SOURCE: Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft, pp. 20–30, 44–50. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1982.

[In the following excerpt, Joshi, author of several books on Lovecraft, examines Lovecraft's stories in regard to the influence of Lord Dunsany, their New England settings, and the influence of Edgar Allan Poe.]

THE “DUNSANIAN” TALES

Dunsany has influenced me more than anyone except Poe—his rich language, his cosmic point of view, his remote dream-world, and his exquisite sense of the fantastic, all appeal to me more than anything else in literature. My first encounter with him—in the autumn of 1919—gave an immense impetus to my writing; perhaps the greatest it has ever had.

(SL: I, 243)

That statement, uttered in 1923, sums up the enormous hold that Lord Dunsany's work took over Lovecraft's imagination. Critics, however, have always been dissatisfied with the dozen or so tales of Lovecraft's that can be called “Dunsanian”—they are unoriginal, their plots are weak, they pale next to Lovecraft's other fiction. All these statements are true to a certain extent, but this adverse criticism ignores two fundamental points: 1) Lovecraft's “Dunsanian” tales in fact reveal more originality and complexity than has commonly been assumed; and 2) the Dunsany influence was most important in a formative way; that is, it gave an impetus to Lovecraft's fiction-writing by which he later wrote the great novelettes of horror upon which his fame now rests. Judged on their own merits, the “Dunsanian” tales reveal many points of interest, and Lovecraft's later Dunsanian work—during the period 1926–27, when he wrote The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and other tales—shows that he had by this time consolidated the Dunsanian influence in such a way that he could use it as a vehicle for the expression of his own ideas.

What works by Dunsany did Lovecraft read? The query can be answered easily by reading his correspondence and by examining his Dunsany holdings in his library.¹ Lovecraft's preference emphatically tended toward Dunsany's early short stories, especially such collections as The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), A Dreamer's Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), and the like. Lovecraft liked the plays (cf. Plays of Gods and Men [1917] and Plays of Near and Far [1923]) slightly less, and they—along with Dunsany's poems, which Lovecraft also enjoyed—influenced him far less than the tales. Of Dunsany's later novels, Lovecraft singled out The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) but found in these novel-length works a general slackening of the intensity and ponderous naivete that had made the early tales so unique a contribution to literature.

It has always been amazing to Lovecraft critics—as it was to Lovecraft's own associates—that he wrote “Polaris” (1918) a full year before ever reading Dunsany. Here was a short tale in nearly every respect in the Dunsanian vein. The tale, based upon a dream (recorded in SL: I, 62), displays all the earmarks of the later Dunsanian fiction: the piquant mythical proper names (Olathoe, Daikos, Kadiphonek, Lomar, Zobna, the Inutos),² the use of stylistic repetition and august phraseology (“Still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow betwixt strange peaks”—D [Dagon], 19), and the air of wistful and dream-like fantasy characteristic of Dunsany. Its only important variation is that it is set not in an imaginary fantasy land but in the distant past of the Earth, which the narrator has reached through some form of ancestral identification. The conclusion, where the narrator comes to feel that this ancestral or atavistical life is in fact his real life while his mundane existence (out of which he cannot “wake”) is only a dream-life, is poignant in the narrator's lugubrious wish to “save the [ancient] city whose peril every moment grows” (D, 22), unaware that it has perished countless ages ago.

Whence derive the “Dunsanian” features in this tale? The style could well be an imitation of the King James Bible or perhaps the prose-poems of Poe, … while the central theme certainly reflects, however indirectly, Lovecraft's longing to escape the garish present for the sublimity of an imagined past. Nonetheless, the parallelism with Dunsany is startling and will remain one of the oddities in literature.

“The White Ship” (1919), one of the first tales to be written after Lovecraft's discovery of Dunsany, reveals an important distinction not understood by most scholars: whereas the style of the tale is manifestly (and perhaps excessively) Dunsanian, the theme is entirely Lovecraft's. While the superficial structure of the tale—a fantastic dream-journey over the sea—obviously echoes Dunsany's “Idle Days on the Yann” (in A Dreamer's Tales), Lovecraft's tale is in fact an allegory with varying levels of meaning.³ The narrator's abandonment of Sona-Nyl, “the Land of Fancy,” for the mythical realm of Cathuria, “the Land of Hope” which turns out to be nothing but a “monstrous cataract,” reflects Lovecraft's fundamental cynicism and ridicule of those who reject present tranquility for imaginary bliss, whether it be the bliss of Heaven or some future success.

Similar is “The Quest of Iranon” (1921), one of the most tragically poignant tales in the Lovecraft canon. Iranon, imagining himself to be of royal blood, seeks eternally for the mythical city of Aira and roams the countryside singing. Aside from incidental satire upon the bourgeois mentality (“‘But I am Iranon, a singer of songs … and have no heart for the cobbler's trade’”;⁴ “‘Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you?’”—D, 117), the tale presents an enormously powerful statement on the futility of hope and the tragedy of disillusion. Iranon learns that he is nothing more than a common shepherd's son and not a Prince of Aira. As a result, he calmly drowns himself in quicksand. “That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world” (D, 122).

“The Tree” (1920) is the most curious of Lovecraft's Dunsanian tales because it is set in an actual historical period—ancient Greece. Although there are mentions of an archon (one of the governing magistrates at Athens) in “The Quest of Iranon,” “The Tree” takes place in the Peloponnesus itself. The characters are given pure Greek names (Kalos = “lovely” or “handsome”; Musides = “son of the Muses”) and vie, in an ostensibly cordial manner because of their abiding friendship, in a contest to build the loveliest statue of Tyche (= “change” but sometimes “fate”; hence the motto of the tale, Fata viam invenient = “The Fates will find a way”)⁵ for the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily. But after a time Kalos grows ill and finally dies. The cause, it is implied, is that Musides poisoned him through jealousy. Musides, however, suffers the revenge of the Fates when he is killed by a strange olive-tree that grows out of Kalos' tomb. This quaintly moralistic tale, reminiscent of folklore, brings to mind several of Lovecraft's other lesser Dunsanian tales, such as “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919), “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920), and “The Other Gods” (1921).

In “Celephais” (1920) we find Dunsanianism used not only for philosophical but for autobiographical ends. In this tale of an obscure writer (who was “the last of his family,” “did not care for the ways of people about him,” and “was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote”—D, 60) who in drug-induced dreams takes on the name of King Kuranes reigning in Celephais “in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills” (D, 61), we again detect Lovecraft's wish to “let my spirit rest amidst the past.” However, Kuranes (whose “real-life” name is significantly withheld) escapes not into an imaginary fantasy realm but into “his own world of childhood” (D, 61):

Whilst [others] strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

(D, 60)

The quotation reveals the tale's significant connection with the novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and in fact with the whole of what modern scholars call “the Randolph Carter cycle,” for this passage is in effect a concise description of what Carter himself discovers at the end of his stupendous journey through the dream-world of Kadath.

The “Randolph Carter cycle” is itself a rather heterogeneous collection of five tales, and there is little evidence that Lovecraft ever considered them a “series” of any sort. Only “The Silver Key” (1926) and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (suggested by and written in collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price, 1932–33) are openly connected, although The Dream-Quest describes the first stage of Carter's dream-wanderings and “The Silver Key” takes up where it left off.⁶

The first Randolph Carter tale is “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). Since it is hardly Dunsanian in any particular and has almost no connection with the other tales, there is no reason to study it here. The same may be said for “The Unnamable” (1923), often ignored as a tale involving Randolph Carter as a character. With The Dream-Quest (1926–27), however, we first see Carter as a dream-personage in a work definitely in the Dunsanian vein.

It would hardly be fruitful to describe the events of this “tale of picaresque adventure—a quest for the gods through varied and incredible scenes and perils” (SL: II, 94), since the actual “message” of the tale has in effect already been summed up in the previous quotation from “Celephais.” Carter seeks all through dreamland for the “sunset city” of his imagination, but finds it in the memories of his own childhood in New England. That this novel was written only a few months after Lovecraft's return to Providence from the hated New York cannot be insignificant.

Indeed, the culmination of the novel, where Nyarlathotep explains to Carter the source of his “sunset city,” contains some of Lovecraft's most golden prose:

“For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. … Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.”

(MM [At the Mountains of Madness], 379–80)

With “The Silver Key” (1926), we find Carter unable to return to dreamland since he has “lost the key of the gate of dreams” (MM, 386), but here any resemblance to The Dream-Quest ends. “The Silver Key” is not only quite un-Dunsanian in style but is nothing more or less than an exposition of Lovecraft's ethical and aesthetic philosophy. Carter's successive attempts—and failure—to find comfort in cynicism, religion, the “modern freedoms” of “licence and anarchy” (MM, 388), and travel reveal allegorically the hollowness and pomposity of human ideals in an universe where “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness (MM, 386).” Finally Carter, coming across a magical silver key, returns—bodily this time—to childhood. Some of the New England dialect used by Carter's old hired hand, Benijah Corey, sounds somewhat comical to our ears and injures a tale whose philosophical seriousness and bitterness make it almost unique in the Lovecraft corpus.

“Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932–33) was written only—and rather reluctantly—at E. Hoffmann Price's insistence and is, in general, not successful since Price's and Lovecraft's ideas never quite fit harmoniously.⁷ Many of the ideas in the tale are Price's—particularly the interesting mathematical speculations in the middle of the text—and Lovecraft, when rewriting Price's original draft, retained a good portion of Price's language.⁸ The tale is not Dunsanian to any notable degree, and is more important as a contribution to the Lovecraft Mythos.

Before we attempt an analysis of Dunsany's influence upon Lovecraft, we must make note of a curiosity that runs through many of these “Dunsanian” tales—the extent to which elements of Graeco-Roman classicism enter into them. This feature has gone almost wholly unnoticed by scholarship in spite of the fact that “The Tree” is set in classical times. Countless classical parallels can be seen in the tales: “The Other Gods,” where Barzai the Wise attempts to catch a glimpse of the gods on Mount Hatheg-Kla and is punished for his boldness, is a faithful depiction of the Greek concept of hubris or excessive pride.⁹ “The Tree,” Lovecraft wrote, was “based on the Greek idea of divine justice and retribution” (SL: I, 121). “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” appears to draw part of its imagery from the eighth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (especially from the description of the Calydonian hunt). But it is in The Dream-Quest that we find the employment of classical themes at its subtlest. The structure of the whole tale, of course, can generally be considered a manipulation of the Odyssey-theme. Moreover, it is fairly clear that the surging of the black galley into space is borrowed from an analogous scene in the True History of the late Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata, while the grotesque battle of the cats and zoogs seems modeled upon the fifth-century B.C. Homeric parody, “The Battle of the Frogs and Mice.” Even the place-name “Sarkomand” brings to mind the Bactrian town of Samarkand (or Maracanda), conquered by Alexander in 328 B.C. The most significant classical connection, however, appears at the conclusion. Note this remark by Nyarlathotep:

“But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's dreamland, and burn still with the flame of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence toward the mild gods of earth.”

(MM, 378)

When we turn to Vergil's Aeneid, we find that Aeneas too is not merely respectful of the gods (pius), but is seeking his due as well. He is destined, indeed driven, by fate (fato profugus) to found the Roman race in Italy.

What can this incorporation of classical devices—something we find much less frequently in Lovecraft's other fiction—mean? Lovecraft knew that Dunsany's own synthetic mythology was a combination of Graeco-Roman, Celtic, and Oriental myth in a distinctive and unique fashion, and it is likely that Lovecraft's own “Dunsanian” fantasies allowed him to make a similar melange, combined with a strong dose of his own cosmic philosophy. In this way the “Dunsanian” tales gain a depth not noticeable at first glance. Not horrific, they instead are the expressions of the ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical thought of Lovecraft together with the classical learning of his youth. Their frequent inclusion of satire only confirms this tendency.

The work of Dunsany, then, while it initially worked deleteriously on Lovecraft's style—for Lovecraft could never capture the delicacy of the Irish prose-poet, and his own unique style was temporarily submerged—allowed Lovecraft to use fiction (rather than essays or poetry, as he had done hitherto) as a vehicle for his increasingly profound ideas on life and literature. Moreover, the satire, pathos, and pensive tragedy found in these works offer a vivid and refreshing contrast to the Poe-esque horror of his other early work.

In sum, the reason why Lovecraft's Dunsanian fantasies are not perfect successes is that Lovecraft, in spite of his remark that “Dunsany is myself” (SL: I, 234), was not in fact sufficiently in tune with Dunsany's own mentality. Lovecraft could not for long subordinate horror to beauty in fiction, and his “sense of place” soon compelled him to abandon the imaginary fantasy-lands of Ooth-Nargai and Kadath and base his work upon the very real New England countryside and history that he so well knew and of which he was so much a part. …

THE “NEW ENGLAND” TALES

Those works by Lovecraft which can be called “New England” tales can theoretically encompass a large variety of stories. Such diverse works as “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1921–22) and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35) are set, at least in part, in the New England region whose history, terrain, and folkways Lovecraft knew so well through a lifetime's travel and study. But we must here be concerned only with those tales in which New England—whether it be Providence, Boston, or the backwoods of Vermont and western Massachusetts—acts as a pivotal force, where, in effect, New England becomes an actual character of the tale.

The question of what led Lovecraft to write about the region in which he was raised is not an idle one, for it was not immediately evident to Lovecraft that fictional use could be made of the New England area. His earliest tales are set in unusual or distant locales—Mammoth Cave in “The Beast in the Cave” (1905), France in “The Alchemist” (1908), and the Pacific in “Dagon” (1917). Some of his early tales actually set in New England—“The Tomb” (1917), “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919), and “The Terrible Old Man” (1920)¹⁰—do not employ the local background to any particular degree: they are in as much a never-never land as “The Outsider.” What, then, led Lovecraft to bring New England alive in “The Picture in the House” (1920), “The Festival” (1923), and later works?

The answer seems to be the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.¹¹ Lovecraft's reading of Hawthorne was apparently very thorough, and he seems to have read not only his novels and tales but his fragments, sketches, and notebooks—all are alluded to in his essays and letters. Moreover, there is evidence that Lovecraft began an extensive campaign of re-reading Hawthorne during the early part of 1920, as revealed in his Commonplace Book.¹² Indeed, the very idea of keeping a commonplace book of plot germs is obviously derived from Hawthorne's similar notebooks. The Hawthornian influence upon Lovecraft is manifold and multilevel, but at its root it seems to have impelled Lovecraft to make use of his native region in a far profounder way than before.

“The Picture in the House” (Dec. 1920)¹³ first reveals the trend, and in its opening paragraph Lovecraft enunciates the element of horror to be found in a hoary and desolate region:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

(DH [The Dunwich Horror], 121)

It is precisely because New England had an historical depth lacking in nearly all other parts of the United States that Lovecraft, with his fascination for the past, could use it in fiction. All around him were survivals from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Lovecraft could in reality feel the difference between the narrow, repressed world of the Puritans and the spaciousness of the Georgian age in England and America. “The Picture in the House” simply depicts the effects of solitude upon a hideously and preternaturally aged backwoods farmer who has taken to cannibalism through a lifetime's poring over pictures in ancient and morbid tomes that he can hardly read. It thus continues the probing of abnormal psychology begun in “The Tomb” and carried on in a number of Lovecraft's later tales.

“The Festival” (1923) is an attempt by Lovecraft to capture the enormous aesthetic thrill—“the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence” (SL: III, 126)—of seeing Marblehead, Massachusetts, for the first time at 4.05 p.m. on December 17, 1922. This town has even now survived with amazingly few alterations since the eighteenth century. It was not merely the physical beauty of its huddled roofs and steeples which attracted Lovecraft, but something profounder:

In a flash all the past of New England—all the past of Old England—all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World—swept over me and identified me with the stupendous totality of all things in such a way as it never did before and never will again.

(SL: III, 126)

Perhaps it was this thought which led Lovecraft to write in the tale: “It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind” (D, 187). In any case, the point of the story—beyond the remarkably exact descriptions of the city, rechristened “Kingsport,” and beyond the ponderous citation of the Necronomicon at the conclusion—is that the past cannot die and that antiquity itself can breed the most awesome horrors known to man. The narrator is compelled to keep the festival through the influence of his ancestors, “that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten” (D, 187). “The Festival” contains some of Lovecraft's smoothest, most elegant, and most pensively subdued prose, and may in fact be read as an extended prose-poem.

With “The Shunned House” (1924), we are in a different atmosphere altogether. This novelette—which could well be called Lovecraft's version of a House of the Seven Gables—is one of the longest and most complex tales that Lovecraft had yet written and, as with the best of his work, operates on many levels. The “shunned house” itself was an actual home (still standing) at 135 Benefit Street in Providence, abandoned and decaying in Lovecraft's day but now restored. It is the closest thing to a standard “haunted house” tale that Lovecraft ever wrote, although he is at pains to make it clear that the house was not in fact haunted in the traditional sense: “The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any real sense ‘haunted’” (MM, 223–24). Spurred by his uncle's previous researches into the house's sinister history, the narrator himself undertakes his own profounder studies in what seems to be almost the manner of a detective story. Finally the breakthrough comes: not only was the house built upon an old cemetery, but upon the gravesite of a sinister Frenchman, Etienne Roulet, descendant of one suspected of being a “daemoniac” (MM, 235). In the end science is used to put down the horror. A quantity of sulphuric acid is used to destroy the peculiar entity—“a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency” (MM, 246), which the narrator excavates in the cellar. This entity, which appears “like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two,” is in fact—and this is one of the most cosmically potent passages in Lovecraft—an “unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen” (MM, 246).

Three years later Lovecraft wrote his lengthiest fictional work, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927).¹⁴ Here we can hardly cover more than a fraction of this rich and complex work, but there is no question but that it is Lovecraft's greatest tribute to the New England region that bore him. That Providence is mentioned in the first sentence of the novel shows to what an extent that city dominates the work. It is, as Barton L. St. Armand wrote, “a kind of prima materia—a basic, irreducible substance—which he transmutes through the alchemy of his art into a rarefied and golden product.”¹⁵ In the early parts of the novel, describing Charles Dexter Ward's idyllic youth in this haven of tranquil antiquity, Lovecraft could well be writing his autobiography:

His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous hill that rises just east of the river, and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before that the town had long overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along the shady sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their generous yards and gardens.

(MM, 106)

St. Armand is correct in stating that “anyone who has lived in Providence has probably seen exactly this sight and felt precisely this way,”¹⁶ but Providence does not remain so blessed for long. When Ward begins to burrow with increasing tenacity into the history of his long-forgotten and disturbingly long-lived ancestor Joseph Curwen, there is unearthed a hideous tale of pre-Revolutionary days, where the leading citizens of colonial Providence were compelled to undertake the extinction of Curwen—scholar, alchemist, recluse, and deliver into the darkest depths of black magic—and his entire abode and appurtenances. The lengthy sub-narrative wherein this tale is told (Part II: “An Antecedent and a Horror”) may be one of the triumphs of historical fiction, and Lovecraft's detailed knowledge of Providence history—much of it absorbed through books in 1925 and 1926 as a tonic against the stifling atmosphere of New York—has allowed him to create a fascinating and flawless picture of eighteenth-century New England culture. The greatest achievements in this regard are the letters by Curwen and his cohorts around the world, written in the “crabbed and archaic” (MM, 183) diction of the seventeenth century:

“I delight that you continue in ye Gett'g at Olde Matters in your Way, and doe not think better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's in Salem-Village. Certainely, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr Copy'g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende.

(MM, 130)

What, in fact, are Curwen and his associates trying to do? What is the significance of the epigraph from Borellus (i.e., the medieval French scientist Pierre Borel)¹⁷ about the “essential Saltes of humane Dust”? The truth, subtly hinted throughout the novel, is revealed only toward the end:

What these horrible creatures … were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear. … 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.

(MM, 187)

That these “essential Saltes” could be raised by proper incantations is, indeed discovered in an all too horrible way by Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, the Ward family's doctor who ultimately quells the horrors. Willett, in an inadvertent utterance of an incantation while exploring the dark and sinister basement of Charles Ward's bungalow, raises a hideous specter who writes a note to Willett in the “pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A.D.” (MM, 207), ordering Willett to kill Curwen and dissolve his body in acid.

But how can Curwen, presumably killed by the colonial band of citizens, be roaming in the early twentieth century? It appears that Ward himself, who gradually learned enough of Curwen's magic through the discovery of his papers, raised Curwen through his own “essential Saltes.” Unfortunately Ward is reluctant to recommence the nefarious activities of Curwen and his associates (who themselves have survived to Ward's day and whom Ward visits on his three-year European tour); indeed, in a poignant letter, Ward tells Willett of his deeds:

“Instead of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception or calculation. … Upon us depends more than can be put into words—all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe. I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.”

(MM, 171)

But that meeting with Willett never comes. Curwen—who by a malign fate resembles Ward in nearly every physical particular—puts Ward out of the way and attempts to pass himself off as Ward. Eventually Willett sees through the ploy and destroys Curwen through the very black magic that Curwen himself had used to create such horror over three centuries.

Is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward merely an exercise in Lovecraft's descriptions of modern and historical Providence? We can hardly accept so facile an answer, but we must likewise reject St. Armand's belief that the “simple moral of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is that it is dangerous to know too much, especially about one's own ancestors.”¹⁸ Such an interpretation would make Ward, and not Curwen, the “villain”; but it is obvious that we are to see Ward merely as the hapless, passive, and tragic victim of Curwen's machinations. Ward's bitter plea that “I did it for the sake of knowledge” is in fact his justification for his delvings into the past, a justification which frees him—in Lovecraft's mind—from all moral guilt. It would be strange indeed for Lovecraft, who professed an “acute, persistent, unquenchable craving to know” (SL: I, 61), to write so lengthy a work on the dangers of knowledge. It is Curwen who, through an unhealthy Faustian desire to gain supremacy of the greatest minds of the world and to perpetuate his life beyond the normal span, is destroyed triumphantly.

Many of Lovecraft's later tales are set in New England, but—due to their importance in forming the Lovecraft Mythos—they had best be studied in detail. … We can, however, note that much of the topographical background for “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) came from Lovecraft's visits to western Massachusetts in 1927 and 1928, and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930) contains, in its descriptions of Vermont, actual passages from Lovecraft's earlier essay, “Vermont—a First Impression” (1927).¹⁹ So too the Innsmouth in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) derives from Lovecraft's visits to the coastal town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, while “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) likewise reveals Lovecraft's linkage of the mythical “Arkham”—that “changeless, legend-haunted city” (MM, 248)—with the Salem of sinister repute. Interestingly, in “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933), Arkham becomes virtually a haven of peace and safety compared to the even more dreadful Innsmouth. Finally, “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935) returns to a Providence setting and contains amazingly exact descriptions of Lovecraft's own study, as well as the “Federal Hill” region in downtown Providence where the Italian segment even now congregates.

The increasing use of New England topography and history—either for its own sake in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or as the springboard for works of larger scope as in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” or “The Haunter of the Dark”—reveals Lovecraft's penchant for basing his work on a solid and realistic foundation. Indeed, Lovecraft made this usage a principle in his aesthetic of weird fiction writing:

Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric—confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, mood, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than characters and plot.

²⁰

In no other way could Lovecraft let loose his imagination than by establishing a tale in a realistic setting. Although he set his tales in Antarctica, England, France, the Pacific, Africa, and elsewhere, it was only New England that could provide him this realistic base since Lovecraft clearly doubted “if any scenery could affect me quite as poignantly as my native New England” (SL: II, 159). …

OTHER TALES AND REVISIONS

Throughout his career, Lovecraft wrote random tales which fit into no concrete pattern as do the “Dunsanian” tales or those of the Lovecraft Mythos. While in his occupation as literary revisionist, he would often revise or ghost-write weird tales which amounted virtually to original fiction. Indeed, the 25,000-word novelette “The Mound” was based upon a one-paragraph summary by Zealia Bishop, a plot-germ which Lovecraft found so “insufferably tame and flat” (SL: III, 97) that he concocted an entire tale which surely has almost nothing of the original authoress' conceptions in it.²¹

Many of these tales—especially those written early in his career—bear strong traces of a Poe-esque influence. Lovecraft remarked that, upon his discovery of Poe at age eight, he set about writing many Poe pastiches (SL: II, 109). However, it is hard to trace, in such early work as “The Secret Cave” (1898) or “The Mysterious Ship” (1902), any influence of Poe or anyone else. Even “The Beast in the Cave” (1905) reveals little of the Poe-esque save perhaps in style. It is only with “The Alchemist” (1908) and later works that we find the authentic imprint of Poe.

The influence of Poe—which is usually combined with an influence derived from the “Gothic” novels of the late eighteenth century—takes on several different forms in Lovecraft's tales. They can be enumerated as follows:

1) a generally febrile and “adjective-filled” style of writing (from “The Tomb” through “The Rats in the Walls”);

2) a rather neurotic narrator around whom the tale centers and who is subject to much psychological analysis (“The Tomb,” “The Outsider,” “The Hound,” “The Rats in the Walls”);

3) a setting either in the past (“The Alchemist”) or in England (“The Hound,” “The Rats in the Walls”) or on the Continent (“The Music of Erich Zann”);

4) the Gothic castle (“The Alchemist,” “The Tomb,” “The Rats in the Walls”; cf. the modified version in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

Most of these early tales are comparatively undistinguished in their own right, although several broach themes that Lovecraft would elaborate later on. “The Alchemist” (1908) already features a wizard who has kept himself alive for six-hundred years through black magic—a figure foreshadowing Joseph Curwen. The tale also involves a long family curse which perhaps looks ahead to “The Rats in the Walls” and even “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” “The Tomb” (1917) deals with psychic possession in much the same way as does The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and its inclusion of a hilarious “drinking song” (whose original title was “Gaudeamus” = “Let us delight”) not only breaks the monotony of an otherwise ponderously heavy tale but brings to mind the similar poetic snatches in the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Poe's “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

The celebrated tale “The Outsider” was, as Lovecraft confessed, “my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height” (SL: III, 379). Indeed, it seems—in its depiction of the narrator's attempt to escape from his strange existence into the world of men, and his discovery that the horrible monster he sees upon entering a gaily lit mansion is in fact his own form—to be a re-telling of “The Masque of the Red Death” from the monster's point of view. The opening paragraphs, moreover, bear startling phraseological similarities to the opening of “Berenice.” What the tale is precisely supposed to mean is not entirely clear.²² Its conclusion seems to hint at the horror of solitude and alienation:

Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

(DH, 59)

A different sort of Poe-esque influence is revealed by Lovecraft's four extant prose-poems—“Memory” (1919), “Nyarlathotep” (1920), “Ex Oblivione” (1920 or 1921), and “What the Moon Brings” (1922).²³ In their sonorous language and emphasis on mood over plot, they are clearly derived from such of Poe's tales as “Silence—a Fable” and “Shadow—a Parable.” All are powerful short excursions in atmosphere and contain a wistful pathos that we find only in the Dunsanian tales. Particularly moving is the final paragraph of “Ex Oblivione,” dealing with the common Lovecraftian theme of escaping the dreary present for the world of dream and imagination, and ultimately of oblivion itself:

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of drug and dream pushed me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.

(BTWOS [Beyond the Wall of Sleep], 9)

Two other early Poe-esque tales deserve mention, although neither represents Lovecraft at his best. “The Music of Erich Zann” (1921) tells of a mute old musician in Paris who plays bizarre melodies on a “viol” (the Renaissance stringed instrument played between the legs, not a poeticism for “violin”) and frantically tries to conceal the view from the window of his top-storey garret apartment. Sadly, when the narrator finally looks out this window, we are given so vague a description that the tale leaves us unsatisfied. Of “The Hound” (1922) little need be said save that it reveals a rather shameless display of perfervid Poe-esque rhetoric and an elementary tale of supernatural revenge upon two psychotic individuals who have taken to grave-robbing to relieve their “devastating ennui” (D, 152).

With “The Rats in the Walls” (1923)—which might perhaps be called Lovecraft's version of “The Fall of the House of Usher”—we are in an entirely different league altogether. In its taut, concise prose, gradual, cumulative suspense, powerful psychological analysis, and grisly conclusion, it represents not merely the high-water mark in Lovecraft's early fiction but can perhaps stand as a nearly perfect example of the short story. It tells the tale of an aging American industrialist who decides to rebuild his evil-rumored family home in England. His line has been the subject of strange whispers for centuries, and the very site of his mansion—Exham Priory—is said to have a history still older than the Roman foundations unearthed during the reconstruction. Finally, after the narrator and his cats—and they alone—hear seemingly thousands of rats scampering downward through the walls, an exploration party is organized that penetrates lower and lower under the mansion, coming upon appalling signs of cannibalistic feasts between rats and humans stretching back into prehistory. When the narrator learns that it is his own family and ancestors who are responsible for the carnage, he not only goes mad but actually descends upon the evolutionary scale—a descent brilliantly indicated by successively archaic usages of language—and is found crouching over the half-eaten form of a colleague, Capt. Norrys, who throughout the tale has been given the now hideous epithet of “plump.” The celebrated passage demands quotation:

… It's voodoo, I tell you … that spotted snake … Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! … 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust … wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? … Magna Mater! Magna Mater! … Atys … Dia ad aghaid's ad aodann … agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa! … Ungl … ungl … rrrlh … chchch. …

(DH, 52)

The sequence, of course, is archaic English, Latin, Celtic (borrowed from Fiona MacLeod's “The Sin-Eater”—cf. SL: I, 258), and finally primitive ape cries.²⁴

“Cool Air” (1926) can be said to be the last direct imitation of Poe, either in style or in theme. This tale, indeed, is almost embarrassingly similar to Poe's “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”: a Spanish doctor, an implacable foe to death, keeps himself alive after his technical death by artificial preservation, and in this way maintains an existence of sorts for eighteen years until the ammonia cooling system in his room—which maintains a temperature of 55 degrees F—breaks down. The narrator frantically tries to procure ice while the mechanism is being fixed, but to no purpose, and the doctor literally dissolves into what Lovecraft in “The Thing on the Doorstep” would term “liquescent horror.” If anything, the tale testifies to Lovecraft's comparatively successful employment of New York as a fictional setting. The narrator announces at the opening: “It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and common-place rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side” (DH, 203).

Another group of Lovecraft's miscellaneous tales reveals a penchant for exotic or unusual settings. The tendency is evident so early as “The Beast in the Cave” (1905), set in Mammoth Cave. (Lovecraft would not in fact visit a real cave until 1928, when he saw the Endless Caverns in Virginia—cf. SL: II, 246.) “The Beast in the Cave,” in spite of the author's youth, is actually a competent and powerful narrative if the florid style of writing can be ignored. In its depiction of a man's descent to a subhuman level through his being lost in the labyrinthine cave, we may detect already Lovecraft's concern for the preservation of civilization and the danger of a return to barbarism.

“Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1920)—whose original title has never been restored since its first publication, and which is commonly known as “Arthur Jermyn”—takes us to Africa, and in its subtlety and conciseness justifies Lovecraft's comparatively high regard for it. Here again the dominance of ancestry is the theme, as Sir Arthur Jermyn learns that his great-great-grandfather Sir Wade Jermyn had mated with a creature in the depths of the Congo (“Whether it was human or simian only a scientist could determine”—D, 54) and had thus caused the physical and intellectual peculiarities that had plagued the Jermyns ever since. It is this knowledge which incites Jermyn calmly to immolate himself upon a lonely moor.

Slightly less exotic in setting is “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1921-22), a series of six tales with a recurring central character that may well rank as the nadir of Lovecraft's fiction. The series was commissioned by G. J. Houtain for the “vile rag” (SL: IV, 170) Home Brew. Lovecraft regarded the venture as aesthetically disastrous (“To write to order, and to drag one figure through a series of artificial episodes, involves the violation of all that spontaneity and singleness of impression which should characterize short story work”—SL: I, 158) but thought that the $5.00 per installment offered (and ultimately never entirely paid him) was good enough to undertake the effort. The literary source for the series—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—is so obvious as not to require elaboration. Indeed, Herbert West's successive attempts to imbue life into dead flesh often becomes rather amusing in a half-parodic way, and there is no question but that Lovecraft wrote the thing at least partially with tongue in cheek.

Lovecraft's other serial for Home Brew, “The Lurking Fear” (1922), is a rather different specimen and manages to maintain a type of unity in spite of the need to provide a “punch” at the end of each of the four sections. One of these—where is described the hideous death of the narrator's assistant in trying to trace the source of the lurking fear (“For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face”—D, 176)—is actually one of the more powerful moments in Lovecraft. Again hereditary degeneration is at the base of the tale, which involves the descent upon the evolutionary scale of a family excessively given to inbreeding.

One of the most undervalued of Lovecraft's works is the novelette “Under the Pyramids” (1924; commonly titled “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”), ghost-written for Harry Houdini. This is really one of the best tales of Lovecraft's middle period, and in its length, complexity, and cosmic approach, it becomes a vanguard for his later Mythos tales. Lovecraft did much research into the Egyptian setting for the tale (aided by guidebooks from and trips to the Egyptian Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and indeed parts of the tale read rather like a travelogue or encyclopaedia. But when the narrator (intended to be Houdini himself) stumbles upon strange monstrosities in the depths of the pyramids, we are given some potently frenzied descriptions:

I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak … but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches … men should not have the heads of crocodiles. …

(D, 226)

The culmination, of course, is the conclusion, where we learn that the “five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus” to whom the hybrid entities pray and offer unholy sacrifices is nothing more than “that of which it is the merest forepaw” (D, 229)—a touch of awesome cosmicism which reminds us of the “titan elbow” of the entity unearthed in “The Shunned House.”

Two other tales employing a New York setting deserve note. “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925) is perhaps the most disappointing of Lovecraft's longer tales. It deals with very conventional black magic (pillaged by Lovecraft from the “Magic” article in the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica) and may find its only virtue in the dismal descriptions of the Red Hook area in which Lovecraft lived.²⁵ “He” (1925) is rather more redeeming, and in its opening and obviously autobiographical lines recalls Lovecraft's own sentiments during his New York stay:

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.

(D, 230)

The narrator's quest for beauty and antiquity finally makes him stumble across a curious and archaically dressed guide who leads him through intricate tangles of streets and at last, through a curtained window (recall “The Music of Erich Zann”), shows him vistas of past and future New York; the latter typify Lovecraft's views of the coming decadence of western man:

I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettledrums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

(D, 237)

Of Lovecraft's revisions of the fantasy work of other writers little need by said. Some of them are mildly enjoyable on a low level—especially C. M. Eddy's “The Loved Dead” (1923) and Zealia Bishop's “The Curse of Yig” (1928)—but add almost nothing to our knowledge of Lovecraft the man or writer. The revisions of works by Sonia Greene, Hazel Heald, Wilfred Talman, and others are in general hardly even competent. The lengthy “Medusa's Coil” (1930) is typical: its style is slovenly and its plot so uncoordinated that no sense can be made of the tale upon completion. The collaboration with Kenneth Sterling, “In the Walls of Eryx” (1936), is rather better and is the only pure tale of science-fiction in which Lovecraft had a hand. Its depiction of the narrator's stumbling into an invisible maze (the core idea was Sterling's, but the development was apparently Lovecraft's) is one of the more original concepts in imaginative fiction, and his gradual psychological decay is handled ably.

Of the four collaborations with R. H. Barlow two—“‘Till A' the Seas’” (1935) and “The Night Ocean” (1936)—merit more than passing mention. The former employs the common “last man” theme (perhaps influenced here by Hodgson's The Night Land), and those passages which can be identified as Lovecraft's²⁶ reveal a fine sense of the cosmic futility of an inconsequential humanity lost in the gulfs of time and space. “The Night Ocean” deserves much lengthier treatment than can be allowed here,²⁷ not merely because the exact degree of Lovecraft's authorship has not been (and probably can never be) determined but because it may rank as one of the finest and subtlest tales in the whole Lovecraft canon. Aside from the profound comments on the nature of aesthetic expression that fill the opening pages, the tale tells of a pensive narrator (“For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming; and who can say that such a nature does not open latent eyes sensitive to unsuspected worlds and orders of being?”—UCPP: I, 49) who senses a strange presence upon the beach of a resort area where he is vacationing. The whole tale is told with enormous subtlety, psychological analysis, and hauntingly beautiful imagery. However, in the end we encounter only a tantalizing vagueness: “A strangeness … had surged up like an evil brew within a pot, had mounted to the very rim in a breathless moment, had paused uncertainly there, and had subsided, taking with it whatever unknown message it had borne” (UCPP: I, 65).

Before leaving Lovecraft's fiction, we must make passing mention of some of his openly humorous tales. “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” (1917) is a tongue-in-cheek “memoir” of the eighteenth-century titan by an exceedingly aged colleague and contains an amazingly faithful reproduction of archaic diction. “Sweet Ermengarde” (1920s?) is a rather farcical satire on the Horatio Alger type of tale, and curiously anticipates Nathanael West's novel A Cool Million (1934). “Ibid” (1928) is an exquisitely sober account of the very voluminous author of the title (whose full name, it transpires, is “Gaius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus Aemilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus”—UCPP: II, 1–2) and the history of his work from late antiquity to the present. Of the two collaborations with R. H. Barlow, “The Battle That Ended the Century” (1934) is a huge and hilarious “in-joke” in which the names of many of Lovecraft's associates are parodied (e.g., Frank Belknap Long becomes Frank Chimesleep Short), and the unfinished “Collapsing Cosmoses” (1935) is an amusing if transparent satire on the “space-opera” brand of science fiction. It is not likely that Lovecraft put much time into these works or considered them anything but mild amusements, but they reveal a side of Lovecraft not often found so obviously in his horror tales.

That Lovecraft was a versatile writer of fiction is immediately clear from studying his lesser tales. The varieties in style and tone (from the frenzy of “The Hound” to the pensive placidity of “The Night Ocean”), setting (the Africa of “Arthur Jermyn” to the Paris of “The Music of Erich Zann”), and content (the wistful pathos of the prose-poems to the grisly horror of “The Lurking Fear”) point to a complexity in the fictional oeuvre which is matched by the complexity of Lovecraft's life and thought. However, Lovecraft's true versatility is revealed only by an examination of the work—poetry, essays, letters—that he did entirely outside the domain of fiction.

Notes

1. Cf. Joshi and Michaud, Lovecraft's Library, 255–68.

2. Several of these names appear to be neo-Greek coinages (Olathoe; Daikos; Kadiphonek; Zobna); Lovecraft, indeed, later recognized (cf. “Lord Dunsany and His Work” [1922]) that one of Dunsany's own methods of coining names was in such a neo-Greek fashion (hence, e.g., Argimenes).

3. See Dirk W. Mosig, “‘The White Ship’: A Psychological Odyssey” (FDOC, 186–90).

4. This is curiously reminiscent of a line in Gautier's Mlle de Maupin: “‘You are a cobbler and I am a poet.’”

5. The motto is curiously omitted in modern editions of the tale.

6. “The Silver Key” was apparently written just before The Dream-Quest (or at any rate before the completion of the novel), a clear indication that Lovecraft has already planned out the conclusion of the novel and intended “The Silver Key” as the next “installment” in the “series.”

7. Price's original version of the sequel is still extant in JHL.

8. Price himself has unwittingly diminished his own role in the sequel, stating: “I estimated that he left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words” (“The Man Who Was Lovecraft,” in SAC, 282).

9. See my essay, “‘Reality’ and Knowledge,” p. 24, cited in the Secondary Bibliography.

10. Philip A. Shreffler (in The H. P. Lovecraft Companion; see Secondary Bibliography) makes some amusing speculations on the geographical details of the town of Kingsport (=Marblehead, Massachusetts) in this tale, amusing because Lovecraft did not visit Marblehead until late 1922 and used it as a fictional model for Kingsport only in “The Festival” (1923). Similarly, Innsmouth is mentioned both in “Celephais” (1920) and in the Fungi from Yuggoth (sonnet XIX, “The Bells,” 1929), but it was modeled upon Newburyport, Massachusetts, only in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931). Indeed, the Innsmouth in “Celephais” appears to be in England.

11. For the comprehensive treatment see Donald R. Burleson, “H. P. Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence”; lesser studies are Cannon's “H. P. Lovecraft in Hawthornian Perspective,” Bloch's “Out of the Ivory Tower,” and Wetzel's “Some Thoughts on the Lovecraft Pattern.” All are included in the Secondary Bibliography.

12. The problems in dating the entries in the Commonplace Book are enormously complicated and have yet to be resolved. That Lovecraft began the Commonplace Book in early 1920 and not 1919 (as indicated by R. H. Barlow's edition; cf. Notes and Commonplace Book, p. 16) is clear from SL: I, 106–08. For early entries derived from Hawthorne, see Notes and Commonplace Book, pp. 21, 25.

13. Letter #94 in SL (SL: I, 160–62), where the composition of “The Picture in the House” is noted, is misdated from 14 Dec. 1920 to 14 Dec. 1921.

14. The novel was written entirely in the early months of 1927 (cf. my “Sources for the Chronology of Lovecraft's Fiction” as cited in Secondary Bibliography), and not (as Derleth wrote in the introduction to MM, p. ix) in 1927–28 or, as de Camp (Lovecraft: A Biography, p. 292) believes, in November 1927.

15. “Facts in the Case of H. P. Lovecraft (FDOC, 173).

16. Ibid., p. 175

17. Not Giovanni Borelli, as speculated by Roger Bryant in Nyctalops, 2, no. 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1975), 26ff. I owe this observation to Robert Marten.

18. “Facts in the Case of H. P. Lovecraft” (FDOC, 178).

19. Rpt. UCPP, II, 38–41; cf. my notes ad loc.

20. Quoted in Derleth's introduction to DH, p. xvi [my italics].

21. For the vagaries of its composition and publication, see my article, “Who Wrote ‘The Mound’?” Nyctalops, 2, No. 7 (March 1978), 41–42.

22. See Dirk W. Mosig's important article, “The Four Faces of ‘The Outsider’” (cf. Secondary Bibliography) and William Fulwiler's “Reflections on ‘The Outsider,’” Lovecraft Studies, 1, No. 2 (Spring 1980), 3–4.

23. Another prose-poem, “Life and Death” (1920?), is lost; for details see my bibliography, p. 185. “The Street” (1920) can also probably be classified as a lengthy prose-poem.

24. For a linguistic analysis see W. S. Home, “The Lovecraft ‘Books.’”

25. See, however, St. Armand's discussion in H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent (1979), pp. 38ff.

26. The original typescript by Barlow, with extensive additions and corrections by Lovecraft in pen, survives in JHL.

27. See Donald R. Burleson's review of UCPP, I, in Lovecraft Studies, 1, No. 1 (Fall 1979), 43ff., and my note in UCPP: I, 75 f.