Henry
S. Whitehead was an associate of H.P. Lovecraft and collaborated with him on
several stories. He began corresponding
with Lovecraft in late 1930, not long before his death. Of Whitehead, Lovecraft once said “He has
nothing of the musty cleric about him; but dresses in sports clothes, swears
like a he-man on occasion, and is an utter stranger to bigotry or priggishness
of any sort.” Whitehead’s novella Cassius (1931) was discussed in a recent
post, (see Homunculus). Whitehead wrote just over 40 stories, and
more than half of them saw print in Weird
Tales. He did most of his writing between
1923 and 1932, when he died at the age of 50. In the mid 1940s his work was published by
Arkham House in two collections of short fiction.
One
source suggests that Whitehead was strongly influenced by the writing of Edward
Lucas White and William Hope Hodgson.
Several of his stories were set in the West Indies, and often featured
voodoo, ghosts, and related supernatural activity. S.T. Joshi, in his biography of H.P. Lovecraft,
comments that Whitehead’s “urbane and erudite weird fiction is one of the few
literary high spots of Weird Tales, although its lack of intensity and
the relative conventionality of its supernaturalism have not won it many
followers in recent years.” Until fairly
recently, Whitehead’s stories were out of print, but Ash Tree Press published a
collection called Passing of a God and
Other Stories (2007). More detail
about this interesting author may be found at:
Henry
S. Whitehead’s The Trap (1931) is a “secondary
revision” by H.P. Lovecraft, defined by S.T. Joshi as one “in which Lovecraft
merely touched up—albeit sometimes extensively—a preexisting draft.” This is in contrast to the “primary revisions”,
in which it is clear that Lovecraft did most of the writing. According to Joshi, Lovecraft wrote most of the
central section of The Trap. This is according to comments Lovecraft made
in a letter to R.H. Barlow. However, in
a later publication, Joshi estimates that the last three quarters of the story are
Lovecraft’s contribution. Alert readers
can observe the shift from Whitehead’s urbane conversational style to Lovecraft’s
denser, more verbose prose.
There
are other differences between the two authors which make this collaboration disjointed
and problematic. When Lovecraft’s
section begins, characters and dialogue vanish, to be replaced with pseudo-scientific
theorizing and laborious historical back story.
Typically in a Lovecraft story, historical detail precedes the main action of the story, as a way to build up both
the credibility and the sense of impending horror as events unfold. In The
Trap (1931), it is offered as explanation after the main conflict is
resolved, almost as an afterthought.
The Trap (1931) is an example of a
particular type of trans-dimensional portal, one involving a cursed or
transmogrified mirror. An old mirror of
mysterious origin is set up in a school teacher’s quarters, where it attracts
the attention of one of the students. A
boy is sucked through the mirror into the fourth dimension. He is able to
communicate telepathically with his teacher when the latter is dreaming. It is through these dreams that the narrator
of the story is able to understand the nature of the boy’s predicament as well
as perceive the strange world on the other side. Rescue is potentially hazardous but fairly straightforward
to accomplish, given assumptions about how the mirror operates.
Rescue
is delayed several pages by considerable speculation and explanation of the
history of the mirror. However, the
story is interesting conceptually—a detailed account of what it might be like
to enter the fourth dimension by way of an oddly fashioned reflective surface,
and the impact of such an adventure afterwards.
When the boy is examined after his rescue, he is found to be left-handed
instead of right-handed, and his internal organs are rearranged on opposite
sides of his body—this trope shows up again in later science fiction concerning
transport across dimensions.
It is
interesting to compare Whitehead’s The
Trap to A. Merritt’s Through the
Dragon Glass (1917). (See 3.
Through a Gateway ). The older story
essentially relies on magic to explain the operation of the mirror, while in The Trap, an effort is made to enlist
science in determining how it works. Here,
Whitehead’s and Lovecraft’s collaboration is a transitional work, marking a shift away from supernaturalism
towards a more materialistic explanation of weird events. (See also Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, written just a few years before.) Science shows up, almost like a guest who
arrives too early, and there is an awkward tension. Lovecraft in the end falls back on using an occult
origin to explain the mirror’s weird properties.
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