Henry
S. Whitehead was a close associate of H.P. Lovecraft, and the two authors share
a number of similarities. They
occasionally collaborated, though it is doubtful Lovecraft had to contribute as
much to Whitehead’s work as he did with less able writers. One of these joint efforts was the 1931 story
Cassius, one of Whitehead’s better
known tales. (See also 1.
Homunculus).
S.T. Joshi
notes that Lovecraft was aware of three of Whitehead’s stories set in the
fictional Connecticut town of Chadbourne, of which The Chadbourne Episode (1933) was one. It is likely that the town of Chadbourne was inspired
by Lovecraft’s Arkham, and seems to have been an equally hazardous
locale. Regrettably, the two other Chadbourne
stories have not been found.
The Chadbourne Episode was published a few months after
Whitehead’s death, and represents a late career work. Twenty-five
of his stories appeared in Weird Tales, beginning
in 1924, and several of his writings appeared posthumously in the late 1930s
and 1940s. Whitehead, who served as an Episcopalian clergyman in the U.S.
Virgin islands, was known for his incorporation of West Indies folklore and
Vodou into distinctive horror fiction.
In a tribute to the author, Joshi quotes a reminiscence of Lovecraft’s:
“…As
I glance at my curio shelf I see a long mottled snake in a jar, & reflect
how good old Canevin caught & killed it with his own hands—thinking I might
like a sample of Dunedin’s lurking horrors. [Whitehead later lived in Florida,
where Lovecraft once visited him.] He
was not afraid of the devil himself, & the seizure of that noxious wriggler
was highly typical of him. The
astonishing versatility & multiplicity of attractive qualities which he
possessed sound almost fabulous to one who did not know him in person.”
The Chadbourne Episode is by far one of Gerald Canevin’s
darker, more gruesome adventures.
Canevin is Whitehead’s alter ego, in the same sense that Randolph Carter
was H.P. Lovecraft’s. This story is not
set in some sunny corner of the U.S. Virgin Islands, but in rural Connecticut,
and while it is high summer, there is a definite chill in the air. Cats, dogs and farm animals have begun to go
missing in the vicinity of Canevin’s rental property, which is initially blamed
on “cattymounts”, a southerner’s term for mountain lions. Wrong species!—the offending organism may be
more porcine than feline. When a young
boy vanishes, the people of Chadbourne turn to Canevin for help.
The
story opens incongruously: a girl’s blueberry picking expedition serves to
foreshadow later horrific events. The Chadbourne Episode, a relatively
short story, is one of those worth re-reading, especially to appreciate
Whitehead’s foreshadowing and his careful creation of the setting and principle
characters. The arrangement has an
interesting symmetry. There are two
upper class families represented, the Canevins, who own an historic old farm,
and their close friends, the Merrits, whose mausoleum, like the farm, have been
infested and defiled by a foreign presence.
There are also two boys, one doomed, the other courageous at the scene
of a final conflagration between good and evil, which is also between native
and immigrant. “The old yeoman stock had
not run down appreciably in young Jed.”
Whitehead gives inordinate attention to both boys, who seem to represent
American wholesomeness and possibly racial purity.
(As a
sideline, Whitehead also wrote adventure stories for boys including Baseball and Pelicans from 1926 and Pinkie at Camp Cherokee from 1931. There is interesting commentary about
Whitehead at the Wormwoodiana blog at http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2013/12/henry-s-whitehead-news.html.)
The author’s
Gerald Canevin stories tend to have a bright, chatty, bon vivant tone that
contrasts powerfully with the terrors that are revealed, serving to amplify
them. In The Chadbourne Episode, this tone is more subdued, though Canevin still
shows an aristocratic bemusement at the locals, his social inferiors. This time the supernatural investigator does
not have to do any research, or apply his worldly, encyclopedic knowledge to
the unfolding horror. His peer, a
physician named Tom Merritt, informs him of the threat, and essentially asks
Canevin to exterminate it. “Bring that Männlicher rifle of yours,”
Merritt says, a weapon that Canevin repeatedly describes as “a weapon of
precision”.
As in
H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, horror—on earth at least—often has a foreign origin,
or at least foreign assistance. Could the young boy's disappearance have anything to do with the Persian immigrants who are renting the Canevin farmhouse? Reading The Chadbourne Episode now, many decades
after the trauma of World War II—and with racial and ethnic strife still a feature of current wars and
political unrest—one gets a chill that goes beyond the frightening elements
inside the story. The Chadbourne Episode is much more than a tale about shooting down
some local monsters. The nightmare that
Whitehead transcribed in the 1930s is still dreamed all over the world.
As is
the case with Lovecraft’s work, Whitehead almost never includes any women in
his stories. If women appear at all,
they are indistinguishable from background details, as parts of the setting, as
a kind of wallpaper. And when there is a
substantial female character, “she” is not actually a woman, strictly
speaking. Whitehead’s Mrs. Lorriquer, in
the 1932 story of the same name, spends much of the story as a physical shell
inhabited by the spirit of a profane Frenchman.
The
only women of note to appear in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction are the asexual ogress
Keziah Mason, in The Dreams in the Witch-House
(1933), and Asenath Waite, the weird woman in The Thing on the Doorstep (1937).
Asenath is also a shell inhabited by the spirit of her sorcerer father,
and later on by that of her doomed husband, Edward Pickman Derby. Any femininity that Keziah or Asenath may
have once possessed has long fled by the time they appear in these two Lovecraft
stories. (See also A
Lovecraftian Gender-Bender) In The Chadbourne Episode there is a
shocking and grotesque parody of a woman, “the dam and nine whelps”, which
appears near the end. What is going on
here?
Compare
the women—what few there are in the fiction of Whitehouse and Lovecraft—with
female characters in the work of Clark Ashton Smith and even Robert E.
Howard. Or with the creepy Mrs.
LeNormand in the recently republished 1937 novel by William Sloane, To Walk the Night (strongly recommended).
The Chadbourne Episode will remind Lovecraft readers of
similar ghoul stories like The Lurking
Fear (1923) and Pickman’s Model
(1927), which also depict old families that devolve over time, as well as nightmarish
visions of racial and ethnic difference and fears of miscegenation. Like these two stories, Whitehead’s tale is
unresolved at the end, with a strong intimation that communities of such creatures are now thriving in American locations, far from their Asian origin. The story is remarkably graphic and violent
for its time, perhaps indicating that these fears were intensifying in the
minds of many.
********************
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Halloween from The R’lyeh Tribune!
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