HOWARD PHILLIP LOVECRAFT'S
“THE
UNNAMABLE”
We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century
tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham,
and speculating about the unnamable. Looking
toward the giant willow in 
the cemetery, whose trunk had nearly engulfed an
ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and
unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking from that
hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me
that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could
possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner.
Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and
“unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my
lowly standing as an author. I was
too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes’
faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what
they had experienced. We know
things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions;
wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which
cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct
doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists, with
whatever modifications tradition and
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.
With
this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed.
He was principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and
sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of
life. It was his view that only our
normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is
the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action,
ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by
accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs.
Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the
unexplained, for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I,
he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from
the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic re-combinations of images
usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual
existence, was something virtually incredible to is clear, practical, and
logical intellect. With him all
things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and
although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of
far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself
justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot
be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really
“unnamable.” It didn’t sound
sensible to him.
Though I well realized the futility
of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of an orthodox
sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved me to more
than usual contentiousness. The
crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of
the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my
spirit in defense of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the
enemy’s own country. It was not,
indeed, difficult to begin a counterattack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually
half clung to many old-wives’ superstitions which sophisticated people had
long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and
in the impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed
all their lives. To credit these
whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the
existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their
material counterparts. It argued a
capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead
man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down
the stretch of centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses
are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the
terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations?
And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to
it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it extravagant to
imagine physically living dead things in shapes—or absences of shapes—which
must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly “unnamable”? “Common
sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth,
is merely stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.
Twilight
had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking.
Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them,
having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his
success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat.
The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows,
but we did not move. Our seat on
the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind
the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or
the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering,
deserted seventeenth-century house between us and he nearest lighted road.
There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked
on about the “unnamable,” and after my friend had finished his scoffing I
told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the
most.
My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922 issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific
coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly
milksops; but New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its
shoulders at my extravagance. 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. And
as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite
impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler!
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 gray. All this
was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to
insist on that fact. Then I
told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed
among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain
reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary
described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and
how they were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came
to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces
suspected to be there.
It
had been an eldritch thing—no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan
age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface—so
little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional
ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft
terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains,
but even that is a trifle. There
was no beauty: no freedom—we can see that from the architectural and household
remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped devines.
And inside that rusted iron straightjacket lurked gibbering hideousness,
perversion, and diabolism. Here,
truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.
Cotton Mather, in that demonic 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 a beast but less than an a
man—the thing with the blemished eye—and of the screaming drunken wretch
that 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.
It
is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive
tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted
meadows near the woods. Something ha caught my ancestor on a dark valley road,
leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his back;
and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks
of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws.
Once a postrider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a
frightful loping nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours
before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly,
there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was
buried in the crypt behind his own house insight of the blank slate slab.
They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was,
dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and
hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong.
Then they stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage,
leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With
the years the legends take on a spectral character—I suppose the thing, if it
was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously—all the more hideous
because it was so secret.
During
this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words
had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about
the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my
fiction. I told him why the boy had
gone to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be
interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of those who
had sat at them. The boy had gone
to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen
behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.
Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to
his analytical mood. He granted for
the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but
reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of nature need not be unnamable
or scientifically indescribable. I
admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had
collected among the old people. Those
later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more
frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms
sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless
nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a
sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab.
Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to
death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and
consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though
largely forgotten by the last two generations—perhaps dying for lack of being
thought about. Moreover, so far as
esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be
grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so
gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic
perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature?
Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous
terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?
The hour must now have grown very
late. A singularly noiseless bat
brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not
see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently
he spoke.
“But is that house with the attic window still standing and
deserted?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“I have seen it.”
“And
did you find anything there—in the attic or anywhere else?”
“There were some bones up under the eaves.
They may have been what that boy saw—if he was sensitive he wouldn’t
have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him.
If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical,
delirious monstrosity. It would
have been blasphemous to leave such ones in the world, so I went back with a
sack and took them to the tomb behind the house.
There was an opening where I could dump them in.
Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull.
It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and
mine.”
At
last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near.
But his curiosity was undeterred.
“And what about the
window-panes?”
“They
were all gone. One window had lost
its entire frame, and in all the others there was not a trace of glass in the
little diamond apertures. They were that kind—the old lattice windows that went out
of use before 1700. I don’t
believe they’ve had any glass for a hundred years or more—maybe the boy
broke ‘em if he got that far; the legend doesn’t say.
Manton was reflecting again.
“I’d like to see that house,
Carter. Where is it? Glass or no
glass, I must explore it a little. And
the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an
inscription—the whole thing must be a bit terrible.”
“You
did see it—until it got dark.”
My friend was more wrought upon than
I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatricalism he started
neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp
which released a strain of previous repression.
It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through
the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that
accursed old house beside us. And
because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the
grisly glassless frame of that demonic attic window.
Then
came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction,
followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man
and monster. In another instant I
was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen
entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the
root-clutched mold of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a
stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom
with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned.
There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of
loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what
it meant.
Manton, though smaller than I, is
more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same instant, despite his
greater injuries. Our couches were
side by side, and we knew in a few seconds hat we were in St. Mary’s Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to
aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer
who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the
old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have
stood. Manton had two malignant
wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts and gougings in the back.
I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of
the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof.
It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the
puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were.
Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull—though the animal
was a difficult thing to place and account for.
After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck
questions:
“Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those
scars—was it like that?”
And
I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected—
“No—it
wasn’t that way at all. It
was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of
horror beyond all memory. There
were eyes—and a blemish. It was
the pit—the maelstrom—the ultimate abomination.
Carter, It was the unnamable!”