H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Read online

  First “Dunsanian” Tales

  In September 1919, Lovecraft first read the fantasy tales of Lord Dunsany, with their Biblically lofty and dreamy style and their author’s invented pantheon of ancient gods whose caprices very capably rival those of old Norse and Graeco-Roman deities. Lovecraft, who soon thereafter actually saw Dunsany speak in Boston, was stunned by the man’s writing, both for the oneiric beauty of its style and the cosmicism of its conception. Lovecraft would himself produce a group of stories which from their similarity in style to the Irish master have come to be known as the “Dunsanian” tales. Only Lord Dunsany has earned such a place in the Lovecraft canon, for although Poe, Hawthorne, and Arthur Machen are approximately comparable influences, their influence is so diffuse and so mingled that one cannot readily point to a definitely identifiable corpus of tales as the “Poe stories” or the “Hawthornian stories” or the “Machen stories.” Only the Dunsany influence shows the requisite cohesiveness to form such a label.

  In emulating Lord Dunsany, however, Lovecraft seems merely to have “fleshed in” a tendency already existing in himself; for the remarkable fact is that he wrote his first “Dunsanian” story about a year prior to his discovery of Dunsany. Lovecraft wrote “Polaris”

  17 in 1918, and the story shows him to have had a predisposition to be receptive to Dunsany’s style. On this point Lovecraft himself remarks, “‘Polaris’ was written in 1918, before I knew anything about Dunsany, and is interesting as a case of unconscious parallelism of manner.”

  18 The story is characterised by a sonorous and lofty style suggestive of the King James Bible (which Lovecraft, his total religious skepticism notwithstanding, is known to have admired), with many sentences beginning with And, and with such syntactic inversions as “Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not.” Lovecraft, however, made of the story not simply a display of stylistic fondnesses but also of his fascination with the past and with dreams.

  The narrator in “Polaris” lives in a house overlooking a sinister swamp and is obsessed with the shining of the Pole Star, which seems to leer at him and keep him awake, “winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.” (This sentence is poetically balanced by the device of chiasmus, the abba pattern in the words “convey, message, message, convey.”) One night when the Pole Star is obscured by clouds so that the narrator can sleep, he sees in his dreams a spectral marble city, which he will come to see often; it is situated on a plateau where “scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star.” Thus does Lovecraft convey the knowledge that the city is far to the north on the globe, near the Pole, though “the air was warm and stirred not”; the dreamer has been transported not only to arctic regions but many thousands of years back in time as well. He puts the question to himself (indeed, the question that will be the central one for this little tale): does the dream-city or the house near the swamp have the greater claim to be called reality? His own role in his dreams sharpens [as will happen, much later, though in a very different way, to another Lovecraft dreamer in “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–1935)] focussing down from a disembodied observer to an active participant in the city’s affairs. He comes to know the city as Olathoë, “which lies on the plateau of Sarkia, betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.” Lovecraft, with an astonishingly Dunsanian-sounding way of wielding names, for one who has not yet read Dunsany, already begins here to formulate his “dreamland” later to be explored in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; for the city of Olathoë lies in the forgotten northern land of Lomar, which will come to be well known in the Lovecraftian landscape (or dreamscape).

  The narrator enters the city’s affairs to find that it is in danger of attack by “squat, hellish yellow fiends” called Inutos, and that although he is “feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships” (perhaps a snatch of Lovecraftian self-image here) he will be entrusted with a most important military post: the watchtower near the pass through which the Inutos will have to come. He mans the post, pledging to light a warning signal of fire in case of attack. However, he is beset by the soporific whisperings of the Pole Star, which bids him slumber until the passage of 26,000 years shall have brought the celestial pole back around to its current position. The sentry struggles against drowsiness and tries to connect the Pole Star’s words with lore learned from the ancient Pnakotic Manuscripts—Lovecraft has already in 1918 begun to manufacture fictive “books” of old lore—but sleep in the dream overtakes him and he finds himself awake back in his house, which he now regards as a dream-house. Indeed, his “waking” world now functions as a world of dream relative to his dream city, and the story piquantly raises and refuses to settle the question of which world is “real,” much like the Zen account of the man who awakes from dreaming that he is a butterfly and wonders whether now he is a butterfly dreaming that he is a man. The narrator is trapped traitoriously “asleep” at his post by being in the waking world, and the Pole Star thus functions as a logical bipolarity; it keeps him “awake,” it lulls him to “sleep,” depending on the point of view. Not only does the story provide a charmingly encapsulated statement of the dream-versus-reality enigma, but also gives an early glimpse of a theme that will come to be of central importance to many Lovecraft works: the notion that in a foreordained way the past will reach forward to engulf the unfortunate soul whom the blind cosmos has chosen to place on the treadmill of cosmic cycles of time. For such a person, the present is not a place in which it is possible to hide from the past. The very ending of “Polaris” repeats the statement about the Pole Star—“yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey”—in such a way as to suggest cyclicity in time, so that Lovecraft has succeeded, in a very short early tale, in wedding sense to form.

  When Lovecraft actually discovered, read, and saw Lord Dunsany, he wrote, in November 1919, the first story that can literally be called, by virtue of influence, a Dunsanian tale in his canon of works, “The White Ship.”

  19 This story would mark what Lovecraft would come to call his “‘White Ship’ period,” though eventually he criticised the story as being an artificial and “namby-pamby” failure to recapture the Dunsany style. Whatever Lovecraft’s own assessment, “The White Ship” is an intriguing little fantasy.

  The story is a kind of allegorical odyssey, a journey through the human mind, as it were. The narrator Basil Elton, a lighthouse keeper, listens to the stories told to him by the murmuring of the immemorial ocean—a common symbol for the unconscious mind, “for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.” He repeatedly is visited, or fancies that he is visited, by a white ship out of the South, beckoning him to a journey. Finally, he answers the call and is taken successively to several exotic places. First there is Zar, “where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten.” The crew does not disembark, for none who set foot in Zar can ever return. Next comes Thalarion, “wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom.” The narrator is refused permission to go ashore, for in Thalarion “walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,” and there reigns the eidolon Lathi, that men may not look upon and survive. The ship departs, following a bird of blue plumage further southward many days to Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained, a place at first enticing but turning out to reek of charnel odours. Passing this up, the white ship comes to Sona-Nyl, the Land of Fancy.

  At Sona-Nyl the narrator and crew go ashore “upon a golden bridge of moonbeams” and dwell in bliss “for many aeons.” The obvious suggestion, in this journey through aspects of the mind, is that in the realm of pure fancy there can be found boundless joy. However, like the proverbial dog who bites at the bone in his pond reflection and loses his own bone, Basil Elton grows restless in Sona-Nyl and longs to journey further, beyond the basalt pillars of
the West to rumoured Cathuria, the Land of Hope “which no man hath seen.” The crew are loath to go but finally agree; as they fear, however, this last journey, in effect a rejection of the joys of the Land of Fancy, proves to be overly ambitious and ends in a disastrous falling into a watery abyss. Elton pays dearly for his overweaning pride, for his unreasonable expectations; he finds himself back in the lighthouse, where symbolically his light has gone out, and he is never again told stories by the sea or visited by the white ship.

  In a sense the tale is an allegorical statement of the Lovecraftian world-view, in that the lighthouse keeper has been led on by the sky-coloured bird, encouraged to believe that such things as the Land of Hope, ultimate meaning to life, can be found. All has been illusion; in the end there is no Cathuria, no Land of Hope, but only chaos—and the bird that has so acquiesced in the man’s self-deluding flaps its “mocking” sky-blue wings over the scene. Here is no picture of a cosmos that cares for the hopes of man, man who can find some form of bliss only in the Land of Fancy.

  However, the story has its limitations, in that with regard to the distinction between symbolism and allegory, one notices that “The White Ship” is mere allegory. A true symbol is not simply an object or idea that stands for another object or idea; there must be genuine interest both in the symbol itself in its own right and in what is symbolised. For example, in Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad,” in which the characters ride on a train supposed to be bound for the Celestial City, one cannot separate the literal train ride from that which it symbolises, for the purpose of being interested in both—one can only be interested in the train ride as symbol of ill-conceived striving for heaven. “The Celestial Railroad” is pure allegory; the train ride is not a symbol in the full sense of the word. By contrast, another Hawthorne train ride, that which occurs at the end of The House of the Seven Gables after the death of Judge Pyncheon, is true symbolism and not simply an allegorical event; we are interested not only in the train ride as symbol of Clifford’s liberation but as a literal event woven into the narrative, an event that in itself commands our attention.

  Clearly, the voyage in “The White Ship” is, in terms of this distinction, simple allegory. The voyage itself, as a literal event in its own right, does not compel our attention apart from its allegorical function as a symbol for self-exploration, for exploration of the human condition. The places seen are identified directly as the Land of Pleasures Unattained, the Land of Fancy, and so on, in a manner reminiscent of the Hawthorne allegory; this is quite different from such a truly symbolic voyage as, say, Marlow’s trip up the Congo River in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, in which both the literal voyage and what it symbolises (a journey through the psyche to confront the Shadow) earn our interest. If Lovecraft’s “The White Ship” is less than profound by dint of being mere allegory, allegory free, of course, of the sort of moralising didacticism found in Hawthorne, it is nonetheless artistically pleasing in other respects, particularly in its hauntingly poetic use of descriptive language, which though decidedly Dunsanian, has also a distinctively individual Lovecraftian ring to it. The narrator says, for example, of his imagined Cathuria, “At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the three-coloured shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist.” We know that as a poet the author would be at home among the inhabitants of his Sona-Nyl, who “are gifted with unmarred grace.”

  Shortly after writing “The White Ship,” Lovecraft turned from pure fantasy to a blend of Dunsanian fantasy and aquatic horror to write, in December 1919, “The Doom that Came to Sarnath.

  20 Again here his diction is lofty and sonorous in the Dunsanian way, but, far from being purely imitative, it shows also a darkness of tone that is Lovecraft’s own. The story opens:

  There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.

  In this very opening paragraph Lovecraft twice makes use of the device of chiasmus, a stylistic device that will come to be a frequent and effective one for him, in which syntactic elements occur in the pattern abba for poetic balance and symmetry: “. . . fed by (a) no stream (b) . . . no stream (b) . . . flows (a)” and “. . . stood . . . Sarnath . . . Sarnath . . . stands.” In the latter sentence there is actually the pattern abccba, with a buildup from time element to “standing” to Sarnath and a symmetric builddown, the sentence suggesting by its very form the cycle of coming and going of the great city. The story proceeds with descriptive language that is quite beautiful throughout, telling of the immemorially ancient city of Ib, whose vaguely aquatic inhabitants (worshipping a stone likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard) are attacked and vanquished, their flabby bodies pushed into the lake at spearpoint, by newcomers: early men, who build their city of Sarnath nearby on the shore of the same vast lake in the land of Mnar. The victors from Sarnath take home, as their spoils, the stone idol of Bokrug and set it up in their own temple as a symbol of the conquest of Ib; but the idol vanishes, and the high priest, who has scrawled “the sign of DOOM” on the altar, is found dead of fright.

  Sarnath, however, prospers and grows to a mighty and opulent centre of activity, its streets paved with onyx, its skyline graced with lofty towers and domes. (Lovecraft even postulates a sort of geodesic dome, climate-controlled all year, over the city’s gardens.) The tale’s narration paints a vivid and stirring picture of Sarnath, a picture in which Lovecraft’s love of the architectural graces of ancient Greece and his love of near-Eastern artistic beauty (from the atmosphere imbibed, no doubt, in his childhood reading of the Arabian Nights) are well in evidence.

  However, as the title suggests, and as is prophesied by the ancient high-priest, Samarth’s beauty and merry-making are not to last. On the occasion of the festival commemorating the thousandth year since the destroying of Ib (Lovecraft here making use of the “millennium” concept), strange mists and lights arise from the lake, and the revellers are scattered in panic, bearing tales of flabby, green, voiceless creatures seen in the king’s banquet hall. Later when adventurous young explorers from adjacent lands finally return to the lake, they find no trace of the city of Samarth, but only the ancient, seaweed-encrusted stone likeness of Bokrug, which is taken and “subsequently worshipped beneath the gibbous moon throughout the land of Mnar.” This last is perhaps a trifle straining to one’s credulity, but the total effect of the tale is undeniably spectral and impressive.

  It is interesting, also, that the original destruction of Ib by the builders of Samarth is motivated by nothing more than xenophobia: “they thought it was not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk.” The newcomers slay the denizens of Ib without provocation, merely because they are repellent of aspect. Considering that it is the slayers’ descendants who meet their foreordained doom, and the wronged beings of Ib who win out, the story is perhaps a comment quite different from the usually assumed point of view of Lovecraft the “racist.” It is clear from Lovecraft’s pronouncements that his “racism” consisted primarily of a desire for ethnic integrity; he feared intercultural mixing, preferring to see each race or nationality or culture retain its own identity rather than commingle with others. In this light, then, we may observe that so far as can be told from the story, the inhabitants of Ib were content to keep to themselves within their own cultural confines, so that the attack from Samarth is, from Lovecraft’s point of view, an act of true racism and intolerance—and the act is gravely punished. One should be cautious, however, about reading any outright didacticism into the work; Lovecraft expressly disliked designed moral didacticism in literature.

  Other Writings

  During the period of 1917–1919 Lovecraft produced a number of other pieces of writing, even aside from the mainstream of his writings in the amateur press (which for most of his life was voluminous, if somewhat inte
rmittent), such as his delightful little spoof “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” (September 1917) and such essays as “The Simple Spelling Mania” (December 1918). He wrote, in 1918, a “dime novel” called The Mystery of Murdon Grange, which disappeared into the machinations of an Anglo-American round-robin amateur correspondence club and is unfortunately no longer in existence, so far as is known.

  Early in 1919 Lovecraft wrote a story titled “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”