Odds are, when you think of H.P. Lovecraft, you think of passages like this:
those first men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
-From (where else?) The Call of Cthulhu
Indeed, Lovecraft has entered the popular imagination as a horror writer. Tales like The Dunwich Horror, Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour Out of Space (my personal favorite) as considered his classic.
But there was more than one side to the man and his writing. Lovecraft was extremely prolific, and much of his fiction, especially the earlier stuff, is more fantasy than horror. He drew heavily from Lord Dunsany's lush tales (perhaps the most influential fantasist until Tolkien) as well as his own dreams.
I'd forgotten how powerful some of those stories could be. Until the other night when I sat down with a complete volume of Lovecraft's fictions. One in particular, Celephaïs, might now be among my favorites. It begins like so:
In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
That last line hits hard, doesn't it? The whole story is moving and, one senses, very personal. Lovecraft's legacy rests on merciless cosmic terror, but here he's deeply compassionate, even heartbreaking. Like his horror, it mines dreams for its power, but this time they're not nightmares; though Kuranes could be said to live through any number of them in the waking world.
What Celephaïs captures perfectly is that moment of deep, cutting separation that comes just after the sudden end of an absolutely perfect dream. There's no single word for the split second when fantasy crashes into reality as you're back in your bed, alarm blaring and life's thousand weights settling in once more.
Let us never be too old, or too wise, to forget what we see on the other end of the ivory gates — and that dreams (or bliss) don't have to end there.
