Crom Your Enthusiasm (9)

By: John Hilgart
August 11, 2015

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite fantasy novels from the Thirties (1934–1943). Enjoy!

THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD | H.P. LOVECRAFT | 1941

H.P. Lovecraft’s narrators are always throwing themselves into a hellish abyss with single-minded purpose and scientific precision. The path to this abyss is inevitably a very old thing — a house, a book, a crypt, a portrait, an attic window, a cupboard, a sculpture, a manuscript in the local university library.

Lovecraft was fetishistically and existentially attached to old things. During a brief, agoraphobic residence in working-class Brooklyn — arguably the event that turned him into a first-class writer — he turned immigrants into horrors and worried particularly about the threat they posed to the New England family heirlooms he’d moved with him from his lifelong (and soon to be again) home in Providence. Years later, in one of his final letters, he worried about the disposition of those same artifacts.

His identity was so bound up in and fortified by a pseudo-patrician New England past — and in the old town and possessions that embodied it — that he invested old things with impossible depth and meaning. Unfortunately, Lovecraft was also a nihilist, completely and sincerely at an intellectual level.

As a result, most of his stories are about researchers who disclose the wonder of historical particularity, only to dig too deep, breaking through into an infinity of space and time that renders everything human retroactively tiny, benighted, and meaningless. Lovecraft’s beloved objects and histories became arcane and alien in his fiction, because he could not succeed in defending their affirmative significance.

He is celebrated for merging the supernatural and science fiction, which he achieved by placing the access codes to the infinite, indifferent universe within old books, 17th century, gambrel-roofed Providence homes, and family trees. When you crack the code, the old New England timbers give way, and you fall infinitely far. You are annihilated.

I am not spoiling much by telling you that The Case of Charles Dexter Ward concerns a man who uses family artifacts to resurrect his fascinating ancestor, only to be murdered by him and stuffed into the ancestor’s old cupboard.

Alongside a few of his best cosmic monster stories – the abyss with tentacles – The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one of the finest ways to experience and to understand the mechanism that makes Lovecraft’s fiction compelling and impossible to imitate. People have been writing “Lovecraftian” fiction for nearly a century at this point, but it all falls short. The authors have noted the symptoms, but they do not suffer from the necessary illness.

***

CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2015): Erik Davis on Jack Williamson’s DARKER THAN YOU THINK | Sara Ryan on T.H. White’s THE SWORD IN THE STONE | Mark Kingwell on C.S. Lewis’s OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET | David Smay on Fritz Leiber’s THIEVES’ HOUSE | Natalie Zutter on Robert E. Howard’s QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | James Parker on J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT | Adrienne Crew on Dion Fortune’s THE SEA PRIESTESS | Gabriel Boyer on Clark Ashton Smith’s ZOTHIQUE stories | John Hilgart on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD | Barbara Bogaev on William Sloane’s TO WALK THE NIGHT | Rob Wringham on Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN | Dan Fox on Hergé’s THE SEVEN CRYSTAL BALLS | Flourish Klink on C.S. Lewis’s PERELANDRA | Tor Aarestad on L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s THE ROARING TRUMPET | Anthony Miller on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH | Suzanne Fischer on E.R. Eddison’s MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES | Molly Sauter on Herbert Read’s THE GREEN CHILD | Diana Leto on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s TARZAN AND THE LION MAN | Joshua Glenn on Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON | Andrew Hultkrans on H.P. Lovecraft’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS | Lynn Peril on Fritz Leiber’s CONJURE WIFE | Gordon Dahlquist on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME | Adam McGovern on C.L. Moore’s JIREL OF JOIRY stories | Tom Nealon on Fritz Leiber’s TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE | John Holbo on Robert E. Howard’s CONAN MYTHOS.

***

Crom Your Enthusiasm (9)

Categories

Tags