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Waugh (2007) - Lovecraft and Lawrence Face The Hidden Gods in Lovecraft Annual.
Waugh (2007) - Lovecraft and Lawrence Face The Hidden Gods in Lovecraft Annual.
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Lovecraft Annual
Recent studies of “The Colour out of Space” have explored its dense
literary quality. As a story that alludes to and plays with a variety of
texts, it has slowly become as iridescent a work as the stone that it
celebrates. First, it contains a network of allusions and parodies of
various biblical moments: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
the leading of the children of Israel out of Egypt; the incarnation,
death, resurrection, and second coming of Christ; and the prophecies
of the Antichrist.1 Most of these allusions parody the original texts as
well as prepare the way for an apocalyptic event. Also, in a complex
fashion the story layers allusions to Macbeth with allusions to Para-
dise Lost.2 What we have not yet recognized is the possibility that
some of the imagery of Lovecraft’s story that we have so far ascribed
to biblical material and some of its salient themes may have been
suggested by Lovecraft’s reading D. H. Lawrence’s long novella St.
Mawr, which appeared two years before Lovecraft’s work. Once
more, as Gayford and Mariconda have argued, we must consider the
extent to which Lovecraft has connections with modernism.
The evidence for this possibility is textual rather than direct.
Lovecraft refers to Lawrence only twice in the letters, some three
years after the writing of “The Colour out of Space.” The second ref-
erence is appreciative, clearly the result of some thought. It begins by
contrasting to writers who “violate people’s inherited sensibilities for
no adequate reason” other writers “whose affronts to convention are
1. Price (23–25), Burleson (116), and Waugh (“Landscapes” 234–36) deal with
these allusions in detail.
2. Burleson (111–13) and Waugh (“The Blasted Heath”) discuss these particulars.
9
work has other moments which must have interested him, and we
shall begin with them.
First we should note the story of the horse itself, staring out of the
darkness as a challenging presence that is both solar with its sun-arched
neck and chthonic with a neck that starts forth like a snake; he is a stal-
lion, but does not “seem to fancy the mares, for some reason” (12), and
his Welsh name means St. Mary. He is phallic, as his “lovely naked
head” and his resemblance to a snake indicate, but he is also feminine;
opposites coincide in him. When Lou Witt, the protagonist, looks at
him that first time he stands there, “his ears back, his face averted, but
attending as if he were some lightning-conductor” (12). The crisis of the
novella occurs when the horse rears up and falls upon her husband
who, not man enough to master it, pulls it back onto himself. One of
the uncertainties of the work is whether the horse startles at a whistle
or at the sight of a snake that children have stoned to death; but the
text makes it most probable that it startles in sympathy with the death
of a kindred spirit. That image of the snake is to recur much more
forcefully at the end of the novel.
Horses play a part in Lovecraft’s story. Ammi’s horse is sensitive
to the transformation of the landscape (DH 61), breaks loose when
the Colour in the well begins to move (DH 71), and in the climax of
the story screams and dies: “That was the last of Hero till they buried
him next day” (DH 77). The totemic name “Hero” indicates its
chthonic aspect, the son of the Great Mother and the snake (Harrison
260–94). In addition, the name is androgynous if we keep in mind the
Hero for whom Leander drowns or the Hero of Much Ado about
Nothing. And St. Mawr no more endures to the end of Lawrence’s
novella than Lovecraft’s Hero does, for before Lou retires to her
ranch where she has her climactic vision, her stallion deserts his he-
roic celibacy to pursue mares. No god is the ultimate god.
This description of the horses in Lovecraft’s story, however, in no
way testifies to the real presence of St. Mawr, for with his androgyny,
his power, his hidden threat, and his character as a conductor of
lightning, he much more suggests the role of the meteor, that mes-
senger from another world. It is a stone, but with hollows inside. It
possesses “a torrid invulnerability” (DH 58) that renders it immune to
chemical solvents. Most interestingly, the color of St. Mawr is diffi-
cult to fix. At first he is described simply as a bay, but three para-
graphs later, when Saintsbury pats him, “Lou saw the brilliant skin of
cient; he does not want to examine where Pan came from, as Machen
and Forster seem to do, but where the force that he represents is go-
ing. Pan needs to disappear back into the landscape, become once
more a hidden god, if he is to become potent.
A more benign Pan appears in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the
Willows as a Christ-figure, the true Christ of the animals, following a
tradition based upon a story that Plutarch related, one found in Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning’s “The Dead Pan,” Friedrich Schiller’s “Die
Götter Griechenlands,” and also on the lips of a would-be artist in
Forster’s story. A sailor, Thamus, hearing a command in the air “to
proclaim that the great god Pan has died” (Plutarch 400), does so and
hears a loud lament (Plutarch 400–403). “As this story coincided with
the birth (or crucifixion) of Christ it was thought to herald the end of
the old world and the beginning of the new”; scholars today connect
the story with the traditional lament for the fertility god Tammuz or
Adonis (“Pan” 663). Something ambiguous resides, then, in the tradi-
tional interpretations of the story; either the voice announced the
birth of Christ and the dispersal of the pagan gods, including Pan, or,
more interestingly, it implied that Pan, the all who was the logos of
the world, had died. In Grahame’s novel Christ manifests himself as
the god who cares for every lost creature, “lest the awful remem-
brance [of death] should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and
pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-
lives of little animals” (77; ch. 7).
Lawrence and Lovecraft know of another Pan, however, one
much more ambiguous than we have observed so far, in Hawthorne’s
romance The Marble Faun. The work concerns four friends in Rome,
one of whom, a young innocent named Donatello, bears an uncanny
resemblance to the statue of a faun, though only a few minutes later
they doubt the resemblance because “faces change so much, from
hour to hour, that the same set of features has often no keeping with
itself” (9.20), any more than the stone out of space has any keeping
with itself. Nevertheless, Donatello may more than resemble the
faun, since he refuses to allow anyone to touch his ears, which are
hidden by his thick hair. But though in the fancy of his friends he
seems to incarnate the golden age and Eden, he suffers a fall, throwing
a man over a cliff to his death, and Donatello’s guilt infects the inno-
cence of his friends. As one of them says, perhaps meaning more than
she realizes, “If there be any such dreadful mixture of good and evil
and female. In this regard it is significant that in St. Mawr two major
characters, Lewis and Lou, bear the same name.
Lawrence hints in a number of ways that Pan, whatever Pan may
be, presides over the crisis in which St. Mawr rears back. It is noon,
the panic hour, and the whistle indicates the sound of the Panpipe, a
detail found in Forster’s story. When the horse rears, “his eyes were
arched, his nostrils wide, his face ghastly in a sort of panic . . ., his face
in panic, almost like some terrible lizard” (62). St. Mawr becomes the
embodiment of the chthonic moment in Pan appears as terror.
The figure of Pan recurs in Lawrence’s novel when Lewis, the
Welsh groom, speaking out of the darkness where Pan lives (95) reacts
to a falling star by telling Lou’s mother how it feels to live inside a myth-
ology. For Lewis the trees are alive, watching the humans who move
among them and eager to hurt them; the trees watch and listen and
will kill the humans if possible (95–96). Lewis reacts in this way be-
cause for him the sky is not the empty space suggested by Newtonian
science, not like “an empty house with a slate falling from the roof”;
instead, “many things twitch and twitter in the sky, and many things
happen beyond us,” and so when a meteor falls from the sky Lewis
thinks, “They’re throwing something to us from the distance, and we’ve
got to have it, whether we want it or not” (97). Just as Lovecraft ani-
mates the universe of Einsteinean space with an indifference that seems
malevolent and also describes trees thrashing in a windless night, Law-
rence argues for a world where neutral space is filled with a vital life.
Closely connected with the figure of Pan is the myth of the horse
that so much concerns the plot of the novel. When Lou first encoun-
ters the horse he already bears a totemic impact, his eyes arching out
of the darkness with a challenge that Lou slowly responds to as the
novella proceeds. He is demonic, like the classical daemons that en-
counter mortals in a personal fashion. Half snakelike, though with the
sun in his neck, he represents an early version of the divinity that
shall appear at the end of the novella. Lovecraft develops very little
of this in connection with the horse itself, but it is possible that this
imagery combines with the image of the oracular, cannibal horses in
Macbeth to produce the horse that takes on an admonitory character
in “The Colour out of Space.”
The climax of Lawrence’s novella occurs in an impassioned de-
scription of “the power and the slight horror of the pre-sexual prime-
val world” that Lou finds in the Arizona landscape. Lawrence’s
the spirit of place: the crude, half-created spirit of place, like some
serpent-bird for ever attacking man, in a hatred of man’s onward-
struggle towards further creation” (141). This is Quetzacoatl, the god
that Lawrence will celebrate in his next novel, The Plumed Serpent.
The details of this description could have originated in many
places. Though he had only arrived recently in the Southwest, Law-
rence soon became fascinated by the mythic materials of the region.
Some of its aspects, however, appear reminiscent of Tennyson’s
poem “The Eagle: Fragment”:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
3. This word refers to Horace’s anxiety that a classic is good for nothing but
teaching children their grammar (Epis. 1.20.17–18).
were about to become Vestal virgin, the oracle of Delphi, and St.
Simon Stylites all at once, dedicated to the gods that rule the zenith
of the sky and the private hearth.
In contrast to this god, the goats of Pan that once roamed the
mountain are the spirits of inertia with their fire-mouths that kill
everything and their smell that “came up like some uncanny acid fire”
(132), the creatures that represent all the forces that slew the New
England woman. These preside over the poison-weed and the “curious
disintegration working all the time, a sort of malevolent breath, like a
stupefying, irritant gas, coming out of the unfathomed mountains”
(133). This language is very like that language that Lovecraft uses to
describe the effect of the Colour that has left a scar on the landscape
“like a great spot eaten by acid” (DH 55), on occasion like a gas that
brushes past Ammi or the narrator and leaves them unable to react.
Above all, it is a poison that cannot be leached out of the soil (65) and
that in the climactic moment is revealed as an “undimensioned rain-
bow of cryptic poison from the well” (78). In both books the inimical
powers are fiery, impalpable, acidic, and poisonous, the destructive
forces of the snake that has not yet raised itself from the earth.
Thus Lovecraft’s story does hint at the snake and bird. After the
narrator has assured us several times of the poison and acid that the
Colour spills upon the landscape, he speculates, “Whatever daemon
hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would
quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the
air?” (81). The rhetoric cannot permit us to see the serpent or bird of
prey still hidden in the landscape, but for a moment the story points
at a snake and bird groping beneath the ground.
Despite this mythological mode I must admit that Lovecraft's
story contains no bird except the poultry that “turned greyish and
died very quickly” (DH 66), a nasty end from which it is difficult to
draw any haruspicinal consequence. His serpent is not plumed. Mrs.
Gardner perceives things that “moved and changed and fluttered”
(DH 65); the trees are “clawing at the grey November sky” (DH 69),
at the crisis “twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in con-
vulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impo-
tently” (DH 76), but they are never able to escape the ground in the
flight that they desire. This eagle tears from underneath the earth, not
from above it. The plumed serpent does not appear. In this landscape
Lovecraft can see no way how the things above and the things below
Works Cited
Burleson, Donald R. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Cannon, Peter. H. P. Lovecraft. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1962.
“Cygnus.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica. 11th ed.
Forster, E. M. The Machine Stops and Other Stories. Ed. Rod Meng-
ham. London: André Deutsch, 1997.
4. I have in mind here the contrast that Jane Harrison drew between teratic and
peloric manifestations; the teratic is a sign in the sky, a manifestation of the
rational powers, the peloric a monstrous growth in the earth (458–59).
5. Cf. Joshi (134–39) and Cannon (86).
———————
Briefly Noted
Lovecraft’s works have appeared in all manner of media, from films
and television to comic books and role-playing games. One of the pur-
est transformations of Lovecraft’s words into an alternate medium is
the audio recording. Lovecraft has not been entirely lucky with his au-
dio interpreters: Roddy McDowall’s 1961 Caedmon recording is splen-
did, but subsequent ventures—by David McCallum and others—have
left a bit to be desired. It is therefore with great pleasure that we can
announce the recent release of four splendid audiobooks by Audio-
Realms. The first contains “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Call of
Cthulhu,” the second has “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “Dagon”
(a felicitous pairing indeed!), the third includes “Herbert West—
Reanimator,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Statement of Randolph
Carter,” and “The Outsider,” and the fourth contains “The Rats in the
Walls,” “The Shunned House,” and “The Music of Erich Zann.” Each
audiobook contains three CDs and lasts well over three hours. They
are read by Wayne June, whose deep, cavernous, almost sepulchral
voice, subtly modulating its timbre and emotional resonance with the
fluctuations of the text, forms an ideal vehicle for Lovecraft’s richly
textured prose. Uncluttered by distracting and unnecessary music or
other frills, these audiobooks provide a wonderful vehicle for appreci-
ating Lovecraft’s dense and complex work. For further information, go
to: www.audiorealms.com.