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

  The caravan departs, and the townspeople discover that their cats have all vanished. Little Atal, the innkeeper’s son (companion to Barzai the Wise in “The Other Gods,” a Dunsanian tale written about a year later; in that tale he has grown up to be a priest), reports having seen all the cats circling the ill-reputed cottage behind the elms. The next morning, all the cats are back, sleek and fat and uninterested in their food. When it is noticed that no light appears in the cottage for several days, the burgomeister decides to investigate, taking with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the stonecutter—names deftly chosen to enhance the Dunsanian ring to the tale, and names sonorously suggestive of their owners, in that in “Shang” one can hear the ringing of the anvil, in “Thul” the dull ponderousness of the stone. The party finds two cleanly picked human skeletons; the implications are obvious, and Lovecraft has indulged in a quaint bit of fun in his personal love of cats, who are the contented and purring wielders of vengeance in the tale. Poetically, the story ends cyclically, repeating the opening statement that “in Ulthar, no man may kill a cat.”

  In November 1920 Lovecraft wrote another Dunsanian story, “Celephaïs”

  37 which, in a letter written shortly after the tale’s composition, he says “weaves together a large number of my recent dreams on a thread of pathos.”

  38 The protagonist is a Londoner named Kuranes, though Kuranes is a name that he has come by in dreams and does not use in waking life; the tale is a “dreamland” story which foreshadows the novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath not only in its dream-topography—the city of Celephaïs is “in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai” (a patently Dunsanian-style name) “beyond the Tanarian Hills” in a dream world assumed to exist permanently for deep dreamers—but also philosophically and thematically. Kuranes is a fictive image of Lovecraft; he “did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams.” Unlike his fellow humans who strive “to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality,” Kuranes cares only for beauty: “When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.” Thus, Kuranes is an adumbration of Randolph Carter of the later novel about Kadath, who seeks for his dream-revealed “sunset city” only to find ultimately that it is the sum-total of his childhood reveries and the beauty of his native region. Lovecraft often remarked in letters that he looked back on the bliss of his childhood with longing, and indeed Kuranes longs for “that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.” The narrator of the tale philosophises on the point that children have mystical visions of wondrous beauty; but after becoming “dulled and prosaic from the poison of life” the same people can hope to return to these beatific visions only in dream.

  Kuranes beholds his dream-city of Celephaïs after a dream-walk through his native region and a plunge down an abyss, recalling that he had once dwelled there for an hour in his childhood only to be awakened by his nurse. Again he wakes after glimpsing his city “after forty weary years,” but soon reclaims the city in dreams and walks its onyx pavements. He finds a sea captain familiar to him from his childhood dream, and gains passage on a galley in the harbour “to sail out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea that leads to the sky.” This conceit of the river that flows to coalescence with the sky is a common imagery in Lovecraft’s dream fiction, and indeed his use of the name “the river Skai” is strongly suggestive of this coalescence. The galley sails over strange regions and comes almost to the fabulous harbour of Serannian, “the pink marble city of the clouds,” when Kuranes again awakes.

  This time Kuranes is frustrated in his efforts to return in dream to Celephaïs, which evidently functions in the story as a sort of idealisation of beauty itself. He seeks in vain through dreamland for the Valley of Ooth-Nargai, seeing many unheard-of places: “One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders.” Lovecraft in such passages proves himself quite adept at dreamlike narration.

  Kuranes perseveres in his search, “once barely escaping from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery in the cold desert plateau of Leng.” This episode recurs in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; in many respects the story “Celephaïs” seems to be a sort of warmup for the writing of that more ambitious work.

  Kuranes tries drugs to increase and deepen his sleep, but to no avail, and finally he is turned out of his garret to roam the streets. He wanders to a place of sparse habitation and is met by a cortege of knights from Celephaïs come to bear him home and install him as “chief god for evermore” of Ooth-Nargai because he has created the region in his dreams: “He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn.” Thus the dream-seeker after beauty has found what he sought, in that deepest of all sleep. The philosophical comment seems to be that in a lurid and beauty-starved life, visions of real beauty can only be fleeting; one can escape from the garish squalor of the world and “prolong” one’s glimpses of bliss only by escaping from life itself. In particular, the artist who seeks after beauty has no place in the prosaic world. (Interestingly, the story’s final paragraph contains Lovecraft’s first reference to the name Innsmouth, which later is used for the semi-fictitious Massachusetts seacoast town in “The Shadow over Innsmouth. “)

  A little less than four months after the writing of “Celephaïs,” Lovecraft produced, in late February 1921, a thematically and stylistically similar Dunsanian tale called “The Quest of Iranon.”

  39 Of the story, Lovecraft soon after its writing remarked:

  I am picking up a new style lately—running to pathos as well as horror. The best thing I have yet done is “The Quest of Iranon” whose English Loveman calls the most musical and flowing I have yet written, and whose sad plot made one prominent poet actually weep—not at the crudity of the story, but at the sadness.

  40

  The story’s protagonist is a young man—or a man who thinks himself still young—named Iranon, a wanderer “vine-crowned, his yellow hair glistening with myrrh and his purple robe tom with briers.” He comes to the granite city of Teloth, where men live in (symbolically) square houses and toil and frown without the relief of merriment; the place is one of art-forsaking sterility. Iranon announces himself:

  I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my calling is to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotus-buds.

  Clearly, one may regard Iranon as yet another representation of Lovecraft, who yearned for the bliss of his childhood and as a writer was a “singer of songs,” as it were. Iranon sonorously describes his childhood city of “cerulean pools and crystal fountains,” and says that he was a prince there. He is not well received in Teloth; the archon there has him lodged, interestingly enough, in a stable, and assigns him to the cobbler’s shop to be apprenticed. “But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, and have no heart for the cobbler’s trade.” (In this response one readily sees an attitudinal pattern belonging to Lovecraft himself, who indeed had no heart for the prosaic world of work, or even for “hawking” his own manuscripts.) The archon replies that all must toil in the granite city; when Iranon remonstrates that a life of toil without beauty is like death, he is told that he has blasphemed: “for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good . . . . All here must serve, and song is folly.”

  Despairing, Iranon prepares to leave, and he encounters a like-minded Telothian yo
uth named Romnod, who tells him of Oonai, a distant city of lute-playing and dancing. Although Iranon doubts that this is his remembered Aira, the two depart together in search of the place. When they find it, Oonai turns out to be a city of lively but garish and dissipated merriment, where Romnod, yielding to the pleasures of the place (going from one extreme to the other without finding balance), grows coarse and red with wine, and dies. Saddened, Iranon resumes his purple-robed poverty and wanders on, finally to encounter an old shepherd, whom he asks where Aira can be found. The shepherd’s response brings the tale to its sad culmination; he replies that he has heard of Aira, but only “in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar’s boy given to strange dreams.” The playmate, he says, fancied himself a prince and was laughed at, so that he ran away to find more sympathetic audiences for his songs and dream-tales. “Nor was there ever a marble city of Aira . . . save in the dreams of mine old playmate Iranon who is gone.” Upon hearing this dream-shattering truth, Iranon—“a very old man in tattered purple,” though his dreams have always made him think himself young and golden-haired—walks into the quicksand. The tale ends with the poetic intrusion of an omniscient narrator: “That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.” This choice of words, and indeed the entire story’s narration, leaves one feeling that in some deeper sense the self-deluded Iranon’s world of imagined beauty and song has perhaps all along been the truer world, so that the tale has the capacity for creating much ambivalence of interpretation. On one level the work may be viewed as a Lovecraftian comment, somewhat in the manner of Kafka, on the position of the artist in an uncaring marketplace. Iranon has said, “But though I have had listeners sometimes, they have been very few.” On another level the story may be regarded as philosophising, like “Celephaïs,” on the point that true beauty is to be glimpsed only in dream and in memories and fantasies of childhood. Iranon’s elusive Aira existed in his dreams and fancies, which he carried with him all along; in this respect the story thematically foreshadows The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. In any case, its melodiousness of language and its variegation of interpretability mark it as one of Lovecraft’s most engaging efforts in the Dunsanian vein.

  During August 1921 Lovecraft wrote another little Dunsanian tale, “The Other Gods,”

  41 of which he said, two years later, “Yes—it represents me in my most Dunsanian mood.”

  42 The story, like Dunsany’s tales of the gods of Pegāna, deals with the relation between gods and men; and the thematically central notion in the story is that of the wages of hubris or overweening pride. “Atop the tallest of earth’s peaks,” the tale opens, “dwell the gods of earth, and suffer no man to tell that he hath looked upon them.” These gods have been pushed to more and more remote heights by inquisitive humans and indeed “have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the old waste where no man treads,” leaving behind them on the old peaks no sign except a great carven image on the mountain’s face. In all these details, of course, the story anticipates the Kadath novel, with the significant difference that while in the latter work Randolph Carter’s prideful quest is tolerated, as it were, by the gods, the hubris of Barzai the Wise in “The Other Gods” is not; Barzai is too wise for his own good.

  The young priest Atal (the now grown-up innkeeper’s son from “The Cats of Ulthar”) has become the disciple of old Barzai, who is learned in such ancient texts as the Pnakotic Manuscripts (which, like the Necronomicon, are texts invented by Lovecraft); he has learned of the gods’ habits and has resolved to do what is forbidden—to look upon them as they sneak back onto the summit of Hatheg-Kla to dance and rejoice and “try to play in the olden ways on the remembered slopes” when the summit is hidden by clouds, which are the ships of the gods. The two ascend this awesome mountain in a frightful and laborious climb, Barzai finally pulling up far ahead of young Atal, who can only hear Barzai’s cries at last but cannot see him. In typical Lovecraftian fashion, the conduit through which information flows is an observer removed from the starkness of that which develops, so that the reader is left to imagine and speculate on much.

  The utterances that Atal hears show Barzai’s pride growing more dangerous: “The wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than earth’s gods, and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught,” he exclaims upon hearing the gods at play. He resolves to see them as well, “and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than they.” In this portrait of god-flouting, Lovecraft is following the tradition of Greek drama, where protagonists (Oedipus, for example, who thinks that he can escape from god-given lines of prophecy) often are caught up by their prideful slighting of the gods. Barzai’s quest, though the reader is kept from a direct view of the details (also as in Greek drama), ends in horror: “The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth! . . . Do not see! . . . I am falling into the sky.” Barzai, of course, is never seen again, and later climbers find “graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious and Cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel.” The symbol is like one that occurs in parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient for men to know how to read. The gods return from Kadath to dance reminiscently once more in the mists of Hatheg-Kla. The tale, a rather simple and moralising one, is well in keeping with the Dunsanian tradition and style; by adding such touches as the Pnakotic Manuscripts, however, Lovecraft has also infused the story with his own manner—never content merely to copy, Lovecraft assimilated his Dunsany influence for his own distinctive treatment.

  “The Outsider” and “The Rats in the Walls”

  During the same period (1920–1923) in which Lovecraft was producing some of his most purely Dunsanian works, such as “Celephaïs’ and “The Quest of Iranon,” he also wrote stories that show more than anything else the influence of Poe, because of their deep psychological interpretability, their mirroring of the human psyche, and their grimness of tone and subject, notably “The Outsider” and “The Rats in the Walls.”

  Lovecraft wrote “The Outsider” in 1921,

  43 and it remains one of his most enigmatic and complexly interpretable tales, though Lovecraft himself was eventually to be less than satisfied with it:

  To my mind this tale—written a decade ago—is too glibly mechanical in its elimination effect, & almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of its language. As I reread it, I can hardly understand how I could have let myself be tangled up in such baroque and windy rhetoric as recently as ten years ago. It represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.

  44

  However one may judge the language, whether one agrees that the narration is “pompous” or “baroque” or not (it is certainly less restrained than some of the later works in the maturity of his style) one must own that Lovecraft here makes short shrift of the critical possibilities in the tale, many of which he may well not have been conscious of in the process of writing.

  “The Outsider” is told from the point of view of a first-person narrator who lives in the depths of an ancient castle devoid of light and furnished only with antique and cobwebbed books and the bones of the castle’s nethermost crypts. The Outsider longs for light, for escape from his surroundings, and finally resolves to undertake a perilous climb up the inside of the castle’s black tower. The narration at this point is graced with a poetically balanced instance of chiasmus: “it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.” Ascending in agonising slowness by the slightest of footholds, he pulls himself up through a ponderously slabbed trapdoor into a chamber at the top of the tower, a dark room filled with “odious oblong boxes of disturbing size.” Finding and opening a door he beholds, for the first time, the radiant moon, and stumbles up the steps beyond the door to find, to his great amazement, not the vantage-point of a prodigious height above the ground, but the level ground itself stretching all around, with an ancient stone church nearby. Wandering thro
ugh the countryside he finds a brilliantly lighted hall and hears gaiety and revelry within. He steps into the hall to see its inhabitants, so recently merry, fleeing in pandaemonium and fear from some unknown horror. He spies the horror standing just within an arched doorway:

  it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide . . . . I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty of the human shape.

  The narrator throws out a hand to ward off the monstrosity leering so close to his face and is destroyed in the awful moment in which he does so, for he has touched “a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.”

  Interpretations of the story abound. It is clear that one may indulge in biographical criticism, speculating that the story is a fictive mirroring of Lovecraft himself, “a stranger in this century,” unable to embrace the ways of his fellow lodgers in the modem age. However, there are serious problems with this interpretation—Lovecraft did, in fact, find much warmth of companionship with a wide circle of friends, and while the Outsider says, “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness,” Lovecraft’ s own recollection of childhood was one of longing and pleasant reminiscence.