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

What, then, did Lovecraft learn from Dunsany? The answer may not be immediately evident, since it took several years for the Dunsany influence to be assimilated, and some of the most interesting and important aspects of the influence are manifested in tales that bear no superficial resemblance to Dunsany. Perhaps Lovecraft’s most perceptive account of Dunsany’s influence on him occurs in a letter of March 1920: ‘The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me.’¹⁸ This comment was made in a discussion of Lovecraft’s verse writing; and it is no accident that his verse output declined dramatically after 1920. There had been a dichotomy between Lovecraft’s fictional and poetic output ever since he had resumed the writing of stories: how could tales of supernatural horror have any relation to the empty but superficially ‘pretty’ Georgianism of his verse? With the decline of verse writing, that dichotomy disappears—or, at least, narrows—as the quest for pure beauty now finds expression in tales.

More to the point, Lovecraft learned from Dunsany how to enunciate his philosophical, aesthetic, and moral conceptions by means of fiction, beyond the simple cosmicism of ‘Dagon’ or ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’. The relation of dream and reality—dimly probed in ‘Polaris’—is treated exhaustively and poignantly in ‘Celephaïs’; the loss of hope is etched pensively in ‘The White Ship’ and ‘The Quest of Iranon’. Lovecraft found Time and the Gods ‘richly philosophical’,¹⁹

and the whole of Dunsany’s early—and later—work offers simple, affecting parables on fundamental human issues. Lovecraft would in later years express his philosophy in increasingly complex ways as his fiction itself gained in breadth, scope, and richness.

In spite of his own assertions to the contrary, Lovecraft’s ‘Dunsanian’ fantasies are far more than mechanical pastiches of a revered master: they reveal considerable originality of conception while being only superficially derived from Dunsany. Interestingly, Dunsany himself came to this conclusion: when Lovecraft’s work was posthumously published in book form, Dunsany came upon it and confessed that he had ‘an odd interest in Lovecraft’s work because in the few tales of his I have read I found that he was writing in my style, entirely originally & without in any way borrowing from me, & yet with my style & largely my material’.²⁰ Lovecraft would have been grateful for the acknowledgment.

During this period Lovecraft of course did not cease to write tales of supernatural horror, and a number of these display his increasing grasp of short story technique; some of them are also rather good in their own right. One of the most well-known, at least in terms of its genesis, is ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, written in late December 1919 and, apparently, a virtual literal transcript of a dream in which Lovecraft and Samuel Loveman explore some centuried graveyard, during which Loveman descends the steps of an ancient tomb, never to return. It is an effective, if predictable, story, and first appeared in W. Paul Cook’s Vagrant for May 1920.

‘The Temple’ (probably written in the fall of 1920) requires little discussion, being a confused tale of a German U-boat commander who descends to the bottom of the ocean and comes upon a city built by some ancient civilization. The story is poorly conceived, having an excess of supernatural phenomena that are never adequately explained. Considerably better is ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’ (also written in late 1920), a compact story of miscegenation: Sir Arthur Jermyn learns to his horror that his ancestor, Sir Wade Jermyn, had, during his explorations of the Congo, married a ‘white ape’, leading to the physical and psychological aberrations of the Jermyn line. Curiously enough, Lovecraft admits that the story was actually inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

(1919).²¹ Evidently Lovecraft found Anderson’s exposure of the family secrets of a small American town a bit tame, so he devised a much darker ‘skeleton’ in the Jermyn closet.

‘From Beyond’ (written on 16 November 1920) is almost a caricature of the ‘mad scientist’ tale, but is of interest in that it was clearly derived from some passages in Elliot’s Modern Science and Materialism, particularly those referring to the notion that most material objects consist largely of empty space. In the story, Crawford Tillinghast devises a machine that breaks down the barriers that prevents us from seeing all the loathsome entities that pass by and through us at every moment.