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

A funeral service was held on 18 March at the chapel of Horace B. Knowles’s Sons at 187 Benefit Street. Only a small number of friends and relatives were there—Annie, Harry Brobst and his wife, and Annie’s friend Edna Lewis. These individuals then attended the actual burial at Swan Point Cemetery, where they were joined by Edward H. Cole and his wife and Ethel Phillips Morrish, Lovecraft’s second cousin. The Eddys had planned to come but arrived after the gravesite ceremony was over. Lovecraft’s name was inscribed only on the central shaft of the Phillips plot, below those of his father and mother: ‘their son / HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT / 1890– 1937’. It took forty years for Lovecraft and his mother to receive separate headstones.

The outpouring of grief from both the weird fiction and the amateur press was instantaneous and overwhelming. The June 1937 issue of Weird Tales contained only the first wave of letters from colleagues and fans alike. It is remarkable how perfect strangers such as Robert Leonard Russell, who knew Lovecraft only from his work, could write: ‘I feel, as will many other readers of Weird Tales, that I have lost a real friend.’ Many real friends—from Hazel Heald to Robert Bloch to Kenneth Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith to Henry Kuttner—also wrote moving letters. Jacques Bergier, in the September 1937 issue, concluded: ‘The passing of Lovecraft seems to me to mark an end of an epoch in the history of American imaginative fiction.’

One of the most remarkable phenomena about Lovecraft’s passing is the number of poetic tributes it inspired. Henry Kuttner, Richard Ely Morse, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, Emil Petaja, and many others wrote fine elegies; but the best without question is Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘To Howard Phillips Lovecraft’, written on 31 March 1937 and published in Weird Tales for July. Its conclusion can only be quoted:

And yet thou art not gone

Nor given wholly unto dream and dust:

For, even upon

This lonely western hill of Averoigne

Thy flesh had never visited,

I meet some wise and sentient wraith of thee,

Some undeparting presence, gracious and august. More luminous for thee the vernal grass,

More magically dark the Druid stone

And in the mind thou art for ever shown

As in a wizard glass;

And from the spirit’s page thy runes can never pass.¹

It is beyond the scope of this volume to trace the subsequent history of the appreciation of Lovecraft and his work; in any event, this information has now been more exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. A few points, however, may be touched upon here, in order to provide some hints of how an obscure writer who died with no book issued by a major publisher has now achieved worldwide renown as the leading author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century.

An unsung hero in this transformation is R. H. Barlow, who was named Lovecraft’s literary executor in a document written by Lovecraft toward the end of his life, ‘Instructions in Case of Decease’. Barlow came to Providence shortly after Lovecraft’s death and eventually donated most of his manuscripts and some printed matter to the John Hay Library of Brown University. This act allowed for the eventual correction of Lovecraft’s texts based upon consultation of manuscript and early printed sources.

August Derleth and Donald Wandrei teamed up to establish Arkham House, a firm initially designed solely to preserve Lovecraft’s work in hard covers. Arkham House quickly broadened its range to publish the work of other weird and science fiction writers, and today it retains its place as a leading small press publisher in this realm. Largely through Wandrei’s influence, Arkham House issued five substantial volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters (1965– 76), thereby revealing Lovecraft’s greatness as an epistolarian and the complex philosophical thought that underlay his creative work.

Paperback editions of Lovecraft emerged as early as the 1940s, and Ballantine Books began its fruitful paperback publications in the late 1960s, continuing to the present day. Ballantine, however, has not consistently used the corrected texts of Lovecraft’s work published by Arkham House under my editorship in four volumes (1984–89); but Penguin has begun issuing these corrected texts in annotated editions beginning with The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999).