An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

At last Marsh’s painting is done, but horror is in the offing. Antoine awakes one day to find Marceline in a pool of her own blood, her long, luxurious hair hacked off. Marsh must be the culprit; but when Antoine follows a bloody trail to an upstairs room, he finds Marsh dead, with his son Denis crouching next to him, “a tousled, wild-eyed thing.” Denis maintains that he killed Marceline because “she was the devil—the summit and high-priestess of all evil.” He had come back home because he continued to suspect that Marsh and Marceline were lovers; but as he saw Frank’s painting, he realized that Marsh was trying to warn him about his wife, conveying by means of his painting that she was a “leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia.” After he had killed Marceline, her hair continued to exhibit signs of animation, and as he hacked off her hair it wrapped itself around Marsh and choked him to death. After telling his tale to his father, Denis dies.

Antoine buries the bodies of Marsh (with Marceline’s coils still around him), Marceline, and his son in the cellar. He has, however, preserved Marsh’s painting, and reluctantly he takes the traveler up to the room where it is kept. As the two are looking at it, the strands of hair begin to lift themselves from the painting and seem about to strike Antoine. The traveler draws out his automatic and shoots the painting, but Antoine curses at the traveler: the painting has to be kept intact, otherwise Marceline and her coils will revive and come out of their grave. Sounds from the basement seem to confirm that this is happening, so the two men flee; the house in any event is ablaze from a candle that Antoine had dropped in the studio. The traveler makes it to his car, but he sees Antoine overtaken by a “bald, naked figure,” and also dimly perceives some large snake-like form among the tall weeds and bushes. As he drives to the nearest town, he learns that the de Russy mansion had in fact burned down five or six years ago. The traveler then informs us of the ultimate horror of the matter: Marceline was, “though in deceitfully slight proportion,” a negress.

Notes for the story survive (in AHT), including both a plot outline and a “Manner of Narration” (a synopsis of events in order of narration); here too it is made clear that the final racist revelation —“woman revealed as vampire, lamia, &c. &c.—& unmistakably (surprise to reader as in original tale) a negress”—is meant to be the culminating horror of the tale. The mention here of an “original tale” may suggest that there was a draft of some kind by Bishop, but if so, it does not survive. WTrejected the story. Later in 1930 HPL discussed with Frank Belknap Long (Bishop’s agent) the possibility of sending it to Ghost Stories(HPL to Frank Belknap Long, [November 1930]; AHT), but if it was sent there, it was again rejected. As with “The Mound,” the tale was heavily altered and rewritten by August Derleth for its magazine appearance, and he continued to reprint the adulterated texts in book form until the corrected text appeared in 1989.

See Marc A.Cerasini, “Dark Passion: ‘Medusa’s Coil’ and ‘Black Canaan,’” CryptNo. 11 (Candlemas 1983): 33–36.

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Page 167

“Memory.”

Prose poem (350 words); probably written in the spring of 1919. First published in the United Cooperative(June 1919), an amateur journal coedited by HPL, Winifred Jackson, and others. First collected in BWS;corrected text in MW

A Daemon of the Valley holds a colloquy with “the Genie that haunts the moonbeams” about the previous inhabitants of the valley of Nis, through which the river Than flows. The Genie has forgotten these creatures, but the Daemon declares: “I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.”

Poe’s influence dominates this very short work: there is a Demon in Poe’s “Silence—a Fable”; “the valley Nis” is mentioned in Poe’s “The Valley of Unrest” (whose original title was “The Valley Nis,” although HPL may not have been aware of the fact); and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” which features a dialogue like that of HPL’s tale, speaks of the destruction of all earth life by means of a fire caused by a comet passing near the earth.

See Lance Arney, “The Extinction of Mankind in the Prose Poem ‘Memory,’” LSNo. 21 (Spring 1990): 38–39.

Menes.