“What has haunted my
dreams for nearly forty years is a strange sense of adventurous expectancy
connected with landscape and architecture and sky-effects”
H.P. Lovecraft (SL
3.100).
It's
shocking to think that "The Terror From The Depths" is four decades
old. It reads like one of our
contemporary Lovecraft pastiche Easter-egg-hunts with which H.P.L.'s epigones
and their anthologists and vanity publishers burden the reader.
The chief
strength of the story, like Leiber's splendid 1962 "A Bit of the Dark World" lies in its
evocative descriptions of the mountains and hills of southern California:
....almost as long as I
can remember and certainly ever since Anton Fischer’s tragic and abrupt demise,
nothing has ever bulked large with me save my own brooding and this brick house
set in the hills with its strange, queerly set stone carvings and the hills themselves,
those sandy, spongy, salt-soaked, sun-baked hills. There has been altogether
too much of them in my background: I have limped too long along their crumbling
rims, under their cracked and treacherous overhanging sandstones, and through
the months-dry streams that thread their separating canyons. I have thought a
great deal about the old days when, some Indians are said to have believed, the
Strangers came down from the stars with the great meteor shower and the lizard
men perished in the course of their frantic digging for water and the scaly sea
men came tunneling in from their encampments beneath the vast Pacific which
constituted a whole world to the west, extensive as that of the stars. I early
developed too great a love for such savage fancies. Too much of my physical
landscape has become the core of my mental landscape. And during the nights of
my long, long sleepings, I hobbled through them both, I am somehow sure. While
by day I had horrible fugitive visions of my father, underground, dead-alive,
companied by the winged worms of my nightmare. Moreover, I developed the notion
or fantasy that there was a network of tunnels underlying the paths I limped
along and corresponding to them exactly, but at varying depths and coming
closest to the surface at my “favorite spots.”
....And the hills
helped me as much as my home. For a month I roamed them daily and walked the
old familiar paths between the parched and browning undergrowth, my mind full
of old tales and scraps of childhood brooding. I think it was only then, only
with my returning, that I first came fully to realize how much (and a little of
what) those hills meant to me. From Mount Waterman and steep Mount Wilson with
its great observatory and hundred-inch reflector down through cavernous Tujunga
Canyon with its many sinuous offshoots to the flat lands and then across the
squat Verdugo Hills and the closer ones with Griffith Observatory and its
lesser ’scopes, to sinister, almost inaccessible Potrero and great twisting
Topanga Canyons that open with the abruptness of catastrophe upon the
monstrous, primeval Pacific—all of them (the hills) with few exceptions sandy,
cracked, and treacherous, the earth like rock and the rock like dried earth,
rotten, crumbling, and porous: all this had such a hold on me (the limper, the
fearful listener) as to be obsessive. And indeed there were more and more
symptoms of obsession now: I favored certain paths over others for ill-defined
reasons and there were places I could not pass without stopping for a little.
My fantasy or notion became stronger than ever that there were tunnels under
the paths, traveled by beings which attracted the venomous snakes of the outer
world because they were akin to them. Could some eerie reality have underlaid
my childhood nightmare?—I shied away from that thought.
Leiber
suggests the cult quackery popular in southern California is the result of a
certain "call" going out:
....Many people migrate
here, healthy as well as sick, drawn by the sun, the promise of perpetual
summer, the broad if arid fields. The only unusual circumstance worthy of note
is that there is a larger sprinkling than might be expected of persons of
professed mystical and utopian bent. The Brothers of the Rose, the
Theosophists, the Foursquare Gospelers, the Christian Scientists, Unity, the
Brotherhood of the Grail, the spiritualists, the astrologers—all are here and
many more besides. Believers in the need of return to primitive states and
primitive wisdoms, practitioners of pseudo-disciplines dictated by pseudo-sciences—yes,
even a few overly sociable hermits—one finds them everywhere; the majority
awaken only my pity and distaste, so lacking in logic and avid for publicity
are they. At no time—and let me emphasize this—have I been at all interested in
their doings and in their ignorantly parroted principles, except possibly from
the viewpoint of comparative psychology.
And they were brought
here by that excessive love of sunlight which characterizes most faddists of
any sort and that urge to find an unsettled, unorganized land in which utopias
might take root and burgeon, untroubled by urbane ridicule and tradition-bred
opposition—the same urge that led the Mormons to desert-guarded Salt Lake City,
their paradise of Deseret. This seems an adequate explanation, even without
bringing in the fact that Los Angeles, a city of retired farmers and small
merchants, a city made hectic by the presence of the uncouth motion-picture
industry, would naturally attract charlatans of all varieties. Yes, that
explanation is still sufficient to me, and I am rather pleased, for even now I
should hate to think that those hideously alluring voices a-mutter with secrets
from beyond the rim of the cosmos necessarily have some dim, continent-wide
range.
Indeed,
our narrator's father, a stone mason, seems to have heard the call in Kentucky,
and moved his family to the region in response.
....My father’s stone
engravings were indeed quite fanciful and even a little disconcerting in their
subject matter and location. One was in the basement’s floor of natural rock,
which he had smoothed. From time to time I’d watch him work on it. Desert
plants and serpents seemed to be its subject matter, but as one studied it one
became aware that there was much marine stuff too: serrated looping seaweeds,
coiling eels, fishes that trailed tentacles, suckered octopus arms, and two
giant squid eyes peering from a coral-crusted castle. And in its midst he
boldly hewed in a flowery stone script, “The Gate of Dreams.” My childish
imagination was fired, but I was a little frightened too.
One
curious coincidence pertaining to the Cthulhery
of the story: The narrator describes a
"Miskatonic Project" [into which all Lovecraft's major plots are
enfolded]. Robert Bloch's misbegotten
1978 "novel" Strange Eons
features an "Arkham Project" with the same X-Files brand of remit.
"The
Terror from the Depths" originally appeared in the 1976 DAW anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu. I'm sure I read it there when I found a copy
of the paperback in the mid-1980s. It is
certainly the strongest story in that collection, though Ramsey Campbell's
wonderfully-titled "The Tugging" is a close second. I re-read it this week in my eBook of Ross
Lockhart's 2012 anthology The Book of Cthulhu II, from which the above
excerpts are pulled.
Leiber
creates a world strangely consonant with Robert Frost's magnificent 1928 poem,
"Once by the Pacific."
The shattered water
made a misty din.
Great waves looked over
others coming in,
And thought of doing
something to the shore
That water never did to
land before.
The clouds were low and
hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown
forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and
yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in
being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being
backed by continent;
It looked as if a night
of dark intent
Was coming, and not
only a night, an age.
Someone had better be
prepared for rage.
There would be more
than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.
Jay R.
2/16/17
****
2/16/17
****
Appendix A:
....Late in life Leiber
finally broke down and produced an avowed Lovecraftian pastiche, writing “The
Terror from the Depths” when invited by Edward Paul Berglund to contribute to
his anthology, The Disciples of Cthulhu (1976). The result is an
extraordinarily rich and complex novelette that, as Byfield (57–58) has shown,
is a model for Leiber’s incorporation of the mythic theories of Jung and Joseph
Campbell in his later work. On a superficial level, “The Terror from the
Depths” can be read as a vast in-joke: it would require a lengthy commentary to
pinpoint all the tips of the hat to works by Lovecraft scattered through this
story, including something so insignificant as the cry “Merciful Creator!” (TD
301), borrowed from “Pickman’s Model” (DH 22). More interestingly, Leiber has
written a loose sequel to some of Lovecraft’s most celebrated later tales,
especially “The Whisperer in Darkness,” whose protagonist Albert N. Wilmarth
plays a major role in the story. Wilmarth, amusingly enough, bears a striking
physical resemblance to Lovecraft himself. Although Leiber of course never met
Lovecraft, he had by this time read enough about Lovecraft’s life and
mannerisms to capture some of his characteristic behaviour-patterns:
He [was] . . . a tall
young man, cadaverously thin, always moving about with nervous rapidity, his
shoulders hunched. He’d had a long jaw and a pale complexion, with dark-circled
eyes which gave him a haunted look, as if he were constantly under some great
strain to which he never alluded. . . . He’d seemed incredibly well read and
had had a lot to do with stimulating and deepening my interest in poetry. (TD
290)
The narrator, Georg
Reuter Fischer, even remarks to Wilmarth at one point: “‘You know, . . . I had
the craziest idea—that somehow you and he [Lovecraft] were the same person’”
(TD 310). Lovecraft himself, indeed, plays a minor role in the tale.
Conversely, Fischer (whose first and last names are derived from Leiber’s friends
Georg Mann and Harry O. Fischer, and whose middle name is Leiber’s own) is
clearly modelled on Leiber himself, so that the story’s scenario—in which
Wilmarth acts as a sort of mentor to Fischer in the pursuit of arcane
knowledge—echoes Lovecraft’s own brief tutorship to the young Leiber.
More than mere
imitation, however, “The Terror from the Depths” strives both to recapture some
of the textural richness of Lovecraft’s best stories and, perhaps, to show that
profound portrayals of human character are not incompatible with the general
“cosmic” orientation of Lovecraft’s work. To put it very crudely, Fischer finds
himself simultaneously attracted and repelled by the cosmic forces dwelling
under his Southern California home; and his first-person narrative reveals,
entirely unbeknownst to himself, the degree to which these forces have
throughout his entire life affected his mind and guided his actions to the
final cataclysmic conclusion. Leiber here has drawn from many of Lovecraft’s
tales: Cthulhu’s control of dreams (“The Call of Cthulhu”); the possible
attractions of yielding to the non-human (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”); the
compelling quest for scientific knowledge in the face of personal danger (“The
Whisperer in Darkness,” At the Mountains of Madness). And yet, the result is a
story that features considerably more psychological analysis than Lovecraft
ever included in his own work.
Accordingly, “The
Terror from the Depths” can on one level be seen as Leiber’s attempt to
“rewrite” “The Whisperer in Darkness” so that it has more to say about the
“real world” and “real people.” Recall that one of Leiber’s criticisms of
Lovecraft’s tale is that Wilmarth is presented as excessively gullible—a
comment that may point to Leiber’s overall dissatisfaction with the portrayal
of character in Lovecraft’s work generally. The same cannot be said of “The
Terror from the Depths,” where the slow absorption of both Fischer and Wilmarth
into the physical and mental grasp of the cosmic entities is depicted with
subtlety and psychological insight. In Lovecraft’s tale Wilmarth is also
momentarily attracted by the prospect of cosmic insights that might be made
available to him: “To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time
and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to
the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a
thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!” (DH 243). But in the
end he draws back and flees to the safety of the human world. Leiber’s scenario
shows that the mere option to yield or not to yield to the non-human has become
a moot point, since Fischer’s mind has long ago been captured by the cosmic
beings. What Leiber has done here—and, really, throughout his work—is to break
down the simple dichotomy of external horror and internal horror, showing that
both can be, and usually are, fused into an enigmatic and chilling union.
It cannot be repeated
frequently enough that Fritz Leiber was one of the few writers of the “Lovecraft
Circle” to have fully assimilated the Lovecraft influence and gone on to
produce vital, original work that reflects his own (not Lovecraft’s) themes,
concerns, and philosophy. The same cannot be said for the Lovecraftian work of
August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Brian Lumley, and even Ramsey Campbell.
Campbell became an original writer only when he repudiated the Lovecraft
influence that dominated his first volume, The Inhabitant of the Lake (1964),
and went on to write the very different work for which he is now justly
acclaimed. Leiber never had to make such a clear break, perhaps because his
youthful conceptions were already pointing in a somewhat Lovecraftian direction
(especially in the mingling of horror and science fiction), so that he could
use Lovecraft’s work less as the source of abject imitation than as a spur to
his imagination. Leiber never attempted to imitate Lovecraft’s distinctive
style (save, as an homage, in “The Terror from the Depths”), and instead drew
upon fundamental Lovecraftian themes, moods, and aesthetic principles—the
impingement of vast extraterrestrial entities upon the earth; the focusing upon
a hapless, solitary human being caught in the web of cosmic forces; the
intellectual terror of a defiance or subversion of natural law; the need to
modernise the weird tale by utilising modern science as a source of terror—as
the foundation of his early work. Night’s Black Agents is a testimonial to how
much Leiber has learned from Lovecraft, but many other works could be cited to
flesh out the picture.
In the end, however,
Leiber remains a writer capable of expressing his own unique vision; the most
important lesson he drew from Lovecraft was some clues on how best to express
it.
S.T. Joshi,
"Passing the Torch: H.P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber" in The Evolution of the Weird Tale.. Hippocampus Press.
2004.
***
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