‘These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.’
We suddenly realize why that ‘sunset city’ contained such otherwise curious features as gables and cobblestoned lanes. And we also realize why it is that the various fantastic creatures Carter meets along his journey—zoogs, gugs, ghasts, ghouls, moonbeasts— touch no chord in us: they are not meant to. They are all very charming, in that ‘Dresden-china’ way Lovecraft mistook Dunsany to be; but they amount to nothing because they do not correspond to anything in our memories and dreams. So all that Carter has to do—and what he does in fact do at the end—is merely to wake up in his Boston room, leave dreamland behind, and realize the beauty to be found on his doorstep.
Lovecraft’s resurrection of the Dunsanian idiom—not used since ‘The Other Gods’ (1921)—seems to me meant not so much as an homage as a repudiation of Dunsany, at least of what Lovecraft at this moment took Dunsany to be. Just as, when he wrote ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’ in 1922, he felt that the only escape from modern disillusion would be to ‘worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial’, so in 1926—after two years spent away from the New England soil that he now realized was his one true anchor against chaos and meaninglessness—he felt the need to reject these decorative artificialities. By 1930—only seven years after claiming, in pitiable wishfulfilment, that ‘Dunsany is myself’—he made a definitive break with his once-revered mentor:
What I do not think I shall use much in future is the Dunsanian pseudo-poetic vein—not because I don’t admire it, but because I don’t think it is natural to me. The fact that I used it only sparingly before reading Dunsany, but immediately began to overwork it upon doing so, gives me a strong suspicion of its artificiality so far as I am concerned. That kind of thing takes a better poet than I.2
In later years Lovecraft repudiated the novel, refusing several colleagues’ desires to prepare a typed copy of the manuscript. The text was not published until it was included in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943).
It is remarkable that, almost immediately after completing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in late January 1927, Lovecraft plunged into another ‘young novel’,3 The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Actually, at the outset he did not regard it as anything more than a novelette, but by the time it was finished on 1 March, it had reached 147 manuscript pages. At approximately 51,000 words, it is the longest work of fiction Lovecraft would ever write. While it does betray a few signs of haste, and while he would no doubt have polished it had he made the effort to prepare it for publication, the fact is that he felt so discouraged as to its quality—as well as its marketability—that he never made such an effort, and the work remained unpublished until four years after his death.
Perhaps, however, it is not so odd that Lovecraft wrote The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a blinding rush nine months after his return to Providence; for this novel—the second of his major tales (after ‘The Shunned House’) to be set entirely in the city of his birth—had been gestating for at least a year or more. I have mentioned that in August 1925 he was contemplating a novel about Salem; but then, in September, he read Gertrude Selwyn Kimball’s Providence in Colonial Times (1912) at the New York Public Library, and this rather dry historical work clearly fired his imagination. He was, however, still talking of the Salem idea just as he was finishing the DreamQuest; perhaps the Kimball book—as well, of course, as his return to Providence—led to a uniting of the Salem idea with a work about his hometown.
The novel concerns the attempts of the seventeenth-century alchemist Joseph Curwen to secure unholy knowledge by resurrecting the ‘essential saltes’ of the great thinkers of the world. Curwen also leaves his own essential saltes to be discovered by his twentieth-century descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, so that he is resurrected, only to be put down by the Ward family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett. The historical flashback—occupying the second of the five chapters—is as evocative a passage as any in Lovecraft’s work.
The house that serves the model for Charles Dexter Ward’s residence is the so-called Halsey mansion (the Thomas Lloyd Halsey house at 140 Prospect Street). In late August 1925 Lovecraft heard from Lillian that this mansion was haunted.4 Although now broken up into apartments, it is a superb late Georgian structure (c. 1800) fully deserving of Lovecraft’s encomium. Lovecraft was presumably never in the Halsey mansion, but had a clear view of it from 10 Barnes Street; looking northwestward from his aunt’s upstairs back window, he could see it distinctly.
One significant literary influence may be noted here: Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return (1910). Lovecraft had first read de la Mare (1873–1956) in the summer of 1926; of The Return he remarks in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’: ‘we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust’. In de la Mare’s novel, of course, there is actual psychic possession involved, as there is not in Charles Dexter Ward; and, although the focus in The Return is on the afflicted man’s personal trauma—in particular his relations with his wife and daughter—rather than the unnaturalness of his condition, Lovecraft has manifestly adapted the general scenario in his own work.
The apparent source for the character Charles Dexter Ward is a very interesting one. Of course, there are many autobiographical touches in the portraiture of Ward; but many surface details appear to be taken from a person actually living in the Halsey mansion at this time, William Lippitt Mauran, who was born in 1910. Lovecraft was probably not acquainted with Mauran, but it is highly likely that he observed Mauran on the street and knew of him. Mauran was a sickly child who spent much of his youth as an invalid, being wheeled through the streets in a carriage by a nurse. Moreover, the Mauran family also owned a farmhouse in Pawtuxet, exactly as Curwen is said to have done. Other details of Ward’s character also fit Mauran more closely than Lovecraft.5
The early parts of the novel in particular are full of autobiographical details. The opening descriptions of Ward as a youth are filled with echoes of Lovecraft’s own upbringing, although with provocative changes. For example, a description of ‘one of the child’s first memories’—’the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens’—is situated in Prospect Terrace, whereas in letters Lovecraft identifies this mystic vision as occurring on the railway embankment in Auburndale, Massachusetts, around 1892. Ward’s ecstatic return to Providence after several years abroad can scarcely be anything but a transparent echo of Lovecraft’s own return to Providence after two years in New York. The simple utterance that concludes this passage—’It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home’—is one of the most quietly moving statements in all Lovecraft’s work.