Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales, the widely beloved pioneering speculative fiction magazine. Today we are going to tackle four WT stories from the era by an author closely associated with WT, H. P. Lovecraft, stories I haven't blogged about yet, though I may have read some of them in the distant past. I will be reading them from my Arkham House hardcover Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Corrected Ninth Edition), but I'll include links to the stories' 1920s Weird Tales appearances: just click the magic words below to be whisked off to the hellish landscapes which lie just beneath the surface of our own mundane reality:
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1921)
This story, a history of a now extinct noble English family, contains, in concise concentrated form, many of the standard Lovecraftian themes--lost cities, degenerated races, miscegenation, unwelcome revelations about one's identity, and scholars and explorers who search for the truth and are driven mad by what they find. The opening paragraph is almost a thesis statement for the whole Lovecraft oeuvre, asserting that life is "hideous" and that the more science discovers, the more hideous we realize life is, and if science ever uncovers the truth about our identity we may well all kill ourselves. The male members of the Jermyn family dramatize this morbid claim, many of them dying in shocking, melodramatic, fashion, their remains disposed of in ways that are particularly macabre.
In brief, an 18th-century head of the Jermyn clan was an explorer in Africa, and upon his return to Britain claimed to have discovered the ruins of an ancient city apparently once inhabited by a race of white people and/or a race of human-ape hybrids. His discoveries are scoffed at, and he ends up in a madhouse, where he dies. This guy's descendants tend to be ugly, even deformed--it is hinted they have simian features--and the men tend to have unusual marriages, to women of the lower classes and/or women they refuse to allow out of the house, lest they be seen in public. Quite a few Jermyns are murdered by family members or commit suicide, including the last of the line, who dies without issue. These murders and self-murders are generally a reaction to a realization about the Jermyn ancestry--it seems that several of the Jermyn men have mated with women who are part-ape, surviving members of the ancient race that built or lived in that ruined city. One female Jermyn was crudely mummified and worshipped as a god or used as a totem or good luck charm by various black tribes.
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" generates a mood and has lots of solid horror ideas--all the varied shocking fates individuals and their bodies suffer--but it is not a traditional story with a plot and characters and all that. I like it.
As with most of Lovecraft's work, you can find "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" in a multitude of Lovecraft collections. I will point out that this tale has also been reprinted in a 1973 Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia anthology, Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes, and in a 2008 Marvel comic alongside a graphic novel adaptation of the story by Richard Corben.
Our narrator makes clear immediately that he is of a secretive people small in number whose culture, a culture that stretches back long before the rise of Christianity, a culture with an affinity for the stars, has been suppressed, but who have striven to keep that culture alive by holding a festival every 100 years. At Christmas time he comes to a coastal New England town to participate in this ceremony, makes his way to a seventeenth century house inhabited by an old man and an old woman who through disguises keep the narrator from seeing their flesh and who utter no speech--the man communicates via stylus and wax tablet. Lovecraft does a good job describing these weirdos and their house.
Late at night the entire town of people, all of them dressed to obscure their forms and visages, assembles at a church and descends through trap door and spiral stair deep into the earth, to hold a bizarre ceremony involving a monstrous flame that generates no heat and causes no shadows, and a herd of queer monsters that are to serve as the assembled throng's steeds and carry them to even stranger ceremonies deeper still beneath the surface. The old man who welcomed the narrator into his home is apparently the leader of the group, and uses a copy of The Necronomicon in the ritual; it is suggested this creature is an ancestor of the narrator, somehow still alive, though horribly decayed or transformed, centuries after his burial. The narrator, horrified, escapes, almost dying in the effort, and wakes up in a hospital after being rescued as he floated in the harbor. The town seems different, more modern--was the narrator cast back in time last night, or drawn into some intersection of our world and another?
Quite good, a sort of embryonic, more concise, less extreme version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." In this story the narrator's jump from ignorance to knowledge of his heritage is less radical, as he starts off knowing his people are unlike others and doesn't end the story as an actual monster, as does the narrator of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."
I guess this is the sort of criticism of Americans we can expect from a self-described conservative like Lovecraft, that Americans are deracinated and obsessed with the self and progress and so have no use for the past, see the past as something to be escaped or overcome or just ignored and forgotten. I'm not sure how seriously we can take Lovecraft on the particulars about New York--while he did spend time in New York, I don't think he ever went to Paris or London, so his comparisons among the three cities must largely be based on stuff he read or heard. And of course a lot of Lovecraft's criticisms of this sort are animated by the fact that the New York of the 1920s is full of Jews and blacks and Catholics, not just the Dutch and English who founded and then sized New Amsterdam. Still, a provocative line of thinking, and the idea of New York as a dead thing inhabited by parasites and scavengers a powerful image, making for compelling reading.
The narrator spends his time searching New York for streets whose buildings are all old, streets where there are no foreigners. He is accosted by a man who, apparently, has a similar avocation, and this taciturn guy leads the narrator on a curious maze-like journey through old neighborhoods where they see no people, an odyssey that includes a climb over a brick wall and a long stretch of crawling through some kind of low tunnel. Finally, the man brings the narrator to an 18th-century house in a walled yard and doffs his cloak to reveal he wears 18th-century costume. Emaciated and ancient, he claims to be an antiquarian who affects the dress of two centuries ago, and to have at his command the magic learned by an ancestor who lived in this house when it was built, magic his ancestor learned in England and France and from the local Indians. With this magic he is able to show the narrator, through a window, the New York of the past, and, horrifyingly, the New York of the future, a future of dizzyingly tall towers, flying machines, and "yellow, squint-eyed people...dancing insanely to...ceaseless dirges...." The narrator cries out in fear at the nightmare fate which awaits NYC, summoning the ghosts of the Indians who once dwelt here and were murdered by the 18th-century wizard. The strange old antiquarian is surely in fact that very wizard, and the Native ghosts carry him off as he finally decays as he should have decayed way back in colonial times. The house collapses and the narrator barely escapes being crushed under it, falling unconscious from wounds he suffers on the way out.
(Today's stories are all about decaying bodies and/or collapsing buildings--change in Lovecraft is always for the worse.)
A solid piece of work that exploits our fears of the future and of foreigners, our all too appropriate expectation that our culture and way of life are going to be swept away and forgotten and we will be replaced by people who are incomprehensible to us and, perhaps, evil and disgusting.
After its debut in Weird Tales alongside a rarely reprinted Edmond Hamilton serial we can look forward to reading soon and reprinted work by Shelly and Poe, "He" has been included in some attractive anthologies, like Donald A. Wollheim's Terror in the Modern Vein and various European volumes.
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| Wollheim included in Terror in the Modern Vein his own story of New York disillusionment, "The Rag Thing," and Robert Heinlein's story of discovering the horrible reality behind apparent reality, "They" |
In Chapter I, we are introduced to Malone, a New York police detective with "the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things" who is living in Rhode Island after a terrible experience in Brooklyn left him with deep psychological wounds. He was in some kind of raid in which a collapsing building killed many of his comrades, and the general public thinks that this disaster is what has led to his mental illness. In fact, he witnessed "a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds," but is canny enough to know nobody will believe his story so he keeps it to himself.
The narrative shifts backwards in time in Chapter II, and we learn a little more about Malone, a smart guy who has always been interested in the occult, in the evil that lurks beneath the surface, has read books about witches and has his own theories about human behavior and human history. We also learn about Red Hook, where Malone is stationed, a decayed Brooklyn neighborhood inhabited by blacks, Italians, Syrians and "Spaniards," many of them up to no good or just hanging around, likely, Malone theorizes, even long before he comes face to face with the terrible truth, "heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind."
Chapter III introduces us to Suydam, a fat old Dutchman with a nice house and huge library of books on the occult in Flatbush. This guy has been spending a lot of time in Red Hook, hanging around with groups of "swarthy" people and making strange comments about "unlimited powers" he is striving to acquire. He was also wasting all his money importing from Europe rare books on strange topics and acquiring buildings in Red Hook where are housed throngs of dark foreigners. His relatives want him declared insane, but fail in their legal efforts, as before the judge Suydam appears normal; the local and Federal police, however, keep an eye on Suydam as the man's many contacts in Red Hook are among the worst criminals in the area, thieves and importers of illegal immigrants. Malone is assigned the job of leading the investigation and effort to round up the undocumented Near Eastern weirdos--Kurdish Yezidis said to worship the devil--with which Suydam's swarthy cronies are populating Red Hook.
Chapter IV covers Malone's investigation and developments in Suydam's life. Suydam's appearance, behavior, health and finances improve, his white hair even regaining its original youthful color, and he wins over the relatives who previously thought him mad. The Dutchman spends more time at home in Flatbush, even has the place renovated and becomes more social than ever before in his life--he even gets engaged! Meanwhile, Malone and his comrades are able to get into some of the Red Hook houses where Suydam's Kurdish and other non-white cronies have been living, discovering strange, sinister, inscriptions in esoteric tongues on the walls.
Chapter V tells of the death of Suydam and his new wife on the Europe-bound ocean liner just after their wedding. Some kind of animal or monster, only glimpsed by a member of the crew before it vanished out a porthole, massacres the newlyweds, and almost immediately afterwards a boarding party of Arabs and other strange characters from a tramp steamer take custody of Suydam's mangled body.
At the same time Suydam is killed and his carcass carried off, in Red Hook there is a big excitement described in Chapter VI. Some little white boys with blue eyes have disappeared from Gowanus and the local Scandinavians are forming a mob to invade Red Hook to try to rescue them, so the police raid suspicious buildings in Red Hook to forestall civil unrest. The cops interrupt some kind of elaborate ceremony, and, in one of Suydam's buildings, Malone has an impossible experience he'd like to chalk up to a dream or hallucination. A wind that seems alive sucks him into a subterranean world of vast chambers and shores upon dark seas where he sees monsters of all shapes and sizes and witnesses a perverted marriage ceremony which culminates in the mutilated corpse of Suydam, again obese and white-haired and impossibly and frantically alive, flees a horde of monsters.
Like the protagonists of "The Festival" and "He," after his glimpse of the horrible reality behind our complacent reality, Malone falls unconscious and is awoken by rescuers. The buildings the cops raided collapsed on him and his comrades, killing many of the police and most of the captured worshippers. Chapter VII, the denouement, describes how tunnels were discovered leading from Suydam's Flatbush house to various locales and the authorities chalk it all up to an illegal immigrant smuggling operation. But Malone knows better, that the Suydam affair is connected to evil from beyond space and time that threatens to overwhelm our universe, and we readers are assured that the evil traditions practiced in Red Hook continue to this day.
"The Horror at Red Hook" is a good horror story that leaves behind all the fun (or boring, to some) architecture and history talk we see in "The Festival" and "He" and serves up a double helping of racial essentialism and race hatred, romanticizing Celts ("sensitive") and Scandinavians ("Vikings"), dismissing Southern Europeans slightingly, and depicting Arabs, Asians and blacks as disgusting and alien ("the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth..."; "Their [the Yezidi Kurds'] squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section....") The horror of "He" I feel is more rational and historically grounded, depicting the white man displacing the natives of the New World while appropriating the native's wisdom, and then being displaced in turn by the Oriental who, presumably, took advantage of Western advances in science and technology to build his super city and armada of aircraft, while the horror in "The Horror at Red Hook" is based simply on disgust at the appearance and alleged behavior of nonwhites. Still effective, but less thought-provoking, visceral rather than intellectual, the horror of seeing something gross under a rock, not the horror of considering where your society is heading.
"The Horror at Red Hook" received immediate recognition, being included in the 1927 British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thompson, You'll Need a Night Light and the 1928 American anthology Not At Night! edited by Herbert Asbury.
I like all these stories, and I think they are a good example of what Lovecraft, at least in his early work, is all about, and for personal reasons I think "He" is my favorite. And stories about a changing New York and about illegal immigrants may resonate with readers today. So of course I recommend you read these stories, though be careful not to start including words like "squint-eyed" and "negroid" in casual conversation.
I'm putting my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales back on the shelf but pulling down The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, so brace yourself for more Lovecraft material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and, in the meantime, just accept the world as it appears and don't go digging into caves and caverns and sewers trying to unearth the real truth--you'll be better off.
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