The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, and more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

The Tree

“On a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an olive grove about the ruins of a villa.”

The Tree opens with a quote in Latin that basically says “The Fates will find a way.” This opening establishes destiny and maybe even justice as core themes: the universe will find a way to correct itself, to right a wrong. Injustice will not prevail forever; it seems to promise. This is a crucial element to help us understand a narrative that ends on an obtuse note, denying us full access to character motivations, making us unable to grasp the true nature of the climatic events.

The story is set in Greece and the narrator is recounting what a beekeeper told him of the strange tree that stands in mount Maenalus. This titular tree is described as “oddly repellant”: its “grotesque” shape reminding people of a “death-distorted body of a man” – a fitting description given that the tree grew over the tomb of one.

This is the story of this very man, Kalos, and his close friend, Musides. They’re both famous sculptors that one day receive the order to build each one a statue of Tyche – the goddess of chance – to be placed in the city of Syracuse. They’re to compete with each other, but since they are so close (full of “brotherly love”) Kalos and Musides “instead of concealing his work from the other, would offer aid and advice.”

Kalos and Musides are great friends. At the beginning, the narrator only talks about them together, with one name always being followed by the other (“All men paid homage to Kalos and Musides”/ “But Kalos and Musides dwelt…”), which marks the strength of their bond. It’s said that there was not a hint of jealousy between the two men – a key point when it comes to analyzing the ending – and that they “dwelt in unbroken harmony.” The initial focus, then, is on painting their friendship in bright colors, making us believe it’s sincere and inviolable.

Despite their unbroken harmony, the narrator points out how they had radically different natures. Musides liked to party: every night he reveled “amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea,” seeking banquet halls to feast. Kalos, on the other hand, preferred the solitude of home: he passed time in his olive grove, where it’s said he communed with all sorts of strange beings, fauns and dryads, who the sculptor liked to represent in his work.

Kalos’ connection with the supernatural is, of course, central to the story. The hideous tree that eventually grows on his tomb is said to stand on “the chosen haunt of dreaded Pan,” with the god of the wild appearing here immediately attached to negative adjectives to indicate how to associate oneself with these elements can’t lead to anything good.

Kalos, therefore, doesn’t take long to get sick, plagued by a mysterious illness. He gets more pallid by the day and no one knows why: “As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of puzzled physicians and of his assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to the grove which he so loved.”

Musides gets hurt by his friend’s fondness for the grove and its fauns and dryads. The narrator doesn’t say if he’s jealous, feeling betrayed, or if he thinks Kalos is being ungrateful. But we see Musides crying because his friend chose the forest creatures over him: “his eyes filled with visible tears at the thought that Kalos should care more for the fauns and the dryads than for him.”

Kalos knows he’s going to perish, so he asks Musides to take some twigs from his olive trees and bury them next to his tomb. When Kalos dies “sitting alone in the darkness of his grove,” Musides fulfills his promise and buries the twigs, which makes the strange human-shaped tree grow in that place. A tree so hideous that people feared passing by it at night, alarmed by its menacing aura and human shape. Its rapid growth also surprised everyone, which were “at once fascinated and repelled.”

And so, right before the fateful day when Musides has to deliver his sculpture of Tyche, there’s a storm and part of the strange tree falls onto his house. When the people arrive to see what happened, they find neither the sculptures of Tyche nor Musides himself. It’s said that the human-shaped olive tree still stands on that tomb, and that those that pass near it at night hear in the wind a voice saying “I know! I know!”

This ending is enigmatic, but the possible interpretations don’t make the story more complex. The heart of the matter lies in the last line of the text, the sentence whispered by the tree. What does Kalos know?

The first hypothesis is that this is a revenge story: Musides poisoned his friend trying to win the contest, but Kalos’ spirit lived on in the tree and punished him for it. The quote that opens the story, then, would make reference to this revenge after death: fates found a way to avenge a murder.

However, the text doesn’t seem to support this reading: the narrator never once puts in doubt the purity of their friendship – on the contrary, actually – and even tries to dispel any doubts about one being jealous of the other’s work.

We could be dealing with an unreliable narrator, of course: the story that’s being told here, after all, is a man telling us what a beekeeper told him. But another issue here is that with this reading, Pan, the fauns and dryads become a positive force, they become agents of destiny – which doesn’t quite fit their characterization as “dreaded beings.”

This characterization is made by the narrator, not the beekeeper, but he still could be just clueless or prejudiced against those beings. In other words, this interpretation means that all judgment made throughout the course of the story was wrong.

While this reading turns the events into a basic revenge story, the other one goes in the opposite direction. Now, the interpretation is that this “I know! I know!” is a confession of guilt. Pan and his ilk now assume a complete negative, monstrous form: by having dealings with them, Kalos condemned not only himself but also his friend. He acquired knowledge – maybe it was the creatures that made him good at his job in the first place, which would further explain why he made sculptures of them – but this cost Kalos his life and of those dear to him.

This reading makes the story a simple cautionary tale about the dangers of dealing with the occult, very similar to many others written by Lovecraft. The initial quote, then, makes reference to what happens when you associate yourself with dark beings: your destiny becomes equally dark. Your life is bound to end in tragedy.

We could also read some homoerotic tension in their “unbroken harmony” and “brotherly love”. Consequently, their deaths would be framed as punishment for their “transgression,” while the last line would mean that Kalos knows why they were punished. We may be putting more meaning to the text here than it seems to have, but the story doesn’t give us much to work on.

The problem is that there’s not a lot going on in The Tree: without complex characters, relationships, structure, or themes, we can only loosely conjecture about the nature of the events and characters. The open ending may warrant disparate interpretations, but they don’t make what came before much more interesting.

May 07, 2021.