In the thread on the level of threat in the stories of CAS and HPL, I posted the paper linked below. Sawfish suggested a separate thread for it. The paper was published in the fanzine Fadeaway, edited by Bob Jennings, where several articles by me have appeared. Lovecraft has been one of my favorite authors for something like 50 years. I wanted to try to get at something important in my enjoyment of his main stories, things I have revisited over the years -- particularly because I think my experience isn't unique, even though the factor I focus on isn't usually specified as a source of the appeal of these works.

This thread, if people participate, will probably elicit some thoughtful responses: if Lovecraft's stories possess long-lived appeal for you, wherein does that appeal really lie?

[efanzines.com]

The article starts on page 12.

Ok, Dale. I went back and annotated the paper and identified eight aspects contained in it, either directly and explicitly, or else implicitly and this stimulated some tangential thinking.

Not real sure I'll actually get to all eight...

Starting with your observtions on humor, this is an area in which we mostly agree:

Quote:

DN
Let me further ask veteran readers of Lovecraft who read him first as youngsters: Didn’t you, like me, indulge in “Lovecraftian humor”? I did almost as soon as I began to read him. Classmates still remember, too, the social studies class period during which the teacher was called away and I strode to the chalkboard and offered a spontaneous lecture on Cthulhuism. I remember a fanzine ad that mentioned “The Dumb Witch Horror.” Peter Cannon’s Scream for Jeeves combined Lovecraft and P. G. Wodehouse. Lovecraft parodies have abounded over the years. But do people write parodies of Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, or Arthur Machen? The extravagance of Lovecraft’s fiction makes it the inevitable target of affectionate parody and, of course, of affectionate imitation. I suspect that some of those reading this piece have tried to work up some of that fun Lovecraft feeling by writing Mythos tales of their own. It may not be easy to write a really convincing Lovecraft pastiche, but it’s very easy to get the hang of Lovecraft’s fiction. As readers of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories may attempt pastiches, so Lovecraft readers have a phase as “Lovecraftian” writers.

I came to HPL late; I already knew about CAS. There was in the 1960s a band called "H. P. Lovecraft". I never heard any music by them, but hearing the name of the band I already had some idea that he was a writer of horror, although I don't know how.

Anyway, I took a date to see The Dunwich Horror at the drive-in, down in San Diego (FWIW) while in college and it was an awful film. But later, when I saw HPL books in the same section with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, I bought one, no doubt.

I think maybe you've raised elsewhere the idea that HPL injects humor *by intent*, and also simply unintended, by use of overwrought dialog (and dialect!), phonetic renderings of sounds, etc. If not, my apologies, but I'd like to expand here a bit, if you don't mind...

HPL's narrators seem very dry, indeed, so we can't expect much laugh-worthy stuff out of them, either when they describe something directly, or the narrative limited omniscient POV tells us what they are thinking, or what may occur to them.

Nor are there many intended yuks in the descriptions.

But two instances of intended humor, understated, of course (but that's often the best kind!) occur to me:

In The Picture in the House, the narrator, a guy riding his bike along a NE backroad, gets caught in a rainstorm, and ducks into what he thinks is an abandoned farmhouse.

But he is wrong...


SPOILERS

...





In spite of the unkempt and frankly unclean interior, a decrepit and yet strangely youthful old codger, disturbingly robust, too, comes down the stairs and proceeds to show the biker an old book. There's a place in the old book where there's an illustration, and it's apparent that the old boy has looked at this page hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

It's a rendering of a cannibal market place, as related by early explorers. It's pretty disturbing to note that *anyone* would repeatedly view it, but the old boy rather innocently (truly--he was a rustic innocent, socially; had no idea how what he did/said would affect interlocutors) tells the biker how he indeed was fascinatd by the image--and worse: what, exactly about the illustration appealed to him--and how, over time, it made him wonder about what a cannibal meal would be like.

The old man was becoming increasingly animated as he blythely relates all this, and even goes so far as to begin to intimate that he had done away with various local characters and, ostensibly, eaten them.

All this is related in the thickest possible--and maybe beyond "possible"--old Yankee accent. And you can well imagine how nervous the biker might have been while listening in horrified silence.

Then, as if the old man first noticed some squirming, he interjects sternly:

"Set still! What ails ye?" or something like that.

Well, duh!!! OF COURSE we, the readers, know "what ails" the biker! He's getting scared witless by a confessed murderer/cannibal who appears to have lived for more than 150 years!

The second example comes in the prose poem, Nyarlathotep, and I believe that another posters her at ED identified this, because I sure missed it.

As most HPL readers know, this is essentially the end of the world, and it's presaged by "signs", one of which is:

Quote:

HPL
...And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem;...

The idea that the screams of those who intuit by dreams that all are doomed is viewed in the same light as, say, littering, or loud music, i.e., "a public problem", seems to comically understate the situation. I mean, they've got *lots* worse problems coming... :^)

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish -- and anyone else so inclined -- I would love to see your responses one by one to whatever strikes you in the paper. I had hoped it would initiate some dialogue at the fanzine where it appeared -- well, frankly, I'd have liked a storm, a mother lode, of letters of comment. Maybe something like that will happen here.

So am I right, by the way? Were any of y'all young enough when you first read HPL to write truly sophomoric parodies of HPL, like me?

That's a topic of its own.

Then there's the topic of humor in Lovecraft's stories, intended or not. I'm sure I originally read "The Picture in the House" is a not terribly fast-witted kid and took it at face value, rating it as one of HPL's less interesting stories (I cottoned to the Cthulhu mythology right away). But since then it has seemed to me kind of a funny story, as the narrator gets increasingly wound up while the cannibal too is getting more excited -- ''ef 'twas more the same'" -- and then the thing has two climaxes, the narrator's eyes bugging out as he sees the blood dripping through the ceiling, and then the lightning bolt that blasts the horror-house to bits. It's like those kid campfire stories that get you wound up tighter and tighter... "'Now I'm at the bottom of the stairs....now I'm on the landing.... Now I'm at the top of the stairs.... Now I'm walking down the hallway.... Now I'm at your bedroom doorrrrr.... Now I'm in your room.... Now I'm at the foot of your bed.... Now I'm standing over you: GIVE ME A PIECE OF THAT CHOCOLATE CAKE!!'" and everybody laughs.

Hah!

you know, this comparison is interesting in terms of how old we were when first reading HPL. As best I recall I was maybe 23-25. I had had such formative classes as "Bible as Literature" and "An Introduction to Satire" at the undergrad level. I had been trained to actively *look* for stuff like that, so I tended to see it.

...sometimes when it wasn't really there...GULP!

I'll wait a bit before starting on my second identified point...

Most enjoyable.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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I might have read HPL and CAS for the first time in the same book, Carter's Young Magicians anthology, in the second half of 1969, as a youngster turned 14 not too many weeks ago. That was the age at which I first read Edgar Rice Burroughs and Two-Gun, so it was eventful, but these fellas never did unseat Tolkien as my favorite...

I'd like to press that point, though, about parody a little more. My impression, again, is that parodies of Lovecraft are a feature of many fans who first read him as youngsters -- but kids (like me) who read Machen and Blackwood at the same time never wrote parodies of them; and I think that holds true for adults also. Do kids write Poe parodies?

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I might have read HPL and CAS for the first time
> in the same book, Carter's Young Magicians
> anthology, in the second half of 1969, as a
> youngster turned 14 not too many weeks ago. That
> was the age at which I first read Edgar Rice
> Burroughs and Two-Gun, so it was eventful, but
> these fellas never did unseat Tolkien as my
> favorite...
>
> I'd like to press that point, though, about parody
> a little more. My impression, again, is that
> parodies of Lovecraft are a feature of many fans
> who first read him as youngsters -- but kids (like
> me) who read Machen and Blackwood at the same time
> never wrote parodies of them; and I think that
> holds true for adults also. Do kids write Poe
> parodies?

This part about comparison of HPL and Machen, et al, touches upon one of the annotations I made. But let me ask, prematurely: did Machen, Blackwood, and the others listed in your article, write regularly for the weird pulp market?

Sometimes, reading HPL, I get the feeling that he may have been paid by the word, and I also recognize and respect that he exerted a decent level of artistic control, but his explicit descriptions of monsters, as per the examples in your article, lead me to think that maybe, when push came to shove, he tended to retain verbiage that might better have been either restated using less copious and precise descriptive language, or else having much of it cut, entirely.

So I'm now guessing that some of HPL's tendency toward unneeded verbosity was an artifact of the market he was trying (successfully) to tap.

BTW, I agree with what seems to me to be your overall view of HPL: a very effective writer of specialized prose for a small niche market. He straddled being just a bit too thrill-oriented with at least the ability to "take you away" (like Doyle) and to present you with a fairly original--and threatening--cosmos.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Lovecraft complained about the rubbish published in the pulps, but the fact is that he immersed himself in WT, reading it, I suppose, cover to cover every month. It's likely he would be influenced. A lesson for us all! -- what you read and watch becomes a part of you, and is that where you want to be? As a writer, occasionally, of ghostly stories, I would want generally to avoid pulp stuff. Conversely, I've been conscious of a little influence of the movies of Kurosawa and maybe Tarkovsky, to the benefit of my work.

Hi, Dale.

Befoe I send my next response to my annotated sections of the article, did any other the authors whom you note as being likely unparodied, write for the weird pulps on any regular basis? These were: Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, or Arthur Machen?

I'm now entertaining the idea that conformity to the parameters required for weird pulp publication may tend to expose one to parody. Not the main reason, but a contributory one.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish, I don't think the other three authors wrote for pulp magazines -- I'm not sure those pulp mags even appeared before the 1920s or so. Although Machen's "White PeopleA" is said to have been published in a magazine that promoted malted milk (!), Horlick's, if that's relevant!

Lovecraft seems to have loved and hated Weird Tales -- he liked to think of it as a venue for the advancement of his beloved genre, but was honest enough to admit that it was basically a magazine filled with cheap rubbish.

I'm not sure he ever rewrote any of his stories to get them sold -- and I'm not sure he was ever given the chance.

But I'm wandering from the point about parody. Non-pulp, indeed highly literary authors can be parodied -- Max Beerbohm did a lovely parody of Henry James! Here is "The Mote in the Middle Distance."

[en.wikisource.org]

So, again: why teeming Lovecraft parodies but not Machen/Blackwood/Hodgson parodies? Inquiring minds want to know.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sawfish, I don't think the other three authors
> wrote for pulp magazines -- I'm not sure those
> pulp mags even appeared before the 1920s or so.
> Although Machen's "White PeopleA" is said to have
> been published in a magazine that promoted malted
> milk (!), Horlick's, if that's relevant!
>
> Lovecraft seems to have loved and hated Weird
> Tales -- he liked to think of it as a venue for
> the advancement of his beloved genre, but was
> honest enough to admit that it was basically a
> magazine filled with cheap rubbish.
>
> I'm not sure he ever rewrote any of his stories to
> get them sold -- and I'm not sure he was ever
> given the chance.
>
> But I'm wandering from the point about parody.
> Non-pulp, indeed highly literary authors can be
> parodied -- Max Beerbohm did a lovely parody of
> Henry James! Here is "The Mote in the Middle
> Distance."
>
> [en.wikisource.org]
> /The_Mote_in_the_Middle_Distance
>
> So, again: why teeming Lovecraft parodies but not
> Machen/Blackwood/Hodgson parodies? Inquiring
> minds want to know.

Well, to start with, we know it's possible to parody anyone, but we're talking not abut the exception, but if I understand you, the parodies of HPL were comparatively common.

Too, how many Hemingway parodies have you read? So far as I know there used to be an annual event, with a prize for best Hemingway parody.

Sooo....

What this may point to is that:

1) You have to be fairly widely read, or else, face it, who cares enough to parody you? Who would ever get the joke you so carefully crafted if they werem't already familiar with the author being parodied?

2) You need to have a readily identifiable style.

I know the answers to neither of these as relate to Blackwood, Hodgson, or Machen.

So you can have a Bored of the Rings, but is there a market for a parody of The Great God Pan?

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Not sure if pulps were as big in the UK as they were in the US? I don't think Blackwood, Hodgson or Machen would have been household names, anyhow.

Machen had a funny career arc. He wrote the stories which defined him in his youth, but had difficulties getting them published and spent most of his middle years as a jobbing actor.

Dale - I'm guessing you've seen that Beerbohm cartoon of Henry James staring at his hand (in a fog)? It made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it.

I've only read a handful of HPL stories, but my impression is that they are characterised by a couple of tropes that leave them wide open to parody - usually the MC finds a book or some talismanic device that enables him to see the veil that separates our world from the tentacled horrors that lurk in the abyss. And yet - as somebody on another forum pointed out - despite staring doom in the face, the MC still maintains enough sang froid to pen a couple of thousand words on the whole experience.

Cathbad Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Not sure if pulps were as big in the UK as they
> were in the US? I don't think Blackwood, Hodgson
> or Machen would have been household names, anyhow.
>
>
> Machen had a funny career arc. He wrote the
> stories which defined him in his youth, but had
> difficulties getting them published and spent most
> of his middle years as a jobbing actor.
>
> Dale - I'm guessing you've seen that Beerbohm
> cartoon of Henry James staring at his hand (in a
> fog)? It made me laugh out loud the first time I
> saw it.

There are some guys I just have a lot of trouble reading. James is one, Faulkner another.

I'll not mention Joyce, since I have yet to talk to *anyone* who said he enjoyed Joyce's writings.

Then you get Dreiser, whom I had *assumed* I would not like, and I'm surprised that no one was teaching him in all my Lit classes in the 60s. In my opinion, this guy told a very good story.

>
> I've only read a handful of HPL stories, but my
> impression is that they are characterised by a
> couple of tropes that leave them wide open to
> parody - usually the MC finds a book or some
> talismanic device that enables him to see the veil
> that separates our world from the tentacled
> horrors that lurk in the abyss. And yet - as
> somebody on another forum pointed out - despite
> staring doom in the face, the MC still maintains
> enough sang froid to pen a couple of thousand
> words on the whole experience.

That's a kind of narrative frame: the related tale. It does a couple of things: it all but *ensures* us that come what may in the story, the narrator, if he takes part in the action, survives it. This affects the level of threat perceived by the reader.

(BTW, CAS's The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis are an exception, with that odd codicil at the end...)

Yep, HPL does a lot of that: a related story rather than a participatory one, or one told at some point after the completion of the action.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Hi, Dale.

If it's OK with you I will move on to my next annotated section; please feel free to comment on the "HUMOR" subthread.

The next aspect concerns a part of your article that listed the lack of the necessity of daily commitments to work and the like, in the narrator. I think you were using this as a minor point of support for your thesis--that Lovecraft creates a sort of "comfortable" environment for the reader, much as the Holmes stories of Doyle do. So in singling it out, I'm actually artificially raising its importance to your thesis--and I recognize this--but it brought forth two important points concerning the narrator and/or main POV in a short story of this type, and I'd like to explore them with folks here at ED.

I'll include the section of your article, but with the middle section elided for brevity. People can refer to the full article to see this section in its entirety.

Quote:

DN

Now let’s consider Lovecraft’s typical main characters and another aspect of Lovecraft’s comfortable world. Lovecraft's Mythos stories often have rather more in common with “The Wind in the Willows” (think of Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad) than they are given credit for.

Lovecraft's protagonists do not have to show up for a boring or physically demanding day’s work. To the extent that money is mentioned or implied, it's just there as needed. The protagonists have ready access to interesting places to go, so as to satisfy their curiosity. They have no onerous responsibilities to employers who expect them to show up for work and who might demand that they be productive on the job.

For example, in “The Call of Cthulhu,” Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston becomes curious about the Cthulhu cult and some weird coincidences. Just happening to see a newspaper clipping from New Zealand that intrigues him, while visiting a friend in New Jersey, Thurston doesn’t post a letter or send a telegram asking for more details. Rather, calling upon ample funds of unspecified origin, he takes a train to San Francisco. From there he sails to New Zealand and reaches Dunedin a few weeks later. He finds out little but Johansen’s address in Norway. Off he sails for London and Oslo. He talks Johansen’s widow into giving him her husband’s secret papers and, presumably, sails back to America, thus completing the circling of the globe. Whatever he may be anxious about at the end of his narrative, he’s not worried about money or being behind in his work after his long vacation.

[MUCH ELIDED!!! See: [efanzines.com] for complete text.]


“The Dreams in the Witch-House” may be a Mythos story, but its central character, Walter Gilman, is unusual in being a relatively impoverished student – although one who is well-regarded by his professors and, I think we may assume, might have achieved a comfortable academic position if not for his premature death. “The Thing on the Doorstep,” like “The Dreams in the Witch-House” an effort usually regarded as one of the lesser stories of Lovecraft’s maturity, doesn’t align with my exposition of Lovecraft’s comfortable world, but I didn’t intend to argue that everything he wrote did so, only that his Mythos stories typically exhibit the “comfortable” characteristics I’ve described, and owe some of their appeal to that fact.

First off, I agree with the main thrust of your observation: that the narrator, unlike the reader, has what appears to be complete access to his own time, and sufficient money to indulge his interests. I also agree that this, in a near-subliminal sense, makes the reader a part of this personal freedom, and hence "comfortable".

It's like how I've described participating in ED: to me, a comfortable British gentleman's club of equals in the early 20th C, comfy chairs, a fire in the hearth, good conversation. All we lack are servants, cigars, and brandy... ;^)

But here's what interests me: within the confines of the short-story form, can we reasonably expect either of these two facets: a) day-to-day accounting of the narrator's (or POV's) normal occupations; and b) any significant character growth or development?

I'd suggest that with few exception the answer is "no" to both. The brevity of the format precludes these sorts devices. For day-to-day stuff, it would be seen as a digression that dilutes the impact of the central theme, and for character development, again, there's just not that much time AND...

...in a short story, the focus is often a singe event or alternatively, a *snapshot* of a particular character of interest, but there's again no time--nor reader expectancy--to go much beyond this.

For writers like CAS or HPL, they usually tell us about a single event that is extraordinary, either in the nature of the event (being lectured to, and eventually eaten by, an extraordinary being, as in The Weird Avoosl Wuthoqquan), or the setting the collapsed necropolis of Chaon Gacca in Weaver in the Vault, or often both.

Of the "other kind" of short story, the snapshot of a character, without any real development (no time!) I can't think of any in fantasy right off the bat, but for mainstream I'd say Barn Burning (itself a part of a series) is about the POV's father, who can best be described as embittered white trash, or Nick Adams in any of the Nick Adams coming-of-age stories. In the latter, the *series* may show character growth, but not any single story, which are like snapshots in a family album.

This is sure fun for me, Dale, and I hope that my questions and observations do not come off as too pushy or pointed. I have opinions, clearly, but I also realize that that's *exactly* what they are: opinions, and not definitive answers.

I don't think that many definitive answers can be found in the discussion of fiction. It's just not possible, given the notions of artistic freedom rightly employed by an author.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 11 Sep 20 | 11:38AM by Sawfish.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I always reckoned there was an element of wishful thinking here, on the part of both CAS and HPL. CAS was no stranger to hard physical work, but his stories are populated by sorcerers whose work - when they do any work at all - is of a largely cerebral nature. HPL's characters never seem to have a day job; they are gentlemen of leisure, whereas HPL died in poverty. In that respect, I guess I can see where Dale is coming from!

Sawfish, I'd hoped the essay on "Lovecraft's Comfortable World" would spur discussion -- responses such as yours.

But it's not that I was saying the stories necessarily suffer from a literary defect in having main characters who have the personal liberty and financial independence to come and go as they please, etc. My main point there is just that I think the appeal of a situation like that is a part, probably an important part, of many readers' enjoyment of the stories without their realizing it. They think they are enjoying cosmic horror -- and maybe they are, but they are also, quite likely, enjoying an escape from quotidian obligations.

Lovecraft rose above himself in "The Colour Out of Space" in his writing style, in his evocation of pathos, etc. He does so also in this story in that the narrator is (as I recall) a surveyor. He has a reason for being on the scene other than gentlemanly curiosity.