The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Penguin Classics, 2001)
by H.P. Lovecraft
USA, 1927

"Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature," the blurb on the back of my Penguin Classics edition of this collection asserts, "was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the emerging genre of science fiction in the early 1920s."  Correctly or not, I take that explanation to mean that Lovecraft liked to tell implausible stories with some sort of a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) as opposed to a supernatural underpinning where possible.  As far as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is concerned, that's more or less exactly what you get insofar as "the case of the missing madman" (92) collides feverish tales of grave robbing, necromancy, the raising of the dead, vampirism, cargos of mummies and the implausible like up against a "rational" world view informed by the latest advances of Einstein and "the modernistic Waste Land of Mr. T.S. Eliot" (182).  Never mind, for the moment, that Einstein's and Eliot's superpowers are found wanting by our unnamed narrator in comparison to the esoteric secrets handed down by ancient sorcerers through the ages!  Since I enjoyed my time with this short novel without really being able to put a finger on why, I'll have to give Lovecraft credit for keeping the pedal to the metal on the plot twists and turns and for deftly handling material that bounces back and forth between 17th century Salem and 20th century Providence with an impressive amount of period detail.  He's a good storyteller.  I was also amused by the one paragraph where a lesson from Oscar Wilde's life and the fate of a character in a Lord Dunsany tale were used to flesh out the back story of an ancestor of the title character--a rather freewheeling use of metafiction if you think about it.  Perhaps more intriguingly for one wondering about the distance between the novelist and his narrator, it's interesting to note the spotlight placed on antiquarianism as a possible explanation for Charles Dexter Ward's purported madness.  Given the writer's own predilection for archaic words (anent & eldritch being two handy examples) and a doctor character's contention that Ward's increasing infatuation with the "strange and archaic" offers signs of his madness "as if the snapping of the writer's mind had released a flood of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood antiquarianism.  There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit and occasionally the language are those of the past" (162), one can't help but ask: was Lovecraft poking fun at himself here or is this a mere red herring in terms of the plot?  Whatever, Lovecraft is said to have disparaged this tale as clunky and unfit for publication or some such.  For my part, I found it brimming with the "prime, forbidden, crazy stuff" that Amateur Reader (Tom) predicted I might find in the comments to a previous Lovecraft post here.  Wild.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

Source

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Lovecraft's longest-ever piece at just over a hundred pages, appears on pages 90-205 of The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Tales (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).

The Thing on the Doorstep

"The Thing on the Doorstep"
by H.P. Lovecraft
USA, 1937

"It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer" (341).  If it's also true, as I think I've read somewhere, that Lovecraft's conception of a successful supernatural tale hinged on the art of credibly relating something that couldn't have happened, then props to him for that doozy of an opening sentence and the preposterous but entertaining piece of writing that follows.  A Poe-like tale of madness, serial demonic possession and/or both, "The Thing on the Doorstep" waylaid me, the Lovecraft neophyte, with both its odd antiquarian bent and its loving appeal to local flavor (for example, the reference to "Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets" [349], so laughable out of context, is perfectly convincing here in the fussy secondhand telling by the unreliable narrator).  For non-New Englanders or at least those less enamored of a Weird New England setting on its lonesome, there's also an appreciably obsessive attention to metafictional detail evident in things like the allusion to one Justin Geoffrey--"the notorious Baudelairean poet" who "died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary" (342)--whom a footnote informs me is a character Lovecraft borrowed from Robert E. Howard's 1931 short story "The Black Stone."  That touch struck me as almost Borgesian, in fact, in terms of its sheer bookish fun.  Rating: PG for pulpy goodness, of course!

Source

"The Thing on the Doorstep," the title tale from The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), appears on pp. 341-365 of said collection.