The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (77 page)

HPL's science in this novel is sound for its period, although subsequent discoveries have made a few points obsolete. He was so concerned about the scientific authenticity of the work that, prior to its first publication in
Astounding Stories
, he inserted some revisions eliminating a hypothesis he had made that the Antarctic continent was in fact two land masses separated by a frozen channel between the Ross and Weddell Seas—a hypothesis that had been proven false by the first airplane flight across the continent, by Lincoln Ellsworth and Herbert Hollick-Kenyon in late 1935.

Among HPL's inspirations for the story were the paintings of the Himalayas by Nicholas Roerich, which HPL had seen only the previous year in New York when the Nicholas Roerich Museum opened there. He probably did not set the tale in the Himalayas themselves both because they were already becoming well known and because he wanted to create the sense of awe implicit in mountains taller than any yet discovered on the planet. Only the relatively uncharted Antarctic Continent could fulfill both these functions.

The novel has frequently been thought to be a “sequel” to Poe's
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
; but, at least in terms of plot, it cannot be considered a true sequel—it picks up on very little of Poe's enigmatic work except for the cry “Tekeli-li!,” as unexplained in Poe as in HPL. It is not clear that
Pym
even influenced the work in any significant way. A recent scholar, Jules Zanger, has aptly noted that the novel “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” (“Poe's Endless Voyage:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
,”
Papers on Language and Literature
22, No. 3 [Summer 1986]: 282).

Although HPL declared that the short novel was “capable of a major serial division in the exact middle” (HPL to August Derleth, March 24, [1931]; ms., State Historical Society of Wisconsin), suggesting that, at least subconsciously, he envisioned the work as a two-part serial in
Weird Tales
, the novel was rejected in July 1931 by editor Farnsworth Wright. HPL reacted bitterly, and concluded late in life that “its hostile reception by Wright and others to whom it was shown probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career” (SL 5.224). HPL let the novel sit for years. Then, in the fall of 1935, he let a young science fiction fan, Julius Schwartz, act as agent on the work; Schwartz took it to F. Orlin Tremaine, editor of
Astounding Stories
, who accepted it at once, apparently without reading it. It was published, however, with severe editorial tampering, including the chopping up of HPL's long paragraphs, alteration of punctuation, and (toward the end) omission of several passages, amounting to about 1000 words. HPL was enraged at the alterations, calling Tremaine the “god-damn'd dung of a hyaena” (HPL to R. H. Barlow, June 4, 1936; LVW 331).

Ben P. Indick, “Lovecraft's POElar Adventure,”
Crypt of Cthulhu
No. 32 (St. John's Eve 1985): 25-31.

Peter Cannon, “
At the Mountains of Madness
as a Sequel to
Arthur Gordon Pym
,”
Crypt of Cthulhu
No. 32 (St. John's Eve 1985): 33-34.

Jason C. Eckhardt, “Behind the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft and the Antarctic in 1930,”
Lovecraft Studies
No. 14 (Spring 1987): 31-38.

Marc A. Cerasini, “Thematic Links in
Arthur Gordon Pym, At the Mountains of Madness
, and
Moby Dick
,”
Crypt of Cthulhu
No. 49 (Lammas 1987): 3-20.

S. T. Joshi, “Lovecraft's Alien Civilisations: A Political Interpretation,” in
Selected Papers on Lovecraft
(West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1989).

Peter Cannon, Jason C. Eckhardt, Steven J. Mariconda, and Hubert Van Calenbergh, “On
At the Mountains of Madness:
A Panel Discussion,”
Lovecraft Studies
No. 34 (Spring 1996): 2-10.

David A. Oakes, “A Warning to the World: The Deliberative Argument of
At the Mountains of Madness
,”
Lovecraft Studies
No. 39 (Summer 1998): 21-25.

1
The narrator of the novel is cited only by his last name in the text (see p. 262-64), but in “The Shadow out of Time” (1934-35) he is identified as Professor William Dyer of the geology department of Miskatonic University.

2
The phrase is found in the work of Lord Dunsany: “ ‘And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness.' ” “The Hashish Man,” in
A Dreamer's Tales
(1910; rpt. Boston: John W. Luce, [1916]), p. 125. But HPL may have arrived at the phrase independently.

3
On the origin of the name HPL wrote: “let me say that—although I am not personally acquainted with anyone of this patronymic—I chose it as a name typical of good old New England stock, yet not sufficiently common to sound conventional or hackneyed” (SL 5.228).

4
More exactly, as Jason C. Eckhardt (see Further Reading) points out, Dornier Do-J “Wal” airplanes, a twin-engine, single-wing flying boat used primarily for passenger service. The planes were each capable of carrying 7000 pounds of cargo.

5
The body of water just outside the Ross Ice Shelf, an enormous frozen sea at the edge of the Antarctic Continent facing the Pacific Ocean; discovered by the English explorer James Clark Ross (1800-1862) in his expedition of 1839-43. HPL wrote a nonextant juvenile work (c. 1902) entitled
Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N.

6
The English explorers Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (1874-1922) had explored the Ross Ice Shelf in an expedition of 1901-4; at one point they nearly died on a sled journey over it. On a later expedition (1907-9) Shackleton climbed Mount Erebus on Ross Island. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) undertook an expedition to Antarctica (1910-12) and on December 14, 1911, became the first man to reach the South Pole. Scott had attempted to beat him to the pole, but he failed to do so; on his return trip he died on the Ross Ice Shelf on March 29, 1912, leaving a poignant diary of his journey. The American Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888-1957) on his first Antarctic expedition (1928-30) landed on the Ross Ice Shelf, where he established Little America I.

7
The eon (now more commonly termed Proterozoic) following the Archean eon and preceding the Cambrian period. The exact extent and dates of eons, eras, periods, and epochs as understood in HPL's day sometimes differ considerably from modern estimates. See page 423 for a table of the geological terms referred to by HPL (figures indicate millions of years before the present; terms in square brackets indicate terms not cited by HPL).

8
It had become common information only with the Shackleton expedition of 1907-9, when the discovery of deep seams of coal established that the continent had once been warm.

9
For the
Arkham Advertiser
and the Associated Press, see, respectively, nn. 31 and 56 to “The Dunwich Horror.”

10
A conglomeration of good New England names; cf. Edward Derby in “The Thing on the Doorstep” and Richard Upton Pickman in “Pickman's Model.”

11
As Eckhardt points out, Byrd's 1928-30 expedition left New York Harbor on August 25, 1928, passed through the Panama Canal, and stopped at Dunedin, New Zealand, for supplies. Tasmania was formerly a common site for refueling or resupplying by expeditions either going to or returning from the Antarctic: John Briscoe (1831), Sir James Clark Ross (1839), Charles Wilkes (1841), Sir Douglas Mawson (1911), and others stopped there.

12
The name is perhaps a tip of the hat to Byrd, one of whose ships in his 1928-30 expedition was named
City of New York
(Richard E. Byrd,
Little America
[New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930], p. 11). It is not certain that HPL actually read
Little America
, but it is evident that he closely followed newspaper accounts of Byrd's expedition, as there are frequent mentions of Byrd in letters of the 1929-31 period.

13
The captain of a whale ship, the
C. A. Larsen,
that assisted Byrd's expedition was also a Scandinavian, Captain Nilsen (Byrd,
Little America
, p. 16).

14
“An atmospheric glow seen from a distance over snow-covered land in the arctic regions” (OED).

15
The range of mountains at the eastern end of Victoria Land; the tallest peak is Mount Sabine (12,201 feet above sea level).

16
The camp would be placed at the opposite end of the Ross Ice Shelf from where Byrd's contemporaneous expedition had established Little America.

17
Russian painter Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947) went to Tibet in 1923-28 and painted many landscape vistas of the Himalayas; he also wrote several books on Buddhism. Many of his paintings are in the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which opened in 1930 at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street and is now at 319 West 107th Street in New York City. HPL saw it soon after it opened, remarking in a letter: “Surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time, & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, May 21-22, 1930; ms., JHL).

18
The plateau of Leng was first cited in “Celephaïs” (1920) but was apparently in a dream-world there; in “The Hound” (1922) it is situated in “Central Asia” (CC 84).

19
Ross Island is at the very southeastern tip of the Ross Ice Shelf. Mount Erebus is 12,448 feet above sea level, Mount Terror 10,702 feet above sea level.

20
HPL had first visited Quebec in September 1930, only a few months before writing this novel, and had been captivated by its scenic grandeur and archaic architecture. Cf.
A Description of the Town of Quebeck
(1930-31): “The antient wall'd city of
Quebeck
. . . lyes on a promontory on the north bank of the River
St. Lawrence
; forming a small peninsula with the
St. Lawrence
on the south & east sides, & the confluent River
St. Charles
on the north. Most of this peninsula is a very lofty table-land, rising above a narrow shoar strip in the sheer cliffs of rock. . . . The average height of the cliffs is about 300 feet . . .”
To Quebec and the Stars
(West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1976), p. 115.

21
By Ross.

22
From “Ulalume,” ll. 15-19. The poem was written probably in July 1847 and first published in the
American Review
(December 1847). The identification of Yaanek with Mount Erebus was first made here by HPL and represents one of his several contributions to Poe scholarship.

23
The first book publication of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket
by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is dated 1838 but was copyrighted in June 1837. Two installments had appeared in the January and February 1837 issues of the
Southern Literary Messenger
, at that time edited by Poe. HPL is here concerned only with the latter portion of the novel, which takes place in a group of islands in the Antarctic Ocean.

24
It was Amundsen who pioneered the use of sled-dogs, and he was followed by later explorers. Scott's use of ponies and tractors ended in disaster and contributed to the ultimate tragedy of his 1911-12 expedition, when he died in the Antarctic.

25
HPL had invented the city of Kingsport in “The Terrible Old Man” (1920), but did not identify it with the city of Marblehead until “The Festival” (1923), a year after visiting that quaint Massachusetts seaport for the first time.

26
In other words, from November to March.

27
In fact, the average temperature in Antarctica during summer ranges from 32° F on the coast to -30° F in the interior, and during winter from -4° F on the coast to -94° F in the interior. HPL was himself notoriously sensitive to cold, although the causes for his ailment are not well understood. He was uncomfortable when the temperature dropped below 70°, and would lose consciousness in temperatures below 20°.

28
A large glacier to the southeast of the Ross Ice Shelf. It is near Mount Kirkpatrick, which, at 14,856 feet above sea level, is one of the highest points in the Antarctic Continent.

29
Mount Fridtjof Nansen is in fact only 13,350 feet above sea level.

30
As originally written, this passage read: “. . . west, but radically different from the parts lying eastward below South America, which in all probability form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas.” HPL must have revised the passage at some point before sending the tale (through his agent Julius Schwartz) to
Astounding Stories
in late 1935. The notion that the Antarctic Continent was two separate land masses was a minority opinion throughout the nineteenth century, although Ross had believed that Antarctica may be several different land masses. HPL is wrong in thinking that Byrd disproved the hypothesis: Lincoln Ellsworth and Herbert Hollick-Kenyon disproved it on the first airplane crossing of the continent from the Weddell to the Ross Sea in November 1935.