An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

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promptly goes to the madhouse and shoots the thing in Edward Derby’s body; this account is his confession and attempt at exculpation.

The story was written as part of HPL’s campaign, in the summer and fall of 1933, to rejuvenate his writing (and his entire literary outlook) by a renewed reading of the classics of weird fiction. The autograph manuscript was typed by a “delinquent revision client” ( SL4.310). This might be Hazel Heald, although it cannot be the same person who typed “The Dreams in the Witch House” for HPL: firstly, the typewriter faces on the existing typescripts are very different; secondly, the typescript for this story is extremely inaccurate, to such a degree that HPL’s chapter divisions have been overlooked, resulting in only five chapters instead of seven. These errors were not corrected until DH (1984 ed.).

The story appears to have two significant literary influences. One is H.B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928; first published in England in 1925 as The Remedy), a novel about a man who displays anomalous powers of hypnosis and mind-transference. An entry in HPL’s commonplace book (#158) records the plot-germ: “Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence over him. Kills him in defence of his soul—walls body up in ancient cellar—BUT—the dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body) changes bodies with him…leaving him a conscious corpse in cellar.” This is not exactly a description of the plot of The Shadowy Thing,but rather an imaginative extrapolation based upon it. In Drake’s novel, Avery Booth exhibits powers that seem akin to hypnosis, to such a degree that he can oust the mind or personality from another person’s body and occupy it. He does so on several occasions, and in the final episode he appears to have come back from the dead (he had been killed in a battle in World War I) and occupied the body of a friend and soldier who had himself been horribly mangled in battle. HPL has amended this plot by introducing the notion of mind-exchange:whereas Drake does not clarify what happens to the ousted mind when it is taken over by the mind of Booth, HPL envisages an exact transference whereby the ousted mind occupies the body of its possessor. The notion of mind-exchange between persons of different genders may have been derived from the other presumed literary influence, Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls(1911), which HPL owned. Here a scientist persuades his wife to undergo an experiment whereby their “souls” or personalities are exchanged by means of a machine he has built; but in the course of the experiment the man’s body dies and the machine is damaged. The rest of the novel is involved in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the woman (now endowed with her husband’s personality but lacking much of his scientific knowledge) to repair the machine. “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35) takes the notion a step further, describing the exchange of minds between a human being and an alien creature.

Some features of Edward Derby’s life supply a twisted version of HPL’s own childhood. But there are some anomalies in the portrayal of the youthful Edward Derby that need to be addressed. Upton refers to Derby as “the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known.” It is unlikely, given his characteristic modesty, that HPL would have made such a statement about a character modeled upon himself. Derby may be instead an amalgam of several of HPL’s associates. Consider this remark about Alfred Galpin: “He is intellectually exactly

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like mesave in degree. In degree he is immensely my superior” ( SL1.128); elsewhere he refers to Galpin—who was only seventeen when HPL first knew him in 1918—as “the most brilliant, accurate, steel-cold intellect I have ever encountered” ( SL1.256). Galpin never wrote “verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast” as Derby did as a boy, nor published a volume of poetry when he was eighteen. But Clark Ashton Smith created a sensation as a boy prodigy when he published The StarTreader and Other Poemsin 1912, when he was nineteen. And Smith was a close colleague of George Sterling, who—like Justin Geoffrey in the tale—died in 1926 (Sterling by suicide, Geoffrey of unknown causes). HPL’s mention that Derby’s “attempts to grow a moustache were discernible only with difficulty” recalls his frequent censures of the thin moustache Frank Belknap Long attempted for years to cultivate in the 1920s.