by Kenneth Hite
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Lovecraft, obviously, idolized Poe, calling him (incorrectly, but understandably) “my only model” or something to that effect in a quote I can’t seem to track down right now. He learned a vast amount from Poe; lessons best summarized by Lovecraft’s own enumeration of Poe’s virtues as a craftsman:
Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical knowledge of terror’s true sources which doubled the force of his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in merely conventional shudder-coining… Poe, too, set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship … we can constantly trace his influence in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently in the climax.
But unlike Poe, HPL is (usually) not really interested in any given human being’s psychology. Rather, Lovecraft’s heroes, like those of most Gothics, are societal proxies. They are stand-ins for the (shaky) structure of scientific rationality; a sort of mirror-image of the (John W.) Campbellian heroic Everyman, if you will. Lovecraft takes the characteristics of Poe’s “haunted man” and projects them onto humanity (and, as in all good Gothics, onto the landscape) stating effectively that there are cosmic truths which we cannot afford to look at, and fundamental limitations that no Faustian drive or scientific irony can overcome, because these limitations are innate in humanity.
It will take Lovecraft a while to figure this out for himself; there are a lot of very tiresome neurasthenic, hysterical narrators to come before he finds his more natural métier in dry, academic madness.
Essentially, then, where Poe was writing psychological horror (of, naturellement, a very emotional, Romantic bent), Lovecraft was writing existential horror. As early as “Dagon,” you can see it hatch.
Polaris
[May 1918]
It’s a shame that “Polaris” is so offputting for so many reasons, from the inanition of the narrator (“I was feeble and given to strange faintings”) to the really repugnant racism (Yay “tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar”! Boo “squat, hellish, yellow fiends [who] knew not the scruples of honour”!) to the really repugnant racism (“Inutos” = Inuit). (The whole polar myth is just soaking in racist broth; see Joscelyn Godwin’s summary of it in Arktos, if you haven’t already availed yourself.) The language is florid—what we’d call ‘Dunsanian’ if Lovecraft hadn’t written it a year before he ever read Dunsany. And there’s no shortage of supposed-to-be-exciting adjectives.
But it’s probably the most philosophically (if not structurally) interesting of these three early Lovecraft tales. Lovecraft wrote it to refute William James (or, rather, to refute a Jamesian friend, Maurice Moe), and the entire point of the tale is that we don’t know (nor does the narrator) which is the dream world and which the real world. (Think hard now—do we actually have any more reason to believe in the nameless “house of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp” than in the city of Lomar?) Layered onto that, the story strongly implies that the “dream world” of Lomar is our own world 26,000 years (one full precession of the equinoxes) ago, and hence: that time and consciousness and history are cyclic, that the soul is not individual or even time-bound, and that even today the intellectuals are nodding off on the peaks while our civilization enters its terminal state. Joshi chose wisely when he used this tale and “Shadow Out of Time” to bracket one volume of his Penguin edition—they’re almost identical in theme and even in aspects of content.
Lots of reasons to go back to “Polaris,” then, and not just because it’s where Lovecraft made up—and importantly, made up names for—his first a) ancient civilization, b) alien race (assuming the “Gnophkehs”aren’t just cavemen), and c) tome of forgotten lore, in this case, the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Plus a much cooler version of the “evil star” motif that he tries out again next, in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”
Somebody who wanted to recast the entire Mythos as a Spenglerian, neo-Platonist, Gnostic myth-cycle could do worse than build on the frozen foundations of Lomar.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
[Spring 1919]
Aside from its title having inspired a pretty rockin’ Smithereens song, this story is not worth much.
I’m normally not one for subversive readings for subversion’s sake—evil Sherlock Holmeses and noble Draculas are, if anything, more tiresome and hackneyed nowadays than mere pastiches are—but I’ve got to say that the only way I can even stand to re-read this story is by casting the “brother of light” as a kind of cousin to the Colour Out of Space. When it starts smarmily assuring Lovecraft’s Mary Sue4 about their noble kinship in the dream-world, or prating about how the poor hillbilly Joe Slater was “unfit to bear the intellect of cosmic entity,” I just want to root hard for Algol.
This is HPL at his most condescending, snobby, and faux-genteel, and it grates almost more than the racism, which is almost never at the core of any Lovecraft story, unlike the snide classism he presumes upon in this one. Of course, this was the era when elite, progressive eugenicists were faking research on white “Kallikaks” to support programs of euthanasia and sterilization for the “unfit lower orders,” and a lot of those narratives carried racial overtones as well. For example, the “Jukes” were of mixed race, as were the interestingly-named “Slaughters” of upstate New York, who may have been the “Slahters or Slaters” mentioned in the New York Tribune article Lovecraft read that helped inspire this story. (Although even here, Lovecraft goes out of his way to avoid a racial angle, describing Joe Slater as devolved “white trash,” and mentioning his blue eyes and blond beard.)
Lovecraft used his correspondents in the Catskills, and the historical nova, to some good effect. Also, the thought-radio is neat, and the notion of the separate worlds whose joining is fatal is always a good vein for Lovecraft to work, but even as a rehearsal for “Shadow Out of Time” or “Dreams in the Witch House” this tale is talky and substandard. It’s short, though, so that’s good.
The White Ship
[October 1919]
Although the tale obviously prefigures Dream-Quest, the later novel will essentially reverse this story’s moral. An unexceptionable, if unexceptional, immram, “The White Ship” is the sort of story that just sits there and breathes allegory at you, gravid with Symbolic Freight.
Take your pick:
The White Ship is the path to Self-Knowledge (Hermetic, Jungian, whatever, take your pick).
The White Ship is the True Soul, of which we cannot partake.
The White Ship is Dream.
The White Ship was sent by the ocean-soul to kidnap Elton; the story is an early sketch for “Shadow Over Innsmouth”.
The White Ship is Jesus; the story is about HPL’s regrets at being an atheist.
The Bird of Heaven is Jesus; the story is about HPL’s insistence that religion is hateful illusion meant to lead us away from happiness.
The White Ship is the illusion of Human Progress; trying to reach Cathuria leads only to watery Cthulhoid destruction.
The White Ship is the Psychopomp; Basil Elton is a continuously-reincarnate spirit of the Eltons, and the Bearded Man is his Lar, the spirit of his family.
The Bearded Man is Nyarlathotep, on the grounds that anything problematic in a Lovecraft story always winds up being Nyarlathotep.
The White Ship is a political allegory for Warren Harding, who evades all the real troublesome issues, tries to maroon you in a land of happy talk, but eventually smashes up when you follow him (West) into splendid isolation and normalcy.
The White Ship is a political allegory for Woodrow Wilson, who exposes you to horrible dangers,
strands you in pointless stagnation while claiming it’s for your own good, and wrecks everything when you follow him to Cathuria, which is the League of Nations, and hence impossible of attainment.
See how easy that is?
Me, I think that Darrell Schweitzer has it right and “The White Ship” is Lovecraft playing at allegory, that the message is transparent Epicureanism, and that it’s pastiching Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann.”
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
[December 3, 1919]
This is a terrific, terrific story. I’ve loved it forever. I set part of one of my early Call of Cthulhu roleplaying campaigns in Sarnath an unspecified number of years before the DOOM. (Time gates and dream-based time travel, since you asked.) This story is like caramel. I’m sure there are people who don’t like caramel, but don’t ask me to understand them.
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One real quick note on the city’s name: Sarnath, near Varanasi, is a historical city in India where the Buddha first taught the Dharma. This is almost certainly a coincidence.
Lovecraft thought he made it up, and then he thought he stole the name from Dunsany. He doesn’t seem to have known about the actual Sarnath in India at all.
If you ask me, it’s what happens when you start with ‘Sardathrion’ (the paradise city of the gods from Dunsany’s “Time and the Gods,” upon which this story is pastiched) and blend it with ‘Karnak’, which is probably what Lovecraft was thinking of given the similarity of the description of Sarnath to that of “hundred-gated Thebes” in Homer.
In support of this completely wild speculation, I’ll note that the same blend explains ‘Kadatheron,’ which also appears in this story.
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“Sarnath” is one of HPL’s three best pre-1926 tales, up there with “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Rats in the Walls.” And where “Rats” is his perfect ‘Poe’ story, this is his perfect ‘Dunsany’ story. (“Erich Zann” is his perfect ‘Lovecraft’ story to that point, although with “Call of Cthulhu” HPL goes and rewrites the rulebook for perfect Lovecraft stories.)
Like “Rats,” the tone and aim are slightly different than the model. (In this case “Time and the Gods,” primarily, but there’s lots of others in there.) But like “Rats” (and “Dunwich Horror,” his perfect ‘Machen’ story) the difference is an intentional culinary choice, in this case a surprisingly mature one given the story’s early composition—1919! Like I say, HPL writes nothing to touch it for two more years, although “Cats of Ulthar” comes perhaps close.
It’s a little denser than Dunsany (a custard, not a meringue). But it makes up for the added weight with both mythic resonance and horror. Dunsany’s tales sound like late-Classical myths, something spun up by Virgil or Ovid or one of those guys and translated by an Edwardian Irishman. Lovecraft’s best work sounds like early myth, something desperately smooshed together by Hesiod or hinted at by Euripides and translated by a shocked Cotton Mather.5 And Dunsany only very seldom gets into true horror, although he’ll make more small hairs stand up on the back of your neck than any other fantasiste this side of Fritz Leiber.
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This story is pregnant with Biblical weight, referencing Daniel at Belshazzar’s feast, the fate of Dagon before the Ark, and the fate prophesied for Edom in Isaiah.6 Even the dimensions of Sarnath and the fulsome description of its wonders recall the New Jerusalem in Ezekiel and Revelation. But of course, it’s Lovecraft, so the avenging God who brings the well-deserved DOOM to Sarnath is not YHWH but Bokrug, and his angels are demonic ab-human moon-spawn.
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There’s all kinds of other places you could go with this story. I’ll toss a little one out here for now, as it suits my own personal urban-mythic obsessions. Consider the Lovecraftian city topos. As with cities in most of the Western literary canon, a city is either Dis (Ib, Irem, New York) or Jerusalem (Sarnath, Providence, Randolph Carter’s ‘sunset city’). What this story tells us is that Dis and Jerusalem are the same city. Sarnath destroys Ib, Ib destroys Sarnath. We see the same evolution with Kadath and Pnakotus—both locus of horror and alien paradise, the horror of the place occurring precisely because the city was once an alien paradise—and in a twisted way with Innsmouth (a place of horrible exodus becomes a place of welcome pilgrimage) and even R’lyeh, the promised New Jerusalem of the apocalyptic future when the stars come right again.
“The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth.” You tell ‘em, Isaiah, and play that over on your non-Euclidean tintype.
The Statement of Randolph Carter
[late December 1919]
This is just a shaggy-dog story, albeit a better one than “The Unnamable.” Like “Dagon,” it was based on one of Lovecraft’s dreams, with him in the ‘Randolph Carter’ part and Samuel Loveman as ‘Harley Warren.’ Weirdly enough, Lovecraft and C.M. Eddy almost recapitulated this story in 1923, going in search of “Dark Swamp” near Chepachet, Rhode Island, but they couldn’t find it. Given the amount of Blair Witch-esque wandering around in the woods that HPL did with his friends and alone, it’s odd that he seldom uses that outdoorsy method of introducing the horror.
The big question, of course, is what English-speaking monsters could possibly have unnerved a fellow like Harley Warren? (Any number of things could have overpowered and eaten him, of course.) My current favorite notion is that the horde/swarm (whatever it is) attacks along, and consumes, the language center of its victim on a psychic level—becoming quite literally indescribable. (Kind of a cognitive-linguistic Gorgon or basilisk.) The act of perceiving, and attempting to make linguistic sense of, the creature(s) is thus a self-destroying act. (Again, like spearing a basilisk—its poison runs along the tool you use to apprehend it, and kills you.) By eating/absorbing Warren, it/they ate/absorbed his language center and could thus speak English to Carter.
Or, sure, they might have been ghouls.
The Terrible Old Man
[January 28, 1920]
Not actually a bad story, in an EC Comics kind of way, but far, far from Lovecraft’s best. I don’t find myself particularly annoyed by the arch diction (which Joshi, I think, is correct to derive from Dunsany’s tales), and at least Lovecraft doesn’t drag it out endlessly (a la “The Outsider”) in an attempt to prolong the journey to the punch line.
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And I really do like the Terrible Old Man, his necromantic bottles (which I’ve ripped off for a number of roleplaying game sessions since), and especially his front yard:
Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys…
This sentence-plus is nigh-perfectly done, although one might cavil at Lovecraft using “strange” and “oddly” to force the reader’s conclusion.
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Honesty compels us to admit that this is a Lovecraft story (although almost the only one) in which he gives ugly narrative (as opposed to descriptive) vent to his racism. Ethnic minorities (Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, as Joshi points out, represent Italians, Poles, and Portuguese, the three main non-Anglo immigrant groups in Providence in 1920) die horribly at the hands of Outside forces, directed by an old Anglo-Saxon New Englander. Worse yet, their deaths are obviously played for comic effect. Lovecraft dilutes some of the nasty taste by conflating Anglo-Saxon New England longevity with degeneration and horror (which he repeats in, for example, “Picture in the House,” “He,” Charles Dexter Ward, and even “Dunwich Horror”—all of which have Anglo-Saxon victims), but not all of it.
The Tree
[Spring? 1920]
Grecian argle-bargle from HPL, obviously modelled on Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, and just as obviously a mistaken choice by Lovecraft. I’m not sure why Lovecraft’s historical fiction skills don’t shine here, when his work in, say, Charles Dexter Ward demonstrates how good
his historical sense was. Maybe it’s just the seven years’ difference in the writing dates. Maybe it’s just that nothing much happens in the story at all, or that Lovecraft the writer was stultified by his own historical knowledge. For whatever reason, comparing “The Tree” to Robert E. Howard’s historical fiction (written with a far more slapdash approach) is kind of depressing.
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