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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Summer School

New book, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fourth collection – available now!

01 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works, Summer School

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Available now in paperback… my latest book collection of essays:
Lovecraft in Historical Context: fourth collection.

A book of essays is now an annual tradition with me, and this year’s volume weighs in at 304 pages, 76,000 words. Contains many expanded and footnoted versions of blog posts which first appeared here — for instance the essay “The terribly nice old ladies” zooms up to 12,000 words as I delve into the source landscape of “The Dunwich Horror”. Long-time Lovecraft researchers may be especially interested in 4,000 words of highly detailed scholarship which lays out the complete circus/theatrical and movie executive career of Arthur Leeds prior to the Kalem Club, accompanied by the first known photograph of him and a newly discovered Leeds short story that is an obvious inspiration for “Cool Air”.

Enjoy!

cont4cover

contents

PART ONE: General essays

1. Typhon as a source for Cthulhu.
2. Arthur Leeds : the early biography, photographic portraits, and a story.
3. The terribly nice old ladies : Miniter and Beebe at Wilbraham.
4. A source for Rev. Abijah Hoadley in “The Dunwich Horror”.
5. An unknown H.P. Lovecraft correspondent?
6. Shards from H.P. Lovecraft’s quarry.
7. Of Rats and Legions : H.P. Lovecraft in Northumbria.
8. Looking into the Shining Trapezohedron.
9. Notes made after reading R.E. Howard’s key ‘Lovecraftian’ stories.
10. H.P. Lovecraft’s cinema ticket booth job, circa 1930.
11. Garrett P. Serviss (1851—1929) : a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft.
12. John Howard Appleton (1844—1930).
13. Tsan-Chan in Tibet : Tibetan Bon devils and Lovecraft’s future empire.
14. The locations of Sonia’s two hat shops.
15. In the hollows of memory : H.P. Lovecraft’s Seekonk and Cat Swamp.
16. A note on “The Paxton”.
17. Rabid! A note on H.P. Lovecraft and the disease rabies.
18. Pictures of some members of the Providence Amateur Press Club.
19. H.P. Lovecraft and his Young Men’s Club.
20. A few additions for Anna Helen Crofts (1889-1975).
21. An annotated “The History of the Necronomicon”. — sample

PART TWO: Finding Lovecraft’s most elusive correspondents

1. Wesley and Stetson : Providence models for Wilcox in “Cthulhu”?
2. Geo. FitzPatrick of Sydney : the Australian correspondent.
3. A likely candidate for the H.P. Lovecraft correspondent C.L. Stuart.
4. Curtis F. Myers (1897-?)
5. Sounding the Bell : finding a long ‘lost’ Lovecraft correspondent.
6. The fannish activity of Louis C. Smith.
7. Fred Anger after H.P. Lovecraft.
8. Reds and pinks : the politics of Woodburn Prescott Harris.
9. A note on H.P. Lovecraft’s British correspondent, Arthur Harris.
10. On Poe : Horatio Elwin Smith (1886-1946).
11. Gardens of delight? Thomas Stuart Evans (1885-1940).
12. The Hatter : Dudley Charles Newton (1864-1954).

Thanks for the cover art to Cotton Valent and Apolonis Aphrodisia.

Buy the book in paperback!

Lovecraft University

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works, Summer School

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Last month Mark Bauerlein peeked into the padded cell of the contemporary university English Dept. His article, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, took a look at exactly what gets taught in first-year English classes…

The fundamentals of the tradition (Shakespeare, Milton, Romantic poets, modernist poets) are missing [from the basic introductory English courses in universities], and so are the fundamentals of literary reading (prosody, rhetoric, figurative language, structure, genre, etc.) Here we see the internal destruction of English as a field. […] Unlike other disciplines, English no longer distinguishes degrees of difficulty and significance. It turns an introductory course into something else — a hasty acquaintance with complex ideas such as différance [Derrida], a quick indoctrination in complex identity matters, a hip involvement with edgy novels — and most students who receive it, I would guess, discern the decadence of the enterprise.

I’ve noted in passing the strange insularity that this vanguardist approach seems to have caused in the Gothic Studies wing of English Literature. Wilum Pugmire wrassled a few days ago with the crude Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style pointing-and-screaming about race, which sometimes results from such courses…

I am searching this book of 468 pages [Lovecraft Remembered], which is made up mostly of memoirs of H.P. Lovecraft by people who knew him as personal friend or correspondent, for mention of his racism. I am grown tired of this new dreary fixation of commentary on Lovecraft that identifies him primarily as a racist writer. I find such emphasis misguided to the point of perversity. Lovecraft’s racism was grotesque and ignorant, and it echoes indeed throughout his fiction; but there is much more to Lovecraft’s genius that is far more vital and interesting. This new school of judgmental critics, who emphasis first and foremost that Lovecraft was racist, and then follow this up to explain why he was “a good bad writer,” shews the absurdity and ineffectiveness of much [mainstream academic] modern Lovecraft critique, critique that reveals far more ignorance regarding Lovecraft and his work than anything else.

In defence of mainstream academia, there is a steady flow of sound dissertations and theses each year (though only sometimes from straight Eng Lit departments, and then usually from outside America). And now a small crop of Lovecraft course module-documents are available online, mostly for one-semester courses being taught mostly in American universities. I occasionally come across these course documents while searching the Web, and they seem encouraging. Most seem well designed and at least minimally aware of the historical context (if only the context of the genre’s tradition). Though I’d imagine that more than a few of these are the products of enthusiastic hourly-paid visitor or adjunct lecturers, rather than cautious faculty. How well they play in the classroom I have no idea. I guess they encounter people lacking in a historical framework and fundamentally unequipped in actual techniques of doing in-depth historical scholarship, something that seems to me implicitly required to adequately study the political dimensions of historical texts and authors. If a student or even their teacher has no idea of the actual historical structures and trajectories of the racial categories and regrettable racisms of Lovecraft’s time, then the default politically-acceptable ‘year zero’ approach will be the only one available to them.

Seems to me that this is part of a wider erasure of history from the study and understanding of creativity — something evidenced by the shrinkage or closure of art history depts, and an increasing ‘the history doesn’t matter much’ approach in other departments teaching creative students. That’s bound to have a snowball effect, as graduates of these courses move up the career chain, being less likely to value the history side of teaching because they lack a real grounding in it themselves. And management doesn’t push history, because the students don’t like being asked to do historical essays and forcing them to do it increases the student drop-out and failure-rate in the department. The rise of joint Masters degrees (History and English, etc) may help somewhat, but some radical bunker-busting among the disciplines would probably be needed to help such courses make a useful combined impact on a student in the nine months available to a one-year Masters course.

These various factors make it highly unlikely that a young mainstream academic of today will invest the time and expense needed to even begin to become a fair Lovecraft scholar (several years of close reading, of books and journals that could cost $2,000 or more to amass). In a system dominated by career advancement and management strictures, mainstream academics tend to need ‘quick wins’ that ‘tick the boxes’ and add ‘impact’ to the key assessments on which departmental funding depends.

These and other barriers seem destined to further bifurcate the field into: i) long-standing independent Lovecraft scholars and philosophers, operating mostly outside the academy, and ii) mainstream academic ‘dabblers’ who dip into Lovecraft either to make a quick buck for their publisher or to make their slim young C.V. a little more hip — but who consequently get basic things wrong and thus are chuckled at and ignored or scourged by the Lovecraftians. That said, I recognise that I started as a ‘dabbler’ myself, and know that — if one keeps at it — then it can lead to better things.

What is to be done? In the age of the virtual classroom, video lectures and Skype, one wonders… could Lovecraft scholars start a self-funding online ‘Lovecraft University 101’ summer school, for say six weeks or so each year? Perhaps with the aid of the likes of the turn-key infrastructure on offer at Coursera or Udacity or edX. I’ll contribute a headmaster’s mortar-board for Robert Price.

New book – Lovecraft in Historical Context: a third collection

30 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works, Summer School

≈ 2 Comments

I’m pleased to say that the print edition of my annual essays collection is now available for purchase!

Lovecraft in Historical Context: a third collection of essays and notes. 25,000 words, and many illustrations. 120 pages, as a 6″ x 9″ paperback. Buy it here.

Contains expanded, polished, and copiously footnoted/referenced versions of my recent draft essays and short notes. Plus new essays that are exclusive to the print edition.

1. Who was “Harley Warren”?
2. Who were the Blatschkas?
3. Lovecraft’s telescope.
4. Lovecraft’s camera.
5. Edison’s virtual ‘visit’ to Providence, 1896, a source for “Nyarlathotep”.
6. Missing : the Sentinel of Lovecraft’s Sentinel Hill.
7. Running down Danforth, at the Paterson Museum.
8. Neutaconkanut : Lovecraft’s last summer walk.
9. What could Lovecraft and his circle have known of Doctor John Dee?
10. Locating “The Mound”.
11. Some covers of The All-Story.
12. Mirrored : reflections on Lovecraft’s reflections.
13. Ten examples of tentacular propaganda, 1881-1910s.
14. A real horror : on the 1918 flu pandemic in Providence.
And more…!

I hope to produced a hand-coded Kindle ebook edition at some point soon.

Enjoy!

Lovecraft in Historical Context, volume 2 – now out in paperback

31 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works, Summer School

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Now available as a paperback, for those who prefer to read in print rather than from a screen — my new book Lovecraft in Historical Context: further essays and notes. PayPal accepted.

CONTENTS: Story – “The Quest to Azathoth” (new 5,000 word short story). Essays and Historical Notes – 1. The Typewriter of H.P. Lovecraft; 2. Some Notes on the Origins of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”; 3. Appendix: Quabbin and “The Colour Out of Space”; 4. Lovecraft, Houdini, and Egypt in Fantastic Literature; 5. What Does Danforth See At The End of Mountains?; 6. A Fainting Spell: Lovecraft and fainting; 7. Looking into Lovecraft’s Toilet; 8. Loveman as a Source for “Hypnos”. 9. The Mystery of “J.N.”; 10. A Note on the Pickwick Club Disaster; 11. On The Real Mammoth Cave and “The Beast in the Cave”; 12. The Winds of Insanity; 13. The Cats of H.P. Lovecraft; 14. Cats and the Fantastical (a bibliography); 15. A Note on the Elder Signs; 16. Secrecy and Secretions; 17. Postcards from the High House; 18. Two Postcards from the Providence Public Library; 19. An Alternate Ending: a fiction.

Illustrated with my own cover artwork. 31,000 words. 134 pages. July 2011. Perfect-bound paperback with colour covers. Buy it here.

Also available: the first volume of Lovecraft in Historical Content (2010) in paperback

Summer School: final assignment

31 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Odd scratchings, Summer School

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My final creative assignment for the 2011 Lovecraft Summer School. It’s a 5,000 word short story based on a combination of the entries in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and newly written for the Summer School. For your reading pleasure, “The Quest to Azathoth” is available in print, fronting in my new book of essays Lovecraft in Historical Context: further essays and notes. PayPal accepted.

Summer School: assignment nine

30 Saturday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries, Summer School

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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”


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]

Summer School: assignment eight

28 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries, Summer School

≈ 3 Comments

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..


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.


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.


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.

Summer School; assignment seven

27 Wednesday Jul 2011

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Assignment Seven, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Words, and Yet More Words” (The Outsider).

Your assignment today […] Cthulhu Chick recently formatted Lovecraft’s original works into eBook format, a process which allowed her to make a count of Lovecraft’s favorite words.


A Fainting Spell

The word “Faint (ed/ing)” occurs 189 times in the collected published works of H.P. Lovecraft, and it is almost his most commonly used word.

Readers will remember that Lovecraft was a self-taught expert on 18th century literature and letters, as well as being prone to fainting. In that old tangle of history and literature there is a curious and interesting set of meanings that cast light on the word “faint”. “Feign” and “Faint” and “Fain” all have the same root in old French, from which they passed together into Middle English and thus into the modern language. I will suggest that this conjoined historic root imbues the word “faint” with the idea of the human imagination, and links it to a certain class of refined persons. Outsiders, if you like.

To “feign” or to make a “feignt” is to contrive or to imaginatively invent, in terms of making a public show of such in order to deceive. It is the very stuff of poets…

‘And all that poets feign of bliss and joy’ — Shakespeare, King Henry VI.

To “feign” is also a deceptive physical move in swordplay (“The length of the strip allows fencers plenty of room to feignt”), just as it is a literary pretence in the wordplay of poets and in the verbal strategies used in courtly and political dissembling.

Somewhat similarly to “feign”, the word “fain” means to ask or desire (in a wishful or anticipating way) for something one has imagined, hoping it will happen in the near future…

‘Yea, man and birds are fain of climbing high.’ — Shakespeare, King Henry VI.

This again links it to the act of the active imagination, this time in the mental placing of an action at a distance in space and future time.

There is a further inflection that seems relevant to Lovecraft. This is “fainéant”, a very old word and also rooted in the old French. It meant “an idler”, which is what some people have wrongly accused Lovecraft of being throughout his life merely because he had no regular gainful drudge-work. The meaning of “fainéant” thus links “faint” and “fainting” and “fain” to the concept of the ‘idle’ and scholarly gentleman, who speaks softly or faintly, yet who has also been educated to be learned in the poetic arts of “feigning”. Incidentally, Lovecraft was said by some to have a faint and piping voice — although possibly this perception was partly filtered through a class-based view of him as an old-fashioned aristocratic New Englander, who so ‘weirdly’ clung to speaking in the old accent of the 18th century British upper classes in the face of the modernity of the 1920s and 30s.

It is thus interesting that “faint” could once have been used in place of “feigned” or “feignt”. In the 18th century John Ash’s The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775) states that “faint” is an obsolete term for “feigned” or “feignt”…

Faint (adj. obsolete): Feigned.

Admittedly this may just be due to the standardisation of spelling at that time. But obviously the words were at one time difficult to distinguish from each other.

One can note that real bodily fainting is not only caused by fear and horror or exhaustion. There is also the fainting caused by ecstasy, so memorably enshrined in art in Bernini’s sculpture “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”. In ecstatic fainting, for Lovecraft, the meanings of “faint” or a “feign” seem to come together, in terms of his undoubted ability to transmute places into fiction. Writing to his aunt of his first impressions of New York, Lovecraft claims he almost fainted with “aesthetic exaltation” (a phrase and concept he probably had from Proust, possibly in combination with Clive Bell’s Art of 1914) in his initial response to the sublimity and power of the city (Lorca had a very similar response). This interestingly links the idea of fainting not only with the simple “blanking out” of consciousness that our dull modern medical conception associates it with, but also with the response to an attuned act of accepting aesthetic impressions.

A link between the environmentally “faint” (i.e.: “a faint glimmer”) with the poetical “feignt” might be also be made, by remembering the common 18th and 19th century rhetoric that suggested sensitive writers and poets and other outsiders had the power to perceive faint impressions unseen by ordinary people. Such individuals (“men of feeling and perception”) were commonly deemed to be perceptive to faint shimmerings or radiances, delicate tints or emanations, soft hums and whispers in the air, faint tracks or paths or patterns found in real places that could later be transmuted through imaginative literary “feignts” into fresh paths in the cultural heritage.

‘To be ‘spiritual’ around 1900 was, in the most nondenominational of senses, to be receptive, contemplative, inwardly quiet. It was, in the most nonscientific of senses, to be attentive to “vibrations” emanating from other hearts, other beings, other times.’ — Hillel Schwartz, Noise and Silence : the soundscape and spirituality.

18th Century ‘fainting couch’.

To physically faint is the sign in the literary Gothic of the high status and highly-sensitive individual. One “faints away”, and drifts away from our usual world. Ordinary mortals then content themselves with the resulting words that may be…

‘caught from the hand of the fainting poet’ — from a discussion of the state of mind of the poets of the early 1800s, in Poet Lore 1898.

An 1837 poem refers to the way that the Muse… “Shone on the fainting Poet’s eye upturn’d”, suggesting the phrase was commonly understood at that time — and those who know the poetry of the 1700s may be able to say if the phrase was even then a relic of that earlier century. Nevertheless, there was a common notion of the swooning sensibilities of poets. It was present at least as late as 1923, when André Chevrillon could write with a straight face of…

Shelley, the poet of the fainting ecstatic soul” — Three Studies in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare.

This association of fainting with the stereotype can doubtless be traced back into shamanism (think of the ever-dancing Sufi dervishes fainting with ecstatic visions, or the Mongolian shamans and their association with fainting) and the most ancient folk-explanations for fainting in humans — which perhaps once worked in close association with the shamanic idea that animals which faint for protection are ‘tricksters’ or had had their spirit touched or borrowed by the totemic trickster-spirit of their kind.

The once-common phrase of “having a fainting spell” also associates the word “fainting” with magic enacted at a distance through words (“spell” potentially meaning not only “time period” but also “a magic spell”, again a form of poetry). When one faints physically, one is suddenly spiritless and breathless, one ‘loses heart’ or becomes ‘fainthearted’ — as if an unheard magic spell has been cast by some unknown force to pierce one’s heart. This notion of a spiritual attack echoes again in the similar and once-common phrase: “an attack of the vapours”. The idea of an attack or psychic invasion can be linked to the idea of religious ecstasy that is in traditional religion called “transverberation”. This is the medieval Catholic term for ecstatic fainting (Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” was also called “The Transverberation of Saint Teresa”, before the term was lost to common usage), in which the heart of a saint was deemed to have been pierced by a visiting angel. One faints because one has received penetrating impressions from other dimensions, impressions that are beyond language and which cannot be spoken because one’s very breath has been snatched away. Unspeakable, if you like.

Further reading:

Heaton, Kenneth W. (2006). “Faints, Fits, and Fatalities from Emotion in Shakespeare’s Characters: survey of the canon”. The British Medical Journal of the 21st December 2006; 333, 1335.

Scarlett, E.P. (1965). “The Vapors”. Archive of Internal Medicine, 1965, Vol. 116, 1, pp. 142-146.

Smith, Philip E.M. (2005). “Fainting Painting”. Practical Neurology 2005, 5, pp. 366-369. [Neurology and Art special issue. Smith gives a survey of fainting in 19th century art]

Smith, Philip E.M. (2006). “Fainting In Classical Art”. International Review of Neurobiology 2006, Vol. 74, pp. 79-88. [Section VII is “Men Fainting”]

Summer School: assignment six

26 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Summer School

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Assignment Six, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Under the Pyramids”.

“Under the Pyramids” was ghost-written by Lovecraft for Harry Houdini, the first of several small (but lucrative) jobs. […] Your assignment today is […] on any aspect of today’s reading


S.T. Joshi does not give an index entry to ‘Egypt’ or ‘Ancient Egypt’ in his monumental two-volume biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence. Possibly that particular passage into the great pyramid of Lovecraft’s mind is one that is best left sealed. Such an entrance, if opened, might at first look deceptively small — but one could surely be lost down there in the immense dark maze — wandering in the footsteps of the youthful Lovecraft amid the dusty chambers of cat mummies that smile so enigmatically, the spectral visage of the former explorer Theophile Gautier, the dead books of myth and lore, the little chamber of Abdul Alhazred where one must stoop as if a child, the great glitteringly stygian wells of ancient lore, the eerie bas-reliefs of Hotep (who might be Nyarlathotep), and the scarab beetles still inexplicably crawling in the shadowy corners.

Lovecraft’s interest in Ancient Egypt spanned the major period of digging and discovery in the early 20th century. What then are the key discoveries that might have excited Lovecraft’s imagination, in the twenty years from when Lovecraft reached the age of 14 (1904) until his writing of “Under The Pyramids” (Feb 1924)?

In 1904 the first authoritative book on the famous Rosetta Stone was published. The Stone was the key to deciphering the Ancient Egyptian language, unread since the fall of the Rome. It was because of this stone, worked on by scholars since 1822, that the young Lovecraft was able to read the myths and lore of the Ancient Egyptians — in a fine readable translation by Budge of the British Museum. The book placed the academic cap-stone on over 80 years of work, validating in the modern mind the various translations that had been published.

In 1905 the sand was completely cleared away from the Sphinx, and the great monument was seen its entirety for the first time since classical antiquity. Lovecraft refers to the Sphinx several times in his works other than “Under the Pyramids”. In “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) the Sphinx is referred to briefly, although only in passing. In his “The Cats of Ulthar” (June 1920), he has his narrator suggest a link with the cat-worship of the Ancient Egyptians…

The Sphinx is his cousin [i.e.: the cousin of the house cat], and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

This might appear to imply that Lovecraft thinks the Sphinx’s original face (the current one is a later and cruder addition) was perhaps more cat-like. I believe a lion-with-mane (thereby allowing the current head-dress to be cut in the later carving) has been suggested, and that may have been a current theory known to Lovecraft in the 1910s?

In his “Under The Pyramids” Lovecraft transfers Houdini’s choice of location to the Temple of the Sphinx (a real place, the gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid), leading him to speculate again on the nature of the original face of the Sphinx…

Near the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx — mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and memory. […] There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren — but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear.

Sphinx, partly excavated from the sands, circa 1904/1905.

Countless shrines and temples and tombs were discovered in Egypt in the 1900s and 1910s, some perfectly preserved. These built on a great train of previous discoveries in the nineteenth century, which had included the life-sized sculptures of Khephren which are among the finest we have from Ancient Egypt. The articles on the early 20th century finds come thick and fast in The Century, National Geographic, Scientific American, and elsewhere. The famous bust of Nefertiti was found in 1912. Various writers of fiction notably responded to the new discoveries and the public interest they aroused. Algernon Blackwood produced various notable Egypt stories such as “Descent in Egypt” (1914) and “The Wings of Horus” (1914). Sax Rohmer published the novel Brood of The Witch-Queen (1918). Both these writers had visited Egypt. Lovecraft himself refrained from using Egyptian settings, possibly because he could not afford to travel and because he felt he required sight and sound of a place in order to write about it. He only managed to write “Under the Pyramids”, to order, with aid of guide-books and travel accounts. Although in Nyarlathotep (1920) his dreams had certainly drawn near to the place, if only briefly…

“And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger.”

The early 1920s saw one of the greatest triumphs in Egyptology. Howard Carter was then one of the most famous excavators in Egypt, and he probably influenced the choice of Lovecraft’s name of Randolph Carter (who made his first appearance in print in 1919) in amalgam with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter hero (first appeared in print 1912). Three years after the formal end of the First World War, in 1922 Howard Carter excavated the steps leading to the untouched tomb of Tutankhamun. The final tomb (‘the mummy chamber’ or ‘Sepulcher’) was not opened until February 1923 and was reported in full in National Geographic magazine in May 1923. The marvels uncovered sparked a renewed Egyptomania that swept the western world and continued into the 1930s.

Lovecraft’s “Under The Pyramids”, written exactly a year after the opening of the Tutankhamun tomb, rode on the immediate coat-tails of Carter’s famous discovery. “Under The Pyramids” followed various non-fiction books issued in 1923, and also literary re-issues that cashed in on the public interest — such as the Sax Rohmer vampire thriller Brood of The Witch-Queen (1918) which was revised and reissued as It Came Out of Egypt (Munsey’s magazine, serialised Sep, Oct, Nov 1923).

Further reading:

Baikie, James (1924). A Century of Excavation in the Land of the Pharaohs. [Gives a useful overview of the excavations Lovecraft might have known of in 1924.]

Barrell, John (1991). “Death on the Nile: Fantasy and the Literature of Tourism 1840–1860”. Essays in Criticism (1991), XLI (2), pp. 97-127.

Barker, Phillip (1949). “Egyptian Mythology in Fantastic Literature”. Fanscient 3 (3), pp.41-44. Fall 1949. (No.9) [This appears to be the only substantial scholarly writing on the topic that strays beyond the 19th century]

Colby, Sasha (2006). “The Literary Archaeologies of Theophile Gautier”. CLCWeb, Vol. 8 Issue 2 (June 2006).

Dahab, F. Elizabeth (1999) “Theophile Gautier and the Orient” CLCWeb, Vol.1 Issue 4 (December 1999).

Day, Jasmine (2006). The Mummy’s Curse : Mummymania in the English-speaking world. Taylor & Francis.

Frost, Brian (2008). The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. Scarecrow Press.

Lant, Antonia (1997). “The Curse of the Pharaoh : or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania.” IN: Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Rutgers University Press. [See also the Ancient Egypt Film Site for a complete list of films.]

MacDonald, Sally (Ed.)(2003). Consuming Ancient Egypt. UCL Press.

Parramore, Lynn (2008). Reading the Sphinx: ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century literary culture. Palgrave Macmillan.



With thanks for the Creative Commons photo-elements used, to Elizabeth Hollins (pyramid) and Zanthia (tentacle).

Summer School: assignment five

25 Monday Jul 2011

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Assignment Five, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Howard Himself”.

Your assignment today is pure speculation. What aspect of modern culture do you think would have influenced Lovecraft if he were writing today? What contemporary scientific or cultural developments do you think would have enthralled him?


An Alternate Ending : a fiction

Howard Phillips Lovecraft made it, somehow, to 1939. And 1939 made him. Having enlisted but failed to serve in the First World War, in 1939 Lovecraft was determined to serve his country in the coming Second World War. After much wrangling, since he was then nearly 50, he became a member of the local Coast Guard Reserve force in 1939. In this capacity he then, somehow, came to the attention of the Boston Navy Yard. There he was able to secure a part-time assistant’s job with the library of the Naval Archives at Boston — probably so as to release a serviceman for intelligence duties. Within a year he had completely mastered the history of the navy in New England, and later made many useful contributions to its scholarly study. One of the first papers he wrote was a thorough historical survey of smuggling, usefully suggesting a number of little-known places on the New England coastline at which German submarines might try to clandestinely land people or materials. This bought his abilities to the notice of his superiors. His old and latent talent for comic writing also came into service, and he published comic stories and sketches in the armed forces magazines. Most notable of these are a string of fascinating comedy propaganda squits against the Axis powers, hilariously depicting them in his most outrageously pulp manner as inept and stupid many-tentacled monsters. It is also believed that he was sometimes confidentially consulted, by his predecessor at the Navy archive, on thorny problems in military intelligence work. Lovecraft himself notes that he was regularly assigned to help monitor the popular story magazines, for their possible clandestine use in passing ‘secret messages’ to German and later Japanese spies. The regular Navy pay, a warm office and the food of the officers’ canteen (for which, as the stand-in archivist and ad-hoc intelligence consultant, he was given a special pass) rapidly beefed up his physical and mental condition. As did a change of situation from Providence to Boston, since he was required to move there for the duration of the war. He felt this move to be his patriotic duty, but was no doubt pleased to find that it brought him into regular contact with those younger than himself.

From 1942, when America formally entered the war and men were consequently in short supply on the Home Front, he was placed in command of a special intelligence group of the U.S. Coast Guard Beach Patrol. This consisted of young lads who were not of sufficient mental fitness to serve in the forces, but whose youthful appearance, zeal, and writerly and artistic powers of observation led the Navy to form them into a clandestine ‘plain clothes’ unit — with special responsibility for detecting any communication between persons on the New England shoreline and the enemy at sea. Toward the end of the war Lovecraft once again began to write steadily, and in 1943-44 he wrote his great trilogy of weird werewolf novels now generally known under the title “The Wreck of Dreams”. These were set on the mist-haunted New England coastline of the 18th century, and were well reviewed for their powerful anti-Nazi subtext, the exploration of the roots of human cruelty, and the depiction of the struggle of man to overcome his own bestial instincts in the face of overwhelming terror. The strong sales of these popular but intelligent wartime chillers led to the publication of a long-awaited book collection of the best of his earlier stories in 1948.

After the end of the war he drifted back to Providence and found that he was able to eke out a living on book royalties, rights-options sold for some radio monologues, and the ghost-writing of plots and regional dialect for radio playwrights. The early 1950s saw the decline of radio in the face of television, for which he felt he was not suited to write. But around that time he began to be regularly approached by Hollywood agents to option some of his early works and werewolf novels for movies, and this — with the help of his shrewd new agent August Derleth — meant he was able to live in some modest comfort for the rest of his life. After receiving one especially lucrative movie options cheque in 1958, Lovecraft even made attempts to purchase back his boyhood home — but he found that the owners were unwilling to sell.

His own fiction writing was quiescent throughout most of the 1950s, possibly because he felt that he had said all he had wanted to say, and because the horrors of the recent war overshadowed anything he might be able to conjure in fiction. He did however write thoughtful and prescient prose meditations on the dawn of the atomic age and its likely impacts on the psyches of the young, which gained him some brief prominence as a public intellectual. Like many after the war, he was somewhat embarrassed by his political enthusiasms of the early 1930s. His intellectual infatuation with the authoritarian/fascist variant of socialism had been swept away by the experience of the war. In the early 1950s he read Ayn Rand’s science-fiction work Anthem (1937) while writing his monumental survey essay on the history of early science-fiction, and this led him to Rand’s seminal novel The Fountainhead (1943). He found Rand’s works chimed well with his own very similar atheism, individualism, and rigorous rationalism. Amid the changed and burgeoning economy of 1950s America, and under the influence of Rand’s potent pro-capitalist arguments and the very real communist threat, he sloughed off his earlier distaste for capitalism. He became a minor but very effective early supporter of Rand in the years before she published Atlas Shrugged (1957).

In the late 1960s Lovecraft was much feted by the new generation of science-fiction and fantasy writers, especially British writers, to the extent that he had to hire a part-time correspondence secretary, the brilliant young Harvard graduate S.T. Joshi. But at that time Lovecraft felt himself too old to accept any invitations to travel, and confined himself to dictated correspondence. The hiring of an eager secretary did, however, have the by-product of leading in time to the magnificent six-volume edited collection of letters which effectively form Lovecraft’s autobiography and which may — in future centuries — be judged to be Lovecraft’s most lasting contribution to the world of literature.

In the late 1960s Lovecraft learned of the experiment which the science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock was undertaking, in ‘giving away’ his major character Jerry Cornelius to be used by others writers. Lovecraft was put in mind of his own permissive attitudes to the use of his work in the 1920s and 30s, and made the seemingly spur-of-the-moment decision that has forever enshrined him as a ‘founding father’ of the open source movement. On his 80th birthday he famously demanded to be driven through the August heat, by the visiting Robert Barlow, to New York. At the main copyright offices in the city he alarmed the officials by signing all of his early Dunsanian and ‘Yog-Sothothery’ works into the public domain, a then unheard-of thing for a writer to do. Barlow, then a tenured and highly respected university professor of anthropology, was luckily able to assure the officials that the old man was quite sane and knew what he was doing. Derleth was furious when he found out what had happened, since he had renewed the copyrights just a few years before. But Lovecraft thereby ensured the place of the Cthulhu mythos in the weird literature of the 1960s and 70s, and spawned an empire of spin-offs and pastiches that will forever keep his name in the public eye. To encourage interest in his radical decision, he returned to Providence and wrote a new work for the Mythos, dictating it to Barlow over the following week and collaborating with his protégé on polishing the writing for a contemporary audience. This was Lovecraft’s final dazzling classic, and his first work of ‘Yog-Sothothery’ since the late 1930s. The novella “The Messages of Nyarlathotep” begins conventionally enough in a classically early Lovecraftian vein in a sort of alternate-history ‘proto valve-punk’ 1920s New York that recalls Nyarlathotep’s first appearance in fiction, but then moves forward in time to become an almost psychedelically intense and richly terrifying multi-layered voyage into the information society and its psychic implications — showing that Lovecraft had fully assimilated the new ideas on communications, cybernetics, systems theory and many other ideas of the 1960s. This last great work places him firmly in the vanguard of the prophets of the information revolution, and has also been seen as a progenitor of cyberpunk.

Summer School: assignment four

23 Saturday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Summer School

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Assignment Four, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Secrecy in horror”.

“Today’s assignment […] It’s difficult to have any amount of horror without secrets […] Without furtive whispers and things unseen, we would have very little to discuss here, so your assignment today is to discuss some aspect of secrecy in horror, using “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a starting point.”


On Secrecy and Secretions

Lovecraft was among the first generation of human beings who were able to write and publish in a fully open manner on religion and ideas. He may have realised this, for he had spent much of his youth clinging to an attic life-raft made of books from the 18th century — a century during which secrecy and dissembling were basic health-and-safety requirements for those imaginative free-thinkers who created the Enlightenment. Codes, cryptic allusions, substitutions, hints, subtly indicative inversions and elisions, private-edition books passed covertly from hand to hand — all the subterfuges variously and routinely forced on writers by intolerant authorities who could forcibly “make windows into men’s souls”, if given a sniff of written evidence. From these 18th century writers Lovecraft must have learned more than style. He must also have learned some techniques for speaking the unspeakable.

When an old technology dies, it often becomes aestheticised by the young and made part of some new and curious bricolage. Literary and religious secrecy was a technology, of a kind. Lovecraft had seen established religion, and its tediously obstreperous counter-sects, start to fade in the light of science and the bedding down of the American experience of intellectual freedom. As a consequence, the counter-measures devised by the intelligent against religion were also increasingly obsolete. The way was open, and Lovecraft deftly aestheticised the old secrecy into new syncretic horrors.

Of course, the censor’s pen continued to strike out from little islands of moral panic until the mid 1960s — but even these would be washed away in time, revealing an abundant coral reef of beautiful queer fish and strange limpet-like creatures dwelling fixedly amid their abundant secretions. Lovecraft never lived to see that carnival of repressed secrets, and he was appalled enough by the fumblings of the literary avant-garde of his own time. So he was only able to deal with personal and psycho-sexual secrets in a hidden manner. Most of his implicitly semi-autobiographical fiction was thus a wash of simultaneous revealings and concealings — rather like a receding tide that reveals a hidden reef on which the reader can sometimes glimpse Lovecraft’s own lived experience flopping and writhing about, far off and forlorn. Lovecraft never expected that we would glimpse it, let alone that one day there would be a whole fleet devoted to trawling in his personal depths, using curiously-shaped contraptions to surface eye-bulging secrets never meant to be seen.

I increasingly think that Lovecraft may have kept another category of secrets. I think he had his own dark reef of influences and sources, a reef unspoken of and still hidden somewhere off the deep water of his imagination. In the 18th century a writer would have had trouble concealing his sources, since there were so relatively few of them. Those living and writing in the 18th century had a serious literature one could read through completely in about fifteen years, if one was keen, including the key works from classical antiquity. The outlets for publishing and intellectual discourse were few and populated by those who were inclined to be capaciously knowing, and this would also make it difficult to conceal sources. By contrast Lovecraft was living in a different world, for all that he pretended otherwise. He was immersed in the fecund abundance of early 20th century popular culture, much of it ephemeral. He was also familiar with the grave-robbers’ paradise of the New York used book dealers and libraries — in which the curious browser could pull down a dusty book and open a window into a dark vista unseen since the 19th century. This must have been a very tempting combination of environments for Lovecraft. Now, of course it would be ridiculous (although rather delicious) to suggest that Lovecraft kept a second, secret Commonplace Book filled with jottings about the tentacles of H.G. Wells (surely topping the Wandrei reading-list in Spring/Summer 1927) and obscure popular arcarna destined for insertion into his stories. Claiming a secret history for which there is no public evidence is exactly what Lovecraft’s work so delightfully pokes fun at. I have little or no evidence to back up my suspicion, and the evidence may never be found, even if there was any reason for it to exist. But I can’t help think that the secrets of writers, like secretions, sometimes leak out onto the printed page and leave stains.

Further reading:

Stahl, John Daniel (1996). “The Imaginative Uses of Secrecy in Children’s Literature”. IN: Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press.

Roberts, M. and Ormsby-Lennon, H. (Eds.) (1995). Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies. AMS Press.

Calinescu, M. (1994). “Secrecy in fiction: textual and intertextual secrets in Hawthorne and Updike”. Poetics Today, Vol.15, No.3, Autumn 1994.

Liste-Noya, Josand (2011). American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy in the Literature and Culture of the United States. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Alliker Rabb, Melinda (2008). Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750. Palgrave Macmillan.

Pionke, Albert D. (2010). Victorian Secrecy. Ashgate.

Meyer Spacks, Patricia (2003). Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. University of Chicago Press.

Gunn, Joshua (2005). Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century. University of Alabama Press.

Summer School: Assignment Three

22 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Summer School

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Assignment Three, Vacation Necronomicon School: “The Elder Sign”.

“Today’s assignment […] The Elder Sign is one of the only things known to man that can provide any measure of protection against the Deep Ones. I felt it would be prudent to make one …”


On The Elder Sign:

The Elder Sign is mentioned five times in Lovecraft’s work.

1). In “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” (written 1926) it is a genuflection, presumably made with the hands, of simple folk in the Dreamlands when these people are asked by Randolph Carter about the Earth’s gods and the rememberance of their dancing on Lerion (the mountain source of the River Skai)…

“Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.”

The earlier story “The Other Gods”(1921) implies that the Other Gods have long since displaced or captured Earth’s gods to unknown Kadath (“The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!”), so that the simple folk in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” are indeed making a warding sign against the Other Gods, rather than against Earth’s gods. The Other Gods are identified with the monsters of the Cthulhu mythos, since Lovecraft refers in his fiction to “Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods”.

2). In the Lovecraft story fragment “The Descendant” (1927) the elder sign is also a genuflection made with the hands, seen used by Atlanteans living near the sea in the British Isles during the Roman occupation…

“Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the West that had sunk…”

The story refers to Stonehenge and other circles being built by these people. Here again the sign seems to be a ‘warding’ against evil. It also associates the sign with stones. There have been various cranky ideas that the actually-existing stones at Stonehenge contain “hidden” symbols revealed only in certain angles and types of lights, but these theories are only now being seriously tested by archeologists in summer 2011…

“Despite the vast amount of archaeological activity and academic study into Stonehenge and its landscape over the centuries, relatively little is known about the lichen-covered surfaces of the sarsens and bluestones that make up the stone circle. The availability of high resolution laser scanners that can produce highly accurate surface models means that it is now possible to record details and irregularities on the stone surfaces down to a resolution of 0.5mm. It is also hoped that secrets hidden underneath the thick cover of lichens may be revealed in the analysis using sophisticated software.” (English Heritage)

3). The elder sign is also depicted as a ‘warding’ genuflection in Lovecraft’s ghost-written work “The Last Test” (1927)…

“with face convulsed, he called down imprecations from the stars and the gulfs beyond the stars; so that even Surama shuddered, made an elder sign that no book of history records, and forgot to chuckle.”

4). August Derleth, in The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), suddenly leaps in with the notion that R’lyeh is sealed with an Elder Sign. But S.T. Joshi has shown that very little of Derleth’s novel is sourced from Lovecraft. Presumably Derleth knew the short Lovecraft poem “The Messenger“, in which the Elder Sign is linked to the opening of a sealed boundary containing evil…

“The thing, he said, would come that night at three
[…]
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.”

But this small poem is dedicated to “Bertrand K. Hart, Esq.”. The biographical details involved, as excavated by S.T. Joshi, clearly point to this being a humourous poetic squit against Hart, written with much skill but little thought, and meant to be read with a knowing smile by Lovecraft’s circle. It implies that the Elder Sign is a key rather than a ‘warding’ or a ‘seal’ for evil things, and as such it goes against all Lovecraft’s other uses of the term.

5) As for the modern inclination to make runic-style stones for the ‘sign’ — which ridiculously draws the Mythos into the territory of flaming pentangles and similar pseudo-occult nonsense — this arises via the later story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931). The actual term “elder sign” is not used in this story, but the sign-stones in the story are obviously meant to have ‘warding’ powers. They are learned of thus: the veteran sea captain “Cap’n Obed”, the one who first summoned the Deep Ones to Innsmouth, encounters a small volcanic island in the South Sea Islands in the early 1800s. The story of this was later spun to the drunk Zadok, seemingly by Obed’s First Mate — and Zadok then ramblingly relates it to the protagonist many decades later…

“old magic signs as the sea-things says was the only things they was afeard of.”

“In some places they was little stones strewed abaout—like charms—with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them was the Old Ones’ signs.”

“We didn’t hev them old charms to cut ’em off [i.e.: stop them from coming ashore] like folks in the Saouth Sea did”

These are then clearly sign-charms on small stones, or things that are so old as to appear to be stones. These sign-objects were made by the “Old Ones” [the Elder Things in At The Mountains of Madness] and they have the power to keep the “Deep Ones” away from land.

There are some similarities here with the marked green soapstones that feature prominently in At The Mountains of Madness…

“groups of dots in patterns […] on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times”

Animals are shown in Mountains to be instinctively fearful of the stones, and similar stones may have had a similar effect on the animalistic amphibian Deep Ones.


Assignment:

So, what would be a scientifically valid ‘warding’ instrument, one that could be held in the hand? What about a cup of coffee – the coffee mug being of stoneware (often patterned), being held up before oneself in the hand (rather like a genuflection), and of course the coffee having a genuine ‘warding off’ effect against sleep and thus nightmares. This latter point would thus link it back to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands.

The symbol is from the alphabet-style Vinca sign system, found in Southern Europe and as old as the pyramids. It has never been translated.

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