I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

by S.T. Joshi

First, of course, is H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing, which we have already seen as an influence on “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Second, there is Henri Béraud’s obscure novel Lazarus (1925), which Lovecraft had in his library and which he read in 1928.[102] This novel presents a man, Jean Mourin, who remains in a hospital for sixteen years (for the period 1906–22) while suffering a long amnesia; during this time he develops a personality (named Gervais by the hospital staff) very different from that of his usual self. Every now and then this alternate personality returns; once Jean thinks he sees Gervais when he looks in the mirror, and later he thinks Gervais is stalking him. Jean even undertakes a study of split personalities, as Peaslee does, in an attempt to come to grips with the situation. (Parenthetically, the amnesia motif in “The Shadow out of Time” makes for a very provocative autobiographical connexion. Peaslee’s amnesia dates from 1908 to 1913, the exact time when Lovecraft himself, having had to withdraw from high school, descended into hermitry. Perhaps he had himself come to believe that another personality had taken over during this time.) A third dominant influence is not a literary work but a film: Berkeley Square (1933),