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

by Donald R. Burleson

  The novel’s second chapter, “An Antecedent and a Horror,” is a sort of flashback in which the reader learns what Ward’s meticulous research has told him of his “hushed-up” ancestor, whose evil reputation stemmed from his curious experiments, his “passion for grave-yards,” and his inexplicable longevity. Curwen had, besides his house in Olney Street (patterned by Lovecraft on a real Providence house no longer standing), a farm in Pawtuxet, a few miles south of Providence, where he carried on his suspicious activities. Visitors occasionally called on him—Lovecraft makes them “Dr. Checkley, the famous wit” and “Mr. John Merritt,” two historical personages—but departed much disturbed at the titles of his books, including such things as Roger Bacon’s Thesaurus Chemicus and, of course, the Necronomicon; Lovecraft achieves considerable realism here and elsewhere by mentioning the dreaded Alhazred volume in conjunction with venerable tomes really existing. Curwen, surely not less than a century old but appearing merely middle-aged, became increasingly a shunned man, but had such wizard-like ability at “unearthing family secrets for questionable use” (i.e., blackmail) that when he decided, like Suydam in “The Horror at Red Hook,” to maneuvre his way back into social respectability, he was able to exert his nefarious influence on a certain Mr. Tillinghast to break his daughter Eliza’s engagement to Ezra Weeden, a sailor, so that Curwen could marry her. Lovecraft thus arranges Curwen’s fatal flaw in judgment, for this action proves to be beyond even Curwen’s bounds of wisdom; Weeden became Curwen’s sworn enemy and his undoing, spying on his strange activities at the Pawtuxet farm, where boxes “disturbingly suggestive of coffins” were often delivered—there was one aborted attempt at delivering Egyptian mummies—and where bizarre catechism-like questionings and ritual sounds were heard. Weeden surmised that there were chambers and passages beneath the farm.

  At length Weeden decided to confide in others, and here Lovecraft nicely weaves history and fiction together by mentioning such real Providence notables as ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, John Carter, and John Brown and his brothers. Cleverly, Lovecraft has the group decide not to notify the new governor; true to his artistic dictum that a horror tale must be crafted as if it constituted a deliberate and serious hoax, Lovecraft, by declining to involve the presiding governor, keeps his narrative “undisprovable” and not inconsistent with known history. The newly assembled group intercepted Curwen’s mail, encountering “a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem” expressing frustration at attempts to raise up the dead, cautioning Curwen “doe not call up Any that you can not put downe” and: “I ask that you shalle write me as Jedediah and not Simon. In this community a Man may not live too long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son.”

  Finally, there was a plan to surprise Curwen at his farm by a large raiding-party. Lovecraft here masterfully emulates the tradition of Greek drama in keeping the carnage “offstage,” by making the diary of Weeden’s friend Eleazar Smith the sole conduit of information about the raid, and by placing Smith in an auxiliary contingent at some distance from the farm. The reader sees and hears, in the flashback, only what Smith saw and heard: clouds of acrid smoke, choruses of horrible screams. The narrator (not Smith) obtrudes on the tale to speculate “whether any citizen of Providence killed Joseph Curwen,” the suggestion being that Curwen may have “called up” something by his sorcery that took vengeance on him rather than defending him as intended.

  In Chapter 3, “A Search and an Evocation,” the narrator tells of young Ward’s researching his ancestor Curwen. At the Essex Institute in Salem—more realism—he encounters two striking things: a cipher manuscript (a recurrent Lovecraftian motif) of one Edward Hutchinson, Curwen’s only close friend besides Orne; and a Curwen letter to Orne that turns out to be of central importance in the novel. Curwen there remarks that he shall not go away and come back in the guise of a younger relative as Orne has done, and says, “I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE,” thus giving the narrative at least a tangential connexion with the Lovecraft Mythos; evidently the sorcery of Curwen and his associates has roots in the powers of the Great Old Ones. More importantly, Curwen says, after discussing magical means by which “ye thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres”: “And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal look Backe, tho’ know’g not what he seeks.” The reference, of course, is to Charles Ward, who is indeed “looking back” in researching Curwen’s doings. There is a strong but delectably vague suggestion that some preternatural agency may be involved in young Ward’s birth (“of ye Seede of Olde,” which, ambiguously, may be simply Curwen’s family line or something less explicable, but in any case is prophetic in nature), so that while Ward in a sense is a kind of Faust-figure whose ill-conceived curiosity proves to be his undoing, there is also a sort of predestination or inevitability to his involvement. One has here a sort of Lovecraftian version of the Miltonic paradox of the preordained Fall; Ward “sins,” as it were, by “looking back,” but he had to—it was always known that he would, and his motive, as confessed to Dr. Willett, is one seemingly less than culpable if rather Faustian: “I did it for the sake of knowledge.”

  The letter also affords Ward a way of identifying Curwen’s house, an extant edifice in Olney Court familiar to him in his antiquarian rambles. Inspecting the place, he uncovers a rumoured painting of Curwen (Lovecraft has it executed by Cosmo Alexander, the real teacher of Gilbert Stuart), making the atavistical discovery that he resembles Curwen uncannily. Ward’s father arranges to have the painting removed and installed in the boy’s study at home, and in the removal Ward discovers, in a wall niche behind the panelling, something causing excitement in him that few readers could fail to feel with him: the journal and notes of Joseph Curwen, including another cipher text, a cipher key, an account of Curwen’s travels, and a document “To Him Who Shal Come After, and How He May Gett Beyonde Time and Ye Spheres.”

  Ward’s research now becomes furtive and dark in nature, involving as it does not only the study of his newfound materials but also chemical experimentation and a search for the unmarked grave of Joseph Curwen. Ward’s concerned parents persuade the family physician to talk with the youth—enter Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, an unusually heroic Lovecraft character. (Lovecraft draws the name from a real Rhode Island personage named Marinus Willett Gardner, who also may well be the name-source for Nahum Gardner in “The Colour out of Space.”) Ward puts Willet off by excusing his outre investigations on the grounds that Curwen’s papers contain early and obscure scientific revelations, and that properly to study them necessitates immersing oneself in the past. Willett sees some of Curwen’s diary, later recalling amounts of it that rather tax the reader’s credulity.

  Coming of age and gaining some measure of independence from his parents, Ward takes a long trip abroad to confer with certain aged scholars; his return to Providence and his taxicab ride up Prospect Street are plainly autobiographical of Lovecraft’s own joyous homecoming from New York. From this point onward, Ward’s attic studies are secretive and bizarre in the extreme; there are “chantings and repetitions, and thunderous declamations in uncanny rhythms,” and “half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or charcoal”—one wonders at the patience and forbearance of Ward’s parents. One night, the mother sees four workmen carrying “a long, heavy box” up to Charles’s attic laboratory; it is clear to the reader that Charles has found Curwen’s remains. Naturally, he conceals the truth from his parents, keeping from their eyes a newspaper item the next day about illicit diggings in North Burial Ground (a real Providence cemetery) at a spot where no grave was known to exist; the style of this and other newspaper articles quoted is, like that in “The Call of Cthulhu,” rather too literary for journalistic reporting and too similar to Lovecraft’s general style of narration to provide the necessary contrast and realism, though not so much so as to produce a really jarring effect.

  After a series of particularly wild chantings from behind Ward’s closed door—Love
craft wisely leaves the visual aspect of these rituals to be imagined by the reader—there is an especially dramatic moment when Mrs. Ward, listening at Charles’s door to what sounds unaccountably like a dialogue between the youth and some unknown party, hears Charles utter a cautionary phrase: “Sshh!—write!” Charles soon afterward moves armloads of books from his lower study up to the attic—books on modem topics for the revivified Curwen to study, as it turns out—and the Curwen painting on the lower room’s panelling is found to have crumbled into” a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.” From this time on the nefarious Curwen, an ancestor whose very previous existence has disturbed Charles’s mother, is secretly ensconced upstairs with Ward, and the narrative sustains much suspense and fascination on this point. At times Curwen, masquerading as Charles, comes and goes freely, and there is another newspaper report of mischief at North Burial Ground; this time the grave of Curwen’s old enemy Ezra Weeden has been desecrated, to the horrified bewilderment of modem scions of the family; Lovecraft places their home at 598 Angell Street, his own pre–New York residence, and names the modem descendant Hazard Weeden after his own ancestral name Hazard (also the source of “Abdul Alhazred”). There are reports of vampirism in the area, and yet another newspaper article reports prowlers in Pawtuxet near the Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet resort (which really exists there). Soon afterward Charles purchases “at an exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner” a bungalow there—on the site, the reader may surmise, of Curwen’s old farm. Charles, clearly a pawn of Curwen by this time, moves his attic laboratory there, where he carries on ritualistic activities with a bearded “Dr. Allen,” Curwen in disguise. Lovecraft is tantalisingly vague about the details of a shocking incident in which a truck bound for the Pawtuxet bungalow is intercepted; it contains something (by implication, bodily remains of someone prominent) so problematical that Charles barely explains his way out of extreme trouble; “the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their proper places, and the general public will never know of their blasphemous disturbance.”

  Charles now leaves the bungalow and writes to Dr. Willett of his desire to disentangle himself from the affair; he asks him to come to the Ward house, adding: “Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don’t burn it.” It is too late, however; Curwen, passing himself off as Charles, has returned, as the reader is left to surmise, to kill the youth. Like Dr. Faustus, Charles has made unthinkable commitments to gain knowledge of a sort which only excessive pride and a certain naiveté could move one to seek, and the time has come for him to pay the price, as he must have had to expect.

  Curwen, pretending to be Ward, tries to discount the letter written to Dr. Willett; but on the basis that “Ward’s” mind seems to have undergone a shift in content (antiquarian knowledge largely displacing modem knowledge), Willett and the elder Ward have him committed to an asylum, and band together to get to the bottom of the whole affair. They intercept a letter to Dr. Allen from a “Simon O.” in Prague and, struggling to understand, rationalise that someone is imitating Simon Orne’s handwriting, just as Charles seems to have come to imitate Curwen’s. Lovecraft has masterfully created a high tension in the reader, who looks helplessly on as Willett and Charles’s father seem maddeningly slow to put the facts together, but who must understand that no one could sanely be expected to believe or readily comprehend those facts.

  They intercept a second letter, this one from “Edw: H.” (Hutchinson) in Transylvania: a letter highly important to the narrative in that it not only illuminates the grand design of Curwen and his colleagues—“It will be ripe in a yeare’s time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then there are no Boundes to what shal be oures”—but also supports the speculation that sorcery and the outer spheres of Yog-Sothoth may have been involved in Charles Ward’s very birth. Hutchinson says of the dangerously squeamish Charles: “You can’t saye him down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon such as ye other Formula hath call’d up from Saltes.” The point is that if it is even possible for Hutchinson and Curwen to speak of “saying Charles down,” then in some unexplained way sorcery may have been involved in his prophesied birth.

  Willett has now surmised the nature of the grand scheme:

  They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world’s wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them . . .. from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group.

  Willett resolves to investigate the Pawtuxet bungalow, discovering a passageway leading to realms beneath, Lovecraft’s “subterranean regions” motif revisited with great power. At this point the narrative point of view narrows from omniscience to the central intelligence of Willett’s viewpoint, thus bringing focus and potency to the horrors waiting. Willett finds an underground study full of Curwen papers, including repetitions of the “Dragon’s Head” symbol and formula (ascending node, for calling someone or something up) and the “Dragon’s Tail” symbol and formula (for putting down). Exploring a vast underground pillored hall, he finds its floor to be full of deep, cylindrical wells capped with perforated stone slabs; his experience here is one of the most powerfully frightful scenes in all of Lovecraft’s writings. Perceiving an awful stench and moaning sound to be issuing from one of the wells, he lifts the stone and shines his light down the shaft to see a slippery thing squirming at the bottom—“Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpably unfinished”; it turns out to be one of Curwen’s many unsuccessful experiments using imperfect “saltes.” In describing Willett’s reactions, Lovecraft makes a striking statement redolent of his own artistic outlook and responses:

  there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

  Willett drops his flashlight and, in a scene of exquisite horror, is reduced to crawling about the pit-studded chamber floor in utter darkness, fearing a drop into the opened well, or the possible ascent of its occupant. He does crawl out of the chamber, however, and returns to the underground study, resolving—here obtrudes a choice bit of quite Lovecraftian humour—“to leave no stone unturned” in his investigation of the Charles Ward affair.

  In another chamber he encounters leaden jars containing “saltes” in great profusion and with mind-boggling implications:

  here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages, snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end.

  (How far Lovecraft has come with the motif of ghoulery since the relatively crude days of “The Hound”!) Further exploring, Willett finds the twin formulae on a wall, and mumbling aloud in an effort to reconcile two observed versions of the “ascension” formula—an ingenious device on Lovecraft’s part—he inadvertently calls something up from the nearby salts. In a rare Lovecraftian handling of narrative point of view, the reader at this point is drawn directly into Willett’s mind as the point of view narrows still further, momentarily, from third-person central intelligence to a burst of pure stream-of-consciousness: “Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?”

  Willett awakes from a faint to find himself safe in bed upstairs (the entity called up had no quarrel with him) but with his valise emptied of the Curwen papers that he had collected; as so often happens in Lovecraft’s best works, the evidence is lost. He finds in his pocket a scrap of paper containing Saxon letterings in Latin enjoining him to kill Curwen and dissolve the body in acid. (The writer, Willett later maintains, somehow sees to the dispatching of Curwen’s cohorts Orne and Hutchinson. )

 
; In a rather overdone and needlessly repetitious section that follows, Willett mulls over all the case’s puzzlements and slowly comes to understand the situation. He finds and incinerates the real Charles Ward’s body, buries the ashes in North Burial Ground, and does his best to console the parents without disclosing any of the truth of the case. Willett’s attitude toward Charles is sympathetic:

  he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.

  This passage shows the novel to be richer than most Lovecraft works in characterisation, both of Charles and of Willett.

  In a rather melodramatic final scene—a scene that contains that rarest of all devices in the Lovecraft oeuvre, true dialogue, a device Lovecraft expressly disliked for being jarring and obtrusive in the maintenance of mood—Willett confronts Curwen in the asylum cell and, intoning the “descending node” formula from Curwen’s own repertoire, puts Curwen back into the abyss from which Charles called him: “For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.” As in “The Shunned House,” the horror is gone in the end; this fact makes the plot perhaps a little less lastingly satisfactory than those works in which the horror lingers.

  In any event, its occasional tendency toward melodrama and needless reiterative explanation notwithstanding, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one of Lovecraft’s most remarkable and impressive works. Its deft interweaving of history and fantasy, its tantalising suggestiveness, its striking imageries, its depth of characterisation—surely no other Lovecraft character is so enigmatic and intriguing as Charles Ward—potent episodic horrors, and its compelling thematic flavour, all combine to suggest most strongly that in “repudiating” the novel and failing to seek its publication, Lovecraft suffered from what may well be his most regrettable and unjustifiable bout with diffidence and harshness as a self-critic.