A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

With Annie Gamwell, Lovecraft made another excursion in late October, although this one was much closer to home. It was, in fact, nothing less than his first visit to his ancestral region of Foster since 1908. It is heartwarming to read Lovecraft’s account of this journey, in which he not only absorbed the intrinsic loveliness of a rural New England he had always cherished but also re-established bonds with family members who still revered the memory of Whipple Phillips.

Echoes of the trip are manifested in his next work of fiction, ‘The Silver Key’, presumably written in early November. In this tale Randolph Carter—resurrected from ‘The Unnamable’ (1923)—is now thirty; he has ‘lost the key of the gate of dreams’ and therefore seeks to reconcile himself to the real world, which he now finds prosy and aesthetically unrewarding. He tries all manner of literary and physical novelties until one day he does find the key—or, at any rate, a key of silver in his attic, which somehow takes him back in time so that he is again a nine-year-old boy. Sitting down to dinner with his aunt and uncle, Carter finds perfect content as a boy who has sloughed off the tedious complications of adult life for the eternal wonder of childhood.

‘The Silver Key’ is, clearly, an exposition of Lovecraft’s own social, ethical, and aesthetic philosophy. It is not even so much a story as a parable or philosophical diatribe. He attacks literary realism, conventional religion, and bohemianism in exactly the same way as he does in his letters. But, as Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, has exhaustively pointed out, ‘The Silver Key’ is in large part a fictionalized account of Lovecraft’s recent Foster visit.²⁴ Details of topography, character names, and other similarities make this conclusion unshakable. Just as Lovecraft felt the need, after two rootless years in New York, to restore connections with the places that had given him and his family birth, so in his fiction did he need to announce that, henceforth, however far his imagination might stray, it would always return to New England and look upon it as a source of bedrock values and emotional sustenance.

‘The Silver Key’, with its heavily philosophical burden, is by no means oriented toward a popular audience, and it is no surprise that Farnsworth Wright rejected it for Weird Tales. In the summer of 1928, however, Wright asked to see the tale again and this time accepted it for $70.

‘The Strange High House in the Mist’, written on 9 November, shows that the Dunsany influence had now been thoroughly internalised so as to allow for the expression of Lovecraft’s own sentiments through Dunsany’s idiom and general atmosphere. Indeed, the only genuine connections to Dunsany’s work may perhaps be in some details of the setting and in the manifestly philosophical, even satiric purpose which the fantasy is made to serve. We are now again in Kingsport, a city to which Lovecraft had not returned since ‘The Festival’ (1923), and Thomas Olney learns of the strange creatures that haunt an ancient house on a high cliff north of the city. After he returns to his family, Olney’s soul no longer longs for wonder and mystery; instead, he is content to lead his prosy bourgeois life with his wife and children.

On various occasions Lovecraft admits that he had no specific locale in mind when writing this tale: he states that memories of the ‘titan cliffs of Magnolia’²⁵ in part prompted the setting, but that there is no house on the cliff as in the story. ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ contains little in the way of specific topographical description, and we are clearly in a never-never land where— anomalously for Lovecraft—the focus is on human character.

For the strange transformation of Thomas Olney is at the heart of the tale. The Terrible Old Man states: ‘somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney’. The body has returned to the normal round of things, but the spirit has remained with the occupant of the strange high house in the mist; Olney realizes that it is in this realm of nebulous wonder that he truly belongs. His body is now an empty shell, without soul and without imagination.

But Lovecraft was by no means done with writing. In a departure from his normal habits, he wrote ‘The Silver Key’ and ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ while simultaneously at work on a much longer work. Writing to August Derleth in early December, he notes: ‘I am now on page 72 of my dreamland fantasy.’²⁶ The result, finished in late January, would be the longest work of fiction he had written up to this time—The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cosmic Outsideness (1927–28)