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

Certainly, Lovecraft had no compunction in allowing the individual sonnets of the Fungi to appear quite randomly in the widest array of publications. Ten sonnets appeared in Weird Tales in 1930–31 (as well as ‘Recapture’, published earlier); five more appeared in the

Providence Journal in the early months of 1930; nine appeared in Walter J. Coates’s Driftwind from 1930 to 1932; the remainder appeared later in amateur journals or fan magazines, and after Lovecraft’s death many more were printed in Weird Tales

. The cycle as a unit was not published until 1943.

It had been more than a year since Lovecraft had written any original fiction; and that tale—’The Dunwich Horror’—was itself written after more than a year’s interval since its predecessor, ‘The Colour out of Space’. Revision, travel, and inevitably correspondence ate up all the time Lovecraft might have had for fiction, for he stated repeatedly that he required a completely free schedule to achieve the mental clarity needed for writing stories. Now, however, at the end of 1929, a revision job came up that allowed him to exercise his fictional pen far beyond what he expected— and, frankly, beyond what was required by the job in question. But however prodigal Lovecraft may have been in the task, the result— ’The Mound’, ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop—was well worth the effort.

Of this story it is difficult to speak in small compass. It is, at twenty-five thousand words, the lengthiest of Lovecraft’s revisions of a weird tale, and is comparable in length to ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. That it is entirely the work of Lovecraft can be gauged by Bishop’s original plot-germ, as recorded by R. H. Barlow: ‘There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman.’¹⁷ Lovecraft found this idea ‘insufferably tame & flat’¹⁸ and fabricated an entire novelette of underground horror, incorporating many conceptions of his evolving mythcycle, including Cthulhu (under the variant form Tulu).

‘The Mound’ concerns a member of Coronado’s expedition of 1541, Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, who leaves the main group and conducts a solitary expedition to the mound region of what is now Oklahoma and stumbles upon the underground realm of Xinaian (which he pronounces ‘K’n-yan’), occupied by approximately human denizens from outer space. These people have developed remarkable mental abilities, including telepathy and the power of dematerialization—the process of dissolving themselves and selected objects around them to their component atoms and recombining them at some other location. Zamacona initially expresses wonder at this civilization, but gradually finds that it has declined both intellectually and morally from a much higher level and has now become corrupt and decadent. He attempts to escape, but suffers a horrible fate. A manuscript that he had written of his adventures is unearthed in modern times by an archaeologist, who paraphrases his incredible tale.

This skeletonic plot outline cannot begin to convey the textural richness of the story, which—although perhaps not as carefully written as many of Lovecraft’s original works—is successful in depicting vast gulfs of time and in vivifying with a great abundance of detail the underground world of K’n-yan. What should also be evident is that ‘The Mound’ is the first, but by no means the last, of Lovecraft’s tales to utilize an alien civilization as a transparent metaphor for certain phases of human (and, more specifically, Western) civilization. Initially, K’n-yan seems a Lovecraftian utopia: the people have conquered old age, have no poverty because of their relatively few numbers and their thorough mastery of technology, use religion only as an aesthetic ornament, practise selective breeding to ensure the vigour of the ‘ruling type’, and pass the day largely in aesthetic and intellectual activity. But as Zamacona continues to observe the people, he begins to notice disturbing signs of decadence. Science was ‘falling into decay’; history was ‘more and more neglected’; and gradually religion was becoming less a matter of aesthetic ritual and more a sort of degraded superstition. The narrator concludes: ‘It is evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machinery had brought it during its middle period.’ These sentiments are exactly echoed in Lovecraft’s letters of the period.

Rich in intellectual substance as ‘The Mound’ is, it is far longer a work than Lovecraft needed to write for this purpose; and this length boded ill for its publication prospects. Weird Tales was on increasingly shaky ground, and Farnsworth Wright had to be careful what he accepted. It is not at all surprising that he rejected the tale in early 1930.