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

Lovecraft could not afford to scorn David Van Bush: he was a regular customer, and he paid promptly and well. In 1917 Lovecraft was charging a rate of $1.00 for sixty lines of verse; by 1920 Bush had agreed to pay $1.00 for forty-eight lines; and by September 1922 Bush was paying him $1.00 for every eight lines of verse revised. This is a pretty remarkable rate, given that the best Lovecraft could do with his own professionally published poetry was to get 25 cents per line for verse in Weird Tales. Lovecraft goes on to note: ‘I told him that only at this high price could I guarantee my own personal service—he doesn’t like Morton’s work so well, and asked me to do as much as possible myself.’¹² What this clearly means is that Lovecraft and Morton have teamed up to do revisory work. How formal was such an arrangement? It is difficult to tell, but consider the following ad that appeared in the amateur journal L’Alouette

(edited by Charles A. A. Parker) in September 1924:

THE CRAFTON SERVICE BUREAU offers the expert assistance of a group of highly trained and experienced specialists in the revision and typing of manuscripts of all kinds, prose or verse, at reasonable rates.

THE BUREAU is also equipped with unusual facilities for all forms of research, having international affiliations of great importance. Its agents are in a position to prepare special articles on any topic at reasonable notice. It has a corps of able translators, and can offer the best of service in this department, covering all of the important classical and modern languages, including the international language Esperanto. It is also ready to prepare and supervise courses of home study or reading in any field, and to furnish expert confidential advice with reference to personal problems. APPLICATIONS and INQUIRIES may be addressed to either of the heads of THE BUREAU:

Howard P. Lovecraft, 598 ANGELL STREET,

James F. Morton, Jr., 211 WEST 138TH STREET,

PROVIDENCE, R.I. NEW YORK, N.Y.

Lovecraft (or Morton) has certainly caught the spirit of advertising! I have no idea how much business this wildly exaggerated ad— suggesting that Lovecraft and Morton were ‘heads’ of a non-existent bureau of editors, revisors, translators, and solvers of ‘personal problems’—brought in; Bush seemed to remain Lovecraft’s chief revision client until well into the 1920s. It is likely that many of the ‘services’ noted above were provided by Morton. Even those ‘personal problems’ were probably under Morton’s jurisdiction, since among his published works was at least one collaborative treatise on sex morality. It is, in any case, difficult to imagine Lovecraft at this stage dealing with anyone’s personal problems but his own.

In the midst of all this activity, both amateur and professional, Lovecraft finally embarked upon a career of professional fiction publication; inevitably, the opportunity was afforded him by amateur connections. Around September of 1921 George Julian Houtain (who had married the amateur writer E. Dorothy MacLoughlin) conceived the idea of launching a peppy and slightly off-colour humour magazine named Home Brew

. As contributors he called upon his various amateur colleagues, and managed to secure pieces from James F. Morton, Rheinhart Kleiner, and others for early issues. For some strange reason he wished Lovecraft to write a serial horror story, even though such a thing would seemingly clash with the general humorous tone of the magazine. He offered Lovecraft the princely sum of $5.00 per two-thousand-word instalment (a quarter of a cent per word). ‘You can’t make them too morbid’, Lovecraft reports Houtain telling him.¹³ The first issue of the magazine duly appeared in February 1922, featuring the first instalment of ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, which Houtain ran under the title ‘Grewsome Tales’ (‘grewsome’ was a legitimate spelling variant of ‘gruesome’ at this time).

Lovecraft takes a certain masochistic pleasure in complaining at being reduced to the level of a Grub Street hack. Over and over for the next several months he emits whines like the following:

Now this is manifestly inartistic. To write to order, to drag one figure through a series of artificial episodes, involves the violation of all that spontaneity and singleness of impression which should characterise short story work. It reduces the unhappy author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and unimaginative hack-work. Nevertheless, when one needs the money one is not scrupulous—so I have accepted the job!¹⁴ One gets the impression that Lovecraft actually got a kick out of this literary slumming.