The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (80 page)

103
Palmyra was a city in northern Arabia that for a brief period in the later third century C.E. attained celebrity when a succession of Roman emperors favored it with their patronage. It was destroyed by the Emperor Aurelian in 273. The statuary and architecture of Palmyra are a fusion of Greco-Roman and Middle Eastern styles.

104
This cry is as unexplained in Poe as it is in HPL. It is first uttered by savages dwelling on some islands off the coast of Antarctica (
Arthur Gordon Pym
, ch. 22), and later by birds: “The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal
Tekeli-li!
as they retreated from our vision” (ch. 25).

105
Orpheus's wife, Eurydice, fleeing from Aristaeus, stepped on a serpent and died. Orpheus descended to Tartarus and made a plea to Hades, ruler of the underworld, to restore her to life. Hades granted the request on the condition that he not look back at her until she has left the underworld. Orpheus observed the condition until the last moment, when he looked back to see if she was still behind him; he then lost her forever. The story is told in Ovid's
Metamorphoses
10.1-77.

106
When angels came to Lot to announce the imminent destruction of Sodom, Lot and his family fled; but his wife looked back at their abandoned property and as punishment was turned into a pillar of rock salt. See Genesis 19:1-26.

107
This exact subway line is still in operation today as part of the Red Line to Harvard. It is one of the oldest subway lines in the nation, and the entire run from South Station to Harvard was completed on December 3, 1916. HPL no doubt rode it on many subsequent occasions. The “Washington Under” stop (i.e., under Washington Street) is now called Downtown Crossing; and there is now an additional stop, Charles/MGH (i.e., at the foot of Longfellow Bridge near the Charles River and the Massachusetts General Hospital) prior to the three stops in Cambridge (Kendall, Central, and Harvard).

108
This sentence appears to be an allusion to the basic plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story “The Horror of the Heights” (in
Danger! and Other Stories
[1918]; rpt. in
Tales of Terror and Mystery
[1922]). HPL reports reading Conan Doyle's horror stories when he visited W. Paul Cook in Athol in the summer of 1928 (see HPL to Lillian D. Clark, June 25, 1928; ms., JHL).

109
Sir Douglas Mawson (see n. 36) commanded an expedition to the Antarctic in 1929-31 that explored Kemp Land and Enderby Land.

110
The celebrated tale is first told in Homer's
Odyssey
12.142-200. Ed ward Lucas White elaborated upon the myth in “The Song of the Sirens,” in
The Song of the Sirens and Other Stories
(1919), which HPL read in 1921.

111
The following fragmentary utterances by Danforth were intended by HPL to be vague and inconclusive, so as to end the novel on a note of portentous mystery. In his notes to the novel HPL has written: “Danf. screams at what he sees in sky—over mts—PIPING? VAPOURS? . . . End.” Cf. HPL to August Derleth, May 16, 1931: “In my tale the shoggoth provides a concrete & tangible climax—& what I wished to add was merely a vague hint of further spiritual horrors . . . What the thing was supposed to be, of course, was a region containing vestiges of some utterly primal cosmic force or process ruling or occupying the earth (among other planets) even before its solidification, & upheaved from the sea-bottom when the great Antarctic land mass arose. Lack of
interest
in the world beyond the inner mountains would account for its non-reconquest of the sphere. But then again, there may have been no such thing!” (ms., State Historical Society of Wisconsin).

112
The title of sonnet XXVII of
Fungi from Yuggoth
. Pharos means lighthouse (from Pharos, the name of the island in the Bay of Alexandria upon which was a famous lighthouse).

“The Thing on the Doorstep” was written on August 21-24, 1933, and first published in
Weird Tales
( January 1937). The story appears to have two significant literary influences. One is H. B. Drake's
The Shadowy Thing
(1928; first published in England as
The Remedy
, 1925), a novel about a man who displays anomalous powers of hypnosis and mind-transference. An entry in HPL's commonplace book (#158) records the plot-germ: “Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence over him. Kills him in defence of his soul—walls in ancient cellar—BUT—the dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body)
changes bodies with him . . .
leaving him a conscious corpse in cellar.” This is not exactly a description of the plot of
The Shadowy Thing
, but rather an imaginative extrapolation based upon it. In Drake's novel, a man, Avery Booth, does indeed exhibit powers that seem akin to hypnosis, to such a degree that he can oust the mind or personality from another person's body and occupy it. Booth does so on several occasions throughout the novel, and in the final episode he appears to have come back from the dead (he had been killed in a battle in World War I) and occupied the body of a friend and soldier who had himself been horribly mangled in battle. HPL has amended this plot by introducing the notion of
mind-exchange:
whereas Drake does not clarify what happens to the ousted mind when it is taken over by the mind of Booth, HPL envisages an exact transference whereby the ousted mind occupies the body of its possessor. The notion of mind-exchange between persons of different genders may have been derived from the other presumed literary influence, Barry Pain's
An Exchange of Souls
(1911), which HPL had in his library. Here a scientist persuades his wife to undergo an experiment whereby their “souls” or personalities are exchanged by means of a machine he has built; but in the course of the experiment the man's body dies and the machine is damaged. The rest of the novel is involved in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the woman (now endowed with her husband's personality but lacking much of his scientific knowledge) to repair the machine.

In one sense the story is a reprise of
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
: the attempt by Asenath (in Derby's body) to pass herself off as Edward in the madhouse is analogous to Joseph Curwen's attempts to maintain that he is Charles Dexter Ward. In noting that Asenath is in fact the soul of her own father Ephraim, HPL may have been making a mocking allusion to the Bible, where Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, marries Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 41:45); one of their offspring is Ephraim (Genesis 41:52). HPL has, therefore, reversed the relationship of the biblical Ephraim and Asenath. (HPL also chose these names to reflect the Massachusetts Puritans' fondness for using names from the Old Testament for their own offspring.)

Other names in the story are also of biographical significance. HPL's familiarity with Salem is reflected in the names Derby and Crowninshield, both prominent in Salem history. The Derby house (1761) was built by Richard Derby (1712-1783) for his son Elias Hasket Derby and Elias's wife, Elizabeth Crowninshield. The name of the story's narrator, Daniel Upton, is an echo of Winslow Upton (1853-1914), a professor of astronomy at Brown University and a friend of the Lovecraft family who assisted in HPL's early absorption of astronomy.

HPL was so dissatisfied with the story upon its completion that he refused to submit it anywhere. At last, in the summer of 1936, when Julius Schwartz proposed to HPL to market some of his tales in England, HPL reluctantly submitted the story (along with “The Haunter of the Dark”) to Farnsworth Wright of
Weird Tales
, who accepted both of them with alacrity.

S. T. Joshi, “Autobiography in Lovecraft,”
Lovecraft Studies
No. 1 (Fall 1979): 7-19 (esp. 12-15).

Robert M. Price, “Two Biblical Curiosities in Lovecraft,”
Lovecraft Studies
No. 16 (Spring 1988): 12-13, 18.

Donald R. Burleson, “The Thing: On the Doorstep,”
Lovecraft Studies
No. 33 (Fall 1995): 14-18.

1
This phase of Derby's character—his precocity—may reflect HPL's colleague Alfred Galpin (1901-1983). In 1918 HPL remarked of Galpin: “It is hard for me to realise that eleven years separate me from Galpin, for his thoughts fit in so well with my own. . . . He is passing me already in the intellectual race, and in a few years will have left me behind completely” (SL 1.72).

2
HPL began writing poetry in his sixth year, although the earliest surviving specimen—“The Poem of Ulysses” (1897)—was written when he was seven. None of this early verse is, however, weird, consisting largely of retellings of classical myths.

3
This phase of Derby's character is a clear reflection of HPL's own, especially in regard to his overprotective mother. Consider a series of anecdotes told by an acquaintance, relating to HPL's infancy: “On their summer vacations in Dudley, Massachusetts [in 1892] . . . , Mrs. Lovecraft refused to eat her dinner in the dining room, not to leave her sleeping son alone for an hour one floor above. When a diminutive teacher-friend, Miss Ella Sweeney, took the rather rangy youngster to walk, holding his hand, she was enjoined by Howard's mother to stoop a little lest she pull the boy's arm from its socket. When Howard pedaled his tricycle along Angell Street, his mother trooped beside him, a guarding hand upon his shoulder.” Quoted in S. T. Joshi,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
(West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996), p. 51. HPL claimed to have a variety of nervous ailments that made school attendance sporadic.

4
HPL's friend Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) produced a sensation in California when he published
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
(1912) at the age of nineteen, inspiring critics to hail him a throwback to Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne.

5
Justin Geoffrey is a character in Robert E. Howard's tale “The Black Stone” (
Weird Tales
, November 1931); in that story he is said to have traveled to a small village in Hungary, written “a weird and fantastic poem” called “The People of the Monolith,” and then “died screaming in a madhouse five years ago” (Robert E. Howard,
Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors
[New York: Baen Books, 1987], pp. 10, 12). In giving his date of death as 1926, HPL not only was seeking to harmonize the date with Howard's tale, but may also have been thinking of Clark Ashton Smith's mentor, the celebrated California poet George Sterling (1869-1926), who committed suicide in his room at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco.

6
HPL no doubt wished that this were the case in his own circumstances. In 1936 he wrote: “No one more annoyingly lacks the least rudiments of remunerative enterprise or commercial aptitude than I. I simply don't know how to gather cash except incidentally and accidentally. I made the mistake in youth of not realising that literary endeavour does not always mean an income. I ought to have trained myself for some routine clerical work . . . affording a dependable stipend yet leaving my mind free enough for a certain amount of creative activity—but in the absence of immediate need I was too damned a fool to look ahead. I seemed to think that sufficient money for ordinary needs was something which everyone had as a matter of course—and if I ran short, I ‘could always sell a story or poem or something' ” (SL 5.363).

7
HPL appreciated the boyishness of his friend Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) but mercilessly ridiculed him for his attempts to grow a mustache. On their first meeting in 1922, HPL remarked: “Long . . . is an exquisite boy of twenty who hardly looks fifteen. He is dark and slight, with a bushy wealth of almost black hair and a delicate, beautiful face still a stranger to the gillette. I think he likes the tiny collection of lip-hairs—about six on one side and five on the other . . .” (SL 1.180).

8
Albert N. Wilmarth, in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” lives at 118 Saltonstall Street in Arkham (CC 208). The name derives from Sir Richard Saltonstall (1586-1661), who came to Massachusetts in 1630 on the
Arbella
and founded the city of Watertown.

9
First cited in “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1921-22).

10
The
Book of Eibon
was invented by Clark Ashton Smith in “Ubbo-Sathla” (
Weird Tales
, July 1933) as the purported work of the Hyperborean wizard Eibon. HPL had read the story in manuscript as early as February 1932 (see HPL to August Derleth, March 4, 1932; ms., State Historical Society of Wisconsin), and first cited the
Book of Eibon
in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932; MM 263).
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
by von Junzt was a joint invention of Robert E. Howard (who came up with von Junzt and the English title of his book,
Nameless Cults
) and August Derleth, who supplied the German title. See CC 418n.15. For the
Necronomicon
, n. 37 to “The Dunwich Horror.”

11
HPL may have been thinking of his own literary apprenticeship, when he was greatly influenced successively by Poe, Lord Dunsany, and Arthur Machen. As late as 1929 he lamented: “There are my ‘Poe' pieces & my ‘Dunsany' pieces—but alas—where are any
Lovecraft
pieces?” (SL 2.315; “any” mistranscribed as “my” in SL).

12
HPL attempted to enlist in the Rhode Island National Guard in May 1917, but intervention by his mother caused him to be rejected for health reasons (see SL 1.45-49).

13
Plattsburg (now spelled Plattsburgh) is a city in northeastern New York State. It is the site of the United States Military Reservation, founded in 1814 and one of the oldest military schools in the country. In 1916, as part of the “Plattsburg experiment” initiated by Major General Leonard Wood, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, the military base at Plattsburg became one of five camps in the eastern United States for the rapid training of officers to serve in the army in the event of American entry into World War I. The next year the plan was enlarged to encompass sixteen camps across the country, which were opened on May 15, 1917.