The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 14
3. Lord Dunsany, in his 1918 Tales of War, wrote, in a chapter titled “Nightmare Countries”: “There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe’s ‘Dark tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir’; there are some queer twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of Swinburne:
By the tideless dolorous inland sea
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the mind a sort of nightmare country which one’s thoughts revisit on hearing the lines quoted” (73).
4. Compare, as Peter Cannon observes, in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft,” Holmes’s statement to Dr. Watson in “The Copper Beeches”: “You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there. . . . But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.” There are ad ditional parallels between this tale and “The Copper Beeches,” examined in depth by Cannon in “Parallel Passages in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Picture in the House.’” Note that “The Copper Beeches” first appeared in America in June 1892 in various newspapers and in various American book editions later that year; the narrator may have come across the story soon after its publication.
5. The view of the narrator—that the Puritans were warped by their fanatical beliefs—was a popular one, shared by Lovecraft himself. In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, he wrote, “An abnormal Puritan psychology led to all kinds of repression, furtiveness, & grotesque hidden crime, while the long winters & backwoods isolation fostered monstrous secrets which never came to light” (October 9, 1931, Selected Letters, III, 423). For a more thoughtful study of the Puritans and the consequences of their rigid moral code, see Charles Lloyd Cohen’s God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. Cohen, director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions and a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, writes: “To friends they seemed militant soldiers in the army of the Lord; to foes, officious busybodies disrupting village camaraderie, but on at least one point all observers could agree: to be a Puritan meant living a life distinctively ardent” (4).
6. The Miskatonic River is first named in this story. It may be seen to follow an easterly course across Massachusetts and, as will become clear later, it originates in the hills west of Dunwich. It runs eastward past Dunwich, turns southeast, and flows through the town of Arkham. The river empties into the sea two miles to the south near Kingsport, which lies just to the northeast. A detailed “History of the Miskatonic Valley, Part One” by Peter Rawlik (alas, with no supporting notes and covering only the Indians and early colonists) appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu in 2000.
7. This is the first mention of the town of Arkham, which (as will be seen) is the seat of Miskatonic University. Arkham figures prominently in a number of stories, including
“The Dunwich Horror,” “Herbert West: Reanimator,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House” and is mentioned in many more. Although this editor will point out correspondences between Kingsport, Arkham, and other Massachusetts towns, Lovecraft wrote to August Derleth on November 6, 1931:
About “Arkham” and “Kingsport”—bless my soul! but I thought I’d told you all about them years ago! They are typical but imaginary places—like the river “Miskatonic,” whose name is simply a jumble of Algonquin roots. Vaguely, “Arkham” corresponds to Salem (though Salem has no college), while “Kingsport” corresponds to Marblehead. Similarly, there is no “Dunwich”—the place being a vague echo of the decadent Massachusetts countryside around Springfield—say Wilbraham, Monson, and Hampden (Selected Letters, III, 432).
Although numerous scholars continue to delve into the real locations of incidents described in Lovecraft’s works, Peter Cannon, in H. P. Lovecraft, calls Arkham the “quintessential, cosmically haunted New England town. As befits such status, Arkham transcends any one spot on the map.” Even Will Murray, who has expended more energy on identifying the locations than any other Lovecraftian scholar and who names Oakham, Massachusetts, as the real Arkham (in “In Search of Arkham Country”), admits: “It is clear . . . that Lovecraft is not consistent with his placement of locales. . . . None of Lovecraft’s conceptions are intrinsically fixed. Rather, they are fluid and protean as befits fantasy creations” (66–67). But not even Murray can resist: In “In Search of Arkham Country Revisited,” he reverses his field and concludes that Arkham is a combination of Greenwich and New Salem.
This edition will adopt a less dogmatic approach. While similarities between specific locations and the names given to the locales of the stories may be observed, this editor believes that it is futile to attempt to pin down a specific location on conventional maps of New England as the place where a specific series of events occurred. Like Dr. Watson in his chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft’s narrators deftly conceal the names and places of their tales.
In 1934, Lovecraft drew a map of Arkham, which he mentioned in a March 28 letter to Donald Wandrei, a writer, friend, and protégé: “One thing I did lately was to construct a Map of Arkham, so that allusions in any future tale I may write may be consistent.” It was first published, as “Map of Arkham,” in The Acolyte 1, no. 1 (Fall 1942), 26, and is reproduced here, along with a 2006 adaptation.
8. Report of the Kingdom of Congo, “Drawn Out of the Writings and Discourses of the Portuguese, Duarte Lopez” (or Lopes), by Filippo Pigafetta (1591), reprinted in English (London: John Murray, 1881). The work first appeared in Italian in 1591; there were subsequent editions in German (1597, with the De Bry plates) and Latin (1598, under the title Regnum Congo).
9. Johannes Theodorus and Johannes Israel De Bry, born in Liège, were the sons of the German-Flemish engraver, goldsmith, printer, and bookseller Dirk De Bry, whose popular, sometimes fanciful illustrations of French and British colonization of North America gave generations of Europeans slightly erroneous notions of the New World. The brothers’ work, too, was in part inaccurate, largely because they drew their illustrations based on secondhand accounts and pictures—as did their father—rather than from actual observation. (None of the De Brys crossed the Atlantic.) However, the black-and-white illustrations make it difficult to determine whether the natives’ skin is white or black, and their features in some of the illustrations do appear different from those of the Caucasian visitor. S. T. Joshi, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (370), ascribes the description to Lovecraft’s deriving his knowledge of Pigafetta from Thomas Henry Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (1894), which contained redrawn versions of the De Bry illustrations, but in fact the description is close to the truth and may simply be ascribed to a hasty viewing of the book.
10. The Anziques were a distinct tribe or nation of people living in the Congo. The picture mentioned is here:
11. Isaiah Thomas, a Worcester writer and printer, and the founder of the American Society of Antiquaries (now the American Antiquarian Society), published John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1791, only the second American illustrated edition. His first almanac appeared in 1802.
12. The Glorious Works of Jesus Christ in America, subtitled, in English, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (only the book’s title was in Latin). Nearly seven hundred pages long, and described by one critic as “a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds, witchcraft, and Indian wars, interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew which rise up like so many d
ecayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface” (William Tudor, North American Review, January 1818, 255–72), it was published in 1702. Lovecraft’s library contained a first edition of this ornate, heavily allusive work, an inheritance. A sweeping, often brilliant, treatise on the culture of the New England colonies, it detailed, among other events, the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, of which Mather, an eminent Puritan minister, is judged to have been both one of the architects and, later, a critic. He is on record as having supported the admission in court of so-called spectral evidence—the visions and dreams of the defendants—although he is also said to have been conflicted about the consequences of its having been made admissible.
13. In the first appearance of the story, the following sentence came after the description of the character’s clothing and hygiene: “On a beard which might have been patriarchal were unsightly stains, some of them disgustingly suggestive of blood.” It was later removed.
14. The American Civil War was long over by 1868, so Holt could not have been killed in that war. Therefore, he presumably was killed in the War of 1812 (and may well have acquired his captaincy in the Revolutionary War), and he traded the book to the man in 1768, making him well over 130 years old.
15. A cargo ship out of Salem, Massachusetts. They thrived before the War of 1812, when many sailors were impressed into the American navy.
16. Perhaps the old man means the palmetto-like trees in the third illustration.
“Argumentum III. Edicti Regii, de quo cap. 3. fecundi libri agitur, executio” (from Vera Descriptio Regni Africani by Phillipum Pigafettam).
17. Some strange creatures are depicted in the De Bry illustrations, but none that matches this description (none appears in the plates of the Huxley version of the book, either, but such a creature is described there—see note 9, above).
18. P. S. Owens points out, in “The Mirror in the House: Looking at the Horror of Looking at the Horror,” that this means that the corpse on which the old man has been dining—for we are led to the conclusion that he is a cannibal—is in his bedroom, not the kitchen or another convenient storage place, making the bedroom “a scene of violent, animalistic, unnatural acts” and adding, in Owens’s phrase “a carnality to the carnivorousness.” The narrator’s mind is “saved” because he stops enjoying the perverse and horrible revelations.
Herbert West: Reanimator
Lovecraft reportedly despised the story as “hack” work, having little literary merit, and he may have even intended it as parody. It is seminal, however, as the first great zombie story, written with Lovecraft’s usual meticulous scientific background. Firmly set in Arkham, it confirms that town and its university as the epicenter of the weird. The Herbert West saga has been retold in a series of films from the 1980s to the 2000s starring Jeffrey Combs as West and has even manifested itself as a porn film (Re-Penetrator).
“To be dead, to be truly dead, must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death.”
—COUNT DRACULA1
PART I: FROM THE DARK2
OF HERBERT WEST, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago,3 when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham.4 While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school, where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes.5 In his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection of this process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself—the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey,6 whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Hæckel7 that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called “soul” is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause,8 West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly.9 To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned.10 West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter’s field. We finally decided on the potter’s field, because practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s researches.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill,11 where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college—materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes—and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our unauthoris
ed laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance—even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Sumner’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.
It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns,12 for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today.13 The process of unearthing was slow and sordid—it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists—and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.