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.
But if Derby’s youth and young manhood are an amalgam of HPL and some of his closest friends, his marriage to Asenath Waite clearly brings certain aspects of HPL’s marriage to Sonia Greene to mind. Sonia was clearly the more strong-willed member of the couple; it was certainly from her initiative that the marriage took place at all and that HPL uprooted himself from Providence to come to live in New York. The objections of Derby’s father to Asenath—and specifically to Derby’s wish to marry her —may dimly echo objections of HPL’s aunts to his marriage to Sonia. (Such objections can only be inferred from the tenor of some of HPL’s letters to his aunts.)
In one sense the story is a reprise of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:the attempt by Asenath (in Derby’s body) to pass herself off as Edward in the madhouse is precisely analogous to Joseph Curwen’s attempts to maintain that he is Charles Dexter Ward.
One glancing note in the story that has caused considerable misunderstanding is Upton’s remark about Asenath: “Her crowning rage…was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers.” This sentiment is clearly expressed as Asenath’s (who, let us recall, is only Ephraim in another body), and need not be attributed to HPL. A decade earlier HPL had indeed uttered some silly remarks on women’s intelligence: “Females are in Truth much given to affected Baby Lisping…They are by Nature literal, prosaic, and commonplace, given to dull realistick Details and practical Things, and incapable alike of vigorous artistick Creation and genuine, first-hand appreciation” ( SL1.238). But by the 1930s he had come to a more sensible position: “I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences…. The feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is probably little if any inferior in total quality” ( SL5.64).
HPL was so dissatisfied with the story upon its completion that he refused to submit it anywhere. At last, in the summer of 1936, when Julius Schwartz proposed to HPL to market some of his tales in England, HPL reluctantly submitted the story, along with “The Haunter of the Dark,” to Farnsworth Wright of WT,who promptly accepted both.
See S.T.Joshi, “Autobiography in Lovecraft,” LSNo. 1 (Fall 1979): 7–19 (esp. 12–15); Donald R.Burleson, “The Thing: On the Doorstep,” LSNo. 33 (Fall 1995): 14–18.
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Thorfinnssen, Georg.
In At the Mountains of Madness,the captain of the barque Miskatonic,one of the supply ships for the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31.
Thorndike, Henry.
In “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” the village undertaker who invents a chemical that can simulate death in a person who remains alive and conscious. He accidentally injects himself with his chemical and is buried alive.
Thornton,———.
In “The Rats in the Walls,” a “psychic investigator” brought in by Delapore to investigate the crypt beneath Exham Priory.