New Clues

New Clues to Lovecraft's Role in
"Out of the Eons" and "The Crawling Chaos"

by Robert M. Price

Lovecraft scholarship moves on apace, and the "assured conclusions" of yesterday may be overturned by new evidence today. And precisely this has happened in the cases of two of Lovecraft's revision tales. New evidence enabling us to identify more closely HPL's contribution has recently been unearthed by S. T. Joshi and Steve Behrends. Joshi, in the process of perusing a set of unpublished letters from Lovecraft to Robert Barlow, happened upon this passage: "'Out of the Eons' may be regarded as a story of my own. The only thing supplied by the alleged authoress is the idea of an ancient mummy found to have a living brain" (April 30, 1935, John Hay Library). Of course, this is no real surprise. We already had a quote of Lovecraft to much the same effect: "I should say I did have a hand in it. . . . I wrote the damn thing!" (to Clark Ashton Smith, Selected Letters V, p. 130). But until now the exact nature of Hazel Heald's plot-germ was a matter of conjecture. It turns out to have been pretty minimal.

With "The Crawling Chaos" by "Elizabeth Berkeley" (Winifred V. Jackson) it is just the opposite. Here previous critical opinion had credited the entire tale to Lovecraft, supposing him merely to have incorporated some rudimentary ideas of Jackson's here and there. This was a natural inference from Lovecraft's remarks to Frank Belknap Long that "The Green Meadow and The Crawling Chaos were written around ideas of the amateur poet Winifred V. Jackson. . . . In prose technique she fails, hence can utilize story ideas only in collaboration with some technician" (Selected Letters I, p. 136).

Yet now Behrends has turned up a letter from Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth (April 14, 1937) that puts the matter in a new light. When he was planning The Outsider and Others, Derleth contacted Smith, requesting that he pass along any rare Lovecraft materials in his possession for inclusion in the volume. Smith obliged, sending him a copy of the April 1921 issue of The United Cooperative, which featured the original appearance of "The Crawling Chaos". This copy apparently had been sent to Smith by HPL himself, as Smith's remarks to Derleth imply: "HPL wrote the beginning and the end, as indicated on margins; the main portions being Mrs. Jackson's. . . . Though HPL's portions of 'The Crawling Chaos' are the best, the style is quite surprisingly sustained throughout Mrs. Jackson's part" (quoted by permission of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Estate of Clark Ashton Smith).

So, then, it would seem that the prose of the tale is not entirely Lovecraft's work after all. But does the new information from Smith comport with what Lovecraft's letters tell us? In fact, there is really no contradiction at all. The letter to Long excerpted above continues: "These [i.e., Jackson's] ideas are generally fantastic and terrible in the extreme, and so curiously like my own conceptions that I can develop and express them --- in some cases build upon them --- with so little difference that the result shows no sign of dual authorship" (Ibid.). HPL's judgment on this last point would seem to have been borne out in Smith's recognition that Jackson sustained the style throughout (though of course Smith had the order wrong --- it was Lovecraft, strictly speaking, who may be said to have maintained Jackson's style since the first draft was hers, as we will shortly see).

In the passage just quoted, Lovecraft speaks of "building upon" Jackson's "conceptions". There is evidence in another Lovecraft letter that he built upon something more solid that this. He sent to Rheinhardt Kleiner "an account of a Jacksonian dream . . . which I am some time going to weave into a horror story" (May 21, 1920, Selected Letters II, p. 116). Now this might mean either that he planned to use the mere idea of the dream, or that he intended to use the "account" itself as the basic draft. Smith's letter makes it clear that the latter is what Lovecraft did. Internal evidence also confirms this, as well as enabling us to determine with a fair degree of probability the extent of Lovecraft's contribution.

First we would expect to find a core narrative of a dream, most likely one that possesses some rudimentary plot within itself; otherwise it would not have commended itself for use in a story. Basically we seem to have just such a dream account beginning with paragraph three: "For a moment my surroundings seemed confused. . . ." It ends at the close of paragraph nine: ". . . I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet beneath its protecting shade." In between, we have the sort of fairly coherent dream that we are all likely to recall and share with others after we wake. In it the dreamer finds herself in a house set high upon a promontory where she can see that the pounding waves are rapidly demolishing the cliffs of the peninsula upon which the house is located. She escapes, fleeing inland along the beach, becoming terrified of wild animals she fears may lurk along the way. She is able to make it, and to resist a bizarre temptation to return to the imperiled house, only by fixing her attention upon a large sheltering palm tree, whose safety she at last reaches. In the course of this narration we find various marks of a genuine dream that would make less sense if introduced as story devices, e.g., this irrelevant incongruity: "Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me."

That the last six paragraphs (ten through fifteen) of the story are Lovecraft's is hinted by the presence of quasi-classical names reminiscent of the early "Dunsanian" fantasies, e.g., "Teloe", "Cytharion", "The Arinurian Streams". Also, here and in the first two paragraphs we seem to be able to detect more of Lovecraft's characteristic prose style than in the central seven paragraphs, though as Smith noted, the difference is hardly jarring.

Stylistic considerations aside, there are two readily discernable clues which would seem to make our division of the tale more certain. There are two subtle yet significant clashes of conception between the central seven paragraphs and the rest. First, if we begin reading at paragraph three, we naturally assume that this is an account of a nocturnal sleep dream, with the place-disorientation common to dreams ("For a moment my surroundings seemed confused," etc.). Eventually the narrator looks out a window. "I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium." Read by itself, that is, within the context only of paragraphs three through nine, this sentence would imply that the narrator is subject neither to fever nor to drug hallucinations. Indeed the point is that the sight beheld is so remarkable precisely because it is neither, yet in the "frame" for the dream account (paragraphs one and two) we find that the whole story is the account of an opium dream during a fever! Plainly Lovecraft's imagination was sparked by this phrase and it inspired his new setting, since none was explicitly supplied by Jackson.

Second, according to the central section, the danger to the narrator is that she will die in the collapse of the cliff on which her house is situated. So she runs to safety. But as of paragraph ten, we learn that the end of the world has come!

And, of course, it is also in this paragraph that the action takes a whole new direction, replete with quasi-classical gods and undeniably Lovecraftian phraseology like: "They have come down through the gloaming from the stars", "dark gods of the inner earth", etc. Not only so, but this paragraph (and with it Lovecraft's second section) begins with a fairly obvious "seam" indicating transition to new and discontinuous action: "There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror. . . ." Another such seam, naturally, occurs at the end of Lovecraft's first section, providing the transition to Jackson's section: "Then I opened my eyes." We may find ourselves reminded of the point in the film version of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and we pass from the black-and-white of her Kansas farmhouse to the vivid colors of Munchkinland.

Thanks to recent research by S. T. Joshi and Steve Behrends, we are now better able to determine exactly what Lovecraft contributed to "Out of the Eons" and "The Crawling Chaos": in the case of the former, virtually the whole of the story, in the case of the latter, just over half, rather less than had been suspected. We can be grateful for the new light shed on these two Lovecraft revisions, even while we wait and hope for more such illuminating discoveries.