A Journey Through the Fiction of Lovecraft: Part One | "The Beast in the Cave" - "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson"

I begin a journey through the very nearly complete fiction works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Image source: Bud's Art Books
This book was issued by Race Point Publishing, an imprint of the Quarto Publishing Group.

I describe it as 'very nearly complete' for one main reason: firstly, it lacks three early stories of Lovecraft which precede "The Beast in the Cave." Secondly, it excludes two and a half dozen collaborations with other writers. It is for this reason that I call it 'very nearly complete', even though, for all intents and purposes, it is complete: all of his short stories, his novellas, and the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

In this part, I will be reading and commenting upon the first five stories of the collection.

First draft written in 1904, final in 1905 when H.P. Lovecraft was fourteen(!) and published eventually in the June 1918 issue of The Vagrant.

The prose lacks the deliberation and polish of his later work, and many a paragraph trend towards the far-too-long.

The plot is very rough; things that look like foreshadowing are gone back upon. Perhaps it's meant to imply that the protagonist - a quiet, scholarly-type - is a scatterbrained fellow, but in truth I think it's a product of youth: the story's just scattershot. The ending is a predictable "twist" ending in which the beast is revealed to have been a man who himself got lost in the cave years earlier.

This story doesn't really ring of Lovecraft but of Poe, but without Poe's intelligence and ability to craft a story. The protagonist is idiotic, the twist is predictable, nothing quite makes the sense it probably had in the writer's mind - the cave network is vast (but it isn't), the protagonist is sure he'll never see the light of day (but the guide finds him), the creature is a man (at least once) and in the end I am left dissatisfied.

Written in 1908, when HPL was around 17, and published eventually in the November 1916 issue of United Amateur.

Of these two surviving pieces of juvenilia, "The Alchemist" is undoubtedly superior. The prose is tighter, though still rough around the edges - unnecessarily long paragraphs - and it bears a great setting: the ruins, long-decaying, of the Comtes de C-----. Our protagonist is the last of them, Antoine, who has never really ventured outside the castle and has been raised effectively by the old butler. His father was killed a month before his birth, his mother died during his birth - it is difficult not to see autobiographical elements.

The narrative takes place over a long period of time, though it is written from the perspective of Antoine in the here and now: we are taken through his childhood, to the ten years of his life which he presumed would be his last, and finally to his discovery, in the last week of his life, in a deserted portion of the castle, a long-abandoned room.

The ending is another "twist" in which the ancient "apparition" inhabiting that room is revealed to be Charles Le Sorcier, who by now ought to be long, long, long dead. Both this ending and the resolution to Antoine's curse dissatisfies; he is somehow sure that if he killed the "apparition" that he'd be freed of the curse. This is hardly even a twist: the story is called "The Alchemist," and immortality - and the philosopher's stone - is alluded to or mentioned many times.
We also get the first bit of poetry from HPL:

"May ne'er a noble of thy murd'rous line
Survive to reach a greater age than thine!"
Poetry shall appear many more times in his works before we're finished.

This story is rather close to Lovecraft's later works - the peasants tell stories, a noble lineage fallen into disrepute, even a hereditary curse. Interestingly, however, this hereditary curse applies to a specific birthday (34), which is a more fantasy trope than that of horror. The rhyming couplet, an early example of poetry in Lovecraft, however, seems unconvincing: "noble" is specified, an odd choice: what if the family loses its titles?

Antoine is, oddly, determined to meet death on his feet, which feels disjunct with his earlier, bookish manner. Intentional or not? I would venture that a young Lovecraft really was trying to write a more active character, but just couldn't make it click.

From the view of story, this is actually poorer than "The Beast in the Cave." But I give it points for superior atmosphere.

Written June 1917 and published in the March 1922 issue of The Vagrant. It is the first of three stories written by HPL in 1917, the others being "Dagon" (July 1917) and "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" (1917).

Sure, "The Beast in the Cave" had as its protagonist a quiet, scholarly-type but it's really in "The Tomb" that we get Jervas Dudley, the model for many a future Lovecraft protagonist:

• a strange, quiet, curious, scholarly-type
• an obsession with the strange, the ancient, the little-known, a/or the otherworldly
• connected, by some manner of family history, to the strange
• imaginative, psychologically sensitive, a dreamer
• considered insane, or already committed to an asylum
  (Note that not all of these characteristics need be present - in particular, that of insanity.)

Naturally, he bears even archaic diction. Though committed to an asylum, Dudley likely was intended to be believed in full, but here and there are hints that Dudley perhaps is, indeed, a little crazy. The connection of family history is that Dudley is descended from the Hydes, of whom are buried in the tomb.

The prose, again, is tighter - though still not reaching the full level of polish Lovecraft later would have, there's a more considered quality to it, despite its pretentious introduction. Though occasionally we do get a lovely gem such as "One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of eighteenth-century Bacchanalian mirth."

That "bit of Gregorian playfulness" is another example of Lovecraft's pen turning to poetic form by way of amusing lyrics. Here is the first verse:

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass,
For life will soon pass;
When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!

Dudley does have something distinguishing him - it may be poor word choice, but I don't think so. Look at the descriptions: after he awakens from the casket he lied in (for one night - we skipped to when he was twenty-one from when he was ten), he is described as bearing "signs of ribald revelry." Then, he says that he went to the tomb every night, "seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal."

After this trip to the tomb he becomes more social, "unconsciously [growing] the bearing of a man man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion." (original: "... till I unconsciously grew to possess ...")

At the end, the Hydes' mansion seems to appear, and he engages in "music, laughter, and wine" with them until the lightning strikes it. Jervas Dudley - whom seems to be an exact mirror of Jervas Hyde - is brought to the asylum.

This is something of a strange story for Lovecraft: many of the things he'd later describe with adjectives of horror and fear lack those same adjectives. And yet, at the end, a bolt of lightning - a symbol of diving judgement. And just before hand, a line that Dudley spoke blasphemies, "[heeding] no law of God, Man, or Nature." And at the very end, the very, very end, the butler, Hiram, ventures into the tomb: there lay a coffin bearing the single word "Jervas," where he one day will be buried.

It's odd, in part for its confused ending and in part because so many of the later themes of Lovecraft's fiction appear here - just not in the mode of horror.

Unlike future stories, the nature of engagement with the dead here, in Dudley, is not clinical necromancy but of free-spirited revel.

Written in July 1917, published in the November 1919 issue of The Vagrant. This story was - at least in part - inspired by a dream.

Lovecraft here hits an early peak in his atmospheric writing with the nightmarish conjurement of the vision of an ocean-floor lifted very suddenly to land: that such an environment, stuffed to the gills with dying marine creatures and all manner of strange flora, would horrify the (anonymous) narrator is not unrealistic at all.

So too does he first hit upon his theme of man's inevitable doom by way of an uncaring and incomprehensible cosmos.

Unfortunately, that's about all that can be said in this story's favor.

The narrator has become enslaved to a drug, though he asks we not think him a "weakling or degenerate," that last term may well the first appearance of Lovecraft's more repugnant views of certain aspects of humanity. The narrator was prisoner aboard a German P.O.W. ship - yet he was well-treated, so much so that he was able to escape well-provisioned with water and food. And yet, if he could escape with such riches, why bother escaping at all?

The main bulk of the story is his falling asleep and awaking upon land, bringing up a portion of the ocean floor, "exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths." He eventually makes his way to discover a monolith, bearing "the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures."

The writing system is a hieroglyphic one based not upon common flora and fauna of land but instead of the fauna of the marine world. It bears also a pictorial carving of its makers, fish-people of some sort. He even sees one rise from the depths, describing its overall ugliness as it either hugs, bows before in worship, or mutters prayer before the monolith.

Narrator flees and goes mad, committing suicide eventually as he supposedly can see it, only finding relief by way of morphine, and his suicide is committed as he has written his account of what happens and, hearing a noise at the door of "some immense slippery body," commits suicide.

Where to begin? The creatures does nothing to him, does not even interact with him. Of the monolith, surely it would intrigue more than horrify - but then, I suppose we must make allowances for his condition. But then, it is only after the creature interacts with the monolith that he says "I think I went mad then." From the pure ugliness of it! Not because of any genuinely monstrous quality, but simply because he thinks it is ugly - witness the descriptions "loathsome," "like some stupendous monster of nightmares," "its hideous head."

They came from before mankind, it seems, "some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born." (Note that at this time the Piltdown Man had not yet been definitively discredited - this was to come in 1953, some sixteen years after Lovecraft's 1937 death.)

What an ugly tale! The great crime of this fish-people is essentially non-existent: they exist, they look different from us, they believe differently from us, they portray themselves in art, they write (and, therefore, speak) differently from us. It is no wonder that Lovecraft has a reputation for racism. But, at the tail end, the narrator's real fear comes out: that one day they'll come back, these slimy water creatures from before history, drag down "the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind," and take Earth for themselves.

That they destroy us not because they are monsters, but because we are - this story, I should note, was written a year and a half before the Great War ended. I wonder what influence this may've had on HPL.

So here we are: Lovecraft's xenophobia laced with an undercurrent of fear, not of the unknown but that the unknown are more deserving then we are; the proto-Cthulhu tale of a landmass arising from the depths of the Pacific, preceded by dreaming strange dreams; and not merely the proto-Cthulhu but the proto-Mythos, arguably.

Written in 1917, published in the September 1917 United Amateur, under the name Humphrey Littlewit, Esq.

Ending on an amusing note we have this story which doesn't presage any of Lovecraft's later works, instead serving as an amusing diversion into HPL satirizing his own antiquarian affectations. Every name is italicized, many a word is capitalized, befitting the lack of standardization back in the 1660s and 1700s. Even past tense words have an apostrophe - resolv'd, remark'd, observ'd. Spellings become archaic: gratifie, teaze, stile.

It is an amusing tale. I'm left wondering what might've happened had Lovecraft written a little more comedy. Perhaps he has. Truth be told, dear reader, I haven't actually read all of Lovecraft. This will be my first read-through.

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And there you are! So. Just for a bit of fun on my part I think I'm going to rank these, and I will do so in order of favorite to least favorite.

1. "The Tomb"
   A subversion of the horror in later Lovecraft works, the delightful verse and the way in which the weird becomes a source of joy marks this out among his juvenilia.
2. "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson"
   Lovecraft writing humor rather than horror? Surely not, but that's what this is - and it's surprisingly good, too.
3. "The Alchemist"
   A well-told tale, if one marred by deficiencies in plotting.
4. "Dagon"
   Atmospheric, if baldly xenophobic. Probably the best put-together tale of the five, if you exclude "The Tomb."
5. "The Beast in the Cave"
   Not very original, messy prose (and Lovecraft was never considered a great prosewriter to begin with), and deficiencies in plotting.

I'll be honest with you, I went back and forth on what order to put those last three stories. I was tempted even to call it a tie, but... subtle distinctions render some preferable to others. Let's just say, though, that there's a wide gulf between two and three.

Please join me again in the future for the next few stories from Lovecraft's oeuvre.