The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath or lost with Randolph Carter No. 1

Analogue to our podcast, this blog post will investigate into H.P. Lovecraft’s famous Dream Circle story: “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.  It will give you an insight into Lovecraft’s life during the time of 1926; when he wrote the story; and its publishing history afterwards. The post will further summarize the plot for you and will point out important elements and existing interpretations

Living in a Dream – Lovecraft’s Return to Providence in 1926

Lovecraft and his wife, Sarah Greene, in 1924

After living in Brooklyn for nearly 2 years, Lovecraft returned home to Providence in 1926.Apart from hanging out with fellow writers and trips to historic scenes, it seems that he did not enjoy New York very much. He not only disliked mixed raced crowds, talking in languages he did not understand; the city was also way too expensive to for a writer of dime novel fiction. With no considerable income of his own, he was depending on his wife and aunts for money. He could only afford a basic room on the edge of a sketchy neighbourhood - which lived up to all his prejudgements when his suits were stolen at one point of his stay. Already in 1925 he had enough, in a letter to his aunt Lillian he wrote:

     “…It so happens that I am unable to take pleasure or interest in anything but a mental re-creation of other & better days— for in sooth, I see no possibility of ever encountering a really congenial milieu or living among civilized people with old Yankee historic memories again—so in order to avoid the madness which leads to violence & suicide I must cling to the few shreds of old days & old ways which are left to me. Therefore no one need expect me to discard the ponderous furniture & paintings & clocks & books which help to keep 454 always in my dreams. When they go, I shall go, for they are all that make it possible for me to open my eyes in the morning or look forward to another day of consciousness without screaming in sheer desperation & pounding the walls & floor in a frenzied clamour to be waked up out of the nightmare of ‘reality’ & my own room in Providence. Yes— such sensitivenesses of temperament are very inconvenient when one has no money—but it’s easier to criticise than to cure them.”  (Letter to Lillian D. Clark, 8. August 1925)

     In the summer of 1926 he was finally able to return to his beloved Providence. The following year turned out to be his most effective writing period. As soon as he got back, he started working on “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” in October 1926 until January 1927.

1943 Cover

Throughout the process he was quite critical with his writing, mentioning to August Derleth “I…am very fearful that Randolph Carter’s adventures may have reached the point of palling on the reader; or that the very plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness” (Letter to August Derleth, early Dec. 1926). And elsewhere, shortly afterwards: “Actually, it isn’t much good; but forms useful practice for later and more authentic attempts in the novel form” (Letter to Wilfred B. Talman, 19 Dec. 1926)    

     But Lovecraft never rewrote the story. In his later years he even refused to provide a tipped manuscript when asked for it. “The Dream Quest to the Unknown Kadath” remained unpublished during his life and was only published after his death by Arkham Sampler in a collection called Beyond the Walls of Sleep in 1943. 

“The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”

The story follows Randolph Carter throughout his dream in which he searches for the unknown city of Kadath, the home of the Gods. His quest leads him to all kinds of landscapes, to the moon and underground, meeting numerous fantastic creatures including the magical Cats of Ulthar and their human priest Atal; King Kuranes, who came to dream his own kingdom in which he is now a prisoner unable to go back to the real world; and Richard Pickman, a former painter who after leaving the real world turned into a ghoul. On several occasions Carter is warned and even threatened. At the end, the godlike priest Nylarlathotep tricks him and instead of reaching Kadath, he awakes in his own room in Boston, realizing the beauty and the actual healthy reality of the city.  

     Unpolished as it is, the story is the longest of Lovecraft’s Dream Circle stories and also the longest one featuring Randolph Carter as a character.  That Lovecraft did not intent to publish it is even more curious since Randolph Carter remains an important, persistent character throughout his later work. Considering all the stories in which he is mentioned together, “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” serves as a central narrative, conditioning his later – then also published – character development. The  details of which will be the topic of another post, for now it is important to notice that the story itself can be identified as central for his Dream Quest writing.

Map of the Dream Land

Not only because of its importance regarding the character of Randolph Carter, but also due to its detailed description of the geography of the Dream Lands.   In “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” several historic landscapes Lovecraft created in his previous work; like in “Cats of Ulthar”, “The Other Gods”, “The White Ship”; are presented as belonging to the Dream Lands, portraying Lovecraft’s own desire to be able to go back in time through his dreams. Another fantastic place; the Plateau of Leng; which is mentioned in this story and in several others, changes its position in every narrative it appears. Maybe with these geographic alterations, the early Lovecraft wanted to give the reader a sense of wandering geography which he later would make more plausible by letting his characters travel to other dimensions, conditioning an estrangement of place.

Randolph Carter, the Anti-Hero

Through the looking class, “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” can also be read as an inversion of the classical odyssey theme, making Randolph Carter an unusual, but believable Anti-Hero figure. Carter is not presented as a physical active character; he gets taken prisoner several times, left in the need of external help to rescue him.

Randolph Carter, Arkam Horro Card Game

Norman Gayford similar argued that Carter “…exemplifies the path of the modern anti-hero in that he faints, seems unable to use a traditional weapon.”  All the way throughout his quest he is warned by his alias, reacting by not only ignoring their advice, but also violating their friendship. As Gayford illustrates: “…Atal offers “discouraging advice. Carter then violates the relationship, and gets Atal drunk in an attempt to force out more information than is offered. He is not playing exactly by the rules of the game. Kuranes, former hashish user who dies in the dream world, becomes King of Ilek-Vad, and remakes a small portion of dream world into his idyllic vision of the English countryside, is a significant aid. Out of his harshly learned wisdom, Kuranes tells Carter to quit seeking the city because its attainment cannot be as good as it is in the form of a vision. […]

   When Carter meets with Kuranes, it is as if we see Father warning Son against his course of action. […] Kuranes is a psychically wounded king. For all his prestige, he cannot recreate reality; merely manufacture a simulacrum of it. The confrontation between the two reminds us of his estrangement and Carter’s freedom. […]

   Richard Pickman, late artist-cum-ghoulmaster, is of vital aid in getting Carter back onto the right path. Like Kuranes, he is a fitting aid for the anti-hero, himself an outcast artist.”

   Cater, unable to decipher the warnings, continues his quest. But without realizing it, his dream had gotten the control over him – using his obsession to suppress him. Trapped it is now for him impossible to reach Kadath. Gayford concludes: “Carter awakens from that final plunge negatively transformed. Yes, he realizes his New England, but the dream world has been lost to him. This plunge through the universe may be the first true crossing of the threshold. Only then does a vital transformation of the anti-hero occur: he loses his creativity. […]

     Carter emerges from Dream-Quest emptied rather than cleansed, deposited in reality rather than transcending it. […]There is no trophy with which to return. Carter left his castle, Kadath, behind; he rejected dissolution, and in doing so he places himself in a spiritual coma. His experience with the Being leads him to the realization that the universe is not malignant. Rather, it is uncaring of man. That, as we know, was Lovecraft’s philosophy. […]” (Norman Gayford, Randolph Carter: An Anti-Hero’s Quest, Part I, in: Lovecraft Studies, No. 16, 1988, p. 3-12)

     In this sense, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” provides a deeper insight into the interpretive patterns Lovecraft formed and implanted into his fiction. The story connects Lovecraft’s nostralgia for the fantastic and the past with an almost cynical understanding of entrophy produced by time. But if he ever read Hegel’s philosophical writing on Heraclitus; which shares striking similarities with Lovecraft’s (fictional) worldview; is unknown, but will remain as an interesting subject of comparison for a furture post. As a teaser, here is a quote from James Strilin, back in 1850’s a scholar on Hegel, writing about Heraklitus in Hegel’s work and at the same time – strangely - summarizing Lovecrafts’s Dream Land:

(James Hutchison Stirlin, The Secret of Hegel, 1865, p. 60.)

Literature Cating: H.P. Lovecraft's "The Cats of Ulthar"

You like Lovecraft and you like cats? – Then this post might be of interest to you. It will provide some insight into the so far underestimated fantasy story “Cats of Ulthar” from Howard Phillip Lovecraft. With his horror stories about the Cthulhu Myth the 1920 author became posthumous famous. Cats became iconic too; yet nearly no one bothers to look at Lovecraft’s cat stories. In order to change that, the following post will sum up the plot of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” for you and will provide you an insight into his thoughts on cats in general. 

The “The Cats of Ulthar”, as the title says, takes place in a small and ancient village named Ulthar. Among the villagers one old couple has a reputation to sadistically torture and kill any cat that happens to pass through their farmyard at night. One day, the little village is visited by an unfamiliar caravan whose carriages are painted with animal heads and who seemed to be praying to strange gods. One of their members is a little orphan boy named Menes whose only delight is a small black kitten after the plague had blemished him badly. Menes’ kitten disappears and seeing him crying, the villagers tell him about the old couple. He calms down and by looking up to the sky mumbles a prayer which turns the clouds into “….nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks”. 

At the very night the caravan leaves the village, never to return. At the same time, all cats seem to disappear and the locals start to suspects the old couple or the caravan. The cats reappear the next day “….[v]ery sleek and fat […] with purring content”; while the old couple seems to be missing. The innkeepers son, Atal, reports that he had “…at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage”. After a week the mayor forces the door of the cottage open, only to find “…cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor.” After this incident a law was made that no man may kill a cat in Ulthar. “…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 Meroe 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.” 

Lovecraft wrote „The Cats of Ulthar” in 1920. In the same year the story was first published by the literature journal Tryout. The story is part of the so called Dream Circle, the middle period of his writing between 1920 and 1927. Compared to the stories of his later Chtulhu Myth Circle, the Dream Circle stories do not share a prime motive. Nonetheless share stories of the Dream Circle elements, like places and names, which link them to each other. The city of Ulthar for example is also mentioned in the „The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“ from 1926. This story follows Randolph Carter form Boston, who in a dream searches for the unknown place Kadath, where ancient gods are believed to live. He gets told that the residence of Ulthar had seen the gods; which refers to Menes invocation in the “The Cats of Ulthar”, where the goods became visible in the shape of clouds. In order to find the way to Kadath, Carter decides to head for Ulthar. 

“…At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once visited and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon afterward he came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central piece the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent presence of cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing Zoogs) revealed the near neighborhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their little green cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles whenever the graceful cats afford space enough…” 

Arriving in Ulthar, Carter goes to visit the temple to inquire the direction to Kadath. The high priest is no one other than Atal, the innkeeper’s son who had secretly watched the cat’s performing their ritual in “The Cats of Ulthar”. In Carters dream Atal is now more than three hundred years old. Accordingly, Ulthar has changed too: it has grown into a city with a historical town center, inhabited by an uncountable number of cats. Still they seem to be scarcely audible after dark, it seems “… that they were mostly heavy and silent from strange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptically realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops…”. Carter discovers that the cats really disappear to the dark side of the moon, where they seem to have their own social hierarchy and gods. For them every place in the dreamland is just a short hop away. 

But the world around them is chaotic and they live in fear of evil and destruction. This is a perspective Lovecraft had lined out in a poem, named “The Cats” in 1925. Other than providing a description of their magical talents, he lines out how their world is subject to chaos and decay: 

 “…Colour and plendour, desease and decying,
      Shrieking and ringing and crawling insane,
      Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,
     Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain

     Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal.
     Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,
     Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,
    Yelling the Garden of Pluto’s red rune…”

This poem ultimately reflects Lovecraft’s own financial and social situation at that time. In it, he identifies himself with his cats of Ulthar. One year later, in the story of the unknown Kadath, he invents Randolph Carter as his alter ego. Therefore Carter too in the story shares Lovecraft sympathy for cats; shown when he is patting a small back kitten in front of the temple in Ulthar echoing Menes from “The cats of Ulthar”. Lovecraft himself had a black cat, named Nigger-man, who is also a side kick character in his story “The Rats in the walls”. „The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“ was rejected by several magazines and Lovecraft did not rewrite it like other stories. It was first published after his death and remains a rough draft of a fantasy novella, but withholds many links to his other stories. 

Another reason why he might have written the poem about cats in 1925 and one year later the „The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“, could have been a humoristic talk, called: “Something about Cats”, he had held during a meeting of the Blue Pencil Club in New York in 1926. The talk is not so much about cats, but about the cat lover – Lovecraft himself - , who, compared to the dog lover, “….repudiate[s] the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship to man are supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and individual personality joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe, cynical and unconquered lord of the housetops.“ 

    Behind this typification of the cat and the cat lover lies Lovecraft’s perception of elite belonging. He believed in a continuing aristocracy and transpired that onto his fictional cats and also himself. He was, in spite of his continuing interest in science, never a member of actual academic elite and saw this as a flaw. His field was literature and he tried to demonstrate his intellect through writing. This is particular evident in his choice of historic and scientific vocabulary. Within that, he follows a strict structure to achieve a certain setting: In “The cats of Ulthar” for example, he uses the old word “Burgesse” for habitants of the village, “Cotter”, for farmer, and “Burgomaster” for major. This all are late French words transcended into early English just a few decades before Shakespeare. His story takes place in ancient times, so he uses an old fashioned language to literary display his setting. He even risks to become enigmatic by using uncommon synonyms, like “Malkin” or “Grimalkin” for cat in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and his talk on cats in 1925. Originally "Malkin" was the late French term for a female daemon and from there was applied in the English language for a witch who could transform into a cat. Thanks to such a transformation of one of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the term became a famous cat name. The Grimalkin is the name of the leader, the oldest and savviest cat, reflecting in its grey- gri – hair. Since Lovecraft created his cats to have magical powers, “Malkin” is just the perfect name for them. He writes in his talk the cat mirrors ”… the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.” 

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