HP Lovecraft's β€œThe Pickman's Model”: dissection by a nightmarish artist

An analysis of the symbolic substrate - from the catabasis in a truly existing underground Boston to the pre-Islamic folklore of the Ghouls - of the famous story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft Pickman's model (1926), recently adapted into one of the episodes of the TV series Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), directed by director Keith Thomas.

di Miranda Gurzo

Howard Phillips Lovecraft he wrote Pickman's model in 1926, after his return to Providence following his marriage and al New York stay. Back in his beloved native land after the confrontation, which saw him defeated, with the ruthless modern society, Lovecraft turned to New England to find new life for his inspiration, weakened by the rather unproductive years spent in the metropolis. The frame of Pickman's model it is in fact a darkly transfigured Boston, which anticipates the nightmare New England in which Lovecraft set his stories in the following years.

The story is told through a particularly original narrative structure. Pickman's model in fact, it takes place as a monologue during which the narrator, a certain Thurber, who we learn is well versed in the Bostonian artistic milieu, tells the interlocutor, Eliot, the horrible adventure that occurred to him by attending Richard Upton Pickman, painter originally from Salem, the city of witches par excellence, a very gifted artist but ostracized by artistic circles due to his taste for the horrid and cemetery settings. This unusual narrative form might seem cumbersome, but it is a very smooth reading, in which the reader can easily identify with Eliot and listen to the grim confessions of the narrator.

Pickman's Model (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, 2022)

It is basically a story about art, based on the premise, explained at the beginning of the story, that "only the true artist knows the true anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear, the exact type of lines and proportions that are connected with the latent instincts or inherited memories of fear, and the right contrast of colors and lighting effects that awaken the sleeping sense of strangeness”. These considerations of an aesthetic nature find an echo in the contemporary essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), in which Lovecraft, examining the vast literary corpus of fantastic fiction, made an effort to highlight the cardinal principles which underlie an effective reproduction of the emotion of fear.

The story mentions several examples of artists gifted with the artistic qualities that Lovecraft recognized in them painters whose art arouses "the latent instincts" of fear: among them we can cite Goya, which produced some of the most memorable examples of "dark" art, Walleye, whose engravings Lovecraft began to appreciate as a child thanks to his grandfather's huge library, which contained several works illustrated by the historic engraver, and Clark ashton smith, who is still remembered today as one of the founding members of the so-called "Lovecraft Circle", and whose literary and visual arts efforts the Providence Dreamer greatly appreciated.

It must be said that the story itself inspired other artists from the beginning, and this not only today that Lovecraft is universally recognized as one of the fathers of modern supernatural horror literature. Ever since it began to circulate among Lovecraft's friends Pickman's model did not fail to impress those who read it, so much so that a friend of Frank Belknap Long, Dean P. Phillips, created a statuette of the "Ghoul Feeding", the gruesome subject of Pickman's painting that gives the title to the story.

Pickman's Model (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, 2022)

Although it is a short story and not one of his most important stories, Pickman's model contains some very interesting narrative cues, as well as seminal themes that we find in much of the Lovecraftian literary corpus. One of them is that of catabasis, the descent into the darkness of the unconscious, which comes to Lovecraft from an immemorial heritage, as old as man, and which will influence him from the earliest literary beginnings. In 1898, just eight years old, he wrote The Secret Cave, in which two children discover that their basement hides the entrance to a hidden cave, while The beast in the cave, written in 1905, sees the protagonist lost in the tunnels of the Mammoth Cave where a mysterious creature roams.

The descent will constantly resurface in his stories: from The Shunned House, a The Transition of Juan Romero a The Temple, Up to TheMound, the theme of a subterranean or underwater world where terrifying wonders are hidden it is insistent and declined in a myriad of nuances. The protagonist falls from time to time in the dungeons of a castle, as in The Rats in the Wall, or in a cellar or a cave, to make a terrible discovery: monsters exist, and they are even worse than we imagine them in our darkest fantasies.

From a psychological point of view, the catabasis theme is connected to the inner process of death and rebirth, in which the individual is called to confront his inner monsters in order to defeat them and "resurrect" as a renewed man. It is a literary motif as old as man, a real archetype that never ceases to inspire artists even now that modernity with its artificial lights has cornered the ancestral terror of darkness and underground places. We find the theme of the catabasis in all cultures and at all latitudes, from the classic myth of Persephone kidnapped by Hades and held captive in the shadowy kingdom of the dead, to her Sumerian equivalent Inanna, up to the Mayan myths of Xibalba, the nine underground kingdoms where the terrifying deities of death dwell.

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It goes without saying that, given the horrific frame of the Lovecraftian narrative, the protagonists are precluded from any happy conclusion: from the confrontation with these forces, if they are lucky enough not to be physically annihilated, they can emerge unscathed only by appealing to stoicism and awareness of the ridiculousness of the negligible niche occupied by mankind in the vast and terrifying edifice of the universe, a universe that in the perspective of the Providence Dreamer is ruthless, impersonal and devoid of ultimate purpose. But this is not the case Pickman's model which, as we shall see, will show us the other two less fortunate paradigmatic destinies of the unfortunate explorers of the unknown.Β 


Pickman's (and incidentally narrator Thurber's) descent into darkness takes place in Boston's North End, an old and run-down suburban area that greatly impressed Lovecraft, who visited it several times. Unfortunately, the sinister setting of the story has not remained unscathed as the years progressed and progress. Indeed, we read in the Lovecraft's letter to Dwayne Rimel of 14/01/34:

Pickman's model depicts Boston's North End as it was a few years ago, though many of these tangled old alleyways have now been swept away by civic changes: old houses have been demolished and fences erected on the site. storage warehouses for goods. I still remember when the exact location of the artist's house in history was demolished and burned to the ground. It was 1927, and Donald Wandrei (whose stories you probably know, and who was then living in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, though he is now in New York) was visiting the East for the first time. He wanted to see the place where the story is set and I was very happy to take him there, thinking that his sinister strangeness would exceed his expectations of him. Imagine my dismay, then, to find nothing but an empty space where the rickety old houses and alleyways had previously stood! This fact really caught me off guard, because they were still there until the previous summer. Well, Wandrei had to take my word for what was there before, though we could still find traces of the course of the main cobbled street between the open foundation walls. A year later it was all covered by a large brick building…

Other reminiscences are found in the letter to Robert Bloch of 9/05/33, in which Lovecraft writes to the young correspondent that

…until late 1926 the tangled courtyard (Foster street) which formed the scene existed…the following months witnessed its complete demolition, the entire maze of old houses one block to each side being razed. Only the zigzagging line of the vanished alley, winding between cellar walls in full sunlight, remained to suggest the grim strangeness of the preceding scene. Ancient pipes of inexplicable use have indeed been found under the houses of this sinister section, probably their purpose was related to pre-revolutionary smuggling.

Map of Boston on which the supposed underground tunnels are recorded

The sinister crypts and dark tunnels that lie underground in Boston in fact, they are not a figment of Lovecraft's fervent imagination, but they really existed, and perhaps some of them still exist today. In the 453th century some bricklayers at work discovered that in a house at XNUMX Commercial Street there was a basement where a large stone gap connected the cellar with a tunnel that continued to Salem Street. However, the gallery was walled up, and it was not possible to know where it led. The building was demolished in 1906 without knowing for sure who had built the tunnel. The vulgate had it that the tunnels had been built to facilitate the shady dealings of Thomas Gruchy, a privateer and smuggler who in 1745 established his own residence in Boston, on Salem Street.

It is in all probability to these events that Lovecraft refers in his letters and in the story itself. However, the shady dealings of Thomas Gruchy do not fully explain the existence of theintricate network of tunnels that pierce the Boston subsoil. An 1817 writing mentions a further gallery under a house located in Lynn Street, while the AIA Guide to Boston states that a historic house on Salem Street has a cellar in which is a sealed archivolt thought to lead to the cemetery of Copp's Hill.

Lovecraft was undoubtedly aware of all these rumors. In the story the Copp's Hill Cemetery it is in fact frequently mentioned: it is revealed to us that it is one of the recurring backgrounds of the morbid works of Pickman, who usually portrays the abject feasts of ghouls among the tombstones. In one canvas in particular a group of cackling creatures are huddled around a ghoul reading aloud from a Boston travel guide. The title of the work, β€œHolmes, Lowell and Longfellow lie buried on Copp's Hill”, implies that evidently the remains of the three writers must have suffered from the revolting appetite for the flesh of corpses typical of ghouls.

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Lovecraft, through Pickman's voice, also reveals that he has conducted research on the history of the place when he states that a mill already stood on the hill in 1632, just as it is evident that he was aware of the frequent finds of tunnels or the remains of tunnels when he did claim to Pickman that "Almost every month we read that some workman, while demolishing this or that ancient building, has come across brick arches and blind wells". Curiously, even a large proportion of the subway tunnels that the narrator Thurber feels repelled and fearful of are now part of the shadowy world of underground Boston, for the railroad tunnels that once ran underground from Park Street along Tremont, Boylston and the Theater District have been abandoned for decades and closed to public access. Β 

Underground tunnel, Boston

Significantly, no Pickman's model to act as a guide to the protagonist in the terrifying bowels of the earth are ghouls, abject creatures, anthropomorphic but with a canine snout, who have the revolting habit of feeding on corpses. Since remote antiquity, the dog has been considered a psychopomp animal, that is, it acts as a guide for the souls of the dead in the afterlife; just think of the Cerberus of classical mythology, the three-headed Molosser who guards the gates of Hades, or of the Egyptian Anubis with the canine head who escorts the deceased to the room of Osiris, where his soul will be weighed in the scales of judgement.

In the past centuries it was widespread belief that the devil could appear to his worshipers in the form of a black dog, and in fact the legend is known which has it that the famous occultist Enrico Cornelio Agrippa was always accompanied by a large black mastiff, which was claimed to be a familiar demon with canine features. Lovecraft had already exploited the idea of ​​the supernatural hound in The hound from 1919, a Huysmans-esque tale where two decadent bohemian thrill-seekers and grave-robbers are persecuted by a supernatural dog after violating a sorcerer's sacellum (note that ironically in the English language grave-robbers are called just "ghoul").

Ne Pickman's model however the monstrous beings of the crypts do not appear in the flesh; nevertheless their presence in the story is made even more atrocious by the portraits of the abominable creatures painted by the protagonist, from whose macabre details the reader learns the morbid peculiarities of the ghouls that infest the underground of Boston. Lovecraft modeled the crypt dwellers inspired by Arab folklore borrowed from youth readings, such as the vathek by William Beckford o One thousand and one nights, translated by Antoine Galland, in which ghouls are described as demons that haunt cemeteries and desert places, preying on unwary wayfarers. In Arabic the word "ghoul" or "ghul" literally means "demon". Certainly Lovecraft was aware of this, who always chose the terms he used and their etymology with extreme care and skill.

Original illustration by HP Lovecraft for the short story The Pickman's Model

A few years before he had written the rest Beyond the Wall of Sleep, a short story in which the star Algol plays an important role, whose name has the same origin ("al ghoul" that is "the devil"). Since pre-Islamic times ghouls were believed to be part of the ranks of jinn, non-human creatures more akin to the invisible realms than to the material world; although traditionally they do not have a canine appearance, some legends attribute them the ability to transform themselves into various animals, including jackals and hyenas, known for their sarcophagus habits.

If the ghouls of pre-Islamic folklore were probably more akin to disembodied spirits, often portrayed with features similar to those of Western demons, in Lovecraft they acquire a repulsive physicality, which erupts with mocking malice from the canvases painted by Pickman and described by the narrator with rare skill . In a clever succession of morbid revelations we learn from the details of the paintings in Pickman's studio that the hideous ghouls have the habit of exchanging their young with human newborns: while the kidnapped children are destined to assume the habits and even the appearance of ghouls, the ghoul babies take on a human appearance but do not lose their depraved spirit and corrupt, spreading evil and vice among men.

This phenomenon is known as changing: according to ancient European traditions, the lineages of non-human nature such as the Fairies or the Little People have lost or seen their ability to reproduce over time and even to maintain a link with the material kingdom. To perpetuate their species it was believed that they kidnapped human children leaving in their place a small of their emaciated offspring or, in some cases, a double of the kidnapped child who, however, would never have been like all the others, since of the human being he possesses only the features.

Pickman's Model (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, 2022)

Lovecraft got the idea of ​​the supernatural exchange from Arthur Machen, and more specifically from the story The Novel of the Black Seal; in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, we read that in Machen's tales we find "the notion that beneath the mounds and stony hills of Wales dwells that squat subterranean and primitive race whose vestiges have given rise to our legends of fairies, elves and Little People, and to whose interventions must be attributed to certain inexplicable disappearances, and occasional replacement of normal newborns with strange changelings”. To these information Lovecraft followed a synthesis of the aforementioned story of Machen, the plot of which is based precisely on one of these supernatural exchanges.Β 

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The theme of the changing merges, in this story, with another topos typical of Lovecraftian fiction: that of the bloodline contaminated by illicit and unnatural marriages. In fact, the story alludes to an ancestor of Pickman, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692, whom the artist wanted to portray with traits similar to those of demonic ghouls, as well as Pickman's similarity to the abject creatures. Incidentally, Lovecraft chose the surnames Pickman and Upton to characterize the protagonist of the story since they are typical surnames of Salem, thus wanting to give greater likelihood to the story; later, when he drafted the history and chronology of the Necronomicon, in 1927, Lovecraft will forever link the name of the sulphurous painter to that of the cursed tome he imagined.

The veiled but chilling allusions to the artist's sorcery-smelling ancestry lead the reader to suppose that Pickman's ancestress is herself one of those ghouls substituted for infants in cradles, and that in Pickman's veins runs the same blood as the devourers of corpses. It will be them, the abject ghouls with canine snouts, who will guide the painter in his descent into darkness, from which he will never emerge again.

Pickman's Model (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, 2022)

Ne Pickman's model we have the perfect representation of the two possible destinies that await the one who dares to make the descent. In the case of Thurber, who narrates the story to his friend Eliot, we have, if not exactly the madness to which many of the characters from Lovecraft's pen are destined, at least a powerful nervous jolt that makes him unable to descend into the underground environments, so much to even prevent him from taking the subway or even going down to the cellar. In this first case the individual called to confront the Unknown, the totally other, is unable to accept the revelations that the abyss has reserved for him and withdraws horrified, with a psychic balance forever compromised.

In the second case, the explorer, represented here by Pickman, not only has no horror towards what the catabasis has revealed to him, but rather recognizes something of his own in it, which excludes him forever from the human and social consortium. Pickman in fact disappears into thin air, and is in The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath that we find out what happened to him. As he was expected he abandoned human habits to move permanently in the chthonic world inhabited by ghouls, ending up becoming one of them:

There, atop a 1768 headstone stolen from Boston's Granary Burying Ground, sat the ghoul that had once been Richard Upton Pickman. He was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoul's physiognomy that his human origin was already obscured. But he still remembered some English, and managed to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, occasionally aided by ghoul babbles.

Pickman's Model (Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, 2022)

The second possible fate of those who face the catabasis in the Lovecraftian corpus of literature is therefore the teratomorphosis or transmogrification: having discovered in himself a nature similar to that of the mysterious inhabitants of darkness, the individual renounces his human nature by becoming something else, and remains in a sort of dark state or condition of death, if not physical, at least spiritual. It is what to use the terminology of Arthur Machen, who addressed this issue in several stories, we could call "protoplasmic reversion", a regression of evolution that leads back to a primordial, chaotic state, prior to the birth of order and form.

It is a case that is more rarely present in Lovecraft's stories, but is always expressed with noteworthy narrative power, and in this sense the case of The Shadow over Innsmouth, in which the protagonist learns, first with horror and then with a kind of almost mystical exaltation, that he is part of a lineage that binds him to the abysmal creatures of the story. In the very similar case of Pickman, the grotesque transformation of the protagonist into a ghoul is foreshadowed from the beginning of the narrative, when the narrator Thurber recalls that a mutual acquaintance developed a growing revulsion towards the features of the artist who, β€œsaid, they changed into a form that didn't suit him", seasoned all with obscure allusions to his eating habits.

Seduced by the abyss he has explored, it is time for Pickman to acknowledge his dark origin and reconnect with the dark world of which he has always been a part. On the other hand, as Thurber recalls, β€œHe was not a human being in the strict sense. He must have been born in the darkness of the unknown, or he must have found the way to unlock the forbidden gate… now he's back among the fabulous shadows that he loved to explore”.

HP Lovecraft (1890 - 1937)

NOTES

Β [1] Letter dated 22/08/34 to RH Barlow.

Β [2] http://sparechangenews.net/2015/07/bizarre-boston-the-secret-north-end-tunnels/

Β [3] https://youtu.be/yFIo-dBlmjs, https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/05/21/boston-subway-tunnel-scollay-adams


BIBLIOGRAPHY

HP Lovecraft, "Pickman's model", in The myths of horror, Omnibus Mondadori, 1990

HP Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature", in Horror theory, Bietti Editore, 2018

HP Lovecraft, Letters to Robert Bloch and Others, Hippocampus Press, 2015

HP Lovecraft, "In Search of the Mysterious Kadath", in All the tales 1923-1926Oscar Mondadori, 1990

HP Lovecraft, O Fortunate Floridian: HP Lovecraft's Letters to RH Barlow, University of Tampa Press, 2016

ST Joshi, I am Providence. Volume 2: 1920-1928, Providence Press, 2020Β 

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