SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

by H. P. Lovecraft

Part Seventeen

Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. "Edward Randolph's Portrait," in "Legends of the Province House," has its diabolic moments. "The Minister's Black Veil" (founded on an actual incident) and "The Ambitious Guest" imply much more than they state, whilst "Ethan Brand"—a fragment of a longer work never completed—rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer—an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from a very ancient grave.

But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, "The House of the Seven Gables," in which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient house—one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast towns, but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well-known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an object well-calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692.

From this setting came the immortal tale—New England's greatest contribution to weird literature—and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder—old Colonel Pyncheon—snatched the land with peculiar ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon—"God will give him blood to drink"—and the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son consented to build the great gabled house for his father's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and peculiar and sometimes terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.

The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient home—almost as alive as Poe's House of Usher, tho in subtler way—pervades the tale as a recurrent motif pervades an operatic tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike, unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly and treacherous Judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel all over again—all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the stunted vegetation and anaemic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phoebe, cousin and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications of terror well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her harpsichord which precedes a death in the family—the latter a variant of an immemorial type of Aryan myth—link the action directly with the supernatural; whilst the dread nocturnal vigil of old Judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way in which the Judge's death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected either by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for—something. It is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite deftness to its latter-day setting.

But Hawthorne left no well-dined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe—who so clearly and realistically understood the natural basis of the horror—appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievements—which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz-James O'Brien (1828-1862) who became naturalized as an American and perished honourably in the Civil War. It is he who gave us "What Was It?" the first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant's "Horla;" he also who created the inimitable "Diamond Lens," in which a young microscopist falls in love with a maiden of an infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which characterized Poe and Hawthorne.

(Discontinued At This Point)

GLEANINGS
by Louis C. Smith

I promise to write an article about that Great High God among fantasy authors, M. P. Shiel; much of the best science-fantasy, from a literary standpoint, has been written by him. Anyway, when you read "The Purple Cloud," "Dr. Krasinski's Secret," "This Above All," or any of the other two score novels penned by him, such little matters as scientific accuracy never enter your head (which does not by any means imply that his science is not correct to the N'th degree). A hypnotist with words is M. P. Shiel.

And he is—and has been—almost as much a Heaven-born genius as some of the characters he weaves through the pages of his novels. He is fluent with a half-dozen languages, is literally a master of all sciences, writes in a blinding, complicated style no one else on Earth could imitate—much less create!—and has written as many books as Haggard, Burroughs, and a few others combined. At 12 he wrote a novel; at 13, printed a newspaper; and at 15, wrote novels for serialization in large public papers.

Lester Anderson, fantastiac extra-ordinary of Hayward, California, is fortunate enough to count himself a very good friend and correspondent of the lexicographical (hah!) Clark Ashton Smith.

Speaking of whom: Smith and H. P. Lovecraft are great friends, by correspondence. Lovecraft refers to C.A.S. as "My good old friend and correspondent, Klarkash-Ton, Hierophant of Atlantis and High-Priest of Tsathoggua."

Again Bram Stoker! His latest to chance my way is "The Jewel of Seven Stars." With every reading of this English weird-tale master, I am seized in profound melancholia, despairing the fact that he did not live another twenty years, to pen another score novels. Not content with being a master of superb plot (involved plot too!) Stoker went to exquisite pains to instill that ultra-weird and chilling sense of the unreal so characteristic of his work.

In "Jewel of the Seven Stars," he spins a yarn of Egyptian queens who wield a strange and powerful influence over the lives of present-day people; of mummified cats walking again and striking in the dark, vampire-like; of hypnotic spells and influences; of developments so utterly mystifying and gripping, the reader cannot put the book down after once opening it. And Bram Stoker's novels are not the abbreviated two-hundred page book so much in evidence today; they are voluminous; though not, I might mention, as "infinite" as "Anthony Adverse."

Here is something—not strictly fantasy, but certainly of interest to all who make fantasy a hobby—which I have deemed worthy of passing on: about twenty years ago there lived in Honolulu, in the much-sung Hawaiian Islands, a man, W. D. Westervelt by name, who spent all his spare time in the collecting of legends and myths about volcanoes. Perhaps the best result of his efforts was a little book called "Legends of Hawaiian Volcanoes," small but crammed to the fly-leaves with fascinating historical, scientific, and mythological data. Others had the titles of "Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods," "Legends of Old Honolulu," "Legends of Maui," etc. No, not true fantasy, but they read like first-rate weird stories. Incidentally, this is a field for stories practically untouched; tales built around Hawaiian and other old native legends have been scarce.

Once, in those dear dead days when I first awakened to the call of fantasy, I was seized with some strange outbreak of energy; and typed two copies of Edmond Hamilton's first tale, "The Monster God of Mamurth." The copies are still on had. Not faultless typing, but readable. If anyone has not read this great little story by Hamilton, I'll gladly send a copy to the first two fans writing me.