Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories.
Today we’re looking at two early stories: “Memory,” written in 1919 and first published in the May 1923 issue of The National Amateur, and “Polaris,” written in 1918 and first published in the December 1920 issue of The Philosopher.
Spoilers ahead.
“One night as I listened to the discourse in the large square containing many statues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a stranger in the streets of Olathoë, which lies on the plateau of Sarkis, betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and his speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and patriot.”
POLARIS (1918)
Unnamed narrator habitually watches the night sky from his chamber window, fascinated by Polaris, the Pole Star. It hangs ever in the same spot, far above a swamp of muttering trees and a cemetery on a low hillock. Winking like an insane eye, it tries to convey a message it can no longer recall.
When it’s cloudy, narrator can sleep.
Under a horned waning moon (yes, another one), narrator first dreams of the city, all marble on a strange plateau between strange peaks. Sometimes night reigns over the city. Sometimes a low sun never sets. Tall bearded men with grave faces and gray eyes converse in public squares. Initially narrator is content to visit the city as an incorporeal presence. But then he longs to join the inhabitants, realizing the marble city cannot be a dream. Indeed, how can he prove that the stone and brick house near the swamp and cemetery is the greater reality?
One night he achieves his desire to walk in the city, embodied as a grave man among other grave men. Nor is he a stranger in Olathoe, betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek. He is a citizen of the land of Lomar, and he must help his friend Alos, who commands the Lomarian forces in their fight against the Inutos, “squat yellow fiends” intent on conquest because not honorable like the tall gray-eyed men.
Sadly, narrator is subject to fainting in adverse conditions. However, though he’s long studied the Pnakotic manuscripts and other tomes, his vision remains keenest among his fellows. Alos assigns him to duty on the watchtower. Should the Inutos try to invade through the passes, narrator must signal the defenders.
Narrator watches for many days, fighting fatigue. Then, under the light of a waning moon, Polaris peeps into the tower and murmurs a poem:
“Slumber, watcher, till the spheres
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv’d, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o’er
Shall the past disturb thy door.”
Narrator struggles to connect these words with the tomes he’s studied, but his drowsiness increases. He succumbs at last to sleep and passes into a dream of the stone and brick house near swamp and cemetery. He cannot wake though Lomar depends on his vigilance. Screaming at the dream-creatures around him does no good. These daemons insist he isn’t dreaming and that there is no land of Lomar except in his fevered imagination. What he calls Lomar has been a wilderness of ice for millennia, inhabited only by “squat yellow” people the daemons call “Esquimaux.”
As narrator writhes in guilty agony over his unwilling betrayal of Olathoe, Polaris leers down, winking to convey a message it can no longer recall.
MEMORY (1919)
The valley of Nis lies under a horned waning moon. Its trees are overgrown, its vegetation rank. Creeping vines and dank moss overrun its ruined palaces. Toads, snakes and little apes reign here now, along with nameless scaly things and forms not meet to be beheld. The river Than runs through the valley, slimy and weedy, its waters inexplicably red.
The Genie of the moonbeams asks the Daemon of the Valley (who is Memory) about those who built the palaces. Memory responds that the builders were like the waters of the Than, not to be understood, while their deeds were but of the moment. They looked rather like the little apes in the trees, and their name was Man.
The Genie flies back to the horned moon, and the Daemon observes a little ape in a tree that grows in a crumbling courtyard.
What’s Cyclopean: These stories seem to have both dipped their vocabulary from the same bucket of words. Horned waning moons and daemons abound.
The Degenerate Dutch: Oh, hey, it’s the squat, hellish, yellow Inutos who invaded Lomar 100,000 years after one of their kings exchanged places with a Yith. Who are apparently ancestors to “squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they call “Esquimaux”. Nothing says clever worldbuilding like trying to make white guys the original original inhabitants of the Americas, yeah?
Mythos Making: Oh, hey, it’s Lomar, one of whose kings exchanged places with a Yith 100,000 years before invasion by the squat, hellish, yellow Inutos.
Libronomicon: The otherwise feeble hero of “Polaris” has learned much from the Pnakotic manuscripts (did that king bring them back from the Archives, one wonders?) and the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Is the narrator of “Polaris” mad when he thinks the modern world a dream, or when he thinks “Lomar” a dream? Or does the madness lie in the north star itself? Shades of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”
Anne’s Commentary
Two early Dreamlandy pieces. Lovecraft had apparently not read Dunsany when he wrote “Polaris”; later he was struck by its stylistic similarity to the older “dreamer’s” tales. “Polaris” was based on an actual dream, which Lovecraft described in a letter, where he was present in the strange high city only as an incorporeal observer. “Memory” reads more like a fable than a dream. Or maybe it’s Arabian Nights fan-fiction, given the focus on genies and daemons.
I prefer the shorter of these flash fics. “Memory” packs a lot of eerie and evocative imagery into a tiny narrative space. As so often happens in Lovecraft’s more poetic prose, the moon makes an appearance, its phase as ever explicit. Here we have no gibbous or full moon but a waning crescent which tears “a path for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree.” Antiaris toxicaria, it turns out, is a real tree related to the figs and widely found in the tropics, where its latex has been used for dart or arrow poison. However, the frequent and colorful literary accounts of its lethality were exaggerated. One 18th century writer claimed it could wipe out all animal life within a fifteen mile radius, but I guess the upas-tree isn’t what got the human civilization in the valley of Nis. Other potentially poisonous or venomous creatures abound, though, including the toad, the snakes and those unnamed scaly things. I’d be careful what I touched in Nis, and I’d wear high boots. The vegetation in general is marvelously dynamic, creeping and crawling and twining and heaving. Whether the Than river runs red with plant tannins or blood, I’m not drinking its water.
I can’t say much about the forms that move in the shadowy nooks of the valley. They’re not meet to be seen, or described. Did they bring about the destruction of Man? Or did the little apes do it, and that’s why Memory stares so at one? My first idea was that Memory was pondering the ape’s evolutionary possibilities. But what if those little apes carried some Ebola-level pathogen relatively innocuous to them but super-deadly to humans? I love pandemic stories, as long as they don’t feature zombified victims. A hemorrhagic fever bad enough to eternally pollute the river with the blood of the dying, that would be much more interesting to me.
“Polaris” returns us to the fabulous dream-city trope, and to the common sub-trope of dream-city as more vital and compelling than any earthly setting, even an earthly setting featuring a very promising swamp and boneyard. The story also poses Lovecraft’s perpetual puzzle: Which is the REAL scenario here? Is the narrator a madman confined to the house of stone and brick, where “daemons” (staff) cannot convince him that Olathoe is a mere delusion? Or did Polaris somehow curse the Lomarian patriot to everlasting slumber in a dream-asylum? If the second, Polaris is a real jerk, because after twenty-six thousand years of serene oblivion, he let the narrator realize he’s trapped in dream when he should be defending Olathoe from those pesky Inutos.
Speaking of whom, maybe Randy Newman was right about short people. They got no reason to live, unless it’s to overcompensate for their squatness via military conquest minus the honor. Because you’ve got to be tall and gray-eyed to engage in military conquest with honor, wiping out any pesky Gnophkehs that might be standing in the way of your expansion. Gnophkehs are hairy and long-armed and cannibalistic, and none of those things are good. Think about white gorillas. Think about wookiees, I mean, if wookiees ate other wookiees. Actually, I think they’re vegetarians – those long canines are strictly for defense.
Oh, and being yellow isn’t good either. Asiatic peoples aside, there are kings and wallpaper, as mentioned last week.
And a final oh: William Fulwiler suggests that “Polaris” is an autobiographical expression of Lovecraft’s frustration over his unfitness for active duty in WWI. That both the narrator and Lovecraft were scholarly, with a tendency to faint under certain adverse conditions, is suggestive. Also suggestive is the asylum. The original buildings of Butler Hospital are indeed of brick and stone. The campus overlooks the Seekonk River and its swampy bottoms and ravines rich with red maples. And Swan Point Cemetery abuts Butler to the north, complete with plenty of low hillocks. One wonders what stars Howard imagined his parents gazing at from their windows at this hospital, and maybe what stars he might gaze at if he ever came to reside there, amateur astronomer that he was.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
At long last, we come down to two stories about cities—Lovecraft’s 3rd and 5th, respectively. Both cities will echo throughout his oevre, and Lomar itself—in fact, the invasion described in “Polaris”—gets a cameo and confirmation of its reality in “Shadow Out of Time,” his penultimate masterpiece.
In “Memory,” a brief and somewhat purple prose poem, Lovecraft creates his first ruined city. Maybe it’s the 2nd, if you count the displaced monolith in Dagon, but it’s certainly the first ruined human city. And of course, that’s the really scary part, that even humanity’s most ancient and noble deeds are fleeting things scarcely to be remembered by those with perspective. That triviality is the shadow in “Shadow Out of Time,” and underlies the madness in “Mountains of Madness.” Ephemerality and forgetfulness and entropy are at the core of cosmic horror, and here they are, in place right at the foundation.
The invocation of human ephemerality, of course, is neither fully developed here nor realized as evocatively as in those later stories. The Daemon and the Genie practically sit there holding up a sign with the Moral of the Story. And while humans degenerating into non-sapient primates seems to be one of Howard’s recurring nightmares—“The Lurking Fear” is only the most notable example—I’m afraid I can’t help picturing the “little leaping apes” in Disney-esque tutus, showing up to relieve the Lords a’Leaping as the holidays approach their close. It takes some of the sting out of devolution.
“Polaris” offers another recurring city type: the city that calls in dreams, the dreamer’s true homeland. You could fit in there, if only you could find it—and in this case, if you could manage to preserve it against its inevitable fall. This gives the story a certain power in spite of the eye-rolling nature of the threat. Carter’s sunset city may have summoned him on a grand quest—but while he never manages to dwell there permanently, the city itself is never in jeopardy. A homeland where you can never live is one thing; a homeland you discover only to live perennially in the moment of its destruction goes beyond sehnsucht into real nightmare.
I like that Lomar, thought it lacks much in the way of context or worldbuilding this early on, eventually gets fully integrated into the Mythos timeline. It ties these early images to Lovecraft’s more mature creations, although I could certainly do without the ongoing references to squat yellow Inutos. Plus the story works a lot better if you don’t think too hard about the implied timeline for northern Canada, and instead let Lomar slip into the Dreamlands’ endless cycle of invasions, civilizations overrunning earlier ones, and belated deific vengeance.
A final word: it’s pretty startling to find ourselves at the end of Lovecraft’s main oevre of stories! When we started a year and a half ago, it felt like a near-infinite supply of material. That’s the nature of all human endeavor, of course—even hundred thousand year old civilizations must eventually run out their time. Fortunately, enough people have played in Howard’s sandbox that we needn’t fear the degeneration of the reread any time soon.
Next week, we earn our poetic license with the first 12 sonnets of the “Fungi From Yuggoth” cycle. Be there or be trapezohedral.
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” will be available from the Tor.com imprint in Spring 2017. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with the recently released sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
I ran out of things to say about the Dream Cycle a long time ago.
Weird Tales: “Memory” didn’t show up in the pulps in Lovecraft’s lifetime but “Polaris” appeared in the February 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan, alongside William Lumley’s “The Dweller”, Clark Ashton Smith’s essay “The Weird Works of M. R. James”, R. H. Barlow’s “The Tomb of the God” and the fifth part of the serialisation of “Supernatural Horror in Literature”. It was reprinted in the December 1937 Weird Tales, which also featured Robert Bloch’s “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” and an untitled poem by Robert E. Howard.
Our Work Is Not Yet Done: Further Lovecraft stories to re-read:
Juvenillia: “The Little Glass Bottle”, “The Secret Cave”, “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard”, “The Mysterious Ship”, “The Beast in the Cave”, “The Alchemist”
Solo short fiction: “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”, “Sweet Ermengarde”, “Old Bugs”, “The Street”, “The Descendant”, “The Very Old Folk”, “The Thing in the Moonlight”, “Ibid”, “The Evil Clergyman”
Collaborations: “The Green Meadow” (Winifred V. Jackson), “Poetry and the Gods” (Anna Helen Crofts), “The Crawling Chaos” (Winifred V. Jackson), “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (Sonia Greene), “The Ghost Eater” (C. M. Eddy), “The Loved Dead” (C. M. Eddy), “Ashes” (C. M. Eddy), “Deaf, Dumb and Blind” (C. M. Eddy), “Two Black Bottles” (Wilfred Blanch Talman), “The Last Test” (Adolphe de Castro), “The Electric Executioner” (Adolphe de Castro), “Medusa’s Coil” (Zealia Bishop), “The Trap” (Henry S. Whitehead), “Winged Death” (Hazel Heald), “The Horror in the Burying-Ground” (Hazel Heald), “The Hoard of the Wizard Beast” (R. H. Barlow), “The Slaying of the Monster” (R. H. Barlow), “The Battle That Ended the Century” (R. H. Barlow), “”Til A’ the Seas”” (R. H. Barlow), “Collapsing Cosmoses” (R. H. Barlow), “The Challenge from Beyond (Moore, Merritt, Howard & Long), “The Disinterment” (Duane W. Rimel), “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (William Lumley), “The Night Ocean” (R. H. Barlow)
Extent of Lovecraftian involvement ambiguous: “Four O’Clock” (Sonia Greene), “The Sorcery of Aphlar” (Duane W. Rimel)
“26,000 years” has a very specific relevance — because the axis of the earth “precesses”, it points to different stars at different times. Polaris is the North Star today but it wasn’t a few thousand years ago and won’t be a few thousand years hence, until the earth completes a cycle which is 26,000 years. The editor seems to have dreamt his way 26,000 years in the past when Polaris was the pole star, or maybe because Polaris was his guide or gateway, and was either trapped or forced to sleep because Polaris lost its influence until the cycle came round again. The stars changed, to coin a phrase.
Racism aside, there’s something more solid about this civilization’s destruction than some of the other ones Lovecraft gives us. This isn’t elder gods or curses bringing about destruction. This is one ancient city overrun by another civilization (a civilization that either couldn’t maintain the technology that kept a city going in the frozen north or that couldn’t cope with global cooling). This sort of stuff happens (whether or not it did in this particular case).
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that, if you’re dealing with someone who wasn’t able to fight alongside thousands who died in a terrible war, and who now has terrible guilt for failing to protect others in a war that didn’t happen, you should treat it as a metaphor the patient’s created for himself. Focus on dealing with the guilt and the patient’s sense of failure. Just ignore the reality issue (or leave it till after the big issues have been resolved).
And maybe find out where this fear of people with malnutrition/jaundice/liver ailments comes from.
Not much to say about this pair that hasn’t already been said. I agree with Ruthanna that the little apes in “Memory” are probably the devolved descendants of the men who built the ruined city.
In the hands of a more skilled writer, I think “Polaris” could have been a decent story, though of a sort that hasn’t really been popular for 75 or 80 years. I’m not sure that HPL could ever have been that writer, maybe an A. Merritt or even a Robert W. Chambers (some of his semi-weird stuff is in this vein), but not Lovecraft. And as StrongDreams notes @2, the precession of the equinoxes plays a role here. Lovecraft’s love of astronomy is showing.
@3 Ellynne: And maybe find out where this fear of people with malnutrition/jaundice/liver ailments comes from.
These were the waning days of the Yellow Menace (soon to be replaced by the first Red Scare) which gave us, among other things, Fu Manchu. It’s the sort of thing Lovecraft ate up with a spoon, alas.
Randoms thoughts and observations:
How good are they: Not bad bad. Certainly not major Lovecraft, but decent enough (brevity definitely works in their favor)
Waiting for Dunsany: As has already been noted, the fact that “”Polaris” precedes HPL’s first encounter with Dunsany is quite intriguing. More evidence, I should think, that literary influence is less a matter of the shock of the new and more a matter of encountering work that coincides with pre-existing tendencies.Or, to put it another way, it looks as though we would have had HPL’s Dunsany-period even if Dunsany had never existed.
The shadow of Poe: Joshi (LIFE, 167) notes the strongg influence of Poe on” Memory” (cf things like “Silence-A Fable,” “The Valley of Unrest,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”).
Influences on “Polaris”: Perhaps the end of the Norse settlements in Greenland? Although climatic changes were key, pressure from the proto-Inuit Thule culture also played a role.
Lomar, what kind of place was it?:Interesting to see how HPL characterizes Lomar as terrible in THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME (” with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it;”).
@@@@@ 3 and 4: HPL and the Yellow Peril: Well, it was widely thought in the first quarter of the 20th century that East Asia (in particular, China and Japan) was the one region that could pose a serious challenge to the West. HPL certainly shared that fear. On the other hand, he also felt a great deal of admiration for China:
Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophical traditions in the world—an “inferior” of any sort
Since we are starting “Fungi” next week, does this mean that we won’t be looking at Lovecraft’s account of his Roman dream, “The Very Old Folk?”:
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/vof.aspx
I always thought that is was a shame that he didn’t turn it into a story. Of course, he did allow Frank Belknap Long to incorporate it into THE HORROR FROM THE HILLS, but one can’t help but wonder how HPL (with his love for all things Roman) would have handled it.
You have touch’d on one vital aspect of Lovecraft’s genius. There are many tales that seem to blur the barrier betwixt reality and dream. Even a story seemingly rooted in the “real” world, “The Music of Erich Zann,” has aspects that simply don’t make sense when one tries to rationally comprehend ye tale. Is this vision seen from out ye window some hallucination, a vision of future calamity, a hypnotic effect of outre music? Why is the allure of horror so profound that after fleeing the scene in fright, the narrator is so determined to try and locate it again, and yet he cannot? Was it all a dream? Other stories, such as “The Festival” and “The Outsider” obscure ye dimensions between what is real and what is imaginary. Is “Dagon” a memory of something experienced, or a recollection of a dream? The final scene in that tale seems utter delirium. I love this aspect in Lovecraft’s art.
Ooooo–Fungi from Yuggoth!!!!! I am obsess’d with that poem, and have written an entire book inspir’d by it.
Everything SchuylerH lists will be covered eventually–but we’ll be interspersing the remaining collaborations, fragments, and juvenilia with stories by the writers who inspired Lovecraft and those inspired by him. (And yeah, the list we’re working from seems a bit arbitrary in what it classes as a full story. But we also don’t want to have week after week of minor work, so.)
Okay, he nailed it about the precession, but had anyone known at that time that 80 degrees N was once pretty warm, even if the day/night regimen was the same extreme type as now? It was weird enough in Fairbanks, I recall, and that’s not near so high of a latitude. –Polar forests, and so on, unlike anything today. Of course, that was back in the Paleocene, I seem to recall, and perhaps the Cretaceous–some part of dinosaur time, I think. Folks knew about hippos in Britain and so on, but the strangeness of a subtropical forest finding a way to exist in a land with 6 months of night, that seems to have gotten into the public consciousness later.
About 15 years back or so there was a Republic of Lomar here, a micronation complete with stamps featuring Roerich paintings. I didn’t join, and don’t recall what happened to it, though I don’t think either Gnophkeh or Inuit were involved.
I really need to signal better when I’m being facetious. Yes, I’ve read about the “Yellow Peril.” I still say (facetiously) that Lovecraft sounds like he has a deep rooted fear of bilious conditions.
Happy birthday to: Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).
@8: Which list are you using?
@9: Some information on the Republic of Lomar. I saw elsewhere references to 419 scammers selling Nigerians applications for Lomar passports.
@9 Angiportus: I think the warm polar regions were known at that point. Fossil finds had indicated that the whole world was a lot warmer and the theory of continental drift was considered fringe at best (though HPL seems to have believed it). Without the continents moving around, the only way cold-blooded (as they were thought to be at the time) saurians could have lived in those high latitudes would have been if the region were warm.
Unfortunately certain kooks are STILL trying to make white civilisation in the early Americas a thing, and certain white-nationalists are STILL trying to declare a big coverup when we don’t believe them. It is called the Solutrean Hypothesis, also known as Across Atlantic Ice.
The tiny mustard seed of truth in it is that the Solutrean era in Europe (20kya) and the Clovis era in the Americas (11kya I think) share characteristics: they were industrial-revolutions in how to chip stone tools. This led to needle-and-thread, and better weapons, across the Atlantic.
The Hypothesis proposes that Europeans (the Conan-looking ones with the dark hair and blue eyes, who did actually exist, before the farmers and charioteers came) crossed the Atlantic, established the Clovis innovations here, passed that to the nearest “First Nations” when they finally showed up, and were later wiped out by various Mohawks and (especially) by the Inuits.
Problem: nine thousand years between 20kya Europe and 11kya New Brunswick, and a large ocean. The nine millennia get handwaved, but the ocean – the Hypothesis claims – wasn’t a problem, because Conan and his crew hugged the great North Atlantic glacier of Ice Age 20kya.
@13/Zimriel: On a side note, blue-eyed Europeans did not “actually exist” in that age. Blue-eyed humans only came into existence 6,000-10,000 years ago.
Jana: I am relying on several publications of Solutrean-era European hunter-gatherers. As mentioned, these were the only sort of European at the time, because it was too darn cold to do any farming. For instance here in 2015. (I hope the link sticks.)
Very light skin is a different mutation; that seems to have come in, first with the farmers, at the time-frame you mention, then with the Indo-Europeans, finally with a lot of local natural-selection in that direction.
@15/zimriel: Interesting. I got my numbers from the work of Hans Eiberg et al. from 2008. I wasn’t aware of anything more recent on the subject. Thanks for the link!
Jana: turns out I was wrong. Blue eyes showed up on the scene 14kya / 12kBC; after the Solutrean stratum.
zimriel: Still much earlier than my original claim. Thank you for coming back and linking to another interesting article!
Lovecraft wrote a poem in 1917 entitled ‘Astrophobos’.
‘Polaris’ seems like a companion piece to, or perhaps exegesis of, this poem.
Also, among Lovecraft’s many phobias of the Other, he does seem to rank Eskimos pretty highly, which is strange considering they’re probably very unlikely to visit Providence or be found loitering the streets of New York City. And it’s not just their distant, Lomar-conquering ancestors that are to be feared — even today some of them worship Cthulhu!
In “Memory” I believe the apes are the humans left over from the fallen civilisation. I think Lovecraft is trying to say that if human civilisation ceases to exist our achievements are meaningless and we are no longer human but apes.
In “Polaris” I believe the narrator is just waking up from his dream-slumber. I think his city had fallen thousands of years ago and now that he is beginning to wake up he remembers the duty that he had been trusted with. No wonder he feels so guilty; he is shifting from his dream (the entities around him are the companions in his dream) to reality.