The post-war chill of January 1946 was made a little colder for readers of Esquire magazine by an article on the 1938 New England floods, illustrated with with a very gloomy picture specially commissioned for the article.

Not quite a “Friday ‘picture postal'”, but a flooded Providence is as as-good-as. This image unwittingly visually trailed a short profile and supposed memoir of one H.P. Lovecraft, then a figure of quite some mystery. This item was to be found later on in the issue, and was penned by John Wilstach.

S.T. Joshi bluntly calls this memoir “fictitious” in his monumental Lovecraft Bibliography. It’s easy to agree, and for this reason I won’t muddy the waters by republishing it here. The editor of Esquire magazine even appears to implicitly warn his readers of being too credulous, in his trailer-blurb for the article…

In the article itself Wilstach claims to recall that he was drinking with the poet Hart Crane one day in New York in the twenties, and Hart happened to have the crumpled manuscript of Lovecraft’s “He” in his pocket. Crane thought highly of the tale and asked Wilstach to accompany him then and there on a visit to Lovecraft’s decrepit room in Red Hook, as he allegedly felt tender and protective toward the ‘old gent’. Given what we now know of Crane’s antipathy toward Lovecraft, and his apparent ignorance of the tale (only published September 1926, after Lovecraft had left New York), this seems highly unlikely.

But possibly the Esquire article needed jazzing up for acceptance. As such it’s not impossible that Wilstach substituted the famous Crane for a lesser writer he had actually known and who had known Lovecraft. His biographical blurb puts him in about the right place for that…

John Hudnall Wilstach (b. 1891) was a short-story writer and novelist specializing in circus and carnival life, crime, and science fiction.

Given his apparent circus specialism, one wonders if a possible candidate for the ‘real’ Crane might then have been Arthur Leeds. Leeds had a circus background, and might once have asked Wilstach to look over Lovecraft’s new ‘New York’ tales with a view to finding a market in ‘the slicks’ in which Wilstach sometimes published. That would be one hypothesis which could fit, but more would have to be known about Wilstach in 1920s New York to say more.

It can however be more firmly suggested that Wilstach had most of his personal material for the Esquire article from Paul Cook. Comments on the Esquire article, on the front page of the NAPA amateur journal the Literary Newsette for 2nd February 1946, seem to confirm this…

Wilstach obviously “… obtained most of the facts from W. Paul Cook, for whom he seems to have a strong admiration.

Wilstach’s article also claims he once made a post-New York winter visit to Lovecraft’s home in Providence, though he gives no address or date and not a single telling detail. There are however a couple of interesting points in his article, arising from his likely Cook connection. In the second half of the article there is an un-credited quote, which the editor has surprisingly let slip through un-credited. Presumably this quote is from Cook, given Cook’s known concern over people making the Poe comparison…

A friend once suggested that he stimulate dreams by means of drugs. Lovecraft exclaimed that if drugs would give him any worse dreams than he experienced without them, he would go mad. His dreams were his own. It is unfair to call him equal to Poe, greater than Poe, or lacking in certain Poe qualities. Better, consider him as standing alone.

That sounds like Cook, although if the quote was hooked from print I can’t discover. Evidently Wilstach had talked with Cook, since he relates the ‘Lovecraft wouldn’t disturb a sleeping cat in his lap’ anecdote, and states it was “told me by Cook”. A later June 1946 Esquire letter by Wilstach, defending his claims of a mid-1940s “Lovecraft cult” against a questioning March 1946 letter by Weird Tales founder Henneberger, shows that Wilstach had access to Cook’s mid-1940s little magazine Ghost. In this same letter he also talks of “my friend Cook”.

Given this reasonably firm Cook connection, one point in Wilstach’s article does ring true…

The [Lovecraft] family had been prominent in Providence. It was Lovecraft’s ambition to buy back the old home and restore the family’s position. He was almost in tears when he found a number of his grandfather’s books in a bookshop. He bought all he could.

Given that we know Lovecraft went on long book-hunting trips in Providence with Cook, both at the store of ‘Uncle Eddy’ and at other book-sellers, this last seems quite likely to be a fragment of memoir had via Cook. One then wonders if finding “his grandfather’s books in a bookshop” can be confirmed by a mention somewhere in Lovecraft’s letters? It does seem the sort of thing he would have told at least one correspondent about, though I don’t recall encountering it.

The Esquire article succeeded in bringing Weird Tales founder Henneberger to print, on the letters page of the June 1946 issue. This item is not in the Lovecraft Bibliography. He makes a pithy rebuttal without specifics, but more interestingly flashes a light on the very moment of Lovecraft’s initial reception in the Weird Tales office.

This itself is somewhat questionable in light of what we now know. Henneberger recalls that it was he who discovered Lovecraft, via Home Brew and the story “Randolph Carter”. But we know it was Cook’s The Vagrant that had published “Randolph Carter” in May 1920, not Home Brew. While Henneberger was doubtless keeping a close and wary eye on Home Brew (a possible competitor), it’s less certain he had also been tracking The Vagrant since summer 1920. However, its quite likely that in late 1922 he had made enquiries among the amateur journalists about suitable writers for his new Weird Tales, and been sent a bundle of The Vagrant.

He has it that he “contacted Lovecraft through this magazine” via editor Houtain, and personally invited a submission from Lovecraft. He was sent “The Rats in the Walls” and after reading it he showed it to his editor who was incredulous. We know it was published in Weird Tales, but not until March 1924, and we also know that this was not the “first” story to see print. That was “Dagon”, in the Halloween 1923 issue.

We also know that “Rats” could not have been among the initial handwritten manuscripts Lovecraft sent to Weird Tales in May 1923, since the tale was only written in late summer 1923. “Rats” was eventually submitted to Weird Tales, but it only arrived in the office circa 10th November 1923 (Selected Letters I, page 259). “Rats” had been typed by Eddy for Lovecraft, presumably with a couple of carbons, and submitted in good form to Argosy, which was one of the well-paying ‘slicks’. Evidently a carbon had also been mailed to Arthur Leeds, since Lovecraft states Leeds had written back to say he felt the tale was just too horrible for Argosy to accept… and so it proved. The rejected “Rats” was then quickly sent on to Weird Tales, to join the pile of other Lovecraft tales awaiting consideration.

One way of explaining Henneberger’s memories is then to say that he had indeed been tracking Home Brew and that, via Houtain its editor, he had indeed acquired Lovecraft’s address and passed it on to his editor at Weird Tales. This is not incompatible with the known fact that Lovecraft’s friends were drawing the new Weird Tales to his attention and urging him to submit some stories. We know that Lovecraft had eventually after much persuasion sent in stories in passable hand-written manuscript form in May 1923 (“Dagon”, “Carter”, “Ulthar”, “Arthur Jermyn”, The Hound”). But Henneberger’s 1947 letter implies that Lovecraft only really came to his attention when the Weird Tales editor queried how startlingly good the Eddy-typed “The Rats in The Walls” was, when it was read in mid November 1923. Clearly this Lovecraft was a cut above his Home Brew “Herbert West” and “Lurking Fear” serial-shockers, and his sent-in tales “Carter” and “The Hound” obviously gave only a hint of what he could really do. This seminal moment in time would then be what Henneberger was recalling in his 1947 letter. He did indeed ‘discover’ Lovecraft via Home Brew, at least in terms of getting an address out of Houtain. But he perhaps wasn’t quite aware of what a great writer he had got hold of, until his startled editor landed “Rats” on his desk for a second opinion. What he then pulled off his shelves to comfort his editor would not have been the serial-shockers of Home Brew, but was more likely something like some back-issues of Cook’s amateur publication. Containing as it did items such as the 1920 printing of “Randolph Carter”, and more importantly Cook’s 1919 essay “Howard P. Lovecraft’s Fiction” which had introduced “Dagon” to the world. In this respect it’s perhaps notable that “Dagon” was the first Lovecraft story printed in Weird Tales (October 1923). Evidently there was a copy of this in good form, somewhere in the Weird Tales offices. The presence of this last item in print would be ‘a given’, had Lovecraft in May 1923 sent his “Dagon” to Weird Tales not in the handwriting which obscured the other tales in his bundle, but rather in Cook’s 1919 printed form.

Such was the past, as Henneberger recalled it after some 25 years. What of the future? He has certainly been proven correct in his prescient forecast that Lovecraft…

will be read as enthusiastically in 2023 as he was in 1923

A useful reminder that Halloween 2023 will be the 100th anniversary of Lovecraft’s fiction first appearing in Weird Tales.