Strange Tales seemed at first to be a serious rival to Weird Tales: it paid 2 cents per word on acceptance, and it formed a significant market for such writers as Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, August Derleth, and Hugh B. Cave who could mould their styles to suit Bates’s requirements. Wright must have been greatly alarmed at the emergence of this magazine, for it meant that some of his best writers would submit their tales to it first and send material only to Weird Tales that had been rejected by Strange Tales. But the magazine lasted for only seven issues, folding in January 1933.
The whole issue of Lovecraft’s sensitivity to rejection, or to bad opinions of his work generally, deserves consideration. Recall the In Defence of Dagon essays of 1921: ‘There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.’ Admittedly, this statement was made well before his work had become more widely available in the pulp magazines, but ‘self-expression’ remained the cornerstone of his aesthetic to the end. Lovecraft was aware of the apparent contradiction, for the issue came up in discussions with Derleth. Lovecraft had already told Derleth that ‘I have a sort of dislike of sending in anything which has been once rejected’,17 an attitude that Derleth—who in his hard-boiled way sometimes submitted a single story to Weird Tales up to a dozen times before it was finally accepted by Wright—must have found nearly incomprehensible. Now, in early 1932, Lovecraft expanded on the idea:
I can see why you consider my anti-rejection policy a stubbornly foolish & needlessly short-sighted one, & am not prepared to offer any defence other than the mere fact that repeated rejections do work in a certain way on my psychology—rationally or not—& that their effect is to cause in me a certain literary lockjaw which absolutely prevents further fictional composition despite my most arduous efforts. I would be the last to say that they ought to produce such an effect, or that they would—even in a slight degree—upon a psychology of 100% toughness & balance. But unfortunately my nervous equilibrium has always been a rather uncertain quantity, & it is now in one of its more ragged phases.18
Lovecraft had always been modest about his own achievements— excessively so, as we look back upon it; now, rejections by Wright, Bates, and Putnam’s, and the cool reactions of colleagues to whom he had sent stories in manuscript, nearly shattered whatever confidence he may have had in his own work. He spent the few remaining years of his life trying to regain that confidence, and he never seems to have done so except in fleeting moments. We can see the effect of this state of mind in his very next story.
‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ was written in November and December of 1931. Lovecraft reports that his revisiting of the decaying seaport of Newburyport, Massachusetts (which he had first seen in 1923), led him to conduct a sort of ‘laboratory experimentation’19 to see which style or manner was best suited to the theme. Four drafts (whether complete or not is not clear) were written and discarded, and finally Lovecraft simply wrote the story in his accustomed manner, producing a twenty-five-thousand-word novelette whose extraordinary richness of atmosphere scarcely betrays the almost agonizing difficulty he experienced in its writing.
Once again, the plot of the story is relatively elementary. The narrator, Robert Olmstead (never mentioned by name in the story, but identified in the surviving notes), in the midst of a genealogical and antiquarian tour, comes to the decaying New England seaport of Innsmouth by accident, finding an undercurrent of the sinister there. Encountering an aged denizen, Zadok Allen, he learns the incredible history of the town: in the middle nineteenth century Obed Marsh had come upon bizarre fish-frog hybrids in the Pacific who promised him great riches if they could be allowed to mate with the residents of Innsmouth. The resulting miscegenation produces hideous physical and psychological aberrations. Later, Olmstead’s snooping is detected and he is forced to flee precipitately from the hotel in which he is lodged. He escapes, but some time later he discovers that he himself is related to the Innsmouth people: he finds himself developing the ‘Innsmouth look’. He makes the fateful decision not to kill himself but to return to Innsmouth and join his hybrid relations.
‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ is Lovecraft’s greatest tale of degeneration; but the causes for that degeneration here are quite different from what we have seen earlier. This is clearly a cautionary tale on the ill effects of miscegenation, or the sexual union of different races, and as such may well be considered a vast expansion and subtilization of the plot of ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’ (1920). It is, accordingly, difficult to deny a suggestion of racism running all through the story. All through the tale the narrator expresses—and expects us to share— his revulsion at the physical grotesqueness of the Innsmouth people, just as in his own life Lovecraft frequently comments on the ‘peculiar’ appearance of all races but his own.
An examination of the literary influences upon the story can clarify how Lovecraft has vastly enriched a conception that was by no means his own invention. The use of hybrid fishlike entities was derived from at least two prior works for which Lovecraft always retained a fondness: Irvin S. Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’ (which Lovecraft read in the Cavalier in 1913 and praised in a letter to the editor) and Robert W. Chambers’s ‘The Harbor-Master’, a short story later included as the first five chapters of the episodic novel In Search of the Unknown (1904). But in both these stories we are dealing with a single case of hybridism, not an entire community or civilization. This latter conception is at work in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (in John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908)), where a traveller coming to a small town in France discovers that the townspeople all turn into cats at night. This story, therefore, is probably a more dominant literary influence than those by Cobb or Chambers, in spite of the latter’s superficial similarity in motif.
The narrator, Olmstead, proves to be one of Lovecraft’s most carefully etched characters. The many mundane details that lend substance and reality to his personality are in large part derived from Lovecraft’s own temperament and, especially, from his habits as a frugal antiquarian traveller. Olmstead always ‘seek[s] the cheapest possible route’, and this is usually—for Olmstead as for Lovecraft—by bus. His reading up on Innsmouth in the library, and his systematic exploration of the town, parallel Lovecraft’s own thorough researches into the history and topography of the places he wished to visit and his frequent trips to libraries, chambers of commerce, and elsewhere for maps, guidebooks, and historical background.
Lovecraft was, incredibly, profoundly dissatisfied with the story. A week after finishing it on 3 December, he wrote lugubriously to Derleth: ‘I don’t think the experimenting came to very much. The result, 68 pages long, has all the defects I deplore—especially in point of style, where hackneyed phrases & rhythms have crept in despite all precautions … No—I don’t intend to offer “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for publication, for it would stand no chance of acceptance.’20 That Lovecraft meant what he said is revealed by his extraordinarily snide response to Farnsworth Wright’s request to send in new work:
Sorry to say I haven’t anything new which you would be likely to care for. Lately my tales have run to studies in geographical atmosphere requiring greater length than the popular editorial fancy relishes—my new ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’ is three typed pages longer than ‘Whisperer in Darkness’, and conventional magazine standards would undoubtedly rate it ‘intolerably slow’, ‘not conveniently divisible’, or something of the sort.21 Lovecraft is consciously throwing back into Wright’s face the remarks Wright had made about At the Mountains of Madness.