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

Two other literary influences can be noted if only to be dismissed. It has frequently been assumed that ‘The Shadow out of Time’ is simply an extrapolation upon Wells’s The Time Machine; but there is really very little resemblance between the two works. Lovecraft did read Wells’s novel in 1925, but there is little in it that might be thought to have a direct bearing on his story. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) has been suggested as an influence on the enormous stretches of time reflected in the story, but Lovecraft did not read this work until August 1935, months after his tale’s completion.¹⁹

The core of the plot had already been conceived as early as 1930, emerging out of a discussion between Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith regarding the plausibility of stories involving time-travel. By March 1932 Lovecraft had devised the basic idea of mind-exchange over time, as outlined in another letter to Smith.²⁰ It is important to cite this letter in order to show that the conception of mindexchange over time had been devised before Lovecraft saw Berkeley Square, the only other work that might conceivably have influenced this point.

Lovecraft began the actual writing of ‘The Shadow out of Time’ in late 1934. He announces in November: ‘I developed that story mistily and allusively in 16 pages, but it was no go. Thin and unconvincing, with the climactic revelation wholly unjustified by the hash of visions preceding it.’²¹ What this sixteen-page version could possibly have been like is almost beyond conjecture. The disquisition about the Great Race must have been radically compressed, and this is what clearly dissatisfied Lovecraft about this version; for he came to realize that this passage, far from being an irrelevant digression, was really the heart of the story. Lovecraft finally wrote a second (and perhaps even a third) draft, completing it by late February 1935. Clearly this tale was one of the most difficult in genesis of any of Lovecraft’s tales. And yet, in many ways it is the culmination of his fictional career and by no means an unfitting capstone to a twenty-year attempt to capture the sense of wonder and awe he felt at the boundless reaches of space and time. Although Lovecraft would write one more original tale and work on several additional revisions and collaborations with colleagues, his life as a fiction writer ends, and ends fittingly, with ‘The Shadow out of Time’.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Caring about the Civilization (1929–37) In the summer of 1936 Lovecraft made an interesting admission:

I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression —and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been.¹

This is one of the few times Lovecraft explicitly mentions the Depression as signalling a radical change in his beliefs on politics, economics, and society; but perhaps he need not have made such an admission, for his letters from 1930 onward return again and again to these subjects.

There was little in Lovecraft’s personal circumstances that led him to the adoption of a moderate socialism; he did not—as many impoverished individuals did—become attracted to political or economic radicalism merely because he found himself destitute. First, he was never truly destitute—at least, not in comparison with many others in the Depression (including some of his own friends), who lost all their money and belongings and had no job and no roof over their heads; second, he scorned Communism as unworkable and culturally devastating, recommending an economic system considerably to the left of what the United States actually adopted under Roosevelt but nevertheless supporting the New Deal as the only plan of action that had any chance of being carried out.

And yet, Lovecraft’s conversion to socialism was not entirely surprising, first because socialism as a political theory and as a concrete alternative to capitalism was experiencing a resurgence during the 1930s, and second because Lovecraft’s brand of socialism still retained many of the aristocratic features that had shaped his earlier political thought. The latter point I shall take up presently; the former is worth elaborating briefly.