A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Lovecraft submitted the story to Strange Tales, but it was rejected because, incredibly enough, another just-accepted tale had already utilized this insect-writing idea! I do not know what immortal masterwork of literature beat Lovecraft to the punch; but the note about the tale’s submission to Strange Tales is of some interest. I think it quite plausible that the earlier Heald tales were written with that better-paying market in view. There is no evidence that the other tales were submitted there; they could well have been, as all but one of them were written prior to the magazine’s folding at the end of the year. Lovecraft submitted ‘Winged Death’ to Farnsworth Wright, but the latter must have delayed in accepting the tale, for it was published only in Weird Tales

for March 1934.

I fervently hope that ‘The Horror in the Museum’ is a conscious parody—in this case, a parody of Lovecraft’s own myth-cycle. Here we are introduced to a new ‘god’, Rhan-Tegoth, which the curator of a waxworks museum, George Rogers, claims to have found on an expedition to Alaska. Indeed, the story could be read as a parody of both ‘Pickman’s Model’ and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Consider the absurdity of the scenario: it is not a mere representation of a god that is secreted in a crate in the cellar of the museum, but the actual god itself!

The story is mentioned in a letter of October 1932: ‘My latest revisory job comes so near to pure fictional ghost-writing that I am up against all the plot-devising problems of my bygone auctorial days.’¹⁵ This story seems to have been readily accepted by Wright, for it appeared in Weird Tales

for July 1933, in the same issue as ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’.

‘Out of the Æons’—which Lovecraft was working on in early August 1933—is perhaps the only genuinely successful Heald revision, although it too contains elements of extravagance that border on self-parody. This tale concerns an ancient mummy housed in a museum and an accompanying scroll in indecipherable characters. The scroll eventually yields up its secrets, telling the tale of a man who encounters the god Ghatanothoa 175,000 years ago; of course, the mummy is the man in question, whose body is petrified but whose brain still lives.

It is manifestly obvious that Heald’s sole contribution to this tale is the core notion of a mummy with a living brain; all the rest is Lovecraft’s. He admits as much when he says: ‘Regarding the scheduled “Out of the Æons”—I should say I did have a hand in it … I wrote

the damn thing!’¹⁶ The tale is substantial, but it too is written with a certain flamboyance and lack of polish that bar it from taking its place with Lovecraft’s own best tales. It appeared in Weird Tales for April 1935.

‘The Horror in the Burying-Ground’, on the other hand, returns us to earth very emphatically. Here we are in some unspecified rustic locale where the village undertaker, Henry Thorndike, has devised a peculiar chemical compound that, when injected into a living person, will simulate death even though the person is alive and conscious. Lovecraft never mentions this revision in any correspondence I have seen, so I do not know when it was written; it did not appear in Weird Tales

until May 1937.

Lovecraft no doubt was paid regularly by Heald, even though it took years for her stories to be published; at least, he makes no complaints about dilatory payments as he did for Zealia Bishop. Although Lovecraft is still speaking of her in the present tense as a revision client as late as the summer of 1935, it does not seem as if he did much work for her after the summer of 1933.

Another revision or collaboration in which Lovecraft became unwillingly involved in the fall of 1932 was ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’. E. Hoffmann Price had become so enamoured of ‘The Silver Key’ that, during Lovecraft’s visit with him in New Orleans in June, he ‘suggested a sequel to account for Randolph Carter’s doings after his disappearance’.¹⁷ There is no recorded response on Lovecraft’s part to this suggestion, although it cannot have been very enthusiastic. On his own initiative, therefore, Price wrote his own sequel, ‘The Lord of Illusion’—an appallingly awful piece of work that unwittingly parodies the story of which it claims to be an homage. And yet, Lovecraft felt some sort of obligation to try to make something of it. He rightly concluded: ‘Hell, but it’ll be a tough nut to crack!’¹⁸ The rush of other work prevented him from working on it for months, and he did not finish the job until early April.