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

The key to the story, of course, is the anomalous meteorite. Is it—or are the coloured globules inside it—animate in any sense we can recognize? Does it house a single entity or many entities? What are their physical properties? More significantly, what are their aims, goals, and motives? The fact that we can answer none of these questions very clearly is by no means a failing; indeed, this is exactly the source of terror in the tale. As Lovecraft said of Machen’s ‘The White People’, ‘the lack of anything concrete is the great asset of the story’.⁹ In other words, it is precisely our inability to 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 the sense of nameless horror.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the tale is the mundane matter of its publication history. ‘The Colour out of Space’ appeared in Amazing Stories

for September 1927; but the critical question is whether the tale was ever submitted to Weird Tales. Although Sam Moskowitz claimed that it was submitted both there and to the Argosy, no documentary evidence has emerged to support the contention. Consider also Lovecraft’s comment to Farnsworth Wright in his letter of 5 July 1927: ‘this spring and summer I’ve been too busy with revisory and kindred activities to write more than one tale—which, oddly enough, was accepted at once by Amazing Stories’.¹⁰

The wording of this letter suggests that this is Lovecraft’s first mention of the story to Wright. There is equal silence concerning a possible Argosy rejection.

But if Lovecraft was hoping that in Amazing Stories—the first authentic science fiction magazine in English—he had found an alternative to Weird Tales, he was in for a rude awakening. Although his later work contained a fairly significant scientific element, Amazing

became a closed market to him when Hugo Gernsback paid him only $25.00 for the story—a mere one-fifth of a cent per word—and this only after three dunning letters. Although in later years Lovecraft briefly considered requests from Gernsback or from his associate editor, C. A. Brandt, for further submissions, he never again sent a tale to Amazing. He also took to calling Gernsback ‘Hugo the Rat’.

Just before writing ‘The Colour out of Space’, Lovecraft had to hurry up and type ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, since Cook wished it immediately for the Recluse. Lovecraft had been making random additions to the essay based upon recent readings—including the subtle and atmospheric tales of Walter de la Mare—but Cook’s rush order compelled him to type up the essay without any further enlargements. Even this, however, was not quite the end. Late in March, after Cook had sent Lovecraft the first proofs, Donald Wandrei lent F. Marion Crawford’s superb posthumous collection of horror tales, Wandering Ghosts (1911), to Lovecraft, while in April Lovecraft borrowed Robert W. Chambers’s early collection The King in Yellow

(1895) from Cook; he was so taken with these works that he added paragraphs on both writers in the page proofs.

The Recluse appeared in August 1927; although initially planned as a quarterly, this was the only issue ever published. Although not strictly a weird publication, it contains fine work by Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, H. Warner Munn, Frank Belknap Long, and Samuel Loveman. Cook wished to send The Recluse to certain ‘celebrities’, in particular to all four of Lovecraft’s ‘modern masters’, Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James. As it happened, the issue did find its way to some of these figures, and their responses to Lovecraft’s essay are of interest. James rather unkindly declared in a letter that Lovecraft’s style ‘is of the most offensive’, but goes on to remark: ‘But he has taken pains to search about & treat the subject from its beginning to MRJ, to whom he devotes several columns.’¹¹ Machen’s response can be gauged only from Donald Wandrei’s comment to Lovecraft: ‘I received a letter to-day from Machen, in which he mentioned your article and its hold on him.’¹² Copies were also apparently sent to Blackwood, Dunsany, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and several others.