by Kenneth Hite
Lovecraft seems to be commenting subtly on his previous work, saying that none of his earlier approaches to horror fiction is as powerful as the [vaster] new one that embraces all three.
Note that Thurston, who assembles all three perspectives into a master (monster?) narrative, is Lovecraft’s first purely academic narrator, and will be far from the last.
Pickman’s Model
[September 1926]
I can shew you a house [Cotton Mather] lived in, and I can shew you another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk!
— Richard Upton Pickman
This is pretty much the core of “Pickman’s Model,” where history meets fear and legend, again rooted to a setting drawn with almost Pickman-like realism. Joshi is excellent where he notes that Pickman’s expressed aesthetics in painting are the same as Lovecraft’s in fiction. Note, by the way, the immense improvement over not quite six years between this work and “Celephaïs,” also about a rejected artist who winds up carried into an Otherworld, also intended as artistic “criticism of the deed.”
However, I confess that my absolute favorite parts of the story are the descriptions of Pickman’s pictures, especially “Subway Accident” (which is really just terrifying, implying some degree of official cooperation, at least in a cover-up of the ghoul infestation) and the Bierce-ian black joke of “Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried In Mount Auburn.” In the latter you can almost see Lovecraft’s wry smile as the provincial Providence man takes lit’ry Boston Brahminism down several notches.
Methinks Robert Bloch agreed with me—his magnificent novel Strange Eons opens with the protagonist discovering “Ghoul Feeding” in an old antique shop.
The story, in short, is excellent, and although I agree with Joshi that Lovecraft doesn’t quite carry off Thurber’s “hard-boiled” voice, I think it’s at most a minor flaw in a nearly perfected collage of horror, history, allusion, art-criticism, and black, bleak humor.
The Strange High House in the Mist
[November 9, 1926]
By the way, I’m almost forgetting to mention ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’, which impressed me with renewed power. It is like an eyrie from which the imagination can take flight to ‘worlds of undiscovered gold’.
— Clark Ashton Smith, letter to H.P. Lovecraft, March 11 1930
If anything, this note of Smith’s is an understatement. The estimable John Rateliff calls “Strange High House” Lovecraft’s “single best story,” which is going a trifle too far in my opinion, but it’s certainly HPL’s single best fantasy story, better even than “Sarnath” or “Cats of Ulthar,” not least because it has a complexity and a multi-dimensionality not usually found in Lovecraft’s fantasies—and not in his horror tales until At the Mountains of Madness or thereabouts.
“The Call of Cthulhu,” a truly great story, is by contrast essentially a dizzying, vertiginous fugue in one direction—“vastness” or “sublimity” or what-have-you. Every note, from every source, comes back to the same chords. But in “Strange High House” we have two dimensions working—Thomas Olney’s quest for something Other, which in Lovecraft’s “Dunsanian” tales is usually a noble thing (even a smugly noble thing, pace “Celephaïs”), and the impingement of the Other on the town of Kingsport, which begins in standard Lovecraftian spook-mode as dangerous, then seemingly joins up with the “noble quest” in a reversal. Except that Olney comes down “hollow,” and the Kingsporters fear that the old gods have renewed their appetite for questers. Lovecraft, in other words, is endorsing Olney’s quest—there is a nobler, higher, altogether better truth Outside—while condemning it—such quests bring the Outside closer and will hollow out first Kingsport and then perhaps all the world. We end with a kind of photo-negative of Machen’s “Great Return,” or an echo of Eliot’s words: “Mankind cannot bear too much reality.” Kingsport becomes Semele, beloved of the gods and burnt alive by their regard.
And on a sheerly mechanical level, there’s almost not a word out of place; Lovecraft almost effortlessly pulls aside the curtain on Erich Zann’s window to show us where our world and Outside are tangent: “And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.” Only the actual immanence of the gods seems anticlimactic—Neptune is very much out of place, and even Nodens seems more like a courtly aristocrat than, you know, a god from the Abyss.
I can sort of see where he was going with it, of course. Lovecraft strongly differentiates between Neptune and Nodens as part of his “tension and release” method in this story. After the increasing creepiness of the climb (tension), Olney meets the House-keeper and is pleasantly invited in (release). We go through a couple more minor cycles of that and then the House-keeper gets hinky again (tension) but it’s released with “Trident-bearing Neptune” (all very classical and clear), who is associated with words like “golden flames” and “sportive tritons and fantastic nereids.” But the release is too stuttery, as when we get to the very next line, by contrast, Nodens is the “grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss,” and even the nereids get weird with their gongs made of “grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers in black sea-caves” and we’re back up to the tension.
But then “wizened” and “hoary” Nodens “helps” Olney and the House-keeper into his shell and suddenly seems like a nice old guy with mobility issues. And too soon to really turn the corner—wham!—we cut away to Kingsport again. Neptune’s introduction, and Nodens’ sudden gentility, are both stutters toward release that don’t quite work. I think it’s because here’s where the gears are meshing most finely between “noble dream-quest” and “terrible Faustian bargain.”
Either Lovecraft should have reined in the awfulness for a pure “release” moment, presenting the gods’ human face, or the Mighty Ones should have both been mixtures of the creepy and familiar.
And even if it doesn’t quite work at that delicate moment of counterpoise, Lovecraft still effectively sets us up for the big sting at the end—one of the few true “surprise endings” in his whole oeuvre. That Nodens, what a nice guy. Maybe he’ll come back more often. And drain the light out of everyone’s eyes, the better to illuminate the high house in the mist.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
[October 1926-January 22, 1927]
Despite its novella length (38,000 words), this novel—a literal phantasmagoria—is so rich, so meandering, so surprising, so tonally discordant, so clever, and so unrelieved in its flumes of incident and invention that it would take at least another 38,000 words to perform anything like an adequate critical examination.
So far, critics have pretty much confined themselves either to discovering its various antecedents (besides the obvious Dunsany tales “Idle Days on the Yann” and “Time and the Gods” again) or adumbrating on its main (and equally obvious) theme. George Wetzel apparently believes that the whole thing is a lengthy gloss on the Aeneid, which has the virtue of being strange enough to be plausible. Peter Cannon’s theory that it is an Augustan Vathek is probably more sound, but there are further unmistakable parallels—if not influences—from Burroughs (alien hero—named Carter no less—fights a collection of ethnic stereotypes and Orientalist imagery in a nonsensical fantasyland) to Baum (“There’s no place like home”) to Burton (J. Vernon Shea believes that Arabia Deserta and other such travel narratives clearly influenced the novel) to Bunyan (one of Lovecraft’s original titles for the novel was A Pilgrim in Dreamland), and that’s only the ‘B’s. I suspect that a lot of it is that all quest tales will turn out to be strongly formally similar (like virtually all heroes of classical and Renaissance romance, for instance, Carter is kidnapped by pirates), though I wouldn’t rule out anything Lovecraft proveably read. The re-imagining of his various “Dunsanian” locales and characters (including the heretofore non-”Dunsanian” Pickman, Nyarlathotep, Leng, and Randolph Carter himself) as all part of one “Dreamland” indicates
that HPL was in jackdaw mode when he wrote Dream-Quest, which he soon considered mere “useful practice” for a real novel.
As far as the theme goes, it’s (as I said) obvious: Carter realizes that the true city of wonder is Boston. Like so many of the “Dreamland” stories, Dream-Quest turns out to be about nothing so much as aesthetics. Lovecraft is turning away from the puerile Decadence he exalted in “Celephaïs” toward his own more natural metier of hyper-realism. This is a fond and final hail and farewell to “Dunsanian” thought (though Joshi argues that Lovecraft is not so much rejecting Dunsany as he is rejecting Lovecraft’s own flawed view of Dunsany) and it not coincidentally also marks Lovecraft’s joyous return to golden New England after fleeing the gug-infested canyons of New York City.
****
In my experience, readers either love Dream-Quest to bursting or they don’t quite get the point. I tend toward the latter; the luxury of the novel form (and the absence, unlike Charles Dexter Ward, of any narrative layers or complexity) gives Lovecraft way too much space to thrash about stylistically. Although by 1926 he was just too good a writer to produce sheer endless waffle, I always feel like reading the thing straight through is a bit much of a muchness. (A surfeit of Turkish Delight, as it were.) As a result, by the time I get to the end, I’m never quite sure whether the “mild gods of Earth” are actually off in Boston, or in some sort of pocket-Boston, or if Nyarlathotep is just lying and the gods are dead, or what. (Keeping in mind the situation in “Time and the Gods”—in which Time destroys the gods’ pleasure-dome—and what we’ve seen of the “mild gods of Earth” in “Strange High House in the Mist,” none of these options sound particularly good for Hub City.) That said, there are some great, great incidents—the war of the Cats of Ulthar vs. the Cats of Saturn; the bravura episode with the Veiled Priest; the forest of the Zoogs; the sheer delight of meeting Pickman and realizing that, in Dreamland at least, the ghouls are all right.
The Silver Key
[early November 1926]
A very strange story, one that goes farther than any other, I think, to explicate just who Lovecraft thought he was, and a good bit of why he thought that. Why dredge through “The Outsider” for murky wracks of the Lovecraftian subconscious when he dissects his whole thought and philosophy for you right here? That said, it’s hard to find this celebration of the urge to regress to childhood (as opposed to the past in general, or as opposed to the terrors of regression along the family tree) anywhere else in the canon (except, obviously, for Dream-Quest, written at the same time), and one is tempted to chalk that up to Lovecraft’s brief, intense reaction to returning home to Providence after his nerve-shattering experience of “the pest zone” that was New York City.
Sadly, “The Silver Key” is so concerned with meticulously exploring Lovecraft / Carter’s interior life and thought that it doesn’t do much as a story; one understands why the readers of Weird Tales “heartily disliked” it. My reaction isn’t as strong, but it is telling, I think, that I’ve re-read “From Beyond” (a far inferior piece of technical work on every level) probably six or seven times for every time I’ve read “Silver Key.” It’s not even the essential absence of plot: not much more happens in “From Beyond” on a story level either, but it lays out Lovecraft’s cosmic dread far more compellingly than “Silver Key” does his “indifferentism.” Plus, of course, even Lovecraft didn’t believe that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind” is apathy, which is why there’s a thriving horror literature, and tales of ennui are rapidly forgotten, dei gratia. Contrariwise, if you’re a John Updike fan, maybe this is your favorite Lovecraft tale ever.
****
But “The Silver Key” is a guide to Lovecraft’s thought only as far as November of 1926, and I think it’s a fading guide even by then. Surely the ending of Dream-Quest (which becomes, unbelievably, a prequel to this story) rejects it already—it is not dream cities Carter searches for, but earthly Boston. It is my contention that Lovecraft must have changed his mind, at least aesthetically, even while he was finishing Dream-Quest in January of 1927—note his sudden lack of interest in the novel—and that Charles Dexter Ward (begun immediately after completing Dream-Quest) is almost his own response to it. Here we have a slew of characters, none of them remotely “indifferent,” none of them Randolph Carter; a story in which the urge to regress takes on a historical tone—and resumes HPL’s old horrifying tenor—that would inform almost every tale to follow. Even indifferentism becomes horrible, in “Colour Out of Space” and in the uncaring experimentations of fungoid Outer Ones and crinoid Elder Things. In a very real sense, then, almost everything truly lasting and important about Lovecraft’s fiction emphatically rejects this story.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
[January 23-March 1, 1927]
Again, I find that the better the story, the less I feel the need to say much else about it. Lovecraft himself sums up the novel, and indeed almost his whole oeuvre, in it, when Ward writes:
I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.
That, and the rapturous regionalism of the whole piece (“It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.”) are clearly the fundamental thematic concerns, just as the formal structure of the piece is easily typed as a Poe-style detective story.
The novel is rich enough, of course, that you can chase any number of leitmotivs through it, from Lovecraft’s use of his own autobiography to create the idealized Ward, to the eerie and continuous foregrounding of the visual senses (painting and architecture recur specifically, but there’s a lot of explicitly visual description for HPL here) and their contrast with hidden lore, the clever uses of parallelisms to imply a cyclic “myth of Return” throughout, and the sheer excellence of Lovecraft’s portrayal of Joseph Curwen’s character. Curwen is far and away the best villain in Lovecraft—Wilbur Whateley is too pathetic, Asenath Waite is too camp, Herbert West is but a bravura cartoon, and the rest are deliberately opaque—and he withstands comparison with almost any other horror villain as well, up to and including Hannibal Lecter or Randall Flagg.
One productive vein to work in Charles Dexter Ward is the “Eden myth” of Lovecraft’s utopian, antiquarian Providence with Curwen as its Serpent (both past and present) and Ward as its Adam. Joshi makes the very interesting point that in the great Providence tales—this novel, “Shunned House,” and “Haunter of the Dark”—the evil is defeated. Eden prevails. On the “Eden” theme, I will also indulge myself in a quote from Barton St. Armand:
If, according to the Christian tradition man is both lost and saved in a garden—Eden and Gethsemane—then according to Lovecraft’s mythology man is both lost and saved in a library.
There are, of course, lots of weird little loose ends: Why were Curwen, Orne, et al. planning to re-animate Ben Franklin of all people? Was the revenant from Number 118 Merlin or something even less human? What’s with the werewolf sightings? And perhaps most insistent of all, why is resurrecting zombie savants (a relatively harmless activity as Lovecraftian hobbies go) threatening to “all life and Nature”? This sort of thing makes for great game fodder, even though most of it is probably down to the fact that the novel we have is a first draft at best, assembled (by Derleth and Wandrei) from a number of draft chapters sent around to Lovecraft’s correspondence circle. Joshi reports we have an A.M.S. of “Ward,” but I don’t know if that refers to an intact original, or to the re-assembled postmortem text from which Weird Tales printed the novel in 1941.
****
Which is perhaps the most frightening thing, to me at any rate, about this piece. A (patchwork?) first draft, written in well under two months in 1927 and abandoned wrongly and foolishly by the author, is the second-greatest horror novel of all time. (Lovecraftian italics very much intentional.) Admittedly, at 50,000 words, it’s not a very long novel, but horror needs a bit of confinement. The
mind reels at how good a novel, and perhaps how many more years of Lovecraft’s life, he and we were cheated of by HPL’s “renunciation” of this work. It sat in pieces in his files or wherever for the next decade, while four separate publishers asked him if he had a novel they could see. Talk about lost and saved in a library.
****
Oh, all right. Dracula, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Haunting of Hill House, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Damnation Game, Carrion Comfort, The Ceremonies, Conjure Wife, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, and either Declare or It, depending on whether you count Declare as horror. (Conversely, I suppose, if you count Heart of Darkness as horror under the meaning of the act, then Dracula drops to number two and so forth.) I’m open to intelligent disputation on Nos. 5-10, although if you take off my choices for Barker, Simmons, and Hodgson, you’re just going to wind up replacing them with Cabal, Song of Kali, and House on the Borderland, so why bother?