An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

In regard to the strange transformation of Thomas Olney, which is at the heart of the tale, the Terrible Old Man provides a hint: “somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney.” The body has returned to the normal round of things, but the spirit has remained with the occupant of the strange high house in the mist; the encounter with Neptune and Nodens has been an apotheosis, and Olney realizes that it is in this realm of nebulous wonder that he truly belongs. His body is now an empty shell, without soul and without imagination: “His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it.” This tale could be read as a sort of mirrorimage of “Celephaïs”: whereas Kuranes had to die in the real world in order for his spirit to attain his fantasy realm, Olney’s body survives intact but his spirit stays behind.

HPL had submitted the story to WTin July 1927 but it was rejected. In 1929, he let W.Paul Cook have it for the second number of The Recluse(it had even been typeset), but when it became clear in the spring of 1931 that the issue would never appear, HPL resubmitted the story to WT,which accepted it and paid Lovecraft $55.

See Donald R.Burleson, “Strange High Houses: Lovecraft and Melville,” CryptNo. 80 (Eastertide 1992): 25–26, 29; S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft and Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez” CryptNo. 82 (Hallowmas 1992): 3–6; Cecelia Drewer, “Symbolism of Style in ‘The Strange High House in the Mist,’” LSNo. 31 (Fall 1994): 17–21; Nicholaus Clements, “‘The Strange High House in the Mist’: Glowing Eyes and the Prohibition of the Impossible,” LSNo. 40 (Fall 1998): 11–15. Strauch, Carl Ferdinand

(1908–1989), literary scholar and brief correspondent of HPL (1931–33). Strauch received a B.A. from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and was put in touch with HPL by his friend Harry K.Brobst, who at the time also lived in Allentown. Strauch visited HPL in Providence in September 1932, not long after he published a book of poetry, Twenty-nine Poems(1932). He conveyed to HPL much of the “hex” legendry of the Pennsylvania Dutch region. HPL reports in a letter to Robert Bloch ([c. late June 1933])

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that Strauch was working on a “realistic novel,” but this evidently came to nothing. Although cordial, the correspondence came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1933: it appears that Strauch was discouraged at the sharp criticism that HPL, Brobst, and E.Hoffmann Price delivered upon a story of Strauch’s during a session in Providence in August 1933. Strauch went on to receive a Ph.D. from Yale (1946) and to become a leading scholar on Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was on the editorial board of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson(Harvard University Press, 1971f.) and wrote Characteristics of Emerson, Transcendental Poet(1975) and other monographs, as well as many articles in scholarly journals. He taught at Lehigh University from 1934 to 1974.

“Street, The.”

Short story (2,250 words); written in late 1919. First published in the Wolverine(December 1920); rpt. National Amateur(January 1922); first collected in The Lovecraft Collectors Library,Volume 2 (1953); corrected text in D