A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Are the aunts to be criticized for their attitude? Certainly, many of those today who believe that the acquisition of money is the highest moral good that human beings can attain will find it absurd, incomprehensible, and offensively class-conscious; but the 1920s in New England was a time when standards of propriety meant more than an income, and the aunts were simply adhering to the codes of behaviour by which they had led their entire lives. If anyone is to be criticized, it is Lovecraft: whether he agreed with his aunts on the issue or not (and, in spite of his Victorian upbringing, my feeling is that at this time he did not), he should have worked a little harder to express his own views and to act as an intermediary so that some compromise could have been worked out. Instead, he seems to have stood idly by and let his aunts make all the decisions for him. In all honesty, it is highly likely that he really wished the marriage to end at this point—or, at the very least, that he was perfectly content to see it continue only by correspondence, as indeed it did for the next several years. All he wanted was to come home; Sonia could shift for herself.

How are we to judge Lovecraft’s two-year venture into matrimony? There is, certainly, enough blame to spread to all parties: to the aunts for being cool to the entire matter and for possibly failing to provide adequate support—either financial or emotional—to the struggling couple; to Sonia for feeling that she could mould Lovecraft to suit her wishes; and, of course, to Lovecraft himself for being generally thoughtless, spineless, emotionally remote, and financially incompetent. There is nothing but circumstantial evidence for this first point; but let us consider the last two more carefully.

Sonia’s memoir makes it clear that she found in Lovecraft a sort of raw material which she wished to shape to her own desires. The fact that a great many women enter into marriage with such conceptions is no great mitigating factor. In essence, she wanted to remake his entire personality—ostensibly to benefit him, but really to make him more satisfactory to herself. She bluntly declared that she initially wished Lovecraft and Loveman to meet in order to ‘cure’ Lovecraft of his race prejudice; it would certainly have been a good thing if she had succeeded, but clearly that was beyond her powers.

It seems hardly profitable at this juncture to blame Lovecraft for his many failings as a husband—nothing can be accomplished now by such a schoolmasterly attitude—but much in his behaviour is inexcusable. The most inexcusable, of course, is the decision to marry at all, a decision he made with very little awareness of the difficulties involved (beyond any of the financial concerns that emerged unexpectedly at a later date) and without any sense of how unsuited he was to be a husband. Here was a man with an unusually low sex drive, with a deep-seated love of his native region, with severe prejudice against racial minorities, suddenly deciding to marry a woman who, although several years older than he, clearly wished both a physical and an intellectual union, and deciding also to uproot himself from his place of birth to move into a bustling, cosmopolitan, racially heterogeneous megalopolis without a job and, it appears, entirely content to be supported by his wife until such time as he got one.

Once actually married, Lovecraft displayed singularly little consideration for his wife. He found it much more engaging to spend most of his evenings, and even nights, with the boys. He did make a concerted effort to find work in 1924, but virtually gave up the attempt in 1925–26. Once he came to the realization that married life did not suit him, he became content—when Sonia was forced to move to the Midwest in 1925—to conduct a marriage at long distance by correspondence.

Three years after the debacle Lovecraft pondered the whole matter, and to his words not much need be added. He plainly admitted that a fundamental difference in character caused the breakup:

I haven’t a doubt but that matrimony can become a very helpful and pleasing permanent arrangement when both parties happen to harbour the potentialities of parallel mental and imaginative lives—similar or at least mutually comprehensible reactions to the same salient points in environment, reading, historic and philosophic reflection, and so on; and corresponding needs and aspirations in geographic, social, and intellectual milieu … With a wife of the same temperament as my mother and aunts, I would probably have been able to reconstruct a type of domestic life not unlike that of Angell St. days, even though I would have had a different status in the household hierarchy. But years brought out basic and essential diversities in reactions to the various landmarks of the time-stream, and antipodal ambitions and conceptions of value in planning a fixed joint milieu. It was the clash of the abstract-traditional-individualretrospective-Apollonian aesthetic with the concrete-emotional-present-dwelling-social-ethical-Dionysian aesthetic; and amidst this, the originally fancied congeniality, based on a shared disillusion, philosophic bent, and sensitiveness to beauty, waged a losing struggle.¹¹

Abstract as this sounds, it reveals a clear grasp of the fundamentals of the matter: he and Sonia were simply not temperamentally suited to each other.

What is more remarkable is that in later years Lovecraft would in many instances actually conceal the fact that he ever was married. When giving the essentials of his life to new correspondents, he would mention the New York episode but not Sonia or his marriage; and only if some correspondent bluntly and nosily asked him point-blank whether or not he was ever married would he admit that he was. It is as if his marriage, and his entire New York stay, had never happened.

Meanwhile there was the actual move from Brooklyn to Providence to undertake. Lovecraft’s letters to his aunts for the first half of April are full of mundane details on the matter—what moving company to hire, how to pack up his books and other belongings, when he will arrive, and the like. I have previously mentioned that Sonia was planning to come back to assist in the move; indeed, she notes rather tartly that ‘it was out of my funds that [the move] was paid for, including his fare’.¹²

Lovecraft boarded a train in the morning of Saturday 17 April, and arrived early in the afternoon. He tells the story inimitably in a letter to Long:

Well—the train sped on, & I experienced silent convulsions of joy in returning step by step to a waking & tridimensional life. New Haven—New London—& then quaint Mystic, with its colonial hillside & landlocked cove. Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air—nobler roofs & steeples, with the train rushing airily above them on its lofty viaduct—Westerly—in His Majesty’s Province of RHODEISLAND & PROVIDENCE-PLANTATIONS! GOD SAVE THE KING!! Intoxication follow’d—Kingston—East Greenwich with its steep Georgian alleys climbing up from the railway —Apponaug & its ancient roofs—Auburn—just outside the city limits—I fumble with bags & wraps in a desperate effort to appear calm—THEN—a delirious marble dome outside the window—a hissing of air brakes—a slackening of speed— surges of ecstasy & dropping of clouds from my eyes & mind—HOME—UNION STATION—PROVIDENCE!!!!¹³

The printed text cannot tell the whole story, for as Lovecraft approaches the triumphant conclusion his handwriting begins to grow larger and larger, until that final word is nearly an inch high. It is symmetrically balanced by four exclamation marks and four underscores. W. Paul Cook made a celebrated remark that the rest of this book will, I trust, instantiate: ‘He came back to Providence a human being—and what a human being! He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.’¹⁴ Cook has another imperishable account of Lovecraft’s settling in:

I saw him in Providence on his return from New York and before he had his things all unpacked and his room settled, and he was without question the happiest man I ever saw— he could have posed for an ‘After Taking’ picture for the medical ads. He had taken it and shown that he could take it. His touch was caressing as he put his things in place, a real love-light shone in his eyes as he glanced out of the window. He was so happy he hummed—if he had possessed the necessary apparatus he would have purred.¹⁵

We do not know much of what Lovecraft was doing during the first few months of his return to Providence. In April, May, and June he reports seeing several parts of the city he had never seen before, at least once in the company of Annie Gamwell. He expresses the wish to do more reading and collecting of Rhode Island matter, and claims that a special corner of the reference room of the Providence Public Library will now be among his principal haunts.

Providence enters into several of the tales he wrote in the year after his return; indeed, this period—from the summer of 1926 to the spring of 1927—represents the most remarkable outburst of fiction-writing in Lovecraft’s entire career. Only a month after leaving New York he wrote to Morton: ‘It is astonishing how much better the old head works since its restoration to those native scenes amidst which it belongs. As my exile progressed, even reading and writing became relatively slow and formidable processes.’¹⁶ Now things were very different: two short novels, two novelettes, and three short stories, totalling some 150,000 words, were written at this time, along with a handful of poems and essays. All the tales are set, at least in part, in New England.

First on the agenda is ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, written probably in August or September. This story had, as noted previously, been plotted a full year earlier, on 12–13 August 1925. The plot of this well-known tale does not need elaborate description. The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, tells of the peculiar facts he has learned, both from the papers of his recently deceased grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, and from personal investigation. The upshot of his investigations is the revelation that an awesome cosmic entity, Cthulhu, had come from the stars in the dawn of time and established a stone city, R’lyeh, which then sank into the Pacific Ocean. In early March 1925, the city rose from the waters as the result of an earthquake, and Cthulhu momentarily emerges; but, presumably because the stars are not ‘ready’, the city sinks again, returning Cthulhu to the bottom of the ocean. But the mere existence of this titanic entity is an unending source of profound unease to Thurston because it shows how tenuous is mankind’s vaunted supremacy upon this planet.

It is difficult to convey by this bald summary the rich texture of this substantial work: its implications of cosmic menace, its insidiously gradual climax, its complexity of structure and multitude of narrative voices, and the absolute perfection of its style—sober and clinical at the outset, but reaching at the end heights of prose-poetic horror that attain an almost epic grandeur.

The origin of the tale goes back even beyond the evidently detailed plot-synopsis of 1925. Its kernel is recorded in an entry in his commonplace book (no. 25) that must date to 1920, about a man visiting a museum of antiquities with a statue he has just made. This is a fairly literal encapsulation of a dream Lovecraft had in early 1920, which he describes at length in two letters of the period.

The dominant literary influence on the tale is Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla’. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ Lovecraft writes that it ‘relat[es] the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department’. Cthulhu is not, of course, invisible, but the rest of the description tallies uncannily with the events of the story. Nevertheless, it must frankly be admitted that Lovecraft himself handles the theme with vastly greater subtlety and richness than Maupassant. There may also be a Machen influence; especially relevant is ‘Novel of the Black Seal’, where Professor Gregg, like Thurston, pieces together disparate bits of information that by themselves reveal little but, when taken together, suggest an appalling horror awaiting the human race.

Many of the locales in Providence are real, notably the Fleur-deLys building at 7 Thomas Street, where the artist Wilcox (who fashioned a sculpture of Cthulhu after dreaming about him) resides. The earthquake cited in the story is also a real event. Steven J. Mariconda, who has written exhaustively on the genesis of the tale, notes: ‘In New York, lamps fell from tables and mirrors from walls; walls themselves cracked, and windows shattered; people fled into the street.’¹⁷ Interestingly, the celebrated underwater city of R’lyeh, brought up by this earthquake, was first coined by Lovecraft as L’yeh.¹⁸

The true importance of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, however, lies not in its incorporation of autobiographical details nor even in its intrinsic excellence, but in its being the first significant contribution to what came to be called the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. This tale contains nearly all the elements that would be utilized in subsequent ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ fiction by Lovecraft and others. There is, to be sure, something going on in many of the tales of Lovecraft’s last decade of writing: they are frequently interrelated by a complex series of cross-references to a constantly evolving body of imagined myth, and many of them build upon features—superficial or profound as the case may be—in previous tales. But certain basic points can now be made, although even some of these are not without controversy: first, Lovecraft himself did not coin the term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’; second, Lovecraft felt that all his tales embodied his basic philosophical principles; third, the mythos, if it can be said to be anything, is not the tales themselves nor even the philosophy behind the tales, but a series of plot devices utilized to convey that philosophy. Let us study each of these points further.

First, the term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ was invented by August Derleth after Lovecraft’s death; of this there is no question. The closest Lovecraft ever came to giving his invented pantheon and related phenomena a name was when he made a casual reference to ‘Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery’,¹⁹ and it is not at all clear what these terms really signify.

Second, Lovecraft utilized his pseudomythology as one (among many) of the ways to convey his fundamental philosophical message, whose chief feature was cosmicism. This point is made clear in a letter written to Farnsworth Wright in July 1927 upon the resubmittal of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to Weird Tales (it had been rejected upon initial submission):

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.²⁰

This passage maintains that all Lovecraft’s tales emphasize cosmicism in some form or another. If, then, we segregate certain of Lovecraft’s tales as employing the framework of his ‘artificial pantheon and myth-background’ (as he writes in ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’), it is purely for convenience, with a full knowledge that Lovecraft’s work is not to be grouped arbitrarily, rigidly, or exclusively into discrete categories (‘New England tales’, ‘Dunsanian tales’, and ‘Cthulhu Mythos tales’, as Derleth decreed), since it is transparently clear that these (or any other) categories are not well-defined or mutually exclusive.

Third, it is careless and inaccurate to say that the Lovecraft Mythos is Lovecraft’s philosophy: his philosophy is mechanistic materialism and all its ramifications, and, if the Lovecraft Mythos is anything, it is a series of plot devices meant to facilitate the expression of this philosophy. These various plot devices need not concern us here except in their broadest features. They can perhaps be placed in three general groups: first, invented ‘gods’ and the cults or worshippers that have grown up around them; second, an ever-increasing library of mythical books of occult lore; and third, a fictitious New England topography (Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, etc.). It will readily be noted that the latter two were already present in nebulous form in much earlier tales; but the three features came together only in Lovecraft’s later work. Indeed, the third feature does not appreciably foster Lovecraft’s cosmic message, and it can be found in tales that are anything but cosmic (e.g., ‘The Picture in the House’); but it is a phenomenon that has exercised much fascination and can still be said to be an important component of the Lovecraft Mythos. It is an unfortunate fact, of course, that these surface features have frequently taken precedence with readers, writers, and even critics, rather than the philosophy of which they are symbols or representations.

It is at this point scarcely profitable to examine some of the misinterpretations foisted upon the Lovecraft Mythos by August Derleth; the only value in so doing is to serve as a prelude to examining what the mythos actually meant to Lovecraft. The principal error is that Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ can be differentiated between ‘Elder Gods’, who represent the forces of good, and the ‘Old Ones’, who are the forces of evil.

Derleth, a practising Catholic, was unable to endure Lovecraft’s bleak atheistic vision, and so he invented out of whole cloth the ‘Elder Gods’ as a counterweight to the ‘evil’ Old Ones, who had been ‘expelled’ from the earth but are eternally preparing to reemerge and destroy humanity. This invention of ‘Elder Gods’ allowed him to maintain that the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is substantially akin to Christianity, therefore making it acceptable to people of his conventional temperament. An important piece of ‘evidence’ that Derleth repeatedly cited to bolster his claims was the following ‘quotation’, presumably from a letter by Lovecraft:

All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.

In spite of its superficial similarity with the ‘Now all my tales …’ quotation previously cited (with which Derleth was familiar), this quotation does not sound at all like Lovecraft—at any rate, it is entirely in conflict with the thrust of his philosophy. When Derleth in later years was asked to produce the actual letter from which this quotation was purportedly taken, he could not do so, and for a very good reason: it does not in fact occur in any letter by Lovecraft. It comes from a letter to Derleth written by Harold S. Farnese, the composer who had corresponded briefly with Lovecraft and who severely misconstrued the direction of Lovecraft’s work and thought very much as Derleth did.²¹ But Derleth seized upon this ‘quotation’ as a trump card for his erroneous views.

There is now little need to rehash this entire matter. There is no cosmic ‘good-versus-evil’ struggle in Lovecraft’s tales; there are no ‘Elder Gods’ whose goal is to protect humanity from the ‘evil’ Old Ones; the Old Ones were not ‘expelled’ by anyone and are not (aside from Cthulhu) ‘trapped’ in the earth or elsewhere. Lovecraft’s vision is far less cheerful: humanity is not at centre stage in the cosmos, and there is no one to help us against the entities who have from time to time descended upon the earth and wreaked havoc; indeed, the ‘gods’ of the Mythos are not really gods at all, but merely extraterrestrials who occasionally manipulate their human followers for their own advantage.

And it is here that we finally approach the heart of the Lovecraft Mythos. What Lovecraft was really doing was creating (as David E. Schultz has felicitously expressed it²²) an anti-mythology. What is the purpose behind most religions and mythologies? It is to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.²³ Human beings have always considered themselves at the centre of the universe; they have peopled the universe with gods of varying natures and capacities as a means of explaining natural phenomena, of accounting for their own existence, and of shielding themselves from the grim prospect of oblivion after death. Every religion and mythology has established some vital connection between gods and human beings, and it is exactly this connection that Lovecraft is seeking to subvert with his pseudomythology.

From the cosmicism of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to the apparent mundaneness of ‘Pickman’s Model’—written, apprently, in early September—seems a long step backward; and, while this tale cannot be deemed one of Lovecraft’s best, it contains some features of interest. The narrator, Thurber, writing in a colloquial style very unusual for Lovecraft, tells of the painter Richard Upton Pickman of Boston, whose spectacularly horrific paintings violently disturb him. Later Thurber learns that the monsters depicted by Pickman in his paintings are taken ‘from life’.

No reader can have failed to predict this conclusion, but the tale is more interesting not for its actual plot but for its setting and its aesthetics. The setting—the North End of Boston, then (as now) a largely Italian district—is portrayed quite faithfully, right down to many of the street names; but, less than a year after writing the story, Lovecraft was disappointed to find that much of the area had been razed to make way for new development. Aside from its topographical accuracy, ‘Pickman’s Model’ expresses, in fictionalized form, many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that Lovecraft had just outlined in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.

‘The Call of Cthulhu’ was initially rejected by Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, but it is predictable that Wright would snap up the more conventional ‘Pickman’s Model’, publishing it in the October 1927 issue.

Lovecraft was doing more than writing original fiction; he was no doubt continuing to make a meagre living by revision, and in the process was slowly attracting would-be weird writers who offered him stories for correction. In the summer of 1926 his new friend Wilfred B. Talman came to him with a story entitled ‘Two Black Bottles’. Lovecraft found promise in the tale—Talman, let us recall, was only twenty-two at this time, and writing was not his principal creative outlet—but felt that changes were in order. By October the tale was finished, more or less to both writers’ satisfaction. The end result is nothing to write home about, but it managed to land with Weird Tales and appeared in the August 1927 issue.

A revision job of a very different sort on which Lovecraft worked in October was The Cancer of Superstition. This appears to have been a collaborative project on which Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy worked at the instigation of Harry Houdini. Houdini performed in Providence in early October, at which time he asked Lovecraft to do a rush job—an article attacking astrology—for which he paid $75.00. This article has not come to light; but perhaps it supplied the nucleus for what was apparently to be a full-length polemic against superstitions of all sorts. Houdini had himself written several works of this kind—including A Magician among the Spirits (1924), a copy of which he gave to Lovecraft with an inscription— but he now wished something with more scholarly rigour.

But Houdini’s sudden death on 31 October put an end to the endeavour, as his wife did not wish to pursue it. This may have been just as well, for the existing material is undistinguished and largely lacks the academic support a work of this kind needs. Lovecraft may have been well versed in anthropology for a layman, but neither he nor Eddy had the scholarly authority to bring this venture to a suitable conclusion.

Shortly after the writing of ‘Pickman’s Model’, something strange occurs—Lovecraft is back in New York. He arrived no later than Monday, 13 September, for he speaks of seeing a film with Sonia that evening. I am not certain of the purpose of this visit—it clearly was only a visit, and I suspect the impetus came from Sonia. Lovecraft, although of course still married to Sonia, seems to have reverted to the guest status he occupied during his 1922 visits: he spent most of his time with the gang, particularly Long, Kirk, and Orton. On Sunday the 19th Lovecraft left for Philadelphia. Sonia had insisted on treating him to this excursion, presumably as recompense for returning to the ‘pest-zone’.

With Annie Gamwell, Lovecraft made another excursion in late October, although this one was much closer to home. It was, in fact, nothing less than his first visit to his ancestral region of Foster since 1908. It is heartwarming to read Lovecraft’s account of this journey, in which he not only absorbed the intrinsic loveliness of a rural New England he had always cherished but also re-established bonds with family members who still revered the memory of Whipple Phillips.

Echoes of the trip are manifested in his next work of fiction, ‘The Silver Key’, presumably written in early November. In this tale Randolph Carter—resurrected from ‘The Unnamable’ (1923)—is now thirty; he has ‘lost the key of the gate of dreams’ and therefore seeks to reconcile himself to the real world, which he now finds prosy and aesthetically unrewarding. He tries all manner of literary and physical novelties until one day he does find the key—or, at any rate, a key of silver in his attic, which somehow takes him back in time so that he is again a nine-year-old boy. Sitting down to dinner with his aunt and uncle, Carter finds perfect content as a boy who has sloughed off the tedious complications of adult life for the eternal wonder of childhood.

‘The Silver Key’ is, clearly, an exposition of Lovecraft’s own social, ethical, and aesthetic philosophy. It is not even so much a story as a parable or philosophical diatribe. He attacks literary realism, conventional religion, and bohemianism in exactly the same way as he does in his letters. But, as Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, has exhaustively pointed out, ‘The Silver Key’ is in large part a fictionalized account of Lovecraft’s recent Foster visit.²⁴ Details of topography, character names, and other similarities make this conclusion unshakable. Just as Lovecraft felt the need, after two rootless years in New York, to restore connections with the places that had given him and his family birth, so in his fiction did he need to announce that, henceforth, however far his imagination might stray, it would always return to New England and look upon it as a source of bedrock values and emotional sustenance.

‘The Silver Key’, with its heavily philosophical burden, is by no means oriented toward a popular audience, and it is no surprise that Farnsworth Wright rejected it for Weird Tales. In the summer of 1928, however, Wright asked to see the tale again and this time accepted it for $70.

‘The Strange High House in the Mist’, written on 9 November, shows that the Dunsany influence had now been thoroughly internalised so as to allow for the expression of Lovecraft’s own sentiments through Dunsany’s idiom and general atmosphere. Indeed, the only genuine connections to Dunsany’s work may perhaps be in some details of the setting and in the manifestly philosophical, even satiric purpose which the fantasy is made to serve. We are now again in Kingsport, a city to which Lovecraft had not returned since ‘The Festival’ (1923), and Thomas Olney learns of the strange creatures that haunt an ancient house on a high cliff north of the city. After he returns to his family, Olney’s soul no longer longs for wonder and mystery; instead, he is content to lead his prosy bourgeois life with his wife and children.

On various occasions Lovecraft admits that he had no specific locale in mind when writing this tale: he states that memories of the ‘titan cliffs of Magnolia’²⁵ in part prompted the setting, but that there is no house on the cliff as in the story. ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ contains little in the way of specific topographical description, and we are clearly in a never-never land where— anomalously for Lovecraft—the focus is on human character.

For the strange transformation of Thomas Olney is at the heart of the tale. The Terrible Old Man states: ‘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; 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.

But Lovecraft was by no means done with writing. In a departure from his normal habits, he wrote ‘The Silver Key’ and ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ while simultaneously at work on a much longer work. Writing to August Derleth in early December, he notes: ‘I am now on page 72 of my dreamland fantasy.’²⁶ The result, finished in late January, would be the longest work of fiction he had written up to this time—The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cosmic Outsideness (1927–28)

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was finished at 43,000 words on 22 January 1927. Even while writing it, Lovecraft expressed doubts about its merits: ‘Actually, it isn’t much good; but forms useful practice for later and more authentic attempts in the novel form.’¹ That remark is about as accurate a judgment as can be delivered on the work. More than any other of Lovecraft’s major stories, it has elicited antipodally opposite reactions even from devotees: L. Sprague de Camp compared it to George MacDonald’s Lilith and Phantastes and the Alice books, while other Lovecraft scholars find it almost unreadable. For my part, I think it is a charming but relatively insubstantial work: Carter’s adventures through dreamland do indeed pall after a time, but the novel is saved by its extraordinarily poignant conclusion. Its chief feature may be its autobiographical significance: it is, in fact, Lovecraft’s spiritual autobiography for this precise moment in his life.

It is scarcely worth while to pursue the rambling plot of this short novel, which in its continuous, chapterless meandering consciously resembles not only Dunsany (although Dunsany never wrote a long work exactly of this kind) but William Beckford’s Vathek (1786); several points of plot and imagery also bring Beckford’s Arabian fantasy to mind. Lovecraft resurrects Randolph Carter in a quest through dreamland for his ‘sunset city’, which is described as follows:

All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles.

This certainly sounds—except for some odd details at the end—like some Dunsanian realm of the imagination; but what does Carter discover as he leaves his hometown of Boston to make a laborious excursion through dreamland to the throne of the Great Ones who dwell in an onyx castle on unknown Kadath? Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the gods, tells him in a passage as moving as any in Lovecraft:

‘For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love …

‘These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.’

We suddenly realize why that ‘sunset city’ contained such otherwise curious features as gables and cobblestoned lanes. And we also realize why it is that the various fantastic creatures Carter meets along his journey—zoogs, gugs, ghasts, ghouls, moonbeasts— touch no chord in us: they are not meant to. They are all very charming, in that ‘Dresden-china’ way Lovecraft mistook Dunsany to be; but they amount to nothing because they do not correspond to anything in our memories and dreams. So all that Carter has to do—and what he does in fact do at the end—is merely to wake up in his Boston room, leave dreamland behind, and realize the beauty to be found on his doorstep.

Lovecraft’s resurrection of the Dunsanian idiom—not used since ‘The Other Gods’ (1921)—seems to me meant not so much as an homage as a repudiation of Dunsany, at least of what Lovecraft at this moment took Dunsany to be. Just as, when he wrote ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’ in 1922, he felt that the only escape from modern disillusion would be to ‘worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial’, so in 1926—after two years spent away from the New England soil that he now realized was his one true anchor against chaos and meaninglessness—he felt the need to reject these decorative artificialities. By 1930—only seven years after claiming, in pitiable wishfulfilment, that ‘Dunsany is myself’—he made a definitive break with his once-revered mentor:

What I do not think I shall use much in future is the Dunsanian pseudo-poetic vein—not because I don’t admire it, but because I don’t think it is natural to me. The fact that I used it only sparingly before reading Dunsany, but immediately began to overwork it upon doing so, gives me a strong suspicion of its artificiality so far as I am concerned. That kind of thing takes a better poet than I.²

In later years Lovecraft repudiated the novel, refusing several colleagues’ desires to prepare a typed copy of the manuscript. The text was not published until it was included in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943).

It is remarkable that, almost immediately after completing The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in late January 1927, Lovecraft plunged into another ‘young novel’,³ The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Actually, at the outset he did not regard it as anything more than a novelette, but by the time it was finished on 1 March, it had reached 147 manuscript pages. At approximately 51,000 words, it is the longest work of fiction Lovecraft would ever write. While it does betray a few signs of haste, and while he would no doubt have polished it had he made the effort to prepare it for publication, the fact is that he felt so discouraged as to its quality—as well as its marketability—that he never made such an effort, and the work remained unpublished until four years after his death.

Perhaps, however, it is not so odd that Lovecraft wrote The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a blinding rush nine months after his return to Providence; for this novel—the second of his major tales (after ‘The Shunned House’) to be set entirely in the city of his birth—had been gestating for at least a year or more. I have mentioned that in August 1925 he was contemplating a novel about Salem; but then, in September, he read Gertrude Selwyn Kimball’s Providence in Colonial Times (1912) at the New York Public Library, and this rather dry historical work clearly fired his imagination. He was, however, still talking of the Salem idea just as he was finishing the DreamQuest; perhaps the Kimball book—as well, of course, as his return to Providence—led to a uniting of the Salem idea with a work about his hometown.

The novel concerns the attempts of the seventeenth-century alchemist Joseph Curwen to secure unholy knowledge by resurrecting the ‘essential saltes’ of the great thinkers of the world. Curwen also leaves his own essential saltes to be discovered by his twentieth-century descendant, Charles Dexter Ward, so that he is resurrected, only to be put down by the Ward family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett. The historical flashback—occupying the second of the five chapters—is as evocative a passage as any in Lovecraft’s work.

The house that serves the model for Charles Dexter Ward’s residence is the so-called Halsey mansion (the Thomas Lloyd Halsey house at 140 Prospect Street). In late August 1925 Lovecraft heard from Lillian that this mansion was haunted.⁴ Although now broken up into apartments, it is a superb late Georgian structure (c. 1800) fully deserving of Lovecraft’s encomium. Lovecraft was presumably never in the Halsey mansion, but had a clear view of it from 10 Barnes Street; looking northwestward from his aunt’s upstairs back window, he could see it distinctly.

One significant literary influence may be noted here: Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return (1910). Lovecraft had first read de la Mare (1873–1956) in the summer of 1926; of The Return he remarks in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’: ‘we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust’. In de la Mare’s novel, of course, there is actual psychic possession involved, as there is not in Charles Dexter Ward; and, although the focus in The Return is on the afflicted man’s personal trauma—in particular his relations with his wife and daughter—rather than the unnaturalness of his condition, Lovecraft has manifestly adapted the general scenario in his own work.

The apparent source for the character Charles Dexter Ward is a very interesting one. Of course, there are many autobiographical touches in the portraiture of Ward; but many surface details appear to be taken from a person actually living in the Halsey mansion at this time, William Lippitt Mauran, who was born in 1910. Lovecraft was probably not acquainted with Mauran, but it is highly likely that he observed Mauran on the street and knew of him. Mauran was a sickly child who spent much of his youth as an invalid, being wheeled through the streets in a carriage by a nurse. Moreover, the Mauran family also owned a farmhouse in Pawtuxet, exactly as Curwen is said to have done. Other details of Ward’s character also fit Mauran more closely than Lovecraft.⁵

The early parts of the novel in particular are full of autobiographical details. The opening descriptions of Ward as a youth are filled with echoes of Lovecraft’s own upbringing, although with provocative changes. For example, a description of ‘one of the child’s first memories’—’the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens’—is situated in Prospect Terrace, whereas in letters Lovecraft identifies this mystic vision as occurring on the railway embankment in Auburndale, Massachusetts, around 1892. Ward’s ecstatic return to Providence after several years abroad can scarcely be anything but a transparent echo of Lovecraft’s own return to Providence after two years in New York. The simple utterance that concludes this passage—’It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home’—is one of the most quietly moving statements in all Lovecraft’s work.

It is a pity that Lovecraft made no efforts to prepare The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for publication, even when book publishers in the 1930s were specifically asking for a novel from his pen; but we are in no position to question Lovecraft’s own judgment that the novel was an inferior piece of work, a ‘cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism’.⁶ It has now been acknowledged as one of his finest works, and it emphasizes the message of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath all over again: Lovecraft is who he is because of his birth and upbringing as a New England Yankee. The need to root his work in his native soil became more and more clear to him as time went on, and it led to his gradual transformation of all New England as the locus of both wonder and terror.

The last tale of Lovecraft’s great spate of fiction-writing of 1926–27 is ‘The Colour out of Space’, written in March 1927. It is unquestionably one of his great tales, and it always remained Lovecraft’s own favourite. Here again the plot is too well known to require lengthy description, and focuses on the horrifying effects of a meteorite—or, more specifically, the nebulous entity or entities within the meteorite—after it lands upon a New England farmer’s field. Crops grow strangely, animals develop anatomical abnormalities, and finally both humans and animals alike crumble into a greyish dust. At the end there is a tremendous eruption of light from a well: the creatures have returned to their cosmic home.

Lovecraft was correct in calling this tale an ‘atmospheric study’,⁷ for he has rarely captured the atmosphere of inexplicable horror better than he has here. First let us consider the setting. The reservoir mentioned in the tale is a very real one: the Quabbin Reservoir, plans for which were announced in 1926, although it was not completed until 1939. And yet Lovecraft declares in a late letter that it was not this reservoir but the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island (built in 1926) that caused him to use the reservoir element in the story.⁸ He saw this reservoir when he passed through this area in the west-central part of the state on the way to Foster in late October. I cannot, however, believe that Lovecraft was not also thinking of the Quabbin, which is located exactly in the area of central Massachusetts where the tale takes place, and which involved the abandonment and submersion of entire towns in the region.

The key to the story, of course, is the anomalous meteorite. Is it—or are the coloured globules inside it—animate in any sense we can recognize? Does it house a single entity or many entities? What are their physical properties? More significantly, what are their aims, goals, and motives? The fact that we can answer none of these questions very clearly is by no means a failing; indeed, this is exactly the source of terror in the tale. As Lovecraft said of Machen’s ‘The White People’, ‘the lack of anything concrete is the great asset of the story’.⁹ In other words, it is precisely our inability to define the nature—either physical or psychological—of the entities in ‘The Colour out of Space’ (or even know whether they are entities or living creatures as we understand them) that produces the sense of nameless horror.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the tale is the mundane matter of its publication history. ‘The Colour out of Space’ appeared in Amazing Stories for September 1927; but the critical question is whether the tale was ever submitted to Weird Tales. Although Sam Moskowitz claimed that it was submitted both there and to the Argosy, no documentary evidence has emerged to support the contention. Consider also Lovecraft’s comment to Farnsworth Wright in his letter of 5 July 1927: ‘this spring and summer I’ve been too busy with revisory and kindred activities to write more than one tale—which, oddly enough, was accepted at once by Amazing Stories’.¹⁰ The wording of this letter suggests that this is Lovecraft’s first mention of the story to Wright. There is equal silence concerning a possible Argosy rejection.

But if Lovecraft was hoping that in Amazing Stories—the first authentic science fiction magazine in English—he had found an alternative to Weird Tales, he was in for a rude awakening. Although his later work contained a fairly significant scientific element, Amazing became a closed market to him when Hugo Gernsback paid him only $25.00 for the story—a mere one-fifth of a cent per word—and this only after three dunning letters. Although in later years Lovecraft briefly considered requests from Gernsback or from his associate editor, C. A. Brandt, for further submissions, he never again sent a tale to Amazing. He also took to calling Gernsback ‘Hugo the Rat’.

Just before writing ‘The Colour out of Space’, Lovecraft had to hurry up and type ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, since Cook wished it immediately for the Recluse. Lovecraft had been making random additions to the essay based upon recent readings—including the subtle and atmospheric tales of Walter de la Mare—but Cook’s rush order compelled him to type up the essay without any further enlargements. Even this, however, was not quite the end. Late in March, after Cook had sent Lovecraft the first proofs, Donald Wandrei lent F. Marion Crawford’s superb posthumous collection of horror tales, Wandering Ghosts (1911), to Lovecraft, while in April Lovecraft borrowed Robert W. Chambers’s early collection The King in Yellow (1895) from Cook; he was so taken with these works that he added paragraphs on both writers in the page proofs.

The Recluse appeared in August 1927; although initially planned as a quarterly, this was the only issue ever published. Although not strictly a weird publication, it contains fine work by Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, H. Warner Munn, Frank Belknap Long, and Samuel Loveman. Cook wished to send The Recluse to certain ‘celebrities’, in particular to all four of Lovecraft’s ‘modern masters’, Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James. As it happened, the issue did find its way to some of these figures, and their responses to Lovecraft’s essay are of interest. James rather unkindly declared in a letter that Lovecraft’s style ‘is of the most offensive’, but goes on to remark: ‘But he has taken pains to search about & treat the subject from its beginning to MRJ, to whom he devotes several columns.’¹¹ Machen’s response can be gauged only from Donald Wandrei’s comment to Lovecraft: ‘I received a letter to-day from Machen, in which he mentioned your article and its hold on him.’¹² Copies were also apparently sent to Blackwood, Dunsany, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and several others.

As early as April 1927 Lovecraft already had a vague idea of expanding ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ for a putative second edition, and Cook occasionally mentioned the possibility of issuing such an edition separately as a monograph. Lovecraft set up a section in his commonplace book entitled ‘Books to mention in new edition of weird article’, listing several works he read in the subsequent months and years; but Cook’s physical and financial collapse confounded, or at least delayed, the plans, and the second edition did not materialize until 1933, and in a form very different from what Lovecraft envisioned.

Lovecraft, having by 1927 already published nearly a score of tales in Weird Tales, and finding that amateur work was at a virtual end with the demise of the UAPA, now began gathering colleagues specifically devoted to weird fiction. The last decade of his life would see him become a friend, correspondent, and mentor of more than a dozen writers who would follow in his footsteps and become well known in the fields of weird, mystery, and science fiction.

August Derleth (1909–71) wrote to Lovecraft through Weird Tales, and the latter replied in August 1926. From that time on, the two men kept up a very steady correspondence—usually once a week—for the next ten and a half years. Derleth had just finished high school in Sauk City, Wisconsin, and in the fall of 1926 would begin attendance at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. As a fiction writer he would reveal astounding range and precocity. Although his first story in Weird Tales dates to his eighteenth year, his weird tales—whether written by himself or in collaboration with the young Mark Schorer—would be in many ways the least interesting aspect of his work; they are conventional, relatively unoriginal, and largely undistinguished, and he readily admitted to Lovecraft that they were written merely to supply cash for his more serious work. That serious work—for which Derleth would eventually gain considerable renown, and which today remains the most significant branch of his output—is a series of regional sagas drawing upon his native Wisconsin and written in a poignant, Proustian, reminiscent vein whose simple elegance allows for evocative character portrayal. The first of these works to be published was Place of Hawks (1935), although Derleth was working as early as 1929 on a novel he initially titled The Early Years, which was finally published in 1941 as Evening in Spring. Those who fail to read these two works, along with their many successors in Derleth’s long and fertile career, will have no conception why Lovecraft, as early as 1930, wrote with such enthusiasm about his younger colleague and disciple.

Donald Wandrei (1908–87) got in touch with Lovecraft through Clark Ashton Smith in late 1926, shortly after he had entered the University of Minnesota. Smith was the first writer to whom Wandrei was devoted, and in many ways he remained Wandrei’s model in both fiction and poetry. Wandrei was initially attracted to poetry, but he was also experimenting with prose fiction. Some of this early work is quite striking, especially ‘The Red Brain’ (Weird Tales, October 1927). It, along with several other works such as the celebrated ‘Colossus’ (Astounding Stories, January 1934), reveals a staggeringly cosmic imagination second only to Lovecraft’s in intensity. Like Derleth, who spent nearly the whole of his life in and around Sauk City, Wisconsin, Wandrei lived almost his entire life in his family home in St Paul, Minnesota, save for various periods in New York in the 1920s and 1930s; but unlike the cheerful Derleth, Wandrei had a brooding and misanthropic streak that often intrigued Lovecraft and may perhaps have helped to shape his own later philosophical views.

I wish I knew more about Bernard Austin Dwyer (1897–1943), but as he published relatively little and was more an appreciator than a creator, he remains a nebulous figure. He lived nearly the whole of his life in and around the tiny village of West Shokan, in upstate New York, near the towns of Hurley, New Paltz, and Kingston. Although attracted to weird fiction and the author of a short poem published in Weird Tales (‘Ol’ Black Sarah’ in the October 1928 issue), his chief interest was weird art; and in this capacity he naturally became fast friends with Clark Ashton Smith. One gains the impression that Dwyer was a kind of mute, inglorious Milton. He came in touch with Lovecraft through Weird Tales in the early part of 1927. In the summer of 1927 Lovecraft both played host to a succession of visitors to Providence and undertook several journeys of his own—something that would become a habit every spring and summer, as he roamed increasingly widely in quest of antiquarian oases. First on the agenda was his new friend Donald Wandrei, who undertook a trip from St Paul, Minnesota, to Providence entirely by hitchhiking. One would like to think that such an expedition was a little safer then than it would be now, and perhaps it was; Wandrei seemed to have no difficulty getting rides, even though on occasion he had to spend nights under the open sky, sometimes in the rain.

Arriving on 20 June in Chicago, where he confirmed all Lovecraft’s impressions of the place, Wandrei went to the Weird Tales office and met Farnsworth Wright. Lovecraft himself had spoken to Wright about Wandrei’s work early in the year, and perhaps as a result Wandrei’s ‘The Red Brain’—rejected a year earlier—was accepted in March. Wandrei felt the need to return the favour, so he spoke to Wright about ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Accordingly, Wright asked Lovecraft to resubmit the tale and accepted it for $165.00; it appeared in the February 1928 issue. This did not, of course, prevent Wright from rejecting ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ and ‘The Silver Key’ later in the summer; but in both cases he asked to see them again, and ultimately accepted them for $70.00 and $55.00, respectively.

On 12 July Wandrei arrived in Providence, staying till the 29th. On the 16th Lovecraft and Wandrei set out for Boston; but the excursion was somewhat of a disappointment. Lovecraft was especially keen on showing Wandrei the sinister, decaying North End where ‘Pickman’s Model’ was set, but was mortified to find that ‘the actual alley & house of the tale [had been] utterly demolished; a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down’.¹³ This remark is of interest in indicating that Lovecraft had an actual house in mind for Pickman’s North End studio.

On Tuesday, 19 July, Frank Long and his parents drove up from New York City, while simultaneously James F. Morton came down from Green Acre, Maine, where he had been visiting. On the 21st the entire crew went to Newport. The Longs left on the 22nd, whereupon Morton dragged Lovecraft and Wandrei to the rock quarry on which Lovecraft still held the mortgage, and for which he was still receiving his pittance of a payment ($37.08) every six months. The owner, Mariano de Magistris, set his men to hunting up specimens, while his son drove them home in his car. ‘That’s what I call real Latin courtesy!’ Lovecraft remarked in a rare show of tolerance for non-Aryans.¹⁴

On Saturday the 23rd occurred an historic pilgrimage—to Julia A. Maxfield’s in Warren, where Lovecraft, Morton, and Wandrei staged an ice-cream-eating contest. Maxfield’s advertised twentyeight flavours of ice cream, and the contestants sampled them all. Wandrei could not quite keep up with the others, but he at least managed to dip his spoon into the remaining flavours so that he could say he had tasted them all.

That afternoon a contingent from Athol, Massachusetts, arrived —W. Paul Cook and his protégé, H. Warner Munn (1903–81). Lovecraft had no doubt heard something of Munn before. Munn’s ‘The Werewolf of Ponkert’ (Weird Tales, July 1925) was apparently inspired by a comment in Lovecraft’s letter to Edwin Baird published in the March 1924 issue. He contributed extensively to the pulps and over his long career wrote many supernatural and adventure novels; but perhaps his most distinguished works were historical novels written late in his career, notably Merlin’s Ring (1974) and The Lost Legion (1980). Lovecraft took to Munn readily, finding him ‘a splendid young chap—blond and burly’;¹⁵ he would visit him frequently when passing through Athol.

On the 29th Wandrei finally left, but Lovecraft’s own travels were by no means over. In August, after visits to Worcester, Athol, Amherst, and Deerfield, Lovecraft and Cook went to Vermont to visit the amateur poet Arthur Goodenough. A decade before, Goodenough had praised Lovecraft in a poem (‘Lovecraft—an Appreciation’) containing the grotesque image, ‘Laurels from thy very temples sprout’. Lovecraft had thought Goodenough was spoofing him, and only with difficulty was he prevented by Cook from writing some devastating reply; instead, he wrote a poem in return, ‘To Arthur Goodenough, Esq.’ (Tryout, September 1918). Now, when meeting him, Lovecraft was captivated by Goodenough, and especially by the archaic and rustic charm of his dress and demeanour. Lovecraft later wrote a rhapsodic essay on his entire Vermont visit, ‘Vermont—A First Impression’, which appeared in Walter J. Coates’s regional magazine Driftwind for March 1928.

On 25 August Lovecraft visited Portland, Maine. He spent two days there and enjoyed the town immensely: although it was not as rich in antiquities as Marblehead or Portsmouth, it was scenically lovely—it occupies a peninsula with hills at the eastern and western ends, and has many beautiful drives and promenades— and at least had things like the two Longfellow houses (birthplace and principal residence), which Lovecraft explored thoroughly. Travels to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Haverhill, Gloucester, and Ipswich in Massachusetts concluded Lovecraft’s two-week trek.

Meanwhile various prospects for the book publication of Lovecraft’s stories were developing. One possibility began taking shape late in 1926 when Farnsworth Wright broached the idea of a collection. This project would keep Lovecraft dangling for several years before finally collapsing. The reasons for this are perhaps not far to seek. In 1927 Weird Tales (under its official imprint, the Popular Fiction Publishing Company) issued The Moon Terror by A. G. Birch and others. For whatever reason, the book was a complete commercial disaster, remaining in print nearly as long as Weird Tales itself was in existence. And, of course, the onset of the Depression hit the magazine very hard, and for various periods in the 1930s it appeared only once every two months; at this time the issuance of a book was the last thing on the publishers’ minds. Nevertheless, in late December 1927 negotiations were still serious enough for Lovecraft to write a long letter giving his own preferences as to the contents. Lovecraft concludes with an interesting remark: ‘As for a title—my choice is The Outsider and Other Stories. This is because I consider the touch of cosmic outsideness—of dim, shadowy nonterrestrial hints—to be the characteristic feature of my writing.’¹⁶

One story Lovecraft did not offer for the collection (probably just as well, as Wright had already rejected it for the magazine) was ‘The Shunned House’, which W. Paul Cook wished to publish as a small book. Cook had initially conceived of including it in The Recluse, but presumably held off because the magazine had already attained enormous size. Then, around February 1927, he first broached the idea of printing it as a chapbook, uniform in format with two other publications, Frank Long’s slim collection of poetry The Man from Genoa and Samuel Loveman’s The Hermaphrodite, both issued in 1926. The issuance of The Recluse delayed work on the book project, but in the spring of 1928 things began to move. Lovecraft read proofs in early June, even though he was then on another extensive series of travels. By the end of June The Shunned House was printed but not bound. About three hundred copies were printed.

Unfortunately, things soured at this very moment. Both Cook’s finances and his health were in a very shaky state. The Shunned House—which Cook was financing, without any contribution by Lovecraft—had to be put on the back burner. In January 1930 Cook’s wife died and Cook suffered another and severer nervous breakdown. The depression completed his devastation, and The Shunned House’s emergence became increasingly remote. By the summer of 1930 Lovecraft heard that the sheets had been sent to a binder in Boston, but the book still did not come out. The matter hung fire all the way to Lovecraft’s death.

Late in 1927 Lovecraft received You’ll Need a Night Light, a British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thomson and published by Selwyn & Blount. It contained ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, marking the first time that a story of Lovecraft’s appeared in hardcover. The volume was part of a series of ‘Not at Night’ books edited by Campbell; the stories for most of the volumes were culled from Weird Tales, and several of Lovecraft’s tales and revisions would later be reprinted. Although pleased at its appearance, Lovecraft had no illusions as to the anthology’s merits. ‘As for that “Not at Night”—that’s a mere lowbrow hash of absolutely no taste or significance. Aesthetically speaking, it doesn’t exist.’¹⁷

Rather more significant—and indeed, one of the most important items in the critical recognition of Lovecraft prior to his death—was the appearance of ‘The Colour out of Space’ on the ‘Roll of Honor’ of the 1928 volume of Edward J. O’Brien’s Best Short Stories. Lovecraft sent O’Brien a somewhat lengthy autobiographical paragraph for a section at the back of the book; he expected O’Brien merely to select from it, but instead the latter printed it intact, and it occupied eighteen lines of text, longer than any other biography in the volume. On the whole it is an exceptionally accurate and compact account of Lovecraft’s life and beliefs.

In the autumn of 1927 Frank Belknap Long took it into his head to write a longish short story entitled ‘The Space-Eaters’. This story can be said to have two distinctive qualities: it is the first work to involve Lovecraft as a character (if we exclude whimsies like Edith Miniter’s ‘Falco Ossifracus’, in which the central character, while modelled on Randolph Carter, shares some chracteristics with Lovecraft), and—although this point is somewhat debatable—it is the first ‘addition’ to Lovecraft’s mythos.

To be perfectly honest, ‘The Space-Eaters’ is a preposterous story. This wild, histrionic account of some entities who are apparently ‘eating their way through space’, are attacking people’s brains, but are in some mysterious manner prevented from overwhelming the earth, is frankly an embarrassment. In this sense, however, it is sadly prophetic of most of the ‘contributions’ other writers would make to Lovecraft’s conceptions.

Whether it is indeed an addition to or extrapolation from Lovecraft’s mythos is a debatable question. The entities in question are never named, and there are no references to any of Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ (only Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth had even been invented at this time, the latter in the unpublished Case of Charles Dexter Ward). What there is, however, is an epigraph (omitted from the first appearance—Weird Tales, July 1928—and many subsequent reprintings) from ‘John Dee’s Necronomicon’—i.e., from a purported English translation of Olaus Wormius’s Latin translation of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft made frequent citations of this Dee translation in later stories. This phenomenon would recur throughout Lovecraft’s lifetime: a writer—usually a colleague—either devised an elaboration upon some myth-element in Lovecraft’s stories or created an entirely new element, which Lovecraft then co-opted in some subsequent story of his own. This whole procedure was largely meant in fun—as a way of investing this growing body of myth with a sense of actuality by its citation in different texts, and also as a sort of tip of the hat to each writer’s creations.

Lovecraft, meanwhile, was doing relatively little fiction-writing of his own—he had written nothing since ‘The Colour out of Space’. What he did do, however, on Hallowe’en was to have a spectacular dream about ancient Rome that might serve as the nucleus of a story. He subsequently wrote a long account of the dream to several colleagues—Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, Bernard Austin Dwyer, and perhaps others. One would have liked to see Lovecraft himself write up the dream into an actual story, but he never did anything with it. In 1929 Long asked Lovecraft that he be allowed to use the letter verbatim in a short novel he was writing, and Lovecraft acceded. The result was The Horror from the Hills, published in two parts in Weird Tales (January and February 1931) and later as a book.

Around this time Lovecraft also wrote a history of his mythical book, the Necronomicon, although largely for the purpose of keeping references clear in his own mind. This item bears the title ‘History of the Necronomicon’. On this draft a sentence is added about Dr. Dee’s translation of the volume, leading one to believe that Lovecraft had written the bulk of the text prior to seeing Long’s ‘The Space-Eaters’. Since he noted that he had ‘just received’ that story in late September, ‘History of the Necronomicon’ was probably written just before this time.

In late 1927 Lovecraft declared that he had never yet advertised for his revisory services¹⁸ (he had evidently forgotten about the ‘Crafton Service Bureau’ ad in L’Alouette in 1924), so that new revision clients would have come to him only by referral. Two such clients made their appearance about this time—Adolphe de Castro and Zealia Brown Reed Bishop.

De Castro (1859–1959), formerly Gustav Adolphe Danziger, was an odd case. He met Ambrose Bierce in 1886 and become an enthusiastic devotee and colleague. A few years later he translated Richard Voss’s short novel Der Mönch des Berchtesgaden (1890–91), and had Bierce revise it; it was published serially as The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter in the San Francisco Examiner in September 1891 and then as a book in 1892. With Bierce and others, Danziger formed the Western Authors Publishing Association, which issued Bierce’s poetry collection Black Beetles in Amber (1892) and Danziger’s own short story collection, In the Confessional and the Following (1893). Shortly thereafter, however, Bierce and Danziger had a falling out—mostly over financial wrangling over the profits from the Monk and over Danziger’s management of the publishing company—and although Danziger occasionally met up with Bierce on random subsequent occasions, the two did no further work together.

Bierce went down to Mexico in late 1913, evidently to observe or to participate in the Mexican Civil War. Danziger (now de Castro) lived in Mexico between 1922 and 1925 editing a weekly newspaper. In 1923 he managed to talk with Pancho Villa; Villa maintained that he threw Bierce out of his camp when Bierce began praising Carranza. Later, according to this account, Bierce’s body was found by the side of a road. De Castro wrote an article in the American Parade for October 1926 entitled ‘Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was’, going on at length about his collaboration on the Monk and discussing his search for Bierce in Mexico.

It was at this point that de Castro came in touch with Lovecraft. With the publicity he was now receiving, he felt the time was right to capitalize on his association with Bierce. He knew Samuel Loveman, and the latter recommended that de Castro write to Lovecraft and seek his help on two projects: a book-length memoir of Bierce, and a revision of the story collection, In the Confessional. Lovecraft agreed to do one story—titled ‘A Sacrifice to Science’ in de Castro’s book and published as ‘The Last Test’ in Weird Tales for November 1928—for which he received $16.00 (de Castro received $175.00 from Weird Tales).

‘The Last Test’ is one of the poorest of Lovecraft’s revisions. It tells the melodramatic story of a doctor, Alfred Clarendon, who is apparently developing an antitoxin for black fever while in charge of the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin but who in reality has fallen under the influence of an evil Atlantean magus, Surama, who has developed a disease that ‘isn’t of this earth’ to overwhelm mankind. All this is narrated in the most stiff and pompous manner conceivable. Lovecraft has radically overhauled the plot while yet preserving the basic framework—the California setting, the characters (though the names of some have been changed), the search for a cure to a new type of fever, and (although this now becomes only a minor part of the climax) Clarendon’s attempt to persuade his sister to sacrifice herself. But—aside from replacing the nebulously depicted assistant of Dr Clarendon (‘Dr Clinton’ in de Castro) named Mort with the much more redoubtable Surama—he has added much better motivation for the characters and the story as a whole. This, if anything, was Lovecraft’s strong point. He has made the tale about half again as long as de Castro’s original; and although he remarked of the latter that ‘I nearly exploded over the dragging monotony of [the] silly thing’,¹⁹ Lovecraft’s own version is not without monotony and prolixity of its own.

If it seems unjust that Lovecraft got less than one-tenth of what de Castro was paid, these were the conditions under which Lovecraft operated his revision service: he was at least assured of his fee whether the end result sold or not. (Occasionally, of course, he had difficulty collecting on this fee, but that is a separate matter.) In many cases the revised or ghostwritten tale did not in fact sell. Lovecraft would, in any case, never have wanted to acknowledge such a piece of drivel as ‘The Last Test’, and it is in some ways unfortunate that his posthumous celebrity has resulted in the unearthing of such items and their republication under his name— the very thing he was trying to avoid.

Even before Lovecraft finished ‘The Last Test’, de Castro was pleading with him to help him with his memoirs of Bierce. This was a much more difficult proposition, and Lovecraft was properly reluctant to undertake the task without advance payment. De Castro, being hard up for cash, could not assent to this; so Lovecraft turned him over to Frank Long, who was getting into the revision business himself. Long offered to do the revision for no advance pay if he could write a signed preface to the volume. De Castro agreed to this, and Long did what appears to have been a very light revision—he finished the work in two days! This version, however, was rejected by three publishers, so that de Castro came back to Lovecraft on his knees and asked him to take over the project. Lovecraft demanded that de Castro pay him $150.00 in advance, and once again de Castro declined. He appears then to have gone back to Long. The book did in fact come out—with how much more revision by Long, or anyone else, is unclear—as Portrait of Ambrose Bierce, published by The Century Company in the spring of 1929 and with a preface by ‘Belknap Long’.

In this whole matter de Castro comes off as both wheedling and sly, trying to get Lovecraft and Long to do work for him for little or no pay and for the mythical prospect of vast revenues at a later date. And yet, he was not a complete charlatan. He had published at least one distinguished book of scholarship with a major publisher (Jewish Forerunners of Christianity (E. P. Dutton, 1903)). He also seemed to know many languages and had served as a minor functionary in the United States government for a time. If there is a certain ghoulishness in his attempt to cash in on his friendship with Bierce, he was certainly not alone in this.

Another revision client that came into Lovecraft’s horizon at this time was Zealia Brown Reed Bishop (1897–1968). Bishop was studying journalism at Columbia and also writing articles and stories to support herself and her young son. I assume that she was divorced at this point. Finding out about Lovecraft’s revisory service through Samuel Loveman, she wrote to him in late spring of 1927. In her memoir of Lovecraft, Bishop expresses great admiration for Lovecraft’s intellect and literary skill, but also admits rather petulantly that Lovecraft tried to steer her in directions contrary to her natural inclination: ‘Being young and romantic, I wanted to follow my own impulse for fresh, youthful stories. Lovecraft was not convinced that [t]his course was best. I was his protégé[e] and he meant to bend my career to his direction.’²⁰ Bishop goes on to say that at this point she returned to her sister’s ranch in Oklahoma, where she heard some tales by Grandma Compton, her sister’s mother-in-law, about a pioneer couple in Oklahoma not far away, and wrote a story called ‘The Curse of Yig’, which Lovecraft praised highly.

And yet, it can hardly be doubted that the story as we have it is almost entirely the work of Lovecraft except for the bare nucleus of the plot. ‘The Curse of Yig’ is quite an effective piece of work, telling of the horrible fate of a couple, Walker and Audrey Davis, the former of whom has a morbid fear of snakes. Lovecraft writes of his contribution to the story in a letter to Derleth:

By the way—if you want to see a new story which is practically mine, read ‘The Curse of Yig’ in the current W.T. Mrs. Reed is a client for whom Long & I have done oceans of work, & this story is about 75% mine. All I had to work on was a synopsis describing a couple of pioneers in a cabin with a nest of rattlesnakes beneath, the killing of the husband by snakes, the bursting of the corpse, & the madness of the wife, who was an eye-witness to the horror. There was no plot or motivation—no prologue or aftermath to the incident—so that one might say the story, as a story, is wholly my own. I invented the snake-god & the curse, the tragic wielding of the axe by the wife, the matter of the snake-victim’s identity, & the asylum epilogue. Also, I worked up the geographic & other incidental colour-getting some data from the alleged authoress, who knows Oklahoma, but more from books.²¹

Lovecraft charged Bishop $17.50 for the tale. She managed to sell the story to Weird Tales, where it appeared in the November 1929 issue; she received $45.00 for it. One letter Lovecraft wrote to Bishop in late spring of 1928 is of interest:

When you perceive the foregoing temporary address, and correlate it with what I have quite frequently expressed as my unvarnished sentiments toward the New York region, you will probably appreciate the extent of the combined burdens and nerve-taxes which have, through malign coincidence, utterly disrupted my programme this spring, and brought me to the verge of what would be a complete breakdown if I did not have a staunch and brilliant colleague—my young ‘adopted grandchild’ Frank B. Long—to whom to lean for coöperation and assistance in getting my tasks in shape.²²

What could be the meaning of this? The address at the head of this letter—395 East 16th Street, Brooklyn, New York—tells part of the story; the other part—which Lovecraft told almost none of his colleagues (those, at any rate, who did not already know the situation)—is that Sonia had called him back to New York.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Fanlights and Georgian Steeples (1928–30)

Lovecraft arrived in New York no later than April 24. Sonia writes in her memoir: ‘Late that spring (1928) I invited Howard to come on a visit once more. He gladly accepted but as a visit, only. To me, even that crumb of his nearness was better than nothing.’¹ How ‘gladly’ Lovecraft accepted this invitation we have already seen in the letter to Zealia Bishop. To his old friend Morton he is a little more expansive: ‘The wife had to camp out here for quite a spell on account of business, and thought it only fair that I drop around for a while. Not having any snappy comeback, and wishing to avoid any domestick civil war, I played the pacifist … and here I am.’²

The ‘business’ referred to is Sonia’s attempt to set up a hat shop in Brooklyn—368 East 17th Street, in the very next block from where she was living. Sonia had invested $1000 of her own money to set up the shop, which formally opened on Saturday the 28th. Lovecraft helped Sonia on ‘sundry errands’ on several occasions, including one stint of addressing envelopes from 11.30 p.m. to 3.30 a.m. one night.

But let us not be deceived; Lovecraft was by no means resuming his marriage any more than was necessary. Sonia writes with considerable tartness: ‘But while visiting me, all I saw of Howard was during the few early morning hours when he would return from his jaunts with either Morton, Loveman, Long, Kleiner, or with some or all of them. This lasted through the summer.’³ Indeed it did; and his gallivanting began almost as soon as he came to town. And yet, although he did do some exploring of the region with friends—a drive along the Hudson River with Long; a visit to James F. Morton’s museum in Paterson; a trip to Talman’s home in Spring Valley, in Rockland County just above the New Jersey border—Lovecraft and Sonia did manage to go on 13 May to Bryn Mawr Park, the area in Yonkers where they had purchased property in 1924.

On 7 June Lovecraft unexpectedly received an invitation from Vrest Orton that changed his travel plans significantly. He had been planning to visit Bernard Austin Dwyer in West Shokan, then head south for perhaps a week to Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.; but Orton—although living in the pleasant Riverdale section of the Bronx—was disgusted with New York and wished to move out to a farm near Brattleboro, Vermont, which he had just purchased. He insisted that Lovecraft come along, and it took little persuasion for Lovecraft to accede.

Lovecraft’s faint taste of Vermont in 1927 had only whetted his appetite; now he would spend a full two weeks in quaint rusticity, and he made the most of it. Orton was, of course, not coming alone, but brought his whole family—wife, infant son, parents, and maternal grandmother, Mrs Teachout, an eighty-year-old woman whose recollections of the past Lovecraft found fascinating. The entire party arrived around 10 June, and Lovecraft stayed till the 24th.

It is charming to read of the simple chores Lovecraft performed (‘I have learned how to build a wood fire, & have helped the neighbours’ boys round up a straying cow’⁴)—no doubt he could momentarily indulge in the fantasy of being a grizzled farmer. Orton’s farm, indeed, had few modern amenities—no plumbing except for a lead pipe to lead in the spring water, and no illumination except with oil lamps and candles.

Most of the time, however, Lovecraft struck out on lone trips of exploration. On the 13th he climbed Governor’s Mountain (1823 feet above sea level). The next day he called on his old amateur friend Arthur Goodenough and then went across the Connecticut River into New Hampshire to climb Mount Wantastiquet. On the 18th he went to Deerfield and Greenfield in Massachusetts by bus. On the 17th Lovecraft, Orton, and Walter J. Coates went to Arthur Goodenough’s home in Brattleboro for a literary conclave with several other local writers—a gathering that was written up in the Brattleboro Reformer.⁵ Another newspaper item was an article on Lovecraft by Vrest Orton entitled ‘A Weird Writer Is In Our Midst’, published in the Brattleboro Reformer for 16 June. It appeared in a column called ‘The Pendrifter’, conducted by Charles Crane. On the afternoon of the 21st a neighbour, Charley Lee, took Lovecraft to meet an eccentric farmer named Bert G. Akley, a self-taught painter and photographer of much native skill. Lovecraft was captivated with this ‘veritable jack-of-all-trades’ who none the less ‘retains the primitiveness of the agrestic yeoman’.⁶

On Friday, 29 June, Lovecraft moved on to another leg of his journey as distinctive as his Vermont stay; for Edith Miniter, the old-time amateur, almost demanded that Lovecraft pay her a visit in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where she was residing with her cousin, Evanore Beebe. He stayed for eight days, and was charmed by the vast array of antiques collected by Beebe, the seven cats and two dogs who had the run of the place, and especially by the spectral local folklore Miniter told him. In ‘Mrs. Miniter—Estimates and Recollections’ (1934) Lovecraft writes:

I saw the ruinous, deserted old Randolph Beebe house where the whippoorwills cluster abnormally, and learned that these birds are feared by the rustics as evil psychopomps. It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves. If the soul eludes them, they disperse in quiet disappointment; but sometimes they set up a chorused clamour of excited, triumphant chattering which makes the watchers turn pale and mutter—with that air of hushed, awestruck portentousness which only a backwoods Yankee can assume—’They got ‘im!’

Finally, in mid-July, Lovecraft prepared for his southern jaunt. Catching trains to New York and then to Philadephia, he reached Baltimore on 11 July. Although the bulk of the town was unmistakably Victorian, he found one poignant landmark—Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in the Westminster Presbyterian Churchyard. He was planning to go directly from Baltimore to Washington, but the colonial relics of Annapolis proved a fatal temptation; and they were no disappointment. That evening Lovecraft left for Washington, spending the next three days there. At this point yet another temptation proved alluring—an excursion to the Endless Caverns in New Market, Virginia. This was a good four hours by bus from Washington, but the rate was so cheap ($2.50) that Lovecraft could ill resist. Having written about caves from boyhood, he found that the chance actually to visit one was not to be denied. As with his entire trip, this proved highly stimulating to his imagination.

Shortly after returning to Providence Lovecraft wrote a lengthy account of his spring travels, ‘Observations on Several Parts of America’. It is the first of several lengthy travelogues—some of the others are ‘Travels in the Provinces of America’ (1929), ‘An Account of Charleston’ (1930), and A Description of the Town of Quebeck (1930–31)—and it is among the best. Its flawless capturing of eighteenth-century diction is matched by the deftness with which it weaves travel impressions, history, and personal asides into a smoothly flowing narrative.

Certain practical souls have shed bitter tears at Lovecraft’s ‘wasting’ his time writing these lengthy accounts, which were manifestly produced with no idea of publication and—in the cases of the latter two documents mentioned above—with not even the prospect of meeting any other eye than their author’s. Here is one of many occasions in which later commentators have tried to live Lovecraft’s life for him. The only ‘purpose’ of these items is to afford pleasure to Lovecraft and to some of his friends, and that is enough. The ‘Observations’ and the ‘Travels’ are single-spaced typescripts, and in effect are open letters, the first written to Maurice W. Moe although surely circulated to other close associates. A volume of Lovecraft’s travelogues would be very welcome.

Lovecraft did manage to do some writing aside from letters and his travelogue; in early August he wrote ‘The Dunwich Horror’. This is, certainly, one of his most popular tales, but I cannot help finding serious flaws of conception, execution, and style in it. Its plot is well known, and centres upon the efforts of Wilbur Whateley, his mother Lavinia, and his grandfather, Old Whateley, to bring in a horde of monsters from another dimension to overwhelm the earth. One monster in particular has been locked up in their house for years; and, after Wilbur dies in attempting to pilfer the Necronomicon from the Miskatonic University Library, the creature breaks out and causes sundry destruction before being dispatched by means of incantations uttered by the Miskatonic University librarian, Henry Armitage, and two of his colleagues. It is then discovered that the monster in question was Wilbur’s twin brother.

It should be evident even from this narration that many points of plotting and characterisation in the story are painfully inept. Let us first consider the moral implications of the tale. What we have here is an elementary ‘good-versus-evil’ struggle between Armitage and the Whateleys. That Lovecraft did not mean to portray Armitage parodically (as has been suggested) is proved by a remark made in a letter to August Derleth just after writing the story: ‘[I] found myself psychologically identifying with one of the characters (an aged scholar who finally combats the menace) toward the end’.⁷

What ‘The Dunwich Horror’ did was, in effect, to make the rest of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (i.e., the contributions by other and less skilful hands) possible. Its luridness, melodrama, and naive moral dichotomy were picked up by later writers (it was, not surprisingly, one of Derleth’s favourite tales) rather than the subtler work embodied in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘The Colour out of Space’, and others. In a sense, then, Lovecraft bears some responsibility for bringing the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ and some of its unfortunate results upon his own head.

In an important sense, indeed, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ itself turns out to be not much more than a pastiche. The central premise—the sexual union of a ‘god’ or monster with a human woman—is taken directly from Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’. The use of bizarre footsteps to indicate the presence of an otherwise undetectable entity is borrowed from Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’. Some other features relating to the invisible monster are taken from Anthony M. Rud’s ‘Ooze’ (Weird Tales, March 1923). The fact that Lovecraft on occasion borrowed from previous works need not be a source of criticism, for he ordinarily made extensive alterations in what he borrowed; but in this case the borrowings go beyond mere surface details of imagery to the very core of the plot.

‘The Dunwich Horror’ is, of course, not a complete failure. Its portrayal of the decaying backwoods Massachusetts terrain is vivid and memorable, even if a little more hyperbolic than that of ‘The Colour out of Space’; and it is, as should now be evident, largely the result of personal experience. Lovecraft later admitted that Dunwich was located in the Wilbraham area, and it is clear that both the topography and some of the folklore (whippoorwills as psychopomps of the dead) are in large part derived from his visit with Edith Miniter. The forest gorge that Lovecraft calls the Bear’s Den, however, is taken from a visit to just such an area, near Athol, that Lovecraft took on 28 June in the company of H. Warner Munn.

It is not at all surprising either that ‘The Dunwich Horror’ was snapped up by Weird Tales (Lovecraft received $240.00 for it, the largest single cheque for original fiction he had ever received) or that, when it appeared in the April 1929 issue, its praises were sung by the readership.

In the fall of 1928 Lovecraft heard from an elderly poet named Elizabeth Toldridge (1861–1940), who five years earlier had been involved in some poetry contest of which Lovecraft was a judge. Toldridge was a disabled person who lived a drab life in various hotels in Washington, D.C. She had published—no doubt at her own expense—two slim volumes of poetry earlier in the century, The Soul of Love (1910) and Mother’s Love Songs (1911). Lovecraft wrote to her cordially and promptly, since he felt it gentlemanly to do so; and, because Toldridge herself wrote with unfailing regularity, the correspondence flourished to the end of Lovecraft’s life. Toldridge was, indeed, one of the few later correspondents of Lovecraft not involved in weird fiction.

The correspondence naturally focused on the nature of poetry and its philosophical underpinnings. It was just at this time that Lovecraft was beginning a revaluation of poetic style; and the barrage of old-fashioned poetry Toldridge sent to him helped to refine his views. In response to one such poem he wrote:

It would be an excellent thing if you could gradually work out of the idea that this kind of stilted & artificial language is ‘poetical’ in any way; for truly, it is not. It is a drag & hindrance on real poetic feeling & expression, because real poetry means spontaneous expression in the simplest & most poignantly vital living language. The great object of the poet is to get rid of the cumbrous & the emptily quaint, & buckle down to the plain, the direct, & the vital—the pure, precious stuff of actual life & human daily speech.⁸

Lovecraft knew he was not yet ready to practise what he preached; but the mere fact that he had written very little poetry since about 1922 meant both that prose fiction had become his chief aesthetic outlet and that he had come to be profoundly disappointed in his earlier poetic work.

But if Lovecraft could not yet exemplify his new poetic theories, he could at least help to inculcate them in others. Maurice Moe was preparing a volume entitled Doorways to Poetry, which Lovecraft in late 1928 announces as provisionally accepted (on the basis of an outline) by Macmillan. As the book developed, he came to have more and more regard for it; by the fall of 1929 he is calling it ‘without exception the best & clearest exposition of the inner essence of poetry that I’ve ever seen’.⁹ Lovecraft refused to accept any payment for the evidently extensive revision he performed on the book. It is, as a result, very unfortunate that the manuscript of the volume does not seem to survive; for, as with so many projects by Lovecraft and his friends, Doorways to Poetry was never published.

Before Lovecraft could undertake the southern tour he was planning for the spring of 1929, he had one small matter to take care of—his divorce from Sonia.

Around the end of 1928 Sonia must have begun pressing for a divorce. Interestingly enough, Lovecraft was opposed to the move: ‘during this period of time he tried every method he could devise to persuade me how much he appreciated me and that divorce would cause him great unhappiness; and that a gentleman does not divorce his wife unless he has a cause, and that he has no cause for doing so’.¹⁰ It is not, certainly, that Lovecraft was contemplating any return to cohabitation, either in New York or in Providence; it is simply that the fact of divorce disturbed him, upsetting his notions of what a gentleman ought to do. He was perfectly willing to carry on a marriage by correspondence, and actually put forth the case of someone he knew who was ill and lived apart from his wife, only writing letters. Sonia did not welcome such a plan: ‘My reply was that neither of us was really sick and that I did not wish to be a long-distance wife “enjoying” the company of a long-distance husband by letter-writing only.’

What subsequently happened is not entirely clear. According to Arthur S. Koki,¹¹ who consulted various documents in Providence, on 24 January a subpoena was issued by the Providence Superior Court for Sonia to appear on 1 March. On 6 February Lovecraft, Annie Gamwell, and C. M. Eddy went to the office of a lawyer, Ralph M. Greenlaw, at 76 Westminster Street (the Turk’s Head Building), and presented testimony to the effect that Sonia had deserted Lovecraft. All this was, of course, a charade; but it was necessary because of the reactionary divorce laws prevailing in the State of New York, where until 1933 the only grounds for divorce were adultery or if one of the parties was sentenced to life imprisonment. The only other option in New York was to have a marriage annulled if it had been entered into ‘by reason of force, duress, or fraud’ (the last term being interpreted at a judge’s discretion) or if one party was declared legally insane for five years.¹² Obviously these options did not exist for Lovecraft and Sonia; and so the fiction that she ‘deserted’ him was soberly perpetrated, surely with the knowledge of all parties in question.

The overriding question, however, is this: Was the divorce ever finalized? The answer is clearly no. The final decree was never signed. How Sonia could have allowed this to happen is anyone’s guess. One can only believe that Lovecraft’s refusal to sign was deliberate—he simply could not bear the thought of divorcing Sonia, not because he really wanted to be married to her, but because a ‘gentleman does not divorce his wife without cause’. This purely abstract consideration, based upon social values Lovecraft was already increasingly coming to reject, is highly puzzling. But the matter had at least one unfortunate sequel. It is certain that Sonia’s marriage in 1936 to Dr Nathaniel Davis of Los Angeles was legally bigamous—a fact that disturbed her considerably when she was told of it late in life. It was a fittingly botched ending to the whole affair.

Lovecraft’s spring travels commenced on 4 April. On that day Vrest Orton drove him up to a home in Yonkers which he was occupying with his wife, child, and grandmother. The place, built around 1830 and set in an idyllic rural area, charmed Lovecraft. He spent his time visiting the gang in New York, going to various literary gatherings arranged by Orton, and generally enjoying his freedom from responsibility and work.

On 1 May Lovecraft’s travels began in earnest. He went right down to Washington, stayed overnight at a cheap hotel (he got a room for $1.00), then caught the 6.45 a.m. bus the next morning to Richmond, Virginia. He stayed in Virginia for only four days but took in an astonishing number of sites—Richmond, Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Fredericksburg, and Falmouth. All were delightful. Richmond, although it had no one colonial section, nevertheless revealed substantial traces of antiquity to the diligent searcher; of course, it had suffered terrible damage during the Civil War, but was rapidly rebuilt shortly thereafter, and Lovecraft— sympathetic as he always was to the Confederate cause—found the frequent monuments to the Confederate heroes heartwarming. And, of course, he saw a number of sites relating to Poe, including the Poe Shrine (now the Edgar Allan Poe Museum), which had opened only recently. On 3 May Lovecraft saw Williamsburg (then only in the early stages of its restoration as a colonial village), Jamestown, and Yorktown all in a single day.

On 6 May Lovecraft was back in Washington, where he looked up both old and new friends (Edward Lloyd Sechrist and Elizabeth Toldridge) and explored several museums. Returning to New York on the 9th, Lovecraft found that the Longs were planning a fishing trip upstate, so that they could conveniently take him right to the doorstep of Bernard Austin Dwyer, who was at this time occupying a house at 177 Green Street in Kingston. They left the next morning, reaching Kingston in the early afternoon. For the next several evenings Lovecraft and Dwyer sat up discussing literature and philosophy till far into the night. On the 14th Lovecraft visited the neighbouring towns of Hurley and New Paltz, both of them full of Dutch colonial remains.

After a brief stay with Cook in Athol, Lovecraft returned home around the 18th. It had been a great trip, with ten states plus the District of Columbia traversed; and it had given Lovecraft his first fleeting taste of the South, although in later years he would see far more of it. As with his previous year’s travels, he wrote up his 1929 jaunt in a tremendous eighteen-thousand-word travelogue entitled ‘Travels in the Provinces of America’, which, however, was not published until 1995.

On 13 August the Longs drove through Providence on their way to Cape Cod and picked up Lovecraft to accompany them. New Bedford was explored that day, as well as other towns in the vicinity—Chatham, Orleans, Hyannis, Sandwich. But the best part of the journey for Lovecraft was on the 17th, when he took his first ride in an aeroplane. It was only $3.00, and would fly passengers all over Buzzard’s Bay. It proved no disappointment: ‘The landscape effect was that of a bird’s eye view map—& the scene was such as to lend itself to this inspection with maximum advantage … This aeroplane ride (which attained a pretty good height at its maximum) adds a finishing touch to the perfection of the present outing.’¹³ For someone with so cosmic an imagination as Lovecraft, it is scarcely to be wondered that a ride in an aeroplane would be a powerful imaginative stimulus; and only poverty prevented his ever repeating the experience.

One more trip occurred on 29 August. Lovecraft and Annie Gamwell took yet another sojourn to the ancestral Foster region, renewing their acquaintances of three years earlier and extending their explorations still further. This time they investigated the area called Howard Hill, where Asaph Phillips had built his homestead in 1790. They met several people who recalled Whipple Phillips and Robie Place, saw old Phillips gravestones, and consulted genealogical records that helped Lovecraft fill in details of his ancestry. Later they returned to Moosup Valley, the site of their 1926 trip.

In the fall of 1929 Lovecraft and Derleth engaged in a debate over the best weird stories ever written. This may have been part of the honours thesis Derleth was writing (‘The Weird Tale in English Since 1890’, completed in 1930 and published in W. Paul Cook’s late amateur journal, the Ghost, for May 1945), but, whatever the case, the discussion ended up having an unexpectedly wider audience. Bertrand K. Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, who ran a column called ‘The Sideshow’, published a list of the best weird tales that Lovecraft found so tame that he sent in the lists prepared by Derleth and Frank Long, as well as his own.

Lovecraft was tickled by his appearance in the paper. He did not ordinarily like to obtrude himself as a persistent bombarder of letters to the editorial page, feeling it callow and self-promotional; but around this time another matter far more pressing to him than an academic discussion of weird fiction forced him once again into a vigorous letter-writing campaign. In spring it had been announced that the old warehouses along South Water Street would be torn down to make way for what was announced as a new hall of records (adjacent to the very fine neo-Georgian court house, built in 1928–33, at the corner of College and North Main Streets). Appalled at the threatened destruction, he wrote a long letter on 20 March 1929 (published in the Sunday Journal for 24 March) appealing almost frantically to the city government not to destroy the buildings. But Lovecraft must have known that the fate of the warehouses was sealed. As a final ploy he resurrected his rusty poetic skills and wrote a poignant twelve-stanza poem, ‘The East India Brick Row’, on 12 December. It appeared in the Providence Journal on 8 January 1930.

‘The East India Brick Row’ was written in the midst of an unexpected burst of poetry at the end of 1929. At the very beginning of the year, or perhaps in late 1928, Lovecraft had written the powerful weird poem ‘The Wood’ (Tryout, January 1929)—a poem that finally begins to exemplify those principles of poetry as a living language that Lovecraft had now embraced and was inculcating to Elizabeth Toldridge and others.

‘The Outpost’, written on 26 November, inaugurated the poetic outburst. It is not a great success, and was rejected by Farnsworth Wright as being too long (it is in thirteen quatrains). It speaks of the ‘great King who fears to dream’ in a palace in Zimbabwe. The poem seems clearly inspired by various anecdotes told to Lovecraft by Edward Lloyd Sechrist, who had actually been to the ruins of Zimbabwe in Africa.

At this point B. K. Hart re-enters the scene. The discussion of weird fiction had about died down when Hart stumbled upon a copy of T. Everett Harrés’ Beware After Dark! containing ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. While enjoying the tale, he was startled to note that Wilcox’s residence at 7 Thomas Street was one he himself had once occupied. Hart, in a column published in the Journal for 30 November, pretended to take umbrage and made a dire threat: he would send over a monster to Lovecraft’s house at 3 a.m. What else could Lovecraft do but, that night at 3 a.m., write ‘The Messenger’?

The thing, he said, would come that night at three From the old churchyard on the hill below;

But crouching by an oak fire’s wholesome glow, I tried to tell myself it could not be.

Surely, I mused, it was a pleasantry

Devised by one who did not truly know

The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,

That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.

He had not meant it—no—but still I lit

Another lamp as starry Leo climbed

Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed

Three—and the firelight faded, bit by bit.

Then at the door that cautious rattling came—

And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!

Winfield Townley Scott—he who had referred to the bulk of Lovecraft’s verse as ‘eighteenth-century rubbish’—calls this ‘perhaps as wholly satisfactory as any poem he ever wrote’.¹⁴ B. K. Hart must have been pleased with the piece, for he printed it in his column for 3 December 1929.

‘The East India Brick Row’ followed in early December, after which Lovecraft wrote what I might regard as his single most successful poem, ‘The Ancient Track’. ‘There was no hand to hold me back / That night I found the ancient track’, begins—and ends— this brooding, pensive lyric, written in Poe-esque iambic trimeter. This poem readily sold to Weird Tales, where it appeared in the March 1930 issue and for which Lovecraft received $11.00.

Then, in the remarkable week between 27 December and 4 January, Lovecraft wrote the Fungi from Yuggoth. The thirty-six sonnets that make up this sequence are generally regarded as his most sustained weird poetic work, and the cycle has accordingly generated a considerable body of criticism. Before studying the text itself, it may be well to consider some of the factors that may have led to this tremendous outburst of weird verse.

The most general influence, perhaps, is Clark Ashton Smith. While it is true that fiction had, by around 1921, already come at least to equal poetry as Lovecraft’s major aesthetic outlet, it can also be no accident that the virtual surcease of his poetic output from 1922 to 1928 commenced at the very time he came in touch with Smith. Here was a poet who was writing dense, vigorous weird and cosmic poetry in a vibrant, vital manner as far removed as possible from the eighteenth century or even from the poetry of Poe. Lovecraft had long realized, in an abstract way, the deficiencies of his own poetry, but had rarely encountered a living poet doing work he could admire and even envy; now he came upon just such a poet. Lovecraft’s verse during this period accordingly descends to harmless birthday odes or other occasional verse, with rare exceptions such as the powerful ‘The Cats’, ‘Primavera’, or ‘Festival’ (published as ‘Yule Horror’).

Then, around 1928, he began work on Moe’s Doorways to Poetry. After a long period of quiescence, Lovecraft was forced to turn his attention again to the theory of poetry. The immediate influence on the Fungi, however, clearly seems to be Wandrei’s Sonnets of the Midnight Hours, which Lovecraft read no later than November 1927. This cycle—in which all the poems are in the first person and all are inspired by actual dreams by Wandrei—is certainly very powerful, but does not seem to me quite as polished or as cumulatively affecting as Lovecraft’s. Nevertheless, Lovecraft clearly derived the basic idea of a sonnet cycle from this work.

Winfield Townley Scott and Edmund Wilson independently believed that the Fungi may have been influenced by Edwin Arlington Robinson, but I cannot find any evidence that Lovecraft had read Robinson by this time, or in fact ever read him. He is not mentioned in any correspondence I have seen prior to 1935. The parallels in diction adduced by Scott seem to be of a very general sort and do not establish a sound case for any such influence.

We now come to the vexed question of what the Fungi from Yuggoth actually is. Is it a strictly unified poem that reveals some sort of ‘continuity’, or is it merely a random collection of sonnets flitting from topic to topic with little order or sequence? I remain inclined toward the latter view. No one can possibly believe that there is any actual plot to this work, in spite of various critics’ laboured attempts to find such a thing; and other critics’ claims for a kind of ‘unity’ based on structure or theme or imagery are similarly unconvincing because the ‘unity’ so discovered does not seem at all systematic or coherent. My conclusion remains that the Fungi sonnets provided Lovecraft with an opportunity to crystallize various conceptions, types of imagery, and fragments of dreams that could not have found creative expression in fiction—a sort of imaginative housecleaning. The fact that he so exhaustively used ideas from his commonplace book for the sonnets supports this conclusion.

Some of the sonnets seem to be reworkings of some of the dominant conceptions of previous stories. ‘Nyarlathotep’ is a close retelling of the prose poem of 1920; ‘The Elder Pharos’ speaks of a figure who ‘wears a silken mask’, whom we first saw in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath; ‘Alienation’ seems roughly based upon ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’. More significantly, some poems seem to be anticipations of stories Lovecraft would write in later years, making the Fungi a sort of recapitulation of what he had written before and a presage of his subsequent work.

Those who argue for the ‘unity’ of the Fungi must take account of the somewhat odd manner in which the cycle achieved its present state. ‘Recapture’ (now sonnet XXXIV) was written in late November, presumably as a separate poem. For years after it was written, the Fungi comprised only thirty-five sonnets. In 1936, when R. H. Barlow considered publishing it as a booklet, he suggested that ‘Recapture’ be added to the cycle; but, when he rather casually tacked it on at the end of a typescript he was preparing, Lovecraft felt that it should be placed third from the end: ‘“Recapture” seems somehow more specific & localised in spirit than either of the others named, hence would go better before them—allowing the Fungi to come to a close with more diffusive ideas.’¹⁵ To my mind, this suggests no more than that Lovecraft had some rough idea that the cycle ought to be read in sequence and ought to end with a more general utterance. And yet, shortly after finishing the series he was still mentioning casually the possibility of ‘grind[ing] out a dozen or so more before I consider the sequence concluded’.¹⁶

Certainly, Lovecraft had no compunction in allowing the individual sonnets of the Fungi to appear quite randomly in the widest array of publications. Ten sonnets appeared in Weird Tales in 1930–31 (as well as ‘Recapture’, published earlier); five more appeared in the Providence Journal in the early months of 1930; nine appeared in Walter J. Coates’s Driftwind from 1930 to 1932; the remainder appeared later in amateur journals or fan magazines, and after Lovecraft’s death many more were printed in Weird Tales. The cycle as a unit was not published until 1943.

It had been more than a year since Lovecraft had written any original fiction; and that tale—’The Dunwich Horror’—was itself written after more than a year’s interval since its predecessor, ‘The Colour out of Space’. Revision, travel, and inevitably correspondence ate up all the time Lovecraft might have had for fiction, for he stated repeatedly that he required a completely free schedule to achieve the mental clarity needed for writing stories. Now, however, at the end of 1929, a revision job came up that allowed him to exercise his fictional pen far beyond what he expected— and, frankly, beyond what was required by the job in question. But however prodigal Lovecraft may have been in the task, the result— ’The Mound’, ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop—was well worth the effort.

Of this story it is difficult to speak in small compass. It is, at twenty-five thousand words, the lengthiest of Lovecraft’s revisions of a weird tale, and is comparable in length to ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. That it is entirely the work of Lovecraft can be gauged by Bishop’s original plot-germ, as recorded by R. H. Barlow: ‘There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman.’¹⁷ Lovecraft found this idea ‘insufferably tame & flat’¹⁸ and fabricated an entire novelette of underground horror, incorporating many conceptions of his evolving mythcycle, including Cthulhu (under the variant form Tulu).

‘The Mound’ concerns a member of Coronado’s expedition of 1541, Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, who leaves the main group and conducts a solitary expedition to the mound region of what is now Oklahoma and stumbles upon the underground realm of Xinaian (which he pronounces ‘K’n-yan’), occupied by approximately human denizens from outer space. These people have developed remarkable mental abilities, including telepathy and the power of dematerialization—the process of dissolving themselves and selected objects around them to their component atoms and recombining them at some other location. Zamacona initially expresses wonder at this civilization, but gradually finds that it has declined both intellectually and morally from a much higher level and has now become corrupt and decadent. He attempts to escape, but suffers a horrible fate. A manuscript that he had written of his adventures is unearthed in modern times by an archaeologist, who paraphrases his incredible tale.

This skeletonic plot outline cannot begin to convey the textural richness of the story, which—although perhaps not as carefully written as many of Lovecraft’s original works—is successful in depicting vast gulfs of time and in vivifying with a great abundance of detail the underground world of K’n-yan. What should also be evident is that ‘The Mound’ is the first, but by no means the last, of Lovecraft’s tales to utilize an alien civilization as a transparent metaphor for certain phases of human (and, more specifically, Western) civilization. Initially, K’n-yan seems a Lovecraftian utopia: the people have conquered old age, have no poverty because of their relatively few numbers and their thorough mastery of technology, use religion only as an aesthetic ornament, practise selective breeding to ensure the vigour of the ‘ruling type’, and pass the day largely in aesthetic and intellectual activity. But as Zamacona continues to observe the people, he begins to notice disturbing signs of decadence. Science was ‘falling into decay’; history was ‘more and more neglected’; and gradually religion was becoming less a matter of aesthetic ritual and more a sort of degraded superstition. The narrator concludes: ‘It is evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machinery had brought it during its middle period.’ These sentiments are exactly echoed in Lovecraft’s letters of the period.

Rich in intellectual substance as ‘The Mound’ is, it is far longer a work than Lovecraft needed to write for this purpose; and this length boded ill for its publication prospects. Weird Tales was on increasingly shaky ground, and Farnsworth Wright had to be careful what he accepted. It is not at all surprising that he rejected the tale in early 1930.

The lingering belief that Frank Belknap Long had some hand in the writing of the story—derived from Zealia Bishop’s declaration that ‘Long … advised and worked with me on that short novel’¹⁹— has presumably been squelched by Long’s own declaration in 1975 that ‘I had nothing whatever to do with the writing of The Mound. That brooding, somber, and magnificently atmospheric story is Lovecraftian from the first page to the last.’²⁰ Long was at this time acting as Bishop’s agent, and had in fact prepared the typescript of the tale. After its rejection by Weird Tales, Long proceeded to abridge it by merely omitting some sheets from the typescript and scratching out portions of others with a pen. But this version also did not sell, so the story was put aside. It was finally first published only in Weird Tales for November 1940, and then in a severely abridged form.

Lovecraft’s travels for the spring–summer of 1930 began in late April. Charleston, South Carolina, was his goal, and he seems to have shot down to the South with scarcely a stop along the route. He reports being in Richmond on the afternoon of 27 April and spending a night in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; 28 April found him in Columbia, South Carolina. Later that day Lovecraft caught a bus that took him directly to Charleston. A postcard written to Derleth on 29 April may give some inkling of Lovecraft’s sentiments:

Revelling in the most marvellously fascinating environment —scenically, architecturally, historically, & climatically—that I’ve ever encountered in my life! I can’t begin to convey any idea of it except by exclamation points—I’d move here in a second if my sentimental attachment to New England were less strong … Will stay here as long as my cash holds out, even if I have to cut all the rest of my contemplated trip.²¹

Lovecraft remained in Charleston until 9 May, seeing everything there was to see; and there certainly was much to see. Charleston remains today one of the most well-preserved colonial oases on the eastern seaboard—thanks, of course, to a very vigorous restoration and preservation movement that makes it today even more attractive than it was in Lovecraft’s day, when some of the colonial remains were in a state of dilapidation. Everything that Lovecraft describes in his lengthy travelogue, ‘An Account of Charleston’ (1930), survives, with rare exceptions.

In his travelogue Lovecraft, aside from supplying a very detailed history of the town, lays down a systematic walking tour—which he optimistically states can be covered in a single day (I did so, although it took me about seven hours and several rest-stops)— which covers all the prominent antiquities of Charleston with a minimum of backtracking. The tour leaves out some fairly picturesque sections that are not colonial (the western end of South Battery, for example), as well as outlying areas such as Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, the Citadel, and the like, although Lovecraft probably explored these himself. He recognizes that the heart of colonial Charleston is the relatively small area south of Broad Street between Legare and East Bay, including such exquisite thoroughfares as Tradd, Church, Water, and the like; the alleys in this section—Bedon’s Alley, Stolls Alley, Longitude Lane, St Michael’s Alley—are worth a study all their own. Progressing northward, the section between Broad and Calhoun becomes increasingly post-Revolutionary and antebellum in architecture, although the town’s centre of government and business still remains the critical intersection of Broad and Meeting. North of Calhoun there is scarcely anything of antiquarian interest.

On 9 May Lovecraft reluctantly left Charleston and proceeded to Richmond, where he remained for about ten days. On the 13th he took an excursion to Petersburg, a town about fifteen miles south of Richmond full of colonial antiquities.

Lovecraft was learning to cut expenses on the road. Wandrei tells us how he saved on cleaning bills away from home: ‘He neatly laid out his trousers between the mattresses of his bed in order to renew the crease and press overnight. He detached the collar from his shirt, washed it, smoothed it between the folds of a hand towel, and weighted it with the Gideon Bible, thus preparing a fresh collar for the morning.’²² So the Gideon Bible had some use for Lovecraft after all! He was now becoming an amateur self-barber, using a ‘patent hair-cutter’²³ he had picked up—no doubt a sort of trimmer.

In Richmond Lovecraft did most of the work on another ghost job for Zealia Bishop, although he seems not to have finished it until August. She surely contributed as much (or as little) to this one as to the previous two; but in this case one is more regretful of the fact, for it means that the many flaws and absurdities in the tale must be placed solely or largely at Lovecraft’s door. ‘Medusa’s Coil’ is as confused, bombastic, and just plain silly a work as anything in Lovecraft’s entire corpus. Like some of his early tales, it is ruined by a woeful excess of supernaturalism that produces complete chaos at the end, as well as a lack of subtlety in characterization that (as in ‘The Last Test’) cripples a tale based fundamentally on a conflict of characters. The tale concerns one Denis de Russy, a young man who falls in love with a mysterious French woman named Marceline Bedard and brings her back to his family estate in Missouri, where she has a tense relationship with Denis’s father (the narrator of the bulk of the story) and with Denis’s friend, the painter Frank Marsh. In the end it transpires that, aside from possessing various supernatural powers, Marceline was, ‘though in deceitfully slight proportion … a negress’.

The overriding problem with this tale—beyond the luridly pulpish plot and the crudely racist conclusion—is that the characters are so wooden and stereotyped that they never come to life. Lovecraft well knew that he had both a very limited understanding of and very limited interest in human beings. He contrived his own fiction such that the human figures were not the focus of action; but in a revision—where, presumably, he had to follow at least the skeleton of the plot provided by his client—he was not always able to evade the need for vivid characterization, and it is precisely those revisions where such characterization is absent that rank the poorest.

It is, certainly, not the tale’s lack of quality that prevented its publication in a pulp market, for much worse stories were published with great regularity; but for whatever reason (and excessive length may again have had something to do with it), ‘Medusa’s Coil’ was rejected by Weird Tales. It finally appeared in the issue for January 1939. Both ‘The Mound’ and ‘Medusa’s Coil’ were heavily altered and rewritten by Derleth for their magazine appearances, and he continued to reprint the adulterated texts in book form up to his death. The corrected texts did not see print until 1989.

Back in New York on 20 May, Lovecraft was excited to read one interesting piece of forwarded mail—a letter from Clifton P. Fadiman of Simon & Schuster encouraging Lovecraft to submit a novel. He immediately responded by saying that, although he might write a novel later (clearly The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was not even considered as a submission), he would like to submit a collection of short stories. A few days later Lovecraft’s enthusiasm waned considerably: he discovered that the letter was merely a mimeographed form-letter sent to everyone who had appeared on the ‘Honor Roll’ of the O’Brien short story annuals; moreover, Fadiman had responded by saying: ‘I am afraid that you are right in that our interest in a collection of short stories would not be very vivid. I hope, however, that you will buckle down & do that novel you speak of. If it is good, its subject matter will be a help rather than a hindrance.’²⁴ It is interesting to note that mainstream publishers’ now inveterate reluctance to publish weird short story collections was already evident in 1930.

Otherwise the two weeks spent in New York included additional museum-going (Metropolitan, Brooklyn, and also the newly opened Nicholas Roerich Museum) as well as the usual round of catching up on old friendships. One unexpected acquaintance whom Lovecraft met was Hart Crane, who came to Loveman’s apartment on the evening of 24 May when Lovecraft was there. The Bridge had been published that spring, making him ‘one of the most celebrated & talked-of figures of contemporary American letters’. Lovecraft’s portrait of him is simultaneously admiring and pitying:

Poor devil—he has ‘arrived’ at last as a standard American poet seriously regarded by all reviewers & critics; yet at the very crest of his fame he is on the verge of psychological, physical, & financial disintegration, & with no certainty of ever having the inspiration to write a major work of literature again. After about three hours of acute & intelligent argument poor Crane left—to hunt up a new supply of whiskey & banish reality for the rest of the night!²⁵ Lovecraft was sadly correct in his prediction, for Crane would commit suicide two years later.

Lovecraft’s return home on 13 or 14 June ended another recordbreaking sojourn, but it was by no means the end of his year’s travels. On 3–5 July he decided to take in the NAPA convention in Boston—only the second national amateur convention he had ever attended, the other being the NAPA convention of 1921. But even this was not the end of his travels. On 30 August we find him boarding a train north—to Quebec. It would be his first and last time out of the United States, aside from two further visits there in later years. Lovecraft had come upon a remarkably cheap $12.00 excursion fare to Quebec, and could not pass up the chance to see a place of whose antiquarian marvels he had so long heard. The sight of the Canadian countryside—with its quaint old farmhouses built in the French manner and small rustic villages with picturesque church steeples—was pleasing enough, but as he approached the goal on the train he knew he was about to experience something remarkable. And he did:

Never have I seen another place like it! All my former standards of urban beauty must be abandoned after my sight of Quebec! It hardly belongs to the world of prosaic reality at all—it is a dream of city walls, fortress-crowned cliffs, silver spires, narrow, winding, perpendicular streets, magnificent vistas, & the mellow, leisurely civilisation of an elder world … Horse vehicles still abound, & the atmosphere is altogether of the past. It is a perfectly preserved bit of old royalist France, transplated to the New World with very little loss of atmosphere.²⁶

He stayed only three days, but by keeping constantly on the move saw almost everything there was to see—City Hall Square, Montmorency Park, Notre Dame des Victoires, Chateau Frontenac, the Ursuline Convent, and much more. A side trip to the falls of the Montmorency River capped the visit.

The travels of 1930 had again surpassed their predecessors, and were highlighted by two transcendent sites—Charleston and Quebec. In later years Lovecraft returned to both these havens of antiquity as often as his meagre funds would allow. In the meantime he could at least write about them, both in rapturous letters and postcards to his friends and in formal travelogues; and he did just that. ‘An Account of Charleston’, which I have already discussed, is undated, but was probably written in the fall. But Quebec impelled an even more heroic work, which occupied much of the fall and winter. A Description of the Town of Quebeck was the longest single work Lovecraft would ever write. After a very comprehensive history of the region, there is a study of Quebec architecture (with appropriate drawings of distinctive features of roofs, windows, and the like), a detailed hand-drawn map of the principal sites, and a detailed walking tour of both the town itself and ‘suburban pilgrimages’. That Lovecraft could have absorbed enough of the town in three days to have written even the travelogue portion (the historical section was clearly learned later through much reading) is a sufficient indication of what those three crowded days must have been like. The Quebec travelogue also lay in manuscript until long after Lovecraft’s death, and was not published until 1976.

But beginning early in the year and continuing all through the spring, summer, and early autumn, Lovecraft was at work on a document that was actually designed to be read by the general public: ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. Although this would be among the most difficult in its composition of any of his major stories, this 25,000-word novelette—the longest of his fictions up to that time aside from his two ‘practice’ novels—conjures up the hoary grandeur of the New England countryside even more poignantly than any of his previous works, even if it suffers from some flaws of conception and motivation.

The tale focuses on the correspondence that develops between Albert N. Wilmarth, a professor of literature at Miskatonic University, and a Vermont recluse named Henry Wentworth Akeley, who soberly reports the existence of a colony of extraterrestrials from the planet Yuggoth dwelling in the region, who, by means of a complicated mechanical device, can remove the brains of human beings from their bodies and to take them on fantastic cosmic voyagings. Wilmarth is naturally sceptical of Akeley’s tale, but subsequent events—including the aliens’ attacks on Akeley—appear to confirm it. Wilmarth is then invited up to Vermont by Akeley, although the letter written by the recluse sounds peculiar and uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, Wilmarth makes the journey, where he meets an Akeley who seems both physically and psychologically changed. Akeley is now reconciled to the prospect of his brain being removed and taken to Yuggoth and beyond, for he will thereby acquire cosmic knowledge made available only to a handful of human beings since the beginning of civilization. Numbed with astonishment, Wilmarth retires to bed, but hears a disturbing colloquy in Akeley’s room with several of the buzzing voices and other, human voices. But what makes him flee from the place is a very simple thing he sees as he sneaks down to Akeley’s room late at night: ‘For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.’

Without the necessity of stating it, Lovecraft makes clear the true state of affairs: the last, reassuring letter by ‘Akeley’ was in fact a forgery by the alien entities, written as a means of getting Wilmarth to come up to Vermont with all the evidence of his relations with Akeley; the speaker in the chair was not Akeley—whose brain had already been removed from his body and placed in one of the machines—but one of the aliens, perhaps Nyarlathotep himself, whom they worship.

The genesis of the tale is nearly as interesting as the tale itself; Steven J. Mariconda has studied the matter in detail, and in large part I am echoing his conclusions.²⁷ The Vermont background of the tale is clearly derived from Lovecraft’s visits of 1927 and 1928; indeed, whole passages of ‘Vermont—A First Impression’ have been bodily inserted into the text, but they have been subtly altered in such a way as to emphasize both the terror and the fascination of the rustic landscape. It is also evident that Henry Wentworth Akeley is based in part on the rustic Bert G. Akley whom Lovecraft met on the 1928 trip. Akeley’s secluded farmhouse seems to be a commingling of the Orton residence in Brattleboro and Goodenough’s home farther to the north. And, of course, Lovecraft has ingeniously incorporated the discovery of the planet Pluto (announced in the New York Times for 14 March), identifying it with his mythical Yuggoth.

The actual writing of the tale was, however, very difficult and unusually prolonged, extending from February to September. The story was ‘provisionally finished’ in Charleston, but underwent significant revisions after various suggestions were made by Frank Long and Bernard Dwyer. The nature of these revisions is not entirely known, but it appears that Dwyer recommended that Wilmarth be made a less gullible figure. Lovecraft did not make much headway on this point: although random details were inserted to heighten Wilmarth’s scepticism, he still seems very naive in proceeding blithely up to Vermont with all the documentary evidence he has received from Akeley. And yet, Wilmarth exhibits in extreme form something we have seen in many of Lovecraft’s characters: a difficulty in believing that a supernatural or supernormal event has occurred.

But ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ suffers from a somewhat more severe flaw, one that we have already seen in ‘The Dunwich Horror’. Once again, in violation of Lovecraft’s stated wish to discard conventional morality in regard to his extraterrestrials, he has endowed his aliens with common—and rather petty—human flaws and motivations. They are guilty of cheap forgery on two occasions; and on the first occasion they are so inept as to misspell Akeley’s name, in spite of the fact that, as they themselves maintain, ‘Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving lifeform.’ Their gun-battles with Akeley take on unintentionally comic overtones, reminiscent of shoot-outs in cheap western movies.

But whereas such flaws of conception and execution cripple ‘The Dunwich Horror’, here they are only minor blemishes in an otherwise magnificent tale. ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ remains a monument in Lovecraft’s work for its throbbingly vital evocation of New England landscape, its air of documentary verisimilitude, its insidiously subtle atmosphere of cumulative horror, and its breathtaking intimations of the cosmic.

‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, being one of the longest stories Lovecraft actually bothered to type and submit to a publisher, brought corresponding proceeds. It was readily accepted by Farnsworth Wright, who paid Lovecraft $350.00 for it—the largest cheque he had ever received and, indeed, ever would receive for a single work of fiction. Wright planned to run it as a two-part serial; but early in 1931 Weird Tales was forced into publication every two months for about half a year, so that the story appeared complete in the August 1931 issue.

The period from 1928 to 1930 saw Lovecraft write only two original weird tales (the severely flawed ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and the somewhat flawed but otherwise monumental ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’) along with three revisions for Zealia Bishop: one highly significant (‘The Mound’), another fair to middling (‘The Curse of Yig’), and one totally forgettable (‘Medusa’s Coil’). But to measure Lovecraft solely on his weird output would be an injustice both to the man and to the writer. His travels to Vermont, Virginia, Charleston, Quebec, and other antiquarian oases provided much imaginative nourishment, and his accounts of his journeys, both in letters and in travel essays, are among his most heartwarming pieces. His correspondence continued to increase as he gained new acquaintances, and their differing views—as well as his constant absorption of new information and new perspectives through books and through observation of the world around him—allowed him considerably to refine his philosophical thought. By 1930 he had resolved many issues to his satisfaction, and in later years only his political and economic views would undergo extensive revision. It is, then, appropriate to examine his thought before proceeding to the examination of the subsequent literary work based upon it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Non-supernatural Cosmic Art (1930–31)

By the early 1930s Lovecraft had resolved many of the philosophical issues that had concerned him in prior years; in particular, he had come to terms with the Einstein theory and managed to incorporate it into what was still a dominantly materialistic system. In so doing, he evolved a system of thought not unlike that of his later philosophical mentors, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana.

It appears that Lovecraft first read both these thinkers between 1927 and 1929. He clearly found Russell’s reliance on science and his secular ethics to his liking, although Russell was not exactly an atheist. In 1927 Russell encapsulated his philosophical outlook in terms Lovecraft would have welcomed:

I still believe that the major processes of the universe proceed according to the laws of physics; that they have no reference to our wishes, and are likely to involve the extinction of life on this planet; that there is no good reason for expecting life after death; and that good and evil are ideas which throw no light upon the nonhuman world.¹

What Lovecraft had come to realize about the Einstein theory— in particular, its bearing on the three principles of materialism emphasized by Hugh Elliot (the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology, and the denial of substances not envisaged by physics and chemistry)—is that Newtonian laws of physics still work entirely adequately in the immediate universe around us: ‘The given area isn’t big enough to let relativity get in its major effects— hence we can rely on the never-failing laws of earth to give absolutely reliable results in the nearer heavens.’.² This allows Lovecraft to preserve at least the first of Elliot’s principles. As for the second:

All we can say of [the cosmos], is that it contains no visible central principle so like the physical brains of terrestrial mammals that we may reasonably attribute to it the purely terrestrial and biological phaenomenon call’d conscious purpose; and that we form, even allowing for the most radical conceptions of the relativist, so insignificant and temporary a part of it … that all notions of special relationships and names and destinities expressed in human conduct must necessarily be vestigial myths..³

This passage reveals how intimately the denial of teleology is, for Lovecraft, connected with the idea of human insignificance: each really entails the other. If human beings are insignificant, there is no reason why some cosmic force (whether we identify it with God or not) should be leading the universe in any given direction for the benefit of humanity; conversely, the evident absence of conscious purpose in the universe at large is one more—and perhaps the most important—indication of the triviality and evanescence of the human species. Lovecraft is still more emphatic on the third point (denial of spirit):

The truth is, that the discovery of matter’s identity with energy—and of its consequent lack of vital intrinsic difference from empty space—is an absolute coup de grace to the primitive and irresponsible myth of ‘spirit’. For matter, it appears, really is exactly what ‘spirit’ was always supposed to be. Thus it is proved that wandering energy always has a detectable form—that if it doesn’t take the form of waves or electron-streams, it becomes matter itself; and that the absence of matter or any other detectable energy-form indicates not the presence of spirit, but the absence of anything whatever.⁴

This entire letter must be read to appreciate Lovecraft’s admirable reconcilation of Einstein and materialism. I have no doubt that he derived much of his data from contemporary literature on the subject—perhaps in the form of magazine or newspaper articles— but the vigour of his writing argues for a reasoned synthesis that is surely his own.

Lovecraft had a little more difficulty with quantum theory, which affects Elliot’s first principle, and which Lovecraft seems to have absorbed around this time. Quantum theory asserts that the action of certain sub-atomic particles is inherently random, so that we can only establish statistical averages of how a given reaction will turn out. Lovecraft addresses quantum theory significantly, to my knowledge, only once in his correspondence—in a letter to Long in late 1930:

What most physicists take the quantum theory, at present, to mean, is not that any cosmic uncertainty exists as to which of several courses a given reaction will take; but that in certain instances no conceivable channel of information can ever tell human beings which courses will be taken, or by what exact course a certain observed result came about.⁵

It is clear from this that Lovecraft is merely repeating the views of experts. The point he is trying to establish is that the ‘uncertainty’ of quantum theory is not ontological but epistemological; that it is only our inability (an inherent inability, not merely some deficiency in our sense-perception or general reasoning capacity) to predict the behaviour of sub-atomic particles that results in uncertainty. This conclusion—although accepted by Einstein in his celebrated dictum ‘God does not play dice with the cosmos’—appears to be wrong. Bertrand Russell has declared that the ‘absence of complete determinism is not due to any incompleteness in the theory, but is a genuine characteristic of small-scale occurrences’;⁶ although he goes on to say that atomic and molecular reactions are still largely deterministic.

And yet, in the late 1920s and early 1930s quantum theory was hailed as shattering the first of Elliot’s materialistic principles—the uniformity of law—just as relativity was thought to have shattered, or at least qualified, the second and third. We now know—in so far as we really know the ultimate ramifications of quantum theory— that the uniformity of law is itself only qualified, and perhaps not even in a way that has any philosophical significance. The relation between quantum theory and, say, the possibility of free will is anything but clear, and there is as yet no reason to carry the effects of quantum theory into the behaviour of macrocosmic phenomena.

Some of the most bracing pages in Lovecraft’s letters of this period deal with his emphatic assertion of atheism against those of his colleagues (especially Frank Long) who felt that the ‘uncertainty’ revealed by modern astrophysics left room for the recrudescence of conventional religious belief. Lovecraft was well aware that he was living in a time of both social and intellectual ferment; but he had nothing but contempt for those thinkers who were using the relativity and quantum theories to resurrect old-time belief:

Although these new turns of science don’t really mean a thing in relation to the myth of cosmic consciousness and teleology, a new brood of despairing and horrified moderns is seizing on the doubt of all positive knowledge which they imply; and is deducing therefrom that, since nothing is true, therefore anything can be true … whence one may invent or revive any sort of mythology that fancy or nostalgia or desperation may dictate, and defy anyone to prove that it isn’t ‘emotionally’ true—whatever that means. This sickly, decadent neomysticism—a protest not only against machine materialism but against pure science with its destruction of the mystery and dignity of human emotion and experience —will be the dominant creed of middle twentieth centuries aesthetes.⁷

Lovecraft’s later ethics is in many ways a direct outgrowth of his metaphysics, and it is also intimately connected with his evolving social and political views. The question for Lovecraft was: how to conduct oneself with the realization that the human race was an insignificant atom in the vast realms of the cosmos? One solution was to adopt the perspective of a sort of bland cosmic spectator upon the human race. But this is not a very useful yardstick for actual behaviour, and Lovecraft had to devise some system of conduct, at least for himself, that might be consistent with cosmicism. It is only at this time that he came to espouse an aesthetic retention of tradition as a bulwark against the potential nihilism of his metaphysics. This view had no doubt been evolving unconsciously for many years, but it becomes explicit only now; but in so doing, Lovecraft leaves himself open to criticism at several points.

Throughout his life Lovecraft wavered between (validly) recommending tradition for himself and (invalidly) recommending it for everyone. In 1928 he had properly asserted the relativity of values (the only thing possible in a universe that has no governing deity): ‘Value is wholly relative, and the very idea of such a thing as meaning postulates a symmetrical relation to something else. No one thing, cosmically speaking, can be either good or evil, beautiful or unbeautiful; for entity is simply entity.’⁸

All this is unexceptionable, and yet it gradually gives way to a much less defensible view: that, given the relativity of values, the only true anchor of fixity is tradition—specifically the racial and cultural tradition out of which each person grows. The matter crops up in a discussion with Morton, who appears to have questioned why Lovecraft was so passionately concerned about the preservation of Western civilization when he believed in a purposeless cosmos:

It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which gave us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.⁹

That ‘we’ is very ominous. Lovecraft seems unaware that it is only those, like himself, in whom the sense of tradition has been strongly ingrained who will clutch at tradition—racial, cultural, political, and aesthetic—as the only bulwark against nihilism.

It should now be clear not only why Lovecraft clung to tradition so firmly but why he so ardently sought to preserve his civilization against onslaughts from all sides—from foreigners, from the rising tide of mechanization, and even from radical aesthetic movements. As the 1920s progressed, Lovecraft began to sense that the greatest foe to tradition was the machine culture. His views on the subject are by no means original to him, but his remarks are both incisive and compelling. Two books powerfully affected Lovecraft’s thinking on these matters, although he could say with justice that he had arrived at least nebulously at the same fundamental conceptions prior to reading them. They were Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22); translated in two volumes in 1926 and 1928) and Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper (1929). Lovecraft read the first volume of Spengler (he never read the second, so far as I can tell) in the spring of 1927, and seems to have read Krutch no later than the fall of 1929.

Lovecraft had long been inclined to accept Spengler’s basic thesis of the successive rise and fall of civilizations as each passes through a period of youth, adulthood, and old age. He later expressed reservations, as many others did, on the degree to which this biological analogy could be pressed; but otherwise he accepted Spengler enthusiastically, coming to believe that one particular phase of Western culture was coming to an end—the agrarian and early industrial phase, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, that had in his view seen the greatest flowering of Western culture. Whatever the future held in store, it would no longer be a part of his culture, but some other, alien culture with which he could not possibly identify.

Lovecraft’s reading of Krutch’s The Modern Temper made him face the situation of art and culture in the modern world. Krutch’s book is a lugubrious but chillingly compelling work that particularly addresses itself to the question of what intellectual and aesthetic possibilities remain in an age in which so many illusions—in particular the illusions of our importance in the cosmos and of the ‘sanctity’ or even validity of our emotional life—have been shattered by science. This is a theme on which Lovecraft had been expatiating since at least 1922, with ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’. Indeed, I believe Krutch’s work was instrumental in helping Lovecraft to effect a further evolution of his aesthetic theory. He had already passed from classicism to Decadence to a sort of antiquarian regionalism. But he knew that the past—that is, prior modes of behaviour, thought, and aesthetic expression—could be preserved only up to a point. The new realities revealed by modern science had to be faced. Around this time he began some further ruminations on art and its place in society, in particular weird art; and in so doing he produced a radical change in his theory of weird fiction that would affect much of what he would subsequently write.

Frank Long was again, somehow, the catalyst for the expression of these views. Long was lamenting the rapid rate of cultural change and was advocating a return to ‘splendid and traditional ways of life’—a view Lovecraft rightly regarded as somewhat sophomoric in someone who did not know much about what these traditional ways actually were. In an immense letter written in late February 1931, Lovecraft begins by repeating Krutch’s argument that much of prior literature has ceased to be vital to us because we can no longer share, and in some cases can only remotely understand, the values that produced it; he then writes: ‘Some former art attitudes—like sentimental romance, loud heroics, ethical didacticism, &c.—are so patently hollow as to be visibly absurd & nonusable from the start.’ Some attitudes, however, may still be viable:

Fantastic literature cannot be treated as a single unit, because it is a composite resting on widely divergent bases. I really agree that ‘Yog-Sothoth’ is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached serious literature as yet … The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or assocative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation. The reasonable permanence of this phase of poetic phantasy as a possible art form (whether or not favoured by current fashion) seems to me a highly strong probability.

I do not know what exactly Lovecraft means by ‘Yog-Sothothery’ here. My feeling is that it may refer to Dunsany’s prodigal invention of gods in The Gods of Pegana, which we have already seen Lovecraft to have repudiated as far as his own creative expression is concerned; indeed, he says here of this type of material that ‘I hardly expect to produce anything even remotely approaching it myself’. He continues:

But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitation regarding the sense of outsideness. I refer to the aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast & provocative abyss of the unknown. This has always been the chief emotion in my psychology; & whilst it obviously figures less in the psychology of the majority, it is clearly a well-defined & permanent factor from which very few sensitive persons are wholly free.

Now we are getting more to the crux of the matter: Lovecraft is beginning to provide a rationale for the type of weird fiction he has been writing for the past few years, which is a fundamentally realistic approach to the ‘sense of outsideness’ by the suggestion of the vast gulfs of space and time—in short, cosmicism. There is nothing here that is different from prior utterances of this idea; but Lovecraft now continues:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt —as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?¹⁰

This renunciation of the supernatural, as well as the need to offer supplements rather than contradictions to known phenomena, make it clear that Lovecraft was now consciously moving toward a union of weird fiction and science fiction (although perhaps not the science fiction published in the pulp magazines). Indeed, in formal terms nearly all his work subsequent to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is science fiction, in that it supplies a scientific justification for the purportedly ‘supernatural’ events; it is only in his manifest wish to terrify that his work remains on the borderline of science fiction rather than being wholly within its parameters. Lovecraft’s work had been inexorably moving in this direction since at least the writing of ‘The Shunned House’, and such things as At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ (1934– 35) are only the pinnacles in this development.

At the Mountains of Madness , written in early 1931 (the autograph manuscript declares it to have been begun on 24 February and completed on 22 March), is Lovecraft’s most ambitious attempt at ‘non-supernatural cosmic art’; it is a triumph in almost every way. At forty thousand words it is his longest work of fiction save The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Just as his other two novels represent apotheoses of earlier phases of his career—The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath the culmination of Dunsanianism, Ward the pinnacle of pure supernaturalism—so is At the Mountains of Madness the greatest of his attempts to fuse weird fiction and science fiction.

The basic plot of the novel—the discovery by the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 of the frozen remains of bizarre barrel-shaped entities from the depths of space, and their even more terrifying ‘slaves’, the shoggoths, who ultimately overwhelmed their mastersmed the셀is elementary; but no synopsis can even begin to convey the rich, detailed, and utterly convincing scientific erudition that creates the sense of verisimilitude so necessary in a tale so otherwise outré. We have already seen how Lovecraft’s fascination with the Antarctic dated to as early as his tenth year; indeed, as Jason C. Eckhardt has demonstrated,¹¹ the early parts of Lovecraft’s tale clearly show the influence of Admiral Byrd’s expedition of 1928–30, as well as other contemporary expeditions. And, of course, Lovecraft’s sight of the spectacular paintings of the Himalayas by Nicholas Roerich—mentioned a total of six times in the novel—played a role in the genesis of the work.

The real focal point of At the Mountains of Madness is the civilization of the alien entities, which are referred to as the Old Ones. The narrator, William Dyer, studying their history as depicted on the bas-reliefs of their immense city, gradually comes to realize the profound bonds human beings share with them, and which neither share with the loathsome, primitive, virtually mindless shoggoths. The most significant way in which the Old Ones are identified with human beings is in the historical digression Dyer provides, specifically in regard to the Old Ones’ social and economic organization. In many ways they represent a utopia toward which Lovecraft clearly hopes humanity itself will one day move. The single sentence ‘Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic’ establishes that Lovecraft had himself by this time converted to moderate socialism.

In terms of the Lovecraft’s mythos, At the Mountains of Madness makes explicit what has been evident all along—that most of the ‘gods’ of the mythos are mere extraterrestrials, and that their followers (including the authors of the books of occult lore to which reference is so frequently made by Lovecraft and others) are mistaken as to their true nature. Robert M. Price, who first noted this ‘demythologizing’ feature in Lovecraft,¹² has in later articles gone on to point out that At the Mountains of Madness does not make any radical break in this pattern, but it does emphasize the point more clearly than elsewhere. The critical passage occurs in the middle of the novel, when Dyer finally acknowledges that the titanic city in which he has been wandering must have been built by the Old Ones: ‘They were the makers and enslavers of [earth] life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about.’ The content of the Necronomicon has now been reduced to ‘myth’.

The casually made claim that the novel is a ‘sequel’ to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym deserves some analysis. In my view, the novel is not a true sequel at all—it picks up on very little of Poe’s enigmatic work except for the cry ‘Tekeli-li!’, as unexplained in Poe as in Lovecraft—and the various references to Pym throughout the story end up being more in the manner of in-jokes. It is not clear that Pym even influenced the work in any significant way. A recent scholar, Jules Zanger, has aptly noted that At the Mountains of Madness ‘is, of course, no completion [of Pym] at all: it might be better described as a parallel text, the two tales coexisting in a shared context of allusion’.¹³

Lovecraft declared that At the Mountains of Madness was ‘capable of a major serial division in the exact middle’¹⁴ (after Chapter VI), leading one to think that, at least subconsciously, he envisioned the work as a two-part serial in Weird Tales. But, although he delayed his spring travels till early May in order to undertake what was for him the herculean task of typing the text (it came to 115 pages), he was shattered to learn in mid-June that Farnsworth Wright had rejected it. Lovecraft wrote bitterly in early August:

Ye s—Wright ‘explained’ his rejection of the ‘Mountains of Madness’ in almost the same language as that with which he ‘explained’ other rejections to Long & Derleth. It was ‘too long’, ‘not easily divisible into parts’, ‘not convincing’—& so on. Just what he has said of other things of mine (except for length)—some of which he has ultimately accepted after many hesitations.¹⁵

It was not only Wright’s adverse reaction that affected Lovecraft; several colleagues to whom he had circulated the text also seemed less than enthusiastic. One of the unkindest cuts of all may have come from W. Paul Cook, the very man who had chiefly been responsible for Lovecraft’s resumption of weird fiction in 1917 but who markedly disliked his later trend toward scientific realism.

Was Wright justified in rejecting the tale? In later years Lovecraft frequently complained that Wright would accept long and mediocre serials by Otis Adelbert Kline, Edmond Hamilton, and other clearly inferior writers while rejecting his own lengthy work; but some defence of Wright might perhaps be made. The serials in Weird Tales may indeed have been, from an abstract literary perspective, mediocre; but Wright knew that they were critical in impelling readers to continue buying the magazine. As a result, they were by and large geared toward the lowest level of the readership, full of sensationalized action, readily identifiable human characters, and a simple (if not simple-minded) prose style. At the Mountains of Madness could not be said to have any of these characteristics. Some of Wright’s cavils, as recorded by Lovecraft, were indeed unjust; in particular, the comment ‘not convincing’ cannot possibly be said to apply to this work. But Lovecraft himself knew that Wright had come to use this phrase as a sort of rubber-stamp whenever he did not care for a work.

It is possible, however, that the rejection affected Lovecraft so badly because it coincided with yet another rejection—that of a collection of his tales by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. In the spring of 1931 Winfield Shiras, an editor at Putnam’s, had asked to see some of Lovecraft’s stories for possible book publication. Lovecraft sent thirty tales—nearly all the manuscripts or tearsheets he had in the house at the time—and, in spite of his characteristic predictions that nothing would come of it, he may well have held out a hope that he might see his name on a hardcover book. Putnam’s had, after all, come to him, and not as a matter of form as Simon & Schuster had done the year before. But by mid-July the dismal news came: the collection was rejected. The Putnam’s rejection may in fact have been more staggering than that of At the Mountains of Madness:

The grounds for rejection were twofold—first, that some of the tales are not subtle enough … too obvious & wellexplained—(admitted! That ass Wright got me into the habit of obvious writing with his never-ending complaints against the indefiniteness of my early stuff.) & secondly, that all the tales are uniformly macabre in mood to stand collected publication. This second reason is sheer bull—for as a matter of fact unity of mood is a positive asset in a fictional collection. But I suppose the herd must have their comic relief!¹⁶

I think Lovecraft is quite right on both points here. His later tales do not, perhaps, leave enough to the imagination, and in part this may indeed be a result of subconsciously writing with Weird Tales’ market demands in mind; but in part this is precisely because of the tendency of this work to gravitate more toward science fiction. Lovecraft was in the position of being a pioneer in the fusion of weird and science fiction, but the short-term result was that his work was found unsatisfactory both to pulp magazines and to commercial publishers that were locked in their stereotypical conventions.

A third rejection occurred at the hands of Harry Bates. Bates had been appointed editor of Strange Tales, a magazine launched in 1931 by the William Clayton Company. Word about the magazine must have gone out by spring (although the first issue was dated September), for in April Lovecraft sent along five old stories (all rejected by Wright); all were turned down. Lovecraft should not have been much surprised at this: not only were these on the whole inferior stories, but the Clayton firm was long known as preferring fast-paced action to atmosphere.

Strange Tales seemed at first to be a serious rival to Weird Tales: it paid 2 cents per word on acceptance, and it formed a significant market for such writers as Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, August Derleth, and Hugh B. Cave who could mould their styles to suit Bates’s requirements. Wright must have been greatly alarmed at the emergence of this magazine, for it meant that some of his best writers would submit their tales to it first and send material only to Weird Tales that had been rejected by Strange Tales. But the magazine lasted for only seven issues, folding in January 1933.

The whole issue of Lovecraft’s sensitivity to rejection, or to bad opinions of his work generally, deserves consideration. Recall the In Defence of Dagon essays of 1921: ‘There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.’ Admittedly, this statement was made well before his work had become more widely available in the pulp magazines, but ‘self-expression’ remained the cornerstone of his aesthetic to the end. Lovecraft was aware of the apparent contradiction, for the issue came up in discussions with Derleth. Lovecraft had already told Derleth that ‘I have a sort of dislike of sending in anything which has been once rejected’,¹⁷ an attitude that Derleth—who in his hard-boiled way sometimes submitted a single story to Weird Tales up to a dozen times before it was finally accepted by Wright—must have found nearly incomprehensible. Now, in early 1932, Lovecraft expanded on the idea:

I can see why you consider my anti-rejection policy a stubbornly foolish & needlessly short-sighted one, & am not prepared to offer any defence other than the mere fact that repeated rejections do work in a certain way on my psychology—rationally or not—& that their effect is to cause in me a certain literary lockjaw which absolutely prevents further fictional composition despite my most arduous efforts. I would be the last to say that they ought to produce such an effect, or that they would—even in a slight degree—upon a psychology of 100% toughness & balance. But unfortunately my nervous equilibrium has always been a rather uncertain quantity, & it is now in one of its more ragged phases.¹⁸

Lovecraft had always been modest about his own achievements— excessively so, as we look back upon it; now, rejections by Wright, Bates, and Putnam’s, and the cool reactions of colleagues to whom he had sent stories in manuscript, nearly shattered whatever confidence he may have had in his own work. He spent the few remaining years of his life trying to regain that confidence, and he never seems to have done so except in fleeting moments. We can see the effect of this state of mind in his very next story.

‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ was written in November and December of 1931. Lovecraft reports that his revisiting of the decaying seaport of Newburyport, Massachusetts (which he had first seen in 1923), led him to conduct a sort of ‘laboratory experimentation’¹⁹ to see which style or manner was best suited to the theme. Four drafts (whether complete or not is not clear) were written and discarded, and finally Lovecraft simply wrote the story in his accustomed manner, producing a twenty-five-thousand-word novelette whose extraordinary richness of atmosphere scarcely betrays the almost agonizing difficulty he experienced in its writing.

Once again, the plot of the story is relatively elementary. The narrator, Robert Olmstead (never mentioned by name in the story, but identified in the surviving notes), in the midst of a genealogical and antiquarian tour, comes to the decaying New England seaport of Innsmouth by accident, finding an undercurrent of the sinister there. Encountering an aged denizen, Zadok Allen, he learns the incredible history of the town: in the middle nineteenth century Obed Marsh had come upon bizarre fish-frog hybrids in the Pacific who promised him great riches if they could be allowed to mate with the residents of Innsmouth. The resulting miscegenation produces hideous physical and psychological aberrations. Later, Olmstead’s snooping is detected and he is forced to flee precipitately from the hotel in which he is lodged. He escapes, but some time later he discovers that he himself is related to the Innsmouth people: he finds himself developing the ‘Innsmouth look’. He makes the fateful decision not to kill himself but to return to Innsmouth and join his hybrid relations.

‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ is Lovecraft’s greatest tale of degeneration; but the causes for that degeneration here are quite different from what we have seen earlier. This is clearly a cautionary tale on the ill effects of miscegenation, or the sexual union of different races, and as such may well be considered a vast expansion and subtilization of the plot of ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’ (1920). It is, accordingly, difficult to deny a suggestion of racism running all through the story. All through the tale the narrator expresses—and expects us to share— his revulsion at the physical grotesqueness of the Innsmouth people, just as in his own life Lovecraft frequently comments on the ‘peculiar’ appearance of all races but his own.

An examination of the literary influences upon the story can clarify how Lovecraft has vastly enriched a conception that was by no means his own invention. The use of hybrid fishlike entities was derived from at least two prior works for which Lovecraft always retained a fondness: Irvin S. Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’ (which Lovecraft read in the Cavalier in 1913 and praised in a letter to the editor) and Robert W. Chambers’s ‘The Harbor-Master’, a short story later included as the first five chapters of the episodic novel In Search of the Unknown (1904). But in both these stories we are dealing with a single case of hybridism, not an entire community or civilization. This latter conception is at work in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (in John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908)), where a traveller coming to a small town in France discovers that the townspeople all turn into cats at night. This story, therefore, is probably a more dominant literary influence than those by Cobb or Chambers, in spite of the latter’s superficial similarity in motif.

The narrator, Olmstead, proves to be one of Lovecraft’s most carefully etched characters. The many mundane details that lend substance and reality to his personality are in large part derived from Lovecraft’s own temperament and, especially, from his habits as a frugal antiquarian traveller. Olmstead always ‘seek[s] the cheapest possible route’, and this is usually—for Olmstead as for Lovecraft—by bus. His reading up on Innsmouth in the library, and his systematic exploration of the town, parallel Lovecraft’s own thorough researches into the history and topography of the places he wished to visit and his frequent trips to libraries, chambers of commerce, and elsewhere for maps, guidebooks, and historical background.

Lovecraft was, incredibly, profoundly dissatisfied with the story. A week after finishing it on 3 December, he wrote lugubriously to Derleth: ‘I don’t think the experimenting came to very much. The result, 68 pages long, has all the defects I deplore—especially in point of style, where hackneyed phrases & rhythms have crept in despite all precautions … No—I don’t intend to offer “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for publication, for it would stand no chance of acceptance.’²⁰ That Lovecraft meant what he said is revealed by his extraordinarily snide response to Farnsworth Wright’s request to send in new work:

Sorry to say I haven’t anything new which you would be likely to care for. Lately my tales have run to studies in geographical atmosphere requiring greater length than the popular editorial fancy relishes—my new ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’ is three typed pages longer than ‘Whisperer in Darkness’, and conventional magazine standards would undoubtedly rate it ‘intolerably slow’, ‘not conveniently divisible’, or something of the sort.²¹ Lovecraft is consciously throwing back into Wright’s face the remarks Wright had made about At the Mountains of Madness.

But if Lovecraft himself refused to submit ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ to Weird Tales, Derleth was not so reticent. Without Lovecraft’s permission or knowledge, he sent to Wright a carbon of the story in early 1933; but Wright’s verdict was perhaps to be expected: ‘I have read Lovecraft’s story, THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, and must confess that it fascinates me. But I don’t know just what I can do with it. It is hard to break a story of this kind into two parts, and it is too long to run complete in one part.’²² Lovecraft must have eventually found out about this surreptitious submission, for by 1934 he is speaking of its rejection by Wright. Lovecraft himself, it should be pointed out, submitted only one story to Wright in the five and a half years following the rejection of At the Mountains of Madness.

In the summer of 1930, Lovecraft came in touch with one of the most distinctive figures in the pulp fiction of his time: Robert Ervin Howard (1906–36). Howard is a writer about whom it is difficult to be impartial. Like Lovecraft, he has attracted a fanatical cadre of supporters who both claim significant literary status for at least some of his work and take great offence at those who do not acknowledge its merits. I fear, however, that after repeated readings of his fiction I fail to be impressed with very much of it. The bulk of Howard’s fiction is subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature.

Howard himself is in many ways more interesting than his stories. Born in the small town of Peaster, Texas, about twenty miles west of Fort Worth, he spent the bulk of his short life in Cross Plains. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of this ‘post oaks’ region of central Texas, and his father, Dr I. M. Howard, was one of the pioneer physicians in the area. Howard was more hampered by his lack of formal education than Lovecraft—he briefly attended Howard Payne College in Brownwood, but only to take bookkeeping courses—because of the lack of libraries in his town; his learning was, accordingly, very uneven, and he was quick to take strong and dogmatic opinions on subjects about which he knew little.

As an adolescent Howard was introverted and bookish; as a result, he was bullied by his peers, and to protect himself he undertook a vigorous course of body-building that made him, as an adult of five feet eleven inches and 200 pounds, a formidable physical specimen. He took to writing early, however, and it became his only career aside from the odd jobs at which he occasionally worked. A taste for adventure, fantasy, and horror—he was an ardent devotee of Jack London—and a talent for writing allowed him to break into Weird Tales in July 1925 with ‘Spear and Fang’. Although Howard later published in a wide variety of other pulp magazines, from Cowboy Stories to Argosy, Weird Tales remained his chief market and published his most representative work.

That work runs the gamut from westerns to sports stories to ‘Orientales’ to weird fiction. Many of his tales fall into loose cycles revolving around recurring characters, including Bran Mak Morn (a Celtic chieftain in Roman Britain), King Kull (a warrior-king of the mythical prehistoric realm of Valusia, in central Europe), Solomon Kane (an English Puritan of the seventeenth century), and, most famously, Conan, a barbarian chieftain of the mythical land of Cimmeria. Howard was keenly drawn to the period of the prehistoric barbarians—perhaps because that age dimly reflected the conditions of pioneer Texas that he learnt and admired from his elders.

One does not, of course, wish to deny all literary value to Howard’s work. He is certainly to be credited with the founding of the subgenre of ‘sword-and-sorcery’, although Fritz Leiber would later significantly refine the form; and, although many of Howard’s stories were written purely for the sake of cash, his own views do emerge clearly from them. The simple fact is, however, that these views are not of any great substance or profundity and that Howard’s style is crude, slipshod, and unwieldy. It is all just pulp— although, perhaps, a somewhat superior grade of pulp than the average.

Howard’s letters, as Lovecraft rightly maintained, deserve to be classed as literature far more than does his fiction. It might well be imagined that the letters of two writers so antipodally different in temperament as Lovecraft and Howard would at the very least be provocative, and sure enough their six-year correspondence not only ranges widely in subject matter but also becomes, at times, somewhat testy as each man expresses his views with vigour and determination. Howard was clearly intimidated by Lovecraft’s learning and felt hopelessly inferior academically; but he also felt that he had a better grasp of the realities of life than the sheltered Lovecraft, so that he was not about to back down on some of his cherished beliefs. In some instances, as in his frequent descriptions of the violent conditions of the frontier with fights, shootouts, and the like, one almost feels as if Howard is subtly teasing Lovecraft or attempting to shock him; some of Howard’s accounts of these matters may, in fact, have been invented.

In his tales of the 1930s Howard started dropping references to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology, and he did so in exactly the spirit Lovecraft intended—as fleeting background allusions to create a sense of unholy presences behind the surface of life. Very few of Howard’s stories seem to me to owe much to Lovecraft’s own tales or conceptions, and there are almost no actual pastiches. The Necronomicon is cited any number of times; Cthulhu, R’lyeh, and Yog-Sothoth come in for mention on occasion; but that is all.

Meanwhile Clark Ashton Smith was getting into the act. Smith’s allusions to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology are, like Howard’s, very fleeting; indeed, it is highly misleading to think that Smith was somehow ‘contributing’ to Lovecraft’s mythos, since from the beginning he felt that he was devising his own parallel mythology. Smith’s chief invention is the god Tsathoggua, first created in ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’. Written in the fall of 1929, this story evoked raptures from Lovecraft. He was so taken with the invention of Tsathoggua that he cited the god immediately in ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’; and, since the latter tale was printed in Weird Tales for August 1931, three months before ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’, Lovecraft beat Smith into print with the mention of the god.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft was fully aware that he was borrowing from Smith. Smith himself, noting a few years later how many other writers had borrowed the elements he had invented, remarked to Derleth: ‘It would seem that I am starting a mythology.’²³ Smith of course returned the favour and cited Lovecraft’s inventions in later tales.

Toward the end of 1930 Lovecraft heard from Henry St Clair Whitehead (1882–1932), an established pulp writer who published voluminously in Adventure, Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and elsewhere. Whitehead was a native of New Jersey who attended Harvard and Columbia, was a reporter for a time, and in 1913 was ordained as an Anglican priest. In the late 1920s he was archdeacon in the Virgin Islands, where he gained the local colour for many of his weird tales. By 1930 he was established in a rectory in Dunedin, Florida.

Whitehead’s urbane, erudite weird fiction is one of the few literary high spots of Weird Tales, although its lack of intensity and the relative conventionality of its supernaturalism have not won it many followers in recent years. Still, his two collections, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946), contain some fine work. There is some little mystery as to what has become of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Whitehead; it appears to have been inadvertently destroyed. There are also no surviving letters by Whitehead to Lovecraft. Nevertheless, it is evident that the two men became fast friends and had great respect for each other, both as writers and as human beings. Whitehead’s early death was one of a succession of tragedies that would darken Lovecraft’s later years.

Another significant correspondent was Joseph Vernon Shea (1912–81). Shea wrote to Lovecraft in 1931, sending a letter to Weird Tales for forwarding; there rapidly developed a warm and extensive correspondence—in many senses one of the most interesting of Lovecraft’s later letter-cycles, even if some of the material is embarrassingly racist and militarist in content. Shea was blunt and, in youth, a trifle cocksure in the expression of his opinions, and he inspired Lovecraft to some vivid and piquant rebuttals.

Another young colleague who came into Lovecraft’s horizon in 1931 was Robert Hayward Barlow (1918–51). Lovecraft had no knowledge, when first receiving a letter from Barlow, that his new correspondent was thirteen years old; for Barlow was then already a surprisingly mature individual whose chief hobby was, indeed, the somewhat juvenile one of collecting pulp fiction, but who was quite well read in weird fiction and enthusiastically embraced a myriad of other interests. Barlow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and spent much of his youth at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father, Col. E. D. Barlow, was stationed; around 1932 Col. Barlow received a medical discharge and settled his family in the small town of De Land, in central Florida. Family difficulties later forced Barlow to move to Washington, D.C., and Kansas.

Lovecraft was taken with Barlow, although their correspondence was rather perfunctory for the first year or so. He recognized the youth’s zeal and incipient brilliance, and nurtured his youthful attempts at writing weird fiction. Barlow was more interested in pure fantasy than in supernatural horror, and the models for his early work are Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith; he was so fond of Smith that he bestowed upon the closet where he stored his choicest collectibles the name ‘The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis’. This collecting mania—which extended to manuscripts as well as published material—would prove a godsend in later years.

By the time he got to know Barlow well, Lovecraft regarded him as a child prodigy on the order of Alfred Galpin; and in this he may not have been far wrong. It is true that Barlow sometimes spread himself too thin and had difficulty focusing on any single project, with the result that his actual accomplishments prior to Lovecraft’s death seem somewhat meagre; but in his later years he distinguished himself in an entirely different field—Mexican anthropology—and his early death deprived the world of a fine poet and scholar. Lovecraft did not err in appointing Barlow his literary executor.

One may as well give some consideration now to Lovecraft’s correspondence, for it would only grow in later years as he became the focal point of the fantasy fandom movement of the 1930s. In late 1931 he estimated that his regular correspondents numbered between fifty and seventy-five.²⁴ But numbers do not tell the entire story. It certainly does seem as if Lovecraft—perhaps under the incentive of his own developing philosophical thought—was engaging in increasingly lengthy arguments with a variety of colleagues. He wrote a seventy-page letter to Woodburn Harris in early 1929; a letter to Long in early 1931 may have been nearly as long. His letters are always of consuming interest, but on occasion one feels as if Lovecraft is having some difficulty shutting up.

Many have complained about the amount of time Lovecraft spent (some have termed it ‘wasted’) on his correspondence, whining that he could have written more fiction instead. Certainly, his array of original fiction (exclusive of revisions) over the last several years was not numerically large: one story in 1928, none in 1929, one in 1930, and two in 1931. Numbers again, however, are deceiving. Almost any one of these five stories would be in itself sufficient to give Lovecraft a place in weird fiction. Moreover, it is by no means certain that Lovecraft would have written more fiction even had he the leisure, for his fiction-writing was always dependent upon the proper mood and the proper gestation of a fictional conception; sometimes such a conception took years to develop.

But the overriding injustice in this whole matter is the belief that Lovecraft should have lived his life for us and not for himself. If he had written no stories but only letters, it would have been our loss but his prerogative. Lovecraft did indeed justify his letter-writing in a letter to Long:

an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the publick at first-hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.²⁵

There is certainly much truth in this, and anyone can tell the difference between the cocksure Lovecraft of 1914 and the mature Lovecraft of 1930. What he does not say here, however, is that one of the chief motivations for his correspondence was simple courtesy. Lovecraft answered almost every letter he ever received, and he usually answered it within a few days. He felt it was his obligation as a gentleman to do so. This is how he established strong bonds of friendship with far-flung associates, many of whom never met him; it is why he became, both during and after his lifetime, a revered figure in the little worlds of amateur journalism and weird fiction.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mental Greed (1931–33)

The year 1931 was, of course, not an entire disaster for Lovecraft, even though the rejections of some of his best work stung him. His now customary late spring and summer travels reached the widest extent they would ever achieve in his lifetime, and he returned home with a fund of new impressions that well offset his literary misfortunes.

Lovecraft began his travels on Saturday, 2 May, the day after he finished the back-breaking work of typing At the Mountains of Madness. His customary stop in New York was very brief, and he caught a bus for Charleston via Washington, D.C., Richmond, Winston-Salem and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina. The total time of this bus ride was thirty-six hours.

Lovecraft found Charleston pretty much the same as the year before. On the 6th Lovecraft took a bus for Savannah, and from there caught another bus for Jacksonville (saving a night’s hotel or YMCA bill), arriving at 6 a.m. on the 7th. Jacksonville was a modern town and hence had no appeal for Lovecraft; it was only a way station to a more archaic place—nothing less than the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, St Augustine, Florida.

In the two weeks Lovecraft spent in St Augustine he absorbed all the antiquities the town had to offer. The mere fact of being in such an ancient place delighted him, although the town, with its predominantly Hispanic background, did not strike so deep a chord as a town of British origin such as Charleston did. Nevertheless, he was marvellously invigorated by St Augustine—both spiritually and physically, since the genuine tropicality of the town endowed him with reserves of strength unknown in the chilly North. He stayed at the Rio Vista Hotel on Bay Street for $4.00 a week.

Lovecraft canvassed the entire town—including the Post Office (housed in a 1591 mansion), Fort San Marcos, the Fountain of Youth, the Bridge of Lions, the Franciscan monastery, and what is presumed to be the oldest house in the United States, built in 1565 —as well as nearby Anastasia Island, which offers a spectacular view of the archaic skyline.

Lovecraft finally did break away around 21 May, as his new correspondent Henry S. Whitehead insisted that he come and visit for an extended period in Dunedin, a small town on a peninsula north of St Petersburg and Clearwater. We do not know much about this visit, but Lovecraft found both the environment and his host delightful. Lovecraft and Whitehead were of almost exactly the same build, and the latter lent Lovecraft a white tropical suit to wear during especially hot days, later making a present of it.

Either while at Dunedin or when he returned home a month or two later, Lovecraft assisted Whitehead on the writing of a story, ‘The Trap’. He notes in one letter that he ‘revised & totally recast’¹ the tale, and in another letter says that he ‘suppl[ied] the central part myself’.² My feeling is that the latter three-fourths of the story is Lovecraft’s. ‘The Trap’ is an entertaining if insubstantial account of an anomalous mirror that sucks hapless individuals into a strange realm where colours are altered and where objects, both animate and inanimate, have a sort of intangible, dreamlike existence. Whitehead’s and Lovecraft’s styles do not seem to me to meld very well, and the urbanely conversational style of Whitehead’s beginning gives way abruptly to Lovecraft’s long paragraphs of dense exposition. The tale was published in the March 1932 issue of Strange Tales, under Whitehead’s name only, Lovecraft having refused a collaborative byline.

By early June Lovecraft was ready to return north, but two timely revision cheques allowed him to prolong the trip to its ultimate destination, Key West. This was the farthest south Lovecraft would ever reach, although on this and several other occasions he yearned to hop on a boat and get to Havana, but never had quite enough money to make the plunge.

Key West, the most remote of the Florida Keys, was reached by a succession of ferries and bus rides, since the Depression had not allowed the state to construct the continuous series of causeways that now connects all the Keys. Lovecraft wished to explore this place not only because of its remoteness but because of its genuine antiquity: it had been settled in the early nineteenth century by Spaniards, who called it Caja Huesco (Bone Key); later the name was corrupted by Americans to Key West. Lovecraft spent only a few days in Key West, but he canvassed the place thoroughly.

By 16 June he was back in St Augustine. He gradually moved north, exploring Charleston, Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Philadelphia. After a week in New York and a weekend with the Longs at the seaside resort of Asbury Park, New Jersey, Lovecraft accepted Talman’s offer to spend a week in his large Flatbush apartment. On 6 July a gang meeting at Talman’s featured, as a special guest, Seabury Quinn, the Weird Tales hack. Lovecraft, although taking a dim view of his endless array of clichéd stories (most revolving around the psychic detective Jules de Grandin), found him ‘exceedingly tasteful & intelligent’,³ although more a businessman than an aesthete. Lovecraft finally returned home on 20 July.

Random travels in New England occupied him in October and early November, but the increasing cold curtailed any further outings that required extensive outdoor travel.

Lovecraft’s financial situation was not getting any better, although for the moment it was not getting any worse. The publication of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ in the August 1931 Weird Tales enriched him by $350.00—a sum that, given his boast that he had now reduced his expenses to $15.00 per week, could have lasted him for more than five months. Here is how he did it:

$15.00 per week will float any man of sense in a very tolerable way—lodging him in a cultivated neighbourhood if he knows how to look for rooms, (this one rule, though, breaks down in really megalopolitan centres like New York —but it will work in Providence, Richmond, or Charleston, & would probably work in most of the moderate-sized cities of the northwest) keeping him dressed in soberly conservative neatness if he knows how to choose quiet designs & durable fabrics among cheap suits, & feeding him amply & palatably if he is not an epicurean crank, & if he does not attempt to depend upon restaurants. One must have a kitchen-alcove & obtain provisions at grocery & delicatessen prices rather than pay cafes & cafeterias the additional price they demand for mere service.⁴

Of course, this is predicated on Lovecraft’s habit of eating only two (very frugal) meals a day. He actually maintained that ‘my digestion raises hell if I try to eat oftener than once in 7 hours’.⁵

But original fiction—especially now that he was writing work that was not meeting the plebeian criteria of pulp editors—was not going to help much in making ends meet. Reprints brought in very little: he received $12.25 from Selwyn & Blount in mid-1931 (probably for ‘The Rats in the Walls’ in Christine Campbell Thomson’s Switch On the Light (1931)), and another $25.00 for ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931); but, aside from ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ and $55.00 for ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ from Weird Tales, that may have been all for original fiction sold for the year. Of course, after his double rejections of the summer, Lovecraft was in no spirit to hawk his work about. In the fall Lovecraft sent Derleth several stories he had asked to see, including ‘In the Vault’. On his own initiative Derleth retyped the story (Lovecraft’s typescript was becoming tattered to the point of disintegration), and then badgered Lovecraft into resubmitting it to Wright; Lovecraft did so, and the tale was accepted in early 1932 for $55.00.

Of course, a book would have been a real means to both financial gain and literary recognition. In March 1932 such a prospect emerged for the third time, but once again it collapsed. Arthur Leeds had spoken about Lovecraft to a friend of his who was an editor at Vanguard. Vanguard queried Lovecraft, saying they wanted a novel, but Lovecraft (having already repudiated The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and evidently not considering At the Mountains of Madness a true novel) said he had none at hand. Nevertheless, the firm did ask to see some of his short stories, so Lovecraft sent them ‘Pickman’s Model’, ‘The Dunwich Horror’, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. The stories eventually came back.

How was revision faring? Not especially well. After the work done for Zealia Bishop and Adolphe de Castro, no new would-be weird writers were appearing on the horizon. Of course, the revision of weird fiction was a relatively small facet of his revisory work, which centred on more mundane matter—textbooks, poetry, and the like. But the departure of David Van Bush as a regular client, along with Lovecraft’s unwillingness or lack of success in advertising his services, made this work very irregular.

The prospect of a regular position emerged some time in 1931, but again came to naught. The Stephen Daye Press of Brattleboro, Vermont (managed by Vrest Orton), gave him the job of revising and proofreading Leon Burr Richardson’s History of Dartmouth College (1932). Although Lovecraft received only $50.00 plus expenses for his work on the book, he thought that it ‘may prove the opening wedge for a good deal of work from the Stephen Daye’;⁶ but, again, this did not happen. Lovecraft’s revision on the Dartmouth College history really amounted to mere copyediting, for I cannot detect much actual Lovecraft prose in the treatise.

One very curious job Lovecraft had around this time was that of a ticket-seller in a movie theatre. A professor at Brown University, Robert Kenny (1902–83), maintained that he saw Lovecraft go downtown in the evening (he worked the night shift) and sit in a booth in one of the theatres, reading a book whenever he was not actually dispensing tickets. I asked Harry K. Brobst about the story, and he confirmed it, stating that Lovecraft admitted to him that he held such a job and saying that he actually liked it at the start, but that it did not last very long. Brobst does not know when Lovecraft held the position, but he believes it to have been in the early days of the depression, perhaps 1929–30.

Somehow or other, in spite of rejections and the precarious status of his revision work, Lovecraft managed to write another tale in February 1932, ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’. Its working title—’The Dreams of Walter Gilman’—tells the whole story. A mathematics student at Miskatonic University named Walter Gilman who lives in a peculiarly angled room in the old Witch House in Arkham begins experiencing bizarre dreams filled with sights, sounds, and shapes of an utterly indescribable cast; other dreams, much more realistic in nature, reveal a huge rat with human hands named Brown Jenkin, who appears to be the familiar of the witch Keziah Mason, who once dwelt in the Witch House. In the end he is killed by Brown Jenkin, although not before he has prevented Keziah from performing some kind of sacrificial offering involving a kidnapped baby.

One can agree wholeheartedly with Steven J. Mariconda’s labelling this story ‘Lovecraft’s Magnificent Failure’.⁷ In a sense, ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ is the most cosmic story Lovecraft ever wrote: he has made a genuine, and very provocative, attempt actually to visualize the fourth dimension, largely through the use of geometric imagery. The imaginative scope of the novelette is almost unbearably vast; but it is utterly confounded by slipshod writing and a complete confusion as to where the story is going. Lovecraft here lapses into hackneyed and overblown purple prose that sounds almost like a parody of his own style.