Although Lovecraft dutifully read as much of Machen as he could, it was the horror tales that remained closest to his heart. In particular, a whole series of works—including ‘The White People’, ‘The Shining Pyramid’, ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ (a segment of the episodic novel The Three Impostors), and others—make use of the old legends of the ‘Little People’, a supposedly pre-Aryan race of dwarfish devils who still live covertly in the secret places of the earth and occasionally steal human infants, leaving one of their own behind. Lovecraft would transform this topos into something even more sinister in some of his later tales.
Lovecraft seems to have owed the discovery of Machen to Frank Long. I cannot detect any Machen influence on Lovecraft’s tales prior to 1926, but the Welshman’s work clearly filtered into Lovecraft’s imagination and eventually emerged in a quite transformed but still perceptible manner in some of his best-known stories.
Lovecraft had, indeed, not written any stories since ‘The Lurking Fear’ in November 1922; but then, in a matter of two or three months, he wrote three in quick succession—’The Rats in the Walls’, ‘The Unnamable’, and ‘The Festival’. All three are of considerable interest, and the first is without question the greatest tale of Lovecraft’s early period.
The plot of ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (probably written in late August or early September) is deceptively simple. A Virginian of British ancestry, a man named Delapore, decides to spend his latter years in refurbishing and occupying his ancestral estate in southern England, Exham Priory, whose foundations go disturbingly far back in time, to a period even before the Roman conquest of the first century A.D. Delapore hears of some strange legends attached to the house—including the tale of a huge army of rats that devoured everything in its path in the Middle Ages—but dispenses them as pure myth. A variety of weird manifestations (many of them sounding like rats scurrying in the walls of the castle) then begin to appear following Delapore’s occupation of the place on 16 July 1923, culminating in an exploration (with a number of learned scientists) of the cellar of the castle. There the explorers come upon an immense expanse of bones, and it becomes evident that Delapore’s own ancestors were the leaders of a cannibalistic witch-cult that had its origins in primitive times. Delapore goes mad, descends the evolutionary scale (heralded by the increasing archaism of the oaths he utters at the end), and is found bent over the half-eaten form of his friend, Capt. Norrys.
It is difficult to convey the richness and cumulative horror of this story in any analysis; next to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it is Lovecraft’s greatest triumph in the old-time ‘Gothic’ vein—although even here the stock Gothic features (the ancient castle with a secret chamber; the ghostly legendry that proves to be founded on fact) have been modernized and refined so as to be wholly convincing. And the fundamental premise of the story—that a human being can suddenly reverse the course of evolution—could only have been written by one who had accepted the Darwinian theory.
Certain surface features of the tale—and perhaps one essential kernel of the plot—were taken from other works. As Steven J. Mariconda has pointed out,8 Lovecraft’s account of the ‘epic of the rats’ appears to be derived from a chapter in S. Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1869). Some portions of Delapore’s concluding cries were lifted directly from Fiona Macleod’s ‘The SinEater’, which Lovecraft read in Joseph Lewis French’s anthology, Best Psychic Stories (1920).
More significantly, the very idea of atavism or reversion to type seems to have been derived from a story by Irvin S. Cobb, ‘The Unbroken Chain’, published in Cosmopolitan for September 1923 (the issue, as is still customary with many magazines, was probably on the stands at least a month before its cover date). Lovecraft admits that Long gave him the magazine in 1923.9 This tale deals with a Frenchman who has a small proportion of negroid blood from a slave brought to America in 1819. When he is run down by a train, he cries out in an African language—’Niama tumba!’—the words that his black ancestor shouted when he was attacked by a rhinoceros in Africa.
‘The Rats in the Walls’ was first submitted, not to Weird Tales, but to the Argosy All-Story Weekly, a Munsey magazine whose managing editor, Robert H. Davis, rejected it as being (in Lovecraft’s words) ‘too horrible for the tender sensibilities of a delicately nurtured publick’.10 Lovecraft then sent the story to Baird, who accepted it and ran it in the March 1924 issue.
‘The Unnamable’ and ‘The Festival’, Lovecraft’s two other original stories of 1923, return to New England in their different ways. The former is slight, but could be thought of as a sort of veiled justification for the type of weird tale Lovecraft was evolving; much of it reads like a treatise on aesthetics. At the beginning there is a lengthy discussion on the weird between Randolph Carter and Joel Manton (clearly based upon Maurice W. Moe). Manton does not believe that there can be anything in life or literature that could be ‘unnamable’; but he finds out differently when such an entity attacks them as they are sitting in a New England churchyard.
Aside from its interesting aesthetic reflections, ‘The Unnamable’ fosters that sense of the lurking horror of New England history and topography which we have already seen in ‘The Picture in the House’, and which would become a dominant trope in Lovecraft’s later work. The tale is set in Arkham, but the actual inspiration for the setting—a ‘dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb’ and, nearby, a ‘giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab’—is the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem, where just such a tree-engulfed slab can be found.
‘The Festival’ (written probably in October) can be considered a virtual three-thousand-word prose-poem for the sustained modulation of its prose. The first-person narrator comes back to Kingsport and is led into an underground chamber beneath a church and encounters spectacular winged horrors that fly off into the unknown, bearing the inhabitants of the town on their backs. This is the first story in which the mythical town of Kingsport (first cited in ‘The Terrible Old Man’) is definitively identified with Marblehead. Much of the topography cited in the story corresponds exactly with that of Marblehead, although some of the actual sites mentioned have only recently been identified by Donovan K. Loucks. For example, the church that is the focal point of the tale is probably not St Michael’s Episcopal Church, as has long been thought. If Lovecraft had a specific church in in mind, he may have been referring either to the First Meeting House (built in 1648 on Old Burial Hill) or the Second Congregational Church (built in 1715 at 28 Mugford Street), or a fusion of the two.
There is, in addition to the topography of Marblehead, a literary (or scientific) influence to the story. In 1933 Lovecraft stated in reference to the tale: ‘In intimating an alien race I had in mind the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers who preserved primitive rites like those of the witch-cult—I had just been reading Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.’11 This landmark work of anthropology by Margaret A. Murray, published in 1921, made the claim (now regarded by modern scholars as highly unlikely) that the witch-cult in both Europe and America had its origin in a pre-Aryan race that was driven underground but continued to lurk in the hidden corners of the earth. Lovecraft— having just read a very similar fictional exposition of the idea in Machen’s stories of the ‘Little People’—was much taken with this conception, and would allude to it in many subsequent references to the Salem witches in his tales; as late as 1930 he was presenting the theory seriously.