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

The Christmas season of 1934 was an unusually festive one at 66 College Street. Lovecraft and Annie had a tree for the first time in a quarter-century, and Lovecraft takes naive delight in describing its decoration: ‘All my old-time ornaments were of course long dispersed, but I laid in a new & inexpensive stock at my old friend Frank Winfield Woolworth’s. The finished product—with tinsel star, baubles, & tinsel draped from the boughs like Spanish moss— is certainly something to take the eye!’¹⁷

The New Year’s season of 1934–35 once more found Lovecraft in the New York area. R. H. Barlow was in town, and Lovecraft met him frequently. On New Year’s night Lovecraft had stayed up till 3 a.m. with Barlow revising a story of his—‘“Till A’ the Seas”’ (Californian, summer 1935). This fairly conventional ‘last man’ story is of interest only because Barlow’s typescript, with Lovecraft’s revisions in pen, survives, so that the exact degree of the latter’s authorship can be ascertained. Lovecraft has made no significant structural changes, merely making a number of cosmetic alterations in style and diction; but he has written the bulk of the concluding section, especially the purportedly cosmic reflections when the last man on earth finally meets his ironic death. It’s all pretty routine stuff—but Lovecraft was at this very time in the midst of writing something on somewhat the same theme but in a much more compelling way.

By the fall of 1934 Lovecraft had not written a work of original fiction for more than a year. His confidence in his own powers as a fiction writer were clearly at a low ebb. As the months dragged on, Lovecraft’s colleagues began to wonder whether any new story would ever emerge from his pen. In October E. Hoffmann Price urged Lovecraft to write another story about Randolph Carter, but Lovecraft declined.

Given all the difficulties Lovecraft was experiencing in capturing his ideas in fiction, it is not surprising that the writing of his next tale, ‘The Shadow out of Time’, took more than three months (10 November 1934 to 22 February 1935, as dated on the autograph manuscript) and went through two or perhaps three entire drafts. Moreover, the genesis of the story can be traced back at least four years before its actual composition. Before examining the painful birth of the story, let us gain some idea of its basic plot.

The story deals with Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor at Miskatonic University who suffers a five-year amnesia (1908–13). Regaining his memory, he gradually learns that his type of amnesia is analogous to that of a very small number of people throughout history who believe they have been psychically possessed by the Great Race, a group of entities shaped like ten-foot-high rugose cones who have perfected the technique of mind-exchange over time, and who cast their minds back and forth across time into the bodies of many different species in order to learn the secrets of the universe. On an expedition to Australia, Peaslee learns in a most poignant way that the Great Race actually existed: he discovers the manuscript he must have written (for it is ‘in my own handwriting’) millions of years ago as a captive mind of the coneshaped creatures.

The cosmic scope of this work—second only to At the Mountains of Madness in this regard—allows ‘The Shadow out of Time’ to attain a very high place in Lovecraft’s fictional work; and the wealth of circumstantial detail in the history, biology, and civilization of the Great Race is as convincing as in At the Mountains of Madness but perhaps still better integrated into the story. Indeed, the Great Race become the centrepiece of the story, in such a way that they—like the Old Ones of

At the Mountains of Madness—come to seem like the ‘heroes’ of the tale.

The basic mind-exchange scenario of the tale has been taken from at least three sources. First, of course, is H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing, which we have already seen as an influence on ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’. Second, there is Henri Béraud’s obscure novel Lazarus

(1925), which Lovecraft had in his library and which he read in 1928.¹⁸ This novel presents a man, Jean Mourin, who remains in a hospital for sixteen years while suffering a long amnesia; during this time he develops a personality very different from that of his usual self. A third dominant influence is not a literary work but a film: Berkeley Square (1933), which enraptured Lovecraft by its portrayal of a man whose mind somehow drifts back into the body of his ancestor in the eighteenth century. He saw the film four times, and was clearly much captivated by it.