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

The only viable amateur organization, the NAPA, was reaching unheard-of levels of spite and vindictiveness. The locus of this new feuding was Hyman Bradofsky (b. 1906), whose Californian offered unprecedented space for lengthy prose contributions and whom Lovecraft had supported in his successful bid for the presidency of the NAPA for the 1935–36 term.

I am not entirely clear why Bradofsky created so much hostility among other members. He was evidently accused of being highhanded in various procedural matters relating to the NAPA constitution, and he himself apparently responded to criticism in a somewhat testy manner. Whether Bradofsky’s being Jewish had anything to do with it is similarly unclear; I suspect that this was a factor, although Lovecraft never acknowledges it. In any case, it is certainly to Lovecraft’s credit that he came to Bradofsky’s defence, since by all accounts many of the attacks upon him were highly unjust, capricious, and snide.

Lovecraft’s chief response was an essay written on 4 June, entitled ‘Some Current Motives and Practices’. In it Lovecraft censures Bradofsky’s opponents—or, rather, the thoroughly despicable tactics they are using against him—refutes the attacks by vindicating Bradofsky’s conduct, and in general pleads for a return to civilized standards in amateurdom. Lovecraft arranged with Barlow to mimeograph the essay, which would be sent to all NAPA members. Barlow must have distributed the item by the end of June. I cannot sense that it had any particular effect.

In early June Robert E. Howard wrote to his friend Thurston Tolbert: ‘My mother is very low. I fear she has not many days to live.’¹² He was correct: on the morning of 11 June, Hester Jane Ervin Howard fell into a coma from which her doctors said she would never emerge. Howard got into his car and shot himself in the head with a gun. He died eight hours later; his mother died the next day, leaving Howard’s aged father, Dr I. M. Howard, doubly bereaved. Robert E. Howard was thirty years old.

At a time when telephones were not as common as now, the news spread relatively slowly. Lovecraft heard of it only around 19 June, when he received a postcard written three days earlier by C. L. Moore. He got the full story a few days later from Dr Howard. Lovecraft was overwhelmed with shock and grief:

Damnation, what a loss! … I can’t understand the tragedy— for although R E H had a moody side expressed in his resentment against civilisation (the basis of our perennial and voluminous epistolary controversy), I always thought that this was a more or less impersonal sentiment … He himself seemed to me pretty well adjusted—in an environment he loved, with plenty of congenial souls … to talk and travel with, and with parents whom he obviously idolised. His mother’s pleural illness imposed a great strain upon both him and his father, yet I cannot think that this would be sufficient to drive his tough-fibred nervous system to selfdestructive extremes.¹³

In the short term Lovecraft assisted Dr Howard as best he could, by sending various items—including his letters from Howard—to a memorial collection at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas. Lovecraft’s own letters to Howard met a more unfortunate fate, and appear to have been inadvertently destroyed by Dr Howard some time in the late 1940s. But very large—perhaps nearly complete—extracts of them had been transcribed under August Derleth’s direction; a relatively small proportion of them was actually published in the Selected Letters. A joint Lovecraft–Howard correspondence would be very illuminating.

Almost immediately Lovecraft wrote a poignant memoir and brief critical appraisal, ‘In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard’, that appeared in Fantasy Magazine for September 1936. R. H. Barlow wrote a touching sonnet, ‘R. E. H.’, that formed his first and last appearance in Weird Tales (October 1936). That issue contained a wealth of tributes to Howard in the letters column, one of which was of course from Lovecraft.

Various outings in spring and summer and visits by a number of friends old and new during the latter half of the year made 1936 not quite the disaster it had been up to then. The heat of summer was anomalously late in arriving, but the week of 8 July finally brought temperatures in the 90s and saved Lovecraft ‘from some sort of general breakdown’.¹⁴ On 11 July he took a boat trip to Newport, doing considerable writing on the lofty cliffs overlooking the ocean.