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

Another individual who established—or attempted to establish —various journals wavering uncertainly between the fan and semiprofessional levels was William L. Crawford (1911–84), with whom Lovecraft came in touch in the fall of 1933. Lovecraft would, with a certain good-natured maliciousness, poke fun at Crawford’s lack of culture by referring to him as Hill-Billy, presumably alluding both to Crawford’s residence in Everett, Pennsylvania (in the Alleghanies) and to his stolid insensitivity to highbrow literature. But Crawford meant well. Initially he proposed a non-paying weird magazine titled Unusual Stories but almost immediately ran into difficulties, even though he accepted Lovecraft’s ‘Celephaïs’ and ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ for the magazine. By early 1934 he proposed a second journal, Marvel Tales, either as a companion to Unusual or as a replacement for it. ‘Celephaïs’ appeared in the first issue (May 1934) of Marvel, while ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ finally appeared in the March–April 1935 issue. Two issues of Unusual Stories did emerge in 1935 (prefaced by a queer ‘advance issue’ in the spring of 1934), but contained no work by Lovecraft.

But Crawford’s bumbling attempts deserve commendation for at least one good result. In the fall of 1933 he asked Lovecraft for a nine-hundred-word autobiography for Unusual, evidently the first of a series. Lovecraft had great difficulty condensing his life and opinions into nine hundred words, so on 23 November he wrote a longer version of about three thousand words and somehow managed to trim this down to the requisite size. The shortened version, now lost, never appeared; but providentially Lovecraft sent the longer version to Barlow for preservation, and this is how we have the piece entitled ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’—easily Lovecraft’s finest autobiographical essay.

The revision of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ coincided with an extensive course of rereading and analysing the weird classics in an attempt to revive what Lovecraft believed to be his flagging creative powers. Rejections were still affecting him keenly, and he was beginning to feel written out. Perhaps he needed a break from fiction as he had had in 1908–17; or perhaps a renewed critical reading of the landmarks in the field might rejuvenate him. Whatever the case, Lovecraft produced several interesting documents as a result of this work. Probably the most significant is ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, Lovecraft’s canonical statement of his own goals for weird writing, as well as a schematic outline of how he himself wrote his own stories.

And yet, this research does not seem to have helped Lovecraft much in the short term, for the first actual story he wrote at this time—’The Thing on the Doorstep’, scribbled frenetically in pencil from 21 to 24 August 1933—is, like ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’, one of his poorest later efforts.

The tale, narrated in the first person by Daniel Upton, tells of Upton’s young friend Edward Derby, who in his thirties becomes attracted to and marries a young Innsmouth woman named Asenath Waite. It turns out that Asenath—who has anomalous hypnotic powers—is capable of thrusting her mind into the body of another person; the ousted mind then occupies her own body. Moreover, Asenath herself is in fact the mind of her father Ephraim: as his own death approached, he switched minds with his own daughter. Derby, a weak-willed individual, initially succumbs to this body-switching, but ultimately rebels by killing Asenath. But her mind is strong enough to retain life, and she again exchanges personalities with Edward, thrusting his mind into the decaying corpse of her own body. Edward, exercising superhuman strength, emerges from the grave and becomes the ‘thing on the doorstep’— approaching his friend Upton and, by way of a letter, urging him to kill the person that is occupying his own body.