The other day I bought a second-hand copy of H. P. Lovecraft's The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1970). It wasn't a first edition, mind you, but rather a 1976 reprint of the limited-edition Arkham House original. Nevertheless, it went very nicely with my three-volume set of their edition of Lovecraft's Collected Stories:
- The Dunwich Horror and Others (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1963)
- At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964)
- Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965)
At first I thought it might be a complete signature which had fallen out by accident, but that didn't seem, on closer examination, to be the case. So far as I could see, the pages had either been cut or carefully torn from their place. There are no other gaps in the rest of the book, as I carefully ascertained by leafing all the way through it.
Never mind, I thought. I can make up the deficiency by reading both stories in my copy of S. T. Joshi's variorum edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Revisions and Collaborations.
Interestingly enough, while Joshi's edition does include the first story, ‘The Invisible Monster’ – also known as ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ – in the body of the text, he relegated ‘Four O'Clock’ to an appendix:
S. T. Joshi having determined that this tale is not properly a part of the Lovecraft corpus; the story is entirely Sonia's, Lovecraft having simply made a few suggestions as to its prose style. [1]But is that the whole truth of the matter? Sonia Greene was, after all, considerably more to Lovecraft than any of his other clients and collaborators. The two were married in 1924, and lived together for a few months in Sonia's apartment in Brooklyn before she moved to Cleveland to follow up a job opportunity.
It seems impossible to imagine the multi-phobic, antisemitic nationalist Lovecraft maintaining a married life with anyone, least of all a Jewish emigrée from the old Russian Empire, but they do appear to have been quite happy together – for a short time, at least.
The two discussed divorce in 1929, after Lovecraft had moved back from New York to his beloved Providence, Rhode Island, but the paperwork was never completed, so they were – technically at least – still married when he died in 1937. Sonia composed a short memoir, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, in the mid-1940s, but it wasn't published in full until 1985, long after her death in 1972.
Lovecraft's friend and editor, August Derleth claimed, in a 1947 letter to his young protégé Ray Bradbury, that she ‘wanted to incorporate a lot of his prejudices as if they were major parts of his life, seen through her Yiddish eyes'. [2]
Derleth accordingly did his best to block publication of the full memoir, though he did include parts of her Providence Journal article ‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft As His Wife Remembers Him’ in his 1949 Lovecraft miscellany Something About Cats and Other Pieces, along with her two stories ‘The Invisible Monster’ and ‘Four O'Clock’.
Lovecraft himself commented of these stories in a 1922 letter to his friend Alfred Galpin:
Mme. G. has taken to this sort of composition — has written one & planned two more — & I’m damned if they don’t look like good stuff! The first one, “Four O’Clock”, has some images noxiously Poe-esque — I shall polish it up for use ... [3]Sonia herself wrote to her friend Winfield Townley Scott in 1948:
I have sent to Arkham House snap photo of HPL’s aunts, some post cards, a story revised by HP and a fictitious story I wrote about HP a few months after I met him, but at his request I did not publish it in the Rainbow because, as he told it, it was obviously a description of himself. [4]In his excellent article on the subject, published on the website Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein: The Undiscovered Mythos, Bobby Derie comments:
If the “story revised by HP” is “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”/”The Invisible Monster,” then by process of elimination the “fictitious story I wrote about HP” must be “Four O’Clock.” Which perhaps places this story ... closer to affectionate parody than an effort at a weird tale, a literary tweaking of Lovecraft’s nose.Is that the reason for the missing pages in my copy? Has some Lovecraftian obsessive attempted to remove this stain on the Master's escutcheon by cutting out this 'alien' story from the (then) authorised version of his literary corpus?
S. T. Joshi, too, seems strangely coy about his decision to exclude it from his revised text of Lovecraft's collected revisions. This is what he has to say on the subject in his own recent edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Revisions and Collaborations:
In a letter to Winfield Townley Scott (11 December 1948; ms JHL), Sonia H. Davis wrote that this story was written only at HPL’s suggestion. On that basis, I excluded it from the revised Horror in the Museum (1989); but in fact, much of the prose appears to be similar to HPL’s own prose, with some characteristic linguistic and even punctuational usages; so HPL probably did touch up the story somewhat. HPL never mentions the story in any extant correspondence, it was apparently not published in his lifetime. The only basis for the text is its first appearance in 1949. [5]It's hard to believe that the quasi-omniscient Joshi is unaware of the mention of 'Four O'Clock' in Lovecraft's 1922 letter (quoted above). Nor is it immediately obvious how his admission that 'HPL probably did touch up the story somewhat' equates with this continued refusal to acknowledge it as canonical.
Joshi, too, may find Sonia's insistence on Lovecraft's undeniable racism problematic, given the amount of his life he himself has devoted to a man who would undoubtedly have despised him had the two ever met. Derleth's reaction to her memoir was both franker and coarser:
in it she has HPL posing as a Jew-baiter (she is Jewish), she says she completely supported HPL for the years 1924 to 1932, and so on, all bare-faced lies. [6]His implication that these are typically Jewish lies is not far from the surface in this and other passages quoted in Bobby Derie's magisterial survey of the evidence.
What, then, of the story itself? You can find the complete text of it at Wikisource. [7]
This is how it begins:
Four O'Clock
[1922]
by Sonia H. Greene
About two in the morning I knew it was coming. The great black silences of night's depth told me, and a monstrous cricket, chirping with a persistence too hideous to be unmeaning, made it certain. It is to be at four o'clock — at four in the dusk before dawn, just as he said it would be. I had not fully believed it previously, because the prophecies of vindictive madmen are seldom to be taken with seriousness. Besides, I was not justly to be blamed for what had befallen him at four o'clock on that other morning; that terrible morning whose memory will never leave me. And when, at length, he had died and was buried in the ancient cemetery just across the road from my east windows, I was certain that his curse could not harm me. Had I not seen his lifeless clay securely pinned down by huge shovelfuls of mould? Might I not feel assured that his crumbling bones would be powerless to bring me the doom at a day and an hour so precisely stated? Such, indeed, had been my thoughts until this shocking night itself; this night of incredible chaos, of shattered certainties, and of nameless portents ...
•
Last night, at six o'clock, the phone rang.
– Some time (not now, obviously) but some time when you have a moment, could you possibly come across and have a look at my TV? It doesn't seem to be working.
– I'll come across now.
– Oh, okay.
– See you in a second.
My mother's TV is often on the blink. She doesn't know how to fix it, as she can't form new memories anymore, and every attempt we make to explain to her just which remote control to use to turn on the channel she wants founders on this unfortunate fact.
Last time, after a week of struggle with the TV which involved two separate repairmen (one quite useless, the other both heroic and kindly) we succeeded in getting her Sky dish up and running again. This involved replacing the Skybox as well as parts of the satellite dish on her roof, which is why I call the second of these technicians ‘heroic’. He climbed up there despite the high winds and the imminent threat of a hailstorm, and kept a smile on his face throughout. I've seldom admired a man more.
Unfortunately, to get to Sky, my mother has to choose ‘AV’ on her TV remote, and then turn on the Skybox. This is too much for her. She can turn on the television itself, or she can turn on Sky if the screen is already set to Sky, but she can't combine the two operations.
I've tried writing out the various steps involved in capital letters on a little sign propped up by the television, but she never remembers to look at it when difficulties arise.
And yet the television is her lifeline. She can still tune in her radio, and she even uses her computer to play online games and check her email, but the television is the friend that keeps her in touch with the world each evening.
Knowing how much she needs it, then, I came up with the best compromise I could. I tuned the TV to Sky, then hid the other TV remote. This meant that she couldn't fully turn off the screen, but she could turn Sky on and off.
Unfortunately it also meant that the screen has the logo ‘NO SIGNAL RECEIVED’ moving up and down on it. This irritates her inordinately. Turning it off with the TV remote has the effect of turning off Sky, however, which leaves her without any channels to watch.
The free-to-air aerial on top of her apartment block is intended for all the tenants, but since none of the others seem to watch non-streaming TV, when it blew down in one of the recent gales, no-one seemed to know whose responsibility it was to fix it, or even who’d put it up in the first place. All in all, we thought it better to rely solely on Sky.
Usually, when I get that six o'clock phone call, I can manage it pretty easily. I dread it, of course. We can go for weeks with the system working fine, but every now and then she succeeds in turning the whole thing off. All I have to do is go over, locate the TV remote, turn the picture back on, and shift the reception code to AV.
This time, however, the whole screen was off. There was no little red pilot light to be seen, and the TV remote was powerless to turn anything on or off.
Had she unplugged it somehow? She did say that she'd got up in the middle of the night because it irritated her – perhaps casting a ghostly light on the room, or moving in the corner of her eye – and managed to turn it off. She couldn't tell me how, though. Direct questions of any kind tend to throw her, and I don't know enough about TVs to be au fait with all the various methods of turning them on and off.
Everything seemed to be plugged in as usual. I tried unplugging it all and then plugging it in again. No soap. Everything remained dark.
– How on earth did you do it?
– I don't know, she wailed.
– Well, I don't know either. We'll have to get another repairman. It's beyond me, I'm afraid.
I saw in my mind's eye the grim prospect of booking in another tradesperson – ‘they'll be calling sometime between 12 and 5 pm’ – then sitting there waiting for them, as she's only too prone to turn them away if they come while she's on her own. Nor can she explain to them why they've been called.
I could see she was upset by it all. So was I. But what could I do? There was nothing I could think of to try which I hadn't already tried. I had to leave. But I knew I was leaving her in the dark, with no friendly newsmen or sports commentators for company. She breaks my heart.
Next day my wife went over and located the – virtually invisible – black plastic indentation on the back of the TV which you have to press to turn the set on and off. God knows how my mother located it in the middle of the night, but she managed somehow. Her television is up and running again … for the moment.
Every evening, though, around six o'clock, I begin to feel nervous and look in the direction of the phone. Will it be tonight? Or tomorrow? Sometimes she can ring us five times in a row about the same matter, get the same reply, ring off, then be reminded of it again, and ring us again. But we are her sole lifeline, and each call is, for her, the first time she's mentioned it.
Notes:
[1] Wikipedia: ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horror_in_the_Museum_and_Other_Revisions].
[2] Bobby Derie, ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis’ Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein: The Undiscovered Mythos (17/6/20). [https://deepcuts.blog/2020/06/17/the-private-life-of-h-p-lovecraft-1985-by-sonia-h-davis/].
[3] Bobby Derie, ‘Four O’Clock’ (1949) by Sonia H. Greene.’ Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein: The Undiscovered Mythos (24/8/19). Available at: [https://deepcuts.blog/2019/08/24/four-oclock-1949-by-sonia-h-greene/].
[4] Derie, ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft’ (17/6/20).
[5] H. P. Lovecraft, Collected Fiction, Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations): A Variorum Edition. Ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017), 613.
[6] Derie, ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft’ (17/6/20).
[7] Sonia H. Greene, ‘Four O'Clock’ (1922). Wikisource. [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Four_O%27Clock].
•
H. P. Lovecraft: Collected Fiction, Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations (2017)Four O'Clock
[1922]
by Sonia H. Greene
About two in the morning I knew it was coming. The great black silences of night's depth told me, and a monstrous cricket, chirping with a persistence too hideous to be unmeaning, made it certain. It is to be at four o'clock — at four in the dusk before dawn, just as he said it would be. I had not fully believed it previously, because the prophecies of vindictive madmen are seldom to be taken with seriousness. Besides, I was not justly to be blamed for what had befallen him at four o'clock on that other morning; that terrible morning whose memory will never leave me. And when, at length, he had died and was buried in the ancient cemetery just across the road from my east windows, I was certain that his curse could not harm me. Had I not seen his lifeless clay securely pinned down by huge shovelfuls of mould? Might I not feel assured that his crumbling bones would be powerless to bring me the doom at a day and an hour so precisely stated? Such, indeed, had been my thoughts until this shocking night itself; this night of incredible chaos, of shattered certainties, and of nameless portents.
I had retired early, hoping fatuously to snatch a few hours of sleep despite the prophecy which haunted me. Now that the time was so close at hand, I found it harder and harder to dismiss the vague fears which had always lain beneath my conscious thoughts. As the cooling sheets soothed my fevered body, I could find nothing to soothe my still more fevered mind; but lay tossing and uneasily awake, trying first one position and then another in a desperate effort to banish with slumber that one damnably insistent notion — that it is to occur at four o'clock.
Was this frightful unrest due to my surroundings; to the fateful locality in which I was sojourning after so many years? Why, I now asked myself bitterly, had I permitted circumstance to place me on this night of all nights, in that well-remembered house and that well-remembered room whose east windows overlook the lonely road and the ancient country cemetery beyond? In my mind’s eye every detail of that unpretentious necropolis rose before me - its white fence, its ghost-like granite shafts, and the hovering auras of those on whom the worms fed. Finally the force of the conception led my vision to depths more remote and more forbidden, and I saw under the neglected grass the silent shapes of the things from which the auras came - the calm sleepers, the rotting things, the things which had twisted frantically in their coffins before sleep came, and the peaceful bones in every stage of disintegration from the complete and coherent skeleton to the huddled handful of dust. Most of all I envied the dust. Then new terror came as my fancy encountered his grave. Into that sepulcher I dared not let my thought stray, and I should have screamed had not something forestalled the malign power that pulled my mental sight. That something was a sudden gust of wind, sprung from nowhere amidst the calm night, which unfastened the shutter of the nearest window, throwing it back with a shivery slam and uncovering to my actual waking glance the antique cemetery itself, brooding spectrally beneath an early morning moon.
I speak of this gust as something merciful, yet know now that it was only transiently and mockingly so. For no sooner had my eyes compassed the moonlight scene than I became aware of a fresh omen, this time too unmistakable to be classed as an empty phantasm, which arose from among the gleaming tombs across the road. Having glanced with instinctive apprehension toward the spot where he lay mouldering — a spot cut off from my gaze by the window-frame — I perceived with trepidation the approach of an indescribable something which flowed menacingly from that very direction ; a vague, vaporous, formless mass of greyish- white substance or spirit, dull and tenuous as yet, but every moment increasing in awesome and cataclysmic potentiality. Try as I might to dismiss it as a natural meteorological phenomenon, its fearsomely portentous and deliberate character grew upon me amidst new thrills of horror and apprehension; so that I was scarcely unprepared for the definitely purposeful and malevolent culmination which soon occurred. That culmination, bringing with it a hideous symbolic foreshadowing of the end, was equally simple and threatening. The vapor each moment thickened and piled up, assuming at last a half tangible aspect; while the surface toward me gradually became circular in outline, and markedly concave; as it slowly ceased its advance and stood spectrally at the end of the road. And as it stood there, faintly quivering in the damp night air under that unwholesome moon, I saw that its aspect was that of the pallid and gigantic dial of a distorted clock.
Hideous events now followed in demoniac succession. There took shape in the lower right-hand part of the vaporous dial a black and formidable creature, shapeless and only half seen, yet having four prominent claws which reached out greedily at me - claws redolent of noxious fatality in their very contour and location; since they formed too plainly the dreaded outlines, and filled too unmistakably the exact position, of the numeral IV on the quivering dial of doom. Presently the monstrosity stepped or wriggled out of the concave surface of the dial, and began to approach me by some unexplained kind of locomotion. The four talons, long, thin, and straight, were now seen to be tipped by disgusting, thread-like tentacles, each with a vile intelligence of its own, which groped about incessantly, slowly at first, but gradually increasing in velocity until I was nearly driven mad by the sheer dizziness of their motion. And as a crowning horror I began to hear all the subtle and cryptical noises that pierced the intensified night silence; a thousand-fold magnified, and in one voice reminding me of the abhorred hour of four. In vain I tried to pull up the coverlet to shut them out; in vain I tried to drown them with my screams. I was mute and paralyzed, yet agonizingly aware of every unnatural sight and sound in that devastating, moon-cursed stillness. Once I managed to get my head beneath the covers — once when the cricket's shrieking of that hideous phrase, four-o’clock, seemed about to shatter my brain — but that only aggravated the terror, making the roars of that detestable creature strike me like the blows of a titanic sledgehammer.
And now, as I withdrew my tortured head from its fruitless protection, I found augmented diabolism to harass my eyes. Upon the newly painted wall of my apartment, as if called forth by the tentacled monster from the tomb, there danced mockingly before me a myriad company of beings, black, grey, and white, such as only the fancy of the god-stricken might visualize. Some were of infinitesimal smallness; others covered vast areas. In minor details each had a grotesque and horrible individuality, in general outlines they all conformed to the same nightmare pattern despite their vastly varied size. Again I tried to shut out the abnormalities of the night, but vainly as before. The dancing things on the wall waxed and waned in magnitude, approaching and receding as they trod their morbid and menacing measure. And the aspect of each was that of some demon clock-face with one sinister hour always figured thereon - the dreaded, the doom-delivering hour of four.
Baffled in every attempt to shake off the circling and relentless delirium, I glanced once more toward the unshuttered window and beheld again the monster which had come from the grave. Horrible it had been before; indescribable it had now become. The creature, formerly of indeterminate substance, was now formed of red and malignant fire; and waved repulsively its four tentacled claws - unspeakable tongues of living flame. It stared and stared at me out of the blackness; sneeringly, mockingly; now advancing, now retiring. Then, in the tenebrous silence, those four writhing talons of fire beckoned invitingly to their demoniacally dancing counterparts on the walls, and seemed to beat time rhythmically to the shocking saraband till the world was one ghoulishly gyrating vortex of leaping, prancing, gliding, leering, taunting, threatening four o’clocks.
Somewhere, beginning afar off and advancing slowly over the sphinx like sea and the febrile marshes, I heard the early morning wind come soughing; faintly at first, then louder and louder until its unceasing burden flowed as a deluge of whirring, buzzing cacophony bringing always the hideous threat, ‘four o’clock, four o’clock, FOUR O’CLOCK.’ monotonously it grew from a whimper to a deafening roar, as of a giant cataract, but finally reached a climax and began to subside. As it receded into the distance it left upon my sensitive ears such a vibration as is left by the passing of a swift and ponderous railway train; this, and a stark dread whose intensity gave it something of the tranquility of resignation.
The end is near. All sound and vision have become one vast chaotic maelstrom of lethal, clamorous menace, wherein are fused all the ghastly and unhallowed four o’clocks which have existed since immemorial time began, and all which will exist in eternities to come. The flaming monster is advancing closely now, its charnel tentacles brushing my face and its talons curving hungrily as they grope toward my throat. At last I can see its face through the churning and phosphorescent vapors of the graveyard air, and with devastating pangs I realize that it is in essence an awful, colossal, gargoyle-like caricature of his face — the face of him from whose uneasy grave it has issued. Now I know that my doom is indeed sealed; that the wild threats of the madman were in truth the demon maledictions of a potent fiend, and that my innocence will prove no protection against the malign volition which craves a causeless vengeance. He is determined to pay me with interest for what he suffered at that spectral hour; determined to drag me out of the world into realms which only the mad and the devil-ridden know.
And as amidst the seething of hell’s flames and the tumult of the damned those fiery claws point murderously at my throat, I hear upon the mantel the faint whirring sound of a timepiece; the whirring which tells me that it is about to strike the hour whose name now flows incessantly from the death-like and cavernous throat of the rattling, jeering, croaking grave-monster before me — the accursed, the infernal hour of four o’clock.
•
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