THE DEEP ONES: "The Silver Key" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Silver Key" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins October 24.

First published in the January,1929 issue of Weird Tales



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/sk.asp
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41900

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Fantasy Hall of Fame
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy All-Time Greats

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Key
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream-Quest_of_Unknown_Kadath
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0G--7RH0qM
http://tinyurl.com/9lx3ypq

Click on the LT HPL link above and check out his author page. Poor guy - it's a mess!

I think I'll take a nostalgic read of this one from my old Ballantine edition of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

> 2

Ouch. That author page is sad.

I'm reading this out of H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction.

I'll be reading it out of my nice AH At the Mountains of Madness.

"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams."

Very nice opening line. There is something of Dunsany in it, of course, but I can also hear Bradbury, Gaiman and so many others.

This is followed by a delightfully misanthropic Lovecraftian rant that just runs on and on:

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose.

Yeah, tell us how you really feel, Grandpa!

The story that this most closely reminded me of (and which I could easily believe was a conscious model for it) was Machen's "A Fragment of Life." Both are philosophically digressive. Both involve a disenchanted protagonist connecting with a mythic stratum of reality through nostalgia and family history. The Machen story is much better, I think. It's probably my favorite of his after "The White People." "The Silver Key" by contrast doesn't rank among Lovecraft's major accomplishments, although I continue to be impressed at how much it differs from "The Call of Cthulhu," written only shortly before it.

ETA: I'm not at all persuaded by the Wikipedia editor's suggestion (citing Joshi and Schultz) that Huysmans' Against the Grain was an inspiration for HPL here. Carter is not comparable to des Essientes.

There are certainly some significant autobiographical ingredients in "Randolph Carter." His primary family relationships being to his mother and grandfather were a tip-off.

From the Wikipedia article: "Wright ... later told Lovecraft that the story was 'violently disliked' by readers. It is believed to have been disliked due to Lovecraft having renounced bigotry in the story, which at the time was wide spread."

Okay, that's some dismal use of the passive voice: "It is believed...." Jeez, by whom? But where in this story do we see the renunciation of bigotry?

I can certainly see how pulp readers looking for action would have felt cheated by this philosophical essay with its minor incident of dubious time travel, though. This is not Seabury Quinn!

Ha! I just realized that this story is an important tributary for the Joe Hill at the end of this quarter's schedule.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Ummm.. renunciation of bigotry by hating all men equally?

>9 paradoxosalpha:

I'm going to mull that one over for a while.

After all of the Dunsany I've been reading over the past year, DEEP ONES-related or otherwise, I'm rather enjoying going back and re-reading HPL's "Dreamlands" period. It's a good thing that Lovecraft moved on to bigger and better things, but it's fun to spot those more deliberate lifts from Dunsany in these stories.

I have never cared for Lovecraft's dream stories and I am glad that he outgrew that phase and found his own voice.

That said, I liked this story much more on this reading than ever before. The prose style is effectively restrained and the opposite of pulpish. HPL does quite well at capturing the melancholy of disenchantment. Carter's temporary disorientation when he travels back to his childhood is well described.

The flip-flops regarding the key are awkward: first it is metaphorical, then it is an actual, physical key, then the key unlocks the way from an actual cave to a maze of or leading to dreamland.

Apparently RC is not stuck in a time loop. He lives into his fifties, then his consciousness goes back to childhood, then he uses his knowledge to enter dreamland. No repetition.

What was fearsome about the 'snake-den'? We don't learn about that until the sequel, unless it was just because Edmund Carter practiced black magic there.

>9 paradoxosalpha:/10

The Silver Key points the way to the keys of Hill's Keyhouse, of course! Duh on me! :P

Huh. As I consider #11, I never would have thought that I'd end up thinking about this story in connection with a Chuck Palahniuk novel, but has anyone here read Rant? It's a favorite of mine, and it features non-cyclic, self-enhancing time travel (along with venereal rabies and a number of other crazinesses).

Is Randoph Carter his own grandpa?

Reach out a tendril...

Your own personal Lovecraft
Someone in deep despair
Someone out there
Your own personal Lovecraft
Someone in deep despair
Someone out there

Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
In the Ghooric Zone
Consciousness descending
Into voids unending

Take it from me
There still is a key
Leading to see
Your high reverie
Dreaming a solution
From this mundane confusion

As Douglas Adams pointed out: the main problem with time travel isn't about family relations but about grammar. :-)

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html

I enjoyed how the misanthropic rant gradually segues into into a compelling, ethereal travelogue:

All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, the clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted roots.

Then little descriptions like the following only enhance the eerie mood:

At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side.

>14 Nicole_VanK:

How about this confusing blurb from the back of the 1976 edition of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath:

"THE SILVER KEY. Where the fantasies of youth were replaced by realities that unlocked the past and haunted a future that had already been lived..."

>13 paradoxosalpha:

Thank you for the explanatory link for "I'm My Own Grandpa" - once performed by the all-Muppet Gogolala Jubilee Jugband!

I like the verse, but "venereal rabies"!? Now there's a concept for you! :D

> 16 I like the verse, but

Oh, thanks. The doggerel/filking is mine, unrelated to Rant, just sort of inspired by the idea of "The Silver Key" as HPL's fantasy of personal salvation.

This is at least the second time I've read this story, but this time I was expecting H. P. expounding his personal aesthetic and moral philosophy, so I paid more attention to the weird aspects.

First, there is the fairly seamless transition of Randolph Carter in contemporary times seeming to physically return to the world of his childhood. Second, there is the odd position of the narrator. The story goes from omniscient third person narrator (seemingly) -- which relates Carter’s experiences and mental state -- to a first person narrator who hopes to meet Carter again in the land of dreams. Is he the narrator of the first part of the tale? If so, how does he know all the details of Carter's experience and the actual events behind the clues that exist in the wake of Carter's disappearance? After all, he hasn't journeyed yet to the land of dreams to meet Carter.

It's a bit like the well-known narrative problem in the movie Citizen Kane -- how does anyone know "Rosebud" was Kane's last word when he dies alone?

>7 paradoxosalpha: Your candidate for the model of the story does make more sense than Joshi's given Lovecraft's love of Machen.

I also like how world weary this story is in tone. Old Grandpa was, after all, only 36 when he wrote it.

> 18 the odd position of the narrator

I had noticed that on this read, but neglected to mention it. Pondering it now, I suppose it would make excellent sense if the narrator were actually Carter's personal genius or tutelary daemon!

ETA: The penultimate paragraph of "The Silver Key" isn't a great fit with my new reading, but it would be lovely if such a story were written that way. Hm.

Sorry I'm coming to the conversation so late but a truly crazy family situation has prevented me from doing much of anything for the past several days, and now I'm pissed 'cause I had comments on the story to make which I've just about completely forgotten now. Anyway, it's good to be back home now. :)

One of the things that I remember I was going to comment upon was that discussing Lovecraft's fiction is maybe a little less fun than discussing that of, say, Robert W. Chambers because HPL is such a well-documented and widely-written-about individual. With an HPL story, I'll say something to myself like, "Hey! That part is a reference to such-and-such!" and then see the same observation corroborated elsewhere, causing me to question whether I actually made said observation independently or I read it elsewhere and am not remembering that I did so.

One observation that I'm relatively sure I made independently is that this passage...

He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.

...recalls both "The Masque of the Red Death" and the opening pages of Vathek; it also seem to resemble what I've read about Against the Grain (mentioned by PA in #7), but I still haven't read that one so I cannot verify this.

There are several sublime passages in this tale - Kenton has quoted a few of them - but by far my favorite is this:

Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

Quintessential HPL, and about as fine a bit of writing as anything to ever flow forth from his pen.

> 20

The interior decorating business is straight out of Huysmans. My bad for overlooking it in #7. However, I still think the larger arc of the story is more like Machen's "A Fragment of Life."

>21 paradoxosalpha:

My bad for overlooking it in #7.

Well, it's a fairly brief (and therefore easy to miss) passage.

"A Fragment of Life."

Haven't read that one either - started it a couple times but have never finished it for some reason. Really need to get cracking on my European decadents. ;)

Just re-read this one in preparation for "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". I didn't take part in the original discussion.

I remember the overriding impression I took away on my first reading of this story was an elegiac tone, and a sense of nostalgia for a golden childhood, much like Ray Bradbury's stories of "Green Town," Illinois.

The threatening, occult aspects of Arkham and surrounds, although mentioned, are very much in the background here. If this was the latest Lovecraft story you were reading in Weird Tales, would you wonder if he was turning away from The Mythos, from even treating the fantastic in the context of his stories as objectively real?

Maybe this is part of the reason the story wasn't well received: that it seemed to presage a new direction that the fans didn't like.

Oh, and I concur that the omniscient narrator being revealed as a third party with apparently too much knowledge of Carter's thoughts and doings is a textual problem (unless Carter once told it all to him, in the real world or in the Dreamlands, maybe in the manner of Black and Carver in Providence no. 8).

>23 housefulofpaper:

I reread it, too, for the same reason, as well as because I simply really like the story. It continues to age well for me, and will perhaps stand as the ultimate fictional statement of Lovecraft the aesthete.

>23 housefulofpaper:
>24 artturnerjr:

Similar motivation for me, reading for the first time to prepare for this week's read of "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".

The opening paragraphs really emphasize the parallels in HPL's focus with the premises of Camus and Sartre a bit later in the century: the absurdity of life, the emptiness of prior orientations.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries.

Rather than go on to establish an "improved" outlook, though, HPL stays there and focuses on the implications.

Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. ... They were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.

Reminds me a bit of James Branch Cabell.

>26 paradoxosalpha:

I had that very thought when reading just that passage!

>26 paradoxosalpha: >27 elenchus:
I've seen that suggestion made somewhere; but also the suggestion that he had in mind Dunsany who he had once held in the highest regard but who had lost his way into Jorkensism etc.

>28 Crypto-Willobie:

Dunsany seems more likely, if HPL had a specific writer in mind. I'm actually reading some Cabell at the moment, though (The Devil's Own Dear Son), so that's what occurred to me.

>26 paradoxosalpha: ff.

S.T. Joshi's footnote on that very passage (in Penguin Classics' The Dreams in the Witch-House and Other Weird Stories) reads as follows:

This paragraph may reflect HPL's disappointment with what he took to be the decreasing element of pure fantasy in the work of Lord Dunsany. In a late letter to Fritz Leiber he discusses his conception of Dunsany's literary development: "As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity. He was ashamed to be uncritically naive, and began to step aside from his tales and visibly smile at them even as they unfolded. Instead of remaining what the true fantaisiste must be - a child in a child's world of dream - he became anxious to show that he was really an adult good-naturedly pretending to be a child in a child's world"

If HPL were at all familiar with JBC, my guess would be that Cabell was always too sophisticated, always too tired in his droll observations. In any case, I smiled inwardly at how HPL's description could apply so fittingly to Cabell's works, and yet be off the mark (from my vantage) in its assessment.

For that matter, I'd say the same for Dunsany, though I don't have a strong grasp of his earlier and later periods. But I don't begrudge HPL his perspicacity, he observed a real quality of writing even if he doesn't appreciate it as highly as I do.

>31 elenchus:

Agreed.