"The Unnamable", Mather's MAGNALIA, and related matters

[j d worthington]

Just for the heck of it, I'm going to throw out a few bits concerning that odd little tale of Lovecraft's, "The Unnamable", for anyone interested.

As anyone who has read this brief tale is aware, the central idea was inspired by a passage from Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, of which Lovecraft owned an ancestral copy. Though he used the story also to explore his evolving ideas of the weird tale, it is this portion which I would like to address at the moment.

Here is the relevant passage from the story itself:

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, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred.[...] Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people's windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't describe what it was that turned his hair grey.[...]

Cotton Mather, in that daemoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man -- the thing with the blemished eye -- and of the screaming drunken wretch they had hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell -- there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.

-- Dagon, pp. 203-204​

And here is the original, very brief, bit from the Magnalia:

At the Southward there was a Beast, which brought forth a Creature, which might pretend unto something of an Humane Shape. Now, the People minded that the Monster had a Blemish in one Eye, much like what a profligate Fellow in the Town was known to have. This Fellow was hereupon examin'd; and upon his Examination, confess'd his infandous Bestialities; for which he was deservedly Executed.

-- Magnalia Christi Americana, Bk. VI, p. 35, "The Tenth Remark"​

I must admit that, reading this in a facsimile (taken from a microfilm of the original) of the 1702 edition, with the peculiar orthography, there is a feeling of being in touch with the times when it was written which carries a certain power to almost cause one to (imaginatively) suspend disbelief... but more of that at another time.

Obviously, Lovecraft paraphrased and expanded on what he had found in Mather (which he probably originally read as a small child); but he did keep fairly close to the "facts" of the case, as far as they go, before adding his own sequel to events.

Here, on the other hand, is what Donald Tyson has to say about this story in his The Dream-World of H. P. Lovecraft:

In the story "The Unnamable," Randolph Carter relates the history of a house that stands next to the Old Burying Ground in Arkham[....] A young unmarried girl in the house gave birth to a monster with horns on his head. She was put to death for this indiscretion, and the monster was cared for by her father until his death, after which it appears to have starved. Carter is never explicit in the tale about the father of the ******* offspring -- that is the "unnamable" aspect of the story -- but he alludes to a slaughterhouse. One supposition is that the girl had sex with a horned beast at the slaughterhouse, and give [sic] birth to a monster similar to the Minotaur of ancient Greek mythology.

-- Tyson, pp. 184-85​

I must admit to being at a loss as to how anyone could make that many blunders concerning a story in such a short space (one brief paragraph). "A young unmarried girl" (???) agrees with neither Mather nor Lovecraft ("screaming drunken wretch"; "profligate Fellow"); the "unnamable", as anyone who has read the story -- well, anyone but Tyson, obviously -- would know, has nothing to do with the identity of the parentage of the thing, but its very nebulous nature as a spiritual essence of something which was, even in life, "a blasphemy against Nature"; the "slaughterhouse" is actually the site where the two friends of the story are found, and the slaughterhouse itself is long gone; the thing which led to the hanging (according to Lovecraft; more generally, execution according to Mather) of the offender was not the horns on the thing's head, but its "blemished eye" -- a mark which he shared. And so on.

Now, maybe I'm just unusually obtuse these days (it's possible), but... can anyone explain to me how Tyson got an unmarried girl, etc., from either of these sources? Because frankly, I'm at a complete loss.*

At any rate, I hope there may be someone who has wondered about the original passage from Mather, but has never had the fortune to actually find it... and if anyone wishes to add their own thoughts, questions, etc., I would be interested in hearing them...

*I don't mean to imply that Tyson's book is utterly worthless, though I find it to be one of the least useful examinations of Lovecraft, at least of any length, which I have come across, and largely due to such things as these. On the other hand, when he does have a worthwhile take on something, even if I think the occult nature of it is nonsense, it is at least genuinely interesting and food for thought. It is just that these instances are regrettably few....

 

[w h pugmire esq]

Gonna print this out and study it and give the tale a long think. I love this tale more and more as I age. It has keenly influenced my own Lovecraftian writing. Very happy to see this thread.

Haven't listen'd to ye cosmic music yet, gonna be a rather crowded day. I'll get to it tonight, m'dear.

 

[w h pugmire esq]

I have now read ye tale again, studied it rather, and am in the process of writing a wee sequel to it that also blends aspects from Bob Bloch's "The Mannikin." I have always loved "The Unnamable," and it shews perfectly why Lovecraft has such power over me. Yet one thing I realised is that the power of a single tale is reinforced with rereading, and with one's growing knowledge of HPL's biography, &c. This, for me, is what makes him an Immortal as an author. His Works expand in potency the more we return to them, the more we study Lovecraft's life and writings. I first read the tale as an LDS missionary in Northern Ireland, finding it in the Panther Horror volume, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. It may have been the first Randolph Carter tale that I ever perused, although being such would mean nothing to me at the time because I had no idea of Carter as a recurring character or as a biographical stand-in for Lovecraft in his fiction--all of this knowledge came later, and it is such knowledge that deepens fascination with Lovecraft's fiction. In a letter of 1919 to Reinhardt Kleiner, Lovecraft writes, "As you infer, 'The White Ship' is in part influenced by my new Dunsanian studies." That word, "studies" is interesting: Lovecraft not only reads the Irish author, he approaches the reading as a form of study, as aesthetic investigation. This is exactly what I do with the fiction of H. P. Lovecaft. Lovecraft is like a plot of fertile land in which it is rumored that gold and gems have been buried, and one digs deeply into the tales as one reads them, hunting for treasures of awe and inspiration.

For me, the story works at a very primal level, answering my need for dark Gothic weird fiction, and has been utterly influential on my approach to writing such fiction. It is said that Lovecraft had no talent for creating characters, and yet even these two characters, who for the majority of the tale simply sit and chat, come absolutely to life, and they have points of real interest. Carter's personality is potent. I am fascinated by everything he reveals about himself and this town wherein he finds himself, this Arkham. As with much of Lovecraft, the "shocking" ending, the malefic climatic revelation, is the weakest, most boring part of the tale. It is the build-up, the weaving of mood, atmosphere, incident, that causes the hypnotic effect that so captivates us and returns us to ye tale.

As for Tyson--I find him clueless concerning Lovecraft's life and works, and promptly got rid of his book after trying to read it a third time, a frustrating attempt. He is completely wrong concerning Lovecraft's personality, painting HPL as a complete oddball, when in fact H. P. Lovecraft was a very ordinary gentleman who possessed an extraordinary imagination. Selah.

 

[j d worthington]

I tend to agree with you that HPL is one of those writers whose work grows with each reading (at least in most cases). For all his "extreme" approach (as some would have it), there is an awful lot going on with his fiction which lies below the surface....

As for Tyson--I find him clueless concerning Lovecraft's life and works, and promptly got rid of his book after trying to read it a third time, a frustrating attempt. He is completely wrong concerning Lovecraft's personality, painting HPL as a complete oddball, when in fact H. P. Lovecraft was a very ordinary gentleman who possessed an extraordinary imagination. Selah.

Yes, I found Tyson's psychoanalyzing of him to be particularly inept... and often completely at odds with the known facts of his biography. He certainly didn't mind rewriting history or ignoring large contradictions or "cherry-picking" as badly as any religious apologist in order to "support" his point; and for that reason, I'm afraid I cannot express any real enthusiasm about him as a Lovecraftian "scholar". I do find some of his thoughts here and there to be of interest -- the bit about the nature of the night-gaunts being related to Susie's delusions and, indeed, to an apparently relatively common type of experience (whether hallucination or not), for instance.... But so much of the book is made up of his painting the man as an insufferable snob, spoilt rich boy, prig, obnoxious in so many ways, and then immediately turning around and adding a note essentially saying "but I'm not really saying he was any of these things... not really... no...", which is simply disingenuous, given the length of the passages he just spent doing precisely that. It makes the worst of de Camp's tendencies in this direction look like he did nothing but praise Lovecraft! I have some issues with Prof. Airaksinen's book, but compared to this, it is a shining example of how to approach such a subject!

I haven't yet read Tyson's Alhazred, though I have it on my shelves. I did read his Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred, and found it uneven. Some parts I found to be extremely evocative and to capture a Lovecraftian mood beautifully; other parts annoyed me and bored me to tears -- they simply read too much like the bulk of occult b.s. I've read over the years which, at best, tend to be about as entertaining as reading the average cookbook or automotive manual. (Note: I have read one or two cookbooks which were actually a hoot and a joy to read: Sauerkraut Yankees being a prime example. I highly recommend it both for the quirky approach to the subject, and for the wonderful recipes within. But most are certainly not what I would call "gripping" reading.) I am hoping that Alhazred is going to be closer to the better parts of his earlier book, especially given the length of the damned thing; but such stuff as this little bit of "scholarship" has me approaching his work with a rather jaundiced eye....

On another note: When I get around to rereading Mather's book, I wonder if I'll find any other ways in which it influenced HPL. It has been far too long since I last went through it to remember any such, but it really wouldn't surprise me to find something like that there....