“Thing on the Doorstep, The“

Thing on the Doorstep, The
   Novelette (10,830 words); written August 2124, 1933. First published in WT(January 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2 and TD.
   The narrator, Daniel Upton, tells of his young friend Edward Derby, who since boyhood has displayed a remarkable aesthetic sensitivity toward the weird, in spiteor perhaps becauseof the overprotective coddling of his parents. Derby attends Miskatonic University and becomes a moderately recognized fantaisisteand poet. He frequently visits Upton, using a characteristic knockthree raps followed by two more after an intervalto announce himself. When he is thirty-eight he meets Asenath Waite, a young woman at Miskatonic, about whom strange things are whispered: she has anomalous hypnotic powers, creating the momentary impression in her subjects that they are in her body looking across at themselves. Even stranger things are whispered of her father, Ephraim Waite, who died under very peculiar circumstances. Over his fathers opposition, Derby marries Asenathwho is one of the Innsmouth Waitesand settles in a home in Arkham. They seem to undertake very recondite and perhaps dangerous occult experiments. Moreover, people observe curious changes in both of them: whereas Asenath is extremely strong-willed and determined, Edward is flabby and weak-willed; but on occasion he is seen driving Asenaths car (even though he did not previously know how to drive) with a resolute and almost demonic expression, and conversely Asenath is seen from a window looking unwontedly meek and defeated. One day Upton receives a call from Maine: Derby is there in a crazed state, and Upton has to fetch him because Derby has suddenly lost the ability to drive. On the trip back Derby tells Upton a wild tale of Asenath forcing his mind from his body and going on to suggest that Asenath is really Ephraim, who forced out the mind of his daughter and placed it in his own dying body. Abruptly Derbys ramblings come to an end, as ifshut off with an almost mechanical click.” Derby takes the wheel from Upton and tells him to pay no attention to what he may just have said.
   Some months later Derby visits Upton again. He is in a tremendously excited state, claiming that Asenath has gone away and that he will seek a divorce. Around Christmas of that year Derby breaks down entirely. He cries out:My brain! My brain! God, Danits tuggingfrom beyondknockingclawingthat she-devileven nowEphraim….” He is placed in a mental hospital and shows no signs of recovery until one day he suddenly seems to be better; but, to Uptons disappointment and even latent horror, Derby is now in that curiouslyenergisedstate such as he had been during the ride back from Maine. Upton is in an utter turmoil of confusion when one evening he receives a phone call. He cannot make out what the caller is sayingit sounds likeglubglub”—but a little later someone knocks at his door, using Derbys familiar three-and-two signal. This creatureafoul, stunted parodyof a human beingis wearing one of Derbys old coats, which is clearly too big for it. It hands Upton a sheet of paper that explains the whole story: Derby had killed Asenath to escape her influence and her plans to switch bodies with him permanently; but death did not extinguish Asenath/Ephraims mind, for it emerged from the body, thrust itself into the body of Derby, and hurled his mind into Asenaths corpse, buried in the cellar of their home. Now, with a final burst of determination, Derby (in the body of Asenath) has climbed out of the shallow grave and is now delivering this message to Upton, since he was unable to communicate with him on the phone. Upton promptly goes to the madhouse and shoots the thing in Edward Derbys body; this account is his confession and attempt at exculpation.
   The story was written as part of HPLs campaign, in the summer and fall of 1933, to rejuvenate his writing (and his entire literary outlook) by a renewed reading of the classics of weird fiction. The autograph manuscript was typed by adelinquent revision client” ( SL4.310). This might be Hazel Heald, although it cannot be the same person who typedThe Dreams in the Witch Housefor HPL: firstly, the typewriter faces on the existing typescripts are very different; secondly, the typescript for this story is extremely inaccurate, to such a degree that HPLs chapter divisions have been overlooked, resulting in only five chapters instead of seven. These errors were not corrected until DH (1984 ed.).
   The story appears to have two significant literary influences. One is H.B. Drakes 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 HPLs commonplace book (\#158) records the plot-germ:Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence over him. Kills him in defence of his soulwalls body up in ancient cellarBUTthe dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body) changes bodies with himleaving 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 Drakes novel, Avery Booth exhibits powers that seem akin to hypnosis, to such a degree that he can oust the mind or personality from another persons 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 Pains An Exchange of Souls(1911), which HPL owned. Here a scientist persuades his wife to undergo an experiment whereby theirsoulsor personalities are exchanged by means of a machine he has built; but in the course of the experiment the mans 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 husbands personality but lacking much of his scientific knowledge) to repair the machine. “The Shadow out of Time” (193435) takes the notion a step further, describing the exchange of minds between a human being and an alien creature.
   Some features of Edward Derbys life supply a twisted version of HPLs own childhood. But there are some anomalies in the portrayal of the youthful Edward Derby that need to be addressed. Upton refers to Derby asthe 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 HPLs associates. Consider this remark about Alfred Galpin:He is intellectually exactly like mesave in degree. In degree he is immensely my superior” ( SL1.128); elsewhere he refers to Galpinwho was only seventeen when HPL first knew him in 1918asthe most brilliant, accurate, steel-cold intellect I have ever encountered” ( SL1.256). Galpin never wroteverse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid castas 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, wholike Justin Geoffrey in the taledied in 1926 (Sterling by suicide, Geoffrey of unknown causes). HPLs mention that Derbysattempts to grow a moustache were discernible only with difficultyrecalls his frequent censures of the thin moustache Frank Belknap Long attempted for years to cultivate in the 1920s.
   But if Derbys 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 HPLs 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 Derbys father to Asenathand specifically to Derbys wish to marry hermay dimly echo objections of HPLs aunts to his marriage to Sonia. (Such objections can only be inferred from the tenor of some of HPLs letters to his aunts.)
   In one sense the story is a reprise of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:the attempt by Asenath (in Derbys body) to pass herself off as Edward in the madhouse is precisely analogous to Joseph Curwens attempts to maintain that he is Charles Dexter Ward.
   One glancing note in the story that has caused considerable misunderstanding is Uptons remark about Asenath:Her crowning ragewas 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 Asenaths (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 womens intelligence:Females are in Truth much given to affected Baby LispingThey 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 withThe Haunter of the Dark,” to Farnsworth Wright of WT,who promptly accepted both.
   See S.T.Joshi, “Autobiography in Lovecraft,” LS No. 1 (Fall 1979): 719 (esp. 1215); Donald R.Burleson, “The Thing: On the Doorstep,” LS No. 33 (Fall 1995): 1418.

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