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

Lovecraft had always been modest about his own achievements— excessively so, as we look back upon it; now, rejections by Wright, Bates, and Putnam’s, and the cool reactions of colleagues to whom he had sent stories in manuscript, nearly shattered whatever confidence he may have had in his own work. He spent the few remaining years of his life trying to regain that confidence, and he never seems to have done so except in fleeting moments. We can see the effect of this state of mind in his very next story.

‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ was written in November and December of 1931. Lovecraft reports that his revisiting of the decaying seaport of Newburyport, Massachusetts (which he had first seen in 1923), led him to conduct a sort of ‘laboratory experimentation’¹⁹ to see which style or manner was best suited to the theme. Four drafts (whether complete or not is not clear) were written and discarded, and finally Lovecraft simply wrote the story in his accustomed manner, producing a twenty-five-thousand-word novelette whose extraordinary richness of atmosphere scarcely betrays the almost agonizing difficulty he experienced in its writing.

Once again, the plot of the story is relatively elementary. The narrator, Robert Olmstead (never mentioned by name in the story, but identified in the surviving notes), in the midst of a genealogical and antiquarian tour, comes to the decaying New England seaport of Innsmouth by accident, finding an undercurrent of the sinister there. Encountering an aged denizen, Zadok Allen, he learns the incredible history of the town: in the middle nineteenth century Obed Marsh had come upon bizarre fish-frog hybrids in the Pacific who promised him great riches if they could be allowed to mate with the residents of Innsmouth. The resulting miscegenation produces hideous physical and psychological aberrations. Later, Olmstead’s snooping is detected and he is forced to flee precipitately from the hotel in which he is lodged. He escapes, but some time later he discovers that he himself is related to the Innsmouth people: he finds himself developing the ‘Innsmouth look’. He makes the fateful decision not to kill himself but to return to Innsmouth and join his hybrid relations.

‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ is Lovecraft’s greatest tale of degeneration; but the causes for that degeneration here are quite different from what we have seen earlier. This is clearly a cautionary tale on the ill effects of miscegenation, or the sexual union of different races, and as such may well be considered a vast expansion and subtilization of the plot of ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’ (1920). It is, accordingly, difficult to deny a suggestion of racism running all through the story. All through the tale the narrator expresses—and expects us to share— his revulsion at the physical grotesqueness of the Innsmouth people, just as in his own life Lovecraft frequently comments on the ‘peculiar’ appearance of all races but his own.

An examination of the literary influences upon the story can clarify how Lovecraft has vastly enriched a conception that was by no means his own invention. The use of hybrid fishlike entities was derived from at least two prior works for which Lovecraft always retained a fondness: Irvin S. Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’ (which Lovecraft read in the Cavalier in 1913 and praised in a letter to the editor) and Robert W. Chambers’s ‘The Harbor-Master’, a short story later included as the first five chapters of the episodic novel In Search of the Unknown

(1904). But in both these stories we are dealing with a single case of hybridism, not an entire community or civilization. This latter conception is at work in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (in John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908)), where a traveller coming to a small town in France discovers that the townspeople all turn into cats at night. This story, therefore, is probably a more dominant literary influence than those by Cobb or Chambers, in spite of the latter’s superficial similarity in motif.

The narrator, Olmstead, proves to be one of Lovecraft’s most carefully etched characters. The many mundane details that lend substance and reality to his personality are in large part derived from Lovecraft’s own temperament and, especially, from his habits as a frugal antiquarian traveller. Olmstead always ‘seek[s] the cheapest possible route’, and this is usually—for Olmstead as for Lovecraft—by bus. His reading up on Innsmouth in the library, and his systematic exploration of the town, parallel Lovecraft’s own thorough researches into the history and topography of the places he wished to visit and his frequent trips to libraries, chambers of commerce, and elsewhere for maps, guidebooks, and historical background.