David V. Bush is a short, plump fellow of about forty-five, with a bland face, bald head, and very fair taste in attire. He is actually an immensely good sort—kindly, affable, winning, and smiling. Probably he has to be in order to induce people to let him live after they have read his verse. His keynote is a hearty good-fellowship, and I almost think he is rather sincere about it. His ‘success-in-life’ stuff is no joke so far as finance is concerned; for with his present ‘psychological’ mountebank outfit, his Theobaldised books of doggerel, and his newly-founded magazine, Mind Power Plus, he actually shovels in the coin at a very gratifying rate. Otherwise he’d never have a suite at the Copley-Plaza.11
The letter goes on at some length, touching on Bush’s rural upbringing, his wife, his odd jobs (trick cyclist in a circus, ‘ham’ actor, clergyman), and his ‘new gospel of dynamic pychology’ (‘which has all the virtues of “New Thought” plus a saving vagueness which prevents its absurdity from being exposed before the credulous public amongst whom his missionary labours lie’).
Lovecraft could not afford to scorn David Van Bush: he was a regular customer, and he paid promptly and well. In 1917 Lovecraft was charging a rate of $1.00 for sixty lines of verse; by 1920 Bush had agreed to pay $1.00 for forty-eight lines; and by September 1922 Bush was paying him $1.00 for every eight lines of verse revised. This is a pretty remarkable rate, given that the best Lovecraft could do with his own professionally published poetry was to get 25 cents per line for verse in Weird Tales. Lovecraft goes on to note: ‘I told him that only at this high price could I guarantee my own personal service—he doesn’t like Morton’s work so well, and asked me to do as much as possible myself.’12 What this clearly means is that Lovecraft and Morton have teamed up to do revisory work. How formal was such an arrangement? It is difficult to tell, but consider the following ad that appeared in the amateur journal L’Alouette (edited by Charles A. A. Parker) in September 1924:
THE CRAFTON SERVICE BUREAU offers the expert assistance of a group of highly trained and experienced specialists in the revision and typing of manuscripts of all kinds, prose or verse, at reasonable rates.
THE BUREAU is also equipped with unusual facilities for all forms of research, having international affiliations of great importance. Its agents are in a position to prepare special articles on any topic at reasonable notice. It has a corps of able translators, and can offer the best of service in this department, covering all of the important classical and modern languages, including the international language Esperanto. It is also ready to prepare and supervise courses of home study or reading in any field, and to furnish expert confidential advice with reference to personal problems. APPLICATIONS and INQUIRIES may be addressed to either of the heads of THE BUREAU:
Howard P. Lovecraft, 598 ANGELL STREET,
James F. Morton, Jr., 211 WEST 138TH STREET,
PROVIDENCE, R.I. NEW YORK, N.Y.
Lovecraft (or Morton) has certainly caught the spirit of advertising! I have no idea how much business this wildly exaggerated ad— suggesting that Lovecraft and Morton were ‘heads’ of a non-existent bureau of editors, revisors, translators, and solvers of ‘personal problems’—brought in; Bush seemed to remain Lovecraft’s chief revision client until well into the 1920s. It is likely that many of the ‘services’ noted above were provided by Morton. Even those ‘personal problems’ were probably under Morton’s jurisdiction, since among his published works was at least one collaborative treatise on sex morality. It is, in any case, difficult to imagine Lovecraft at this stage dealing with anyone’s personal problems but his own.
In the midst of all this activity, both amateur and professional, Lovecraft finally embarked upon a career of professional fiction publication; inevitably, the opportunity was afforded him by amateur connections. Around September of 1921 George Julian Houtain (who had married the amateur writer E. Dorothy MacLoughlin) conceived the idea of launching a peppy and slightly off-colour humour magazine named Home Brew. As contributors he called upon his various amateur colleagues, and managed to secure pieces from James F. Morton, Rheinhart Kleiner, and others for early issues. For some strange reason he wished Lovecraft to write a serial horror story, even though such a thing would seemingly clash with the general humorous tone of the magazine. He offered Lovecraft the princely sum of $5.00 per two-thousand-word instalment (a quarter of a cent per word). ‘You can’t make them too morbid’, Lovecraft reports Houtain telling him.13 The first issue of the magazine duly appeared in February 1922, featuring the first instalment of ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, which Houtain ran under the title ‘Grewsome Tales’ (‘grewsome’ was a legitimate spelling variant of ‘gruesome’ at this time).
Lovecraft takes a certain masochistic pleasure in complaining at being reduced to the level of a Grub Street hack. Over and over for the next several months he emits whines like the following:
Now this is manifestly inartistic. To write to order, to drag one figure through a series of artificial episodes, involves the violation of all that spontaneity and singleness of impression which should characterise short story work. It reduces the unhappy author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and unimaginative hack-work. Nevertheless, when one needs the money one is not scrupulous—so I have accepted the job!14 One gets the impression that Lovecraft actually got a kick out of this literary slumming.
In spite of the fact that the six episodes of ‘Herbert West— Reanimator’ were clearly written over a long period—October 1921 to mid-June 1922—the tale does maintain unity of a sort, and Lovecraft seems to have conceived it as a single entity from the beginning: in the final episode all the imperfectly resurrected corpses raised by Herbert West come back to dispatch him hideously. In other ways the story builds up a certain cumulative power and suspense, and it is by no means Lovecraft’s poorest fictional work. The structural weaknesses necessitated by the serial format are obvious and unavoidable: the need to recapitulate the plot of the foregoing episodes at the beginning of each new one, and the need for a horrific climax at the end of each episode.
No one would deem ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ a masterpiece of subtlety, but it is rather engaging in its lurid way. It is also my belief that the story, while not starting out as a parody, became one as time went on. In other words, Lovecraft initially attempted to write a more or less serious, if quite ‘grewsome’, supernatural tale but, as he perceived the increasing absurdity of the enterprise, abandoned the attempt and turned the story into what it in fact was all along, a self-parody.
The question of influence might be worth studying briefly. It has casually been taken for granted that the obvious influence upon the story is Frankenstein; but I wonder whether this is the case. The method of West’s reanimation of the dead (whole bodies that have died only recently) is very different from that of Victor Frankenstein (the assembling of a huge composite body from disparate parts of bodies), and only the most general influence can perhaps be detected. The core of the story is so elementary a weird conception that no literary source need be postulated.
It has frequently been believed—based upon Lovecraft’s remark in June 1922 that ‘the pay was a myth after the second cheque’15— that Lovecraft was never fully paid for the serial; but a letter to Samuel Loveman in November 1922 reports that Houtain has ‘paid up his past debts’ and even advanced Lovecraft $10 for the first two segments of ‘The Lurking Fear’.16