Re: Phallic trees?
Posted by:
Gavin Callaghan (IP Logged)
Date: 18 September, 2008 07:38PM
The "legendary" CAS illus. for HPL's "The Lurking Fear"... I saw a copy of the Necro. Press rep. of this in the Cornell Library, and I have to say, if one hasn't seen these drawings, one isn't missing much! They're basically like stick-figures. HPL was effusive in his praise, but that was just HPL's characteristic generosity/hyperbole, I think. There's another thread on the same topic of these illus. somewhere else on Eldritch Dark, and that was the consensus about them there, too, as I recall.
The best drawings for this story can actually be found in Joe Sinnott's masterful, although loose (Lovecraft is uncredited) adaptation, "The Last of Mr. Mordeaux", published by pre-Marvel Atlas in the 1950's. It was reprinted by Marvel in the seventies in Tomb of Darkness #16. Joe Sinnott is still alive, and lives in Saugerties, NY.
>>"but then maybe I, like HP, am too innocent to notice such things..."
In the essay I'm working on (Dark Arcadia: From Arcadia to Arkham), I deal with HPL's knowledge of such things, and I come to a similar conclusion to that of Robert Waugh in "The Subway and the Shoggoth", who suggests that HPL wasn't innocent as he appeared, simply reticent. I go much further than Waugh, however, and suggest that Lovecraft wasn't merely knowledgable, but actively engaging in an anti-Hellenic polemic which was the complete inverse of Samuel Loveman's Hellenism; in fact, HPL's Cthulhu Fiction was a caricature/satire of it (so goes my theory). Lovecraft's veiled critique of Loveman's interest in such things as phallic symbolism (Lovecraft talks about Loveman having done enough "delving along these lines", ie, into "phallic symbolism"; Lovecraft refers to Loveman's "The Hermaphrodite", which he edited for the press, as "The Herm Book" -a "herm" being a hermaphroditic phallic symbol much in use by the Decadents [Beardsley, Fred Holland Day], and earlier used by the ancient Hellenes as a Bacchanalian symbol, etc.) will reach its apogee in his story "The Haunter of the Dark", in which the staring-eyed monster lives in a phallic black steeple/tower.
Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 18 Sep 08 | 07:58PM by Gavin Callaghan.