Fenham.
Fictitious town in Maine invented either by HPL or by C.M.Eddy and cited in “The Loved Dead” (1923) and “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind” (1924).
< previous page page_91 next page > < previous page page_92 next page >
Page 92
Fenner, Matthew.
In “In the Vault,” a man for whom George Birch builds a new coffin, when he recognizes that his first effort was somewhat shoddy for the person intended. Birch uses the rejected casket for someone he did not like very well, with disastrous results.
Fenton, Dr.
In “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” a physician at a psychopathic institution in upstate New York and the boss of the narrator, an intern there.
“Festival.”
Poem (20 lines in 4 stanzas); written around Christmas 1925. First published in WT(December 1926) (as “Yule Horror”).
A poem to Farnsworth Wright, editor of WT,speaking of Wright as an “abbot and priest” at a “devilwrought feast.” Wright, taken with the work, published it but dropped its last stanza, which alluded directly to him.
“Festival, The.”
Short story (3,700 words); probably written in October 1923. First published in WT(January 1925); rpt. WT(October 1933): first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in CC. The first-person narrator finds himself in Kingsport, Mass., on the Yuletide “that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.” He follows a course along the old town that can be traversed to this day. He passes by the old cemetery on the hill, where “black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse,” and makes his way to a house with an overhanging second story and full of antique furnishings. Eventually he is led from the house by its occupants, including a man whose face seems to be a cunningly made waxen mask. He and the other townspeople make their way to a church in the center of town; entering it, they all descend robotically down a “trapdoor of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit,” where the celebrants worship a sickly green flame next to an oily river and then ride off on the backs of hybrid winged creatures. The narrator resists ascending the creature reserved for him, and in doing so he jostles his companion’s waxen mask; horrified at some nameless sight, he plunges into the river and eventually finds himself in St. Mary’s hospital in Arkham. He asks for a copy of the Necronomiconof Abdul Alhazred, and therein reads a passage that appears to confirm the events he has experienced, specifically in relation to entities that “have learned to walk that ought to crawl.”
The story is based upon HPL’s several trips to Marblehead, Mass., beginning in December 1922. Of his first trip there HPL later wrote that it was “the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence. In a flash all the past of New England—all the past of Old England—all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World—swept over me and identified me with the stupendous totality of all things in such a way as it never did before and never will again. That was the high tide of my life” ( SL3.126–27). The course of the narrator’s journey through the town corresponds to an actual route that leads to the center of Marblehead; the house with the overhanging second story is probably to be identified with an actual house at 1 Mugford Street. The church where the climactic incidents occur has long been thought to be St.
< previous page page_92 next page > < previous page page_93 next page >
Page 93
Michael’s Episcopal Church in Frog Lane, but this identification appears to be incorrect: St. Michael’s has no steeple, and allusions to it in this story and later tales make it clear that it is on a hill and that it is a Congregational church. In all likelihood, HPL was probably referring to one of two nowdestroyed Congregational churches in the city. The old cemetery on the hill is clearly Old Burial Hill, where many ancient graves are to be found.
In 1933 HPL 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” ( SL4.297). This controversial work of anthropology by Margaret A.Murray, published in 1921, made the claim (regarded by modern scholars as highly unlikely) that the witch-cult in both Europe and America had its origin in a preAryan race that was driven underground but continued to lurk in the hidden corners of the earth. HPL had just read a similar fictional exposition of the idea in Arthur Machen’s stories of the “Little People” and was accordingly much taken with this conception; he would allude to it in many subsequent references to the Salem witches in his tales, and as late as 1930 he was presenting the theory seriously (see SL3.182–83). The epigraph, from Lactantius, appears to derive from HPL’s ancestral copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana
See Donovan K.Loucks, “Antique Dreams: Marblehead and Lovecraft’s Kingsport.” LSNo. 42 (Summer 2001): 48–55.
Finlay, Virgil [Warden] (1914–1971),
American artist; perhaps the most accomplished artist to appear in the pulp magazines. Finlay came in touch with HPL in September 1936 and corresponded with HPL until the latter’s death. Finlay actually offered to illustrate HPL’s tales for a potential book of his work, even though HPL had no prospects for any such book publication at the time. HPL was prodigiously impressed with Finlay’s art, and in late November 1936 he wrote a sonnet (“To Mr. Finlay, upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch’s Tale, ‘The Faceless God’”; Phantagraph,May 1937), based upon Finlay’s illustration of Robert Bloch’s “The Faceless God” ( WT,May 1936). Finlay himself illustrated HPL’s “The Haunter of the Dark” ( WT, December 1936) and “The Thing on the Doorstep” ( WT,January 1937). Prior to HPL’s death Finlay executed his celebrated portrait of HPL as an eighteenth-century gentleman, although there is no evidence that HPL ever saw it; it was scheduled to appear in Willis Conover’s Science-Fantasy Correspondent,but it appeared in April 1937 as the cover of that magazine’s successor, Amateur Correspondent . Finlay went on to prepare dust-jacket illustrations for HPL’s Oand Marginalia. HPL’s letters to him were excerpted in “Letters to Virgil Finlay” ( Fantasy Collector’s Annual,1974). See Virgil Finlay, Virgil Finlay(Donald M.Grant, 1971), with lengthy contributions by Sam Moskowitz and Gerry de la Ree; Gerry de la Ree, Virgil Finlay Remembered(Gerry de la Ree, 1981). “For What Does the United Stand?”
Essay (535 words); probably written in the spring of 1920. First published in the United Amateur (May 1920); rpt. MW
< previous page page_93 next page > < previous page page_94 next page >
Page 94
Brief article on the importance of the UAPA in fostering education and the literary development of amateur writers.