An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

HPL recounts at length in letters how he came to write the tale. WTwas struggling financially, and the owner, J.C.Henneberger, felt that Houdini’s affiliation with the magazine might attract readers. Houdini was the reputed author of a column (“Ask Houdini”) that ran in a few issues, as well as of two short stories probably ghostwritten by others. In mid-February Henneberger commissioned HPL to write “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini was claiming that he had actually been bound and gagged by Arabs and dropped down a shaft in the pyramid called Campbell’s Tomb; but as HPL began exploring the historical and geographical background of the account, he came to the conclusion that it was complete fiction, and so he received permission from Henneberger to elaborate the account with his own imaginative additions. Henneberger had planned to publish the story as by “Houdini and H.P.Lovecraft,” but was disconcerted that HPL had written the account in the first person; he thought readers would be confused by a first-person story with a joint byline, so HPL’s name was omitted. (His role in the story was acknowledged in an editor’s note accompanying the 1939 reprint of the story.) HPL received $100 for the tale, paid in advance. He wrote the tale hastily in the last week of February, but then left the typescript in the train station in Providence while leaving to go to New York to marry Sonia H.Greene. (The ad HPL placed in the lost-and-found section of the Providence Journalsupplies his original title to the story.) Accordingly, he and Sonia spent much of their honeymoon preparing a new typescript of the story from HPL’s autograph manuscript, which fortunately he had brought with him.

The tale is surprisingly effective and suspenseful, with a genuinely surprising ending for those reading it for the first time. HPL’s Egyptian research was probably derived from several volumes in his library, notably The Tomb of Perneb(1916), a volume issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had seen many Egyptian antiquities firsthand at the museum in 1922. Some of the imagery of the story probably also derives from Théophile Gautier’s nonsupernatural tale of Egyptian horror, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”; HPL owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances(1882). The writing is somewhat florid, but deliberately so; and there must be a certain

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tart satire in the fact that Houdini—one of the strongest men of his day—faints three times in the course of his adventure.

“Unknown, The.”

Poem (12 lines in quatrains); probably written in the fall of 1916. First published in the Conservative (October 1916) (as by “Elizabeth Berkeley”).

A weird vignette in which the narrator finds something horrifying in the face of the moon. HPL notes in a letter to the Gallomo (September 12, 1923; AHT) that the poem was published under Winifred Virginia Jackson’s pseudonym “in an effort to mystify the [amateur] public by having widely dissimilar work from the same nominal hand.” HPL also published “The Peace Advocate” ( Tryout,May 1917) under this pseudonym.

See Donald R.Burleson, “Lovecraft’s ‘The Unknown’: A Sort of Runic Rhyme,” LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 19–21.

“Unnamable, The.”

Short story (2,970 words); written September 1923. First published in WT (July 1925); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D

In an old burying ground in Arkham, the first-person narrator, “Carter,” and his friend Joel Manton discuss Carter’s horror tales. Manton enunciates his objections to the weird—as contrary to probability, as not based on “realism,” and as extravagant and unrelated to life. In particular, he scoffs at the idea of something being termed “unnamable”; but later that evening the two men encounter just such an entity in the burying ground.

Although Carter’s first name is never mentioned, one assumes that he is Randolph Carter of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). But because of the uncertainty of his identity, “The Unnamable” has frequently not been considered part of the sequence of stories involving Carter. Only the most glancing reference to the incident related in this story appears in “The Silver Key” (1926): “Then he went back to Arkham,…and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows, and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor.”