A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

One bizarre postscript to this entire affair concerns C. M. Eddy’s ‘The Loved Dead’, which appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales. Lovecraft had, of course, revised this tale. When the issue appeared, it was promptly banned on the grounds that ‘The Loved Dead’ was about necrophilia (true enough, indeed) and apparently considered obscene. It is not entirely clear what actually happened, but it seems that the magazine was banned only in the state of Indiana.⁹ To what degree the notoriety of the banning affected sales of Weird Tales is also in doubt: it can certainly not be said that this banning somehow ‘saved’ the magazine by causing a run on the issue, especially since it would be four months before the next issue appeared. We may discover, however, that less fortunate consequences occurred—at least, as far as Lovecraft was concerned—in later years.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft was becoming very much involved with Weird Tales—perhaps more than he would have liked. In midMarch he reports that Henneberger ‘is making a radical change in the policy of Weird Tales, and that he has in mind a brand new magazine to cover the field of Poe–Machen shudders. This magazine, he says, will be “right in my line”, and he wants to know if I would consider moving to CHICAGO to edit it!’¹⁰ There is a certain ambiguity in this utterance, but I believe the sense is not that Henneberger would start a ‘brand new magazine’ but that Weird Tales

itself would be made over into a ‘new’ magazine featuring Poe–Machen shudders. Lovecraft had earlier noted that Baird had been ousted as editor and that Farnsworth Wright had been placed in his stead;¹¹ this was only a stop-gap measure, and Lovecraft was indeed Henneberger’s first choice for editor of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft has frequently been criticized for failing to take up this opportunity just at the time when, as a new husband, he needed a steady income; the thinking is that he should have overcome his purely aesthetic distaste of the modern architecture of Chicago and accepted the offer. But the matter is more complicated than this scenario suggests. First, although Sonia was in favour of the move, it would have meant either Sonia’s search for uncertain job prospects in Chicago or the couple’s having to live a thousand miles away from each other merely for the sake of employment. Second, Lovecraft knew that Henneberger was deeply in debt: Henneberger had lost $51,000 on his two magazines, Weird Tales and

Detective Tales, and there was no guarantee that either enterprise would continue in operation much longer. If Lovecraft had therefore left for Chicago, he might after a few months have been stranded there with no job and with little prospect of getting one. Lovecraft was, in my view, wise to decline the offer. In any case, even in the most ideal financial circumstances, he might not have made the best editor of a magazine such as Weird Tales. His fastidious taste would have rejected much that was actually published in its pages: there was simply not enough artistically polished weird fiction to fill what was really nothing more than a cheap pulp magazine paying a penny a word.

What actually happened to Weird Tales in this crisis was that Henneberger sold off his share of Detective Tales

to the co-founder of Rural Publications, J. M. Lansinger (who retained Baird as editor of that magazine), appointed Farnsworth Wright as permanent editor of Weird Tales (he would retain that position until 1940), and then—as the only way to make up the $40,000 debt he had accrued—came to an agreement with B. Cornelius, the printer of the magazine, as follows: ‘Cornelius became chief stockholder with an agreement that if the $40,000 owed him was ever repaid by profits from the magazine, Henneberger would be returned the stock.’¹² A new company, the Popular Fiction Publishing Co., was formed to issue the magazine, with the stockholders being Cornelius, Farnsworth Wright, and William Sprenger (Weird Tales’ business manager); after a several-month hiatus Weird Tales resumed publication with the November 1924 issue. Although Henneberger retained a minor interest in the new company, Weird Tales never made sufficient profits for him to buy it back; in any case, he seems to have lost interest in the venture after a few years and finally drifted entirely out of the picture.