In
his Supernatural Horror in Literature, H.P.
Lovecraft described Irvin S. Cobb as “a gifted and versatile humourist”. Cobb was a successful journalist, author and
actor, producing hundreds of short stories which he wrote during the first four
decades of the 20th Century.
Some of these were adapted to movies—silent films initially. He also published over 60 books. For a time he covered the First World War for
the Saturday Evening Post. He tended to write humorous pieces about his
home state of Kentucky, filled with local color.
Lovecraft
praised one of his earlier stories, Fishhead
(1913), which originally appeared in The
Cavalier, one of the Munsey Magazines.
Some have suggested that Lovecraft got the inspiration for his well
known The Shadow Over Innsmouth
(1936) from Cobb’s story. Both works
share the notion of a half man-half fish hybrid, so perhaps Lovecraft found the
germ of an idea here.
However,
the stories are very different in tone, style and perspective. Fishhead
is a simple story of revenge, effectively delivered through careful
attention to the details of setting and the violent ending. The
Shadow Over Innsmouth is much more complex, dealing with themes of idolatry,
apostasy, hereditary evil and self-discovery.
Irvin
S. Cobb will remind some readers of Manly Wade Wellman, another southern writer. Both employ a folksy, matter-of-fact
presentation of the details of their stories.
But Cobb is much less whimsical or lyrical than Wellman, and his story
contains more graphically violent imagery.
Fishhead opens with a description of
Reelfoot Lake, which straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border. “It is an after-thought of creation,” the
narrator writes, the result of an unusual earthquake back in 1811. “In places it is bottomless.” He goes on to describe the water, the land
and its denizens in affectionate detail, not forgetting to mention the enormous
and hazardous catfish that inhabit the lake.
It is
interesting to compare this landscape to one of Lovecraft’s. Cobb’s setting is a warm, sunny place
brimming with creatures of all kinds.
The reader hears about frogs, turtles, garfish, duck, geese, buffalo
gnats, wild pigs, pelicans, snake birds, bull bats, big speckle legged mosquitoes,
and of course, the catfish. The
vegetation is similarly inventoried. In
contrast, a Lovecraftian hill or forest is almost completely devoid of life
forms, save for some “barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly
pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds…” and perhaps some fungus. Most of the time it is pretty quiet and still
on Lovecraft Mountain.
Fitting
perfectly amidst the busy ecology of Reelfoot Lake is the individual known as “Fishhead”,
locally feared because of his repulsive ichthyic features and strange reclusive
habits. The narrator explains that
Fishhead’s mother was frightened badly by one of the big catfish shortly before
giving birth to him, “so that the child came into the world hideously marked.” This superstitious explanation gives the
story the feel of a folk tale. But Fishhead
is also the product of a mixed marriage.
His father was an African American and his mother a Native American—so the
horror of miscegenation is also in view.
Not fitting in with the people around him, Fishhead develops a closer
relationship with the lake dwellers he resembles.
Two
local men falsely accuse Fishhead of messing with their trout lines. He bests them in a fight, but the altercation
sets into motion a plan for vengeance against him. The narrator’s sympathies are clearly with
the outcast, despite his frightful appearance and the fact that he is a
half-breed. It ends badly for all
involved, except perhaps for the catfish.
The
story is interesting as a snapshot of race relations circa 1913. The “N-word” is used several times. This may
offend the linguistically sensitive, but the word is used as Mark Twain would
have used it, not necessarily in the derogative fashion it is used today. The author clearly sides with the strange
outsider despite his mixed ethnicity—in a way that Lovecraft, a decade or so
later, never did. Also striking is that
Fishhead lives on several borders, materially and figuratively. His cabin is on the state line, his lake
straddles two states, and he himself is nearly amphibious, inhabiting land and
water. His blood intermingles two races,
and perhaps a third. What other borders would he have been able to
cross, had he lived?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your interest in The R'lyeh Tribune! Comments and suggestions are always welcome.