inspired fantasies. This is not a hard and fast rule, though; the later stories aren't necessarily uniformly excellent and the earlier stories aren't necessarily uniformly less good. Each phase of Lovecraft's oeuvre has its own particular pleasures and displeasures.
This survey is based upon the chronological catalogue of Lovecraft's fiction established by S.T. Joshi, as published in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales and also available on the Internet at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive site. I will attempt to cover all the extant works listed therein in basically the order in which they are listed. For this revised version of the text, I have now included notes on the stories included in the Miscellaneous Writings volume that I had not previously been able to consider. I will not be considering the three authenticated incomplete works, "Azathoth", "The Descendant" and "The Book", since none of them are developed far enough to be able to make any real judgements upon them. However, I have decided to reverse my earlier decision to discount "The Evil Clergyman", for reasons that I will explain when I come to that point.
This being a survey of the fiction, I shall not be looking at the poetry or essays or letters or any other non-fictional material in any detail. I may make some passing references in the course of this piece to some of these works, but the fiction will be the focus. In order to approach Lovecraft's fiction, I feel that some biographical detail will be necessary. I find that with many writers, biography is one of the best keys to understanding their works and situating them within their life, and this is especially true of Lovecraft. As such, we shall cover quite a bit of biographical ground through the course of this piece, and we shall need to cover a good amount of it before we can properly get onto the written works. This is not really intended as a proper biography, however, and readers looking for proper biography should try elsewhere. Other readers may not find the analyses here to be terribly "literary", but I want to keep this text as accessible as possible. In general I hope to keep this as brief and simple a survey as I can make it, with a few digressions. There are other writers more capable than I of subjecting Lovecraft to the rigours of modern literary criticism, so if that's what you want seek them out instead.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, being the only child of Sarah Phillips and Winfield Lovecraft, at the Phillips residence at 454 Angell St. in Providence, R.I. Not long after this, the Lovecraft family moved to Auburndale, Massachusetts, where they were frequents guests of the poetess Louise Imogen Guiney; the young Howard took a particular shine to one of her several St Bernard dogs, which is very interesting given his later love of cats. Lovecraft's earliest memories all stemmed from the Auburndale period. In 1893, however, Winfield Lovecraft was struck with a nervous breakdown possibly induced by syphilis contracted on a business trip, which saw him being committed to an institution, and which forced the family back to 454 Angell St. His father died in 1898; Lovecraft barely remembered him and relied on his grandfather and uncles for male authority figures.
Young Howard could read from an early age and was able to write from the age of about four or five. At that age he was seized with a love for the Arabian Nights, and a relative gave him the nickname Abdul Alhazred around this time (a name which will become supremely important later on in another context). This early enthusiasm was soon displaced by a more lasting one when he moved onto Grimm's Fairy Tales and then Bulfinch's Age of Fable, opening him to the world of classical myth. Another book called Garth's Ovid, an 18th century collective translation of Ovid featuring Dryden and Pope amongst its contributors, seems to have been the book which gave Lovecraft his 18th century fixation. "I was born 200 years too late," he once said, and it is undeniable that he had a very real psychological identification with that period. Attracted by the formal nature of the book, the translations being made in the English heroic couplets of that age, Lovecraft hunted out everything he could find pertaining to the time and was never quite able to completely lose this period enthusiasm. The heroic couplet became his preferred vehicle for writing his own verse, and he had trouble shaking it. A final, crucial discovery came in 1898 when he first read Edgar Allan Poe. If Lovecraft's literary tastes could be seen to already be developing in the direction of the fantastic by the age of six, Poe set him firmly towards the macabre end of that field.
Lovecraft's earliest stories and poems date from 1897, those being "The Poem of Ulysses" and a story of 200 words called "The Noble Eavesdropper". Over the next ten years, Lovecraft wrote many such poems and stories, though he made a point of destroying almost all of the stories he had written in 1908, retaining only a few as examples of his juvenilia that he could bear to look at. We do not know how many stories he wrote, though we do know a few titles of lost works and we know what some of them were about. Lovecraft described what he could remember of the plots of some of the stories in letters to correspondents much later. Most of what he describes sound like Poe-derived Gothics, although he claimed to have written many detective stories at this time as well, also Poe-derived.
A total of six pre-1908 stories have survived the ages and Lovecraft's destruction of his juvenile oeuvre; two were saved by Lovecraft (these we shall come to soon) and four by his mother. These are "The Little Glass Bottle", "The Secret Cave, or John Lees (sic) Adventure", "The Mystery of the Graveyard" and "The Mysterious Ship". The first of these is dated 1897, the middle pair 1898 and the last 1902. There is not really much that can be said about or for these early works; in a curious way they're almost critique-proof. S.T. Joshi notes that they are nowhere near as good as the verses he was writing at that age; not having had an opportunity to read any of Lovecraft's early verse bar one solitary example of 1902 ("To Pan"), I can't agree or disagree knowledgeably with that judgement. The best that can be said for them is that Lovecraft's handle on grammar and spelling was visibly improving from the first story to the fourth. None of these stories saw publication until 1959, 22 years after Lovecraft's death.
Writing and reading fantastic fiction was not his only occupation at this time. At the age of nine he developed an interest in chemistry, and at twelve he discovered astronomy. Astronomy in particular remained another life-long interest; when Pluto was discovered in 1930 while he was writing "The Whisperer in Darkness", he did not hesitate to appropriate it as his own, naming it as the home planet of the alien creatures in that story. There certainly was an interesting duality in Lovecraft's personality, fond as he was of both hard science and fantasy fiction, which some commentators seem to find hard to get a grip on, though I have no problems doing so myself. Lovecraft's belief in the supernatural was simply non-existent and he never believed in any of the horrors he would come to write about; as he noted late in life, the very fact that he disbelieved such things made them more interesting to him.
Around 1896/97 he was first taken to the theatre and in 1906 he also attended his first film show, though his interest in these waned somewhat as years went on. A shorter-lived interest was music; Lovecraft took violin lessons from the ages of seven to nine, and even gave a small public recital in 1898, until nervous troubles prevented him from persisting. He later came to despise classical music, though he liked light popular tunes, and in the 1930s claimed the upper limit of his musical appreciation was the Irish-American operetta composer Victor Herbert. (On another occasion, however, he admitted to a fondness for certain items by Richard Wagner.) These rather ill-defined nervous problems formed a constant thread throughout Lovecraft's life, with a particularly bad one seeming to hit around 1908 when his rather half-hearted attempts at schooling came to an end.
Private tutors, as well as relatives and his own not inconsiderable efforts, saw him through those years when he did not receive formal schooling; according to Lovecraft, he did not enter school until he was eight years old, and then he did not last at it for very long, since he had already learned the various things on the curriculum. He did not return to this school, the Slater Avenue school, until 1902. This time he made more of an effort to fit in with his classmates despite his basically solitary nature, although he was not generally liked and made only a few actual friends. He also had trouble with the discipline at Slater Avenue, often clashing with teachers, and he was much happier with the looser discipline of Hope Street High School, which he attended on and off from 1904 to 1908. At Sunday school he was a similar failure; despite the best efforts of all involved, Lovecraft simply refused to give into the Christian (particularly Baptist) belief system his well-intentioned guardians and teachers tried to force on him. Philosophically he settled on scientific rationalism and materialism, though in religious terms he seems to have wavered between agnosticism and outright atheism.
But a vaguely described nervous breakdown put an end to Lovecraft's schooling in 1908, as noted above. As such he never graduated from high school but, more crushingly to him, he thereby never made it into Brown University where he would otherwise have gone. He was always embarrassed by this failure, especially since many of the male figures in his life at that time, particularly his uncle Franklin C. Clark, were men of a scholarly bent that he looked up to and wished he could emulate. S.T. Joshi has conjectured, not unreasonably, that at least part of the cause of this "breakdown" lay in his failure to adequately master mathematics, especially algebra, and his subsequent realisation that a career in astronomy, which he'd set his heart on, was beyond him as a result.
Things were not all bad. Generally Lovecraft's childhood seems to have been happy enough, and the period 1902-03 definitely seems to have formed some sort of golden age for him. He was writing prodigiously for someone of his age, writing and hand-printing his own scientific "textbooks" and a small scientific newspaper that he circulated among family and friends for a number of years. In June 1906 the name H.P. Lovecraft first saw published print, with a short article attacking astrology in the Providence Sunday Journal, and for the next two years he regularly contributed pieces on astronomy to the regional newspapers around Providence. And he continued to write stories. As mentioned, most of these are lost, but two from 1905 and 1908 were retained by Lovecraft and have survived to reach paperback publication, being the earliest Lovecraft stories to be generally available.
"The Beast in the Cave" tells a story of someone lost inside Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and menaced by an unseen animal presence. The narrator injures it and is rescued by the rest of his expedition team, who examine the creature, finding it isn't actually an animal, but a devolved and degenerated human being. It is dated April 21 1905, and given that Lovecraft was not quite fifteen when he wrote it, it is reasonably good, certainly a vast advance on the earlier stories. Parts of it are recognisable as having been written by him, and the theme of human degeneracy which has been identified as one of Lovecraft's key themes and fears is already in evidence. "The Alchemist", from 1908, relates a story of a line of medieval French barons labouring under a six hundred year old curse placed on them by an alchemist, who uses sorcery to extend his life over six centuries so that he can ensure the curse is always fulfilled, until he is killed by the last of the line. Both of these stories make for fine juvenilia, though of course they bear little or no comparison with the later works. "The Alchemist" is notable for being the first H.P. Lovecraft story to be published (printed in The United Amateur in November 1916), and for being the last story he is known to have written before the wholesale destruction of his early stories. It was nine years before he would write another.
In 1904, disaster struck the Lovecraft family when his grandfather Whipple V. Phillips died, and the company he owned was sold off. Lovecraft called the elder Phillips "the centre of my entire universe", and his loss was a catastrophic one. The Lovecraft family lost what money they should have received from the sale as stockholders, and also lost their home, being forced to move to 598 Angell St. Lovecraft held a lifelong dream to recover the old place and restore it, but it was never to be. He later claimed to have considered suicide around this time, and though his later retellings of the event may contain some degree of (over)dramatisation, we can perhaps assume he was serious. He claimed that all that held him back was the thought of all the things he would never know, things he had never learned and never would if he left early. And so he lived, and it's notable that, however set in his ways he sometimes seemed to become, he never completely lost this learning instinct.
Although many people seem to think Lovecraft lived practically all his life as a sickly Rhode Island recluse, the fact is that he was reasonably well-travelled. He lived in New York for two years, went even further north to Quebec on more than one occasion and liked to visit his correspondent and protegé Robert H. Barlow in Florida. It has to be stressed, however, that virtually all of Lovecraft's jaunts took place after 1920. For the first thirty years of his life, Lovecraft never ventured beyond the three states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. He lived for nearly two thirds of his life in a very confined area indeed, engendering a sort of provincialism which perhaps goes a long way towards explaining some of the early limitations of his personality—not that these limitations necessarily all vanished once he took himself off to travel more often after 1920.
And as Joshi says, during the period from 1908 to 1913, Lovecraft really was the recluse many people think he always was. These five years are the most obscure of Lovecraft's life. He wrote a few of his scientific texts and masses of poetry based on 18th century models, but basically he did not get out often. His first published poem appeared in 1912, called Providence in 2000 AD, a satire on a movement by some Italian migrants in Providence to have a street renamed after Christopher Columbus. Foreigners would always provide him with a target in his letters and essays, even in some of the stories, and Lovecraft's racism, alleged or otherwise, is possibly the hardest part of him to accept today; his racial theories as expounded in various early (and indeed later) letters and essays make rather uncomfortable reading. Still, I'm always wary of making value judgements on the values of bygone times, and often worry that we fall into the same trap as the early Christians when in power and faced with the beliefs of the pagans—because it doesn't fit into our dominant modern beliefs, at the very least we ignore it and the very worst we actively destroy it, focusing too much on the negative without giving any thought to positive achievements. If Lovecraft held racial beliefs which are no longer generally fashionable, then he would not have been the only one at that time—nor, arguably, would he be the only one now, at least not as long as the Ku Klux Klan (who he referred to once as "that noble but much maligned band") exists. Having said that, let us continue.
One day in 1913, Lovecraft wrote a letter to a magazine and thereby unwittingly changed his life. For distraction at this time he often turned to popular magazines such as the Black Cat, the Argosy and the All-Story. These magazines provided him with a source of contemporary weird fiction—to this point Lovecraft had only come into contact with certain classics of the genre—but he was embarrassed to admit to reading pulp magazines of this sort, and later tried to cover himself by saying he only started reading them around 1913 and dropped them soon after; but the truth of the matter seems to be that he had been reading the pulps since at least 1905, possibly earlier. One of the Argosy's writers, Frederick Jackson, so offended Lovecraft that he wrote an abusive letter to the magazine. The letter was duly published and duly attacked in kind, though it did receive some support. Lovecraft was particularly provoked by one John Russell, who responded in verse to Lovecraft's attack on Jackson; Lovecraft responded in kind with his humorous verse letters called "Ad Criticos". Others responded in similar fashion, and so the not always seemly attacks continued until in 1914, after many months of warfare in both directions, Lovecraft made peace with Russell, and they published a composite poem to mark the end of the dispute, which had been followed by Edward F. Daas of the United Amateur Press Association. Daas extended an invitation to Lovecraft to join the UAPA—and so began Lovecraft's rehabilitation into the world, in a way.
Lovecraft was no doubt well-suited to amateur journalism—he'd produced and printed his own newspapers and books from a fairly young age—and he proved to be exceedingly capable, producing his own paper called The Conservative from 1915 to 1919, with another couple of issues in the early 1920s, as well as contributing to the papers of others, and also through the various official positions he would hold within the amateur organisations. He would grow somewhat disillusioned with the amateur press groups by about 1920, but he never gave them up altogether, later defecting to the United's rival, the National Amateur Press Association, with whom he remained for the rest of his life, and he knew the beneficial effect amateur journalism had had on him; at a 1921 amateur journalism conference, he delivered a speech on this subject, concluding that amateur journalism had given him life itself.
Although Lovecraft remained fairly solitary and stuck in Providence, he now kept up at least a bit more contact with the outside world again through the papers and articles he published with the UAPA, through the people who now came to visit him, and also through his correspondence, which started to take off about this time. L. Sprague de Camp estimated that Lovecraft wrote something like 100,000 letters in his lifetime; S.T. Joshi finds this figure too high but has stated that about 20,000 may still exist. Nine hundred and thirty were published, nearly all of them edited in some way, in the Arkham House Selected Letters series between 1965 and 1976. The Selected Letters ran to five volumes, so we can guess how many volumes would be needed to hold all the surviving letters uncut; and if all 100,000 survived, to quote the apostle John out of context, "I do not think the world itself could hold the volumes they would fill." Lovecraft's letters are justly famous and will probably form his real enduring monument, and are necessary reading, but they are not our focus here.
Most of the things he wrote for the amateur press were essays (several collected in the Miscellaneous Writings collection) and poetry. Lovecraft's poetry has never come in for many good notices. Lovecraft himself knew his poetic limitations, knew that his skill lay in producing verse that was technically and metrically perfect, but which was lacking in any other poetic inspiration and talent. A letter from April 1918 lists nearly 80 poems published in amateur papers since 1914 by Lovecraft under his own name and under pseudonyms, which he dismisses in these two withering sentences: "What a mess of mediocre & miserable junk. He hath sharp eyes indeed, who can discover any trace of merit in so worthless an array of bad verse." When he let go of the 18th century forms and mannerisms, however, he was capable of producing some not bad things. Some of the verse revolved around fantastic themes, which he had obviously never been able to shake; his most famous fantastic poems are the Fungi From Yuggoth, a series of 36 sonnets composed at New Year 1929/30, when he had a sudden and brief reignition of his poetic muse. Although he never entirely stopped writing verses, once he rediscovered fiction poetry stopped being his main literary outlet.
Most importantly, though, it was through amateur journalism that he finally returned to fiction writing. He used The Alchemist as his credential to enter the UAPA, and it was published in an amateur paper called The United Amateur in November 1916, as mentioned. It received a favourable enough response from those who read it, and Lovecraft was encouraged to put pen to paper and produce fiction again. In June 1917, the first result was a story called "The Tomb". Allowing for the fact that it is virtually a debut—the early stories hardly count, given the long time since he had written any—it isn't too bad. It's nothing special, though. "The Tomb" is an adequate late-Victorian potboiler and not much more. Yet even in this, effectively his first story, we might discern the rudiments of one of his later great themes, the way in which the past impinges in horrible ways upon the present. In "The Tomb" it is the ghostly presence of an ancestor of the narrator; the ghostly presences of the later stories would be much more intriguing, of course.
"Dagon" was his second story, written a month after the first, and already we see something more interesting. Around the time he was writing these stories, Lovecraft did something astonishingly out of character for him. He attempted to enlist for the war effort. (Remember this was the time of World War I, and the US only entered the fray in 1917; indeed he was also said to have attempted to enlist as a British citizen in 1914 and was similarly stopped.) It's almost unimaginable that Lovecraft did this or that he would have been accepted in any case, though he claims he made it through the first physical exam somehow, and may have proceeded if his mother hadn't discovered what he was doing and frustrated all his efforts after that. It was yet another thing that made Lovecraft feel inadequate, and I'm sure there's some significance in the fact that the narrator of "Dagon" is a crewman aboard a ship captured by the Germans at the war's outbreak. He escapes and somehow arrives at a disgusting swamp; from there he discovers a vast canyon containing a similarly huge piece of ancient masonry and a monstrous thing that clambers all over it: "it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then." It's that deadpan last sentence which is the killer.
There are two more items listed for 1917, "A Reminiscence of Dr Samuel Johnson" and "Sweet Ermengarde." The first of these is a short mock essay, modelled upon Boswell's Life of Johnson, and written in what I presume is a perfect pastiche of the 18th century manner. Lovecraft presents himself as a contemporary of the good doctor, with Boswell being a revision client of his; in an ingenious twist, Lovecraft revises an authentic bit of Boswellian verse, and I daresay the result is actually an improvement. "A Reminiscence" also has the notable distinction of being the first of Lovecraft's new fictional productions to be published, first seeing print, in the United Amateur for November 1917. "Dagon" would have to wait until 1919 and "The Tomb" until 1922 for publication.
"Sweet Ermengarde" would have to wait longer than either of them, not seeing print until 1943. This is undoubtedly the least likely item in the entire Lovecraft canon, a fairly funny parody of a rural romance: a sweet young (or maybe not so young) thing from down on the farm is wooed by the evil landlord, the handsome Jack Manly, and a complete bounder who tempts her to the big city but abandons her. Ermengarde is adopted by a wealthy old patroness whose purse she finds in the street and returns to her; at the end, which follows hard upon, we discover that Ermengarde is actually the old woman's daughter and that she was stolen at birth some twenty-eight years earlier by the woman she had always believed to be her mother.
Quite why "A Reminiscence" and "Sweet Ermengarde", as well as other items which I shall note in due course, have always remained on the fringe of the Lovecraft canon is something which mystifies me; perhaps their sheer difference from the rest of the canon is to blame, though it certainly doesn't necessarily make them inferior. Lovecraft was not a believer in humour as an element of the weird tale, but he was not a humourless person—this fact should be blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with the letters—and "Sweet Ermengarde" proves he was capable of doing outright comedy. The exact date of the story is a bit uncertain, however. On the basis of the manuscript handwriting, Joshi dates it in the Miscellaneous Writings collection to some uncertain point between 1919 and 1925 (his earlier chronology in Dagon does not even include the story at all); however, the most recent corrected chronology of Lovecraft's works, at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive website, dates it to 1917, at the very beginning of Lovecraft's revived fiction career; hence I also consider it under this date, which has some interesting potential implications.
His first story for 1918 was "Polaris", another story of the past pressing on the present. In this case, the narrator is tormented by memories of a past life thousands of years earlier, when he forgets his guard duties and the kingdom he is meant to protect is overrun by invaders. The story apparently stemmed from a dream Lovecraft had himself; what is interesting here is the exotic nomenclature, the place names—Sarkia, Noton, Kadiphonek, Lomar, Olathoë—for reasons I shall come to shortly.
He followed "Polaris" with "The Mystery of Murdon Grange". This story is listed as lost, and I only mention it because of a comment Lovecraft made in a letter in relation to it: "Really, I think I could have been a passable dime novelist if I had been trained in that noble calling!" As events turned out, he did not quite become a dime novelist, but perhaps not far from it. All we know of the story itself is that he published it in the amateur press as a serial, each part "authored" by a different one of Lovecraft's various pseudonyms.
Finally in 1918 we have Lovecraft's first known collaborative effort, a very odd number called "The Green Meadow." He had written the first paragraph or so from a dream of his, then showed it to the poetess Winifred Jackson, who told him of a similar dream of her own, so he decided to incorporate her dream into his, and the result was published under their respective pseudonyms, though Jackson otherwise had little to do with it. This was the only time, apart from another Jackson collaboration, that Lovecraft added his own name to one of his collaborative efforts; all his others were unsigned by him. "The Green Meadow" is somewhat disjointed, with the introduction having seemingly little to do with the body of the text and frankly I find it incomprehensible. It reads as if it were written as an exercise of some sort, maybe just to see if it could be done. Its value otherwise seems pretty negligible; since it never saw print until 1927, Lovecraft was clearly in no hurry to dispose of it.
In hindsight we can see that 1919 was a fairly important year for Lovecraft. First of all, his increasingly unstable mother was finally committed in March. Once again Lovecraft was faced with the household being scaled down; it often seems like his whole life was a series of such downsizings. Like his father, she was sent to Butler Hospital, and like him also, she would not come back out. Winfield Townley Scott conjectured that her husband's derangement may have led to her own—the examining doctor noted that some disorder had been in evidence at least since 1904 (when Whipple Phillips died), and possibly as far back as 1893, when Winfield Lovecraft collapsed—and perhaps in turn this had an effect on her relationship with young Howard.
Lovecraft's relationship with his mother was an undeniably odd one. She had helped inculcate in him an exaggerated sense of his own ugliness—I forget who else compared Lovecraft's mug to an Easter Island statue, though surely he wasn't that hideous—and S.T. Joshi conjectures that some of the disgust she may have felt at her husband contracting syphilis was projected onto her son. She seems to have been something of a hindering presence; without wishing to read too much into it, I think it's interesting that not long after her death in 1921, and despite the heavy shock this still caused for him, Lovecraft suddenly came into his own and blossomed to a degree. Even Lovecraft himself once said that he never had any sufficiency, never mind surplus, of physical or mental energy until he was over thirty—i.e. by 1920 or 1921. Once Sarah Lovecraft was gone, there was nothing to stop him getting enlisted, or from doing any other rash and impetuous thing.
The other great event of 1919 came in September when he first read a book by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany. Dunsany had seen action in the Boer War and World War I, and was also a famous chess champion, but is mostly remembered for his fantasy writing. He devised his own mythology along the lines of classical myth and combined this with Biblical-style prose to produce books like The Gods of Pegana, The Sword of Welleran and A Dreamer's Tales. The effect on Lovecraft, when he sat down to read the last of these was electric, and gave his new writing career a huge kickstart. This is why "Polaris" and "The Green Meadow" present interesting cases, in that they seem to use a sort of "Dunsanian" nomenclature and style of writing, even though they were written before his encounter with Dunsany. Perhaps Lovecraft was already going to develop along similar lines himself and Dunsany confirmed him in that direction. At any rate an affinity seems to have already been there, as Lovecraft himself recognised.
Before proceeding, let us consider a couple of Lovecraft's other major influences. By 1923 Lovecraft had discovered the Welsh author Arthur Machen, who was the latest of Lovecraft's primary influences. By the time he came to write his famous history of fantastic fiction, Supernatural Horror In Literature, in 1926/27, he would rate Machen's "White People" as second only to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows". A key theme of Machen's was the survival of forces from the past, and this would famously become the dominant theme of Lovecraft's later fiction as well. It is worth remembering, however, that some of Lovecraft's tales prior to his discovery of Machen also deal with ancient forces impinging upon the present, such as in "Polaris" or "The Nameless City," to some degree even as early as "The Tomb", so it would seem that Machen is not solely responsible for inspiring this aspect of Lovecraft's work. It may be a similar case to "Polaris", where Lovecraft employs "Dunsanian" nomenclature a year before actually reading any of Dunsany's works. Perhaps the feeling for ancient survivals was already inherent to some degree in Lovecraft before he found Machen; in the latter he may have recognised this feeling, and Machen may have helped to magnify it somewhat by the time Lovecraft came to write the later stories.
M.R. James was another author Lovecraft admired, specialising in ghost stories, and he would later be admitted into the pantheon, Lovecraft calling him "the earthiest member of the big four" (with Poe, Dunsany and Machen). In Supernatural Horror In Literature, Lovecraft said that James formulated three golden rules for macabre fiction: one, it should have a familiar modern setting the reader can relate to; two, the apparition should be malevolent (it is a horror story after all); and three, the terminology of conventional occultism and pseudo-science should be avoided at all costs. From that point on, after writing Supernatural Horror In Literature, Lovecraft would do his best to put those rules into practice with his own fiction, though his "ghosts" would be of a rather different order to James'.
Unquestionably, though, it was Dunsany who provided a major impetus for Lovecraft in the early days of his return to fiction. Thekla Zachrau has claimed that this influence exclusively extends to a number of stories written between 1919 and 1921, but I feel this claim is untenable and unnecessarily absolute; certainly the direct influence of Dunsany may indeed have been limited to this period of the early 1920s and worn off gradually as Lovecraft became less enamoured of his later works, but it is arguable that an indirect and somewhat diluted influence can still be traced even up to Lovecraft's very latest works such as "The Haunter of the Dark", if only in the nomenclature employed in these stories. And his affection for Dunsany never actually disappeared. Though Lovecraft admitted being disheartened by Dunsany's later works, such as the Jorkens books which he dismissed as "tripe", he retained his fondness for those early works of Dunsany that he discovered in 1919 until the end.
So what actually was the first "Dunsanian" story? This is slightly difficult to answer. It's easiest to just say "Polaris" was, avant la lettre, but what about when we consider the stories from 1919?
The first three items for that year are "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", "Memory" and "Old Bugs". None of these has a specific date other than 1919, so I don't know precisely when each was written. The last named is another of Lovecraft's rarely discussed curiosa, apparently posthumously excerpted from a letter to his young correspondent Alfred Galpin (the very last piece of Lovecraft's fiction to be published, along with his very first stories, in 1959). Lovecraft was deadly serious about the evils of alcohol—1919 was the year of Prohibition, lest we forget—but in this story he takes a light-hearted approach in an attempt to warn Galpin of the horrors of drink. In the year 1950, Old Bugs is an extreme derelict who lurks around a speakeasy doing menial jobs; he came to this unseemly end after a bright beginning thanks to just one sip of the demon drink, and at the end of the story is revealed to be none other than Alfred Galpin. Amusing enough—Galpin himself proclaimed it to be "farcically diverting"—but not in any way related to the question of Dunsanian influence, hence I've chosen to consider it ahead of the other two.
Both "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "Memory" present more interesting cases in relation to the Dunsany question. The narrator of the former story is an intern at a mental institution (an interesting location for a story, especially given events of this year described above) to which a man, Joe Slater, is brought suffering unusually fantastic hallucinations. Lovecraft's interest in human degeneracy finds voice in his narrator here; he is intrigued by the Catskills native Slater, who he thinks is too backwards and coarse to be having the amazing visions that he does. As such, he wires him up to a mind-reading machine he has invented (one of those devices of pseudo-science M.R. James warned against) and finds Slater is possessed by a curious being of light (Lovecraft's first cosmic entity) who is liberated by Slater's death. The story lacks much narrative momentum and has a flat, telegraphed ending, but what's interesting is a comment from the opening paragraph about how, in sleep, man finds himself in another world less corporeal but no less real than this physical one. Lovecraft seems to foreshadow his not too far off development of his dreamland fantasies.
"Memory", meanwhile, must be the shortest and sweetest thing Lovecraft ever wrote following his return to fiction writing. Along with his later works "Nyarlathotep", "Ex Oblivione" and "What The Moon Brings", it is often classified as a prose poem; Lovecraft claimed he was a fan of the form, but these seem to have been his only overt efforts in that area. The "story" or "plot" of "Memory" is negligible to non-existent; in a valley sits a demon watching little apes playing in ruins, a genie comes down to ask who made the now ruined structures, and the demon says it was the predecessors of the little apes, who used to be called Man. What matters is the writing itself, the poetic style and tone which seems to have a very Dunsanian cast. It would be interesting to know exactly when "Memory" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" were written; if they predate his discovery of Dunsany, we have to classify them with "Polaris" as interesting coincidences.
"The Transition of Juan Romero" follows these. It is a fairly minor Gothic tale (remember Lovecraft alternated between modes in these early days). The narrator and Romero work at a mine in 1890s California; a new part of the mine is blown open, revealing a seemingly bottomless abyss. Late one night, Romero hears a subterranean rumble coming from the mine and he and the narrator investigate; in the newly-discovered abyss a barely described and annoyingly vague horror destroys Romero and threatens the narrator… who then wakes up and decides it was a dream, except Romero is dead. This was another story that never saw print in Lovecraft's lifetime, and I don't suppose he would've been terribly bothered by that fact.
We come now to "The White Ship", an undeniable and avowed product of Lovecraft's reading of Dunsany. It is similar to Dunsany's "Bethmoora" or "The Hashish-Man" in that the fantastic dreamland elements seem to coexist in this physical world. Basil Elton guards a lighthouse and sees the White Ship passing by; he is taken aboard and shown a variety of wondrous lands; hearing of a particularly fabulous land called Cathuria, beyond the basalt pillars of the West, he asks to be taken there. These pillars are an evident parallel with the ancient Greeks' Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), but where America really did lie beyond those pillars, nothing lies beyond Lovecraft's pillars except a titanic waterfall plunging into the void. Elton awakes by his lighthouse and the White Ship is never seen again. Like most of his dreamland stories, "The White Ship" is rather light and airy, and generally it is rather well done, though Lovecraft later entertained a very low opinion of it, as of most of his Dunsanian works.
"The Doom That Came To Sarnath" is the first story located fully within the dreamlands, telling of the city of Ib, inhabited by strange beings from the moon, which is destroyed by humans who build their own city, Sarnath, on the ruins. Every year the humans celebrate their destruction of Ib with a great festival, but on the thousandth anniversary of Ib's destruction the strange beings from the moon return to wreak havoc. The Dunsanian language and archaisms in "Sarnath" are more pronounced and I find it somewhat difficult to read. But it's not without interest, and it's still more recognisable as Lovecraft's work than Dunsany's.
It is significant that the world in which Lovecraft locates his Dunsanian fantasies is accessed through dreams. Lovecraft was famous for his dreams, and a number of his stories had their origins in dreams of his, such as "The Statement of Randolph Carter", "Nyarlathotep", "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow Out Of Time". The narrator of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" begins by wondering if people ever truly realise "the titanic significance of dreams". Cthulhu announces his return from the bottom of the ocean-floor by sending dreams to people. The second volume of Lovecraft's selected letters contains a long (about eight pages) account of a highly detailed Roman dream that later furnished the material for Frank Belknap Long's novel The Horror From The Hills (and, in a slightly different way, also his own "The Very Old Folk", as we shall see); in similar fashion, Lovecraft "donated" another dream to Robert Bloch to weave a story around. Dreams had a great importance for Lovecraft, so there is no doubt something significant in the fact that the world of the Dunsanian tales is accessible to us only through dreams, although otherwise the "reality" of the dreamlands seems solid enough; by the time of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in 1926, however, Lovecraft showed himself ready to turn away from the "reality" of the dreams, and return to the reality of his own world and situation.
He ended 1919 with "The Statement of Randolph Carter", whose origin in a dream accounts for some of its formal oddities, as with "The Evil Clergyman" (to be described in due course). In this story Lovecraft unveils his fictional alter ego Randolph Carter for the first time, as Carter and his fellow mystic Harley Warren visit an ancient cemetery to test Warren's theory that not all corpses decay in the grave but some "live" on as vibrantly as in life. Unfortunately for Warren, he is proven right when he descends into one tomb, using a long phone line to communicate with Carter on the surface. Warren disappears, and the dead thing in the tomb announces to Carter that Warren is dead. The original dream featured Lovecraft's friend Samuel Loveman as Warren and himself as Carter; given that he held Loveman in extremely high regard, dream analysts could have some fun working out what Lovecraft's sending him to an ugly dream death might mean.
By early 1920, Lovecraft was feeling confident and cocky enough to consider a full-length novel. He seems to have never written one word of it beyond the title, The Club of the Seven Dreamers, but it still shows that he felt in possession of his skills. Fourteen stories are listed for 1920, including a lost work called "Life and Death" (which may have been another prose poem in similar vein to "Memory", according to a surviving description in Lovecraft's commonplace book), thus making this his most prolific year for individual works, though not all of them maintained an equal standard. Most are at least good, but a couple are not.
"The Terrible Old Man" is one of the latter. The title, which makes it sound like a children's book or something, is part of the problem. The language is similar to one of his Dunsanian works, but the setting is the real New England in which Lovecraft lives. Peter Cannon equates the little battle in this brief episode between three European thieves and vagabonds and a very old New England native with surprising powers with the bigger battle Lovecraft tried to fight between the pressing onslaught of modernity and new values versus solid old New England traditions—particularly Anglo-Saxon ones. Here Lovecraft gives real vent to his dislike of foreigners, though as Cannon notes, the diverse national make-up of his group of thieves means that at least he doesn't pick on any single nationality—although that still doesn't really make it any better, nor does it make the story better either.
The classical setting of "The Tree" is a unique one for Lovecraft; despite his fascination since childhood with antiquity, this is the only one of his stories to feature an actual ancient setting. It is interesting to note also that, for all of Lovecraft's love of Rome, he chose to set the story in ancient Greece, "on a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia". The language of the story is not far removed from the Dunsanian tales, however, and he may as well have located it within his dreamlands. This very short story is also one of Lovecraft's more obscure moments. The story (two sculptors commissioned to make statues of Tyche for the Tyrant of Syracuse; one dies and the other is left to finish his own statue and win all the glory; a mysterious violent storm destroys his work and himself) is ostensibly simple enough, although if T.E.D. Klein, in his introduction to Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, had not mentioned the fact that "The Tree" is about "a crime barely hinted at", the poisoning of one sculptor by the other and the supernatural vengeance that the dead man takes, I must say that I would certainly never have guessed it myself.
"The Cats of Ulthar" returns us to the dreamlands, and is Lovecraft's first attempt at voicing his fondness for felines in his fiction. Very short, very simple: in the little village of Ulthar live an old couple who have a passion for killing cats, but the other villagers are too afraid of them to do anything. A caravan of strangers passes through the village, including a small boy whose only possession is a black kitten. The kitten disappears, the boy offers up unusual prayers for help, the caravan leaves and the cats of Ulthar mysteriously vanish that night. They return just as mysteriously the next morning, and the devoured corpses of the old couple are found. Pleasing but not exactly substantial.
"The Temple" is a message in a bottle story of sorts with an Atlantean twist. It unfolds in another wartime setting, this time from the Germans' side. Karl Heinrich commands a U-boat which sinks an Allied vessel; the U-boat crew find the body of one of the victims clinging to their hull, and discover an ivory carving on his person. The crew gradually goes collectively mad, the engine blows up, and a strange pod of dolphins pursues the U-boat until it reaches a sunken temple miles below the surface. Heinrich, the last survivor, explores this temple, finding a larger-scale version of the ivory carving and later seeing lights coming from within. Although it's slightly hard to accept some of the rhetoric that Lovecraft makes his narrator spout, "The Temple" is generally effective.
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" takes the prize for the longest Lovecraft story title if nothing else. Miscegenation, sexual relations between different races, was one of Lovecraft's greatest fears, and in this story he really lets rip with sexual relations between man and monkey. Arthur's ancestor Sir Wade Jermyn discovers a civilisation of man/ape hybrids in the Congo; in Africa he meets his wife, who no one ever sees and who disappears on a return voyage to Africa with him. After Wade's descendants meet many misfortunes, young Arthur finally voyages to the Congo himself, learning that the hybrid civilisation worshipped a mummified goddess; the "goddess" is found, and a medallion around its neck proves it is, in fact, the remains of Wade Jermyn's half-human, half-ape wife. Arthur destroys himself in horror at his discovery of his only semi-human nature. The story isn't particularly good, and Lovecraft hated the title "The White Ape" that it received upon publication in Weird Tales in 1923, claiming it gave the ending away.
The next two stories can be dealt with quickly, since both of them bid fair to be Lovecraft's poorest works. "The Street" is indeed about a street, built by Puritan settlers, and the things that happen in the street through the decades; the street seems possessed with its own soul and finally self-destructs when a crowd of terrorists colonise it, leaving nothing but ruins. A whiff of the contemporary anti-Communist "Red scare" hangs over it, as Peter Cannon has observed. In the collaborative effort "Poetry and the Gods", a young woman sits reading a bit of free verse—a poetic form Lovecraft famously despised—and is visited by the classical gods, who tell her that poetry is the only way left for the gods to manifest these days. The identity of Lovecraft's co-author "Anna Helen Crofts" seems to remain unknown; the story was published under one of Lovecraft's many pseudonyms and "Crofts" may have similarly covered the other author or indeed been her real name. At any rate, the story seems to be more her work than his.
"Celephaïs" would have to be an improvement after those two, and it is, being another Dunsanian story where the real and the dream worlds intertwine. Kuranes is a typical Lovecraftian dreamer, escaping the banalities and horrors of the real world through flights of fancy into another. In one of these dream visions, he sees his ideal enchanted city of Celephaïs, and spends months searching for it. When he finds it, he is made supreme god of the place, since he created it in his dreams after all, and rules it forever; in the real world, however, he ends up a suicide at the base of a cliff, having been thrown out of the scummy London garret he has lived in. "Celephaïs" also provides the first mention of the plateau of Leng, which Kuranes visits in passing on his search and which Lovecraft will revisit later on.
"From Beyond" was one of the first short Lovecraft stories I read, and I personally think that it remains a good little introduction. He falls back on the pseudo-science again, though the machine this time is more interesting, revealing as it does the horrible monstrous things that inhabit the space around us, incorporeal and invisible. The story exploits the reasonably common occult idea that the pineal gland works as a sort of psychic third eye; Crawford Tillinghast's machine triggers the user's dormant pineal gland, unveiling the rest of the universe. At this time, before Lovecraft had found professional publication, most of his stories were published in amateur papers. "From Beyond" was not one of these, remaining unpublished for whatever reason until 1934.
"Nyarlathotep" was another of Lovecraft's dream narratives; he claimed he wrote the first paragraph just as he awoke from the dream, before he was even fully awake. It's one of his strangest moments; at a time of worldwide upheaval, Nyarlathotep comes from Egypt bringing weird scientific gear and generally spreading terror. The narrator attends one of Nyarlathotep's shows, watches the horrible images he projects on a cinema screen, but loudly claims he is not afraid. Nyarlathotep drives the audience out into the street. The city outside has been mysteriously ruined, and the people are somehow dragged into a void as the story ends in verbal chaos. Nyarlathotep is the first of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones to be named, later to be numbered among Azathoth, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, though Lovecraft does not yet seem to have properly worked out his pantheon of gods and monsters. He had in fact come up with the "hideous name" Azathoth in 1919, as noted in his commonplace book, but did not employ it until 1922.
"The Picture in the House" is a pretty average tale of cannibalism in the New England backwoods. The narrator enters an ancient house to escape the coming rain; the house is not as deserted as he first thinks, but the withered and ancient inhabitant is happy to have him, and is especially proud of an ancient book the narrator was looking at. He shows him one particular picture in the book, a cannibal's butcher shop, and says how it inspired him to give the ultimate white meat a go, whereupon a suspiciously convenient lightning bolt strikes the house and destroys it, leaving the narrator miraculously unharmed in one of Lovecraft's least convincing climaxes.
Next comes "The Crawling Chaos", another collaboration with Winifred Jackson. This is another dream narrative, and again Jackson seems to have had little to do with the actual writing, but it is a significant improvement on "The Green Meadow". The narrator is given an opium shot during an operation, and imagines himself at the end of the world. He encounters an angelic child, and is swept up into the sky; looking down, he watches the oceans boil and the Earth explodes. Lovecraft must have been more keen on this one than he was with "The Green Meadow", as it quickly saw publication in April 1921.
The 1920 season ends with "Ex Oblivione", another of his prose poems. If Dunsany's influence on "Memory" is debatable, it is beyond question here. Again it is the telling of the story that matters in this brief sketch, whose narrator is weary of life and finds a little gate of bronze on his wanderings through a valley in his dreams. He tells himself that beyond the gate lies a radiant and lovely dream-country from which he can never return, and discovers the drug which will unlock the gate, beyond which lies only the pure oblivion the narrator is really looking for, and so, "happier than I had ever dared hoped to be," dives straight through into it. "Ex Oblivione" certainly seems a fair reflection of the low moods Lovecraft constantly found himself in at this time.
part two
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