by Kenneth Hite
Nyarlathotep
[November 1920]
Although we get bits of it in “Dagon”:
I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.
and a hint in “Arthur Jermyn”:
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species…for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
It’s in “Nyarlathotep” that we get Lovecraft’s full-blown Apocalypse. Like “Dagon,” “Statement of Randolph Carter,” and “Celephaïs” written from a dream, this prose-poem doesn’t even pretend to have a plot. It’s all incident. The parallels to the Book of Revelation are obvious—we have the turmoil of war and weather, and a harbinger figure emerges (out of Egypt, not Babylon—but then Christ came “out of Egypt” at least once) for his Second Coming, spreading an almost literally Antichrist-like gospel of technology and nightmare. He “opens the seals” and shows a vision of the end of the world, which then happens, leaving the New Heaven and Earth unified in Him. It’s really, really good, and repays re-reading both for under-emphasized tropes in Lovecraft (as in “He” and “Shadow Out of Time,” the Yellow Peril conquers the world in the future) and for language and theme. Only Castro’s ranting apocalypse from “Call of Cthulhu” is its equal, and it’s distanced by being placed in another voice.
****
I will lose my eliptonist’s license if I don’t note that pulp scholar Will Murray has theorized that Lovecraft based this story on the “electrical showman” tours conducted by Nikola Tesla around the turn of the century. Speaking in my skeptic’s voice, I don’t believe it—there’s no evidence—but I’d accept the notion that Tesla put some of the flavor into the atmosphere that Lovecraft drew on for Nyarlathotep’s atmospherics: “Then the sparks played amazingly around the head of the spectators” certainly sounds Tesla-ish, but the rest is just wishful thinking of the sort I heartily endorse.
From Beyond
[November 16, 1920]
“From Beyond” is evidence that I will overlook the worst excesses (and this story, in Darrell Schweitzer’s apt description, gibbers from start to finish) of Lovecraft’s early Poe-influenced style if he’s using it in the service of an actual Lovecraftian concept.
Here, Lovecraft revisits “Fall of the House of Usher,” (as he will again, far more ably, in “Rats in the Walls”) with a hyper-sensitive madman and his mostly anonymous guest, who exists almost solely to hear the exposition unfold and to plausibly describe the madman’s destruction. But where we see further (and more horribly) into Usher in Poe’s tale, in this one we see further (and more horribly) into the truth of the Universe.
I consider “From Beyond” to be an almost critical story for understanding the Cthulhu Mythos, despite its narrative flatness and the absence of any of the great names. Rather, its very simplicity of construction and paucity of specific myth-cycle linkage allows it to serve as a skeleton key to the more sophisticated later stories. This story is entirely a disquisition on the nature of the Outside.
We learn that the Outside is:
Much vaster than the perceptible cosmos, and that our dimensionality (including time) is purely local.
Entirely interpenetrative of our universe; as Uncle Chu would say, “The Outside is here, Mister Burton.”
Largely (even entirely) independent of our concerns.
Horribly dangerous, both physically and mentally, to those who encounter it, even fleetingly.
Inhabited by entities, both sentient and non-, as well as by intelligences that transcend sapience.
Possessed of its own hierarchies, ecologies, and struggles.
Accessible by human (and logically by in- or pre-human) technology.
When so accessed, capable of being harnessed or of expanding human abilities in ways strongly resembling legendary magic.
This metaphysics becomes common to the rest of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. With this metaphysics established, Lovecraft spends the rest of his career learning the exact ratio of Outsideness to put in a story, and the need for rigorous verisimilitude, even calm, in the “material components” of a tale. His best stories, are those that skirt the line between reality and Outsideness; what the radical critic Paul Buhle has so interestingly phrased thusly:
Lovecraft’s true strength, then, lay in his ability to give the modern sense of indeterminacy a weird and poetic interpretation. What man feared was not correctly speaking the ‘Unknown’…[but]…being on the verge of rediscovering something terrible and arcane…the more threatening because in another sense it was known already….
I like Buhle’s nod to Heisenberg in this quote, and the way it grounds Lovecraftian cosmicism not just in quantum physics (which, like the Tillinghast resonator, demonstrates just how meager our world of Newtonian experience and inference really is) but also Theosophy; the sense of knowledge that predates, but somehow informs, humanity. The Theosophical component is mostly absent from “From Beyond,” but the Heisenbergian component of the Mythos is never clearer.
The Picture in the House
[December 12, 1920]
Lovecraft wrote some great first lines in his day, but there’s only one or two that can stand up there with “Seekers after horror haunt strange, far places.” The trouble is that people seem to miss his further point, in the delight of the phrase—that your own backyard is scarier still, if you stop to look. This was one of Lovecraft’s unsung contributions to horror; bringing it home rather than setting it in “Italy” or “Geneva” or “Transylvania” or some nebulous no-place like Poe did. (Poe, after all, boasted: “Horror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” Yes, but.) True, Machen had the same instinct on occasion, and Stoker was clever enough to briefly bring a foreign vampire into the beating heart of Victorian London, but Lovecraft did it more intensely than either. And yes, HPL did his share of globe-trotting writing. But all that said, this seeking after horror at home is one of Lovecraft’s sterling “Copernican Revolutions” of weird fiction; no less influential for all the occasional Aristarchuses and Nicolases of Cusa before him. There’d be no Stephen King Maine without Lovecraft’s New England; it’s the richness of reference to something you know intimately that separates the real from the phony.
We’ll leave our introduction of the “familiar setting” revolution with this very striking HPL quote, from a November 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith:
I want to know what stretches Outside, & to be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down to the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form parts of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me.
Keep that quote in mind, especially once we get to Antarctica.
****
This, to make a very unfair comparison, is partially why I’m less than impressed with the adequate horror-pulp Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher. They’re supposedly set in Chicago, but for all the Chicago-ness they exhibit, they might as well be set in Arkham, or Metropolis. Or Toronto, which is apparently where they filmed the short-lived TV show.
****
It’s fun to peel the layers back on the titular picture, which is of a cannibal feast of “the Anziques.” (Again, HPL avoids centering on race, noting instead that the “Anziques” are depicted “with Caucasian features.”) Just now, I told you about the picture, as written by Lovecraft, as relayed by the narrator, as described by the Old Man, as illustrated by “the brothers De Bry,” from text
printed in a Latin edition, of a book originally written in Italian, by an author telling another traveler’s story. That’s eight levels between you and the cannibal feast. (And since HPL never actually saw a copy of Regnum Congo, but depended on descriptions and some reproductions in book by T.H. Huxley, that’s either one or two more levels in there somewhere.) This is a raw version of the interleaved, almost archaeological narrative that HPL will come to master fully in “The Call of Cthulhu.”
****
One more great phrase from the story, less well-known than the opener: “hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy…” Brrrrr.
The Nameless City
[mid- to late January 1921]
This is a fairly annoying story, in that it contains far too many good, powerful ideas than should be allowed in a story this badly written. One would like to just ignore it and move on, but one really can’t.
****
I’ll just note, for those joining us late, that the Nameless City is not Irem of the Pillars. The legend of Irem served as Lovecraft’s model, but here again as with Ib/Sarnath we see our city-cycle unfold, this time as a sort of photo-negative. The Nameless City spawns (?) the human imitation city Irem; Irem appears as the Nameless City dries out; the debased remnants of the Nameless City tear “a pioneer of ancient Irem” to pieces; the Nameless City’s inhabitants enter the hollow earth. In the Arabic legend, the same pattern: Irem is riding for a fall as Mecca rises; the debased Iremites drive off Hud (the lone “pioneer” from Mecca); Irem sinks into the sands.
****
Joshi is correct to notice that Lovecraft does the “history of the aliens by convenient bas-relief” better in At the Mountains of Madness, although even there it’s just never very convincing. The psychic visions of Robert Blake in “Haunter of the Dark” are at least plausible.
****
It is interesting to note that this, too, like “Dagon” and “The Temple” and “Festival” and “Celephaïs” and Dream-Quest and “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” is one of the “Oceanic Underworld/Otherworld” motif stories. The reptiles are aquatic (crocodile-seal blend), the Nameless City was a seaport, the Moore poem quoted (to better effect than Alhazred, in fact) mentions the “Sea of Death,” and the narrator fights “swirling currents” and a “torrent.” Lovecraft repeatedly plays with words like “abyss” and “gulf,” which can apply to caverns and ocean deeps alike. The inner world of the reptiles (“a sea of sunlit mist”) even resembles both the “Dreamlands” and Y’ha-Nthlei: “glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys.” Finally, Lovecraft took partial inspiration for this tale from a dream in which the protagonist in a “subterranean chamber—seeks to force door of bronze—overwhelmed by influx of waters.” Dreamland, Underworld, Ocean, Otherworld.
****
But how on earth does someone who can compose the wonderful simile of the ruins “protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave” manage to let themselves write, not a page later, that the “brooding ruins…swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet.” It’s like a Randall Garrett Lovecraft parody in its pluperfect wrongness. And it ain’t gonna get any better for the next five stories, sadly.
The Quest of Iranon
[February 1921]
One would be tempted to call this story Lovecraft’s riff on Robert W. Chambers’ “Repairer of Reputations,” which also concerns the fall of someone with delusions of royalty, except that HPL didn’t read that story until 1927. As it is, it’s more likely Lovecraft’s riff on Dunsany’s “Carcassonne,” and the interesting thing is that in 1921 Lovecraft’s prose is very much improved by his effort to pastiche Dunsany. Where faux-Poe unleashes all of Lovecraft’s bad purpuric habits without adding any of Poe’s genius for psychology, faux-Dunsany restrains Lovecraft, forcing him to hit a rhythm, while adding HPL’s superior instinct for plot to mitigate Dunsany’s occasional Irish tendency to aimless (though beautiful) blather.
****
The similarity between the fate of Iranon and the fate of returnees from the Otherworld (I’m thinking specifically of Herla’s men, but there are others) is another chalk-mark for our habit of reading the so-called “Dreamland” stories as “Faërie” stories instead. We might thus also consider Iranon an early example of what Wetzel would have called the “changeling motif” in Lovecraft, which he develops more powerfully with the ghouls and Deep Ones.
****
And let’s note, too, that like Leng and Kadath, Sarnath and Lomar (both of which feature in this tale) also show up in Lovecraft’s “real world”—the boundary between “Dreamland” stories and “Mythos” stories is so thin as to be risible. As thin, indeed, as one suspects Lovecraft considers the boundaries between the mundane world and any of his higher dimensions (the ultraviolet, hyperspace, the Dreamlands, the past of “He” and “The Tomb,” or the chaos outside Erich Zann’s window), or the boundary between life and death in “Cool Air” and “Herbert West” and “Pickman’s Model.” Thin-ness of boundaries, the lack of walls between the Mad and the True or the Sacred and the Profane (or, reductively, the Anglo-Saxon and the Foreign), seems to be a huge meta-concern spanning all of Lovecraft’s work.
######
The Moon-Bog
[early March 1921]
The saving grace of “The Moon-Bog” is that Lovecraft doesn’t appear to have cared enough about it to over-write, or at least he doesn’t fill every scintilla of narrative space with his Poe-esque spasms. On the other hand, aside from one or two concepts that will pay off big in later works—such as the notion of archaeology as the Gothic sin of ‘awakening the past’—and another intriguing example of lunar trouble (along with “Sarnath”), this story, by its very pro forma nature, is almost worse than something like “The Outsider.”
****
Again, though, I like the use of Greek myth as Elder Horror.
****
For racism-watchers, it’s interesting to note that despite the anti-Irish sentiments he sometimes expressed in HPL’s letters (“try and reason with an Irishman!”), the simple Irish workmen in this story are far more notable for their class than their ethnicity. They’re not even the colorful, childlike Irish country folk you meet in, say, Ray Bradbury’s Irish tales, but rather generic peasants, who drop exposition in their “wild legendry,” bustle about as servants, and then get kidnapped by the Fair Folk, er, naiads. The story could just as easily have been set in England (as its great descendant “The Rats in the Walls” was) or Pomerania or Spain; a remarkable deafness to setting from HPL, although the bog itself is a familiar New England swamp. For “The Moon-Bog,” HPL chose the setting because the piece was meant for a St. Patrick’s Day meeting of his amateur fiction group; Dunsany aside, Lovecraft doesn’t seem to have felt Ireland or the Irish to be much of an inspiration, for good or ill. Indeed, the only other Irishmen named as such in all of Lovecraft’s fiction are Detective Malone the “Dublin College man” from “Horror at Red Hook,” and the “great wholesome” policeman in “Haunter of the Dark.” While casting the Irish as good cops over their heads won’t win Lovecraft any awards for creative thinking, it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been.
In Lovecraft’s correspondence with Robert E. Howard, who claimed to be of “Celtic stock,” they seem to have agreed that the Celt provided a necessary leavening of poetry and magic to the hardy and stolid Anglo-Saxon, and that was about it. (Seriously, though, even in our enlightened era, who doesn’t have a little bit of that antique ethnography still rattling around in their brain?) One suspects that between Dunsany, Maturin, Stoker, and LeFanu, Lovecraft may not have shared quite the disdain and contempt for the Irish that his self-image as an 18th-century Englishman would otherwise demand.
The Outsider
[Summer 1921]
Just to start off, I think that there’s very little that can improve on Lovecraft’s own self-criticism:
To my mind this tale—written a decade ago—is too glibl
y mechanical in its climactic effect, & almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of the language. As I re-read it, I can hardly understand how I could have let myself be tangled up in such baroque & windy rhetoric as recently as ten years ago. It represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.
I haven’t got the vaguest idea why August Derleth made it the title tale of his first Lovecraft compendium, and I’ve got mostly condescending, insulting ideas why it seems to take such central place in Lovecraft criticism since. (Because it’s a great, bloody obvious hook for various forms of cheap or downright meretricious psychoanalysis, is why, for starters.) I will allow that if you’re interested in Lovecraft’s stories as studies of the human condition, as opposed to dissections of the human position in the universe, “The Outsider” is probably your “From Beyond.” I have a very hard time believing that someone who is both as tremendous a writer, and as manifestly mediocre at (because uninterested in) characterization, as Lovecraft was, can profitably be read that way, but you pays your money and so forth.