The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  Whatever the validity of these remarks, they may provide hints as to Lovecraft’s enthusiastic reaction to the novel. Aside from the novel’s setting in Wales (perhaps another nod to Arthur Machen), the fact that the house is built upon Roman foundations, and may perhaps have been the scene of “ancient and awful cults” in Roman times, surely fired Lovecraft’s imagination. He had, after all, as a teenager started a story about a Roman colony establishing itself in central America,[200] and one of the chief sources of his enthusiasm for Machen was Machen’s brilliant evocation of Roman Britain in such works as The Hill of Dreams (1907). It is perhaps no accident Frank Belknap Long recommended Cold Harbour to Lovecraft,[201] for it was Long who also introduced Lovecraft to Machen.

  What is of interest is that Long also urged Lovecraft to read Young’s earlier novel, Woodsmoke (1924), which, as we have seen, does have a minimal supernatural component. Lovecraft chided Long for making him “made through 300-odd pages of description and realistick psychology” merely to absorb the relatively meagre element of weirdness in the novel: “So far as supernaturalism is concern’d, there’s just about enough for a good short story.”[202] In a later letter Lovecraft did concede that Woodsmoke “is a very good novel—a very good novel indeed,” but his chief interest was Cold Harbour, and his initial reaction is striking:

  . . . the important thing is “Cold Harbour”, which I have lately read with the profoundest of admiration. It is easily the best novel of fear which the present generation has produced, and the cumulative horrors are introduced with admirable power and restraint. The method of narration—using different characters as mouthpieces—is exceedingly effective. All that I failed to admire was the end, where a little “letting down” was apparent to me. Arthur Machen would have done it differently. Praise modern disillusion as you will, you can’t convince your Grandpa that there isn’t something of anticlimax in a mere murder, suicide, and conflagration after so much elaborate preparation. The antique horror ought to have figured more extensively toward the end—and incidentally, I was reminded of my own “Rats in the Walls” by this chronicle of a place wherein prehistoric, Roman, and other rites had blended their transmitted maleficence.[203]

  This comment tells us much of importance: first, Lovecraft correctly gauged that the (pseudo-)supernatural premise of Cold Harbour made it a genuinely weird novel rather than, as with so many other purportedly weird works, a mystery or suspense novel with occasional supernatural episodes; and second, the tale’s evocation of the “bad place” topos, stretching back millennia to Roman or pre-Roman civilisation, had struck a deep chord in Lovecraft in that it reflected one of his own central concerns as a weird fictionist.

  It is difficult to detect any direct influence of Cold Harbour on Lovecraft. The towering and baleful figure of Humphrey Furnival might perhaps have coloured Lovecraft’s portrayal of Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)—a novel initially conceived in New York, but written only after Lovecraft’s return to Providence in April 1926—while the rich evocation of the rural landscape of Wales may have offered Lovecraft some hints in regard to his similar evocation of New England topography in his later tales. But it may be sufficient to note Lovecraft’s surprisingly high regard for this novel—a regard that justifies its rescue from oblivion for the delectation of the contemporary enthusiast of the weird. Francis Brett Young was by no means a professional practitioner of supernatural literature; but the solitary achievement of Cold Harbour once again attests to the truth of Lovecraft’s own dictum that “no better evidence of [the weird’s] tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them.”

  Henri Béraud, Lazarus (1925)

  In Henri Béraud’s Lazarus (1925) we have a case where both the author and his work are now virtually forgotten. Béraud (1885–1958) himself proves to be of some interest in his own right, not so much for his prolific writing (even though he won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1922), but because in the 1930s he joined the French fascist movement and later collaborated with the Nazis. He was condemned to death for treason in 1944, but his sentence was commuted; he was placed in prison and finally released in 1950.

  Béraud wrote voluminously—chiefly historical novels, travel books, and political tracts. The novel Lazare (1924) was one of the earliest of his writings, but the author’s momentary celebrity caused it to be among the first of his works to be translated into English. It appears to be Béraud’s sole excursion into weird fiction.

  This novel presents a man, Jean Mourin, who remains in a hospital for sixteen years (for the period 1906–22) while suffering a long amnesia; during this time he develops a personality (named Gervais by the hospital staff) very different from that of his usual self. Every now and then this alternate personality returns; once Jean thinks he sees Gervais when he looks in the mirror, and later he thinks Gervais is stalking him. This simple outline ought to make it obvious to any well-informed reader that the novel bears a striking resemblance to Lovecraft’s great late tale “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35); indeed, the amnesia of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee in that story occurs at approximately the same time as Mourin’s (1908–13), although perhaps these dates have an autobiographical significance, as they correspond exactly to the period when Lovecraft himself, having had to withdraw from high school, descended into hermitry. Perhaps he had himself come to believe that another personality had taken over during this time.

  Certainly it is not surprising that Lovecraft, when he read the novel in early 1928, wrote that it was “a remarkable study of a vivid phase of madness.”[204] He had long been fascinated with the idea of mind-exchange, and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) was manifestly influenced by a somewhat similar novel that Lovecraft had read, H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928). In that story, of course, the exchange of minds had occurred only between two human beings; in “The Shadow out of Time” he breathtakingly postulated exchange of personalities between a human being and an alien entity from the depths of space—and time. Could Lazarus, with its fascinating premise that what passes for amnesia is in fact the result of one personality ousting another, have given Lovecraft a plausible plot device to convey the essence of his own conception? Certainly, Jean Mourin’s behaviour upon recovering his memory bears striking similarities to that of Peaslee; and at one point Mourin, like Peaslee, even begins an historical study of past cases of split personalities in an attempt to account for his plight.

  But Lazarus need not justify its continued existence merely as an adjunct to a more celebrated work. It is a gripping, intense novel in its own right, and some of the scenes and tableaux are as riveting as anything in Lovecraft. By focusing so intensely on Mourin’s dazed and harried confusion, the novel develops an existential terror that even Lovecraft cannot match. One of the high points of the novel is when Mourin looks in a mirror and thinks he sees Gervais there:

  Jean who hoped he was mistaken managed to gather strength to look again. Might it not be a distortion of his own face produced by some effect of cross reflection? No: there are two faces: one pale and haggard, that of Jean Mourin, the other masculine and healthy, belonging to Gervais . . . He had to come back: and he had come. . . .

  But such things aren’t possible! Gervais had no longer any real existence, Jean knew that perfectly well. If Gervais was to erturn Mourin would have to fall back into the abyss of madness.

  The mingling of horror, pathos, confusion, and dramatic tension renders Lazarus a quiet triumph of the weird, even if nothing supernatural can be said to have occurred in it.

  R. E. Spencer, The Lady Who Came to Stay (1931)

  R. E. Spencer’s The Lady Who Came to Stay (1931) must be one of the more obscure Lovecraft associational items. It was cited in a list of “Books to mention in new edition of weird article” (i.e., “Supernatural Horror in Lit
erature”) found at the end of Lovecraft’s commonplace book, but was one of four items not mentioned when Lovecraft revised his treatise for its incomplete serialisation in the Fantasy Fan (1933–35), the other three being James Hogg’s Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, Algernon Blackwood’s “Chemical” (in Cynthia Asquith’s The Ghost Book), and Barry Pain’s “The Undying Thing” (from his collection Stories in the Dark). There is no mystery as to why Lovecraft did not discuss The Lady Who Came to Stay in his revised essay: although he clearly found the work to his liking, he read it only in December 1933, some months after he had submitted the revised text of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” to Charles W. Hornig of the Fantasy Fan; and, moreover, the prospect of Lovecraft’s subsequently adding a note about the novel at the appropriate place (toward the end of chapter 8) came to naught when the Fantasy Fan failed in February 1935, with the serialisation having proceeded only to the middle of chapter 8. Subsequent efforts to continue the serialisation in another fan magazine proved futile, and the text as revised for the Fantasy Fan only appeared in complete form in The Outsider and Others (1939).

  And yet, Lovecraft was clearly impressed with The Lady Who Came to Stay when he borrowed a copy of it from Clark Ashton Smith; as he wrote to August Derleth:

  Pretty damn good! Indeed, it gets about as far as anything of limited imaginative scope—with only the traditional household ghost as spectral furniture—possibly can. The creeping pervasiveness of the atmosphere is a thing of sheer genius, & the realistic characterisation of the ancient gentlewoman is marvellous. I can easily understand your especial fondness for the novel, since so many of your own studies centre around prim, morbid, secluded old ladies of just this sort. Has Spencer produced anything since the “Lady”? A man who could write a thing like that must have more in him.[205]

  Who was Robin Edgerton Spencer (1896–1956)? He remains largely a mystery man in American literature, and the only substantive information on him derives from a brief autobiographical statement published shortly after Lady appeared. In it he states that he was born on December 23, 1896, in Ogden, Utah, the son of a train dispatcher. At the age of thirteen he secured employment as an office boy with the Oregon Short Line Railroad. Becoming fascinated with music, he strove to become a professional violinist, but failed in the attempt. After a brief stint in the Army Medical Corps (1918–19), Spencer became a federal civil servant and worked in the Pacific coast, Bismarck, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota. Always a voracious reader, Spencer early absorbed the work of Dumas, Dickens, and Poe, and later “stumbled upon novels of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Butler, and George Meredith”; but it was his discovery of Henry James, around 1923, that changed his life. Spencer read through the entire New York Edition of James’s novels and tales; in addition, he took courses at George Washington University to continue his exploration of “the mysteries of the craft of fiction.”[206] He began The Lady Who Came to Stay in 1926, working slowly on it until it was completed in 1929. It was published simultaneously by Alfred A. Knopf and the Book League of America in 1931.

  The book was, on the whole, cordially reviewed when it appeared. The anonymous reviewer in the Saturday Review of Literature spoke harshly about Spencer’s imitation of James—“its manner is nearly the worst conceivable, a confused echo of certain inimitable masters of manner”—but praised the tale itself:

  “The Lady Who Came to Stay” is not imitative in substance, but an original and haunting study of human relations among the several generations of a family hopelessly bound together by the tie of blood. The old house in which the family life centers becomes haunted by a series of ghosts or presences who make it the scene of their prolonged struggle for dominance for evil or good. It is a sort of ghost story on the spiritual and psychological plane, not without its aspects of mere bodily dread and amaze. But the deeper horror lies in its exhibition of a living world besieged and imperiled by the passions and intentions of beings whose bodies long since ceased to inhabit the family home. This is enough to say of the tale as a tale. In sum it is vital enough to make one forget its mannerism; and that is saying much.[207]

  Margaret Wallace came to a very different conclusion regarding the novel’s style, but was in accord in regard to the overall merits of the story:

  It is an uncommonly powerful and mature story, written in a pliable and polished and remarkably unimitative prose. Neither in form nor material, indeed, is Mr. Spencer’s work reminiscent of his models, whoever they may have been. His style, in its lucidity and precision, and in a slightly mannered structe of the sentences, might suggest Henry James, but it moves with a swiftness and direction most certainly not Jamesian. Without doubt, “The Lady Who Came to Stay” is an expression of a new and original and very striking talent.

  . . . Even if [the novel] had not been wrtten with consummate skill, and with an individuality which defies classification, it would still not be possible to dismiss “The Lady Who Came to Stay” as simply a “ghost story.”[208]

  Martha Dodd’s review is mixed, but on the whole praiseworthy. Finding some sections of the novel uneven, she states that the first section is the best (“the atmosphere of horror is convincingly and consistently achieved”). She goes on to remark:

  This book is an extraordinary combination of distinction and mediocrity. It has, like the best first novels, a splendid, fresh approach; and like most first novels, unsureness in motive and technique. . . .

  The conclusion in conneciton with the preceding symbolism leaves the impression of the author’s own inconclusiveness. That a novel avowedly romantic in trappings and mystical in subject should be definitely powerful in its effect indicates the presence of an unusual talent.[209]

  Lovecraft’s own comments on the novel are of great interest. His remark about its “limited imaginative scope” is a reference to Spencer’s utilisation of the ghost motif in a relatively conventional manner, at least as far as the supernatural manifestations are concerned; like his master, Henry James, the ghosts of Katherine and Phoebe are mere symbols for the competing psychological pressures faced by the living characters as they wrestle with the familial heritage that envelops them. Although Margaret Wallace is correct in pointing out that the novel seems set in a kind of never-never-land (“We do not know any of [the characters], in the sense that we do not know who they are, what they do, where they live, or how much money they have”), the novel appears to suggest a New England locale—perhaps an echo of the intense domestic ghosts of the New Englander Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—and this may have contributed to Lovecraft’s appreciation of the tale.

  Lovecraft’s query as to whether Spencer had written anything else subsequent to Lady could have been answered in the affirmative, for in 1933 he published another novel, The Incompetents. This, however, is not in any sense a weird work, but instead a family drama also probably influenced by James. Only in 1937 did Spencer publish another novel that might conceivably be considered weird—Felicita, in which a writer occupies a house with a bad reputation and produces a novel whose central character, a woman, appears to come to life and fall in love with him. Spencer’s last novel—and, apparently, the last work of any kind he published—is The Death of Mark (1938), a grim psychological drama dealing with the relations of three characters to a domineering man who has become a cripple.

  At this point R. E. Spencer seems to disappear from the public record. Not only did he publish no more work, but he vanishes altogether, and we have no idea where he lived or how he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life. His death is recorded in library catalogues as occurring in 1956, but his obituary was published in no newspapers or magazines that I have come upon. The Lady Who Came to Stay remained Spencer’s most successful novel, having been translated into French[210] and, in 1941, appearing on Broadway as a play.[211] This dramatisation was, however, slated by prominent drama critic Brooks Atkinson when it opened at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York on January 2, 1941: “It is a silly, maudlin piece of willful adolescence that see
ms especially mal à propos in the modern world.”[212]

  The novel’s relatively conventional supernatural effects, along with Lovecraft’s reading it quite late in life, no doubt accounts for its apparent failure to influence Lovecraft’s own writing to any significant degree. But as a model for the effective symbolic use of the supernatural for the portrayal of character and the conveyance of a profound message about the lingering influence of familial heritage and tradition, The Lady Who Came to Stay has much to teach us; and the fact that it conveys that message with such subtlety of language and cumulative potency of emotion demonstrates that, purely as a reading experience, it deserves resurrection to terrify a new generation of devotees of the weird.

  Acknowledgments

  “Mary Shelley: Frankenstein and Others,” first published as the introduction to Frankenstein and Others: The Complete Weird Fiction of Mary Shelley (Hippocampus Press, 2018).

  “Théophile Gautier: The Eternal Feminine,” first published as the introduction to Gatier’s The Mummy’s Foot and Other Fantastic Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2018).

  “A Forgotten Weird Fictionist: Henry Ferris,” first published as the introduction to A Night with Mephistopheles: Selected Works of Henry Ferris (Tartarus Press, 1997).

  “W. W. Jacobs: A Pessimistic Humourist,” first published as the introduction to Twin Spirits: The Complete Weird Stories of W. W. Jacobs (Hippocampus Press, 2018).