120,6 March 1935, to Emil Petaja. The same remark about destroying the manuscript is made in later 1935 letters. (See also note 168.)

  171 . Edmund Wilson, in his astonishingly unperceptive essay “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous,” refers to the story as “hack-work,” remarking that the Great Race utterly falls short of terrifying him, and missing the point entirely that the real horror of the tale is one of cosmic implication; this myopic reading is wholly unworthy of the “dean of American criticism.” See H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, pp. 46–49.

  172 . Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 98–120.

  173 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.156, 30 April 1935, to Robert Bloch.

  174 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.224, 12 February 1936, to E. Hoffmann Price.

  175 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.413–15, 20 February 1937, to Arthur Widner. This letter was written twenty-three days before Lovecraft’s death.

  176 . Exploring the real church, St. John’s on Federal Hill in Providence, I have observed, in a dusty tower room much like the one described, an actual ladder leading to an overhead loft and trap door. The age and decreptitude of the ladder forbade any safe further exploration.

  177 . Lovecraft, “In the Walls of Eryx,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 269–96.

  178 . Lovecraft and Robert H. Barlow, “The Night Ocean,” in Uncollected Prose and Poetry, pp. 48–66. (This is the story’s first publication, except for an Italian translation appearing in 1976). See also my review in Lovecraft Studies, 1, No. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 40–46. I have, however, revised somewhat downward my estimate of the amount of the writing Lovecraft is likely to have done.

  179 . Lovecraft, 20 February 1937, to Duane Rimel, John Hay Library, Brown University.

  180 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, Y, 36, 24 September 1934, to James F. Morton.

  181 . Lovecraft, as “Where Once Poe Walked,” in Collected Poems, p. 88.

  182 . Lovecraft, “To Klarkash-Ton, Lord of Averoigne,” in Collected Poems, p. 92.

  183 . H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.173, 3 May 1922, to Frank Belknap Long.

  184 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.378, 19 June 1931, to J. Vernon Shea.

  185 . Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe , p. 642. All further Poe references are to this volume.

  186 . Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” p. 103.

  187 . Poe, “Ligeia,” p. 656.

  188 . Poe, “Ligeia,” p. 656.

  189 . Poe, “Ligeia,” p. 661.

  190 . Poe, “The Black Cat,” p. 223.

  191 . See also my article “H. P. Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence,” in Extrapolation, 22, No.3 (Fall 1981), pp. 262–69.

  192 . Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables, in The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, pp. 245, 258. Further references to Hawthorne are to this volume except as noted for Hawthorne’s American Notebooks.

  193 . Lovecraft, “The Picture in the House,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 12–22.

  194 . Hawthorne, p. 259.

  195 . Hawthorne, p. 254.

  196 . Hawthorne, p. 247.

  197 . Hawthorne, p. 412.

  198 . Lovecraft, The Notes and Commonplace Book, p. 21.

  199 . Hawthorne, Passages from the American Notebooks, p. 26.

  200 . Hawthorne, Passages from the American Notebooks, pp. 209–10.

  201 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.110, 7 March 1920, to Rheinhart Kleiner.

  202 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.243, 30 July 1923, to Clark Ashton Smith.