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

In spite of the fact that the six episodes of ‘Herbert West— Reanimator’ were clearly written over a long period—October 1921 to mid-June 1922—the tale does maintain unity of a sort, and Lovecraft seems to have conceived it as a single entity from the beginning: in the final episode all the imperfectly resurrected corpses raised by Herbert West come back to dispatch him hideously. In other ways the story builds up a certain cumulative power and suspense, and it is by no means Lovecraft’s poorest fictional work. The structural weaknesses necessitated by the serial format are obvious and unavoidable: the need to recapitulate the plot of the foregoing episodes at the beginning of each new one, and the need for a horrific climax at the end of each episode.

No one would deem ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ a masterpiece of subtlety, but it is rather engaging in its lurid way. It is also my belief that the story, while not starting out as a parody, became

one as time went on. In other words, Lovecraft initially attempted to write a more or less serious, if quite ‘grewsome’, supernatural tale but, as he perceived the increasing absurdity of the enterprise, abandoned the attempt and turned the story into what it in fact was all along, a self-parody.

The question of influence might be worth studying briefly. It has casually been taken for granted that the obvious influence upon the story is Frankenstein; but I wonder whether this is the case. The method of West’s reanimation of the dead (whole bodies that have died only recently) is very different from that of Victor Frankenstein (the assembling of a huge composite body from disparate parts of bodies), and only the most general influence can perhaps be detected. The core of the story is so elementary a weird conception that no literary source need be postulated.

It has frequently been believed—based upon Lovecraft’s remark in June 1922 that ‘the pay was a myth after the second cheque’¹⁵— that Lovecraft was never fully paid for the serial; but a letter to Samuel Loveman in November 1922 reports that Houtain has ‘paid up his past debts’ and even advanced Lovecraft $10 for the first two segments of ‘The Lurking Fear’.¹⁶

Lovecraft managed to write two other stories while working desultorily on ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, and they are very different propositions altogether. ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ appears to have been written in late 1921, probably December. The first of its many appearances was in the National Amateur for March 1922. The story—recounting the tale of Erich Zann, a mute viol-player who dwells in a lofty garret in Paris and apparently plays his bizarre music in order to ward off some nameless entity lurking just outside his window—justifiably remained one of Lovecraft’s own favourite stories, for it reveals a restraint in its supernatural manifestations (bordering, for one of the few times in his entire work, on obscurity), a pathos in its depiction of its protagonist, and a general polish in its language that Lovecraft rarely achieved in later years.

The other story of this period is ‘Hypnos’, probably written in March 1922 and first published in the National Amateur for May 1923. It is a curious but quite substantial tale that has not received the attention it deserves, perhaps because Lovecraft himself in later years came to dislike it. ‘Hypnos’ tells of a sculptor who encounters another man at a railway station, becomes fascinated with him, and apparently undertakes weird dream-travels through space and time in his company. After a particularly horrifying experience, the two men strive to stay awake as much as possible, in an attempt to ward off the strange dreams. Later the friend disappears, and all that is left is an exquisite bust of him in marble, with the Greek word HYPNOS (sleep) inscribed at the base.

It would seem that the interpretation of this story rests on whether the narrator’s friend actually existed or not; but this point may not affect the analysis appreciably. What we have here, ultimately, is, as with ‘The Other Gods’, a case of hybris, but on a much subtler level. At one point the narrator states: ‘I will hint— only hint—that he had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his.’ This sounds somewhat extravagant, but in the context of the story it is powerful and effective, even though not much evidence is offered as to how the person could have effected this rulership of the universe. In the end, ‘Hypnos’ is a subtilization of a theme already broached in several earlier tales, notably ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’—the notion that certain ‘dreams’ provide access to other realms of entity beyond that of the five senses or waking world.