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Thursday, February 8, 2018

"Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain." : Lovecraft Analysis Part One




Rejoice, oh reader, for we have finally arrived at that most critical of destinations: The first of my analytical posts, whose existence I myself doubt even as I’m typing this. I’ve learned quite a bit about blogging in the past few months, the main one being that consistent Internet opinionating is not too far off from a second job. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that this post should have been begun several times before it actually commenced.

Commenced we have, though, and I’m excited to be getting around to actually sharing some of my thoughts and observations about specific Lovecraft stories, especially those which I had not previously read. In this case, that amounts to all three stories I’m going to cover in this post. These stories vary moderately in how much I enjoyed them, but they all read and feel like Lovecraft.

Bryant refers to this as the “smell test,” otherwise known as that six sense a dedicated reader of a specific author develops over the years which allows them to gauge a work’s authenticity.* My own Lovecraft detector was already fairly well-tuned, but these stories definitely helped hone it further. This was probably most noticeable while reading the two pieces of juvenilia present; there’s a palpable sense of a writer who is coming into his own, but hasn’t quite refined his raw talent to its full potential.
*This sense is, of course, not confined just to the world of literature, and any fan of an artist within any medium usually has such a sense. For instance, I’m not a huge fan of The Hateful Eight, because to me it doesn’t feel like real Quentin Tarantino. In my opinion, it’s more like someone who has watched all his other movies is doing their absolute best to make a Tarantino film.

The Beast in the Cave (1905)
While not the earliest extant example of Lovecraft’s writing*, this is his first piece of published fiction of which scholars are aware. It involves an unnamed narrator attempting to escape from a cave in which he has become lost after leaving the guided excursion they were on. Many of Lovecraft’s tropes are already on display, although they are not yet as effective as they will become. For instance, the narrator’s sense of dread builds a palpable tension, but it’s undercut by the somewhat ham-handed ruminations about death and facing one’s fate with determination.
The tension picks up when the narrator realizes that there’s something else in the cave with him, and that it is getting closer. There’s genuine imagination on display during this part, as Lovecraft – via the protagonist – envisions all manner of terrestrial predators transformed and misshapen by years in the dark. This bit is also interesting on a historical level, and gives us some early insight into Lovecraft’s understanding of science.
Origin of the Species had only been published forty-six years previously in 1859, a scant three decades before Lovecraft was born. The concept of evolution, represented here by an animal changing based on its environment, was still widely scrutinized, even by members of the scientific community. That a young man of 15 should have enough knowledge of the theory to include a variation of it in a short story speaks volumes about Lovecraft’s education up to that point.
The tale’s final revelation takes this association a step further, but unfortunately does so in a manner that I didn’t find all that compelling. As the unknown thing nears our narrator, he hurls several rocks in its direction, apparently injuring it gravely. The guide manages to track him down around the same time, and together they investigate the corpse. The big reveal is that the creature had once been a man (!) who like our protagonist got lost in the caves and was forced to eke out a meager existence in the darkness. The climax plays much like the shocking revelations Lovecraft would eventually include in the last few lines of many stories, though as I said, this one falls a bit flat for me.
I will say that the twist would probably have been a bit more grotesque to contemplate at the time this was written and published, especially given that Lovecraft’s description of the man-thing makes it sound very much like an ape. Let’s face it, we still live in a time when evolution is a hot button issue for many, and the suggestion that a human could devolve back into an ape-like beast would be met with disapproving sneers. In that sense, at least, I have to give “The Beast in the Cave” a fair amount of credit.
One last interesting thing of note, while I was reading this, my girlfriend was playing the video game Skyrim, and at one point was exploring some frozen caves filled with snow cats. As a result, my mental image of the cave was one of snow and ice, rather than the rocks and earth Lovecraft undoubtedly had in mind. Likewise, my imaginings of the titular beast were very feline in nature until the reveal. I just thought it was curious how that outside influence impacted “my” version of the story.
Final Verdict: This is an engaging enough bit of juvenilia and it’s interesting to see what would become regular aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction popping up so early on. I probably wouldn’t read this again for pure enjoyment, but won’t mind when it pops up on further project-related re-reads.
*According to the list available at http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/chrono.aspx, there are eight stories Lovecraft wrote which pre-date “The Beast in the Cave,” although only four of them have extant copies. Even the ones that haven’t been lost are not much more than fragments, some written when Lovecraft was only seven or eight years old, but they show quite a bit of both imagination and macabre.
 
The Alchemist (1908)
For reasons which I can’t quite put my finger on – although they might present themselves during this writing – I like this story better than its predecessor. Our narrator actually has a name this time (Antoine, Comtes de C——) which is a rarity within Lovecraft’s canon, and both is and isn’t important to the story.* Antoine informs the reader that he is ninety years old, and then proceeds to relay the tale of how all the male heirs in his line had died within days of their 32nd birthday.
Obviously Antoine himself has escaped this fate somehow, and here we find another standard of Lovecraft’s writing coming into ply for the first time. As with the opening of a story like “The Thing on the Doorstep,” we are being given information about the narrator’s current situation as an intentional tease against which the rest of the story plays out. From this conspicuous introduction, Antoine lays out the origins of the “curse” which had so afflicted his predecessors. Antoine explains that he did not know of the curse until his aged caretaker, Pierre, started to become senile and began talking about it. At the age of twenty-one, Pierre gave him a family document which outlined the details.
It was all tied to a man named Michel Mauvais who lived on their lands and was rumored to be an alchemist, as well as his son, Charles Le Sorcier, who himself was marked as a sorcerer. One day they were suspected of having used one of Antoine’s young ancestors (Godfrey) in their nefarious rituals, and the father was killed by Godfrey’s father (Henri) before the matter could be sorted. Charles witnesses Henri kill his father, threw something from a phial in Henri’s face which killed him instantly, and cursed all male heirs of the line to die at around the same age as Henri. No one really thought any more of it until Godfrey, once grown, and then later his son Robert both died unexpectedly and tragically at the age of thirty-two.
According to the letter, this cycle of male heirs dying at 32 had been ongoing for centuries. This information had a profound effect upon Antoine, who decided never to marry – lest he inflict the curse on another generation. He began to never wander too far from the family chateau, which was surrounded by a once-impenetrable fort, and instead explored its mysteries. One day a few years after Pierre’s death, when Antoine himself is but a week away from thirty-two, he stumbles upon a trap door deep in an ancient section of the castle. Following the tunnel it leads to, he discovers a strange laboratory, and inside it an old and terrifying man. The old man attempts to hurl the contents of a phial at Antoine, and our narrator if forced to burn his attacker with his torch.
Now, if you haven’t guessed it by this point and don’t want a spoiler, skip this next bit and go on to my analysis of “The Tomb.” With his dying breath, the old man who attacked Antoine reveals that he is Charles Le Sorcier, the titular alchemist, and has kept himself alive for 600 years so that he can continue to kill the male heirs of Antoine’s line at the age of around thirty-two. This is where the tale ends, but also where it gives us one final piece of information to chew on. While it’s true Antoine tells us he is ninety years old, and that the estate is in disrepair, he never actually gives any indication that he is “old,” or in failing health. One can only wonder: What became of the contents of Charles Le Sorcier’s lab, and the elixir of life which he had purportedly discovered?
Perhaps it’s this underlying mystery which makes me feel more favorably toward this story than “The Best in the Cave.” I admittedly rolled my eyes a bit at the final line here – “FOR I AM CHARLES LE SORCIER!” – until I started thinking about Antoine’s advanced age and the possible ramifications. This, for me, is where Lovecraft truly shines. The initial shock of his reveals is not to be undersold, but it’s their implications which more often than not keep me thinking about the stories days and even weeks later. This kind of storytelling takes fine-tuning in order to pull off correctly, and I feel like it’s kind of a dying art.
M. Night Shyamalan used to be capable of achieving it, and though I haven’t yet seen Split, I’ve heard it’s a return to form. Too many creators think it’s just about having the audience go “What a twist!” The twist needs to completely change how we perceive the events that came before, and make us alter our expectations for what is going to come after. Even better is Lovecraft’s ability to give us that teaser at the beginning of a story – “All of the men in my family die at 32, except me.” – and thereby heighten the tension during the story itself, as we wait for the revelation of what brought our narrator to that initial point.
Final Verdict: As I said above, I found the story to be a bit cliché on my first reading, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Definitely worth at least one re-read after the revelation to spot clues hidden within.
*You could argue that Antoine’s name is important, because it’s specifically his family line that has been “cursed.” At the same time, the story could easily be rewritten to never make mention of the narrator’s name and work just as well.
 
The Tomb (1917)
We now take a nine-year jump in both Lovecraft’s life and his writing. “The Tomb” is in many ways the obvious next step from the two previous stories, and further refines several techniques which Lovecraft would employ for his entire writing career. Unfortunately, for me at least, it is also the first example of a certain conceit he would become fond of which I personally don’t enjoy, because it’s rarely executed well. The conceit in question is one in which the narrator claims certain things as real, but everyone around them believes them to be mentally unhinged. The rub is that we, as the reader, are never given a solid answer on who we should believe.
Our narrator this time around is once again granted a name – Jervas Dudley – and his name is most assuredly important to the story. Young Jervas discovers a locked mausoleum in the wilds near his house; the titular tomb belonged to the Hyde family, who fell into ruin after their mansion burned and the last heir was killed in a fire caused by a lightning strike. Jervas is fascinated by the tomb, and begins sleeping outside of it, much to the consternation of his family. He eventually gains access to the tomb, or so he says, via a key he purportedly locates in his family’s attic with unearthly precision after waking suddenly one afternoon from his vigil.
This is where the events as presented by Jervas begin to diverge from what those around him are observing. He claims to be going inside the tomb and sleeping in an empty sepulcher with his name inscribed on the burial plate; according to servants and neighbors his family has tasked with watching him, though, he only sits outside the tomb in a trance-like state. While asleep inside the tomb, Jervas is apparently transported back in time to the Hyde mansion before its downfall. All of this comes to a head one night when Jervas visits the tomb during a thunderstorm, and envisions himself at a party at the mansion on the night it burned down. He awakens in a panic, believing himself to have been burned alive, to find he is being restrained by his father and several other men.
In the ensuing struggle, an antique box is discovered which the storm has likely unearthed from the ruins of the mansion. Inside is a porcelain miniature of a man, along with the inscription “J.H.” To his eyes, the miniature is an exact match for Jervas’s own features, and he determines that he must be the reincarnation of “Jervas Hyde.” He tries to explain this to his father, along with his visions while inside the tomb, but this falls on deaf ears. His father explains that no one has ever seen Jervas enter the tomb, and an inspection of the padlock – which Jervas has supposedly been opening when the key – shows it to be aged and rusted completely shut. Jervas is committed to an asylum, as he is believed to be mad, but his servant Hiram remains faithful to him. At Jervas’s request, Hiram breaks into the tomb and does indeed find an empty chamber with the name “Jervas” on the inscription. The story ends with Jervas informing us that when he dies, Hiram has promised to have him entombed in that spot.
There are, obviously, many different interpretations of the story, leading to many different conclusions. On one end of the spectrum we have the notion that Jervas is right, and supernatural forces were at work the entire time; on the other end is the concept that Jervas is just a delusional young man, who pieced together imaginary experiences based on folklore about the Hyde mansion and tomb. Now, obviously this is Lovecraft, so most folks would be inclined – and maybe rightly so – to go with the first option. I don’t know if I’m just feeling contrary, but I personally think Jervas is just off his rocker, and I think that explanation gives us a more interesting jumping-off point for looking at this story – and the other two we’ve discussed - as it relates to Lovecraft himself.
Final Verdict: I didn’t much care for this story upon reading it, and further examination has not done much to endear me further. For me, the central concept of “Is any of this real?” isn’t an appealing one, an opinion which extends to almost all stories of this ilk.

---
So there you have my impressions of our first three stories, along with some background and tangential information. This post was originally going to tackle ten tales, but upon realizing it was getting out of hand, Bryant from The Truth Inside the Lie convinced me to alter my scope. That’s not to say this post is done, however! Instead, I’d like now to do a bit of ruminating on what these stories can reveal to us about H.P. Lovecraft’s life at the time of their composition.
H.P. Lovecraft’s father, Winfield, was committed to a mental institution when Lovecraft himself was not even yet three years old, and died there five years later. Details are slim – we are talking about 1893, after all – but medical records indicate that Winfield had been "doing and saying strange things at times" for a year before his commitment. The best official diagnosis available points to late-stage syphilis as the most likely culprit, although Lovecraft himself always maintained that his father’s condition was caused by exhaustion and overwork from his job as a travelling salesman. With his father absent, Lovecraft’s paternal figure became Whipple Van Buren Phillips, his maternal grandfather. Whipple was instrumental in formulating Lovecraft’s early impressions of the world; he showed his grandson objects he had acquired while traveling, told the boy strange tales of his own invention, and purportedly made young H.P. walk through darkened rooms at age 5 to “cure” a fear of the dark.
I don’t want to delve too much into Lovecraft’s entire life history just yet, but suffice to say these things – along with a slew of other family drama and trauma – had a profound impact on him. He was apparently prone to “nervous attacks,” and at 18 had a breakdown so severe he never finished high school or recovered enough to attend college. Here’s where I’m going with this: All three of these stories deal with the idea of finding one’s place in the world. “The Beast in the Cave” presents us both with a narrator who is lost in the literal sense and with a glimpse at the fate that befell someone who previously couldn’t find their way out of those catacombs. “The Alchemist” and “The Tomb” take things one step further, dealing very directly with the concepts of family and lineage, and what happens when someone believes they belong to a bloodline that has been cursed. It’s not all that difficult to picture Lovecraft himself wandering the rooms of the Phillips estate, studying the various portraits, heirlooms, and family documents, and imagining various portions of his predecessors’ lives.
With all supernatural elements and ties to his different mythos stripped away, the central theme that recurs again and again within Lovecraft’s writing is one of exploration and discovery. Many of his protagonists – almost all of whom beyond this point will be unnamed, intellectual white men – are seeking a sense of belonging, even if the end result is discovering that where they belong has horrific implications. When you cut to the core of “cosmic horror,” past all of the tentacle-faced horrors and half-breed monster offspring, the nugget at the center is simply the idea that we don’t matter very much.
As I move forward in this project, these three pieces have added a new layer to my understanding of Lovecraft, and I expect my further readings will be influenced accordingly. From this point onward the Lovecraft reading room in my head will undoubtedly be occupied at times by a figure who is either a child or a young man still in his teens. I doubt the figure will much, but when it does speak, it will almost assuredly be questions such as “Who am I?” or “Where do I belong?” I imagine that, regardless of the answer given, the figure will find it unsatisfactory and fade away again until it’s ready to make another inquiry. Where it will wander during its absence I cannot say, other than to assume it is looking for somewhere to call home, some proof that its existence matters. If these stories are anything to go by, I fear its search is doomed to be a fruitless one.

2 comments:

Bryant Burnette said...

"The Beast in the Cave" --

(1) "For instance, the narrator’s sense of dread builds a palpable tension, but it’s undercut by the somewhat ham-handed ruminations about death and facing one’s fate with determination." -- Would it be possible to see the ruminations about death and fate and whatnot as being the backbone of the story? I'm playing devil's advocate in suggesting that, I think, but maybe there's something to it. The first time I read the story, I got caught up in thinking it was a plot hole that the narrator could become separated from his group so easily. This time, I wondered if it was on purpose, and in a quasi-suicidal manner. And if so, maybe part of the allure of doing it was for the opportunity it afforded to have precisely that type of rumination in a sort of for-realsies scenario. It's a stretch, but I kind of like it.

(2) "That a young man of 15 should have enough knowledge of the theory to include a variation of it in a short story speaks volumes about Lovecraft’s education up to that point." -- I'd snarkily contrast this with today's fifteen-year-olds, but who am I kidding? Today's 45-year-olds aren't this savvy.

(3) The big reveal fails for me, too. Not in a ruins-the-story kind of way, though; it's a logical reveal. I'm let down by the tour guide finding the narrator; I guess there's no way for the story to go where it goes without that happening, but it seems like a cheat, somehow. Still, as juvenilia goes, this is aces.

"The Alchemist" --

(1) The first time I read these, I preferred "The Beast in the Cave," but I think this time, I'm with you in preferring "The Alchemist." Most of it, at least.

(2) That device of striking out all but the first letter of the last name works on me. I always, when seeing that (or similarly prose-specific devices), think of how utterly incapable an audiobook is of replicating it.

(3) Not only is this story a rarity for having the narrator be named, but it's -- correct me on this if I'm wrong -- one of the relatively few stories that takes place entirely outside of New England.

(4) The final line is indeed dreadful beyond all dreams of redemption.

(5) As will be the case numerous times in Lovecraft stories with other characters, I basically just imagine Le Sorcier as Alan Moore.

Bryant Burnette said...

"The Tomb" --

(1) "The rub is that we, as the reader, are never given a solid answer on who we should believe." -- I'm always Team Narrator in these matters. Or if not always, usually. And though I had more or less the same reaction as you the first time I read this story, this time I think I'm more inclined to buy in to it. I can't help but think of the things Randolph Carter does while sleeping -- why not Jervas, as well?

(2) There's also some resonance between this story and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." I won't be more specific. (I don't mean that the two are related plot-wise; just that they share a sort of theme. You'll see when you get there.)

(3) "For me, the central concept of “Is any of this real?” isn’t an appealing one, an opinion which extends to almost all stories of this ilk." -- If you're anything like me, unreliable-narrator stories tend to make you roll your eyes. This is one. Or is it? It is. Unless it isn't!

(4) I really like the poem Jervas delivers at one point.

etc. --

(1) Oh, man! The idea that Lovecraft's father had gone to an asylum did not occur to me at all while reading "The Tomb." Would you say that this means that that story is a sort of indirect attempt to place himself in his father's mindset? If so, that makes the ambiguity surrounding the story all the more compelling, I think.

(2) " "“The Beast in the Cave” presents us both with a narrator who is lost in the literal sense and with a glimpse at the fate that befell someone who previously couldn’t find their way out of those catacombs." -- Nice! Well, not for Lovecraft, I guess.

(3) "I doubt the figure will much, but when it does speak, it will almost assuredly be questions such as “Who am I?” or “Where do I belong?” " -- I mean, like, I'll turn 44 this year and I ask those questions in almost every waking moment. Probably many of the unwaking ones, too. Never do quite seem to get definitive answers.

(4) "If these stories are anything to go by, I fear its search is doomed to be a fruitless one." -- Fruitless perhaps. But the entire body of work of H.P. Lovecraft is a byproduct of that fruitlessness, so you've got some company on that train, and it's pretty fuckin' stylish.

(5) I read all three of these in Joshi's variorum edition, which is a lot of fun. I'm getting the hang of how to casually glance at the footnotes while reading without breaking up the narrative too much. Bless ol' S.T.'s heart. It's a fine project to have undertaken and finished.