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

But the supremely intolerable thing is the way the text is cut in the last instalment—to get an old serial out of the way quickly. Whole passages … are left out—the result being to decrease vitality & colour, & make the action mechanical. So many important details & impressions & touches of sensation are missing from the concluding parts that the effect is that of a flat ending. After all the adventure & detail before the encounter with the shoggoth in the abyss, the characters are shot up to the surface without any of the gradual experiences & emotions which make the reader feel their return to the world of man from the nighted aeon-old world of the Others. All sense of the duration & difficulty of the exhausted climb is lost when it is dismissed objectively in only a few words, with no hint of the fugitives’ reactions to the scenes through which they pass.¹⁰

What this passage shows is how conscious Lovecraft was of the emotional and psychological effect of prose and the need (in serious literature as opposed to pulp hackwork) to ground a weird or wonder tale in the most careful realism both of scene and of mood. Perhaps Lovecraft was trying to have his cake and eat it too in writing a story containing very advanced philosophical and scientific conceptions in ‘old-fashioned leisurely prose’ and then expecting it to appear intact in a science fiction pulp magazine.

What Lovecraft therefore did was to purchase three copies of each instalment and laboriously correct the text, either by writing in the missing portions and connecting the paragraphs together by pencil or by eliminating the excess punctuation by scratching it out with a penknife. This whole procedure took the better part of four days in early June. All this may seem somewhat anal-retentive, but Lovecraft wished to lend these three copies to colleagues who had not seen the typescript and would otherwise be reading only the adulterated Astounding text.

On top of this, the story itself was received relatively poorly by the readers of the magazine. This negative response has perhaps been exaggerated by later critics, but certainly there were a sufficient number of readers who failed to understand the point of the tale or felt it inappropriate for Astounding. Robert Thompson lays in with pungent sarcasm: ‘I am glad to see the conclusion to At the Mountains of Madness for reasons that would not be pleasant to Mr. Lovecraft.’ But Cleveland C. Soper, Jr, is the most devastating: ‘why in the name of science-fiction did you ever print such a story as At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft? Are you in such dire straits that you must print this kind of drivel? … If such stories as this … are what is to constitute the future yarns of Astounding Stories, then heaven help the cause of science-fiction!’

‘The Shadow out of Time’ appeared in the June 1936 issue of Astounding. Lovecraft incredibly says that ‘It doesn’t seem even nearly as badly mangled as the Mts.’,¹¹ and the one surviving annotated copy of the issue bears relatively few corrections; but the recently unearthed autograph manuscript makes it abundantly clear that this story suffered the same reparagraphing that At the Mountains of Madness received. Other errors are apparently due to Barlow’s inability to read Lovecraft’s handwriting when he prepared the typescript. It is a mystery why Lovecraft did not complain more vociferously about the corruption of this text, even though no actual passages were omitted. My feeling is that he may have felt so indebted to both Barlow (for typing the story) and Wandrei (for submitting it) that any complaints might have struck him as a sign of ingratitude. In any event, in a very short time other matters would distract him from such a relatively harmless matter.

‘The Shadow out of Time’ was received much more unfavourably than At the Mountains of Madness by readers. The August 1936 issue (the only one that contains any significant comment on the story) contains a barrage of criticism. Some individuals, however, either came to Lovecraft’s defence in regard to the attacks received by At the Mountains of Madness or had generous praise for the new story. These latter comments negate the claim that Lovecraft’s work was universally panned in Astounding.

Lovecraft, however, had little time to bother with the reaction of his work in the magazine: he knew that he was not likely to write very much more that would find favour with Astounding. In any case, other events closer to home were occupying his attention.