Coates, Walter J[ohn] (1880–1941).
Amateur journalist in North Montpelier, Vt., who issued the little magazine Driftwind,which contained much poetry by HPL as well as “The Materialist Today” (initially a letter to Coates, c. May 1926; published in Driftwindfor October 1926 and also as a separate brochure [Driftwind Press, 1926] in fifteen copies). Coates contributed a lengthy essay on Vermont poetry to W.Paul Cook’s Recluse (1927). He was the author and editor of many volumes of poetry, including Mood Songs: Voices within Myself(Hartford, Vt.: Solitarian Press, 1921), Vermont in Heart and Song(editor) (North Montpelier, Vt., 1926), Vermont Verse: An Anthology(editor) (Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Daye Press, 1931), Harvest: A Sheaf of Poems fromDriftwind (editor) (North Montpelier, Vt.: Driftwind Press, 1933). He corresponded sporadically
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with HPL to the end of the latter’s life, and wrote an obituary of HPL for Driftwind,April 1937. Cole, Edward H[arold] (1892–1966).
Massachusetts amateur journalist; editor of The Olympian. He came in touch with HPL in late 1914, when he advised HPL to assist the Providence Amateur Press Club; he met HPL in December 1914. Their correspondence continued until HPL’s death. He married Helene E. Hoffman (1893–1919), who gave birth to a son, E[dward] Sherman Cole (b. 1918), to whom HPL wrote a few whimsical letters in early 1919. Upon Helene Hoffman Cole’s death, HPL wrote a poetic tribute, “Helene Hoffman Cole: 1893–1919: The Club’s Tribute” ( Bonnet,June 1919), as well as a prose article, “Helene Hoffman Cole—Litterateur” ( United Amateur,May 1919). HPL frequently visited Cole in the Boston area in the 1920s and 1930s. After HPL’s death, Cole edited a special issue of The Olympian(Autumn 1940) devoted to HPL, for which he wrote a lengthy memoir, “Ave atque Vale!” (rpt. LR). Cole, Ira A[lbert] (1883–?).
Kansas amateur journalist and editor of The Plainsman,for which HPL wrote “On the Cowboys of the West” (December 1915). He became a member of the round-robin correspondence group, the Kleicomolo (1915–19?), with HPL, Rheinhart Kleiner, and Maurice W.Moe. HPL published some of Cole’s poems in The Conservative(“The Dream of a Golden Age,” July 1915; “In Vita Elysium,” July 1917). Cole later converted to Pentacostalism. He wrote a brief memoir of HPL, “A Tribute from the Past” ( OWash-Ta-Nong,1937; rpt. LR).
“Collapsing Cosmoses.”
Short story fragment (640 words); written in collaboration with R.H.Barlow. First published in Leaves (1938); first collected in MW
Dam Bor looks through his cosmoscope and sees an enemy fleet advancing through space. He and the narrator go to the Great Council Chamber to alert delegates from other galaxies. Hak Ni, a commander, is asked by Oll Stof, the president of the chamber, to battle the fleet. He does so. The fragment ends at this point.
The idea was for each author to write alternating paragraphs, although HPL sometimes wrote only a few words before yielding the pen to his younger colleague, so that considerably more than half the piece is Barlow’s, as are a fair number of the better jokes. As a satire on the space operas popularized by Edmond Hamilton, E.E. “Doc” Smith, and others, the story is fairly effective. “Colour out of Space, The.”
Short story (12,300 words); written in March 1927. First published in Amazing Stories(September 1927); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An1and CC A surveyor for the new reservoir to be built “west of Arkham” encounters a bleak terrain where nothing will grow; the locals call it the “blasted heath.” The surveyor, seeking an explanation for the term and for the cause of the devastation, finally finds an old man, Ammi Pierce, living near the area, who tells him an incredible tale of events that occurred in 1882. A meteorite had landed on the property of Nahum Gardner and his family. Scientists from Miskatonic University
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who examine the object find that its properties are very bizarre: the substance refuses to cool, displays shining spectroscopic bands never seen before, and fails to react to conventional solvents. Within the meteorite is a “large coloured globule”: “The colour…was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.” When tapped with a hammer, it bursts. The meteorite itself, continuing anomalously to shrink, finally disappears.
Henceforth increasingly odd things occur. Nahum’s harvest yields apples and pears unprecedentedly huge in size, but they prove unfit to eat; plants and animals undergo peculiar mutations; Nahum’s cows start to give bad milk. Then Nahum’s wife Nabby goes mad, “screaming about things in the air which she could not describe”; she is locked in an upstairs room. Soon all the vegetation starts to crumble to a grayish powder. Nahum’s son Thaddeus goes mad after a visit to the well, and his sons Merwin and Zenas also break down. Then there is a period of days when Nahum is not seen or heard from. Ammi finally summons the courage to visit his farm and finds that the worst has happened: Nahum himself has gone insane, babbling only in fragments; but that is not alclass="underline" “That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in.” Ammi brings policemen, a coroner, and other officials to the place, and after a series of bizarre events they see a column of the unknown color shoot into the sky from the well; but Ammi sees a small fragment of it return to earth. The gray expanse of the “blasted heath” grows by an inch per year, and no one can say when it will end. The reservoir in the tale is the Quabbin Reservoir, plans for which were announced in 1926, although it was not completed until 1939. And yet, HPL declares in a late letter that it was the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island (built in 1926) that caused him to use the reservoir element in the story (HPL to Richard Ely Morse, October 13, 1935; ms., JHL). He saw the reservoir when he passed through the west-central part of the state on the way to Foster in late October 1926. But HPL surely was also thinking of the Quabbin, which is located exactly in the area of central Massachusetts where the tale takes place, and which involved the abandonment and submersion of entire towns in the region. Also, Clara Hess’s statement that HPL’s mother once told her about “weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark” reminds one of Nabby Gardner’s madness.
HPL felt the story was more an “atmospheric study” ( SL2.114) than an orthodox narrative. The lack of clear answers to many of the central issues in the tale—specifically, the nature of the meteorite (is it—or the colored globule inside it—animate in any sense that we can recognize? Does it house a single entity or many entities? What are their physical properties? What are their aims, goals, and motives?)—is not a failing but a virtue. As HPL said of Machen’s “The White People,” “the lack of anything concreteis the great assetof the story” ( SL3.429). It is precisely because we cannot define the nature—either physical or psychological—of the entities in “The Colour out of Space” (or even know whether they are entities or living creatures as we understand them) that produces a sense of horror. In this story HPL most closely achieves his goal of avoiding the depiction of “the human form —and the local human passions and conditions and standards—…as native to other worlds or other universes” ( SL2.150).