Then, around 1928, he began work on Moe’s Doorways to Poetry. After a long period of quiescence, Lovecraft was forced to turn his attention again to the theory of poetry. The immediate influence on the Fungi, however, clearly seems to be Wandrei’s Sonnets of the Midnight Hours, which Lovecraft read no later than November 1927. This cycle—in which all the poems are in the first person and all are inspired by actual dreams by Wandrei—is certainly very powerful, but does not seem to me quite as polished or as cumulatively affecting as Lovecraft’s. Nevertheless, Lovecraft clearly derived the basic idea of a sonnet cycle from this work.
Winfield Townley Scott and Edmund Wilson independently believed that the Fungi may have been influenced by Edwin Arlington Robinson, but I cannot find any evidence that Lovecraft had read Robinson by this time, or in fact ever read him. He is not mentioned in any correspondence I have seen prior to 1935. The parallels in diction adduced by Scott seem to be of a very general sort and do not establish a sound case for any such influence.
We now come to the vexed question of what the Fungi from Yuggoth actually is. Is it a strictly unified poem that reveals some sort of ‘continuity’, or is it merely a random collection of sonnets flitting from topic to topic with little order or sequence? I remain inclined toward the latter view. No one can possibly believe that there is any actual plot to this work, in spite of various critics’ laboured attempts to find such a thing; and other critics’ claims for a kind of ‘unity’ based on structure or theme or imagery are similarly unconvincing because the ‘unity’ so discovered does not seem at all systematic or coherent. My conclusion remains that the Fungi sonnets provided Lovecraft with an opportunity to crystallize various conceptions, types of imagery, and fragments of dreams that could not have found creative expression in fiction—a sort of imaginative housecleaning. The fact that he so exhaustively used ideas from his commonplace book for the sonnets supports this conclusion.
Some of the sonnets seem to be reworkings of some of the dominant conceptions of previous stories. ‘Nyarlathotep’ is a close retelling of the prose poem of 1920; ‘The Elder Pharos’ speaks of a figure who ‘wears a silken mask’, whom we first saw in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath; ‘Alienation’ seems roughly based upon ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’. More significantly, some poems seem to be anticipations of stories Lovecraft would write in later years, making the Fungi a sort of recapitulation of what he had written before and a presage of his subsequent work.
Those who argue for the ‘unity’ of the Fungi must take account of the somewhat odd manner in which the cycle achieved its present state. ‘Recapture’ (now sonnet XXXIV) was written in late November, presumably as a separate poem. For years after it was written, the Fungi comprised only thirty-five sonnets. In 1936, when R. H. Barlow considered publishing it as a booklet, he suggested that ‘Recapture’ be added to the cycle; but, when he rather casually tacked it on at the end of a typescript he was preparing, Lovecraft felt that it should be placed third from the end: ‘“Recapture” seems somehow more specific & localised in spirit than either of the others named, hence would go better before them—allowing the Fungi to come to a close with more diffusive ideas.’15 To my mind, this suggests no more than that Lovecraft had some rough idea that the cycle ought to be read in sequence and ought to end with a more general utterance. And yet, shortly after finishing the series he was still mentioning casually the possibility of ‘grind[ing] out a dozen or so more before I consider the sequence concluded’.16
Certainly, Lovecraft had no compunction in allowing the individual sonnets of the Fungi to appear quite randomly in the widest array of publications. Ten sonnets appeared in Weird Tales in 1930–31 (as well as ‘Recapture’, published earlier); five more appeared in the Providence Journal in the early months of 1930; nine appeared in Walter J. Coates’s Driftwind from 1930 to 1932; the remainder appeared later in amateur journals or fan magazines, and after Lovecraft’s death many more were printed in Weird Tales. The cycle as a unit was not published until 1943.
It had been more than a year since Lovecraft had written any original fiction; and that tale—’The Dunwich Horror’—was itself written after more than a year’s interval since its predecessor, ‘The Colour out of Space’. Revision, travel, and inevitably correspondence ate up all the time Lovecraft might have had for fiction, for he stated repeatedly that he required a completely free schedule to achieve the mental clarity needed for writing stories. Now, however, at the end of 1929, a revision job came up that allowed him to exercise his fictional pen far beyond what he expected— and, frankly, beyond what was required by the job in question. But however prodigal Lovecraft may have been in the task, the result— ’The Mound’, ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop—was well worth the effort.
Of this story it is difficult to speak in small compass. It is, at twenty-five thousand words, the lengthiest of Lovecraft’s revisions of a weird tale, and is comparable in length to ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. That it is entirely the work of Lovecraft can be gauged by Bishop’s original plot-germ, as recorded by R. H. Barlow: ‘There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman.’17 Lovecraft found this idea ‘insufferably tame & flat’18 and fabricated an entire novelette of underground horror, incorporating many conceptions of his evolving mythcycle, including Cthulhu (under the variant form Tulu).
‘The Mound’ concerns a member of Coronado’s expedition of 1541, Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, who leaves the main group and conducts a solitary expedition to the mound region of what is now Oklahoma and stumbles upon the underground realm of Xinaian (which he pronounces ‘K’n-yan’), occupied by approximately human denizens from outer space. These people have developed remarkable mental abilities, including telepathy and the power of dematerialization—the process of dissolving themselves and selected objects around them to their component atoms and recombining them at some other location. Zamacona initially expresses wonder at this civilization, but gradually finds that it has declined both intellectually and morally from a much higher level and has now become corrupt and decadent. He attempts to escape, but suffers a horrible fate. A manuscript that he had written of his adventures is unearthed in modern times by an archaeologist, who paraphrases his incredible tale.
This skeletonic plot outline cannot begin to convey the textural richness of the story, which—although perhaps not as carefully written as many of Lovecraft’s original works—is successful in depicting vast gulfs of time and in vivifying with a great abundance of detail the underground world of K’n-yan. What should also be evident is that ‘The Mound’ is the first, but by no means the last, of Lovecraft’s tales to utilize an alien civilization as a transparent metaphor for certain phases of human (and, more specifically, Western) civilization. Initially, K’n-yan seems a Lovecraftian utopia: the people have conquered old age, have no poverty because of their relatively few numbers and their thorough mastery of technology, use religion only as an aesthetic ornament, practise selective breeding to ensure the vigour of the ‘ruling type’, and pass the day largely in aesthetic and intellectual activity. But as Zamacona continues to observe the people, he begins to notice disturbing signs of decadence. Science was ‘falling into decay’; history was ‘more and more neglected’; and gradually religion was becoming less a matter of aesthetic ritual and more a sort of degraded superstition. The narrator concludes: ‘It is evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machinery had brought it during its middle period.’ These sentiments are exactly echoed in Lovecraft’s letters of the period.