46 Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 33–52. L. Barton St. Armand has commented at length on this story in his book The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The story is not, however, so central to the overall Lovecraft canon as this treatment seems to suggest.
47 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.181, 2 July 1935, to Catherine L. Moore (written from De Land, Florida, on a visit to Robert Barlow).
48 . Lest Lovecraft’s use of the name Nigger-Man (a real childhood pet of his) raise the question of Lovecraft’s supposed racism, it must be pointed out that the name was accepted by the editor of Weird Tales, where the story was published, and raised no known protests from the readers. Lovecraft was a product of the age and society in which he lived.
49 . L. Barton St. Armand suggests in The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (p. 50) that the ending is a sort of apparent gibberish by which Lovecraft was poking fun at the ending of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Given the real nature and source of the passage in question, this interpretation, at least as it refers to conscious intentions on Lovecraft’s part, is doubtful.
50 . Carl Gustav Jung, Man and his Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 67.
51 . Lovecraft, “The Music of Erich Zann,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 89–97.
52 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.167, 8 February 1922, to Frank Belknap Long.
53 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.379, 19 June 1931, to J. Vernon Shea.
54 . Filmmaker John Strysik produced a most effective seventeen-minute film of “The Music of Erich Zann,” in which, interestingly enough, he identifies the story’s nameless narrator as Charles Dexter Ward. This is not palpably inconsistent with the Ward novel, since in that work young Ward does take a long trip abroad, to study as it were.
55 . In French there is no exact equivalent to d’auseil. The closest thing is a phrase based on le seuil, which means “threshold,” “door sill.” Au seuil means “on the threshold,” so that with de (“from”), the expression d’ au seuil means “from on the threshold,” i.e., “off the threshold.” Alternatively, with de taken as “of,” d’ au seuil could be translated as “of being on the threshold,” and perhaps the suggestion is that the Rue d’ Auseil (Rue d’Auseuil) is the street of being on the threshold of immense and terrific revelations to be glimpsed through the garret window.
56 . If for purposes of free interpretation the narrator is thought of as Charles Dexter Ward (see note 54), even though Lovecraft is extremely unlikely to have thought of any connexion himself, with the Ward novel six years away, perhaps the “mocking note far, far away in the West” may be regarded as the doom-foreboding influence of Joseph Curwen, away to the west in America, awaiting Ward’s return to loose Curwen on the world.
57 . The argument that follows is based largely on my article “‘The Music of Erich Zann’ as Fugue,” in Lovecraft Studies, 2, No. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 14–17. It is by no means unknown for fugal structure to be discernible in fiction. Alain Robbe-Griller’s French novel Topology of a Phantom City, for example, with its reiterated and transmuted images, can much more readily be called a fugue than a novel; and Douglas Hofstadter, in his Godel, Escher, Bach, finds fugal structure in a fascinating variety of settings, not all literary.
58 . Lovecraft, “The Tree,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 86–90.
59 . Lovecraft, “The Temple,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 73–85.
60 . Lovecraft, “Arthur Jermyn,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 47–55.
61 . Lovecraft, “From Beyond,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 66–72.
62 . Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep,” in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, pp. 6–7.
63 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.160–62, 14 December 1920, to Rheinhart Kleiner. In print this letter is misdated to 1921.
64 . Lovecraft, “Ex Oblivione,” in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, pp. 8–9.
65 . Lovecraft, “The Nameless City,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 99–110.
66 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.122, 26 January 1921, to Frank Belknap Long.
67 . In printed versions of the story the word even is unfortunately omitted; it is present in manuscript, and in fact in the second occurrence in the printed story itself.
68 . It turns out that Thomas Moore’s long poem “Alciphron” [see The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (New York: Leavitt & Allen Bros., n.d.), pp. 612–28], mentioned by Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature as containing elements of subterranean horror, is an imagistic influence on “The Nameless City”—as he does in “The Dunwich Horror” referring to Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Lovecraft here almost seems to want to leave broad hints about the matter of influence. Moore’s protagonist wanders beneath the ancient temples of Memphis, summoned there by a dream; at one point he enters a small chapel (cf. Lovecraft’s chapel with low ceiling) described thus:
The walls were richly sculptur’d o’er
And character’d with that dark lore
Of times before the Flood, whose key
Was lost in the “Universal Sea.” (p. 620.)
This imagery clearly finds lodgment not only in “The Nameless City” but in At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time.” Moore’s protagonist traverses
Cold halls, in which a sapless throng
Of Dead stood up, with glassy eye
Meeting my gaze as I went by . . . . (p. 623.)
And Moore even mentions, later, the sacred reptiles of the Egyptians:
. . . that kindred breed
of reverend well-drest crocodiles. . . . (p. 627.)
The relation of these passages to Lovecraft’s tale is obvious. Further, Moore describes clanging metallic gates and their “o’erwhelming din,” and the influence of this imagery is clear, in terms of Lovecraft’s “brazen door” with its “deafening peal.” This passage in Moore comes just beyond the passage that Lovecraft’s protagonist quotes aloud, fearing to “quote more.” Lovecraft quotes from “A1ciphron” again in “Under the Pyramids,” where the influence again is obvious.
69 . Lovecraft, “The Moon-Bog,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 91–98.
70 . Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 123–51.
71 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.166, 8 February 1922, to Frank Belknap Long.
72 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.201, 12 November 1922, to Clark Ashton Smith.
73 . I am indebted to S. T. Joshi for pointing out the similarity.
74 . It is something of a mystery why Lovecraft evinces enough interest in the real town of Bolton to mention it in several stories, including “The Rats in the Walls.” Nothing biographical is known to link him with the town. See note 120 concerning “The Colour out of Space,” for what may be a fruitful speculation.
75 . Lovecraft, “Hypnos,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 160–66. According to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft during a visit to the Poe cottage in Fordham, New York, removed a copy of “Hypnos” from his coat pocket and dedicated it to Poe. See Long’s H. P. Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, p. 237.
76 . Lovecraft, “What the Moon Brings,” in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, pp. 4–5.
77 . Lovecraft, “The Hound,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 152–59.
78 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.192, 17 October 1930, to Clark Ashton Smith, to whom Lovecraft was sending a copy of “The Hound” on request.
79 . Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 167–86.
80 . My wife Mollie Burleson, herself a lifelong student of Lovecraft’s writings, pointed out to me the uniqueness, in the Lovecraft canon, of this
reliance on the conventional device of violent weather to perpetuate the requisite mood.
81 . Lovecraft, “The Unnamable,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 196–203.
82 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.139, June 1927, to Bernard Austin Dwyer.
83 . Lovecraft, “The Festival,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 187–95.
84 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 4.275, 17 October 1933, to Richard Ely Morse.
85 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.205–06, 11 January 1923, to Rheinhart Kleiner. “I have look’d upon Marblehead, and have walk’ d waking in the streets of the 18th century. And he who hath done that, can never more be a modem.”
86 . Lovecraft, “On Reading Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder,” in A Winter Wish, ed. Tom Collins, p. 107.
87 . H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shunned House,” in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 222–47.
88 . Editor Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales rejected the story on the grounds that his historical buildup was too slow and bereft of action, and asked Lovecraft to cut it out of the tale; it is to the credit of Lovecraft, who believed that such background was often a necessary mental and emotional preparation for the reader, that he refused to do so. Consequently, the story only saw “publication” when W. Paul Cook printed it as a small book, which, however, had no circulation.
89 . Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 240–59.
90 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.20, 2 August 1925, to Frank Belknap Long.
91 . Lovecraft, “He,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 230–39.
92 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.101, 10 February 1927, to Donald Wandrei.
93 . Lovecraft, “In the Vault,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 10–18.
94 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.26, 20 September 1925, to Clark Ashton Smith.
95 . Lovecraft, “Cool Air,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 203–12.
96 . This distinction is discussed by Fritz Leiber, Jr., in his essay “A Literary Copernicus,” in Essays Lovecraftian, ed. Darrell Schweitzer, pp. 5–15. Leiber in turn credits Henry Kuttner with the terminology confirmation versus revelation.
97 . Lovecraft, “Under the Pyramids,” as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,” in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 204–29. The story is here published as having been written “With Harry Houdini.” “With” should logically read “For,” because Houdini did none of the writing, suggesting only a plot outline.
98 . Sonia H. Davis, “Lovecraft as I Knew Him,” in Something About Cats, p. 239.
99 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.326, 12 March 1924, to James F. Morton.
100 . The letter cited in note 99, immediately following the portion quoted.
101 . Lovecraft, “Primavera,” in Collected Poems, pp. 77–79.
102 . H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 130–59.
103 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.79, 26 October 1926, to Frank Belknap Long.
104 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.149–51, 5 July 1927, to Farnsworth Wright.
105 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.10–11,23 July 1934, to Duane Rimel.
106 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 5.302, 29 August 1936, to Willis Conover.
107 . This episode is derived from an actual dream that Lovecraft had six years earlier, in which, trying to sell a newly sculpted bas-relief to the curator of a museum, he remarked, “This was fashioned in my dreams; and the dreams of man are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx or garden-girdled Babylon.” The bas-relief there depicted “a procession of Egyptian priests.” Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.114–15, 21 May 1920, to Rheinhart Kleiner.
108 . Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 290–385.
109 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.95, 19 December 1926, to Wilfred Blanch Talman.
110 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.131, June 1927, to Bernard Austin Dwyer.
111 . Much of the commentary here is based on my article “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, in press).
112 . I am indebted to S. T. Joshi for pointing out that where the printed texts of the novel have “dholes,” the manuscript clearly and consistently reads “bholes.”
113 . Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, pp. 101–221.
114 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.99–100, February 1927, to Frank Belknap Long.
115 . In printed texts the words “profound and,” present in manuscript, are missing: they are not only conducive to alliteration, but semantically important.
116 . Lovecraft, “The Colour out of Space,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 60–88.
117 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.316, 8 March 1929, to Elizabeth Toldridge.
118 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.379,19 June 1931, to J. Vernon Shea.
119 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, V, 348, 10 November 1936, to Wilfred Blanch Talman.
120 . Lovecraft mentions the town of Bolton, Massachusetts, in several of his stories; the reason, if any, is something of a mystery, for nothing biographical is known that would link him with, or explain his interest in, Bolton. There is, however, one speculative but rather engaging possibility. The town of Bolton is known by mineralogists to have a certain rare mineral existing only there and on Mt. Vesuvius, and appropriately termed boltonite. Lovecraft had long known his learned friend James Ferdinand Morton, first meeting him on 5 September 1920 (well ahead of his first mention of Bolton in “Herbert West—Reanimator”) after corresponding with him for a few years. Morton was an accomplished mineralogist (originally from Littleton, Massachusetts), who established the mineral collection in the Paterson, New Jersey, museum of which he was curator, and in fact offered Lovecraft an assistant curatorship there in 1925. It is highly probable that Morton knew of boltonite, and certainly possible that Lovecraft learned of it from him in some mineralogical chat. (Later, in 1930, Lovecraft’s letters reflect that Morton was trying to persuade Lovecraft to pursue a serious mineral collection of his own.) Indeed, the notion of such a rare mineral, if he had heard of it, could well have given Lovecraft the idea for his bizarre meteorite in “The Colour out of Space.”
121 . Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 160–202.
122 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 2.246, 31 August 1928, to Clark Ashton Smith.
123 . Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.379, 19 June 1931, to J. Vernon Shea.
124 . Commentary here on Lovecraft’s use of Athol and Wilbraham impressions is based largely on my article “Humour Beneath Horror: Some Sources for The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness,’” in Lovecraft Studies, 1, No.2 (Spring 1980), pp. 5–15.
125 . Commentary here on the monomyth interpretation is largely based on my article “The Mythic Hero Archetype in ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ “in Lovecraft Studies, 1, No.4 (Spring 1981), pp. 3–9.
126 . The name Dunwich is derived from the former English village of that name, slowly washed into the ocean by tidal erosion, and described in terms of exceeding bleakness by Swinburne in his poem “By the North Sea.” Lovecraft, even if he had missed this poem (which is highly unlikely), would certainly have known of the bygone Dunwich from its mention in Arthur Machen’s novel The Terror, which he is known to have read.
H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Classics of Lovecraft Criticism Book 1) Page 30
