H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Page 14

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  “My coming to New York,” the first-person narrator remarks in the opening paragraph, “had been a mistake.” Seeing the city at first by moonlight, he is charmed with its antique alleys and constellations of light. “But success and happiness were not to be”; by daylight he finds himself oppressed by “squalor and alienage” and “shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes around them”—two cardinal sins in the Lovecraft Weltanschauung, to be without dreams and to be without deeply rooted kinship to one’s surroundings. The would-be poet in the tale discovers “the unwhisperable secret of secrets,”

  the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris is of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

  He consoles himself with the city’s atmospheric charms of the night: “With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.” This is certainly one of the most clearly autobiographical passages in all of Lovecraft’s works.

  The narrator, on a nocturnal, wistful antiquarian walk through the Greenwich section, meets an apparently likeminded stranger, the “he” of the title, who offers to be his guide, taking the narrator through a disorienting maze of increasingly archaic alleys offering such sights as “unbelievably Colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the sides”; Lovecraft’s knowledge and love of Colonial lore is well in evidence here. Passing finally through a “low-arched gate of nailstudded black oak,” the two men enter an old house redolent of “unwholesome centuries of decay,” where the guide reveals himself to be dressed in eighteenth-century garb. Speaking with appropriately archaic diction (saying “sartain” for “certain” and “sarving” for “serving”), he explains that the house stands on ancestral ground, where the Indians once performed certain magical rites at the full of the moon. The speaker’s supposed ancestor—actually, as it turns out in characteristic Lovecraftian fashion, the speaker himself, whose hollow voice bespeaks an unnatural age—learned from the Indians certain forms of magic which he demonstrates; the Indians were given poisoned rum for their troubles. When the narrator screams at seeing the display of magic, the vengeful Indians are called up, for moccasined feet are heard beyond the door, which is splintered by a tomahawk. This is all rather corny, and imagistically confused as well, for instead of tomahawk-wielding, moccasin-shod Indians, the invader from the battered door is “a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred with shining malevolent eyes.” As the moonlight enters from the window—here the imagery is consistent and suggestive, for the Indians have performed their rites by moonlight—the narrator’s companion blackens and shrivels to a mere head; the eye-studded black slime swallows up the head and bears it away. At this point, as in “The Horror at Red Hook,” the building inexplicably collapses, sending the narrator cascading to lower levels; he crawls away, broken and bleeding, but when he is found, the rain has effaced the trail of blood that would have made it possible to trace the scene of the horror; as in such later works as “The Shadow out of Time” and “The Whisperer in Darkness,” the evidence is lost, so that Lovecraft is here making early use of a plot device later to be more satisfactorily employed. At the story’s end the narrator remarks, anticipating biographical reality by some eight months, “Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.” Altogether, the tale is not without its incidental points of interest, stylistically and biographically, and it does employ the Lovecraftian theme of the past reaching forward horribly to engulf someone in the present—here rather moralistically handled, for the reader senses that the victim deserves his fate, unlike such merely hapless and fatebound victims as Charles Dexter Ward. In its imagistic lack of clarity, “He” is clearly inferior to most of the later works, though Lovecraft’s description of it as “mawkish drivel” is undeservedly severe.

  “In the Vault” and “Cool Air”

  On 18 September 1925 Lovecraft, seemingly much given to one-day story outputs during this period, wrote “In the Vault,”

  93 a tale set back in New England rather than New York, and dealing grotesquely with the theme “an eye for an eye”; in its heavily ironic overtones and its choice of subject matter, the story is reminiscent of, and most probably influenced by, Ambrose Bierce. Lovecraft says of it:

  The enclosed was written up from an idea given me by an interesting old fellow in Massachusetts—the idea of an undertaker imprisoned in a village vault where he was removing winter coffins for spring burial, & his escape by enlarging a transom reached by the piling-up of the coffins. This is all my venerable friend suggested—the motivation & denouement, together with the actual writing, were all my own. I tried to employ a homely, prosaic style more or less in harmony with the theme.

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  The “venerable friend” was Lovecraft’s amateur press acquaintance Charles W. (“Tryout”) Smith in Haverhill, Massachusetts. “In the Vault” was immediately rejected by Weird Tales as being too grisly even for its readers, but five years later the magazine reconsidered and accepted the story.

  The first-person narrator (who remarks, “I am no practiced teller of tales”) is the doctor of the story’s protagonist George Birch, having taken over these duties from one Doctor Davis, from whom he has learned the gruesome details; the narrative device of having a narrator who is not the focal character, but rather is present chiefly for the purpose of illuminating that character, is one to which Lovecraft will again resort in such works as “Cool Air,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Here, an effective “distance” is established by making the story one that is told at an extra remove from the reader. Birch is a “bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker” whom the narrator warns the reader against viewing as merely homely and comic. Birch, though basically not an evil man, is “lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable” as evidenced by the careless manner in which he fits corpses “to containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy.” Perhaps Lovecraft here, instead of displaying such judgmental adjectives, could have allowed the reader to draw his own conclusions from Birch’s habits; in not doing so, Lovecraft unwittingly emulates the intrusive and editorialising narrators of those nineteenth-century novels that he so disliked. Clearly, Lovecraft at this point, though growing impressively as an artist, is not yet at the height of his powers.

  In any case, Birch enters a vault in which bodies are stored awaiting burial, and plans to bury “little old Matthew Fenner” (the “little” being a veiled bit of foreshadowing); he has previously made a coffin for Fenner but “in a fit of curious sentimentality” has deemed It too flimsy, assigning it instead to Asaph Sawyer and building a better one for Fenner. Due to his own carelessness at neglecting the condition of the latch, Birch is trapped in the vault when the wind blows the door shut. Finding that a “high, slit-like transom” over the door is his only hope for escape, he resolves to pile coffins up under it and stand on them. While toiling to enlarge the transom for his egress, he hears the rending of wood beneath his feet as the rotting casket lid gives way “jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not care to imagine.” He feels horrible pains in his ankles and struggles to pull himself up, “his body responding with that maddening slowness from which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of nightmare.” After Birch does escape, Doctor Davis discovers that both of Birch’s ankles are cripplingly lacerated about the Achilles tendons. After visiting the tomb to investigate, the doctor returns to upbraid Birch. He has found Asaph’s head broken in, in the shattered coffin, and says, “An eye for an eye! Great Heavens, Birch, but you got what you deserved! The skull turned my stomach, but the other was worse—those ankles cut neatly off t
o fit Matt Fenner’s cast-aside coffin!” The dominant tone of “In the Vault” is one of irony, a heavy-handed irony more subtle than that which permeates “The Terrible Old Man” but far less so than the cosmic irony of many of the later works. There is irony in the very name Birch, in that the tale treats of coffin-wood; there is irony in the neighing “unsympathetic reply” of Birch’s waiting horse; there is irony when, in the construction of his platform of coffins, “he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more sturdily made”; there is irony when the returning Davis finds the door yielding “readily to a touch from the outside”; and there is supreme “just reward” irony when Birch’s ankles are mutilated as if vengefully by the teeth of the corpse whose feet Birch has amputated. Birch, of course, unlike later Lovecraftian inheritors of horror, roundly deserves his fate. The tale, though narrated in a somewhat excessively editorial fashion, and though rather overbearingly ironic, shows Lovecraft to be capable at this point of potent imagery and effectively consistent characterisation. “In the Vault” is obviously a tale of local New England horror rather than a work with cosmic implications, but it stands as an essentially successful story of its type.

  In March 1926 Lovecraft wrote the last of his stories of the New York period, a work set in New York and titled “Cool Air.”

  95 It owed much in influence to Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” though not enough to make it a mere imitation by any means. He sold the story not to Weird Tales (which rejected it) but, in 1928, to a then new (and short-lived) fantasy magazine called Tales of Magic and Mystery, which eventually paid him $18.00 for it. Like “In the Vault,” “Cool Air” is a story of local horror without cosmic scope, though in dealing with the theme of victory over death it has somewhat broader implications than the strictly provincial “In the Vault.”

  “You ask me to explain,” the first-person narrator says in the story’s opening, “why I am afraid of a draught of cool air”; imaginatively transmuted to fictional use, Lovecraft’s own extreme aversion to cold is visible here. The narrator philosophises about finding horror not in darkness and silence, but in broad daylight in a busy metropolis. Rather down and out, the narrator has procured rooms in a brownstone roominghouse of “sullied splendour” which argues “a descent from high levels of tasteful opulence.” He learns, from the landlady Mrs. Herrero, of Dr. Muñoz who lives upstairs and has some strange malady: “He ees vairy queer in hees seeckness—all day he take funnee-smelling baths, and he cannot get excite or warm.” The narrator, because of a mild heart attack—here the plot depends excessively on fortuity and coincidence—meets Dr. Muñoz, who lives in artificially perpetuated cool air amid furnishings and books which (like Lovecraft’s ensconcement in New York among his Providence trappings) “bespoke a gentleman’s study rather than a boarding-house bedroom.” Dr. Muñoz has (like Lovecraft) a coldness of touch, as well as (unlike Lovecraft, whose voice was high and piping) “a finely modulated though oddly hollow and timbreless voice.” He has been engaged, he says, in studies intended to conquer death; as for his own malady, he requires constant cold of 55° or 56° Fahrenheit, and has been thus afflicted since a great illness of eighteen years before, having survived through the uncommon ministrations of a certain Dr. Torres.

  As time passes, the narrator sees Dr. Muñoz decline physically, and sees the doctor’s self-treatment take on more bizarre forms: “He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and Egyptian incense ‘til his room smelled like the vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings.” Concomitantly, his requirements for cold increase, and he modifies his ammonia piping to bring the temperature down to near-freezing. His appearance becomes so frightful that a repairman unexpectedly glimpsing him has an epileptic fit—this surely an overdone bit of melodrama.

  Finally, the inevitable happens; the refrigeration pump breaks down, and Dr. Muñoz is reduced to bathing in ice water behind a closed bathroom door—Lovecraft wisely keeps him intriguingly out of sight for the reader—while the narrator desperately combs the city for a replacement piston; but he returns too late. A horrible odour permeates the house, and from behind the locked door of the Muñoz rooms there is only the sound of “a nameless sort of slow, thick dripping.” When the door is finally unlocked, the narrator and others enter to witness a scene in which Lovecraft exhibits fine control and restraint:

  A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and ended unutterably.

  The descriptive restraint that Lovecraft practices here is much more lastingly powerful than any mere photographic description could have been; like the “horror in a covered platter” of “The Rats in the Walls,” the demise of Dr. Muñoz in a slimy trail which ends “unutterably” is a horror that grows rather than declines in potency upon rereading. The scene is open to be filled in by the worst of whatever lurks in the reader’s own imagination, and one may imagine worse things with each rereading of the story. Too, the imagery of slime and liquescent putrefaction is decidedly more effective than the dependence of more traditional horror tales on bloodshed, of which there is virtually none in Lovecraft’s work, and none needed.

  The note left by Dr. Muñoz tells a tale that, of course, the reader cannot fail to have guessed—that the doctor has unnaturally preserved the semblance of life in himself, refrigerating himself to forestall bodily decay: “It had to be done my way—artificial preservation—for you see I died that time eighteen years ago.” Although marred in spots by a tendency toward melodrama and a dependence on coincidence, “Cool Air” exhibits a number of impressive strengths: carefully modulated tension, striking imagery, strongly suggestive veiled description, and an ending that is no less powerful for being a confirmational rather than a revelational ending

  96 —the reader knows exactly what is coming, yet finds It moving and unforgettable when it does come. To prepare the reader so to react to such an ending requires no small narrative skill. The horror of “Cool Air” is an essentially local horror, but the story’s narration, all pointed toward a carefully prepared confirmational ending of considerable impact, shows Lovecraft by early 1926 to be developing abilities that come to grand fruition later on; in particular, the technique of ending by confirmation, seen here in an early but reasonably successful form, finds enhanced form in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) and has certainly reached perfection in Lovecraft’s hands by the completion of “The Shadow out of Time” in 1935. Thus, one sees that some of Lovecraft’s techniques most effective in the later works may be traced back through a number of years of artistic development, the salient feature of his art being that these techniques, as the years pass, are applied to themes and conceptions of ever greater cosmicism.

  Other Writings

  Associated with the New York period is only one other piece of prose fiction, a story titled in manuscript “Under the Pyramids” but published m Weird Tales under the title “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”

  97 and actually written in February and March of 1924, immediately before Lovecraft’s departure for New York, as a piece of ghostwriting for Harry Houdini. The story may conveniently be grouped with the New York stones because of the circumstances surrounding it. When the time came in early March 1924 for Lovecraft to slip away from his aunts to New York to marry Sonia, Lovecraft had written a longhand draft of the story and prepared a final typed copy to send to Weird Tales. However, when he boarded his train for New York, he left the typed draft in the station; considering his extreme loathing of the labour of typing, his dismay must have been great indeed. All during the time of the weddmg preparations and the couple’s honeymoon trip to Philadelphia, Lovecraft, with the aid of an uncannily tolerant Sonia dictating from the handwntten draft
, was busy at the singularly unromantic task of reconstructing, and retyping the final draft of the story. Sonia would later wnte that “when the manuscript was finished we were too tired and exhausted for honeymooning or anything else.”

  98 Soon after this expenence Lovecraft remarked:

  BOY, that Houdini job! It strained me to the limit, and I didn’t get it off till after we got back from Philly. I went the limit in descriptive realism in the first part, then when I buckled down to the under-the-pyramid stuff I let myself loose and coughed up some of the most nameless, slithering, unmentionable HORROR that ever stalked cloven-hooved through the tenebrous and necrophagous abysses of elder night.

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  The story’s first-person narrator, a close fictive image of Houdini himself, relates events that may have happened to him during a vacation in Egypt; the story is somewhat weakened in impact from the outset when the narrator-showman remarks that the events of the tale “certainly did not take place.”

  Several pages are devoted to colourful details of the narrator’s first impressions of Egypt, details that Lovecraft, who, of course, had never been there, took the trouble to research meticulously. After a tour of the pyramids with a guide named Abdul Reis, a Pharaoh-like, “hollow-voiced” fellow in the tradition of Lovecraftian characters who have outlived their natural years, the narrator witnesses an altercation between his guide and a stranger called Ali Ziz, with the result that the guide and the stranger agree to settle their differences in a nocturnal fight atop the Great Pyramid. Following the others to the site, the narrator, after watching the fight, finds that the entire sequence of events has been staged as an entrapment of himself, for the crowd falls on him and binds, gags, and blindfolds him; he speculates that they take his reputation as an escape artist as a kind of insolent imitation of the supposedly real magic of their gods. They bear him off to some spot where he is brutally lowered down a rocky-sided shaft running incredibly deep underground; he faints a number of times, waking once to find himself lying on the floor of some black subterranean chamber with astonishing lengths of released rope piling up around him from above, and wakes again to find the rope gone (a detail never accounted for). After much blind and agonising stumbling around, he witnesses by torchlight a passing horde of beings on whom Lovecraft does indeed lavish much extravagant description, characterising them in terms of Egyptian lore fearsomely familiar to the narrator—human bodies with heads of crocodiles (like rumoured composite mummies), headless creatures, hippopotami with human hands, and the like. Rather, the narrator sees the hybrid monstrosities’ shadows; this is an effective touch by which Lovecraft places his horrors at extra distance from the reader while still adequately conveying their nature. Present even are King Khephren—the mocking guide “Abdul Reis” himself—and his ill-rumoured and ghoulish bride Queen Nitokris. The group is worshipping hideously at the brink of some great yawning gateway to still deeper realms, from which issues occasionally a “fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle”; sacrifices are offered. The narrator escapes, but not without seeing something emerge from the pit to claim its “impious objects of nourishment,” something tentacled and as large as a hippopotamus. As so often happens in Lovecraft’s work, however, the “horror” is dimmed by a further and immeasurably more potent horror waiting—the narrator’s mind is blasted by the memory of “that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . and that of which it is the merest forepaw.” The narrator recalls ever after a question that has haunted him: “What huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?” This is a most engaging question, and by virtue of it the tale leaves dark speculations forming in the mind.