An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

For the next thirteen years their relations consisted solely of correspondence. HPL got into the habit of typing long letters to Moe recounting his various travels (the essays “Observations on Several Parts of America” [1928] and “Travels in the Provinces of America” [1929] are two such items), which Moe was to read and then pass on to other colleagues. In 1927 or 1928 HPL wrote a satirical biography of Ibid, which Moe thought of submitting to the American Mercury;

< previous page page_169 next page > < previous page page_170 next page >

Page 170

but it was later decided that the piece was too specialized for a general readership, so it remained unpublished until it appeared in the O-Wash-Ta-Nong(January 1938). By this time HPL was assisting Moe extensively in the revision of his treatise on the appreciation of poetry, Doorways to Poetry,of which HPL thought very highly. One result of the work was HPL’s “Sonnet Study” (1929?), consisting of one Petrarchan and one Shakespearean sonnet. HPL also wrote several dozen sonnets, including Fungi from Yuggoth,and other poems after a long hiatus. Doorwayswas never published, and the manuscript does not seem to survive. A small pamphlet, Imagery Aids(Wauwatosa, Wis.: Kenyon Press, 1931), may be all that is left of this treatise. In late 1934 Moe asked HPL to contribute an article of his choice for an amateur magazine being produced by his students; HPL wrote an essay on traces of Roman architecture in America and sent it to Moe. It never appeared in the magazine, and HPL later believed it to be lost; but a transcript survives in AHT. HPL wrote the essay “Heritage or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms” ( Californian,Summer 1935) as an introduction to the Roman architecture piece.

Moe visited HPL for the second and final time on July 18–19, 1936, as he and his son Robert (who was working in Bridgeport, Conn.) came to Providence. HPL had been corresponding regularly with Robert since 1934. Since they had a car, they managed to visit several of the surrounding towns— Pawtuxet, Warren, and Bristol. At that time Moe and HPL participated in a final correspondence group, the Coryciani, although only two letters by HPL survive. After HPL, R.H.Barlow, and Adolphe de Castro wrote their acrostic poems on Poe on August 8, 1936, Moe himself wrote one of his own and then hectographed all four as Four Acrostic Sonnets on Edgar Allan Poe(1936). August Derleth reprinted Moe’s poem in his anthology, Poetry out of Wisconsin(1937). After HPL’s death Moe wrote the brief but poignant memoir, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Sage of Providence” ( O-Wash-TaNong,[1937]; rpt. LR).

“Moon-Bog, The.”

Short story (3,430 words); written shortly before March 10, 1921. First published in WT(June 1926); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D

Denys Barry, who comes from America to reclaim an ancestral estate in Kilderry, Ireland, decides to empty the bog on his land: “For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up.” The peasants refuse to assist him for fear of disturbing the spirits of the bog. Barry calls in outside workers and the project continues apace, even though the workers confess suffering from strange and troublesome dreams. One night the narrator, Barry’s friend, awakes and hears a piping in the distance: “wild, weird airs that made me think of some dance of fauns on distant Maenalus” (a curious nod to “The Tree”). Then he sees the laborers dancing as if under some form of hypnosis, along with “strange airy beings in white, half indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of the bog.” But the next morning the workers seem to remember nothing of the night’s events. The next night things reach a climax: the piping is heard again, and the narrator again sees the “white-clad bog-wraiths” drifting toward the deeper waters of the bog, followed by the mesmer

< previous page page_170 next page > < previous page page_171 next page >

Page 171

ised laborers. Then a shaft of moonlight appears, and “upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen daemons.” It is Denys Barry, who is spirited off and never seen again.