THE DEEP ONES: "The Cats of Ulthar" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Cats of Ulthar" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins July 20.

First published in the November 1920 issue of The Tryout.



Image by Jeff Powers

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cu.aspx
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Cats_of_Ulthar (free eBook and audiobook)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41872

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction
The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories
H. P. Lovecraft: Masters of the Weird Tale
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales

MISCELLANY

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/cd.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cats_of_Ulthar
https://lovecraftzine.com/2013/10/10/lovecrafts-views-on-cats-and-dogs-their-fun...
http://tinyurl.com/hnfcnn2

Rereading it in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (a book I am increasing glad my library has a copy of!).

Reread it in Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

Online for me. I'm somewhat surprised but don't think I've ever read this one before now.

By 1920, people knew that Gypsies weren't really from Egypt, right?

The line for me was this one: Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. This was another tale in which the ultimate outcome was never in much doubt, so this sentence added a nice frisson even if it wasn't exactly unexpected.

>5 paradoxosalpha:
I took the term as a generic (if racist) reference to wanderers, the way it was used in Britain to encompass even those not specifically Romani. But you raise an interesting question: is the usage reflective more of the author, or of the setting (fictional Ulthar)?

Overall rather derivative of Dunsany, I suppose I enjoy his work even in emulation!

HPL didn't actually use the term "gypsy" in the story. What he did was to festoon gypsy-like nomads with ancient Egyptian religion, thus indicating their continuity.

I think this is one of HPL's most successful Dunsanian approximations. I love the image of "all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts."

The opening paragraph is a wonderful ode to the feline:

For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

There's also an appearance by "the lean Nith". Could he possibly be a relative of Nifft the Lean? :-D

>7 paradoxosalpha:

He calls them "strange wanderers" or "dark wanderers". If HPL didn't reference Egypt and Africa in the first paragraph, I wouldn't have taken this for an earthbound tale.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

Huh! You're right, of course. Shows that it was lodged in my head, though, and had been there even before I read your comment here.

>9 gwendetenebre:

Just to confuse matters, in TDQoUK Ulthar is located in the Dreamlands, not on the waking Earth.

Speaking of the first paragraph, note that it mentions Meroë, a ruined city in Sudan that you could visit if you wanted, in a breath with Ophir, which is little more than a name from the Bible with a couple millennia's worth of legendry built upon it. HPL isn't yet dropping references to his own mythology, but he's already mixing the mundane with the legendary.

(There's no reason to suppose that the Biblical Ophir wasn't a real place, but we're told very little of it. The legendry built around it by latter ages is much more extensive, and attempts to locate it have often resembled those to locate a real Atlantis.)

Ophir serves as the focus of King Solomon's Mines and an assortment of later fantasy literature doubtless influenced by it. ERB seems to have mutated it to Opar in the Tarzan stories, and Phillip Jose Farmer wrote a couple of novels set in ancient Opar.

Those Ultharian cats take their role as predators seriously!

This story primarily interests me in that, yeah, it's disturbing, but it's not disturbing in the same way that more archetypal HPL tales like At the Mountains of Madness are. HPL's work tends to find its horror in the cosmic/extraterrestrial; this tale derives its horror from more commonplace sources, a strategy I associate more with writers like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King.

>6 elenchus:
>8 gwendetenebre:

Joshi and David E. Schultz (in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia) have the following to say re: Dunsany's influence on this tale:

There are several superficial borrowings from Dunsany: the name of the boy Menes (possibly derived from King Argimenes of the play King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, in Five Plays...); the "dark wanderers" (perhaps an echo of the "Wanderers... a weird, dark tribe" mentioned toward the end of "Idle Days on the Yann," in A Dreamer's Tales...). The entire scenario is probably inspired by the many similar tales of elementary revenge in The Book of Wonder...

>8 gwendetenebre:

There's also an appearance by "the lean Nith". Could he possibly be a relative of Nifft? :-D

I noticed that, too. Wonder if this is where Michael Shea got the idea for the name.

>13 artturnerjr:

The boy Menes is surely named not for Dunsany's Argimenes, but for Menes, the semi-legendary founder of Egypt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/science/29cat.html?hp&_r=0

Hm. Our "Egyptian Menes" is also a plague orphan, which seems to suggest a subtext pitting the pro-feline classical world of Egypt against the cat-shunning Hebrews, who were of course responsible for Egypt's plagues. (There is not one mention of domestic cats in the Hebrew scripture, despite their historical prevalence in the Near East.)

Note the more circumspectly ethical nature of Menes' divine retribution when contrasted to that of Moses. I-Am-That-I-Am smites the Egyptians en masse, but Bast concentrates her poetic justice on the felicidal couple in particular.

>11 AndreasJ:

You're right - that mixing of the mundane and the legendary is a bit off-putting. I need to revisit the Dreamlands cycle.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I kept thinking that Ophir came from Conan, but maybe Tarzan's Opar is what I was actually trying to recall.

>13 artturnerjr:

HPL gets a bit more gruesome than Dunsany probably would have, although the general tone and the tale's brevity definitely call the latter's work to mind.

>17 gwendetenebre:

Oh, there's an Ophir among Conan's Hyborian Age kingdoms also. It is supposed to be the oldest of the kingdoms of that era, in fact, having been founded by survivors of the Atlantean deluge.

>15 paradoxosalpha:

"I'll domesticate myself, thank mew very much!" growls the little beastie. Interesting article!

>5 paradoxosalpha:

I just checked a popular encyclopaedia from 1922, and it states the Indian origin as undisputed fact; it doesn't seem to expect that readers will have different ideas. Based on other articles, in that case it'd likely said something like "contrary to popular opinion".

>20 AndreasJ:

A very neat reference check.

Ophir is a resonant enough name to be used for a brand of artisanal gin (I was going to write still resonant enough, but - no pun intended).

I think this is a story that probably works better for cat lovers than for non-cat lovers, not for the obvious reason that it features cats, but because a large percentage of cat lovers would, I believe, be quick to forgive a cat that turns man-eater, if there are extenuating circumstances.

#15 What an adorable kitten! My sister's cat, Cosmo, is yellow-eyed and black. My cat, Kai, is a black, very dark gray, and sand-colored tabby with gooseberry green eyes. Her body shape is not unlike that of Egyptian cats. Guest cat Tia is a light gray tabby with butterscotch eyes.

My copy of this story is in The Doom that came to Sarnath. I think that the innkeeper's son, Atal, grew up to be the young priest in 'The Other Gods' in that book. Yes, I forgive the kitties of the story.

#19 Cute!