The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (81 page)

14
HPL is clearly reflecting on the death of his own mother in 1921, a few months before his thirty-first birthday, and the subsequent sense of liberation he felt. On one occasion HPL admitted to his wife that the influence of his mother upon him had been “devastating” (see Joshi,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
, p. 257).

15
HPL's friend Edward H. Cole taught at the Chauncy Hall School, a boys' day school in Boston (see HPL to E. Hoffmann Price, May 4, 1936; ms., JHL). For Kingsport see n. 25 to
At the Mountains of Madness
.

16
The reference is to “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), set in the decaying Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth (which HPL roughly identified with Newburyport) and dealing with a race of loathsome hybrid entities resulting from the sexual union of sea-creatures with the town's inhabitants. HPL mentions the Waite family on several occasions in the story, specifically one Luella Waite (see CC 302).

17
This seemingly misogynist sentiment should not be attributed to HPL. It is true that early in his career he had expressed scorn for women's intelligence (as in this comment from 1923: “In my opinion, [the female mind] is not only not more imaginative than that of Men, but vastly less so . . . They are by Nature literal, prosaic, and commonplace” [SL 1.238]); but by 1934 he noted: “The feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is probably little if any inferior in total quality” (SL 5.64).

18
The name derives from an old and prominent family that had settled in Salem since at least the late seventeenth century.

19
Recall HPL's description of Helen Vaughan, the mysterious woman who is the focus of Arthur Machen's “The Great God Pan” (1894): “[she] is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her enormities” (“Supernatural Horror in Literature” [1927]; D 423).

20
This image may be an echo of one found in Arthur Machen's “Novel of the White Powder” (a chapter in the episodic novel
The Three Impostors
[1895]) in which a man takes a drug that causes his mental and physical destruction, so that he confines himself to his room. His sister at one point states: “As I delayed a moment at the verge of the pavement, waiting for a van to pass by before crossing over to the house, I happened to look up at the windows . . . I had glanced up at the window of my brother's study, and at that moment the blind was drawn aside, and something that had life stared out into the world. Nay, I cannot say I saw a face or any human likeness; a living thing, two eyes of burning flame glared at me, and they were in the midst of something as formless as my fear, the symbol and presence of all evil and all hideous corruption.” Arthur Machen,
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
, p. 52.

21
An isolated village in central Maine, on the shore of Chesuncook Lake.

22
For the shoggoths see
At the Mountains of Madness
(p. 300 and n. 84). Shoggoths are apparently allied to the hybrid creatures in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (see CC 306, 335).

23
HPL had extensively explored Portland, Maine, on a two-day trip in 1927 (see SL 2.163).

24
Handwriting is an important indicator of personality in HPL: see
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
(p. 178 above), and also “The Shadow out of Time,” in which Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee is horrified to discover a document “in my own handwriting” (DH 433) that he must have written millions of years ago. On the general topic see Peter Cannon, “Letters, Diaries, and Manuscripts: The Handwritten Word in Lovecraft,” in
An Epicure in the Terrible
, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), pp. 148-58.

25
A prominent Innsmouth family in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where the “Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots” (CC 289) are mentioned. See also Walter Gilman (a resident of Arkham), the protagonist of “The Dreams in the Witch House.”

26
Twin cities in southwest Maine, on opposite banks of the Saco River.

27
Two of HPL's favorite colonial towns. HPL first visited Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1922; the next year, speaking of its antiquities, he rhapsodized: “It is a dream—a vision—the experience of a lifetime! Man, man! Why didn't someone shoot me while I was happy—there amidst the atmosphere of Georgian days!” (SL 1.244). HPL's 1931 visit to Newburyport, Massachusetts (a town he had first seen in 1923), was the inspiration for “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

28
Two towns south of Newburyport; they are mentioned frequently in “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

29
These surnames are cited frequently in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”: Joe Sargent is the bus driver of the Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport bus, and there is a Babson Street in the town (see CC 321-22).

30
HPL uses the word in the ancient Roman sense (
tributum
): a forced payment or contribution, usually from a conquered state. Here, of course, it signifies blackmail.

31
This tale was written, and presumably takes place, before Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933. See n. 4 to “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”

32
It may not be beyond the bounds of conjecture to guess at what Ed ward Derby (in Asenath's body) is trying to say. The first three “glubs” are probably meant to suggest Derby's attempt to speak his friend's name: “Dan . . . Dan . . . Dan.” The two subsequent noises are presumably in response to Upton's “Who is it?”—“Ed-ward . . . Ed-ward.”

33
Probably an echo of the celebrated conclusion of Poe's “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845): “Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.”