Pickman's Model

[w h pugmire esq]

Over at ye H. P. Lovecraft and His Legacy blog group they've just posted two pages from a typed MS of "Pickman's Model," shewing ye first page of manuscript & ye well-known drawing by Grandpa of his ghoul. His portrayal of the ghoul has always really disappointed me, as I don't find it close to what I envision in my imagination, it's too dog-like. But, great Yuggoth, how I love seeing replications of Lovecraft's MSS! I enlarged this first page of "Pickman's Model" and printed it out so that I can pretend that I am holding in me paw the actual thing. Perhaps one day S. T. will take me to John Hay and shew me ye MSS of Lovecraft's tales--I have no real interest in seeing his letters, but I am obsess'd with seeing ye manuscripts of his stories. Perhaps this is because I so identify with HPL as a writer--he is, after all, the writer who has given me my writer's life. I would not be an author were it not for H. P. Lovecraft.

I love this story so much, to the point of intense obsession. I cannot leave it alone, I always want to comment on it with fiction of my own. Thankfully, I have realised my inability to write a novel concerning Pickman, but I know that I will continue to read this tale and write my wee fictive reflections on it for the rest of my life. I smile when I see people refer to it as one of Lovecraft's minor, less successful stories; & I raged when I read Joyce Carol Oates's Introduction to Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, where she dismisses ye story as "trashy"--what the hell does that mean?

People complain that Lovecraft couldn't create interesting or believable characters. The story begins with a remarkable character, its narrator, who "speaks" in a voice we have never before encountered in Lovecraft and never will again. It is complete "character," and it is used brilliantly as a narrative tool in telling the tale. And the portrayal of Richard Upton Pickman enthralls me! He comes across as unique, mysterious and utterly sinister, truly linked to ye nameless horrors he evokes with artistic genius. People complain that the ending comes as no surprise, but it has always seemed to me perfect and effective, exactly right; but ye tale is not just a tool that leads up to this "shocking" revelation. It has points of interest throughout. It conjures, with perfect art, its situation, and expresses that situation superbly. It paints its portrait of the artist and his art, his genius, his horrors, absolutely, so that everything can be visualized within the haunted cavity of one's skull.

S. T. has pointed out: "...the story is of interest in expressing, in fictionalized form, many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that HPL had just outlined in 'Supernatural Horror in Literature.'" But it does so much more. It evokes the North End of Boston, and when I walked those lanes with ye Penguin Classics edition of The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, a felt a thrill of ye antient past that was, in great part, a still-extant evocation of Lovecraft's depiction of place. But it is my contention that the story is fascinating as a weird tale. The ending is the least interesting point of the story; everything leading up to that ending is the meat of age-old horror that delights the Lovecraftian. When we enter ye North End, Lovecraft brings it to eerie life. When we enter Pickman's secret studio, we can smell the past and its secret horrors.

The story is so delightful that just writing of it here makes me want to read it yet again. It always delights. I've yet to read it in ye Centipede Press Masters of the Weird Tale omnibus. I shall do so afore I leave for Portland and ye HPLFF. Perhaps some day I shall mature enough as an author to actually write my novel inspir'd by this delightful weird tale. For now, I shall hold my wee print-out of Lovecraft's typed MS, which evokes a subtle magick all its own.

 

[J-WO]

I didn't know he actually drew a picture of a ghoul--astounding!

I, for one, wish HPL had written a couple more like Model, with 'character-narrators'--he had an unsung facility for such, as the story ably demonstrates.

Am I right in thinking its a relatively early tale in his career, or have I just imagined that?

 

[w h pugmire esq]

I didn't know he actually drew a picture of a ghoul--astounding!

I, for one, wish HPL had written a couple more like Model, with 'character-narrators'--he had an unsung facility for such, as the story ably demonstrates.

Am I right in thinking its a relatively early tale in his career, or have I just imagined that?

He wrote it during the rush of creativity that followed his return to Providence after two years in New York, when he moved into 10 Barnes Street. It was the tale he wrote directly after having written "The Call of Cthulhu" and just before he began work on the strange and wonderful "The Silver Key." Joshi seems to find the characterization of Thurber as one of the story's "flaws," or so he suggests in H. P. Lovecraft: A Life; but this seems another instance where Joshi approaches a story unimaginatively, looking for realistic consistency in a fantasy narrative. I consider this one minor flaw in Joshi's criticism of Lovecraft's fiction, his wanting it all to "make sense."