As with Machen and Dunsany, Blackwood is an author Lovecraft should have discovered earlier than he did. His first book, The Empty House and Other Stories (1906), is admittedly slight, although with a few notable items. John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908) became a bestseller, allowing Blackwood to spend the years 1908–14 in Switzerland, where he did most of his best work. Incredible Adventures (1914)—the very volume toward which Lovecraft was so lukewarm in 1920—is one of the great weird collections of all time.
Blackwood was frankly a mystic. In his autobiography, Episodes Before Thirty (1923), he admits to relieving the heavy and conventional religiosity of his household by an absorption of Buddhist philosophy, and he ultimately developed a remarkably vital and intensely felt pantheism that emerges most clearly in his novel The Centaur (1911), the central work in his corpus and the equivalent of a spiritual autobiography. In a sense Blackwood sought the same sort of return to the natural world as Dunsany. But because he was, unlike Dunsany, a mystic, he would see in the return to Nature a shedding of the moral and spiritual blinders which in his view modern urban civilization places upon us; hence his ultimate goal is an expansion of consciousness that opens up to our perception the boundless universe with its throbbing presences. Several of his novels deal explicitly with reincarnation, in such a way as to suggest that Blackwood himself clearly believed in it. Philosophically, therefore, Blackwood and Lovecraft were poles apart; but the latter never let that bother him, and there is much in Blackwood to relish even if one does not subscribe to his world view.
Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) is a much different proposition. Weird writing represents a quite small proportion of his writing, and was indeed merely a diversion from his work as educator, authority on medieval manuscripts, and Biblical scholar. His edition of the Apocryphal New Testament (1924) long remained standard. James took to telling ghost stories while at Cambridge, and his first tales were recited at a meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893. He later became Provost of Eton and began telling his tales to his young charges at Christmas. They were eventually collected in four volumes: Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904); More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); A Thin Ghost and Others (1919); and A Warning to the Curious (1925). This relatively slim body of work is none the less a landmark in weird literature. If nothing else, it represents the ultimate refinement of the conventional ghost story. James was a master at short story construction; he also was one of the few who could write in a chatty, whimsical, and bantering style without destroying the potency of his horrors. Like Lovecraft and Machen, James has attracted a somewhat fanatical cadre of devotees. But in all honesty, much of James’s work is thin and insubstantiaclass="underline" he had no vision of the world to put across, as Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and Lovecraft did, and many of his tales seem like academic exercises in shudder-mongering. Lovecraft seems first to have read James in mid-December 1925. Although his enthusiasm for him was high at the time, it would later cool off. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ he would rank James as a ‘modern master’, but by 1932 he declared that ‘he isn’t really in the Machen, Blackwood, & Dunsany class. He is the earthiest member of the “big four”’.29
There was not much criticism of weird fiction up to this time upon which Lovecraft could draw for his treatise. He read Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921), a landmark study of Gothic fiction, in late November; it is quite clear that he borrowed heavily from this treatise in his chapters (II–V) on the Gothics, both in the structure of his analysis and in some points of evaluation. Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927) came out just about the time of Lovecraft’s own essay; it is a very penetrating historical and thematic study that Lovecraft later read with appreciation. Conversely, the only exhaustive study of modern weird fiction was Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), which Lovecraft would not read until 1932; but, when he did so, he rightly criticized it as being overly schematic in its thematic analyses and hampered by an amusing squeamishness in the face of the explicit horrors of Stoker, Machen, and others.
Lovecraft’s essay, accordingly, gains its greatest originality as an historical study in its final six chapters. His lengthy chapter on Poe is, I think, one of the most perceptive short analyses ever written, in spite of a certain flamboyancy in its diction. Lovecraft could not summon up much enthusiasm for the later Victorians in England, but his lengthy discussions of Hawthorne and Bierce in Chapter VIII are illuminating. And his greatest achievement, perhaps, was to designate Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James as the four ‘modern masters’ of the weird tale; a judgment that has been justified by subsequent scholarship. Indeed, the only ‘master’ lacking from this list is Lovecraft himself.
Lovecraft admitted that the writing of this essay produced two good effects; first: ‘It’s good preparation for composing a new series of weird tales of my own’;30 and second: ‘This course of reading & writing I am going through for the Cook article is excellent mental discipline, & a fine gesture of demarcation betwixt my aimless, lost existence of the past year or two & the resumed Providence-like hermitage amidst which I hope to grind out some tales worth writing.’31 The second effect is one more in a succession of resolutions to cease his all-day and all-night gallivanting with the gang and get down to real work; how successful this was, it is difficult to say, in the absence of a diary for 1926. As for the first effect, it came to fruition in late February, when ‘Cool Air’ was apparently written.
‘Cool Air’ is the last and perhaps the best of Lovecraft’s New York stories. It is a compact exposition of pure physical loathsomeness, dealing with what happens when a Dr Muñoz, who requires constant coolness in his New York apartment, finds his air conditioning unit malfunctioning, and the narrator is unable to find anyone to fix it. The result is that Muñoz, who is actually dead but is trying to keep himself alive by artificial preservation, ends as a ‘kind of dark, slimy trail [that] led from the open bathroom to the hall door’ and that ‘ended unutterably’.
The apartment house that serves as the setting of the tale is based on the brownstone occupied by George Kirk both as a residence and as the site of his Chelsea Book Shop at 317 West 14th Street in Manhattan for two months during the late summer of 1925. In regard to literary influences, Lovecraft later admitted that the chief inspiration was not Poe’s ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ but Machen’s ‘Novel of the White Powder’ (an episode from The Three Impostors),32 where a hapless student unwittingly takes a drug that reduces him to a loathsome mass of liquescence. And yet, one can hardly deny that M. Valdemar, the man who, after his presumed death, is kept alive after a fashion for months by hypnosis and who at the end collapses ‘in a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity’, was somewhere in the back of Lovecraft’s mind in the writing of ‘Cool Air’. This story, much more than ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, is Lovecraft’s most successful evocation of the horror to be found in the teeming clangour of America’s only true megalopolis.