First, some housekeeping. The Bulwark published a piece by me! It discusses the warrior cop ethos and asks how to square it with the inaction of the police in Uvalde. You can check it out here. It’s gotten mostly praise so far, which is exciting, and kind of surprising — I was expecting to get yelled at more by the Blue Lives Matter crowd, but perhaps they didn’t find it. Many thanks to Martyn Wendell Jones and Adam Keiper for working with me on the piece!
Now, to business.
H.P. Lovecraft is the subject of many Twitter mini-discourses on any given day, but I think his actual writing is often neglected by these brouhahas. We debate whether or not he was racist (he was!) and whether or not he is an important writer (he is foundationally important in his specific niches, and is a major influence on horror and science fiction, though his impact on broader culture is probably fairly small), but we often don’t talk about the way he actually put words together into sentences. When we do, it’s mostly to make fun of his turgid prose and his fondness for calling things “indescribable,” Often these jokes make me think that the joker hasn’t actually read any Lovecraft (or has maybe only read about a dozen pages of At the Mountains of Madness, which I think is highly overrated).
So let’s look at a specific sentence from The Call of Cthulhu, his most famous short story. It’s one of my favorites, and shows a remarkable amount of restraint from our boy. The sentence in question reads, in its entirety: “A mountain walked or stumbled.”
To understand why I like this sentence so much, we’ll need to look at the structure of The Call of Cthulhu.1 Call is presented as a first-person narrative found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston, and is split into three sections. In each of these sections, Thurston describes a piece of evidence which, when combined with the other two, reveals to him the existence of Cthulhu, a vast and ancient star-spawned being sleeping deep beneath the ocean (in his house at R’lyeh), and who is worshipped by many secret cults around the world. The first two consist of the effects of his dead uncle, George Gammell Angell, a professor of Semitic Languages at Brown. In the first chapter, Thurston learns that old Professor Angell had a strange encounter with a young artist who was seized by bizarre dreams of a hideous place beneath the ocean, and who repeatedly heard the phrase “Cthulhu fhtagn.” Amongst Angell’s effects is a bas-relief (made by the young artist) depicting Cthulhu himself:
“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”
The second chapter relates Angell’s previous encounter with the word “Cthulhu,” which took place at a conference of the American Archaeological Society seventeen years prior to the young artist’s rapture. At that conference, a New Orleans Police Inspector sought the help of the gathered scholars in identifying a strange sculpture found during a raid on a murderous cult hiding in the bayous:
“The figure . . . represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.”
The third portion consists of Thurston’s own research, when he happens to trip upon a short newspaper article detailing how the crew of a New Zealand schooner found a strange island in the middle of the ocean, and how all but one of them died, and that the survivor (Johansen) returned with a “horrible stone idol.” The idol is described as having a “cuttlefish head, dragon body, [and] scaly wings.” Thurston investigates and ultimately finds Johansen’s diary, which records his encounter with Cthulhu Itself.
My sentence comes from Thurston’s summary of Johansen’s diary. Here it is in context, from the description of Great Cthulhu’s rampage through the sailors who accidentally woke it up:
“Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of [Cthulhu’s appearance.] Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox2 raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”
(emphasis added)
Lovecraft doesn’t give us much more description of the Thing Itself.3 It sweeps up three sailors in its "flabby claws," it "slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus," it slides "greasily" into the water to chase Johansen's ship, and when Johansen crashes his ship into Cthulhu in a desperate attempt to distract it, its "awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht." That's about it.
As I mentioned above, Lovecraft has often been accused of relying too much on the cheap trick of saying that something is “too horrible to be described,” so as to get out of actually painting a picture of his monsters. There are certainly examples of this in his fiction (most prominently in The Unnameable, where the characters meet an unnameable monster that is only very loosely described) yet most commonly when he describes something as “indescribable,” he then goes ahead and tries to describe it anyway. (Even the Unnameable is “a gelatin — a slime; a vapor; — yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes — and a blemish. It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination.”). What he usually does is say “this is indescribable, but here are some of the pieces I remember.”
Here, Lovecraft does not much describe Cthulhu when It actually appears on the scene. (Or, more accurately, when Thurston reads about Its actual appearance in Johansen’s diary). We get flashes of description, but from those paragraphs alone, one would have a hard time coming up with much of a picture. Yet Lovecraft doesn’t have to describe Cthulhu at this point, because he’s already described It three times, through his descriptions of the various art-objects depicting Cthulhu. We’ve seen the artist’s bas-relief and both sculptures, all of which agree that It has a squid-head, wings, and a vaguely humanoid silhouette. We don’t need to be told what Cthulhu looks like any more — we need to be told what it feels like to behold It.
That’s what “A mountain walked or stumbled” does. It’s the summation of Johansen’s terror as he stares at Great Cthulhu, lumbering out of the deep. It’s a simple sentence, blessedly bereft of Lovecraft’s usual stack of adverbs and adjectives, but every word fits neatly into the picture.
It’s “a” mountain that walks or stumbles, not some particular mountain; a lesser writer might have said “Everest walked or stumbled,” to get a cheap reference in for superlative scale, yet that would have been a human (or at least terrestrial) referent, and Cthulhu transcends all human referents.
It’s a “mountain” that walks or stumbles, because of the scale involved; It’s so much bigger than Johansen that he feels like it’s the landscape itself rising up to smash him.
It “walked,” because it moved, but also because it’s casual; the Thing didn’t sprint or run, it “walked.” Cthulhu wants to eat these guys, but It’s not that fussed about it.
It walked “or” stumbled, because Johansen can’t really understand what he’s seeing; these are his best attempts at description, but he can’t really pin it down. Even looking at Cthulhu drives several of the sailors instantly mad, so is it any wonder that Johansen struggles to remember or describe the monster?
It walked or “stumbled,” because it’s moving in some lurching, unpleasant way, not simply putting one foot in front of the other like a human would. Cthulhu has been sleeping (or dead) for countless aeons, and is only just waking up; also, It doesn’t move according to the rules of our physics.
This is my favorite sentence Lovecraft ever wrote because of the way it places us within Johansen’s disintegrating mind, and does so with more restraint than HPL was usually capable of. It’s a stark moment of terror and incomprehension. The story has already tried to make us scared of Cthulhu, but it’s those five words that really bring the point home.
The artist who made the bas-relief.
Wait, that’s a different book.