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

Returning home, Lovecraft found the legion of cats called the Kappa Alpha Tau flourishing in customary state. But tragedy was in the offing. A cat Lovecraft had named Sam Perkins, born only in June of 1934, was found dead in the shrubbery on 10 September. Lovecraft immediately wrote a touching elegy, now titled ‘Little Sam Perkins’.

R. H. Barlow and Robert Bloch were not the only young boys who showered Lovecraft with their halting if promising works of fiction; another one who did so, almost from the beginning of his association with Lovecraft, was Duane W. Rimel (1915–96), a young fan and budding writer from Idaho. In May 1934, when he was in Florida, Lovecraft examined a story by Rimel entitled ‘The Tree on the Hill’, on which he ‘tried a bit of strengthening toward the end’.¹⁴ For some reason the story did not see print until it appeared in the fan magazine Polaris

for September 1940. It becomes clear that Lovecraft supplied the entire third section of the story, as well as a citation from a mythical volume—the Chronicle of Nath by Rudolf Yergler—in the second.

Rimel falls into one of two classes of revision clients for whom Lovecraft was willing to work for no charge: ‘genuine beginners who need a start’ and ‘certain old or handicapped people

who are pathetically in need of some cheering influence—these, even when I recognise them as incapable of improvement’.¹⁵ Even in his professional revision work, Lovecraft adopted a weird sort of altruism:

When I revised the kindergarten pap and idiot-asylum slop of other fishes, I was, in a microscopic way, putting just the faintest bit of order, coherence, direction, and comprehensible language into something whose Neanderthaloid ineptitude was already mapped out. My work, ignominious as it was, was at least in the right direction—making that which was utterly amorphous and drooling just the minutest trifle less close to the protozoan stage.¹⁶

More free work was being dumped on Lovecraft’s shoulders at this time, especially for the NAPA. Lovecraft ended up writing at least part of the Bureau of Critics columns in the National Amateur

for the following issues: December 1931; December 1932; March, June, and December 1933; June, September, and December 1934; March, June, and December 1935. These articles are in essence similar to the old ‘Department of Public Criticism’ columns for the United Amateur of 1914–19, but much briefer and incorporating the quite radical shifts in Lovecraft’s aesthetic sensibility that had clearly occurred in the interval.

Around July Lovecraft wrote an essay, ‘Homes and Shrines of Poe’, for Hyman Bradofsky’s Californian. Bradofsky (b. 1906) quickly became one of the significant figures in the NAPA during the mid1930s; for although he was himself an undistinguished writer, his Californian

offered unprecedented space for writers of articles and prose fiction. During the next several years he continually asked Lovecraft for pieces of substantial length, and in this case Bradofsky wanted a two-thousand-word article for the winter 1934 issue. Lovecraft decided to write an account of all known Poe residences in America, but the resulting article is a little too mechanical and condensed to be effective.

Another essay that appeared in Bradofsky’s Californian (in the winter 1935 issue) is ‘Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction’; but this piece had been composed around July 1934 for one of William L. Crawford’s magazines although, like ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’, it never appeared there. In this essay Lovecraft copies whole passages from ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, and in the end does not see a very promising future for science fiction unless certain significant changes in outlook are made by its writers:

Insincerity, conventionality, triteness, artificiality, false emotion, and puerile extravagance reign triumphant throughout this overcrowded genre, so that none but its rarest products can possibly claim a truly adult status. And the spectacle of such persistent hollowness has led many to ask whether, indeed, any fabric of real literature can ever grow out of the given subject-matter.

Although his low opinion of the field is clearly derived from a sporadic reading of the science fiction pulps, Lovecraft does not think that ‘the idea of space-travel and other worlds is inherently unsuited to literary use’; such ideas must, however, be presented with much more seriousness and emotional preparation than had been done heretofore.