Under the Pyramids
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"Under the Pyramids," is the original manuscript title for a novelette commonly titled "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,". It was ghost-written by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft for escape artist Harry Houdini in February/March 1924.[1] It was first published under Houdini's byline in the May/June/July 1924 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales and was also reprinted in 34, No 1 (June-July 1939) of the same magazine. The proper title was deduced from an advertisement placed by H.P. Lovecraft in the Providence Journal (3 March 1924) declaring the loss of the typed manuscript.
Lovecraft did much research into the Egyptian setting for the tale (aided by guidebooks from and trips to the Egyptian Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
According to S.T. Joshi, "J.C. Henneberger, owner of Weird Tales, wished Lovecraft to write up an account Houdini had told him: on a trip to Egypt, he had been bound by Arabs and left in some deep chamber of Campbell's Tomb in the valley of the pyramids. Houdini was attempting to pass off this adventure as a true occurrence, but Lovecraft's subsequent research established that the story was largely fictitious. As such, Lovecraft allowed his imagination free rein, transferring to the temple of the Sphinx but otherwise retaining many of the details of the narrative as related by Houdini." [1]
Lovecraft famously lost the manuscript of the novelette at Union Station in Providence when he was en route to New York to get married. Subsequently Lovecraft retyped half of the novelette on his own, before going to St Paul's Chapel to marry Sonia Greene. The last half of the novelette was typed by a stenographer's office in the Hotel Vendig, Philadelphia on the nights of March 4 and 5, 1924. Lovecraft received payment of $100 - the largest sum he had hitherto earned as a fiction writer - on March 21. It was the only occasion on which he was paid by Weird Tales in advance of publication. The story is told in more detail in S.T. Joshi's biography H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. [2]
[edit] Reaction
Lin Carter reports that "both Weird Tales and Houdini himself were impressed" by Lovecraft's work. Carter calls "Under the Pyramids" "one of the best things Lovecraft had written up to that time.... [T]he mystery and romance of antiquity stirred Lovecraft deeply, and the glamorous Egyptian setting of this fictionalized narrative touched creative wellsprings within him, producing one of his most powerful and evocative pieces."[3]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ S.T. Joshi, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft, pp. 189-90.
- ^ S.T. Joshi, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, pp. 328-31.
- ^ Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, pp. 35, 37.
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