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

Even before Lovecraft finished ‘The Last Test’, de Castro was pleading with him to help him with his memoirs of Bierce. This was a much more difficult proposition, and Lovecraft was properly reluctant to undertake the task without advance payment. De Castro, being hard up for cash, could not assent to this; so Lovecraft turned him over to Frank Long, who was getting into the revision business himself. Long offered to do the revision for no advance pay if he could write a signed preface to the volume. De Castro agreed to this, and Long did what appears to have been a very light revision—he finished the work in two days! This version, however, was rejected by three publishers, so that de Castro came back to Lovecraft on his knees and asked him to take over the project. Lovecraft demanded that de Castro pay him $150.00 in advance, and once again de Castro declined. He appears then to have gone back to Long. The book did in fact come out—with how much more revision by Long, or anyone else, is unclear—as Portrait of Ambrose Bierce

, published by The Century Company in the spring of 1929 and with a preface by ‘Belknap Long’.

In this whole matter de Castro comes off as both wheedling and sly, trying to get Lovecraft and Long to do work for him for little or no pay and for the mythical prospect of vast revenues at a later date. And yet, he was not a complete charlatan. He had published at least one distinguished book of scholarship with a major publisher (Jewish Forerunners of Christianity

(E. P. Dutton, 1903)). He also seemed to know many languages and had served as a minor functionary in the United States government for a time. If there is a certain ghoulishness in his attempt to cash in on his friendship with Bierce, he was certainly not alone in this.

Another revision client that came into Lovecraft’s horizon at this time was Zealia Brown Reed Bishop (1897–1968). Bishop was studying journalism at Columbia and also writing articles and stories to support herself and her young son. I assume that she was divorced at this point. Finding out about Lovecraft’s revisory service through Samuel Loveman, she wrote to him in late spring of 1927. In her memoir of Lovecraft, Bishop expresses great admiration for Lovecraft’s intellect and literary skill, but also admits rather petulantly that Lovecraft tried to steer her in directions contrary to her natural inclination: ‘Being young and romantic, I wanted to follow my own impulse for fresh, youthful stories. Lovecraft was not convinced that [t]his course was best. I was his protégé[e] and he meant to bend my career to his direction.’²⁰

Bishop goes on to say that at this point she returned to her sister’s ranch in Oklahoma, where she heard some tales by Grandma Compton, her sister’s mother-in-law, about a pioneer couple in Oklahoma not far away, and wrote a story called ‘The Curse of Yig’, which Lovecraft praised highly.

And yet, it can hardly be doubted that the story as we have it is almost entirely the work of Lovecraft except for the bare nucleus of the plot. ‘The Curse of Yig’ is quite an effective piece of work, telling of the horrible fate of a couple, Walker and Audrey Davis, the former of whom has a morbid fear of snakes. Lovecraft writes of his contribution to the story in a letter to Derleth:

By the way—if you want to see a new story which is practically mine, read ‘The Curse of Yig’ in the current W.T. Mrs. Reed is a client for whom Long & I have done oceans of work, & this story is about 75% mine. All I had to work on was a synopsis describing a couple of pioneers in a cabin with a nest of rattlesnakes beneath, the killing of the husband by snakes, the bursting of the corpse, & the madness of the wife, who was an eye-witness to the horror. There was no plot or motivation—no prologue or aftermath to the incident—so that one might say the story, as a story, is wholly my own. I invented the snake-god & the curse, the tragic wielding of the axe by the wife, the matter of the snake-victim’s identity, & the asylum epilogue. Also, I worked up the geographic & other incidental colour-getting some data from the alleged authoress, who knows Oklahoma, but more from books.²¹

Lovecraft charged Bishop $17.50 for the tale. She managed to sell the story to Weird Tales, where it appeared in the November 1929 issue; she received $45.00 for it. One letter Lovecraft wrote to Bishop in late spring of 1928 is of interest: