Category Archives: Historical context

Chats et Autres Betes (1933)

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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My continuing reading of the Barlow letters, now about half-way, has led me to discover a fine Lovecraftian artwork. Its excellence causes my ‘Kittee Tuesday’ feature to make a brief return.

In early 1934 Lovecraft was in New York and, having just put young Barlow on the bus, he sauntered over to the public library to peruse the new books with Belknap Long. He was rewarded by the sight of a new cat book. Steinlen’s Chats et Autres Betes had been published in Paris in 1933, and was presumably freshly catalogued and on display among the new artbooks. It has 19 black and white etched plates, seemingly very conventional, but with a tipped-in end-paper which is magnificent. Here is a good look at the whisker-twirling work, which we can only imagine had Lovecraft emitting a rare out-loud chuckle when he saw it…

It there’s ever to be a proper Lovecraft Museum in a physical building, this must surely be a prime candidate for one of the giant wall murals at the Cat Cafe.

There’s no Archive.org or other free edition of the book. While the French Gallica site does have the book’s more mundane kitties, it does not have a scan of the ensemble end-paper — presumably prised out and stolen long ago.

The faint lines on the scan are perhaps archival preservation tape applied to prevent cracking. It would be rather fab if a talented DeviantArt artist were to faithfully re-make this at 8k, perhaps with the additional of faint moonlight colour.

What was Steinlen’s inspiration? One wonders if he might have encountered Lovecraft’s story “The Cats of Ulthar” by around 1932, and if so this would be an early Lovecraft illustration. “Ulthar” had been published in Weird Tales in 1926, and presumably such things were known in the Surrealist circles of Paris in the 1920s and 30s. But possibly there were other “king o’ the cats” stories or fairy-tales in France. Can French readers offer any evidence, for a supposition that the Paris Surrealists knew of Weird Tales? Or offer a well-known source in French folk-tale or nursery-rhyme?

Anna Helen Crofts

06 Monday Apr 2020

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The Berkshire Eagle newspaper’s ‘Mysteries from the Morgue’ column has a new piece on Anna Helen Crofts. Crofts was an amateur journalist and a one-time collaborator with Lovecraft on “Poetry and the Gods” (1920). Unlike many, the newspaper is accessible from outside the USA. It adds some details about her later life, and it seems she married well in 1945 and had a very fine retirement.

Joshi’s I Am Providence has a section on the story and he remarks…

she appears under her own name in the UAPA [amateur journalism] membership lists, residing at 343 West Main Street in North Adams, Massachusetts, in the far northwestern corner of the state. I have no idea how Lovecraft came in touch with her or why he chose to collaborate on this tale; he never mentions it or his coauthor in any correspondence I have ever seen. … This [story] is surely one of the most peculiar items in Lovecraft’s fictional corpus, not only for its utterly unknown genesis but for its anomalous theme.

For more details see my A few additions for Anna Helen Crofts (1889-1975) post, and the linked online copy of The Fossil #341, July 2009 (Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., “The strange story of “Poetry and the Gods” by Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe”).

The newspaper has not felt able to print the photo which sits alongside her 1919 school yearbook entry, possibly due to its small size. But here it that photo via Archive.org, and I’ve suitably enhanced and enlarged and colourised it as much as possible from such a scan of a tiny old picture…

I have a larger 1300px version if anyone wants it, but it shows the blobbling more than this reduction.

The Haunted Castle, a 1927 study of the weird

04 Saturday Apr 2020

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Lovecraft’s famous survey of supernatural literature was published in The Recluse in August 1927. Later in the same year Eino Railo published the history of the literary gothic in The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. A December 1927 review in the New York Evening Post suggests Railo’s book was published in time for the Christmas market and the January book-token crowd, and thus it appeared several months after Lovecraft’s circle had finished digesting his Supernatural Literature. Lovecraft refers to The Haunted Castle, a translation from the Finnish, in admiring terms in a later letter to Barlow and terms it a study of “the weird”.

Rather surprisingly Wikipedia has no page in English for Eino Railo, an important literary historian of the early 20th century. But using Google Translate on his Finnish page shows the book was originally his thesis in Finnish, Haamulinna (1925). Thus, even though there was at least one young Finn on the fringes of Lovecraft’s circle, it initially seems highly unlikely that Lovecraft would have read the book before writing Supernatural Literature. However, consider that the Finnish thesis must have taken a while to translate to English. This was done for Routledge, for an English edition to be published in both London and New York. As such it’s not impossible that news of the translation was circulating in New York weird and publishing circles, and circulating while Lovecraft was living and socialising in New York. Certainly the Routledge office in New York must have been aware, by the late summer, of what they had set for publication shortly before Christmas 1927.

Joshi says of the book, in his Icons Of Horror And Supernatural…

In 1927 Eino Railo published the definitive and entertaining The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism, providing a virtual Baedeker to the castle — forerunner of the haunted house — and other elements of gothic literature.

Given this praise and the date of publication, it must form an important touchstone for “what Lovecraft knew of” in the older non-pulp weird, by circa early 1928, and also what his circle was aware of in terms of their literary forebears.

While not yet online in full, the book does have a 4,000 word contents-list, which can be found online if you seek hard enough.

“The Return of the Undead”

31 Tuesday Mar 2020

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“The Return of the Undead” by Kalem member and Lovecraft friend Arthur Leeds, in the Halloween 1925 issue of Weird Tales (November 1925). (Continuation of the story on page 712).

Lovecraft praises the story to Barlow in O Fortunate Floridian in a letter of January 1934, calling it a “splendid tale of a child vampire” in a fever hospital. I don’t see it mentioned or included in any surveys of ‘Lovecraft faves’. Judging by letters to Weird Tales it was also a strong favourite with the readership that season. It is presumably nearly out of copyright now (1st January 2021), and could make for a timely graphic novel adaptation.

Incidentally, in the same letter Lovecraft also gives another bit of data for the end-point of the Arthur Leeds biography, which I don’t think I had in my biographical chapter on Leeds: in the winter of 1933/34 Leeds was overwintering at Coney Island, at the Hotel Clement. A seedy place, judging by this possibly 1940s photo. The hotel was burned out in 1948 and a report of the fire furnished posterity with the information that it was “adjoining the center of the resort’s amusement area”.

This situation might suggest that, during this part of the Great Depression, Leeds in some way deployed his stage-craft and production talents at Coney Island. Possibly helping to build and revivify the attractions there for the coming season? It would be nice to think that he was able to deploy his talents on the more macabre attractions such as the Ghost Train, Hall of Mirrors, and the like. But a year later in 1935, Lovecraft tells Barlow that Leeds is out of a job again and is getting in line to get onto some New Deal work. Possibly Coney Island was thus only seasonal and transitory work, if Leeds was indeed working there in the winters.

Literary Influences of Robert E. Howard

30 Monday Mar 2020

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Todd B. Vick has just launched a new blog series, “The Literary Influences of Robert E. Howard”, with the increasingly forgotten James Branch Cabell as the opener.

In his review, Howard calls Cabell the ablest writer of the present age. Along with many other readers back then, Howard was seized by Cabell’s command of the English language.

Carl van Vechten’s portrait of Cabell, 1935. B&W from the Library of Congress, but here newly up-rezzed, tweaked and colourised by me. View on a dark background and good monitor, to see the wooden cane in the lower half. Feel free to use for worthy projects.

DMR also recently had a short post Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery: James Branch Cabell which noted others influenced by Cabell…

Neil Gaiman counts JBC as his favorite author.

The Lovecraft-Barlow letters also reveal that Cabell was a key idol for Barlow. The Lovecraft-Bloch letters also indicate Bloch was an admirer, though perhaps less ardently that Barlow.

What of Lovecraft? He was more tepid. In 1920 he called Cabell a “real thinker”. But while judging most of Cabell’s fiction “sound and admirable”, and often with an enjoyable “light, witty, & sophisticated manner” and a fine ear for “prose rhythm”, for fantasy Lovecraft very much preferred Dunsany for his “genuine magic & freshness”.

He was distinctly sniffy about the politics, though, by 1935. To Bloch he wrote… “Cabell strikes me as a pale-pink Anatole France — with a lot less to say than his prototype had”. Pale-pink here seems to refer to Cabell’s politics. If one was ‘pink’ in the mid 1930s, one was a dupe or a fellow-traveller of the ‘reds’ (the Communist Party). Such people failed to know or recall that when ‘the revolution’ is in its early stages the intellectual comrade — the bookish guy with intellectual theories and a taste for poetry — is the one put up against the wall and shot by the thuggish element among his comrades. Still, even in a letter to Bloch of November 1935 Lovecraft can still be found lauding Cabell and overlooking his political foolishness. In this letter Lovecraft remarked that Cabell had… “one of the finest and maturest styles yet found in American prose”.

New book: Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom

27 Friday Mar 2020

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The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom: Volume One: A Tour of the 1930s is a lavishly illustrated 516-page new book. The $150 first edition is said to have sold out already, but there’s an ebook at a still-hefty $40.

Some have called it a “sumptuous scrapbook”. John Locke (The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales) has called the book…

“A much more detailed portrait of First Fandom than previously available”

There’s also the interesting addition of… “Original narrative comics, that bring to life key events”.

I can’t immediately find scholarly or otherwise weighty reviews. I’m thus uncertain if it offers a few nods toward less public and less photogenic networks, such as Lovecraft and his circles. Ideally one would want a whole chapter on the influence of that on early science fiction, but it might be tough to find quality archival pictures.

A revision of “The Strange High House in the Mist”?

26 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings

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Re-reading Barlow’s memoir of Lovecraft, in O Fortunate Floridian, I was struck by the implication of the comment by Barlow that…

Of “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1926) I have a much-interlined and revised typescript; the rhythms (he said) became too obvious in his story and had to be toned down.

Barlow’s reference to “rhythms” is ambiguous. Does it refer to the poetic play of words in lines, or to the larger structure which repeatedly pounds like ocean waves through the last part of the story?

But the clear implication here is that Lovecraft once made a heavily revised version of this typed story. Did Barlow have the early typescript of a revised version, which had then been cleanly re-typed and submitted to Weird Tales in summer 1931? It would seem a natural moment to make some changes. If so, then the further implication of Barlow’s comment is that the November 1926 original (rejected by Weird Tales and due to appear in The Recluse, but never printed there) was markedly different from the 1931 version?

The Lovecraft Encyclopedia makes no mention of any revision in either 1931 or 1934, or of a lost 1926 original which had been typed but then heavily revised. Nor, so far as I can see, is there mention of such on the survey of Lovecraft’s ‘lost’ material in “Locked Dimension Out of Reach” (Lovecraft Annual 2011), or in Joshi’s I Am Providence or his notes for Penguin Modern Classics.

But we can assume Barlow is accurate, and that there was a detailed revision. One then wonders when this was done. If in Florida in 1934 during his visit with Barlow, then the following item from Barlow’s memoir of Lovecraft may have some bearing, perhaps arising from the work in the revision…

At breakfast he told us his dreams; once of how he was a magician standing on a cliff over the ocean sending balls out into space and guiding them back, some of them returning with the scars and mosses of seas and spaces unknown.

A slightly different version of the dream is given on page 402 of O Fortunate Floridian, adding winds and wetness… a “high cliff by the ocean, where winds were blowing” and the balls “would have encrustations of odd growths, or be slimy wet.”

Readers will remember that the setting of “The Strange High House in the Mist” is a tall sea-cliff above the ocean, the original 1926 story being most likely written for a boy who lived on a sea-cliff at the ocean’s edge near Marblehead. Thus this dream, and Barlow’s comment, might hint that Lovecraft revised the story while staying with Barlow in Florida?

The Brown Repository has the story as scans, presumably deposited there by Barlow, and the notes on the record-page suggests a solution to the mystery. Although the item is…

Dated at the end: “Novr. 9, 1926.” This combination of manuscript (pages 1-7 and 10) and typescript (pages 8 and 9) was heavily revised by HPL. He apparently continued to make revisions even after the story was first published in Weird Tales, 18, No. 3 (Oct 1931).

Thus, by the look of it, it seems there was indeed some sort of composite assemblage and accretion on top of the original handwritten story of 1926, consisting of many inserted typed pages among the handwritten leaves and very heavy revision throughout. I imagine that access to Joshi’s Collected Fiction, A Variorum Edition, Volume 2: 1926–1930 would help further unlock the sequencing of this item, since the book has “High House” and it offers…

“all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story — manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications.”

Though I’m unsure if it also pares back to what sits underneath all Lovecraft’s crossings out, and attempts a forensic reconstruction of the 1926 original. Unfortunately this book is too expensive for me, even at its current reduction from $180 to $99.

The Marvellous A. Merritt

23 Monday Mar 2020

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Who was “The Marvellous A. Merritt”? And why was he quite so popular among the cognoscenti in Lovecraft’s time? Sam Moskovitz investigated in 1960, in a detailed survey and appraisal which found its way into a British magazine…

Lovecraft met the famous author in January 1934 in New York, and proffered a copy of his “The Rats in The Walls” for consideration. In a letter to Barlow of 10th? February 1934, Lovecraft told Barlow he had found Merritt “genial and interesting … sincerely and deeply interested in the weirdness he portrays”. He later wrote to Galpin…

Among other new people I met was the fairly famous fantastic magazine writer A. Merritt, whose “Moon Pool” I have admired ever since its appearance in 1918.” — letter to Galpin, 28th April 1934.

The February letter to Barlow reveals that he had not yet read Merritt’s novel The Metal Monster (first version, 1920), since Lovecraft mentions it and implies he had not yet read it. At that point Barlow was offering to send him either The Metal Monster or the later version The Metal Emperor.

The Metal Monster had been left unread until that time, because Lovecraft had been told in 1920 that it was dull…

… The Metal Monster, which I had never read before because Eddy told me it was dull. The damn’d fool! (nephew — not our late bibliophilick friend [‘Uncle’ Eddy, the Providence bookseller]). Actually, the book contains the most remarkable presentation of the utterly alien and non-human that I have ever seen. I don’t wonder that Merritt calls it his “best and worst” production. The human characters are commonplace and wooden – just pulp hokum – but the scenes and phaenomena… oh, boy!” — letter to Morton, 6th March 1934.

Incidentally, Lovecraft’s mention above of “our late bibliophilick friend” is another confirmation for Uncle Eddy of Providence, and faintly implies Uncle Eddy was not just a sour dealer in but also a lover of books.

Comparing the dating of this and the Barlow letter suggests that Lovecraft probably read the novel around the end of February 1934. Which version did Lovecraft read? He could have been sent the yellowing 1920 magazine pages by Barlow, but there was also a 1927-28 version that might have arrived instead…

“The Metal Monster” was serialized a second time in a Gernsback magazine, Science and Invention, from October 1927 to August 1928. (There were eleven parts in all.) The story was revised somewhat and re-titled “The Metal Emperor.”

This matters because “the first two chapters [are] missing in later prints”. Thus if one doesn’t have the 1920 magazine version, it’s a different beast. A very different beast, since…

“for [1927-28] Science & Invention magazine, Merritt really tore into the body of text, creating an entirely new version … This version focused on the sciency stuff, with Merritt backing-off the purple prose for which he is renowned.”

This strongly suggests that Barlow would have sent Lovecraft the original 1920 version, probably as tear-sheets. Barlow was likely savvy enough about such things to prefer The Metal Monster over The Metal Emperor. [Update: Yes, a 1934 postcard from Lovecraft reveals “The Metal Monster” was sent and read February 1934].

The original 1920 magazines containing “The Metal Monster” are not on Archive.org, but you may be pleased to learn that the original can now be had for $15 from Hippocampus Press.

Later in 1934, an August letter to Barlow reveals that Merritt had been given up as “hopeless”, in terms of a Lovecraft-Merritt correspondence. At the January meeting Lovecraft had given Merritt a copy of his “The Rats in the Walls”, but in August was still waiting for the tale to spark a letter and thus a possible correspondence between the two masters.

Lovecraft and Haggard

22 Sunday Mar 2020

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The International Walter Pater Society has announced Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism No. 4, which was due to be published November 2019…

The issue includes a cluster of articles on ‘Decadence and the Weird’, guest edited by Dustin Friedman and Neil Hultgren. Friedman questions gay identity in Teleny. Hultgren turns to proto-modernist form in Arthur Machen’s prose. Jessica Straley traces the threat and promise of anthropomorphized flora as depicted in Algernon Blackwood’s stories. Molly Youngkin argues that the women populating Rider Haggard’s tales inspired the later weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

On Haggard, Lovecraft did at least try to dip into the famous author but may have succeeded only in reading She. He wrote to Kleiner in early February 1920 that…

Cook has also been kind, outlining a reading course in Haggard. I shall not tackle the gentleman in question till I am through with Algernon Blackwood, whose rather mediocre fantasies I am absorbing one after another. When I do read She, I will report my critical impressions in detail.

However, it appears he did not go on to assemble and then peruse Cook’s course. Since Joshi notes that Haggard’s most famous work was left unread for many years…

HPL did not read the novel [She] until 1926, and obtained his personal copy of the book still later.

Specifically he had to read She, probably at some speed and along with many others, to prepare his Supernatural Literature survey essay. A letter to Derleth, 31st October 1926, further illuminates…

I’ve recently begun reading the work of Sir H. Rider Haggard for the first time. ‘She’ is very good, & if the others are at all commensurate, I have quite a treat ahead”.

Yet, with the resources available to me, I can find no evidence that he read anything of Haggard other than She. Certainly Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library lists only She, thus I assume there is no other evidence of Haggard to be found anywhere else in Lovecraft’s letters. If Lovecraft had read some of Haggard’s other books, one would have thought he would have mentioned them to at least one correspondent.

But if he did read some after She, what might they have been?

Obvious candidates are the She sequel Ayesha, the Return of She; and the well-known adventure King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain. The vivid Ancient Egyptian settings of Morning Star and (in part) The Wanderer’s Necklace might have appealed, and their publication dates would have put them on Cook’s 1920 “reading course”. The other possibility that Cook would surely have noted is Doctor Therne (1898), a ‘tormented scientist’ confessional about a plague that sweeps England. It might have been hard to obtain by circa 1926, but Cook was reputed to have a vast library until 1930 and would probably have lent it. It may interest some to know that Therne is told from Dunchester, a name which evokes the similar-sounding Dunwich.