H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Page 3

  Lovecraft, besides providing us in his letters with plentiful description of his artistic philosophy, also shares with us his ideas on the mechanical methodology itself of the writing process. In “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”

  10 he sets out definite steps that he has found to be helpful in crafting a weird tale (though there is no reason to think that his method must be restricted to the writing of horror fantasy). While admitting that for him there is no one inflexible way to write a story, he gives the following outline as a pattern that on the average is reliable.

  First, he says, one should prepare a synopsis of events in the actual order of occurrence, which is often not to be the order of their narration in the finished story; this step gets the essential details down on paper. Next, one should write a second synopsis of events in their order of narration, feeling free to delete or add details as the story increasingly takes shape in the mind. Then the third step is to write out the story “rapidly, fluently, and not too critically” following the second synopsis; changes in the incidents may still be made so long as they are consistent with the whole plan. Next, one should revise the text, polishing it with regard to “vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties of tone, grace and convincingness of transitions, . . . effectiveness of beginning, ending, climaxes, etc., dramatic suspense and interest, plausibility and atmosphere, and various other elements.” Finally, the fifth stage (one to which Lovecraft, who notoriously hated typing, never looked forward) is to prepare a neatly typed text, even here touching up any spots that still need light revision. In any case, the story’s plot must be realistically and consistently maintained throughout the writing and revising process, even though Lovecraft expressly thought mood and atmosphere more centrally important to a weird tale than plot as such; there can be no blunders of inconsistency.

  Lovecraft also remarks in a 1930 letter: “My own attitude in writing is always that of the hoax-weaver. . . . For the time being I try to forget formal literature, & simply devise a lie as carefully as a crooked witness prepares a line of testimony with cross-examining lawyers in his mind.

  11 Thus, he obviously gives great weight to consistency, plausibility, and realism—realism in the sense that in order for the reader to be emotionally prepared to “suspend disbelief” at the moment necessary, when the unreal horror enters and gives the illusion of violating cosmic law, the writer must lead the way with a realistic backdrop which serves as a foil to the unreal eventualities. Lovecraft depends on the psychology of fear for his effects, and remarks (again in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”):

  Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage and “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

  12

  Lovecraft emerges, by his own pronouncements and from the evidence of his fictional creations themselves, as a writer with well-thought-out philosophical principles and deep convictions about the nature of the properly conceived and executed weird tale, and a writer closely in touch with the nature of fear. Well in evidence also is his inclination to revere the integrity and beauty of language, after the classical and eighteenth-century models that he so much admired. It is to his everlasting credit that in the face of pressure from editors to conform to the conventions of the popular pulp-magazine marketplace, he would not agree to rewrite or cheapen his tales, even when his refusal to do so meant the absence of payments desperately needed. “If I can’t get cash without twisting my writing,” he remarks in a 1935 letter, “I’ll willingly starve.”

  13 Had he acquiesced in the artistic treason expected of him at times by editors, many of his stories would scarcely have been worth preserving, but he remained faithful to his principles to the end.

  In a 1927 letter Lovecraft delivers a powerful statement about the nature of artistic inspiration:

  The time to begin writing is when the events of the world seem to suggest things larger than the world—strangeness and patterns and rhythms and uniquities of combination which no one ever saw or heard of before, but which are so vast and marvellous and beautiful that they absolutely demand proclamation with a fanfare of silver trumpets. Space and time become vitalised with literary significance when they begin to make us subtly homesick for something “out of space, out of time.” There is no real author who has not stood in awe and expectancy before some fragment of earthly scene—some gap in quiet hills at dawn, some bit of city pavement glistening with rain and reflecting evening’s lamps and lighted windows, some line of distant roofs or balustraded garden terrace—whose glorified contours bring up with sweetly maddening poignancy a haunting, ineluctable sense of cosmic memory; of having known that scene and others akin to it in other lives, other worlds, and other dreamlands. To find those other lives, other worlds, and other dreamlands, is the true author’s task.

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  With what success Lovecraft found those other lives, other worlds, and other dreamlands, we shall see in a critical examination of his writings.

  2. Stirrings: Emergence of a Dark Talent (1917–1919)

  “The Tomb” and “Dagon”

  “The Tomb,”

  15 written in June 1917, was Lovecraft’s first venture into horror fiction since the days of his juvenile efforts, and bears a noticeable influence of Poe, with whom Lovecraft was highly infatuated during this period. Even in this early and relatively unsophisticated tale, however, we find thematic foreshadowings of things to come.

  Like many of the tales of Poe, Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” opens with a rather morose narrator’s philosophical ruminations: “Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal.” In this case, the narrator, telling the tale as a sort of flashback that is explanatory of his present situation, has been confined to an asylum, and remarks in the tale’s opening sentence that he realises that this circumstance will call into doubt, for many, the authenticity of his story. Thus, Lovecraft even as early as 1917 is practicing a fictional device that he will come to use extensively later on—the device of offering the reader a rational “out” if he wishes to avail himself of it, a way to discount the story as not having happened. However, the device is a piquant one; the reader is offered the option of disbelieving the narrator, but the narration is such that the reader is led, at the same time, to want to believe the story in spite of the reduced credibility of the narrator. Thus is a tension built up in the reader’s mind, and this tension, which exists in numerous Lovecraft tales, helps account for the manner in which those tales tend enigmatically to stick in the mind and haunt the reader.

  The narrator, Jervas Dudley, shows some Lovecraftian autobiographical signs, in that he remarks, “from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary . . . unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation of my acquaintances . . . roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home.” He relates his discovery of an ancient family tomb in the woods, a vault once surmounted by the ill-rumoured house of the Hyde family whose remains lie in the tomb; the house, reputed to have drawn divine wrath by the godless revellings of its inhabitants, is known to have been destroyed by a stroke of lightning. Young Jervas finds the tomb door padlocked tantalisingly ajar and becomes obsessed with the idea of entering the vault; he lies for long nocturnal hours on the grass before the locked entrance and indulges in weird reveries, finally even forming the herbiage there into a kind of temple. He discovers that the Hyde family forms part of his own ancestry. After reading of Theseus in Plutarch’s Lives, he decides that he must let the lines of fate play out—that he will not be able to enter his shrine until the proper time. Thus, Lovecraft introduces the the
me of foreordination, which he uses with such power later on in the novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; in each of the two works, a character functions as a family scion predestined to come along and assume the traits of an ancestor.

  One night Jervas glimpses a light in the tomb and hears voices in old New England dialect; he returns home, much changed, and effortlessly locates the tomb’s key in an attic chest (one is reminded of Lovecraft’s similar use of this motif nine years later in his story “The Silver Key”). Returning to the vault and entering it, Jervas finds, besides the casket of his ancestor Sir Geoffrey Hyde, an untenanted casket “adorned with a single name,” and, symbolically, he lies down in the box.

  From this point Jervas atavistically assumes jaunty and ribald characteristics much unlike his former reserved self, even shocking his elders with a sprightly drinking song sporting such lines as

  But fill up your goblets and pass ’em around—

  Better under the table than under the ground!

  and

  So Betty, my miss,

  Come give me kiss;

  In hell there’s no innkeeper’s daughter like this!

  (This from the pen of Lovecraft, who shunned alcohol in brittle teetotaler fashion and had in 1917 never known a woman’s kiss delivered with romantic intent.) The drinking song is one instance of a whole body of “strange and forgotten lore” to which Jervas has mysteriously become privy.

  Growing suspicious, Jervas’s parents have him followed at night, and he emerges from one of his stays in the vault to find himself being watched. Astonishingly enough, the watcher only reports that the lad has spent the night in the bower before the tomb entrance as before. Thus, the question arises, as it does in so many Lovecraft stories, of whether the narrator is mad and imagining the whole affair, or is really experiencing what is suggested; this question is, of course, ultimately unresolved.

  At length Jervas finds—or thinks he finds, as the reader wishes to believe—the old Hyde mansion restored and full of light and revelry. He mingles in the throng as a Hyde, until the house is engulfed in flame by a huge lightning bolt. The scene fades into a prosaic one in which Jervas is detained by captors, to be taken to an asylum; and these captors unearth a box containing a portrait of a wigged young man resembling Jervas, the portrait bearing the initials J. H. An attendant at the asylum conveys to Jervas the information that the tomb, found still padlocked and only now opened, contains a coffin marked “Jervas,” in which the lad, it is promised, will one day be buried.

  “The Tomb,” aside from its obvious Poe influence, shows much promise (the author’s later referring to it as “stiff” notwithstanding) in Lovecraft’s sombre and mood-building narration, though it is marred by a few minor flaws. The author has Jervas lead a villager to the Hyde mansion’s forgotten subcellar, at a time when Jervas was supposedly keeping his entire connexion with the house and the tomb secret, and one’s credulity is strained a bit. Also, Lovecraft overtly points out that the narrator, when he joins the revelry at the mansion, has assumed the name Jervas Hyde; it would have sufficed to mention the initials J. H. and to let the assumption of the name be inferred—the author here may perhaps be charged with overexpression of an obvious point. Nevertheless, the tale is an effective and haunting one to appear so early in Lovecraft’s career, and the use of the theme of atavistical return to ancestral identity interestingly foreshadows things to come.

  A month after writing “The Tomb,” Lovecraft produced another tale, “Dagon,”

  16 his first story to appear in Weird Tales; he considered it to be somewhat superior to “The Tomb.” Once again Lovecraft here tantalises us with a narrator of doubtful credibility: “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.” (This psychological opening pattern is one that he derives from Poe.) The narrator’s introductory remarks continue to the effect that he is enslaved to morphine to make his life endurable, and that he plans to throw himself from his garret window to escape the memory and the dread he is about to explain. As in “The Tomb,” we have here the option not to believe such a narrator’s tale; the artistic trick is to make the story’s effect such that we want to believe it anyway—in doing this, Lovecraft is already beginning to practice a fictional technique that he will wield with ever-increasing effectiveness throughout his career.

  The narrator tells how he was captured by a German sea-raider (in World War I), from which he escaped in a small boat—alone, for Lovecraft protagonists are virtually always placed in the position of facing their horrors alone, without consolation or even corroborating witnesses to the reality of their perceptions. The narrator recalls that he drifted aimlessly for “uncounted days,” awaking one day from a despairing sleep to find his boat and himself “half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see.” The air of the remembered scene reeks with the miasma of decaying fish (an almost ultimate horror in itself to Lovecraft in real life; he was nauseated by seafood and fishy odours, and perhaps assumes too readily that the reader is similarly affected) and the narrator surmises that the vast body of black slime has been thrown to the surface from the ocean’s aeon-unseen floor by some volcanic upheaval. Here Lovecraft is already (unwittingly, in all likelihood) foreshadowing his use of this same motif nine years later in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), in which the horrific vaults of sunken R’lyeh are thrust to the surface similarly; by the time of his later use of the motif, however, Lovecraft has grown a great deal as a weaver of tales, in that the latter story is much more extensively plotted and has more far-flung implications. Indeed, “Dagon” can scarcely be said to have a plot; it stands as a study in morbid fear, fear of things real or things imagined by the narrator, as the reader wishes to believe.

  Exploring the slimy plain on foot, the narrator finds a sort of canyon and descends into it to encounter a body of water at the bottom and a curious stone standing on the opposite shore. This is Lovecraft’s first use of a motif that will commonly recur in his tales—that of the sinister carven monolith. For carven it turns out to be, with curious aquatic symbols foreshadowing the later bas-relief in “The Call of Cthulhu” and, still later, the tiara in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931). It is clear that Lovecraft was a writer of the idée fixe; sometimes a given image or motif reappears, though always newly adorned, in Lovecraft’s work over a period of many years.

  The narrator, struck with the realisation that this carven object has lain “at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, notices among the monolith’s carvings some which depict, in part, “a certain sort of men . . . disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto,” and he remarks, “Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail.” Lovecraft leaves the details vague, for the reader to imagine, thus once again practicing as early as 1917 a fictional technique that he will pursue and refine throughout his career. He has also introduced here a notion central to his later work, the idea that the earth has unthinkably ancient cycles of life predating the known epochs of the planet’s history.

  Lovecraft shows effective control of the story’s mood-invoking strong potential when he sets the narrator up for a sudden and horrifying surprise. The narrator is quietly musing over his “unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist,” and: “Then suddenly I saw it.” An animate thing only vaguely described (“Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome”) slides out of the dark water and repulsively makes apparent obeisances to the carven monolith. The narrator, further driving a wedge between the reader’s inclinations to believe (i.e., suspend disbelief) or not to do so, remarks, “I think I went mad then.” It is notable that in the narrator’s designedly sparse description of the monstrosity, there is the word “loathsome”; here Lovecraft, who has undeservedly been accused at times of having “adjectivitis,” simply shows that what is important is not any objectively detailed picture of the creature, but rather the narrator�
�s emotional response. At the story’s end the narrator, who has awakened in a San Francisco hospital and has come to associate his remembered creature with the Philistine fish-god Dagon, submits to morphine to quiet his nerves, but to little avail. Questioning his own sanity, he allows himself (just before hearing or imagining a lumbering at his door and presumably hurling himself from the window) to wonder about the sea and “the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.” Thematically, one can scarcely avoid thinking here of the ending of “The Call of Cthulhu” and even of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Indeed, these later tales seem to have been in incubation in Lovecraft’s mind at the time of his writing of “Dagon,” which, although it scarcely shows Lovecraft even approaching the full development of his narrative powers, clearly foreshadows the later efforts and gives us an early glimpse of some of his fictional techniques and devices—the isolated character, the narrator of tantalisingly questionable trustworthiness, the careful linguistic manipulation of mood, the suggestive vagueness of description, and the impressionistic emphasis on narrator response to the horror—devices that would come to shape Lovecraft’s work increasingly in later years.