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

In terms of the Lovecraft’s mythos, At the Mountains of Madness makes explicit what has been evident all along—that most of the ‘gods’ of the mythos are mere extraterrestrials, and that their followers (including the authors of the books of occult lore to which reference is so frequently made by Lovecraft and others) are mistaken as to their true nature. Robert M. Price, who first noted this ‘demythologizing’ feature in Lovecraft,¹² has in later articles gone on to point out that At the Mountains of Madness does not make any radical break in this pattern, but it does emphasize the point more clearly than elsewhere. The critical passage occurs in the middle of the novel, when Dyer finally acknowledges that the titanic city in which he has been wandering must have been built by the Old Ones: ‘They were the makers and enslavers of [earth] life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the

Necronomicon affrightedly hint about.’ The content of the Necronomicon has now been reduced to ‘myth’.

The casually made claim that the novel is a ‘sequel’ to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym deserves some analysis. In my view, the novel is not a true sequel at all—it picks up on very little of Poe’s enigmatic work except for the cry ‘Tekeli-li!’, as unexplained in Poe as in Lovecraft—and the various references to Pym

throughout the story end up being more in the manner of in-jokes. It is not clear that Pym even influenced the work in any significant way. A recent scholar, Jules Zanger, has aptly noted that At the Mountains of Madness ‘is, of course, no completion [of Pym] at all: it might be better described as a parallel text, the two tales coexisting in a shared context of allusion’.

¹³

Lovecraft declared that At the Mountains of Madness was ‘capable of a major serial division in the exact middle’¹⁴ (after Chapter VI), leading one to think that, at least subconsciously, he envisioned the work as a two-part serial in Weird Tales

. But, although he delayed his spring travels till early May in order to undertake what was for him the herculean task of typing the text (it came to 115 pages), he was shattered to learn in mid-June that Farnsworth Wright had rejected it. Lovecraft wrote bitterly in early August:

Ye s—Wright ‘explained’ his rejection of the ‘Mountains of Madness’ in almost the same language as that with which he ‘explained’ other rejections to Long & Derleth. It was ‘too long’, ‘not easily divisible into parts’, ‘not convincing’—& so on. Just what he has said of other things of mine (except for length)—some of which he has ultimately accepted after many hesitations.¹⁵

It was not only Wright’s adverse reaction that affected Lovecraft; several colleagues to whom he had circulated the text also seemed less than enthusiastic. One of the unkindest cuts of all may have come from W. Paul Cook, the very man who had chiefly been responsible for Lovecraft’s resumption of weird fiction in 1917 but who markedly disliked his later trend toward scientific realism.

Was Wright justified in rejecting the tale? In later years Lovecraft frequently complained that Wright would accept long and mediocre serials by Otis Adelbert Kline, Edmond Hamilton, and other clearly inferior writers while rejecting his own lengthy work; but some defence of Wright might perhaps be made. The serials in Weird Tales may indeed have been, from an abstract literary perspective, mediocre; but Wright knew that they were critical in impelling readers to continue buying the magazine. As a result, they were by and large geared toward the lowest level of the readership, full of sensationalized action, readily identifiable human characters, and a simple (if not simple-minded) prose style. At the Mountains of Madness could not be said to have any of these characteristics. Some of Wright’s cavils, as recorded by Lovecraft, were indeed unjust; in particular, the comment ‘not convincing’ cannot possibly be said to apply to this work. But Lovecraft himself knew that Wright had come to use this phrase as a sort of rubber-stamp whenever he did not care for a work.