Shortly after the writing of ‘Pickman’s Model’, something strange occurs—Lovecraft is back in New York. He arrived no later than Monday, 13 September, for he speaks of seeing a film with Sonia that evening. I am not certain of the purpose of this visit—it clearly was only a visit, and I suspect the impetus came from Sonia. Lovecraft, although of course still married to Sonia, seems to have reverted to the guest status he occupied during his 1922 visits: he spent most of his time with the gang, particularly Long, Kirk, and Orton. On Sunday the 19th Lovecraft left for Philadelphia. Sonia had insisted on treating him to this excursion, presumably as recompense for returning to the ‘pest-zone’.
With Annie Gamwell, Lovecraft made another excursion in late October, although this one was much closer to home. It was, in fact, nothing less than his first visit to his ancestral region of Foster since 1908. It is heartwarming to read Lovecraft’s account of this journey, in which he not only absorbed the intrinsic loveliness of a rural New England he had always cherished but also re-established bonds with family members who still revered the memory of Whipple Phillips.
Echoes of the trip are manifested in his next work of fiction, ‘The Silver Key’, presumably written in early November. In this tale Randolph Carter—resurrected from ‘The Unnamable’ (1923)—is now thirty; he has ‘lost the key of the gate of dreams’ and therefore seeks to reconcile himself to the real world, which he now finds prosy and aesthetically unrewarding. He tries all manner of literary and physical novelties until one day he does find the key—or, at any rate, a key of silver in his attic, which somehow takes him back in time so that he is again a nine-year-old boy. Sitting down to dinner with his aunt and uncle, Carter finds perfect content as a boy who has sloughed off the tedious complications of adult life for the eternal wonder of childhood.
‘The Silver Key’ is, clearly, an exposition of Lovecraft’s own social, ethical, and aesthetic philosophy. It is not even so much a story as a parable or philosophical diatribe. He attacks literary realism, conventional religion, and bohemianism in exactly the same way as he does in his letters. But, as Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, has exhaustively pointed out, ‘The Silver Key’ is in large part a fictionalized account of Lovecraft’s recent Foster visit.24 Details of topography, character names, and other similarities make this conclusion unshakable. Just as Lovecraft felt the need, after two rootless years in New York, to restore connections with the places that had given him and his family birth, so in his fiction did he need to announce that, henceforth, however far his imagination might stray, it would always return to New England and look upon it as a source of bedrock values and emotional sustenance.
‘The Silver Key’, with its heavily philosophical burden, is by no means oriented toward a popular audience, and it is no surprise that Farnsworth Wright rejected it for Weird Tales. In the summer of 1928, however, Wright asked to see the tale again and this time accepted it for $70.
‘The Strange High House in the Mist’, written on 9 November, shows that the Dunsany influence had now been thoroughly internalised so as to allow for the expression of Lovecraft’s own sentiments through Dunsany’s idiom and general atmosphere. Indeed, the only genuine connections to Dunsany’s work may perhaps be in some details of the setting and in the manifestly philosophical, even satiric purpose which the fantasy is made to serve. We are now again in Kingsport, a city to which Lovecraft had not returned since ‘The Festival’ (1923), and Thomas Olney learns of the strange creatures that haunt an ancient house on a high cliff north of the city. After he returns to his family, Olney’s soul no longer longs for wonder and mystery; instead, he is content to lead his prosy bourgeois life with his wife and children.
On various occasions Lovecraft admits that he had no specific locale in mind when writing this tale: he states that memories of the ‘titan cliffs of Magnolia’25 in part prompted the setting, but that there is no house on the cliff as in the story. ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ contains little in the way of specific topographical description, and we are clearly in a never-never land where— anomalously for Lovecraft—the focus is on human character.
For the strange transformation of Thomas Olney is at the heart of the tale. The Terrible Old Man states: ‘somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney’. The body has returned to the normal round of things, but the spirit has remained with the occupant of the strange high house in the mist; Olney realizes that it is in this realm of nebulous wonder that he truly belongs. His body is now an empty shell, without soul and without imagination.
But Lovecraft was by no means done with writing. In a departure from his normal habits, he wrote ‘The Silver Key’ and ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ while simultaneously at work on a much longer work. Writing to August Derleth in early December, he notes: ‘I am now on page 72 of my dreamland fantasy.’26 The result, finished in late January, would be the longest work of fiction he had written up to this time—The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cosmic Outsideness (1927–28)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was finished at 43,000 words on 22 January 1927. Even while writing it, Lovecraft expressed doubts about its merits: ‘Actually, it isn’t much good; but forms useful practice for later and more authentic attempts in the novel form.’1 That remark is about as accurate a judgment as can be delivered on the work. More than any other of Lovecraft’s major stories, it has elicited antipodally opposite reactions even from devotees: L. Sprague de Camp compared it to George MacDonald’s Lilith and Phantastes and the Alice books, while other Lovecraft scholars find it almost unreadable. For my part, I think it is a charming but relatively insubstantial work: Carter’s adventures through dreamland do indeed pall after a time, but the novel is saved by its extraordinarily poignant conclusion. Its chief feature may be its autobiographical significance: it is, in fact, Lovecraft’s spiritual autobiography for this precise moment in his life.
It is scarcely worth while to pursue the rambling plot of this short novel, which in its continuous, chapterless meandering consciously resembles not only Dunsany (although Dunsany never wrote a long work exactly of this kind) but William Beckford’s Vathek (1786); several points of plot and imagery also bring Beckford’s Arabian fantasy to mind. Lovecraft resurrects Randolph Carter in a quest through dreamland for his ‘sunset city’, which is described as follows:
All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles.
This certainly sounds—except for some odd details at the end—like some Dunsanian realm of the imagination; but what does Carter discover as he leaves his hometown of Boston to make a laborious excursion through dreamland to the throne of the Great Ones who dwell in an onyx castle on unknown Kadath? Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the gods, tells him in a passage as moving as any in Lovecraft:
‘For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love …