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

It is possible, however, that the rejection affected Lovecraft so badly because it coincided with yet another rejection—that of a collection of his tales by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. In the spring of 1931 Winfield Shiras, an editor at Putnam’s, had asked to see some of Lovecraft’s stories for possible book publication. Lovecraft sent thirty tales—nearly all the manuscripts or tearsheets he had in the house at the time—and, in spite of his characteristic predictions that nothing would come of it, he may well have held out a hope that he might see his name on a hardcover book. Putnam’s had, after all, come to him, and not as a matter of form as Simon & Schuster had done the year before. But by mid-July the dismal news came: the collection was rejected. The Putnam’s rejection may in fact have been more staggering than that of At the Mountains of Madness:

The grounds for rejection were twofold—first, that some of the tales are not subtle enough … too obvious & wellexplained—(admitted! That ass Wright got me into the habit of obvious writing with his never-ending complaints against the indefiniteness of my early stuff.) & secondly, that all the tales are uniformly macabre in mood to stand collected publication. This second reason is sheer bull—for as a matter of fact unity of mood is a positive asset in a fictional collection. But I suppose the herd must have their comic relief!¹⁶

I think Lovecraft is quite right on both points here. His later tales do not, perhaps, leave enough to the imagination, and in part this may indeed be a result of subconsciously writing with Weird Tales’ market demands in mind; but in part this is precisely because of the tendency of this work to gravitate more toward science fiction. Lovecraft was in the position of being a pioneer in the fusion of weird and science fiction, but the short-term result was that his work was found unsatisfactory both to pulp magazines and to commercial publishers that were locked in their stereotypical conventions.

A third rejection occurred at the hands of Harry Bates. Bates had been appointed editor of Strange Tales, a magazine launched in 1931 by the William Clayton Company. Word about the magazine must have gone out by spring (although the first issue was dated September), for in April Lovecraft sent along five old stories (all rejected by Wright); all were turned down. Lovecraft should not have been much surprised at this: not only were these on the whole inferior stories, but the Clayton firm was long known as preferring fast-paced action to atmosphere.

Strange Tales

seemed at first to be a serious rival to Weird Tales: it paid 2 cents per word on acceptance, and it formed a significant market for such writers as Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, August Derleth, and Hugh B. Cave who could mould their styles to suit Bates’s requirements. Wright must have been greatly alarmed at the emergence of this magazine, for it meant that some of his best writers would submit their tales to it first and send material only to Weird Tales that had been rejected by

Strange Tales. But the magazine lasted for only seven issues, folding in January 1933.

The whole issue of Lovecraft’s sensitivity to rejection, or to bad opinions of his work generally, deserves consideration. Recall the In Defence of Dagon essays of 1921: ‘There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.’ Admittedly, this statement was made well before his work had become more widely available in the pulp magazines, but ‘self-expression’ remained the cornerstone of his aesthetic to the end. Lovecraft was aware of the apparent contradiction, for the issue came up in discussions with Derleth. Lovecraft had already told Derleth that ‘I have a sort of dislike of sending in anything which has been once rejected’,¹⁷

an attitude that Derleth—who in his hard-boiled way sometimes submitted a single story to Weird Tales up to a dozen times before it was finally accepted by Wright—must have found nearly incomprehensible. Now, in early 1932, Lovecraft expanded on the idea:

I can see why you consider my anti-rejection policy a stubbornly foolish & needlessly short-sighted one, & am not prepared to offer any defence other than the mere fact that repeated rejections do work in a certain way on my psychology—rationally or not—& that their effect is to cause in me a certain literary lockjaw which absolutely prevents further fictional composition despite my most arduous efforts. I would be the last to say that they ought to produce such an effect, or that they would—even in a slight degree—upon a psychology of 100% toughness & balance. But unfortunately my nervous equilibrium has always been a rather uncertain quantity, & it is now in one of its more ragged phases.¹⁸