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

Lovecraft received at least a partial draft of the text by midFebruary, and came to realize that ‘the job is somewhat ampler than I had expected—involving the furnishing of original elements as well as the revision of a specific text’; but—in spite of his aunt’s illness at this time—he was willing to undertake the task if he received clear instructions on how much expansion he should do. He breezily adds, ‘Rates can be discussed later—I fancy that any figure you would quote (with current precedent in mind) would be satisfactory.’¹⁵ Later, after all the work was finished, he felt that Renshaw would be a cheapskate if she paid him anything less than $200. In the end, he received only $100, but this seems to have been his own fault, since his own final price was $150, which he reduced to $100 because of his tardiness.

Lovecraft initially tried to meet Renshaw’s deadline of 1 May, but with all his troubles of the spring and summer this became quite unfeasible. Faced with a new deadline of 1 October, Lovecraft worked for sixty hours without a break in mid-September and somehow managed to get the thing done.

Much of both Renshaw’s and Lovecraft’s work on Well Bred Speech survives in manuscript, and allows us to gauge precisely how much each contributed to most parts of the text. The result is, however, a mediocre work, even with Lovecraft’s additions. He has added most significantly to chapters I (The Background of Speech), III (Words Frequently Mispronounced), VI (Bromides Must Go [on clichés]), and X (What Shall I Read?). But much of this material was excised in the published version. The final chapter (published posthumously as ‘Suggestions for a Reading Guide’) has been gutted, in particular the last section—covering recent books on the sciences. The chapter as a whole (as Lovecraft wrote it) is a fairly sound beginner’s guide to both literature and scholarship up to his day.

In his final year Lovecraft continued to attract new—and mostly young—correspondents who, unaware of his increasing ill health, were thrilled to receive actual letters from this giant of weird fiction. Most of them continued to reach him through Weird Tales, but several got in touch through the increasingly complex network of the science fiction and fantasy fan circuit.

Among the most promising of these was Henry Kuttner (1915– 58). A friend of Robert Bloch’s, he had published only a single poem in Weird Tales before writing to Lovecraft early in 1936. Several colleagues thought that Lovecraft had either ghostwritten or extensively revised Kuttner’s ‘The Graveyard Rats’ (Weird Tales, March 1936), but this story had already been accepted before Lovecraft heard from Kuttner. Kuttner had, however, by this time already written a tale whose first draft—rejected by Weird Tales— may have been consciously Lovecraftian. In his second letter to Kuttner, on 12 March, Lovecraft offers a lengthy criticism of ‘The Salem Horror’; and it is clear that Kuttner made major changes in the story based upon these comments. Kuttner’s geographical, historical, and architectural knowledge of Salem was all wrong, and Lovecraft set about correcting it; his letter is full of drawings of representative Salem houses, a map of the city, and even sketches of various types of headstones found in the older cemeteries. Other parts of Lovecraft’s letter suggest that significant overhauling to the basic plot and incidents of the story was also done.

One small detail in Lovecraft’s letters to Kuttner proved to be of great moment in the subsequent history of weird, fantasy, and science fiction. In May he casually asked Kuttner to pass on some photographs of Salem and Marblehead to C. L. Moore once Kuttner himself had finished with them; and it was in this way that Moore and Kuttner became acquainted. Marrying in 1940, the couple jointly wrote some of the most distinguished work of the ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction.