The Shadow over 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' Part IV: The Ticket Agent, Threshold Guardian

So, finally we are moving into the meat of Innsmouth, which means, well, first, I'm going to stop harping on that damn submarine attack, and second, we are finally moving somewhere, although it turns out that movement is into lots and lots of exposition. I'm going to quote a lot a length, because I want to show how these expositions work as complete vignette or flash stories in their own right. Which is part of why section after section of exposition works in Innsmouth. It is a tricky thing, but one I think HPL pulls off, even though I think he is giving into his worst instinct and getting a good result.

I also want to call attention to how well HPL writes capturing dialect, and how when he stops relying on his overly effected style, he becomes a lot more effective. I really think these parts are some of his best writing. I can't help but feel compelled on by this.

"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 - but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now - B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it, must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He's supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner - they say a South Sea islander - so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here - though, come to think of it, the elder children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take too much stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth - whispering 'em, mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh - about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don't go down with me.

"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef - sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.

"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.

"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough - there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town - and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back - there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk - that a lot of our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.

"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we can't be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst - fact is, I don't believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em - they used to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came in.

"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around - but just try to fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad - walking and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was dropped - but now they use that bus.

"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth - called the Gilman House - but I don't believe it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms - though most of 'em was empty - that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural - slopping like, he said - that he didn't dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.

"This fellow - Casey, his name was - had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folk watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place - it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it's always been a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.

"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh women-folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things - mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at themselves - Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.

"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly, and full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.

"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.

"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you - even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you."

A lot of this isn't so much foreshadowing or clues as in a normal mystery, but a bare skeleton of truth that later exposition fills in more details. Of course, here it makes sense that the speaker doesn't quiet believe what he has been told, so the constant '...but I don't believe it' works this time.

Look at

...old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts...

I mean, that's pretty much a rough synopsis of what old Zadok Allen will later say. So again we have this loopy structure of telling you what will happen later on, but here this builds tension instead of deflating it-- at this point, the idea of summoning of devils is treated as beyond the pale, while it turns out to be far weirder, if anything else, than that. And, again, I love how he captures the regionalism of New England-- 'but I don't believe it' takes the form of “but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don't go down with me.” I mean, obviously, when you come from Panton, you're too sensible to believe this stuff (as a side note, if you look up Panton, you'll see the one citation for the town is that, even though unnamed and unimportant, this minor character is from there, unintentionally capturing so much about the town so well, perhaps?).

“[T]here's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now” could've been used to set up for poor little cousin Lawrence. The fact that this could've been done but just plain damn wasn't just serves to highlight how crap that part is.

Then we come to the part that is hardest to articulate my feeling about:

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it... I s'pose you know... that a lot of our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.... That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place... I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South - lawless and sly, and full of secret things. "

I'm certainly not interested in defending the racial views of HPL, nor do I care about how it supposedly softened to mere vehement racism over time. And I certainly don't want to pretend we can gloss over or separate this sort of stuff from the other themes neatly or historicize it away into 'it was a different time.'

It seems to me two things are important to say about Innsmouth though: First, Innsmouth's horror is primarily one of racial degeneracy, and for all the feints of fishmen, poor hygiene, and home repair, it is no accident that first things first, the people of Innsmouth are said to be rather racial progressive about the whole 'miscegenation' thing, not only in terms of (ominous music plays, while whispering the next word) admixture, but outright marriage, especially for 'it was a different time.' That needs to be accepted, because, frankly it's going to get a lot creepier than not blaming people for feeling racial prejudice.

Second, this isn't The Horror at Red Hook. Both sides of the the racial story need to be accepted. I'm not defending Innsmouth as being a more mature, enlightened view of race, just a more complicated one-- and, frankly, I feel that this still works as a horror story, where Red Hook is really just a horrifying, angry howl. And part of why I feel it works is the casualness of the racism, and yet the constant reminder of even in the world of Innsmouth there is this tension if not resistance to it-- the Chinese wife has nothing to do with the breeding programs of Obed Marsh, and it is freely admitted that such spooooky miscegenation is not unheard of, producing no named ill-effects. The racial issues at work here are complicated, since it is race that is the red herring, and racial prejudice which hide the real truth. Part of me wants to read this as super-duper racism, but I don't think it's stable ground. The ambiguity of race and racism in the story, if nothing else, helps evoke the creepy wrongness of Lovecraft Country, and you are never really sure where you stand.

The story freely admits that the racial prejudice is a blinding prejudice, and this is not the same as the sense in Red Hook of having merely the warranted amount of xenophobia of the evil foreigners. It calls attention to the fact that racial prejudice produces inane ideas like another person's religion is must be devil worship, which is a noticeable change from not only the devil worship by foreigners in Red Hook but also the voodoo meeting (je-eez! really?) of the "very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type" in The Call of Cthulhu. Sure, they are still into devil worship, more or less, in Innsmouth, but this is laughable on its face, not an obvious truth about those who've mingled with the "queer kinds of people."

Again, I'm not interested in even getting into HPL's changing views on race. I mean, gee, I guess there won't be a whites-only maw when Cthulhu eats us and all, but that's not really even close to sitting together at the table of brotherhood. However, in Innsmouth being of 'mixed blood' doesn't always make you a devil worshiper. The racial background of the main devil worshipers here seem to be white and, more or less, doing it for practical reasons, not some sort of racial degeneracy. So all his old tropes are mixed up here.

And it is this, I think, that makes it still work as a creepy setting-- the racism isn't the only presented point of view, and mostly works against the grain. I will admit my deliberate counter-reading of of Chapter IV as trying to bring a family member home doesn't make the town of Innsmouth itself a racial utopia, but I will say the ticket agent himself seems to be conflicted about racial prejudice; while he calls the prejudice out as a prejudice, I have no other read than “[t]hat plague of '46 must have taken off the best [that is, 'pure,' nee 'white'] blood in the place,” and yet he still sees Innsmouth residents as white people, even if they are white trash.

So I'm not sure exactly how to take this, other than a whole lotta creepy folk incidentally not caught up in white supremacy... as sailors often were. There is this counter-critique like this running through out Innsmouth. The 'racial degeneracy' problem is supposedly symptomatic of a deeper one (wink!), but I'm failing to see the specifics of what is going wrong here. Certainly I can see HPL expecting the mere mixing as the horror, but it's like he puts the best foot forward, which is an odd way to go about having an irrational fear. We'll get into more specifics when we get to Zadok Allen, but I'm really not sure what the Deep Ones are up to that is so inhuman.

Later, however, we will find out that the narrator himself is a product of miscegenation, which complicates things tremendously-- the entire story revolves around empathizing with the plight of this mixed blooded protagonist. And while I concede that the longing he has for his own kind is certainly meant ironically, I still find HPL makes a pretty good case for the Deep One's side-- among other things, the hybrids never die, never grow out, hang out with all their relatives, and have a pretty leisurely life. If this was in the clouds instead of underwater, it would clearly be a sort of heavenly existences. In the end, not being 'pure' isn't much a problem for the narrator, even when that impurity is, you know, freaking fleshing eating fishmen. Now that's racially progressive. Ironies and implied contrasts aside, HPL seems to have a problem not gilding the lilies for miscegenation.