Whitehead’s urbane, erudite weird fiction is one of the few literary high spots of Weird Tales, although its lack of intensity and the relative conventionality of its supernaturalism have not won it many followers in recent years. Still, his two collections, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946), contain some fine work. There is some little mystery as to what has become of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Whitehead; it appears to have been inadvertently destroyed. There are also no surviving letters by Whitehead to Lovecraft. Nevertheless, it is evident that the two men became fast friends and had great respect for each other, both as writers and as human beings. Whitehead’s early death was one of a succession of tragedies that would darken Lovecraft’s later years.
Another significant correspondent was Joseph Vernon Shea (1912–81). Shea wrote to Lovecraft in 1931, sending a letter to Weird Tales for forwarding; there rapidly developed a warm and extensive correspondence—in many senses one of the most interesting of Lovecraft’s later letter-cycles, even if some of the material is embarrassingly racist and militarist in content. Shea was blunt and, in youth, a trifle cocksure in the expression of his opinions, and he inspired Lovecraft to some vivid and piquant rebuttals.
Another young colleague who came into Lovecraft’s horizon in 1931 was Robert Hayward Barlow (1918–51). Lovecraft had no knowledge, when first receiving a letter from Barlow, that his new correspondent was thirteen years old; for Barlow was then already a surprisingly mature individual whose chief hobby was, indeed, the somewhat juvenile one of collecting pulp fiction, but who was quite well read in weird fiction and enthusiastically embraced a myriad of other interests. Barlow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and spent much of his youth at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father, Col. E. D. Barlow, was stationed; around 1932 Col. Barlow received a medical discharge and settled his family in the small town of De Land, in central Florida. Family difficulties later forced Barlow to move to Washington, D.C., and Kansas.
Lovecraft was taken with Barlow, although their correspondence was rather perfunctory for the first year or so. He recognized the youth’s zeal and incipient brilliance, and nurtured his youthful attempts at writing weird fiction. Barlow was more interested in pure fantasy than in supernatural horror, and the models for his early work are Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith; he was so fond of Smith that he bestowed upon the closet where he stored his choicest collectibles the name ‘The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis’. This collecting mania—which extended to manuscripts as well as published material—would prove a godsend in later years.
By the time he got to know Barlow well, Lovecraft regarded him as a child prodigy on the order of Alfred Galpin; and in this he may not have been far wrong. It is true that Barlow sometimes spread himself too thin and had difficulty focusing on any single project, with the result that his actual accomplishments prior to Lovecraft’s death seem somewhat meagre; but in his later years he distinguished himself in an entirely different field—Mexican anthropology—and his early death deprived the world of a fine poet and scholar. Lovecraft did not err in appointing Barlow his literary executor.
One may as well give some consideration now to Lovecraft’s correspondence, for it would only grow in later years as he became the focal point of the fantasy fandom movement of the 1930s. In late 1931 he estimated that his regular correspondents numbered between fifty and seventy-five.24 But numbers do not tell the entire story. It certainly does seem as if Lovecraft—perhaps under the incentive of his own developing philosophical thought—was engaging in increasingly lengthy arguments with a variety of colleagues. He wrote a seventy-page letter to Woodburn Harris in early 1929; a letter to Long in early 1931 may have been nearly as long. His letters are always of consuming interest, but on occasion one feels as if Lovecraft is having some difficulty shutting up.
Many have complained about the amount of time Lovecraft spent (some have termed it ‘wasted’) on his correspondence, whining that he could have written more fiction instead. Certainly, his array of original fiction (exclusive of revisions) over the last several years was not numerically large: one story in 1928, none in 1929, one in 1930, and two in 1931. Numbers again, however, are deceiving. Almost any one of these five stories would be in itself sufficient to give Lovecraft a place in weird fiction. Moreover, it is by no means certain that Lovecraft would have written more fiction even had he the leisure, for his fiction-writing was always dependent upon the proper mood and the proper gestation of a fictional conception; sometimes such a conception took years to develop.
But the overriding injustice in this whole matter is the belief that Lovecraft should have lived his life for us and not for himself. If he had written no stories but only letters, it would have been our loss but his prerogative. Lovecraft did indeed justify his letter-writing in a letter to Long:
an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the publick at first-hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.25
There is certainly much truth in this, and anyone can tell the difference between the cocksure Lovecraft of 1914 and the mature Lovecraft of 1930. What he does not say here, however, is that one of the chief motivations for his correspondence was simple courtesy. Lovecraft answered almost every letter he ever received, and he usually answered it within a few days. He felt it was his obligation as a gentleman to do so. This is how he established strong bonds of friendship with far-flung associates, many of whom never met him; it is why he became, both during and after his lifetime, a revered figure in the little worlds of amateur journalism and weird fiction.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mental Greed (1931–33)
The year 1931 was, of course, not an entire disaster for Lovecraft, even though the rejections of some of his best work stung him. His now customary late spring and summer travels reached the widest extent they would ever achieve in his lifetime, and he returned home with a fund of new impressions that well offset his literary misfortunes.
Lovecraft began his travels on Saturday, 2 May, the day after he finished the back-breaking work of typing At the Mountains of Madness. His customary stop in New York was very brief, and he caught a bus for Charleston via Washington, D.C., Richmond, Winston-Salem and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina. The total time of this bus ride was thirty-six hours.
Lovecraft found Charleston pretty much the same as the year before. On the 6th Lovecraft took a bus for Savannah, and from there caught another bus for Jacksonville (saving a night’s hotel or YMCA bill), arriving at 6 a.m. on the 7th. Jacksonville was a modern town and hence had no appeal for Lovecraft; it was only a way station to a more archaic place—nothing less than the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, St Augustine, Florida.
In the two weeks Lovecraft spent in St Augustine he absorbed all the antiquities the town had to offer. The mere fact of being in such an ancient place delighted him, although the town, with its predominantly Hispanic background, did not strike so deep a chord as a town of British origin such as Charleston did. Nevertheless, he was marvellously invigorated by St Augustine—both spiritually and physically, since the genuine tropicality of the town endowed him with reserves of strength unknown in the chilly North. He stayed at the Rio Vista Hotel on Bay Street for $4.00 a week.