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

The apparent source for the character Charles Dexter Ward is a very interesting one. Of course, there are many autobiographical touches in the portraiture of Ward; but many surface details appear to be taken from a person actually living in the Halsey mansion at this time, William Lippitt Mauran, who was born in 1910. Lovecraft was probably not acquainted with Mauran, but it is highly likely that he observed Mauran on the street and knew of him. Mauran was a sickly child who spent much of his youth as an invalid, being wheeled through the streets in a carriage by a nurse. Moreover, the Mauran family also owned a farmhouse in Pawtuxet, exactly as Curwen is said to have done. Other details of Ward’s character also fit Mauran more closely than Lovecraft.⁵

The early parts of the novel in particular are full of autobiographical details. The opening descriptions of Ward as a youth are filled with echoes of Lovecraft’s own upbringing, although with provocative changes. For example, a description of ‘one of the child’s first memories’—’the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens’—is situated in Prospect Terrace, whereas in letters Lovecraft identifies this mystic vision as occurring on the railway embankment in Auburndale, Massachusetts, around 1892. Ward’s ecstatic return to Providence after several years abroad can scarcely be anything but a transparent echo of Lovecraft’s own return to Providence after two years in New York. The simple utterance that concludes this passage—’It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home’—is one of the most quietly moving statements in all Lovecraft’s work.

It is a pity that Lovecraft made no efforts to prepare The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

for publication, even when book publishers in the 1930s were specifically asking for a novel from his pen; but we are in no position to question Lovecraft’s own judgment that the novel was an inferior piece of work, a ‘cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism’.⁶ It has now been acknowledged as one of his finest works, and it emphasizes the message of

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath all over again: Lovecraft is who he is because of his birth and upbringing as a New England Yankee. The need to root his work in his native soil became more and more clear to him as time went on, and it led to his gradual transformation of all New England as the locus of both wonder and terror.

The last tale of Lovecraft’s great spate of fiction-writing of 1926–27 is ‘The Colour out of Space’, written in March 1927. It is unquestionably one of his great tales, and it always remained Lovecraft’s own favourite. Here again the plot is too well known to require lengthy description, and focuses on the horrifying effects of a meteorite—or, more specifically, the nebulous entity or entities within the meteorite—after it lands upon a New England farmer’s field. Crops grow strangely, animals develop anatomical abnormalities, and finally both humans and animals alike crumble into a greyish dust. At the end there is a tremendous eruption of light from a well: the creatures have returned to their cosmic home.

Lovecraft was correct in calling this tale an ‘atmospheric study’,⁷ for he has rarely captured the atmosphere of inexplicable horror better than he has here. First let us consider the setting. The reservoir mentioned in the tale is a very real one: the Quabbin Reservoir, plans for which were announced in 1926, although it was not completed until 1939. And yet Lovecraft declares in a late letter that it was not this reservoir but the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island (built in 1926) that caused him to use the reservoir element in the story.⁸ He saw this reservoir when he passed through this area in the west-central part of the state on the way to Foster in late October. I cannot, however, believe that Lovecraft was not also thinking of the Quabbin, which is located exactly in the area of central Massachusetts where the tale takes place, and which involved the abandonment and submersion of entire towns in the region.