The View from the Cheap Seats (31 page)

I
f literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water. The Horror place is a rather more dangerous place, or it should be: you can walk around Fantasy alone.

And if Horror and Fantasy are cities, then H. P. Lovecraft is the kind of long street that runs from the outskirts of one city to the end of the other. It began life as a minor thoroughfare, and is now a six-lane highway, built up on every side.

That's H. P. Lovecraft, the phenomenon. H. P. Lovecraft, the man, died at the age of forty-seven, over fifty years ago.

THE MAN: THIN,
ascetic, an anachronism in his own time.

There's a World Fantasy Award sitting on my stairs; I pat its head as I walk past: a Gahan Wilson sculpture of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). It's a portrait of a thin-lipped man, with a high forehead, a long chin, and wide eyes. He looks vaguely uncomfortable, vaguely alien, an Easter Island statue of a man.

He was a solitary individual, an inhabitant of Providence,
Rhode Island. He communicated with the outside world through letters, some of them the length of short novels.

He wrote for the pulps: fiction for disposable publications like
Weird Tales,
its covers showing vaguely arty lesbian bondage scenes. He ghostwrote a Houdini story, rewrote the work of aspiring writers; he sold two tales—“At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”—to
Astounding Stories
.

He was a believer in unpleasant doctrines of racial superiority, and an Anglophile. He was a student of horror. There is an abundance of conjectures as to the circumstances of his life and death, the roots of his fiction, but they remain theories.

In his lifetime, he wasn't a major writer. He wasn't even a minor writer. He was a minor pulp writer, as forgettable as any of his time (quick! can you name five other writers for
Weird Tales
in the twenties and thirties?). But there was something there which, like Lovecraft's own Cthulhu, did not die.

(Poor Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan and of King Kull, is one of the other
Weird Tales
authors who's still remembered, when Seabury Quinn and many of the rest of them have blown away into the footnotes. Howard killed himself at the age of thirty, in 1936, when he heard of his mother's impending death. Then there's Robert Bloch, who, at the age of eighteen, published his first professional short story in
Weird Tales,
and went on to a long and distinguished career.)

Some of the influence of Lovecraft was immediate. His correspondents and fellow writers, including Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, and others, played with the mythos he created: a world in which we exist in a tiny fragment of space-time, in which space, inner and outer, is vast, and inhabited by things that mean us harm, and by other things to which we matter less than cosmic dust. Much of Lovecraft's influence on fiction, however, would not really be felt for fifty years after his death.

His fiction was not collected while he lived. August Derleth,
Wisconsin author, cofounded with Donald Wandrei the small-press publisher Arkham House, in order to publish Lovecraft's fiction: and Derleth first collected Lovecraft's prose in
The Outsider and Others,
two years after Lovecraft's death. Since then Lovecraft's stories have been collected and re-collected internationally, in many anthologies, in many permutations.

This anthology is about dreams.

DREAMS ARE STRANGE
things, dangerous and odd.

Last night I dreamed I was on the run from the government, somewhere in middle Europe—the last holdout of a decayed communist regime. I was kidnapped by the secret police, thrown in the back of a van. I knew that the secret police were vampires, and that they were scared of cats (for all vampires were scared of cats, in my dream). And I remember escaping from the van at a traffic light, running from them through the city, trying to call several unresponsive city cats to me: gray and sleek and skittish, they were, unaware that they could save my life . . .

It is possible to go mad, looking for symbolism in dreams, looking for one-to-one correspondences with life. But the cats are Lovecraft's. And the vampiric secret police, in their own way, are his too.

LOVECRAFT GOT BETTER
as he went on.

That's a polite way of putting it.

He was pretty dreadful when he started out: he seemed to have no ear for the music of words, no real sense of what he was trying to do with stories. There's no feeling in the earliest material of someone putting their life, or even the inside of their head, down on paper; instead, we watch Lovecraft in the beginning, copying, pastiching awkwardly—here's a dash of Poe,
there's a little Robert W. Chambers—and over and above all the other voices of Lovecraft's early days, the awkward Anglophilic imitation of the voice of Lord Dunsany, the Irish lord and fantasist, whom Lovecraft admired more, perhaps, than was good for his fiction.

Dunsany was one of the great originals. His prose voice resonated like an oriental retelling of the King James Bible. He told stories of strange little gods of faraway lands, of visits to dream-lands, of people with odd, but perfectly apt names: always with a slight amused detachment. Many of the stories you'll find in this anthology, like “Hypnos,” or “The Quest of Iranon,” are vaguely Dunsanyish in tone.

Somewhere in there, however, as time passed, Lovecraft's own voice began to emerge. The writing became assured. The landscape slowly becomes the inside of Lovecraft's head.

IT WAS SEPTEMBER
1983, at the New Imperial Hotel in Birmingham, in the English Midlands: I had come to Birmingham for the British Fantasy Convention, to interview authors Gene Wolfe and Robert Silverberg for English magazines.

It was my first convention of any kind. I went to as many panels as I could, although I remember only one panel. The panelists were, if memory serves, authors Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, and the late Karl Edward Wagner, and Irish illustrator Dave Carson.

They talked about the influence of Lovecraft on each of them: Campbell's hallucinatory tales of urban menace, Lumley's muscular horror, Wagner's dark sword and sorcery and modern, slick tales: they talked about the psychology of Lovecraft, the nightmarish visions, how each of them had found something in Lovecraft to which he responded, something that had inspired him: three very different authors, with three very different approaches.

A thin, elderly gentleman in the audience stood up and asked the panel whether they had given much thought to his own theory: that the Great Old Ones, the many-consonanted Lovecraftian beasties, had simply used poor Howard Phillips Lovecraft to talk to the world, to foster belief in themselves, prior to their ultimate return.

I don't remember what the panel's response was to that. I don't recall them agreeing with it, though.

Then they were asked why they liked Lovecraft. They talked of the huge vistas of his imagination, of the way his fiction was a metaphor for everything we didn't know and feared, from sex to foreigners. They talked about all that deep stuff.

Then Dave Carson, the artist, was handed the mike. “F—— all that,” he said happily, having drunk a great deal of alcohol, dismissing all the erudite psychological theories about Lovecraft and cutting to the chase: “I love H. P. Lovecraft because I just like drawing monsters.”

Which got a laugh from the audience, and a bigger laugh when Dave's head gently touched down on the table a few seconds later, and then Karl Edward Wagner took the microphone from Dave's fingers, and asked for the next question. (And, now, a decade later, Dave Carson's still with us, last heard of fishing off the pier at Eastbourne, probably fishing up strange Lovecraftian beasties he draws so well from the depths of the English Channel, but the bottle carried away poor Karl.)

It's true, though. Lovecraft's influenced people as diverse as Stephen King and Colin Wilson, Umberto Eco and John Carpenter. He's all over the cultural landscape: references to Lovecraft, and Lovecraftian ideas, abound in film, television, comics, role-playing games, computer games, virtual reality . . .

Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He's rock and roll.

I'm introducing a collection here that takes us through the dream-fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, weaving it into a huge tapestry that drives from Fantasy to Horror and back again.
Here's the tale of “Pickman's Model”—pure horror, and vintage Lovecraft—and then there's Richard Upton Pickman, creeping through “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” . . . The chronological arrangement of stories forms odd patterns. Dreams and nightmares, too. Vampires and cats.

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT
Lovecraft's fiction, about his worlds, that is oddly alluring for a writer of fantasy or horror. I've written three Lovecraftian stories: one obliquely, in
Sandman
—a quiet, dreamlike story (it's the first story in the
Worlds' End
collection. You can tell it's Lovecraftian, because I use the word
cyclopian
in it); one a hard-boiled “Maltese Falcon” variant with a werewolf as hero (in Steve Jones's fine anthology
Shadows over Innsmouth
), and a third, when I was much younger, that was an awkward attempt at humor, an extract from Cthulhu's autobiography. If I go back to Lovecraft again (and I'm sure I shall, before I die) it will probably be for something else entirely.

So what is it about Lovecraft that keeps me coming back? That keeps any of us coming back? I don't know. Maybe it's just that we like the way he gives us monsters to draw with our minds.

If this is your first excursion into H. P. Lovecraft's world, you may find the way a little bumpy at first. But keep going.

You'll soon find yourself driving down a road that will take you through the twin cities, and off into the darkness beyond.

If literature's the world.

And it is.

This was my introduction to
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death,
1995.

           
Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

                
“What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.

                
“I don't know what it is,” said Hark, “but it's the only one there ever was.”

This book, the one you are holding,
The 13 Clocks
by James Thurber, is probably the best book in the world.

And if it's not the best book, then it's still very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one's ever really seen anything like it since.

I had a friend call me one evening in tears. She was fighting with her boyfriend and her family, her dog was sick and her life was a shambles. Furthermore anything I said—
everything
I said—only served to make matters worse. So I picked up a copy of
The 13 Clocks
and began to read it aloud. And soon enough my friend was laughing, baffled, and delighted, her problems forgotten. I had, finally, said the right thing.

It's that sort of book. It's unique. It makes people happier, like ice cream.

James Thurber, who wrote it, was a famed humorist (most of his stories and articles were for adults) and a cartoonist with a unique style of drawing (lumpy men and women who looked
like they were made out of cloth, all puzzled and henpecked and aggrieved). He did not illustrate this book because his eyesight had got too bad. He got his friend Marc Simont to illustrate it instead. In England, it was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle, and that was the version I read when I was about eight. I was fairly certain it was the best book I had ever read. It was funny in strange ways. It was filled with words. And while all books are filled with words, this one was different. It was filled with magical, wonderful, tasty words. It slipped into poetry and out of it again, in a way that made you want to read it aloud, just to see how it sounded. I read it to my little sister. When I was old enough, I read it to my children.

The 13 Clocks
isn't really a fairy tale, just as it isn't really a ghost story. But it feels like a fairy tale, and it takes place in a fairy-tale world. It is short—not too short, just perfectly short. Short enough. When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed. I watch Thurber wrap his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words. It is a miracle. I think you could learn everything you need to know about telling stories from this book.

Listen: it has a prince in it, and a princess. It has the evilest duke ever written. It has Hush and Whisper (and Listen). Happily, it has Hagga, who weeps jewels. Terrifyingly, it has a Todal. And best and most marvelously and improbably of all, it has a Golux, with an indescribable hat, who warns our hero,

           
“Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself.”

                 
“But why?”

                 
“I thought the tale of treasure might be true.”

                 
“You said you made it up.”

                 
“I know I did, but then I didn't know I had. I forget things, too.”

Every tale needs a Golux. Luckily for all of us, this book has one.

There are stories out there where it helps to have an introduction, where you need someone to explain things for you before you begin. An introduction to set the scene, where the introducer shines light into dark places and lets the story shine more brightly, just as a precious stone polished and placed in a fine setting looks better than it might in a dusty corner or glued to a duke's grimy glove.

The 13 Clocks
is not one of those stories. It doesn't need an introduction. It doesn't need me. It is like one of Hagga's jewels of laughter, and likely to dissolve if it is examined too long or too closely.

It's not a fairy tale. It's not a poem, it's not a parable or a fable or a novel or a joke. Truly, I don't know what
The 13 Clocks
is, but whatever it is, as someone else said of something else at the top of this introduction, it's the only one there ever was.

This introduction was originally written for the 2008 New York Review of Books edition of James Thurber's
The 13 Clocks
.