As with
most of his collaborations with other authors, Two Black Bottles (1927) is interesting mainly because of Lovecraft’s
influence and how the story relates to the author’s other work. It is better than many of his joint
efforts, though not nearly as good as The
Mound (1930) or The Horror in the
Museum (1932), both with Zealia Bishop.
Two Black Bottles is a “secondary”
revision according to Joshi’s classification; he describes this work as one “in
which Lovecraft merely touched up—albeit sometimes extensively—a preexisting
draft.”
Two Black Bottles was written by Wilfrid Branch
Talman, who sent the draft to Lovecraft for editing. Lovecraft
met Talman during his brief stay in New York City, when the younger man was in
his early twenties. Talman had earlier sent
him a booklet of his poetry to review, and later on sent him this tale of
necromancy and vengeance from the grave. The text is mostly devoid of the lengthy, adjective-laden sentences
favored by Lovecraft, and the plot moves along relatively swiftly.
The
most identifiable contribution from Lovecraft are the passages of dialogue—which
are awful. The setting of the story is
northern New Jersey, but the principle characters speak in a stilted pseudo-Appalachian
dialect that is quite out of place, (“Curse ye, ye rascal…I’m done fer!”). In various stories Lovecraft seems to assume
that people in rural areas all sound alike, no matter what region of the
country they live in. He never mastered
the art of rendering human conversation in his fiction, and does not appear to
have had an ear for everyday spoken language.
His revision of Talman’s original dialogue weakens the overall quality
of Two Black Bottles, such as it is.
According
to S.T. Joshi, Talman worked as a New
York Times reporter for a time, and was also an editor for the Texaco Oil
Company newspaper and other trade papers.
He occasionally dabbled in fiction writing. He and Lovecraft shared an interest in local history
and genealogy. Talman was especially interested in his Dutch ancestry and was
active in the Holland Society of New York.
This is reflected in the gloomy setting of Two Black Bottles, which is the dwindling village of Daalbergen,
originally founded by Dutch settlers.
Lovecraft
had a number of interesting relationships with younger men, of which Talman was
one. Others include Robert H. Barlow,
Frank B. Long, Alfred Galpin, and Samuel Loveman. It does not seem too much of stretch to see a
literary transmutation of these friendships into such Lovecraftian “bro-mances”
as Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919), The Tree (1921), Hypnos (1923), The Quest of
Iranon (1935), and The Thing on the Doorstep
(1937). In my view at least, reading
these stories as a group and seeing their interrelated themes and imagery
provides insight into Lovecraft’s personality and the nature of his
relationships with others.
Though
Lovecraft thought positively of the younger man, Talman was somewhat critical
of Lovecraft in return. Recalling his
assistance on Two Black Bottles,
Talman disliked how Lovecraft had modified the dialogue and made it more
colloquial in tone. Near the end of
Lovecraft’s career, Talman tried unsuccessfully to help Lovecraft produce new
fiction along with his extensive travelogue material, acting as an amateur
agent. Another “what if”: Lovecraft appeared to have considerable
potential as a travel writer, but did not develop or market it.
Talman
was one of the few who left a description of H.P. Lovecraft’s voice, as well as the author’s behavior
when laughing. S.T. Joshi quoted the
following from Talman in his two volume biography of Lovecraft:
His
voice had that flat and slightly nasal quality that is sometimes stereotyped as
a New England characteristic. When he
laughed aloud, a harsh cackle emerged that reversed the impression of his smile
and to the uninitiated might be considered a ham actor’s version of a hermit’s
laughter. Companions avoided any attempt
to achieve more than a smile in conversation, so unbecoming was the result.
Others
described his conversational voice as “somewhat falsetto”, (Sonia Greene) or
“piping-voiced” (Hart Crane). L. Sprague
De Camp reports Talman’s insistence that he could not recall Lovecraft ever
making an anti-Semitic remark either verbally or in writing. “Nor do I remember anything he ever said
knowingly to wound a listener.” It seems
that Lovecraft was able to modulate his views about race and ethnicity, or at
least their expression, in some settings.
In Two Black Bottles, the narrator is
summoned to the dreary village of Daalbergen to attend to his late uncle’s
estate. Daalbergen is Talman’s version
of Innsmouth, which also contains a decrepit and desecrated old church. The narrator’s uncle was the last pastor of
this church, and according to the villagers, came under the influence of an
evil old sexton, (who is actually 200 years old). This is a familiar trope in horror fiction,
that of a demonic groundskeeper whose evil is in direct contrast to the
hallowed ground and edifice where he works.
There is an echo of this in Robert W. Chambers classic The Yellow Sign (1902).
The
narrator confronts the old wizard in a ruined belfry, surrounded by “old and
dusty books and manuscripts—strange things that bespoke almost unbelievable age…on
rows of shelves which reached to the ceiling were horrible things in glass jars
and bottles…” The narrator discovers
that his uncle’s predecessor was the notorious Dominie Slott, a clergyman
devoted to occult arts. The sexton has
continued his master’s work, of which the narrator’s uncle was the most recent
victim. On a table are two mysterious bottles containing spirits—not of the
liquid variety. Regrettably, one of the bottles
is broken in the struggle, possibly the wrong one.
Two Black Bottles contains some conventionally spooky
imagery, but the most memorable and haunting aspect is the unresolved ending. Had the author included just a bit more
humanizing detail about the doomed uncle, readers would care more about his
fate. This story may be interesting to
enthusiastic readers of Lovecraft for some of the imagery that recurs in a number
of his better stories. For example, the
narrator’s fumbling around in the dark of the old church and later scaling the
stairway to the belfry recalls The
Haunter of the Dark (1936), and the imprisonment of souls in bottles
reminds one of the old wizard’s paraphernalia in The Terrible Old Man (1921).
Necromancy is developed much more thoroughly in Lovecraft’s ambitious
later work, The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward (1941).
********************
“…in the centre of the town, where perched a
great white church…and it had made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance
itself a moment on the ghostly spire.”
—from The Festival (1925), by H.P. Lovecraft
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