I've read this story a couple of times now and to be honest I don't like it much. But I'm going to try and find some positive things to say.
The Bad
My main problem is that this story hasn't really aged very well. Maybe in 1905/1918 the idea of a man getting lost in a cave and becoming beast-like would have been shocking, but in 2019 it just feels a bit mundane or predictable. That said, I agree that Lovecraft has done a good job telling the story he has decided to tell - and for all my criticisms, it's far superior to anything I could write now, let alone when I was 14! And actually, having read a lot of Lovecraft before this, the fact that the "beast" was actually a man was surprising, if not shocking. I suppose I was expecting a Mi-Go or a Shoggoth (not that Lovecraft had worked out those sorts of things at this stage), although in the context of the story as it is only the revelation of it being a man would really work.
Additionally, the narrator is just way too ideal to be compelling: "look how amazing and intelligent and unemotional this guy is - he's not scared of anything!". I guess every author has been guilty of this at some point, and to be fair, Lovecraft at least had the decency to have his intellectually superior human give in to fear at the climax. But the story suffers from the early description of the protagonist. I like the comparison with the protagonist in "The Statement of Randolph Carter" being a corrective to this sort of thing.
The Good
I think the other Lovecraft story that this one called most to my mind was "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (according to criticisms I've read, one of Lovecraft's most racist stories - surely an accolade of some sort, if not a positive one), which has the "white ape" trope played out the opposite way to this story (I won't say any more, so as not to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it). For me, this comparison makes "Beast" seem a lot more nuanced - even if perhaps unintentionally, and only in the context of Lovecraft's later works. Rather than the revelation being of cosmic horror, strange alien creatures or impure bloodlines, or the people involved being "degenerates" (whether through breeding with non-humans, or just being races Lovecraft didn't like), the horrible, fear-inducing beast turns out just to be a man - a strange man, marked by his time in the cave, but a man nonetheless. The fear of the unknown that pervades Lovecraft's work is there, but is proven to be unfounded (we don't know whether the beast-man was intending to attack the narrator, but we're given no reason to think so). So actually, the true horror of the story is how a man reacts to his fear of the unknown with violence. Even today, this is an important commentary on human nature, but sadly it seems almost ironic when written by someone with Lovecraft's (deserved) reputation. And in the end I could have done with just a bit more sense of regret for his actions on the part of the narrator to fully convince me that Lovecraft was completely sincere in making this point.
I think Brandon would love for us to do more mole-people stories, so if you've got specific suggestions we want them.
Lovecraft's Vulcanism is something I'm interested in tracking as we get further into his writing. It's not something I've paid a lot of attention to before (I never identified with Spock either) but it does seem like such an important part of his own way of dealing with the world, though I think that today we would really say that what he's advocating is meditation as a means of easing anxiety. But I'm also interested in this as a marker of masculinity in the early twentieth century, a shutting down of emotions, and I can't help but think about this in the context of men coming home from the First World War shortly after he wrote this story.
I can't believe we didn't call back to this story when we did "The Rats in the Walls." But I love that story enough that I'll want to do another episode on it someday!
Also I'd like to read some weird Tom Sawyer story about a fictional HPL and REH as twelve-year-olds in 1910s Idaho or something like that, finding strange artefacts and fighting mole people and just generally getting into mischief together.
I read the story recently and listened to the podcast this morning. Here are some of my observations:
Some of the best stories, or at least my favorite stories, have some sort of built-in ambiguity. Here I'm thinking of something like Total Recall where the fantastic events might or might not be implanted memories. It's important that you can enjoy these story on a surface level without even being aware of the interpretative juncture lurking underneath. It's amazing to see a young Lovecraft do something like this. I didn't even catch on to it at first. The creature could be an old man that has somehow stayed alive after becoming lost in the cave, or it could be a member of a new race, descendants of the cave-dwelling patients, evolved to exploit the new environment--here the peculiar eyes and hair of the man become signs of deeper physiological change.
There's something going on with ideas of man's ancestry. At first, we might think that an escaped ape has gotten lost in the cave system. Later, we realize that this strange ape is in-fact a man! One way to think about this is that he had regressed to some former state under the influence of the caves--a sort of retrogression giving re-birth to the caveman of old. Evolution is commonly understood to be one-way. There's something unsettling about old forms re-emerging.
As an aside, I'd like to mention that cavemen tales and weird fiction have a storied history that's worth thinking about. The first Robert E. Howard story ever published was a caveman story called Spear and Fang. He was only 19 when it came out in Weird Tales.
I wonder where this story sits in the long history of 'mole people' stories. There have been quite a few of them, with older stories often taking place in old mining tunnels, and newer ones usually having city sewers as their nexus. I'm sure I encountered this concept on Saturday morning cartoons as a kid, which makes me think about how deeply this idea has seeped into the popular imagination, or maybe it was always there?
A few of Lovecraft's other stories were invoked in the podcast. The one that jumps to my mind is The Rats in the Walls. There too we find the horrifying imagery man gone quadruped. There too we find underground tunnels full of mystery and disturbing discovery.
There was talk in the podcast of the protagonist being almost Vulcan in his approach to the plight he finds himself in. The comparison that came to my mind was that of Marcus Aurelius. In one of his letters, Lovecraft says: "Roman dreams were no uncommon features of my youth—I used to follow the Divine Julius all over Gallia as a Tribunus Militum o’nights". I can imagine a teenage Lovecraft being fascinated by the Stoic Emperor--a figure of power and dignity--one who could have anything in the world, but chooses self-restraint. Combine this with the systematic thinking of the dispassionate scientist and you have a powerful mixture.
We know from Lovecraft's later letters that he thought a philosophical mindset was the best way of grappling with the disturbing facts of the universe. What's interesting is how he brings rationality to a breaking point. We find this theme in many of his later stories too. Many of his protagonists are men of reason, but they keep finding themselves in situations which reason cannot comprehend, or perhaps more spookily, situations where reason comprehends all too well.
These are great insights, and I do think that Lovecraft's age shines through in this story -- in both the good and the bad. I like the comparison to Arthur Jermyn -- that's a story that stands out in my imagination, though I'm not sure I'm looking forward to covering it even if I know that we will someday have to address Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia.