The climax of Lawrence’s novella occurs in an impassioned description of “the power and the slight horror of the pre-sexual primeval world” that Lou finds in the Arizona landscape. Lawrence’s profound distrust of human individualism expresses itself as the individual vanishes in the animated divine landscape where “pillars of cloud” appear in the desert. This is a divinity, however, which only slowly appears and which explicitly has nothing to do with the Christian god of love. It is a world “before and after the God of Love” (139), a repudiation of Grahame’s Pan which Lovecraft also repudiates. First the “debasing” (133) and “invidious” malevolence of the landscape is once more insisted upon; it eats the soul of anyone who attempts to live within it a life of trade and production (133–34). Especially, it reduces a New England woman who had moved there with her husband. No longer able to speak, she spends her days staring (137), unable to engage “the seething cauldron of lower life, seething on the very tissue of the higher life, seething the soul away, seething at the marrow” (141), a passage that recalls both the disintegration of Helen in Machen’s story and the cauldron of the witches in Macbeth. The landscape, which is also to say the demonic divinity that is slowly becoming manifest within it, transforms her into a corpse that she tries to hide from, “the corpse of her New England belief in a world ultimately all for love” (141). And what happens to the New England woman happens to Lou’s mother: “She sat like a pillar of salt, her face looking what the Indians call a False Face, meaning a mask. She seemed to have crystallized into neutrality” (142). Like Lot’s wife, who looks back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lou’s mother freezes into a mask because she is unable to move into the new world of the Arizona landscape that her daughter finds so meaningful.
This entire section of the novella has an obvious relevance to the description of Mrs. Gardner, the New England woman traumatized and transformed by the Colour that has fallen as though it were a falling star. She becomes sure that “something was taken away—she was being drained of something. . . . By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours” (DH 65). All these events become a religious challenge. The god of the Gardners’ was never a god of love; Lovecraft knows his Puritans too well, better than Lawrence. For Nahum Gardner God’s overwhelming election has become preterition: “it must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord’s ways so far as he knew” (DH 68). For Lovecraft the visitation of the meteor has meant an emptying of any metaphysical sanction, even that god of a greater life of which Lawrence was the prophet.
One of the most telling details of Lovecraft’s story is the supernatural abundance that the landscape seems to manifest even as the people are destroyed within it: “The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the coming crop” (DH 60), though at last everything crumbles, “and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum’s ground” (DH 62). The same abundance appears in Lawrence’s landscape, filled with an intense, fiery, vegetative life: “The very flowers came up bristly, and many of them were fang-mouthed, like the dead-nettle; and none had any real scent” (138). They do, however, possess colors that declare an inhuman savagery, “the curious columbines of the stream-beds, columbines scarlet outside and yellow in, like the red and yellow of a herald’s uniform” (138), or the honeysuckle, “the purest, most perfect vermilion scarlet, cleanest fire-colour, hanging in long drops like a shower of fire-rain that is just going to strike the earth” (139), or “the rush of red sparks and Michaelmas daisies, and the tough wild sunflowers” (139). The apocalyptic landscape is overrun in “a battle, a battle, with banners of bright scarlet and yellow” (139). Even the rose, the traditional flower of love, is “set among spines the devil himself must have conceived in a moment of sheer ecstasy” (139).
This mention of the devil, like the earlier mention of those flowers that are “fang-mouthed,” makes us consider what kind of divinity, what kind of “spirit of place” (141) inhabits this landscape. Certainly Pan has a part in it, for it had been a ranch of goats that the Mexicans called “fire-mouths, because everything they nibble die” (131–32), and as we noted Pan, half-goat, may be one of the sources of the traditional image of the devil.
The landscape, however, is animated by a spirit of place, “a great reality” (Studies 16), that slowly becomes explicit. A part of that god can be seen in “the vast, eagle-like wheeling of the daylight, that turned as the eagles which lived in the near rocks turned overhead in the blue” (135). Beneath them “the vast strand of the desert would float with curious undulations and exhalations amid the blue fragility of mountains” (135–36). In comparison to this desert charged with enormous energy, mortal life is as nothing: “The landscape lived, and lived as the world of the gods, unsullied and unconcerned. The great circling landscape lived its own life, sumptuous and uncaring. Man did not exist for it” (137). Finally the god appears, “the animosity of the spirit of place: the crude, half-created spirit of place, like some serpent-bird for ever attacking man, in a hatred of man’s onward-struggle towards further creation” (141). This is Quetzacoatl, the god that Lawrence will celebrate in his next novel, The Plumed Serpent.
The details of this description could have originated in many places. Though he had only arrived recently in the Southwest, Lawrence soon became fascinated by the mythic materials of the region. Some of its aspects, however, appear reminiscent of Tennyson’s poem “The Eagle: Fragment”:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls. (110)
Several of these details are to be found in both Lawrence and Lovecraft. In Lawrence the landscape seems a “seething cauldron” (141), where “sometimes the vast strand of the desert would float with curious undulations and exhalations” (147). In Lovecraft the narrator looks forward to the time when the reservoir “will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean” (54). In Lawrence the lightning, a symbol of Zeus and fertility, has left a “perfect scar, white and long as lightning itself,” upon a totemic pine (138); and we recall that St. Mawr is a “lightning-conductor” (12). In Lovecraft, the lightning strikes where the meteor has fallen and scarred the ground. The sense of the sun, though, is very different in these works; Lawrence shares with Tennyson a sense of its dominance in the high mountains, whereas Lovecraft mutes the sun as he represents the viewpoint of the Gardner family, slowly drowned in the effects of the miasmic Colour. A difference between Tennyson’s and Lawrence’s vision and Lovecraft’s is the ring and circle of the horizon that obsesses the English imagination, the open space of the great world, and Lovecraft’s narrow landscape of a claustrophobic New England valley. Tennyson’s eagle appears in Lawrence as an actual creature and as a part of the metaphoric landscape. Though no implicit eagle appears in Lovecraft the lightning itself, as his classical mind would have recognized, belonged to Zeus, whose bird is the eagle. He would, for instance, have been aware of the portent in the Iliad when an eagle seizes a snake:
Jove’s Bird on sounding Pinions beat the Skies;
A bleeding Serpent of enormous Size,
His Talons truss’d; alive, and curling round,
He stung the Bird, whose Throat receiv’d the Wound.
Mad with the Smart, he drops the fatal Prey,
In airy Circles wings his painful way. (12.233–39)
Hector’s brother warns that the eagle “Retards our host” (12.258); it warns humanity not to exceed its limit. More generally, the portent is an image of the antagonism between the sky and the earth; though it is the first plumed serpent that appears in European literatur
e, before anyone in Europe had begun to interpret world mythology, it represents a failure at reconciling sky and earth, rather like what occurs in Lovecraft’s story.
Another way to understand Tennyson’s lines presents itself, however, and thereby another way to understand St. Mawr and “The Colour out of Space.” Given the traditional significance of the eagle as an emblem of contemplation, its domination of the earth may symbolize the poetic imagination, attempting in a lordly fashion to seize its subject, a seizure that is no more successful an act than is “Kubla Khan,” if we keep in mind that each poem presents itself as a fragment. Lawrence’s novella is also a fragment; its failure of closure points beyond itself at the novel that he was shortly to write, The Plumed Serpent, in which he would much more thoroughly investigate that archetype. Like the eagle that circles and submerges itself in its landscape, Lawrence perceives himself as circling and submerging himself in every new landscape in which he attempts to find the new form of the gods that shall be.
This interpretation makes us reconsider Lovecraft’s story as an attempt to revision his own poetic imagination; that is to say, in Hillman’s sense of the word, he treats the Colour as a myth of his own power to create weird fiction. When the Colour returns to the sky, it aims itself at Deneb in the constellation of the Swan, which is a traditional image of the poet. Socrates seems to put aside irony when he imagines himself as a swan, one that as a poet and a philosopher praises the good things it shall see after its death (Phaedo 85b). With more irony, and I think more akin to Lovecraft’s mode, at the end of the second book of the Odes Horace imagines himself as a half-human and a half-swan, almost but not quite transformed into the great bard he believes and fears3 that he shall be regarded as after his death (2.22). Lovecraft’s Colour remains in this halfway state, bizarre and threatening while a small part of it remains in the well to infect Ammi, the narrator, and the reader. In this infection Lovecraft imagines his art as successful, but insofar as it cannot return to that great otherness in which it originates as unsuccessful; and even the return aims itself at Deneb, the tail of the Swan, not its eyes or its wings. And just as the Swan in the constellation represents the swan into which Zeus transformed himself when he seduced Leda, with its own voice echoing internally, “Ipse deum Cycnus condit vocemque sub illo, / non totus volucer, secumque immurmurat intus” [The swan itself conceals a god and his voice within him, not completely a bird, and murmurs to itself within] (Manilius 5.381–82), just so the Colour, a messenger from the outside, retains its secret within itself; and Lovecraft, despite his voluminous letters, retains the secret of his creativity in the dreams from which so many of them originate. Tennyson and Lawrence’s imagination glories in the day, Lovecraft’s in the night. Tennyson’s eagle, a contemplative that stands “Close to the sun in lonely lands” and with great energy falls upon its prey, performs an act of the apocalyptic imagination that informs the sense of final things found in both Lawrence and Lovecraft.
These final things, the consummation of the world and its judgment, are quite complex with both authors. In Lawrence it is a question of what gods shall appear and what gods the protagonist Lou shall serve. She gives an indication of this early in her approach to her Arizona farm, as she turns to the hidden gods and the hidden fire. Now it is no longer a question of Pan, but of various mythological presences, which correspond to and argue with “the successive inner sanctuaries of herself” (129). As she puts it at this point, the chief god shall be “my Apollo mystery of the inner fire,” which is also “the hidden fire . . . alive and burning in the sky” (129). It is as though she were about to become Vestal virgin, the oracle of Delphi, and St. Simon Stylites all at once, dedicated to the gods that rule the zenith of the sky and the private hearth.
In contrast to this god, the goats of Pan that once roamed the mountain are the spirits of inertia with their fire-mouths that kill everything and their smell that “came up like some uncanny acid fire” (132), the creatures that represent all the forces that slew the New England woman. These preside over the poison-weed and the “curious disintegration working all the time, a sort of malevolent breath, like a stupefying, irritant gas, coming out of the unfathomed mountains” (133). This language is very like that language that Lovecraft uses to describe the effect of the Colour that has left a scar on the landscape “like a great spot eaten by acid” (DH 55), on occasion like a gas that brushes past Ammi or the narrator and leaves them unable to react. Above all, it is a poison that cannot be leached out of the soil (65) and that in the climactic moment is revealed as an “undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well” (78). In both books the inimical powers are fiery, impalpable, acidic, and poisonous, the destructive forces of the snake that has not yet raised itself from the earth.
Thus Lovecraft’s story does hint at the snake and bird. After the narrator has assured us several times of the poison and acid that the Colour spills upon the landscape, he speculates, “Whatever daemon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air?” (81). The rhetoric cannot permit us to see the serpent or bird of prey still hidden in the landscape, but for a moment the story points at a snake and bird groping beneath the ground.
Despite this mythological mode I must admit that Lovecraft's story contains no bird except the poultry that “turned greyish and died very quickly” (DH 66), a nasty end from which it is difficult to draw any haruspicinal consequence. His serpent is not plumed. Mrs. Gardner perceives things that “moved and changed and fluttered” (DH 65); the trees are “clawing at the grey November sky” (DH 69), at the crisis “twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently” (DH 76), but they are never able to escape the ground in the flight that they desire. This eagle tears from underneath the earth, not from above it. The plumed serpent does not appear. In this landscape Lovecraft can see no way how the things above and the things below can be reconciled; the coincidence of opposites does not take place. Though it comes from the sky and returns to it, a sign in the heavens and its messenger, this monster assumes a peloric form in the well; the reader experiences it for only a short time as a teratic portent.4 It returns, explosively propelled from the center of the earth into the otherness from which it came, but a portion of it falls back; it tries to become one or the other but lags behind both. It is too, too American, “a torn, divided monster.”
Though the two stories work towards a revelation that is very similar, the differences are striking. Lovecraft’s short story, to the mind of many critics one of his best,5 is condensed, unveering, and inevitable. Lawrence's novella is more diffuse, beginning as an analysis of a modern marriage, moving into a satire of modern culture, and only at the end revealing itself as a religious challenge. Also, something of a reversal of expectations takes place here. Lovecraft, the quondam disciple of Poe, deserts his fantastic pantheon and takes decisive steps by which “The Colour out of Space” becomes a science fiction work rather than a weird tale, though not a science fiction work that remains content with the Newtonian laws of science. Lawrence, who began as a naturalist in the mode of Hardy, creates in the final pages of the novella a fantasia of the unconscious that plays with a variety of mythological figures.
Who would have expected that they could meet across such differences?
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