Lovecraft and the Mass Rock

In searching the past for clues to the present, I have been reading a little about Ireland. My family is from western Ireland, historically a poverty-stricken and now a vastly depopulated place. Sad to say, much of that was because of the British. The Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were among the chief instruments of British oppression. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), an Anglo-Irishman and a man to whom we as Americans owe so much, called the Penal Laws: 

[A] machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.

I leafed through a book the other day and my eyes landed on a page, specifically a quote on that page. The book is Ireland for Beginners by Phil Evans and Eileen Pollock (1983). Here's the quote:

Illicit Catholic worship survive[d] [in the early 1700s] using round flat-top rocks as altars hidden in the woods. (p. 26)

When I read those words, I thought immediately of the altar stones in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and his associates. Altar stones appear in "The Dunwich Horror," "The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Colour Out of Space," all by Lovecraft, and "Notebook Found in a Deserted House," by Robert Bloch. In every one of those stories, they are associated with forbidden rites, including human sacrifice and of bringing into our world beings from other places. (1) They are found on hilltops and in backwoods. If you replace the word Catholic with the word Cthulhu in the second quote above, you have a pretty precise description of them. The stone used in Catholic Ireland, by the way, is called a mass rock, or Carraig an Aifrinn.

That brings up two issues. First, the words Cthulhu and Catholic. If you remove the vowels and the last consonant (if h is a consonant) from those words, you get:

Cthl

and

Cthl

Coincidence? Yeah, I think so.

Second and more to the point, H.P. Lovecraft was a pretty WASPy guy, an old New England Protestant Tory. Did that make him anti-Catholic? I have never read anything to suggest that he was anti-Catholic, although as a nativist, he might have been disposed against Catholics and people from Catholic countries, for example, Italians, Spaniards, and Latin Americans. Castro, the old man who knows the story of Cthulhu in "The Call of Cthulhu," leaps to mind as one of that type. He's only one, but I would hazard a guess that there were others.

So was Lovecraft exposed to anti-Catholic feelings remaining from Colonial America, especially from New England, which was first settled by Puritans? And did those feelings find their way into his stories? Rhode Island was founded as a colony of religious freedom. Did that include freedom for Catholics? I would like to think so. I have read that 44% of the people in Rhode Island are Catholic, making the state the most Catholic by percentage of any state in the Union. But how far back does that Catholicism go? To colonial times? I can't say.

In addition to being a WASPish and old-fashioned New Englander, Lovecraft was a fan of the writers and thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Penal Laws were enacted and enforced in Ireland around that time. That was also a time for the casting out of religion in favor of the supremacy of reason in western Europe. Our revolution grew, in part, out of the Age of Reason and the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Unfortunately the French Revolution did, too, and it is still bearing poisoned fruits in the forms of materialism, atheism, leftism, socialism, etc. Lovecraft himself was a materialist or an atheist, a fact S.T. Joshi, an atheist himself, never fails to mention. All that may be beside the point. The point is this: did the image of the Catholic mass rock, hidden in the woods in a place where forbidden rites were held, survive into the twentieth century? And did it find its way into weird fiction? If so, was it still moored to anti-Catholicism, or had it been cut loose, only to survive as a kind of atavism?

Note
(1) You could say that, in a way, the Catholic Mass is symbolic of human sacrifice and a bringing into the world of a being from another place. Beyond that, we shouldn't forget that the story of the resurrection of Cthulhu is similar to the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that similarity to have been unintentional, but you never know.

H.P. Lovecraft in eighteenth century dress, by Virgil Finlay.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Notes on "The Colour Out of Space"

I recently reread "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft, a story composed in March 1927 and published in Amazing Stories in September of that year. I won't analyze the story. Instead I'll just put down some notes.

Here's the cover of the issue of Amazing Stories in which "The Colour Out of Space" appeared:

Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

"The Colour Out of Space" was obviously not the cover story, but the oversized plants give a person pause. Here's a quote from Lovecraft's story:

Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world.

Below is an image of the dust jacket of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, published in 1969 by Arkham House. "The Colour Out of Space" is not in that book, but the monstrous skunk cabbages seem to have made it into Lee Brown Coye's drawing:

Or maybe that's a jack-in-the-pulpit on the right.

"The Colour Out of Space" had been reprinted two years before in 3 Tales of Horror. Here is Coye's dust jacket design for that book:

The illustration here is in fact of "The Colour Out of Space." Those are the corpses of Nahum Gardner's two sons, Merwin and Zenas, sunk in the poisoned well outside his house. Today is the anniversary of the death of Thaddeus Gardner, Nahum's oldest son, which took place on October 19, 1882. You don't want to know what happened to him. Or if you do, just read the story. By coincidence, this is also the anniversary of the death of John E. Vetter, a friend of Coye and a fan and collector of Lovecraft. He died on October 19, 2002, at age seventy.

Once you've read enough stories and seen enough movies, they start to stick in your head and the similarities among them stand out. I'm not sure that similarities signify that one writer is influenced or inspired by another or that he or she is copying or swiping from another. I'll just say that I can see similarities among "The Colour Out of Space," The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897), the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) (remember the crumbling?), and The Blob (1958). The Blob is especially like "The Colour Out of Space," at least at the beginning.

In reading about Lovecraft's story, I came across the idea that the author wanted to create a truly alien and incomprehensible being. I was on the lookout for indications of that in "The Colour Out of Space." Nahum Gardner himself says it:

" . . . dun't know what it wants . . . ."

The phrase is ambiguous at first glance. Is it that Nahum "dun't know what it wants"? Or is it the entity itself that "dun't know what it wants"? But then Nahum says, in reference to his wife, ". . . dun't know how long sense I fed her . . . ." It seems clear, then, that Nahum doesn't know what the entity wants. In its utter alienness, the entity cannot be understood. And that makes me think of Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (1961), a novel about a truly alien intelligence.

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

More Whip-poor-wills

At PulpFest, I saw a copy of Whispers #10, from 1977. The cover drawing is by Frank Utpatel (1905-1980). It drew my eye because of the whip-poor-wills in flight:

On July 14, 2015, I wrote about whip-poor-wills in weird fiction. I included the following image by Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981):

Coye's drawing is an illustration for "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth, from Weird Tales, September 1948. Coye also created the cover illustration for that issue:

There aren't any whip-poor-wills on the cover, but according to Jaffery and Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales, "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" was indeed the cover story.

Coye clearly worked from John James Audubon's paintings of whip-poor-wills and Chuck-will's widows:

It's clear that Frank Utpatel did as well, at least for the bird in the upper part of his composition, which is simply a reversed image of Audubon's whip-poor-will. The bird perched on the fencepost may simply be a copy from a field guide, such as the Golden field guide to Birds of North America (1966).

Coye and Utpatel were near contemporaries. Both worked for Weird Tales, Arkham House, and Whispers. Both continued working up until their deaths, and both had drawings published in the year that they died. In Utpatel's case, those were for issues of The August Derleth Society Newsletter. Incidentally, during the 1960s, Derleth published a magazine of verse. The title was Hawk and Whip-Poor-Will: Poems of Man and Nature.

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Bittersweet Fortnight in 1969

At PulpFest, I bought two TV tie-in novels of The Prisoner. I've read them both and liked No. 2 (the novel) better than No. 3. In reading about The Prisoner, I found an interesting coincidence:

On Tuesday, September 2, 1969, the original run of Star Trek came to an end with a repeat of the episode "Requiem for Methuselah." The last line of dialogue in that last episode was spoken by Mr. Spock to ease the heartbreak and pain of his friend, Captain Kirk. The line was a single word: "Forget."

Nine days later, on Thursday, September 11, the last episode of The Prisoner was broadcast. It, too, was a repeat, the last in a series that had been a summer replacement show in 1968 and 1969, despite the fact that there was only one season (17 episodes) made. Thus, in the space of less than a fortnight at the beginning of September 1969, two of the very best television shows ever made ended. The consolation was that Star Trek went into syndication immediately. The first syndicated episode was broadcast on Monday, September 8, 1969. Fans of The Prisoner would have to wait many more years before getting a chance to see their favorite show again. Thankfully, both are now available on video.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Edgar Allan Poe & James Whitcomb Riley

Today is a day of two anniversaries. On this date in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore at age forty. The circumstances of his death remain mysterious. Also on this date in 1849, James Whitcomb Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana. Two generations, six hundred miles, and the veil of death separated them. How could they ever have been connected? Both were poets. Of the two, only Edgar Allan Poe was published in Weird Tales. Riley could have been, as he wrote about ghosts, witches, and goblins. His verse even earned him a place in Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House in 1947. Poe was also in that volume, as were H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, among many others. But that wasn't a connection so much as an association. The connection between Poe and Riley was far older than that. It had come about seventy years before, in fact, in July 1877, when Riley, then twenty-seven years old, conspired to perpetrate a hoax on the reading public by passing off his poem "Leonainie," as an undiscovered work by Edgar Allan Poe. On August 2, 1877, the Kokomo Dispatch, its editor in on the hoax, published the poem:

LEONAINIE

Leonainie--angels named her;

And they took the light

Of the laughing stars and framed her

In a smile of white:

And they made her hair of gloomy

Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy

Moonshine, and they brought her to me

In the solemn night.--

In a solemn night of summer,

When my heart of gloom

Blossomed up to meet the comer

Like a rose in bloom;

All the forebodings that distressed me

I forgot as joy caressed me--

(Lying joy that caught and pressed me

In the arms of doom!)

Only spake the little lisper

In the angel-tongue;

Yet I, listening, heard her whisper,--

"Songs are only sung

Here below that they may grieve you--

Tales are told you to deceive you--

So must Leonainie leave you

While her love is young."

Then God smiled and it was morning,

Matchless and supreme;

Heaven's glory seemed adorning

Earth with its esteem:

Every heart but mine seemed gifted

With the voice of prayer, and lifted

Where my Leonainie drifted

From me like a dream.

It didn't take long for the hoax to fall through. Newspapers all over the country were quick to recognize it and to comment on the poem and its then unknown author:

From the New York Evening Post (Aug. 7): ". . . a poetic sin has been laid at [Poe's] door . . . ."

From the Philadelphia Commonwealth (Aug. 8): "The gin mills of Maryland and the Old Dominion never turned out liquor bad enough to debase the genius of Poe to the level of these wretched verses."

From the Baltimore American (Aug. 9): "The unfortunate poet [Poe] was no doubt guilty of many indiscretions, but it is hard to suppose that in his most eccentric mood he could ever have penned such wretched doggerel as that which is now attempted to be fastened on him under the name of 'Leonainie'."

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Aug. 9): "The composition is wild enough to have been written under the influence of Egyptian or Terre Haute whiskey, and possesses, therefore, what an eminent journalist of this city defines as a local flavor."

And this tantalizing possibility:

From the Nashville Daily American (Aug. 10): "[Poe] will surely pay his respects to the scalp of the Indiana man who brought it out."

On August 25, the Kokomo Tribune, rival paper to the Dispatch, printed an exposé. James Whitcomb Riley was implicated as the author, and the editor of the Dispatch as his co-conspirator. Both suffered damage to their reputations. Riley lost his job. But he didn't stay down for long, and by the end of his life, all had been forgiven, as he was loved and cherished as the "Hoosier Poet" and the "Children's Poet." Even his poem was redeemed in the collection Armazindy, published on this date in 1894. In any case, Happy Birthday to the Hoosier Poet! And R.I.P. to E.A.P.

James Flora's illustration for "Nine Little Goblins" by James Whitcomb Riley, a poem reprinted in the book A Red Skelton in Your Closet (1965).

I would like to acknowledge the website James Whitcomb Riley, at this URL:

http://www.jameswhitcombriley.com/leonainie.htm

for information used to write this article.

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn (1976)

Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) wrote more stories than anyone for Weird Tales and for a longer period of time, from 1923 to 1952, almost the entire run of the magazine. If my count is right, Quinn placed 146 stories in "The Unique Magazine" in those years. Ninety-three of them were in the continuing adventures of his occult detective, Jules de Grandin. Of those 146, seven were reprinted in The Adventures of Jules de Grandin in 1976. They include the first of the de Grandin stories, "The Horror on the Links," retitled for the book "Terror on the Links."

A dealer at PulpFest recommended the Jules de Grandin stories to me. I have just one of the five Popular Library reprint books of the 1970s. These books are hard to come by at a decent price. I was lucky enough to find one at Half Price Books, one of the world's greatest stores, for just two dollars. I finally finished it this weekend.

Here's what I think: Seabury Quinn set up his series seemingly with the Sherlock Holmes series in mind. Jules de Grandin is French rather than British. Nonetheless, he is, like his predecessor, eccentric and seemingly all-knowing. Eccentric is probably a kind word. I find him to be annoying as all get-out. His assistant, Dr. Trowbridge, plays the Dr. Watson role as recorder and narrator of de Grandin's adventures. Unlike Watson, Dr. Trowbridge is grouchy, obtuse, and practically useless. You can lay the blame at the author's feet.

Despite all of that, Quinn was, over all, a good writer. Certain of his scenes are unforgettable, as in "The Man Who Cast No Shadow" when de Grandin destroys a vampire in her grave and discovers another in his underground lair. In short, I will keep looking for the Jules de Grandin books, but not at the prevailing price. One thing dealers should realize is that their clientele is probably beginning to disappear. The generations that first read pulp magazines and even paperback books are passing from the earth. I doubt that the prices they once paid will hold for very much longer.

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn

Edited by Robert Weinberg

(Popular Library, 1976)

Cover art by Vincent di Fate; illustrations by Steve Fabian, including a map of Harrisonville, New Jersey, and portrait drawings of Jules de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge based on drawings by Virgil Finlay.

Contents:

• "A Sherlock of the Supernatural" by Lin Carter
• "By Way of Explanation" by Seabury Quinn (originally in The Phantom-Fighter [?] by Seabury Quinn, Mycroft & Moran, 1966)
• "Terror on the Links" (originally "The Horror on the Links," Weird Tales, Oct. 1925; reprinted May 1937)
• "The Tenants of Broussac" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1925)
• "The Isle of Missing Ships" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1926)
• "The Dead Hand" (Weird Tales, May 1926)
• "The Man Who Cast No Shadow" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1927)
• "The Blood Flower" (originally "The Blood-Flower," Weird Tales, Mar. 1927)
• "The Curse of Everard Maundy" (Weird Tales, July 1927)
• "Afterword" by Robert Weinberg

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Conservative vs. the Zombie

A year ago this weekend, I ended my seemingly interminable series "What is the monster of the twenty-first century?" with the conclusion that zombies, representing mass man and his desire to dehumanize, consume, and ultimately eradicate the individual human being, are the monsters of our time. Today (Oct. 3, 2015) I read an opinion piece more or less along those lines. (Like I've said before, it's nice when your theorizing is confirmed by others.) The piece is called "In the Zombie World, Only the Conservative Survive." It's by David French, an attorney and staff writer at the National Review. You can find it by clicking here.

Mr. French's essay opens with these words:

          The Obama era is the era of the zombie. It is a strange irony that the politician of "hope and change" has presided over a pop-culture world dominated by shuffling, moaning, undead cannibals who mindlessly rule a post-government apocalyptic landscape.

I might argue that it's no irony at all, being that our current president is the leader and apotheosis of mass man. In any case, the angle of the essay is skepticism towards government and faith in the individual, especially in the the well-armed individual living out what can only be called conservative principles. Mr. French writes: "In zombieland, there are three kinds of people: those who know how to use guns, those who learn how to use guns, and zombies." It's strange that he would include zombies in the category of people, but if zombies don't represent monsters or disease or some alien force so much as they represent mass man or simply the fallen state of man, then they should probably be included in that category.

In my essay of last year, I wondered whether the zombie-like people among us see themselves as such, just like I wondered in the 1980s whether the creeps among us saw themselves as the creeps in the high school movies of the time. The answer then was probably the same as the answer now: no, probably not. Another quote to that point from "In the Zombie World, Only the Conservative Survive":

Yet despite these [conservative-minded] premises, the Left loves this show [The Walking Dead or TWD]. Read Huffington Post or Salon or virtually any other lefty site that follows pop culture, and they’re dissecting TWD, breaking down and analyzing episodes with loving care. 

So the answer appears to be no, period. That leads to the conclusion I have made, and that Mr. French seems to make as well, that ultimately all people are conservative in that conservatism is simply a fact of life. It's the way people live when they are free.

That got me thinking about another point I left out of my series from last year (as if I left anything out). The heroes of our literature and popular culture embody conservative values: courage, strength, self-reliance, self-actuation, individual character, love of freedom, pursuit of justice, and so on. Odysseus doesn't try to understand his enemies. He kills them. The men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits of Middle Earth don't take an invasion of their world by masses simply by lying down, nor do they wish to surrender their rights or freedoms to a prevailing force. They resist. Daryl on The Walking Dead doesn't believe in a democracy in which the dehumanizing and all-consuming mass man has his way. Instead he pierces their brains with bolts from his crossbow. The leftist hero on the other hand--Che Guevara, Mao, Lenin--is a thug, a criminal, a mass murderer, in short a mass man who wishes to strip his fellow human beings of their rights, freedoms, property, and lives, more importantly, of their individual identity, dignity, and humanity. Again, we are Winston and Julia, the leftist hero is O'Brien. Like O'Brien--and like Number 2 in The Prisoner--he wants not so much to kill us as to make us one of him, to get us to conform. He wants us no longer to be individuals. So can the Leftist identify in any way with Winston or Number 6? I would say no, for the Leftist doesn't value freedom or individuality. If that's so, then how can the Leftist identify with the human beings in The Walking Dead against the zombies, whose sole desire is to render the individual one of the mindless masses? Again, I would argue that he can't. If you call yourself a leftist--or in the parlance of our times, a liberal--and you identify with human beings over zombies, you are a traitor to your beliefs--and loyal to the inescapable fact of your humanity.

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley