The Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society blog asks of Lovecraft, “did he base the character of Old Castro on Adolphe Danziger de Castro”? And offers some interesting comparisons.
Old Castro
14 Sunday Jul 2019
Posted in Historical context
14 Sunday Jul 2019
Posted in Historical context
The Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society blog asks of Lovecraft, “did he base the character of Old Castro on Adolphe Danziger de Castro”? And offers some interesting comparisons.
The short answer is “no”. HPL wrote and finished “The Call of Cthulhu” in the summer of 1926.
Ah yes, I’d forgotten that… thanks for reminding me. Oh well, I’ll let the post stand as a future reminder to others.
There was a further “revising and finishing” (in Wandrei’s words) of “The Call of Cthulhu” in the summer of 1927, but the first evidence of de Castro on the scene comes in November 1927.
Yet Joshi seems uncertain as to exactly when Lovecraft first encountered Castro… “Two such clients made their appearance about this time [“late 1927″] — Adolphe de Castro and Zealia Brown Reed Bishop.” Without seeing the contents of de Castro’s first known letter to Lovecraft (apparently 20th Nov 1927) it’s difficult to know if that was obviously ‘the first letter’, or not. Though the fact that Lovecraft noted revision prices for him, shortly after, suggests that it was.
One does wonder, though, if there may have been some previous encounter at some amateur journalism event? That possibility would hinge on exactly when Castro first arrived to live in New York City during 1927, and if he sought out the amateurs at that point and attend one or more of their events (Dench’s etc). Even then, I don’t know of a 1927 visit by Lovecraft to New York City which would bring them into face-to-face contact during the apparent “revising and finishing” of “The Call of Cthulhu”.
Apparently the “Cthulhu” typescript is undated, so we can’t tell if it was typed up over Christmas 1927, after he encountered Castro. If so, then he could have then tweaked the name of the “immensely aged mestizo” from something generic like Pedro, to Castro?
It is highly unlikely that HPL, who, as is well known, hated typing, typed this fairly long story twice (he first submitted the story to Wright in October 1926). Since the name “Castro” is actually typed in the text, not revised in pen, it is likely that it was “Castro” at least as early as 1926 when the story was first submitted..
More relevant information, via Joshi’s I Am Providence….
“Lovecraft’s letter to Wright accompanying the tale—the landmark letter of July 5, 1927”.
So, even though the surviving typescript of “Cthulhu” is apparently undated, the letter must surely indicate the date on which it was re-submitted. This re-submission was invited by Wright, following Wandrei’s fateful visit to the Weird Tales office in Chicago. The personal invite presumably meant that there was probably less need to re-type the story, to fool Wright that changes had indeed been made to the story. Otherwise a re-typing might have been needed – because Wright placed red ink dots down the sides of a typescript, when assessing a story, and could thus tell an unchanged re-submission he had read before.
This doesn’t entirely rule out a re-typed revision, but even if there was a re-typing (not necessarily by Lovecraft himself) then the early July 1927 date of the re-submission to Weird Tales thus has to rule out the possibility that Castro = de Castro.