Category Archives: Historical context

Dating the birth of the tentacle

16 Saturday Oct 2010

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Examples of Lovecraftian tentacles in the circa-1895 work of H.G. Wells, writing when he was at the height of his powers…

“Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near Land’s End. In no department of zoological science, indeed are we quite so much in the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods.”

[…] “The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus, with huge and very long and flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from the sea.”

— H.G. Wells, “The Sea Raiders” (1896)

“Their heads were round, and curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed fish and with the same subtle play of colour, and these wings were not built on the plan of a bird-wing or bat, […] The body was small, but fitted with two bunches of prehensile organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the mouth. […] They would alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a smallness almost rod-like, and hop into the interior.” [my emphasis]

— H.G. Wells, “The Crystal Egg” (1897)

“A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal–there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing — against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.”

— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1894/1895)

“Among the inner caves of the place waving trees of crinoid stretched their tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot like shining minarets and lilies of filmy light out of the general glow of the city.”

— H.G. Wells, “In The Abyss” (1896)

Possibly more could be found. I was only searching one volume of Wells’s stories.

Werewolves in Literature: twelve classic stories

10 Sunday Oct 2010

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Werewolves in Literature: twelve classic stories. New ebook anthology on the Amazon Kindle, on a special introductory offer at $0.99. 112,000-word uniform-style ebook, with linked table-of-contents.

Saki (two stories).
Harold Warner Munn.
Frederick Marryat.
Rudyard Kipling.
Gerald Biss.
Eugene Field.
Guy de Maupassant.
Algernon Blackwood.
Marie de France.
Joseph Jacobs.
William Baldwin.

It’s interesting that Lovecraft, shortly before his death, told someone that he was planning a werewolf epic (Ernest A. Edkins, “Idiosyncrasies of H.P.L.” In Lovecraft Remembered. Edited by Peter Cannon. (Arkham House, 1998). Pages 94-95.)

The insect philosophers

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

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I had thought that this story in the December 1930 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions…

…was an indication that Lovecraft’s passing aside about a beetle race in “Shadow out of Time”…

“After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Shadow out of Time” (written Nov 1934 – Feb 1935).

… might have been his picking up on a current of thought popular at the time. But there is a much earlier precedent in Lovecraft’s works…

“You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (published October 1919).

Possibly Lovecraft got the ‘successors to humanity’ idea from H.G. Wells. There is an excised section of The Time Machine which imagines a far future Earth in which the degenerated last men are preyed upon by gigantic insects — although Lovecraft didn’t read that book until his New York soujourn, and since he read the book version he wouldn’t have seen that extracted section with the insects.

Possibly the idea of having the beetle race be “the successors of humanity” was a later addition to the 1919 idea in Lovecraft’s mind. One wonders if seeing people encased in the black carapaces of the early cars didn’t spark his imagination on that point?

Here is Lovecraft on the topic in a letter, in the mid 1920s…

“if the sun gives heat long enough, there will certainly come a time when the mammal will have to go down to subordination as the reptilia went before him. We are not nearly so well equipped for combating a varied environment as are the articulata; and some climatic revulsion will almost certainly wipe us out some day as the dinosaurs were wiped out—leaving the field free for the rise and dominance of some hardy and persistent insect species—which will in time, no doubt, develop a high specialisation of certain functions of instinct and perception, thus creating a kind of civilisation, albeit one of wholly different perceptions, (when other species view a given object, their ocular image of it differs—sometimes widely—from ours) emphases, feelings, and goals.”

Lovecraft and the Welsh Marches

10 Friday Sep 2010

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The Racial Worldview of H. P. Lovecraft, Parts 2 and 3 (yesterday I linked to part one, at another site), which this time tracks through the letters from 1919 to 1923. The three-part trawl of his letters, which appears to have been compiled in 2002, stops at 1923. Presumably the far-right compiler felt his own ugly lumpen assumptions would have been compromised if he’d ventured beyond 1923 — since Lovecraft married a Jewish woman in 1924, and Lovecraft’s earlier crude views began to change as he (like the rest of the world) wrestled with the intense social issues of the late 1920s and 1930s.

I hadn’t known that Lovecraft traced one side of his family back to the Welsh Marches of England…

“The Phillipses come from the borderlands of Wales, that mystic Machenian land.”

Although this is stated in a letter (May 3, 1923) that generally sounds very flippant, this personal snippet is probably(?) a sound personal belief. Yet I can’t find any mention of it via Google Books, so it may not have much basis in hard genealogy. I live not far from this area, and when he refers to the borderlands of Wales he must presumably mean the modern Welsh Marches, an interestingly imprecise and hybrid area so memorably evoked in literature by Kilvert’s Diary. Presumably this origin was a ‘family fact’ inherited via his great-great-grandmother, Esther Whipple, as to their origin in the British Isles. In view of his disparaging of the Celts and the Welsh in other early letters, one wonders if the exact location of the family origin may have been finessed by Lovecraft (or by earlier family members), in order to nudge his family origin over the English border. Since, in the above selection, for instance, he talks of…

“The Welsh, who have no Teutonic blood, are of little account.” (Letter #10, Dec 6, 1915).

“cursed, effeminate Celts” (Oct 6, 1921).

I wonder if the young Lovecraft, or his earlier family members, felt that a possible Welsh root to one side of the family was an unspeakable ‘skeleton’ lurking in his family tree?

The Mound

31 Tuesday Aug 2010

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Gongnardia has a new review/appreciation of The Mound, Lovecraft’s 29,000-word novella which was ghost-written for his revision client Zealia Bishop, who apparently never paid him for it. His work for Zealia Bishop was built around the barest of plot ideas and outlines — “slim plot synopses”, as they are referred to in the notes to Lord of a Visible World: an autobiography in letters. Undertaken late 1929, the tale has a modern man discovering the manuscript of a 16th century conquistador explorer in the Old West (Oklahoma). A vast underground civilization of extraterrestrial beings is encountered, and in the process a large sweep of geological ‘deep’ time is described. This makes The Mound (written 1929-30) an interesting “trial run” for Lovecraft’s own novella At the Mountains of Madness (written Feb/Mar 1931). This is one I don’t seem to remember reading as a youth, and it’s not one I’ve so far encountered in my current re-reading of Lovecraft.

The story doesn’t seem to have been done as an audio book, either free or commercially. But it is online here. The full and complete manuscript version only appeared as a critical edition in print in 1989, in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions from Arkham Press.

The Pickwick Club disaster as inspiration for “Red Hook” and “He”

28 Saturday Aug 2010

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Lovecraft’s New York stories “The Horror at Red Hook” (written 1st-2nd August 1925) and “He” (written 11th Aug 1925) both culminate in calamitous and severe building collapse. Similarly, “In the Vault” (18th Sept 1925) features a man trapped in a building. Could these elements of collapse and trapping have been inspired by the Pickwick Club collapse disaster, in Boston (New England) in July 1925? The collapse killed 44 people.

Lovecraft’s own building had also been shaken by a minor earthquake in late February 1925, though it was structurally unharmed. This would have primed him to worry about possible building collapse.

From the book The Wicked Waltz and other scandalous dances, by Mark Knowles (2009)…

Also interesting it that, at that time, there was a public association being made between dance halls (a seedy dance hall features prominently in “Red Hook”) and Satan (ditto)…

“[The book] Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (2008) explores the overwhelming popularity of social dancing and its close relationship to America’s rapidly changing society in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the fiercely contested debate about the morality of social dancing in New York City, led by such moral reformers and religious leaders as Rev. John Roach Straton. Guided by the firm belief that dancing was a leading cause of immorality, Straton and his followers succeeded in enacting municipal regulations on social dancing and moral conduct within the more than 750 public dance halls in New York City.”

10 stories set in Red Hook, NY

27 Friday Aug 2010

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Lovecraft’s long New York story “The Horror at Red Hook” was written at the start of August 1925. Although its quality is usually disparaged by Lovecraft scholars, noted critic Harold Bloom called the story: “one of his most delicious tales” (Twentieth-century American Literature, 1986). I tend to agree, and find something very interesting in how Lovecraft projects dual semi-autobiographical heroes in Malone and Suydam (yes, I consider Suydam a hero — but that’s for a proper essay).

But what of the stories and novels that came after it, also set in the notorious Red Hook? Here’s my quick survey of other stories set in Red Hook:—

1. Frank Palescandolo’s pulp novel Rumble on the Docks (1953) is set in Red Hook. The book must have risen above the average, since it was filmed in 1956.

2. The well-known film On The Waterfront (1954) was Elia Kazan’s study of gangster/union rule on the docks, and of the longshoreman (Marlon Brando) who fights back against corruption.

3. Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge (1955/1956) was a domestic tragedy of love, violence, and illegal immigration, set in Red Hook. Apparently the script arose as an offshoot from On The Waterfront.

4. Hubert Selby’s notorious novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957) is a famously bleak collection of six linked stories set in the violent neighbourhoods of Red Hook/Brooklyn. It was filmed in 1990.

5. “Book One: The Gang” is the first half of the book Memos from Purgatory by Harlan Ellison, an autobiographical account in which the famous science fiction author recounts how in 1957 he joined one of the gangs in Red Hook for research purposes. It was later made into a TV movie for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1964).

6. Rick Dakan’s The Call of Cthulhu game book in the After Lovecraft series The Horror At Red Hook: The Cold Case of Robert Suydam brings back Lilith to Red Hook, along with bewitched little girls.

7. The collection The Lovecraft Papers (1996) by P. H. Cannon includes the novella “Pulptime: Being a singular adventure of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club, as if narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.”, originally issued as a separate book (Weirdbook Press, 1984). An ageing Sherlock Holmes recruits Lovecraft and the Kalem Klub to help solve a mystery in Red Hook in the 1920s.

8. Alan Moore’s The Courtyard (Avatar Press, 2003) was a two-issue comic book, containing a Lovecraftian tale set in the Red Hook of the present day. Which doesn’t mean that it’s any nicer as a neighbourhood. In the 1990s LIFE magazine labelled Red Hook one of the worst neighbourhoods in the USA, and… “the crack capital of America”. Avatar Press also published Alan Moore’s The Courtyard Companion (2004), which contains the original short story by Alan Moore, and an essay by Antony Johnson. The story had originally appeared in The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H.P. Lovecraft (Creation Books, 1995).

9. Alan Moore followed up The Courtyard with the more substantial Lovecraftian comic-book series Neonomicon (2010, ongoing), which has modern-day FBI agents investigating a series of gory cult killings in Red Hook.

10. My own book Tales of Lovecraftian Cats (2010) includes two prequels to “The Horror at Red Hook”, one of which is set in Red Hook and one of which follows Robert Suydam on his mysterious eight-year sojourn in Europe.