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

One does not, of course, wish to deny all literary value to Howard’s work. He is certainly to be credited with the founding of the subgenre of ‘sword-and-sorcery’, although Fritz Leiber would later significantly refine the form; and, although many of Howard’s stories were written purely for the sake of cash, his own views do emerge clearly from them. The simple fact is, however, that these views are not of any great substance or profundity and that Howard’s style is crude, slipshod, and unwieldy. It is all just pulp— although, perhaps, a somewhat superior grade of pulp than the average.

Howard’s letters, as Lovecraft rightly maintained, deserve to be classed as literature far more than does his fiction. It might well be imagined that the letters of two writers so antipodally different in temperament as Lovecraft and Howard would at the very least be provocative, and sure enough their six-year correspondence not only ranges widely in subject matter but also becomes, at times, somewhat testy as each man expresses his views with vigour and determination. Howard was clearly intimidated by Lovecraft’s learning and felt hopelessly inferior academically; but he also felt that he had a better grasp of the realities of life than the sheltered Lovecraft, so that he was not about to back down on some of his cherished beliefs. In some instances, as in his frequent descriptions of the violent conditions of the frontier with fights, shootouts, and the like, one almost feels as if Howard is subtly teasing Lovecraft or attempting to shock him; some of Howard’s accounts of these matters may, in fact, have been invented.

In his tales of the 1930s Howard started dropping references to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology, and he did so in exactly the spirit Lovecraft intended—as fleeting background allusions to create a sense of unholy presences behind the surface of life. Very few of Howard’s stories seem to me to owe much to Lovecraft’s own tales or conceptions, and there are almost no actual pastiches. The Necronomicon is cited any number of times; Cthulhu, R’lyeh, and Yog-Sothoth come in for mention on occasion; but that is all.

Meanwhile Clark Ashton Smith was getting into the act. Smith’s allusions to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology are, like Howard’s, very fleeting; indeed, it is highly misleading to think that Smith was somehow ‘contributing’ to Lovecraft’s mythos, since from the beginning he felt that he was devising his own parallel mythology. Smith’s chief invention is the god Tsathoggua, first created in ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’. Written in the fall of 1929, this story evoked raptures from Lovecraft. He was so taken with the invention of Tsathoggua that he cited the god immediately in ‘The Mound’ (1929–30) and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’; and, since the latter tale was printed in Weird Tales for August 1931, three months before ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’, Lovecraft beat Smith into print with the mention of the god.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft was fully aware that he was borrowing from Smith. Smith himself, noting a few years later how many other writers had borrowed the elements he had invented, remarked to Derleth: ‘It would seem that I am starting a mythology.’²³

Smith of course returned the favour and cited Lovecraft’s inventions in later tales.

Toward the end of 1930 Lovecraft heard from Henry St Clair Whitehead (1882–1932), an established pulp writer who published voluminously in Adventure,

Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and elsewhere. Whitehead was a native of New Jersey who attended Harvard and Columbia, was a reporter for a time, and in 1913 was ordained as an Anglican priest. In the late 1920s he was archdeacon in the Virgin Islands, where he gained the local colour for many of his weird tales. By 1930 he was established in a rectory in Dunedin, Florida.

Whitehead’s urbane, erudite weird fiction is one of the few literary high spots of Weird Tales

, although its lack of intensity and the relative conventionality of its supernaturalism have not won it many followers in recent years. Still, his two collections, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946), contain some fine work. There is some little mystery as to what has become of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Whitehead; it appears to have been inadvertently destroyed. There are also no surviving letters by Whitehead to Lovecraft. Nevertheless, it is evident that the two men became fast friends and had great respect for each other, both as writers and as human beings. Whitehead’s early death was one of a succession of tragedies that would darken Lovecraft’s later years.