No author is identified more with Weird Tales than is Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) of Providence, Rhode Island, and--for a short time--Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights, New York. Lovecraft was thirty-two years old when the first issue of Weird Tales was published in March 1923. I imagine that he had waited all of his life for such a title to appear.
I don't know when or where Lovecraft first came upon Weird Tales, although it's clear by reading the first letter below that he did not see the March issue right away. According to his biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft was "urged by his friends to submit stories to this new market." Lovecraft resisted. (His amateurism and dilettantism are maddening even to this day.) "About April," de Camp wrote, "Lovecraft let himself be persuaded to send [Edwin] Baird five manuscripts." (From Lovecraft: A Biography, Ballantine Books, 1976, pp. 190-191.) Lovecraft sent a kind of cover letter with his submissions. It reads like a résumé by a person who doesn't want the job. It's clear to me that Lovecraft lacked self-esteem or feelings of self-worth. He almost demanded rejection. But that's what a person often does who has experienced rejection from those closest to him, especially, or perhaps exclusively, from his parents.
The long excerpt below begins with Edwin Baird's introduction and continues with the full text of Lovecraft's first letter in Weird Tales, September 1923. After that, Baird had his one-sentence closing. I have made the names of several authors boldface.
Equally interesting is the letter from H. P. Lovecraft, another master of the weird tale, from whom we have accepted some stories for your entertainment. Mr. Lovecraft's letter, unlike Mr. Triem's, doesn’t exactly flatter WEIRD TALES, but we are nevertheless glad to pass it on to you:
"My Dear Sir: Having a habit of writing weird, macabre, and fantastic stories for my own amusement, I have lately been simultaneously hounded by nearly a dozen well-meaning friends into deciding to submit a few of these Gothic horrors to your newly-founded periodical. The decision is herewith carried out. Enclosed are five tales written between 1917 and 1923.
"Of these the first two are probably the best. If they be unsatisfactory, the rest need not be read . . . 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' is, in the main, an actual dream experienced on the night of December 21-22, 1919; the characters being myself (Randolph Carter) and my friend, Samuel Loveman, the poet and editor of 'Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce.'
"I have no idea that these things will be found suitable, for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself.
"My models are invariably the older writers, especially Poe, who has been my favorite literary figure since early childhood. Should any miracle impel you to consider the publication of my tales, I have but one condition to offer; and that is that no excisions be made. If the tale can not be printed as written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection. Excision by editors is probably one reason why no living American author has a real prose style . . . But I am probably safe, for my MSS. are not likely to win your consideration. 'Dagon' has been rejected by _____ _____, to which I sent it under external impulsion--much as I am sending you the enclosed. This magazine sent me a beautifully tinted and commendably impersonal rejection slip . . .
"I like WEIRD TALES very much, though I have seen only the April number. Most of the stories, of course, are more or less commercial--or should I say conventional?--in technique, but they all have an enjoyable angle. 'Beyond the Door,' by Paul Suter, seems to me the most truly touched with the elusive quality of original genius--though 'A Square of Canvas,' by Anthony M. Rud, would be a close second if not so reminiscent in denouement of Balzac's 'Le Chef d’Ouvre inconnu'--as I recall it across a lapse of years, without a copy at hand. However, one doesn't expect a very deep thrill in this sophisticated and tradesman-minded age. Arthur Machen is the only living man I know of who can stir truly profound and spiritual horror."
Despite the foregoing, or because of it, we are using some of Mr. Lovecraft's unusual stories, and you will find his "Dagon" in the next issue of WEIRD TALES.
L. Sprague de Camp had this reaction:
Lovecraft had done everything [in his letter] to assure rejection of his stories: the haughty tone, the art-for-art's-sake pose, the deprecation of his own work, and the mention of a previous rejection.
It strikes me as the work not of a man in his thirties but of a boy in his teens.
* * *
As promised, Weird Tales published Lovecraft's story "Dagon" in its issue of October 1923. William F. Heitman's illustration (below) is a good and understated one. Heitman was not especially good at depicting weird, fantasy, horror, or the supernatural. The real heart of "Dagon" was probably outside his range as an illustrator, but a picture of a man in a boat works. I wonder if this was the first published illustration of a work by Lovecraft, or at the very least in a mainstream publication.
"Dagon" is from 1917 or 1919. Nineteen nineteen was also the year in which Lovecraft's contemporary J.C. Henneberger (1890-1969) arrived in Indianapolis and in which The Thrill Book was in publication. I haven't read every story published in Weird Tales to that date, October 1923, but I'm not sure that any one of them is like "Dagon" in its implications, which are of vast expanses of time and the insignificance of man or men lost in an indifferent or even hostile cosmos. (Lovecraft's narrator is essentially a human-like device used to tell a cosmic story.) Edwin Baird called it "a radically different sort of story." There are problems with "Dagon" to be sure. One is Lovecraft's patented overwrought prose. Another is the closing, which became a cliché not only in his work but in myriads more stories in and out of Weird Tales. Only seven short years separated its composition from that of "The Call of Cthulhu." Call "Dagon" a practice run for Lovecraft's later story. But we can also see in these two stories how much Lovecraft matured as a builder of sustained works of fiction between 1919 and 1926.
* * *
"Dagon" takes up less than two and a half pages in Weird Tales. Lovecraft's second published letter, which appeared on page 82, isn't quite that long, but it's long enough. A full paragraph of it has to do with "Dagon."
Once again, Edwin Baird introduced Lovecraft, after which his correspondent launched into another long missive. Included are excerpts from two poems by Lovecraft, his first lines of verse to be published in the magazine. Baird stepped in twice before writing a closing to "The Eyrie" for the month of October. Again, I have made the names of authors boldface.
You may recall the letter from H. P. Lovecraft, published here last month. A bit caustic, that letter; and today we have pleasure in offering another, which, if less stinging, is none-the-less enjoyable. Our friend Lovecraft always has something to say when he writes. Thus:
"Dear Mr. Baird: I should apologize if my former letter seemed to tax WEIRD TALES with seeking conventional material. Such was not my intention in any way. I only meant that I presumed you would not wish too subtle or cryptical material for presentation to the general public. There is a difference between mere originality and delicate symbolism, or hideously nebulous adumbration. How many American readers outside the frankly 'highbrow' class, for example, would find any pleasure or coherent impression in Arthur Machen's 'The White People,' or in the fantastic passages of the same author's 'Hill of Dreams'? In a word, I take it that WEIRD TALES wants definite stories, with a maximum of plot, tension of situation, explosive climax, and statement rather than too elusive suggestion--this rather than, the Baudelairian prose-poem of spiritual Satanism, where chiseled phrase, lyrical tone, color, and an opiate luxuriance of exotic imagery form the chief sources of the macabre impression . . . .
"I lately read the May WEIRD TALES, and congratulate yon on Mr. Humphrey's 'The Floor Above,' [for a moment I had a shiver which the author didn't intend--I thought he was going to use an idea which I am planning to use myself!! But it wasn't so, after all], which is a close second to my favorite, 'Beyond the Door.' Evidently my taste runs to the architectural! 'Penelope' is clever--but Holy Pete! If the illustrious Starrett's ignorance of astronomy is an artfully conceived attribute of his character's whimsical narrative, I'll say he's right there with the verisimilitude! I wrote monthly astronomical articles for the daily press between 1906 and 1918, and have a vast affection for the celestial spheres.
"Some day I may send you a possible filler, beginning:
’’Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded ail things with my sight--
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being
driven to madness and fright."
[The lines are from Lovecraft's poem "Nemesis," which was printed in the April 1924 issue of Weird Tales.]
Mr. Lovecraft, you will observe, is quite as deft at poetry as he is with prose; and as further evidence of this, we submit the prologue to a 300-line heroic poem of his that we may print some day:
"I am he who howls in the night;
I am he who moans in the snow;
I am he who hath never seen light;
I am he who mounts from below.
My car is the car of death;
My wings are the wings of dread;
My breath is the north wind's breath;
My prey are the cold and dead."
As you know, we are publishing a series of Mr. Lovecraft’s prose pieces, beginning with “Dagon;” and of this story he wrote us, in part:
"I shall venture 'Dagon' as a sort of test of my stuff in general. If you don't care for this, you won't care for anything of mine. . . . It is not that 'Dagon' is the best of my tales, but that it is perhaps the most direct and least subtle in its 'punch'; so that for popular publication it is most likely to please most. In copying it I have touched up one or two crude spots--it having been written in 1917, directly after a lull of nine years in my fiction-writing. Naturally I was a bit rusty in the management of the prose. A friend of mine--Clark Ashton Smith, the California poet of horror, madness and morbid beauty--showed this yam to George Sterling, who declared he liked it very much, though suggesting (absurdly enough, as I view it!) that I have the monolith topple over and kill the 'thing' . . . a piece of advice which makes me feel that poets should stick to their sonneteering . . .
"My love of the weird makes me eager to do anything I can to put good material in the path of a magazine which so gratifyingly cultivates that favorite element. I shall await with interest the next issues, with the tales you mention, and am meanwhile trying to get the opening number through a newsdealer. I am sure the venture will elicit some notable contributions as its fame spreads--and the extent of that fame may be judged from the fact that people in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and California have been equally prompt in calling my attention to it and urging me to try my luck!"
In a way, "Dagon" is a radically different sort of story, even for WEIRD TALES, and those that will follow it are even more so. For this reason, we shall be particularly interested in hearing what our readers think of the Lovecraft tales. THE EDITOR.
Lovecraft's next letter and next story on his own--"The Picture in the House"--would appear in the issue of January 1924. (Collaborating with his future wife, Sonia H. Greene, he co-wrote, ghost-wrote, or revised "The Invisible Monster" in the November 1923 issue. His contribution was anonymous.) Lovecraft also had stories in the issues of February, March, April, and May/June/July 1924. That's a nice run in the first year and more of "The Unique Magazine."
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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