The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (2 page)

Why would such a man as Lovecraft—who up to this point had expressed an interest only in literature, science, colonial antiquities, and other intellectual subjects, and who at the age of twenty-nine had expressed a complete inexperience in “amatory phenomena”
⁶
—suddenly plunge into marriage? To be sure, Lovecraft was one of the most asexual beings on record; perhaps he thought that his marriage would also be largely an affair of the intellect. Certainly, his strange March 9 letter to his aunts unwittingly suggests that marriage to Sonia might be slightly preferable to boredom and suicide! But perhaps a much later work—the story “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933)—provides some hints, although even these may be unwitting.

Here we find a weak-willed individual, Edward Derby, who upon the death of his mother “was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady”—just as Lovecraft professed that the death of his own mother in 1921 “gave me an extreme nervous shock,” and later: “Psychologically I am conscious of a vastly increased aimlessness and inability to be interested in events. . . . This bereavement decentralises existence—my sphere no longer possesses a nucleus, since there is now no one person especially interested in what I do or whether I be alive or dead.”
⁷
But what does Derby do? “Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.” This is the closest Lovecraft ever came to speaking, in public, of the effect his mother had upon him. The cloistered life the two of them led from 1904 to 1919—with ever-dwindling finances and with his mother so terrified of bankruptcy and so frustrated by her brilliant but “useless” son that she herself suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be sent to Butler Hospital—can only be imagined. Lovecraft himself was plagued by a variety of nervous ailments during this period, and yet in later years he would remark casually to friends that “My health improved vastly and rapidly, though without any ascertainable cause, about 1920-21.”
⁸
Was Lovecraft really so unaware of the “unseen bondage” he had escaped? There is good reason to doubt it, if “The Thing on the Doorstep” is any evidence.

And just as Asenath Waite, although much younger than Edward Derby, pursues him relentlessly until he marries her, Sonia Greene—who first met Lovecraft only six weeks after the death of his mother—went out of her way to visit him in Providence and to invite him for lengthy visits to her Brooklyn apartment in 1921-22. She claims that they were corresponding almost daily in 1923-24, and he must have made the decision to marry and uproot himself months before he actually did so. Initially, the fairylike skyscrapers of New York were a wonder and a marvel, and the numerous literary friends he had in the area were a tonic both to his intellectual and to his burgeoning social life. But eventually, one had to think of work. Sonia's hat shop collapsed, and there was suddenly “something of a shortage in the exchequer.”
⁹
Now began the humiliating period of job-hunting. But who, in this city of garish modernity and hard-sell, would hire a well-bred New England gentleman who had never been previously employed and seemed fit only to turn the elegant phrase? No one, it transpired, even though Lovecraft tried such inapposite positions as salesman for a collection agency and lamp-tester. Somewhat surprisingly, even publishing companies and advertising agencies that might have benefited from Lovecraft's facile pen turned him down. Sonia then had to leave New York and take a job in the Midwest, Lovecraft holing up in a one-room dive in what was then the virtual slum of Brooklyn Heights. Matters were not helped by his being robbed of nearly all his clothing in May 1925.

In this trying period, Lovecraft himself exhibited all the weakness of will of his later creation, Edward Derby. He could not bring himself to admit to his aunts that his decision to marry was rash and ill-conceived, and that (as he wrote in “He” [1925]) his “coming to New York had been a mistake”; instead, he waited until the aunts themselves (apparently prodded by Lovecraft's best friend in New York, Frank Belknap Long) issued the invitation to return home in the spring of 1926. Then, while accepting that invitation with alacrity and relief, he gave little thought to how his wife fit into the scheme of things. When Sonia proposed to set up a hat shop in Providence, the aunts vetoed the measure: shabby genteel though they were, they still had enough sense of their social standing to be appalled at the thought of a tradeswoman wife for their nephew. Lovecraft, like Derby, meekly acquiesced in his aunts' decision, effectively ending the marriage.

And yet, as Derby's friend Daniel Upton hypothesized, “Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—might not the
change
of dependence form a start toward actual
neutralisation,
leading ultimately to responsible independence?” This is exactly what happened in Lovecraft's case. As his longtime friend W. Paul Cook attested, Lovecraft's New York “exile” had been a hard necessity to his emotional maturation: “He came back to Providence a human being—and
what
a human being! He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.”
¹⁰
His homecoming did not signal a return to the hermitry of the 1908-13 period; instead, with a stable and familiar base of operations, Lovecraft could travel both physically (as he did over the next decade, from Quebec to Key West, from Cape Cod to New Orleans, from Boston to Charleston) and intellectually: he began paying close attention to developments in American and world politics, society, culture; his fictional work, accordingly, lost the “derivative and overbookish” qualities that hampered the poetry of Edward Derby. His transient experience of New York cosmopolitanism had only reemphasized the importance of his New England heritage for his aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual outlook; and yet, he became the antithesis of the backwoods New England farmer of “The Picture in the House” (1920), and instead took the entire cosmos as the stage of his imaginative voy agings.

Lovecraft's return to Providence in April 1926 impelled the greatest surge of creative writing he ever experienced, including such memorable performances as “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and “The Colour Out of Space” (1927). “Pickman's Model” (1926) is one of the lesser components of this outburst, but it is a tale of consuming interest for what it says about Lovecraft. To be sure, the setting of the tale—the then decaying North End of Boston—is rendered with matchless authenticity, although Lovecraft was mortified to discover that several of the locales (including the actual house that served as the basis for Richard Upton Pickman's studio) had been razed by the time he revisited the place the very next year; but the tale also underscores the aesthetic principles of weird fiction that Lovecraft had just outlined in his masterful historical sketch, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1925-27), and would continue to embody in his own work for the rest of his life. The distinction between literature and hackwork; the artist's need for self-expression; the quest for sincerity and honesty in art, whether that art be deemed “wholesome” or “morbid”—these principles may appear elementary, even hackneyed, but Lovecraft's resolute adherence to them is the chief reason why his work has survived while that of the many “professional” writers for
Weird Tales
and other weird, science fiction, and mystery pulps have vanished into a merited oblivion. In the short term, of course, Lovecraft was the sufferer for his aesthetic inviolability: some of his best work was rejected by the pulps as being too far beyond the stifling conventions of the genre, while it was unsuitable to a mainstream market that was, in its own direction, scarcely less conventional in its outlook and had deemed genre fiction as beyond the pale of serious literature.

One of the works that Lovecraft never bothered to prepare for publication, although he should have, was the short novel
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
(1927). It is the second of the two lengthy works he wrote at this time, directly following
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
(1926-27). Two more dissimilar works could scarcely be envisioned; and yet, in the end they underscore the same point. In the earlier work, the Bostonian Randolph Carter searches through dreamland for the “sunset city” he can no longer find in his dreams; along the way he meets all sorts of curious creatures—gugs, ghasts, zoogs, and, of course, a legion of cats who float Carter on their backs as they leap from the moon to the earth—and traverses a plethora of wondrous realms. The result is an orgy of imaginative exuberance, free of the strict topographical realism that governs most of Lovecraft's other work. But what does Carter find at the end of his journey? He is told by the god Nyarlathotep in a passage as poignant as anything in Lovecraft:

Similarly, Charles Dexter Ward, a native of Providence, travels all over Europe for the secrets of alchemy, but ultimately returns to the city of his birth—exactly as Lovecraft returned from two hellish years in New York. The simple sentence “It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home” is all we need to realize that Lovecraft is speaking of himself here. Ward is certainly the most autobiographical of Lovecraft's characters; and although he himself succumbs to the evil machinations of the wizard Joseph Curwen, Providence itself is saved and remains pure and unscathed.

The autobiographical elements in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) do not relate to character—unless we adopt Peter Cannon's wry theory that Wilbur Whateley, his mother Lavinia, and Old Whateley represent deliberately twisted versions of Lovecraft, his mother, and his grandfather—but rather relate to topography, embodying the travels in central Massachusetts Lovecraft had undertaken just prior to writing the story. Celebrated as it is, the story seems to have more than its share of flaws and drawbacks, particularly in a rather naïve good-versus-evil scenario that Lovecraft carefully eschewed in most of his other work. It is by far his most “pulpish” story, and it is no surprise that it was snapped up by
Weird Tales
as soon as he submitted it.

No one could imagine
At the Mountains of Madness
as being topographically autobiographical, for Lovecraft never voyaged outside of the North American continent, let alone ventured all the way to Antarctica. And yet, the Great White South had fascinated him since boyhood: he had written little pamphlets on the voyages of Ross, Wilkes, and other mid-nineteenth-century explorers, had eagerly followed the renewed wave of exploration at the turn of the century, and of course found Admiral Byrd's expedition of 1928-30 of consuming interest. Lovecraft was not shy in declaring the novel his “best” work of fiction
¹¹
—a judgment with which it is difficult to disagree. The meticulous realism of the opening chapters is vital in allowing Lovecraft to suggest a slow and gradual incursion of weirdness within this carefully etched realm. Just as, in
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
, Joseph Curwen and his nefarious deeds are inserted craftily and seam lessly within the known historical record of Rhode Island, so in
At the Mountains of Madness
Lovecraft incorporates his barrel-shaped extraterrestrials, the Old Ones, within what was then known of the topography, geology, and history of the Antarctic continent. Are we not told, in the
Necronomicon
, that the Old Ones exist “not in the spaces we know, but
between
them”? And did not Lovecraft, by 1931, evolve an aesthetic of weird fiction that exactly embodied this conception? “The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming
supplements
rather than
contradictions
of the visible & mensurable universe.”
¹²

Lovecraft well knew that, in the type of weird fiction he was writing, memorable characters do not, by design, bulk large:

And yet, Lovecraft also knew that his characters could not be so bland that they failed to elicit reader sympathy and reader identification; at the least, they had to serve as the reader's eyes, ears, and mind for the perception of the supernatural or supernormal “phenomena” being presented. And in a few works, as in
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
and “The Thing on the Doorstep,” characters do function as more than merely “principles (or defiances of principles) of the cosmic framework”; and in those cases Lovecraft found that the best source for the realism that would bring these characters alive was himself: