THE DEEP ONES: "Pickman's Model" by H.P. Lovecraft

"Pickman's Model" by H.P. Lovecraft.

Discussion begins July 30.

First published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/pm.aspx
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lovecraft/hp/pickman/
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/pickmansmodel.htm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41899

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

H.P. Lovecraft: Tales
Black Seas of Infinity
The Dunwich Horror and Others
The Best of H./P. Lovecraft

MISCELLANY

http://www.slideshare.net/kcfronk/artists-mentioned-in-lovecrafts-pickmans-model...
http://www.artmagick.com/pictures/artist.aspx?artist=henry-fuseli
http://www.franciscodegoya.net/
http://www.chicagomodern.org/artists/anthony_angarola/
http://unfilmable.blogspot.com/p/pickmans-models.html
http://www.crypt-of-cthulhu.com/pseudointellectual.htm
http://www.hulu.com/watch/58795
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickman%27s_Model
http://tinyurl.com/qz8s77c

Think Ill be reading from Centipede's new Library of Weird Fiction: H.P. Lovecraft volume.

The Complete Fiction for me.

Hannes Bok's illustration for this story is a favorite of mine:

The Dunwich Horror and Others for me.

I've got this story in several collections (I'm sure that goes for all of us) but Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is nearest to hand.

Another link for miscellany:
http://www.chicagomodern.org/artists/anthony_angarola/

A HPL story I hadn't read in ages, and recalled little but the ending of. The conceit that the narrator is telling the story to a specific individual is unique in Lovecraft I think?

Pickman's monologue about North End inevitably reminded me of the saying that in England 200 miles is a long way - in America 200 years is a long time. I live in Sweden, where urbanization came late by European standards, yet the city where I live was older in 1632 than what Boston is now.

>8 AndreasJ:

I read "The Statement of Randolph Carter" just after this, which has the narrator telling his story to the police, but you might be right about the use of a specific individual in "Pickman". I imagine it must be inspiring (or at least atmospheric) to live in an "ancient" city! I'm located in Pennsylvania, where we go back to the Colonial War era, if not a bit further. I must confess that a structure built in the 1700's seems quite old to me. :-D

I was struck by following line, as "Pickman" was written not long after HPL's infamous Brooklyn residence:

“The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he’d put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don’t you realise that places like that weren’t merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren’t afraid to live and feel and die.

It's practically the polar opposite of how he felt about NYC.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" does share the conversational conceit with "Pickman's Model," but they are certainly outliers among HPL's stories, where a cooler first-person narrative (like "The Rats in the Walls") or even a documentary conceit (like "The Shadow Out of Time") are more common. I was struck by how chatty this one was.

Speaking of "chatty", this rant by Pickman is great:

“Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I’ll wager that in eight I can shew you something queer in the cellar. There’s hardly a month that you don’t read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down—you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers—and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old times! This wasn’t the only world a bold and wise man could know—faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!

"Pale-pink brains"! Ouch! RUP can really deliver the malicious jibe.

Throughout the story, the old Boston underground, connected via tunnels and the remnants of basement-built wells, etc., is convincingly - and eerily - evoked.

On this read of "Pickman's Model," I was impressed by the extent to which it could fuel the sort of speculation rife among 21st- and late-20th-century occultists that HPL's Yog-Sothothery was an avenue to an objectively accessible sphere of spiritual experience, i.e. the Lovecraft-as-sorcerer trope. This paragraph in particular:

Don’t ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there’s all the difference in the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ from the pretender’s mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life painter’s results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence-school cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman saw—but no! Here, let’s have a drink before we get any deeper. Gad, I wouldn’t be alive if I’d ever seen what that man—if he was a man—saw!

I can easily see how this passage—with knowledge of the upshot of the story—read as an expression of Lovecraft's actual literary method and/or ideals, could lead to the sort of "creative" allegations made by Kenneth Grant, or fictions like Rodinoff's Lovecraft or Wheeler's The Arcanum.

>10 paradoxosalpha: I was struck by how chatty this one was

Agreed. The tone of the 'dialog' really stands out from his other works. The first paragraph really moves at a fast clip with a more modern feel. I thought the style worked well (although maybe not the phrase "bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution").

Overall, I enjoyed the story and remembered it fairly well but not the final line - which explains why I couldn't quite place the title of the Joanna Russ we'll be reading later even though it sounded familiar.

HPL displays some finely-tuned black humor::

...and another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest—a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guide-book and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, “Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn”.

>13 lucien:

I'm looking forward to the Joanna Russ story - too bad Caitlín Kiernan's "Pickman's Other Model" didn't make the cut this time to make it a ghoulish trifecta! I'll have to check that one out on my own.

>14 gwendetenebre:

I joined the ghouls' mirth!

I think there are enough of us interested that we can have an off-schedule thread for the Kiernan story. It should probably wait until after the Russ, though.

>11 gwendetenebre: "witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea;"

This was the one moment where I felt like the story connected with the "mythos": in particular, "Dreams in the Witch-House" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," respectively.

>15 paradoxosalpha:

After Russ - I'm in!

>16 paradoxosalpha:

Yes. Include also "The Call of Cthulhu" with it's secret rites practiced in out-of-the-way places (swamps instead of tunnels). I think you've nailed down the answer to my question in the Centipede thread as to why S.T. Joshi chose to include "Pickman" in the upcoming Mythos volume, A Mountain Walked.

An enjoyable tale. It's never gonna have the same effect as it did the first time I read it, obviously, but it's still worth a reread. Love all the shout-outs to the great weird artists, particularly the one to Clark Ashton Smith.

Some of S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz' comments on the tale (from its entry in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia:

The story is noteworthy in that it expresses many of the same aesthetic principles on weird fiction that HPL had just outlined in Supernatural Horror in Literature....{w}hen Thurber confesses that "Pickman was in every sense - in conception and in execution - a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist," one thinks of HPL's allusion to his recent abandonment of the Dunsanian prose-poetic technique for the "prose realism"... that would be the hallmark of his later work. The colloquial style of the story (as with "In the Vault") is unconvincing; Thurber, although supposedly a "tough" guy who had been through the world war, expresses implausible horror and shock at Pickman's paintings: his reactions seem strained and hysterical. Pickman recurs as a minor character in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

>19 artturnerjr:

Thurber also blanches at the end as he listens at the door while strange noises and gun shots come from the other side. Perhaps discretion is the better part of valor in this case, but an action hero he is not.

Check these out:

http://www.mwctoys.com/REVIEW_112706a.htm

http://www.monstersinmotion.com/cart/popup_image/pID/789

I kind of like the rat tail in the MiM link.

I haven't finished my re-read of the story yet.

In the meantime, here's a couple of pictures of the North End of Boston from the time of the story. Both are from the David Haden's Tentaclii Lovecraft blog.

http://tentaclii.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/12144/

http://tentaclii.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/vintage-photos-of-providence/

>20 gwendetenebre:

an action hero he is not

Exactly. He's an HPL protagonist that thinks he's a Robert E. Howard protagonist, if you will (though even Conan got creeped out by the supernatural beasties he encountered from time to time).

The only indication we have that Thurber is a tough guy is that he claims to be. That's not necessarily out of character for someone who isn't.

This story almost moves beyond the HPL trope of horrors inhering in the buildings and landmarks of colonial-era America (a localised horror), and makes all cellars, subways, and so on the sites of potential horror. It suggests to me both the 'American Gothic' that developed after the Golden Age of Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, and the shots of public statues at the end of the Doctor Who episode 'Blink" (the one that introduced the Weeping Angels).

>14 gwendetenebre:
I agree about the "finely-tuned black humour" (sorry, have to use the UK spelling!) but I wonder if in some ways we are more thin-skinned about deploying real people in fiction of this type than was the case 80-90 years ago. Of course it's easier to disseminate outrage (real or feigned) today.

Sorry to chime in late. Things kept coming.

This is the third time I've read this story.

>19 artturnerjr: The second time I read this story I also thought about this story in relation to Lovecraft's developing aesthetic of horror. He considered the matter as serious and worthy subject of art and was disappointed conventional literary society didn't seem to agree. You can sort of see the reaction of others to Pickman's work as something of a metaphor for conventional literature's opinion of weird fiction though it's obvious a limited one. Pickman really is painting ghoulish horrors.

His friends remarked on Lovecraft's attention to contemporary slang, and, in his letters, he'd break into imitation of contemporary slang usages. This is the only story, though, where you really see that playful side of Lovecraft.

There also seems to be a bit of a temperance joke here. The narrator keeps suggesting Elliot have a drink, but it seems he's just suggesting coffee, black coffee to be specific.

For an extemporaneous outburst of shock and horror, the final ending line seems implausibly delayed. I must admit I still like though, and I liked seeing the ghouls again. Some of my favorite mythos stories involve them a recent example being "Dogs" by Jeffrey Thomas.

>25 RandyStafford:

There also seems to be a bit of a temperance joke here. The narrator keeps suggesting Elliot have a drink, but it seems he's just suggesting coffee, black coffee to be specific.

I think my favorite line in the whole tale (aside from the famous final line) is, "Give me that decanter, Eliot!" :D

You recall that Pickman’s forte was faces. I don’t believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression.



Witches' Sabbath, Francisco Goya, 1798



Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat), Goya, 1821–1823

More information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Sabbath_(Goya,_1798)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Sabbath_(The_Great_He-Goat)