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

Of course, a book would have been a real means to both financial gain and literary recognition. In March 1932 such a prospect emerged for the third time, but once again it collapsed. Arthur Leeds had spoken about Lovecraft to a friend of his who was an editor at Vanguard. Vanguard queried Lovecraft, saying they wanted a novel, but Lovecraft (having already repudiated The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

and evidently not considering At the Mountains of Madness a true novel) said he had none at hand. Nevertheless, the firm did ask to see some of his short stories, so Lovecraft sent them ‘Pickman’s Model’, ‘The Dunwich Horror’, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. The stories eventually came back.

How was revision faring? Not especially well. After the work done for Zealia Bishop and Adolphe de Castro, no new would-be weird writers were appearing on the horizon. Of course, the revision of weird fiction was a relatively small facet of his revisory work, which centred on more mundane matter—textbooks, poetry, and the like. But the departure of David Van Bush as a regular client, along with Lovecraft’s unwillingness or lack of success in advertising his services, made this work very irregular.

The prospect of a regular position emerged some time in 1931, but again came to naught. The Stephen Daye Press of Brattleboro, Vermont (managed by Vrest Orton), gave him the job of revising and proofreading Leon Burr Richardson’s History of Dartmouth College (1932). Although Lovecraft received only $50.00 plus expenses for his work on the book, he thought that it ‘may prove the opening wedge for a good deal of work from the Stephen Daye’;⁶

but, again, this did not happen. Lovecraft’s revision on the Dartmouth College history really amounted to mere copyediting, for I cannot detect much actual Lovecraft prose in the treatise.

One very curious job Lovecraft had around this time was that of a ticket-seller in a movie theatre. A professor at Brown University, Robert Kenny (1902–83), maintained that he saw Lovecraft go downtown in the evening (he worked the night shift) and sit in a booth in one of the theatres, reading a book whenever he was not actually dispensing tickets. I asked Harry K. Brobst about the story, and he confirmed it, stating that Lovecraft admitted to him that he held such a job and saying that he actually liked it at the start, but that it did not last very long. Brobst does not know when Lovecraft held the position, but he believes it to have been in the early days of the depression, perhaps 1929–30.

Somehow or other, in spite of rejections and the precarious status of his revision work, Lovecraft managed to write another tale in February 1932, ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’. Its working title—’The Dreams of Walter Gilman’—tells the whole story. A mathematics student at Miskatonic University named Walter Gilman who lives in a peculiarly angled room in the old Witch House in Arkham begins experiencing bizarre dreams filled with sights, sounds, and shapes of an utterly indescribable cast; other dreams, much more realistic in nature, reveal a huge rat with human hands named Brown Jenkin, who appears to be the familiar of the witch Keziah Mason, who once dwelt in the Witch House. In the end he is killed by Brown Jenkin, although not before he has prevented Keziah from performing some kind of sacrificial offering involving a kidnapped baby.

One can agree wholeheartedly with Steven J. Mariconda’s labelling this story ‘Lovecraft’s Magnificent Failure’.⁷ In a sense, ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ is the most cosmic story Lovecraft ever wrote: he has made a genuine, and very provocative, attempt actually to visualize the fourth dimension, largely through the use of geometric imagery. The imaginative scope of the novelette is almost unbearably vast; but it is utterly confounded by slipshod writing and a complete confusion as to where the story is going. Lovecraft here lapses into hackneyed and overblown purple prose that sounds almost like a parody of his own style.

‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ is Lovecraft’s ultimate modernization of a conventional myth (witchcraft) by means of modern science. Fritz Leiber, who has written a perspicacious essay on the tale, notes that it is ‘Lovecraft’s most carefully worked out story of hyperspace-travel. Here (1) a rational foundation for such travel is set up; (2) hyperspace is visualized; and (3) a trigger for such travel is devised.’⁸ Leiber elaborates keenly on these points, noting that the absence of any mechanical device for such travel is vital to the tale, for otherwise it would be impossible to imagine how a ‘witch’ of the seventeenth century could have managed the trick; in effect, Keziah simply applied advanced mathematics and ‘thought’ herself into hyperspace.