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

In late 1927 Lovecraft declared that he had never yet advertised for his revisory services¹⁸ (he had evidently forgotten about the ‘Crafton Service Bureau’ ad in L’Alouette in 1924), so that new revision clients would have come to him only by referral. Two such clients made their appearance about this time—Adolphe de Castro and Zealia Brown Reed Bishop.

De Castro (1859–1959), formerly Gustav Adolphe Danziger, was an odd case. He met Ambrose Bierce in 1886 and become an enthusiastic devotee and colleague. A few years later he translated Richard Voss’s short novel Der Mönch des Berchtesgaden

(1890–91), and had Bierce revise it; it was published serially as The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter in the San Francisco Examiner in September 1891 and then as a book in 1892. With Bierce and others, Danziger formed the Western Authors Publishing Association, which issued Bierce’s poetry collection Black Beetles in Amber

(1892) and Danziger’s own short story collection, In the Confessional and the Following (1893). Shortly thereafter, however, Bierce and Danziger had a falling out—mostly over financial wrangling over the profits from the Monk and over Danziger’s management of the publishing company—and although Danziger occasionally met up with Bierce on random subsequent occasions, the two did no further work together.

Bierce went down to Mexico in late 1913, evidently to observe or to participate in the Mexican Civil War. Danziger (now de Castro) lived in Mexico between 1922 and 1925 editing a weekly newspaper. In 1923 he managed to talk with Pancho Villa; Villa maintained that he threw Bierce out of his camp when Bierce began praising Carranza. Later, according to this account, Bierce’s body was found by the side of a road. De Castro wrote an article in the American Parade

for October 1926 entitled ‘Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was’, going on at length about his collaboration on the Monk and discussing his search for Bierce in Mexico.

It was at this point that de Castro came in touch with Lovecraft. With the publicity he was now receiving, he felt the time was right to capitalize on his association with Bierce. He knew Samuel Loveman, and the latter recommended that de Castro write to Lovecraft and seek his help on two projects: a book-length memoir of Bierce, and a revision of the story collection, In the Confessional. Lovecraft agreed to do one story—titled ‘A Sacrifice to Science’ in de Castro’s book and published as ‘The Last Test’ in Weird Tales

for November 1928—for which he received $16.00 (de Castro received $175.00 from Weird Tales).

‘The Last Test’ is one of the poorest of Lovecraft’s revisions. It tells the melodramatic story of a doctor, Alfred Clarendon, who is apparently developing an antitoxin for black fever while in charge of the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin but who in reality has fallen under the influence of an evil Atlantean magus, Surama, who has developed a disease that ‘isn’t of this earth’ to overwhelm mankind. All this is narrated in the most stiff and pompous manner conceivable. Lovecraft has radically overhauled the plot while yet preserving the basic framework—the California setting, the characters (though the names of some have been changed), the search for a cure to a new type of fever, and (although this now becomes only a minor part of the climax) Clarendon’s attempt to persuade his sister to sacrifice herself. But—aside from replacing the nebulously depicted assistant of Dr Clarendon (‘Dr Clinton’ in de Castro) named Mort with the much more redoubtable Surama—he has added much better motivation for the characters and the story as a whole. This, if anything, was Lovecraft’s strong point. He has made the tale about half again as long as de Castro’s original; and although he remarked of the latter that ‘I nearly exploded over the dragging monotony of [the] silly thing’,¹⁹ Lovecraft’s own version is not without monotony and prolixity of its own.

If it seems unjust that Lovecraft got less than one-tenth of what de Castro was paid, these were the conditions under which Lovecraft operated his revision service: he was at least assured of his fee whether the end result sold or not. (Occasionally, of course, he had difficulty collecting on this fee, but that is a separate matter.) In many cases the revised or ghostwritten tale did not in fact sell. Lovecraft would, in any case, never have wanted to acknowledge such a piece of drivel as ‘The Last Test’, and it is in some ways unfortunate that his posthumous celebrity has resulted in the unearthing of such items and their republication under his name— the very thing he was trying to avoid.