5. Aristophanes (450?–385? B.C.E.), Greek comic playwright; T. Petronius Arbiter (1st century C.E.), author of the Satyricon (LL 688); Lucius Apuleius (2nd century C.E.), author of The Golden Ass (LL 37).
6. All-Story Weekly, 22 June 1918 (LL 17). HPL listed it among his ten favorite weird tales.
7. Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Justine; ou, Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791); first Eng. tr. as Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1889). Cf. SL 3.106.
8. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1835–1895); Venus im Pelz (1870); first Eng. tr. as Venus in Furs (1921). Cf. SL 3.108.
9. Comte de Lautréamont (1846–1870) [pseud. of Isidore Ducasse], Les Chants de Maldoror (1868).
10. Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), “Le Bateau ivre” [“The Drunken Boat”]. HPL owned Edgell Rickword’s Rimbaud, the Boy and the Poet (1924; LL 735).
11. Stephen Phillips (1868–1915), Marpessa (1900); a poem. The drama Herod was also published in 1900.
12. Wandrei visited HPL in mid-September 1932 (cf. SL 4.68–69).
13. The original version of The Web of Easter Island (1948).
[3] [ALS]
66 College St.,
Providence, R.I.
May 31, 1935.
Dear Mr. White:—
Very good to hear from you again! Your story is interesting & well-written, & seems to me to indicate marked promise for a fictional career. You have a vivid way of putting things, & a flow of words bespeaking competence & assurance. There is, too, a sense of drama & of climax which augurs well. Later on perhaps you will choose to emphasise modern technique a little less, & to substitute more ordinary phases of life for the extremely dramatic moments here represented—but the best course to follow is that of natural evolution. You are certainly started splendidly—& perhaps the newspaper columning will prove a benefit in the end, because of the training it gives in observation & narrative values. Your extensive reading is all in the right direction—& I trust that the general college curriculum has not been quite so barren of benefit as you may at the moment assume.
Your impressions of Shakespeare are not far from those which I have entertained at various times. Ultimately, though, one has to concede the bard’s vast superiority as a whole over any of his contemporaries. He had a breadth & insight—& a tremendously apt mode of characterisation—which none of the others could parallel. Of course he was very uneven, so that many dull & mediocre passages can be found in his works. Some of his plays are undeniably less effective than various single plays of others. But in spite of all this, a general survey of his achievements will easily demonstrate his superiority. The idolatry given him during the 19th century was perhaps excessive—but after all allowances are made, he remains clearly the premier reflector of human nature so far as our civilisation is concerned.
D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, is almost certainly overrated at present. He had, of course, great power—but his fame was fortuitously boosted by the fact that he was a biassed neurotic in an age generally permeated by the same neurosis.1
I have seen reviews—all favourable—of the work of Howell Vines,2 but have not yet read any of his books. I surely must repair this omission before long. Most of the vital writing in America seems to come from the South nowadays—a condition which I think will increase rather than decrease. A settled, homogeneous people has much to say & generally says it powerfully.
I think you have Swinburne sized up about right. He tried to make a few inches go a long way—& really got by largely because of his matchless melody, & because of the fatuous Victorian notions from which he was luckily free. Henry James was assuredly solid, but I can’t bring myself to like him intensely. His care in expressing precise states of mood & meaning often becomes fumbling & old-maidish—& he had an unfortunate habit of confining his attention to certain very artificial (& basically not very significant) human types. I haven’t read much of Aldous Huxley, since literary “smartness” does not appeal to me. That kind of writing seems to involve values & perspectives of very doubtful reality or permanence. However, I’ll admit that Aldous is an arresting social thinker when he chooses to be. Accurate thinking runs in the family!3
I have not read “Ulysses”, but believe that the principle of the stream-of-consciousness method is a valuable one—destined to influence fiction in the future. However, I doubt its value as an exclusive method of narration.4 It will probably work best when assimilated to the main stream of fiction—supplementing objective narration in places where thoughts or inner life are at variance with external manifestations. Hope your friend can put his novel across successfully—that kind of thing makes a good beginning even when one grows beyond it or builds upon it.
I liked George Meredith in youth, for he seemed to deal with real people & events—a refreshing contrast to the sentimental caricaturist Dickens, whose work I’ve always detested. Now I can see how essentially Victorian—how influenced by artificial & erroneous conceptions—Meredith was. But he did try to put serious psychology into fiction. Galsworthy I admire rather than relish. Bennett I don’t care for. George Moore doesn’t interest me greatly—though perhaps I haven’t read his best specimens. Hardy strikes me as overrated—there is an underlying pomposity & sentimentality in him. The fact is, I don’t think our race is very successful in fiction. The French are the real masters of that field—Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Stendhal, Proust . . . Nobody can beat them unless it is in the 19th century Russians—Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Turgeniev—& they reflect a racial temper so unlike ours that we really have much difficulty in appraising them. On the whole, I believe that Balzac is the supreme novelist of western Europe. Many try to put Proust ahead of him today, but I believe Proust is too narrow in his field & too specialised—even abnormal—in his psychology to take first rank. Balzac hasn’t yet met his match.
The drama certainly fills an important niche. I used to enjoy it vastly, though latterly pure narration seems to captivate me more. Acting is assuredly a major art—as creative in its way as composition. It has not, however, the infinite breadth & depth of composition—since it always involves the interpretation of what someone else has conceived & recorded. That is, unless one acts in one’s own plays.
Your assistant editorship has undoubtedly been excellent practice, & I hope you’ll remain in college & edit the magazine next year. Editing exercises one’s literary judgment as few other things can do.
Clark Ashton Smith’s address is Box 385, Auburn, California. I’m enclosing a circular of his brochure of fantastic stories5—which I advise you very strongly to get if you haven’t it already. He is easily the leader of all the writers in W T, & these stories (rejected by Wright) are better than any which have appeared in the magazine.
W T is pretty mediocre lately, though something passable appears now & then. So you saw that “Gates of the Silver Key”?6 I’ll confess I don’t think much of it—it doesn’t represent any original impulse of mine, & tends to be artificial & mechanical. I simply can’t collaborate successfully. Since then I have written two more stories, but have not sent them in for publication.7 Wright has rejected my best things, & I doubt whether he has much more use for my work. There has been talk of a collection of my stories in book form—Derleth’s publishers, Loring & Mussey, having asked to see my stuff8—but all this seems to be coming to nothing. By the way—did you see the little magazine devoted to the discussion of weird fiction—The Fantasy Fan—during its brief career (Sept. ’33 to Feb. ’35)? If not, I’ll send you one or two issues of which I have duplicates. Another little publication of the same sort—Fantasy Magazine—carries my brief autobiography & portrait in its current issue.9 And have you seen William Crawford’s Marvel Tales? I can let you have a copy of that.
Hope you’ll see New Orleans sooner or later—though as I may have said, I vastly prefer Charleston. Charleston is, in my opinion, the most delightful & fascinating city in the United States. Nowhere else had the mellow beauty of the past so comple
tely survived. Other towns which I prefer to New Orleans are St. Augustine, Savannah, & Natchez. St. Augustine, with buildings going back to the 1570’s & 1580’s, is something utterly unique.
My trips since last writing you have included one to ancient Quebec in Aug.–Sept. 1933, & one to De Land, Florida (where I visited the young weird tale enthusiast R. H. Barlow for nearly 2 months) in May & June, 1934. On the latter trip I also stopped in Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine, Richmond, Washington, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia, & N.Y. It is possible that I shall visit Barlow again very shortly, though straitened finances will cut down intermediate stops. In Sept. 1934 I visited the island of Nantucket (only 90 miles from here) for the first time in my life, & found it an infinitely quaint & unspoiled survival of New England whaling days. Around New Year’s I visited Long in New York, & met several others of the weird group—including Barlow, who was up from the South. The present spring has been an atrociously late one in the north, & I have had very few outings so far. Just now some real warmth seems to be coming— so that, even if I don’t get to Florida, I can probably resume my open-air programme before long.
Well—again let me congratulate you upon your excellent story. Keep it up, & I’m sure you’ll be able to do something serious in fiction. I suppose you know that Derleth is really getting into the literary world—making Scribners10 & the Atlantic, & being about to have his 4th11 novel published. Only 26 years old, too.
All good wishes—
Yrs most cordially,
H. P. Lovecraft
Notes
1. “Writers I’d call morbid are D. H. Lawrence & James Joyce, Huysmans & Baudelaire” (SL 3.155).
2. Howell Vines (1899–1981), author of A River Goes with Heaven (1930) and This Green Thicket World (1934).
3. HPL refers to Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), biologist and philosopher, grandfather of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) and his brother Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975), biologist and humanist.
4. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was banned in the U.S. from its publication until 1933. HPL himself sparingly employed stream-of-consciousness techniques in accordance with this dictum, for example, in the closing paragraphs of “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935).
5. The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn, CA: Auburn Journal Press, 1933; LL 810).
6. HPL and E. Hoffmann Price, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” WT, July 1934.
7. “The Thing on the Doorstep” (August 1933) and “The Shadow out of Time” (November? 1934–March 1935).
8. Cf. SL 5.111. The collection was rejected (SL 5.317).
9. F. Lee Baldwin, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Biographical Sketch,” Fantasy Magazine 4, No. 5 (April 1935): 108–10, 132. The “portrait” is a linoleum cut by Duane W. Rimel.
10. August Derleth, “Crows Fly High,” Scribner’s Magazine 96, No. 6 (December 1934): 358–62; “Now Is the Time for All Good Men,” Scribner’s Magazine 98, No. 5 (November 1935): 295–98. For Derleth’s appearance in the Atlantic Monthly, see letter 6, n. 2.
11. Place of Hawks (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1935; LL 235).
[4] [ALS]
Ancient San Agustin—
August 20, 1935.
My dear White:—
As you may perceive, I am on my way at last! I accompanied the Barlows to Daytona & helped them settle in the flat they are to occupy for a fortnight. Then the diligencia for ancient San Agustin! It surely is good to see centuried gables & facades & balconies & garden walls—& hear the sound of tinkling fountains at twilight, & of cathedral chimes cast in 1682—after 2 months & 9 days of rural modernity! Am revelling in the atmosphere of a 370-year-old city—a city founded when Shakespeare was a year old, & still containing houses which had 40 years behind them when the first settlers landed at Jamestown. I’m staying a week—at my usual hotel, the cheap but cleanly Rio Vista on the bay front—& cutting my food bill down to a minimum. I spend most of my time absorbing ancient vistas & writing atop the venerable fortress of San Marcos. Moving north at midnight August 25–6—& will get 5 hours in Savannah before striking my beloved Charleston . . . the most fascinating town of this continent (north of Mexico, at least) except Quebec. Am so short of cash that my stay in Charleston will be badly cut down—& hopes of stopping anywhere north of that grow dimmer & dimmer. However, it surely has been a great trip, all in all! I left home on the 5th of June—& heaven knows how I’ll get all the accumulated papers read up upon my return!
Now about your story. Bless my soul, but you are arriving! Honestly, this is a tremendous piece of work—with surprising fidelity to human nature, & tremendous cleverness in manipulating turns of emotion. One of the best touches is at the very last—where you disappoint the anticipations of the mediocre reader, who expects the hero to end it all in the river after his disillusionment. No charge for borrowing my sentiments toward the northern winter, my preferences in Floridan zones, & my hateful task of revising bum MSS.!1 The whole thing is natural without being tame, & is full of vividly original illustrative touches. The only change I could possibly suggest is a slight toning-down of places where the quest for originality tends to torture idiom into Euphuism, or to dictate obscure words (geniculate, phantuscular, nemophily, &c.) which are really less effective than ordinary words because of their lack of mellow associations. But these matters are trifles. The point is, that the story is really powerful & admirable—a conclusive testimony of your writing ability. I return it as per request—& with a goodly quota of thanks & admiration.
Regarding your “Saddypost” experiments—before you put great amounts of time & energy into them, I wish you would read Edward J. O’Brien’s “Dance of the Machines”, & the introductions to his various year-books of the short story.2 For the fact is, that this “slick” sort of story is really very far from being authentic art—forming, rather, a mere artificial device to gratify the expectations of an unreflective & un-analytical bourgeois public. Plot, in the common sense of complex events artificially arranged to produce certain clashes, interactions, & climaxes, is an utterly meretricious device unworthy of employment by any serious man of letters. It is a distortion—a concoction of things without a counterpart in actual life. Action in the overspeeded sense is closely akin. Dialogue can be an artistic medium of narration—but seldom is as employed by the popular commercial writers. The trouble with Satevepost junk is that it simply follows an empty formula—deliberately twisting, obscuring, & misrepresenting human values & motives. It is clever but meaningless. Certainly, it is hard enough to write—but it is tragic that so much human energy & intelligence should be wasted on a frivolous & irrelevant object instead of going into actual aesthetic creation. However—don’t let me preach!
Yes—I must get a look at “Lust for Life”. “Ouroboros” is a favourite of mine—I must look up Eddison’s latest.3 You size up “Jurgen.4 pretty well—I must pass that observation on to Barlow! As for a Bierce-Hearn resemblance—well, I suppose they did have a certain common stylistic element derived from 19th century journalism; but Hearn soon outstripped his contemporary in all the subtleties & musical graces of expression. No—I never heard of a book by Wallace Smith.5 If he can write as well as he draws, his Mexican tales ought to be worth reading!
Congratulations on discovering a source of old magazines! I’m telling Barlow about it—he has files of Argosy, Cavalier, &c. which he might possibly commission you to fill out. Yes—I do very much want extra copies of my tales for lending purposes, & will empower you to pick up any that don’t cost too much. Just now, however, I’m so broke that I wouldn’t dare contract a bill for a quarter! I’m eating on 20¢ to 25¢ per diem—with nickel cans of beans as a basis!
Fine weather so far in St. Augustine. I dread the plunge northward (Salzor6 has nothing on me!), but shall at least have good furnace heat furnished within a month. Old bones need to be thawed out . . . today is my 45th birthday!
Thanks for permission to retain the cutting. I’m very glad to have a likeness of you for
my private Hall of Fame!
All good wishes, & renewed congratulations on the excellence of your story—
Yrs most sincerely—
H P L
Notes
1. White had sent HPL another story in his letter of 17 August. He wrote therein, “I regret to say it is not what it was meant to be. I used your feeling for New England winter, and your liking for the central portion of Florida, which I hope you will not mind” (ms., JHL).
2. “Saddypost” refers to the Saturday Evening Post; HPL felt that the stories it published were trite and conventional. Edward J. O’Brien (1890–1941), The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929; LL 651); cf. SL 3.32; 4.73, 91. O’Brien edited The Best Short Stories of the Year from 1915 to 1941.
3. Irving Stone (1903–1989), Lust for Life (1934), a fictionalized biography of Vincent Van Gogh; E. R. Eddison (1882–1945), The Worm Ouroboros (1922; LL 291); Eddison’s “latest” was Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia (1935).
4. James Branch Cabell (1879–1958), Jurgen (1919). The book was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1920. Cf. “The Omnipresent Philistine” (1924): “That censors actually do seek to remove . . . legitimate and essential matter, and that they would if given greater power do even greater harm, is plainly shewn by the futile action against Jurgen, and the present ban on Ulysses, both significant contributions to contemporary art” (CE 2.77).
5. Wallace Smith (1888–1937) was primarily an artist, illustrating, among many other things, Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922). HPL refers to Smith’s The Little Tigress: Tales out of the Dust of Mexico (1923).
6. Possibly a character in the story by White mentioned earlier in this letter.
[5] [ALS]
66 College St.,
Providence, R.I.,
Octr. 28, 1935
Dear White:—
Well—my total incarceration didn’t begin so early as I feared it would, since the autumn has been distinctly above the average in warmth. Possibly I mentioned my visit near Boston Sept. 20–23, when my host & I took many delightful side-trips to places like rocky Nahant, ancient Marblehead, brooding, hilly Wilbraham [the “Dunwich” of my story], & sandy, willow-decked Cape Cod. On Oct. 8 I had a trip to New Haven—a place which I had never thoroughly explored before. Though not as rich in colonial antiquities as Providence, it has a peculiar fascination of its own—& I explored it quite thoroughly, seeing all the old houses, churches, college buildings, &c., & visiting 3 museums & 2 botanic gardens. The most impressive sights of all, perhaps, are the great new quadrangles of Yale University—each an absolutely perfect reproduction of old-time architecture & atmosphere, & forming a self-contained little world in itself. The Gothic courtyards transplant one in fancy to mediaeval Oxford or Cambridge—spires, oriels, pointed arches, mullioned windows, arcades with groined roofs, climbing ivy, sundials, lawns, gardens, vine-clad walls & flagstoned walks—everything to give the young occupants that massed impression of their accumulated cultural heritage which they might obtain in Old England itself. To stroll through these quadrangles in the golden afternoon sunlight; at dusk, when the candles behind the diamond-paned casements flicker up one by one; or in the beams of a mellow Hunter’s Moon;1 is to walk bodily into an enchanted region of dream. It is the past & the ancient mother land brought magically to the present time & place. The choicest of these quadrangles is Calhoun College—named from the illustrious Carolinian2 (whose grave in St. Philips churchyard, Charleston, I visited only 2 months ago), who was a graduate of Yale. Nor are the Georgian quadrangles less glamorous—each being a magical summoning-up of the world of two centuries ago. I wandered for hours through the limitless labyrinth of unexpected elder microcosms, & mourned the lack of further time. Certainly, I must visit New Haven again. But this was not all. On Oct. 16 my friend Samuel Loveman came on from New York, & we proceeded at once to Boston to absorb books, museums, & antiquities. Stayed 3 days, & had a very enjoyable time. It is just possible that I shall have one trip more—a ride over the Mohawk Trail & just into Vermont in a friend’.3 well-heated Chevrolet—but I’m not counting heavily on that.
Lovecraft Annual, No. 1 Page 5
