Dreams and Fancies [Unknown Binding]

H.P. Lovecraft (Author)

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• Publisher: Arkham House; First Edition edition (1962)
• ASIN: B0014LJQKE
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Lovely Wee Book, January 21, 2010

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W. H. Pugmire "I never can be tied to raw, ne... (Sesqua Valley) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dreams and fancies (Hardcover)

There are very few early Arkham House Lovecraft books that I have ached to own -- but this is one of them. Much of its charm, for me, comes from Richard Taylor's wonderful jacket illustration: the man is so good that one is tempted to buy a book as lousy as the original TRAIL OF CTHULHU just to have his jacket! (But one doesn't...) This 1962 AH book collects some interesting Lovecraftian items, combining them with a theme of Dreams. Perhaps Derleth's introduction best describes the book, and so I reproduce it in whole:

For H. P. Lovecraft, wrote Donald Wandrei not long ago, "There was no such thing as 'sleep' in the ordinary meaning or usage of the word; he passed directly from the waking world into an equally vivid and detailed dream-world, complete with conversations, odors, colors, and the feel of objects and taste of viands, but always with fantastic settings and adventures toward impending dooms and horrors in dreams that were seldom chaotic or jumbled, but often developed step by step like well-constructed narratives."
In a very real sense, H. P. Lovecraft lived in a world as remote as possible from the unpleasant realities of life in the twentieth century; in the vast, meaningless cosmos in which mankind existed, motelike, as he was wont to put it, the most important reality to him was the world of his childhood, one filled with wonder, a world in which he imagined himself living in ancient Greek or Roman times--and, a little later, in eighteenth century England,--one in which the terror of the unknown was as omnipresent as the sense of adventurous expectancy was an integral part of his workaday life.
Lovecraft's dreams provoke speculation, inevitably. Was it but coincidence, for example, that most of his dreams took place in the cold months?--or was there no relation between this fact and the extreme sensitivity to cold which plagued Lovecraft? The overwhelming majority of Lovecraft's dreams can be traced directly to his childhood fancies and fears, which Lovecraft himself certainly recognized when he wrote January 10, 1937, to Willis Conover, Jr., "My dreams usually go back very far in time, and it takes a long while for any new experience or scene or acquaintance to get worked into them. At least 3/4ths of them are laid at my birthplace, where I haven't lived since 1904, and involve those who were living in those days. But the real scenes frequently merge into unknown and fantastic realms, and include landscapes and architectural vistas which could scarcely be on this planet. At times I also have HISTORICAL dreams -- with a setting in various remote periods."--like the periods of which he read so voraciously when, as a boy, he was left for hours among his Grandfather Whipple Phillips' books.
Lovecraft's was such a world as merged readily with the many worlds of his dreams and fancies, but his dreams were not, contrary to a belief which has spread among his readers, very often translatable into fiction. None knew this better than Lovecraft himself. On June 11, 1920, he wrote to his old friend, Rheinhart Kleiner, "As to dreams--the only trouble with fictionising them is plot-invention. In spite of all the value of imagery, the real crux of a story is the PLOT--a connected, climatic unit which must move along with relentless coherence and suspense to a thrill of horror and surprise which shall impress the reader more than all the fine speech and scenery combined. The plot must be stronger than the atmosphere, else the 'story' will degenerate into a mere fantasy. It is far easier to write a prose-poem than to create real stories, and I am determined to make my products STORIES in every sense of the word. In RANDOLPH CARTER I did my best. I cannot always reach that level, but I can at least avoid such vague junk as my MEMORY. De Quincey is familiar to me, but impressed me more with his language and erudition than with his fancy. I never took opium, but if I can't beat him for DREAMS from the age of three or four up, I am a dashed liar! Space, strange cities, weird landscapes, unknown monsters, hideous ceremonies, Oriental and Egyptian gorgeousness, and indefinable mysteries of life, death, and torment, were daily--or rather nightly--commonplaces to me before I was six years old. Today the percentage of dreams in which I am an observer and not an actor has slightly risen."
Many years of dreams in no way altered this opinion. Less than a year before his death, he wrote to Henry Kuttner on May 18, 1936, "Dreams are generally too vague & incoherent for literary exploitation, but once in a while something almost ready-made comes along. I am a very vivid dreamer, & have frequently made use of dreams in stories. THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER is virtually a literal transcript of a nightmare I experienced in December 1919. Another singular dream of mine (Oct. 1927) about Roman Spain has been incorporated by (Frank Belknap) Long into his THE HORROR FROM THE HILLS. In other tales I have used fragments of less complete nocturnal visions--& other dreams are jotted down in my notebook for possible future use."
Yet Lovecraft's dreams did profoundly influence his creative life in that they shaped his stories. Evidence exists that this is so, quite apart from that to be adduced in a study of his fiction. On April 16, 1936, he wrote to Henry Kuttner, "I believe that--because of the foundation of most weird concepts in dream-phenomena--the best weird tales are those in which the narrator or central figure remains (as in actual dream) largely passive, & witnesses or experiences a stream of bizarre events which--as the case may be--flows past him, just touches him, or engulfs him utterly."
In point of fact, comparatively few of Lovecraft's stories were created wholly out of dreams. The most complete of them was, as Lovecraft has pointed out, THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER. The most ambitious of them was the novelette, THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME. The remainder of those stories which derive wholly from dreams are comparatively slight pieces, though it is true, as he has stated to correspondents, that fragments of dreams found their way into many of his stories.
This collection offers the most outstanding of the dreams, in the most detailed accounts to be found in Lovecraft's letters, together with certain fancies--(like that pursued in letters of over two years' duration to Clark Ashton Smith, following Smith's presentation of one of his sculptures to Lovecraft, included here to illustrate the thin line between Lovecraft's dreams and his waking fancies)--and the stories recognizably deriving from those dreams. It is presented here as an associational item for Lovecraft completists."

How fascinating to watch Derleth continue to weave his legends concerning Lovecraft, some of which are absurd. I bought my copy of this book in the dealer's room at WFC last year, and when I shew'd S. T. Joshi that line in the introduction, "...most of his dreams took place in the cold months..." the world's leading Lovecraft scholar snorted, "NONSENSE!" It makes one pause & ponder, how much of the nonsense that compromises so much of the "Lovecraft legend" has its genesis in Derleth's dreams & fancies that he purported to be biographical fact?

Nonetheless, this wee book is quite delightful. This is, I think, the first book appearance of "The Thing in the Moonlight," a spurious work that is no longer included in modern collections of Lovecraft's fiction (the beginning & ending framework is not the writing of H. P. Lovecraft) -- and in its appearance here we find, directly below the title, a line in italics which reads, "He dreamed--but could not awake". The selection of letters is really great, especially those to Clark Ashton Smith. It's a great package, this short book -- & it will only increase in value, abundantly, as strange aeons pass.