H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Not much plot here at all, really. But the thing that gives the story its drama and impact is the suggestive style in which it is told and the peculiar, almost documentary, technique used in telling it.

  Lovecraft seems to have figured out that it was easy enough to give your readers the spooky shudders with a tale laid in the spider-haunted ruins of a crumbling castle in Transylvania, but quite another thing to raise gooseflesh with a tale firmly set in the sunlit world of today. In order to perform this feat, he deliberately tantalizes the reader with mysterious hints as to exactly what is going on in the story; the tale progresses in a broken and jumbled sequence of bits and pieces of evidence, and Lovecraft virtually leaves it up to the reader to piece the scattered jigsaw fragments together himself into a coherent pattern. There is considerable fascination in this kind of writing; it certainly jars the reader from his complacency, and involves his intelligence in active participation in the story. In fact, it is not unlike the technique used by certain very excellent mystery writers—such as John Dickson Carr, the mighty master of the locked room puzzle story.

  Moreover, the peculiar documentary technique adds considerable verisimilitude to the incredible marvels that he at the center of the story. Lovecraft shoves detailed evidence into the reader’s hand at every step of the way. The narrator inherits the papers and the bas- relief from a deceased relative—now Poe, concerned entirely with mood, would have stopped right there— but Lovecraft goes on to document this item of data by stating that the dead man was the narrator’s grand- uncle, “George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.” He even goes on with further information, saying, “Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many.” You will observe that this is the dry, factual tone of voice used by newspaper articles. Not only is there nothing here for the reader to disbelieve, but much for him to recognize: Providence, Rhode Island, is a real city; Brown University is a real university.

  The same technique is employed throughout the novelette. At every turn the reader is supplied with precise, factual information. Consider the clay tablet which bears the image of Cthulhu in bas-relief. Lovecraft informs you that it is “a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area.” At no point in the story does Lovecraft begin to fudge on the documentation: the man who heard the Eskimo wizard chanting the peculiar phrase is identified with precision as “the late William Channing Webb, professor of anthropology in Princeton University,” and so on.

  As the possibility of a worldwide Cthulhu cult begins to emerge, Lovecraft further buttresses the supposed fact of its existence by name-dropping the titles of learned-sounding books. And here we can see clearly the cleverness of our author, for among those books to which the narrator refers are Scott-Elliott’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Of course, the Necronomicon is purely an invention of Lovecraft’s imagination, but it gains an illusory reality by being mentioned in context with the books by Scott-Elliott, Frazer and Margaret Murray (which are real books and may be found in most libraries).

  When the development of the story approaches its most sheerly fantastic element—the submerged island which is temporarily raised to the surface, exposing its oozy shores and tumbled ruins of Cyclopean stone to the gaze of awe-struck sailors—Lovecraft does everything possible to convince the reader that this, too, is fact. The incident enters the story in the form of a newspaper clipping, which Lovecraft quotes in full, adding the information that the item appeared in an Australian newspaper, The Sydney Bulletin, in the issue of April 18, 1925. The circumstances surrounding the island’s discovery are reported with an enormous effort at factual documentation. Lovecraft gives the name of the ship, the company to which it belonged, the port from which it sailed and the port to which it was bound, the dates involved, the names of the individuals concerned, and even the exact latitude and longitude at which the island was found:

  The Emma . . . was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22d, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert . . .

  This kind of writing was not new to horror fiction —Dracula is given in the form of excerpts from diaries and letters, and several of Arthur Machen’s best stories are supported by an internal structure of scholarly references (The Novel of the Black Seal, for example)— but the readers of Weird Tales were not accustomed to find this kind of writing in the pages of their favorite magazine. The story made a great stir, and it marked the birth of a new era in the writing of supernatural literature.

  What Lovecraft actually achieved in The Call of Cthulhu was to perfect a remarkably clever and subtle technique of exposition. There is hardly any plot to the story at all—it is concerned almost entirely with conveying information about this world-wide Cthulhu cult. As the tale opens, neither the narrator nor the reader know anything about this cult; step by step, Lovecraft leads the reader through the jumble of seemingly isolated bits of data, until both reader and narrator begin to perceive a frightening pattern behind these cryptic incidents.

  Lovecraft was to use this narrative technique in story after story from this point on. His readers, by then very much on the alert for any hints concerning “Arkham” or the Necronomicon or any of the other tags and references, experienced the repeated thrill of discovery with each recognized symbol. To the intellectual pleasure of the detective work involved in putting clue and clue together was added the terrific suspense of knowing things the narrator did not: an innocent Lovecraft character might find a certain ancient book mouldering in the attic; in idle curiosity he turns the pages, while (as it were) the readers, peering over his shoulder in helpless suspense, held their breath waiting for the shattering horrors they knew were coming. It was very much the same sort of pleasure we took as kids watching a film like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: poor, fat, lovable little Lou Costello is wandering through the old, dark, spooky mansion—he is oblivious to the fact that lumbering out of the shadows behind him is the Frankenstein monster—which we, the audience, can see from our particular viewpoint, but he cannot.

  With the writing of The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft added considerably to the growing system of internal lore. The tale contains the first appearances in print of Cthulhu, R’lyeh, and also, insofar as I have been able to discover, the first use of the term “the Great Old Ones.”

  Although the story ties itself to The Nameless City and the preceding Mythos tales with references to Alhazred, the Necronomicon, Irem the City of Pillars, etc., you will notice that it oddly fails to utilize the other names thus far invented in the Mythos. That is, the story takes place in Lovecraft’s own city of Providence instead of his imaginary Arkham, and it does not mention Azathoth or Nyarlathotep or even the Pnakotic Manuscript. These facts clearly indicate that Lovecraft himself was not yet aware that his works were beginning to divide into two bodies of interrelated fiction: the Dunsanian “Dreamlands” cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos cycle. He would simply pick up bits of data from either cycle to mention in a new story, as in The Call of Cthulhu, without thinking anything about it.

  In the following year, 1927, he wrote two stories which display this unawareness of exactly what he was doing. In that year he wrote the short story The Colour Out of Space and began work on a short novel entitled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which he did not complete until 1928.

  Both stories demonstrate his growing mastery of the techniques of storytelling. Colour is a real story, unlike Call, which is merely a body of exposition disguised as a story by appearing in narrative form.

  Derleth and Briney consider The Colour Out of Space to be part of the Mythos; Weinberg does not. I agree with Weinberg. To be co
nsidered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, a story must share the background lore given in earlier stories, and must build upon this basis by presenting us with yet more information. Colour does not do this at all; it is a completely self- contained story which does not rely upon any of the background lore previously established in the Mythos. The plot is concerned with a meteorite and the strange infection or contamination it brings to earth. There is not a single reference in the tale to Cthulhu or Azathoth or Nyarlathotep, to Abdul Alhazred or the Necronomicon, to R’lyeh or Irem or the Great Old Ones. The only point at which the tale relates at all to the Mythos is that it is set “west of Arkham.”

  Let’s be clear on this point: the mere mention of a Mythos name in an otherwise self-contained story cannot be taken as proof that the tale belongs to the Mythos. You will recall the many names and symbols of the Mythos which appeared in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; if the mere mention of Arkham or the Miskatonic is to be construed as sufficient reason to include a story in the Cthulhu Mythos, then we have abundant reason to so include Dream-Quest, which contains ten times as many Mythos names as does The Colour Out of Space.

  The obvious test for a borderline Mythos tale like Colour is, simply, would you still consider it as belonging to the Mythos if its references to Arkham were changed to read, say, Boston?

  Of course you would not; hence I can see no reason for including Colour in the Mythos.

  The same test, when applied to Charles Dexter Ward, eliminates it, too, from consideration as a tale in the Cthulhu Mythos.

  Ward is a splendid novel. It is a real story, with a plot and characters; it is much more than merely exposition presented in a narrative form. But—and this is most significant—the novel develops its own internal mythos, that of an old author named Borellus and of a secret system of reviving the dead from the “essential salts” which remain after a body has decomposed. The plot of the novel does not borrow from or build upon the system of the Mythos, and neither does it contribute a new portion of background lore to future stories in the Mythos. Lovecraft did not return to Borellus and his grisly mode of reviving the dead in other stories. The novel is, therefore, self-contained.

  Derleth, Briney and Weinberg all agree in considering Ward as a Mythos story—but why? Outside of twice mentioning the Necronomicon, and an occasional reference to Yog-Sothoth,3* the story bears no further connection to the Mythos. In fact, it has more internal references to the material of the “Dreamlands” stories. That is, Randolph Carter appears herein as the friend of one of the characters, and there are mentions of the Sign of Koth and of a certain black tower described in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

  The fact of the matter is that Lovecraft was not deliberately writing a series of Mythos stories—he was just writing stories. A name or a symbol or an imaginary book mentioned in one story might well be mentioned again in another story very different from the first in style or mood or setting.

  Authors are a lazy tribe and frequently plagiarize their own works, unaware or uncaring what confusion this practice may cause later scholars who scrutinze their texts, looking for internal connections. A good example of this is Ambrose Bierce. His famous tale, An Inhabitant of Carcosa, introduced a passage from an ancient sage or prophet named Hali, and also has reference to a spiritualist medium named Bayrolles. Bierce wrote no more tales about Carcosa, but another tale, The Death of Halpin Frayser, contains another mention of Hali, while yet a third tale, The Moonlit Road, mentions yet again the medium Bayrolles.

  These three stories have absolutely no connection with each other, except for this overlapping use of certain names.

  Lovecraft did exactly this same sort of thing, and it is only in retrospect that we can leaf back through his stories and see that certain tales do indeed contribute to and share a common body of lore, while others simply do not, even though they may at times mention one or another name from it.

  ***

  1* Which Lovecraft curiously prefigured five years earlier in a reference to “the seven cryptical books of earth” in The Other Gods (1921).

  2* Much later, by a most amusing error, to be mistakenly incorporated into the Mythos as an individual being, Gnoph-Keh, one of the minor members of the Great Old Ones.

  3* This is Lovecraft’s first use of Yog-Sothoth in a story; the name is merely mentioned and is peripheral to the central matter of the tale.

  6. Acolytes of the Black Circle

  In many ways, Lovecraft was his own worst enemy. It is true that, in his attempt to do something genuinely new and original in weird fiction, he suffered because of the inability of others to see what he was trying to do. But he also failed to follow up his few successes and the opportunities they opened for him. He would expend enormous amounts of time and energy in the creation of a story, then would display total indifference as to whether or not it was purchased. The Dream- Quest of Unknown Kadath, for example: he never really finished with it, never bothered to revise it, and certainly made no effort to get it published. (In fact, it was not published until many years after his death.)

  Furthermore, despite the fact that new magazines devoted to the varieties of fantastic fiction were appearing on the stands, Lovecraft remained bound to Weird Tales and to the erratic whims of its editor, Farnsworth Wright. Wright often rejected Lovecraft’s manuscripts on one pretext or another—for instance, incredible as it may seem, he rejected The Call of Cthulhu —whereupon Lovecraft would simply sulk, become despondent, and, convinced that his fiction was no good, would write to his correspondents that his work was “a failure” and that he was “finished for good.”

  Instead of doing the sensible thing and sending the tale to other magazines (such as Hugo Gemsback’s Amazing Stories, which made its first appearance on the newsstands in 1926), he would just mope and waste his time revising other people’s stories for mere pennies 1* rather than turning out stories of his own. This was a colossal waste of time: 1927, the year in which he wrote The Colour Out of Space and began Charles Dexter Ward, began the last decade of his life. Those two stories completed, he almost entirely wasted the final ten years of his life, during which he wrote only eight stories.

  For Lovecraft to have considered Weird Tales as his only market was a most regrettable error. Farnsworth Wright was a great editor, but he had his blind spots, and one of them was Lovecraft. He turned down many stories later recognized as among Lovecraft’s very best, and his decisions were oddly facile. Sometimes he would flatly reject a story, then, months or even years later, ask to see it again and, occasionally, purchase it. But Lovecraft remained tied to Weird Tales and did not like to send his tales elsewhere.

  At times, he would even neglect to submit his stories to Weird Tales, as in the case of Charles Dexter Ward. This short novel is, as I have already pointed out, a very well done piece of. story-telling, one of the best and most professional tales Lovecraft had yet written. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that he ever submitted the novella to Farnsworth Wright or, in fact, to anyone else. Even his correspondents, to whom he circulated most of his stories in manuscript, sometimes years before they ever appeared in print, never saw this story and heard very littie concerning it in his letters from this period. 2*

  We have no idea why Lovecraft set this short novel aside without seeking publication, involving such an apparent waste of his time and effort. He may have worried that the story would be too lengthy for Farnsworth Wright, whose most frequent reason for rejecting Lovecraft’s stories was their extended wordage. But if so, why did he fail to send the story elsewhere, to another magazine that did not mind serials? The only conceivable reason is this reluctance of his to submit his work to “commercial” periodicals.

  The futility of this way of thinking becomes obvious when you consider that the other magazines were happy to get Lovecraft stories and bought his stuff whenever they could get it—and would probably have taken more from him if they could have. Amazing Stories bought the The Colour Out of Space after Farnsworth Wright
had rejected it (Wright also rejected Polaris and In the Vault at the same time), but it never occurred to Lovecraft to send his other tales to Amazing. In part, this was because of his innate amateurism (a true professional does not let one rejection discourage him but sends the manuscript around to everyone else in sight until eventually someone buys it), and, in part, because of his snobbery. Here, that favorite affectation of his interfered with his work.

  Lovecraft was a gentleman, an aristocrat, and while it was all right for him to “play” with literature, it could never be more than an amusement of his leisure hours, and it could certainly never be considered as a job. Gentlemen did not work for a living; Lovecraft was a gentleman. Q.E.D.

  This lack of any concerted effort to sell his stories, together with his story revising work for which he charged such small fees, meant that Lovecraft could barely subsist on his small income. And indeed, he lived like a miser. In one of his letters he describes, with seeming pride, his method of subsisting on the cheapest and sparsest diet that would sustain life:

  Fortunately I have reduced the matter of frugal living to a science, so that I can get by on as little as $1.75 a week by purchasing beans or spaghetti in cans and cookies or crackers in boxes.