“The Shadow Out of Time”

It was the latest written of Lovecraft’s most famous tales, and I continue to think it’s the weakest of them.

The problem as I see it is the same one found in the entire latter half of “At the Mountains of Madness.” Namely, it ceases to be frightening allusions and hints at barely describable semi-entities and at nuclear chaos exceeding the utmost modern delvings of Planck and Einstein, and other such formulations (which are ultimately Lovecraft’s greatest literary strength).

Instead, it starts looking too much like your smart 15-year-old nephew’s role-playing campaign: actively fleshed-out and detailed worlds in which far too much information is given about the properties and doings of these other races. In short, it starts to sound too much like the pulp fiction of which Lovecraft is often wrongly accused of being guilty in all of his stories (even by shrewd readers like Edmund Wilson).

The low point for me, I think, is the part in “The Shadow Out of Time” when one of the star-headed monsters from “At the Mountains of Madness” is referred to by a proper name. We really didn’t need to know that they had names. Nor did we need to hear in detail about the judicial system of the tall, rugose, cone-shaped beings and their manner of handling files and pens. Things do not become scarier the more we know about them.

This raises the question of whether Lovecraft had any additional great stories in him when he died of cancer at age 46, in early 1937. Though it may sound a touch cruel to say such a thing about one of my favorite writers, my guess is “probably not.” He had an extremely powerful peak period from around 1925-1932, quite a bit shorter than in most visionary intellectual careers, but a peak period that I think is pretty sharply demarcated in quality from both the preceding and ensuing years.

Another problem with “The Shadow Out of Time” is that it hinges too much on the plot idea. At his best, Lovecraft wrote passages that are great even when taken completely out of context, but there are many fewer such passages in “The Shadow Out of Time,” which I’ve long felt myself less interested in repeatedly rereading than the other major stories.

My vote for most underrated Lovecraft tale: “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Sure, it could stand to have a few subpar passages trimmed out as well, but it’s hard to pull off a Lovecraftian story set mostly in the 18th century (despite his great fondness for that century) and it seems to me that he brilliantly succeeds.

I continue to think that one of the most interesting tasks for an American Literature specialist would be a parallel biography of Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler. They’re almost exactly the same age, but Lovecraft stopped writing pretty much when Chandler started. Both ascended from the ranks of pulp to do first-rate literary work. Lovecraft was a recluse smothered by aged female relatives; Chandler was a hard-drinking ladies’ man. Both married older women, though in Chandler’s case there seems to have been some deception surrounding that point. Both were excellent writers of letters. Lovecraft was a worldly failure, while Chandler was eventually a Hollywood success story. In some ways they were polar opposites as people, but in other ways they performed similar tasks.