A Lovecraft envelope, postmark 9th June 1934, with a note to Clark Ashton Smith on the back…

Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] wishes you would fcall [phone? call / tell?] him as much as possible about H2UICQU01QMN2HAH [Hziulquoigmnzhah], the paternal uncle of Tsathoggua – cf. “Door to Saturn”.

My guess would be that this might relate to tweaking Smith’s “Door to Saturn” (pub. Jan 1932) before a reprint, so as to align it with the emerging Tsathoggua aspect of the mythos…

I have done what I could toward elucidating the genealogy of Tsathoggua, and am sending Ar-Ech-Bei [Barlow] the result of my delvings into the Parchments of Pnom, the chief Hyperborean authority on such matters. Pnom [R.E. Howard?] has much more to say about Tsathoggua than about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth; but no doubt you have access to other records, mainly concerning these entities; and I’d be glad of more specific information about them. As I am pointing out to Ar-Ech-Bei, Pnom’s account of Ts. can be reconciled with the legendry told to Zamarcona in ‘The Mound.’ The myth, through aeons, was varied in the usual mythopoeic fashion by the cavern-dwellers, who came at last to believe that merely the images of Tsathoggua, and not the god himself, had emerged in former cycles from the inner gulf. Ts., travelling fourth-dimensionally from Saturn, first entered the Earth through the lightless abyss of N’kai; and, not unnaturally, the Yothians regarded N’kai as his place of origin. Undoubtedly the god now resides in N’kai, to which he returned when the ice overwhelmed Hyperborea.” (thanks to Will Murray for the 1934 Lovecraft to Smith letter extract)

An interesting insight into the care Lovecraft took, in co-ordinating the merging of the emerging mythos.

A new article in The Airship suggests the influence of M.R. James on Lovecraft. Although the only evidence given is from 1935 — when Lovecraft only had “The Haunter of the Dark” left to write.

S.T. Joshi puts Lovecraft’s reading of James at 1924…

he would discover … M. R. James in 1924″ (Primary Sources, p.10)

Possibly this was his reading for Supernatural Horror in Literature, in which James was given three pages on the ghost stories.

In 1927 Lovecraft wrote to Bernard Dwyer of the inevitable doom of the ghost story, of the type that relied on traditional time-worn approaches and which lacked any background philosophy or wider ramifications…

this art will, of course, in all its phases depend upon the past; and will [therefore] grow weaker and weaker as that past and its conditions recede into the background. It will last longest in such regions as cling most tenaciously to old things and old conditions”

But it seems Lovecraft enjoyed James’s ghost stories and they became a favourite of his. In a 1931 letter (Selected Letters III, p.379) he wrote…

I make no claim to membership in the first rank of weird writers — a rank represented by Poe among the dead, & by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Lord Dunsany, & Montague Rhodes James among the living.”

In a 1934 letter (Selected Letters VI, p.383) Lovecraft again stated that…

My favourite authors — aside from the Graeco-Roman classics & the English poets & essayists of the 18th century — are Poe, Dunsany, Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, & others of that type.”

“Notes on writing weird fiction” similarly names James as a great weird writer. Though in Lovecraft’s opinion these writers, apart from Dunsany at his best, usually lacked something…

What I miss in Machen, James, Dunsany, de la Mare, Shiel, & even Blackwood & Poe, is a sense of the cosmic. … Another lack which I constantly feel is that of realism or convincing seriousness. That is, the average weird author is essentially superficial & frivolous in his purpose. He wishes merely to entertain…” (Writers of the Dark, p.14)

The 1935 letter, quoted in The Airship article linked above, does have good deal of admiration for James. Lovecraft sees him as able to keep up with the likes of Dunsany and Blackwood, and understands his conventional approach as actually giving rise to an interesting interweaving of the horrific and the mundane…

M. R. James joins the brisk, the light, & the commonplace to the weird about as well as anyone could do it — but if another tried the same method, the chances would be ten to one against him. The most valuable element in him — as a model — is his way of weaving a horror into the every-day fabric of life & history — having it grow naturally out of the myriad conditions of an ordinary environment.”

Yet 1935 is too late to establish an actual influence of James on Lovecraft’s own stories. Lovecraft’s basic themes and approaches were pretty well set by 1924, when he first encountered James. There are only two scholarly claims for a James influence listed in the H.P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography. These are Simon McCulloch’s “The Toad in The Study”, Ghosts & Scholars 20, 1995 (Lovecraft may have been influenced by James’s portrayal of documents and ‘forbidden knowledge’); and Ward Richard’s “In Search of the Dread Ancestor”, Lovecraft Studies 36, 1997 (the Dexter Ward character of Curwen might have been influenced by Count Magnus in the James’s Count Magnus). These claims are possible, yet James had no Lovecraft-related entry at all in the index of the recent volume Lovecraft and Influence, let alone an essay.

A Lovecraft letter also noted James’s death in 1936, though only in passing and among a list of other names of the recently deceased.

I delved back into the BBC’s archives via the new online archive of Radio Times listings, looking for Lovecraft items on the BBC. The item below is one of their earliest. It perhaps exemplifies why some people had a bad reaction in the 1970s to what they thought was Lovecraft. Because in this case, the nation would have been listening to a 1957 Derleth story wrongly attributed to Lovecraft…

(1972)
Study on 3
The Horror Story 1: Gothic Tales
20th-century Gothic is illustrated by H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Gable Window, read by EDWARD BISHOP.

So far as I can tell “The Gable Window” was wholly by Derleth, only being very loosely based on Lovecraft via one of the brief story ideas found in the Commonplace Book.

Big glass-plate photo from the Library of Congress. Click, then click again, for the biggest version.

Some lucky bidder snagged this Lovecraft letter for $600. And the auctioneers kindly gave the world a nice clear scan, large enough to read.

The desert refered to is Dunsany’s… “There lie seven deserts beyond Bodrahahn, which is the city of the caravans end. None goeth beyond.”

Edgar Allan Poe, Part-Time Cosmologist. He came up with…

a spookily intuitive description of the Big Bang theory more than 70 years before astrophysicists came up with the idea [and] “Eureka” [also] goes on to propose that all the scattered and blown-apart atoms of the universe are now rushing together again.