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

One other idea Barlow had evolved at about this time was a volume of C. L. Moore’s best stories. Catherine Lucile Moore (1911–87) first appeared in Weird Tales in November 1933 with the striking fantasy ‘Shambleau’. She went on to publish several more stories in Weird Tales that evocatively combined exotic romance, even sexuality, with otherworldly fantasy. Barlow had Lovecraft get in touch with Moore about the proposed volume, and a very substantive correspondence ensued, Lovecraft continually beseeching Moore not to kowtow to pulp standards and to preserve her aesthetic independence, even if it meant economic losses in the short term. Had he lived longer, he would have taken heart in her subsequent career, for she became one of the most distinctive and respected voices in the next generation of science fiction and fantasy writers.

But perhaps the most important function that Barlow performed was not printing but typing. By mid-July Derleth had still given no report on the autograph manuscript of ‘The Shadow out of Time’; and, as Barlow was enthusiastic about seeing it, Lovecraft asked Derleth to send it down to Florida. By early August Lovecraft was expressing a certain irritation that Barlow was apparently not making much of an effort to read the thing; but very shortly he was forced, delightedly, to eat his words. For in fact Barlow was surreptitiously preparing a typescript of the story.

Lovecraft was completely bowled over by Barlow’s diligence and generosity in this undertaking. Although he generously wrote that Barlow’s transcript was ‘accurately typed’,³ he later admitted that there were a number of errors in it. Nevertheless, Lovecraft sent the typescript on the usual round of readers.

Lovecraft finally moved along on 18 August, spending some time in St Augustine, Charleston, Richmond, and other points before reaching New York on the 2nd. He finally reached home on 14 September.

One thing Lovecraft did in Charleston and Richmond was finish what he called a ‘composite story’—a round-robin weird tale entitled ‘The Challenge from Beyond’. This was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, who wanted two round-robin stories of the same title, one weird and one science fiction, for the third anniversary issue of Fantasy Magazine (September 1935). The weird item was written successively by C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long. Lovecraft’s segment is the only one that actually advances the plot; and in so doing he has cannibalized his own (as yet unpublished) ‘Shadow out of Time’ by introducing the notion of mind-exchange between human beings and some alien entities. The resulting tale is merely a literary curiosity, although the science fiction version is still worse.

Another story on which Lovecraft worked around this time— Duane W. Rimel’s ‘The Disinterment’—is, however, a very different proposition. This tale—very similar in atmosphere to some of Lovecraft’s early macabre stories, especially ‘The Outsider’—is to my mind either wholly written by Lovecraft or a remarkably faithful imitation of Lovecraft’s style and manner. Rimel has emphatically maintained that the story is largely his, Lovecraft acting only as a polisher; and correspondence between the two men— especially Lovecraft’s enthusiastic initial response to the story— seems to support this claim. In a letter to Rimel of 28 September 1935, Lovecraft does speak of making ‘slight verbal changes’ in the manuscript; but in the absence of the manuscript or typescript, it is difficult to know what this means. In the story Rimel (or Lovecraft) has taken the hackneyed ‘mad doctor’ trope and shorn it of its triteness and absurdity by a very restrained portrayal, one that suggests far more than it states. ‘The Disinterment’ was published in Weird Tales for January 1937.

In mid-October 1935 Lovecraft broke his self-imposed rule against collaboration by revising a story by William Lumley entitled ‘The Diary of Alonzo Typer’. Lumley had produced a hopelessly illiterate draft of the tale—set in an abandoned house near Lumley’s hometown of Buffalo—and sent it to Lovecraft, who, feeling sorry for the old codger, rewrote the story wholesale while still preserving as much of Lumley’s conceptions and even his prose as possible. The result, however, is still a dismal failure. Lovecraft feels the need to supply a suitably cataclysmic ending, so he depicts the narrator coming upon the locus of horror in the basement of the house, only to be seized by a monster at the end while heroically (or absurdly) writing in his diary: ‘Too late—cannot help self— black paws materialise—am dragged away toward the cellar.’ Undeterred, Lumley enterprisingly sent the story to Farnsworth Wright, who accepted it in early December for $70.00; Lovecraft magnanimously let Lumley keep the entire sum. The story was not published in Weird Tales, however, until February 1938.