The experience of class defeat: Notes on H. P. Lovecraft and At The Mountains of Madness

[....]Lovecraft's fiction is haunted by the spectre of cosmic fatalism: the idea that human beings can never possibly fathom the mysteries of the universe and that the universe, in turn, remains indifferent to humanity. To Lovecraft, human beings had as little chance of understanding the inner mechanisations of hyperspace as an ant does planet Earth. It's a viewpoint that chimes perfectly with the lumbering, misanthropic gait of Electric Wizard: the world cast as a pitiless void, life a cosmic accident.

--   Sword, H. (2022). Monolithic undertow: In search of sonic oblivion. White Rabbit.

[....] There they were—the three sledges missing from Lake's camp—shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough—the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents—everything derived from Lake's equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens....

-- end of chapter nine, Lovecraft, H. P. (2005). At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. Modern Library.

*   *   *

[....]Lovecraft was notoriously not only an elitist and a reactionary, but a bilious lifelong racist. His idiot and disgraceful pronouncements on racial themes range from pompous pseudoscience—"The Negro is fundamentally the biologically inferior of all White and even Mongolian races"—to monstrous endorsements—"[Hitler's] vision is . . . romantic and immature . . . yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man's basic urge . . . I know he's a clown, but by God, I like the boy!"

-- excerpt from China Miéville's 2005 introduction to:   Lovecraft, H. P. (2005). At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. Modern Library.

 

❖

Several days ago I woke at 2 a.m. to find myself listening to the end of chapter nine of  HorrorBabble's audiobook of At the Mountains of Madness. An enchanting experience: akin to reading a page without being given the title, date, plot or author's name.

As a Marxist I'm passionate about context: dates of both production and reception are crucial. Production of what? Production of anything whose use-value is the product of human labor. 

Free of accreted layers of literary and historical context, listening to At the Mountains of Madness in this way was an uncanny and sublime experience.

*   *   *

At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

My first reading of ATMM was in one of the early-1980s Del Rey / Ballantine paperback reprints: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror. This was Christmas money well-spent by my sixteen year old self, and undoubtedly a peak instance of reception, as I read ATMM during the cold and snowy final week of December 1982.

To the first-time reader ATMM is a staunchly distanced story. Dramatized action does not begin until the halfway point; prior to that, we might be reading a report by one of J. G. Ballard's corporate or civil service psychiatrists. Only after reading another late Lovecraft novella are we able to deduce the first-person narrator's name: geologist William Dyer of Miskatonic U.

Such distancing, such absolute absence of conventional melodrama, makes for a beautifully concise piece of fiction. The later toing and froing of stories like "Who Goes There?" is absent: there is no genre veil between readers and protagonists as Dwyer and Danforth climb up through millenia of levels from an underground labyrinth toward daylight and salvation in the city of the Old Ones:

      So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping— "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li !"

     I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct—in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through—perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and—thank God—through the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once—else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.

     "South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harard. . . ." The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it....

All respect to Dwyer's conclusion, but I would also propose that Danforth's action in counting-off the subway stops presents a mind desperate for "home-feeling," fumbling at a last means to preserve sanity and keep running.

*   *   *

What Dwyer and Danforth found under the mountains of madness in the seemingly uninhabited city of the Old Ones was exotic, but not unknown in earth's history. Hydraulic and agricultural societies  built on slave labor have not been rare. Lovecraft's exoticism is in creating a civilization so ancient its artworks and preserved knowledge have withstood and depicted ice ages, warming ages, and physical ravages today understood as the action of plate tectonics.

The Old Ones, keepers of the flame, preservers of splendor and learning, lost the class war against slaves they themselves created. A few slaves apparently remain, inquisitive in their own way (or simply aping their rulers?), but the first contact between them and human explorers follows a familiar pattern to other encounters in history.

The "flight by night" out of the labyrinth as Dwyer and Danforth race to their aircraft recapitulates many similar night journeys in world literature. The two men are committed to warning the world. Many individuals over millenia were probably similarly motivated to halt the development of evident catastrophes. Certainly, we know they all failed in their efforts.

*   *   *

In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition, UK petty bourgeois socialist China Miéville claims that for all H. P. Lovecraft's reactionary opinions, "he became a socialist, advocating some social programs and government control of the economy." (This smacks of Miéville trying to have his cake and eat it, too. JR)

No political opinions expressed by Lovecraft during his adulthood were unusual for a man or woman of his class. Many men and women left similar circumstances behind when they joined the labor movement and its revolutionary socialist vanguard. Alas, Lovecraft was not won to Bolshevism, or even by an electoral brand of social democracy. Instead, his tendency was toward a US version of National Socialism, a mystifying sop designed to preserve the dictatorship of capital.

Fear of social degeneration/decline was the pauperized Lovecraft's motivation. He apparently did not show any interest in joining Pelley's Silver Shirts or the Coughlin organization, but many with similar backgrounds and skills did.

Miéville correctly points out Lovecraft's adaptation to Spengler's geopolitical rationalizations. It strikes me that Lovecraft might have also been a passionate reader of pseudoscience books like Degeneration by Max Nordau, a best seller in the fin de siècle middle class milieu of Europe.

 

In his superb 2018 study Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, James Machin writes:

[....]in Degeneration (1892), the German sociologist Max Nordau made explicit links between Decadent literature and actual social and biological decline, evoking pseudoscientific and garbled Darwinism in his use of the term 'degeneration' and propagating the specious sub-Lamarckian notion that moral recidivism and physical dissolution could be inherited and could fatally weaken a bloodline within generations.

     For Nordau , the fin de siècle and Decadence became pejorative synonyms for an amorality, morbidity, and incontinence that threatened not only the social fabric but the future of civilization itself. Atavism was evidenced by physical, cultural, and psychological symptoms, and manifestations of degeneracy were to be found in the 'stigmata' of misshapen physiognomy ('disproportionate growth of particular parts'), the 'inchoate liminal presentations' of degenerate contemporary art, and the 'mental imbalance' of the artist (Nordau 1895, 23, 1895, 61). According to Nordau , some figures, such as Paul Verlaine, had the dubious honour of exhibiting all these symptoms simultaneously (Nordau1895, 119–120). Over the course of nearly 600 pages, Nordau details a bewildering quantity and variety of symptoms of degeneration, including 'emotionalism', being 'tormented by doubts', the seeking after 'the basis of all phenomena', revolutionary and anarchist activity, political inclination, Buddhism, and pessimism. Even the tendency to 'associate in groups' is included on a charge sheet that seems to encompass the sum of all human activity, and Nordau identifies figures as disparate as Wagner, the children's illustrator Kate Greenaway, furniture-designer Rupert Carabin, and Oscar Wilde as all exhibiting the atavistic neurological disorders of the degenerate mind.

     The absurd reach of Nordau's thesis was certainly identified and criticized at the time, although typically with a concession to the ambition of Nordau's vision: Israel Zangwill described it as being 'as brilliant as it is wrong-headed' and the Review of Reviews called it a 'bad but interesting book' in which Nordau's 'idea' is 'pressed home unsparingly with manifold examples, and with a continuous vigour of writing' (Zangwill 1895, 160). George Bernard Shaw was moved to write a lengthy riposte for the American journal Liberty , and although he would later claim that with his rebuttal of Nordau the ' Degeneration boom was exhausted', Nordau's treatise still ran into seven editions in the year of its publication alone in Britain. Moreover, his perception that some contemporary cultural trends were predicated upon a 'contempt for traditional views of custom and morality' certainly resonated with more reactionary commentators (Shaw 1919, 12; Nordau1895, 5). The influence of Degeneration was also intensified by the concurrency of its popularity with the Wilde trial, the first British edition being published four days after 'the Marquess of Queensbury left his libellous card at the Albemarle' (Söder 2009, 63).

*   *   *

H. P. Lovecraft was never a socialist.

Many revolutionary socialists like myself don't demand Lovecraft and other 20th century writers pass a political purity test before we purchase and enjoy their work.

A mainstream writer who shared many of Lovecraft's political rationalizations and habits of petty bourgeois moralizing until his death in 2012, Gore Vidal is another example from my reading list. (John Buchan, Evelyn Waugh, Simone Weil, Flannery O'Connor, and Simon Raven: the list quickly grows.)

Lovecraft's class, the petty bourgeoisie, lost all remaining social and political independence in the 20th century. In the 1930s, the best and brightest were won to the working class movement. Sadly, at that time a growing bureaucratic caste internationally made a treacherous counterfeit of that movement; counterrevolutionary Stalinism led the working class world-wide into one defeat and bloodbath after another.

In response, many 1930s radicals turned to the right by 1949. Authors like Robert Heinlein were part of a sociological cohort that became the initial cadre of cold war publicists. James Burnham, a 1930s Trotskyist leader, would have found nothing objectionable in a novel like 1964's Farnham's Freehold.

*   *   *

The "mountains" in question in ATMM are a conscious symbol for disaster. They strike a chord similar to the blasted landscape of Nahum Gardner's farm in "The Colour Out of Space" (1927) and the subterranean Chesuncook, Maine section of "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933).

Lovecraft's skill, his aesthetic of pleasing remoteness and formal distancing, becomes the objective correlative for what Joshi and others have called his "cosmic indifferentism."

[....]Throughout his life Lovecraft wavered between (validly) recommending tradition for himself and (invalidly) recommending it for everyone. In 1928 he had properly asserted the relativity of values (the only thing possible in a universe that has no governing deity): "Value is wholly relative, and the very idea of such a thing as meaning postulates a symmetrical relation to something else. No one thing, cosmically speaking, can be either good or evil, beautiful or unbeautiful; for entity is simply entity."[15] To Derleth in 1930 he wrote: "Each person lives in his own world of values, and can obviously (except for a few generalities based on essential similarities in human nature) speak only for himself when he calls this thing 'silly and irrelevant' and that thing 'vital and significant', as the case may be. We are all meaningless atoms adrift in the void."

Harold Bloom's summation of Ernest Hemingway's impact is useful to remember: "....he alone

in this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth."

Jay

10 May 2022

Reading Ramsey Campbell: "Lost for Words" (2021)

"Lost for Words" is a funny, gruesome take on the vampire theme. Its protagonist, narrator Roy Stafford, works at a local branch of Texts and has a story appearing in the new anthology Vampiric Visions. His agent wants to see an outline for a novel about his character, Barney the vampire. (That's Barney, not Varney).

Roy's problem is that he is too accommodating: vampires love finding accomodating people. 

At a book signing:

            "What did you want in your book?"

     "Roy Stafford." It sounds as if he means to put me in, but he's reading my name from the cardboard strip propped up in front of me. "To Charles Vane," he says. "From one writing soul to another."

     "You're a writer too."

     "More than some," he says as if I've insulted him. "You'll be seeing my name."

     How much does he look like a writer? You could say his broad flat whitish face resembles a page on which his features have left plenty of space for information. His small thin mouth gives nothing much away, and maybe wariness has shrunk his eyes, while his dinky nose renders his big nostrils comical. I'd note all this on my phone to use somewhere, but I don't want him to see. Instead I say "I can write what you said."

     He splays his copy of Vampiric Visions so wide at my tale about Barney the vampire that I hear the spine crack. As soon as I've inscribed the book he snatches it and sticks out his free hand for a shake. It's so loose and spongy that I could imagine it absorbs anything it finds to assimilate, another image I should store for future use. He caresses my inscription before licking his fingertips, which have picked up ink. "Thanks for the words," he says. "I'll take care of them."

Vane will "take care" of them alright.

Over the following days, as he tries to outline his novel proposal and assist demanding customers at Texts, Roy slowly falls apart. He views words as parts of his anatomy, and the supply dwindles quickly.

"Could you help? My daughter has been searching for a book."

     "What's it called?"

     "That's what we're here to ascertain. Betsy, tell the gentleman what you know about it."

     "Some friends go to the seaside and there's a fairy in the sand who grants them wishes."

     I know the book. I can get the name from my mind. "I see a gang like her," I tell the woman, "and the thing that comes along."

     "What on earth are you saying about us?"

     "Not you. Like her." I poke a finger at the girl. "Her," I say louder. "Some of them."

     "I assure you she would go nowhere near a gang. Kindly make yourself plain."

     "I'm trying, you stupid—" More words come out and get louder. There's quite a lot of them, just not ones children are supposed to hear. The woman pulls the girl away from me as Terry gets here. She's going to talk to him, but he's quicker. "Go home, Roy," he says. "Go now and wait till you hear from me."

     Maybe he doesn't mean leave the thing I was pushing along, but he can have it. I get my coat from the room with all ours in, and I'm off out when the girl says "Look, mummy, there's the book." I see her run to get Five Children and It off a table. It's not her fault her mother's all the things I said. She can have her book, and I can do mine now, because I'm not at work.

     Except I can't. When I try to think about it all I get is what I wrote in Charles Vane's book. No use going home yet, so I go to the trains. Going, I talk to Asha. "How's it developing?" she says.

     "It'll come." I mustn't run out of words till I know "What's Charles Vane's, the place he lives in?"

     "Why do you need his address, Roy?"

     "Got something for him."

     A quiet bit and then "Let me find it for you."

     I need to say another thing. "Was his book about words being magic?"

     "What makes you think that?"

     "I got close to him."

     "I shouldn't get too close, Roy." Stops and says "It was more about words being vampiric, stealing all their victim's thoughts and everything that makes them human. It didn't really work."

     "Oh yes it did."

The apocalyptic social embarrassments of The Overnight (2004) are here condensed with droll brevity and joined to the cracked stream-of-consciousness narrative 

delerium of "McGonagall in the Head" (1992).  "Lost for Words" is a tour de force performance.

Jay

6 February 2022

__________

From: Penumbra No. 2 (2021): A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism

How Well Are You Read?

From I Am Providence The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi

[©2013 by S. T. Joshi]

In the fall of 1929 Lovecraft and Derleth engaged in a debate over the best weird stories ever written. This may have been part of the honours thesis Derleth was writing ("The Weird Tale in English Since 1890," completed in 1930 and published in W. Paul Cook's late amateur journal, the Ghost, for May 1945), but whatever the case, the discussion ended up having an unexpectedly wider audience. In a letter of October 6 Lovecraft evaluated the ten or twelve stories Derleth had selected as his list of "bests," agreeing with some and disagreeing with others (Derleth had already by this time gained his idolatrous fondness for "The Outsider"). Shortly thereafter Frank Long insinuated himself in the controversy. In the middle of November Lovecraft wrote to Derleth:

The other day the literary editor of the local Journal had a discussion in his daily column about the weirdest story ever written—& his choices were so commonplace that I couldn't resist writing him myself & enclosing transcripts (with my own tales omitted) of your & Belknap's lists of best horror tales. He wrote back asking permission to discuss the matter publicly in his column, mentioning you, Belknap, & myself by name—& I have told him he may do so.[75]

This refers to Bertrand Kelton Hart, who signed himself B. K. Hart and wrote a column called "The Sideshow" that ran daily (except for Sundays) in the Providence Journal, devoted largely but not exclusively to literary matters. In the course of several columns Hart transcribed lists of best weird tales by all three participants; Lovecraft's (published in the issue for November 23) is as follows:

"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood 

"[Novel of] The White Powder" by Arthur Machen 

"The White People" by Arthur Machen 

"[Novel of] The Black Seal" by Arthur Machen "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe 

"The House of Sounds" by M. P. Shiel 

"The Yellow Sign" by Robert W. Chambers

A group of second choices includes:

"Count Magnus" by M. R. James 

"The Death of Halpin Frayser" by Ambrose Bierce "The Suitable Surroundings" by Ambrose Bierce "Seaton's Aunt" by Walter de la Mare

Jay

22 March 2021

"Snow Cancellations" by Donald R. Burleson (1989)

I first read about Donald R. Burleson's short horror story "Snow Cancellations" (1989) in S. T. Joshi's The Progression of the Weird Tale (2021).

It is not a riff on Aiken's sublime "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." But it will speak tartly to anyone who grew up anticipating the profoundly liberating effect of a "snow day" in their youth. Covid-19 and Zoom have now, I imagine, made snow days obsolete.

"Snow Cancellations" begins with two boys talking on the phone and listening to alerts on their local AM radio station. 

     "What station you listenin' to?" Kevin asked. Jamie could hear him tuning a radio across the dial, a jumble of stations fading in and out.

     "It's at 1360," he said, "that Manchester station."

     "Got it," Kevin said, and Jamie could hear the radio sound over the phone slide into agreement with his own radio.

     ". . . as storm-related information continues to come in, so stay with us and we'll keep you up to date on what's happening here in southern New Hampshire on this miserable day. Have another cup of coffee for me, won't you? Time now at Storm Center Radio is 7:28, and we have some basketball scores for you—ah, but first, this just in, schools in Londonderry are closed, that's Londonderry, no school, all schools. And I'm told now that schools in Concord and Laconia have been closed after all. That's Concord, no school, all schools, and Laconia, no school, all schools. Here's another one just in—Saint Anselm's College is closed today, both day and evening classes. We'll update you on the whole list of cancellations at 7:40, but first here's Tom Michaud with local sports news. Tell us, Tom, what happened with that basketball game at Rivier College last night?"

     "Hey, Jamie, this is neat. The whole town's covered up with snow."

     Jamie had been to Kevin's apartment building across town several times after school or on Saturdays, and knew that you could see just about the whole town from Kevin's fourteenth-floor living room window.

Burleson spends the first half of "Snow Cancellations" creating a perfectly observed hour of everyday life. Then:

     Outside Jamie's parents' bedroom window, the snow seemed heavier, more insistent, every minute. It brushed against the frosty panes with jittery fingers of white, worrying at the glass, whispering. He could scarcely see far enough out now to make out the pines, except when the snow would lift a moment, rearranged by the wind. He ventured a remark to Kevin, bracing for the taunting reply it would bring.

     "Something about the snow's kinda eerie, isn't it?"

     Kevin was slow in replying, and, surprisingly, he said, "Yeah. Kind of."

     What do you know, Jamie thought—he feels it too. "Kevin, can you see the mill?"

     "Yeah, just barely. It's a long way off. I can just see it. Looks like a ghost."

     ". . . and Storm Center Radio will bring you all the details throughout the day, so stay tuned. I'm Rick Phillips for Radio 1360, Manchester, your information station for southern New Hampshire." Then music, some whimpy-sounding song like the old-fashioned stuff grownups listened to.

     Odd.

     Odd, the way that voice had sounded. Something—different about it.

That voice on the radio, filled increasingly with menace, seems to lick its chops at an accumulating list of cancellations.

     "A little hit of Mel Tormé for a snowy morning, nice, don't you think? Time now is 8:25, that snow keeps coming on down. And do we have some new cancellations for you!"

     Jamie drew the sheets closer around his legs, feeling suddenly colder. The wind outside the window moaned and shifted the snow in crazy-looking patterns. That voice was different, and he didn't like the way it sounded. It was—what? A little like some kind of cartoon-character villain, sort of half-mocking like. Sort of . . . unreal.

     "I see what you mean," he heard Kevin say. "He's . . ."

     "Shh, listen."

     "Here's the big one, friends, listen carefully." He pronounced carefully the way Bela Lugosi might say it in a Dracula movie, drawing the first vowel out long with a final lilt. "Here it is. Merrimack Valley Mill is cancelled." The radio went immediately to music again, some love song.

     For a long while neither boy spoke. It was Kevin who finally broke the silence. "Jamie?"

     "I'm here."

     "Jamie, I'm lookin' out the window and somethin' looks funny."

     "What do you mean, something looks funny?"

     Kevin waited a long time before answering, and when he did, he sounded awestruck. "This ain't right. I can see Pennacook Park."

     "So what's the big deal about seein' Pennacook Park?"

     "I never could see it before. Not from here."

     "Aw, c'mon, Kevin, it's as big as a football field. Bigger. You must of seen it."

     "No, no, I'm tellin' you, Jamie, I never could see it before. I can barely see it now, just when the snow lets up a second, but it's there, all right. And"—Jamie could hear him draw in a shocked-sounding breath; Kevin, Kevin sounding shocked, Kevin who never sounded shocked—"and I just figured out why. It's because the mill ain't there."

     Jamie laughed, but the laugh came out a little hollow. "Give me a break, Kevin. Of course the mill is there. What are you talking about?"

     "Look, Jamie, I ought to know where that mill is, from my own window, and I'm tellin' you, it ain't there. That's why I can see the park, because the mill ain't hidin' it anymore."

     Outside Jamie's parents' window, the wind whooped up into a deranged-sounding howl and threw snow against the panes. "Kevin, what are you saying? My dad works there."

     Kevin was quiet for a long time, then said, "So does mine."

     "Kevin, look—hey, ssh, the guy's on the radio again."

I anticipated that "Snow Cancellations" would develop into a cozy weather catastrophe like something out of John Christopher or Roland Emmerich. No such luck for Kevin and Jamie. 

*   *   *

I found "Snow Cancellations" in my copy of the first volume of the Jones and Campell-edited anthology Best New Horror (1990). Published thirty-one years ago, it also showcases: Chet Williamson, Robert Westall, Thomas Tessier, Ian Watson, Richard Laymon, Karl Edward Wagner, Ramsey Campbell, and Thomas Ligotti just to name a few. 

"Snow Cancellations" is a fine story in any season, and worthy of the company.

Jay 

7 March 2021

A double-goer: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

  The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright with sunset. The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll.

     "What! Jekyll!" he cried. "I trust you are better."

     "I am very low, Utterson," replied the doctor drearily, "very low. It will not last long, thank God."

     "You stay too much indoors," said the lawyer. "You should be out, whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my cousin—Mr. Enfield—Dr. Jekyll.) Come now; get your hat and take a quick turn with us."

     "You are very good," sighed the other. "I should like to very much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not. But indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see you; this is really a great pleasure; I would ask you and Mr. Enfield up, but the place is really not fit."

     "Why, then," said the lawyer, good-naturedly, "the best thing we can do is to stay down here and speak with you from where we are."

     "That is just what I was about to venture to propose," returned the doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the by-street; and it was not until they had come into a neighbouring thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there were still some stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at his companion. They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in their eyes.

     "God forgive us, God forgive us," said Mr. Utterson.

     But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and walked on once more in silence….

❖

*   *   *

Machen must have read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to tatters. Its confidence, buoyancy, and protean economy produce effects that foreshadow Machen's own.

At the beginning of Stevenson's tale, Enfield is reporting a crowd's reaction (and his own) to the sight and proximity of Mr. Hyde after Hyde has assaulted a girl.

....He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl's own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones; and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child's family, which was only natural. But the doctor's case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other....

Dyson has a similar moment in "The Inmost Light."

....after walking about for some time I thought I should like to sit down on a bank and have a smoke. While I was getting out my pouch, I looked up in the direction of the houses, and as I looked I felt my breath caught back, and my teeth began to chatter, and the stick I had in one hand snapped in two with the grip I gave it. It was as if I had had an electric current down my spine, and yet for some moment of time which seemed long, but which must have been very short, I caught myself wondering what on earth was the matter. Then I knew what had made my very heart shudder and my bones grind together in an agony. As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in the row before me, and in an upper window of that house I had seen for some short fraction of a second a face. It was the face of a woman, and yet it was not human. You and I, Salisbury, have heard in our time, as we sat in our seats in church in sober English fashion, of a lust that cannot be satiated and of a fire that is unquenchable,* but few of us have any notion what these words mean. I hope you never may, for as I saw that face at the window, with the blue sky above me and the warm air playing in gusts about me, I knew I had looked into another world — looked through the window of a commonplace, brand-new house, and seen hell open before me. When the first shock was over, I thought once or twice that I should have fainted; my face streamed with a cold sweat, and my breath came and went in sobs, as if I had been half drowned. I managed to get up at last, and walked round to the street, and there I saw the name Dr Black on the post by the front gate....

Later in "The Inmost Light" the alien character of Mrs. Black is underscored:

    ' "My dear sir," I said, "you surprise me extremely. You say that it was not the brain of a human being. What was it, then?"

     ' "The brain of a devil." He spoke quite coolly, and never moved a muscle. "The brain of a devil," he repeated, "and I have no doubt that Black put a pillow over her mouth and kept it there for a few minutes. I don't blame him if he did. Whatever Mrs Black was, she was not fit to stay in this world. Will you have anything more? No? Good-night..."

Selby reports his own emotional harrowing to Dyson in "The Red Hand."

     'Your conclusions are admirable,' said Mr Selby. 'I may tell you that I had my stroll down Oxford Street the night Sir Thomas Vivian died. And I think that is all I have to say.'

     'Scarcely,' said Dyson. 'How about the treasure?'

     'I had rather we did not speak of that,' said Mr Selby, with a whitening of the skin about the temples.

     'Oh, nonsense, sir, we are not blackmailers. Besides, you know you are in our power.'

     'Then, as you put it like that, Mr Dyson, I must tell you I returned to the place. I went on a little farther than before.'

     The man stopped short; his mouth began to twitch, his lips moved apart, and he drew in quick breaths, sobbing.

     'Well, well,' said Dyson, 'I dare say you have done comfortably.'

     'Comfortably,' Selby went on, constraining himself with an effort, 'yes, so comfortably that hell burns hot within me for ever. I only brought one thing away from that awful house within the hills; it was lying just beyond the spot where I found the flint knife.'

     'Why did you not bring more?'

     The whole bodily frame of the wretched man visibly shrank and wasted; his face grew yellow as tallow, and the sweat dropped from his brows. The spectacle was both revolting and terrible, and when the voice came, it sounded like the hissing of a snake.

     'Because the keepers are still there, and I saw them, and because of this,' and he pulled out a small piece of curious gold-work and held it up.

     'There,' he said, 'that is the Pain of the Goat.'

     Phillipps and Dyson cried out together in horror at the revolting obscenity of the thing.

     'Put it away, man; hide it, for Heaven's sake, hide it!'

     'I brought that with me; that is all,' he said. 'You do not wonder that I did not stay long in a place where those who live are a little higher than the beasts, and where what you have seen is surpassed a thousandfold?'

     'Take this,' said Dyson, 'I brought it with me in case it might be useful'; and he drew out the black tablet, and handed it to the shaking, horrible man....

A "Machenist" reading of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would probably present the conclusion that Hyde is an example of an everyday evil, not the Evil Ambrose describes to Cotgrave in "The White People":

     'Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the "sin" of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.'

     'And what is sin?' said Cotgrave.

     'I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

❖

Writers as diverse as Conan Doyle, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Connor, and Jorge Luis Borges have praised Stevenson's revolutionary role as a writer, and the role of his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) Lovecraft gives Stevenson no such acknowledgement (for overall contribution to the weird tale in particular or the short story in general). He does suggest, however:

Robert Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in "Markheim", "The Body-Snatcher", and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. 

I would be hard-pressed to find a "stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare" in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Utterson, Lanyon, and Poole try to do right by Jekyll, but their sympathies in the end have little weight. The effort boomerangs: Lanyon dies of shock and Utterson and Poole find they have arrived too late for their attempted rescue.

S. T. Joshi, in his comprehensive Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), pulls no punches on Stevenson and his novella:

     Kipling never incorporated the supernatural in a novel, but two authors who did do so produced imperishable classics within five years of each other—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). But both The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lippincott's, July 1890; book publication 1891) are seriously flawed, although in almost opposite directions. Both, of course, are classic tales of doppelgängers, and both would appear to have derived some benefit from previous instances of this theme, notably Poe's "William Wilson."

     To write about both these novels now, given how familiar their plots are and how little of a surprise their purportedly cataclysmic revelations engender, is a difficult proposition; but there is every reason to believe that the initial readers of both works found both their fundamental themes titillatingly appalling and their "surprise" endings strikingly effective. Accordingly, our judgment of these works should not be affected by our familiarity with their conclusions, although Stevenson comes close to giving the game away at several points, especially when a document presumably by Hyde is found to be written in a handwriting identical to Jekyll's.

     As it is, Stevenson himself lets the cat out of the bag about two-thirds the way through the novella, presenting a lengthy statement by Jekyll that constitutes the final segment of the text. It is here that whatever moral or aesthetic value exists in the work resides; for up to this point we have been merely reading a cleverly executed suspense narrative in which the apparently separate individuals Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde are becoming increasingly fused. Hyde's nefarious actions—we are introduced to him at the very beginning of the narrative as stepping heedlessly on a child who has gotten in his way, and later he flies into a rage and kills with a cane an elderly man who proves to be no less a figure than the M.P. Sir Danvers Carew—may seem a trifle tame in our day of serial killers and worse, but Stevenson has accomplished his overall mission in portraying the fundamental moral divergence of Jekyll and Hyde.

     What Jekyll states, both in elucidation and, implicitly, in exculpation of his actions, is that, having come to realise "the profound duplicity of life" (56)—that is, that every human being "is not truly one, but two"—he wonders whether these elements or facets of one's personality could be separated by science, specifically by drugs. Jekyll's ostensible purpose in doing so is altruistic: if the "evil" side of a person could somehow be suppressed or eliminated, only the "good" would remain.

     There are a number of problems with this formulation, chief of which is the naïveté of thinking that it is so easy to distinguish what is "good" and what is "evil" in man, especially when it is by no means clear whether moral "good" and "evil" have any genuine meaning aside from what is or is not socially acceptable to a given society at a given moment of its history. But Stevenson does not wrestle with moral conundrums of this kind; indeed, it could be said that his philosophically shallow presentation of human morality is a large part of the reason why Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has enjoyed such popularity over the years, since it corresponds exactly with the philosophically shallow views of the average individual.

     There are also problems with Stevenson's execution of the plot. Jekyll manages to manufacture the drug—the chief component of which he refers to as "a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required" (58)—remarkably easily. If he had come up with this formula with such effortlessness, why had it not been discovered decades or centuries before? Only much later does Jekyll provide a lame qualification, stating that it was the "impurity" (71) of the salt in the first batch of his potion that caused his transformation into Hyde.

     It should be noted that Stevenson, to his credit, is not maintaining that Jekyll is all "good" and Hyde all "evil." The latter may be the case, but the former is not. Indeed, in the earlier part of the narrative we are told that Jekyll had "sinned" (21) in youth; evidently, this is a reference (as Jekyll confesses) to a "certain gaiety of disposition" (56) that conflicted with the scholarly seriousness he wished to present to the world. All this seems to us harmless enough, but to Jekyll it is clearly a matter of concern: "I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in touch with a doctor, Hastie Lanyon, and asks him to bring a fresh supply of drugs to change himself back again. If Hyde, who has been consistently portrayed as entirely "evil," is dominant in the man's personality at this moment, why would he wish to change back to Jekyll? Is it merely to evade the authorities for the murder of the M.P., since a number of individuals had identified Hyde as the murderer and forced him to go into hiding? Whatever the case, the new potion does not work, leading Jekyll/Hyde to come up with the contrived "impurity" argument.

     The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is, in truth, a novella that should have been a novel. Stevenson has a potentially rich and complex idea at his disposal, but he has expressed it in a disappointingly conventional and morally unadventurous manner, and the work is so compressed that the full ramifications of the concept fail to appear. Possibly Stevenson—who, quite frankly, occupies no higher than the second rank of literary greatness, his work in general aesthetically crippled by a jaunty glibness of style, an evil facility in plot construction, and a general absence of profundity—was incapable of giving the idea more detailed treatment; and even though the idea is now in the public domain, it is not clear that anyone else has done so either....

Stephen King, in his 1980 book Danse Macabre, is more direct in his outright praise of the Jekyll/Hyde trope, and of Stevenson as stylist:

….Stevenson's brief and cautionary tale is like the quick, mortal stab of an icepick.  

     Like a police-court trial (to which the critic G. K. Chesterton compared it), we get the narrative through a series of different voices, and it is through the testimony of those involved that Dr. Jekyll's unhappy tale unfolds....

....Hyde, Enfield admits to Utterson, "carried it off like Satan." When Enfield demands compensation in the name of the little girl, Hyde disappears through the door under discussion and returns a short time later with a hundred pounds, ten in gold and a check for the balance. Although Enfield won't tell, we find out in due course that the signature on the check was that of Henry Jekyll.

     Enfield closes his account with one of the most telling descriptions of the Werewolf in all of horror fiction. Although it describes very little in the way we usually think of description, it says a great deal—we all know what Stevenson means, and he knew we would, because he knew, apparently, that all of us are old hands at watching for the mutant:

     He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarcely know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary looking man, and yet I can really name nothing out of the way. . . . And it's not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.

     It was Rudyard Kipling, years later and in another tale, who named what was bothering Enfield about Mr. Hyde. Wolfsbane and potions aside (and Stevenson himself dismissed the device of the smoking potion as "so much hugger-mugger"), it is very simple: somewhere upon Mr. Hyde, Enfield sensed what Kipling called the Mark of the Beast....

[Jekyll] has created Hyde to escape the strictures of propriety, but has discovered that evil has its own strictures.... 

[My emphasis - Jay]

....The difference between Utterson and Jekyll is that Jekyll would only drink gin to mortify a taste for vintages in public. In the privacy of his own library he's the sort of man who might well drink an entire bottle of good port (and probably congratulate himself on not having to share it, or any of his fine Jamaican cigars, either). Perhaps he would not want to be caught dead attending a risqué play in the West End, but he is more than happy to go as Hyde. Jekyll does not want to mortify any of his tastes. He only wants to gratify them in secret.

....A bit of a swerve off the main road here. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published a good three decades before the ideas of Sigmund Freud would begin to surface, but in the first two sections of Stevenson's novella the author gives us a startlingly apt metaphor for Freud's idea of the conscious and subconscious minds—or, to be more specific, the contrast between superego and id. Here is one large block of buildings. On Jekyll's side, the side presented to the public eye, it seems a lovely, graceful building, inhabited by one of London's most respected physicians. On the other side—but still a part of the same building—we find rubbish and squalor, people abroad on questionable errands at three in the morning, and that "blistered and distained door" set in "a blind forehead of discoloured wall." On Jekyll's side, all things are in order and life goes its steady Apollonian round. On the other side, Dionysus prances unfettered. Enter Jekyll here, exit Hyde there. Even if you're an anti-Freudian and won't grant Stevenson's insight into the human psyche, you'll perhaps grant that the building serves as a nice symbol for the duality of human nature.

....Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a masterpiece of concision—the verdict of Henry James, not myself. In that indispensable little handbook by Wilfred Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, the thirteenth rule for good composition reads simply: "Omit needless words." Along with Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Douglas Fairbairn's Shoot, Stevenson's economy-sized horror story could serve as a textbook example for young writers on how Strunk's Rule 13—the three most important words in all of the textbooks ever written on the technique of composition—is best applied. Characterizations are quick but precise; Stevenson's people are sketched but never caricatured. Mood is implied rather than belabored. The narrative is as chopped and lowered as a kid's hot rod....

❖

Utterson eventually traces Hyde to his Soho bolt-hole. 

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.1 "There must be something else," said the perplexed gentleman. "There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?k or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."

    

....tonight there was a shudder in his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his memory; he felt (what was rare with him) a nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his spirits, he seemed to read a menace in the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof....

     And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. "Poor Harry Jekyll," he thought, "my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, l years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault." And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided....

The phrase "Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity" is pregnant indeed, and not only with the handful of strange stories Stevenson lived to write. "We are the real monsters; and our own deadly enemies" was a central aesthetic (if not also philosophical) insight of the Yellow Nineties, and echoed for a century among practitioners of the horror mode.

❖

The peripeteia of Stevenson's life gave readers dozens of romance and strange-story masterpieces. Having just read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the first time, I gratefully acknowledge its place as first among equals. Jekyll is a very modern character, and not merely for his modern professional trappings. He is the middle class civic saint ultimately undone by an arrogance that permits him to think he could have his cake and eat it, too.

Moral: travel cautiously - if at all - if your fellow traveler (and secret sharer) is a Mr. Hyde.

❖

Jay

27 February 2021