A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Lovecraft did manage to do some writing aside from letters and his travelogue; in early August he wrote ‘The Dunwich Horror’. This is, certainly, one of his most popular tales, but I cannot help finding serious flaws of conception, execution, and style in it. Its plot is well known, and centres upon the efforts of Wilbur Whateley, his mother Lavinia, and his grandfather, Old Whateley, to bring in a horde of monsters from another dimension to overwhelm the earth. One monster in particular has been locked up in their house for years; and, after Wilbur dies in attempting to pilfer the Necronomicon from the Miskatonic University Library, the creature breaks out and causes sundry destruction before being dispatched by means of incantations uttered by the Miskatonic University librarian, Henry Armitage, and two of his colleagues. It is then discovered that the monster in question was Wilbur’s twin brother.

It should be evident even from this narration that many points of plotting and characterisation in the story are painfully inept. Let us first consider the moral

implications of the tale. What we have here is an elementary ‘good-versus-evil’ struggle between Armitage and the Whateleys. That Lovecraft did not mean to portray Armitage parodically (as has been suggested) is proved by a remark made in a letter to August Derleth just after writing the story: ‘[I] found myself psychologically identifying with one of the characters (an aged scholar who finally combats the menace) toward the end’.⁷

What ‘The Dunwich Horror’ did was, in effect, to make the rest of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (i.e., the contributions by other and less skilful hands) possible. Its luridness, melodrama, and naive moral dichotomy were picked up by later writers (it was, not surprisingly, one of Derleth’s favourite tales) rather than the subtler work embodied in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘The Colour out of Space’, and others. In a sense, then, Lovecraft bears some responsibility for bringing the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ and some of its unfortunate results upon his own head.

In an important sense, indeed, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ itself turns out to be not much more than a pastiche. The central premise—the sexual union of a ‘god’ or monster with a human woman—is taken directly from Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’. The use of bizarre footsteps to indicate the presence of an otherwise undetectable entity is borrowed from Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’. Some other features relating to the invisible monster are taken from Anthony M. Rud’s ‘Ooze’ (Weird Tales, March 1923). The fact that Lovecraft on occasion borrowed from previous works need not be a source of criticism, for he ordinarily made extensive alterations in what he borrowed; but in this case the borrowings go beyond mere surface details of imagery to the very core of the plot.

‘The Dunwich Horror’ is, of course, not a complete failure. Its portrayal of the decaying backwoods Massachusetts terrain is vivid and memorable, even if a little more hyperbolic than that of ‘The Colour out of Space’; and it is, as should now be evident, largely the result of personal experience. Lovecraft later admitted that Dunwich was located in the Wilbraham area, and it is clear that both the topography and some of the folklore (whippoorwills as psychopomps of the dead) are in large part derived from his visit with Edith Miniter. The forest gorge that Lovecraft calls the Bear’s Den, however, is taken from a visit to just such an area, near Athol, that Lovecraft took on 28 June in the company of H. Warner Munn.

It is not at all surprising either that ‘The Dunwich Horror’ was snapped up by Weird Tales (Lovecraft received $240.00 for it, the largest single cheque for original fiction he had ever received) or that, when it appeared in the April 1929 issue, its praises were sung by the readership.

In the fall of 1928 Lovecraft heard from an elderly poet named Elizabeth Toldridge (1861–1940), who five years earlier had been involved in some poetry contest of which Lovecraft was a judge. Toldridge was a disabled person who lived a drab life in various hotels in Washington, D.C. She had published—no doubt at her own expense—two slim volumes of poetry earlier in the century, The Soul of Love

(1910) and Mother’s Love Songs (1911). Lovecraft wrote to her cordially and promptly, since he felt it gentlemanly to do so; and, because Toldridge herself wrote with unfailing regularity, the correspondence flourished to the end of Lovecraft’s life. Toldridge was, indeed, one of the few later correspondents of Lovecraft not involved in weird fiction.

The correspondence naturally focused on the nature of poetry and its philosophical underpinnings. It was just at this time that Lovecraft was beginning a revaluation of poetic style; and the barrage of old-fashioned poetry Toldridge sent to him helped to refine his views. In response to one such poem he wrote: