Assignment Nine, Vacation Necronomicon School: “From Beyond”.

Your brief writing assignment is to relate some aspect of today’s reading to another Lovecraft story “From Beyond”

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Looking into Lovecraft’s toilet

The early story “From Beyond” (1920) is generally regarded as one of Lovecraft’s most flushable stories, and indeed it was not published until it saw light in The Fantasy Fan (June 1934, Vol. 1, No. 10). This essay suggests linkages between some of the story’s motifs, the house Lovecraft then occupied, and the villain Tillinghast.

First, who might Tillinghast be likely to have been based on? There was a “Tillinghast Supply Machine Company, Boston” in 1919. (Abstract of the Certificates of Corporations, Massachusetts Office of the Secretary of State, 1920). Although incorporated in Boston, the company was prominently based in Providence, and supplied plumbing materials and fittings at both retail and wholesale…

L.H. Tillinghast Supply Co., 162 to 168 Dorrance Street, Providence.

‘A Complete Stock of Everything pertaining to Plumbing. For thirty-seven years we have been manufacturers of and dealers in high grade plumbers’ supplies.’ — Year-book of the Rhode Island Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1911.

Dorrance Street was the main road that led to the Providence railway station, and Lovecraft must have known it well. L.H. Tillinghast advertised in The Providence Directory of 1920, and Lovecraft may have seen their adverts for new toilets and sinks in the newspapers. Their president, at the time Lovecraft wrote his story, was the deliciously-named Lodorick Hoxie Tillinghast, a prominent Providence businessman and local worthy.

One wonders if Tillinghast was then a leading company installing domestic flushing toilet (then also called a “water closet” or “lavatory”) in Providence, as the city suburbs and towns of New England switched from chamber pots and outside privies to inside toilets? Certainly, Dorrance Street was obviously a major commercial street and not some poky little back street, and the long-established nature of the firm seems to suggest it had a wide range and reach. Tillinghast is of course a common local name, but one even wonders if the Tillinghast name may have been imprinted on Lovecraft’s toilet bowl at 598 Angell Street, or on some associated element?

At that time, toilets were perhaps not quite as advanced as the modern ones, and were a lot noisier and possibly more smelly…

‘an antique water closet, essentially an indoor outhouse. They were decorative, like furniture, until the owner lifted the lid or inhaled the bouquet.’ — Citro, Curious New England, 2004.

I think there is some very interesting evidence in the text of the story “From Beyond” to suggest a strong linkage between it and the everyday experience of visiting the toilet. I think I can show that “From Beyond” could be a potent fusion of high philosophy and the low odours arising from the experience of the indoor toilet — and thus from the cultural and personal cloud of anxieties that then surrounded that dreadfully liminal domestic space.

First let me remind readers of Lovecraft’s domestic circumstances in 1920. Since 1904 Lovecraft had shared a rented residence at 598 Angell Street, Providence. Donald Tyson describes this as…

‘a five-room apartment that made up the first floor of a somewhat smaller house [than the family had been used to previously]’ — The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft, 2010.

This sounds rather cramped, although S.T. Joshi suggests that the boy Lovecraft also had access to (officially or unofficially) the attic — which incidentally is where the action in “From Beyond” takes place…

I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by rays which the every-day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows, and the whole place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited the imagination to symbolism and phantasm.

This vision-space is later referred to as an “incredible temple” and “temple-like”, which brings to mind the colloquial description of the domestic toilet as a ‘throne’.

Given the shared nature of the house was it possible that Lovecraft was sharing a toilet with more people than just his female relatives? Sadly, no-one appears to have yet looked into the matter of Lovecraft’s toilet.

There had certainly been anxieties expressed on the subject of shared toilets in New England…

‘Modesty is hardly possible when from four to ten people of varying ages and both sexes live in from two to four rooms, some of them very small. Insufficient water-closet facilities also conduce to a low standard of morals.’ — The New England magazine, Volume 19, 1899.

Also, Chris Perridas has usefully uncovered a letter indicating the dreadful nature of the boys’ toilets in 1912, at the school Lovecraft attended…

‘At the Hope Street School the urinals are offensive, both in odor and appearance, and a positive menace to health. The toilet room is situated opposite the lunch room, and the caterer has spoken frequently of the noisome odors that permeate the basement. Teachers notice the odors as they pass the staircase on the floor above. Even pupils complain.’ — letter of 1912 from Charles E. Dennis, quoted by Chris Perridas in Dec 2010.

All this has obvious relevance to ‘body horror’, the nature of what is ‘beyond’ the u-bend, the emergence of slime into water, etc. But what might the evidence be in the story itself? In “From Beyond” the hero is taken to the attic laboratory (a word so curiously similar to lavatory, and in which he sees a toilet-bowl -like vision of… “a void, and nothing more”), where he enacts some of the key aspects of visiting the toilet to excrete. For instance, the machine which the hero sits near is “detestable” and connected with “chemicals”, rather like a toilet…

‘detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister, violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery’

The key evidence from the story is the descriptions of his sensations while engaged with the machine. These can easily be read as those of sitting on the toilet, passing wind, the holding of one’s breath, and then excreting, all the while feeling a cold draft around one’s uncovered nether regions…

Then, from the farthermost regions of remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality of surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught […] As I waited breathlessly I perceived that both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails

This “pair of rails” could easily be interpreted as the two slats of a toilet seat, on which one waits for things that will glide “into existence” via “a delicate torture” of the body. In this respect then, the description of the horrors as “jellyish monstrosities” and “the things that float and flop” and as…

animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body

My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are — very different.

floating about with some malignant purpose

… are all very suggestive of seeing excretions in the toilet bowl.

Then there is the way in which the story’s attic space has the power to be communicative, in dreadful and damaging ways, with the rest of the house. This parallels the way in which a toilet inexorably conveys its sounds of splashing and flushing to the rest of a small apartment…

the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful — I could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another direction […] it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house.

Here we can note the association of “vibrations” (as in the clanking and flushing of an old-fashioned toilet) with the later discover of empty (and possibly soiled) female clothing. Lovecraft, who had long been living with his female relatives, one possibly not sane, could have suffered similar experiences as an adolescent.

At the end of the story, the hero shoots the machine, revealing its fragile nature, for it seems a single bullet can smash it into a great many pieces, rather as if it were a ceramic toilet bowl…

the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor

The villain Tillinghast again echoes the toilet in his wish to escape from the ‘daily motion’ undertaken on the domestic toilet, and the consequent ‘peering into the bottom’ of the pan, when he says that they will together…

without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation

He might even be interpreted elsewhere as referring to the dreadful social “disintegration” that could be caused if one farted in a genteel sitting room, when Tillinghast warns…

Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move.

Finally, there is also an interesting historical association with the toilet and ‘reading in solitude’, although I can see no smear of it in the bowl of the story. But it is interesting to note that it used to be common to place entertaining ‘reading matter’ in the lavatory to pass the time while waiting for a bowel movement…

‘Reading during the ritual of the toilet […] has a long but mostly unrecorded history.’ — Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 2001.

This is indeed an ancient association, for the 12th century Life of Saint Gregory describes the toilet as…

a retiring place where tablets can be read without interruption.

Then there is the newspaper, which in ‘cut up’ form was once commonly used in toilets in place of the modern toilet paper, and thus was another means of reading even when books were not present in a toilet. Chapbooks were also commonly used as toilet paper in Colonial times in America (see Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, Cambridge University Press 1981, pp. 48-49).

Further reading:

Arthur Jean Cox (1964), “Lovecrap”, The Lovecraftsman, No.3 (Spring 1964). (On scatalogical references in Lovecraft)

Benidickson, Jamie (2007). The Culture of Flushing: a social and legal history of sewage. UBC Press, 2007.

Dawson, Jim (1998). Who Cut the Cheese? : A Cultural History of the Fart. Ten Speed Press, 1998.

Hodding Carter, W. (2007). Flushed : How the Plumber Saved Civilization. Atria, 2007.

Noren, Laura (2010). Toilet : Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. NYU Press, 2010.

Horn, L. Julie (2000). The Porcelain God : A Social History of the Toilet. Citadel, 2000.

Ogle, Maureen (1996). All the Modern Conveniences : American household plumbing, 1840-1890. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Wright, Lawrence (2005). Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water-Closet. Penguin, 2005.

Thornton Williams, Marilyn (1991). Washing ‘The Great Unwashed’: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840-1920. Ohio State University Press, 1991 [Available online. Has much to say on the ‘germ theory’ that Lovecraft would have been raised with]

Assignment Eight, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Restless Nights” (Hypnos).

Your assignment today […] Knowing Lovecraft’s history [of childhood nightmares] it seems natural that he would make nightmares a recurrent theme in his work. Both of today’s selections […] concern the territory of sleep and dreams. Pick either reading assignment, then examine Lovecraft’s use of dreams as a theme, starting from the story you choose..

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Loveman as a source for “Hypnos”

Hypnos was the Greek god of sleep, portrayed in the 19th century as a youth sleeping together with his older brother Thanatos (who is Death, but specifically the ‘good death’ of a quiet parting). Both were the sons of the goddess Nyx (Night). In literature, Forrest Reid’s Demophon (1927) gives a vivid updating of Hesiod’s original classical depiction of Hypnos…

Through the soundless twilight he could see into a cavern, where on a great throne of ebony, strewn with black feathers, Hypnos lay asleep. His pale limbs were relaxed, and on each side of him were empty dream shapes…

The cave is sometimes described (as by Ovid, Metamorphoses Book XI, ‘The House of Sleep’) as surrounded by opium poppies. Hypnos originally appears to have been described as winged, and as having black feathers, although later classical statuary of him seems conventionally human apart from cherub-like wings. This statuary is presumably why Reid can call him ‘pale’. His brother Death was originally white, although remnants of red feathers have recently been detected on one of his statues (classical statues were sometimes heavily decorated and painted, although that may be a far later and decadent tradition, and what we have now are mostly just the plain and pale marble with occasional flakes of paint).

Lovecraft’s extensive early reading on dreams and dream-lore, as well as on Greek and Roman mythology, no doubt meant that he was familiar with the name Hypnos from an early age. Perhaps Lovecraft was also aware of the portrayal of Hypnos in the visual arts. John William Waterhouse’s painting “Sleep and his Half-brother Death” (1874) is perhaps the most famous 19th century example of the portrayal of Hypnos and Thanatos, here shown as distinctly feather-less youths …

For now, just note the poppies in the hand of Hypnos. These feature as a potent grace-note at the end of Lovecraft’s story “Hypnos” and I will discuss them further later.

Lovecraft’s choice of Hypnos for the story now seems rather apt and timely, in relation to his own personal life…

Hypnos dwelled in the underworld with his mother. — Scott Littleton. Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology: Volume 1, p.709)

His home was in a cave […] Here it was always dark and misty — Michael Grant, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology, p.278.

At the time of writing the story Lovecraft was about to emerge from his dark reclusive hermitry of depression and the misty coast of Providence, and also from the shadow of his mother who had died less than a year before “Hypnos” was written. Also like Lovecraft, Hypnos was deemed to have “hundreds of sons” (both Lovecraft and Loveman would have many chastely surrogate ‘grandsons’, such as the gay Robert H. Barlow in Lovecraft’s case) involved in the inculcation of dreams — most prominent among these for Hypnos were the trio: Phantasos (animator of inanimate things in dreams); Morpheus (bringer of dreams, and animator of images of people in dreams); and Phobetor (bringer of nightmares, and animator of animals in dreams).

“Hypnos” was written around March 1922, just as Lovecraft was being enticed into his first-ever visit to the city of New York in April 1922. For the first time he would actually meet Samuel Loveman, his closest friend (by correspondence). The original dedication of “Hypnos” was to Samuel Loveman, although this dedication did not appear in either the May 1923 publication of the story in National Amateur, or in its appearance in the bumper 1924 May-June-July issue of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft then took the manuscript of “Hypnos” with him to New York in April 1922, met Loveman face-to-face for the first time, and read his new story to Loveman — who then told Lovecraft it was the best piece he had ever written. Lovecraft said the same about Loveman’s then-unpublished and uncompleted poem The Hermaphrodite. The two men shared an apartment during the stay, and Lovecraft’s letters state that these intimate works were read aloud, but not in the company of others. The Hermaphrodite would eventually be first published in 1926 in a limited run of 350 copies. As published, this has a section titled “Talent” which has a line in it strongly reflecting the theme of “Hypnos”…

I, who have neither hell nor paradise,
Breathe speech and beauty into hearts of stone.

One wonders if this was inserted after hearing Lovecraft read his “Hypnos”, a story about a sculptor who seems to breathe life into his own sculpture?

The story “Hypnos” would have appealed to Loveman on several levels, beyond the simple dedication. Loveman was a gay man who must have been acutely sensitive to art and literature with homoerotic undertows, and who was also deeply learned in the history of Ancient Greece and its poetry and myths. “Hypnos” is undeniably a story that depicts a deep and intimate and exclusive homosocial bond between two men, in which the beloved is (in the end) deemed to be ‘impossible’ in the eyes of English society even while society gazes upon his beauty — a conundrum not unlike the wider civilisational uses made of Ancient Greece while its attitudes to and practice of homosexuality were simultaneously denied. At the level of detail, the story also seems very open to speculation about the extent to which its several distinct touches of homoeroticism are ‘knowing’ or not.

One wonders if it was from Loveman that Lovecraft learned of the love of Hypnos for Endymion, a shepherd boy, since the story is clearly patterned on this version of the myth. Gay pioneer Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs had in 1879 pointed out that the Greek poet Licymnius of Chios…

‘suggests that it was the god Hypnos (Sleep) who loved [the shepherd boy] Endymion and lulled him to sleep with his eyes open so that the god might forever gaze into them.’ — GTBTQ Encylopaedia, “Endymion” (originally from Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love (1879) by Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, and again in A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) by John Addington Symonds.

‘But Hypnos much delighted
In the bright beams which shot from his eyes,
And lulled the youth [Endymion] to sleep with unclosed lids.’ — Licymnius, Athenaeus (1854), giving Licymnius, translated by C.D. Yonge who gives the poem together with a frank discussion of Greek homosexuality.

Clearly this source would then play into the fact that Lovecraft and Loveman were then about to ‘have sight’ of each other. In respect of Licymnius’s line “the bright beams which shot from his eyes” it is then very interesting that Lovecraft draws a special and foreshadowing attention to what he calls the “burning eyes” of Hypnos…

“wildly luminous black eyes”

“the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes open in terror”

In the later part of the story Lovecraft even has a beam of light shooting into the eyes of Hypnos…

“a shaft of horrible red-gold light — a shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper […] “I followed the memory-face’s mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source”

The red-gold nature of this light might be a further indication of Lovecraft’s knowledge of the Hypnos-Endymion myth, since…

‘This [Hypnos-Endymion] myth led to the association of sunset with Endymion, who was seen as the setting sun’ — Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted With the Night : excursions through the world after dark (2005).

‘the name ‘Endymion’ refers specially to the dying or setting sun’ — Hélène Adeline Guerber, Myths of Greece and Rome, 1938.

The setting sun does, of course, have a… “red-gold light” and cannot “disperse the darkness”. Once one knows this version of the myth and the origins of the name, then this part of the story would seem to be clearly inspired by the myth of Hypnos looking directly into eyes of Endymion, the beautiful boy who is symbolic of ‘the sunset’.

There is also the story’s notable but brief motif of poppies, also red like the sunset, which appears at the climax of the story…

‘young with the youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned.’

… but poppies are also implicitly present throughout the story in the form of the drugs taken, since opiate drugs are derived from poppies. Poppies are found in connection with Hypnos at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which there is apparently on display a certain carved sculpture of Hypnos, one of several there. Possibly Loveman may even have taken Lovecraft to see it, on that first visit to New York shortly after the writing of “Hypnos”. The carving features Hypnos holding a poppy over Endymion…

‘Hypnos, a bearded winged figure of ugly countenance, however, has been substituted for Night and holds a poppy over the sleeping Endymion. One [also] finds him on the other Endymion sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum…’ Millard Meissn, De Artibus Opuscula XL: essays in honor of Erwin Panofsky (1961).

One would love to know if the “ugly countenance” might bear any resemblance to Lovecraft himself, and if Loveman might have remarked on this resemblance in a letter? Sadly there only appears to be a picture of the other, more conventional, carving available online. Possibly the presence of the carving is just a co-incidence.

However that may be, all the other evidence in the text seems to indicate that Lovecraft’s attention had somehow been drawn to Licymnius’s queer version of the love of Hypnos and Endymion, rather than to some general non-queer account of Hypnos, and that he knew the subtler details of it. Given that Loveman was such a classical scholar and also a gay man, one has to assume that this somewhat obscure classical knowledge came from Loveman, and at some time shortly before Lovecraft’s visit to New York and their first actual meeting. If so, then Lovecraft may have been aware of the personal implication of such a revealing, and one then has to wonder if the story “Hypnos” was not partly his gently deflating and coded reply to Loveman’s timid and covert romantic overture? Loveman was then aged 34, and Lovecraft was 31.

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Incidentally, Gavin Hallaghan writes that Lovecraft was a fan of at least one story by Ralph Adams Cram, an author who had written a “sometimes homoerotically-themed” 1895 horror story collection titled Spirits Black and White, the title referring to the brothers Hypnos and Death. Cram apparently was part of the Frederick Holland Day circle of homoerotic creative artists and writers, before he found Catholicism. But it appears that Lovecraft was not able to obtain a copy of the by-then very rare book.

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Further reading:

Comte, Edward Le (1944). Endymion in England: the literary history of a Greek myth. King’s Crown Press, 1944.

Gross, Kenneth (1993). The Dream of the Moving Statue. Cornell University Press, 1993.

Hersey, George L. (2008). Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

McInnis, John. (1990). “Father Images in Lovecraft’s ‘Hypnos'” Fantasy Commentator, 7.1, (Fall 1990), Vol.VII, No.1, pp.41-48. [Lovecraft Centennial Issue]

Stafford, E.J. (1993). “Aspects of Sleep in Hellenistic Culture”. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 38, pp.105–120.

Stoichita, Victor I (2008). The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Whitbread, Thomas B. (2005). “Samuel Loveman : Poet of Eros and Thanatos”, The Fossil, July 2005.