The Lovecraft ghostwritten-story “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” has been given a fine new audio reading by Ian Gordon, and this is now on YouTube. The story is not often recorded for free and also in good listenable form. The new 57-minute recording is from the UK-based Horrobabble, who produce audiobooks and dramatised readings. Other revisions from them on YouTube include “The Horror in the Museum”, “The Mound”, “The Curse of Yig”.

The tale was written in mid October 1935, near in time to “The Haunter of the Dark”, as a unpaid favour to occult believer and apparent old sailor William Lumley. Lovecraft did however get a very grand prize in return as a thank-you gift — a copy of Budge’s masterly and authoritative translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. This was not just an old copy of the 1920 summary booklet from the British Museum. Lovecraft’s Library lists it as the 1923 printing of the revised and expanded second edition, with all three volumes in nearly 700 pages with illustrations. Very nice, and I can see why Lovecraft might have thought it ‘fair exchange’.

In an essay Joshi elaborates on the story’s Catskills-like setting that… “all the geographical and ethnographic data in the tale are due to Lovecraft’s own research”, presumably by raiding the filing cabinets to dig out the old notes made for the background of “The Lurking Fear”.

“The New York state setting of “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” does not, however, owe anything to Lumley (although he was a resident of Buffalo), and all the geographical and ethnographic data in the tale are due to Lovecraft’s own researches”

The debt to “Fear” in the story is obvious, and there are very slight dashes here and there of “The Outsider” and “The Descendent”.

But I also wonder how much of the lost novel The House of the Worm is visible in places in “Alonzo Typer”. Mused on heavily in early 1924, having probably been broadly plotted a year earlier in early 1923[1], Worm as Lovecraft describes it in early 1924 sounds quite similar to “Typer”…

“… the frantic message sent by a dying and prematurely aged father to the boy who ran away twenty years before because of a nameless dread of his new stepmother…. the heiress who lived in the dark house in the swamp. The young man comes, and finds his father alone in the house (or castle — I’m not sure whether I’ll put it in New England or Old England or the German Black Forest)…. alone, yet not alone…. for he looks furtively around him… and other forms flit through remote corridors, strangely attracting swarms of flies after them… and vultures hover over the whole swamp…… and the young man sees things when he goes out on one occasion….”

So far as I can tell, I’m the first to suggest this possibility, that “Typer” has some re-cast traces of Worm.

A series of clustered Commonplace Book entries seem to link with “Typer”…

From perhaps 1919 or 1920:

[55] Man followed by invisible thing.

[58] A queer village — in a valley, reached by a long road and visible from the crest of the hill from which that road descends — or close to a dense and antique forest.

[59] Man in strange subterranean chamber — seeks to force door of bronze — overwhelmed by influx of waters.

And 1922:

[94] Change comes over the sun — shews objects in strange form, perhaps restoring landscape of the past. (Compare to the unnaturally heavy cloud-borne darknesses, and later suggestion of ‘living’ clouds, in “Typer”)

[95] Horrible colonial farmhouse and overgrown garden on city hillside — overtaken by growth. (Compare to the moving bramble thickets in “Typer”)

[96] Unknown fires seen across the hills at night.

And early 1923:

[116] Prowling at night around an unlighted castle amidst strange scenery.

[117] A secret living thing kept and fed in an old house. (Similar to the older [79] Horrible secret in crypt of ancient castle – discovered by dweller.)

[118] Something seen at oriel window of forbidden room in ancient manor house.

I’d suspect these were all loose candidates for inclusion on House of the Worm. Thus to find them in “Typer” is suggestive.[2]

But… I don’t have access to Lumley’s draft to make a comparison and tabulate exactly what Lovecraft added. Joshi has it that the original was… “a hopelessly illiterate draft of the tale — set in an abandoned house near Lumley’s hometown”.

Where to get the draft? Lumley’s “illiterate” rough draft for “Alonzo Typer” was published in Crypt of Cthulhu, Volume 2, Number 2, “Ashes and Others” (Yuletide 1982). I had assumed, from looking at the issue’s bare contents-listing, that it was just a reprint of the published story. The issue has now been added to my “to get” list. The draft was also reprinted in: i) Black Forbidden Things: Cryptical Secrets from the “Crypt of Cthulhu” collection, now forbiddingly expensive even when obtainable; ii) in Medusa’s Coil and Others; and iii) as a definitive edition to be found in Joshi’s recent Collected Fiction, A Variorum Edition, Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations (2017).

Though perhaps I don’t need to check, as Joshi in Lovecraft Studies #17 (1988) has a note on the untyped Lovecraft manuscript of the tale…

“The Diary of Alonzo Typer.” A.Ms., 20 pp.

The A.Ms. is written in a very late script with extremely small characters and many revisions and interlineations. The tale was ghost-written for William Lumley; Lumley’s version survives, and examination of it proves that Lovecraft wholly recast the story, retaining only a few phrases[3] of the original. It is probable that Lovecraft had Lumley prepare the T.Ms. (even though he states that he would prepare [type] it himself; cf. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 21 October 1935; ms., John Hay Library), since the first appearance (Weird Tales, February 1938) makes many curious errors which cannot well be attributed to editorial emendation. All subsequent appearances derive from the Weird Tales text. (my emphasis)

The Weird Tales publication elicited a fascinating letter to The Eyrie from E. Hoffmann Price, in which he reveals a once-planned Mexico expedition in the company of H.P. Lovecraft and R.E. Howard…

What of Worm? Its title, at least, became public and saw print. Frank Belknap Long later alluded to the lost novel, in his “The Space Eaters” (1928)…

My friend wrote short stories. […] One of his tales, “The House of the Worm,” had induced a young student at a Midwestern university to seek refuge in an enormous redbrick building where everyone approved of his sitting on the floor and shouting at the top of his voice: “Lo, my beloved is fairer than all the lilies among the lilies in the lily garden.”

This was presumably where Mearle Prout picked up the title in the early 1930s, and used it for his own story.

Footnotes

1. [↑] A letter of February 1924 stated… “after trying serial stuff for Home Brew [i.e. early 1923] I experimented a bit with the novel form, and an idea partly shaped which will probably suit Mr. H[enneberger]’s requirements. It is a hideous thing whose provisional title (subject to change) is “The House of the Worm”, and he would soon be… “developing a monstrous and noxious idea which has for some time been simmering unwholesomely in my consciousness — a ghastly thing to be intitl’d The House of the Worm.” These details were known before the 2015 discovery of the lost 1924 letter and its Worm details, and are to be found in Selected Letters I.

2. [↑] I also suspect that “The Trap” may have been partly an attempt by Whitehead and Lovecraft to re-work some of the old House of the Worm ideas, perhaps related to the idea of the pictures conveyed in “Alonzo Typer”. Possibly also linked to Commonplace Book: “[80] Shapeless living thing forming nucleus of ancient building”.

3. [↑] Joshi elsewhere elaborates very slightly, considering that those snippets kept were simply “random phrases”, with the implication that they were kept to please the old fellow.