‘For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth . . . the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily . . . this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.’
Onward - onward - dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and the thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words came again - ‘You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.’ Turn - turn - blackness on every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.
Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil Shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos’ core. He could turn and move and leap - he could - he would - he would—
Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through those endless voids of sentient blackness.
Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to no first beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer’s boyhood, and now there were re-made a waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify these things. Out of the void S’ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing his guidance from unhinted deeps.
Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him.
So to the organ chords of morning’s myriad whistles, and dawn’s blaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master’s start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inganok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.
TO A DREAMER
I scan thy features, calm and white
Beneath the single taper’s light;
Thy dark-fringed lids, behind whose screen
Are eyes that view not earth’s demesne.
And as I look, I fain would know
The paths whereon thy dream-steps go,
The spectral realms that thou canst see
With eyes veiled from the world and me.
For I have likewise gazed in sleep
On things my memory scarce can keep.
And from half-knowing long to spy
Again the scenes before thine eye.
I, too, have known the peaks of Thok;
The vales of Pnath, where dream-shapes flock;
The vaults of Zin - and well I trove
Why thou demand’st that taper’s glow.
But what is this that subtly slips
Over thy face and bearded lips?
What fear distracts thy mind and heart,
That drops must from thy forehead start?
Old vision wake - thine opening eyes
Gleam black with clouds of other skies,
And as from some demoniac sight
I flee into the haunted night.
AFTERWORD A GENTLEMAN OF PROVIDENCE
Stephen Jones
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
H.P. Lovecraft
IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century, the American tradition of macabre fiction rested upon the shoulders of three writers - Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce. Although authors such as Henry James, Robert W. Chambers, Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman and a handful of others occasionally dabbled in the supernatural, at the time they were primarily associated with writing outside the genre.
It was not until the founding, in March 1923, of the pulp magazine Weird Tales by publisher J.C. Henneberger that a new generation of writers would establish themselves, initially in the pages of ‘The Unique Magazine’.
For the first year under the editorship of mystery writer Edwin F. Baird, Weird Tales floundered through a series of different formats, publication frequency and cover price and was hopelessly in debt when music critic and editorial assistant Farnsworth Wright took over at the helm of the title in the summer of 1925.
With the magazine’s first anniversary about to be marked by imminent bankruptcy, Wright negotiated a new deal that would enable him to obtain a major interest in the publication once the debts were paid off.
Farnsworth Wright began to attract a new group of writers to the pages of Weird Tales. These youthful discoveries, many of whom would provide the bulk of the magazine’s fiction throughout its precarious existence, included such names as Robert E. Howard, August W. Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Jr, Edmond Hamilton, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei and E. Hoffman Price. Other, already established, writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn and Henry S. Whitehead, reached new peaks of popularity once Wright began publishing their work.
Of this latter group, perhaps the most important and influential contributor to the pulp magazine was H.P. Lovecraft.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890, in his grandparents’ home in Providence, Rhode Island.
While he was still an infant, Lovecraft’s family moved to various locations in Massachusetts, never settling down for long. Then in 1893 his father, travelling salesman Winfield Scott Lovecraft, apparently had a nervous breakdown while alone in a hotel room and was committed to an insane asylum. Lovecraft’s mother, Sarah Susan (Phillips) Lovecraft, returned from Massachusetts with her nearly three-year-old son to live in her parents’ home. Winfield Lovecraft died five years later, aged just forty-four, of tertiary neurosyphilis
.
As a child, Lovecraft led a somewhat sheltered early life, coddled and pampered by his mother and her indulgent family. Because his health was uncertain, his semi-invalidism (a nervous disorder apparently exacerbated by his mother’s own neurotic obsessions) enabled him to read a great deal. Perhaps due to of his family’s paternal English ancestry, his literary influences were the ‘Gothics’ of Mrs Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis and Charles Maturin and such contemporary British authors as Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany.
In later years, the author liked to refer to himself in letters in the persona of an aged recluse, ‘Grandpa Theobald’, and he affected the grammar and spelling of an eighteenth-century English gentleman, often ending a letter ‘Yr. Obt. Servt., HPL’.
Something of a child prodigy, Lovecraft was taken out of school by his mother and taught at home by family members and private tutors. It was around this time, at the age of eight, that he discovered the work of a one-time fellow Providence resident, Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe would remain a life-long influence upon Lovecraft’s writing, and the latter began experimenting with his own short tales of mystery and adventure.
According to his friend and protégé August Derleth, except for some minor juvenilia written when he was around six years old, Lovecraft preserved only a few of his early stories, most of which were written when he was between the ages of fifteen and twenty.
Despite the promise of such early tales as ‘The Beast in the Cave’ (1905), ‘The Picture’ (1907) and ‘The Alchemist’ (1908), Lovecraft was discouraged in his late teens, and he abandoned writing fiction for almost a decade. ‘It is only to be speculated about,’ mused Derleth, ‘whether that early promise would have been fulfilled sooner had Lovecraft’s fiction then earned the encouragement it merited.’
Several of the author’s early stories and fragments were attempts to set down vivid dreams, apparently with the intention of expanding them into longer works later. The key to some of these dream sources can be found in Lovecraft’s letters.
‘Occasionally - but not often - a dream of mine forms a usable fictional plot,’ the author later revealed.
Physically, Lovecraft was a tall, thin, pale man, with bright eyes and a protruding jaw. Probably as a result of having near-photographic memory, he apparently utilised a wide vocabulary with a range that was revealed in his conversation and his writing.
‘HPL carried himself with sufficient of a slouch to make me underestimate his height as well as the breadth of his shoulders,’ later recalled his friend and correspondent E. Hoffman Price, who first met Lovecraft in June 1932. ‘His face was narrow, longish, with long chin and jaw. His stride was brisk. His speech was quick, and inclined to jerkiness. It was as though his body was hard put to keep up with the agility of his mind, his eagerness to express his feelings.’
Although he enjoyed cheese, chocolate, ice-cream and sweet coffee, Lovecraft could not endure the cold and had a life-long aversion to sea food, as he explained to correspondent Donald Wandrei: ‘The very sight and smell of it nauseate me . . . one mouthful would make me actually and violently ill.’
However, he was inordinately fond of cats and also keenly interested in astronomy and eighteenth-century architecture.
‘He knew the year each house was built, who built it, who lived in it, every detail of its architecture and interior,’ recalled Wandrei about a walking tour of Providence he undertook with Lovecraft. ‘He was a pure antiquarian of prodigious memory.’
Much of Lovecraft’s writing was done at night, in longhand with a fountain pen, often on the reverse of old letters and other papers. For much of his writing career he would destroy the original manuscripts as soon as they were published.
While in his early twenties, he became immersed with the amateur journalism movement. He also began contributing astronomical articles to local newspapers while expanding a growing circle of correspondence, often averaging eight to ten letters a day, each usually four to eight pages in length.
Despite having long maintained that he had no talent for fiction, around 1915 Lovecraft was urged to try his hand at writing short stories again. His macabre tale ‘Dagon’ (written in July, 1917) was published by his friend and fellow member of the United Amateur Press Association, W. Paul Cook, in the November 1919 issue of Cook’s amateur journal, The Vagrant. It was followed three years later by ‘The Tomb’, which had been written a month before the earlier story, in the March issue of the same magazine.
Meanwhile, another tale, ‘Polaris’ (written circa May, 1918), had appeared in the December 1920 issue of Alfred Galpin’s The Philosopher.
Although he received no payment for these stories, they provided Lovecraft with an opportunity to hone his craft as a writer of the supernatural.
Around 1918, Lovecraft had discovered that he could make a small amount of money by revising the work of his fellow amateur writers. In fact, for many years these (usually anonymous) revisions became Lovecraft’s major source of income, with his own fiction merely a sideline.
‘Since revision jobs are always irregular,’ Lovecraft explained in a letter to teenage correspondent Willis Conover, Jr, ‘with long gaps between, and so exhausting that one can’t do them justice without a vast amount of time and energy, it follows that they aren’t a very profitable source of income.’
Although much of this work consisted of correcting spelling, punctuation and grammar, or copying out manuscript pages, he would sometimes entirely revise and rewrite a story if its content inspired his imagination.
This was the case with ‘The Crawling Chaos’, an early dream-narrative written in 1920-21 with the amateur poet Winifred Virginia Jackson and published under the double pseudonyms ‘Lewis Theobold, Jr, and Elizabeth Neville Berkley’ in the April 1921 issue of The United Co-operative, another amateur magazine.
Among the authors whose work he substantially rewrote or revised were United States consul Adolphe de Castro; family friend and fellow Providence resident C.M. Eddy, Jr; writer and editor Wilfred Blanch Talman; Midwest journalist and romance writer Zealia B. Bishop; Massachusetts divorcée Hazel Heald; world traveller William Lumley; Lovecraft’s future wife Sonia Greene, and even the famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (Enrich Weiss), all of whom went on to sell their fiction to Weird Tales.
‘He would criticize paragraph after paragraph and pencil remarks beside them,’ recalled Hazel Heald, ‘and then make me rewrite them until they pleased him.’
‘As a writer and instructor in the field of supernatural fiction,’ Zealia Bishop remembered, ‘he was an undisputed master, and another’s work seldom pleased him when he first saw it. He could always find much to improve, and he was generous with his advice, drawing on a vast store of knowledge quite beyond the capacity of the average man of education of his or our time.’
From 1919 until 1929, Lovecraft himself produced a number of similar works that were probably influenced by his discovery of Lord Dunsany’s books. Several of these stories featured the character of Randolph Carter, possibly intended as a fictional representation of the author himself. The first of these tales was the dream-inspired ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, written in December 1919 and published in May the following year in the thirteenth issue of Cook’s The Vagrant.
Randolph Carter returned a further three times - in ‘The Silver Key’ (written in 1926), the posthumously published short novel ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (written between late 1926 and early 1927) and the collaboration ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ (written between October 1932 and April 1933). E. Hoffman Price persuaded Lovecraft to revise and expand Price’s 6,000-word first draft, and the 14,000-word result was published (after being initially rejected by Farnsworth Wright) in the July 1934 Weird Tales.
‘Price liked my old story “The Silver Key” (Weird Tales, January 1929) and urged me to write a sequel,’ Lovecraft revealed to Willis Conover. ‘I didn’t feel like it, hence postponed the matter. Then Price wrote a seq
uel himself, and sent it to me to look over. I found it so different in spirit from the original story that I re-wrote it extensively, and added a new part longer than Price’s.’
‘When I deciphered his manuscript, I estimated that he had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words,’ Price later recalled.
A further attempt by Price to convince the author to collaborate on another Randolph Carter story in 1934 was rejected by Lovecraft, who claimed that it would be too much of a ‘strain’.
‘In the past I have allowed myself to be persuaded into a few collaborative ventures - to please the other guy - but the results have never been satisfactory, ’ Lovecraft wrote to Conover. ‘Now I am compelled by sheer necessity to call a halt. I have more ideas of my own than I have time to develop, and what little time and energy I can spare must go into these.’