Tour de Lovecraft- The Tales

by Kenneth Hite

  That said, lyrically, it’s just bad Poe. Derleth wrote that if discovered in an attic with no author’s name “The Outsider” would “pass for a lost tale of Poe,” to which I would add that there would be little doubt why Poe left it unsigned and put it in an attic. It’s not that the lugubrious, purple style of the thing is bad, in and of itself—Poe could, and did, churn out prose much like it, in really good stories. But in “The Outsider,” it’s just not in service to anything. Where Poe uses the warm fog of such language to create a psychological sensation linking the reader and narrator while exploring the narrator’s inner life, Lovecraft’s wordage is just larded on to extend the distance to the ending (which he lifted from Hawthorne).

  Lovecraft adds insult to injury by using an epigraph from Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which is as full of sex and life and genuine mystery as “The Outsider” isn’t.

  Amazingly enough, George Wetzel manages to say something actually interesting about the piece on a mythical level, so I’ll rip him off. He casts “The Outsider” as one chapter in Lovecraft’s evolving ghoul-cycle, pointing out that the tale’s combination of crypts, dreams, and a decayed corpse with fading (or ancient) human memory are all topoi of Lovecraft’s ghouls. For Wetzel, the ghoul-cycle begins with the unnatural extension of life through cannibalism in “Picture in the House,” continues with the twin themes of self-discovery and buried ancestral horror in “The Outsider” and “The Rats in the Walls,” and emerges triumphantly in “Pickman’s Model” and Dream-Quest, where the full ouroborous pattern of the ghouls is revealed. Although it’s dressing the corpse in borrowed cerements, I have to say this is almost a convincing reason to re-read “The Outsider.”

  The Other Gods

  [August 14, 1921]

  By comparison, here is an example of a failed Dunsany pastiche. Lovecraft attempts Dunsany’s lightly terrifying (or terrifyingly light) parable mode (as shown to best effect in Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods) and, as one might expect, comes crashing to earth like Atal the priest. “Ulthar” notwithstanding, delicate arabesque was not Lovecraft’s metier, especially not in 1921, and double-especially not when he attempted to combine it with cosmic sublimity. Where Dunsany was a musical fabulist, all silver and moonbeams, Lovecraft was a Gothic architect; he worked in stone and leaded glass, and it is a tribute to HPL’s powers in his own media that his later works fling up such vertiginous traceries of language and concept (eventually surpassing Dunsany).

  ****

  I forget which writer it was (Faulkner? O. Henry?) who gave something like this advice to his colleagues: Cross out the first page of every story. Then keep crossing out paragraphs until you get to the actual beginning.

  This isn’t actually true with most Lovecraft. The prolonged serpentine advance from mundanity to Otherness is usually vitally necessary; Lovecraft’s intricate structure requires such a survey for its foundations.

  But this is not the case with a pure fable. Specifically, “The Other Gods” would be immensely better without its first five paragraphs. I’d also venture to say that it would improve mightily if it followed Lovecraft’s standard terminal-climax structure and ended three paragraphs earlier. Re-read that middle section, beginning with “Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert…” and ending with “Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!” and see if I’m not right.

  Herbert West—Reanimator

  [September 1921-June 1922]

  Re-reading this piece, it’s not nearly as terrible as I remember it being. Perhaps this is because I’m low-balling it, but I don’t think so; it’s a genuinely rollicking story, although not without stylistic discord. If it didn’t have to keep summarizing itself (the editor was an idiot) it would be still better.

  ****

  “Reanimator” is one of the earlier uses of (I would argue) a good fictional trait fairly specific to HPL—the exercise of Lovecraftian philosophy, by a Lovecraft character, ends in disaster. (Imagine an Ayn Rand novel in which the selfish, brilliant protagonist dies hated, miserable, impoverished, and alone. Or, to bring it down a notch, a Robert E. Howard story where the proud barbarian is tricked by the wily city folk and winds up exhibited in a zoo or pulling a manure cart for a plantation.) Herbert West, like Lovecraft, believes that life is purely chemical—and demonstrates that belief, and inevitably loses not only his life (in gruesome fashion) but earlier, his scientific mind as well (replacing it with “mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity”). In what we might call his “suicide-by-philosophy” trope, Lovecraft regularly kills his Mary Sues, often for the crime of believing what Lovecraft believes. Not always—Randolph Carter survives where Charles Dexter Ward doesn’t (although Joshi argues fairly plausibly that both those novels are conscious epilogues to previous Lovecraftian aesthetics)—but more often than not.

  ****

  Re-reading the story, I was struck again by the sheer awesomeness of Herbert West’s tissue culture:

  …obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile…It was better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.

  I swear, if I ever came up with something that neat, I’d take the rest of the week off.

  The Music of Erich Zann

  [December 1921]

  Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating something else! There are my “Poe” pieces & my “Dunsany” pieces—but alas—where are any Lovecraft pieces?

  — H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929

  In this oft-quoted passage (made popular by—sigh—August Derleth while taxonomizing HPL’s fiction), Lovecraft is probably referring to his poetry. Even the harshly self-critical HPL admitted that, by 1929, “Only in some of my more realistic fictional prose do I shew any signs of developing, at this late date, a style of my own.” In my estimation, “The Music of Erich Zann” (written in 1921) is the first, and among the finest, of his “Lovecraft pieces.” Neither Poe nor Dunsany could have conceptualized it.

  In it, Lovecraft calves away almost everything except the pure cosmic horror; there are no eldritch tomes, no mongrel swarms of dubious ethnicity, no invocations of Kjh’nrujd, the Masher of the Keyboard. There isn’t even any exposition, and certainly no closure—Zann’s narrative (“a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him”) is literally blown away into the void. Joshi complains that the tale is too minimalist, which is a bit rich coming from him.

  Likewise, the prose is carefully rationed, the adjectives used as buttresses, not as gargoyles. The leitmotif of silence and sound is perfectly maintained throughout, from the “silent and reticent” residents of the Rue d’Auseil through the “howling” music played by the mute violin-cellist to the absence of wind at the end. The story is almost elemental in structure, while still being entirely evocative and unsettling. Lovecraft even manages to limn Paris—if only the Paris of Hugo or Leroux—in a few architectural details, performing the difficult task of providing setting and anchor for a story that takes place almost entirely in two rooms of an anonymous boarding-house.

  ****

  Note, by the way, how Lovecraft underlines the unnamability of the horror—it’s literally never expressed in words. The German narrative disappears before it can be read, and the music defies words and description. But it occurs to me that, like Walter Gilman’s hyperspatial insights, Zann’s music—and the music that the Outside plays through his frozen corpse—could be expressed in mathematics.

  Hypnos

  [March? 1922]

  Okay, “Hypnos” is just crazy-making. It’s chock full of vitally interesting bits. First of all, there’s the strong hint that the narrator’s friend is the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe: immense brow, dark liquid eyes, black hair, dreamer, aged forty as Poe was wh
en he died, references to “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Man in the Crowd” among other Poe tales, and the Poe-esque structure of the story itself. Plus, there’s the “evil star” business again, more Greek myth, the possibities of time-travel and destiny loops (done better, or at least more interestingly, than in “The Silver Key”), and the allusions to Einstein (complimentary) and Freud (dismissive). Even the setting—the London demimonde—is interesting in its oddly random way, and there’s weird sexual-obsession vibes with the whole Muse angle which not even Lovecraft could have been unaware of.

  Plus, the story gives another example of Lovecraftian supra-dimensional magic, blending “dream travel” a la Randolph Carter and hyperspatial exploration a la Walter Gilman. The narrator’s description of their experiments sounds an awful lot like a path-working in the modern Western occult tradition—which is weird, because this is too early for HPL to have read anything by Crowley or the like. Lovecraft’s exposure to the formal occult remained very, very sketchy for someone of his interests and profession, he being far more interested (justifiably so given his narrative priorities) in authentic ghost and witch lore. He eventually tracked down and read Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic, but that was years after writing this story—as late as 1926 he was bemoaning his inability to find a copy.

  But for all that, “Hypnos” just doesn’t cohere. The bits fall all over the place, and the magic is just arbitrarily shoveled out. Part of this incoherence is intentional—it’s another unreliable narrator story, of course, and better at it than “Dagon.” Part of it is the occasional lurch into hysterical language in misbegotten imitation of Poe. (Yes, the narrator is a hysteric. But read this and, say, “The Black Cat” side by side, and see which one is clear when it needs to be and which one isn’t.) But a big part of it is just that I don’t think Lovecraft had it in him, in 1922, to do justice to the whole concept of human psychic exploration of the inhuman. (As contrasted with human physical, or even intellectual, exploration of the inhuman, a narrative that HPL clearly mastered: see At the Mountains of Madness for a seamless braiding of both.) And indeed, given that “The Dreams in the Witch House” doesn’t quite fulfill its potential either, maybe he never did.

  But man, a bad story has no business being this good. It’s like biting into a Jack-in-the-Box burger and realizing that some fool has made it with what began as Kobe beef.

  The Hound

  [October 1922]

  A silly story about silly people. Perhaps only someone as sexless as Lovecraft could describe the self-proclaimed decadence of these two aesthetes so hilariously, although Wilde could possibly have taken a run at it, if he’d been in the mood for a little self-parody. (Joshi claims “The Hound” is self-parody, and it certainly has something of that Kim Newman mashup feel, between the shout-outs to Beckford, Doyle, Poe, Bierce, and Huysmans.) If one ever filmed it, it would almost have to be with two hyper-serious adolescents, to keep the feel correct. Down to the brand names and set design—the endless Lovecraftian “Gother than thou” catalogue never seems more endless than in these introductory paragraphs, which borrow cred from the Symbolists, the pre-Raphaelites, the Decadents, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Goya, while one can only double up in helpless laughter at the notion of “nauseous musical instruments” for the production of “dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness.”

  Plus, the only attempt ever put to paper to wring italicized horror from the words “in the Dutch language.”

  ****

  But I like “The Hound” far above its merits. Not only does it introduce the Necronomicon, and give that lovely shout-out to the “corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia,” when I first read it as a hyper-serious adolescent, it actually worked for me. The titular hound is also just a really cool monster, an astral projection (literally, “the ghastly soul-symbol”) of the Dutch ghoul-lich who somehow learned the secrets of Leng way back in the 15th century. Indeed, the lich may have stolen the hound-amulet, and yet somehow escaped its judgement.

  ****

  Judgement, need I remind you, that arrives “astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial.” Astride… a Bacchanale… of bats… chittering in the Dutch language!

  The Lurking Fear

  [mid- to late November 1922]

  There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear.

  — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear”

  Or in other, better-written, words, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

  This is Lovecraft’s best terrible story. It is so artificial (“Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But I was saved by the very thunder that had summoned it…”), and so overblown (“an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils”), and so ludicrous (“Baleful primal trees…”) that it slithers—through tiramisu-rich prose that might as well be heavy metal lyrics (“a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning”)—all the way to the summit of high camp. Although Joshi is far too ready to play the “self-parody” card to justify Lovecraft’s more godawful slop, it is impossible to believe, in this story at least, that HPL wasn’t doing some portion of it on purpose, given the letter he wrote about this time on the pleasures of giving in to pure hackery.

  ****

  History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism.

  — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear”

  But even in the midst of such squamosity we see the outlines of a vast form rising. Just as “Reanimator” introduces Lovecraft’s intriguing and eventually quite productive trope of the suicide-by-philosophy, “Lurking Fear” (written in the same slam-bang, damn-the-climax style, and for the same cheapskate client) introduces the suicide-by-history, the protagonist whose interest in uncovering the past leads to his doom. It’s prefigured as suicide-by-archaeology in “Moon-Bog” and “Nameless City,” of course, but this tale is the first explicit narrative engagement at length with the researcher-hero. It transposes the exposition as narration into exposition as narrative—rather than the author filling us in on the history of the Jermyn family, we have the protagonist read up on the Martenses, and we read over his shoulder, as it were. (Lovecraft’s increasing skill in thus emotionally identifying us—the curious reader—with the protagonist doomed for his curiosity is perhaps under-emphasized in critical comment.) This trope flowers in almost all of Lovecraft’s Great Works, directly in “Call of Cthulhu,” Charles Dexter Ward, “Innsmouth,” and “Haunter of the Dark” and at close approach (often, again, as archaeology) in At the Mountains of Madness, “Shadow Out of Time,” “He,” “Whisperer in Darkness” and various of the revisions such as “The Mound.”

  It approaches “Whisperer in Darkness” not merely in that element, and in a shared note of Fortean-cryptid ghost-hunting, but in the very un-Lovecraftian arena of character. Our unnamed narrator (whose “love of the grotesque and the terrible… has made [his] career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life”) is much like the folklorist Wilmarth, with perhaps Randolph Carter as a third dimension for what George Wetzel might well call the ur-Investigator, the detective in the great mystery novel—or mystery play—that Lovecraft was writing. Badly, at first.

  The Rats in the Walls

  [late August or early September 1923]

  With all due respect to his two perfect Dunsany pastiches (“The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Doom that Came to Sarnath”) and to the under-rated “The Music of Erich Zann,” “The Rats in the Walls” is Lovecraft’s first fully-throated horror masterpiece. If Lovecraft had suddenly chucked it all away in March 1924, or gone on to write nothing but architectural travelogues, this story would still be remembered and anthologized.

  With stories this good, I don’t propose to spend quite as much effort dragging out their structure and such, or summarizing previous criticis
m.8 I can’t help, however, joyously remarking on the deft way Lovecraft turns Poe’s “House of Usher” inside out with this one. We get the same conceptual play on words, as Delapore descends simultaneously into the putrid bowels of his “house” (Exham Priory) and his “house” (the De la Poer lineage). Like Usher, Delapore’s line is extinct—his son dies of his WWI injuries. We get the same excitation of the sense of hearing as the symptom, almost the literal entry-way, for the horror.9 But unusually for Poe, “Usher” is not particularly (or at least not entirely) fixated on Usher’s interior psychological life, whereas equally unusually for Lovecraft, “Rats” is very much concerned with the interior life of Delapore. In this story, Lovecraft proves himself able to master Poe’s tools and move on—it serves as the solid foundation for his triumphant farewell to Poe, Charles Dexter Ward.

  ****