But if Lovecraft himself refused to submit ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ to Weird Tales, Derleth was not so reticent. Without Lovecraft’s permission or knowledge, he sent to Wright a carbon of the story in early 1933; but Wright’s verdict was perhaps to be expected: ‘I have read Lovecraft’s story, THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, and must confess that it fascinates me. But I don’t know just what I can do with it. It is hard to break a story of this kind into two parts, and it is too long to run complete in one part.’22 Lovecraft must have eventually found out about this surreptitious submission, for by 1934 he is speaking of its rejection by Wright. Lovecraft himself, it should be pointed out, submitted only one story to Wright in the five and a half years following the rejection of At the Mountains of Madness.
In the summer of 1930, Lovecraft came in touch with one of the most distinctive figures in the pulp fiction of his time: Robert Ervin Howard (1906–36). Howard is a writer about whom it is difficult to be impartial. Like Lovecraft, he has attracted a fanatical cadre of supporters who both claim significant literary status for at least some of his work and take great offence at those who do not acknowledge its merits. I fear, however, that after repeated readings of his fiction I fail to be impressed with very much of it. The bulk of Howard’s fiction is subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature.
Howard himself is in many ways more interesting than his stories. Born in the small town of Peaster, Texas, about twenty miles west of Fort Worth, he spent the bulk of his short life in Cross Plains. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of this ‘post oaks’ region of central Texas, and his father, Dr I. M. Howard, was one of the pioneer physicians in the area. Howard was more hampered by his lack of formal education than Lovecraft—he briefly attended Howard Payne College in Brownwood, but only to take bookkeeping courses—because of the lack of libraries in his town; his learning was, accordingly, very uneven, and he was quick to take strong and dogmatic opinions on subjects about which he knew little.
As an adolescent Howard was introverted and bookish; as a result, he was bullied by his peers, and to protect himself he undertook a vigorous course of body-building that made him, as an adult of five feet eleven inches and 200 pounds, a formidable physical specimen. He took to writing early, however, and it became his only career aside from the odd jobs at which he occasionally worked. A taste for adventure, fantasy, and horror—he was an ardent devotee of Jack London—and a talent for writing allowed him to break into Weird Tales in July 1925 with ‘Spear and Fang’. Although Howard later published in a wide variety of other pulp magazines, from Cowboy Stories to Argosy, Weird Tales remained his chief market and published his most representative work.
That work runs the gamut from westerns to sports stories to ‘Orientales’ to weird fiction. Many of his tales fall into loose cycles revolving around recurring characters, including Bran Mak Morn (a Celtic chieftain in Roman Britain), King Kull (a warrior-king of the mythical prehistoric realm of Valusia, in central Europe), Solomon Kane (an English Puritan of the seventeenth century), and, most famously, Conan, a barbarian chieftain of the mythical land of Cimmeria. Howard was keenly drawn to the period of the prehistoric barbarians—perhaps because that age dimly reflected the conditions of pioneer Texas that he learnt and admired from his elders.
One does not, of course, wish to deny all literary value to Howard’s work. He is certainly to be credited with the founding of the subgenre of ‘sword-and-sorcery’, although Fritz Leiber would later significantly refine the form; and, although many of Howard’s stories were written purely for the sake of cash, his own views do emerge clearly from them. The simple fact is, however, that these views are not of any great substance or profundity and that Howard’s style is crude, slipshod, and unwieldy. It is all just pulp— although, perhaps, a somewhat superior grade of pulp than the average.
Howard’s letters, as Lovecraft rightly maintained, deserve to be classed as literature far more than does his fiction. It might well be imagined that the letters of two writers so antipodally different in temperament as Lovecraft and Howard would at the very least be provocative, and sure enough their six-year correspondence not only ranges widely in subject matter but also becomes, at times, somewhat testy as each man expresses his views with vigour and determination. Howard was clearly intimidated by Lovecraft’s learning and felt hopelessly inferior academically; but he also felt that he had a better grasp of the realities of life than the sheltered Lovecraft, so that he was not about to back down on some of his cherished beliefs. In some instances, as in his frequent descriptions of the violent conditions of the frontier with fights, shootouts, and the like, one almost feels as if Howard is subtly teasing Lovecraft or attempting to shock him; some of Howard’s accounts of these matters may, in fact, have been invented.
In his tales of the 1930s Howard started dropping references to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology, and he did so in exactly the spirit Lovecraft intended—as fleeting background allusions to create a sense of unholy presences behind the surface of life. Very few of Howard’s stories seem to me to owe much to Lovecraft’s own tales or conceptions, and there are almost no actual pastiches. The Necronomicon is cited any number of times; Cthulhu, R’lyeh, and Yog-Sothoth come in for mention on occasion; but that is all.
Meanwhile Clark Ashton Smith was getting into the act. Smith’s allusions to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology are, like Howard’s, very fleeting; indeed, it is highly misleading to think that Smith was somehow ‘contributing’ to Lovecraft’s mythos, since from the beginning he felt that he was devising his own parallel mythology. Smith’s chief invention is the god Tsathoggua, first created in ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’. Written in the fall of 1929, this story evoked raptures from Lovecraft. He was so taken with the invention of Tsathoggua that he cited the god immediately in ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’; and, since the latter tale was printed in Weird Tales for August 1931, three months before ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’, Lovecraft beat Smith into print with the mention of the god.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft was fully aware that he was borrowing from Smith. Smith himself, noting a few years later how many other writers had borrowed the elements he had invented, remarked to Derleth: ‘It would seem that I am starting a mythology.’23 Smith of course returned the favour and cited Lovecraft’s inventions in later tales.
Toward the end of 1930 Lovecraft heard from Henry St Clair Whitehead (1882–1932), an established pulp writer who published voluminously in Adventure, Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and elsewhere. Whitehead was a native of New Jersey who attended Harvard and Columbia, was a reporter for a time, and in 1913 was ordained as an Anglican priest. In the late 1920s he was archdeacon in the Virgin Islands, where he gained the local colour for many of his weird tales. By 1930 he was established in a rectory in Dunedin, Florida.