HPL recounts at length in letters how he came to write the tale. WTwas struggling financially, and the owner, J.C.Henneberger, felt that Houdini’s affiliation with the magazine might attract readers. Houdini was the reputed author of a column (“Ask Houdini”) that ran in a few issues, as well as of two short stories probably ghostwritten by others. In mid-February Henneberger commissioned HPL to write “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini was claiming that he had actually been bound and gagged by Arabs and dropped down a shaft in the pyramid called Campbell’s Tomb; but as HPL began exploring the historical and geographical background of the account, he came to the conclusion that it was complete fiction, and so he received permission from Henneberger to elaborate the account with his own imaginative additions. Henneberger had planned to publish the story as by “Houdini and H.P.Lovecraft,” but was disconcerted that HPL had written the account in the first person; he thought readers would be confused by a first-person story with a joint byline, so HPL’s name was omitted. (His role in the story was acknowledged in an editor’s note accompanying the 1939 reprint of the story.) HPL received $100 for the tale, paid in advance. He wrote the tale hastily in the last week of February, but then left the typescript in the train station in Providence while leaving to go to New York to marry Sonia H.Greene. (The ad HPL placed in the lost-and-found section of the Providence Journalsupplies his original title to the story.) Accordingly, he and Sonia spent much of their honeymoon preparing a new typescript of the story from HPL’s autograph manuscript, which fortunately he had brought with him.
The tale is surprisingly effective and suspenseful, with a genuinely surprising ending for those reading it for the first time. HPL’s Egyptian research was probably derived from several volumes in his library, notably The Tomb of Perneb(1916), a volume issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had seen many Egyptian antiquities firsthand at the museum in 1922. Some of the imagery of the story probably also derives from Théophile Gautier’s nonsupernatural tale of Egyptian horror, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”; HPL owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances(1882). The writing is somewhat florid, but deliberately so; and there must be a certain
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tart satire in the fact that Houdini—one of the strongest men of his day—faints three times in the course of his adventure.
“Unknown, The.”
Poem (12 lines in quatrains); probably written in the fall of 1916. First published in the Conservative (October 1916) (as by “Elizabeth Berkeley”).
A weird vignette in which the narrator finds something horrifying in the face of the moon. HPL notes in a letter to the Gallomo (September 12, 1923; AHT) that the poem was published under Winifred Virginia Jackson’s pseudonym “in an effort to mystify the [amateur] public by having widely dissimilar work from the same nominal hand.” HPL also published “The Peace Advocate” ( Tryout,May 1917) under this pseudonym.
See Donald R.Burleson, “Lovecraft’s ‘The Unknown’: A Sort of Runic Rhyme,” LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 19–21.
“Unnamable, The.”
Short story (2,970 words); written September 1923. First published in WT (July 1925); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D
In an old burying ground in Arkham, the first-person narrator, “Carter,” and his friend Joel Manton discuss Carter’s horror tales. Manton enunciates his objections to the weird—as contrary to probability, as not based on “realism,” and as extravagant and unrelated to life. In particular, he scoffs at the idea of something being termed “unnamable”; but later that evening the two men encounter just such an entity in the burying ground.
Although Carter’s first name is never mentioned, one assumes that he is Randolph Carter of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). But because of the uncertainty of his identity, “The Unnamable” has frequently not been considered part of the sequence of stories involving Carter. Only the most glancing reference to the incident related in this story appears in “The Silver Key” (1926): “Then he went back to Arkham,…and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows, and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor.”
In part, the tale is a satire on the stolid bourgeois unresponsiveness to the weird tale. Carter’s observation that “it is the province of the artist…to arouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment” signals HPL’s absorption of the literary theory of Arthur Machen (whom he was first reading at this time), specifically the treatise Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature(1902). The tale might have been directly inspired by the opening of Machen’s episodic novel The Three Impostors(1895), in which two characters debate as to the proper function of literature, one of them (analogous to Manton) remarking that “one has no business to make use of the wonderful, the improbable, the odd coincidence in literature…that it was wrong to do so, because as a matter of fact the wonderful and the improbable don’t happen….” In HPL’s story, the satire becomes more pointed because the character of Manton is clearly based upon HPL’s friend Maurice W.Moe (Manton is “principal of the East High School,” just as Moe was an instructor at the West Division High School in Milwaukee). Carter points out that Manton actually “believ[ed] in the supernatural much more fully than I”—an allusion to Manton’s (and Moe’s) religious beliefs.
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The story also explores the sense of the lurking horror of New England history and topography. It 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 treeengulfed slab can be found. Later in the story HPL records various “old-wives’ superstitions,” some of which are taken from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana(1702), of which he owned an ancestral copy.
Upton, Daniel.
The narrator of “The Thing on the Doorstep” and a close friend of Edward Derby. He shoots Derby to liberate him from the decaying corpse of Asenath Waite, into which Derby’s personality had been cast following his murder of Asenath.
Utpatel, Frank (1905–1980),
artist and late correspondent of HPL (1936–37). Utpatel, a Wisconsinite, was a friend of August Derleth, and in 1932 Derleth asked Utpatel to prepare some illustrations to HPL’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” even though that tale had not been accepted for publication. The whereabouts of these illustrations are unknown; but HPL, remembering them, urged William L.Crawford of the Visionary Press to commission Utpatel to make illustrations for the upcoming book publication of The Shadow over Innsmouth(1936). Utpatel prepared four illustrations, one of which appeared on the dust jacket. HPL professed to like them, even though the bearded Zadok Allen was portrayed as cleanshaven. In later years Utpatel became a distinguished fantasy illustrator, doing much work for Arkham House; he took many years to draw illustrations for HPL’s Collected Poems(Arkham House, 1963) but produced some of his best work there. He also drew the dust jacket for DBand for Frank Belknap Long’s Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside(Arkham House, 1975).