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

Another significant correspondent was Joseph Vernon Shea (1912–81). Shea wrote to Lovecraft in 1931, sending a letter to Weird Tales for forwarding; there rapidly developed a warm and extensive correspondence—in many senses one of the most interesting of Lovecraft’s later letter-cycles, even if some of the material is embarrassingly racist and militarist in content. Shea was blunt and, in youth, a trifle cocksure in the expression of his opinions, and he inspired Lovecraft to some vivid and piquant rebuttals.

Another young colleague who came into Lovecraft’s horizon in 1931 was Robert Hayward Barlow (1918–51). Lovecraft had no knowledge, when first receiving a letter from Barlow, that his new correspondent was thirteen years old; for Barlow was then already a surprisingly mature individual whose chief hobby was, indeed, the somewhat juvenile one of collecting pulp fiction, but who was quite well read in weird fiction and enthusiastically embraced a myriad of other interests. Barlow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and spent much of his youth at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father, Col. E. D. Barlow, was stationed; around 1932 Col. Barlow received a medical discharge and settled his family in the small town of De Land, in central Florida. Family difficulties later forced Barlow to move to Washington, D.C., and Kansas.

Lovecraft was taken with Barlow, although their correspondence was rather perfunctory for the first year or so. He recognized the youth’s zeal and incipient brilliance, and nurtured his youthful attempts at writing weird fiction. Barlow was more interested in pure fantasy than in supernatural horror, and the models for his early work are Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith; he was so fond of Smith that he bestowed upon the closet where he stored his choicest collectibles the name ‘The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis’. This collecting mania—which extended to manuscripts as well as published material—would prove a godsend in later years.

By the time he got to know Barlow well, Lovecraft regarded him as a child prodigy on the order of Alfred Galpin; and in this he may not have been far wrong. It is true that Barlow sometimes spread himself too thin and had difficulty focusing on any single project, with the result that his actual accomplishments prior to Lovecraft’s death seem somewhat meagre; but in his later years he distinguished himself in an entirely different field—Mexican anthropology—and his early death deprived the world of a fine poet and scholar. Lovecraft did not err in appointing Barlow his literary executor.

One may as well give some consideration now to Lovecraft’s correspondence, for it would only grow in later years as he became the focal point of the fantasy fandom movement of the 1930s. In late 1931 he estimated that his regular correspondents numbered between fifty and seventy-five.²⁴ But numbers do not tell the entire story. It certainly does seem as if Lovecraft—perhaps under the incentive of his own developing philosophical thought—was engaging in increasingly lengthy arguments with a variety of colleagues. He wrote a seventy-page letter to Woodburn Harris in early 1929; a letter to Long in early 1931 may have been nearly as long. His letters are always of consuming interest, but on occasion one feels as if Lovecraft is having some difficulty shutting up.

Many have complained about the amount of time Lovecraft spent (some have termed it ‘wasted’) on his correspondence, whining that he could have written more fiction instead. Certainly, his array of original fiction (exclusive of revisions) over the last several years was not numerically large: one story in 1928, none in 1929, one in 1930, and two in 1931. Numbers again, however, are deceiving. Almost any one of these five stories would be in itself sufficient to give Lovecraft a place in weird fiction. Moreover, it is by no means certain that Lovecraft would have written more fiction even had he the leisure, for his fiction-writing was always dependent upon the proper mood and the proper gestation of a fictional conception; sometimes such a conception took years to develop.

But the overriding injustice in this whole matter is the belief that Lovecraft should have lived his life for us and not for himself. If he had written no stories but only letters, it would have been our loss but his prerogative. Lovecraft did indeed justify his letter-writing in a letter to Long: