< previous page page_116 next page > < previous page page_117 next page >
Page 117
venture that Houdini purportedly had in Egypt; but as HPL investigated the details of the incident (told to him in correspondence with Henneberger), he found that it was almost entirely mythical. HPL therefore asked Henneberger for as much imaginative latitude as possible in writing the story. The result was “Under the Pyramids” (published in the May-June-July issue as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”). Henneberger was going to print a joint byline to the story, but because HPL had written it in the first person (as if narrated by Houdini), he felt obliged to omit HPL’s name. Houdini, reading the story in manuscript, expressed great approbation of it (see SL1.328). In the fall of 1924, when HPL, now in New York, was having difficulty finding employment, Houdini asked HPL to visit him at his apartment at 278 West 113th Street in Manhattan, as he would put HPL in touch with “someone worth-while” (SL 1.354). At the meeting, in early October, Houdini gave HPL an introduction to Brett Page, the head of a newspaper syndicate; HPL met Page on October 14, but no job resulted from it. In the fall of 1926 Houdini came in touch with HPL again. He first asked HPL to write an article attacking astrology, for which he paid $75 (see SL2.76, 79). (This article apparently does not survive.) Then he commissioned HPL and C.M.Eddy (who may have done revision work for him at an earlier date) jointly to ghostwrite a full-scale book on superstition, but his sudden death on October 31 put an end to the plans, as Houdini’s widow did not wish to pursue the project. A synopsis of the book, along with the text of one chapter, survive in HPL’s papers under the title The Cancer of Superstition(in DB). Houdini gave HPL a copy of his own debunking of spiritualism, A Magician among the Spirits(1924), with the inscription: “To my friend Howard P.Lovecraft, /Best Wishes,/Houdini./‘My brain is the key that sets me free.’”
See Ruth Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini(1993); Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! (1996).
Houghton, Dr.
In “The Dunwich Horr or,” a physician who is summoned by Wilbur Whateley during Old Whateley’s terminal illness.
“Hound, The.”
Short story (3,000 words); written c. October 1922; first published in WT(February 1924); rpt. WT (September 1939); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in An2and CC The story involves the escapades of the narrator and his friend St. John in that “hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.” The two “neurotic virtuosi,” who are “wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world,” can find in this loathsome activity the only respite from their “devastating ennui.” One day they seek the grave in Holland of “one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.” When they unearth this grave, they find “much—amazingly much” left of the object despite the lapse of half a millennium. They find an amulet depicting a crouching winged hound and take this prize for their unholy museum of charnel objects in England.
Upon their return, strange things begin to happen. Their home seems besieged by a nameless whirring or flapping, and over the moors they hear the “faint, distant baying” as of a gigantic hound. One night, as St. John is walking
< previous page page_117 next page > < previous page page_118 next page >
Page 118
home alone from the station, he is torn to ribbons by some “frightful carnivorous thing.” As he lies dying, he manages to utter, “The amulet—that damned thing—.” The narrator realizes that he must return the amulet to the Holland grave, but one night in Rotterdam thieves take it. Later the city is shocked by a “red death” in a squalid part of town. The narrator, driven by some fatality, returns to the churchyard and digs up the old grave. As he uncovers it, he finds “the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.” The narrator, after telling his tale, proposes to “seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.”
The story was written sometime after HPL and his friend Rheinhart Kleiner visited the churchyard of the Dutch Reformed Church (1796) in Brooklyn on September 16, 1922. HPL remarks: “From one of the crumbling gravestones—dated 1747—I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write—& ought to suggest some sort of a horror-story. I must some night place it beneath my pillow as I sleep…who can say what thingmight not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb?” ( SL1.198). The character St. John is a clear nod to Kleiner, whom HPL referred to in correspondence as Randolph St. John, as if he were a relative of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.
“The Hound” has been criticized for being overwritten, but it appears to be a self-parody, as becomes increasingly evident from the obvious literary allusions (St. John’s “that damned thing” echoing the celebrated tale by Ambrose Bierce; the “red death” and the indefinite manner of dating [“On the night of September 24, 19—”], meant as playful nods to Poe; the baying of the hound clearly meant to recall Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles;and, as Steven J.Mariconda has demonstrated, many nods to Joris-Karl Huysmans, particularly A Rebours).
Some autobiographical touches in the story are noteworthy. While St. John is clearly meant to be Kleiner, the connection rests only in the name, as there is not much description of his character. The museum of tomb-loot collected by the protagonists may be a reference to Samuel Loveman’s impressive collection of objets d’art( nottaken from tombs): HPL first saw the collection in September 1922 and was much impressed by it. The original typescript of the story includes a reference to a new colleague: “A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith.” HPL revised this passage (on the advice of C.M.Eddy, Jr. [see SL1.292–93]) before submitting it to WT
In terms of HPL’s developing pseudomythology, “The Hound” is important in that it contains the first explicit mention of the Necronomiconand attributes it to Abdul Alhazred.
See Steven J.Mariconda, “‘The Hound’—A Dead Dog?” CryptNo. 38 (Eastertide 1986): 3–7; rpt. in Mariconda’s On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations(Necronomicon Press, 1995); James Anderson, “A Structural Analysis of H.P.Lovecraft’s ‘The Hound,’” CryptNo. 88 (Hallowmas 1994): 3–5.