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

‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ is Lovecraft’s ultimate modernization of a conventional myth (witchcraft) by means of modern science. Fritz Leiber, who has written a perspicacious essay on the tale, notes that it is ‘Lovecraft’s most carefully worked out story of hyperspace-travel. Here (1) a rational foundation for such travel is set up; (2) hyperspace is visualized; and (3) a trigger for such travel is devised.’⁸ Leiber elaborates keenly on these points, noting that the absence of any mechanical device for such travel is vital to the tale, for otherwise it would be impossible to imagine how a ‘witch’ of the seventeenth century could have managed the trick; in effect, Keziah simply applied advanced mathematics and ‘thought’ herself into hyperspace.

Lovecraft was unsure about the merits of the tale, so it is not surprising that he refused to submit it to any magazine and merely let it gather dust. A year or so later August Derleth, although thinking it a poor story, nevertheless surreptitiously submitted it to Farnsworth Wright, who accepted it readily and paid Lovecraft $140.00 for it. It appeared in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.

Around this time still more fans, colleagues, and writers were coming into Lovecraft’s horizon. One was a very strange individual from Buffalo, New York, named William Lumley. Lumley was one of several who had become intrigued with Lovecraft’s evolving pseudomythology; most of these correspondents drifted away after a few weeks or months, but Lumley persisted.

A rather more level-headed person was Harry Kern Brobst (b. 1909). He had become interested in weird and science fiction as a youth, being especially fond of the work of Poe, Verne, Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lovecraft. Writing to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, he acquired Lovecraft’s address and began a correspondence, probably in the autumn of 1931. Not long thereafter, however, a fortunate circumstance brought him into much closer touch with his new colleague.

After graduating from high school, Brobst decided to enter the field of psychiatric nursing, and he secured entry into the medical programme at Butler Hospital in Providence. Brobst arrived in Providence in February 1932. A few weeks later he came to visit Lovecraft, and his impressions both of the man and his humble residence at 10 Barnes Street are affecting:

He was a tall man, of sallow complexion, very animated … , with dark, sparkling eyes. I don’t know if this description makes much sense, but that was the impression he made—a very vital person. We were friends immediately…

Now at 10 Barnes Street I believe he was on the ground floor … when you went into the room that he occupied there were no windows—it was completely cut off, and he just lived by artificial light. I remember going in there one time and it was in the colder time of the year … The room was stuffy, very dusty (he wouldn’t allow anybody to dust it, especially the books); his bedding was quite (I hate to say this) dirty … And he had nothing to eat excepting a piece of cheese.⁹

How will Lovecraft ever live down the ignominy of dirty sheets! He who was so meticulous about his personal tidiness appears to have been less scrupulous about his surroundings.

Brobst would be in very close contact with Lovecraft for the next five years, visiting him several times a week, going with him to museums, having meals with him in restaurants, and welcoming Lovecraft’s out-of-town visitors as they came to visit him. Few knew Lovecraft better at this period, on a personal level, than Harry Brobst.

On 18 May Lovecraft left for New York, spending a week there in the usual flurry of social calls on the New York gang. He finally managed to pull away on 25 May, reaching Natchez, Mississippi, a few days later. In Natchez Lovecraft was stimulated both by the spectacular natural landscape (200-foot bluffs above the Mississippi, invigorating tropical climate and vegetation) and the antiquities of the two-hundred-year-old town itself. He then proceeded still further south to his ultimate destination—New Orleans. It did not take long for him to feel the charm of this distinctive city: having arrived in late May, he was ready to declare by 6 June that the three towns of Charleston, Quebec, and New Orleans ‘stand out as the most thoroughly ancient & exotic urban centres of North America’.¹⁰ Naturally the French Quarter—the Vieux Carré—with its unique conjoining of French and Spanish architectural styles appealed to him most, although he found even the newer parts with their long shady streets and stately homes appealing.

An interesting social call occurred toward the end of Lovecraft’s New Orleans stay. He had written of his trip to Robert E. Howard, who bitterly regretted his inability to travel there himself and meet his much-admired correspondent; but Howard telegraphed his friend E. Hoffmann Price, who had a room in the French Quarter, and told him of Lovecraft’s presence. Price accordingly met Lovecraft on Sunday, 12 June, conducting a call that lasted 25¹⁄₂ hours, till midnight on Monday.

Edgar Hoffmann Price (1898–1989) was certainly an unusual individual. A man of many talents—he knew Arabic and he also knew how to fence—he wrote some fine stories for Weird Tales and other pulps in the early 1920s, including the superb ‘Stranger from Kurdistan’ (Weird Tales, July 1925). But the depression hurt Price in more than one way: in May 1932 he was laid off from the wellpaying job he had held with the Prestolite Company, and he decided to try his hand at making a living by writing. He felt he could do so only by writing exactly what the editors wanted, so he began catering quite coldbloodedly to market requirements in many different realms of pulp fiction—weird, ‘Oriental’, ‘weird menace’, and the like. The result was that throughout the 1930s and 1940s Price landed a flood of very slick but literarily valueless material in such magazines, spelling his aesthetic damnation and relegating the vast majority of his work to the oblivion it deserves. Price has an affecting account of his first meeting with Lovecraft:

he carried himself with enough of a slouch to make me underestimate his height as well as the breadth of his shoulders. His face was thin and narrow, longish, with long chin and jaw. He walked with a quick stride. His speech was quick and inclined to jerkiness. It was as though his body was hard put to it to keep up with the agility of his mind …

Twenty-eight hours we gabbled, swapping ideas, kicking fancies back and forth, topping each other’s whimsies. He had an enormous enthusiasm for new experience: of sight, of sound, of word pattern, of idea pattern. I have met in all my time only one or two others who approached him in what I call ‘mental greed.’ A glutton for words, ideas, thoughts. He elaborated, combined, distilled, and at a machine gun tempo.¹¹

As if it were not evident in so many other ways, this first encounter with Price goes far in showing how Lovecraft had matured as a human being over the past fifteen years.

One curious myth that has somehow developed from Lovecraft’s New Orleans trip is the belief that Price took Lovecraft to a whorehouse where the women proved to be avid readers of Weird Tales and were especially fond of Lovecraft’s stories. In fact, this story actually applies to Seabury Quinn (assuming it is not entirely apocryphal); it appears that the women offered Quinn ‘one on the house’ in honour of his illustrious status. Price explicitly and rather drily remarks in his memoir that, out of deference to Lovecraft’s sensibilities, ‘I skipped concubines entirely.’

From New Orleans Lovecraft finally moved on to Mobile, Alabama, then to Montgomery and Atlanta, although the latter city was modern and had no attractions for him. He then proceeded up the Carolinas to Richmond, which he reached toward the end of June. After canvassing the usual sites relating to Poe and the Confederacy, Lovecraft stopped briefly at Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and Philadelphia, finally ending up back in New York around 25 June. This time he stayed in an apartment a few doors away from Loveman in Brooklyn Heights. He expected to linger in the city for more than a week, but a telegram from Annie on 1 July called him suddenly home.

Lillian was critically ill and not expected to survive. Lovecraft caught the first train to Providence, arriving late on the 1st. He found Lillian in a semi-coma, from which she would not awaken until her death on 3 July. She was seventy-six years old. The cause of death was given on her death certificate as atrophic arthritis. Lovecraft had spoken over the years of her various ailments— chiefly neuritis and lumbago—the general effect of which was to limit her mobility severely and render her largely housebound. These various maladies now finally caught up with her.

Lovecraft was not given to expressing extreme emotions in his correspondence, and that was his right; but his remarks to friends about Lillian’s passing scarcely mask the deep grief he felt:

The suddenness of the event is both bewildering and merciful—the latter because we cannot yet realise, subjectively, that it has actually occurred at all. It would, for example, seem incredibly unnatural to disturb the pillows now arranged for my aunt in the rocker beside my centre-table—her accustomed reading-place each evening.¹²

In August Lovecraft received a small augmentation to his selfesteem. Harold S. Farnese (1885–1945), a composer who was then Assistant Director of the Institute of Musical Art at Los Angeles, wished to set two of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets, ‘Mirage’ and ‘The Elder Pharos’ (both in Weird Tales for February– March 1931) to music. Having done so shortly thereafter, Farnese then proposed that Lovecraft write the libretto of an entire opera or music drama based generally on his work; but Lovecraft declined the offer, citing his complete lack of experience in dramatic composition (evidently his 1918 squib Alfredo did not qualify). It is difficult to imagine what such a work would have been like.

Lovecraft’s travels for 1932 were by no means over. On 30 August he went to Boston to spend time with Cook. The next day the two of them went to Newburyport to see the total solar eclipse, and were rewarded with a fine sight. From there Lovecraft proceeded to Montreal and Quebec, spending four full days in the two towns (2–6 September). Lovecraft tried to persuade Cook to come along, but Cook did not relish the ascetic manner in which his friend travelled (sleeping on trains or buses, scant meals, nonstop sightseeing, etc.). Cook did, however, see Lovecraft on his return, and his portrait is as vivid a reflection of Lovecraft’s manic travelling habits as one could ask for:

Early the following Tuesday morning, before I had gone to work, Howard arrived back from Quebec. I have never before nor since seen such a sight. Folds of skin hanging from a skeleton. Eyes sunk in sockets like burnt holes in a blanket. Those delicate, sensitive artist’s hands and fingers nothing but claws. The man was dead except for his nerves, on which he was functioning … I was scared. Because I was scared I was angry. Possibly my anger was largely at myself for letting him go alone on that trip. But whatever its real cause, it was genuine anger that I took out on him. He needed a brake; well, he’d have the brake applied right now.¹³

Cook immediately took Lovecraft to a Waldorf restaurant and made him have a plentiful meal, then took him back to his rooming house so that he could rest. Cook, returning from work at five, forced Lovecraft to have another meal before letting him go. How Lovecraft could actually derive enjoyment from the places he visited, functioning on pure nervous energy and with so little food and rest, it is difficult to imagine; and yet, he did so again and again.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1932 a promising new revision client emerged—promising not because she showed any talent or inclination to become a writer in her own right but because she gave Lovecraft regular work. She was Hazel Heald (1896–1961), a woman about whom I know almost nothing. She was born and apparently spent most of her life in Somerville, Massachusetts, and so far as I know published nothing aside from the five stories Lovecraft revised or ghostwrote for her. Unlike Zealia Bishop, she wrote no memoir of Lovecraft, so that it is not clear how she came in touch with him and what their professional or personal relations were like.

There is good reason to believe that several, of not all five, of the stories Lovecraft revised for Heald were written in 1932 or 1933, even though the last of them did not appear in print until 1937. The first of them appears to have been ‘The Man of Stone’ (Wonder Stories, October 1932). Heald told Derleth that Lovecraft merely touched up an existing manuscript,¹⁴ but to me the tale’s prose reads like Lovecraft throughout. He must have worked on the story by the summer of 1932 at the latest in order for it to have appeared in the October Wonder Stories. It is in the end a conventional story about Daniel ‘Mad Dan’ Morris, who finds in his ancestral copy of the Book of Eibon a formula to turn any living creature into a stone statue, and attempts to do so to both his wife and a man he suspects of dallying with his wife, but in the end is turned to stone himself.

The next tale, ‘Winged Death’, is not much of an improvement. This preposterous story tells of an insect called the ‘devil-fly’ that purportedly takes over the soul or personality of its victim. Sure enough, a scientist is bitten by the creature, and his soul enters its body; absurdly enough, he writes a message on the ceiling of his room by dipping his insect body in ink and walking across the ceiling. This grotesque and unintentionally comical conclusion— which Lovecraft admitted was his own invention—is clearly intended to be the acme of horror, but ends up being merely bathetic.

Lovecraft submitted the story to Strange Tales, but it was rejected because, incredibly enough, another just-accepted tale had already utilized this insect-writing idea! I do not know what immortal masterwork of literature beat Lovecraft to the punch; but the note about the tale’s submission to Strange Tales is of some interest. I think it quite plausible that the earlier Heald tales were written with that better-paying market in view. There is no evidence that the other tales were submitted there; they could well have been, as all but one of them were written prior to the magazine’s folding at the end of the year. Lovecraft submitted ‘Winged Death’ to Farnsworth Wright, but the latter must have delayed in accepting the tale, for it was published only in Weird Tales for March 1934.

I fervently hope that ‘The Horror in the Museum’ is a conscious parody—in this case, a parody of Lovecraft’s own myth-cycle. Here we are introduced to a new ‘god’, Rhan-Tegoth, which the curator of a waxworks museum, George Rogers, claims to have found on an expedition to Alaska. Indeed, the story could be read as a parody of both ‘Pickman’s Model’ and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Consider the absurdity of the scenario: it is not a mere representation of a god that is secreted in a crate in the cellar of the museum, but the actual god itself!

The story is mentioned in a letter of October 1932: ‘My latest revisory job comes so near to pure fictional ghost-writing that I am up against all the plot-devising problems of my bygone auctorial days.’¹⁵ This story seems to have been readily accepted by Wright, for it appeared in Weird Tales for July 1933, in the same issue as ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’.

‘Out of the Æons’—which Lovecraft was working on in early August 1933—is perhaps the only genuinely successful Heald revision, although it too contains elements of extravagance that border on self-parody. This tale concerns an ancient mummy housed in a museum and an accompanying scroll in indecipherable characters. The scroll eventually yields up its secrets, telling the tale of a man who encounters the god Ghatanothoa 175,000 years ago; of course, the mummy is the man in question, whose body is petrified but whose brain still lives.

It is manifestly obvious that Heald’s sole contribution to this tale is the core notion of a mummy with a living brain; all the rest is Lovecraft’s. He admits as much when he says: ‘Regarding the scheduled “Out of the Æons”—I should say I did have a hand in it … I wrote the damn thing!’¹⁶ The tale is substantial, but it too is written with a certain flamboyance and lack of polish that bar it from taking its place with Lovecraft’s own best tales. It appeared in Weird Tales for April 1935.

‘The Horror in the Burying-Ground’, on the other hand, returns us to earth very emphatically. Here we are in some unspecified rustic locale where the village undertaker, Henry Thorndike, has devised a peculiar chemical compound that, when injected into a living person, will simulate death even though the person is alive and conscious. Lovecraft never mentions this revision in any correspondence I have seen, so I do not know when it was written; it did not appear in Weird Tales until May 1937.

Lovecraft no doubt was paid regularly by Heald, even though it took years for her stories to be published; at least, he makes no complaints about dilatory payments as he did for Zealia Bishop. Although Lovecraft is still speaking of her in the present tense as a revision client as late as the summer of 1935, it does not seem as if he did much work for her after the summer of 1933.

Another revision or collaboration in which Lovecraft became unwillingly involved in the fall of 1932 was ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’. E. Hoffmann Price had become so enamoured of ‘The Silver Key’ that, during Lovecraft’s visit with him in New Orleans in June, he ‘suggested a sequel to account for Randolph Carter’s doings after his disappearance’.¹⁷ There is no recorded response on Lovecraft’s part to this suggestion, although it cannot have been very enthusiastic. On his own initiative, therefore, Price wrote his own sequel, ‘The Lord of Illusion’—an appallingly awful piece of work that unwittingly parodies the story of which it claims to be an homage. And yet, Lovecraft felt some sort of obligation to try to make something of it. He rightly concluded: ‘Hell, but it’ll be a tough nut to crack!’¹⁸ The rush of other work prevented him from working on it for months, and he did not finish the job until early April.

The result cannot by any means be called satisfactory. Whereas ‘The Silver Key’ is a poignant reflection of some of Lovecraft’s innermost sentiments and beliefs, ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ is nothing more than a fantastic adventure story with awkward and laboured mathematical and philosophical interludes. Price has remarked that ‘I estimated that [Lovecraft] had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words’,¹⁹ a comment that has led many to believe that the finished version of ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ is radically different from Price’s original; but Lovecraft in fact adhered to the basic framework of Price’s tale as best he could. Price submitted the story to Weird Tales on 19 June, but Farnsworth Wright turned it down. True to his contrary ways, however, he later accepted it. It appeared in the issue for July 1934.

Late in 1932 Lovecraft was pained by the death on 23 November of Henry S. Whitehead, who finally succumbed to the gastric ailment that had enfeebled him for years. Lovecraft pays unaffected tribute to him in a letter to E. Hoffmann Price.²⁰

I have already mentioned Lovecraft’s revision of Whitehead’s ‘The Trap’. There are two other stories on which he gave some assistance, although it is my belief that he contributed no actual prose to either of them. One is ‘Cassius’, which is clearly based upon an entry in Lovecraft’s commonplace book about a man who has a miniature Siamese twin. Whitehead has followed the details of this entry fairly closely in his tale (Strange Tales, November 1931), except that he transfers it to his customary West Indian locale. Lovecraft later admitted that his own development of the idea would have been very different from Whitehead’s.²¹

The other story on which Lovecraft had been assisting Whitehead was called ‘The Bruise’, but he was uncertain whether it had ever been completed. This matter first comes up in April 1932, when Lovecraft notes that ‘I’m now helping Whitehead prepare a new ending and background for a story Bates had rejected’. The story involves a man who suffers a bruise to the head and—in Lovecraft’s version—’excite[s] cells of hereditary memory causing the man to hear the destruction and sinking of fabulous Mu 20,000 years ago!’²² Some have believed that Lovecraft may have actually written or revised this story, but from internal evidence it seems to me that none of the writing is Lovecraft’s, although he does appear to have provided a synopsis of some sort. The story was not published until it appeared in Whitehead’s second Arkham House volume, West India Lights (1946).

Lovecraft wrote a two-page obituary of Whitehead and sent it to Farnsworth Wright, urging that it be used as a quarry for an announcement in Weird Tales. Wright ran the piece as a separate unsigned article—’In Memoriam: Henry St. Clair Whitehead’—in the March 1933 issue, but used only about a quarter of what Lovecraft had sent him, and, since Lovecraft kept no copy of his original, the full text has now been lost.

One very strange piece of writing Lovecraft did at this time was ‘European Glimpses’, dated on the manuscript to 19 December 1932. This is a very conventionalized travelogue of the principal tourist sites in western Europe (chiefly in Germany, France, and England), and is nothing less than a ghostwriting job for Sonia, although Lovecraft—on the few occasions when he spoke of the assignment to correspondents—went out of his way to conceal the fact. Sonia remarks in her memoir:

In 1932 I went to Europe. I was almost tempted to invite him along but I knew that since I was no longer his wife he would not have accepted. However, I wrote to him from England, Germany and France, sending him books and pictures of every conceivable scene that I thought might interest him … I sent a travelogue to H. P. which he revised for me.²³

‘European Glimpses’ itself is by far the least interesting of Lovecraft’s travelogues—if, indeed, it can even be called such—on account of its very hackneyed descriptions of very hackneyed tourist sites that no bourgeois traveller ever fails to visit. Perhaps its only interesting feature is its record of Sonia’s glimpse of Hitler in the flesh in Wiesbaden.

At the very end of 1932 Lovecraft instituted what would become another travelling ritual, as he spent the week or so after Christmas in New York with the Longs. Naturally, he spent Christmas with Annie in Providence, but the very next day he caught a bus for New York and arrived at 230 West 97th Street for a visit of seven or eight days. Loveman and Kirk were dumbfounded to see Lovecraft in the city, but Morton proved to be away from his museum for more than a week, so that no meeting could be arranged. Lovecraft stayed in the city until 3 January.

Lovecraft’s own writing career was, as noted, not progressing very well: only a single story (‘The Dreams in the Witch House’) was written in 1932, and none in the first half of 1933 (excluding the collaboration ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’). Lovecraft remarks to Donald Wandrei that in mid-February 1933 ‘my aunt & I had a desperate colloquy on family finances’,²⁴ with the result that Lovecraft would move from 10 Barnes Street and Annie would move from 61 Slater Avenue and unite to form a single household. That Lovecraft and Annie could not afford even the meagre rent they were no doubt paying (Lovecraft’s was $10 per week, Annie’s probably similar) speaks volumes for the utter penury in which both of them existed.

But luck was, on this occasion, with them. Lovecraft and Annie found a delightful house at 66 College Street, on the very crest of the hill, directly behind the John Hay Library. The house was actually owned by the university and was leased out as two large apartments, one on each of the two floors. The top floor—five rooms plus two attic storerooms—had suddenly become vacant, and Lovecraft and Annie seized on it once they heard of its rent— $10 per week total, presumably half the combined rent for their two separate apartments. Best of all, from Lovecraft’s perspective, was that the house was built in the colonial style; it dates to about 1825. The place fell vacant on 1 May, and Lovecraft moved in on 15 May; Annie moved in two weeks later. Lovecraft was unable to believe his good fortune, and hoped only to be able to keep the place for a significant length of time. As it happened, he would remain there for the four years remaining in his life.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In My Own Handwriting (1933–35)

The house is a square wooden edifice of the 1800 period … The fine colonial doorway is like my bookplate come to life, though of a slightly later period with side lights & fan carving instead of a fanlight. In the rear is a picturesque, village-like garden at a higher level than the front of the house. The upper flat we have taken contains 5 rooms besides bath & kitchenette nook on the main (2nd) floor, plus 2 attic storerooms—one of which is so attractive that I wish I could have it for an extra den! My quarters—a large study & a small adjoining bedroom—are on the south side, with my working desk under a west window affording a splendid view of the lower town’s outspread roofs & of the mystical sunsets that flame behind them. The interior is as fascinating as the exterior—with colonial fireplaces, mantels, & chimney cupboards, curving Georgian staircase, wide floorboards, old-fashioned latches, small-paned windows, sixpanel doors, rear wing with floor at a different level (3 steps down), quaint attic stairs, &c.—just like the old houses open as museums. After admiring such all my life, I find something magical & dreamlike in the experience of actually living in one … I keep half-expecting a museum guard to come around & kick me out at 5 o’clock closing time!¹

A passage like this can be found in nearly every letter Lovecraft wrote during this period, and testifies to the miraculous stroke of luck whereby a move made for purely economic reasons—and after Lovecraft had come to feel so at home at 10 Barnes after seven years’ residence there—resulted in his landing in a colonial-style house he had always longed for. Even his birthplace, 454 Angell Street, was not colonial, although of course it remained dear to his heart for other reasons.

Across the back garden from 66 College Street was a boardinghouse, at which Annie customarily ate both her meals; Lovecraft would eat there occasionally, but he preferred either to go downtown to some cheaper eatery or to make his own humble meals out of cans or from groceries purchased at delicatessens or grocery stores such as the Weybosset Food Basket (still in operation).

One of the most engaging features of the place was a shed next to the boarding-house, whose flat roof supplied an excellent sunning place for the several cats in the area. It was not long before Lovecraft began to make friends with these cats. Since he was living on what was then Brown University’s fraternity row, Lovecraft christened this group of felines the Kappa Alpha Tau (K.A.T.), which he claimed stood for Kompson Ailouron Taxis (Band of Elegant Cats). Their comings and goings would provide Lovecraft much pleasure, and some heartache, over the years.

A few months before he moved to 66 College, around 11 March, Lovecraft had taken a trip to Hartford, Connecticut—on what he tells one correspondent was ‘a job of research which a client was conducting at the library there’.² Again Lovecraft has prevaricated, and again the reason is connected with his ex-wife; for this was the last time he and Sonia saw each other face to face. After she returned from her European tour, Sonia took a trip to the Hartford suburbs of Farmington and Wethersfield; she was so captivated with the colonial antiquities in these towns that she wrote to Lovecraft and asked him to join her. He did so, spending a day and a night there.

That evening, before they parted for the night, Sonia said, ‘Howard, won’t you kiss me goodnight?’ Lovecraft replied, ‘No, it is better not to.’ The next morning they explored Hartford itself, and that evening, as they bade each other adieu, Sonia did not ask for a kiss.³ They never saw each other again nor, so far as I can tell, corresponded.

The new household at 66 College got off, literally, on the wrong foot when, on 14 June, Annie fell down the stairs and broke her ankle. She remained in Rhode Island Hospital for three weeks in a cast and returned home on 5 July, essentially bedridden and with a nurse in attendance; the cast was removed on 3 August, but Annie had to continue using crutches until well into the fall. All this could not have helped the finances of the household, and in an unguarded moment Lovecraft makes note of the ‘financial strain utterly ruinous to us at the present juncture!’⁴

There was some relief, however. On 30 June the peripatetic E.

Hoffmann Price paid Lovecraft a four-day call in Providence in the course of an automobile tour across the country in a 1928 Ford that Lovecraft deemed the Juggernaut. This handy vehicle allowed Lovecraft to see parts of his own state that he had never visited before, in particular the so-called Narragansett Country or South County—the stretch of countryside on the western and southern side of Narragansett Bay, where in the colonial period actual plantations resembling those in the South had existed.

Harry Brobst joined in some of the festivities. On one occasion, when Price was preparing a feast of Indian curry, Brobst made the faux pas of bringing a six-pack of beer. Lovecraft had apparently never seen such a quantity of alcoholic beverages before. Let Price again tell the story:

‘And what,’ he asked, out of scientific curiosity, ‘are you going to do with so much of it?’

‘Drink it,’ said Brobst. ‘Only three bottles a-piece.’

I’ll never forget HPL’s look of utter incredulity … And he watched us with unconcealed curiosity, and with a touch of apprehension, as we drank three bottles a-piece. I’m sure he made a detailed entry in his journal to record this, to him, unusual feat.⁵

Lovecraft’s third and last trip to Quebec occurred in early September, when Annie gave Lovecraft a belated birthday present of a week’s vacation from nursing. He prefaced the trip by visiting Cook in Boston on 2 September, then crammed as much into the next four days as possible, seeing all the sights he had seen on his two previous visits. Lovecraft also managed one day in Montreal, which he found appealing if entirely modern.

In late summer 1933 Samuel Loveman spoke with an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Allen G. Ullman, about Lovecraft’s stories. On Ullman’s request, Lovecraft sent in a total of twenty-five stories— nearly all the work he had not repudiated.

Sympathetic as I generally am to Lovecraft’s relentlessly uncommercial stance, I have difficulty refraining from a strong inclination to kick him in the seat of the pants for the letter he wrote to Ullman accompanying these stories. Throughout the letter Lovecraft repeatedly denigrates his own work out of what he fancies to be gentlemanly humility but which Ullman probably took to be lack of confidence in his own work. For example: ‘The Tomb’ is ‘stiff in diction’; ‘The Temple’ is ‘nothing remarkable’; ‘The Outsider’ is ‘rather bombastic in style & mechanical in climax’; and on and on.⁶ For some reason, perhaps because they were not published, Lovecraft did not send At the Mountains of Madness or ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, two of his strongest works.

It is scarcely a surprise that Ullman ultimately rejected the collection, sending Lovecraft on another round of self-recrimination. And yet, in this case the rejection was not entirely the fault of Lovecraft’s lack of salesmanship. Ullman had asked Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales whether he could dispose of a thousand copies of a proposed collection of Lovecraft’s stories through the magazine; Wright said he could not guarantee such a sale, and Ullman promptly turned down the stories.

The Knopf deal is probably the closest Lovecraft ever came to having a book published in his lifetime by a mainstream publisher. If he had done so, the rest of his career—and, it is not too much to say, the entire subsequent history of American weird fiction— might have been very different. But, after this fourth failure at book publication (following Weird Tales, Putnam’s, and Vanguard), the last three and a half years of Lovecraft’s life were increasingly filled with doubt, diffidence, and depression about his work, until toward the end he came to believe that he had entirely failed as a fiction writer.

In September 1933 The Fantasy Fan began publication. This is, canonically, the first ‘fan’ magazine in the domain of weird/ fantastic fiction, and it inaugurated a very rich, complex, and somewhat unruly tradition—still flourishing today—of fan activity in this realm.

It is an anomaly beyond my powers of explanation that the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction have attracted legions of fans who are not content to read and collect the literature but must write about it and its authors, and publish—often at considerable expense—small magazines or books devoted to the subject. There is no analogous fan network in the fields of detective fiction or the western, even though the first of these fields certainly attracts a far larger body of fans than does weird fiction. Nor is this fan activity entirely to be despised: many of today’s leading critics of weird fiction emerged from the realm of fandom and still retain connections with it. Fandom is perhaps most charitably seen as a training ground that permits young writers and critics (most individuals become fans as teenagers) to hone their nascent abilities; but the field has gained well-deserved contempt because so many of its participants never seem to advance beyond its essentially juvenile level.

The Fantasy Fan was edited by Charles D. Hornig (b. 1916) of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who was scarcely seventeen when the magazine was launched. Celebrated as it is, it operated at a loss during its entire run: it had a pitifully small circulation in its day— only sixty subscribers and a print run probably not exceeding three hundred—and looks very crude and amateurish today. But it attracted immediate attention throughout the world of weird fiction, not only among fans but among its leading authors. Lovecraft saw in it a chance to land (without pay, of course) his oft-rejected tales. He urged Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and even the relentlessly professional August Derleth to send original stories to it, and the appearance of stories by these and other writers has made The Fantasy Fan a choice collectible commanding high prices.

Hornig made, however, one mistake in judgment by instituting, in the very first issue, a write-in column called ‘The Boiling Point’ in which controversial and polemical opinions were deliberately sought out. As a result, a nasty letter-feud broke out between Forrest J Ackerman (b. 1916)—who had harshly criticized a Clark Ashton Smith story—and Lovecraft, Smith, Barlow, and others. By February 1934 Hornig decided that ‘The Boiling Point’ had served its purpose and had in fact aroused too much ill-feeling to be productive. And yet, bitter, vituperative controversies of this sort have remained common in fandom and continue to this day.

Hornig made a wiser decision when he accepted Lovecraft’s offer of preparing a new edition of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ for serialization in the magazine. Lovecraft evidently revised the essay all at once, not piecemeal over the course of the serialization (October 1933 to February 1935); indeed, he seems simply to have sent Hornig an annotated copy of The Recluse, with separate typed (or even handwritten) sheets for the major additions. The serialization progressed very slowly, as the magazine could accommodate only a small portion of text in each issue; when the magazine folded in February 1935, it had published the text only up to the middle of Chapter VIII. For the rest of the two years of his life Lovecraft sought in vain to find some fan publisher to continue the serialization. The complete, revised text of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ did not appear until The Outsider and Others (1939).

Another individual who established—or attempted to establish —various journals wavering uncertainly between the fan and semiprofessional levels was William L. Crawford (1911–84), with whom Lovecraft came in touch in the fall of 1933. Lovecraft would, with a certain good-natured maliciousness, poke fun at Crawford’s lack of culture by referring to him as Hill-Billy, presumably alluding both to Crawford’s residence in Everett, Pennsylvania (in the Alleghanies) and to his stolid insensitivity to highbrow literature. But Crawford meant well. Initially he proposed a non-paying weird magazine titled Unusual Stories but almost immediately ran into difficulties, even though he accepted Lovecraft’s ‘Celephaïs’ and ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ for the magazine. By early 1934 he proposed a second journal, Marvel Tales, either as a companion to Unusual or as a replacement for it. ‘Celephaïs’ appeared in the first issue (May 1934) of Marvel, while ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ finally appeared in the March–April 1935 issue. Two issues of Unusual Stories did emerge in 1935 (prefaced by a queer ‘advance issue’ in the spring of 1934), but contained no work by Lovecraft.

But Crawford’s bumbling attempts deserve commendation for at least one good result. In the fall of 1933 he asked Lovecraft for a nine-hundred-word autobiography for Unusual, evidently the first of a series. Lovecraft had great difficulty condensing his life and opinions into nine hundred words, so on 23 November he wrote a longer version of about three thousand words and somehow managed to trim this down to the requisite size. The shortened version, now lost, never appeared; but providentially Lovecraft sent the longer version to Barlow for preservation, and this is how we have the piece entitled ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’—easily Lovecraft’s finest autobiographical essay.

The revision of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ coincided with an extensive course of rereading and analysing the weird classics in an attempt to revive what Lovecraft believed to be his flagging creative powers. Rejections were still affecting him keenly, and he was beginning to feel written out. Perhaps he needed a break from fiction as he had had in 1908–17; or perhaps a renewed critical reading of the landmarks in the field might rejuvenate him. Whatever the case, Lovecraft produced several interesting documents as a result of this work. Probably the most significant is ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, Lovecraft’s canonical statement of his own goals for weird writing, as well as a schematic outline of how he himself wrote his own stories.

And yet, this research does not seem to have helped Lovecraft much in the short term, for the first actual story he wrote at this time—’The Thing on the Doorstep’, scribbled frenetically in pencil from 21 to 24 August 1933—is, like ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’, one of his poorest later efforts.

The tale, narrated in the first person by Daniel Upton, tells of Upton’s young friend Edward Derby, who in his thirties becomes attracted to and marries a young Innsmouth woman named Asenath Waite. It turns out that Asenath—who has anomalous hypnotic powers—is capable of thrusting her mind into the body of another person; the ousted mind then occupies her own body. Moreover, Asenath herself is in fact the mind of her father Ephraim: as his own death approached, he switched minds with his own daughter. Derby, a weak-willed individual, initially succumbs to this body-switching, but ultimately rebels by killing Asenath. But her mind is strong enough to retain life, and she again exchanges personalities with Edward, thrusting his mind into the decaying corpse of her own body. Edward, exercising superhuman strength, emerges from the grave and becomes the ‘thing on the doorstep’— approaching his friend Upton and, by way of a letter, urging him to kill the person that is occupying his own body.

‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ has many flaws: first, the obviousness of the basic scenario and the utter lack of subtlety in its execution; and second, poor writing, laden (as with ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’) with hyperbole, stale idioms, and dragging verbosity. The story was clearly influenced by H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928; first published in England in 1925 as The Remedy), a poorly written but strangely compelling novel about a man named Booth who displays anomalous powers of hypnosis and mind-transference. Lovecraft has amended this plot by introducing the notion of mind-exchange: whereas Drake does not clarify what happens to the ousted mind when it is taken over by the mind of Booth, Lovecraft envisages an exact transference whereby the ousted mind occupies the body of its possessor. The notion of mind-transference between a man and a woman may have been borrowed by Barry Pain’s outstanding short novel An Exchange of Souls (1911), which Lovecraft is known to have read.

The fact that the mind-exchange occurs between husband and wife gives the story some small interest, if only from a biographical perspective. Various features of Edward Derby’s life supply a twisted version of Lovecraft’s own childhood; but other features seem drawn from the lives of some of Lovecraft’s closest associates, notably Alfred Galpin and Frank Belknap Long.⁷ Derby’s marriage to Asenath Waite, of course, brings certain aspects of Lovecraft’s marriage to Sonia manifestly to mind. Sonia was clearly the more strong-willed member of the couple. On one occasion Frank Belknap Long told me that Sonia was a ‘domineering’ woman, a description very applicable to Asenath Waite. Aside from these points of biographical interest, however, ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ is crude, obvious, lacking in subtlety of execution or depth of conception, and histrionically written.

Lovecraft was becoming the hub of an increasingly complex network of fans and writers in the field of weird and science fiction; and in the last four years of his life he attracted a vast number of young people (mostly boys) who looked upon him as a living legend. I have already noted that R. H. Barlow first came in touch with Lovecraft at the age of thirteen in 1931; now other teenagers came to the fore.

The most promising of them—or, rather, the one who in the end amounted to the most—was Robert Bloch (1917–94), who first wrote to Lovecraft in the spring of 1933. Bloch, born in Chicago but at this time a resident of Milwaukee, had just turned sixteen, and had been reading Weird Tales since 1927. To the end of his life Bloch remained grateful to Lovecraft for his lengthy reply to his fan letter and for continuing to write to him over the next four years. Lovecraft lent unstinting assistance to Bloch, meticulously criticizing his early stories and urging him to restrain the overcolouring and stylistic excesses that marred his tales (flaws that Lovecraft knew all too well from his own early work). The advice paid off in a hurry, for in July 1934 Bloch landed his first story in Weird Tales. From this point on he rapidly became a regular in the magazine, and— although this occurred chiefly after Lovecraft’s death—branched out into the mystery and science fiction fields as well.

Richard F. Searight (1902–75) was not exactly a teenage fan when he began corresponding with Lovecraft in late summer of 1933; indeed, he had had one collaborative story in an early issue of Weird Tales (‘The Brain in the Jar’ in November 1924). A native of Michigan, Searight worked as a telegraph operator for many years. By the early 1930s he decided to return to literature, writing a series of tales and poems which he wished Lovecraft to revise and help him to place professionally. Lovecraft felt that he could not help Searight in a revisory capacity but encouraged him to reconceive his work along less conventional lines. Searight attempted to follow Lovecraft’s advice and did manage to land some tales in Wonder Stories and other science fiction pulps, although many remained unpublished. In one such story, ‘The Sealed Casket’ (Weird Tales, March 1935), Searight came up with a new ‘book’ to add to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology, the Eltdown Shards; Lovecraft would cite it himself in a few later stories.

Helen V. Sully (1904–97) met Lovecraft in person before corresponding with him. The daughter of Genevieve K. Sully, a married woman in Auburn, California, with whom Clark Ashton Smith carried on a long-time affair, Sully decided to explore the eastern seaboard in the summer of 1933, and Smith urged her to look up Lovecraft in Providence. She did so, arriving in the city in early July and being shown all the sites in Providence as well as Newport, Newburyport, and elsewhere. Lovecraft paid for all of Sully’s expenses—meals, trips, lodging at the boarding house across the street from 66 College—while he was her host; she could not have known what a severe burden this must have placed upon his own perilous financial condition. One evening Lovecraft took her to one of his favourite haunts, the hidden churchyard of St John’s Episcopal Church:

It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.⁸

What a ladies’ man! It should be noted that Sully was indeed an exceptionally attractive woman. When she went to New York after visiting Lovecraft, she bowled over the entire weird fiction crowd there: Lovecraft drily reports having to keep Frank Long and Donald Wandrei from fighting a duel over her.

Herman C. Koenig (1893–1959) was, like Searight, well beyond his teen years when he wrote to Lovecraft in the fall of 1933. An employee of the Electrical Testing Laboratories in New York City, Koenig had an impressive private collection of rare books, and he had asked Lovecraft about the Necronomicon and how it could be procured. Lovecraft, disillusioning Koenig about the reality of the volume, nevertheless continued to stay in touch with him, and Koenig would lend him a significant number of weird books that would affect Lovecraft strongly over the next several years. In particular, in the summer of 1934, Koenig began circulating around the Lovecraft circle copies of the forgotten work of William Hope Hodgson, whose novels and tales—particularly The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912)—are prodigious feats of the imagination. August Derleth would later reprint much of Hodgson’s work with Arkham House.

The post-Christmas season of 1933–34 again found Lovecraft in New York, and this time he ended up meeting an unusual number of colleagues old and new, among them Desmond Hall (associate editor of Astounding Stories) and Donald Wandrei’s superlatively talented brother, the weird artist Howard Wandrei.

On the 31st Lovecraft saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s flat in Brooklyn Heights, where he renewed his acquaintance with Hart Crane’s mother, whom he had met in Cleveland in 1922. Crane, of course, had committed suicide in 1932. It was on this occasion, evidently—if Loveman’s word can be trusted—that Loveman’s roommate Patrick McGrath spiked Lovecraft’s drink, causing him to talk even more animatedly than he usually did.⁹ Lovecraft gives no indication of any such thing, and one would imagine that someone so sensitive to alcohol (its mere smell was nearly a purgative) would have detected the ruse. I am half inclined to doubt this anecdote, engaging as it is.

The rest of the winter and early spring of 1934 passed uneventfully, until in mid-March R. H. Barlow made a momentous announcement: he invited Lovecraft for an indefinite visit to his family’s home in De Land, Florida. Lovecraft, whose last trip to Florida and its energizing heat had been in 1931, was anxious to accept the invitation, and the only obstacle was money. But the money does seem to have come in, for by mid-April Lovecraft was making definite plans to head south.

The trip began around 17 April, and after the usual few days in New York he reached Charleston on the 24th, where he spent almost a week. Finally he boarded a bus and arrived at De Land just after noon on 2 May. Barlow and his family actually lived a good eighteen miles southwest of that city along what is now State Road 44; the residence was probably closer to the small town of Cassia than to De Land. There was a lake on the property, and the nearest neighbour was three miles away.¹⁰

We do not know a great deal about what Lovecraft actually did in the more than six weeks he spent with Barlow. Barlow had by this time himself become perhaps his closest, and certainly one of his most voluminous and intimate, correspondents, far more so than Derleth or Wandrei or Howard; in the sudden absence of letters to Barlow we are left to reconstruct the particulars of the visit from a variety of other documents, including Barlow’s journal of the period and his later memoir, ‘The Wind that Is in the Grass’ (1944). In that memoir he gives an impressionistic account of the visit: ‘We rowed on the lake, and played with the cats, or walked on the highway with these cats as the unbelievable sun went down among pines and cypresses … Above all, we talked, chiefly of the fantastic tales which he wrote and which I was trying to write. At breakfast he told us his dreams.’¹¹

Antiquity was not in very great supply in this region of Florida, but Lovecraft and Barlow did manage to get to a Spanish sugar-mill at De Leon Springs constructed before 1763, and other sites at nearby New Smyrna, including a Franciscan mission built in 1696. In early June Lovecraft was taken to Silver Springs, about forty-five miles northwest of De Land. He desperately hoped to get to Havana, but simply did not have the cash.

Of course, the Barlows fed and housed him at their expense, and were so abundantly hospitable that they continually vetoed any suggestion that he move on. No doubt Barlow’s parents perceived that their son and Lovecraft, in spite of the almost thirty-year difference in their ages, had become fast friends. Perhaps Barlow had a lonely existence, with his much older brother Wayne (born in 1908) in the army and not around to aid in his maturation. Barlow, of course, kept himself busy with all manner of literary, artistic, and publishing projects. One of these involved W. Paul Cook’s edition of The Shunned House, the sheets of which had been knocking about from pillar to post in the wake of Cook’s nervous and financial breakdown. Although Barlow obtained about 265 of the sheets, he was at that time caught up in such a whirlwind of activities that he ultimately did little distribution of them, beyond binding about eight copies in 1934–35, one in natural leather for Lovecraft.

One literary project actually did materialize—the spoof known as ‘The Battle that Ended the Century’. Barlow was clearly the originator of this squib, as typescripts prepared by him survive, one with extensive revisions in pen by Lovecraft. The idea was to make joking mention of as many of the authors’ mutual colleagues as possible in the course of the document, which purported to report the heavyweight fight between Two-Gun Bob, the Terror of the Plains (Robert E. Howard) and Knockout Bernie, the Wild Wolf of West Shokan (Bernard Austin Dwyer). More than thirty individuals are mentioned. Barlow had initially cited them by their actual names, but Lovecraft felt that this was not very interesting, so he devised parodic or punning names for them: instead of Frank Belknap Long, one reads of Frank Chimesleep Short. All this is good if harmless fun, but what is more amusing is conspiratorial tones in which Lovecraft speaks of the matter in letters to Barlow. Note his comment when he hears of Frank Long receiving the mimeographed item:

Note the signature—Chimesleep Short—which indicates that our spoof has gone out & that he at least thinks I’ve seen the thing. Remember that if you didn’t know anything about it, you’d consider it merely a whimsical trick of his own—& that if you’d merely seen the circular, you wouldn’t think it worth commenting on. I’m ignoring the matter in my reply.¹²

Lovecraft pushed on to St Augustine on 21 June, remaining there till the 28th. He then spent two days in Charleston, one in Richmond, one in Fredericksburg, two in Washington (where he looked up Elizabeth Toldridge), and one in Philadelphia. When he reached New York he found that the Longs were about to leave for the beach resorts of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, in New Jersey, and he tagged along for the weekend. He finally returned home on 10 July, nearly three months after he had set out.

But all this proved merely the preliminary for a trip of relatively short distance but powerful imaginative stimulus. The island of Nantucket lay only 90 miles from Lovecraft’s doorstep (six hours by combined bus and ferry), but he never visited it until the very end of August 1934. What a world of antiquity he stumbled upon: Whole networks of cobblestoned streets with nothing but colonial houses on either side—narrow, garden-bordered lanes—ancient belfries—picturesque waterfront—everything that the antiquarian could ask! … I’ve explored old houses, the 1746 windmill, the Hist. Soc. Museum, the whaling museum, etc.—and am doing every inch of the quaint streets and alleys on foot.¹³

Returning home, Lovecraft found the legion of cats called the Kappa Alpha Tau flourishing in customary state. But tragedy was in the offing. A cat Lovecraft had named Sam Perkins, born only in June of 1934, was found dead in the shrubbery on 10 September. Lovecraft immediately wrote a touching elegy, now titled ‘Little Sam Perkins’.

R. H. Barlow and Robert Bloch were not the only young boys who showered Lovecraft with their halting if promising works of fiction; another one who did so, almost from the beginning of his association with Lovecraft, was Duane W. Rimel (1915–96), a young fan and budding writer from Idaho. In May 1934, when he was in Florida, Lovecraft examined a story by Rimel entitled ‘The Tree on the Hill’, on which he ‘tried a bit of strengthening toward the end’.¹⁴ For some reason the story did not see print until it appeared in the fan magazine Polaris for September 1940. It becomes clear that Lovecraft supplied the entire third section of the story, as well as a citation from a mythical volume—the Chronicle of Nath by Rudolf Yergler—in the second.

Rimel falls into one of two classes of revision clients for whom Lovecraft was willing to work for no charge: ‘genuine beginners who need a start’ and ‘certain old or handicapped people who are pathetically in need of some cheering influence—these, even when I recognise them as incapable of improvement’.¹⁵ Even in his professional revision work, Lovecraft adopted a weird sort of altruism:

When I revised the kindergarten pap and idiot-asylum slop of other fishes, I was, in a microscopic way, putting just the faintest bit of order, coherence, direction, and comprehensible language into something whose Neanderthaloid ineptitude was already mapped out. My work, ignominious as it was, was at least in the right direction—making that which was utterly amorphous and drooling just the minutest trifle less close to the protozoan stage.¹⁶

More free work was being dumped on Lovecraft’s shoulders at this time, especially for the NAPA. Lovecraft ended up writing at least part of the Bureau of Critics columns in the National Amateur for the following issues: December 1931; December 1932; March, June, and December 1933; June, September, and December 1934; March, June, and December 1935. These articles are in essence similar to the old ‘Department of Public Criticism’ columns for the United Amateur of 1914–19, but much briefer and incorporating the quite radical shifts in Lovecraft’s aesthetic sensibility that had clearly occurred in the interval.

Around July Lovecraft wrote an essay, ‘Homes and Shrines of Poe’, for Hyman Bradofsky’s Californian. Bradofsky (b. 1906) quickly became one of the significant figures in the NAPA during the mid1930s; for although he was himself an undistinguished writer, his Californian offered unprecedented space for writers of articles and prose fiction. During the next several years he continually asked Lovecraft for pieces of substantial length, and in this case Bradofsky wanted a two-thousand-word article for the winter 1934 issue. Lovecraft decided to write an account of all known Poe residences in America, but the resulting article is a little too mechanical and condensed to be effective.

Another essay that appeared in Bradofsky’s Californian (in the winter 1935 issue) is ‘Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction’; but this piece had been composed around July 1934 for one of William L. Crawford’s magazines although, like ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’, it never appeared there. In this essay Lovecraft copies whole passages from ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, and in the end does not see a very promising future for science fiction unless certain significant changes in outlook are made by its writers:

Insincerity, conventionality, triteness, artificiality, false emotion, and puerile extravagance reign triumphant throughout this overcrowded genre, so that none but its rarest products can possibly claim a truly adult status. And the spectacle of such persistent hollowness has led many to ask whether, indeed, any fabric of real literature can ever grow out of the given subject-matter.

Although his low opinion of the field is clearly derived from a sporadic reading of the science fiction pulps, Lovecraft does not think that ‘the idea of space-travel and other worlds is inherently unsuited to literary use’; such ideas must, however, be presented with much more seriousness and emotional preparation than had been done heretofore.

The Christmas season of 1934 was an unusually festive one at 66 College Street. Lovecraft and Annie had a tree for the first time in a quarter-century, and Lovecraft takes naive delight in describing its decoration: ‘All my old-time ornaments were of course long dispersed, but I laid in a new & inexpensive stock at my old friend Frank Winfield Woolworth’s. The finished product—with tinsel star, baubles, & tinsel draped from the boughs like Spanish moss— is certainly something to take the eye!’¹⁷

The New Year’s season of 1934–35 once more found Lovecraft in the New York area. R. H. Barlow was in town, and Lovecraft met him frequently. On New Year’s night Lovecraft had stayed up till 3 a.m. with Barlow revising a story of his—‘“Till A’ the Seas”’ (Californian, summer 1935). This fairly conventional ‘last man’ story is of interest only because Barlow’s typescript, with Lovecraft’s revisions in pen, survives, so that the exact degree of the latter’s authorship can be ascertained. Lovecraft has made no significant structural changes, merely making a number of cosmetic alterations in style and diction; but he has written the bulk of the concluding section, especially the purportedly cosmic reflections when the last man on earth finally meets his ironic death. It’s all pretty routine stuff—but Lovecraft was at this very time in the midst of writing something on somewhat the same theme but in a much more compelling way.

By the fall of 1934 Lovecraft had not written a work of original fiction for more than a year. His confidence in his own powers as a fiction writer were clearly at a low ebb. As the months dragged on, Lovecraft’s colleagues began to wonder whether any new story would ever emerge from his pen. In October E. Hoffmann Price urged Lovecraft to write another story about Randolph Carter, but Lovecraft declined.

Given all the difficulties Lovecraft was experiencing in capturing his ideas in fiction, it is not surprising that the writing of his next tale, ‘The Shadow out of Time’, took more than three months (10 November 1934 to 22 February 1935, as dated on the autograph manuscript) and went through two or perhaps three entire drafts. Moreover, the genesis of the story can be traced back at least four years before its actual composition. Before examining the painful birth of the story, let us gain some idea of its basic plot.

The story deals with Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor at Miskatonic University who suffers a five-year amnesia (1908–13). Regaining his memory, he gradually learns that his type of amnesia is analogous to that of a very small number of people throughout history who believe they have been psychically possessed by the Great Race, a group of entities shaped like ten-foot-high rugose cones who have perfected the technique of mind-exchange over time, and who cast their minds back and forth across time into the bodies of many different species in order to learn the secrets of the universe. On an expedition to Australia, Peaslee learns in a most poignant way that the Great Race actually existed: he discovers the manuscript he must have written (for it is ‘in my own handwriting’) millions of years ago as a captive mind of the coneshaped creatures.

The cosmic scope of this work—second only to At the Mountains of Madness in this regard—allows ‘The Shadow out of Time’ to attain a very high place in Lovecraft’s fictional work; and the wealth of circumstantial detail in the history, biology, and civilization of the Great Race is as convincing as in At the Mountains of Madness but perhaps still better integrated into the story. Indeed, the Great Race become the centrepiece of the story, in such a way that they—like the Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness—come to seem like the ‘heroes’ of the tale.

The basic mind-exchange scenario of the tale has been taken from at least three sources. First, of course, is H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing, which we have already seen as an influence on ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’. Second, there is Henri Béraud’s obscure novel Lazarus (1925), which Lovecraft had in his library and which he read in 1928.¹⁸ This novel presents a man, Jean Mourin, who remains in a hospital for sixteen years while suffering a long amnesia; during this time he develops a personality very different from that of his usual self. A third dominant influence is not a literary work but a film: Berkeley Square (1933), which enraptured Lovecraft by its portrayal of a man whose mind somehow drifts back into the body of his ancestor in the eighteenth century. He saw the film four times, and was clearly much captivated by it.

Two other literary influences can be noted if only to be dismissed. It has frequently been assumed that ‘The Shadow out of Time’ is simply an extrapolation upon Wells’s The Time Machine; but there is really very little resemblance between the two works. Lovecraft did read Wells’s novel in 1925, but there is little in it that might be thought to have a direct bearing on his story. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) has been suggested as an influence on the enormous stretches of time reflected in the story, but Lovecraft did not read this work until August 1935, months after his tale’s completion.¹⁹

The core of the plot had already been conceived as early as 1930, emerging out of a discussion between Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith regarding the plausibility of stories involving time-travel. By March 1932 Lovecraft had devised the basic idea of mind-exchange over time, as outlined in another letter to Smith.²⁰ It is important to cite this letter in order to show that the conception of mindexchange over time had been devised before Lovecraft saw Berkeley Square, the only other work that might conceivably have influenced this point.

Lovecraft began the actual writing of ‘The Shadow out of Time’ in late 1934. He announces in November: ‘I developed that story mistily and allusively in 16 pages, but it was no go. Thin and unconvincing, with the climactic revelation wholly unjustified by the hash of visions preceding it.’²¹ What this sixteen-page version could possibly have been like is almost beyond conjecture. The disquisition about the Great Race must have been radically compressed, and this is what clearly dissatisfied Lovecraft about this version; for he came to realize that this passage, far from being an irrelevant digression, was really the heart of the story. Lovecraft finally wrote a second (and perhaps even a third) draft, completing it by late February 1935. Clearly this tale was one of the most difficult in genesis of any of Lovecraft’s tales. And yet, in many ways it is the culmination of his fictional career and by no means an unfitting capstone to a twenty-year attempt to capture the sense of wonder and awe he felt at the boundless reaches of space and time. Although Lovecraft would write one more original tale and work on several additional revisions and collaborations with colleagues, his life as a fiction writer ends, and ends fittingly, with ‘The Shadow out of Time’.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Caring about the Civilization (1929–37) In the summer of 1936 Lovecraft made an interesting admission:

I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression —and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been.¹

This is one of the few times Lovecraft explicitly mentions the Depression as signalling a radical change in his beliefs on politics, economics, and society; but perhaps he need not have made such an admission, for his letters from 1930 onward return again and again to these subjects.

There was little in Lovecraft’s personal circumstances that led him to the adoption of a moderate socialism; he did not—as many impoverished individuals did—become attracted to political or economic radicalism merely because he found himself destitute. First, he was never truly destitute—at least, not in comparison with many others in the Depression (including some of his own friends), who lost all their money and belongings and had no job and no roof over their heads; second, he scorned Communism as unworkable and culturally devastating, recommending an economic system considerably to the left of what the United States actually adopted under Roosevelt but nevertheless supporting the New Deal as the only plan of action that had any chance of being carried out.

And yet, Lovecraft’s conversion to socialism was not entirely surprising, first because socialism as a political theory and as a concrete alternative to capitalism was experiencing a resurgence during the 1930s, and second because Lovecraft’s brand of socialism still retained many of the aristocratic features that had shaped his earlier political thought. The latter point I shall take up presently; the former is worth elaborating briefly.

The United States has never been an especially fertile soil for socialism or Communism, but there have been occasions when they have been a little less unpopular than usual. Socialism had done reasonably well in the first two decades of the century: the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World), founded in 1905, was gaining influence in its support of strikes by a variety of labour unions, and Eugene V. Debs won nearly a million votes in 1912 as a third-party candidate. But in the period immediately after the First World War, with its ‘Red Scare’ and virulent suppression of all radical groups, socialism was forced underground for nearly a decade.

The depression led to a resurgence in which socialists teamed with labour to demand reforms in working conditions. The socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas polled a little less than 900,000 votes in 1932—not a very large figure, but a larger one than he achieved during any of his other campaigns. A wide array of intellectuals were also in support of socialism (of either a moderate or a Marxist variety) or outright Communism.

And yet, the shift for Lovecraft was in many ways very slow, even grudging at the outset. It seems jointly to have been the result of observation of the increasingly desperate state of affairs engendered by the Depression and of more searching thought on what could be done about it. President Hoover’s staunch belief in voluntarism had made him unwilling to permit the government to give direct relief to the unemployed. Even Roosevelt was only just radical enough to advocate policies that kept the country from total economic collapse, and it was really the Second World War that pulled the United States and the world out of the depression.

What really concerned Lovecraft is not the welfare of the general populace but the civilization-ending revolution this populace could cause if it is not appeased. For after all, ‘All that I care about is the civilisation’:

The maintenance of [a] high cultural standard is the only social or political enthusiasm I possess … In effect, I venerate the principle of aristocracy without being especially interested in aristocrats as persons. I don’t care who has the dominance, so long as that dominance remains a certain kind of dominance, intellectually and aesthetically considered.² Up to the last few years of his life, Lovecraft believed that only a socially recognized aristocracy could ensure such a condition— either through actual patronage of the arts or through a general climate of refined civilization that would axiomatically be regarded as a condition toward which all society would aspire. Revolution of any kind was the last thing he wanted, and this is why he loathed Bolshevik Russia to the end of his days—because it had fostered a cultural destruction that was in no way necessary to the economic reform that its leaders were claiming as their paramount goals. It would take some years for Lovecraft to modify his position on aristocracy, but that modification was finally articulated in 1936:

what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system … a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.³

During the early years of the Depression Lovecraft actually fancied that the plutocracy—now about the only thing equivalent to an aristocracy in the United States—might itself adopt the mores of a true aristocracy. But in the course of time he saw the error of his ways and discarded this approach to the solution of the problem.

There were probably no specific events that led Lovecraft to the shift, but rather an accumulation of many. One significant factor, perhaps, was the so-called Technocracy survey of 1932. The term technocracy was coined by an inventor, William H. Smith, to mean rule by technologists. Elaborated by Howard Scott, an economist and intellectual, the notion led to Lovecraft’s most important conclusion about the economic state of the nation: that technology had made full employment impossible even in principle because machines that required only a few workers to tend them were now doing the work previously done by many individuals, and this tendency would only increase as more and more sophisticated machines were developed. Any sensible and realistic economic and political system must then be based on this premise.

The election of 1932 was of course a landmark. Roosevelt won in one of the largest landslides in American history; but his inauguration would not occur until 4 March 1933, and on 22 February Lovecraft wrote one of his most concentrated and impassioned pleas for political and economic reform—the essay ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’.

In this essay—which he apparently made no effort to prepare for publication, or even to show to his colleagues—Lovecraft advocated the following economic proposals: (1) Governmental control of large accumulations of resources (including utilities) and their operation not on a basis of profit but strictly on need; (2) Fewer working hours (but at higher pay) so that all who were capable of working could work at a livable wage; (3) Unemployment insurance and old age pensions. None of these ideas was, of course, Lovecraft’s original contribution—they had been talked about for years or decades, and the very title of Lovecraft’s essay makes it clear that he is simply echoing what others had said over and over again. Let us consider the history of these proposals in greater detail.

The least problematical was the last. Old age pensions had been instituted in Germany as early as 1889, in Australia in 1903, and in England tentatively in 1908 and definitively by 1925. In 1911–14 unemployment insurance came to England. In the United States, the Social Security Act was signed by Roosevelt on 14 August 1935, although disbursement of money did not begun until 1940.

Government control of large accumulations of wealth has always been a pipe-dream in America, but government control (or at least supervision) of utilities and other institutions was by no means a radical conception in the 1930s. The Roosevelt administration did not undertake such an action until 1934, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was formed to regulate interstate telephone and telegraph rates. By 1935 the Federal Power Commission was governing interstate sale of electric power (natural gas came under control in 1938), the Public Utility Holding Company Act had authorized the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to curb abuses by holding companies (specifically those governing utilities), banks came under federal regulation, and higher taxes were imposed on the wealthy. This was certainly not socialism— although reactionary politicians and businessmen constantly bandied that word about to frighten the electorate and to preserve their own wealth—but it was at least a step in that direction. Of course, many foreign countries exercised actual governmental ownership of public utilities, whereas the United States continues to this day to settle only for governmental supervision.

The most striking of Lovecraft’s proposals is the limitation of working hours so that all who were capable of working could work. This idea enjoyed a brief popularity among political theorists and reformers, but in the end the rabid opposition of business doomed it. In April 1933 Senator Hugo Black of Alabama and William Connery, chairman of the House Labor Committee, proposed a bill for a thirty-hour week so that more people could be employed. Roosevelt did not favour it and countered with the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), which ultimately led to the NRA (National Recovery Administration). This established a minimum wage of $12 a week for a forty-hour week. But, although hailed initially as a landmark in co-operation between government, labour, and business, the NRA quickly ran into trouble because its director, General Hugh Samuel Johnson, believed that businesses would of their own accord adopt codes of fair competition and fair labour practice, something that naturally did not happen. The NRA became the object of criticism from all sides, especially among labour unions and small businesses. Less than two years after it was enacted, on 27 May 1935, it was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, and was officially abolished on 1 January 1936. Many of its labour provisions, however, were ultimately reestablished by other legislation.

Although the movement for shorter working hours continued to the end of the Depression, it never regained the momentum it had had in the early 1930s, prior to its co-opting by the NRA. The fortyhour work week has now been enshrined as a sacrosanct tenet of business, and there is not much likelihood that a move to shorter hours—the chief component of Lovecraft’s (and others’) plans for full employment—will ever be carried out.

Roosevelt, of course, realized that unemployment was the major problem to be dealt with in the short term (at least twelve million were unemployed in 1932—nearly a quarter of the work force), and one of the first things he did upon gaining office was to establish various emergency measures in an attempt to relieve it. Among these was the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), which would enlist young men from the ages of seventeen to twenty-four for the reforestation of parks, flood control, power development, and the like.

Some have wondered why Lovecraft himself never made an attempt to sign on to some such programme. But he was never strictly speaking unemployed: he always had revision work and very sporadic sales of original fiction, and perhaps he feared that he would lose even these modest sources of income if he joined a government-sponsored work programme. What of the WPA (Works Progress Administration), instituted in the summer of 1935? This mostly generated blue-collar construction jobs obviously unsuited for Lovecraft, but the Federal Writers’ Project was an important subdivision of the WPA and resulted in the production of a number of significant works of art and scholarship. Lovecraft could perhaps have worked on the guide to Rhode Island published in 1937, but he never made any effort to do so.

One perhaps unintended effect of the economic crisis was to deflect Lovecraft’s attention from other social evils. The 18th Amendment was repealed on 6 December 1933. A year and a half earlier Lovecraft had already announced that his enthusiasm for prohibition was a thing of the past,⁴ but he made it clear that this was only because he realized that the law against liquor was essentially unenforceable. Lovecraft was surely not pleased at the repeal, but his reference to alcoholism as a ‘relatively insignificant rat’⁵ certainly contrasts with his fulminations against drinking a decade and a half earlier.

Where Lovecraft departed most radically from the Roosevelt administration itself as well as from the main stream of American opinion was in his suggestions for political reform. He saw economics and politics as quite separate phenomena requiring separate solutions. While proposing the spreading of economic wealth to the many, he concurrently advocated the restricting of political power to the few. This should come as no surprise, given Lovecraft’s early (and romanticized) support for the English aristocracy and monarchy, his later readings in Nietzsche, and his own intellectual superiority. And yet, because Lovecraft enunciated his view somewhat misleadingly—or, perhaps, in a deliberately provocative way—he has taken some criticism from later commentators.

In the first place, Lovecraft’s ‘oligarchy of intelligence and education’ (as he terms it in ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’) is not actually an aristocracy or even an oligarchy in the strictest sense. It is indeed a democracy—but merely a democracy that recognizes the ill effects of universal suffrage if the electorate consists (as in fact it does today) largely of the uneducated or the politically naive. Lovecraft’s argument is a very simple one, and is again an outgrowth of his realization of the socioeconomic complexities brought on by the machine age: governmental decisions are now too complex for anyone other than a sophisticated specialist to understand. He discusses the matter cynically with Robert E. Howard:

Democracy—as distinguished from universal opportunity and good treatment—is today a fallacy and impossibility so great that any serious attempt to apply it cannot be considered as other than a mockery and a jest … Government ‘by popular vote’ means merely the nomination of doubtfully qualified men by doubtfully authorised and seldom competent cliques of professional politicians representing hidden interests, followed by a sardonic farce of emotional persuasion in which the orators with the glibbest tongues and flashiest catch-words herd on their side a numerical majority of blindly impressionable dolts and gulls who have for the most part no idea of what the whole circus is about.⁶ How little things have changed.

The first thing that should be done about this situation, in Lovecraft’s view, is to restrict the vote ‘to those able to pass rigorous educational examinations (emphasising civic and economic subjects) and scientific intelligence tests’ (‘Some Repetitions on the Times’). It need not be assumed that Lovecraft automatically included himself in this number; in ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’ he declares himself a ‘rank layman’ and goes on to say: ‘No non-technician, be he artist, philosopher, or scientist, can even begin to judge the labyrinthine governmental problems with which these administrators must deal.’ Lovecraft does not seem entirely aware of the difficulty of ensuring that these tests be fair to all, but he maintained that such a restriction of the vote would indeed be fair because—as we shall see presently—educational opportunities would be vastly broadened under his political scheme.

It is unfortunate that Lovecraft occasionally used the term ‘fascism’ to denote this conception; it does not help much that he says on one occasion, ‘Do not judge the sort of fascism I advocate by any form now existing.’⁷ Lovecraft never actually renounced Mussolini, but his support of him in the 1930s does not seem quite as ardent as it was when Mussolini first rose to power in 1922. The problem is, however, that by the 1930s the term ‘fascism’ connoted not only Mussolini but various English and United States extremists with whom Lovecraft had no intention of aligning himself. The American fascists of the middle to late 1930s were, in Lovecraft’s view, not so much dangerous radicals as mere buffoons who could do little harm to the political fabric. They were not by any means a co-ordinated group, but even individually they represented threats to the government with which both the administration and political thinkers (even armchair ones like Lovecraft) had to come to terms.

The first was the redoubtable Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana. Elected governor in 1928, Long quickly achieved popularity by appealing for a radical redistribution of wealth. Then, in 1934, as a senator he formed the Share Our Wealth Society in an attempt to put his theories into practice. If it be thought that Long’s political vision was actually similar to Lovecraft’s in its union of economic socialism and political fascism, it should be made clear that Long was not by any means a socialist—he did not believe in collectivism but instead yearned nostalgically for a small-town America in which everyone would be an individualistic small business person—and his fascism was of a ruthless sort that rode roughshod over his opponents and in the end led to his being shot by an assassin on 8 September 1935; he died two days later.

Then there was the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, who in his weekly radio programme (‘The Golden Hour of the Little Flower’) had, since 1930, fulminated against both Communism and capitalism, attacking bankers specifically. In late 1934 he conceived of a wealth distribution scheme by forming the National Union for Social Justice.

Lovecraft took frequent note of Long and Coughlin, and in the end he finally repudiated them—not for their economic policies (with which he was more in agreement than otherwise), but for their genuinely fascistic political tactics. But he never regarded them as serious threats. He writes airily in early 1937 that ‘I doubt whether the growing Catholic–fascist movement will make much headway in America’⁸ (an explicit reference to Coughlin) and later remarks, in regard to a broad group of pro-Nazi organizations in the United States:

Granting the scant possibility of a Franco-like revolt of the Hoovers and Mellons and polite bankers, and conceding that —despite Coughlinism, the Black Legion, the Silver Shirts, and the K.K.K.—the soil of America is hardly very fertile for any variant of Nazism, it seems likely that the day of free and easy plutocracy in the United States is over.⁹ He might have been less sanguine had he seen how Coughlin— who was already becoming increasingly anti-Semitic by 1936— sloughed off his social justice pretence in 1938 and came out forthrightly as a pro-Nazi, attracting millions in the process.

Lovecraft knew that Roosevelt was trying to steer a middle course between right- and left-wing extremism; and on the whole he approved that course. Just after the 1932 election he remarks that a vote for the socialist Norman Thomas ‘would have been simply thrown away’.¹⁰ Nevertheless, although he yearned for Roosevelt to progress still farther and faster with reform, it quickly became obvious to him that the New Deal was the only series of measures that had any real hope of actually passing, given the violent resistance on both sides of the political spectrum. He referred to Coughlin, Long, and other radicals as ‘salutary irritants’¹¹ who would help push Roosevelt more to the left (something that in fact happened following the midterm elections of 1934, which gave Congress a more liberal slant). But in early 1935 he was announcing that he wanted something ‘considerably to the left of the New Deal’,¹² although he did not think it was practicable; and by the summer of 1936 he expressed a naive irritation that the administration was ‘too subservient to capitalism’¹³—as if Roosevelt had any intention of ushering in real socialism (even of a liberal, non-Marxist variety) instead of merely shoring up capitalism!

The death-knell of capitalism was indeed being rung by many political thinkers of the day, as was entirely natural in the wake of the Depression, capitalism’s most signal disaster. John Dewey’s thunderous declaration—’Capitalism must be destroyed’—is prototypical. Some of Lovecraft’s younger colleagues—Frank Long, R. H. Barlow, Kenneth Sterling—were wholeheartedly espousing Communism, to the point that at the very end of his life Lovecraft expostulated in mock horror, ‘Damme, but are all you kids going bolshevik on grandpa?’¹⁴

And yet, as time went on Lovecraft increasingly lost patience with the social and political conservatism of the middle-class milieu in which he found himself. He came to understand the temperament that led fiery youths like Long and Barlow to Communism without being himself entirely inclined in that direction. He knew that this leftward swing on the part of youths was a natural response to the increasing stodginess and reactionary tendencies of the other side:

As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’ …) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.¹⁵ How little things have changed.

When the election actually occurred—with another landslide for Roosevelt against the hapless Alf Landon and a third-party candidate, William Lemke, a stooge of Coughlin and Francis E. Townsend, the proponent of old age pensions—Lovecraft was of course delighted. His last few months were perhaps spent in satisfaction, with the thought that Roosevelt could now continue his reforms and achieve a genuine moderate socialist state; it must have been a comforting thought as he lay dying.

As the 1930s advanced Lovecraft became more and more concerned with the place of art in modern society. As he matured he became convinced that art could not retreat unthinkingly into the past but must—as he himself had done on an intellectual level—come to some sort of terms with the machine age if it were to survive and remain a living force in society.

The central issue Lovecraft was facing was how to steer a middle course between ‘high’ culture, which in its radicalism was consciously being addressed to an increasingly small coterie of devotees, and ‘popular’ culture—notably the pulps—which was adhering to false, superficial, and outmoded standards through the inevitable moral conservatism such forms of culture have always displayed. This may be the primary reason for Lovecraft’s lack of commercial success in his lifetime: his work was not conventional enough for the pulps but not daring enough (or daring enough in the right way) for the modernists. Lovecraft correctly recognized that capitalism and democracy gave rise to this split in the nineteenth century:

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence and sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, nonacquisitive persons of assumed position can enjoy. The determinant market for written … and other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger … crcle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals … prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress and speech and external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop and the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, and mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify—and they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature and art lost most of their market; and writing, painting, drama, etc. became engulfed more and more in the domain of amusement enterprises.¹⁶ The principal foe, again, is capitalism, in that it inculcates values that are actively hostile to artistic creation:

in the past did capitalism award its highest benefits to such admittedly superior persons as Poe, Spinoza, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Keats, and so on? Or is it just possible that the real beneficiaries of capitalism are not the truly superior, but merely those who choose to devote their superiority to the single process of personal acquisition rather than to social service or to creative intellectual or aesthetic effort … those, and the lucky parasites who share or inherit the fruits of their narrowly canalised superiority?¹⁷

But what then is to be done? Even if economic reform is effected, how does one change a society’s attitude in regard to the relative value of money as opposed to the development of personality? The solution was simple: education. The shorter working hours proposed in Lovecraft’s economic scheme would allow for a radically increased leisure time for all citizens, which could be utilized profitably in education and aesthetic appreciation. As he states in ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’: ‘Education … will require amplification in order to meet the needs of a radically increased leisure among all classes of society. It is probable that the number of persons possessing a sound general culture will be greatly increased, with correspondingly good results to the civilisation.’ This was a common proposal—or dream—among the more idealistic social reformers and intellectuals. Did Lovecraft really fancy that such a utopia of a broadly educated populace that was willing or able to enjoy the aesthetic fruits of civilization would actually come about? It certainly seems so; and yet, we cannot hold Lovecraft responsible for failing to predict either the spectacular recrudescence of capitalism in the generations following his own or the equally spectacular collapse of education that has produced a mass audience whose highest aesthetic experiences are pornography, television miniseries, and sporting events.

The interesting thing about Lovecraft’s speculations of the 1930s is that they gradually enter into his fiction as well as his letters and essays. We have seen that ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) contains searching parallels between the political and cultural state of the underground mound denizens and Western civilization; and in At the Mountains of Madness (1931) there is a fleeting mention that the government of the Old Ones was probably socialistic. These tentative political discussions reach their culmination with ‘The Shadow out of Time’. The Great Race is a true utopia, and in his description of its political and economic framework Lovecraft is manifestly offering his view as to the future of mankind:

The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegrated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests …

Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts.

This and other passages can be seen as virtually identical to those in Lovecraft’s later letters on the subject and with ‘Some Repetitions on the Times’. The note about ‘highly mechanised’ industry is important in showing that Lovecraft has at last—as he had not done when he wrote ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) and even At the Mountains of Madness—fully accepted mechanization as an ineradicable aspect of modern society, and has devised a social system that will accommodate it.

The one area of Lovecraft’s thought that has—justifiably—aroused the greatest outrage among later commentators is his attitude on race. My contention is, however, both that Lovecraft has been criticized for the wrong reasons and that, even though he clearly espoused views that are illiberal, intolerant, or plain wrong scientifically, his racism is at least logically separable from the rest of his philosophical and even political thought.

Lovecraft retained to the end of his days a belief in the biological inferiority of blacks and also of Australian aborigines, although it is not clear why he singled out this latter group. In any event, Lovecraft advocated an absolutely rigid colour line against intermarriage between blacks and whites, so as to guard against ‘miscegenation’. This view was by no means uncommon in the 1920s, and many leading American biologists and psychologists wrote forebodingly about the possibility that racial intermixture could lead to biological abnormalities. Of course, laws against interracial marriage survived in the United States until an embarrassingly recent time.

But Lovecraft in the course of time was forced to back down increasingly from his claims to the superiority of the Aryan (or Nordic or Teuton) over other groups aside from blacks and aborigines. How, then, can he continue to defend segregation? He does so simply by asserting—from an illegitimate generalization of his own prejudices—a wildly exaggerated degree of incompatibility and hostility amongst different cultural groups. And there is a subtle but profound hypocrisy here also: Lovecraft trumpets ‘Aryan’ conquests over other races (European conquest of the American continent, to name only one example) as justified by the inherent strength and prowess of the race, but, when other ‘races’ or cultures—the French-Canadians in Woonsocket, the Italians and Portuguese in Providence, the Jews in New York—make analogous incursions into ‘Aryan’ territory, Lovecraft sees it as somehow contrary to Nature. He is backed into this corner by his claim that the Nordic is ’a master in the art of orderly living and group preservation’¹⁸—and he therefore cannot account for the increasing heterogeneity of ‘Nordic’ culture.

Lovecraft is, of course, entirely at liberty to feel personally uncomfortable in the presence of aliens; he is even, I believe, at liberty to wish for a culturally and racially homogeneous society. This wish is in itself not pernicious, just as the wish for a racially and culturally diverse society—such as the United States has now become—is not in itself self-evidently virtuous. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks, and Lovecraft clearly preferred the advantages of homogeneity (cultural unanimity and continuity, respect for tradition) to its drawbacks (prejudice, cultural isolationism, fossilization). Where Lovecraft goes astray philosophically is in attributing his own sentiments to his ‘race’ or culture at large.

In my view, Lovecraft leaves himself most open to criticism on the issue of race not by the mere espousal of such views but by his lack of openmindedness on the issue, and more particularly his resolute unwillingness to study the most up-to-date findings on the subject from biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of unquestioned authority who were, through the early decades of the century, systematically destroying each and every pseudoscientific ‘proof’ of racialist theories. In every other aspect of his thought—metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics—Lovecraft was constantly digesting new information (even if only through newspaper reports, magazine articles, and other informal sources) and readjusting his views accordingly. Only on the issue of race did his thinking remain relatively static. He never realized that his beliefs had been largely shaped by parental and societal influence, early reading, and outmoded late nineteenth-century science. The mere fact that he had to defend his views so vigorously and argumentatively in letters—especially to younger correspondents like Frank Long and J. Vernon Shea—should have encouraged him to rethink his position; but he never did so in any significant way.

The brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished. The spearhead of the scientific opposition to racism was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1857– 1942), but I find virtually no mention of him in any of Lovecraft’s letters or essays. The intelligentsia—among whom Lovecraft surely would have wished to number himself—had also largely repudiated racist assumptions in their political and social thought. Indeed, such things as the classification of skulls by size or shape—which Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard waste much time debating in their letters of the 1930s—had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late nineteenth century.

And yet, ugly and unfortunate as Lovecraft’s racial views are, they do not materially affect the validity of the rest of his philosophical thought. They may well enter into a significant proportion of his fiction (miscegenation and fear of aliens are clearly at the centre of such tales as ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, and ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’), but I cannot see that they affect his metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, or even his late political views in any meaningful way. These views do not stand or fall on racialist assumptions. I certainly have no desire to brush Lovecraft’s racism under the rug, but I do not think that the many compelling positions he advocated as a thinker should be dismissed because of his clearly erroneous views on race.

If Lovecraft’s racism is the one aspect of his thought that has been subject to the greatest censure, then within that aspect it is his qualified support of Hitler and his corresponding suspicion of Jewish influence in America that has—again justifiably—caused even greater outrage. He argued the matter at length with J. Vernon Shea in the early 1930s, and the late date of this discussion emphatically refutes the claims of many of Lovecraft’s apologists that he somehow ‘reformed’ at the end of his life and shed many of the beliefs he had spouted so carelessly in his Conservative essays twenty years before. Some of his comments are acutely embarrassing:

[Hitler’s] vision is of course romantic & immature, & coloured with a fact-ignoring emotionalism … There surely is an actual Hitler peril—yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man’s basic urge … I repeat that there is a great & pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism—racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, & an escape from the absurdities of Versailles. The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it & starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!¹⁹

These points are elaborated at great length in this and other letters. According to Lovecraft, Hitler is right to suppress Jewish influence in German culture, since ‘no settled & homogeneous nation ought (a) to admit enough of a decidedly alien race-stock to bring about an actual alteration in the dominant ethnic composition, or (b) tolerate the dilution of the culture-stream with emotional & intellectual elements alien to the original cultural impulse’. Hitler is, Lovecraft believes, wrong in the extremism of his hostility toward anyone with even a small amount of Jewish blood, since it is culture rather than blood that should be the determining criterion.

The whole question of American and British support for Hitler is one that has received surprisingly little scholarly study. Certainly, Lovecraft was not alone among the intellectual classes prior to 1937 in expressing some approbation of Hitler; and just as certainly, Lovecraft cannot possibly be thought to be of the same stripe as the American pro-Nazi groups in the United States, much less such organizations as the Friends of the New Germany or the GermanAmerican Bund, who generally attracted a small number of disaffected German-Americans and were even operated for the most part by German Nazis. Lovecraft cannot even be lumped indiscriminately with the common run of American anti-Semites of the 1930s, most of whom were extreme political conservatives who sought to equate Jewishness with Bolshevism. My feeling is that Lovecraft came by his overall economic and political views, as well as his racial stance, by independent thought on the state of the nation and the world. His beliefs are so clearly and integrally an outgrowth of his previous thinking on these issues that the search for some single intellectual influence seems misguided.

Harry Brobst provides some evidence of Lovecraft’s awareness of the horrors of Hitler’s Germany toward the very end of his life. He recalls that a Mrs Shepherd (the downstairs neighbour of Lovecraft and Annie Gamwell at 66 College) was a German native and wished to return for a time to Germany. She did so, but (in Brobst’s words) ‘it was at that time that Nazism was beginning to flower, and she saw the Jews beaten, and she was so horrified, upset, distraught that she just left Germany and came back to Providence. And she told Mrs. Gamwell and Lovecraft about her experiences, and they were both very incensed about this.’²⁰ Lovecraft indeed remarks about the departure of Mrs Alice Shepherd in late July 1936. I find, however, no mention in any letters of her abrupt return, nor any expression of horror at any revelations she may have conveyed. But references to Hitler do indeed drop off radically in the last year of Lovecraft’s life, so it is conceivable that Lovecraft, having heard accounts from Mrs Shepherd, simply shut up about the matter in the realization that he had been wrong. It would be a comforting thought.

Lovecraft’s point about Jewish domination of German culture leads directly to his assessment of what he feels is happening in the United States, specifically in its literary and publishing capital, New York:

As for New York—there is no question but that its overwhelming Semitism has totally removed it from the American stream. Regarding its influence on literary & dramatic expression—it is not so much that the country is flooded directly with Jewish authors, as that Jewish publishers determine just which of our Aryan writers shall achieve print & position. That means that those of us who least express our own people have the preference. Taste is insidiously moulded along non-Aryan lines—so that, no matter how intrinsically good the resulting body of literature may be, it is a special, rootless literature which does not represent us.²¹

Lovecraft goes on to mention Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner as writers who, ‘delving in certain restricted strata, seldom touch on any chord to which the reader personally responds’. If this is not a case of generalizing from personal experience, I don’t know what is! Newspaper reporting in New York also angers him:

not a paper in New York dares to call its soul its own in dealing with the Jews & with social & political questions affecting them. The whole press is absolutely enslaved in that direction, so that on the whole length & breadth of the city it is impossible to secure any public American utterance—any frank expression of the typical mind & opinions of the actual American people—on a fairly wide & potentially important range of topics … Gawd knows I have no wish to injure any race under the sun, but I do think that something ought to be done to free American expression from the control of any element which seeks to curtail it, distort it, or remodel it in any direction other than its natural course.²²

But what is the ‘natural course’ of American expression? And why does Lovecraft axiomatically believe that he and people like him are the ‘actual American people’ (which means that others who do not share his views are necessarily ‘un-American’)? Lovecraft is again being haunted by the spectre of change: Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson don’t write the way the more conservative novelists write or used to write, so they are deemed ‘unnatural’ or unrepresentative.

What Lovecraft wanted was simply familiarity—the familiarity of the milieu in a racially and culturally homogeneous Providence that he had experienced in youth. In stating that even art must satisfy our ‘homesickness … for the things we have known’ (‘Heritage or Modernism’), Lovecraft is testifying to the homesickness he himself felt when, as an ‘unassimilated alien’²³ in New York or even in latter-day Providence, he witnessed the increasing urbanization and racial heterogeneity of his region and his country. Racialism was for him a bulwark against acknowledging that his ideal of a purely Anglo-Saxon America no longer had any relevance and could never be recaptured.

More generally, the increasing racial and cultural heterogeneity of his society was for Lovecraft the chief symbol of change—change that was happening too fast for him to accept. The frequency with which, in his later years, he harps on this subject—’change is intrinsically undesirable’;²⁴ ‘Change is the enemy of everything really worth cherishing’²⁵—speaks eloquently of Lovecraft’s frantic desire for social stability and his quite sincere belief (one, indeed, that has something to recommend it) that such stability is a necessary precondition of a vital and profound culture.

Lovecraft’s final years were characterised both by much hardship (painful rejections of his best tales and concomitant depression over the merit of his work; increasing poverty; and, toward the very end, the onset of his terminal illness) and by moments of joy (travels all along the eastern seaboard; the intellectual stimulus of correspondence with a variety of distinctive colleagues; increasing adulation in the tiny worlds of amateur journalism and fantasy fandom). But to the end, Lovecraft continued to wrestle, mostly in letters, with the fundamental issues of politics, economics, society, and culture, with a breadth of learning, acuity of logic, and a deep humanity born of wide observation and experience that could not have been conceived by the ‘eccentric recluse’ who had so timidly emerged from self-imposed hermitry in 1914. That his largely private discussions did not have any influence on the intellectual temper of the age is unfortunate; but his unceasing intellectual vigour, even as he was descending into the final stages of cancer, is as poignant a testimonial to his courage and his devotion to the life of the mind as anyone could wish. Lovecraft himself, at any rate, certainly did not think the effort wasted.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The End of One’s Life (1935–37)

For the time being ‘The Shadow out of Time’ remained in manuscript; Lovecraft was so unsure of its quality that he didn’t know whether to type it up or tear it up. Finally, in a kind of despair, he sent the notebook containing the handwritten draft to August Derleth at the end of February 1935—as if he no longer wished to look at it. Meanwhile the fifth proposal by a publisher to issue a collection of Lovecraft’s stories emerged in mid-February—this time through the intercession of Derleth—but ended in a rejection, as Loring & Mussey declined on a collection of tales in July.

Lovecraft went to see Edward H. Cole in Boston on 3–5 May, and in spite of the unusually cold weather managed at least to get to beloved Marblehead. On 25 May Charles D. Hornig, the erstwhile editor of the Fantasy Fan, visited Lovecraft in Providence. By this time, however, he was already in the midst of planning for another grand southern tour—the last, as it happened, he would ever take. For in early May Barlow had invited him down to Florida for another stay of indefinite length. Lovecraft was naturally inclined to accept, and only money stood in the way; but by 29 May Lovecraft concluded optimistically, ‘Counting sestertii, & I think I can make it!’¹

Once again we do not know much of Lovecraft’s activities during his unprecedently long stay with Barlow (9 June to 18 August). Correspondence to others is our sole guide, and this time we do not even have the supplements of any memoirs by Barlow himself. In a postcard to Donald and Howard Wandrei written in July, Lovecraft gives some idea of his activities:

Programme much the same as last year … Bob has built a cabin in an oak grove across the lake from the house, & is busy there with various printing projects—of some of which you’ll hear later on … Last month we explored a marvellous tropical river near the Barlow place. It is called Black Water Creek, & is lined on both sides by a cypress jungle with festoons of Spanish moss. Twisted roots claw at the water’s edge, & palms lean precariously on every hand. Vines & creepers—sunken logs—snakes & alligators—all the colour of the Congo or Amazon.²

Of the printing projects Lovecraft mentions, we know one in particular—an edition of Long’s collected poetry written subsequent to The Man from Genoa (1926), entitled The Goblin Tower. Lovecraft helped to set type on this very slim pamphlet, which Barlow managed to print and bind by late October. Lovecraft took occasion to correct Long’s faulty metre in some of the poems. Barlow was bursting with ideas for other projects, chiefly a collection of Clark Ashton Smith’s poems entitled Incantations; but, as with so many other of his ambitious endeavours, this venture hung fire for years before finally coming to nothing.

One other idea Barlow had evolved at about this time was a volume of C. L. Moore’s best stories. Catherine Lucile Moore (1911–87) first appeared in Weird Tales in November 1933 with the striking fantasy ‘Shambleau’. She went on to publish several more stories in Weird Tales that evocatively combined exotic romance, even sexuality, with otherworldly fantasy. Barlow had Lovecraft get in touch with Moore about the proposed volume, and a very substantive correspondence ensued, Lovecraft continually beseeching Moore not to kowtow to pulp standards and to preserve her aesthetic independence, even if it meant economic losses in the short term. Had he lived longer, he would have taken heart in her subsequent career, for she became one of the most distinctive and respected voices in the next generation of science fiction and fantasy writers.

But perhaps the most important function that Barlow performed was not printing but typing. By mid-July Derleth had still given no report on the autograph manuscript of ‘The Shadow out of Time’; and, as Barlow was enthusiastic about seeing it, Lovecraft asked Derleth to send it down to Florida. By early August Lovecraft was expressing a certain irritation that Barlow was apparently not making much of an effort to read the thing; but very shortly he was forced, delightedly, to eat his words. For in fact Barlow was surreptitiously preparing a typescript of the story.

Lovecraft was completely bowled over by Barlow’s diligence and generosity in this undertaking. Although he generously wrote that Barlow’s transcript was ‘accurately typed’,³ he later admitted that there were a number of errors in it. Nevertheless, Lovecraft sent the typescript on the usual round of readers.

Lovecraft finally moved along on 18 August, spending some time in St Augustine, Charleston, Richmond, and other points before reaching New York on the 2nd. He finally reached home on 14 September.

One thing Lovecraft did in Charleston and Richmond was finish what he called a ‘composite story’—a round-robin weird tale entitled ‘The Challenge from Beyond’. This was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, who wanted two round-robin stories of the same title, one weird and one science fiction, for the third anniversary issue of Fantasy Magazine (September 1935). The weird item was written successively by C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long. Lovecraft’s segment is the only one that actually advances the plot; and in so doing he has cannibalized his own (as yet unpublished) ‘Shadow out of Time’ by introducing the notion of mind-exchange between human beings and some alien entities. The resulting tale is merely a literary curiosity, although the science fiction version is still worse.

Another story on which Lovecraft worked around this time— Duane W. Rimel’s ‘The Disinterment’—is, however, a very different proposition. This tale—very similar in atmosphere to some of Lovecraft’s early macabre stories, especially ‘The Outsider’—is to my mind either wholly written by Lovecraft or a remarkably faithful imitation of Lovecraft’s style and manner. Rimel has emphatically maintained that the story is largely his, Lovecraft acting only as a polisher; and correspondence between the two men— especially Lovecraft’s enthusiastic initial response to the story— seems to support this claim. In a letter to Rimel of 28 September 1935, Lovecraft does speak of making ‘slight verbal changes’ in the manuscript; but in the absence of the manuscript or typescript, it is difficult to know what this means. In the story Rimel (or Lovecraft) has taken the hackneyed ‘mad doctor’ trope and shorn it of its triteness and absurdity by a very restrained portrayal, one that suggests far more than it states. ‘The Disinterment’ was published in Weird Tales for January 1937.

In mid-October 1935 Lovecraft broke his self-imposed rule against collaboration by revising a story by William Lumley entitled ‘The Diary of Alonzo Typer’. Lumley had produced a hopelessly illiterate draft of the tale—set in an abandoned house near Lumley’s hometown of Buffalo—and sent it to Lovecraft, who, feeling sorry for the old codger, rewrote the story wholesale while still preserving as much of Lumley’s conceptions and even his prose as possible. The result, however, is still a dismal failure. Lovecraft feels the need to supply a suitably cataclysmic ending, so he depicts the narrator coming upon the locus of horror in the basement of the house, only to be seized by a monster at the end while heroically (or absurdly) writing in his diary: ‘Too late—cannot help self— black paws materialise—am dragged away toward the cellar.’ Undeterred, Lumley enterprisingly sent the story to Farnsworth Wright, who accepted it in early December for $70.00; Lovecraft magnanimously let Lumley keep the entire sum. The story was not published in Weird Tales, however, until February 1938.

Lovecraft may have been in a generous mood at this time because of some remarkable financial developments of his own. Probably during his stay in New York in early September, Julius Schwartz had come to a gathering of the weird fiction gang at Donald Wandrei’s apartment. Schwartz, who was attempting to establish himself as an agent in the weird and science fiction fields, had been in touch with F. Orlin Tremaine, editor of Astounding, who wished to broaden the scope of the magazine to include some weird or weird/science material. Schwartz asked Lovecraft whether he had any tales that might fit into this purview, and Lovecraft replied that At the Mountains of Madness had been rejected by Wright and had not been submitted elsewhere. Schwartz eventually took the story to Tremaine, probably in late October. Here is his account of what occurred:

The next time I went up to Tremaine, I said, roughly, ‘I have in my hands a 35,000 word story by H. P. Lovecraft.’ So he smiled and said roughly to the equivalent, ‘You’ll get a check on Friday.’ Or ‘It’s sold!’ … Now I’m fairly convinced that Tremaine never read the story. Or if he tried to, he gave up.⁴

What this shows is that Lovecraft was by this time sufficiently well known in the weird/science fiction pulp field that Tremaine did not even need to read the story to accept it; Lovecraft’s name on a major work—whose length would require it to be serialized over several issues—was felt to be a sufficient drawing card. Tremaine was true to his word: he paid Schwartz $350.00; after keeping his $35.00 agent’s fee, Schwartz sent the rest to Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was of course pleased at this turn of events, but in less than a week he would have reason to be still more pleased. In early November he learned that Donald Wandrei had submitted ‘The Shadow out of Time’—which presumably had found its way to him on Lovecraft’s circulation list—to Tremaine, and that story was also accepted, for $280.00. In all likelihood Tremaine scarcely read this tale either.

The financial boon for Lovecraft was certainly marked: he puts it in graphic terms when he writes, ‘I was never closer to the breadline than this year.’⁵ Aside from $105 for ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ and $32.50 from the London agency Curtis Brown for a proposed reprinting of ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ that never came to pass, Lovecraft had had no sales of original fiction in 1934 or 1935. We shall shortly see that even these two welcome cheques from Street & Smith could scarcely save Lovecraft and Annie from severe economies in the coming spring.

Lovecraft’s jubilation at the Astounding sales would later turn sour when he saw the actual stories in print; but that was months in the future. Just as a rejection—or even an unfavourable report from an associate—would plunge Lovecraft into depression and self-doubt about his abilities as a writer, so this double acceptance directly stimulated him into renewed composition. On 5–9 November he reeled off a new tale, ‘The Haunter of the Dark’.

This last original story by Lovecraft came about almost as a whim. Robert Bloch had written a story, ‘The Shambler from the Stars’, in the spring of 1935, in which a character—never named, but clearly meant to be Lovecraft—is killed off. Lovecraft was taken with the story, and, when it was published in Weird Tales (September 1935), a reader, B. M. Reynolds, praised it and had a suggestion to make: ‘Contrary to previous criticism, Robert Bloch deserves plenty of praise for The Shambler from the Stars. Now why doesn’t Mr. Lovecraft return the compliment, and dedicate a story to the author?’⁶ Lovecraft took up the offer, and his story tells of one Robert Blake who ends up a glassy-eyed corpse staring out his study window.

But the flippancy of the genesis of ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ should not deceive us; it is one of Lovecraft’s more substantial tales. It tells of Robert Blake, a young writer of weird fiction, who comes to Providence for a period of writing, but who becomes fascinated with an abandoned church in the Italian district known as Federal Hill. Entering the place, Blake finds a curious object—a metal box containing a curious gem or mineral—as well as the decaying skeleton of an old newspaper reporter whose notes Blake reads. These notes speak of the ill-regarded Starry Wisdom church, and a ‘Shining Trapezohedron’ and a ‘Haunter of the Dark’ that cannot exist in light. Blake concludes that the object on the pillar is the Shining Trapezohedron. Suddenly terrified, he closes the lid of the object and flees the place. This action unwittingly releases a monster confined in the belfry of the church; and this creature—an avatar of Nyarlathotep—escapes fleetingly from its confinement during a blackout, but perishes just at the moment when it fuses its mind with that of Blake, who is staring at it out of his window. Blake dies also.

Many of the surface details of the plot were taken directly from Hanns Heinz Ewers’s ‘The Spider’, which Lovecraft read in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931). This story involves a man who becomes fascinated with a strange woman he sees through his window in a building across from his own, until finally he seems to lose hold of his own personality.

A great proportion of the landmarks described in the story are based upon actual sites. The view from Blake’s study, as is well known, is nothing more than a poignant description of what Lovecraft saw out of his own study at 66 College Street. The church that figures so prominently in the tale is (or, rather, was) also real: it is St John’s Catholic Church on Atwell’s Avenue in Federal Hill, destroyed in 1992. It was, in Lovecraft’s day, very much a going concern, being the principal Catholic church in the area. The description of the interior and belfry of the church is quite accurate. Lovecraft heard that the steeple had been destroyed by lightning in late June of 1935 (he was not there at the time, being in Florida visiting Barlow); and instead of rebuilding the steeple, the church authorities decided merely to put a conical cap on the brick tower. This incident no doubt started his imagination working.

The end of 1935 saw Lovecraft’s fourth—and last—Christmas visit to Frank Long and the rest of the New York gang. Amid the usual round of socializing with old friends, he met some new figures. He met Seabury Quinn for the first time since 1931, and attended a dinner of the American Fiction Guild, an organization that Hugh B. Cave had for years been trying to get him to join. On two occasions Lovecraft went to the new Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. Barlow surprised him with a unique Christmas gift—a forty-two-copy printing of The Cats of Ulthar.

Another booklet that seems to have emerged at this time is Charleston. This is a mimeographed pamphlet that exists in two ‘editions’, if such they can be called. H. C. Koenig was planning a trip to Charleston in early 1936 and asked Lovecraft for a brief description of some of the highlights of the place. Lovecraft wrote a long letter on 12 January that combined a potted history of Charleston with a specific walking tour. This letter merely paraphrases and abridges Lovecraft’s superb unpublished 1930 travelogue, ‘An Account of Charleston’, leaving out the archaic usages and also some of the more interesting but idiosyncratic personal asides. Koenig was so taken with this letter that he typed it up and mimeographed it, running off probably fewer than twenty-five copies. When Lovecraft received the item, he found a number of mistranscriptions which he wished to correct; meanwhile Koenig had asked Lovecraft to rewrite the beginning and ending so as to transform the piece from a letter into an essay. After these corrections and changes were made, Koenig ran off about thirty to fifty copies of the new version, ‘binding’ it (as he had done with the first version) in a cardboard folder.

Not long after returning from New York, Lovecraft—although overwhelmed by revision work, a growing feud in the NAPA, and (ominously) a severe case of what he called ‘grippe’—still managed to find time to lapse into one more collaborative fiction venture— this time with Kenneth Sterling (1920–95), a young fan who had introduced himself to Lovecraft in March 1935. The result is the interesting if insubstantial science fiction tale ‘In the Walls of Eryx’.

Sterling has stated that the idea of the invisible maze was his, and that this core idea was adapted from Edmond Hamilton’s celebrated story (which Lovecraft liked), ‘The Monster-God of Mamurth’ (Weird Tales, August 1926), which concerns an invisible building in the Sahara Desert. Sterling wrote a draft of six to eight thousand words; Lovecraft entirely rewrote the story (‘in very short order’, Sterling declares), making it about twelve thousand words in the process.⁷ Sterling’s account suggests that the version as we have it is entirely Lovecraft’s prose, and indeed it reads as such; but one suspects (Sterling’s original draft is not extant) that, as with the collaborated tales with Price and Lumley, Lovecraft tried to preserve as much of Sterling’s own prose, and certainly his ideas, as possible.

The authors have made the tale amusing by devising nasty injokes on certain mutual colleagues (e.g., farnoth-flies = Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales; effjay weeds and wriggling akmans = Forrest J Ackerman); I suspect these are Lovecraft’s jokes. The narrative, however, turns into a conte cruel when the hapless protagonist, trapped in the invisible maze whose opening he can no longer locate, reveals his deteriorating mental and physical condition in the diary he writes as he vainly seeks to escape.

The story was apparently submitted to Astounding Stories, Blue Book, Argosy, Wonder Stories, and perhaps Amazing Stories. Finally it was published in Weird Tales for October 1939.

Less than a month after Lovecraft recovered from his bout of ‘grippe’, he reported to his correspondents that his aunt Annie was stricken with a much severer case, one that ultimately involved hospitalization (beginning 17 March), then a two-week stay at a private convalescent home (7–21 April). Here is one more of the relatively few occasions in which Lovecraft is guilty of deceit, but in this case it is entirely understandable. In fact, Annie Gamwell was suffering from breast cancer, and her hospital stay involved a mastectomy. It is not a subject someone like Lovecraft would wish to discuss openly even to close associates.

The result for Lovecraft was a complete disruption of his schedule. At one point he states rather harrowingly: ‘My own programme is totally shot to pieces, & I am about on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I have so little power of concentration that it takes me about an hour to do what I can ordinarily do in five minutes—& my eyesight is acting like the devil.’⁸

The one thing Annie’s illness and hospital stay brought out was the severe state of the family finances—something made graphically real by one of the saddest documents ever written by Lovecraft, a diary that he kept while Annie was away and which he would bring to her every few days in order to give an account of his activities.⁹ Here we receive an unvarnished account of the severe economies—especially in food—which Lovecraft was compelled to practise at this time.

On 20 March we learn that Lovecraft had gone back to a bad habit of Clinton Street days—eating canned food cold—for we now hear of his ‘experiment[ing] with heating’ a can of chile con carne. It gets worse. On March 22 some twenty-minute eggs plus half a can of baked beans make ‘a sumptuous repast’. Around 24 March Lovecraft feels the necessity to use canned goods that had been lying around for at least three years, since they had been brought over from Barnes Street. On 29 March he begins using up some old Chase & Sanborn coffee that would otherwise go bad, even though he likes Postum better. Dinner on 30 March was cold hot dogs, biscuits, and mayonnaise.

On 10 April Lovecraft began experimenting with a tin of tenyear-old Rich’s Cocoa and found that it had ‘acquired an earthy taste’: ‘However, I shall use it up somehow.’ He was true to his word: over the next three days he mixed it with condensed milk and resolutely drank it. Afterward he found a tin of Hershey’s Cocoa, a nearly full container of salt from Barnes Street, and a can of diced carrots on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet and set these down for eventual use, also beginning to eat some old canned brown bread, which seemed all right.

The entire effect of all this economizing and eating of old and possibly spoiled food can only be conjectured. Is it any wonder that on 4 April Lovecraft admits to feeling so tired during the middle of the day that he had to rest instead of going out, and that on 13 April he finds, after a nap, that ‘I was too weak & drowsy to do anything’? It should, of course, be emphasized that the meals prepared during this period did not represent his normal eating habits, although these were ascetic enough. I shall have more to say about this later.

At exactly this point, Lovecraft was distracted by another debacle that nearly drove him to give up writing altogether. In midFebruary he had seen the first instalment of At the Mountains of Madness in the February 1936 Astounding and professed to like it; in particular, he had words of praise for the interior illustrations by Howard Brown. But the attractiveness of the illustrations soon soured when Lovecraft actually studied the text.

When he consulted the third and last instalment (April 1936), he discovered the serious tampering that the Astounding editors had performed on the story, particularly the last segment. Lovecraft went into a towering rage:

But hell & damnation! … In brief, that goddamn’d dung of a hyaena Orlin Tremaine has given the ‘Mts.’ the worst hashing-up any piece of mine ever received—in or out of Tryout! I’ll be hanged if I can consider the story as published at all—the last instalment is a joke, with whole passages missing …

I pass over certain affected changes in sentence-structure, but see red again when I think of the paragraphing. Venom of Tsathoggua! Have you seen the damn thing? All my paragraphs cut up into little chunks like the juvenile stuff the other pulp hacks write. Rhythm, emotional modulations, & minor climactic effects thereby destroyed … Tremaine has tried to make ‘snappy action’ stuff out of old-fashioned leisurely prose …

But the supremely intolerable thing is the way the text is cut in the last instalment—to get an old serial out of the way quickly. Whole passages … are left out—the result being to decrease vitality & colour, & make the action mechanical. So many important details & impressions & touches of sensation are missing from the concluding parts that the effect is that of a flat ending. After all the adventure & detail before the encounter with the shoggoth in the abyss, the characters are shot up to the surface without any of the gradual experiences & emotions which make the reader feel their return to the world of man from the nighted aeon-old world of the Others. All sense of the duration & difficulty of the exhausted climb is lost when it is dismissed objectively in only a few words, with no hint of the fugitives’ reactions to the scenes through which they pass.¹⁰

What this passage shows is how conscious Lovecraft was of the emotional and psychological effect of prose and the need (in serious literature as opposed to pulp hackwork) to ground a weird or wonder tale in the most careful realism both of scene and of mood. Perhaps Lovecraft was trying to have his cake and eat it too in writing a story containing very advanced philosophical and scientific conceptions in ‘old-fashioned leisurely prose’ and then expecting it to appear intact in a science fiction pulp magazine.

What Lovecraft therefore did was to purchase three copies of each instalment and laboriously correct the text, either by writing in the missing portions and connecting the paragraphs together by pencil or by eliminating the excess punctuation by scratching it out with a penknife. This whole procedure took the better part of four days in early June. All this may seem somewhat anal-retentive, but Lovecraft wished to lend these three copies to colleagues who had not seen the typescript and would otherwise be reading only the adulterated Astounding text.

On top of this, the story itself was received relatively poorly by the readers of the magazine. This negative response has perhaps been exaggerated by later critics, but certainly there were a sufficient number of readers who failed to understand the point of the tale or felt it inappropriate for Astounding. Robert Thompson lays in with pungent sarcasm: ‘I am glad to see the conclusion to At the Mountains of Madness for reasons that would not be pleasant to Mr. Lovecraft.’ But Cleveland C. Soper, Jr, is the most devastating: ‘why in the name of science-fiction did you ever print such a story as At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft? Are you in such dire straits that you must print this kind of drivel? … If such stories as this … are what is to constitute the future yarns of Astounding Stories, then heaven help the cause of science-fiction!’

‘The Shadow out of Time’ appeared in the June 1936 issue of Astounding. Lovecraft incredibly says that ‘It doesn’t seem even nearly as badly mangled as the Mts.’,¹¹ and the one surviving annotated copy of the issue bears relatively few corrections; but the recently unearthed autograph manuscript makes it abundantly clear that this story suffered the same reparagraphing that At the Mountains of Madness received. Other errors are apparently due to Barlow’s inability to read Lovecraft’s handwriting when he prepared the typescript. It is a mystery why Lovecraft did not complain more vociferously about the corruption of this text, even though no actual passages were omitted. My feeling is that he may have felt so indebted to both Barlow (for typing the story) and Wandrei (for submitting it) that any complaints might have struck him as a sign of ingratitude. In any event, in a very short time other matters would distract him from such a relatively harmless matter.

‘The Shadow out of Time’ was received much more unfavourably than At the Mountains of Madness by readers. The August 1936 issue (the only one that contains any significant comment on the story) contains a barrage of criticism. Some individuals, however, either came to Lovecraft’s defence in regard to the attacks received by At the Mountains of Madness or had generous praise for the new story. These latter comments negate the claim that Lovecraft’s work was universally panned in Astounding.

Lovecraft, however, had little time to bother with the reaction of his work in the magazine: he knew that he was not likely to write very much more that would find favour with Astounding. In any case, other events closer to home were occupying his attention.

The only viable amateur organization, the NAPA, was reaching unheard-of levels of spite and vindictiveness. The locus of this new feuding was Hyman Bradofsky (b. 1906), whose Californian offered unprecedented space for lengthy prose contributions and whom Lovecraft had supported in his successful bid for the presidency of the NAPA for the 1935–36 term.

I am not entirely clear why Bradofsky created so much hostility among other members. He was evidently accused of being highhanded in various procedural matters relating to the NAPA constitution, and he himself apparently responded to criticism in a somewhat testy manner. Whether Bradofsky’s being Jewish had anything to do with it is similarly unclear; I suspect that this was a factor, although Lovecraft never acknowledges it. In any case, it is certainly to Lovecraft’s credit that he came to Bradofsky’s defence, since by all accounts many of the attacks upon him were highly unjust, capricious, and snide.

Lovecraft’s chief response was an essay written on 4 June, entitled ‘Some Current Motives and Practices’. In it Lovecraft censures Bradofsky’s opponents—or, rather, the thoroughly despicable tactics they are using against him—refutes the attacks by vindicating Bradofsky’s conduct, and in general pleads for a return to civilized standards in amateurdom. Lovecraft arranged with Barlow to mimeograph the essay, which would be sent to all NAPA members. Barlow must have distributed the item by the end of June. I cannot sense that it had any particular effect.

In early June Robert E. Howard wrote to his friend Thurston Tolbert: ‘My mother is very low. I fear she has not many days to live.’¹² He was correct: on the morning of 11 June, Hester Jane Ervin Howard fell into a coma from which her doctors said she would never emerge. Howard got into his car and shot himself in the head with a gun. He died eight hours later; his mother died the next day, leaving Howard’s aged father, Dr I. M. Howard, doubly bereaved. Robert E. Howard was thirty years old.

At a time when telephones were not as common as now, the news spread relatively slowly. Lovecraft heard of it only around 19 June, when he received a postcard written three days earlier by C. L. Moore. He got the full story a few days later from Dr Howard. Lovecraft was overwhelmed with shock and grief:

Damnation, what a loss! … I can’t understand the tragedy— for although R E H had a moody side expressed in his resentment against civilisation (the basis of our perennial and voluminous epistolary controversy), I always thought that this was a more or less impersonal sentiment … He himself seemed to me pretty well adjusted—in an environment he loved, with plenty of congenial souls … to talk and travel with, and with parents whom he obviously idolised. His mother’s pleural illness imposed a great strain upon both him and his father, yet I cannot think that this would be sufficient to drive his tough-fibred nervous system to selfdestructive extremes.¹³

In the short term Lovecraft assisted Dr Howard as best he could, by sending various items—including his letters from Howard—to a memorial collection at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas. Lovecraft’s own letters to Howard met a more unfortunate fate, and appear to have been inadvertently destroyed by Dr Howard some time in the late 1940s. But very large—perhaps nearly complete—extracts of them had been transcribed under August Derleth’s direction; a relatively small proportion of them was actually published in the Selected Letters. A joint Lovecraft–Howard correspondence would be very illuminating.

Almost immediately Lovecraft wrote a poignant memoir and brief critical appraisal, ‘In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard’, that appeared in Fantasy Magazine for September 1936. R. H. Barlow wrote a touching sonnet, ‘R. E. H.’, that formed his first and last appearance in Weird Tales (October 1936). That issue contained a wealth of tributes to Howard in the letters column, one of which was of course from Lovecraft.

Various outings in spring and summer and visits by a number of friends old and new during the latter half of the year made 1936 not quite the disaster it had been up to then. The heat of summer was anomalously late in arriving, but the week of 8 July finally brought temperatures in the 90s and saved Lovecraft ‘from some sort of general breakdown’.¹⁴ On 11 July he took a boat trip to Newport, doing considerable writing on the lofty cliffs overlooking the ocean.

As for guests, first on the agenda was Maurice W. Moe, who had not seen Lovecraft since the latter’s fat days of 1923. Moe came with his son Robert for a visit on 18–19 July, and, since Robert had come in his car, they had convenient transport for all manner of sightseeing. They went to the old fishing village of Pawtuxet (then already absorbed into the Providence city limits), drove through Roger Williams Park, and visited the Warren–Bristol area that Robert and Lovecraft had seen in March of the previous year. At Warren they had an all-ice-cream dinner.

On 28 July no less important a guest arrived than R. H. Barlow, who was forced to leave his Florida home because of family disruptions that ultimately sent him to live with relatives in Leavenworth, Kansas. Barlow stayed more than a month in Providence, taking up quarters at the boarding-house behind 66 College and not leaving until 1 September. During this time he was quite unremitting in his demands on Lovecraft’s time, but the latter felt obliged to humour him in light of the superabundant hospitality he himself had received in Florida in 1934 and 1935.

Still another visitor descended upon Providence on 5 August— Adolphe de Castro, who had just been to Boston to scatter his wife’s ashes in the sea. By now a broken man—in his seventies, with no money, and his beloved wife dead—de Castro was still trying to foist various unrealistic projects upon Lovecraft. Trying to cheer the old boy up, Lovecraft and Barlow took him on 8 August to St John’s Churchyard in Benefit Street, where the spectral atmosphere—and the fact that Poe had been there courting Sarah Helen Whitman ninety years before—impelled the three men to write acrostic ‘sonnets’ on the name Edgar Allan Poe. (These were, of course, one line shorter than an actual sonnet.) Of these three Barlow’s may well be the best. But de Castro was the canniest of the bunch, for he later revised his poem and submitted it to Weird Tales, where it was quickly accepted. When Lovecraft and Barlow learnt this, they too submitted their poems—but Farnsworth Wright wanted to use only one. Lovecraft and Barlow were forced to dump their pieces on a fan magazine, the Science-Fantasy Correspondent, where they appeared in the March–April 1937 issue.

Another literary project on which Lovecraft and Barlow probably worked during his stay in Providence was ‘The Night Ocean’. We are now in a position to gauge the precise degree of Lovecraft’s contribution to this tale, as the manuscript has recently resurfaced. It shows that Lovecraft only touched up the prose here and there, making substantial improvements but basically merely ‘copy editing’ the text; as it stands, the story is at least 90 per cent Barlow’s. Barlow had been progressing remarkably as a writer: his ‘A Dim-Remembered Story’ (Californian, summer 1936) is a superbly crafted tale but one that does not seem to bear any revisory hand by Lovecraft at all. Lovecraft waxed enthusiastic about it when he read it in manuscript. ‘The Night Ocean’—published in the winter 1936 Californian—is an even finer work. Of all the tales written by Lovecraft’s colleagues, it comes the closest to capturing the essential spirit of the weird tale, as Lovecraft wrote of some of Blackwood’s works in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’: ‘Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note … Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.’

Lovecraft’s old amateur colleague Anne Tillery Renshaw, who had gone from being a professor to running her own school, The Renshaw School of Speech, in Washington, D.C., resurfaced at this time. In early 1936 she wished him to do revision and editing on a booklet she was writing entitled Well Bred Speech, designed for her adult education classes. Lovecraft was eager to work on the project, not only because it would be intrinsically interesting but because it would presumably bring in revenue at a time when revision work was fairly lean and sporadic.

Lovecraft received at least a partial draft of the text by midFebruary, and came to realize that ‘the job is somewhat ampler than I had expected—involving the furnishing of original elements as well as the revision of a specific text’; but—in spite of his aunt’s illness at this time—he was willing to undertake the task if he received clear instructions on how much expansion he should do. He breezily adds, ‘Rates can be discussed later—I fancy that any figure you would quote (with current precedent in mind) would be satisfactory.’¹⁵ Later, after all the work was finished, he felt that Renshaw would be a cheapskate if she paid him anything less than $200. In the end, he received only $100, but this seems to have been his own fault, since his own final price was $150, which he reduced to $100 because of his tardiness.

Lovecraft initially tried to meet Renshaw’s deadline of 1 May, but with all his troubles of the spring and summer this became quite unfeasible. Faced with a new deadline of 1 October, Lovecraft worked for sixty hours without a break in mid-September and somehow managed to get the thing done.

Much of both Renshaw’s and Lovecraft’s work on Well Bred Speech survives in manuscript, and allows us to gauge precisely how much each contributed to most parts of the text. The result is, however, a mediocre work, even with Lovecraft’s additions. He has added most significantly to chapters I (The Background of Speech), III (Words Frequently Mispronounced), VI (Bromides Must Go [on clichés]), and X (What Shall I Read?). But much of this material was excised in the published version. The final chapter (published posthumously as ‘Suggestions for a Reading Guide’) has been gutted, in particular the last section—covering recent books on the sciences. The chapter as a whole (as Lovecraft wrote it) is a fairly sound beginner’s guide to both literature and scholarship up to his day.

In his final year Lovecraft continued to attract new—and mostly young—correspondents who, unaware of his increasing ill health, were thrilled to receive actual letters from this giant of weird fiction. Most of them continued to reach him through Weird Tales, but several got in touch through the increasingly complex network of the science fiction and fantasy fan circuit.

Among the most promising of these was Henry Kuttner (1915– 58). A friend of Robert Bloch’s, he had published only a single poem in Weird Tales before writing to Lovecraft early in 1936. Several colleagues thought that Lovecraft had either ghostwritten or extensively revised Kuttner’s ‘The Graveyard Rats’ (Weird Tales, March 1936), but this story had already been accepted before Lovecraft heard from Kuttner. Kuttner had, however, by this time already written a tale whose first draft—rejected by Weird Tales— may have been consciously Lovecraftian. In his second letter to Kuttner, on 12 March, Lovecraft offers a lengthy criticism of ‘The Salem Horror’; and it is clear that Kuttner made major changes in the story based upon these comments. Kuttner’s geographical, historical, and architectural knowledge of Salem was all wrong, and Lovecraft set about correcting it; his letter is full of drawings of representative Salem houses, a map of the city, and even sketches of various types of headstones found in the older cemeteries. Other parts of Lovecraft’s letter suggest that significant overhauling to the basic plot and incidents of the story was also done.

One small detail in Lovecraft’s letters to Kuttner proved to be of great moment in the subsequent history of weird, fantasy, and science fiction. In May he casually asked Kuttner to pass on some photographs of Salem and Marblehead to C. L. Moore once Kuttner himself had finished with them; and it was in this way that Moore and Kuttner became acquainted. Marrying in 1940, the couple jointly wrote some of the most distinguished work of the ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction.

One of the most distinctive of Lovecraft’s late associates—not so much for what he accomplished at the time as for what he did later—was Willis Conover, Jr (1921–96). In the spring of 1936, as a fifteen-year-old boy living in the small town of Cambridge, Maryland, Conover had conceived the idea of a magazine, the ScienceFantasy Correspondent. In addition to publishing the work of fans, Conover wished to lend prestige to his magazine by soliciting minor pieces from professionals. He got in touch with Lovecraft in July, and later expressed regret that the Fantasy Fan serialization of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ had ended so abruptly. Lovecraft casually suggested that Conover continue the serialization in his own magazine from the point where it had left off (the middle of chapter eight); Conover jumped at the idea. This item could not be accommodated in the first issue of the Science-Fantasy Correspondent (November–December 1936), but by September Lovecraft had already sent Conover the same annotated copy of the Recluse (with additions written on separate sheets) that he had lent to (and received back from) Hornig.

Shortly after this time, however, Conover took over Julius Schwartz’s Fantasy Magazine, since Schwartz wished to abandon fan editing to become a full-time agent in the science fiction field. Conover then decided to reprint ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ from the beginning. The second issue of the Science-Fantasy Correspondent was dated January–February 1937, but did not contain any segment of the essay. No more issues of the magazine appeared; but some of the material was later transferred to Stickney’s Amateur Correspondent, including ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’.

We know so much about the relationship between Conover and Lovecraft—which is, in all frankness, a fairly minor one in the totality of Lovecraft’s life, although clearly it was significant to Conover—not only because Lovecraft’s letters to him survive but because of the volume Conover published in 1975 entitled Lovecraft at Last. This book is not only one of the finest examples of modern book design, but a poignant, even wrenching testimonial to the friendship between a middle-aged—and dying—man and a young boy who idolized him.

Two other fan editors with whom Lovecraft exchanged a few letters were James Blish (1921–75) and William Miller, Jr (b. 1921), two youths living in East Orange, New Jersey. Blish went on to become one of the most important science fiction writers of his generation. Lovecraft’s influence on him cannot be said to be especially significant, but Blish seems to have remembered his brief association for the whole of his own sadly abbreviated life.

In addition to writers, editors, and publishers, Lovecraft also heard from weird artists. Chief among these was Virgil Finlay (1914–71), whose work in Weird Tales Lovecraft had admired for several months prior to coming in touch with him. Finlay is indeed now recognized as perhaps the greatest pictorial artist to emerge from the pulps, and his stunning pen-and-ink work is unmistakable in its precision and imaginative scope. Lovecraft first heard from him in September 1936, and their correspondence was cordial even though Lovecraft in the end wrote only five letters and one postcard to him. Willis Conover had secretly arranged for Finlay to draw the celebrated portrait of Lovecraft as an eighteenth-century gentleman to head the first instalment of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ in the Science-Fantasy Correspondent, a portrait that, after the demise of that fanzine, appeared on the cover of Amateur Correspondent for April–May 1937.

In November 1936 Lovecraft heard from an individual whom he correctly identified as ‘a genuine find’.¹⁶ Fritz Leiber, Jr (1910–92) was the son of the celebrated Shakespearian actor Fritz Leiber, Sr, whom Lovecraft had seen around 1912 playing in Robert Mantell’s company when it came to the Providence Opera House. The son was also interested in drama, but was increasingly turning toward literature. He had been reading the weird and science fiction pulps from an early age, and later he testified that ‘The Colour out of Space’ in the September 1927 Amazing ‘gave me the gloomy creeps for weeks’.¹⁷ Then, when At the Mountains of Madness and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ appeared in Astounding, Leiber’s interest in Lovecraft was renewed and augmented—perhaps because these works probed that borderline between horror and science fiction which Leiber himself would later explore in his own work. And yet, he himself was too diffident to write to Lovecraft, so his wife Jonquil did so via Weird Tales; for a time Lovecraft was corresponding quasi-separately to both of them.

In mid-December Leiber sent Lovecraft a novella or short novel, ‘Adept’s Gambit’. The work profoundly impressed Lovecraft. This was the first tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser—two swashbuckling characters (modelled upon Leiber himself and his friend Harry O. Fischer, with whom Lovecraft also briefly corresponded) who roamed some nebulous fantastic realm in search of adventure—and Lovecraft wrote a long letter commenting in detail about it and praising it effusively. The published version of the story (in Leiber’s collection, Night’s Black Agents, 1947) apparently differs somewhat from the version Lovecraft saw, hence Leiber presumably revised it substantially along the lines Lovecraft recommended.

Leiber has testified frequently and eloquently to the importance of his brief but intense relationship with Lovecraft. Writing in 1958, he confessed: ‘Lovecraft is sometimes thought of as having been a lonely man. He made my life far less lonely, not only during the brief half year of our correspondence but during the twenty years after.’¹⁸ Leiber’s subsequent career—with such landmark works of fantasy and science fiction as Gather, Darkness! (1950), Conjure Wife (1953), The Big Time (1958), A Specter Is Haunting Texas (1969), Our Lady of Darkness (1977), and dozens of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories—is as distinguished as that of any writer in these fields during the past half-century. He learned much from Lovecraft, but, like the best of Lovecraft’s associates and disciples, he became his own man and his own writer.

Late in 1936 Lovecraft finally saw something he never thought he would see—a published book bearing his name. But predictably, the entire venture was, from first to last, an error-riddled debacle. It is little consolation that The Shadow over Innsmouth has, by virtue of its being the only actual book published and released in Lovecraft’s lifetime, become a valued collectors’ item.

William L. Crawford had a variety of plans for issuing either At the Mountains of Madness or ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ or both as a booklet. He was proposing all manner of schemes for the two stories, including prior serialization in either Marvel Tales or Unusual Stories before their book appearance. Finally—presumably after learning of the acceptance of Mountains by Astounding—Crawford focused on ‘Innsmouth’. The process began in early 1936, and the book was typeset by the Saxton Herald, the local paper in Everett, Pennsylvania. Lovecraft began reading proofs later that spring, finding them full of mistakes but laboriously correcting them as best he could; some pages were apparently so bad that they had to be reset virtually from scratch.

It was Lovecraft who, in late January or early February, had urged Crawford to use Frank Utpatel as an artist for the book. Utpatel executed four woodcuts, one of which—a spectacularly hallucinatory depiction of Innsmouth’s decaying roofs and spires, rather suggestive of El Greco—was also used for the jacket illustration. Lovecraft was delighted with the illustrations, even though the bearded Zadok Allen was portrayed as clean-shaven.

The illustrations, in the end, proved to be perhaps the only worthy item in the book, for certainly the text itself was seriously mangled. Lovecraft did not receive a copy of the book until November—a point worth noting, since book’s copyright page gives the date of April 1936. Lovecraft claimed to have found thirty-three misprints in the book, but other readers found still more. He managed to persuade Crawford to print an errata sheet— whose first version was itself so misprinted as to be virtually worthless—and also found the time and effort to correct many copies of the book manually.

Although four hundred copies of the sheets were printed, Crawford had the money to bind only about two hundred. Lovecraft declares that Crawford had actually borrowed money from his father for the entire enterprise.¹⁹ The book—although advertised in both Weird Tales and some of the fan journals—sold slowly (it was priced at $1.00), and shortly after its publication Crawford was forced to give up printing and publishing for seven years; at some point during this time the remaining unbound sheets were destroyed. So much for Lovecraft’s ‘first book’.

Lovecraft’s own career as a practising fiction-writer was certainly not going very well. In late June Julius Schwartz, evidently intent on following up the success of placing At the Mountains of Madness with Astounding, had proposed what Lovecraft considered a wild and impractical idea of placing some of his stories in England. Lovecraft sent him ‘a lot of manuscripts’²⁰ (leading one to think that Schwartz may have intended to approach book publishers), and, in order to exhaust the American market for as-yet unpublished stories, Lovecraft finally submitted ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ and ’The Haunter of the Dark’ to Weird Tales—the first stories he had personally submitted since he sent in ‘In the Vault’ in 1932. Lovecraft claimed to be surprised that Farnsworth Wright accepted these stories immediately, but he should not have been. Readers of the magazine had been clamouring for his work for years, and had to be satisfied with reprints.

In fact, Lovecraft had reached a psychological state that made both the marketing and the writing of fiction nearly impossible. As early as February 1936—three months after the writing of his last original tale, ‘The Haunter of the Dark’, and several months before the contretemps over his stories in Astounding—he was already admitting:

[ At the Mountains of Madness] was written in 1931—and its hostile reception by Wright and others to whom it was shewn probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career. The feeling that I had failed to crystallise the mood I was trying to crystallise robbed me in some subtle fashion of the ability to approach this kind of problem in the same way—or with the same degree of confidence and fertility.²¹ Lovecraft is already speaking of his fictional career in the past tense.

It is difficult to know exactly when Lovecraft realized that he was dying. The summer of 1936 finally brought the temperature up to a level where he could actually enjoy being outdoors and have the energy to accomplish his work. The fall saw him still taking long walks, resulting in his seeing several sections of his native city he had never before seen in his life. One expedition—on 20 and 21 October—took him to the east shore of Narragansett Bay, in an area called the Squantum Woods. On 28 October Lovecraft went to an area of the Neutaconkanut woods three miles northwest of College Hill.

Christmas was a festive occasion. Lovecraft and Annie had a tree, and the two of them had dinner at the boarding-house next door. Lovecraft received a gift which he certainly did not expect but which he professed to find delightful: a long-interred human skull, found in an Indian graveyard and sent to him by Willis Conover. Conover has received much criticism for sending this item at this time, but of course he could not have known of the state of Lovecraft’s health; and Lovecraft’s pleasure at receiving this mortuary relic seems quite sincere. The entire winter was unusually warm, allowing Lovecraft to continue neighbourhood walks into December and even January. Various letters of this time certainly bespeak no intimations of mortality.

In early January, however, Lovecraft admitted to feeling poorly—’grippe’ and bad digestion, as he put it. By the end of the month he was typing his letters—always a bad sign. Then, in midFebruary, he told Derleth that he had had an offer (of which nothing is known) for a revised version of some old astronomical articles (presumably the Asheville Gazette-News series), which caused him to unearth his old astronomy books and explore new ones. He added at the end of this letter: ‘Funny how early interests crop up again toward the end of one’s life.’²²

Lovecraft was at this time finally receiving the attention of a doctor, who prescribed three separate medications. On 28 February he made a feeble response to Talman’s continued queries about a book deal from William Morrow: ‘Am in constant pain, take only liquid food, and so bloated with gas that I can’t lie down. Spend all time in chair propped with pillows, and can read or write only a few minutes at a time.’²³ Two days later Harry Brobst, who was much on the scene during this time, wrote to Barlow: ‘Our old friend is quite ill—and so I am writing this letter for him. He has seemed to grow progressively weaker the last few days.’²⁴ On a postcard sent to Willis Conover on 9 March, Lovecraft writes in pencil: ‘Am very ill & likely to be so for a long time.’²⁵

The nature of Lovecraft’s various illnesses is not well understood, at least in terms of their aetiology. This may be because Lovecraft waited so long to have them examined by a competent medical authority. On his death certificate the principal cause of death was given as ‘Carcinoma of small intestine’; a contributory cause was ‘chronic nephritis’, or kidney disease.

Cancer of the small intestine is relatively rare, colon cancer being much more common; as a result, this cancer frequently goes undetected for years, even when patients are examined. Lovecraft, of course, was never examined until a month before his death, at which time it was too late to do anything except relieve his pain— and even massive doses of morphine seemed to offer little alleviation. It can be hypothesized why Lovecraft did not go to a doctor earlier, since he first experienced a serious bout of what he called indigestion as early as October 1934.²⁶ Lovecraft’s habitual term for this condition—’grippe’—is simply an antiquated layman’s term for the flu, although it is quite clear (and was probably clear to Lovecraft) that that is not what he had. But Lovecraft’s phobia of doctors and hospitals may have been of very long standing. Recall that his mother’s death was caused by a gall bladder operation from which she was unable to recover. Although it was probably Susie’s general physical and psychological debilitation that led to her death, rather than any medical malfeasance, perhaps Lovecraft gained a fear and suspicion of doctors from this point onward.

The causes of intestinal cancer are various. Chief among them is diet: a high-fat, low-fibre diet results in the greater absorption of animal proteins in the digestive tract, and cancer can result in this manner. Interestingly enough, in view of the amount of canned food Lovecraft ate, studies have shown that modern food additives and preservatives may actually inhibit intestinal cancer.²⁷ It is not that the preservatives in the canned food Lovecraft ate caused his cancer, but that their possible absence may have done so.

It is a difficult question whether Lovecraft’s kidney problems were related to or actually produced by his cancer or were a separate phenomenon entirely; the latter seems quite possible. Chronic nephritis is a now antiquated term for a variety of kidney ailments. In all likelihood, Lovecraft had chronic glomerulonephritis (formerly known as Bright’s disease)—the inflammation of the renal glomeruli (small bulbs of blood capillaries in the kidney). If unrelated to the cancer, the cause of this ailment is not entirely clear. In some cases it is a function of a breakdown of the immune system; in other cases, poor nutrition may be a factor.²⁸ In other words, poor diet may have caused or contributed to both his cancer and his renal failure.

At this point we may as well study Lovecraft’s anomalous sensitivity to cold, although what relation—if any—it had to his worsening cancer is impossible to determine. It has been thought that Lovecraft suffered from a supposed ailment called poikilothermia. This is, however, not a disease but merely a physiological property of certain animals, whereby their body temperature varies with the external environment; in other words, this property applies to cold-blooded animals such as reptiles. Mammals are all homeothermic, or capable of maintaining a constant body temperature (within narrow limits) regardless of the external environment.

Now there is no explicit evidence that Lovecraft’s actual body temperature decreased during the cold, although it could have; since he was never hospitalized when suffering from exposure to cold, no tests exist on what his body temperature was in such a state. We only have various anecdotes as to his symptoms on such occasions: disturbed cardiovascular and/or respiratory functions; swelling of feet (customarily an indication of poor blood circulation); difficulty in the manipulation of hands; headache and nausea, sometimes leading to vomiting; and in extreme cases (perhaps three or four times in his life) actual unconsciousness. I have no idea what this concatenation of symptoms signifies.

What could have caused this condition? There does not seem to be any actual illness coinciding with these symptoms, but one hypothesis can perhaps be made. Body temperature is, in mammals, almost certainly regulated by the central nervous system. Experiments with animals have shown that a lesion in the caudal section of the hypothalamus can result in homeothermic animals becoming quasi-poikilothermic: they do not sweat in hot weather, nor do they shiver in cold weather.²⁹ Lovecraft, of course, did admit to sweating profusely in hot weather, but claimed nevertheless that he had nearly unbounded energy on these occasions. Nevertheless, I believe it is at least possible that some sort of damage to the hypothalamus—which does not affect intellectual or aesthetic capacity in any way—caused Lovecraft’s sensitivity to cold.

And yet, Lovecraft makes it abundantly clear that his ‘grippe’ really did improve whenever the weather warmed up. This, at any rate, was the case during the winter of 1935–36. This fact may have led Lovecraft to believe that his digestive problems were some byproduct of his sensitivity to cold, which he apparently believed to be non-treatable; if so, it could have contributed to his failure to see a doctor until the very end.

Lovecraft’s last month of life is agonizing merely to read about; what it must have been like to experience can scarcely be imagined. This period has been made suddenly more vivid by a diary of his condition that Lovecraft kept until he could scarcely hold a pen.³⁰ Lovecraft began keeping the diary at the very beginning of 1937. He notes lingering digestive trouble throughout the first three weeks of January. Dr Cecil Calvert Dustin was brought in on 16 February. According to his recollections, he could tell immediately that Lovecraft was suffering from terminal cancer, so that he prescribed a variety of painkillers. Lovecraft’s condition did not improve, and the medications did not even appear to alleviate his pain. He took to sleeping propped up in the morris-chair, since he could not lie down comfortably. Also, there was enormous distension in his abdomen. This is an oedema in the peritoneal cavity caused by his kidney disease.

On 27 February Annie told Dr Dustin that Lovecraft was much worse. When Dustin came over, he claims to have notified Lovecraft that his condition was terminal. Lovecraft, of course, kept up a good front to his colleagues, saying merely that he would be out of commission for an indefinite period. On 1 March Annie asked Dustin to call in a specialist in internal medicine. Dustin contacted Dr William Leet, but clearly not much could be done at this stage. The diary entry for 2 March tells the story: ‘pain— drowse—intense pain—rest—great pain’. On 3 and 4 March Harry Brobst and his wife paid a visit; Brobst, with his medical knowledge, must have immediately known of the nature of Lovecraft’s condition, although he too put up a good front when writing to mutual colleagues.

On 6 March Dr Leet came over and found Lovecraft in the bath: immersions in hot water appeared to alleviate the pain somewhat. On this day Lovecraft suffered ‘hideous pain’. By 9 March Lovecraft was unable to take any food or drink. Leet called the next day and advised that Lovecraft check into Jane Brown Memorial Hospital. He was taken there that day in an ambulance. Lovecraft’s diary ends on 11 March; presumably he was unable to hold a pen thereafter.

For the next several days Lovecraft had to be fed intravenously, as he continued vomiting up all nourishment, even liquids. On 12 March Annie wrote to Barlow:

I have intended to write you a gay little letter, long since, but now I am writing a sad little letter telling you that Howard is so pitifully ill & weak … the dear fellow grows weaker & weaker—nothing can be retained in his stomach … Needless to say he has been pathetically patient & philosophical through it all … .³¹

On 13 March Harry Brobst and his wife came to visit Lovecraft in the hospital. Brobst asked Lovecraft how he felt; Lovecraft responded, ‘Sometimes the pain is unbearable.’ Brobst, in parting, told Lovecraft to remember the ancient philosophers—a reference, presumably, to their stoicism in facing death. Lovecraft smiled—the only response Brobst received.³²

On 14 March Lovecraft’s oedema was so severe that a stomach tap drained six and three-fourths quarts of fluid. That day Barlow, having received Annie’s letter, telegraphed her from Leavenworth, Kansas: ‘WOULD LIKE TO COME AND HELP YOU IF AGREEABLE ANSWER LEAVENWORTH TONIGHT.’³³

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died early in the morning of March 15, 1937. He was pronounced dead at 7.15 a.m. That evening Annie telegraphed a reply to Barlow:³⁴ HOWARD DIED THIS MORNING NOTHING TO DO THANKS

EPILOGUE

Thou Art Not Gone

On the evening of 15 March the Providence Evening Bulletin ran an obituary, full of errors large and small; but it made mention of the ‘clinical notes’ Lovecraft kept of his condition while in the hospital— notes that ‘ended only when he could no longer hold a pencil’. This feature was picked up by the wire services, and a brief obituary appeared in the New York Times on 16 March. Frank Long, Lovecraft’s best friend, learnt of his death from reading this obituary.

A funeral service was held on 18 March at the chapel of Horace B. Knowles’s Sons at 187 Benefit Street. Only a small number of friends and relatives were there—Annie, Harry Brobst and his wife, and Annie’s friend Edna Lewis. These individuals then attended the actual burial at Swan Point Cemetery, where they were joined by Edward H. Cole and his wife and Ethel Phillips Morrish, Lovecraft’s second cousin. The Eddys had planned to come but arrived after the gravesite ceremony was over. Lovecraft’s name was inscribed only on the central shaft of the Phillips plot, below those of his father and mother: ‘their son / HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT / 1890– 1937’. It took forty years for Lovecraft and his mother to receive separate headstones.

The outpouring of grief from both the weird fiction and the amateur press was instantaneous and overwhelming. The June 1937 issue of Weird Tales contained only the first wave of letters from colleagues and fans alike. It is remarkable how perfect strangers such as Robert Leonard Russell, who knew Lovecraft only from his work, could write: ‘I feel, as will many other readers of Weird Tales, that I have lost a real friend.’ Many real friends—from Hazel Heald to Robert Bloch to Kenneth Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith to Henry Kuttner—also wrote moving letters. Jacques Bergier, in the September 1937 issue, concluded: ‘The passing of Lovecraft seems to me to mark an end of an epoch in the history of American imaginative fiction.’

One of the most remarkable phenomena about Lovecraft’s passing is the number of poetic tributes it inspired. Henry Kuttner, Richard Ely Morse, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, Emil Petaja, and many others wrote fine elegies; but the best without question is Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘To Howard Phillips Lovecraft’, written on 31 March 1937 and published in Weird Tales for July. Its conclusion can only be quoted:

And yet thou art not gone

Nor given wholly unto dream and dust:

For, even upon

This lonely western hill of Averoigne

Thy flesh had never visited,

I meet some wise and sentient wraith of thee,

Some undeparting presence, gracious and august. More luminous for thee the vernal grass,

More magically dark the Druid stone

And in the mind thou art for ever shown

As in a wizard glass;

And from the spirit’s page thy runes can never pass.¹

It is beyond the scope of this volume to trace the subsequent history of the appreciation of Lovecraft and his work; in any event, this information has now been more exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. A few points, however, may be touched upon here, in order to provide some hints of how an obscure writer who died with no book issued by a major publisher has now achieved worldwide renown as the leading author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century.

An unsung hero in this transformation is R. H. Barlow, who was named Lovecraft’s literary executor in a document written by Lovecraft toward the end of his life, ‘Instructions in Case of Decease’. Barlow came to Providence shortly after Lovecraft’s death and eventually donated most of his manuscripts and some printed matter to the John Hay Library of Brown University. This act allowed for the eventual correction of Lovecraft’s texts based upon consultation of manuscript and early printed sources.

August Derleth and Donald Wandrei teamed up to establish Arkham House, a firm initially designed solely to preserve Lovecraft’s work in hard covers. Arkham House quickly broadened its range to publish the work of other weird and science fiction writers, and today it retains its place as a leading small press publisher in this realm. Largely through Wandrei’s influence, Arkham House issued five substantial volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters (1965– 76), thereby revealing Lovecraft’s greatness as an epistolarian and the complex philosophical thought that underlay his creative work.

Paperback editions of Lovecraft emerged as early as the 1940s, and Ballantine Books began its fruitful paperback publications in the late 1960s, continuing to the present day. Ballantine, however, has not consistently used the corrected texts of Lovecraft’s work published by Arkham House under my editorship in four volumes (1984–89); but Penguin has begun issuing these corrected texts in annotated editions beginning with The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999).

Criticism of Lovecraft—initially fed through ‘fan’ circles (including such noted critics as Fritz Leiber, George T. Wetzel, and Matthew H. Onderdonk)—had to fight off vicious and clumsy attacks on his work by professional critics insensitive to weird fiction (chiefly Edmund Wilson’s notorious review-article, ‘Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous’, published in the New Yorker for 24 November 1945), but eventually this work bore fruit with the emergence of more scholarly criticism in the 1970s, led initially by Dirk W. Mosig and carried on by such critics as Donald R. Burleson, Peter Cannon, David E. Schultz, Robert H. Waugh, Robert M. Price, and myself. The scholarly journal Lovecraft Studies was established in 1979 and has published much sound criticism of Lovecraft.

Many of Lovecraft’s colleagues wrote memoirs of Lovecraft, chiefly at the urging of August Derleth, who published them in various volumes of Lovecraft miscellany published by Arkham House over the years. These have now been gathered in Peter Cannon’s noteworthy volume, Lovecraft Remembered (1998). L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography appeared in 1975, but was widely criticized for lack of sympathy with its subject and an inadequate discussion of Lovecraft’s work and thought.

Media adaptations of Lovecraft were somewhat slow in appearing, and to this day their quality is very variable. Lovecraft’s work was heard on radio as early as the late 1940s; some film versions appeared in the 1960s (The Haunted Palace, 1964; Die, Monster, Die!, 1965; The Dunwich Horror, 1970), but they were both unfaithful and mediocre. Stuart Gordon’s series of films, beginning with Re-Animator (1985), are over-the-top, self-parodic adaptations of some of Lovecraft’s worst tales, but they were nevertheless intermittently successful in their campy manner, and have brought new fans to Lovecraft. His work has been adapted for comic books, role-playing games (most famously, The Call of Cthulhu, published by Chaosium), interactive computer games, and the like. But Lovecraft’s dense prose and slow-moving action has proved very difficult to translate into other media, and it cannot be said that any of these adaptations is, from an aesthetic point of view, entirely successful.

The widespread imitation of what came to be called the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is difficult to discuss objectively. Through the urging of August Derleth, who seemed to have a kind of mania about the Mythos, many horror and science fiction writers tried their hands at imitating Lovecraft, but with almost uniformly poor results. Perhaps only Colin Wilson (The Mind Parasites, 1967) and a very few others, who used Lovecraft as springboards for their own conceptions, have produced sound work in this vein. Ramsey Campbell began his career at a very early age by writing a volume of Lovecraft imitations, published by Arkham House in 1964, but very quickly found his own voice and has now become the finest writer in the field, although he lacks the popularity of some of his best-selling colleagues.

Lovecraft has now been dead for more than sixty years, and his work commands a far wider, and far more diverse, audience than it ever did in his own lifetime. His tales have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have elicited a library of learned commentary, his letters, essays, and poems have been published, his life has become the stuff of legend, and he himself has emerged as a dark but compelling icon of popular culture. Lovecraft is one of those few authors whose work appeals to college professors as well as to teenagers, to hippies as well as to businessmen, to highbrow novelists as well as to lowbrow film producers.

As for Lovecraft’s life, perhaps it is sufficient to say that, in large part, he lived it very much as he wished. We all wish that he could have secured a greater modicum of commercial success during his own lifetime; but he was willing to make sacrifices in personal comfort so as to preserve the purity of his art, and the endurance and increasing popularity of his work show that he made the right decision. So perhaps it is time to honour a man whose devotion to his work, generosity to his friends, and sensitivity of imagination knew virtually no bounds. His life is over now, and only his work remains.

CHAPTER THREE

Notes

Abbreviations used in the notes: AHT = Arkham House transcripts ofLovecraft’s letters; JHL = John Hay Library, Brown University (Providence, RI); SHSW = State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, WI); SL = Selected Letters (1965–76; 5 vols.). Chapter One

1. The 1850 U.S. census, probably enumerated in June 1850, gives George Lovecraft’s age as thirty-one. See Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, ‘Lovecraft’s Ancestors’, Crypt of Cthulhu No. 57 (St John’s Eve 1988): 19.

2. HPL spells his maternal grandmother’s first name as ‘Rhoby’, but Robie is given on the central shaft of the Phillips plot at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence.

3. HPL to Frank Belknap Long, 26 October 1926 (SL II.88).

4. HPL to F. Lee Baldwin, 13 January 1934 (SL IV.344).

5. See Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, ‘Whipple V. Phillips and the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company’, Owyhee Outpost No. 19 (May 1988): 21–30.

6. HPL to F. Lee Baldwin, 31 January 1934 (SL IV.351).

7. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 1 January 1915 (SL I.6).

8. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (SL I.29).

9. SL I.33–34 (note 8).

10. Clara Hess in August Derleth, ‘Lovecraft’s Sensitivity’ (1949); rpt in Lovecraft Remembered, ed. Peter Cannon (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1998), p. 32.

11. Ibid., pp. 34–35.

12. See Richard D. Squires, Stern Fathers ‘neath the Mould: The Lovecraft Family in Rochester (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995).

13. Sonia H. Davis, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. S. T. Joshi (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, rev. ed. 1992), p. 7.

14. HPL to Edwin Baird, 3 February 1924 (SL I.296). Chapter Two

1. HPL to Annie E. P. Gamwell, 19 August 1921 (SL I.147). 3. HPL to Bernard Austin Dwyer, 3 March 1927 (SL II.107). 4. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (SL I.32). 5. Henry G. Fairbanks, Louise Imogen Guiney: Laureate of the Lost (Albany,

NY: Magi Books, 1972), p. 2.

6. SL I.32 (note 4).

7. HPL to August Derleth, [January 1930] (SL III.100).

8. SL I.33 (note 4).

9. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (AHT; not in SL).

10. HPL to Edwin Baird, 3 February 1924 (SL I.296).

11. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 1 January 1915 (SL I.6).

12. Quoted by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1990), p. 11.

13. M. Eileen McNamara, M.D., ‘Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s Final Illness’, Lovecraft Studies No. 24 (Fall 1991): 14.

14. Winfield Townley Scott, ‘His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft’ in Lovecraft Remembered, p. 16. Sarah Susan Lovecraft’s medical records no longer survive, but Scott consulted them around 1944.

15. SL I.6 (note 11).

16. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 29 May 1933 (SL IV.191).

17. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 5 April 1931 (SL III.362).

18. SL I.34 (note 4).

19. Scott, ‘His Own Most Fantastic Creation’, p. 11.

20. SL IV.355 (note 2). The same anecdote is found in HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (AHT).

21. SL III.362 (note 17).

22. Faig, Parents, p. 7.

23. SL I.33 (note 4).

24. HPL to Robert E. Howard, 16 January 1932 (SL IV.8).

25. HPL to Robert E. Howard, 16 January 1932 (AHT).

26. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 8 November 1933 (ms., JHL).

27. SL I.34–35 (note 4).

28. HPL to Virgil Finlay, 24 October 1936 (SL V.335).

29. HPL to August Derleth, 9 September 1931 (SL IV.407).

30. SL I.7 (note 11).

31. SL I.33 (note 4).

32. SL I.7 (note 11).

33. SL II.108 (note 3).

34. SL I.36 (note 4).

35. SL II.109 (note 3). Chapter Three

1. HPL to R. H. Barlow, 25 June 1931 (ms., JHL). 2. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 19–31 July 1931 (ms., JHL). 4. Edmund Pearson, Dime Novels (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), pp. 4f. 5. L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, 1975), p. 33.

6. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 7 March 1920 (SL I.110).

7. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (SL I.37).

8. W. Paul Cook, In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1941), in Lovecraft Remembered, p. 112.

9. SL IV.355–56 (note 3).

10. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 1 January 1915 (SL I.8).

11. HPL to Robert E. Howard, 25–29 March 1933 (SL IV.172).

12. HPL to August Derleth, 4 March 1932 (SL IV.26).

13. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 5 April 1931 (SL III.368).

14. HPL to Richard F. Searight, 5 March 1935; Letters to Richard F. Searight (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1992), p. 51.

15. J. Vernon Shea, ‘Did Lovecraft Suffer from Chorea?’, Outré No. 5 (May 1977): 30–31.

16. Scott, ‘His Own Most Fantastic Creation’, p. 12.

17. SL III.367 (note 13).

18. Davis, Private Life, p. 8.

19. See frontispiece to SL II.

20. SL I.32 (note 7).

21. Frontispiece to Something about Cats and Other Pieces (1949).

22. R. H. Barlow, On Lovecraft and Life (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1992), p. 18.

23. Ms., JHL.

24. SL I.35 (note 7).

25. SL I.29–30 (note 7).

26. HPL to Elizabeth Toldridge, 29 May 1929 (SL II.348).

27. SL I.35 (note 7).

28. Interview of Ethel Phillips Morrish by Paul R. Michaud, August 1977.

29. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 8 November 1933 (ms., JHL).

30. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 10 February 1935 (SL V.104).

31. SL I.36 (note 7).

32. SL I.37 (note 7).

33. See HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 18 September 1932 (SL IV.67) for titles; HPL to Marion F. Bonner, 26 April 1936 (SL V.237) for dates. In this latter letter the title of the second treatise is given as Ross’s Explorations.

34. C. L. Moore to HPL, 6 October 1936 (ms., JHL): ‘Thank you for the privilege of reading that early publication of the Royal Atlas Company, “Wilks’ Exploration” [sic] … I am returning “Wilks’ Exploration” with a sigh …’ The Royal Atlas Company must have been yet another of Lovecraft’s juvenile imprints. Chapter Four

1. I am grateful to Sam Moskowitz for information on the hectograph.

2. ‘Autobiography of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’ (written in 1934), Boys’ Herald 71, No. 1 (October 1941): 7.

3. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (SL I.38).

4. HPL to Duane W. Rimel, 29 March 1934 (SL IV.398).

5. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 20 January 1916 (SL I.19).

6. SL I.39 (note 3).

7. HPL to Helen Sully, 4 December 1935 (ms., JHL).

8. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (AHT).

9. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 2 February 1916 (SL I.20).

10. HPL to the Gallomo, [January] 1920 (SL I.104–5).

11. HPL to August Derleth, 31 December 1930 (SL III.246).

12. Stuart J. Coleman to Winfield Townley Scott, 30 December [1943] (ms., JHL).

13. Clara Hess in August Derleth, ‘Lovecraft’s Sensitivity’; quoted in Lovecraft Remembered, p. 34.

14. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 4 February 1934 (SL IV.357).

15. Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, ‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Early Years 1890–1914’, Nyctalops 2, No. 1 (April 1973): 14n.16, citing probate records.

16. SL IV.358–59 (note 14).

17. SL I.39 (note 3).

18. HPL to Robert E. Howard, 25–29 March 1933 (SL IV.172).

19. SL I.30 (note 3).

20. HPL to J. Vernon Shea, 8 November 1933 (ms., JHL).

21. The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, 30 July 1905.

22. HPL to Alfred Galpin, 29 August 1918 (ms., JHL; published in part in SL I.75).

23. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 15 May 1918 (SL I.60).

24. HPL to Annie E. P. Gamwell, 19 Augut 1921 (SL I.146).

25. Ibid.

26. See note 20.

27. See The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, April 1907; HPL to Samuel Loveman, [c. 5 January 1924]; Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1994), p. 23.

28. SL I.39 (note 3).

29. SL I.38 (note 3).

30. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (AHT).

31. See note 20.

32. SL IV.360 (note 14).

33. SL IV.170 (note 18).

34. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 5 April 1931 (SL III.367).

35. HPL to R. H. Barlow, 10 April 1934 (ms., JHL).

36. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, [6 April 1935] (SL V.140).

37. HPL to Robert Bloch, 1 June 1933; Letters to Robert Bloch (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993), p. 15.

38. HPL to Lillian D. Clark, 14–19 November 1925 (ms., JHL). 39. SL I.40 (note 3).

40. SL V.141 (note 36).

41. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 7 March 1920 (SL I.110–11). 42. HPL to Alfred Galpin, 21 August 1918 (SL I.70). Chapter Five

1. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 1 January 1915 (SL I.9).

2. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 16 November 1916 (SL I.40–41).

3. HPL to Bernard Austin Dwyer, 3 March 1927 (SL II.110).

4. HPL to Helen Sully, 4 December 1935 (ms., JHL).

5. Will Murray, ‘An Interview with Harry Brobst’, Lovecraft Studies Nos 22/23 (fall 1990): 34.

6. Harold W. Munro, ‘Lovecraft, My Childhood Friend’ (1983), in Lovecraft Remembered, pp. 70–71.

7. HPL to Robert E. Howard, 25–29 March 1933 (SL IV.172).

8. R. Alain Everts, ‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex’, Nyctalops 2, No. 2 (July 1974): 19.

9. SL I.9 (note 1).

10. SL I.31 (note 2).

11. HPL to Alfred Galpin, 19 August 1918 (SL I.75).

12. David H. Keller, ‘Lovecraft’s Astronomical Notebook’, Lovecraft Collector No. 3 (October 1949): 1–4.

13. Keller has transcribed ‘Providence Evening Journal’, but this is evidently his error.

14. HPL to Jonquil Leiber, 29 November 1936 (SL V.363).

15. Scott, ‘His Own Most Fantastic Creation’, p. 15.

16. HPL to Maurice W. Moe, 5 April 1931 (SL III.367).

17. Faig, Parents, p. 28.

18. Quoted in Derleth, ‘Lovecraft’s Sensitivity’, in Lovecraft Remembered, pp. 32, 34.

19. HPL to Duane W. Rimel, 13 April 1934 (ms., JHL).

20. HPL to Sarah Susan Lovecraft, 24 February 1921 (SL I.123).

21. Sonia H. Davis, ‘Memories of Lovecraft: I’ (1969), in Lovecraft Remembered, p. 276.