An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The most significant way the Old Ones are identified with human beings is in Dyer’s historical digression, specifically in regard to the Old Ones’ social and economic organization. In many ways they represent a utopia toward which HPL hoped humanity could aspire. The sentence “Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic” establishes that HPL had himself by this time converted to moderate socialism. The Old Ones’ civilization is founded upon slavery of a sort, and there is some suggestion that the condition of the shoggoths might, in part, resemble that of African Americans. The exhaustive history of the Old Ones on this planet, portraying their rise and fall, suggests HPL’s absorption of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West,with its similar emphasis on the inexorable rise and fall of successive civilizations.

In terms of HPL’s work, the novel makes explicit what has been evident all along—most of the “gods” of his mythology are merely extraterrestrials and that their followers (including the authors of the books of occult lore to which reference is so frequently made by HPL and others) are mistaken as to their true nature. Robert M.Price, who first noted this “demythologizing” feature in HPL, has

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pointed out that At the Mountains of Madnessdoes not make any radical break in this pattern, but it does emphasize the point more clearly than elsewhere.

The novel has been called a “sequel” to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym;but, at least in terms of plot, it cannot be considered such: it picks up on very little of Poe’s enigmatic work except for the cry “Tekeli-li!,” as unexplained in Poe as in HPL, and the allusion to Mt. Erebus as Yaanekfrom “Ulalume.” It is not clear that Pymeven influenced the work in any significant way. Jules Zanger has observed that the novel is “no completion [of Pym] at all: it might be better described as a parallel text, the two tales coexisting in a shared context of allusion” (“Poe’s Endless Voyage: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Papers on Language and Literature22, No. 3 [Summer 1986]: 282). HPL declared that the short novel was “capable of a major serial division in the exact middle” (HPL to August Derleth, March 24, [1931]; ms., SHSW), suggesting that, at least subconsciously, he envisioned the work as a two-part serial in WT. But Farnsworth Wright rejected it in July 1931. HPL reacted bitterly (see SL3.395) and let the novel sit for years. Then, in the fall of 1935, the young Julius Schwartz, acting as agent, took it to F.Orlin Tremaine, editor of Astounding Stories,who accepted it at once, apparently without reading it (see Will Murray, “Julius Schwartz on Lovecraft,” CryptNo. 76 [Hallowmas 1990]: 14–18). It was published, however, with severe editorial tampering: HPL’s long paragraphs were split up, punctuation was altered, and (toward the end) several passages, amounting to about 1,000 words, were omitted. HPL fumed at the alterations, calling Tremaine “that god-damn’d dung of a hyaena” (HPL to R.H. Barlow, June 4, 1936; ms., JHL). He corrected by hand his three sets of Astounding,but in the end did not correct many alterations (e.g., the Americanization of his British spellings). These corrected copies were used as the basis of the first Arkham House edition, but even so the text contained nearly 1,500 errors, mostly in spelling and punctuation, but also in the omission of two small passages toward the beginning. The text was restored (based upon the surviving typescript except for passages where HPL made demonstrable revisions on scientific points) in MM (1985 edition).