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

Lovecraft was, incredibly, profoundly dissatisfied with the story. A week after finishing it on 3 December, he wrote lugubriously to Derleth: ‘I don’t think the experimenting came to very much. The result, 68 pages long, has all the defects I deplore—especially in point of style, where hackneyed phrases & rhythms have crept in despite all precautions … No—I don’t intend to offer “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for publication, for it would stand no chance of acceptance.’²⁰ That Lovecraft meant what he said is revealed by his extraordinarily snide response to Farnsworth Wright’s request to send in new work:

Sorry to say I haven’t anything new which you would be likely to care for. Lately my tales have run to studies in geographical atmosphere requiring greater length than the popular editorial fancy relishes—my new ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’ is three typed pages longer than ‘Whisperer in Darkness’, and conventional magazine standards would undoubtedly rate it ‘intolerably slow’, ‘not conveniently divisible’, or something of the sort.²¹ Lovecraft is consciously throwing back into Wright’s face the remarks Wright had made about At the Mountains of Madness.

But if Lovecraft himself refused to submit ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ to Weird Tales

, Derleth was not so reticent. Without Lovecraft’s permission or knowledge, he sent to Wright a carbon of the story in early 1933; but Wright’s verdict was perhaps to be expected: ‘I have read Lovecraft’s story, THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, and must confess that it fascinates me. But I don’t know just what I can do with it. It is hard to break a story of this kind into two parts, and it is too long to run complete in one part.’²² Lovecraft must have eventually found out about this surreptitious submission, for by 1934 he is speaking of its rejection by Wright. Lovecraft himself, it should be pointed out, submitted only one story to Wright in the five and a half years following the rejection of At the Mountains of Madness.

In the summer of 1930, Lovecraft came in touch with one of the most distinctive figures in the pulp fiction of his time: Robert Ervin Howard (1906–36). Howard is a writer about whom it is difficult to be impartial. Like Lovecraft, he has attracted a fanatical cadre of supporters who both claim significant literary status for at least some of his work and take great offence at those who do not acknowledge its merits. I fear, however, that after repeated readings of his fiction I fail to be impressed with very much of it. The bulk of Howard’s fiction is subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature.

Howard himself is in many ways more interesting than his stories. Born in the small town of Peaster, Texas, about twenty miles west of Fort Worth, he spent the bulk of his short life in Cross Plains. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of this ‘post oaks’ region of central Texas, and his father, Dr I. M. Howard, was one of the pioneer physicians in the area. Howard was more hampered by his lack of formal education than Lovecraft—he briefly attended Howard Payne College in Brownwood, but only to take bookkeeping courses—because of the lack of libraries in his town; his learning was, accordingly, very uneven, and he was quick to take strong and dogmatic opinions on subjects about which he knew little.

As an adolescent Howard was introverted and bookish; as a result, he was bullied by his peers, and to protect himself he undertook a vigorous course of body-building that made him, as an adult of five feet eleven inches and 200 pounds, a formidable physical specimen. He took to writing early, however, and it became his only career aside from the odd jobs at which he occasionally worked. A taste for adventure, fantasy, and horror—he was an ardent devotee of Jack London—and a talent for writing allowed him to break into Weird Tales

in July 1925 with ‘Spear and Fang’. Although Howard later published in a wide variety of other pulp magazines, from Cowboy Stories to Argosy, Weird Tales remained his chief market and published his most representative work.

That work runs the gamut from westerns to sports stories to ‘Orientales’ to weird fiction. Many of his tales fall into loose cycles revolving around recurring characters, including Bran Mak Morn (a Celtic chieftain in Roman Britain), King Kull (a warrior-king of the mythical prehistoric realm of Valusia, in central Europe), Solomon Kane (an English Puritan of the seventeenth century), and, most famously, Conan, a barbarian chieftain of the mythical land of Cimmeria. Howard was keenly drawn to the period of the prehistoric barbarians—perhaps because that age dimly reflected the conditions of pioneer Texas that he learnt and admired from his elders.