by Donald Tyson
We know this was the case for the story The Statement of Randolph Carter, in which the character of Carter appears for the first time, because on December 11, 1919, Lovecraft wrote a complete description of a recent dream in a letter to his friend, August Derleth, and it matches exactly the plot of his later short story, with one key difference-in the dream it is Lovecraft himself who is the protagonist, but in the short story the name has been changed from his own to that of Randolph Carter.
In the dream, Lovecraft and one of his many correspondents, a man named Samuel E. Loveman (1887-1976), opened a "flat sepulchre" in an ancient New England graveyard, and Loveman descended into the open sepulchre down a flight of stone steps to investigate the occult secrets of the regions below while Lovecraft remained on the surface, in communication with Loveman by means of a telephone wire that Loveman unreeled from a spool as he progressed. Lovecraft listened in horror as Loveman found more than he bargained for, and in a terrified voice declared that he was doomed, and that Lovecraft should flee from the open grave and save himself. Lovecraft, although paralyzed with fear, stated his intention to descend into the underground passage to help his friend, when a strange and inhuman voice came over the telephone wire, and spoke the fatal words, "You fool, Loveman is dead."
In writing the story based on this dream, Lovecraft did little more than change his name to that of Carter, and Loveman's name to Harley Warren. The location was moved from New England to Big Cypress Swamp in Florida. The story was published in 1920. In it is prefigured the Necronomicon, for Warren is said to carry in his pocket an "ancient book in undecipherable characters" when he descends into the opened sepulchre, and Lovecraft intimates that it was the possession of this dread book that was the cause of Warren's death. However, the Necronomicon is not named is this early story in Lovecraft's writing career, and it is unlikely that Warren's mysterious book was intended to be the Necronomicon.
At the end of his letter to Derleth, Lovecraft mentioned that he planned to turn this dream into a story, just has he had done with the dream that was the basis for his story The Doom That Came to Sarnath. He added, "I wonder, though, if I have a right to claim authorship of things I dream? I hate to take credit, when I did not really think out the picture with my own conscious wits. Yet if I do not take credit, who'n Heaven will I give credit tuh?"
This admission indicates very clearly to what degree Lovecraft was himself Randolph Carter, the explorer of dream worlds. It also supports the possibility that many readers of his works have suspected-that what he wrote about was not entirely fiction, and that Lovecraft was not merely dreaming but was engaged in a form of astral travel when he saw the incredible scenes and experienced the strange events he described in his writings. There are modern ceremonial magicians who take Lovecraft's Old Ones quite seriously, and who use Lovecraft's mythological ancient history of our world as the basis for a system of practical ritual magic.
According to the few brief mentions Lovecraft made of his idealized astral-projecting alter ego, Randolph Carter, he was descended from a long line of English occultists. One of his ancestors was a Crusader knight who studied magic from the Saracens while held captive and awaiting his ransom home. A Sir Randolph Carter was a magician in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. An Edmund Carter was almost hanged for witchcraft at Salem. Esoteric pursuits were an inherent part of Carter's bloodline. He was a resident of Boston in the house belonging to his paternal ancestors, a lover of the architecture of that city, and not surprisingly, a writer of tales of cosmic horror. He had graduated from Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University, so noted for its arcane library, and had served as a soldier during the First World War in the French Foreign Legion.
Randolph Carter appears in six of Lovecraft's stories: The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Unnamable, The Silver Key, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Through the Gates of the Silver Key.
In the earliest two tales, Carter is more of an observer than a participant. The dream plot of The Statement of Randolph Carter has already been related. In The Unnamable, Carter and his friend, Joel Manton, are spending an autumn afternoon lounging in the old burying-ground in Lovecraft's fictional New England town of Arkham, gazing at the mold-covered tombstones and talking about horror in literature. Carter relates a monstrous birth mentioned by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi Americana, of a thing more than beast but less than human, and casually elaborates on the history, saying that the monster did not die but lived to terrorize the town. He describes finding the bones of the thing in the attic eve of the dilapidated house that overlooks the graveyard. Suddenly something rushes out of the attic window of the house, where the misshapen, horned creature lived during its life, and both men awake in the hospital with injuries on their bodies. They were found in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the burying-ground, unconscious. Carter remembers nothing of what transpired, but Manton describes "a gelatin-a slime yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes-and a blemish. It was the pit-the maelstrom-the ultimate abomination."
The assumption may be made that the men were carried through the air to the field, upon which a slaughterhouse had once stood, by some sort of flying invisible monster, perhaps an early prototype of the concept Lovecraft would later develop into his Old Ones. Carter has on his body the bruise imprint of a split-hoof-the kind of print associated with the horned half-human monster of Carter's account. The Devil is noted for his cloven hooves, and the print is a sly acknowledgement by Lovecraft of the story The Man Who Went Too Far by E. F. Benson, at the end of which a corpse is discovered with such cloven footprints on its chest.
Only in the third story in which he appears does Randolph Carter become the active mover of events. The story is autobiographical, at least in an inner sense. It is quite obvious that Lovecraft was writing about himself in The Silver Key when he described Carter's revulsion with the materialism of modern society. Carter even went so far in his depression as to obtain a vial of poison, which he carried with him in case he decided to kill himself. This detail of the story is lifted from Lovecraft's own experience. While living in New York City, Lovecraft himself obtained a vial of poison and carried it with him for a time, so great was his unhappiness.
Lovecraft related that at age thirty, Carter had suddenly lost the key to dreams. He had been told so often by others that dreams were foolish and useless things that he began to half-believe these lies, even though in his heart he never could embrace the external material world or regard it as possessed of any importance. Carter subsisted in this unhappy state, neither a dreamer nor a materialist, for more than twenty years. For a time he wrote popular novels that sold well, but he sickened of their superficiality and burned in disgust the last works he had written.
Lovecraft described in The Silver Key Carter's attempts to recapture the magic of his youth through the study of both religion and conventional occultism, and how he ultimately discarded both pursuits as futile. His adventures with Harley Warren and Joel Manton are mentioned as part of this unrewarded quest for meaning during these middle years. At last, in disgust at his failure, Carter put aside all the esoteric trappings of his life and retreated into the past, redecorating his house in the Victorian style of his childhood. It was through the past that he remembered the way of dreaming. Not long after he turned fifty, he had a dream in which he talked in his old family house at Boston for long hours with his dead grandfather about his ancestors. His grandfather told him about Edmund Carter, who was almost hanged as a witch as Salem, and who before his death had hidden a great silver key in a antique box. The ghost of his grandfather indicated that the key was a legacy to Carter from the past.
Carter found this box in the attic of the Boston house where he was living. There is a curious lack of specificity as to whether the finding of the box occurs in the waking world or the dream world. Even before finding the box, Carter had begun to recapture the power of dreaming through his embrac
e of the things of his childhood. The box is presented in the story as a physical object, but the reader is never entirely certain that Carter is not still dreaming when he describes its discovery, and how its rusty iron lock was forced open by a fearful retainer of the family, who did not like the carved faces that leered at him from its age-blackened lid.
Inside this mysterious oaken box of mystery was an enormous key of tarnished silver, covered with arabesques, along with a scroll that was written over with the same indecipherable characters as were on a papyrus scroll in the possession of his ill-fated friend, Harley Warren, who years ago had descended the moldy steps into the rifled sepulchre at Big Cypress Swamp, never to return. Carter cleaned the key and kept it in its box beside his bed at night. His dreams became more real. He recognized that he was being called by them back into his own past. Lovecraft wrote of Carter, "Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things." Carter felt impelled to take the key to the ancient home of his maternal ancestors.
The maternal family homestead of the Carters is on the Miskatonic River not far outside of Arkham. The ruin of a white house occupies the crest of a hill, and from its windows it is possible to look across the river valley and see the spires of Kingsport in the distance, along with the ocean on the horizon. It is not far from the deserted and dilapidated farmhouse of Goody Fowler, a reputed witch who is remembered with dread in local legend. Lovecraft wrote that Carter's mother and her "fathers before her" had been born in the house, suggesting that at least four generations of Carter's family had occupied the dwelling, probably more. Carter had often visited the house during the first ten years of his boyhood. It was occupied until Carter was age twenty by his great uncle Christopher, and after Christopher passed away Carter allowed the house to remain vacant and untended for thirty years until it collapsed in upon itself. He returned to it at age fifty-four with the silver key, seeking to rekindle within himself the power of dreaming.
The silver key is the physical symbol for the key of the imagination that unlocks the gates of the dreamlands. In dreams, which are astral worlds, symbols have tangible substance. Lovecraft used the device of the key to indicate the intrusion of dream reality into physical reality, the merging of the real world with the dream world, just as the two were merged in Lovecraft's own life. As Carter climbed the hill to the abandoned family farmhouse, he saw sunlight glint from the old Congregational steeple on Central Hill in Kingsport. Suddenly he remembered that the steeple had been torn down years ago to make way for a new hospital.
With this realization, Carter was cast back in time forty-five years to 1883 and became once again a nine-year-old boy. He could not remember where he had obtained the key he carried in his pocket, but dimly recalled his uncle Christopher talking about it. All those who lived in the farmhouse, so many years dead, were alive once again. The next day, nine-year-old Randy Carter took the key to a strange cave known locally as the Snake-Den and entered it. What he did inside the secret depths of the cave was not revealed by Lovecraft, but when the boy emerged he was subtly altered, and had acquired the power of prophetic visions of the future.
The fifty-four year old Carter had vanished from the world on the night he sought to revisit his ancestral home near Arkham, while walking through the ancient woods. Lovecraft intimated that Carter was not dead, but had become a king of the dream city of Ilek-Vad, in the kingdom of Ulthar. In this way Randolph Carter achieved what Lovecraft himself always longed for but was never able to accomplish he left the world of waking reality completely behind him, and went to live in the dreamlands-or so it appeared in this story.
Lovecraft's novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is the longest of his mythos works. It relates a dream adventure that Randolph Carter experienced before the age of thirty, when he was still able to explore the dreamlands at will. It is astonishing and at times bewildering for the sheer complexity of the places, races, and individual beings it describes in the dreamlands. In this novel, Lovecraft lays out the entire geography of the dreamlands. How much of it is his deliberate invention, and how much is a description from his own dream explorations, it is impossible to know, but there are many elements that have been taken from Lovecraft's own dreams.
In order to find a way to return to a wonderful dream city that he had once known, but had forgotten how to reach, Carter undertook a convoluted quest of several months travel to the lofty and mystical mountain Kadath, which lies in the Cold Waste, so that he could consult the gods of the Earth who dwell on its summit. It transpired that the gods themselves had stolen Carter's city for their own to play in, so much did they love it. Carter took back his city and returned to the waking world the same night he had left it, for in the dreamlands time does not pass at the same rate it passes in waking life.
In the final story that directly involves Randolph Carter, Through the Gates of the Silver Key, we learn what happened to Carter when at age fifty-four he took his silver key and vanished into a grove of elms near ruins of the old Carter family farm. The tale is set in the New Orleans house of Carter's literary and financial executor, EtienneLaurent de Marigny, who is described as "this continent's greatest mystic, mathematician, and orientalist," and takes place four years after Carter's disappearance. Friends of Carter have gathered to preside over the division of his estate among his distant cousins, who are represented by one of their number, Ernest K. Aspinwall of Chicago.
In addition to the executor and the cousin, there is present Carter's friend Ward Phillips, a mystic of Providence, Rhode island, who was none other than Lovecraft himself under another name. He was described as "lean, gray, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered." He declared his conviction that since his disappearance, Carter had ruled in the dreamlands as king of the town of Ilek-Vad. The executor de Marigny also believed Carter to still be alive, but the cousins have forced the division of his estate by applying legal pressure. The final man present in the mansion is a mysterious turbaned figure who represents himself as Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benares, India, and who claims to have information concerning the fate of Randolph Carter.
Chandraputra relates to the others that Carter conducted a ritual with the key while standing under the elms at twilight four years ago, involving nine turnings of the key accompanied by incantations. This carried him back to his boyhood, when he was only nine years old. The next day the nine-year-old Carter entered the Snake-Den with the key and, in the inner chamber of the cave, used the key again before a natural arch surmounted with a curious feature resembling a carved hand. This time the key opened a gate to an extension of the Earth that lies outside of time.
Carter confronted the Guardian of the Gate, a being known as 'Umr at-Twil, the Most Ancient One, called by Alhazred in the Necronomicon the "Prolonged of Life." Concerning this guide, Alhazred wrote, "they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM." The Most Ancient One resembled a human form, but was half again as tall as a man, and shrouded entirely in a neutral-colored fabric in which there appeared to be no eyeholes through which he could see. He offered to show Carter the Ultimate Gate, and Carter accepted him as a guide.
Carter ascended onto a throne prepared for him atop a hexagonal pillar, alongside Ancients who served the Most Ancient One. With their help Carter was able to use the key to unlock the Ultimate Gate. As he passed through it, he looked back and saw that he had come through many gates of strange shape. He found his consciousness split into innumerable beings which he simultaneously inhabited. Yog-Sothoth, keeper of all gates, spoke to him and offered him access to the ultimate mystery, which he had in the past granted to only five other men.
Yog-Sothoth showed Carter the pettiness of the gods of Earth, who are wrapped up in the affairs of humanity. He taught him about higher dimensions, and conferred upon him a great truth: "That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality." This was undoubtedly Lovecraft's own belief, the quintess
ence of his life philosophy. Past, present, and future exist only because of the limitations of the human mind. Even change itself is an illusion-all things and all conditions exist simultaneously. All the living beings in the universe are merely facets of the people of the Ultimate Abyss; formless, ineffable archetypes of whom the chief is Yog-Sothoth. On all worlds, all great thinkers such as Randolph Carter are expressions of the Chief Archetype.
Somewhat imprudently, Carter asked the Chief Archetype to send him into the past to the world of Yaddith, and suddenly found himself inhabiting the inhuman body of the wizard Zkauba, a creature with a shape "rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated," with claws and a snout. His consciousness did not immediately gain control, as he had expected, but was initially overpowered by the consciousness of Zkauba.
In time, and with immense difficulty, Carter assumed control over his new body, and used the wisdom of Yaddith to physically travel back to Earth in his alien shell. It was his purpose to decipher the parchment that had accompanied the silver key, and by its correct use regain his human body. Such was the account given by Swami Chandraputra, who was none other than Randolph Carter in disguise, his alien body concealed behind a mask and loose clothing.
As this revelation was made to the three men present at the hearing, the mind of Zkauba regained control of his form and was able to escape the Earth by means of a large, coffin-shaped clock with four hands that was in the house of Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. The wizard recognized the true function of the clock, as a portal through time and space, and entered its coffin-shaped case, never to emerge again upon the Earth. He left the silver key behind. The fate of Randolph Carter remains unknown. He may still be battling for supremacy over the consciousness of Zkauba as the two minds in one body travel from world to world. Lovecraft wrote nothing more on the matter.