The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (70 page)

13
A fashionable street extending eastward from Back Bay to Beacon Hill.

14
Back Bay, west of Beacon Hill, was the haven of middle-class respectability in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the setting for William Dean Howells's
The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885).

15
Copp's Hill is situated in the North End. The Copp's Hill Burying Ground (formerly the Old North Burying Ground) is one of the oldest cemeteries in the city; its earliest interment dates to 1662.

16
Cotton Mather (1662/3-1727/8) was the leading Puritan theologian of his day in America. His role in the Salem witch trials has been exaggerated, but he did not help his cause by writing
Wonders of the Invisible World
(1693), in which he sought to prove the genuine existence of witchcraft. HPL owned an ancestral first edition of Mather's major work,
Magnalia Christi Americana
(1702), a detailed history of the church in New England. Mather wrote hundreds of other books and pamphlets. Cf. “The Unnamable” (1923), founded upon an anecdote in the
Magnalia
: “The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic
Magnalia Christi Americana
” (D 203).

17
The tunnels are real; they were probably fashioned in the Revolutionary period for purposes of smuggling.

18
The socially exclusive Beacon Street extends eastward from Back Bay to Beacon Hill, where it juxtaposes Boston Common.

19
The “peaked roof” is an architectural form prevalent in New England in the mid-seventeenth century, preceding that of the gambrel roof and presenting a very sharp inverted V-shape at the roofline. The so-called Witch House (1642) in Salem is of this type, as is the house (c. 1660) upon which Hawthorne based
The House of the Seven Gables
. The gambrel roof is a form of architecture widely used in New England during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the shape of a reversed V with an additional obtuse angle in each of the slanting sides.

20
The dictatorial Sir Edmund Andros became the first royal governor of Massachusetts in 1686 but was deposed by a revolt of the citizenry in 1689. Sir William Phipps was governor of Massachusetts from 1692 to 1695.

21
HPL's friend, the fantasy and science fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), was also a prolific painter (mostly in crayons and water-colors) and, in the 1930s, sculptor. HPL first saw his drawings when visiting Samuel Loveman in Cleveland in 1922; in the spring of 1926 he saw several more and, preparing to send them to Frank Belknap Long, commented: “GAWD! THOSE COLOURS!! Opium madness unleashed . . . Oh, boy! ‘Twilight'—‘Sunset in Lemuria'—‘The Witch's Wood'—and the Dunsany design! Sancta Pegana, but I don't know that it's right to loose such diabolic provocation upon a young person already addicted to rhapsodick extravagances of diction!” (SL 2.45).

22
HPL adheres to this conception of his “ghouls” (one of whom Pickman himself becomes) in
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
: “his vanished friend Richard Upton Pickman had once introduced him to a ghoul, and he knew well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. . . . [Pickman] was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure” (MM 337-38).

23
Possibly an allusion to the celebrated painting by Henry Fuseli, “The Nightmare” (1781), printed on the cover of
Three Gothic Novels
, ed. Peter Fairclough (Penguin, 1968).

24
HPL alludes to the myth of the “little people,” who are said to practice this kind of baby-exchange. The myth was utilized extensively in the weird fiction of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947). See “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “In the episodic novel of
The Three Impostors
, . . . we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the ‘little people', and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange dark ‘changelings' for normal infants” (D 425).

25
The Boylston Street subway (now called the Green Line) was opened to the public on October 3, 1914. It proceeds from Boston College in the southwest to Lechmere in the North. For a piquant use of the Boston subways, see
At the Mountains of Madness
(p. 334).

26
Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, is one of the most picturesque cemeteries in New England. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), James Russell Lowell (1819- 1891), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), three of the leading American literary figures of the nineteenth century, are all buried there in separate plots. The ghouls' humor of course stems from their awareness that the remains of these authors are no longer where they should be.

27
In 1929, in contrasting his work to that of the pure fantaisiste Clark Ashton Smith, HPL wrote: “you are fundamentally a
poet,
& think first of all in symbols, colour, & gorgeous imagery, whilst I am fundamentally a
prose realist
whose prime dependence is on the building up of atmosphere through the slow, pedestrian method of multitudinous suggestive detail & dark scientific verisimilitude” (SL 3.96).

28
This is presumably the painting HPL earlier referred to as “Ghoul Feeding.” Donald R. Burleson (
Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe
[Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990, p. 92) states that the painting seems to reflect Goya's celebrated
Il Saturno
, depicting Saturn devouring his children.

29
An echo of HPL's canonical definition of the weird tale as “a hint . . . of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (“Supernatural Horror in Literature” [D 368]).

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
, the longest work of fiction HPL ever wrote, was begun in late January 1927 and completed on March 1. It was first published (abridged) in
Weird Tales
(May and July 1941) and in complete form in
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
(Arkham House, 1943). The core idea of the novel may have been conceived as early as 1923, when HPL jotted down in his commonplace book (entry 87) the passage from Borellus that now serves as the epigraph. In August 1925, while living in Brooklyn, HPL was contemplating a novel about Salem; but then, in September, he read Gertrude Selwyn Kimball's
Providence in Colonial Times
(1912) at the New York Public Library, and this rather dry historical work fired his imagination. He was, however, still talking of the Salem idea in late January 1927: “. . . sometime I wish to write a novel of more naturalistic setting, in which some hideous threads of witchcraft trail down the centuries against the sombre & memory-haunted background of ancient Salem” (SL 2.99). But perhaps the Kimball book—as well, of course, as his return to Providence in April 1926-led to a uniting of the Salem idea with a work about his hometown. It was also in late August 1925 that HPL heard an interesting story from his aunt Lillian: “So the Halsey house is haunted! Ugh! That's where Wild Tom Halsey kept live terrapins in the cellar—maybe it's their ghosts. Anyway, it's a magnificent old mansion, & a credit to a magnificent old town!” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, August 24, 1925; ms., JHL). The Thomas Lloyd Halsey house at 140 Prospect Street is the model for Charles Dexter Ward's residence (HPL deliberately changes the address to 100 Prospect Street). Although now broken up into apartments, it is a superb late Georgian structure (c. 1800) fully deserving the encomium HPL gives it in his novel.

One significant literary influence may be Walter de la Mare's novel
The Return
(1910). HPL had first read de la Mare in the summer of 1926; he discusses
The Return
in “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust” (D 415). In de la Mare's novel, of course, there is actual psychic possession involved, as there is not in
Charles Dexter Ward
; and, although the focus in
The Return
is on the afflicted man's personal trauma rather than the unnaturalness of his condition, HPL has manifestly adapted the general scenario in his own work. The extensive use of a portrait of Joseph Curwen (of whom Charles Dexter Ward is the exact image) and its apparent supernatural connection with its original points to the general influence of Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890).

The novel does not appear to involve psychic possession in the obvious sense: in the latter stages of the novel the resurrected Curwen actually kills Ward and attempts to pass himself off as Ward. But psychic possession of a subtler sort may nevertheless come into play. Curwen marries not only because he wishes to repair his reputation, but because he needs a descendant. He seems to know that he will one day die and himself require resurrection by the recovery of his “essential Saltes,” so he makes careful arrangements to bring this about. It appears, then, that Curwen—or some entity he has raised “beyond the spheres”—exercises a psychic influence on Ward so that the latter finds first his effects, then his body, and brings him back to life.

Although there are many autobiographical touches in the portraiture of Charles Dexter Ward, many surface details appear to be taken from a person actually living in the Halsey mansion at this time, William Lippitt Mauran (b. 1910). HPL was probably not personally acquainted with Mauran, but it is highly likely that he observed Mauran on the street and knew of him. Mauran was a sickly child who spent much of his youth as an invalid, being wheeled through the streets in a carriage by a nurse. Moreover, the Mauran family also owned a farmhouse in Pawtuxet (a town settled in 1641 around the edge of Pawtuxet Cove, and now a part of the city of Cranston, a western suburb of Providence), exactly as Curwen is said to have done. Other details of Ward's character also fit Mauran more closely than HPL.

In many ways, the novel is a refinement of “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925). Several features of the plot are borrowed from the earlier story: Curwen's alchemy parallels Robert Suydam's cabbalistic activities; Curwen's attempt to repair his standing in the community with an advantageous marriage echoes Suydam's marriage with Cornelia Gerritsen; Willett as the valiant counterweight to Curwen matches the detective Thomas Malone as the adversary of Suydam.

HPL, however, felt that the novel was an inferior piece of work, a “cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism” (HPL to R. H. Barlow, [March 19, 1934]; ms., JHL). He therefore made no effort to prepare it for publication, even though publishers throughout the 1930s professed greater interest in a weird novel than a collection of stories.

The novel has been indifferently adapted into a film under the title
The Resurrected
(1992), directed by Dan O'Bannon and starring Chris Sarandon as Ward/Curwen.

Barton L. St. Armand, “Facts in the Case of H. P. Lovecraft,”
Rhode Island History
31, No. 1 (February 1972): 3-10; rpt. in
H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism
, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 166-85.

M. Eileen McNamara and S. T. Joshi, “Who Was the Real Charles Dexter Ward?,”
Lovecraft Studies
Nos. 19/20 (Fall 1989): 40-41, 48.

1
The quotation is actually from the appendix (“Pietas in Patriam”) to Book II of Cotton Mather's
Magnalia Christi Americana
(1702), which may or may not be a paraphrase of a work by Petrus (Pierre) Borel (1620-1689), a French physician and scholar who wrote on medicine and natural history. Mather writes: “ 'Tis likely, that all the Observations of such Writers, as the Incomparable
Borellus
, will find it hard to produce our Belief, that the
Essential Salts
. . .” (HPL has added some archaic spellings to the passage.) If Mather had a specific work by Borellus in mind, it may have been his
Historiarum, et Observationum Medicophysicarum, Centuriae
(1653-56). See Barton L. St. Armand, “The Source for Lovecraft's Knowledge of Borellus in
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
,”
Nyctalops
2, No. 6 (May 1977): 16-17.

2
Ward is a distinguished name from Rhode Island colonial history (see n. 73). As for Ward's other names, Dexter is also a well-known family name in Providence, traceable to Gregory Dexter, who accompanied Roger Williams in settling Providence in 1636 and printed Williams's celebrated treatise on Native American languages,
A Key into the Language of America
(1643). HPL also owned several literary anthologies compiled by a mid-nineteenth-century writer, Charles Dexter Cleveland.

3
The name Marinus Bicknell Willett was derived in part from a book of drawings,
Westminster Street, Providence, as It Was about 1824
(Providence, 1917), “From Drawings Made by Francis Read and Lately Presented by His Daughter, Mrs. Marinus Willett Gardner, to the Rhode Island Historical Society.” Bicknell is a prominent family name in Providence; the historian Thomas W. Bicknell (1834-1925) wrote a five-volume
History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations
(1920).