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

‘The Unnamable’ and ‘The Festival’, Lovecraft’s two other original stories of 1923, return to New England in their different ways. The former is slight, but could be thought of as a sort of veiled justification for the type of weird tale Lovecraft was evolving; much of it reads like a treatise on aesthetics. At the beginning there is a lengthy discussion on the weird between Randolph Carter and Joel Manton (clearly based upon Maurice W. Moe). Manton does not believe that there can be anything in life or literature that could be ‘unnamable’; but he finds out differently when such an entity attacks them as they are sitting in a New England churchyard.

Aside from its interesting aesthetic reflections, ‘The Unnamable’ fosters that sense of the lurking horror of New England history and topography which we have already seen in ‘The Picture in the House’, and which would become a dominant trope in Lovecraft’s later work. The tale is set in Arkham, but the actual inspiration for the setting—a ‘dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb’ and, nearby, a ‘giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab’—is the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem, where just such a tree-engulfed slab can be found.

‘The Festival’ (written probably in October) can be considered a virtual three-thousand-word prose-poem for the sustained modulation of its prose. The first-person narrator comes back to Kingsport and is led into an underground chamber beneath a church and encounters spectacular winged horrors that fly off into the unknown, bearing the inhabitants of the town on their backs. This is the first story in which the mythical town of Kingsport (first cited in ‘The Terrible Old Man’) is definitively identified with Marblehead. Much of the topography cited in the story corresponds exactly with that of Marblehead, although some of the actual sites mentioned have only recently been identified by Donovan K. Loucks. For example, the church that is the focal point of the tale is probably not St Michael’s Episcopal Church, as has long been thought. If Lovecraft had a specific church in in mind, he may have been referring either to the First Meeting House (built in 1648 on Old Burial Hill) or the Second Congregational Church (built in 1715 at 28 Mugford Street), or a fusion of the two.

There is, in addition to the topography of Marblehead, a literary (or scientific) influence to the story. In 1933 Lovecraft stated in reference to the tale: ‘In intimating an alien race I had in mind the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers who preserved primitive rites like those of the witch-cult—I had just been reading Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe

.’¹¹ This landmark work of anthropology by Margaret A. Murray, published in 1921, made the claim (now regarded by modern scholars as highly unlikely) that the witch-cult in both Europe and America had its origin in a pre-Aryan race that was driven underground but continued to lurk in the hidden corners of the earth. Lovecraft— having just read a very similar fictional exposition of the idea in Machen’s stories of the ‘Little People’—was much taken with this conception, and would allude to it in many subsequent references to the Salem witches in his tales; as late as 1930 he was presenting the theory seriously.

Meanwhile Lovecraft had actually met a writer of weird fiction in his own hometown—Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr (1896–1971), who with his wife Muriel became fairly close to Lovecraft in the year or two preceding his marriage. The Eddys were at that time residents of East Providence, across the Seekonk River, and, after an initial round of correspondence and a few telephone calls, Lovecraft walked three miles to visit them at their home in August 1923.