12 Ancient Greek poet (sixth century B.C.E.) noted for his drinking songs. HPL was fond of reciting the words to the British drinking song “To Anacreon in Heaven” whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, since Francis Scott Key had borrowed the tune of the drinking song for his own composition.
13 See n. 1.
14 A type of wig popular in the eighteenth century, in which the back hair was enclosed in an ornamental bag.
BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP
“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” was written in the spring of 1919. It was first published in Pine Cones (October 1919), an amateur journal edited by John Clinton Pryor, and reprinted in the Fantasy Fan (October 1934) and Weird Tales (March 1938). HPL notes (LVW 69) that the story was inspired by a passing mention of Catskill Mountain denizens in an article on the New York State Constabulary in the New York Tribune. The article in question is “How Our State Police Have Spurred Their Way to Fame,” by F. F. Van de Water, published in the Tribune for April 27, 1919. The article actually mentions a family named the Slaters or Slahters as representative of the decadent squalor of the mountaineers. There may also be an influence from Jack London’s Before Adam (1906), although no evidence has emerged that HPL read this work. This novel is an account of hereditary memory, in which a man from the modern age has dreams of the life of his remote ancestor in primitive times. At the very outset of the novel London’s character remarks: “Nor . . . did any of my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep.” Other passages in London’s novel also seem to find echoes in HPL’s story. In effect, HPL is presenting a mirror-image of Before Adam: whereas London’s narrator is a modern (civilized) man who has visions of a primitive past, Joe Slater is a primitive human being whose visions, as HPL declares, are such as “only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive.” The story is also an anticipation of “The Shadow out of Time” (1934-35), in which HPL handled the psychic possession of a human mind by an extraterrestrial one with far greater plausibility and cosmic sweep.
1 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.39. “Exposition” here means disposition or inclination.
2 This clause was added after the first publication of the story. HPL came upon the work of Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) around 1921; see “The Defence Reopens!” (1921): “The doctrines [of Freud] . . . are indeed radical, and decidedly repellent to the average thinker. Certainly, they reduce man’s boasted nobility to a hollowness woeful to contemplate. But . . . we are forced to admit that the Freudi ans have in most respects excelled their predecessors, and that while many of Freud’s most important details may be erroneous . . . he has nevertheless opened up a new path in psychology, devising a system whose doctrines more nearly approximate the real workings of the mind than any heretofore entertained” (MW 154). HPL’s phrase “puerile symbolism” probably refers to Freud’s emphasis on the sexual nature of many aspects of dream-imagery, something the sexually sluggish HPL would have found difficult to comprehend.
3 A region in New York State, about eighty miles north of New York City and forty miles south of Albany. HPL had not yet visited the area, having derived most of the topographical background for this tale from the New York Tribune article cited in the introductory note. He may also have learned something of the region from his aged friend Jonathan E. Hoag (1831-1927), an amateur poet residing in Troy, New York (near Albany), with whom HPL had become acquainted in 1918. HPL visited the area only in 1929, when he explored the towns of Kingston, Hurley, and New Paltz, on the eastern fringe of the Catskill Mountains (see SL 2.338-47).
4 This story was written several months before Prohibition went into effect on July 1, 1919, an event commemorated in HPL’s poem “Monody on the Late King Alcohol” (The Tryout, August 1919). In later tales HPL makes a point of referring to “bootleg whiskey” (see “The Dunwich Horror,” p. 235). See also “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (CC 293).
5 An alienist is a physician brought in to determine the sanity of a patient. See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (p. 91).
6 In the first publication of the story, this phrase read “ether-wave apparatus.” This refers to the ancient concept of the ether (see n. 81 to At the Mountains of Madness). The radio—which relies on the transmission of electromagnetic waves—was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1898 but was not widely available until the 1910s.
7 Cf. “The Shadow out of Time,” when Peaslee recounts the entities from both the past and the future whom he meets while his mind is in the captive body of the Great Race: “I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000” (DH 395).
8 This conception is also adapted for “The Shadow out of Time,” when Peaslee notes: “There was a mind . . . from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past” (DH 395). In 1919 Jupiter was thought to have only nine satellites. Today, sixteen satellites are known.
9 A double star in the constellation Perseus. The nickname derives from the Arabic phrase meaning “demon” or “mischief-maker,” referring to the fact that the dimmer of the two stars periodically produces a partial eclipse of the brighter star, thereby radically reducing its visible magnitude.
10 The passage is taken verbatim from Garrett P. Serviss (1851-1929), Astronomy with the Naked Eye (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), p. 152. Serviss, a professional astronomer, was also a prolific science fiction writer whose novels were often serialized in the All-Story Weekly. In a letter to the editor of that magazine (published in the issue of March 7, 1914), HPL wrote: “I have read every published work of Garrett P. Serviss, own most of them, and await his future writings with eagerness.”
THE WHITE SHIP
“The White Ship” was probably written in October 1919. It was first published in the United Amateur (November 1919) and reprinted in Weird Tales (March 1927). It is the first of HPL’s tales written under the influence of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany (1878-1957). The surface plot of the story is clearly derived from Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann” (in A Dreamer’s Tales, 1910). The resemblance is, however, superficial, for Dunsany’s tale tells only of a dream-voyage by a man who boards a ship, the Bird of the River, and encounters one magical land after another; there is no significant philosophical content in these realms, and their principal function is merely an evocation of fantastic beauty. HPL’s tale is meant to be interpreted allegorically or symbolically. Many of the imaginary place-names in the story were cited again in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27), a short novel in which HPL incorporated references to many of his “Dunsanian” tales of 1919-21.
Further Reading
Dirk W. Mosig, “ ‘The White Ship’: A Psychological Odyssey,” in H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 186-90.
Paul Montelone, “ ‘The White Ship’: A Schopenhauerian Odyssey,” Lovecraft Studies No. 36 (Spring 1997): 2-14.
1 This tale was written before HPL read either Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) or M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), two distinctive “last man on earth” novels. Late in life HPL collaborated with R. H. Barlow on a story on this subject, “ ‘Till A’ the Seas’ ” (1935; in HM).
2 Cited again in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: “He [Randolph Carter] saw slip by him the glorious lands and cities of which a fellow-dreamer of earth—a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport—had often discoursed in the old days, and recognised the terraced temples of Zar, abode of forgotten dreams” (MM 317; see also 326). Note that Basil Elton is now said to be a resident of Kingsport, HPL’s fictitious Massachusetts seaport.
3 Cf. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: “[Carter] saw . . . the spires of infamous Thalarion, the daemon-city of a thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns” (MM 317).
4 One of HPL’s favorite words. In both Greek and English, the primary meaning of the word is “phantom,” but HPL tends to use it in its secondary meaning (“image or likeness
,” especially of a god). See his poem “The Eidolon” (1918). HPL may have derived this meaning from Poe’s poem “Dream-Land” (1844): “By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named Night, / On a black throne reigns upright . . .” (ll. 1-4).
5 Also cited, in almost identical phraseology, in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (MM 317).
6 An echo of Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann”: “And the night deepened over the River Yann, a night all white with stars. And with the night there rose the helmsman’s song. As soon as he had prayed he began to sing to cheer himself all through the lonely night.” The Complete Pegana, ed. S. T. Joshi (Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1998), p. 7.
7 Cited again in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (MM 318).
8 Cited again in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (MM 318-19).
9 Archaic spelling of lanterns; used again in “The Festival” (1923; CC 113).
10 The mention of the Greek mountain Olympus (home of the Greek gods) may seem odd in an imaginary-world fantasy, but it is perhaps meant as an echo of the opening line of Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana (1905): “Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Mana-Yood-Sushai.” The Complete Pegana, p. 7.
THE TEMPLE
“The Temple” was written sometime after “The Cats of Ulthar” ( June 15, 1920) but before “Celephaïs” (early November). It was first published in Weird Tales (September 1925) and reprinted in Weird Tales (February 1936). This is the first of HPL’s stories not to have been originally published in an amateur journal; possibly its length was a factor, as most amateur journals could not accommodate so long a tale. Like “Dagon” (1917), it uses World War I as a vivid backdrop, although HPL mars the story by crude satire on his German protagonist’s militarist and chauvinist sentiments. There also seems to be an excess of supernaturalism, with many bizarre occurrences that do not seem to unify into a coherent whole. But the story is significant in postulating (like “Dagon”) an entire civilization antedating humanity and possibly responsible for many of the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of humanity. In a letter HPL remarks that “the flame that the Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein beheld was a witch-fire lit by spirits many millennia old” (SL 1.287), but no reader could ever make this deduction based solely on the textual evidence.
1 HPL’s twenty-seventh birthday.
2 This location would be in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately 800 miles northwest of the Cape Verde Islands.
3 Germany had instituted the practice of sinking civilian shipping by means of submarine torpedoes from the very outset of the war. HPL expressed outrage at the sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania on May 7, 1915, writing the poem “The Crime of Crimes” (Interesting Items, July 1915) as a result.
4 The French province of Alsace-Lorraine was conquered by the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and was retained by Germany until the end of World War I. HPL’s submarine commander presumably expresses his scorn for the Alsatian on the assumption that he is not a true or traditional Prussian.
5 A German city in the state of Lower Saxony, situated on the North Sea. It was the site of an important naval base.
6 Rhineland refers generally to the territory on either side of the Rhine river, in west-central Germany. The Rhineland was awarded to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Again, HPL’s submarine commander apparently feels that the area was too newly acquired for its inhabitants to be properly Prussian.
7 HPL in fact regarded Atlantis as a myth; see his discussion of its mentions in ancient Greek literature in a late letter (SL 5.267-69). He believed that, if a sunken continent existed anywhere, it might be in the Pacific, analogous to what occultists termed Mu (see SL 2.253); HPL employed this notion in his ghostwritten tale, “Out of the Aeons” (1933; HM). But he was not above using Atlantis for fictional purposes: he cites the theosophist W. Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1925) in “The Call of Cthulhu” (CC 142), and in the fragment “The Descendant” (1927?) he makes reference to “Ignatius Donnelly’s chimerical account of Atlantis” (D 361), i.e., Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882).
8 A crystalline powder, usually dissolved in water and used as a sedative.
THE QUEST OF IRANON
“The Quest of Iranon” was written on February 28, 1921. It was first published in the Galleon (July-August 1935), a little magazine edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, and reprinted in Weird Tales (March 1939). It is among the best of HPL’s Dunsanian imitations, although there is perhaps a hint of social snobbery at the end (Iranon kills himself because he discovers he is of low birth). HPL wished to use it in his own amateur paper, the Conservative (whose last issue had appeared in July 1919), but the next issue did not appear until March 1923, and HPL had by then evidently decided against using it there.
1 For a realistic counterpart of this same image (looking down upon a city from a height at sunset), see The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (p. 95 below). On this general theme see Peter Cannon, “Sunset Terrace Imagery in Lovecraft,” in “Sunset Terrace Imagery in Lovecraft” and Other Essays (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1990), pp. 14-17.
2 The title of one of a group of governing magistrates in many of the city-states of ancient Greece, most notably in Athens from the eighth to the fourth century B.C.E.
3 Archaic equivalent of if.
4 In HPL’s “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919), Sarnath was a city on the shores of a lake in the land of Mnar built by people who destroyed the stone city of Ib, but who were later overwhelmed by the resurrected inhabitants of Ib emerging from the lake. HPL thought that he had derived the name Sarnath from Dunsany, but the name does not appear in any of Dunsany’s works. There is a real city in India named Sarnath, but HPL was probably not aware of it.
5 Cf. “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”: “After many aeons men came to the land of Mnar; dark shepherd folk with their fleecy flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai” (D 44).
6 Olathoë and Lomar were invented for the story “Polaris” (1918).
7 First invented in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (see D 48).
THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN
“The Music of Erich Zann” was probably written in December 1921. It was first published in the National Amateur (March 1922) and reprinted in Weird Tales (May 1925) and reprinted a second time in Weird Tales (November 1934). HPL considered the tale among his best, although in later years he noted that it had a sort of negative value: it lacked the flaws—notably over explicitness and overwriting—that marred some of his other works, both before and after. It might, however, be said that HPL erred on the side of underexplicitness in the very nebulous horror seen through Zann’s garret window.
The story appears to be set in Paris. French critic Jacques Bergier claimed to have corresponded with HPL late in the latter’s life and purportedly asked him how and when he had ever seen Paris in order to derive so convincing an atmosphere for the tale; HPL is said to have replied, “In a dream, with Poe” (see Jacques Bergier, “Lovecraft, ce grand génie venu d’ailleurs,” Planète No. 1 [October-November 1961]: 43-46). But there is no evidence that Bergier ever corresponded with HPL, and this account may be apocryphal. HPL himself stated, shortly after writing the story, “It is not, as a whole, a dream, though I have dreamt of steep streets like the Rue d’Auseil” (HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, March 12, 1922; ms., private collection).
The story was among the most frequently reprinted in HPL’s lifetime. Aside from the appearances listed above, it was included in Dashiell Ham mett’s celebrated anthology, Creeps by Night (1931) and its various reprints (e.g., Modern Tales of Horror [1932]); it was reprinted in the Evening Standard (London) (October 24, 1932), occupying a full page of the newspaper. It was also one of the first of HPL’s tales to be included in a textbook: James B. Hall and Joseph Langland’s The Short Story (1956). It was also a
dapted as a haunting seventeen-minute film by John Strysik (1981), now included in the video The Lurker at the Lobby (Beyond Books, 1998).
Further Reading
John Strysik, “The Movie of Erich Zann and Others,” Lovecraft Studies No. 5 (Fall 1981): 29-32.
Donald R. Burleson, “ ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ as Fugue,” Lovecraft Studies No. 6 (Spring 1982): 14-17.
Robert M. Price, “Erich Zann and the Rue d’Auseil,” Lovecraft Studies Nos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 13-14.
Carl Buchanan, “ ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ A Psychological Interpretation (or Two),” Lovecraft Studies No. 27 (Fall 1992): 10-13.
1 Auseil does not exist in French, either as a noun or as a proper noun. Some scholars believe that HPL was intending to suggest a connection with the phrase au seuil (at the threshold), i.e., that Erich Zann’s room is at the threshold between the real and the unreal. Although HPL’s knowledge of French was rudimentary, he could probably have devised a coinage of this kind.
2 This description may suggest that the Rue d’Auseil was loosely based upon a very steep street in Providence, Meeting Street, which similarly ends in a flight of steps as it approaches Congdon Street. Cf. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: “At Meeting Street . . . he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway had to resort in climbing the slope” (p. 96).
3 Peculiar as it sounds, HPL uses the term viol literally, referring to the archaic cellolike instrument played between the legs; the term is not a poeticism for “violin.” He confirms this when he refers to Zann as a “ ’cellist” (HPL to Elizabeth Toldridge, [October 31, 1931?; ms., JHL]); i.e., violoncellist.