An earlier
post in this series introduced the topic of horror stories that take place in
cellars or basements. After discussing
David H. Keller’s memorable The Thing in
the Cellar (1932), the subsequent post moved ahead a few decades to talk
about Ray Bradbury’s Come Into My Cellar
(1962), an example of Cold War era hysteria and paranoia, and Richard Matheson’s
Born of Man and Woman (1950), a
masterful short horror story about adolescent rage.
Given
his traumatic family history, which resulted in life-long psychological and
emotional difficulties for the author, it is no surprise that H.P. Lovecraft
would be preoccupied with the lower levels of his house, that is, his mind and his memories, ancestral or
otherwise. So much of his fiction has to
do with going down dark stairs to the foundations of a residence or even
further below. What was he looking for? Did he ever find it? (See also Looking
Up and Looking Down (Mostly Down).)
It was
by way of my most immediate ancestor—my dad—that I first learned about H.P.
Lovecraft. As a youngster I stumbled
upon The Colour Out of Space (1927)—which
involves considerable staring down into the depths of a bottomless well. The story appeared in an ancient anthology of
science fiction and horror I found on the slowest shelf of my father’s wall of
books. I consumed and re-consumed portions
of this poisonous, oddly coloured fruit whenever my parents were not
immediately nearby. After I began to
wake up screaming in the middle of the night, the book mysteriously vanished
from the lower shelves and reappeared safely out of reach, way up on the shelf
nearest the ceiling. But when my father
mentioned Lovecraft, it was usually in relation to his favorite story, which
was The Rats in the Walls (1924).
Lovecraft’s
approach is markedly different from that of the first three stories, which focus
on the experiences of children. Childhood
fears of the cellar are commonplace; Keller proposes that youngsters—like dogs—have
more acute senses than adults and are better able to detect the presence of
phenomena of which their elders are oblivious.
Perhaps this is why Bradbury has one of his characters urge his adult
peers to be vigilant, to make better use of all five senses, and perhaps a
sixth or seventh as well. Lovecraft
would propose that cats are more
attuned to what may be down there in the dark—there are about as many cats at
Exham Priory as there are in The Cats of
Ulthar (1920) and the Dream Quest of
Unknown Kadath (published posthumously but written around 1927). Actually this is an exaggeration: The
Rats in the Walls contains just 9 cats.
Although
there are cats, with very few exceptions, there are no children in Lovecraft’s
stories. For him, ‘what is down there’
is unknown ancestral history, a forgotten past that reaches up out of the darkness
to throttle the present and the future. Much
of Lovecraft’s horror is autobiographical and genealogical in nature. He is trying always to come to terms with his
family’s impoverishment and loss of social standing, his father’s shameful
death from syphilis, and the terrors of an uncertain financial future.
The Rats in the Walls is one of Lovecraft’s relatively
few haunted house stories, remarkable for its supernatural elements, which include
spectral rats and strange visions of an underground grotto. A wealthy descendant of a family with a
disreputable past—and awful table manners—contrives to restore both the family
homestead and its reputation in a remote site in England. The theme of restoring a family’s lands and
social standing must have been acutely resonant for Lovecraft, who was unable
to do this for his own once prosperous family, who after 1904 was forced to
rent small apartments and subsist on a dwindling inheritance. There is terrible irony in the narrator De la
Poer’s efforts:
The
seat of my fathers was complete, and I looked forward to redeeming at last the
local fame of the line which ended in me.
I would reside here permanently, and prove that a de la Poer, (for I had
adopted again the original spelling of the name) need not be a fiend.
As
enthusiastic readers of Lovecraft know, De la Poer accomplishes exactly the
opposite of what he intends, and is psychiatrically hospitalized by the end of
the story, along with Thornton, the psychic who tries to get him to use all of his senses. Was eventual hospitalization Lovecraft’s fear
as well?
De la
Poer reconstructs the family’s castle on top of the ruins of a much older
edifice. It is hinted that the original
occupants were contemporaneous with the Druids or even arrived earlier. Their gruesome history is linked with that of
the narrator’s ancestors. In fact, there
has been an upwelling and contamination of his family line by a subterranean—because
buried and forgotten—evil. (A very similar
thing happens to the Martense family in Lovecraft’s 1923 story The Lurking Fear.)
Like his
colleague Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft assumes that as individuals travel deeper
into the earth, they risk not only encountering evil and monstrosity but are
likely to become one with them. This descent into diabolical atavism resembles
a pathway to Hell—overtly so in Howard’s case, with all his serpent imagery. Howard emphasizes downward movement as the
route to ever greater evil. Less
spiritually inclined, Lovecraft’s approach to Hell is the path to insanity.
Psycho-architecturally
speaking, De la Poer has built his comfortable, familiar daylight consciousness
on top of the old basement, the vault, the cavern—that is, the repressed or
forgotten truth about his origins. He shares
with his cat an acute sensitivity to noises that his fellow humans cannot
hear. Spectral rats scratch and scuttle
inside the stone walls, their pathways leading relentlessly down to the
foundations of Exham Priory. The author
connects these initial supernatural phenomena with backstory about the history
of the site and its environs, in particular, recalling a grotesque calamity
centuries earlier involving hordes of famished rodents.
However,
Lovecraft has his narrator express his ambivalence about the supernatural;
Yet
when I awoke it was full daylight, with normal sounds in the house below. The rats, living or spectral, had not
troubled me…On going down, I found that the same tranquility had prevailed
elsewhere; a condition which one of the assembled savants—a fellow named
Thornton, devoted to the psychic—rather absurdly laid to the fact that I had
now been shown the thing which certain forces had wished me to know.
At this
point the text disintegrates into what S.T. Joshi has called “perfervid
free-association”—a stream of broken italicized
phrases separated by dashes and ellipses, Lovecraft’s trademark sign that the
narrator has been horrified out of his mind.
(Compare this scene in The Rats in
the Walls with similar ones in The
Haunter of the Dark, The Loved Dead
or The Hound.) In
the end, De la Poer becomes the monstrosity he was trying to transcend, a bleak
outcome typical of Lovecraft.
The Rats in the Walls is one of the author’s most
effective stories and deservedly well known.
S.T. Joshi praised the story as the author’s “greatest triumph in the
old-time Gothic vein” while also appreciating its contemporaneous feel—one of
the relatively few Lovecraft stories with modern dates and references. Joshi was also impressed with the symbolism
that links the narrator’s descent beneath the foundations of Exham Priory to
his recapitulation of ancient history and his own family’s dark past.
On a
side note, it is interesting that cannibalism is a frequent topic in
Lovecraft’s stories. It appears in The Picture in the House (1921), The Lurking Fear (1923), In the Vault (1925) and Pickman’s Model (1927), among other
places. This may be worth exploring in
future posts.
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