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

Lovecraft may have been in a generous mood at this time because of some remarkable financial developments of his own. Probably during his stay in New York in early September, Julius Schwartz had come to a gathering of the weird fiction gang at Donald Wandrei’s apartment. Schwartz, who was attempting to establish himself as an agent in the weird and science fiction fields, had been in touch with F. Orlin Tremaine, editor of Astounding, who wished to broaden the scope of the magazine to include some weird or weird/science material. Schwartz asked Lovecraft whether he had any tales that might fit into this purview, and Lovecraft replied that At the Mountains of Madness had been rejected by Wright and had not been submitted elsewhere. Schwartz eventually took the story to Tremaine, probably in late October. Here is his account of what occurred:

The next time I went up to Tremaine, I said, roughly, ‘I have in my hands a 35,000 word story by H. P. Lovecraft.’ So he smiled and said roughly to the equivalent, ‘You’ll get a check on Friday.’ Or ‘It’s sold!’ … Now I’m fairly convinced that Tremaine never read the story. Or if he tried to, he gave up.⁴

What this shows is that Lovecraft was by this time sufficiently well known in the weird/science fiction pulp field that Tremaine did not even need to read the story to accept it; Lovecraft’s name on a major work—whose length would require it to be serialized over several issues—was felt to be a sufficient drawing card. Tremaine was true to his word: he paid Schwartz $350.00; after keeping his $35.00 agent’s fee, Schwartz sent the rest to Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was of course pleased at this turn of events, but in less than a week he would have reason to be still more pleased. In early November he learned that Donald Wandrei had submitted ‘The Shadow out of Time’—which presumably had found its way to him on Lovecraft’s circulation list—to Tremaine, and that story was also accepted, for $280.00. In all likelihood Tremaine scarcely read this tale either.

The financial boon for Lovecraft was certainly marked: he puts it in graphic terms when he writes, ‘I was never closer to the breadline than this year.’⁵ Aside from $105 for ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ and $32.50 from the London agency Curtis Brown for a proposed reprinting of ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ that never came to pass, Lovecraft had had no sales of original fiction in 1934 or 1935. We shall shortly see that even these two welcome cheques from Street & Smith could scarcely save Lovecraft and Annie from severe economies in the coming spring.

Lovecraft’s jubilation at the Astounding sales would later turn sour when he saw the actual stories in print; but that was months in the future. Just as a rejection—or even an unfavourable report from an associate—would plunge Lovecraft into depression and self-doubt about his abilities as a writer, so this double acceptance directly stimulated him into renewed composition. On 5–9 November he reeled off a new tale, ‘The Haunter of the Dark’.

This last original story by Lovecraft came about almost as a whim. Robert Bloch had written a story, ‘The Shambler from the Stars’, in the spring of 1935, in which a character—never named, but clearly meant to be Lovecraft—is killed off. Lovecraft was taken with the story, and, when it was published in Weird Tales (September 1935), a reader, B. M. Reynolds, praised it and had a suggestion to make: ‘Contrary to previous criticism, Robert Bloch deserves plenty of praise for The Shambler from the Stars. Now why doesn’t Mr. Lovecraft return the compliment, and dedicate a story to the author?’⁶ Lovecraft took up the offer, and his story tells of one Robert Blake who ends up a glassy-eyed corpse staring out his study window.

But the flippancy of the genesis of ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ should not deceive us; it is one of Lovecraft’s more substantial tales. It tells of Robert Blake, a young writer of weird fiction, who comes to Providence for a period of writing, but who becomes fascinated with an abandoned church in the Italian district known as Federal Hill. Entering the place, Blake finds a curious object—a metal box containing a curious gem or mineral—as well as the decaying skeleton of an old newspaper reporter whose notes Blake reads. These notes speak of the ill-regarded Starry Wisdom church, and a ‘Shining Trapezohedron’ and a ‘Haunter of the Dark’ that cannot exist in light. Blake concludes that the object on the pillar is the Shining Trapezohedron. Suddenly terrified, he closes the lid of the object and flees the place. This action unwittingly releases a monster confined in the belfry of the church; and this creature—an avatar of Nyarlathotep—escapes fleetingly from its confinement during a blackout, but perishes just at the moment when it fuses its mind with that of Blake, who is staring at it out of his window. Blake dies also.