An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The third dominant influence is the film Berkeley Square(1933), which enraptured HPL by its portrayal of a man whose mind somehow drifts back into the body of his ancestor in the eighteenth century. This source in particular may have been critical, for it seems to have supplied HPL with suggestions on how he might embody his long-held belief (expressed in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”) that “ Conflict with timeseems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.” HPL first saw Berkeley Squarein November 1933. Initially he was much taken with the fidelity with which the eighteenth-century atmosphere was captured; but on seeing the film again, he began to detect some flaws in conception. Berkeley Squareis based on a play of that title by John L.Balderston (1929). It tells the story of Peter Standish, a man in the early twentieth century who is so fascinated with the eighteenth century—and in particular his own ancestor and namesake—that he somehow transports himself literally into the past and into the body of his ancestor. HPL detected two problems with the execution of the idea: (1) Where was the mind or personality of the eighteenth-century Peter Standish when the twentieth-century Peter was occupying his body? (2) How could the

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eighteenth-century Peter’s diary, written in part while the twentieth-century Peter was occupying his body, not take cognizance of the fact ( SL4.362–64)? In his story HPL seems to have striven to obviate these difficulties.

Other, smaller features in “The Shadow out of Time” may also have literary sources. Peaslee’s alienation from his family may echo Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return(1910), in which again an eighteenth-century personality seems to fasten itself upon the body of a twentieth-century individual, causing his wife to cease all relations with him. Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber(1927), in which a man attempts to recapture his entire past, is perhaps the source for the vast archives of the Great Race. Cline’s protagonist, Richard Pride, keeps an immense warehouse full of documents about his own life, and toward the end of the novel the narrator frantically traverses this warehouse before finding Pride killed by his own dog.

Two other “influences” can be noted if only to be dismissed. It has frequently been assumed that “The Shadow out of Time” is simply an extrapolation upon Wells’s The Time Machine. HPL read the novel in 1925, but there is little in it that has a direct bearing on his story. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men(1930) has been suggested as an influence on the enormous stretches of time reflected in the story, but HPL did not read this work until August 1935, months after the tale’s completion (see HPL to August Derleth, August 7, 1935; ms., SHSW).

Perhaps a significant literary influence can be found in HPL’s own works. The story could be thought of as an exhaustive expansion of the notion of “possession” by an extraterrestrial being as found in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). Minor allusions to other older stories appear, since many were being published only for the first time at the time HPL was writing “The Shadow out of Time.” The story’s amnesia motif makes for a provocative autobiographical connection. Peaslee’s amnesia dates from 1908 to 1913, the exact time when HPL himself, having had to withdraw from high school, descended into hermitry. The inability of the alien inhabiting Peaslee’s body to control its facial muscles may correlate to the facial tics that HPL suffered at that time.

HPL experienced considerable difficulty in writing the story. The core of the plot had been conceived as early as 1930, emerging from a discussion between HPL and Clark Ashton Smith regarding the plausibility of stories involving time travel. HPL noted: “The weakness of most tales with this theme is that they do not provide for the recording, in history, of those inexplicable events in the past which were caused by the backward time-voyagings of persons of the present & future” ( SL3.217). At that time he already envisioned the cataclysmic ending: “One baffling thing that could be introduced is to have a modern man discover, among documents exhumed from some prehistoric buried city, a mouldering papyrus or parchment written in English, & in his own handwriting.”

By March 1932 HPL had devised the basic idea of mind-exchange over time, as outlined in another letter to Smith: