Lovecraft correspondent Fred Anger (William Frederick Anger, probably b. 15th Sept 1920) was a young Lovecraft fan and letter writer to the pulps. The Lovecraft Encyclopedia states he planned an index to Weird Tales and an edition of Fungi from Yoggoth, both with Louis C. Smith, neither of which appeared. He contributed an interview to The Fantasy Fan fanzine.

Here are two fragments of Anger’s youthful letters to pulps…

   “Fred Anger, of Berkeley, California, writes: “Weird Tales is certainly improving steadily. Every new copy gets better and better; evidently there is no end to your progress. The first installment of The Trail of the Cloven Hoof is as good a piece of weird fiction as it is possible to find. Mr. Eadie has given us nothing but the best in all the years he has been writing. The Trail of the Cloven Hoof equals if not excels The World-Wrecker of several years ago. Congratulations, Mr. Eadie. Through the Gates [of the Silver Key?… his letter is incomplete, at least in the digital source I have access to]” — “By Air Mail,” a letter to Weird Tales, September 1934, Vol.24, No.3.

John Cheng’s book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) quotes Anger on page 62, as being representative of writers to the pulp letters pages…

   “Readers were not naive about letters columns. Some readers questioned the validity and representative character of published exchanges. “I hardly think that the small cross-section of the Science Fiction readers as represented by your Discussions is quite a fair example of the readers as a whole,” wrote Fred Anger, 2700 Webster Street, Berkeley, California. “It is inclined to be prejudiced and it is not a customary editorial policy to print letters which really express opinions.”

Cheng does not say to which pulp Anger was writing here, nor does he footnote the quote. It was not Weird Tales, but rather an SF pulp with letters pages titled “Discussions”. Presumably this must have been Amazing Stories. This might suggest Anger was a hard SF as well as a fantasy-horror fan. I have found an online indication that his letter was published in a 1935 issue of Amazing Stories.

Anger appears to have been very antagonistic to Robert Bloch, then of about the same age…

   “Another fellow named Fred Anger never missed a chance to criticize Bloch” (Gary Romeo, “Stars of the Pulps”, Sand Roughs #5, Winter Solstice, 2002).

This was apparently because Bloch didn’t like Conan and had called R.E. Howard’s character “Conan the Cluck” in print.

The Lovecraft correspondence with Anger seems accounted for, and safely in the Selected Letters and held in a public collection…

“H.P. Lovecraft Correspondence: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, United States. The collection consists of 5 holograph postcards (Aug. 31, 1934 to Sept. 2, 1926), 10 holograph letters (Aug. 14, 1934 to Aug. 14, 1935), 1 typescript letter (Jan. 16, 1936), one chain letter (typescript and holograph, undated), one typescript letter signed by August Derleth (April 21, 1968). The letters and postcards are written to Fred Anger from Lovecraft, mostly from his home in Providence, Rhode Island. They relate to their common interests in writing weird fiction and issues relating to publishing their work. Transcriptions of the materials have been made and are available in the archives.”

I have found a further note (.xls file) that this was an…

“Acquisition Donated to the Archives by William F. Anger in 1973”

One assumes that the letter from August Derleth (April 21, 1968) was to alert Anger of the importance of his old Lovecraft letters and items? If so it would likely have Anger’s home address in 1968. Has anyone ever checked this archive, other than perhaps Derleth? Its presence at Minneapolis might suggest that Anger was around Minneapolis, Minnesota in the 1970s? Or perhaps was an alumnus of the university?

Generally lacking in the older Lovecraftian printed literature is a death date for Anger, although I Am Providence states 1920-1997. I have found a Polish listing of correspondents which states “1997”, and interestingly this also notes that Anger personally knew Clark Ashton Smith.

Presumably this 1997 death date was drawn either from Joshi or from Ken Hill’s information given on the alt.horror.cthulhu discussion group in 2008…

   “William Frederick Anger, born in 1921, according to AN H.P. LOVECRAFT ENCYCLOPEDIA […] I don’t find any references to him after the 1930’s. The Social Security Death Index lists a William F. Anger, born 15 September 1920, died 2 September 1997; last known residence, Buffalo, N.Y.; social security number issued in New York State.”

This is the only mention of Anger on that alt.horror.cthulhu thread. An open genealogy website confirms that “William F Anger’s last known residence is at Buffalo, Erie County, NY (New York) 14203.” Another database usefully states…

   “William F Anger, died 09/02/1997 buried at Bath National Cemetery in Bath, NY.”

This has enabled me to find a picture of his gravestone at Bath National Cemetery (Plot: R, 0, 53), the inscription of which tells us that he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War…

Presumably the U.S. Navy archives may have more details of his war service. YN3 indicates he was a “Petty officer third class” in the Navy.

None of this proves that the East Coast Anger is the same as as the West Coast Anger. But my hypothesis would be that after California fandom in the 1930s, where he apparently knew Clark Ashton Smith personally, Anger served in the Navy in the 1940s. He then possibly (my guess) took advantage of the post-war G.I. Bill to get an university education, and went to live in the East Coast. Given that he was a Lovecraft fan I wonder if he may have tried for Brown University? What he did on the East Coast for fifty years, if indeed he was living around New York from circa 1947 to 1997, I have as yet been unable to discover. There seems to be not a whit of him in the fannish record that’s available online.

I’ve been taking a quick look at the possible candidates for another elusive Lovecraft correspondent: C. L. Stuart of 17 Brockett St, E Milton, Mass.

It seems here we have another Barlow error. The address should read “Brackett St.” The location is four miles south of the centre of Boston, near the coast.

I have found a rather likely personage in the form of the East Coast author and encyclopedia editor Charles Leonard Stuart (aka Leonard Stuart).

He first shows up in the online record as a magazine editor in the 1890s, then as Assistant Editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900). In 1910 he edited Current Cyclopedia, and by 1911 he is credited with the revising and editing of Webster’s New Illustrated dictionary. He then tackled the editorship of the Everybody’s cyclopedia (1912) (a complete reference library condensing the world’s knowledge in plain English) with George J. Hagar. This must have been a success, since two years later he was the chief editor of the People’s Cyclopedia (1914)…

Prepared by more than two hundred of the most eminent editors, educators, scholars, scientists, inventors and explorers under the chief editorship of Charles Leonard Stuart

A “Charles Leonard Stuart” has a 1922 copyright registry entry for a nationalist book in 1922 (cranky 1920s racialist stuff, with lots of worries about Papist influence and a chapter on Eugenics) which might have caught Lovecraft’s attention…

The Age of Understanding; or, Americanism and the standard of world nationalism: a true outline of history and science. Boston, R.G. Badger, 1922.

The book is available online at archive.org as by “Stuart, Leonard, [b.] 1868”. A short biography in this volume calls him an…

   “…encyclopedist and author of French-American ancestry; b. near Coutances, France, 12 February 1860; s. of Sara Stuart-Johns of Cornwall, England, and of Philippe Le Sueur, grandson of Pierre Le Sueur (d. 1792), the founder of French Methodism” […] settled in New York City in 1897 […] since has been continuously associated with international encyclopedic and educational book publishing work. Contributor to leading encyclopedias and periodical literature. Editor of the New Century Reference Library (1907); Current Cyclopedia of Ready Reference (1910); People’s Cyclopedia (1914); etc.; author of The Story of Human Flight (1907); A Misunderstood Scientist (1907) ; The Passaic and Its Falls (1910); The Great God Pan (1913); Unity, Life’s Ideal (1914); The Tycoon and the Suffragette (lyrical comedy; 1914); The Cosmic Comedy or the Kaiser’s Dream (1919) [possibly a wartime update of his 1901 The Cosmic Comedy; or, The vital urge]; The Age of Understanding or Americanism the Standard of World Nationalism (1922); A Roamer in Lyonesse (1922); The Eon or The Quest of the Lotus (MS.) [given as “The Eonic Quest” on the title page], Residence Glencliff, N.Y.

After 1922 he becomes quiescent in terms of publication. One assumes he might have retired to Brackett St. in the early-mid 1920s, aged about 65. But I can find no proof of this, other than it certainly looks like a nice retirement spot on Google Street View.

There are number of items in his Age of Understanding biography which would have interested Lovecraft, and might have prompted him to write offering revision services:

  1. The Great God Pan: an All-time Story (1913, Tudor Society, 35 pages). A copy is in Harvard Library, digitised but not yet placed online. This suggests it may have been a scholarly monograph.

  2. The Cornwall and Lyonesse connections might have intersected with Lovecraft’s quest after his own ancestors. I can find no trace of any title called A Roamer in Lyonesse, nor any work on Lyonesse from 1922 to 1935 under any likely name. Possibly the book was anticipated for 1922, but never appeared. Possibly it needed revision work, and if so the topic would have been directly in Lovecraft’s line of interest. Lyonesse is, of course, the Cornish/Arthurian folk story of the lost land under the sea.

  3. The manuscript of his esoteric-sounding “The Eon or The Quest of the Lotus” (aka “The Eonic Quest”) might also have been revision work for Lovecraft. I can find no trace of this work either, under those titles.

Woodburn Prescott Harris (1888-1988) was a Lovecraft correspondent circa 1929, of whom little is known. Only three Lovecraft letters to Woodburn Harris survive, but one is a gargantuan 70 pages. Harris was an English and Drama teacher, seemingly a Shakespeare specialist, who married in the 1920s and thereabouts quit teaching to become a farmer at Vergennes, Vermont. How Harris came to know Lovecraft is uncertain, but it seems that it was only later that he took up Lovecraft’s revision services. Lovecraft wrote of Harris…

“Our intelligent rustick friend Woodburn Harris has suddenly blossom’d into a prolifick professional client — being intent on saving the country [by publishing on the prohibition of liquor]” (Selected Letters III, p.130).

In the list of the addresses of Lovecraft correspondents sent by Barlow to Derleth, Barlow has added a very curious note (Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. gives the list in full in the Lovecraft Annual 2012). Barlow noted for Derleth of Harris that he…

“should have many pink discussions”.

The meaning of this word “pink” seems uncertain. Barlow was gay and Derleth (so I’m told) was bisexual, and the book Selected Papers on Lovecraft (p.69) tantalisingly noted in passing the… “the incredibly erroneous views on sex of Woodburn Harris”. This small constellation of hints might lead some to consider that “pink” could be a code for gay.

But on the face of it “pink” was more likely to imply the correspondence was politically communist in tone. I have found one contemporary reference online, with a similar usage: “I was a member of this parlor pink discussion group back in 1942”, referring to membership of a group with “communistic overtones” (Investigation of Communist activities in the Chicago area, 1954). Also a mention of detecting “well-organized pink discussion groups” in the context of anti-communism (U.S.A. journal, 1956). So it would be tempting to presume that Barlow’s meaning of pink was the same as “pinko”: a once-common term in the 1940s and 50s, meaning someone who was a communist sympathiser or a fellow traveler with socialism. The OED dates “pinko” to as early as 1936, and Barlow’s notes were written 1937.

This seems the most plausible explanation, yet it is one that appears to be directly contradicted by Lovecraft himself…

“As for our young communist — I have just set Farmer Woodburn Harris of Vermont on to him, and expect some brilliant fireworks. Harris is a political conservative of the traditional Yankee mould, and his keen wit and horse-sense will form a delightful foil to young Weiss’s bolshevism…” (Selected Letters III, p.187).

Harris had been an Acting Sergeant Major in the First World War, was the son of a minister and had been a school principal, and by 1930 Harris was a reader of Joseph McCabe’s (apparently sober and balanced) pamphlets concern the facts of the historical reality of Jesus. Harris defended McCabe from shoddy criticism in a letter to the editor in The Outlook, July 9, 1930, p.398. These facts and the Lovecraft comment above suggest that Harris was certainly not a communist “red”, or even a “pink” sympathiser.

So it appears that the word “pink” remains an enigma, unless perhaps someone with access to the Barlow and Derleth letters can shed any light on its use and meaning in those letters?

Possibly the solution to the riddle is that Barlow knew of Weiss’s correspondence with Harris, thus the “pink” nature of the letters that Harris might have in his possession? But against Weiss’s name on the list Barlow notes that Weiss was an outright “Red”. So why might he use “Pink” elsewhere on the list, when “Red” would have served if he was referring to Weiss’s correspondence with Harris?

Perhaps Barlow himself (apparently a communist sympathiser at one time) had once had some correspondence with Harris on politics?

Woodburn Harris circa 1917.

Woodburn Harris in the Middlebury College News Letter, Aug 1956, “Class of 1911” (class reunion photo).