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

What I do not think I shall use much in future is the Dunsanian pseudo-poetic vein—not because I don’t admire it, but because I don’t think it is natural to me. The fact that I used it only sparingly before reading Dunsany, but immediately began to overwork it upon doing so, gives me a strong suspicion of its artificiality so far as I am concerned. That kind of thing takes a better poet than I.²

In later years Lovecraft repudiated the novel, refusing several colleagues’ desires to prepare a typed copy of the manuscript. The text was not published until it was included in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943).

It is remarkable that, almost immediately after completing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in late January 1927, Lovecraft plunged into another ‘young novel’,³ The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

. Actually, at the outset he did not regard it as anything more than a novelette, but by the time it was finished on 1 March, it had reached 147 manuscript pages. At approximately 51,000 words, it is the longest work of fiction Lovecraft would ever write. While it does betray a few signs of haste, and while he would no doubt have polished it had he made the effort to prepare it for publication, the fact is that he felt so discouraged as to its quality—as well as its marketability—that he never made such an effort, and the work remained unpublished until four years after his death.

Perhaps, however, it is not so odd that Lovecraft wrote The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a blinding rush nine months after his return to Providence; for this novel—the second of his major tales (after ‘The Shunned House’) to be set entirely in the city of his birth—had been gestating for at least a year or more. I have mentioned that in August 1925 he was contemplating a novel about Salem; but then, in September, he read Gertrude Selwyn Kimball’s Providence in Colonial Times (1912) at the New York Public Library, and this rather dry historical work clearly fired his imagination. He was, however, still talking of the Salem idea just as he was finishing the

DreamQuest; perhaps the Kimball book—as well, of course, as his return to Providence—led to a uniting of the Salem idea with a work about his hometown.

The novel concerns the attempts of the seventeenth-century alchemist Joseph Curwen to secure unholy knowledge by resurrecting the ‘essential saltes’ of the great thinkers of the world. Curwen also leaves his own essential saltes to be discovered by his twentieth-century descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, so that he is resurrected, only to be put down by the Ward family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett. The historical flashback—occupying the second of the five chapters—is as evocative a passage as any in Lovecraft’s work.

The house that serves the model for Charles Dexter Ward’s residence is the so-called Halsey mansion (the Thomas Lloyd Halsey house at 140 Prospect Street). In late August 1925 Lovecraft heard from Lillian that this mansion was haunted.⁴

Although now broken up into apartments, it is a superb late Georgian structure (c. 1800) fully deserving of Lovecraft’s encomium. Lovecraft was presumably never in the Halsey mansion, but had a clear view of it from 10 Barnes Street; looking northwestward from his aunt’s upstairs back window, he could see it distinctly.

One significant literary influence may be noted here: Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return (1910). Lovecraft had first read de la Mare (1873–1956) in the summer of 1926; of The Return he remarks in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’: ‘we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust’. In de la Mare’s novel, of course, there is actual psychic possession involved, as there is not in Charles Dexter Ward; and, although the focus in The Return is on the afflicted man’s personal trauma—in particular his relations with his wife and daughter—rather than the unnaturalness of his condition, Lovecraft has manifestly adapted the general scenario in his own work.