H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  He dug up some early tales and sped them off to professional markets. Dagon went to Black Cat and was rejected; The Tomb was sent to Black Mask, an adventure pulp; and as soon as Weird Tales appeared on the newsstands, Lovecraft, in a fine burst of energy, dispatched no less than five tales to Edwin Baird, the founding editor. These five stories were The Hound, Arthur Jermyn, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Cats of Ulthar, and Dagon, (on the rebound from Black Cat). In typical fashion, Lovecraft, as usual his own worst enemy as a writer, had apparently submitted them typed, but typed single-spaced; that is, instead of skipping a line between each typed line (standard manuscript form which aids readability), he had simply typed the manuscripts as one would type a personal letter. Editors prefer to handle double-spaced manuscripts, which gives them space to alter a phrase or to add instructions for the printer, and so on. It was another mark of the amateur that Lovecraft either did not know or could not be bothered with this simple professional courtesy.

  Consequently, Baird sent the stories back, with a note saying that, although he liked them, he could not I consider them unless Lovecraft gave him doublespaced copies. Lovecraft regaled Frank Long with this anecdote in a letter of May 13, 1923. He added a note—which must have positively devastated Long, who aspired to professional writing and probably knew such things and accepted them as a matter of course— saying, “I am not certain whether or not I shall bother. I need the money badly enough—but ugh! how I hate typing!”

  He did, however reluctantly, retype one of the five: tales—Dagon. Baird promptly bought it and asked for more; and so Lovecraft’s first Weird Tales story appeared during that magazine’s first year, in the issue of October, 1923. As if the magazine somehow knew its future was intimately bound up with Lovecraft, the issue presented him with a bit of fanfare, devoting a whole page in its readers’ department, the Eyrie, to the new writer, and quoting from his letters. Lovecraft, in a fine glow of enthusiasm, fired off a letter to Long suggesting that he submit something to Weird Tales, and another letter to Baird, replete with samples of Smith’s verse, suggesting that the editor get some fantastic poetry from Smith.4*

  Lovecraft was such a bundle of contradictions that he will be the despair of his eventual biographer. How does one deal with a man so quirky and changeful and perverse that within a month after selling his first story to Weird Tales, he turns around and writes a piece of snobbish idiocy to Long such as the following:

  I am well-nigh resolv’d to write no more tales, but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick. I have concluded, that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman; and that Writing ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment, to be indulg’d in with Infrequency, and Discrimination.

  In that passage you have much of what I would call the worst of Lovecraft, his weakness and his folly: the absurd pretentions to gentility on the part of a man who had lived barely above the level of utter poverty for three years; the ludicrous selfdelusion of thinking himself an “artist”—the snobbishness of spelling “literature” with a capital L—and the silly affectation of 18th-century spelling and grammar. What an infuriating poseur he sounds from his letters!

  And within the next eleven days—such was his capacity for changeableness!—he sat down and wrote two tales—one of them a minor effort, The Unnameable; the other, one of the finest stories of his entire career, The Rats in the Walls.

  Despite a single mention of Nyarlathotep, Rats need not concern us here, as it does not belong to the Cthulhu cycle. But it demonstrates that Lovecraft was back to work again. He fired off story after story to Weird Tales, despite much groaning over the labor of handling a typewriter, a task with which he never bothered to familiarize himself. Sometimes he coaxed his friends into typing up his tales for him: he describes, in another letter to Long dated that October, how a Providence friend named C. M. Eddy typed The Hound for him in exchange for Lovecraft helping to revise Eddy’s story, The Ghost-Eater. The Hound is only a couple of thousand words long; only ten or eleven double-spaced pages in typescript. It should have taken at most an hour or two to type.

  Whatever Lovecraft’s personal affectations might have been, the readers of Weird Tales responded with electric enthusiasm to their first taste of his work, and Baird bought story after story from his new discovery. Throughout 1924, Lovecraft virtually took over the magazine. He had The Picture in the House in the January issue, and The Hound in February; in March, Weird Tales published The Rats in the Walls; and in the April issue Lovecraft was doubly represented by a poem called Nemesis and by Arthur Jermyn which Baird unsubtly retitled The White Ape, much to Lovecraft’s distress.

  The next issue was a monster. Marking the first anniversary of Weird Tales, an extra-large issue went on sale, rather confusingly dated “May-June-July” and selling for 50 cents. Lovecraft had a story, Hypnos, in that issue, as well as an extraordinary piece of ghostwriting which bore the name of the celebrated stage magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini, and the title Imprisoned with the Pharaohs. It was actually one of the best things Lovecraft had written up to that time, but it was not identified as Lovecraft’s work for some years after.

  Despite the fact that Baird had turned out some fine issues and had discovered and printed some exciting talent, of which H.P.L. was probably the best, the first year of Weird Tales was almost its last one. Never very soundly financed, the magazine was losing money rapidly (from a reputed $11,000 capital, the magazine had run into debt to the tune of $40,000). Apparently in an effort to attract some attention to the magazine, a department called “Ask Houdini” was to be added. This led to the notion of printing a bogus supernatural adventure, presumably a first-person narrative that was purported to have happened to Houdini during a trip to Egypt. It seems that something or other rather odd actually happened to the famous magican in the land of the pharaohs, but in the form in which Houdini had told the yarn orally to the publisher of Weird Tales, a gentleman named Henneberger, it was unpublishable. Henneberger, who was very impressed with Lovecraft (and went so far, in a note to H.P.L., as to call The Rats in the Walls the best story Weird Tales had ever received), thought Lovecraft would be just the writer to touch the yarn up and put it into usable form. Lovecraft, quite amused at the whole idea and jubilant over the offer of advance payment, described the affair to a correspondent thusly:

  Weird Tales? Boy—What I told you afore was only the beginnin’! I’m hearing damn near every day from Henneberger—the owner of the outfit—and just had a special delivery order to collaborate on an Egyptian horror with this bimbo Houdini. It seems this boob was (as he relates) thrown into an antient subterraneous temple at Gizeh (whose location corresponds with the so-called Campbell’s Tomb... betwixt the Sphinx and 2nd pyramid) by two treacherous Arab guides—all bound and gagged as on the Keith circuit—(him, not the guides) and left to get out as best he might. Now Henneberger (who is beginning to do some personal directing over Bairdie’s head) wants me to put this into vivid narrative form... and Oh Gawd—I forgot to tell ya that Henny has come acrost wit’ a cheque for ONE HUNDRED BERRIES!

  Having, as this bubbling letter denotes, a marvelous high time, Lovecraft settled down with, very likely, some travel books and perhaps a copy of Baedeker’s guidebook to Egypt and the Sudan5* from which to mine nuggets of local color, and dashed off the ghostwritten article/story, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs. As I included this piece of superlative ghostwriting in the second Ballantine collection of Lovecraft’s early work (The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Ballantine, 1971), I will refrain from describing it here. But no one interested in Lovecraft should overlook it: as I remarked earlier, the mystery and romance of antiquity stirred Lovecraft deeply, and the glamorous Egyptian setting of this fictionalized narrative touched creative well- springs within him, producing one of his most powerful land evocative pieces. It is a remarkable job, and both Weird Tales and Houdini himself were impressed by it.


  Henneberger (as the above-quoted letter suggests) was not only very favorably impressed by Lovecraft, but was becoming quite unhappy with his editor, Edwin Baird. While it is true that during his year of editorship Baird had procured such outstanding talents as those of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (to say nothing of Seabury Quinn, the most durable and lasting of all the Weird Tales writers, or Frank Owen, for that matter), it is also true that during that same first year of his editorship, Weird Tales and its publisher lost fifty-one thousand dollars. Baird had edited thirteen issues, his last being that giant anniversary number; at that point Henneberger fired him.

  To replace Baird as Weird Tales’ editor, Henneberger had a brilliant idea.

  He would hire H. P. Lovecraft!

  ***

  1* The passage reads: “The primary stories of the Cthulhu Mythos written by Lovecraft include thirteen definite titles— The Nameless City, The Festival, The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Dreams in the Witch-House, The Haunter of The Dark, The Shadow Over lnnsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time, At The Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Thing on the Doorstep." I disagree with several entries given here as definitely being stories in the Mythos, but I shall discuss each in its place.

  2* They are The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dreams in the Witch-House, The Challenge from Beyond, The Haunter of the Dark, and The Nameless City. This is a most remarkable list: Weinberg omits The Colour Out of Space and The Festival, which both Derleth and Briney accept as Mythos tales, and includes The Challenge From Beyond, considered Cthulhuoid by neither. Challenge, incidentally, is a round- robin story composed of segments by C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, H.P.L., and Frank Long. (The Weinberg listing gives it as published in Fantastic, May 1960; Chalker says Fantastic, July 1960.) If he means the Lovecraft segment alone, his claim may be valid; if he refers to the whole tale, Lovecraft is not sole author.

  3* Nor did he; however, an experimental draft of these opening pages survives in a fragment titled Azathoth, dated circa 1922, which was found at Lovecraft’s death among his papers. The fragment consists of about five hundred words.

  4* Which, in fact, impressed Baird so much that he broke his own rule not to publish poetry, and wrote to Smith immediately, requesting some samples.

  5* “Which my friend L. Sprague de Camp finds very useful as a source for specific geographical data on terrain when writing historical novels set in that corner of the globe.

  4. The Horrors of Red Hook

  Yes, Lovecraft had certainly come out of his reticent shell with a vengeance!

  In March of 1924, with The Rats in the Walls on the newsstand and the manuscript of Imprisoned with the Pharaohs in his suitcase, Lovecraft surprised his friends by moving to New York City, leaving behind his beloved Providence. But there were even greater surprises to come very shortly.

  On March 3rd, a Monday, Lovecraft and Sonia H. Greene were married at Saint Paul’s Chapel, at Broadway and Vesey Street, by Father George Benson Cox. The couple took up residence in south Brooklyn, at 259 Parkside Avenue.

  I have no doubt that his most intimate friends were staggered, if not stunned, at the news, for women had been thoroughly absent from Lovecraft’s adult life up to this time. Now, at 34, with checks rolling in from Weird Tales and exciting things promising for the future, Lovecraft got married.

  No one has ever seriously suggested that H. P. Lovecraft was a homosexual (active or latent), but then, no one has ever seriously suggested he was a Casanova (active or latent) either. He seems to have been fairly neutral on the whole matter.

  His marriage must have taken his friends by surprise. H.P.L.’s letters frequently ranted about the virtues of the Nordic race, its clear superiority to the “mongrel hordes” of Asia, and so forth. A typical passage, from a May 1923 letter to Long, raves on like this:

  Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry—God Save the King! I am naturally a Nordic—a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests—a Viking—a berserk killer—a predatory rover of the blood of Hengist and Horsa—a conqueror of Celts and Mongrels and founder of Empires—a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras—a drinker of foemen’s blood from new-picked skulls—

  And so on and on, like some hairy-chested barbarian warrior in one of Robert E. Howard’s tales of rip-roaring heroica. A bulky Teuton, a Viking sea-rover, a brother to the frosts, indeed! Lovecraft was unnaturally pale, emaciated, and sickly; anything having to do with the sea, even its odor, made him deathly ill; and far from being a brother to the frosts, he wilted at the slightest touch of cold, and kept the house uncomfortably overheated all winter.

  Therefore, it was surprising, to say the least—what with this almost Nazi-like identification with and glorification of the so-called Nordic “race”—that the (now) Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft was a Jewess of Ukranian stock. She was also about ten years older than Lovecraft, a business woman, an executive with a fashionable Fifth Avenue store, and a widow with a grown daughter.

  However, they met, they fell in love, and—however improbable it may seem, considering Lovecraft’s lifelong lack of interest in women—they married.1*

  The girl born Sonia Haft came to the United States when she was nine years old, and described herself as “a White Russian of the old Czarist regime” in a brief but informative memoir of her days with Lovecraft. When she was sixteen she and a fellow-countryman who had adopted the last name of a Boston friend, Greene, were married; he died seventeen years later in 1916. She first met Lovecraft at a Boston convention of the United Amateur Press Association. It was Love- craft’s old friend and correspondent, James F. Morton, Jr., who introduced them. Mrs. Greene tells that she admired Lovecraft’s personality, but admits “frankly, at first, not his person.” She describes Lovecraft’s voice as “clear and resonant when he read,” but “thin and high-pitched in conversation, somewhat falsetto.” He had also a great prognathous jaw and a broken nose, gotten, he said, during a boyhood accident on a bicycle and aggravated—he may have been joking here—because he looked at the stars every night through his telescope.

  Lovecraft seems to have been rather sensitive about his appearance; or, at any rate, quite conscious of the fact that he in no way resembled the Apollo Belvedere. He made joking references to his “awful looks” and Mrs. Greene describes one occasion, during Lovecraft’s initial visit to New York, when Lovecraft encountered a beautiful Persian cat belonging to her neighbor. “When Howard saw that cat he made love to it. He seemed to have a language that it understood and it immediately curled up in his lap and purred,” she recalled. “Half in earnest, half joking, I said, ‘What a lot of perfectly good affection to waste on a mere cat— when a woman might highly appreciate it!’ He said, ‘How can any woman love a face like mine?’”

  Mrs. Greene well knew that Lovecraft was in an awkward position for marriage. His grandfather Phillips’ estate now stood at some $20,000. That was supposed to last the rest of the lives of himself and the aunts with whom he had been living. Sonia was at this time earning close to $10,000 a year at her work, and assumed—correctly, since that was a splendid income for 1924—that they could both live quite comfortably on her income together with his small income from his inheritance and whatever money he earned by writing.

  She figured, as it turned out, without taking into consideration Lovecraft’s stiff, old-fashioned Yankee pride and sense of family position. But at first all was well. And there was that tempting offer of the editorial job at Weird Tales in the offing....

  It would seem that Henneberger was quite anxious to secure Lovecraft for Weird Tales. For one thing, Lovecraft had already displayed excellent editorial judgment in suggesting that Edwin Baird solicit Clark Ashton
Smith as a contributor. Smith proved enormously popular with the Weird Tales readership, and the literary superiority of his verse (at first) and his prose (later on) was blatantly obvious when compared to the sort of stuff that generally came in, not only in the slush pile, but also from the regular contributors. Lovecraft had also recommended his Providence friend C. M. Eddy, and one of Eddy’s stories, a piece called The Loved Dead, has since been credited with saving the magazine and helping it to survive its first, all-but- disastrous crisis.

  The story appeared in that same giant anniversary issue which also featured the Lovecraft/Houdini tale Imprisoned with the Pharaohs and the Lovecraft story, Hypnos. Eddy’s tale, it seems, was ghoulishly gruesome in the extreme—a bit too much so for some of the more squeamish readers. There were some organized attempts to have the issue removed from some newsstands, and it has been claimed (by Eddy, incidentally) that the publicity generated by these moral vigilantes may have been enough to save Weird Tales from extinction. (What the readers did not know, but Henneberger probably did, was that Lovecraft had played a part in this, too, as The Loved Dead was one of those stories in which he had taken a revisionary hand).

  If perhaps not exactly a “born editor,” Lovecraft certainly had a good eye for fiction and the rare ability to infect other writers with his own enthusiasm, frequendy rewriting their stories (and probably improving them considerably in the process) and on more than one occasion passing along a valuable idea to one of his writer-friends (as, for example, suggesting to Henry S. Whitehead the idea behind one of Whitehead’s most masterly tales, the haunting novelette, Cassius).