The
last post provided an overview of H.P. Lovecraft’s flawed but fascinating
novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943). Some reviewers have considered the novel a work
of psycho-autobiography, an expression of how Lovecraft perceived his work and
his life near the end of the 1920s.
Virtually all of the stories he wrote in emulation of his idol Lord
Dunsany are referenced in the novel, as well as others he had completed around
that time.
In this
sense The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath culminates
and consolidates themes and concepts the author had developed up to this point. In his 1975 biography of Lovecraft, L. Sprague
De Camp describes the novel as “at the same time a dream narrative, a Dunsanian
fantasy, and Cthulhu Mythos story, and the ghoul-changeling theme appears in
it.”
Though
released several years after the author’s death, the novel was completed before
the publication of Lovecraft’s better known mythos stories, beginning with The Call of Cthulhu (1928) and proceeding
with The Dunwich Horror (1929), The Whisperer in Darkness (1931), The Dreams in the Witch-House (1933) and
others. Although Nyarlathotep and
Azathoth appear, (as well as Night-Gaunts, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Plateau of Leng), there is no Necronomicon yet, no Shining Trapezohedron,
no Innsmouth.
Newcomers
to the work of H.P. Lovecraft, or those who first became acquainted with him
thorough his later mythos stories, should not read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath without some preparation. Which preparation includes reading all of his
Dunsany inspired tales first, with the exception of the dreadful The Quest of Iranon (1935)—far and away
the worst thing he ever wrote. The
recommended Dunsanian stories are listed in the previous post—they are
relatively short. In general Lovecraft
wrote a lot of very interesting material in the first half of his career,
roughly 1919 through 1927—well worth investigating. There is much more to Lovecraft than Cthulhu
and the Mythos!
It is
also helpful to know some biographical details about the author’s life. His love of cats is expressed in several
places in the novel, especially in the episodes that take place in the city of
Ulthar and on the dark side of the moon, where Randolph Carter is improbably rescued
by his feline allies. A black kitten he
befriends works its way up through the ranks of a cat army—this is probably an
avatar of the doomed kitten in The Cats
of Ulthar (1920), which in turn is a representation of Lovecraft’s own
therapy animal, a black cat who shall remain nameless here for the sake of more
politically sensitive readers.
Lovecraft’s
love of England and of the 18th Century, so obvious in stories like He (1926) and the earlier humorous piece
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
(1917) is expressed in a poignant episode that takes place near the fanciful
city of Celephaïs, where Carter meets an old friend in the dream world, King
Kuranes. It is helpful to know that in
the story Celephaïs (1922) Kuranes is
actually an impoverished tramp and failed writer in reality, who is delivered
via drowning to permanent residence and rulership of this dreamland city. Here is a passage from that story which
describes Kuranes and Lovecraft as he
was in the early 1920s:
His
money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about
him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom
he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally
ceased to write. The more he withdrew
from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have
been futile to try to describe them on paper.
In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph
Carter meets up again with his old companion and fellow dreamer Kuranes, but the
king is not in his “rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights” in town nor in
his fabulous retreat, the “turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian”. Being a dead
dreamer, Kuranes now has the power to create entire dreamscapes to reside in—and
he has used this power to recreate his boyhood home in an English village.
For
though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and
marvels, splendors and beauties, ecstasies and delights…he would gladly have
resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed
day as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved
England which had moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a
part.
If one
adds “New” in front of England, one can sense Lovecraft’s painful longing for his
simpler, more prosperous past, before the loss of the family fortune and his
uncertain future as an author. It is one of the more moving sections of the
story, of which there are several. (In The Silver Key, published a couple years
after Lovecraft finished the novel, his alter ego Randolph Carter essentially
achieves what Kuranes has done, instead using a strange portal to go backwards
in time.) One of the pleasures of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is
discovering these and other connections to Lovecraft’s earlier work and to
important events in his life.
The next post in this series will take a closer look at the tortuous itinerary
Carter follows on his way to Kadath and the much longed for “marvelous sunset
city”.
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