The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (67 page)

10
John Gay (1685-1732), friend of Alexander Pope and author of
The Beggar's Opera
(1728) and other poetic and dramatic works. Cf. HPL's poem “To Mr. Kleiner, on Receiving from Him the Poetical Works of Addison, Gay, and Somerville” (1918). Matthew Prior (1664-1721) was a minor Augustan poet. HPL owned an 1858 edition of his
Poetical Works
.

11
The poem exists in a separate manuscript (probably predating the story by several years) titled “Gaudeamus,” and appears to be HPL's attempt to write a better version of a drinking song than one of the same name (by an unnamed amateur writer) he had received from a correspondent. In the manuscript (apparently a fragment of a letter) HPL prefaces the poem with the remark: “As for ‘Gaudeamus' [by the unnamed writer], the best I can say is, that its rather too Epicurean subject is as ancient as literature itself, and its treatment mediocre. I believe, without any egotism, that I could do better myself . . .” Will Murray (see Further Reading) suggests that HPL was imitating Thomas Morton's
New English Canaan
(1637), but a more likely candidate might be the drinking song found in act 3, scene 3 of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's
The School for Scandal
(1780), as this would correspond better with “Georgian [i.e., mid- to late-eighteenth century] playfulness.”

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” 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” 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.

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” 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.