The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales
Studies in Supernatural Literature
Series Editor: S. T. Joshi
Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors, edited by Robert H. Waugh,
2013
Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys, by William F.
Touponce, 2013
Critical Essays on Lord, edited by S. T. Joshi, 2013
Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror, edited by Gary
William Crawford, 2014
Lord Dunsany: A Comprehensive Bibliography, Second Edition, by S. T. Joshi and Darrell Schweitzer, 2014
Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy, by Jason V. Brock, 2014
The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, edited
by Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks, 2015
The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales
The Evolution of
Modern Fantasy and Horror
Edited by
Justin Everett
Jeffrey H. Shanks
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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The unique legacy of Weird Tales : the evolution of modern fantasy and horror / edited by Justin
Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks.
pages cm. — (Studies in supernatural literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-5621-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-5622-4 (ebook) 1. Weird
tales. 2. Fantasy fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Horror tales, American—History and
criticism. 4. Periodicals—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. 5. Pulp literature,
American—History and criticism. I. Everett, Justin, editor. II. Shanks, Jeffrey H., 1972– editor.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: Weird Tales—Discourse Community and Genre Nexus
Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks
ix
Part I: The Unique Magazine: Weird Tales, Modernism, and
Genre Formation
1 “Something That Swayed as If in Unison”: The Artistic
Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of
Modernism
Jason Ray Carney
2 Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade of
Weird Tales
Jonas Prida
3 The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”: “Against the
Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller”
Dániel Nyikos
4 Strange Collaborations: Weird Tales’s Discourse Community as
a Site of Collaborative Writing
Nicole Emmelhainz
5 Gothic to Cosmic: Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales
Morgan T. Holmes
v
1
3
15
29
51
63
vi
Contents
Part II: Eich-Pi-El and Two-Gun Bob: Lovecraft and Howard in
Weird Tales
6 A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H. P.
Lovecraft and Postmodernism
Clancy Smith
7 Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality
Bobby Derie
8 Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E.
Howard’s “Worms of the Earth”
Jeffrey H. Shanks
9 Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
Justin Everett
Part III: Masters of the Weird: Other Authors of Weird Tales
10 Pegasus Unbridled: Clark Ashton Smith and the Ghettoization
of the Fantastic
Scott Connors
11 “A Round Cipher”: Word-Building and World-Building in the
Weird Works of Clark Ashton Smith
Geoffrey Reiter
12 C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry: Women and
Gender in the October 1934 Weird Tales
Jonathan Helland
13 Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of
Robert Bloch
Paul W. Shovlin
14 “To Hell and Gone”: Harold Lawlor’s Self-Effacing Pulp
Metafiction
Sidney Sondergard
81
83
105
119
131
151
153
173
187
201
211
Index
229
About the Editors and Contributors
243
Acknowledgments
This volume was the result of much hard work and collaboration on the part
of a number of individuals and would not have been possible without their
generous efforts. In particular, we would like to thank our contributors,
whose excellent work has made this the most important volume of scholarship on Weird Tales to date. We would like to express our appreciation to S.
T. Joshi for his guidance and oversight as the series editor for Studies in
Supernatural Literature and to Stephan Ryan, senior editor at Rowman &
Littlefield. We would also like to thank the Popular Culture Association
(PCA) and American Culture Association (ACA); many of the chapters in
this volume began as papers in the Pulp Studies area at several of the joint
PCA/ACA National Conferences over the last few years, and that venue has
been instrumental in creating a core group of scholars who are undertaking
academic work on Weird Tales and its authors. Finally, we would like to
express our deepest appreciation to our friends and family for their continued
patience and forbearance in their support of our often time-consuming research and scholarship.
vii
Introduction
Weird Tales—Discourse Community and Genre Nexus
Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks
When the magazine Weird Tales first appeared on newsstands in early 1923,
there was nothing else like it—it truly was “The Unique Magazine.” Part of
its attraction was, in fact, that it became a place to gather orphan stories
together and for new forms to be born. Weird Tales published stories that
today we would describe as horror, fantasy, and science fiction (hereafter sf)
when these genres were still evolving, but at a time when no such genre
labels existed. It would be within the pages of Weird Tales, and the sf periodicals Amazing Stories and Astounding that would appear a few years later, as
well within the growing community of fans of these magazines and their own
amateur publications, that these genres would come to be distilled and defined. The role of the readers cannot be overemphasized, because the readers
were to a large extent also the magazine’s writers, and the letter column,
“The Eyrie,” became an important forum for defining exactly what the
“weird tale” was supposed to be.
With Weird Tales a discourse community was formed, made up of editors, authors, readers, and fans who celebrated the nonrealist, extra-mainstream nature of speculative fiction in the early twentieth century, even as
that community took apart that fiction and reassembled it into taxonomic
categories—often in heated epistolary exchanges. According to John Swales,
a discourse community has “common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high level of general expertise.” 1 While many pulps could meet the
basic definition of a discourse community, Weird Tales was particularly,
well, “unique” in the sense that it began by announcing its intention to
promote and publish a new kind of story. The result was that, as hard sf
ix
x
Introduction
began to branch off into its own publications, Weird Tales in the 1920s and
’30s became the home for “weird fiction,” the confluence of supernatural
tales, fantasy adventure, and cosmic horror as part of a unique and tightly
knit community of editors, readers, illustrators, and writers.
The weird tale itself did not originate with the magazine—it had its roots
in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Morris, Jules Verne, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur
Machen, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Abraham Merritt, and many
others. But, it was in Weird Tales and in the works of its most influential
contributors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith,
Robert Bloch, C. L. Moore, Seabury Quinn, and others that the threads spun
by those many eclectic literary antecedents were woven together into something new. Weird Tales functioned as a nexus point in the development of
speculative fiction from which emerged the modern genres of fantasy and
horror.
Weird Tales was the brainchild of publisher Jacob Clark (J. C.) Henneberger, whose biggest success up to that point was the magazine College Humor. In an attempt to break into the emerging pulp magazine market, Henneberger partnered with J. M. Lansinger to found Rural Publications, Inc., and
launched two periodicals: Weird Tales and Real Detective Tales. A fan of
Poe since his teens, Henneberger conceived of Weird Tales after a conversation with several authors who bemoaned the fact that there was no venue to
publish tales of the outré and the macabre. 2 It wasn’t entirely true that there
was no venue available; general interest pulps like Argosy, All-Story, and
Blue Book occasionally published speculative fiction by authors like Burroughs and Merritt, and other periodicals like The Black Cat (though not a
pulp) and the short-lived, poorly distributed Thrill Book devoted a large
amount of space to supernatural stories. But as genre-specific magazines
were just starting to take off in the early 1920s, there was not yet a magazine
devoted entirely to weird fiction. Henneberger planned to change that.
The inaugural issue of Weird Tales was dated March 1923, and the cover
featured a scene from the sf story “Ooze” by Anthony Rud with a cephalopodic monster, a damsel in distress, and a squared-jawed hero armed with a
knife and shotgun. These images were, of course, standard fare for pulp
covers in those days—except for the giant, tentacled amoeba. Other notable
names that debuted in that first issue include Otis Adelbert Kline, now
known for his Burroughs-style planetary romances, and Farnsworth Wright,
who would soon become the magazine’s best-known editor. Later that year,
they would be joined by future mainstays Quinn, Smith, and Lovecraft. The
magazine also ran reprints of stories by classic weird fiction pioneers like
Poe, Bierce, and Bulwer-Lytton.
Introduction
xi
Weird Tales’s struggles, and its eventual success in creating the genre we
now know as “weird fiction” is as much the product of Kairos, a unique
moment when the time is right for the production of a particular utterance.
The magazine, in essence, developed less as a singular text and more as a
corpus, a collection of texts, or a discourse community as defined by Swales
and as a result became responsible for itself. In rhetoric, Kairos refers to the
ability of a rhetor to take advantage of changing circumstances when delivering a speech in accordance with the members of the audience present and
their changing mood. In modern rhetoric, in agreement with Aaron Hess, we
might think of this as “timely” 3—the right words in the right place at the
right time. Weird Tales appeared at just such a moment.
Juxtaposed between literary modernism and pulp magazines targeting
working-class readers, J. C. Henneberger’s experimental magazine did not
belong to either of these worlds. As Jason Ray Carney has pointed out, 4
Weird Tales sought neither the literary license of modernism nor to adhere to
the standard formulas of pulp fare, choosing instead to become, in the words
of an unsigned manifesto published in the first anniversary issue, devoted to
“the weird, the bizarre, the unusual.” 5 As a pulp magazine, Weird Tales was
undeniably meant for consumption by the masses, and ran contrary to the
currents of modernism. At the same time, by promoting the magazine as
“true art,” 6 this manifesto was essentially declaring a break from standard
pulp fare. As the debate that took place in the magazine’s letters column,
“The Eyrie,” during its inaugural year demonstrates, this self-concept provided it with an exigence, in the words of Lloyd Bitzer, “an imperfection
marked by urgency . . . a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a
thing which is other than it should be.” 7 This positioned it against both the
other pulps and the Modernists, while looking backward to the Gothic for its
literary inspiration.
It was, in part, Henneberger’s taste for the literary macabre that put the
magazine in a difficult marketing position upon its appearance on the newsstands because the readers didn’t quite know what to do with it. This became
evident from the comments published in “The Eyrie,” where readers would
bicker over the proper focus of the magazine. While part of this had to do
with the messy collection of stories editor Edwin Baird had selected for the
first issues, part certainly had to do with the stories readers were encountering (for good or ill) in other pulps, and the fact that most of their forms were
rapidly evolving toward the popular genres we are familiar with today.
That the readers of Weird Tales desired a magazine that deviated from
standard pulp formulas is apparent from letters submitted to “The Eyrie” in
the second issue. One reader comments:
This willy-nilly stuff of would-be cowboys (when there aren’t any such animals nowadays) is sickening. So is sugar eaten to excess. Keep this magazine
xii
Introduction
going. There is demand for such literature. . . . Believe me, I’m for it! For the
same reason I have always read Poe. 8
Another reader complains that editors of other magazines “see nothing
but stereotypes”; 9 while a third lists “Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, Bierce,
O’Brien, F. Marion Crawford and DeMaupaussant” [sic] 10 as writers of
weird tales.
In the April issue Baird repeats his complaint that most of the stories
submitted are too formulaic, declares “if Poe were living today he would find
no market for his work except in Weird Tales,” and repeats his determination
to “blaze a new path in magazine literature.” 11 In the regular invocation of
the word literature along with references to Poe and slights directed at other
pulps we can see the attempt on the part of Henneberger and Baird to carve
out a unique, kairotic place in the magazine market. While the reader’s
sentiments are no doubt genuine, since the letters are selected by the editor
the column must be viewed primarily as the editor’s attempt to build an
argument that Weird Tales is a continuation of the literary Gothic. This
situates it in a third position opposed, on one hand, to literary modernism
and, on the other, to the formulaic stories appearing in other pulps.
With the March 1924 issue the genre of weird fiction had begun to consolidate. This issue features the publication of Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the
Walls” and a long excerpt of a letter from Lovecraft who both defines weird
fiction against modernism and defends its quality as art when he writes, “It
occurred to me that I, in my weirder medium, could probably devise some
secret behind a man’s ancestry that would make the worst of [Sherwood]
Anderson’s disclosures sound like the annual report of a Sabbath School.” 12
Ironically, Baird’s final issue (the oversized May–June–July 1924 issue)
would end with an essay, “Why Weird Tales?” attributed to Otis Adelbert
Kline. This essay actually reiterated much of what Baird had been saying in
“The Eyrie” since the magazine’s inception. It reinforces Poe as its literary
inspiration and underlines the idea that Weird Tales was a literary pioneer by
publishing material other pulps had to date refused to print. It goes on to
address the controversy surrounding the types of stories published in its
pages by stating, “We make no pretension of publishing, or even trying to
publish, a magazine that will please everybody. What we have done, and will
continue to do, is gather around us an ever-increasing body of readers who
appreciate the weird, the bizarre, the unusual—who recognize true art in
fiction.” 13 This statement addresses the tension between the desire for horror
stories on one hand and scientific stories on the other, but more important
perhaps is the emphasis on the readers, on the creation of what modern
researchers might call a discourse community, with a focus on two core
aspects of the weird tale—“the bizarre” and “true art.” The essay is essentially an apologia that both apologizes, at least indirectly, for the controversy
Introduction
xiii
and argues for the magazine’s continued existence. Reflecting the first year’s
content, along with the opposite poles of the readers’ preferences, the column
defines weird fiction as consisting of the occult stories on one hand and
scientific stories on the other. While the essayist was certainly correct that
both forms would “live on into the future,” 14 it was not the fate of Weird
Tales to carry on these two forms side by side, but to move toward a convergence, with some stories veering more toward the occult and others toward
the scientific, but in either case characterized by the presence of the bizarre.
But despite the magazine finally beginning to find its unique voice, content, and style, Weird Tales struggled to find marketplace success during its
first year and had begun to fall into debt. Henneberger removed Baird from
Weird Tales (though he left him at Real Detective Tales) and made a generous offer to Lovecraft to take the position. When Lovecraft declined due to
his reluctance to move to Rural Publications’ home city of Chicago, Henneberger gave the editorship to Farnsworth Wright, who had been working as
Baird’s assistant. With Wright at the helm, the magazine survived its initial
stumbles and, while never a huge financial success, Weird Tales would go on
to become one of the most important and influential publications of speculative fiction.
A veteran of World War I and a sufferer of Parkinson’s disease, Wright
had a mercurial editorial style and an eclectic taste in fiction, but under his
watch, the magazine’s stable of core writers grew to include some of the
most influential names in early fantasy and horror. Joining Lovecraft, Smith,
Kline, and Quinn were Frank Belknap Long in 1924, Robert E. Howard and
E. Hoffman Price in 1925, August Deleth and Edmond Hamilton in 1926,
Donald Wandrei in 1927, C. L. Moore in 1933, and Robert Bloch in 1935.
Wright even published a story from a teenage Tennessee Williams in 1928.
He also launched the careers of several notable artists, including Margaret
Brundage, whose risqué scenes of scantily clad women—often being tortured
or held in bondage—created some controversy among readers (but no doubt
increased sales).
The Wright years are now looked upon as a golden age for Weird Tales,
though with the deaths of Howard in 1936 and Lovecraft the following year,
that halcyon period began to wane. In 1938, Henneberger sold Weird Tales to
Short Stories, Inc., owner of the popular adventure pulp of the same name.
Short Stories editor Dorothy McIlwraith was brought on to assist Wright, but
differences of opinion led to Wright resigning in 1940; he passed away a few
months later.
McIlwraith had a very different, often more-conventional, approach than
Wright, and many of the veteran writers of Wright’s tenure had more difficulty selling their stories to the new editor. The new leadership also faced
challenges from nascent competitors like Mort Weisenger’s Strange Stories
and John W. Campbell’s Unknown. Eventually the page count of Weird
xiv
Introduction
Tales was reduced, as was the word rate for contributors, and as sales began
to decline through the 1940s, this situation was exacerbated. Still, there were
new writers who came into their own under McIlwraith—Fritz Leiber, Manly
Wade Wellman, and most importantly, Ray Bradbury. Despite its struggles,
Weird Tales persisted until 1954—the very end of the pulp magazine era.
Over the years it has been rebooted under several different formats and
editorial hands, including Lin Carter, Darrell Schweitzer, Ann VanderMeer,
and most recently, Marvin Kaye.
But it’s the Wright years—the so-called golden age of Weird Tales—that
still attracts the most attention and the most interest from scholars, fans, and
collectors, and it will be on the Wright years that many of the chapters in this
volume will focus. This attention is not unwarranted, however, as it was
during the magazine’s heyday in the 1920s and ’30s that the gestation and
crystallization of the modern American versions of the horror and fantasy
genres took place. And while many individuals, including Wright, contributed to the creative melting pot environment that was Weird Tales during that
time, two names stand out as transcendently influential in their respective
genres: H. P. Lovecraft with horror and Robert E. Howard with fantasy.
There were other giants to be sure: Clark Ashton Smith (often placed
beside Howard and Lovecraft as part of the great Weird Tales triumvirate),
whose beautifully decadent prose and verse may rate him as the most talented of his peers; Catherine L. Moore, who brought a much-needed female
voice to speculative fiction in the interregnum years between the two great
waves of feminist sf; and Robert Bloch, whose explorations of the darker
places in the human psyche would ultimately lead to the creation of one of
the greatest fictional serial killers of all time—Norman Bates. But of the
major contributors to Weird Tales in its prime, it is Lovecraft and Howard
whose innovations had the most long-lasting influence.
Lovecraft freed Gothic horror from its Judeo-Christian cosmological
framework and replaced it with the more terrifying reality of the insignificance of man in the vast materialistic and mechanistic cosmos. Lovecraft’s
cosmic horror is the epitome of the science-fictional sublime of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and more particularly the mathematical sublime of Kant, in its
most overwhelmingly ego-crushing manifestation. Likewise, Lovecraft’s
“gods and monsters” are the science-fictional grotesque 15 taken to the extreme—the familiar elements that are distorted are constituent pieces of living bodies—tentacles, wings, eyeballs, fur, scales—mixed and matched in a
mockery of flesh, so that the reader, like the characters in his stories, are both
repulsed and yet attracted to his mutable forms. Lovecraft’s new vision of the
weird infused the work of the other writers of Weird Tales, both explicitly
and implicitly, and the formation of a circle of regular correspondents centered on Lovecraft created a community of writers that were quite selfconsciously inventing a new mode of expressing horror in fiction—a mode
Introduction
xv
that can only be described as Lovecraftian. Thus, the burgeoning modern
horror genre was infused at birth with the Lovecraft ideology and aesthetic
and their influence on the great names of the field, such as Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Thomas Ligotti, China Miéville, and many others, can hardly be overstated.
While Robert E. Howard also wrote horror stories for Weird Tales, his
great contribution to speculative fiction was in fantasy, where he is credited
as the originator of the “sword-and-sorcery” subgenre, which blends historical adventure fiction with Gothic or Lovecraftian horror. While earlier authors (many of whom influenced Howard) wrote stories that were in a similar
vein, there is no doubt that Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian stories became
the archetypal model for the subgenre and took modern fantasy to much
darker, grittier, and more cynical places than the sentimental fantasists of the
nineteenth century. While Howard’s stories in Weird Tales were sometimes
commercial potboilers, the best of them (and there were many) often explored through analogy more modern social themes, such as racial, colonialist, and cultural anxieties; the changing role of masculinity in an industrial
technocratic world; and the inevitability of corruption in social power structures. An important difference between Howard’s sword-and-sorcery fiction
and more traditional fantasy is that the supernatural element is often portrayed as unnatural—intruding into the story world and threatening the existing paradigm rather than being a natural, inherent part of the world. In fact,
this fits very well the story model that Farah Mendlesohn calls an “intrusion
fantasy,” 16 in which “the world is ruptured by the intrusion, which disrupts
normality and has to be negotiated with or defeated, sent back whence it
came, or controlled.” 17 Thus, the defining characteristic of Howard’s swordand-sorcery that sets it apart from classical fantasy may then be said to be the
resolution of the conflict resulting from irrational forces intruding upon the
rational empirical world, through the agency of a heroic protagonist. 18 This
“historical horror” take on fantasy had an immediate impact on Howard’s
contemporaries and successors in the weird pulps, in particular Clark Ashton
Smith, C. L. Moore, Henry Kutter, and Fritz Leiber. With the paperback
boom in the 1960s and the reinvigoration of fantasy through the 1970s,
Howard’s influence reached its apex, as the darker sword-and-sorcery fiction
of writers like Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Karl Edward Wagner, Samuel Delany, Charles Saunders, Gardner F. Fox, John Jakes, Lin Carter, and
others provided a popular alternative to the high fantasy of Tolkien. While
less obvious than it was three decades ago, it can still be seen as what is
arguably the most mainstream and widely read fantasy series today: George
R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which combines Howard’s gritty
realism and low-magic style with Tolkien’s focus on epic, multilayered storytelling.
xvi
Introduction
This volume explores the important and unique role that Weird Tales
played in taking the many disparate threads of the weird fiction pioneers of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and providing a pulpwood paper
loom for weaving them into what we now think of as the modern genres of
fantasy and horror. Weird Tales served as a crucible for genre exploration,
creation, and hybridization at a very particular time and place in American
culture and the first section of this volume—“The Unique Magazine”—will
explore these ideas in greater detail.
As the literary world was undergoing the Modernist revolution, and at the
same time mass-produced media and unprecedented literacy was creating the
beginnings of a popular culture that would dwarf highbrow literature in social significance, Weird Tales situated itself fitfully and dynamically between
those worlds. Jason Ray Carney explores this tension in the opening chapter,
“‘Something That Swayed as If in Unison’: The Artistic Authenticity of
Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism.”
In the second chapter, “Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the
First Decade of Weird Tales,” Jonas Prida explores the unique ways in which
the fiction of Weird Tales reflected and reacted to the modernist movement—and he does so by looking not at the best-known contributors like
Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, but rather lesser-known writers whose output
nonetheless shaped the voice and tone of the magazine.
In “The Lovecraft Circle and the ‘Weird Class’: ‘Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller,’” Dániel Nyikos looks at the formation of
the Lovecraft Circle within Weird Tales as a reaction to those same tensions
and how those writers set themselves in opposition to the mainstream literary
world.
Nicole Emmelhainz, in “Strange Collaborations: Weird Tales’s Discourse
Community as a Site of Collaborative Writing,” explores the types of collaboration, coauthorship, and social networks that emerged within the Weird
Tales discourse community by examining letters between writers, letters
from editors to writers, and associated fan publications, and shows how this
was a vital resource for some of the magazines most notable authors.
After the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, the next most important modern
genre to coalesce within the unique creative atmosphere of Weird Tales was
sword-and-sorcery. Morgan Holmes traces the development of the genre
from its prototypical antecedents through its maturation under Howard,
Smith, and Moore, to its later evolution following Howard’s death in “Gothic
to Cosmic: Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales.”
In the second section of this volume—“Eich-Pi-El and Two-Gun Bob”—
the chapters focus on Lovecraft and Howard, exploring some of the critical
themes and issues that characterize the works of these two important and
influential figures.
Introduction
xvii
Clancy Smith delves into the philosophical underpinnings of Lovecraft’s
cosmology in “A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H. P.
Lovecraft and Postmodernism” and its extra-human frame of reference and
showing how it has even influenced poststructuralists like Gilles Deleuze.
Bobby Derie, in “Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality,” explores four of the most common interpretations—or “faces”—of Lovecraft’s
expressions of sexuality implicit in his work: the asexual, the heterosexual,
the homosexual, and the transsexual.
Robert E. Howard’s work is thoroughly infused with the concept of
“race” as it was understood in the early twentieth century and in the racist
anthropology of the nineteenth century. The following two chapters attempt,
at least in part, to address this important topic. In “Evolutionary Otherness:
Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E. Howard’s ‘Worms of the Earth,’”
Jeffrey Shanks looks at one expression of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, the Neolithic pygmy theory, and how it informed Howard’s Little
People stories such as “Worms of the Earth.”
And then, Justin Everett looks specifically at the eugenics movement of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its considerable influence
on Howard’s work in “Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard,”
focusing not only on the Little People stories but also the Conan story “Beyond the Black River.”
In the third and final section of this volume we look at some of the other
major writers that helped to create and define the type of fiction that developed in Weird Tales and who were major contributors to that discourse
community from which much of modern horror and fantasy evolved.
Scott Connors leads off this section with a discussion of arguably the
most talented stylist of the Weird Tales writers, Clark Ashton Smith. In
“Pegasus Unbridled: Clark Ashton Smith and the Ghettoization of the Fantastic,” Connors explores Smith’s struggles for literary acceptance in the face
of a critical community that prejudicially confined weird fiction to the realm
of the commercial.
Geoffrey Reiter continues the discussion of Smith in “‘A Round Cipher’:
Word-Building and World-Building in the Weird Works of Clark Ashton
Smith,” in which he shows that Smith’s creative use of language becomes
itself a framework for the subcreation of his secondary worlds and places
him firmly in the tradition of more orthodox fantasists like George MacDonald and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Catherine L. Moore was hardly the only female writer for Weird Tales,
but she is undoubtedly the most influential and best known. In “C. L. Moore,
M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry: Women and Gender in the October 1934
Weird Tales,” Jonathon Helland looks at not only Moore but also the wellknown cover artist Margaret Brundage, exploring the intersection of text and
illustration in depicting female sexuality using Moore’s sword-and-sorcery
xviii
Introduction
story “The Black God’s Kiss” in the context of its original Weird Tales
publication as an example.
After his career as a pulp writer, Robert Bloch would become best known
for his novel Psycho, but during his early tenure at Weird Tales he had
already begun to explore the horrific potential within the human mind. In
“Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch,”
Paul Shovlin delves into this important theme in Bloch’s early works.
In the final chapter of this volume, Sidney Sondergard looks at Harold
Lawlor, one of the lesser-known though still prolific Weird Tales authors
active in the post–Farnsworth Wright period. In “‘To Hell and Gone’: Harold
Lawlor’s Self-Effacing Pulp Metafiction,” Sondergard explores the metafictional aspects of Lawlor’s stories, which often utilize a protagonist who is a
struggling writer looking for literary acceptance—a situation that reflects not
only Lawlor but many of the other Weird Tales authors discussed in this
volume.
It is hoped that the chapters in this volume will show that to fully appreciate the development of weird fiction from the pioneers of the nineteenth
century to the modern creators in the genres of horror, fantasy, and the new
weird, it is imperative that one look at the pulp magazine Weird Tales as a
crucial contextual nexus within which much of that evolution took place—or
was at least greatly accelerated. Only at that particularly time and place—that
moment of Kairos—were all of the elements present, socially, creatively,
critically, to provide a venue for such minds as Lovecraft, Howard, Smith,
Moore, Bloch, and many others to come together and along with editors like
Baird and Wright and their actively engaged readership create a discourse
community that elevated speculative fiction to new heights and whose influence reverberates through modern popular culture; a discourse community,
Weird Tales, that has more than earned its famous sobriquet of “The Unique
Magazine.”
NOTES
1. John Swales, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” in Writing about Writing, ed.
Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2014), 224.
2. Robert Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (West Linn, OR: Fax Collector’s Editions,
1977), 3.
3. Aaron Hess, “Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of
Rhetoric.” Communication Studies 62, no. 2 (2011): 127–52, 138.
4. Jason Carney, “The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in
the Age of Modernist Reflection” (PhD diss., Case Western University, 2014).
5. Anonymous, “Why Weird Tales?” Weird Tales May/June/July 1924, in Weird Tales:
The Magazine That Never Dies, ed. Marvin Kaye (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988),
569–73, 569.
6. Ibid., 569.
7. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968):
1–14, 6.
Introduction
xix
8. Anonymous, letter to “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales, April 1923, 181.
9. Ibid., 181.
10. Ibid., 182.
11. Edwin Baird, “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales, 114.
12. H. P. Lovecraft, letter to “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales , March 1924, 89.
13. Anonymous, “Why Weird Tales?” 569.
14. Ibid., 570.
15. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “On the Grotesque in SF.” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 1,
March 2002, 71–99.
16. Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2008), 114–81.
17. Ibid., 115.
18. Jeffrey Shanks, “History, Horror, and Heroic Fantasy: Robert E. Howard and the Creation of the Sword-and-Sorcery Sub-Genre,” in Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and
30s (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013), 15–16.
Part I
The Unique Magazine: Weird Tales,
Modernism, and Genre Formation
Chapter One
“Something That Swayed
as If in Unison”
The Artistic Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar
Periodical Culture of Modernism
Jason Ray Carney
On April 29, 1923, an aspiring modernist poet, Samuel Loveman
(1887–1976), received a letter from an aspiring pulp fiction writer, H. P.
Lovecraft. In this letter, Lovecraft tells Loveman a strange story: his experience of gaining entry into and exploring the attic of a colonial house in
Salem, Massachusetts, the house of one Rebekah Nurse, a woman hanged for
witchcraft in 1692.
I cannot resist representing Lovecraft—a legend in the modern genres of
fantasy, science fiction, and supernatural horror—as a literary character:
pale; hair meticulously parted; speaking tremulously in his high-pitched
voice; sharp Rhode Island accent; wringing his hands nervously as he asks
the pensive caretaker to allow him to climb into that attic. Lovecraft’s successful entry confirms his enigmatic attraction to the past in both his art and
life: “I saw something hanging from the wormy ridge-pole—something that
swayed as if in unison with the vesper breeze outside, though that breeze had
no access to this funeral & forgotten place—shadows . . . shadows . . .
shadows.” 1 Lovecraft’s letter to Loveman begins to hint at the network of
connections that I outline in this chapter, a relationship between pulp writers
and high modernists that, properly traced back to a site of confluence in
Weird Tales, troubles traditional “high/low” dualism that for many years
conditioned literary history’s elite/popular understanding of the interwar period of Anglophone literature: the idea that literature “split” in the early
twentieth century between a high and a low, the “great divide” between elite
3
4
Jason Ray Carney
modernism and populist mass culture memorably argued for by Andreas
Huyssen in his classic After the Great Divide (1987). In the introduction to
his study, referring to modernism as an “adversarial culture,” Huyssen sums
up his argument succinctly: “[M]odernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an
increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.” 2 But Lovecraft’s letter
to Loveman in 1923, a year after the annus mirabilis of literary modernism;
their correspondence; and their enduring friendship appears as anything but
adversarial. In fact, it would be accurate to say Loveman was a literary colaborer with Lovecraft, a fellow writer publishing in a variety of small circulation, privately printed magazines. Lovecraft and Loveman were friends
with similar artistic ambitions equally invested in each other’s literary careers.
In April of 1923 Lovecraft was alone in a shadowy attic haunted by
America’s colonial past, was metaphorically dwelling in the past, while
Loveman was social, living among a group of Bohemians—writers, artists,
musicians—recently returned to Brooklyn and Greenwich Village from Europe. Lovecraft and Loveman’s correspondence is a confluence of old and
new, the past and present. Moreover, these two writers’ geographical distinctiveness is also worth emphasizing. As exemplar of the most artistically
ambitious pulp fiction, Lovecraft in 1923 here reminds us that its production
took place spatially as well as temporally outside of the regular sites of
modernism and publishing: from Loveman in modern Manhattan we can
distinguish Lovecraft in “colonial” Massachusetts, in the shadows of a
witch’s attic. The Loveman–Lovecraft relationship challenges the distinction
between high and low and pulp and modernism. It also emphasizes a unique
tension at play in the context of modernism, a tension characterized by concrete and historical spatial and temporal elements.
In highlighting these issues of geography and temporality, there is a periodical culture distinction that needs to be emphasized as well, one linked to
the publishing context of interwar urban America. Like many poets living in
New York, Loveman sought publication in “little magazine” periodicals like
the Little Review, Poetry, and the American Mercury—publications highly
regarded by the poetry mainstream. Not so Lovecraft. During the summer
that Lovecraft was poking about in the attic of a reputed witch, admiring and
reflecting on the shadow, he was urged by Loveman and his many literary
correspondents to submit to a newly launched, experimental, “all-fiction”
magazine. This was, of course, Weird Tales. Although Weird Tales, published in Chicago by a commercial firm, would later come to be framed as a
“pulp,” at the time of its launch it was just another all-fiction magazine,
quality of writing aside.
Along with single-spaced typewritten manuscripts for five stories, Lovecraft enclosed a snobbish letter of introduction to the first editor of Weird
“Something That Swayed as If in Unison”
5
Tales, Edwin Baird (1886–1957). Although the role Baird would play in the
Weird Tales story was a short one—he left the magazine after it nearly went
bankrupt in order to edit another pulp, Real Detective and Mystery Stories—
his contribution to it was important: he made the decision to publish Lovecraft’s strange manuscripts.
In his initial letter to Baird, Lovecraft does not cast himself as a professional writer but frames himself as a noncommercial amateur, a dilettante
who merely dabbles in writing grotesque fiction as a distraction, a man who
had to be convinced by his well-meaning friends, against his sense of propriety, to consider something so vulgar as selling his work: “I have lately
been simultaneously hounded by nearly a dozen well-meaning friends into
deciding to submit a few of these Gothic horrors to your newly founded
periodical . . . I have no idea that these things will be found suitable, for I pay
no attention to the demands of commercial writing.” 3 Here is a version of
that rhetorical stance familiar to scholars of interwar Anglophone literature—
the noncommercial artistic writer who is suspicious of the literary marketplace, editorial demands, the conventional tastes of the newly literate
masses—a pose held, in one way or another, by the “usual suspects” of
traditional canons of what has been called “high modernist” literature:
Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Hemingway, Yeats. It has been documented elsewhere how these high writers appear to withdraw from the anonymity and aesthetic degradation threatened by the market and the conventionalisms demanded by the newly literate consumer of literary commodities
while at the same time participating fully in them, financially capitalizing on
their status as cultural elites. The inverse, though, has not been documented:
how certain commercial and pulp writers, like Lovecraft, also adopted noncommercial stances despite their marketplace publishing context. In Lovecraft’s letter to Baird is confirmation of Michel Houellebecq’s interpretation
of Lovecraft as “resolutely anticommercial.” 4 To the extent that it suggests
modernism, I find it provocative to see the anticommercial pose held by a
writer like Lovecraft who, because he entered the literary world through a
commercial magazine like Weird Tales, has been often framed in the past by
literary historians as artistically degraded, as a producer of mass appeal culture, pleasurable entertainment worthy of appearing in extensive surveys but
not worthy of close scrutiny. A gloss of Lovecraft’s literary output reveals a
writer reluctant to mass-produce literary works; as a writer of pulp fiction,
the pace by which he produced manuscripts is low. And yet, as interesting as
Lovecraft’s artistic pose might be in itself, the fact that he had, at last, found
a unique magazine to suit his noncommercial artistic ambitions concerns me
here.
In hindsight, we would call Weird Tales a “pulp magazine,” but in 1923
the idea of the “pulps” as kitschy publications of low-grade commercial
fiction written by tyro hacks was still in the process of emergence. At this
6
Jason Ray Carney
point the reference would have been the “pulpwood paper” magazine, a term
that simply referred to the type of paper the magazine was printed on; the
allegorical projection that carried the “low-grade/low-cost” connotations of
pulpwood paper to the aesthetic quality of fiction that was printed on it came
years later, after the pulpwood magazine business model—widely implemented and confirmed to be commercially lucrative—caused a boom of titles
and the newsstand market became flooded with commodity literature, what
one editor writing in the August 28, 1935, issue of the New York Times
referred to as “fiction by volume.” Consider the following excerpt: “There is
another publishing world little known and certainly unofficially recognized,
in which volume of production is more important than literary quality. The
pulp magazines, month in and month out, regardless of season and almost
without concern for economic depression, go on pouring an endless stream of
fiction to the news-stand trade.” 5 “Unofficially recognized”: this phrase is
important to note as it reveals that “pulp magazines” as a discrete “Grub
street” endeavor, generalizable in terms of high quantity and low quality,
only became at hand as a circulating cultural stereotype after and as a result
of the massive expansion of the all-fiction magazine market. Though East
Coast intellectuals would ironically smile at such Midwest hubris (Weird
Tales was published by a Chicago-based outfit), such magazines could and
often did entertain literary ambitions in 1923. In fact, Weird Tales was
founded in response to what the publisher, Jacob Clark Henneberger, thought
of as an aesthetic crisis, a kind of encroachment of the contaminating commercial influence on literary endeavor. Henneberger describes his reasoning
for founding the magazine in this way:
Before the advent of Weird Tales, I had talked with such nationally known
writers as Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, and Ben Hecht then residing in
Chicago. I discovered that all of them expressed a desire to submit for publication a story of the unconventional type but hesitated to do so for fear of
rejection. . . . When everything is properly weighed, I must confess that the
main motive in establishing Weird Tales was to give the writer free rein to
express his innermost feelings in a manner befitting great literature. 6
Contemporary literary scholars unaware of the history of pulpwood magazines are ill equipped, I think, to read this sloganeering accurately. Suffering
from what David M. Earle calls a “prejudice of form” 7—value-laden preconceptions linked to the media vehicle of a literary text’s first appearance—
many will tend to read this anecdote as nothing more than a rhetorically
savvy brand advertisement, a philistine salesman’s attempt to cash in on what
Pierre Bourdieu would call “symbolic capital.” 8 Given that what would come
to be labeled as “pulp magazines” were engineered to be purchased on the
cheap, printed on acid-rich paper that yellows and disintegrates quickly,
adorned with sensationalized art often representing women in sexual scenar-
“Something That Swayed as If in Unison”
7
ios, and inaccurately thought to be exclusively read by the uneducated lower
classes, one would expect writers who published in them to have a mercenary
vision of their artwork more in accord with that of the editor of the Writer’s
Digest, the de facto trade magazine of commercial writers publishing in
cheap paper, popular publications. Writing in his October 1930 editorial on
“Popular Fiction—As It Is Today,” the editor writes,
Writing for pulp-paper magazines never can be anything but a trade. Writers
should face it as such. Say to yourself, “I am an intelligent writer and have
logically figured out the reason why one hundred thousand readers buy a copy
of Ravenous Ranch Romances each month. . . . I will write a story that not
only coincides with the required word-length, but one that will specifically
appease this incentive on the part of the readers.” 9
Here is an arch pulp writer speaking in harmonious accord with the bipolar
vision of modern literature the idea of the high and low divide implies:
writers in pulp magazines are tradesmen, not artists; their writing is conventional and formulaic; their writing takes this inspired shape in order to satisfy
readers who crave formula and, worse still, a politically suspect escape from
their daily lives made miserable by a system of exploitation. This glimpse
into the trade journal of commercial writers is a confirmation of the vision of
popular literature laid out by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of
Enlightenment: commercial magazines as artistically bankrupt and morally
compromised arms of capitalism’s “culture industry,” an ideological apparatus that pacifies the masses, coaxes them into cooperating in their own exploitation. But at the same time that this passage confirms Adorno and Horkheimer’s vision, it subtly opens up space for the artistic pulp writer. The
sentence “Writing for pulp-paper magazines never can be anything but a
trade” is written as a dialogic response. The editor of Writer’s Digest is
responding to, even scolding, a group of pulp writers, publishers, and editors,
mute here, who he thinks inappropriately consider their writing efforts as
something in excess of mere market exchanges.
Seven years before this editorial, Henneberger might have been considered one of the idealistic publishers who considered “pulp-paper magazines”
as something more than a mere trade censured here. Henneberger officially
founded Weird Tales in 1923, and in the inaugural issue (March 1923), the
editor, Edwin Baird, describes the magazine as a rare market for pulp manuscripts that did not follow conventions established by market-focused editors.
Using the clipped, minimalistic idiom characteristic of pulp magazine editors
concerned about the reading proficiency of their audience, he “brands” Weird
Tales in this way:
Weird Tales is not merely “another new magazine.” It’s a brand new type of
new magazine—a sensational variation from the established rules that are
8
Jason Ray Carney
supposed to govern magazine publishing. Weird Tales, in a word, is
unique. . . . Our stories are unlike any you have ever read—or perhaps will
ever read—in other magazines. They are unusual, uncanny, unparalleled. 10
As a commercial enterprise, Weird Tales might be considered a lackluster
enterprise. Where major pulp magazines like Argosy and Blue Book Magazine could boast circulation among two hundred thousand to five hundred
thousand readers from 1912 to 1922, Weird Tales’s circulation was below
what would have been considered a major success for a pulp magazine business enterprise. Although the scant statistics archive seems to confirm Weird
Tales’s tenuous commercial performance (pulp publishers rarely saved their
business records), the myth of the magazine’s financial struggles is securely
established within the communities of pulp magazine collectors whose
underappreciated preservation efforts have resulted in the magazine’s apotheosis: “For all its fame and the legends which still proliferate about it,” writes
pulp anthologist and enthusiast Peter Haining, “Weird Tales existed for most
of its thirty years (1923–1954) in the most precarious financial state, and
probably at the height of its popularity could boast no more than 50,000
readers.” 11
Within a year of the magazine’s inaugural issue, low circulation had
resulted in Henneberger’s crippling debt of forty thousand dollars to his
printer, B. Cornelius. Because of this, Henneberger was forced to sell his
shares in the company that published Weird Tales to his financial partner;
furthermore, he was forced to sell his shares in Weird Tales to his printer. As
a result of this financial crisis and reorganization, the first editor of Weird
Tales, Edwin Baird, left the magazine to edit the more conventional and
commercially viable Detective Tales. In the summer of 1924, Henneberger
found himself with a magazine that was not selling and that did not have an
editor.
We can only speculate why Henneberger stuck with the magazine, but he
did so, and his decision decidedly repudiates the commercial “mercy killing”
logic that typifies the pulp fiction marketplace in such accounts as Harold
Hersey’s 1937 memoir, Pulpwood Editor: The Fabulous World of Thriller
Magazines Revealed by a Veteran Editor and Publisher: “Only the nonsentimentalist in the pulpwoods—the publisher who has both the business
acumen and the courage to commit these ‘mercy killings’—continues to
prosper and expand. A lagging title is worse than useless.” 12
Quick to reorganize, Henneberger enlisted the help of contributors to edit
a one-year anniversary issue, indexed as May–June–July of 1924. In this
issue appears an anonymously authored manifesto titled, “Why Weird
Tales?”:
“Something That Swayed as If in Unison”
9
What we have done, and will continue to do, is to gather around us an everincreasing body of readers who appreciate the weird, the bizarre, the unusual—who recognize true art in fiction. . . . The writing of the common run of
stories today has, unfortunately for American literature, taken on the character
of an exact science. Such stories are entirely mechanical, conforming to fixed
rules. 13
To an extent, the rhetoric here echoes the clipped editorial of the inaugural
issue, but there is a mission zeal in excess of pure commercial branding.
Compared to the typical pulp fiction magazine with which Weird Tales
shared the cluttered newsstand, we have something different.
Lovecraft’s artistic stance toward his writing efforts and Weird Tales’s
aesthetic-based mission troubles traditional contexts that produce literary and
nonliterary modes of reading. His aesthetic ambition reveals the fictional
nature of mass culture, a fiction that in the past sanctioned intensive close
reading when works published in “little magazines” held by academic libraries are considered and quasi-sociological readings when “pulp magazines”
held by collectors are similarly considered. The reductive ethos and fiction of
mass culture, which shades so many of the traditional historical accounts of
modern Anglophone literature of the early twentieth century, cannot withstand scrutiny when considered in the light of strange writers like Lovecraft—pulp writers with artistic ambition. And Weird Tales, the unique magazine that became synonymous with Lovecraft’s name, exposes as ideology
generalizations about the commodity literature that appeared on newsstands
of the interwar period: one might point out the fact that these magazines were
all commodities, and many conclude that the fiction is unworthy of intensive
reading practices; but Weird Tales, a commercially troubled and aesthetically
experimental enterprise informed by a desire to be a playground for otherwise uncategorizable manuscripts, challenges the notion that these magazines were not concerned with issues of art or did not entertain ideas of
aesthetic ambition. “We make no pretensions of publishing, or even trying to
publish, a magazine that will please everybody,” states the editorial manifesto of the magazine published in the one-year anniversary issue in 1924, an
evocation of cultural capital that recalls the slogan of a flagship little magazine of high modernism, the Little Review: “Making No Compromise with
Public Taste.”
Weird Tales’s editorial manifesto is not only a brand argument functioning to stake out ground in a specific market niche that held out the promise of
profit. Weird Tales and Rural Publications, Inc., Henneberger’s company, are
also, and crucially so, commercial enterprises that sought authenticity amid
an alienated and alienating interwar West. For a long time scholars implicitly
hewed to the positions of modernists who offered similar explanations for
their art and aloofness from a literary marketplace. Recent revisions have
10
Jason Ray Carney
attempted to reconsider literary scholars’ unconscious solidarity with the
high modernists’ rhetoric. In the context of such revisions, withholding judgment though not quite “buying into” Weird Tales’s formally and rhetorically
comparable rhetoric seems appropriate.
In their the study of the periodical culture of literary modernism, Robert
Scholes and Clifford Wulfman suggest that considering the table of contents
of magazines that published modernist works will help, in part, to explain its
difficulty: “[M]odernism was a self-conscious movement, in which works of
art appeared together with manifestoes and critical exegeses. Modernism can
almost be defined as those visual and verbal texts that need manifestoes and
exegeses.” 14 They go on to describe how modernist little magazines like
Poetry, the Dial, the Egoist, and Blast! published, alongside literary works,
explanatory manifestoes and criticism. The little magazine not only introduced subscribers to new forms of modern art, but also served an additional
function: they taught subscribers how to read this new art, to see through its
opacity. They taught their subscribers how to experience modern art.
Very few of the issues of Weird Tales contained literary criticism of a
type highlighted by Scholes and Wulfman, although readers regularly demanded it. Weird Tales was an all-fiction magazine, and one of its major
selling points was its lack of extraneous material, including advertisement
sheets. Unlike most of the publications we would call “little magazines,”
which typically devoted many pages to full-sheet ads and classified pages,
the pulp fiction magazine had very little space devoted to advertising and
garnered little if any revenue from selling advertising space. This lack of
advertisement can be explained by the business model associated with the
marketing of pulp fiction magazines. For example, in the chapter “Behind the
Scenes” of pulp magazine editor Harold Hersey’s 1937 memoir, pulp fiction
magazines appear in this way: “The advertising is the usual run-of-the-mill
stuff taken on a contingency basis: not paid for until it pays for itself in
results. Still, it does fill the second, third and back covers, and it looks
professional. . . . Later on, if our circulation warrants it, we will be able to
charge cash for advertising space.” 15 Weird Tales was typical in this regard,
foregrounding fiction over advertisements. Yet, like many modernist little
magazines, Weird Tales published an important manifesto of goals, an account of aesthetic principles.
The manifesto “Why Weird Tales?” (cited earlier) was not the only isolated instance of framing exegesis for the stories included in the magazine. At
the end of every issue, the editor, Farnsworth Wright, included a section
titled “The Eyrie,” which offered his reflections on the degree to which
Weird Tales was living up to his stated goals. “The Eyrie” would also showcase readers’ reactions to the stories, reactions he collated and abridged.
Consider, for example, a typical passage from the April 1926 “The Eyrie”
section:
“Something That Swayed as If in Unison”
11
It has until recently been the fashion to belittle the bizarre stories, the stark
school of realism insisting that true literature must be tied to the sordid experiences of everyday life. Weird Tales has answered these “realists” by presenting bizarre and outré stories that are among the gems of imaginative literature.
Many of our stories are mere pleasant entertainment for an idle hour, which
take the reader away from the humdrum commonplaces of the life about him
into a deathless country of imagination and fancy; but others are a very high
type of literature. 16
Here is an acknowledgment of the low art cultural stereotype of pulp fiction
magazines as commodity literature in the idea that some of the stories are
framed as “mere pleasant entertainment for an idle hour.” But in addition to
Wright’s posturing of humility is a serious assertion that much of what the
magazine was publishing was indeed literature, something in excess of a
commodity.
As much as Wright’s statement seems to confirm our cultural frame of the
pulps as trash, we should guard against the assumption that pulp fiction
magazines had then the lurid reputation they have now. Even at the height of
their ubiquity, approximately 1935, this stereotype was vexed, with many
challenging it. For example, in a New York Times letter to the editor (September 4, 1935), pulp publisher A. A. Wyn writes in response to a negative
article on the pulps. His description will allow us to experience some of the
contemporary ambivalence toward the cultural status of pulp fiction magazines in circulation at the apex of their ubiquity. Writing as if speaking to the
typical cultural elite, Wyn states,
You may laugh at the stories we use, you may laugh at the paper we use (we
have not as yet archangels for advertising to enable us to sell profitably at a
nickel a magazine costing 22 cents to produce). But you can’t quite laugh at
the 10,000,000 Americans who plunk down their hard-earned cash each month
for their favorite magazine. And who knows what some future historian may
say about the relative merits of the forests of pulp that go into the magazines
and books of today? After all, the masses throughout the world enjoyed the
entertainment of slapstick Charlie Chaplin long before the highbrows discovered that he was an artist “incomparable.” 17
For Wyn, the central issue of the questionable aesthetic status of pulp fiction
magazines is not their essential badness, but their vast quantity, which necessarily precludes assessing anything other than the mere myth, a fiction—“the
pulps”—that only outlines them, and vaguely so. Thus, Wyn cleverly draws
upon another form of the mass media to make his case: to speak of the pulps
as trash is to say something like “The cinema is trash.” Like the many films
of the massive 1930s film industry, dismissing the majority of them as “mere
entertainment” seems reasonable; however, to claim absolutely that all films
12
Jason Ray Carney
are nonartistic commodities is not to allow the very real possibility that an
occasional director’s or actor’s work will rise to the level of art.
Wyn’s letter allows us to see how absolutist claims about the aesthetic
inferiority of the pulps is an outgrowth of the same antimodernity, the same
antitechnological bias that condemned film as an ephemeral attraction of
modern development. Wyn is therefore prescribing a level of restraint to
readers and reminding them that one or two pulp fiction magazines or pulp
writers may, in fact, come to be seen in the future as artists.
Returning to “The Eyrie” section of Weird Tales, one sees that the genuine audacity of the editor, Farnsworth Wright, can be missed, if we choose to
read selectively his editorial from the perspective of traditional canons of
modernism, which would very likely though quite inaccurately frame Weird
Tales as just another degraded mass publication aesthetically contaminated
and compromised. More important than Wright’s admittance that some of the
stories published in his pulp are “pleasant entertainments for an idle hour,”
however, is his sincere statement that some of the stories that Weird Tales
publishes are “gems of imaginative literature,” a “very high type of literature.” 18
Lovecraft’s decision to publish in Weird Tales, and Loveman’s decision
to publish in the little magazines and to be published by little presses, is
significant. When the historical circumstances of these writers are scrutinized
closely, we see that their careers as literary artists exceed the high/low binary. This is particularly so in the case of Lovecraft when the idiosyncratic
nature of Weird Tales as a literary marketplace is reconstructed. However, to
critique the “great divide” in the context of Lovecraft’s and Loveman’s enduring relationship is perhaps to indulge in the tempting idea that they were
both what we might call “modernists.” This would be misleading. Though
the umbrella term high modernism—used to refer to a small corpus of work
produced by a coterie of Anglo-American experimental poets and fiction
writers—was yet to be widely used when Lovecraft was choosing pulp magazines over little magazines as his primary medium, Lovecraft knew of Pound,
Eliot, Conrad, Joyce, and company, and though he did not refer to them as
modernists, he had a sophisticated opinion of them that evolved throughout
his writing career. He sought out their work in rare editions, defended it in
spite of his distaste for uneducated artistic conservatives in publications of
amateur press associations, and poked fun at it in letters, a memorable example of this being his parody of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a long poem
titled “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance.” To preview his
vexed relationship with the high modernists, consider this selection from an
exemplary letter to fellow Weird Tales writer Frank Belknap Long, written
on May 26, 1923: “I have high respect for these moderns as philosophers and
intellectuals, however much I may dismiss and disregard them as poets. T. S.
Eliot himself was an acute thinker—but I do not believe he is an artist. An
“Something That Swayed as If in Unison”
13
artist must always be a child . . . and live in dreams and wonder and moonlight.” 19 Lovecraft’s repeated criticisms of modernist art and poetry make
considering him a high modernist, as have some suggested, the insincere
domestication of a strangeness that leaves intact the reductivist fiction of a
mass culture. Lovecraft has been studied in other contexts, under various
rubrics such as “popular culture,” or “Gothic studies,” “science fiction studies,” and so on, but these approaches to a solitary Lovecraft disembedded
from his artistic ecology, Weird Tales, implicitly perpetuates the idea that
Lovecraft was a solitary genius among pulp hacks—an insidious idea. My
impression is that such contexts are ill equipped to consider how Weird Tales
the magazine itself shared authorship with him; and it dooms the work of
many talented writers who wrote and published with and in that magazine to
continued neglect.
This is not to say that Lovecraft has no place in the contexts of Gothic
literature, science fiction, and popular culture. It is from and through such
discourses that Weird Tales and Lovecraft have received enough attention to
attract intensive scholarly analysis. To frame as unfinished the uptake of
Lovecraft in Gothic studies, science fiction studies, and popular culture studies is merely to point out that these discourses have not yet adequately taken
into account the qualitatively distinct nature of the cultural conditions of
Lovecraft and, more importantly, Weird Tales’s admirable literary enterprise.
Consider this January 1940 statistical speculation offered in the Writer’s
Digest, in order to understand the size of the pulp fiction archive:
The Digest estimates that there are 9,000 different authors submitting manuscripts to pulp-paper magazines in any one year. Of this number more than
two-thirds are not worthy of being read past “page one, middle page, and last
page.” Thus the actual competition available to authors submitting scripts to
the pulps is 3,000. There are 110 pulps buying about 10,000 stories, shorts, and
fillers per year. 20
To set Weird Tales, Lovecraft, and many other artistically ambitious Weird
Tales authors—for example, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L.
Moore—adrift in the sea of so many magazines ignores the unique conditions and pressures of their production context; their notable singularity; the
way that, unlike the majority of those magazines that have since disintegrated, they have been cherished, preserved, replicated, and transferred through
anthologists and painstakingly compiled facsimiles and anthologies. It disregards the value placed on Weird Tales.
How do we adapt such uncategorizable intrusions into our models of
literary history? As pulp writers who think of themselves as artists? A financially troubled commercial magazine with an idealistic mission, to solve an
aesthetic crisis? A group of writers who conditionally hew to dead traditions,
who happily borrow one another’s tropes, and who extend one another’s
14
Jason Ray Carney
narratives in order to suture them together into a decentered allegorical
framework? The answers will have to wait until an authentic attempt to
situate Weird Tales in relation to high modernism, a movement it learned and
even resembles, but only in the way a shadow resembles the object that casts
it.
NOTES
1. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2010), 29.
2. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii.
3. Joshi, I Am Providence, 333.
4. Michael Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna
Khazeni (London: Gollancz, 2006), 39.
5. “Fiction by Volume,” New York Times, August 28, 1935, 16.
6. Robert Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press,
1999), 3.
7. See David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of
Form (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
8. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment of Taste (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
9. John Locke, “Popular Fiction—As It Is Today,” in Pulp Fictioneers: Adventures in the
Storytelling Business (Silver Spring, MD: Adventure House, 2004), 34.
10. Weird Tales, March 1923, 180–81.
11. Peter Haining, “Weird Tales”: A Selection in Facsimile of the Best from the World’s
Most Famous Fantasy Magazine (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990), 261.
12. Harold Hersey, Pulpwood Editor: The Fabulous World of Thriller Magazines Revealed
by a Veteran Editor and Publisher (Silver Spring, MD: Adventure House, 2002), 18.
13. Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story, 17.
14. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 74.
15. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 17.
16. Weird Tales, April 1926, 566.
17. A. A. Wyn, “Pulp Magazines: A Publisher Cites Figures of Their Number Printing
Patronage,” New York Times, September 4, 1935, 18.
18. Weird Tales, April 1926, 566.
19. Joshi, I Am Providence, 478.
20. Locke, “Popular Fiction,” 85.
Chapter Two
Weird Modernism
Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales
Jonas Prida
Although literary modernism is often seen as a rejection of popular forms
and culture—think of the imagist poetry of Ezra Pound or the experimental
novels of James Joyce—new explorations into the ways that modernism
participates in popular culture are complicating this idea. 1 David Earle’s Recovering Modernism argues that pulp magazines, despite publishing modernist writers, have been systematically excluded from the discussion of literary
modernism, largely because of the lowbrow connotations of the pulps. At the
same time, pulp art, the wonderfully lurid illustrations that drew in readers,
became incorporated into the marketing of modernism. Following Earle’s
investigation into the importance of disposable fiction in how modernism
was constructed, this chapter examines the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Between the magazine’s covers, Gothic tropes—haunted houses, lycanthropes,
abandoned castles—vie for space with modernist narratives of repressed
memories and monsters in the ether. In Weird Tales, the suppressed history
of modernism is written, “The Unique Magazine” acting as a site where
various strains of modernist and antimodernist writing and anxieties collide.
Weird Tales’s history is well-known enough, as this publication indicates.
Many of the major twentieth-century voices in fantasy, horror, and science
fiction got their start or were published in Weird Tales. Four of the best
known of these authors are H. P. Lovecraft; Robert E. Howard, creator of
Conan the Cimmerian; Robert Bloch, who later wrote Psycho; and Tennessee
Williams. But to look only at the major authors is to miss the various ways
that modernist tendencies infect and impact Weird Tales. Since Lovecraft
was specifically antimodernist, calling Eliot’s The Waste Land “a practically
meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and
15
16
Jonas Prida
scraps in general,” 2 and Howard’s interest was in barbarism and literary
naturalism, isolating both from modernism’s streams, or so they claimed, it is
more fruitful to explore how many other, more frequent Weird Tales contributors exploited or reflected what we now think of as literary modernism.
For this exploration, the first seven years (1923–1930) of Weird Tales are
investigated. Isolating these specific years, which roughly correspond with
the high point of literary modernism, allows us to see how similar impulses
and anxieties are explored in vastly different ways. The modernist drives and
tensions in Weird Tales can be investigated through four categories: weird
empires, weird science, weird Darwin, and weird devils. These divisions can
be read against the backdrop of the classification struggles in Weird Tales
and pulp in general. In “The Eyrie”—the letters to the editor section—exactly what was going to count as “weird” is frequently discussed. Many readers
felt that science fiction stories should not be included, arguing that other
magazines already incorporated tales of moon civilizations and trips to Jupiter. Lost civilization narratives, popularized by late nineteenth-century writers such as H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne, also acted as a fault line in
what counted as a weird tale. Although many of these narratives include the
tropes of the weird tale, readers maintained that adventure alone is not
enough. It is in these fraught liminal spaces that Weird Tales’s struggle with
modernity is played out.
WEIRD EMPIRE
The two major twentieth-century wars coincide with the final stages of nineteenth-century empires, like England and France, and the growth of the U.S.
empire. Literary modernism explored imperial drives and anxieties in canonical texts such as Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises (1926). In these modernist empires, the interplay of colonizer
and colonized on the psychic landscape is mirrored by the physical landscape. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a seminal modernist novel, uses Marlow’s trip down the Congo to explore the confusion and absurdity of the colonial process. The caves section of Passage to India shows the
mutual dependency and distrust of imperialism creating epistemological lacunae where questions of what happened become as important as why something happened. 3 This lack of understanding of even the most basic events is
part of the disturbing nature of these novels. Additionally, the alienating
effect of the landscape and the confusion over indigenous or colonized cultures creates spaces that can be described as weird.
The connection between the field of science fiction and colonization has
been explored extensively. Kerslake’s Science Fiction and Empire, for example, argues that as the blank spaces on world maps became filled in, writers
Weird Modernism
17
and empires pushed imperial drives outward, writing colonial desires and
need for an Other on new star systems or inner worlds. 4 This displacement of
imperial energy can easily be identified in pieces such as “The Moon Terror”
and “People of the Comet.” But Weird Tales also explores uncanny empires
much closer to home. Although less frequently interrogated than their spacefaring kin, these earth-based colonial texts display similar anxieties and fissures.
Not surprisingly, the sites that are most explored in the Weird Tales
imperial texts are English colonial states—predominantly India—and those
won by the United States during its expansionist phase of 1898–1910, in
which the Spanish-American War plays a defining role. The Philippines, the
city of Santo Domingo, and, most frequently, Haiti 5 show up as spaces where
American power runs headlong into the deeply resistant native populations.
The popular template set by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes
(1912) of a virile white male forced to survive in noncivilized settings is
repeatedly played out in Weird Tales. In stories with titles such as “The Lips
of the Dead” or “The Jungle Monsters” or “The Mystic Bowl,” Westerners
find themselves facing a variety of nonrational forces, usually as a result of
interfering with traditional customs or by efforts to reform the locals. As one
character says in John Horne’s 1929 short story “The Speared Leopard”:
“Magic! Witchcraft! In the tropics the border-line between reality and fantasy grew blurred more easily than most people cared to admit, and it was a
bad business when a white man crossed it.” 6 In almost all these texts, the
dynamic forces of Western rationalism—technology, positivism, science—
are both the causes of the ghostly manifestations and the temporary solutions
to the problems. But in these same cases the solution is only temporary: a
brief victory for the empire before the irrational forces [read colonized] once
again take precedent. 7
Consider, for example, “In Kashla’s Garden,” written by occasional
Weird Tales contributor Oscar Schisgall and published in the May 1927
issue. In a framed narrative, Roger Byrd tells his story of being hypnotized
by an Indian woman and marrying her. He realizes that his sexual desire and
passivity are constructed through mystical powers and decides that his only
way out is killing his wife. 8 Knowing that his wife takes iodine to help keep
her healthy, he swaps the iodine for poison. But the poison seemingly has no
effect, with Byrd’s wife healthy after repeatedly ingesting it. At the end of
the story, Byrd reveals that his wife was already long dead when he was
poisoning her.
In “Garden,” we see many of the standard imperial anxieties around desire, power, and mysticism. Byrd comments early in the text, “Do you think
that under normal circumstances I, Roger Byrd, who could marry any one of
a dozen rich American girls, would have selected an Indian mystic from a
Calcutta marketplace.” 9 In this quotation, the sexual politics of empire are
18
Jonas Prida
reversed; instead of the usual dynamic of the colonizer sexually exploiting
the colonized, here the colonized uses the mystical powers available by virtue of her Indian-ness to enslave Byrd psychically. In standard imperial
discourse, those who control the technological and economic apparatus are
those who determine value, whether it be sexual or monetary. Byrd should,
by the simple fact that he is a white male operating in a colonial space, be
able to command the attention of whom he wishes; the fact that he cannot
and instead finds himself being placed in the position of passive colonial
object generates the anxiety for both Byrd and Schisgall’s readers. 10 The
thought that he may be attracted to her for other reasons—her actual beauty,
for example—is never explored; the only way that an Englishman with the
cultural and economic capital to marry “any one of a dozen rich American
girls” would find a Indian woman desirable is through magic. 11 Similarly,
Byrd’s desire to kill his wife because he cannot break free from her complicates the standard imperial dynamic. Instead of the colonized revolting
against outside elements, here we see the colonizer using violence to escape.
Byrd’s poisoning of his wife is also a type of violence that can be coded as
colonized: it is subtle, happens in a domestic space, and, ultimately, is ineffective. Although Byrd commands the physical through his position as a
white male, this power does little for him when faced with the nonrational: in
the garden, the locals have the advantage, and Byrd has no defense against it.
Arthur J. Burks is another writer who consistently explores questions of
the newly emboldened American empire. Burks, who served in the Marine
Corps and was stationed in the Caribbean in 1924, wrote multiple stories
about Haiti and the Dominican Republic, almost always incorporating some
form of Vodou or traditionalist religion as a counterpoint to American expansion. 12 His narratives usually revolve around the narrator being asked to head
off a native insurrection that employs a supernatural agency. After a chase
through the jungle or mountains of Hispaniola, the narrator captures or kills
the revolutionary but learns that the primal force of the jungle (narratively
coded as natives/savagery/barbarism) cannot be contained. 13 Burks’s short
stories are not anti-imperialistic, but they complicate the usual dynamics of
empire. The forces of civilization won’t win, in Burks’s world, because they
can’t win; the forces they are trying to control are too powerful, too embedded in the landscape to be conquered or controlled.
Burks’s “Black Medicine,” the cover story for the August 1925 Weird
Tales, displays this weird take on American imperialism. 14 Much like we
saw in “Garden,” “Black Medicine” is an exploration of a weird empire, but
this time with American troops and an American colony. The invasion of
Haiti in 1915, and subsequent nineteen-year occupation, led to the first
American colony in the western hemisphere. Until the early 1920s, the Cacos, groups of Haitians with ties to local villages and historical connections
to insurrection, led an organized resistance against the American marines. By
Weird Modernism
19
the time the Americans left in 1934, thousands of Haitians had been killed, 15
and tales of atrocities committed by both Haitians and marines circulated in
the popular press. In “Black Medicine,” Chandler, an American living in
Haiti, where “The late night air, which hung over Port au Prince, weird
capital of the Black Republic, seemed laden with the still breath from a
smoldering furnace,” is bored with the “silly round of gaiety which seemed
the sole aim of the American colony.” 16 After drinking a few too many
mixtures of coffee and rum and having a run-in with Chal David, 17 a revolutionary/Vodou priest, Chandler wanders into the jungle and overhears Chal
David’s plan to reanimate corpses and drive out the Americans: “There will
begin the bloodiest uprising in the history of Haiti; the whites will be slaughtered and their bodies hurled to the sharks which patrol the beach.” 18 All that
the spell requires is the blanco blood, which the natives plan on getting by
killing mixed-race Dominicans. David’s plan is derailed: after kidnapping a
Dominican child, he is killed by the child’s father. Chandler is later returned
to Port au Prince, unable to communicate how he returned to the city or what
actually happened in the jungle.
Burks’s phrasing of Port au Prince as “the weird capital of the Black
Republic” immediately codes the area as a liminal area, both weird and
modern (a republic). Under imperial command, Haiti operates like one of
Chal David’s reanimated corpses; it has the shape of a nation but obeys the
dictates of its creators. Following the argument that zombies are, at their
nonbeating hearts, symbols of capitalism and consumption, 19 it is not surprising that Chandler, bored with his usual duties of imperial administration,
samples the native and the exotic (the local rum and a later blood-colored
drink that allows him to see the undead). Possessed by the spirit of the local,
he learns of the plan to throw the Americans out in a revolt bloodier than the
1792 revolution. Following the argument posited by Chandler’s quotation
late in the text (“Your true Haitian does not dwell long on puzzling happenings. He is too dull and stupid” 20) is standard imperial rhetoric about the need
for civilization to come to the aid of the stupid. What makes Burks’s text
interesting is the chaotic mixture of imperial and anti-imperial sentiments.
The natives are dull and stupid, yet Chandler longs for some attachment to
the culture he is nominally in charge of controlling. Vodou will drive the
Americans out, but sorcery also leads to Chal David’s downfall. The Haitian
population is both sophisticated enough to have formed the “Black Republic”
and desperately in need of outside intervention. 21 If the weird is the offsetting and the spaces out of balance, then Burks’s Haiti is weird indeed.
20
Jonas Prida
WEIRD SCIENCE
The first decade of Weird Tales displays competing tensions about science
and technology, both within the many stories that incorporate modernist
anxieties about science and in the editorial control of the magazine in general. Its first editor, Edwin Baird, included a variety of texts, with titles such as
“The People of the Comet” and “Planet Paradise,” that would later fall under
the category of science fiction, a term yet to be coined. Farnsworth Wright,
who took over for Baird in November 1924, had a less inclusive scientific
vision for the magazine, attempting to limit the scope to stories where science and technology create a sense of unease or menace. 22 In these Wright
weird science texts, the almost exclusively male scientists have either lost
their jobs at respectable college/research posts because of their experiments
or they are independently wealthy, freeing them to explore the arcane without intrusive institutional review boards or nosy colleagues.
Recent discoveries in the fields of weapons, such as the tank (1917) and
chemical warfare, atomics (Neils Bohr’s description of atomic structure in
1922 and Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy in 1927), X-rays (1896)
and Gamma rays (1900), radio frequencies, and automation drove much of
this anxiety about the role of science. Offering the promise of immediate
communication and the collapsing of time and space and the fear that, when
unleashed, these same forces would destroy us, science, much like empire,
became a fertile space for the weird. The high modernism of Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) or A Farewell to Arms (1929) is partially a reaction to the scientific
horrors and mechanized slaughter of World War I. 23 At the same time, these
modernist texts are reacting to advancements in science in general, a feeling
that science itself is developing faster than the humans who ultimately control it. The weird science in Weird Tales is invested in these same anxieties
but operating in the popular register.
Take, for example, Pettersen Marzoni’s two-part cover story “Red Ether,”
which ran in the February and March 1926 issues. Thorton, our resident mad
scientist, uses the radio to broadcast that, unless all war is ended, he will use
his “red ether” super-ray to destroy the world. Not surprisingly, the United
States is unenthusiastic about disarming: “Disarm the United States? It was
preposterous. California pointed warning fingers across the Pacific. ‘Bolshevik’ cried the Eastern money.” 24 Thorton displays the power of the ray on
unsuspecting cities, but before the world disarms Thorton’s plan is foiled and
the ether machine destroyed.
In “Red Ether,” modernism’s uneasy relationship with science is highlighted. Thorton uses contemporary atomic theory to explain how the ray
works: “Knowing the period of the electron, I meet it with an impulse, halt its
revolution, halt the system of electrons whose flow makes up the atom, and
the atom breaks down.” 25 As mentioned earlier, atomic theory was already
Weird Modernism
21
circulating in scientific discourse, and T. S. Eliot discussed Einstein in his
1930 translation of French theorist Charles Mauron’s essay “On Reading
Einstein.” 26 James Joyce also incorporated atomic theory in Finnegans
Wake: “[A]domic structure of our old Finnius the old One, as highly charged
with electrons as hophazards can effective it.” 27 Thorton uses the radio, first
introduced commercially in 1920, to relay his message of terror, employing
the rhetoric of modernistic progress when justifying his creation of the
doomsday weapon: “Less than a half century ago, Marconi would have been
a maniac. Why, less than a century ago the bathtub was considered a menace
to health. Man’s mind was moving faster than at any period in its history.” 28
Much like chemical warfare, tanks, flamethrowers, and other technologies
from the Great War, which were created to make the world safe from war,
only to be used to kill and maim millions, Thorton’s ether ray destroys cities
in an effort to save them. The science may be a weird amalgam of crackpot
atomic theory and electromagnetic waves, but the anxiety is pure modernism.
We see a similar anxiety in Edmond Hamilton’s “The Metal Giants,” the
cover story from the December 1926 issue. Here, instead of a super weapon
using subatomic particles to destroy humanity, the threat is in the form of
giant self-aware robots that exhale poison gas and create even larger versions
of themselves. Their maker, Professor Detmold, is fired from his university
post because of his experiments with artificial brains. After four years of
hiding, the professor returns, unleashing his metal giants on West Virginia
and Pennsylvania. Realizing the error in his ways, the professor makes an
even larger metal wheel that he uses to crush the giants, while dying in the
process.
In a similar way to Marconi in “Red Ether” as a way to ground the story
in scientific reality, “Giants” references Jacques Loeb, American biologist
and one of the leading figures in parthenogenesis. In a 1900 experiment,
Loeb used electricity to change the chemicals in water, allowing for asexual
reproduction in sea urchins. Hamilton’s “electro-brains” are also Loebian;
Loeb was one of the first scientists to argue that consciousness was fundamentally chemical in nature. Anxieties about artificial reproduction and human sterility undergird much of Eliot’s epic The Waste Land, and D. H.
Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) and The Rainbow (1915), where the
natural sexual impulses of humans are consistently contrasted with the deadening monotony of industrial life. The twin ideas that technology may replicate itself without human intervention and that thought is possible through
artificial and chemical process indicate the depth that mechanization, one of
the primary impulses of modernism, was a fraught, weird impulse.
22
Jonas Prida
WEIRD DARWINISM
Closely connected with weird science are the repeated descriptions of Darwinian concepts in Weird Tales, where primates becoming near humans,
humans becoming near primates, and plants evolving into animals are standard narrative fare. The Scopes Monkey trial in 1925, approximately two
years after Weird Tales started publication, brought Darwinian concepts to a
broad audience, and the eugenics movement was nearing its peak during the
first decade of Weird Tales, with high school biology texts including basic
eugenics. However, newspaper coverage of the Scopes trial and textbooks
was not the only place where readers could find evolutionary debates. In
texts as diverse as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Eugene
O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) or The Emperor Jones (1920) to the first
Seabury Quinn story, “The Horror at the Links” (published in the October
1925 issue), questions about development and devolution were part of modernism’s discourse, and, not surprisingly, part of Weird Tales. 29
A text using a mad scientist and Darwinian evolution is F. Douglas
McHenry’s “The Seventh Devil,” published in the November 1925 issue.
This first-person narrative focuses on an adventurer/scientist who sets up his
lab on the Island of Seven Devils, located in the South Pacific. The local
primate population gives him plenty to experiment on; after one successful
experience, the narrator claims, “I now had a monkey nine times as intelligent as a normal monkey.” 30 Corpses drifting onto the shore allow our narrator an opportunity to move evolution along by transferring human brains into
gorillas, eventually producing a hybrid that “punded [sic] off the most seathing [sic] criticisms—of Kant, of Darwin, of Spencer, of Einstein—such as
man had never read before and probably will never read again until the
coming of the Superman of Nietzsche.” 31 As is usually the case when science
goes too far, the scientist is forced to destroy his creation to save his own life.
Two of thinkers whom McHenry’s creation declaims—Darwin and Spencer—indicate the enfolding of evolutionary thinking into popular texts like
Weird Tales. Darwin’s effect on the scientific and intellectual culture is
difficult to overstate: his rejection of humans operating outside of natural
process and his insistence of environmental pressures giving rise to specific
adaptions forced new, less anthropocentric conceptions of the universe.
Spencer’s popularization of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” first mentioned in his 1864 Principles of Biology, and his placing of Darwinian concepts on the development of cultures changed the trajectory of Darwin’s
evolutionary thought, connecting it to the cultural sphere and engendering its
use in modernism’s narratives about cultural development or decline. Along
with Spencer, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–1922) argues
for the possibility of cultural devolution, of a reversion to the chaotic savagery of early history, an idea that operates in many of these Darwinian-influ-
Weird Modernism
23
enced tales. 32 The reference to Nietzsche is also highbrow modernism in pulp
form. W. B. Yeats described Nietzsche as “a strong enchanter” when he first
read him in 1902 and continued with an engagement with Nietzsche idea of
art throughout his career. 33 D. H. Lawrence’s novels The Plumed Serpent
(1926) and Women in Love engage Nietzschean ideas, and Lawrence’s book
of travel sketches, Twilight in Italy (1915), which contains a polemic against
Nietzsche’s “will to power,” rings of Nietzsche’s groundbreaking Twilight of
the Idols. The connection with the “superman” also links Darwin with philosophy. Popularly seen as an evolutionary jump, able to move beyond good
and evil, the Übermensch is the next stage of human development, using its
“inexhaustible fertility and power keep up the faith in man.” 34 In “The
Seventh Devil,” the superman and the superape are offered as parallels: one
needed to explain the other.
In the Seabury Quinn text, “The Horror on the Links,” Jules de Grandin
and Dr. Trowbridge find “a half score ape creatures, not wholly man, not
wholly simian, but partaking horribly of the appearance of each, with fur and
handlike feet, but with the face of something which had once been of mankind.” 35 In the November 1926 issue, H. Warner Munn’s “The City of the
Spiders” focuses on evolutionary spiders “as far above the ordinary spider as
the Anglo-Saxon is above the Australian Bushman.” 36 In the time before the
oceans sank Atlantis, humans were slaves to spiders, but thanks to the Ice
Age and humanity’s ability to harness fire, the last of the giant spiders have
fled south into Venezuela. Munn explains our dislike of spiders: “[I]t is
because the hereditary, subconscious memory knows that these creatures
were once your lords in another existence and it commands you to obliterate
this loathsome, alien life from another age.” 37 Racial memory, evolutionary
leaps, environmental pressures—Darwinian concepts that are seen in both
literary modernism and Weird Tales.
The consistent use of Darwin, Spencer, and their ideas through the range
of high and popular texts speaks to the cultural neurosis that evolutionary
finding engendered. Modernism’s twin explorations into humanity’s animalistic side and humanity’s unease because of our inability to adapt to these
animal roots made for increasingly fraught narratives. With humans no longer ontologically different from their primate ancestors, humans found themselves decentered, potentially adrift in a world where apes can learn or spiders could rule. One reaction to this decentering was the retreat into high
culture displayed in the poetry of Eliot and Pound; a second was the linguistic pyrotechnics of James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake
(1939); a third was weird explorations into the Darwinian; a fourth was the
growing interest in devils, cults, and alternative religions.
24
Jonas Prida
WEIRD DEVILS
There are several critical commonplaces for the skepticism toward traditional
religion and rise of alternative religions in the modernist period: the growing
urbanization of America (the 1920s as the first decade where more people
lived in cities than rural areas) and England, the growth of secularization
(explored in the earlier Darwin section), and the aftermath of the Great War.
Canonical modernists like Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, and Eliot were either
influenced by or participants in the occult, with Yeats’s “membership” in the
Order of the Golden Dawn being the best known. 38 The interest in cultism
and what I call weird devils is seen throughout Weird Tales. In the December
1925 issue, the editorial voice in the “The Eyrie” claimed, “Perhaps no
stories have found such unfailing popularity with you, the readers, as the
devil-tales we have printed.” 39 From E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Stranger
from Kurdistan” to Nictzin Dyalhis’s semi-forgotten classic “The Eternal
Conflict” to less interesting narratives such as Flavia Richardson’s “Out of
the Earth,” Weird Tales exposes the religious anxieties that modernism unleashed.
Black Masses and devil worshipping are circulated in a variety of popular
texts in the early twentieth century, of which Weird Tales is only one example. H. Rider Haggard’s She, in some ways the progenitor of weird adventure
stories, has a woman disguised as a goddess at the center of the text. Robert
E. Howard’s El Borak stories, which feature cultists of the desert gods,
appeared in pulps like Top Notch, and the weird menace pulps often featured
devil worshippers whose job was largely to get the shapely women they
chase in various forms of undress. But what makes Weird Tales’s exploration
of inverted crossed and flaming pentagrams different is that these exploitations have white cultists attacking white victims, as opposed to the antiimperial cults of Burks and Schisgall. If the cultural logic is that indigenous
people’s desire for revenge is part of their primitivism, what then explains
the Satanist or the worshipper of the Peacock Throne? 40 Throughout the
1920s, newspapers and journals broke stories about alternative religions (almost always labeled as cults) that made extravagant claims about their ability
to secure earthly power and riches for their followers. Additionally, tabloidstyle papers like the New York Herald claimed that cultists were responsible
for a variety of murders and disappearances (for example, the Cleveland
Torso Murderer and a Detroit murder cult). 41 A story in the August 1928
Weird Tales, “The Witches’ Sabbath,” incorporates this cultural anxiety,
stating, “This only shows what peril is threatening civilization. . . . If the
world but realized how many suicides, sudden mysterious deaths, murders,
and other crimes, are due to evil possession, there’d be a cry of deliverance
overnight.” 42 The 1924 English translation of Huysman’s novel Là-bas
[Down There], which ends in an extended elaboration of a Satanic Black
Weird Modernism
25
Mass, circulated the tropes of chained women as altars, sacrificed infants,
and robed priests. The publication of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry in 1927
continued the popular discussion of charismatic religion as a front for earthly
gain. While people of color used magic, zombies, spirits, and spells to overthrow power structures, Americans or Europeans used it for less politically
motivated reasons: sex and power.
In the same issue as Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” (February 1928), Seabury Quinn’s investigative team of Jules de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge find
themselves solving the case of “Mephistopheles and Company Ltd.,” which
combines the anxieties of power and sexuality. The duo finds a woman
fleeing from a group of men; after securing her safety, they discover that
Bertha Mueller is convinced that she has been marked: “Mephistopheles—
the Devil—I am possessed by him.” 43 During her recovery, she shows de
Grandin and Trowbridge the mark of the beast. “At each place the girl indicated on her white skin there showed, red and angry, the seared, scorched
soreness of a newly made burn; the crude design of a countenance of incomparable evil—a horned, bearded face, surmounted by the device of an inverted passion-cross.” 44 The inverted cross popularized by Là-bas and circulated through popular accounts of Satanism marks the flesh of the woman
with incomparable evil, which can be read as unregulated sexuality (Bertha is
found at night, unescorted). As the narrative unfolds, the detectives discover
that the devilish cult is a front to blackmail recent European immigrants by
invoking old-world superstitions. The title of the Quinn piece (the devil
worshippers are a limited liability corporation) displays the economic nexus
at the heart of popular conceptions of cult activity. Exposés in Hearst newspapers about Edwin Wilson’s Aquarian Foundation, which forced members
to give all possessions to Wilson, in addition to violent humiliation at his
hands, and Oom the Omnipotent, who operated a “love cult” in New York
State, drove public enthusiasm and hysteria around alternative religions. In a
single issue of Weird Tales, readers get the degenerate orgies of “The Call of
Cthulhu” and the econo-sexual dynamics of “Mephistopheles,” indicating
modernism’s anxious exploration of a changing religious structure.
The May 1928 issue also includes a narrative about the Black Mass, again
connecting it to questions of sex and wealth. Written by Bassett Morgan (a
pseudonym for Grace Ethel Jones), “The Skeleton under the Lamp” follows
the adventures of two down-and-outers who are hired to work at the house of
an artist named Caldoon. The house is a cover for local devil worshippers,
who use it for a wide range of nontraditional sexual acts. For example, the
narrator states, “At dark I opened the door to the party. I don’t know why I
didn’t think it queer to see naked men and women riding cattle and goats to
Caldoon’s door, but it seemed all right to me then.” 45 Later, the narrator
claims, “I heard of a Black Mass. I’ve heard that some dives in big cities put
it on for sightseers. But I’ve been through it, and I’m not afraid of hell after
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Jonas Prida
death any more. What happened isn’t printable.” 46 Unlike in “Mephistopheles,” there is no rational explanation given for Caldoon’s power; the
narrative ends with the narrator burning the house down, killing everyone
inside. The energies of untamed sexuality, energies unloosed in the modern
world, are combined with decadent artists to threaten the same world that
created the threats. In these two weird devil texts, we see the two competing
conceptions of religion in the modernist period. In the Quinn piece, black
magic is a front for economic exploitation; in the Morgan text, the otherworldly alternative is the source for worldly power.
Weird Tales, in its use of devils, demons, and various forms of magic, is
not the only pulp to exploit modern unease about religion. The group of
magazines mentioned earlier in the section known as weird menace also
incorporated a wide range of similar figures and iconography. In titles like
Terror Tales and Horror Stories, cloaked figures armed with knives lurk
around every corner, looking to sacrifice curvy heroines and square-jawed
heroes to Moloch. But what makes these pulps different from Weird Tales is
that at the end of the narrative, Moloch turns out to be a money-hungry man.
In this way, Quinn’s “Mephistopheles” is a precursor of a weird menace text
with its decidedly human explanation for the supernatural. But Morgan’s
text, with its lack of closure or anything close to a rational explanation, is
indicative of an investment in the truly weird. Much like the magical powers
the colonizers faced in India or Haiti, the supernatural powers of Caldoon are
a reaction to modernizing impulses and a reflection of how these impulses
are playing out in the public sphere.
The lowbrowing of modernism or the highbrowing of Weird Tales is
indicative of a range of cultural anxieties set in place by social dislocation,
rapid expansion and contraction of a world economy, shifting gender roles,
and the expansion of mass culture—forces that permeated 1920s and ’30s
culture in ways we are still investigating. Both invested in the project of
modernity by virtue of its commodified nature and outré subject matter and
antimodern in its questioning of technological progress and revival of the
Gothic, Weird Tales displays the various reactions to modernity in its inconsistent and, at times, incoherent manner. Empires, technologies, sciences, and
devils are seen as threats in one text and saviors in another. Machines breathing poison gas share print with antigravity orbs, and colonial operatives save
Americans while simultaneously questioning the imperial logic. Although
the high modernism of Joyce or Faulkner seems a gulf of interstellar space
away from robot monsters and ape-men, the pages of “The Unique Magazine” acted as a vessel to cross this void.
Weird Modernism
27
NOTES
1. David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).
2. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2010), 477. To be fair to Lovecraft, he also commented that he had “high
regard” for modernist thinkers and philosophers.
3. See M. Keith Booker, Colonial Power, Colonial Texts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) for more on this discussion. Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of
Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008) is also a useful text.
4. Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2010).
5. Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism
1915–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) directly discusses Haiti as a
site for imperialist weird fantasy, especially Burks.
6. John Horne, “The Speared Leopard,” Weird Tales, August 1929, 186.
7. Istavan Csicsery-Rony Jr. examines the various ways that science fiction is linked to the
imperial enterprise, arguing that “sf’s debt to utopia is great; but it owes more to Empire.”
“Science Fiction and Empire,” Science Fiction Studies 30 (July 2003): 238.
8. Rieder’s observation that “the double-edged effect of the exotic—as a means of gratifying familiar appetites and as a challenge to one’s sense of the proper or the natural—pervades
early science fiction” (Colonialism, 4) is apt here. Although “Garden” isn’t traditional science
fiction, this exotic dynamic is certainly in action in Byrd’s confusion.
9. Oscar Schisgall, “In Kashla’s Garden,” Weird Tales, May 1927, 652.
10. Anne McClintock, in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), argues in her introduction that colonial narratives are
governed by three themes: “the transmission of white, male power through colonized women;
the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of
commodity capital” (1, 3). “Garden” fits this description, along with the necessary inversion to
create the weird.
11. Another Csicsery-Rony Jr. claim: “What we might call the scientific grotesque comes
with the recognition of an embodied, physical anomaly, a being or an event whose existence or
behavior cannot be explained by the currently accepted universal system of rationalization.”
Byrd’s explanation of the seductive power of magic displays this grotesquery. “On the Grotesque in Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 29 (March 2000): 84.
12. Following the distinction set in Race, Oppression, and the Zombie, edited by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), I use Vodou here as the
traditional form of syncretic religion, while voodoo is used for the racist and exploitative
misunderstanding of the religion.
13. Csicsery-Ronay’s comment that “Empire continually reproduces and revitalizes itself
through the management of local crises” is an accurate one when analyzing Burks’s narrative.
“Science Fiction and Empire,” 237.
14. Burks’s most famous short pieces about his time in Santo Domingo and Haiti were later
collected in Black Medicine (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1966).
15. The official U.S. estimate is more than three thousand, although other sources place it at
more than ten thousand. See Renda, Taking Haiti, for more on this discussion.
16. Arthur J. Burks, “Black Medicine,” Weird Tales, August 1925, 149.
17. Chal David mirrors Charlemagne Péralte, a Caco leader whose capture and death by
American forces helped end the most active resistance group.
18. Burks, “Black Medicine,” 153.
19. See Moreman and Rushton’s Race, Oppression, and the Zombie (7–10) for the overdetermined signification of zombies.
20. Burks, “Black Medicine,” 161.
21. Renda’s analysis of Burks is less generous than mine: “Burks’s Haiti was a site of sexual
excess, gender disorder, and primitive savagery; it was a land characterized by the effective
28
Jonas Prida
absence of the family as a basis for social order. In Burks’s telling, the grotesque horror of Haiti
showed the obvious and urgent need for American rule there.” Taking Haiti, 178.
22. However, Nictzin Dyalhis’s “When the Green Star Waned,” published in Weird Tales in
April 1925, is inarguably a science fiction text. “Star” was voted best story of the issue and of
1925 but also was central to the ongoing discussion of science fiction in Weird Tales. This
schizophrenic response to Dyalhis’s text is representative of the larger anxiety about the place
of science and technology in between the wars.
23. Septemus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is a prime example of the demands modern warfare
placed on participants and the human costs of these demands.
24. Pettersen Marzoni, “Red Ether,” Weird Tales, February 1926, 157.
25. Ibid., 172.
26. Ole Bay-Petersen, “T. S. Eliot and Einstein: The Fourth Dimension in the Four Quartets,” English Studies 66, no. 2 (April 1985): 143–55.
27. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 2000), 615. For more on this connection, see Sean Braune, “From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory,” Journal of
Modern Literature 33 (Summer 2010): 167–81.
28. Marzoni, “Red Ether,” 153.
29. John Rieder’s chapter “Artificial Humans and the Construction of Race” also looks at
this concept in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. For a broader discussion of
the importance of Darwinian ideas, see Virginia Richter, Literature after Darwin: Human
Beasts in Western Fiction 1859–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
30. F. Douglas McHenry, “The Seventh Devil,” Weird Tales, November 1925, 632.
31. Ibid., 635.
32. This discussion is also played out in the letters of Lovecraft and Howard, available in A
Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, ed. S. T. Joshi,
David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009).
33. John Burt Foster, Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 24.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), 19.
35. Seabury Quinn, “The Horror on the Links,” Weird Tales, October 1925, 456.
36. H. Warner Munn, “The City of the Spiders,” Weird Tales, November 1926, 631.
37. Ibid., 646.
38. Leon Surette, in The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the
Occult (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1993), explores the connection between modernism and the occult in detail.
39. “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales, December 1925, 848.
40. Seabury Quinn had a long-running section in Weird Tales, titled “Servants of Satan,”
which recounted the crimes of figures such as Gilles de Rais or Countess Bathory.
41. Phillip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
42. Stephen Bagby, “The Witches’ Sabbath,” Weird Tales, August 1928, 249.
43. Seabury Quinn, “Mephistopheles and Company Ltd.,” Weird Tales, February 1928, 188.
44. Ibid., 199.
45. Bassett Morgan, “The Skeleton under the Lamp,” Weird Tales, May 1928, 606.
46. Ibid.
Chapter Three
The Lovecraft Circle
and the “Weird Class”
“Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller”
Dániel Nyikos
WEIRD TALES AND THE FORMATION OF THE “WEIRD CLASS”
As the Weird Tales writers who became known as the Lovecraft Circle
corresponded with one another, 1 they created not only friendships but a
cohesive group that consciously set itself apart from the established literary
intelligentsia of their age. Their sense of being outsiders and of having been
closed out from traditionally legitimate circles appears throughout the writings of this group, reflecting their own position in literary society. In their
letters 2 and in the pages of the magazine they wrote for, these writers consciously developed their own separate literary tradition, which was opposed
to what was prevalent in the broader world of literature at the time. 3 This
chapter will explore what factors led Weird Tales in general and the Lovecraft Circle in particular to adopt this outsider status as a “weird class,” and it
will explore the influence of this new literary culture by highlighting some of
the varying ways in which these themes appear in the works of the Lovecraft
Circle. To them, the weird tale represented both an escape from a society in
which they felt like literary and social outsiders and a path into a common
kinship with others who shared their taste in imaginative stories.
Weird Tales had a unique place in the field of literature as both pulp
fiction and a publication of weird fiction. The magazine was forced to find a
compromise—not always a happy one—between selling copies and supporting quality literature. This circumstance and the unique genre of the weird
tale, particularly as practiced by the Lovecraft Circle, contributed to the
29
30
Dániel Nyikos
creation and reification of a separate aesthetic that privileged the ability to
create uncanny effects. In representing their literary tradition, these writers
traced their genre to such respected authors as Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G.
Wells, Mary Shelley, and—particularly—Edgar Allan Poe, thus demonstrating their continuity with established literary greatness. They then established
the values of their society in their own works. The solidifying of this weird
society can be observed in the writers and readers of Weird Tales in general,
but I will look more closely at the way these ideas appear in the writings of
the so-called Lovecraft Circle, as this group of writers consciously and explicitly wrote to one another using their unique aesthetic. The Lovecraft Circle
contrasted their stories with those of mainstream literary authors, whom they
labeled mundane, unimaginative, and unable to appreciate the sublime thrill
that uncanny tales produce on an appropriately sensitive reader. While this
aesthetic privileged the Weird Tales reader, it particularly honored writers
able to produce this effect.
As the writings of the weird class are more closely examined, a hierarchy
begins to emerge, one that privileges literary ability and imagination where
other class structures favor social power and wealth—traditional advantages
from which many of these writers felt cut off, often unfairly so. Edgar Allan
Poe can be said to be at the top of the weird class; his stories are used as the
standard by which all others were judged. Lovecraft himself figures as, perhaps, Poe’s heir, 4 particularly in the eyes of the Lovecraft Circle. He also
forms the nexus of that richly varied group of writers through his voluminous
letter writing and conscious efforts to encourage writers and introduce them
to one another. Though Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories are more
popular in his time and more prolific, the praise Lovecraft receives from his
contemporaries, 5 not to mention his influence as the head of the Circle, mark
him as the peak of weird aristocracy. The rest of the shape of this society
takes form in letters and anecdotes: readers tell of traveling to meet with their
favorite writers with the same breathless language as explorers visiting sages
in exotic lands. Their habits, adventures, and eccentricities are described in
adoring detail, creating larger-than-life characters who alone, these breathless accounts seem to say, could craft such wild stories of bizarre imagination.
We can see the interest the members of the weird class take in one another
in their letters to one another and to “The Eyrie.” 6 The language they use
mirrors that of society columns introducing the who’s who of a rich culture,
and they share stories of one another with a sense of recording the lived lives
of literary masters. As an example, Lovecraft writes of a visit from a young
protégé thus: “Very shortly I may have another & a longer-term visitor in the
person of one of the ‘gang’s’ youngest members—Donald Wandrei of St.
Paul, Minn., who turned 21 this summer. He has been working for a year in
the advertising dept. of Dutton’s in New York.” 7 In a time when writers first
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
31
encountered one another as little more than a name attached to a work,
personal stories about the backgrounds of different authors were exchanged
with fascination.
The struggle between these opposed aesthetic viewpoints plays out in
their stories. In weird fiction, this conflict between the mundane and the
imaginative is framed in terms of access to cosmic understanding: being able
to imagine a world beyond the accepted one gives characters the capacity to
see things as they truly are. These characters can, therefore, accurately perceive truth, as the medium of weird fiction allows the authors to create fictive
versions of our own world in which the supernatural, though hidden, is very
real. In these stories, there genuinely are worlds of cosmic wonder and terror,
and the characters who can perceive them as they are gain power by this or
are imperiled by it; frequently both. In this cosmology, society at large is
fundamentally blind and corrupt, masking with rationality and prosaic indifference the reality that only a few outsiders can perceive. Just as their creators saw themselves as social outsiders, these characters frequently tread
paths beyond the well-worn roads of society. While their writers chafed
against the perceived unfairness of the dominant aesthetic that marginalized
their art, these characters live in a cosmically unbalanced world, threatened
by vast forces beyond their ability to control or even fully comprehend. 8
They stand alone against the forces of both blind neglect on the part of their
contemporaries and the cosmic danger of the unknown. Thus, the weird class
positions its fictive self-representation as sole possessors of genuine knowledge about the world, who, despite their privileged understanding, walk outside of society, seeing too much to integrate with a culture that does not
understand them. 9
In this study, I will examine how the weird class was constructed and how
the outsider with access to true knowledge is represented both among the
writers—and, to a lesser extent, their readers 10—as well as their literary
creations. First, I will examine the birth and evolution of Weird Tales, looking both at the creator’s and editors’ intentions for it and at the ongoing
debate in the letter column about the literary status of the magazine. Next, I
will consider how the genre of weird fiction helped shape the oppositional
outsider rhetoric found in many of the stories of the magazine. I will then use
Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and his short story
“The Unnamable” to demonstrate the way he positioned the ability to enjoy
and create an uncanny effect as proof of superior aesthetic tastes and talent. I
will then show how these ideas are also reflected in the writings of Robert E.
Howard, another member of the Lovecraft Circle in whose stories the same
themes take significantly different forms.
I choose the expression “weird class” to refer to the imagined set of
writers and readers who are “sensitive” enough, to use Lovecraft’s favored
term, to appreciate weird literature. I do this to draw special attention to the
32
Dániel Nyikos
class boundaries of that culture. Due to their own outsider status in society in
general as well as the cultural marginalization of their chosen medium, this
group both cuts across class boundaries and sets itself up oppositionally to
the privileged class of writers who did not have to write for the proverbial
penny per word to make a living. They belonged to writers of a new class:
artists who had to write for a living.
This is not to say that the writers of the Lovecraft Circle all saw themselves as kindred to the pulp authors who pounded out formulaic story after
story to meet the demands of the ravenous readership of magazines such as
Black Mask and Argosy. It must be noted that Weird Tales was started to
create a venue for publishing fiction that could not be found elsewhere rather
than to milk profit from a popular theme. At this point, it was the weird story,
not the pulp form, that marked the magazine as a place for a unique culture to
flourish in the form of freedom of expression. Outsiderness was embedded in
the magazine from the start. In the words of its founder, Jacob Clark Henneberger, the magazine’s purpose was “to give the writer free rein to express
his innermost feelings in a manner befitting great literature.” 11 In 1923, when
the magazine was founded, the common stereotypes about the shoddy quality
of writing in the pulp magazines had not yet evolved. Henneberger could not
have known that his chosen publication medium would lead to the magazine
being associated with “the pulps.”
In his dissertation, “The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection,” Jason Carney demonstrates a shift in the public perception of pulps, writing that “‘pulp magazines’ as a discrete ‘Grub street’ endeavor generalizable in terms of high
quantity and low quality only became at hand as a circulating cultural stereotype after and as a result of the massive expansion of the all-fiction magazine
marker.” 12 Carney stresses that it was precisely as a means to create a new
place for the publication of unique stories that had no other outlet that Weird
Tales came about: “Weird Tales was founded in response to what the publisher, Jacob Clark Henneberger, thought of as an aesthetic crisis, a kind of
encroachment of the contaminating commercial influence on literary endeavor.” 13 Thus, it can be said that Weird Tales, at least at its inception, was not
yet marked by the stamp of class marginalization that would later fall on the
pulp form. 14 On the other hand, the genre of the weird story was distinctly an
outsider genre, as the lack of other publications that led to Weird Tales’s
creation illustrates.
As I mentioned, Weird Tales found itself increasingly associated with the
general character of pulp magazines, which, “as a form, became the bottom
of the cultural hierarchy of the 1920s and 1930s,” according to David M.
Earle, author of Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form. 15 Even those responsible for the decisions made by Weird
Tales had to struggle both to create quality work and to draw an audience to
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
33
help the magazine stay afloat. Earle describes the balance pulp publishers
had to strike when constructing their audience. On the one hand, they sought
to appeal to readers from more privileged classes; on the other hand, they had
to continue to sell to their core, working-class audience. The resulting discourse was complex and not easily summarized:
These contemporary portraits of the pulp audience are complex—many selfdescriptive pulp editorials show a hopeful upward mobility, yet are careful not
to ostracize the main, working-class readership. . . . For example, in 1935, A.
A. Wyn wrote: “We all know that plenty of the bankers and brokers, lawyers
and doctors, salesmen and Senators are addicted to reading the pulps.” 16
As writers of both weird fiction and a pulp magazine, the Lovecraft Circle
was doubly marked by outsider status through the magazine’s position in the
broader world of literature. This anxiety was heightened by what some saw
as pandering to scandalous interests. To attract more attention, Weird Tales
often sported lurid covers depicting scantily clad women. The lively debate
on this topic within the magazine’s letter section, “The Eyrie,” demonstrates
the mixed feelings of the readers and writers regarding whether the magazine
should aspire to literary status. Some readers felt scandalized by covers they
said undermined the esteemed quality of the work in Weird Tales. In the
August–September 1936 issue, Marshall Lemer of New York City, in a letter
Farnsworth Wright titled “Is This Sarcasm?” writes,
I admire the artistic sense that prompts Brundage to select invariably what is
frequently the one nude in the entire issue for the cover illustration. . . . I
receive a curious glance from the gentleman that presides over the local news
stand when I ask for Weird Tales, and once I received a copy of Spice and
Ginger Stories in pardonable error. 17
Other readers praised the covers for their artistry and daring. In February
1938, Gertrude Hemken from Chicago, whose outspoken letters written in
strong dialect were a regular staple of “The Eyrie,” writes, “Wotta nude . . . !
Honestly, she looks almost real.” 18 Wright, who took over from Edwin Baird
as editor with Weird Tales in financial straits in 1924, took a pragmatic
approach: the shocking covers sold magazines. Sometimes he took a similar
approach to stories: “He featured stories many times that were not up to the
quality of the other fiction in the magazine but which he knew would sell
copies.” 19 Thus, the magazine walked a line—one that would continue to be
debated—between marketability and literary aspiration.
In terms of content, Wright included stories by famous authors of literary
merit in his “Weird Reprints” section, further demonstrating the magazine’s
literary aspirations. Some of these writers included Charles Dickens, Jules
Verne, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Allan Poe.
34
Dániel Nyikos
Rather than attempting to elevate their favorites to join the ranks of accepted literary authors, enthusiasts of weird fiction situated their preferred
form in terms of an alternate and equally valid literary tradition, one parallel
to the widely accepted canon. To do so, they created their own means by
which to judge the value of work, separate from the language of contemporary criticism. The conversation in “The Eyrie” richly praises and criticizes
the stories of previous issues, using language suggestive of a set weird aesthetic, such as one letter from B. M. Reynolds in 1934: “Its cosmic scope and
imaginative brilliance certainly give one food for thought.” 20 And of another
story, “If he can sustain the present high mark of eery mystery and nameless
horror . . . , he will have written a masterpiece.” Tone, imagination, and style
are key to the weird aesthetic. Among phrases used by other contributors in
that issue are such statements of aesthetic value as “sheer pathos and beauty,”
“unusual and original,” “fantastic and imaginative,” and “as good a piece of
weird fiction as it is possible to find.” The last sentence is worth particular
note. Criticism is almost compulsively situated in this alternative aesthetic,
rather than in terms of literature as a whole.
Readers and writers alike judged the stories of Weird Tales in their own
aesthetic terms, generally avoiding using the language of mainstream literature in their criticism. They often contextualized their praise with phrases
such as “in the weird tales genre” and compared successful writers to others
who wrote in that mode. I chose the October 1937 issue to examine the letter
column for comparisons of the work that appeared in the magazine to other
literature. There are five instances of Weird Tales writers being compared to
other writers of the weird who did not appear in the magazine except in the
reprints, notably Poe and H. G. Wells. These comparisons are all positive,
illustrating the readers’ interest in connecting their favorites to the more
acceptable stories of previous generations. In this way, they helped solidify
the pedigree and ongoing continuity of the literary respectability of their
genre. Interestingly, writers are only compared to other Weird Tales writers
three times. No writers in the magazine are likened to contemporary writers
who did not write weird fiction. The only other writer mentioned is Hemingway, and the mention uses Hemingway as the opposite of weird writers.
That particular letter warrants special attention, as Wright chose it to lead
the column and dedicated almost a page and a half to its content and his own
rebuttal of it. It provides a fascinating insight into the balance between popular entertainment and literature that the magazine sought. The letter writer, G.
M. Wilson, complains that the virtuous characters in the magazine inevitably
win. He could not have won favor with Wright by his choice of wording: “I
read some years ago that a writer who wished to achieve success with your
type of magazine must never let heroism be overcome by villainy” 21 (emphasis mine). He anticipates that Wright might give a typical reply about not
aspiring to a realistic, and hence not literary, representation of life, but insists
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
35
that Weird Tales is not a typical pulp: “You may say you are not writing
about life, that I can get my sordid realism in the contemporary fiction of the
Hemingway school, but . . . [t]he point is that you have the makings of an
excellent magazine, above the class of the usual pulp, yet you usually and
deliberately tie yourself down with this one flaw” 22 (emphasis mine). Wright
might have taken special umbrage at the tone taken by Wilson, which places
his argument in commercial terms and suggests that the editorial choices
taken by the staff are purely to please readers and sell the maximum number
of copies: “I suppose you are a success financially and have a large reading
public, but don’t you think you could widen your appeal and increase circulation by adopting the above suggestion? . . . [I]t is your business to know the
psychology of your reading public.” 23 Wilson’s assumptions, as we have
seen, were basically wrong; Weird Tales was not doing well, and perhaps
was never meant to.
In his response, Wright makes clear his dedication to quality weird literature over predictable potboilers. He describes two stories in previous issues
that caused particular outrage from readers for violent fates that befell their
characters, and he names four stories in just the previous issue in which
virtue does not triumph. “Most 24 of our stories do end happily because that is
the way the authors write them; but our readers can never know in advance
whether the ending will be happy or otherwise.” 25
The unpredictable nature of weird fiction allowed writers to push their
imaginings even beyond those of other magazines, setting their stories in
other worlds, which were often thinly veiled analogues of the contemporary
world. “The one thing readers knew with Weird Tales was that the unexpected was always possible. For if the reader knew in advance that the ending
would always be a happy one, then all threats and occurrences in the tale
could not dispel the knowledge that all would be well in the end. . . . It was
that extra dimension that gave Weird Tales the monopoly on real horror
stories during the era.” 26 The defamiliarizing 27 influence of the weird tale
allowed writers to reshape the contemporary world and make it new in the
eyes of the readers. This allowed writers broader freedom to criticize elements of society and to promote their own worldviews; one can see the realworld analogues behind the cosmic horrors, barbarians, and aliens between
the covers of Weird Tales.
This defamiliarizing effect is particularly strong in this genre of fiction.
According to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. in The Seven Beauties of Science
Fiction, science fiction provides a sense of wonder in two primary modes:
the sublime and the grotesque. These he defines, respectively, as “a complex
recoil and recuperation of self-consciousness coping with phenomena suddenly perceived to be too great to be comprehended” and “the realization that
objects that appear to be familiar . . . are actually undergoing surprising
transformations.” 28 It is clear that weird fiction falls into both categories.
36
Dániel Nyikos
These stories serve to destabilize the audience’s beliefs in rigid concepts: “In
both, the perceiver enjoys a sudden dislocation from habitual perception” in
which “the testing of the categories conventionally used to interpret the
world, and the desire to articulate what consciousness finds inarticulable.” 29
This makes the weird story form an effective vehicle for undermining societal structures and building an alternative system of values. “Behind all of the
specific moments are vast and vastly changed conceptual vistas that make
possible new imaginary experiences and ways of inhabiting material existence.” 30 It is precisely such “vastly changed conceptual vistas” that the
weird class inhabited. The writers of the Lovecraft Circle did more than write
for pay: they used their imaginative output to produce a new and alternative
literary society that reshaped preconceptions about art and the lived experience of artists.
“SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE”
Lovecraft explicitly explains his perception of the relationship of weird fiction to literature at large in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which he
also lays out his ideas arguing for the superiority of his chosen genre, and
therefore the writers of it. In the essay, he creates a dichotomy between the
imagination of the weird story 31 and the banality of other literature, yet he
also presents weird literature as the principal means of conveying horror, as
much a part of human experience as any other emotion captured by other
writers. Thus, he presents weird fiction as both more imaginative than and as
emotionally true as contemporary literature.
In his essay, he suggests that those who dedicate themselves to stories
about mundane events lack imagination: “Relatively few are free enough
from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and
tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of
such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the
majority.” 32 In the language he uses, such as the expression “free from the
spell,” we see his preferencing of the supernatural over the mundane, which
he positioned as deadening to the ability to perceive true beauty. Those who
write and enjoy weird stories are not bound by the “common” and “ordinary.”
Lovecraft specifically attributes inability to appreciate weird fiction to a
lack of sensitivity and insists that the ability to enjoy supernatural horror
exists only among a select elite: “But the sensitive are always with us . . . ; so
that no amount of rationalization, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite
annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.” It is
worth noting that he places rationalism and modernity (to use his word,
“reform”) as opponents of his chosen genre. He insists that his “tradition” is
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
37
“as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or
tradition of mankind,” thus claiming that supernatural horror is as capable of
representing human reality as other forms of literature. In doing so, Lovecraft
does something many of his contemporaries do not: he favorably compares
weird literature to mainstream fiction in terms of craft and representation
rather than merely content. 33
As is usual to the writers and readers of weird fiction, Lovecraft establishes a system for assessing quality within the genre itself, comparing weird
stories only to other weird stories when he describes the qualities that mark a
particularly successful piece: “If the proper sensations are excited, such a
‘high spot’ must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature” (emphasis mine). He also takes pains to separate his favored literary form from that
which might too easily be dismissed as being hackneyed or trashy: “The true
weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a
sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.” 34 Lovecraft, who believed
he had been born in the wrong century, fit perfectly into the outsiders of the
weird class brought together by Weird Tales. What for his characters is a
source of terror and often mental and physical harm was a source of some
hope for Lovecraft: that his artistic endeavors showed his greater sensitivity
toward a unique and vibrant art form. It also revealed a duality to his relationship with the literary elite: he presented their unwillingness to accept his art
form as an inability to appreciate it.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
From boyhood, H. P. Lovecraft was made aware of his family’s reduced
financial and social status, and his chosen career as a writer of weird stories
further strained his position. Lovecraft was born “to a family that was both
well-to-do financially and a part of the informal social aristocracy of” Providence, Rhode Island. 35 His father died a gruesome death in 1898 of what is
now believed to be syphilis. In 1904, when Lovecraft was fourteen, the
mismanagement of his grandfather’s estate “forced the family to move . . .
into a smaller house.” 36 Deeply shamed, he later wrote of himself in this
time, “How could an old man of 14 . . . readjust his existence to a skimpy flat
and new household programme and inferior outdoor setting . . . ?” and
contemplated suicide. 37 His melancholic personality surfaced frequently in
life and found its expression through his writing; he later wrote, “There is no
field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for
fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape
from life.” 38 Never having attended university, Lovecraft felt the shame of
his academic failure all his life. In his construction of cosmic forces in his
38
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stories, he separates access not only to imagination but also to knowledge
from the privileged academic class.
In many of Lovecraft’s stories, true horror comes not from physical danger, but from the realization that the universe is fundamentally ambivalent
toward humanity. By making contact with forces that bring irrefutable
knowledge about the inhuman nature of the cosmos, Lovecraft’s characters
cross from a place of ignorance to one of understanding. Their understanding
of the very places with which they were most familiar, which they imagined
to be complete and fixed, becomes unhinged as they see the fundamental
disharmony of the universe. James Kneale demonstrates that, for someone
with Lovecraft’s conservative perspectives on change and space, the liminal
divisions between imagined worlds where such contact is possible become a
site of anxiety. He writes that, “while thresholds can be read positively or
negatively, Lovecraft usually casts his in a negative light because they open
up the prospect of change, which can only be threatening to someone obsessed with fixity.” 39
In his story “The Unnamable,” Lovecraft challenges what he sees as a
bourgeois prejudice against weird stories, which he attributes to a failure of
imagination. In the story, Lovecraft presents an argument between the narrator and his friend, who represents a straw man for contemporary literature.
Their debate, which begins about art, moves into basic questions about the
essential nature of reality: Whose knowledge of the realities of the world is
more complete?
The narrator tries to convince Joel Manton, “an orthodox sun-dweller”
whose “feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects,” of the
“mystical and unexplained.” 40 As Lovecraft’s narrator insists, “‘Common
sense’ in reflecting on these subjects . . . is merely a stupid absence of
imagination and mental flexibility.” Again, Lovecraft emphasizes the importance of sensitivity to things not felt by most: “No wonder sensitive students
shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts.” 41
Lovecraft’s satire of contemporary literature is clear in his description of
the literary preferences of Manton, for whom anything imaginative is anathema, and the most thorough examination of banal everyday events constitutes
true art:
It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse
strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid
interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs.
Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; or although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he
would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. 42
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
39
After the inevitable confrontation with the horror that proves the narrator’s fears, the narrator is left “too dazed to exult.” 43 In this moment, Lovecraft’s own hope for the triumph of the uncanny over rationality, and therein
the triumph of Lovecraft’s form of mystical knowledge over accepted academia, is clear. Though the narrator is almost destroyed by the experience, his
understanding of the universe is definitively proven. 44
For Lovecraft, who aspired to the identity of a scholar despite his inability
to enter academia, the world of politics and science felt as distant and apathetic as the gods of his stories. For all his class pretensions due to his
heritage, Lovecraft’s poverty was a constant reminder of this outsider status.
He writes of his frustration that his stories did not achieve broader acceptance among readers, and he chafed at the public perception of “the pulps.”
As such, many of Lovecraft’s stories form tacit arguments that there is a vital
science beyond academic knowledge, which is the knowledge of the uncanny
and unknowable that his stories seek to capture. 45 However, for all his imagination and understanding, Lovecraft still saw himself as spurned by the literary elite.
Just as Lovecraft’s anxieties about his relationship with accepted society
were expressed in his stories, so was his terror of the lower class—a class he
refused to imagine he himself had become part of, despite the dire financial
straits that necessitated his ghostwriting for other authors to earn his meager
living. After he married Sonia Haft Greene, an immigrant of Ukrainian and
Jewish descent, 46 he moved to New York City, where his finances forced
him to take residence in Brooklyn. There, he lived elbow to elbow with
uneducated, often foreign-born people. For Lovecraft, the idea that he, a
“sensitive” member of the weird class, could belong among such people was
a source of terrible loathing. His class disgust is strongly tinged with xenophobia, and in his letters he attributes the decay of that part of the city to the
influence of immigrants: “My guess is that its decay had just set in, owing to
the Syrian fringe beyond Atlantic Avenue.” 47 After he finally leaves New
York, he writes, “It is nearly a full year ago that I left it without a pang to
come home to my own—to the clean, white, and ancient New England that
bred me.” 48 By returning to New England, he believed he came closer to the
proper balance owed to one of his ancient family and artistic abilities, though
he would never achieve the affluence and success he felt was his birthright.
Lovecraft’s deep feelings of outsiderness driven home by his stay in
Brooklyn appear in a story he wrote based on this experience, “The Horror at
Red Hook.” The story, which Lovecraft’s wife later suggested was born from
a rude encounter with a group of workers at a restaurant, connects the tendency toward laziness, criminality, and vice that Lovecraft saw in his neighbors
with another fear—that of ancient, pagan, blasphemous rites threatening the
city. In the story, the slum Red Hook, once a respectable neighborhood, is
now multiracial, occupied by “Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro ele-
40
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ments.” 49 By constructing the menace of the neighborhood thus, Lovecraft
exerted artistic domination over his class environment by recasting his anxiety in terms of the cosmic horrors of his own imagination. Thus, he imagined
a bizarre and unknown “truth” literally lurking beneath the thing he despised.
This fictional Red Hook is “a babel of sound and filth, and sends out
strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers.” 50 “From
this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing
along the lanes . . . and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows
when visitors pick their way through.” 51 This depraved, destitute population
worships evil pre-Christian gods and kidnaps innocents for sacrifice to their
gods. “Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had
commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous
abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding.” 52
We see in this a bizarre conjunction: the illiterate immigrant masses worshipping beings of secret power. It must be noted, however, that the immigrants make sacrifices to something they do not understand, which is corrupting New York and America from the inside. This “rotting,” literal in the
story, reflects the metaphorical social rot Lovecraft feared coming from the
multiracial lower class. At the climax of the story, the detective Malone
discovers “solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy . . . including four
mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died
soon after exposure to light; a circumstance the doctors thought rather merciful.” 53 This discovery illuminates the horror that the lower classes will literally bring forth abomination. In this case, the forced mating of humans with
monsters closely mirrors Lovecraft’s phobia of the intermingling of classes
and races.
This goes beyond xenophobia, however: the terrors of the secret world
here threaten to spill over into the familiar, sun-drenched New York its
dwellers thought they understood. Malone, as a white man, glimpses a reality
that remains a mystery to the others, who are unable to grasp its portents:
“Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited perspective in their lack
of wonder at the myriad unexplainable details.” In an interesting turn, Malone wishes the things he experienced in real life could again be confined to
mere fantasy such as that the readers of Weird Tales might enjoy: “But he is
content to rest silent in Chepachet [a small town in Rhode Island], calming
his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible
experience from the realm of present reality to that of picturesque and semimythical remoteness.” 54
Though the fundamental disordering of the universe extends to the upper
class in “The Horror at Red Hook,” the story betrays Lovecraft’s fondness
for the privileged old world. One character, Robert Suydam, is characteristic
of Lovecraft’s representations of the upper class, a decadent scion who
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
41
serves as a reminder of a better age. In the mold of Roderick Usher, whose
“time-honored” family “had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch,” 55
Suydam is “a lettered recluse of an ancient Dutch family . . . inhabiting the
spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built.” 56
Though he, too, is destroyed, Suydam does strike back in death at the unholy
force that slew him. After Suydam falls under the corrupting influence of
Red Hook’s witchcraft and dies, his “naked, tittering, phosphorescent”
corpse pushes the cursed idol from its a pedestal in its underground lair,
freeing the community—although temporarily—from the power of that inhuman god. In Suydam’s character, the reader finds a combination of the decayed and fallen aristocracy of Poe with this final moment of posthumous
redemption. Though he himself is as dead as the era in which his family was
still ascendant, Suydam strikes back at the chaotic disorder of the universe.
The fondness for the old aristocracy lingers in Lovecraft’s story, even with
the passing of the last of that ancient family.
Lovecraft’s writing shows a deep fear that social imbalances would lead
to the complete destruction of civilization, which he saw as already fallen
from its height at the Victorian ideal. Paul Buhle argues, “In asociality and in
history, Horror is the natural concomitant to the Socialist critiques of Capitalism. Horror foreshadows and fulfils the Marxian prediction of Socialism or
Barbarism by placing in true perspective the breakdown of the West.” 57 At
the base of Lovecraft’s fiction is the fundamental challenge of modern science on the established order. If the evolution of humans is a natural process
without inherent meaning, there arises what Buhle calls “a modern sense of
indeterminacy.” 58 This creates a sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness
that ever threatens to crush the sanity of Lovecraft’s characters; the cosmic
horrors of his stories signify the vast ambivalence of the flawed universe. In
this, Lovecraft owes some debt to Poe, as described by Donald R. Burleson:
“Poe’s protagonists are often mentally tormented individuals facing insupportably bleak facts of their existence and circumstances.” 59
For Lovecraft, his own loss of familial prestige, coupled with the humiliation of his reduced circumstances and of his being forced to rely on his
writing to survive, created a terrible sense of helplessness and inconsequentiality. He saw himself ostracized from both academia and the greater literary
world, and he imagined himself separate from both, creating his own artistic
circle with the other writers and the readers of the magazines for which he
wrote. In his stories, this disordered balance almost always leads to ruin for
the characters who realize it.
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ROBERT E. HOWARD
The lone outsider who comes into possession of secret knowledge about the
fundamentally flawed universe also appears in the work of Robert E. Howard. For Howard, this corruption did not come from a fall from grace with
the close of the Victorian era, but rather from a fundamental flaw in civilization itself. Like Lovecraft’s, Howard’s characters frequently discover, to
their horror, that the illusion of normalcy in the world is a thin skin stretched
over a maddeningly vast truth. There is far more to the world than most
imagine, and that which we call civilization is guided by sinister forces
incomprehensible to most. Unlike Lovecraft’s characters, Howard’s heroes
frequently rise to fight back against the terrors of the cosmic night, though
their victory is a fleeting one: the corruption, ultimately, is insurmountable.
Born in a small Texas town in 1906, Howard witnessed as a young man
the transition from frontier life to a modern small town. Howard saw the
effects the wealth of an oil boom has on a region. He wrote, “Oil came into
the country when I was still a young boy, and remained. I’ll say one thing
about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that Life’s a pretty rotten thing about as
quick as anything I can think of.” 60 As Mark Finn writes in his biography,
Blood and Thunder, “Robert’s reaction formed a moral stance that he would
strike over and over again in the wood pulp pages of Weird Tales magazine
and its many competitors. A sensitive man, who felt deeply, he couldn’t help
but be affected by the constant chaos, violence, and corruption that came
with the oil booms.” 61 Howard was something of a contradiction, an amateur
boxer as well as a voracious reader and writer. The people of his small town
did not understand him, and Howard chafed at their perception of him,
though he did have a circle of close friends and correspondents. He, like
Lovecraft and other members of their circle, lived on the fringe of normal
society.
Howard’s stories echo Lovecraft’s in that the outsider protagonists’ ability to access forbidden knowledge sets them apart from their society and
gives them power. Like Lovecraft’s heroes, Howardian characters are often
placed in peril by their exposure to dangers on the borders of the rational
world. Just as Lovecraft’s horrors crept into the minds of those sensitive
enough to glimpse them, the danger of the peek into forbidden truth frequently challenges Howard’s characters. Howard’s protagonists, in contrast to
Lovecraft’s academics, are true working-class heroes. They exemplify virtues of rough masculinity, physical strength, combat prowess, hard work,
toughness, and courage. Often, the protagonist can be identified as soon as a
broad-chested, thick-armed, battle-ready character appears. They have other
things in common with Lovecraft’s characters: they are social outsiders, they
struggle with forces partially beyond their comprehension, and they are
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
43
prone to brooding reflections on the mysteries of the universe. Most of all,
they stand alone.
That Howard hated the idea of working for others is well documented. In
a 1931 letter to Farnsworth Wright, Howard wrote, “Life’s not worth living if
somebody thinks he’s in authority over you.” 62 Writing was an opportunity
to be his own master, and Howard chafed at social conventions. Even Howard’s barbarian heroes appear apart from their tribes and places of origin,
traveling alone and out of place in a wider world. While their harsh upbringings have hardened them to survive in the violent worlds Howard describes,
these heroes are separated from membership in any larger group. They wander, often alone and at odds with the powers that control their world. Their
success or failure depends on their ability to assert their individualism and
control their own fate. Wealth translates to the power to exert one’s will,
often as a corollary to masculine assertion of violence. This is not a gesture
of domination of others, but rather of securing one’s individual freedom. As
it did with Lovecraft, writing gave Howard a chance to control his own
destiny in a fundamentally flawed world.
A recurring theme in Howard’s works is the decadent civilization on the
verge of collapse, particularly characterized by senseless warfare and sexual
excess. In his letters, he is ever against capitalistic greed and exploitation: he
writes against the “gang that are now ham-stringing the administration and
yelling ‘Communism!’ every time Roosevelt tries to free the country a little
from their monopolistic clutches.” 63 In his correspondence, he writes with
great passion about barbarian cultures and the muscular freedom of the cowboys heroes whose last light was fading even then. He, like Lovecraft, believed the best age of the world had passed, though he placed this mantle on
the broad shoulders of barbarians rather than the Romans and the eighteenthcentury English, as Lovecraft did.
The power and danger of forbidden knowledge about the universe reveal
themselves with remarkable clarity in the stories of King Kull. Their treatment is particularly nuanced in “The Shadow Kingdom.” Kull is himself a
barbarian from the island of Atlantis, ruling in a time even before the rise of
the advanced civilization now associated with that island. In Kull’s age, the
mighty state of Valusia rules the world, and he is its king. This position
forces him to glimpse secrets not meant for humans: that power as he knows
it is a lie and that humans, far from being lords of the planet, are merely
pawns in a cosmic game they can little comprehend.
Kull receives his first warning about this from the Pictish ambassador Kanu, who is himself an outsider: as a Pict, he will never be entirely welcomed
by the Valusians, but his long years as an ambassador have made him fat, too
fond—by his own admission—of wine and women. His position outside both
cultures gives him unique insight: he combines half-forgotten Pictish legends
with what he knows of the secrets of Valusia’s politics to glimpse the truth
44
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about the ancient history of Valusia’s leadership, and so he warns Kull, “The
night can hear. There are worlds within worlds.” 64 His words begin to part
the veil that hides the truth from Kull.
This warning weighs heavily on Kull, for whom the place of the city itself
becomes suddenly strange and sinister. He perceives that order is only an
illusion for something fundamentally alien to him, which both makes him an
outsider and threatens him: “You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and
Lemuria rose from the sea.” 65 This is the threat of a past in which the current
divisions between reality and imagination were not so sharp, and humans
fought to survive against things known only in legends. 66 Just as the city,
with its rigid class hierarchies and its masses of unimaginative people who
little know the truth about the place they live, was a source of anxiety in
Lovecraft’s work, it is alienating in Howard’s stories as well.
Thus, as in the works of Lovecraft, the separation of the mundane world
and illusion is disturbed by a terrifying truth: that those things sensitive
people fear are real, waiting in constant menace just beyond the perception of
most. Kull learns that the course of human history has been controlled by a
race of evil serpent-people, who disguise themselves as human priests and
kings. They conspire to kill and replace Kull with one of their own. As Kull
creeps through his own palace, the familiar halls made strange by the new
realization of the secrets within, he feels his perception of reality changing.
He feels “like a naked child before the inscrutable wisdom of the mystic past.
Again the sense of unreality swept upon him. At the back of his soul stole
dim, gigantic phantoms, whispering monstrous things.” 67
The reader sees just how disordered the world has become for Kull as he
perceives the hidden truth and grapples with the significance of this hidden
knowledge: “[H]is flesh crawled with a horrid thought; ‘are the people of
Valusia men or are they all serpents?’” 68 (emphasis in original). As what he
previously believed to exist only in myth proves to be real, Kull fights to
reorient himself as to what is real and what is not. He suddenly questions
everything he had previously taken for granted. Though this hesitation would
leave the psyche of one of Lovecraft’s characters crippled, Kull is made of
stronger stuff, and he steels himself for a fight.
Tall and muscular, Kull little resembles a Lovecraftian protagonist, but
his ability to sense—and even be terrified by—the reality of his world demonstrates that he, too, is a fictional representative of the weird class. As a
king and a barbarian, he is doubly on the margins of society, ruling over a
strange and ancient people he has no kinship with. In an interesting turn,
Kull’s outsider imagination is able to glimpse what the common people of
Valusia have themselves forgotten: the supernatural forces that peer from the
recesses of the past and still lurk in the dark corners of the city.
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
45
The secret to his survival comes out of the dim past, together with the
inhuman menace that threatens to overwhelm Kull. 69 Brule, a Pictish warrior
sent by Ka-nu, reveals to Kull the ancient phrase “Ka nama kaa lajerama,”
which humans can pronounce but serpent-men cannot, thus serving as a
shibboleth. Kull, served both by the secret knowledge imparted to him by the
Picts and by his own overwhelming physical prowess, defeats the serpentmen with the help of Brule. This, like many Howard stories, features the
victory of an outsider character who walks beyond the borders of normal
society and possesses knowledge that average humans do not have access to.
Much has been written about Howard’s complex worldview regarding the
struggle between civilization and barbarism, and it would be a disservice to
suggest that he completely preferred the latter over the former. It is, however,
clear that in civilization itself Howard found an element of the fundamental
corruption of the world. In the battle between the evil snake-cult and those
with knowledge of their presence, he stages the opposition between those
forces that control humans who go through life little guessing the deeper
truths hidden beyond their understanding:
He stopped short, staring, for suddenly, like the silent swinging wide of a
mystic door, misty, unfathomed reaches opened in the recesses of his consciousness and for an instant he seemed to gaze back through the vastnesses
that spanned life and life; seeing through the vague and ghostly fogs dim
shapes reliving dead centuries—men in combat with hideous monsters, vanquishing a planet of frightful terrors. . . . And man, the jest of the gods, the
blind, wisdomless striver from dust to dust, following the long bloody trail of
his destiny, knowing not why, bestial, blundering, like a great murderous
child, yet feeling somewhere a spark of divine fire. 70
In the next sentence, the reader sees a vital clue to Kull’s own perception
of the universe: “Kull drew a hand across his brow, shaken; these sudden
glimpses into the abysses of memory always startled him.” The phrasing
“these sudden glimpses . . . always startled him” demonstrates that he is
prone to these imaginings and has had them before; Kull, too, is sensitive 71 to
the same cosmic secrets that Lovecraft’s characters are. Rather than buckling
to the pressures of what he knows, he rages against it, despite shuddering at
the realization of his own insignificant place in the cosmos.
CONCLUSION
The aesthetic of the weird class took shape through their writings. Rather
than through face-to-face interaction, the Lovecraft Circle expressed their
ideas about their role as writers of weird stories on the fringes of literature
through their stories, poems, and letters. Just as the character of the outsider
46
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who gains knowledge of the secret corruption of the universe that exists
beyond the understanding of most appears in Lovecraft’s and Howard’s
work, this same pattern can be found in the writings of other Lovecraft Circle
authors. It can be traced through the bizarre imaginary worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, where individuals wander lost and amazed, acted upon by forces
they little understand. It is found in C. L. Moore’s stories about Jirel of Joiry
and Northwest Smith, eternal wanderers on the edge of civilization whose
every story is an encounter with the strange forces beyond the pale, one in the
past and the other in the future. In the stories of what S. T. Joshi has termed
the Lovecraft Mythos, written by such authors as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber,
Frank Belknap Long, and Henry Kuttner, we see the use of elements of
Lovecraft’s cosmology: the sensitive protagonist who glimpses behind the
veil that hides universal truths from the minds of most, the vast and sinister
chaos of the world. This is not to say that these stories are cast from the same
mold; every writer adds a unique turn to these themes, and there is space for
richer exploration of the interplay of their themes with the influences of the
weird class.
Each member of the Lovecraft Circle expressed ideas of alienation, of the
triumph of the weird imagination, and of the fundamental wrongness of the
universe that, when detected by those sensitive enough to perceive it, brings
both understanding and madness. It is little wonder that, in the stories these
writers tell, characters who express this weird imagination suffer for it more
often than not, and ultimate destruction at the hands—or tentacles—of irresistible universal forces proves to be the fate of humanity regardless of the
small victories the heroes might achieve. Pushed to the literary fringe by the
pulp format of the magazine and the weird content of their work, these
writers forged with one another and, to a lesser extent, with their readers an
alternative class whose hierarchy was based not on wealth and social power,
but on creativity, imagination, and the ability to craft unique stories. It is,
perhaps, a testament to these writers that they were wrong in one way: their
work continues to make inroads into the literary canon and is finally receiving long-overdue critical attention.
NOTES
1. Considering the myriad writers who contributed to Weird Tales, it is best not to make
sweeping claims about all of them, though certain patterns do emerge. Therefore, I will try to
focus on the writers of the Lovecraft Circle, though I will also draw general cultural lines from
the ongoing conversation in “The Eyrie,” which formed the crux of communication among
weird fiction enthusiasts. Certainly, the Lovecraft Circle was a key part of that conversation.
2. Lovecraft kept a voluminous correspondence. S. T. Joshi estimates that he wrote between forty-two thousand and eighty-four thousand letters. “By the 1930s HPL had become a
fixture in the worlds of pulp fiction and fantasy fandom, and he accordingly began corresponding with a great many fellow writers.” He wrote around 250,000 words in total to Robert E.
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
47
Howard alone; Howard wrote 300,000 to Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P.
Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 146.
3. It would be remiss of me not to mention that it has been argued by others that Weird
Tales and pulp literature in general were influenced by and reflected modernist aesthetics. In
this way, it also served to “Make it new!” in a way that destabilized the perception of stabile
realism. David Earle and Jason Carney, discussed in this chapter, develop this point very well.
Carney shows that the marginalization of the Weird Tales writers allowed them to create this
oppositionality, which was a shadow version of what the modernists were doing: “It was the
Weird Tales writers’ exile from the garden of authentic aesthetic production on a literary plane
into the shadows that conditioned and intensified their project.” Jason Carney, “The Shadow
Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection”
(PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2014), 149–50.
4. The inimitable Gertrude Hemken writes in the December 1937 issue: “The more I read
of Lovecraft’s work, the more I see in them the modern Poe—by his minute detail of every
angle—the history of the family which built the house—the exact description of the plot of
ground in which this ancient dwelling stood . . .—on such things I find HPL so very like Poe.”
See Gertrude Hemken, “Here It Is,” Weird Tales, December 1937, 760.
5. In countless instances, one finds sentiments such as those of Harold S. Farnese in the
July 1937 issue, which bore memorials to Lovecraft after his death: “But has it ever occurred to
you that in Lovecraft you had the greatest genius that ever lived in the realm of weird fiction?”
Harold S. Farnese, “The Greatest Genius,” Weird Tales, July 1937, 125.
6. As an example, Robert Bloch writes of his fellow authors in “The Eyrie” of September
1934: “No one can claim a more interesting career than [E. Hoffmann] Price, soldier of fortune,
etc.; Howard, a typical barbarian like his own Conan; Lovecraft, the recluse; [August] Derleth,
the descendant of a count who fled the French revolution; [Seabury] Quinn and his interesting
job.” Bloch does not give an indication which of Quinn’s jobs he has in mind, but he is perhaps
referring to the fact that Quinn edited an undertakers’ journal. See Robert Bloch, “About Our
Authors,” Weird Tales, September 1934, 396.
7. H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1929-–1931, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971), 371.
8. Carney writes about this cosmology of horror thus: “To the extent that it simulates a
world deconstructing, a reality principle violated, it is an acutely ‘agnostic’ project with a thesis
to impart, captured succinctly in an entry of Clark Ashton Smith’s Black Book: ‘All human
thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe.’”
Carney, “Shadow Modernism,” 19.
9. It should be noted, of course, that not all stories in Weird Tales match this formula, nor
do even all stories written by the Lovecraft Circle; however, the pattern is pervasive and
critical, and provides a fascinating insight into the mind-sets of these authors.
10. As the rich correspondence through letters, “The Eyrie,” and fan publications such as the
Fantasy Fan show, the readers of Weird Tales were deeply involved with the creation of the
magazine and invested in the genre. The line between writer and reader was often crossed, with
many writers expressing admiration for others’ work and longtime readers trying their hand at
producing their own weird stories and poems.
11. Robert Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 1999), 3.
12. Carney, “Shadow Modernism,” 35.
13. Ibid., 35–36.
14. Carney rejects the idea that Weird Tales preferred commercial interests over quality. He
describes the magazine as “a non-commercial and aesthetically experimental enterprise informed by a desire to be a carnivalesque playground for otherwise uncategorizable and unsaleable manuscripts” that “challenges the notion that these magazines . . . were not concerned with
issues of ‘art’ or entertain ideas of aesthetic ambition.” Ibid., 41.
15. David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 36.
16. Ibid., 87.
17. Marshal Lemer, “Is This Sarcasm?,” Weird Tales, August–September 1936, 252–53.
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Dániel Nyikos
18. Gertrude Hemken, “Trudy Answers Our Critics,” Weird Tales, August–September 1936,
252.
19. Weinberg, “Weird Tales” Story, 31.
20. B. M. Reynolds, “A New High Mark,” Weird Tales, September 1934, 394.
21. G. M. Wilson, “Does Virtue Always Win?,” Weird Tales, October 1937, 503.
22. Ibid., 504.
23. Ibid. Though it indicates that Wilson separated Weird Tales from pulp literature in his
mind, it is ironic that he encourages Wright to do exactly the opposite of what more successful
pulp magazines were doing: he tells Wright to make his stories less formulaic and predictable
in order to sell more copies. In doing so, he imagines an audience that wants the opposite of
what pulp audiences were commonly thought to want: generic stories repeated issue after issue
in which the end is never in doubt.
24. In the December 1937 issue, Clifton Hall writes in to address Wilson’s letter. Hall writes
that he “checked back over the stories—exactly 90 of them, including reprints—that have
appeared in the ten issues dated 1937, and found out a surprising fact. There was an exact
split—45–45—between the happy and unhappy endings!” He admits that “it was difficult to
definitely place many yarns in either classification,” but insists that this ratio shows “an amazing balance of endings.” Clifton Hall, “Happy vs. Unhappy Endings,” Weird Tales, December
1937, 765.
25. Farnsworth Wright, untitled introduction to “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales, October 1937,
503.
26. Weinberg, “Weird Tales” Story, 33–34.
27. Here I rely on Shlovsky’s definition of defamiliarization: “Art exists that one may
recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The
purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are
known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to
increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic
end in itself and must be prolonged.” See Viktor Shlovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Literary
Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed. (Maiden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 16.
28. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 146.
29. Ibid., 147.
30. Ibid., 148.
31. Lovecraft defines “the true weird tale” thus: “The true weird tale has something more
than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A
certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be
present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its
subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of
chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition (New York: Modern Library,
2005), 105.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. H. P. Lovecraft, Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters, ed. S. T. Joshi
and David E. Schultz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 8.
36. Ibid., 9.
37. Ibid., 30.
38. Ibid., 270.
39. James Kneale, “From Beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the Place of Horror,” Cultural
Geographies 13, no. 1 (2006): 120.
40. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable,” in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird
Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 83.
41. Ibid., 85.
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class”
49
42. Ibid., 83.
43. Ibid., 89.
44. It may be worth mentioning what probably goes without saying: that this proof is hardly
ever comforting to the characters who come to it, but is rather deeply disturbing, as it reveals a
universe fundamentally corrupt and out of balance. In this case, vindication and relief are polar
opposites: those who live in ignorance are the happy ones. Thus, those who may be imagined to
be in the comfortable bosom of the literary elite are positioned as happy, while those outsiders
whose comfort is their art and their peers in the “weird class” must contend with the burden of
fundamental anxieties about the disturbed order of things—an order that leaves them on the
margins of the literary world.
45. In one of Lovecraft’s few weird stories that may be said to have a triumphant ending,
“The Dunwich Horror,” the abomination from beyond the realm of human understanding is
destroyed by the faculty of the fictional Miskatonic University. This university is worth special
mention, as it is both a respected academic institution and a place of weird knowledge. It has,
for example, in its collection a copy of the famous Necronomicon. While the faculty members
who study occult phenomena are shunned by their peers even at Miskatonic, their theories
prove to be founded in bitter reality. Thus, Lovecraft imagines other “aged academics” whose
interest in strange sciences mirrors his own and who have achieved at least marginal acceptance
in academia.
46. Lovecraft, Lord of a Visible World, xiii.
47. Ibid., 164.
48. Ibid., 167.
49. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook,” in Dreams in the Witch House, 119.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 120.
52. Ibid., 132.
53. Ibid., 135.
54. Ibid., 137.
55. Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (New York: Library of America,
1996), 318.
56. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook,” 121.
57. Paul Buhle, “Dystopia as Utopia: Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Unknown Content
of American Horror Literature,” in H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 219.
58. Ibid., 203.
59. Donald R. Burleson, H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1983), 216.
60. Leon Nielson, Robert E. Howard: A Collector’s Descriptive Bibliography of American
and British Hardcover, Paperback, Magazine, Special and Amateur Editions, with a Biography
(London: McFarland, 2007).
61. Mark Finn, Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard (Austin, TX:
Monkeybrain, 2006), 17.
62. Nielsen, Robert E. Howard, 17.
63. H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P.
Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, ed. S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke (New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2009), 89.
64. Robert E. Howard, Kull: Exile of Atlantis, ed. Patrice Louinet (New York: Ballantine,
2006), 22.
65. Ibid., 24.
66. These are named to Kull later: “the bird-women, the harpies, the bat-men, the flying
fiends, the wolf-people, the demons, the goblins.” Ibid., 36.
67. Ibid., 35.
68. Ibid., 35.
69. In many Howard stories, just as in many Lovecraft stories, modernity itself is portrayed
as a thin and illusive mask stretched over reality. When this mask is pierced, one perceives a
reality that was better known in the shadowy past, when humanity was steeped in occult
50
Dániel Nyikos
wisdom and closer to the fundamental forces that move the cosmos. This opposition to and
undermining of modernity is a key element in the work of both authors.
70. Howard, Kull, 36.
71. It may seem at first glance that Howard’s more famous creation, Conan, does not share
this sensitivity, but this would be a mistake. Conan’s philosophy does not deny that he understands that the world is controlled by secret and sinister forces beyond what most humans
know; instead, he declares only that he does not wish to understand them. As he expresses in
“Queen of the Black Coast”: “I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the
Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of
the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live.” In that
story, he pays dearly for this lack of courage to allow himself to open his imagination to the
possibilities suggested by an ancient ruin, and in the end it is only by such a supernatural
occurrence—one that, in addition, gives a suggestion to this earlier question of his—that Conan
survives. See Robert E. Howard, “Queen of the Black Coast,” in The Coming of Conan the
Cimmerian, ed. Patrice Louinet (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 134.
Chapter Four
Strange Collaborations
Weird Tales’s Discourse Community as a Site of
Collaborative Writing
Nicole Emmelhainz
A common misconception of writers is that their entire creative prowess
comes about solely through their own isolated, individualized talent. Such a
perspective alters the public and scholarly perception of both the figure of the
writer and the act of writing. This myth of the solitary writing genius is
especially problematic in the study of pulp magazines, writing spaces where
high levels of collaboration thrived. Weird Tales, in particular, was known
for cross-pollinations among its writers. As Jason Carney notes regarding the
scholarly perception of H. P. Lovecraft, “Lovecraft has been studied in other
contexts, under various rubrics such as ‘popular culture,’ or ‘Gothic studies,’
‘science fiction studies,’ and so on, but these approaches to a solitary Lovecraft disembodied from his artistic ecology, Weird Tales, implicitly perpetuates the idea that Lovecraft was a solitary genius among pulp hacks—an
insidious idea” 1 (emphasis mine). When readers view Lovecraft as separate
both from the magazine, as well as his many writer colleagues who helped to
shape him as a writer, they understand merely the surface level of a far more
vast creative collaborative process that fueled not just the widely recognized
writers, such as Lovecraft, but a myriad of other writers, readers, and writerreaders, such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Farnsworth
Wright. Taken together, these literary agents, creating together within the
greater context of the pulps, established and developed many popular literary
genres that make up much of the cultural landscape today.
A strength of Weird Tales and, more broadly, all pulpwood magazines
was the fecund atmosphere it created that allowed for various types of collab51
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Nicole Emmelhainz
oration and collaborative writing practices to emerge. Such practices flourished due to the types of discourse communities established by the very
nature of the pulps: their editors, their writers, their readers, and the writing
aesthetics they all helped to create. However, this naturally collaborative
environment found in the community surrounding Weird Tales is an understanding that has not been fully acknowledged by scholars. The focus here
will be to contextualize the collaborative writing practices of the discourse
community cohering within and around the magazine Weird Tales. By viewing Weird Tales and its coterie of writers and editors through the lens of both
discourse community and collaborative writing scholarship, I argue for the
importance of this pulpwood writing community as a vital site for understanding and validating underacknowledged collaborative writing practices
in strictly literary contexts.
COLLABORATIVE WRITING AS PART OF A
DISCOURSE COMMUNITY
In order to understand the significant contribution that pulps like Weird Tales
provide for scholars interested in studying writers and their writing practices,
two areas within writing studies need to be briefly introduced: discourse
communities and collaborative writing. James E. Porter defines a discourse
community as “group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated.” 2
Discourse communities enact rules for being a member of the community
and by which members are expected to abide. Texts composed for a specific
discourse community must also adhere to established conventions—some
superficial, like formatting, others more significant, like the story’s plot—
that demonstrate knowledge of what the community wants and expects from
its members’ writing. These deeper significant conventions also include
showing a familiarity with the works of others within the discourse community. Members of the discourse community find channels or “forums” 3 to
distribute their texts, which also further establishes the community and its
rules, and demonstrates for other would-be members what the expectations
are.
All writers can be thought to belong to one or more discourse community,
with membership being explicit or implicit. Acknowledging the writer’s
membership within various discourse communities is one way to challenge
prevailing notions of the author as a solitary genius. The myth of the solitary
writing genius—the lone figure who creates writing, perfectly, on his own—
incessantly pervades wider cultural understandings of writers and their acts
of writing. While it is true that some aspects of writing production happen
alone, writing is never truly a solitary act. To return to the opening reference
Strange Collaborations
53
regarding Lovecraft, if he is viewed as a solitary writer, the reader not only
loses the close ties Lovecraft formed with other members of the Weird Tales
discourse community, including editors such as Farnsworth Wright and other
writers such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, but also the
various forms of collaboration—of ideas and writing—that occurred by the
very nature of the discourse community existing.
An important consideration to acknowledge regarding the discourse community that formed because of and around Weird Tales is that it created
circumstances that made the socialness of writing more transparent. While
much traditional literary scholarship has clung to the notions of the solitary
writing genius and solitary writing practices, critical work done in writing
studies has analyzed and applied concepts of collaborative writing to writing
practices. Indeed, for more than four decades writing studies has held writing
to be a highly collaborative, social act done through a series of steps that
make up the writer’s process in textual creation. All steps in this process,
most likely, include some form of collaboration. Examples of various collaborations, such as ones between editors and writers and between writers and
writers of Weird Tales, will be examined shortly. It is useful, however, to
understand how writing studies understands collaboration as a part of the
writing process.
One of the leading scholarly voices on collaborative writing practices,
Kenneth Bruffee, argues that collaboration in writing facilitates shared
knowledge creation. He identifies this shared knowledge creation as “communities of knowledgeable peers construct[ing] knowledge.” 4 Within the
Weird Tales discourse community, then, if an editor asked a writer to revise
and resubmit a story, the editor would give advice and direction to help the
writer complete this task so that the revised story would better fit the expectations for publication within the magazine. The writer would first demonstrate his knowledge of the discourse community by submitting a story that
was generally appropriate for the magazine; the editor, who would act as a
“knowledgeable peer,” would offer feedback to the writer to improve the
story. Together, their exchange of written text and ideas—an act of collaboration in the writing process—shows the creation of knowledge and reinforcement of the discourse community’s rules.
What Bruffee’s work on collaboration also does is to allow for further
understandings of writing as a process, one that necessitates and incorporates
a variety of voices in order to come to a more complete understanding of the
writing task at hand. The often-cited “writing as conversation” metaphor
becomes real through the experiences had between writers and editors, as in
the previous example, as they worked together, developing and challenging
ideas with one another. Within the scope of collaborative writing, the next
step would be for the writer to take these lessons learned from the work with
the editor into her own writing process as she crafts new stories for the
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Nicole Emmelhainz
magazine. These kinds of writing moves are meant to teach and reaffirm the
discourse community’s standards and practices. One of the ways in which
this most frequently happened with Weird Tales was through various kinds
of collaborations with both editors and fellow writers, examples that the next
two sections will explore.
“NOTHING SICKENING OR DISGUSTING”: FARNSWORTH
WRIGHT AS DISCOURSE COMMUNITY GATEKEEPER
Collaboration among a variety of groups—editors, writers, readers—was an
accepted, although perhaps not an explicitly understood or acknowledged,
practice in the pulps, and Weird Tales was no exception. It is clear when
reading Harold Hersey’s memoir The New Pulpwood Editor, for example,
that this longtime pulp editor was well aware of the notions of rules and
practices within the pulp discourse community, as he discusses the roles of
editors, writers, and readers. In Hersey’s description, the editor is a “paleontologist” reconstructing “the entire characteristic of his reader” through the
letters he receives from his readership and by noting which authors and
stories are the most popular with these readers. 5 The editor essentially works
closely with the readers in order to establish and reaffirm the discourse
community’s knowledge concerning acceptable texts. This is one means of
knowledge creation for the discourse community, one means of collaboration
that happens between the editor and the readership. Hersey goes on to describe the roles the writers play within the knowledge formation:
[T]he pulpwood editor, having a greater freedom of action, has also a greater
responsibility. He works alone and in Stygian darkness. His magazine is not
printed on expensive, shiny paper. Its sales are not boosted by elaborate promotion schemes. He has only one sure thing to depend upon: his professional
writers—those who have already been tested in the fire of fiction popularity
and have not been found wanting. They know what the public wants even
better than he does. If he’s wise, he guides them with a loose rein, concentrating more on keeping them in harness than in worrying about where they are
taking him. 6
Here, Hersey suggests what was certainly clear to writers in the Weird Tales
circle: that the editor of the magazine was dependent on them, the writers, in
order not simply to adhere to the writing specifications of the publication, but
to “know even better” what the reading public wants. The knowledge creation in this case appears to come from the writers to the editor, who in turn
makes the most informed, appropriate selection for publication in the magazine that would best meet the needs of the readers.
Strange Collaborations
55
Regarding the writers more specifically, Hersey designates them into two
categories: professional and amateur. His interpretation of each type of writer
focuses on their level of immersion within the larger pulpwood publishing
discourse community. The professional writer, Hersey says, “can turn out a
yarn on any subject of any length and at any given time, either woven around
his own theme or one suggested by the editor.” 7 Additionally, this professional writer “has attained an objective state of mind about his work.” 8 The
amateur writer, in contrast, “is incapable of adapting his talents to a practical
purpose. . . . The amateur still talks about that inspiration and individuality in
self-expression which are so precious to the serious artist and utterly worthless to the quantity writer.” 9 The professional writer, in Hersey’s understanding, has been able to internalize the practices and expectations for the discourse communities to which he belongs. He can take suggestions or write
off of his own ideas, knowing what kind of stories to produce. The professional writer can focus on the needs of the community. The amateur writer,
though, has not yet come to understand the expectations of him within the
community; he is focused on himself instead of on the various other members of the community.
The members of the discourse community, then, are expected to know
and understand the types of texts acceptable within the community. They
also participate in various forms of collaboration, some explicit, some implicit, with the editors, other writers, and even the readers, in order to produce these acceptable texts. Though there is, in Hersey’s description, an
interplay between the readers, writers, and editors within the pulpwood publishing discourse communities, the editors hold a certain authority as the
bearers and ultimate enforcers of the agreed-upon rules and practices for the
community. With Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright’s long tenure as editor
shows that he managed to balance the demands of the readership within the
community with the abilities of his writers.
In an October 1931 interview with Author & Journalist, Wright described
the type of story that Weird Tales would publish as “dramatic and striking”
and having a well-developed plot. 10 He goes on to explain that the “ideal is
the presentation of a story having literary value. Very often we accept a tale
which though not emphasizing the weird, the supernatural, or the pseudoscientific, merits approval on account of its rich color, exquisite workmanship, bizarre philosophy, and strong plot.” 11 His description of what he, and
the larger discourse community of Weird Tales, wants shows a surprising
amount of flexibility. Wright emphasizes quality and completeness of writing over merely including some “weird” elements. This speaks to the broader
shared interests of the community, one that Wright feels responsible to uphold and promote. As the interview concludes, its author, Weird Tales writer
E. Hoffmann Price, notes that Wright’s “[p]ersonal rejections, accompanied
by bits of constructive criticism, have made of a good many beginners prime
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Nicole Emmelhainz
members of Wright’s circle of chronic contributors. Wright, the editor, is
first and last the friend of the author.” 12 Given what Hersey says of the role
of the writer being a lifeblood to the success of the magazine by knowing,
sometimes before the editor knows, what the public wants, it is not surprising
to learn of Wright’s involvement with his writers.
As example, what follows are two letters written from Wright to Clark
Ashton Smith, one earlier in Smith’s career as a Weird Tales writer, and one
a few years later, when Smith is more established and versed in the expectations of its discourse community. These letters show Wright calling attention
to the editor-writer and writer-writer collaborations common with the Weird
Tales community:
Mr. Lovecraft, in sending me The Abominations of Yondo, asked me to return
it to you if I could not use it. It is a fascinating bit, but a prose poem rather than
a weird narrative, so I am returning it. 13
I will be glad to take your story, The Monster of the Prophecy, provided you
speed up the first part of the story. The story seems rather too leisurely up to
the point where the Antarean and the human depart for Antares.
I am reluctantly returning the other story, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros. I
am afraid our readers (the great majority of them at least) would find the story
extremely unreal and unconvincing. Personally, I fell under the spell of its
splendid wording, which reminded me of Lord Dunsany’s stories in The Book
of Wonder. 14
Both letters demonstrate Wright’s knowledge of and position within the
Weird Tales discourse community. The first accomplishes two important
elements of work for the community: First, it reinforces the relationships the
community sought to establish between editor-writer and writer-writer. The
reference to Lovecraft in the first sentence shows both relationships: the
close working friendship between Wright and Lovecraft (the former clearly
appreciated and respected the latter’s ideas of good writing), and the growing
relationship between Lovecraft and Smith. The second work this letter does
is help to initiate Smith more into the discourse community surrounding
Weird Tales by explaining, albeit briefly, why his prose poem could not be
published in the magazine.
The second letter, written over four years later, shows both a continued
and even closer relationship having formed between Smith and Wright. In
Wright’s acceptance of Smith’s story “The Monster of the Prophecy,”
Wright gives the author a clear revision needed in order for the story to be a
stronger fit for Weird Tales. The second paragraph, in which Wright rejects
Smith’s story “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” clearly grounds the rejection
not on the level of the writing (Wright says he “fell under the spell of its
splendid wording”), but instead on audience considerations. Wright rein-
Strange Collaborations
57
forces the important role the readership plays in establishing the expectations
for the stories printed in the magazine, though he also shows that he, as
editor, has some power to try to influence what this readership expects, as he
mentions his desire to reprint a Dunsany story: “However, I fear that Lord
Dunsany’s stories would prove unpalatable to most of our readers; though I
intend to test this out by using one of them as a reprint, if I can obtain the
right to do so.” 15 In fact, the implicit suggestion to Smith is that if he can get
the rights to reprint a Dunsany, this may in fact open up Weird Tales to even
more of his stories.
The relations between Wright, as editor; his writers, such as Smith and
Lovecraft; and the readership of Weird Tales show the interconnections between these three membership groups in this discourse community. Each
group’s role is determined and shaped by the needs of the other groups, and
each group also has the power to influence and change the expectations for
texts written for the magazine. Wright’s role as editor permitted him a space
to make those expectations clear for both the writers and readers, who often
would seek to move into the writer category as well. Consider the following
text excerpted from a rejection card detailing the submission guidelines for
Weird Tales, found among Smith’s personal papers:
Weird Tales wants stories of invention, science and surgery, particularly those
that forecast the marvelous science of the future; tales of the bizarre and
unusual; occult and mystic tales, and tales of the supernatural, preferably with
a logical explanation; tales of the monstrosities of superstitious legend: werewolves, vampires, ghosts, familiars, witches, and devil-worship; tales of spirit
return; good humorous and romantic tales with a weird slant; tales of thrills
and mystery; and a few tales of horror, but nothing sickening or disgusting.
Lengths up to 30,000 words. Weird Tales uses no sex stories and no detective
stories. 16
While intended as a form rejection slip—on Smith’s copy, the first two lines,
which thank the writer but reject his work, have been crossed through in
pencil—this paragraph concretely describes the kind of work the editors want
for the magazine. It also directly sets Weird Tales, and by association its
writers, apart from other popular pulpwood magazines of the time, like spicy
and detective pulps. Finally, the card is yet another example of the kind of
relationship Wright fostered with his writers. The materiality of the card has
been altered, the rejection quality of the form crossed off, a sign Wright
personalized the card for Smith. The gesture can be read as not simply again
reinforcing the discourse community’s expectations, but as a sign to Smith
that he was already a member of that community.
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Nicole Emmelhainz
CIVILIZATION VERSUS BARBARISM: LETTERS AS A FORM OF
COLLABORATION BETWEEN HOWARD AND LOVECRAFT
Wright’s role in establishing and promoting the expectations for the Weird
Tales discourse community cannot be overstated. His rejection letters, as
evidenced through Smith’s correspondence with Wright, show a level of
involvement with the authors of the magazine that permitted collaboration
between both groups. Collaboration can also be found between the writers
themselves, and not just collaboration on existing texts, but on the creation of
ideas that became essential to the new genres the magazine allowed to flourish. When looking at the correspondence between Robert E. Howard and H.
P. Lovecraft, for example, one can also find the kind of collaborative knowledge building discussed in the overview of collaborative writing as a practice. Howard and Lovecraft discussed topics and ideas that became the building blocks for the stories and eventually the genres they would establish.
Their written correspondence becomes an important source text for analyzing
how these peer-writers challenged and affirmed each other’s ideas.
The six-year letter exchange between Howard and Lovecraft perhaps offers one of the richest archives for tracing two writers’ implicit and not-soimplicit collaborative practices. As S. T. Joshi notes, this four-hundred-thousand-word “treasure-trove” 17 offers much for the study of both writers—in
particular, I believe, for providing a map for the scholar to follow how each
challenged, often repeatedly, the progression of the other’s thoughts and
ideas, and how these challenged thoughts and ideas then carried over to the
creative writing. Joshi, as well as Patrice Louinet in his introduction to the
Howard collection of Conan fiction, The Coming of Conan, draws attention
to one of the most prominently repeated lines of conversation between the
two writers: that of barbarism and civilization. 18
Joshi describes the whole of Howard and Lovecraft’s correspondence as
“unusual in being very largely philosophical, as each writer emphasizes . . .
his understanding of the nature of the universe and, more particularly, his
preferences in regard to social and political matters.” 19 Howard and Lovecraft’s long descriptions of their personal social and political beliefs, in Joshi’s understanding, lay the groundwork for what he calls “the fundamental
divergence of views” between these writers. 20 Howard’s preference for barbarism and, by connection, the frontier, and Lovecraft’s preference for civilization created a conversation between the two writers that developed
“masses of complexity and fine shades of meaning and emphasis that in
some senses render these views not quite antipodal as they may appear.” 21 In
other words, though some readers of the letters may cite a tension between
Howard and Lovecraft through their heated conversations on barbarism versus civilization, both authors were ultimately able to take away better understandings of their beliefs that they then could translate and incorporate into
Strange Collaborations
59
their own writings. Because of the importance of both Howard and Lovecraft
as two of the founding fathers of weird fiction genres—fantasy and horror—
their epistolary collaboration helps us to understand the creation of new
genres.
Though the depth of conversation between Howard and Lovecraft has
been preserved through publication, there exists, to my research, no critical
discussions on the importance of these conversations on each writer’s creation and development of these genres. While Joshi includes a detailed overview of Lovecraft’s influence over Howard in his article “Cthulhu’s Empire:
H. P. Lovecraft’s Influence on His Contemporaries and Successors,” what
we can add is how it shaped Howard’s work in other genres, particularly his
creation of sword-and-sorcery. 22 Conversely, there appears to be less discussion on how, and to what extent, Howard may have influenced and shaped
Lovecraft’s own writing.
There is, though, scholarship on Howard’s process in creating and developing sword-and-sorcery, as overviewed by Jeffrey Shanks in “History, Horror, and Heroic Fantasy: Robert E. Howard and the Creation of the Swordand-Sorcery Subgenre.” 23 In this review, Shanks shows Howard’s process of
creating both the character of Conan of Cimmeria and the larger sword-andsorcery genre, through a series of more experimental attempts. These experiments, including fiction exploring the characters of Solomon Kane, Kull, and
Bran Mak Morn, gave Howard a space to later formulate what would become
sword-and-sorcery. We see important elements of the genre in stories with all
three of these characters: a barbaric hero, who later becomes a king, who
wields a sword to fight supernatural terrors in exotic, yet at times historically
familiar places.
The larger context of the pulp magazine culture, too, is also important to
note in the establishment of sword-and-sorcery, in providing a creative space
in which Howard could play with genre, to experiment so freely and perhaps
wildly, and in what would become culturally significant ways. Howard mentions the early beginnings of Conan to Lovecraft in a letter sent to him in
1931: “I’ve been working on a new character, providing him with a new
epoch—the Hyborian Age, which men have forgotten, but which remains in
classical names, and distorted myths. [Farnsworth] Wright rejected most of
the series, but I did sell him one—‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ which deals
with the adventures of King Conan the Cimmerian, in the kingdom of Aquilona.” 24 The timing of this seems significant, given what follows are years of
back and forth about the nature of barbarism, its place (or not) within civilization, and the repeated opportunities for both Howard and Lovecraft to
refine their positions and ideas regarding each. In light of the conversations
between Howard and Lovecraft, it is telling to see how the character of
Conan appears to embody elements of both barbarism and civilization. In a
sense, given the creative banter between these two peer writers, Howard
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Nicole Emmelhainz
imbued his creation with a flexibility to move between both areas of human
life. Howard even appears to suggest as much with the invocation at the
beginning of “The Phoenix on the Sword”: “Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer,
with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of
the Earth under his sandalled feet.” 25 There seems to be both a happiness and
a sadness in the character of Conan, a man meant to traverse both wilderness
and civilized society, an ability to do so perhaps reluctantly, as Howard
himself seems to acknowledge over the course of years of letters both the
benefits of civilization at the same time lamenting the loss of frontier, hard
work, and being alive through physical activity.
Additionally, though Howard does not mention it in this letter, there is an
implied collaboration here between himself and Wright as the editorial preferences of Wright and his magazine helped to direct Howard’s creation of the
character. More broadly, as Shanks via Mark Finn notes, Howard knew how
to use the culture of pulp publishing—each magazine with its specific publication guidelines and criteria—to “splash the field,” or in other words, “deliberately mixing two or more genre tropes in a particular story [in order to]
increase his potential market for that story.” 26 This practice demonstrates
Howard’s great knowledge of this particular community, as well as his adept
understanding of his role as a writer, composing texts for a particular audience. But also, as Shanks explains it, Howard’s ability to “juxtapose themes
and tropes from different genres,” his ability to play with “genre hybridization,” paved the way for sword-and-sorcery to come about as a genre. 27 But,
had the particular preferences of editors such as Wright not been there, and
had Howard not been aware enough of them and taken the opportunity to use
them as a creative leverage in his writing, then sword-and-sorcery may never
have developed, or developed as it did.
I want to reiterate the important collaborative practices demonstrated between these two founding genre writers in their letters. Using the critical
framework of collaboration borrowed from writing studies, we can understand this prolific correspondence, to adopt Bruffee’s terms, as an example of
a “community” of two “knowledgeable peers,” each with their own beliefs,
their own strengths and weaknesses, coming together to “construct” new
knowledge, or in this case, new genres. While it is important to note that
genre hybridity was made possible from the particular circumstances within
the pulp publishing culture, it is also necessary to draw attention to the
challenging intellectual discussions Howard had with a peer writer, Lovecraft, who was also helping to define the larger notion of popular writing.
Together, these two founding fathers of weird fiction through their genre
creation helped to influence and establish the larger stylistic and content
expectations for members of the Weird Tales discourse community.
Strange Collaborations
61
“THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND” AS
VEXED COLLABORATION
I conclude by briefly focusing on a pulp fiction text that emerged from the
Weird Tales discourse community that is explicitly collaboratively authored,
“The Challenge from Beyond.” As noted in An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, “Challenge” was the idea of editor Julius Schwartz, “who wanted two
round-robin stories of the same title, one weird and one science fiction, for
the third anniversary issues of Fantasy Magazine.” 28 The story, which details
the journey of its protagonist George Campbell through a mind swap with an
alien wormlike creature triggered by Campbell’s finding a crystal cube, admittedly “did not go quite according to plan.” 29 The collaboration appears to
have been temporarily sidetracked when A. Merritt, who was originally set to
write the third installment, claimed that Frank Belknap Long’s original second installment “deviated from the subject matter suggested by the title” and
refused to participate until Long and his installment was removed from the
story. 30 While Merritt’s new contribution “fail[ed] to move the story along in
any meaningful way,” the issue of moving the plot fell to Lovecraft, who
borrowed from his then-unpublished “The Shadow out of Time.” 31 As Joshi
notes in his biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence, while the story is a
“good fun of a sort,” the story as a whole, and each contributor’s installments, “cannot claim much aesthetic value.” 32
This collaboratively written weird story, coauthored by some of the
founding writers of the genre, fails because the collaboration was not mutual,
the situation too artificial. Merritt appears not to have been a willing participant, acting much as Hersey describes the amateur writer, focused on his
own individual ideas. In this case, the forced collaboration prevented actual
collaboration, the sort of subtle, plastic, and adaptive unconscious processes,
rarely acknowledged by literary critics, but so important for understanding
pulp literature. In “The Challenge from Beyond,” the most explicitly collaborative work I might marshal, there is something wrong: we have five connected though distinct sections, their sutures showing, Lovecraft’s and Howard’s installments in particular demonstrating the kind of writing style and
content they were each known for. But what we do not realize, however, is
that these distinctive “Lovecraftian” and “Howardian” aesthetic textures,
these “flavors” that emerge clearly in those sections, imprecate not a single
author’s aesthetic decisions, but an entire network of discourse members
working, writing, and thinking together. By design of their membership to
the Weird Tales discourse community, these writers knew how the community worked, knew how to write for its members, with the collaboration
happening in a myriad of subtle ways, behind the scenes. When the mode of
collaboration was given a center stage, given a spotlight, the seams became a
strange spectacle of their own.
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NOTES
1. Jason Ray Carney, “‘Something That Swayed as If in Unison’: The Artistic Authenticity
of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism,” chapter 1 in this volume.
2. James E. Porter, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” Rhetoric Review 5, no.
1 (Autumn 1986): 38–39.
3. Ibid., 39.
4. Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the
Authority of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 53.
5. Harold Hersey, The New Pulpwood Editor (Silver Spring, MD: Adventure House,
2002), 38.
6. Ibid., 61.
7. Ibid., 70.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Windy City Pulp Stories: Celebrating 75 Years of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Recognizing Weird Tales (Normal, IL: Black Dog Books, 2007), 50–51.
11. Ibid., 51.
12. Ibid.
13. Brown University, John Hay Library Special Collections. Letter dated October 21, 1925.
14. Ibid. Letter dated January 18, 1930.
15. Ibid.
16. John Hay Library Special Collections. Undated.
17. S. T. Joshi, “Barbarism vs. Civilization: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft in Their
Correspondence,” Studies in the Fantastic, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 95.
18. Patrice Louinet, “Introduction,” in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, by Robert E.
Howard (New York: Del Rey, 2003), xxiii. See also Justin Everett’s discussion of the subject in
“Eugenic Thought in the Work of Robert E. Howard,” chapter 9 in this volume.
19. Joshi, “Barbarism vs. Civilization,” 96.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 97.
22. S. T. Joshi, “Cthulhu’s Empire: H. P. Lovecraft’s Influence on His Contemporaries and
Successors,” in Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the ’20s and ’30s, ed. Gary Hoppenstand
(Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013), 19–35. See also Robert Waugh, ed., Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013).
23. Jeffrey Shanks, “History, Horror, and Heroic Fantasy: Robert E. Howard and the Creation of the Sword-and-Sorcery Subgenre,” in Hoppenstand, Critical Insights, 3–18.
24. Quoted in Joshi, “Barbarism vs. Civilization,” 98.
25. Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, 7.
26. Shanks, “History, Horror, and Heroic Fantasy,” 9. See also Mark Finn, Blood and
Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E Howard, rev. ed. (Plano, TX: Robert E. Howard
Foundation, 2011).
27. Shanks, “History, Horror, and Heroic Fantasy,” 5.
28. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2001), 37.
29. Ibid.
30. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2013), 953.
31. Joshi and Schultz, Lovecraft Encyclopedia, 37; Joshi, I Am Providence, 953.
32. Joshi, I Am Providence, 953.
Chapter Five
Gothic to Cosmic
Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales
Morgan T. Holmes
THE ORIGINS OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY
J. C. Henneberger founded Weird Tales in 1923 as an outlet for “a story of
the unconventional type delving into the realms of fantasy, the bizarre, and
the outré” based on suggestions from popular writers such as Ben Hecht,
Emerson Hough, and Hamlin Garland regarding the need for an outlet for the
unconventional story. 1 Most of the contents of the early issues were poorly
written supernatural stories with a scattering of torture tales, insect stories,
and weird crime yarns. More adventure-laden fare intermittently materialized, including lost race tales, caveman stories, early space opera, and yellow
peril stories. 2 This wide array of fiction is what allowed for the genesis of
what is known today as sword-and-sorcery fiction. Sword-and-sorcery can be
broadly defined as an action-adventure/hero story with supernatural elements
in a setting that is generally preindustrial. Fritz Leiber created the term in
1961 in response to a Michael Moorcock query as to what to name the
genre. 3 Moorcock had used “supernatural adventure fiction” 4 as a description. Don Herron describes the subgenre as follows: “Howard, setting his
tales in remote historical milieus, updated mythology and folklore with a
distinctly modern sensibility, matching redoubtable swords-men against sorcerous adversaries.” 5
The ancestry of sword-and-sorcery goes back to the fiction of H. Rider
Haggard, whose lost race novels King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain,
and She were popular and influential. He also wrote medieval adventure
novels such as Eric Bright-Eyes and The Wanderer’s Necklace, which had
hints of supernatural elements in them. Edgar Rice Burroughs took the Hag63
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gard adventure motif into more fantastic directions; he wrote lost race stories,
but also introduced the element of the feral and near-superhuman protagonist
in Tarzan. Burroughs’s planetary romances took the explorer-adventurer
archetype to another planet with John Carter in A Princess of Mars (first
published as “Under the Moons of Mars,” All-Story Magazine, February–July 1912) and subsequent novels in the cycle. John Carter was in the
tradition of Allan Quatermain and many other lost race story heroes, going to
a new land or in this case a new world. This new type of story proved to be
popular enough to spawn imitations by J. U. Giesy, Charles B. Stilson, and
Ray Cummings. 6 Weird Tales would run planetary romance by Edmond
Hamilton (“The Great Brain of Kaldar” and “World of the Dark Dwellers”)
and Otis Adelbert Kline (“Buccaneers of Venus”), as well as lost race stories
and novels such as Jack Williamson’s “Golden Blood.”
Sword-and-sorcery fiction made its way into Weird Tales through an
indirect route: prehistoric fiction. Two heroic caveman tales by Clifford M.
Eddy, “With Weapons of Stone” (December 1924) and “Arhl-a of the Caves”
(January 1925), followed by Robert E. Howard’s “Spear and Fang” (July
1925) stood out from the ghost stories that filled Weird Tales at the time. All
three appear to be imitations of Paul L. Anderson’s tales of the Ta-an cavemen that ran in the Argosy and Argosy All-Story Weekly in the early 1920s.
Another step in the direction of sword-and-sorcery fiction was that of the
neo-Gothic tale. H. Warner Munn’s “The Werewolf of Ponkert” appeared
alongside Robert E. Howard’s first story “Spear and Fang” in the July 1925
issue of Weird Tales. The trappings of Gothic fiction were present with the
late medieval setting, supernatural menace, dungeons, curses, and so on. H.
P. Lovecraft inspired Munn by asking why someone couldn’t write a story
from the point of view of the werewolf. 7 Munn, like Howard, was an avid
reader of the historical fiction in the general pulp magazines, including Adventure. In addition to the supernatural doom, Munn added pike and harquebus combat against a pack of werewolves. Munn followed up with a threepart sequel, “The Werewolf’s Daughter,” in October, November, and December 1928. The character of Hugo Gunnar wields his rapier as expertly as
any sword-and-sorcery hero. 8
The next issue of Weird Tales contained Robert E. Howard’s entrance
into Gothic sword-and-sorcery with “In the Forest of Villefere.” This tale has
a haunted forest, the traveling swordsman DeMontour of Normandy, and a
werewolf. The story continues in “Wolfshead” (Weird Tales, April 1926),
where the spirit of the werewolf DeMontour killed in the previous story
possesses him. “Wolfshead” has an exotic setting—the coast of West Africa—though it still has more traditional Gothic elements such as a castle.
These Gothic adventure tales may owe much to Alexandre Dumas in addition to Edgar Allan Poe, though the popularity of Rafael Sabatini’s period
swashbucklers cannot be discounted as a possible influence.
Gothic to Cosmic
65
In time, the subgenre featured the melding of action of the historical tale,
the atmosphere of the Gothic story, and the exotic setting of planetary romance in almost equal amounts.
ROBERT E. HOWARD’S EARLY SWORD-AND-SORCERY
Robert E. Howard strained at the pulp fiction conventions, using hitherto
unutilized times and places. In “The Lost Race” (Weird Tales, January 1927),
set in pre-Roman Britain, there is no supernatural element, but it is his first
use of the pre-Celtic Picts in a published story. Howard got closer to swordand-sorcery with “Red Shadows” in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales,
with his first sustained serial character, Solomon Kane, who travels around
fighting supernatural menaces. An English Puritan swordsman of the late
sixteenth century who often quests for justice against crimes and heinous
acts, Kane hunts down Le Loup, a criminal gang leader who murdered a
young girl. The story proceeds from France to Africa, and Kane has a battle
with a gorilla as one fantastic element. The supernatural ingredient is supplied with a scene of an African sorcerer reanimating a corpse. The series is
superficially Gothic with a splash of Burroughs- and Haggard-style African
adventure. The follow-up Solomon Kane stories “Skulls in the Stars” (January 1929) and “Rattle of Bones” (June 1929) are more solidly Gothic in
locale and atmosphere—they have a suggestion of sword-and-sorcery, but
are just Gothic stories with action scenes.
Robert E. Howard catapulted to the top tier of Weird Tales writers with
the publication of “The Shadow Kingdom” in the August 1929 issue, though
Howard had started the story almost three years earlier. 9 Set in the antediluvian age of Atlantis and Lemuria, the story features Kull, a barbarian from
Atlantis who becomes king of Valusia—lost continents were a popular topic
at this time. 10 “The Shadow Kingdom” has been regarded by many as the
first true sword-and-sorcery tale because of the main character, setting, and
atmosphere. The story has Gothic components with its dark corridors and
conspiracy of prehuman serpent-men who appear as humans. It is also a
variation on the sword-and-planet story pioneered by Burroughs more than a
decade earlier. 11 Gone is any connection to history; the setting is purely
fantastic. The background has more in common with planetary romance in
that it is more exotic and fantastic than any classical or medieval setting.
In “The Shadow Kingdom” Howard subverted Atlantis from being a civilized island nation to a mini-continent inhabited by barbarians, while the
mainland to the east of Atlantis held the civilized world. 12 Robert E. Howard
also injected a heavy supernatural element lacking in previous fictional treatments of Atlantis. The story revolves around a plot of reptilian “snake men”
who assume the likeness of humans and infiltrate the highest seats of power.
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The story has a dark, paranoid feel to it, unlike anything seen in pulp magazines to this point. The follow-up story, “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”
(September 1929), had less action but was no less popular: several readers
wrote to “The Eyrie” section of Weird Tales asking when the next Kull story
would appear. Kull is rather passive in these stories as he is figuratively led
by the hand by his friend Brule the Spear Slayer and is often saved by him.
Both stories examine the concept of reality, as illusion plays a major role.
The stories may have a setting that goes back to Plato (i.e., Atlantis), but
Howard’s depiction of Kull’s world is more High Middle Ages than classical. 13
Howard returned to Solomon Kane in “The Moon of Skulls,” as Kane
travels to a lost colony of Atlantis in Africa that has been taken over by a
native tribe. “The Hills of the Dead” (August 1930) has a lost city in Africa
inhabited by vampires. Howard’s description of the vampires is more like the
zombies of modern film and fiction than Bram Stoker’s famous creation.
Howard was blending the exotic with the late medieval in this series of
stories with Kane in Africa.
King Kull returned in November 1930 as a secondary character in “Kings
of the Night.” The main protagonist was Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts in
late antiquity, circa 250 C.E. 14 In the story, a Pictish wizard magically transports Kull through time to help Bran fight against a Roman incursion. Farnsworth Wright originally bought the story for a projected companion magazine to Weird Tales entitled Strange Stories. Judging by the stories procured
for the forthcoming publication, it would have more of an adventure or action
orientation than Weird Tales. 15 This was a new phase for Robert E. Howard,
as “Kings of the Night” was the first story to have a large-scale battle
scene. 16 At this point the elements of sword-and-sorcery were in place with
the more epic backdrops.
Robert E. Howard had also struck up a correspondence with fellow Weird
Tales writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) around this time. Howard would
incorporate Lovecraftian ideas of horror into his own fiction, albeit clumsily
at first. “The Children of the Night” (April–May 1931) has a mix of Lovecraftian exposition and Howardian blood-and-thunder. This was the first of
his “racial memory” stories wherein a modern narrator would remember his
previous life in the distant past—in this case, as a pre-Celtic Aryan tribesman
who clashes with a race of Mongoloid dwarves in Bronze Age Britain. Howard would revisit the Mongoloid dwarf in ancient times to better effect in
“People of the Dark” in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and
Terror. Sword-and-sorcery was now moving out of Weird Tales into other
magazines that featured supernatural fiction and becoming a force in its own
right.
Howard also created a recurring character, Turlogh O’Brien, an Irish
adventurer of the early eleventh century. “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” (October
Gothic to Cosmic
67
1931) is a story portraying Turlogh and Athelstane the Saxon shipwrecked
on an island with menacing giant flightless birds, a lost Norse girl worshipped as a goddess by the natives, and a Lovecraftian monster. The story
was an effective mix of action and the supernatural of the Lovecraftian
cosmic sort. The following issue of Weird Tales oddly ran a story earlier in
Turlogh O’Brien’s life, “The Dark Man.” This story is often held in high
regard, though the supernatural element is slight. It is a fairly straightforward
adventure tale with Turlogh traveling to the Hebrides Islands to rescue an
abducted Irish girl from Vikings. An idol of long-dead Bran Mak Morn, King
of the Picts, plays a part in the story.
The influence of Lovecraft entered into the Solomon Kane stories with
“The Footfalls Within” (September 1931) when Kane faces a demon imprisoned by King Solomon. The last Solomon Kane story went out on a high
note with “Wings in the Night” (July 1932), in which winged men attack and
destroy an African village and Kane sets out to exterminate them, almost
losing his sanity in the process.
Bran Mak Morn returned for the last time in “Worms of the Earth” (November 1932). In this celebrated story, Bran seeks revenge against a Roman
officer using the Mongoloid dwarves as his weapon to achieve it, though he
finds that some weapons are too terrible to use. This middle period of Howard’s career in the pages of Weird Tales saw him as a writer who had hit his
stride. The synthesis of historical adventure with Lovecraftian weird elements would, in the coming months, result in his most famous creation,
Conan the Cimmerian.
CONAN THE CIMMERIAN
In early 1932, while visiting the Rio Grande valley, Robert E. Howard
evolved the idea of a hero from a forgotten age, and Conan of Cimmeria
came striding forth from his imagination. This was the series that really took
off for Howard and is the primary reason sword-and-sorcery became a viable
genre. For weeks, Howard worked at a furious pace on tales of Conan. First,
he reworked a King Kull story, “By This Axe, I Rule!,” about an attempted
coup d’état that contained no supernatural elements. The rewritten story
(“The Phoenix on the Sword”) weaved a sorcerer, magical ring, and a demon
into the plot.
A crucial element was the imaginary milieu. His imagination was free of
any constraints of history—the Hyborian Age of Conan is set after the sinking of Atlantis and before recorded history. He was able to subcreate using a
high medieval foundation with analogues of other cultures on the fringe, such
as Assyria, ancient Egypt, pre-folk wandering Germanics, and the ahistorical
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Picts. There is a colorful splendor with his Hyborian Age that surpassed his
historical tales.
Robert E. Howard had served his apprenticeship and fellowship and was
now entering his master phase. It was fortuitous that Conan came along when
Howard had achieved proficiency with plotting, characterization, and writing. The Conan series was also unique in having a character in which each
story told a different portion of his life. In the first two stories he is a king,
and in the third a teenage thief new to civilization. Pirate, mercenary, scout—
Conan had a different role in each tale. With Conan, the twenty-six-year-old
Howard was pushing hard on the boundaries of acceptable characterization
within the pulp magazine context. He had experimented with roguish characters before, but Conan took the idea into new territory. Nothing like this had
been seen before, though Dashiell Hammett hinted at this direction with his
popular 1920s Continental Op stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask. 17 In
the western pulps, for example, you did not find characters that were Civil
War veterans, buffalo hunters, gunfighters, cowboys, Indian fighters, and
prospectors from story to story. Conan was a new type of fictional character—one that was decades ahead of his time.
Howard described Conan to his girlfriend, Novalyne Price: “That Conan
is the damnedest bastard I ever saw. He gets himself into all kinds of scrapes.
I sure don’t try to give him advice when he tells me all that junk. I just sit
back and listen.” 18
The second Conan story, “The Scarlet Citadel,” was the most popular
story in that issue of Weird Tales (January 1933). Howard painted on a wide
canvas with large battles, a dungeon sequence, and evil sorcerers. “The Tower of the Elephant” (March 1933) took Conan back to his youth and early
contact with civilization with an encounter with the alien Yag-Kosha. Howard may have used Frank Belknap Long’s alien entity Chaugnar Faugn
(“The Horror from the Hills,” January and February–March 1931) as the
basis of Yag Kosha, though the latter lacked the cosmic evil of Long’s
creation.
“Black Colossus” featured a dormant sorcerer who awakens after centuries and attempts the Hyborian Age version of world conquest. A backlash
against Conan began in the October 1933 issue, when Sylvia Bennett of
Detroit wrote in to say, “Will Robert E. Howard ever cease writing his
infernal stories of ‘red battles’ and ‘fierce warfare’? I am becoming weary of
his continuous butchery and slaughter. After I finish reading one of his gory
stories I feel as if I am soaked with blood.” Weird Tales contributor Jack
Williamson, who would survive as one of the most long-lived writers from
the pulp era, wrote to “The Eyrie” for the December 1933 issue defending
“Black Colossus”: “I was rather surprised at the brickbat aimed by Miss
Sylvia Bennett at Howard’s Black Colossus, which struck me as a splendid
thing, darkly vivid, with a living primitive power.”
Gothic to Cosmic
69
“The Slithering Shadow” (September 1933) began a period of weaker
stories that could be considered potboilers—albeit competent potboilers, as
the stories suffer only in comparison to other Conan tales. “Queen of the
Black Coast” (May 1934) is generally held in high regard, with Conan becoming the partner and lover of Bêlit the Pirate. The story ends on a down
note with Bêlit’s death, contradicting the notion that all Conan stories are
formulaic.
Howard took a brief break from Conan when he introduced James Allison
in “The Valley of the Worm” (February 1934). James Allison is a disabled
man who remembers past lives, in or just after the Hyborian Age—in this
case, as Niord the blond Aryan barbarian. There are no Gothic elements here
outside of ruins of some former civilization containing a huge Lovecraftian
creature.
More middling Conan stories followed, though mention should be made
of “The Devil in Iron” (August 1934). This story’s plot revolves around
Conan’s quest to possess a slave girl whom he lusts after. Howard’s Conan is
a sexual character—his desires are more than hinted at, and this is in stark
contrast to the Victorian morals of Tarzan and John Carter, who remain
chaste and committed to their loves. Farnsworth Wright had rejected one of
the earliest Conan stories, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” stating that he
“didn’t care for it.” In the story, Conan is overcome by lust for a supernatural
siren attempting to lead him to his death as a sacrifice for the god Ymir, and
the sexual overtones may have scared Wright.
“The People of the Black Circle” (September, October, and November
1934) was a well-constructed novella serialized in three parts with an adventure set in the Hyborian Age version of Afghanistan. “Beyond the Black
River” (May and June 1935) is famous for the line “Barbarism is the natural
state of mankind.” The story was set on the Aquilonian frontier with settlers
pushing into Pictish territory and had none of the usual Hyborian Age glitter.
Hour of the Dragon (December 1935–April 1936) was a novel serialized in
five parts. 19 Plot items from “The Scarlet Citadel” and “Black Colossus”
were used in an epic tale of a revived long-dead sorcerer of Acheron and a
plot against King Conan of Aquilonia. This was probably the finest novel
ever to run in Weird Tales; the magazine had a poor record with serials with
unforgettable fare such as Arlton Eadie’s The Trail of the Cloven Hoof (July
1934–January 1935) and Paul Ernst’s Rulers of the Future (January–March
1935).
“Red Nails” (July, August–September, and October 1936) was the last
Conan story to appear. Howard said in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith that
perhaps it was too much “red meat,” but it was what he thought was a
realistic depiction of an all-consuming feud.
Howard died on June 11, 1936, ending a streak of genre-defining fiction
that marked the magazine’s high point. Howard had financial issues with
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Wright, complaining of late payment or nonpayment for stories. He had
written “Red Nails” in spring 1935 and wrote no weird fiction after that with
the exception of an unfinished story of a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador set in the Southwest just before his death.
This was the triumph of the Conan series: Robert E. Howard had successfully fused the pulse-pounding adventure of the Crusader stories that he
wrote for Oriental Stories with the Lovecraftian elements with which he had
been experimenting for the past two years. With a total of seventeen Conan
stories in Weird Tales, Howard had created the critical mass for the character, ensuring that sword-and-sorcery would survive. This wasn’t a matter of
two or three stories with the same character but a sustained series. The classic
components were canonized: the competent swordsman, evil sorcerers, exotic fantastic backdrop, otherworldly and other-dimensional menace, treachery,
and skullduggery. In addition to the critical mass of stories, Howard also
wrote one novel and two three-part serial novellas. Having the longer works
added significance to the whole and would prove critical years later for book
publication. The stories were a mix of tropes, with some being straight
swashbuckling adventures, others with tragic endings (“Queen of the Black
Coast”), philosophical endnotes (“Beyond the Black River”), and meditations on hate (“Red Nails”). They were not usually consistently formula
stories along the lines of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin series that were
popular in Weird Tales. And the template was then in place so that even
without Howard the subgenre would continue.
THE SWORD-AND-SORCERY OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH
After Howard, the second most important author in the history of Weird
Tales sword-and-sorcery was Clark Ashton Smith. Smith (1893–1961) had
started as a poet influenced by the decadent movement, particularly Baudelaire and George Sterling. The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) was
published when Smith was a youth of nineteen years. His writing style and
subject matter were already in place. Smith had two stories in the tradition of
Rudyard Kipling in the Black Cat in 1911–1912, and then left fiction writing
for a decade, returning by way of the prose poem in Ebony and Crystal
(1922). The language and images in the prose poems “The Caravan” and
“The Princess Almeena” were dress rehearsals for the later fantastic stories
Smith would write. If Robert E. Howard was the Jack London of Weird
Tales, Clark Ashton Smith was the Gustave Flaubert.
Smith began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in 1922, and the intellectual stimulation proved to be just as important as Lovecraft’s interaction with
Robert E. Howard. Edwin Baird, editor during the first year of Weird Tales’s
existence, bought a couple of Smith’s poems and ran them in the July 1923
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issue. Farnsworth Wright, however, rejected the prose poem “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925, delaying Smith’s debut as a prose writer. Financial
difficulties drove Smith to write more pulp stories at the end of the 1920s. 20
Out of his six series with distinct settings, four could be considered swordand-sorcery due to their settings. “The End of the Story” (May 1930) was the
first of the stories set in Averoigne, an imaginary and decidedly fantastic
region of France. Smith indulged in a heavy Gothic atmosphere in this story
set in 1789 with a young law student, Christophe Morand, finding a centuries-old lamia amid the ruins of an abandoned château. Morand’s tryst with
the lamia is interrupted by a Benedictine abbot, Father Hilaire, and he is left
with a sense of unfulfilled longing. Rather than a sense of horror, “The End
of the Story” strives for the fantastic with sexual undertones. “A Rendezvous
in Averoigne” (April–May 1931) has a medieval time frame in which a
troubadour meets his lover in a haunted forest. They find a phantom castle
with a pair of vampires who have evil designs. Smith proceeded into classic
sword-and-sorcery territory in “The Beast of Averoigne” (May 1933), where
a demon of extraterrestrial origin arrives from a comet and terrorizes the
medieval locale. A sorcerer and two stout men at arms are needed to battle
the creature.
“The Last Incantation” (June 1930) was the first of his stories set in
Poseidonis, the last remnant of Atlantis. Malygris, a magician in his last
days, summons the apparition of a long-lost love, finding that it is not as he
remembered. Smith may have been inspired by Howard to use primordial
settings for some of his stories. The use of mythical continents like Atlantis
by both Howard and Smith created an intersection of results, though both
were coming from different directions. Howard used sword-and-sorcery as a
means for telling adventure tales, while Smith created stories of irony, nostalgia, and doom within a fantasy context. The end result in both cases was
still sword-and-sorcery, though created by different motivations. “The Death
of Malygris” (April 1934) is very typical Smith as rivals to Malygris decide
to investigate whether or not the arch-sorcerer is really dead—much to their
dismay. In “The Double Shadow” (February 1939), originally published as
part of a chapbook of stories in 1933, doom befalls a sorcerer and his henchmen when they invoke an incantation of the serpent-men from Howard’s
Kull stories. This story is an interesting case of using another author’s creation, a frequent occurrence within the Lovecraft Circle.
“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (November 1931) is a landmark story as
the first tale set in Hyperborea and the real beginning of Smith’s sword-andsorcery. Hyperborea is a prehistoric continent, situated roughly where Greenland is today, with a warm climate at first but eventually overwhelmed by
glaciers. Smith had originally written “Satampra Zeiros” in 1929, but Amazing Stories rejected it, as did Farnsworth Wright. Lovecraft convinced
Wright to take a second look, and it was finally accepted. The thief Satampra
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Zeiros plans to rob the tombs of the kings of the deserted capital city of
Commoriom with his partner, Tirouv Ompallios. When the two thieves
awaken a monster in the temple of Tsathoggua, Tirouv Ompallios meets his
doom and Satampra Zeiros barely escapes to tell the tale. Five more tales of
Hyperborea would follow in Weird Tales, one in Strange Tales, another in a
small-press chapbook, and a final story in Stirring Science Stories. Smith
engaged in dark humor in the Hyperborean cycle of stories, and characters
often came to bad ends through their greed or stupidity. “The Testament of
Athammaus” (Weird Tales, October 1932) engages in a sort of slapstick
when a criminal repeatedly resurrects himself after being beheaded.
Smith’s most important imaginary setting was Zothique, set on the last
continent of Earth eons in the future when the sun has faded to a dull red
color. Smith turned off the humor and engaged in a darker sort of story for
Zothique. The far future where sorcery has returned has since become a
classic setting for science fantasy, and Smith’s Zothique has been the template for many subsequent authors. “The Empire of the Necromancers” (September 1932), the first of fifteen stories in the series, has two brother sorcerers who reanimate a population of corpses, skeletons, and mummies to serve
them. The plan lasts until an undead sorcerer prince takes revenge on those
who would wake the dead. “The Isle of the Torturers” (March 1933) continues in the same vein, as King Fulbra of Yoros founders on the Isle of Uccastrog, better known as the Isle of the Torturers. Fulbra is imprisoned and
tortured but has his revenge as he carries the plague of the Silver Death:
“And oblivion claimed the Isle of Uccastrog; and the Torturers were one with
the tortured.”
Smith would return to Zothique in the January 1934 issue with “The
Weaver in the Vault,” in which three warriors are sent to retrieve a mummy
from an abandoned city. An earthquake kills two and traps the remaining
survivor, who witnesses an unearthly entity that consumes the bodies of the
dead while spinning a web of brilliant light. Smith followed up with “The
Charnel God” (March 1934), about an entity that takes all flesh that is dead.
The protagonist Phariom must rescue his bride, who is taken for dead while
in an episode of narcolepsy. Smith ventured into Robert E. Howard territory
in “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” (March 1936), in which two warriors save
the girl and get away alive. Around this time Smith’s fictional output dwindled to one story in 1937, three in 1938, three in 1939, and a handful after
that over the next fourteen years.
C. L. MOORE AND JIREL OF JOIRY
Catherine Lucille Moore (1911–1987), along with Howard and Smith, helped
create the “golden age” of Weird Tales of the 1930s. She started by writing
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weird science fiction stories featuring interplanetary rogue Northwest Smith.
Her fifth story in Weird Tales, “The Black God’s Kiss” (October 1934),
introduced a new character, Jirel of Joiry. Jirel is a red-haired mistress of
mythical Joiry in France somewhere during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Moore, like Howard, Munn, and Smith, used a Gothic setting—there is
little central authority, civil strife is rampant, and sorcery is lurking around
the corner at all times. The villain Guillaume takes Castle Joiry and Jirel as
prisoner. She escapes from the dungeon with the aid of a priest and travels
through a tunnel to a hell-like underground world. There she kisses the statue
of the Black God and returns to kiss Guillaume, who dies a horrible death.
Jirel returns in “Black God’s Shadow” in which, finding no satisfaction in
the destruction of Guillaume, she returns to the hellish underworld to release
him. “Jirel Meets Magic” (July 1935) has Jirel hunting down a sorcerer and
following him through a magical portal to a fantastic land. In “The Dark
Land” (January 1936) Jirel is snatched away by a supernatural being to be his
queen, though Jirel does not submit so easily. “Hellsgarde” (April 1939) has
Jirel attempting to recover a treasure from a haunted castle inhabited by an
evil phantom.
Moore cowrote a story with Henry Kuttner, bringing Jirel and Northwest
Smith together in “Quest of the Starstone” (November 1937). A. Merritt,
Robert E. Howard, and, in particular, Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne stories are probable influences on Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories. They are lushly
written, sometimes to the point of purple prose, but with a deliberate pace.
Many of Moore’s stories have a suggestion of sexuality to them, and they
could be considered feminine sword-and-sorcery. Moore’s production waned
after 1936, possibly due to a lack of ideas—she reused tropes repeatedly,
such as the portal to another world, in both the Northwest Smith and the Jirel
stories. She would have a second phase in science fiction and science fantasy
in her career after marrying Henry Kuttner in 1940, and many female fantasy
and science fiction writers cite Moore as an inspiration. 21
SWORD-AND-SORCERY ODDITIES
Nictzin Dyalhis (1880–1942) is something of a mystery man of Weird Tales.
He had only eight stories in the magazine, starting with “When the Green
Star Waned” (April 1925). This story and its sequel, “The Oath of Hul Jok”
(September 1928), can be described as early space opera. “The Red Witch”
(April 1932), however, is a story of reincarnation, as the protagonist Randall
Crone is in conflict with the phantom of a Stone Age tyrant, Athak. Athak
haunts Rhoda Day, who was Red Dawn in a previous life. Dyalhis’s bestknown story is “The Sapphire Goddess” (February 1934), in which a man
from our world travels via meditation to a sword-and-sorcery world and
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learns he is actually King Karan, who has been in exile. He agrees to retrieve
a sapphire statue in return for restoration of his kingdom. The story is a fun
romp. “The Sea Witch” is another reincarnation story of Vikings, though
there is no real action. A séance starts off “The Heart of Atlantan” (September 1940), in which contact is made with Tekala, daughter of the evil king of
Atlantis. Put adrift in a boat to die as an infant, she is found and raised by the
priest Ixtlil of the Temple of the Lord of the Sun. A rival sect attacks the
temple, but Tekala escapes. By astral projection, he is instructed by Ixtlil to
destroy a gem known as the Heart of Atlantan and bring doom to Atlantis.
Unlike Howard, Smith, and Moore, Dyalhis was a writer outside of the
Lovecraft Circle. There is no Gothic atmosphere present in his stories, but he
had a style that was unique. Dyalhis’s stories have a recurrent theme of good
versus evil as a manifestation of the theosophical duality of the universe.
Seabury Quinn (1889–1969) may have been the most popular writer in
Weird Tales. He was certainly Farnsworth Wright’s favorite author, and the
occult detective Jules de Grandin was Wright’s favorite character; from 1925
on, Quinn often had ten stories per year featuring Jules de Grandin in Weird
Tales. But he also began experimenting with historical stories that were
borderline sword-and-sorcery, including “The Globe of Memories” (February 1937), “Roads” (January 1938), and a story of future barbarism, “Gotterdaemmerung” (May 1938).
THE TWILIGHT OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY IN WEIRD TALES
The death of Robert E. Howard in 1936 coincided with Clark Ashton Smith’s
dwindling production. A further blow to the magazine occurred in March
1937 when H. P. Lovecraft died. Lovecraft had been a central figure, encouraging correspondents to write weird fiction. With hindsight, Farnsworth
Wright realized that Lovecraft was something special the moment he found
out about his death, and he began running fiction from earlier in Lovecraft’s
career that had appeared in amateur press publications. The golden age of
Weird Tales didn’t end abruptly, however; the magazine actually kept up an
autumnal glow in the late 1930s, mainly due to two protégés of Lovecraft,
Robert Bloch (1917–1994) and Henry Kuttner (1915–1958). Sword-and-sorcery had proved popular with readers, who regularly gave approval in the
pages of “The Eyrie,” and they wanted more. 22
The two writers who carried Weird Tales from 1937 to 1939 were undoubtedly Bloch and Kuttner. Lovecraft had mentored Bloch, and the latter’s
early stories were very much imitations of Lovecraft. Interestingly, Wright in
the 1930s seemed more interested in buying imitations of Lovecraft rather
than buying Lovecraft himself. After Lovecraft’s death, Bloch began to write
other kinds of stories, including psychological examinations that would
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eventually make him famous with Psycho. Bloch wrote one bona fide swordand-sorcery tale for Weird Tales: “The Dark Isle” (May 1939). This is an
effective tale of Vincius the Reaper, Roman legionary sent to battle the dark
druids of the Isle of Mona during the reign of the Emperor Nero. Bloch
showed he was competent handling both action and the supernatural.
Kuttner also started out imitating H. P. Lovecraft in the pages of Weird
Tales, and his first story, “The Graveyard Rats” (March 1936), proved to be
popular. But like Bloch, he also began experimenting with stories outside of
Lovecraftian horror. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith he said this to say:
No, I regret that my two King Alfred stories flopped badly, though Wright said
they were “delectably weird,” whatever that means. They didn’t have any
buttock-slapping or cesspool-dunking, which seems to be necessary in all historical yarns. So I wrote a satirical barbarian-adventure tale, which he bought
with great haste and very bad judgment. The story will probably appeal both to
readers who don’t see the satirical implications, and those who do. Anyway, I
had become annoyed at the heroic adventurers who weren’t appalled by the
most Gargantuan baroques out of Abaddon, but instead simply chopped them
to bits, whistling gaily. 23
The character was Elak, nom de guerre for the former Prince Zeulas of
Cyrene in the continent of Atlantis, and the story was “Thunder in the Dawn”
(May and June 1938). The Elak stories are the most Lovecraftian of all
sword-and-sorcery fiction published in Weird Tales. Elak is given little description outside of being lean and wolfish, and artist Virgil Finlay illustrated
Elak as looking rather like the actor Errol Flynn. 24
In the story, Elak returns to Cyrene to aid his brother, King Orander,
repeal an invasion of Vikings. “Spawn of Dagon” (July 1938) has Elak hired
to kill the wizard Zend by the mysterious Gesti, a Lovecraftian Deep One.
Unknown to Elak, Gesti wants to sink Atlantis while Zend stands in the way.
Elak and his companion Lycon are bodyguards for King Phrygior of
Sarhaddon in “Beyond the Phoenix” (October 1938). Xandar the priest murders Phrygior, Elak rescues Phrygior’s daughter Esarra, and they escape.
They travel down the River Syra to the land of the dead looking for aid from
the god Assurah.
The last Elak story, “Dragon Moon,” was not published until January
1941. Elak returns once again to Cyrene, where his brother has been slain by
the sorcerer Karkora the Pallid One. Karkora controls King Sepher of Kiriath
in order to precipitate a war, but Elak leads the army of Cyrene against
Kiriath, killing Sepher and destroying Karkora with a talisman.
The anachronisms such as Vikings and “Pikhts” might have been Kuttner’s idea of satire, along with a rapier-wielding rogue. Characterization is
minimal, while the horror from “outside” is very prominent. The Elak stories
show the change from Gothic to mostly cosmic horror by this time. The
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subgenre was not especially moved or changed by these stories. The main
contribution to it is that they kept the form continuing for a few more years
after Howard’s death.
H. Warner Munn returned in 1939 with a novel, King of the World’s Edge
(September–December 1939), which begins in the aftermath of King Arthur’s last battle. Ventidius Varro gathers the remnants of the Sixth Legion
with the wizard Myrdhinn to leave for better pastures, crossing the Atlantic
Ocean in the ship Prydwen. The Romano-Britons become embroiled with the
cruel Tlapallan, ruler of the Mound Builders. Varro aids the American Indian
leader Hayonwontha against the Tlapallan Empire. The novel was well received by the readership of Weird Tales and later reprinted in paperback. It is
noteworthy for a being a rare if not the only fantastic Arthurian novel to
appear in the pulp magazines.
One writer of sword-and-sorcery who wanted to be in Weird Tales, but
never made it, was Fritz Leiber. He sent in an early version of the story
“Adept’s Gambit,” but Wright rejected it. Leiber also said the Fafhrd and
Gray Mouser stories first went to Weird Tales, where they were sent back
before going to John W. Campbell’s magazine Unknown.
Farnsworth Wright was out as editor by the end of 1939 and died a few
months later after having surgery. 25 Dorothy McIlwraith took over as editor
while at the same time the magazine went bimonthly with a reduced page
count. The publisher of the pulp magazine Short Stories had purchased Weird
Tales and moved operations from Chicago to New York City. Munn said in
an interview in 1978, “Dorothy McIlwraith had her own stable of writers. A
lot of old writers were eliminated.” 26 Clark Ashton Smiths’s “The Coming of
the White Worm” was sent back, for example. The ghost of sword-andsorcery was present with Edmond Hamilton’s mythology-based stories of the
mid-1940s, but true sword-and-sorcery fiction was a casualty of the new
regime. Sword-and-sorcery was, however, published in Strange Stories, Unknown, and Fantastic Adventures.
In the mid-1940s, Edmond Hamilton wrote a cycle of stories using the
mythology of various cultures. The stories are distinct in having elements of
fantasy, lost race, and sword-and-sorcery but not specifically belonging to
one subgenre. “The Shining Land” (May 1945) and its sequel, “Lost Elysium” (November 1945), have a downed pilot finding the Tuatha de Danann
of Irish mythology on an island. “Twilight of the Gods” (July 1948) repeats
the theme with the doom of the Norse Gods and features Eric Wolverson,
who is actually the god Tyr. This sort of story was a variant of sword-andsorcery fiction and the closest the magazine got to it in the 1940s.
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CONCLUSION
The presence of H. P. Lovecraft played a major though often unheralded role
in the sword-and-sorcery fiction of Weird Tales. Just as his own fiction
evolved from Gothic to cosmic, so did that of his Weird Tales companions.
His influence on Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith played a large
part in their literary evolution. Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner had been
immersed in Lovecraft from the beginning, and they jumped straight into
fiction using his idea of forces from the outside and alien gods. C. L. Moore,
who also corresponded with Lovecraft, fused the Gothic and the cosmic in
her Jirel stories. The concept of the indifferent or hostile universe made for a
darker form of fantasy fiction. Only Nictzin Dyalhis was writing from a
different origin, most likely occult or theosophical.
Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith were not part of the science fiction world
of that time: Smith had stories in Wonder Stories, but with howls of outrage
from science fiction fans; and while Lovecraft did have one story (“The
Colour out of Space”) in Amazing Stories and two (“At the Mountains of
Madness” and “The Shadow out of Time”) in Astounding Stories, the latter
two were also generally unpopular with readers. These writers did not look
toward a futuristic technological utopia, but backward to an idealized place
in history that they used for fantastic fiction. What they created did not fit
well with the norms of popular genre fiction of the time, and it would take
three decades for greater acceptance.
Clifford Ball had written to “The Eyrie” January 1937 issue of Weird
Tales with this to say:
I have been a constant reader of your magazine since 1925, when some author’s conception of weirdness was a gigantic ape dragging a half-naked female about a jungle, and I have watched it progress steadily upward to the
zenith. I do not write criticisms; the main purpose of this letter is that I feel
moved to offer my condolences upon the death of Mr. Howard. A hundred
international Tarzans could never erase the memory of Conan the Cimmerian.
Neither Northwest Smith nor Jirel of Joiry—and in Moore you have an excellent author—can quite supplant his glory. When I read that Red Nails would be
the last of Conan’s exploits I felt as though some sort of income, or expected
resource, had been suddenly severed.
Historical adventure, Gothic fiction, and planetary romance all came together
as tributaries to form the subgenre. Robert E. Howard almost single-handedly
created sword-and-sorcery fiction, but H. P. Lovecraft’s influence helped
shape it. Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore added to the critical mass of
sword-and-sorcery fiction needed to create a unique genre identity. Clifford
Ball, Henry Kuttner, and Robert Bloch preserved this sort of story a few
more years when it could have easily disappeared. While the subgenre did
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eventually disappear from Weird Tales, it remained a significant influence on
speculative fiction. A form of sword-and-planet story appeared in Planet
Stories by writers such as Gardner Fox, Leigh Brackett, Bryce Walton, and
Poul Anderson; while set on other planets, it still had the feel and execution
of sword-and-sorcery. It would eventually rise from dormancy in the 1960s
and 1970s and has since become a major subgenre of fantasy—but its origins
lie firmly in the unique literary environment of Weird Tales.
NOTES
1. Robert Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (West Linn, OR: Fax Collector’s Editions,
1977), 3.
2. Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1939, was atypical in the wide
variety of type and quality of story he would accept. He was also very unpredictable; an author
might have one story accepted and the next sent back, rejected for no discernible reason.
3. Fritz Leiber, “On What Should We Call the Kind of Story This Magazine Is About,”
Amra, no. 16 (July 1961): 21.
4. Michael Moorcock, “Putting a Tag on It,” Amra, no. 15 (May 1961): 15. Heroic fantasy
is another term somewhat interchangeable with sword-and-sorcery, though with broader connotations.
5. Don Herron, “Sword-and-Sorcery,” Cimmerian, December 2008, 29.
6. J. U. Giesy, “The Mouthpiece of Zitu,” All-Story Weekly, July 5–August 2, 1919;
Charles B. Stilson, “Polaris—of the Snows,” All-Story Weekly, December 18, 1915–January 1,
1916; Ray Cummings, “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1919.
7. H. P. Lovecraft, letter, Weird Tales, March 1924, 90.
8. Bolstering the mix of historical with the macabre, Munn returned to the werewolf theme
with “Tales of the Werewolf Clan” in November/December 1930 and January 1931. The cycle
continues with lycanthropy, sorcery, and action the story of the Master tormenting descendants
of Wladislaw Brenryk through successive generations during historical events as the Spanish
Armada, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Salem Witch
Trials.
9. “The Shadow Kingdom” was started in late 1926 and finished in mid-1927. “Red Shadows” was written in the fall of 1927 under the name of “Solomon Kane” and first submitted to
Argosy All-Story Weekly. See Rusty Burke, “The Robert E. Howard Fiction and Verse Timeline,” REHupa, http://www.rehupa.com/robert-e-howard-fiction-and-verse-timeline/.
10. Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1924), Atlantis in America (1925); James
Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu (1926).
11. Robert E. Howard owned twelve Edgar Rice Burroughs books, more than any other
writer, including six Tarzan books and four of the John Carter/Barsoom series. That does not
include what he might have read in the pages of the All-Story Magazine, Argosy, and Argosy
All-Story Weekly.
12. Atlantis had been used as a setting a few times before with C. Cutliffe Hyne’s The Lost
Continent (Pearson’s Magazine, July–December 1899) and Fred MacIsaac’s “The Last Atlantide” (Popular Stories, December 17–31, 1927, and Popular Magazine, January 7–21, 1928),
but it is doubtful that Howard had read either of them.
13. Farnsworth Wright rejected three other stories with Kull and one in which he is mentioned but doesn’t appear.
14. The Picts recur again and again in Howard’s fiction, always as barbarians; one critic
describes them as “Howard’s most reliable standard-bearers of hate.” See Leo Grin, “The
Reign of Blood,” in The Barbaric Triumph, ed. Don Herron (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press,
2004), 158.
15. “Kings of the Night” was submitted for Strange Stories; “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” was
accepted for Strange Stories.
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16. This is no coincidence, as Howard had recently begun writing for Weird Tales’s companion adventure magazine, Oriental Stories, in which he was given free rein to write tales of
the Crusades full of hard men and big battles.
17. For example, the tale “Corkscrew,” which sent the short and slightly overweight detective into the West, and “This King Business,” which embroiled him in intrigue in a European
court.
18. Novalyne Price Ellis, One Who Walked Alone (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant,
1986), 20.
19. Robert E. Howard originally wrote the novel in 1934 for submission to an English
publisher, Denis Archer. The publisher went under, so Howard submitted it to Weird Tales.
20. L. Sprague de Camp, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (Sauk City, WI: Arkham
House, 1976), 205.
21. Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sword and Sorceress I (New York: DAW Books, 1984), 9.
22. But first a fan jumped in to fill the void left by the absence of Howard. Clifford Ball
wrote three sword-and-sorcery stories as an homage to Howard: “Duar the Accursed” (May
1937), “The Thief of Forthe” (July 1937), and “The Goddess Awakes” (February 1938). The
stories are fannish imitations of Howard with barbarian heroes and fantastic imaginary settings.
Unfortunately Ball’s action scenes lack the skill of Howard, and he gave up on sword-andsorcery. He had three more non-sword-and-sorcery stories in Weird Tales before disappearing
forever after 1940.
23. Henry Kuttner to Clark Ashton Smith, Dagon Moor, Robert E. Howard United Press
Association Magazine, no. 212 (September 5, 1937): 2.
24. In fact, Flynn might have been the model for Elak, as he uses a rapier in the stories.
25. Kuttner’s “Dragon Moon” was probably purchased while he was still editor.
26. “A Dialogue between Weird Tales author H. Warner Munn & Jessica Amanda Salmonson,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20130628075234/,
http://www.violetbooks.com/Munn.html.
Part II
Eich-Pi-El and Two-Gun Bob:
Lovecraft and Howard in Weird Tales
Chapter Six
A Nameless Horror
Madness and Metamorphosis in
H. P. Lovecraft and Postmodernism
Clancy Smith
THE UNNAMABLE HORROR
H. P. Lovecraft’s universe is populated by entities beyond physical description—“unnameable” 1 horrors beyond our “objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic” that can “scarcely . . . be described in
words,” 2 realms of “paradoxes, contradictions and anomalies” 3 where unspeakable “devils danced on the roofs” and “unnatural madness howled on
the wind.” 4 So, too, do we find realms so far beyond anything the human
senses were ever meant to grasp that Lovecraft, through his wayward protagonists, can only describe through faint analogy and metaphor where unity
and multiplicity exist at once, where language comes in the form of indescribable waves, 5 “which no earthly logic could explain.” 6 His protagonists
are at a loss: they experience impossible fusions of animal and vegetable that
defy all taxonomy, impossible geometric forms of intelligent design that defy
all historical record, as the limited tools of sensation and understanding within the structured confines of language and reason fall woefully short of even
processing, let alone reporting about, the horrors these men must face.
This central term coursing throughout Lovecraft’s vast corpus—unnamable horror—is a fundamental truth of Lovecraft’s cosmology and a central
feature of the horrors his wayward protagonists must face time and again. So,
too, is it a challenge for writer, character, and reader alike: Lovecraft creates
a universe populated by the unthinkable, the unnamable, the unspeakable,
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and challenges everything we know (or thought we knew) about the limits of
human cognition.
I suggest that Lovecraft’s penchant for creating unnamable horrors that
defy categorization by human thought, logic, and language stems from his
wider cosmology and humanity’s “frightful position therein.” 7 Key here is
Lovecraft’s departure from any form of anthropocentric conception of the
universe: the universe is not made in our human image, and humanity holds
no privileged position within that cosmos. It would thus follow that what
populates that universe has no mandate to conform to human experience, and
what is experienced through human faculties is but a piece, a sliver, of a
much wider universe, consequently throwing the very knowability of reality
into question.
S. T. Joshi, one of the foremost experts on Lovecraftian tales, notes,
“Lovecraft, in a major departure from the previous horror tradition—and, in
many ways, from the entire Western literary tradition, which habitually if
unconsciously stressed the centrality of human beings in the cosmos—would
emphasize the insignificance of humanity” 8 (emphasis mine). This “insignificance” 9 is most profoundly felt through the protagonists’ inability to reconcile their experiences with Lovecraft’s unnamable horrors within the narrow
confines of “tri-dimensional” 10 human logic, reason, and sensory experience.
They realize, often when it is far too late, not only the limits of their own
cognition, but also the insignificance of humanity itself in a vast and uncaring universe. In a letter to the editor of Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright,
Lovecraft says,
Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human
laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast
cosmos-at-large . . . to achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time
or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good
and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. 11
Such a position resonates on every page of Lovecraft’s stories, perhaps most
famously reflected in the iconic opening lines of his classic tale “The Call of
Cthulhu,” where he proclaims, “The most merciful thing in the world . . . is
the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” On this “placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity . . . it was not meant
that we should voyage far,” for although “the sciences . . . have hitherto
harmed us little . . . some day the piecing together of our dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” 12
Lovecraft’s universe refuses to reconcile itself with our human perspective: it is bigger than that, beyond that, so hyperbolically so that all mortal
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endeavors, categories of love, hate, fear, madness, sanity, dreams, and reality
(as we conceive them) are equally futile and transient. In part, the horror that
Lovecraft’s characters face is the very realization of their diminutive place in
the cosmos. But so, too, are there horrors they must face in the form of
transgressors from that wider cosmology into our own mortal phenomenological sphere. If humanity is but the tiniest speck in a massive, uncaring
cosmos, why should the creatures that populate it adhere to anthropomorphic
qualities? Why should we expect them to adhere to our meager understanding of logic, of science, of categories of sense and understanding?
These human protagonists, with their limited human cognitive capacities,
experience only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, a sliver of the totality of the
entities that populate Lovecraft’s universe as they intervene upon a human
world. Consider, for example, Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, the
tale of a two-dimensional universe populated by two-dimensional protagonists who suddenly encounter the imposition of a sphere (a three-dimensional
object) supervening upon their world, a thing so alien that it is only partially
experienced as a widening circle while it is being reconciled by the limited
two-dimensional faculties of the denizens of this fictional world. If we take
that concept and shift it up one dimension, we begin to get a glimpse of what
Lovecraft’s protagonists experience: the supervening of entities beyond our
meager tri-dimensional logic experienced only partially, as fragmented slivers of the totality of these horrors. These protagonists reconcile them as best
they can, given the limited resources they have available; but there is always
a remainder, something beyond total capture, and these limitations of human
perception often create a wild delirium, occasionally even madness, as Lovecraft’s protagonists fail in their attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable in a
manner not overly distinct from the experience of what Freud called “the
uncanny.” 13
So, too, does this explain, in no small part, Lovecraft’s iconic literary
technique 14 of always undercutting his protagonist’s own phenomenological
descriptions of these entities. Consider, for example, the description of the
corpse of Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror”: “It would be trite and
not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may
properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of
aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of
this planet and the three known dimensions.” 15 Lovecraft does not dismiss
the possibility of description a priori, for some description of the thing is,
indeed, possible; but a complete picture cannot be painted by anyone who is
“too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the
known three dimensions,” that is, it cannot be described by anyone overly
dependent upon traditionally human ways of thinking and being. As Graham
Harman notes, Lovecraft found a perfect middle path between underdescription and overdescription:
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The sentence just quoted would have been ruined if Lovecraft had adopted
either of two extreme alternatives. If he had said simply that “no human pen
can describe it,” we would have one of the cheapest tricks of bad pulp writing
and shallow thinking. If he had tried instead to shock us with monstrous
detailed descriptions alone, we would also have veered toward pulp. Instead,
we find a disclaimer that neutralizes the initial cliché by calling it “trite and not
wholly accurate,” but which then delves into a descriptive effort that is nearly
impossible to visualize in literal terms anyway. 16
Yet even this pales in comparison to the phenomena encountered by Randolph Carter in what is, perhaps, Lovecraft’s most esoteric tale, “Through the
Gates of the Silver Key”:
Then he drew forth the Silver Key, and made motions and intonations whose
source he could only dimly remember. . . . What happened then is scarcely to
be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic
dreams, and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow, rigid,
objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic. 17
This tale, a favorite of postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze, is riddled
with increasingly esoteric passages that bear more of a resemblance to metaphysical ruminations than phenomenological descriptions. Central to this
particular passage, however, is the distancing of such descriptors from what
Lovecraft often refers to as “tri-dimensional logic,” that is, the traditional
“narrow, rigid,” in a word, structured, ways of knowing the world and being
in the world. The millennia-old intellectual traditions that provide the sum
total of human cognitive tools (language, logic, mathematics, philosophy,
theology, and so forth) are still so rigidly structured (human, all too human)
that they have no hope of capturing that which is entirely alien to human
experience except filtered through that human experience, in which case
Lovecraft’s protagonists may endure only a sliver of the totality of the event
itself. Lovecraft is a poststructural artist in a very sincere and literal sense, so
much so that it ought to come as no surprise that leading poststructural
theorists like Gilles Deleuze incorporated Lovecraft’s language into their
own work.
Thus, I contend that the truly novel horrors of Lovecraft’s tales do not
take traditionally anthropocentric forms of “werewolf” or “vampire” 18 (for
what are those but “wolf-man” or “undead-man”?) but transcend such clearly
structured confines entirely, departing from the comfortable associations of
two arms, two legs, a head of some description, that is, something vaguely
humanoid and something accessible, though perhaps unsettling, to human
cognition. Just as Lovecraft distances himself from an anthropocentric cosmology, so too do his creations defy traditional tri-dimensional taxonomy,
that is, they defy any simple human ontology. By breaking from these tradi-
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tional horror tropes and by embracing a host of abominations that so wildly
defy easy taxonomy, Lovecraft’s tales of terror revolutionized the genre and
anticipated some of the central themes of poststructuralism that would manifest themselves in philosophy decades later. 19 This chapter will investigate
this revolutionary trend in Lovecraft’s stories in Weird Tales, analyzing the
unique phenomenological experience of encountering the “nameless horror”
and looking into the challenge this presents for author, reader, and character
alike, concluding with an overview of the impact Lovecraft’s tales have had
in the philosophical movement of poststructuralism, looking specifically at
the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose seminal text, A Thousand Plateaus, is riddled with Lovecraftian references that aid them in illustrating their own radical position.
EXPRESSING THE INEXPRESSIBLE
It is easy to say that a reliance on the trope “unnamable horror” demonstrates
little more than a deficiency of imagination on the part of the artist, that is,
that the horror in question is unnamable only because the author lacks the
creativity to describe it. Or else the author can describe it but chooses not to
by way of replacing such descriptors with vague allusions for the mere sake
of heightening the narrative tension without any profound philosophical
stake in the matter. Undoubtedly such criticisms have been leveled at Lovecraft over the years due to his penchant for relying so heavily upon incomplete descriptions, allusions to nameless horrors, and esoteric metaphysical
speculations in place of straightforward phenomenological descriptions.
But Lovecraft does not lack imagination and, as we have seen, there are
myriad reasons why he relied so heavily on this particular trope. First, Lovecraft’s cosmology was hyperbolically anti-anthropocentric, leaving room for
massive gaps between human experience and the objective existence of those
entities (or events) that are experienced. This aided Lovecraft in his attempt
to emphasize humanity’s paltry place in a vast and uncaring universe and
marked a decided break between his work in the genre and his predecessors
that relied on easily recognizable and heavily structured entities acting as
antagonists in their own tales of horror. Second, Lovecraft wished to present
his protagonists realistically, that is, to depict (as best as he could) the phenomenological experience of encountering that which is beyond the meager
bounds of human cognition, human language, and human logic. His characters often “short-circuit,” as it were, failing to reconcile what they experience
with their human categories of experience. There is a method to Lovecraft’s
literary madness, one entirely in keeping with his wider cosmological theories of humanity’s inconsequential role in the universe and his literary drive
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toward a certain form of realism in his descriptions of that which cannot be
described.
One of Lovecraft’s more autobiographical tales, “The Unnamable” (with
his frequently used protagonist Randolph Carter, perhaps doubling for Lovecraft himself), offers a unique insight into his self-reflective ruminations on
this precise literary technique as he sets up the character Joel Manton as a
classic detractor. Manton chides Carter on his “constant talk about the ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’” in Carter’s tales, calling such a contrivance
“a very puerile device, quite in keeping” with Carter’s “lowly standing as an
author.” 20 He remarks that Carter was too fond of ending his stories “with
sights or sounds which paralysed” his protagonist’s “faculties and left them
without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.” 21
In contrast, Manton insists, “we know things . . . only through our five senses
or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any
object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions
of fact or the correct doctrines of theology.” 22 The senses, Manton claims,
we must trust, and the senses will take in data that will ever and always be
reconciled with our accepted categories of understanding a rational whole
with no remainder: the very notion of something experienced by the senses
yet unnamable is, for Manton, a chimera.
Carter scarcely knows what to do with such “complacency of an orthodox
sun-dweller,” 23 unable to convince Manton that “phenomena beyond all normal notions” may exist—that is, phenomena beyond the categories of understanding, beyond what the senses can reconcile—and unable to convince
Manton that “spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it,
cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter.” 24 If one were to hold the
latter position, it is far from “extravagant to imagine psychically living dead
things in shapes—or absences of shapes—which must for human spectators
be utterly and appallingly ‘unnamable.’” 25
For Manton, the senses convey data to the mind, the mind correlates these
data with its structured categories, and these correlated data may be expressed in language adequately enough to represent the source of the original
sense data and convey that information to another interlocutor of sufficiently
similar comportment to mentally visualize what is being conveyed through
language. There is nothing, thereby, that can be unnamable. Yet Carter insists that such an experience is possible. Philosopher Mélanie Walton asks,
“What is an expression that can express that which cannot be expressed?
Logicians and grammarians may say that an expression cannot say what
cannot be said: it is an impossibility—or, at the very least, a sloppy use of
language” 26 (emphasis mine). Certainly this represents Manton’s position
succinctly, as he says, “even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not
be unnamable or scientifically indescribable.” But, as Lovecraft warns us
time and again throughout his “weird fiction,” the cold confines of “logic”
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are no defense against the horrors his protagonists must face but, quite the
contrary, are a hindrance: human language and logic are nothing but an
antiquated crutch, a limited perspective that is believed so faithfully that
when faced with the truth of humanity’s miniscule position in the universe,
and the horrors that exist beyond that finite understanding, the mind of the
logician is broken in the attempt to reconcile what is experienced with the
limited categories of sense and understanding within the protagonist’s disposal.
As Harman notes, speaking of Lovecraft, “[N]o other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe
them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.” 27 Language itself is
bound by rules and structure and is a dimension apart from what that language attempts to describe: there are the words and then there is the thing
itself. As Harman notes, “[N]o literal statement is congruent with reality
itself, just as no handling of a tool is the same thing as that tool in the
plenitude of its reality.” 28 There is a “gap,” as Harman likes to say, between
language and reality, particularly in the work of Lovecraft. “Language (and
everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion or indirect speech, a
metaphorical bond with a reality that cannot possibly be made present.” 29
Thus, for Lovecraft, “reality is too real to be translated without remainder
into any sentence, perception, practical action, or anything else.” 30 This sort
of disjunction led philosophers like Immanual Kant to create such a “gap”
between our phenomenological experiences and the “things-in-themselves.”
But, as Harman points out,
the mistake made by Kant, and even more so by his German Idealist successors, is to hold that the relation of appearance to the in-itself is an all-ornothing affair—that since the things-in-themselves can never be made present,
we are either limited to discussions of the conditions of human experience
(Kant) or obliged to annihilate the very notion of things-in-themselves by
noting that this very notion is an accessible appearance in the mind (German
Idealism). 31
But, as Harman points out, there is another option: “[T]he inability to make
the things-in-themselves directly present does not forbid us from indirect
access to them,” that is, it does not mean “the inherent impossibility of all
knowledge, since knowledge need not be discursive and direct.” 32 This “absent thing-in-itself can have gravitational effects on the internal content of
knowledge, just as Lovecraft can allude to the physical form of Cthulhu even
while canceling the literal terms of the description.” 33
Indeed, this is precisely what distances Lovecraft from other writers of
the genre. Lovecraft’s protagonists encounter these abominations in the most
real way possible, that is, nothing is taken in stride and everything is experi-
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enced as testing the limits of what it means to have an experience at all. In
Lovecraft’s own ruminations on the pulp-horror genre, he said,
The characters should react to it as real people would react to such a thing if it
were suddenly to confront them in daily life; displaying the almost soul-shattering amazement which anyone would naturally display instead of the mild,
tame, quickly-passed-over emotions prescribed by cheap popular convention.
Even when the wonder is one to which the characters are assumed to be used,
the sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the
presence of such a thing must somehow be suggested by the author. 34
Lovecraft’s technique, often played off (as Manton suggests) as cheap
tricks to obfuscate the author’s lack of talent—that is, the inability to express
these horrors represents an imaginative deficiency on the author’s part—is in
fact central to his philosophical mission. As Harman suggests, if the protagonists of Lovecraft’s tales encountered these sorts of alien horrors in a quasirealistic fashion, “if all this stated as a matter-of-fact event, then what we
have is nothing but a cheap novelty of ‘unprecedented content.’” 35 Thus,
Manton’s initial condemnations of Carter’s prose are nearly identical to the
accolades Harman bestows upon Lovecraft’s prose. Harman notes, “[T]o
innovate in science fiction” we cannot merely trade “a familiar content for a
bizarre but comparable one. . . . Instead, we must show the everyday banality . . . undercut from within, by subverting the background conditions.”
There must instead “be some deeper and more malevolent principle at
work . . . that escapes all such definition.” 36
The effort that Lovecraft puts into undercutting his own descriptions is no
mere literary contrivance but one of the most honest attempts to convey the
phenomenological experience of a nameless, indescribable horror as realistically as possible: the characters do not simply snap to, pick up arms, and
engage these monsters in some banal sort of action pulp inanity, but are often
frozen and speechless before the abominations of Lovecraft’s universe. Their
minds misfire, scrambling desperately to find some way (inadequate as it
always is) to express the inexpressible, to reconcile that which is beyond
human experience with the limited tools of human experience that they have
at their disposal. In this way, Lovecraft masterfully creates clarity of meaning while concurrently undercutting that clarity of meaning. 37
As Harman notes,
Lovecraft is not simply a pulp writer who tries to force credence with mere
declarations concerning the amazing properties of alternate otherworldly creatures. Instead, he is almost disturbingly alert to the background that eludes the
determinacy of every utterance, to the point that he invests a great deal of
energy in undercutting his own statements. 38
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It is a unique form of “realism” that Lovecraft captures—not the “realism” of
a “realistic” universe, no, but the “realism” of a protagonist’s agonizing
attempt to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, whether that is a fusion of a
plant and animal that simply “cannot be” according to traditional taxonomy
or the location of geometric shapes too old to exist and too alien in contour to
be of earthly origin. I contend it is the scope of Lovecraft’s cosmology (and
humanity’s frightful place therein) that creates the “gap” between his protagonists’ human experiences and the abominations that are experienced; this, in
turn, cultivates Lovecraft’s literary technique, which is anything but a banal
sort of unimaginative hedging away from full descriptions of ancient horrors
but is, rather, a perfectly realistic way of describing the phenomenological
experience of the truly unnamable.
THE PHILOSOPHER, THE SCIENTIST,
THE OCCULTIST, AND THE MYSTIC
Despite the seeming impossibility of describing, in full, these alien encounters, it would seem that some of Lovecraft’s protagonists are better suited to
the task than others. I have already hinted at the reason why: when characters
are too bound by traditional structures of language and their feeble, human
tri-dimensional logic, these structures, which would otherwise enable successful navigation of a human world, are altogether out of place in an entirely
anti-anthropocentric universe. Rather than an aid in life-navigation, these
structures of language and logic are little more than an antiquated crutch that
enfeebles the more imaginative components of human cognition that might
come closer to approximating the otherwise impossible encounters of entirely nonhuman experience. Although it would seem that there is always a
remainder, some aspects of these alien encounters that are beyond total capture, there are nevertheless degrees of approximation that seem to correlate
with the degrees of separation between Lovecraft’s protagonists and their
reliance on traditional forms of human thinking. In other words, the more
abstract and less rigidly structured the thinker (i.e., the more creative, the
more imaginative), the closer that individual will come to total experiential
capture of that which defies those structures of language and logic and,
subsequently, the better the chance that that individual will keep his or her
sanity intact on the other end of the experience. Lovecraft creates a dizzying
array of protagonists from various social and intellectual backgrounds to
experiment with how they might engage this nameless Other, none more
recognizable than Randolph Carter.
Lovecraft creates Carter as a quasi-Quixote figure, where imagination and
joy are continuously threatened into collapse by the pressures of the mundane “prosiness of life.” 39 In “The Silver Key,” Lovecraft’s iconic protago-
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nist finds himself in the midst of a type of an existential crisis wherein, not
long past, he had lost the “key of the gate of dreams,” 40 a mystical item that
Carter would use to escape the doldrums of waking reality into the realm of
dreams, making “nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond
space . . . across ethereal seas.” 41 But like Cervantes’s protagonist, “as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little,
until at last he was cut off altogether.” 42 Having both lost the key to the
gateway of dreams and allowed the tedium of terrestrial existence to whittle
down the joy and wonder in his heart, 43 Carter sought counsel elsewhere:
“well-meaning philosophers” who “had taught him to look into the logical
relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and
fancies.” 44 In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, stretching into the
first half of the twentieth, philosophy (as a scholarly discipline) was under
the sway of what were known at the time as logical positivists, 45 a movement
that eschewed metaphysical questions as ultimately meaningless and focused
far more on communal, empirical verification and the rigid structures of logic
than personal, phenomenological experiences. Whether a statement was
meaningful was predicated upon whether it could be verifiably demonstrated
to be either true or false (operating in a clearly logical, binary system), hence
their aversion to metaphysical queries that were often dismissed as linguistic
confusions or nonsensical fancies. 46 As such, Lovecraft was critiquing a kind
of scientific materialism, perhaps a scientism, that reduces all possible
knowledge to the language and system of measurement of the hard sciences,
thus limiting that which can be known to sensory experience alone.
Yet, as Carter notes (in keeping with Lovecraft’s stated cosmology), there
is no reason to value waking existence over dreams, and the deeds of reality,
so prized among purported scholars, “are just as inane and childish” as any
dream-walking Carter has been accused of believing in. Indeed, the philosophers are even “more absurd” than he, “fancying” waking existence as “full
of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither needing
nor knowing the wishes of existence of the minds that flicker for a second
now and then in the darkness.” 47
The scientists failed to console Carter, as well, unable to replace the
“breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight” of the “magic moulded”
dreamscape with their own “newfound prodigies of science, bidding him find
wonder in the atom’s vortex and mystery in the sky’s dimensions.” 48 They
claimed it was he, not they, who “lack[s] imagination, and was immature
because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.” 49 Carter saw Nature shrieking of its “unconsciousness and impersonal
unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries.” 50 Neither the wisdom
of philosophy nor the far-reaching knowledge of science could alleviate the
gnawing suspicion that this world was “shallow, fickle, and meaningless,” 51
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as all human aspirations are, and “that the daily life of our world is every
inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its
poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and
purpose” as anything his dreams conjured. Carter’s “reason rebelled at the
flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse.” 52
Nor did the occultists help, for Carter found their doctrines “as dry and
inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth
to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not
dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above that level.” 53 So
Carter had to dig deeper still, delving into even “stranger books” and seeking
out even “deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into
arcane of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the
secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him
ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane.” 54 It is here that Carter
moves past the cheap ruminations of purported occultists and enters the
realm of the true mystic, seeking the tomes that reflect the horrifying truth of
mankind’s paltry position in the cosmos, studying with scholars of the
dreaded Necronomicon, until at last “horror overtook” him and he set aside
these studies for the peace of mind of the banality of existence once more.
The end of the tale sees Carter finding a magical key of his ancestors, mystics, the lot of them, and able to vanish from time-space and enter once again
the dreamscape of his childhood.
Carter’s path was a curious one: passing through the halls of philosophy,
the laboratories of science, the rituals of occultists, the tomes of the true
mystics, until at last he found the answer inside himself (via his ancestors) all
along. But this path provides both Carter and reader alike a glimpse into
these different comportments in terms of who (if anyone) is prepared for the
horrors that Lovecraft creates. So, too, can it be seen as a parallel passage to
the one Carter takes in the follow-up story, “Through the Gates of the Silver
Key” (cowritten with E. Hoffmann Price), where Carter experiences entities
and events increasingly distanced from the traditional structures of human
logic and language as he passes through literal “gates” ascending away from
the prosiness of life toward more rarefied and abstract realms wholly alien to
anything human. To this iconic tale I will return in a moment.
DELEUZE, LOVECRAFT, AND POSTSTRUCTURAL HORROR
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are two of the most notable members of
postmodernist/poststructuralist philosophy that arose in France in the latter
half of the twentieth century. Often working in collaboration, they draw upon
their rich knowledge of the entire history of philosophy and their profound
insights into psychoanalysis to break from traditional philosophical discourse
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by delving deeply into a rich and vibrant language all their own to challenge
and critique the traditional conceptions of mind, self, world, and other. Blurring the lines between “human” and “animal,” “animal” and “plant,” they
conjure the macabre imagery of Lovecraft’s literary world of ancient horrors,
nameless terror, and the slow, steady decent into madness and metamorphosis in their seminal text, A Thousand Plateaus.
In one key chapter, Deleuze and Guattari bring to life as their stand-in
Lovecraft’s central protagonist, Randolph Carter, to weave many of their
most challenging and intricate philosophical concepts. When Professor Challenger, standing in for Deleuze and Guattari (and doubling for Carter), delivered his presentation to a rapt and somewhat hostile audience, his articulation of the relationship between the “plane of consistency” and the “plane of
organization,” “reterretorialization” and “deterritorialization,” took on
heightened poignancy when he himself began to “deterritorialize,” literally
melting, transforming, breaking down into the plane of consistency, merging
with the mechanosphere. 55 Though Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the constant check and balance between deterretorialization and reterretorialization,
the emphasis is clearly on the former, an emphasis on the so-called rhizomatic interconnectedness of the cosmos, and a clear animosity toward the socalled arborescent (up-down, hierarchical) structure. 56 Not only is every
event interrelated in this rhizomatic fashion, but it can break down and reform into something other.
Although there are nuanced differences that would certainly be manifested in a more in-depth excavation of these terms, the “plane of consistency” does not seem wholly dissimilar from the “body without organs,” which
Deleuze and Guattari associate with the earth itself. 57 Upon the earth there
occur strata, defined as “layers” or “belts,” which “give form to matters,” 58
namely, from the molecular, rhizomatic earth, from this “plane of consistency,” order in some fashion “coagulates,” if I may use the term, into organizations, systems, territorialization. These organizations are often referred to as
examples of the “arborescent,” which Deleuze contrasts with the “rhizomatic,” which has no singular point of origin but a multiplicity of tendrils and
connections metastasizing throughout the earth. Quick to avoid any of the
time-honored epistemological and ontological dualisms of philosophy, Deleuze notes that there is no absolute, strict dichotomy here, for (in a fashion
similar to our earlier analogy of the plane of organization and the plane of
consistency) the arborescent structures arise out of rhizomatic undercurrents,
linking the two in something far more dynamic than any mere coordination
or symbiosis. 59
The scene of Professor Challenger’s metamorphosis was not, however,
Deleuze’s alone, but was a seamless interweaving of Deleuze’s infamous
imagery with direct quotations from Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the
Silver Key.” In their chapter, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,” De-
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leuze and Guattari cite and reference Lovecraft not just once, but on five
separate occasions, all from the same tale, and all to illustrate a poignant
comparison between the arborescent structures of a plane of organization and
the virtual powers, intensities, and lines of flight that exist in a far more
rhizomatic conception of reality laying “beneath,” if you will, on the plane of
consistency.
In After Life, which contains an extensive exploration of Deleuze’s conceptions of reality, Eugene Thacker notes that, beyond any other novelist of
horror and fantasy, Lovecraft’s work remains the most innovative and extreme, pushing the boundaries of what we could ever possibly conceive to be
the limits of life and reality. Lovecraft’s is, as Thacker says,
[a] world in which we find characters weighted down by deeply in-grained
ways of thinking about the world—rural vs. urban, regional vs. global, civilized vs. primitive, race vs. species, ancient vs. modern, and so on. In the midst
of this all-too-human world, Lovecraft’s characters discover remnants—often
at a distant, furtive archaeological dig—of an advanced form of life that confounds all human knowledge about life as we know it. 60
It is a call to look past or beneath strictly and traditionally branching
hierarchies and modes of thought and society, to challenge the assumed
distinctions born of a three-dimensional, structured reality. The eldritch creatures from At the Mountains of Madness, for example, those things that the
best scientists could not yet “assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom . . . [whose] symmetry is curiously vegetable-like, suggesting vegetable’s essential up-and-down structure,” 61 would be well at home in Deleuze’s
rejection of rigid distinctions and the “up-and-down” hierarchical and overly
structured modes of thinking. This sort of “fusion” of otherwise insolubly
distinct entities is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. The undiluted and complete difference between, say, animal and vegetable is a consequence of purely hierarchical or, perhaps, overly structured thinking: as distinct “organisms,” taking no heed of the bodies without organs therein, two
stratified structures are conceived of as pure “beings” with no hazy area of
indiscernability between them, eschewing the notion of “becoming” altogether. As Deleuze and Guattari say, “multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose the arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity
to serve as a pivot in the object or to divide in the subject.” 62 However,
should we shift our view to a complementary investigation of the plane of
consistency as well as this plane of organization, we see a realm of becoming, indiscernability, and blurred lines of flight penetrating between otherwise strictly distinct structures forging something new: a rhizome, a multiplicity, a becoming, an assemblage. “As assemblage,” as Deleuze and Guattari define it, “is precisely this increase in the line of dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There
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are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure,
tree, or root. There are only lines.” 63
As Bonta and Protevi note, a rhizome is “a decentered multiplicity or
network, roughly synonymous with ‘consistency’ . . . the rhizome is not a
model like a tree, but an ‘immanent process.’” 64 The creatures of Lovecraft’s
macabre cosmology exemplify the protean aspects of the assemblage, presenting themselves as far more indiscernible and rhizomatic than mainstream
science could permit in its far more rigid taxonomy. The shoggoths, for
example, might even be described better as sentient “becomings” rather than
static beings, having no single head or hierarchy, but a multiplicity of organs,
absolutely none of which are anything other than completely protean. These
“multicellular protoplasmic masses” are “capable of molding their tissues
into all sorts of temporary organs,” 65 “throwing out temporary developments
and forming apparent organs.” 66 These shoggoth creatures represent, in a
relative sense, the relationship between the two Deleuzian planes and, perhaps more clearly, the juxtaposition between the “organism” and the “body
without organs” in A Thousand Plateaus. Capable of forming temporary
limbs and organs, quite literally, from the limbless, formless, and unorganized organs, that is, from a body without organs, the shoggoth, in this
peculiar sense, represents a lovely illustration of the relationship between the
organism and the body without organs, and it is thus no surprise that Lovecraft held great import for Deleuze’s own vivid imagery.
Similarly, the eldritch creatures are quite overt representatives of the
blurred realm of indiscernability between animal and vegetable, an assemblage mixing aspects of both to create something greater than either. Indeed,
in the chapter in which Deleuze cites Lovecraft, he gives us the example of
“Little Hans” and defines becoming as the creation of a new assemblage in
asking, “[S]o just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is . . .
taken up in an assemblage. . . . The question is whether Little Hans can
endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects,
that would make it become horse . . . an as yet unknown assemblage that
would be neither Hans’s nor the horses’s, but that of the becoming-horse of
Hans.” 67 Indeed, the plant-animal creatures of Lovecraft may well have been
found quite fascinating for Deleuze in light of his similar example of “becomings” and “assemblages,” the “wasp-orchid,” an assemblage fused of
insect and plant, distinct only in the singular (and less complex) realm of
arborscent, structured, stratified “being” on the plane of organization (that is,
in a common understanding of scientific taxonomy). 68
But what most intrigued Deleuze and Guattari in Lovecraft’s tales were
not the abominations themselves but the possibilities that allowed for Lovecraft’s human protagonists to undergo their own form of transmutation, especially the one endured by Randolph Carter in “Through the Gates of the
Silver Key.” As Carter passes through those sequential gates, time, space,
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and clear-cut distinctions between oneself and the Other (indeed, between
oneself and anything else at all) become blurred into complete indiscernability and finally vanish altogether. The process is slow for Carter, as Deleuze
notes in his chapter “How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?”
The process must be slow, or else one runs the risk of death and destruction
through the process of deterritotialization. As Deleuze and Guattari say,
“[Y]ou don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. . . . Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the
worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata
into demented or suicidal collapse.” 69 Thus, the presentation of sequential
gates, opening one and then the next, presents a fine example to Deleuze’s
observations here: Carter slowly descends into the plane of consistency, one
integral component of the stratified world dissolved at a time.
As Deleuze notes,
Lovecraft’s hero encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnamable waves and unfindable
particles. Science fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from
animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses,
molecules and things imperceptible. 70
As the organism breaks down (for, as Deleuze and Guattari note, “the BwO
is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies . . . the
BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs
called the organism” 71), the organization of the organs is replaced with the
intensities that populate the plane of consistency. As they say, “[T]he BwO is
made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities”; 72
thus, the absence of the stratified structure of organisms proper allows for the
creation of assemblages and multiplicities that interpenetrate otherwise static
and irrevocably distinct entities (the wasp-orchid as the chief example).
In one of Deleuze’s favorite passages from Lovecraft, the horror novelist
describes a scene in which his protagonist passes through the final gate and
merges with what Deleuze directly associates with his “mechanosphere.”
Carter passes beyond the realm of distinct differences between organisms,
bending both time and space and bilocating, trilocating, seeing himself in a
multiverse of manifestations in which forms of his occurrence are anything
but human:
Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate,
conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters
having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst
backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua . . . merging with nothingness in peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of
existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished
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from other beings [nor from all of the becomings running through us—DG],
that is the nameless summit of agony and dread. 73
Deleuze and Guattari insert the segment “nor from all of the becoming running through us” here to highlight the deterritoralization that Carter is experiencing. That Carter is no longer a “definite being” is akin to the notion of
shedding the organization of the organs and entering into that realm of indiscernability that allows assemblages to be formed.
Perhaps the most poignant section in which Deleuze and Guattari cite
Lovecraft comes at the end of their chapter “10,000 BC: The Geology of
Morals,” in which their imagery of Professor Challenger is seamlessly
merged with the conclusion of the Lovecraft’s tale:
No one had heard the summary, and no one tried to keep Challenger from
leaving. Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried toward the plane
of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it.
He tried to slip into an assemblage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock
with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: “the figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a
curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock . . . the figure
had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense
fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. . . . Then
the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it . . .
the abnormal clicking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which
underlies all mystical gate-openings”—the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere. 74
Thus, Professor Challenger merges with Lovecraft’s protagonist and akin to
Carter’s own deterritorialization, leaves behind the stultifying confines of the
organization of his organs and merges with the Mechanosphere, achieving a
sort of absolute deterretorialization.
CONCLUSION
As Thacker notes of Lovecraft, “There is more here than the menacing monster of classic creature-feature films. In these passages, what is horrific is not
just that such nameless things are still alive, but, more importantly, that in
their living they evoke in Lovecraft’s characters the limits of thought—the
limits of thought to think ‘life’ at all. The very terms of human thought fail to
encompass the nameless thing.” 75 Although the descent into madness seems
a common theme throughout Lovecraft’s corpus as his protagonists face off
time and again against the most unspeakable horrors, it is not precisely
“madness” that grips them but, rather, an inability to express in the signs,
symbols, and language of tri-dimensional logic the horrors they experience.
As Thacker notes, “Lovecraft’s character are not insane—in fact, the source
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of their horror is the realization that they are not hallucinating” 76 (emphasis
mine). Had they been hallucinating or dreaming, Thacker notes, they could
then “dismiss what they encounter as pure subjectivism, and the self-world
dichotomy would remain intact.” 77 But the horrors they experience, “incommensurate to any form of rational verification,” cause the traditional categories of thought to “flounder before a form of life that is at once oozing and
mathematical, formless and geometric.” 78
What Lovecraft’s protagonists experience are rhizomatic monsters, formless and nameless, and a terror that they themselves face becoming-animal
and becoming-molecular incapable of being fully captured with the language
and logic of the structured and hierarchical. Even madness and hallucination
are within the confines of a structured system of “normal” and “deviant,”
which are both left far behind in the odysseys of Lovecraft’s tragic heroes. It
is not madness that claims them but the hopeless attempt to describe the
rhizomatic in the language of the arborescent.
Thus, in the twilight world of Lovecraft’s literature, realities twist and
bend as intensities transform his protagonists, depicting, in literary form, the
movement of the organization of organs to the body without organs that
Deleuze and Guattari portray. So, too, do we catch a glimpse, ever and only
out of the periphery of Lovecraft’s chilling vision, of a plane of consistency
so alien and Other, so powerful and intense that it leaves the perceiver irrevocably transformed, just as, I argue, the radical philosophy of Deleuze and
Guattari was precisely meant to do.
NOTES
1. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable,” in Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P.
Lovecraft, ed. Stephen Jones (London: Gollancz, 2008), 133.
2. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” in Jones, Necronomicon, 399.
3. Ibid.
4. Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” in Jones, Necronomicon, 41.
5. “And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that smoke
and burned and thundered.” Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” 407.
6. Ibid., 406.
7. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in Jones, Necronomicon, 201. As Joshi notes, Lovecraft’s “imagination populated the world with a legion of cosmic horrors that bleakly underscore the insignificance of humanity and all its works in a blind, godless universe.” S. T. Joshi,
“Introduction” in H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), ix.
8. Joshi, “Introduction,” xi.
9. Lovecraft was not the only novelist of the time engaging this theme of humanity’s
finitude in a universe of indifference. Olaf Stapledon, for example, the renowned philosopher
and science fiction novelist, depicted this same theme in his seminal works Last and First Men
and Star Maker. As Eric Rabkin notes, Stapledon used the “breathtaking magnitudes offered by
astronomy to gain a new view of earth-boundman” as something so finite that compared to the
eons of time that elapse and the vastness of the cosmos, individual lives are but the most
fleeting sparks in an uncaring and vast cosmos. Eric Rabkin, “The Composite Fiction of Olaf
Stapledon,” Science-Fiction Studies 9, no. 3 (November 1982): 241. In Stapledon’s Star Maker,
for example, we see this sort of imagery and philosophical exploration of humanity’s finitude
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in a vast and indifferent cosmos: “I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in
full retreat. In its rear the freed population of the sky sprang out of hiding, star by star. On every
side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawkflight of imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived
that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in
sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by
generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of
spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings its empires, its philosophies, its proud
sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one
day of the lives of stars.” Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1953),
13.
10. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” 399.
11. Joshi, “Introduction,” ix.
12. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” 201.
13. Freud’s paper on the uncanny (unheimlich) was first published in 1919. There he notes
that the uncanny “belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror”
(1), which certainly resonates with Lovecraft’s own description of the experience of encountering these nameless horrors. Freud, drawing upon Jentsch’s previous work on the topic, defines
the uncanny (unheimlich) as that which is unfamiliar (the opposite, that is, of heimlich, the
“familiar” [3]). But Freud notes it is more than just some rudimentary fear of the unknown but a
deeper and subtler unsettledness. “Unheimlich,” Freud concludes, “is in some way or other a
sub-species of heimlich” (4), that is, the unfamiliar within the familiar, resulting in a cognitive
dissonance that forces the observer to reject, rather than rationalize, this sudden incongruity.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. Alix Strachey, Imago 5 (1919). In Lovecraft’s iconic
tale At the Mountains of Madness, for example, the expedition encounters geometric formations
that simply cannot be purposeful constructs of intelligent life in a place and from a time that all
their accumulated knowledge heretofore would suggest is older than any civilization that could
have possibly existed, and thus these visual experiences are rejected, time and again, as mere
mirage, mere trick of the light, yet nevertheless arousing, in Freud’s own idiom, “dread and
creeping horror.” Note Lovecraft’s own language here: “[I]t was as if these stark, nightmare
spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream. . . . I could not
help feeling that they were evil things.” H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and
Other Tales of Horror (New York: Del Rey, 2007), 29. And again, here, as reference to the
“uncanny” is made explicit: “[B]ut it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts,
and cave mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most . . . their regularity was extreme and
uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted” (42).
14. Lovecraft, like many of the horrors he depicts, manages to escape total capture within
the structured confines of the horror literary genre. Playing off of Farah Mendelsohn’s taxonomy of fantasy fiction (see Farah Mendelsohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008]), Lovecraft skirts between (or, perhaps, merges both) “intrusive
fantasy,” where entities from another world or dimension intrude upon our own, resulting in
awe or horror not unlike the experience of, perhaps, the Kantian sublime (see Immanual Kant’s
Critique of Judgment, Book II: The Analytic of the Sublime [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987]),
and “liminal fantasy,” wherein we watch, only out of the periphery of our gaze, a kind of
Freudian “uncanny” in fleeting patches that instill us with a sense of unease or, on occasion,
outright dread, like the conclusion of At the Mountains of Madness, where the briefest “half
glimpse” back at the horror that pursued our protagonists, a “flash of semi-vision” was enough
to haunt them for the rest of their lives, a glimpse, however fleeting, of this “thing that should
not be.” Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror, 103–4.
15. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in Jones, Necronomicon, 279.
16. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Washington, DC: Zero
Books, 2012), 25.
17. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” 399.
18. “As Lovecraft’s work progressed, he himself began eschewing traditional supernaturalism more and more. He had, in fact, never used such conventional tropes as the vampire, the
ghost, or the werewolf,” Joshi, “Introduction,” xii.
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19. Poststructuralism, speaking in general terms, rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s,
spearheaded by philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze; I will be discussing Deleuze in some detail throughout
this chapter. It is important to keep in mind, however, that unlike other philosophical schools
such as existentialism or phenomenology (and even here there are challenges pinning down a
core pantheon of thinkers or universally accepted themes within the traditions), poststructuralism has a far more amorphous contingent of thinkers, many of whom reject the label entirely.
20. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable,” in Jones, Necronomicon, 128.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 129.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Mélanie Walton, Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius: Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise (New York: Lexington, 2013), 1.
27. Harman, Weird Realism, 3.
28. Ibid., 16.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 17.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Lovecraft, Collected Essays, Vol. 2, Literary Criticism (New York: Hippocampus Press,
2004), 179, cited in Harmon, Weird Realism, 21–22.
35. Harman, Weird Realism, 22.
36. Ibid.
37. The way Harman describes this phenomenon is not altogether dissimilar from a kind of
Heideggerian phenomenology of “unconcealment” that might provide an interesting way of
reading Lovecraft’s technique of simultaneously creating clarity of meaning while undermining
it. For Heidegger, phenomological experience takes place within a “clearing” (Lichtung), a
space that allows for the “unconcealment” (Aletheia) of that which is experienced. As Heidegger notes, “[I]n that clearing rests possible radiance, that is, the possible presencing of presence
itself.” Martin Heidegger, selections from Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Basic
Writings, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 445. Yet, Heidegger notes,
“only what aletheai as clearing grants is experienced and thought, not what it is as such” (448).
There is a remainder to that which is unconcealed, the “what it is” in itself is concealed just as it
is revealed, “the clearing of presence concealing itself, the clearing of a self-concealing sheltering” (448). As Large notes, for Heidegger, “things are present to me because they are meaningful, but they are only meaningful because they have their place within the overall context of my
world.” William Large, Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 65. For Lovecraft, that which is unconcealed in his protagonists’ phenomenological experience of some nameless horror or another is that which can be reconciled by the
protagonists as meaningful within the context of their world (clarity of meaning is given)
while, concurrently, that which cannot be reconciled within the context of their world remains
concealed (clarity of meaning is undercut). In part this helps address Lovecraft’s literary technique, as seen in the description of Wilbur Whateley (see earlier), where the language used to
describe the phenomenon is within the context of the protagonists world and the remainder
must only ever be a gesture, allusion, or hint as to what more remains concealed of that
particular experience, immediately drawing our attention to the inadequacy of any description
the protagonists may give.
38. Harman, Weird Realism, 28.
39. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key,” in Jones, Necronomicon, 294.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
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43. “Wonder had gone away . . . they had chained him down to things that are, and had then
explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world.” Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. This movement took on form and momentum in the early 1920s through a group known
as the Vienna Circle, spearheaded by figures such as Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick, with
similar movements expanding swiftly across Europe including figures such as Carl Hempel and
A. J. Ayer.
46. Carter (and Lovecraft), occupying a New England setting, may have been exposed to a
modicum of American pragmatism as well, the founding fathers of that tradition having formed
the so-called Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although the early scholars of
that movement operated along relatively similar lines as their positivist counterparts, they were
always quick to critique positivism as being far too reductionistic, and Carter might have
enjoyed influences of the great German mystic Emanuel Swedenborg that irrevocably infiltrated the thought of both Charles S. Peirce and, to a far greater degree, his friend William James,
two of the founding members of this Metaphysical Club. Or, as Graham Harman convincingly
argues, exposure to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger may have also served Carter
well.
47. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key,” 254.
48. Ibid., 254–55.
49. Ibid., 255.
50. Ibid., 256.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 257.
54. Ibid.
55. The main thrust of “Geology of Morals,” the third “sequential” chapter of A Thousand
Plateaus.
56. Paul Patton’s Deleuze and the Political clearly articulates Deleuze’s anti-Platonism.
57. “In effect, the body without organs is itself the plane of consistency.” Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 40.
58. Ibid.
59. For the sake of contrast, “[Deleuze and Guattari] oppose trees to rhizomes, but also point
out that any actual system is always subject to intensive forces moving it in the opposite
direction. In other words, the roots of trees (hierarchies) are always beset by rhizomatic
growths, while rhizomes (consistencies) are always prone to take root and develop centralizing
hierarchies. (Technically speaking, however, there is no exact contrast, as the root-tree is a
model for tracing development on a plane of organization or transcendence, while a rhizome is
‘an immanent process’ constantly constructing a plane of consistency.” Mark Bonta and John
Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 52–53.
60. Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2.
61. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, 22.
62. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8.
63. Ibid.
64. Bonta and Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy, 136.
65. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, 64.
66. Ibid., 69.
67. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 257–58.
68. As Bonta and Protevi note, “[A] prime example of a becoming is the wasp-orchid. The
orchid becomes necessary to the life of the wasp and vice versa: what is primary is the new
assemblage, the wasp-orchid machine. The becoming of wasp-orchid does not have a subject
separate from itself: it’s not that the wasp, say, stays the same and merely adds a new property
to the set of properties that defines it. Nor is there a goal . . . distinct from the block of
becoming, for the other in the pair is also changed by its entry into the new assemblage. . . . It is
also important to remember that a becoming is a combination of heterogeneous parts; it is an
alliance rather than a filiation, an ‘unnatural participation,’ a ‘marriage against nature,’ a
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‘transversal communication’” (Deleuze and Geophilosophy, 59). “Unnatural participation” and
“a marriage against nature” are terms used by Deleuze and Guattari in the chapter “BecomingIntense, Becoming Animal,” and echo precisely the same language Lovecraft’s scientifically
minded protagonists use in their description of the eldritch, unnatural, and impossible fusions
of both animal and plant. Of course, the analogy is a loose one, as the wasp-orchid is a singular
assemblage or “block of becoming,” but two distinct entities on the plane of organization (that
is to say, two “organisms”), whereas only a singular organism exists in Lovecraft. Nevertheless, the animal components, Lovecraft notes, influence the development of the plant organs,
and vice versa, forming an internal symbiosis of two otherwise entirely distinct and divergent
taxonomical strains.
69. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 160–61.
70. Ibid., 248.
71. Ibid., 158.
72. Ibid., 153.
73. Ibid., 240.
74. Ibid., 73–74.
75. Thacker, After Life, 3.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
Chapter Seven
Great Phallic Monoliths
Lovecraft and Sexuality
Bobby Derie
Lovecraft is not the sort of writer, or person, to look at his own stories and say:
“Aha! My male creatures are always horribly deformed below the waist, they
worship great phallic monoliths dripping with green liquid, and there is never a
whisper of sex in my stories! I wonder if there is a connection?” Lovecraft’s
awareness of the displacement of sexuality in his fictions—like Poe’s of his
obsessive sex–death nexus—seems nonexistent and consequently untransformed. 1
So wrote Victoria Nelson in her estimation of Lovecraft. The details are
inaccurate, but the idea is common: there is no sex in H. P. Lovecraft’s
fiction, and this absence is the result of Lovecraft’s prudishness or neuroses
regarding sexuality and the female gender. The truth is more complicated;
Lovecraft was a sexual being, who expanded his knowledge and experience
of sexuality in at least some small degree during his lifetime, and his understanding of sexuality found expression in his fiction—in his use of female
characters, in his depiction of romantic relationships, and in his use of weird
sex as a mechanism for the intrusion of the strange in his stories. Our understanding of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction is in part colored by our understanding
of the man himself; by examining the different interpretations of Lovecraft’s
sexuality, we can gain more insight into his fiction.
In part because of the common misconceptions regarding Lovecraft and
sex, a number of different views of Lovecraft’s sexuality have emerged in the
critical literature. While biographical details would tend to support a view of
Lovecraft as essentially heterosexual, other interpretations of Lovecraft’s
sexuality can be valuable for understanding particular critical interpretations
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of Lovecraft’s fiction, and in some cases for specific fictional characterizations of Lovecraft that are based on these views of his sexuality. This chapter
will look at the four most common interpretations of Lovecraft’s sexuality,
positing four “faces” of his life and personality. 2
THE ASEXUAL LOVECRAFT
In Lovecraft’s fictional universe . . . life is a festering disease that, given its
contagious sexual properties, must be contained and endured. This may account for the often-noted fact of Lovecraft’s seeming asexuality and the asexual nature of his works in general. The individual solution remains chastity and
continence, but the force of attraction is often too great even for the stoic—as
Lovecraft himself discovered when he suddenly married Sonia Haft
Greene. . . . The gods themselves are not immune to desire, since HPL’s works
(in particular, “The Dunwich Horror”) deal repeatedly with cosmic monsters
spawning and breeding uncontrollably, using human females only as convenient vessels for their cosmic lust, ostensibly as a means of reclaiming a lost
domain. Zeus descends not as a shower of gold but as a color out of space. 3
There is considerable justification for scholars and biographers to describe
Lovecraft as asexual. By Lovecraft’s own admission, his sexual drive was
low, 4 and outside of his brief marriage he seems to have led an essentially
chaste existence, without any other sexual relationship, nor any real stated
desire for one. Lovecraft recognized this aspect of himself and may have
combined self-observation with his racial views in describing “our savage
blond forefathers as erotically sluggish & extremely chaste.” 5 An apt description of Lovecraft himself, as he wrote in a letter to J. Vernon Shea in
1931: “In these transitional days the luckiest persons are those of sluggish
eroticism who can cast aside the whole muddled business & watch the
squirming of the primitive majority with ironic detachment.” 6
For all that he was personally somewhat prudish about sex and disliked
talking about it for its own sake, Lovecraft did talk about sex from a scientific or artistic perspective—as evidenced in his letters, he corresponded with
many fans, amateur and professional writers, and editors over the years as the
subject came up, and he proved willing and able to discuss it, particularly
where it concerned literary interests, such as certain of his letters to J. Vernon
Shea, 7 Clark Ashton Smith, 8 R. H. Barlow, 9 and August Derleth, to whom
Lovecraft wrote, “[F]or although I detest all sexual irregularities in life itself,
as violations of a certain harmony which seems to me inseparable from highgrade living, I have a scientific approval of perfect realism in the artistic
delineation of life.” 10
With this image of the asexual Lovecraft in mind, critics may reflect on
the instances of asexual reproduction that Lovecraft wrote into the mythos,
through alien races like the plant-like Old Ones from At the Mountains of
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Madness and the body-hopping Great Race of Yith from “The Shadow out of
Time”; more obscurely through the contamination of “The Colour out of
Space,” the sorcerous displacement by Joseph Curwen in The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward, and Ephraim Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep”;
and somewhat more ambiguously through entities of indeterminate sexuality
such as the shoggoths and Cthulhu, whose octopoid spawn are mentioned in
At the Mountains of Madness. Likewise should be considered the ghoul
Richard Upton Pickman of “Pickman’s Model” and The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath, who is hinted to be a changeling entity who spent part of
his life as a human and part of his life as a ghoul.
Lovecraft’s deliberate use of asexual reproduction in his fiction stands in
contrast to the often-present but implicit sexual reproduction discussed earlier; in these stories Lovecraft does not simply hide the sexual act but removes
it entirely, while retaining the reproductive impulse—the ability and desire to
continue the species or the self in new form—in a number of different methods derived from his readings in science (the Elder Things’ spores) and
scientification (mind-transfer). Bruce Lord posits Lovecraft’s repeated use of
asexual reproduction as a direct outgrowth of his own views toward sexuality, biological determinism, and generational degeneration:
Lovecraft’s fiction is rife with examples of societies and individuals that propagate themselves using means other than sexual reproduction, and are thus
able to circumvent the pitfalls of degeneration. Not as surprisingly, in the
majority of these instances, asexual reproduction is cast by Lovecraft as a
preferable and more “advanced” or “superior” means of propagating a species
(by this point it should be clear that terms such as “advanced” and “degenerate” hold a great deal of currency in Lovecraft’s descriptions of his creations
when positioned against the seemingly inescapable path of degeneration that
plagues humanity). In “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow out
of Time,” Lovecraft continues his agenda of supplanting assumptions of humanocentricism by envisioning societies capable of operating without the detrimental effects of sexuality. Additionally, in “The Thing on the Doorstep,”
Lovecraft presents us with one of his most complex tales with regards to sex,
gender, and attempts at circumventing the perils of reproduction via sexual
means. 11
As a parallel thought, consider Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a
gruesome update and revisitation of the central element in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. The creation of Frankenstein’s monster has been considered a
masturbatory fantasy in some respects: the idea of man creating life without a
woman. 12 One possible reading of “Reanimator,” and by extension Lovecraft’s other cases of asexual reproduction, may be considered in a similar
light.
Slightly more difficult cases for consideration are Lovecraft’s asexual and
ambiguously sexual mythos entities, such as Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath,
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ghouls, and night-gaunts. Many of these are not given any explicit gender or
sexual identity in any of the tales, and their alien anatomy, when described,
lacks details of genitals or secondary sexual characteristics like breasts. Most
of the mythos entities are sexless as far as the Lovecraft Mythos is concerned, save for those who prove some sexual ability by procreating with
humanity (Yig, Yog-Sothoth, the Deep Ones) or in cases where the reproductive habits of the entire society (Elder Things, the Great Race, and the inhabitants of K’n-yan) are dealt with in some detail. The “default” gender for
many of these entities in common use is, by general convention of the English language, given to be male (i.e., marked by the masculine pronouns he,
him, his); Lovecraft is not averse to using the gender-neutral they or it as
occasion warrants, but when describing Great Cthulhu, for example, the use
of the masculine indeterminate is much more prevalent.
In stories with asexual alien races, Lovecraft did not avoid the concept of
family or social organization, as noted by S. T. Joshi:
It is a fact of no small interest that all three of Lovecraft’s comparatively
utopian societies have done away with sex in the normal human fashion. This
is understandable in the cases of the Great Race and the Old Ones, since both
these races are totally non-human in biology and could thus hardly propagate
like humans. Both reproduce by spores; consequently there is little place for
family life in the two civilizations. 13
The surveys of civilization for both the Great Race and the Old Ones, for
example, both contain accounts of the alternative social structures. The two
systems are interesting to contrast with Lovecraft’s sole advanced alien civilization that utilized sexual reproduction—the populace of K’n-yan from
“The Mound” (ghostwritten for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop) with its old
hereditary lines mostly forgotten, the populace divided into nonfamilial “affection groups.” Nowhere in these societies is there room for romantic love
as humans understand it, even absent the need or desire for sexual attraction,
but the focus on mental congeniality and mutual affection strongly recalls
Lovecraft’s expressed opinions in his letters and supports Joshi’s contention,
“That Lovecraft was essentially reflecting his own social views when writing
such passages is obvious from the manifestly sympathetic tone in which the
passages are written.” 14
It is a question for the reader as to whether the lack of family structure
and freedom from sex (or at least, sexual mores) better demonstrates the
evolution of these entities, their alienness from humanity, or the asexual
Lovecraft. These societies obviously do not reflect Lovecraft’s upbringing—
but then again, they may reflect something of his adult life, when his biological family narrowed and he found amicable and mutual nonsexual affection
with a surrogate family. More, it may reflect something of Lovecraft’s own
understanding of eugenics and his fears of passing on the undesirable traits
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that he had inherited; it is notable that both of Lovecraft’s parents passed
away in mental institutions, and the collation of genetic inheritance and
institutionalization forms a recurring aspect in stories such as “The Shadow
over Innsmouth,” “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
THE HETEROSEXUAL LOVECRAFT
The general facts of Lovecraft’s life support the view that he was heterosexual, at least insofar as he expressed (however obliquely) his sexual attraction
to women and was married and consummated his marriage to a woman. Even
in this context, however, the ex–Mrs. Lovecraft wrote that Lovecraft had
great difficulty in expressing his desires:
I believe he loved me as much as it was possible for a temperament like his to
love. He never mentioned the word love. He would say instead “My dear, you
don’t know how much I appreciate you.” I tried to understand him and was
grateful for any crumbs from his lips that fell my way. 15
“No, my dear,” he would say, “if you leave me, I shall never marry again.
You do not realize how much I appreciate you.” 16
Joshi claims that Lovecraft’s “extreme restraint in displays of affection” was
a product of his sexual repression and general upbringing. 17 Whatever the
case, already separated, Lovecraft and Sonia did eventually proceed through
the divorce process, under the fictitious grounds that Sonia had deserted her
husband. Lovecraft failed to sign the final decree, and he and Sonia remained
legally married until Lovecraft’s death.
Biographers and friends of Lovecraft were generally critical of the marriage—the difference of age, financial position, ethnicity (Sonia was a Ukrainian emigrant of Jewish descent), and disposition are substantial hurdles for
any couple to overcome. The best that can be said is there was a mutual
attraction between the two: for a time at least, Lovecraft was in love.
In considering the heterosexual Lovecraft, it is interesting to see how his
quintessentially monogamous, heterosexual relationship is reflected in his
fiction. Indeed, all the romantic relationships within Lovecraft’s fiction are
heterosexual and essentially trend toward this norm. The best examples come
from the two lovers’ triangles of a sort in Lovecraft’s revisions—“The Man
of Stone” and “Medusa’s Coil”—where the attractions felt are never consummated. Though the “bad girl” Marceline Bedard attempts a physical affair
and is rebuffed, while “good girl” Rose is sorely tempted by her growing
love for a man other than her husband, both stories end with the women in
question dead. In other stories, the evidence for promiscuity is even slighter:
T’la-yub of “The Mound” is part of a polyamorous society, but specifically
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develops a monogamous, heterosexual inclination, and Lavinia Whateley,
though described as slatternly, is never romantically attached with any particular male figure. The majority of Lovecraft’s other females are in monogamous heterosexual relationships, with extramarital sex only occurring due to
rape.
Of all these characters, none attempt to maintain affections with two
separate male characters at the same time—Marceline Bedard and Rose both
turn their attentions from their husbands, T’la-yub abandons her affectiongroup for her conquistador, Anastasia Wolejko is not listed with any other
“friends,” and Lavinia Whateley shows no other interaction outside her family. If those characters given here might be considered “promiscuous” by
Lovecraft’s standards, it is unclear if they are singled out for unusual punishment in this regard; terrible things happen to many characters in the Lovecraft Mythos regardless of gender, and the deaths of Marceline Bedard and
Rose are no more horrific than the rape and madness of Audrey Davis. Even
in the cases of Bedard and Rose, the cause of their deaths were the occult
forces pervading their lives as much as the instance of their attempts at or
temptation to have an affair.
THE HOMOSEXUAL LOVECRAFT
Others have surmised that he might have been a homosexual or at least a latent
one. They have cited his indifference to heterosexual relationships; the lack of
women in his stories, whose leading characters are often a single male narrator
and one close male friend; and his many friendships with younger men, some
of whom either were overt homosexuals or had tendencies in that direction. 18
The idea has some currency, particularly among homosexual fans of Lovecraft’s fiction, who themselves have faced alienation for an aspect of themselves they cannot change and see the parallels to their experience in Lovecraft’s fiction, as well as among biographers and critics seeking to explain
Lovecraft’s general lack of perceived sexual attraction to females in his life
and fiction. 19 In his published letters Lovecraft has relatively few direct
mentions of homosexuality:
So far as the case of homosexualism goes, the primary & vital objection
against it is that it is naturally (physically & instinctively—not merely “morally” or aesthetically) repugnant to the overwhelming bulk of mankind—including all cultures except the few (the ancient Orient, Persia, post-Homeric
Greece) in which strongly inculcated artificial traditions have temporarily
overcome in nature. There’s nothing “moral” in the adverse feeling. For instance—I hate both physically normal adultery (which is contemptible sneaking treachery) & paederasty—but while I might enjoy (physically) or be
tempted toward adultery, I simply could not consider the abnormal state with-
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out physical nausea. Even excessive psychological sentimentality betwixt
members of the same sex has for the average healthy person a repulsion
varying from a sense of the ridiculous to a feeling-of-disgust. 20
Lovecraft’s earliest reference to actual homosexuals concerns his meeting
Gordon Hatfield and Hart Crane. 21 S. T. Joshi suggests Hatfield may have
been the first openly homosexual individual Lovecraft ever met, which
would go some way toward explaining his reaction—although if this is the
case, Lovecraft’s opinion appears entirely based on “sissy” (feminine, perhaps “camp gay”) behavior. 22 A subsequent letter on the encounter with
Hatfield replaces the neuter “it” with the equally sexless “creature,” but the
primary focus of the sexually derogatory comments in these letters is on
Lovecraft’s belief in the effeminate nature of homosexual men. 23
Lovecraft had a much better reaction to Hart Crane: “Crane has at least
the external appearance and actions of a man, and for that much Alfredus
respected him.” 24 Joshi suggests Lovecraft did not know Hart Crane was a
homosexual, which is why he fared better in Lovecraft letters than Hatfield. 25
Conversely, Frank Belknap Long reportedly confided in Peter Cannon that
“Howard and the rest knew of it, but that didn’t affect their friendship with
Crane.” 26
Whether Lovecraft was aware of Hart Crane’s homosexuality or not,
Crane’s masculine appearance and behavior apparently saved him from
Lovecraft’s jibes. Whatever the case, there is no other hint of Crane’s sexuality in Lovecraft’s other letters, nor in the few volumes of Crane’s letters is it
mentioned Lovecraft ever insulted him in that regard. More tellingly, Lovecraft is not known to have identified any of his homosexual friends such as
Samuel Loveman or R. H. Barlow as such.
One letter to J. Vernon Shea goes into some depth, connecting the idea of
gender identity with sexual identity:
As a matter of fact—although of course I always knew that paederasty was a
disgusting custom of many ancient nations—I never heard of homosexuality as
an actual instinct till I was over thirty. . . . Of course—in ancient times the
extent of the practice of paederasty (as a custom which most simply accepted
blindly, without any special inclination) cannot be taken as any measure of the
extent of actual psychological perversion. Another thing—many nowadays
overlook the fact that there are always distinctly effeminate types which are
most distinctly not homosexual. I don’t know how psychology explains them,
but we all know the sort of damned sissy who plays with girls & who—when
he grows up—is a chronic “cake-eater,” hanging around girls, doting on
dances, acquiring certain feminine mannerisms, intonations, & tastes, & yet
never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclinations. 27
Lovecraft’s comment “I never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till I was over thirty” is clarified in another letter. 28 It is possible that
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Lovecraft was first exposed to the notion of instinctive homosexuality while
studying up to be a husband—several sexologists addressed homosexuality
in their works, including Havelock Ellis and J. A. Symonds’s Sexual Inversions (1897). Reading in the same area is also the probable source of Lovecraft’s choice of determining homosexuality a “psychological perversion”—
at that time, the leading literature described it exactly as such.
Lovecraft wrote little about homosexuality among women—though he
was certainly aware of the concept of lesbianism, as he mentions it in passing
with regard to a literary work in a 1931 letter to R. H. Barlow. 29 As with
male homosexuality, Lovecraft confused sexual identity with gender identity
and behaviors, as when he wrote: “There are too, undoubtedly, many masculine women whose masculine manners & outlook are equally free from actual
homosexuality.” 30
Given the majority of male characters in Lovecraft’s fiction, often close
friends and acquaintances who work closely together and are intimate in
confessing details of their lives and family histories, as seen for example
between the narrator and Edward Derby in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” or
Frank Marsh and Denis de Russy in “The Mound,” the reader may receive
the impression of an implicit homosexual subtext. On their face, these friendships between Lovecraft’s male characters appear chaste and platonic, harkening to similar literary same-sex friendships and partnerships that Lovecraft
was aware of and would have drawn from, notably Phillipps and Dyson,
Arthur Machen’s pseudo-detectives from The Three Impostors, “The Shining
Pyramid,” and “The Red Hand,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson—and from Lovecraft’s many own long and nonsexual friendships with men. That some of Lovecraft’s friends were themselves
homosexuals does not detract from this interpretation.
Whether or not they have a conscious or subconscious homosexual context, the interpretation of some of the Lovecraft Mythos as allegorical to
homosexual experience is valid and worthy of consideration. 31 Consider a
simple allegorical interpretation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a journey of self-discovery for a closeted homosexual, exposed for the first time to
a homosexual community fearful of persecution, asserting his heterosexuality by exposing them, and then discovering and finally embracing his own
sexuality. Of course, a more negative reading of the same story may combine
it with suggestions of sexually transmitted disease and degeneration.
Several stories in the Lovecraft Mythos can be similarly interpreted in
this manner, such as “The Loved Dead”: replacing homosexuality for necrophilia, this collaboration between Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy Jr. very much
follows the narrative of a closeted homosexual who discovers his orientation
at puberty and is unwilling or unable to express his desires in public, lives a
furtive life seeking pleasures on the down-low, and is constantly afraid of
discovery and repercussions by the authorities (which is especially appropri-
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113
ate given the time, when sodomy was still illegal in much of the United
States). Schultz in his article “On ‘The Loved Dead’” also notes, “When the
narrator describes his love for the dead, Lovecraft uses alliteration to indicate
the narrator’s growing excitement. Lovecraft’s poignant sense of what he
called ‘expectancy’ is transformed into a bizarre parody of sexual anticipation.” 32
The general character of the protagonist is familiar to Lovecraft’s readers,
since the basic archetype appears in several of his stories: the unnamed,
obsessive, and sensual seeker of the macabre is prominent in both “The
Lurking Fear” and “The Hound.” It is tempting to look for aspects of Lovecraft’s own character and history reflected in that of the unnamed narrator,
even elements of his own sexuality, and the bare bones are there—the sickly
childhood, the death of grandfather and parents—but the details are wrong,
and it is probably best not to read too much into the character.
For completeness I should mention “The Trap,” written by Henry S.
Whitehead and revised by Lovecraft. An unorthodox reading of this tale may
suggest a homoerotic subtext in the close relationship between a schoolboy
and his male teacher, and the image and associated sensations given for
penetrating to the other side of the mirror as a metaphor for anal sex.
THE TRANSSEXUAL LOVECRAFT
As a very young boy Lovecraft went about in skirts, and his mother, Susie—
whom is said by Sonia to have wanted a daughter—had him in gowns and
grew his hair out into long, girlish locks until about the age of six, and he had
a tendency to insist at that young age “I’m a little girl!” 33 Such an outburst
may make slightly more context given Lovecraft’s extremely young age, and
the possible innocent encouragement of his mother: “My mother innocently
helped to swell my self-esteem by recording all my ‘cute’ childish sayings,
and I began to make these ‘naive’ remarks on purpose to draw attention.” 34
Long locks and going unbreeched were fairly typical practices for children of Lovecraft’s age at those times and probably should not be used as
examples of transsexuality. After his hair was shorn and he began to wear
pants, there is no material in his letters or biography to suggest that Lovecraft
ever identified as female. Still, as with the homosexual Lovecraft, the transsexual Lovecraft strikes a chord with some readers because of the implicit
sense of alienation that could have found expression through Lovecraft’s
fiction. 35 More directly, the idea of a transsexual Lovecraft dovetails with
one of the most evocative stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre: “The Thing on the
Doorstep.”
While Lovecraft does not explore the more lascivious possibilities of
gender swapping (aside from a single suggestion), the entire crux of the story
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depends on Asenath/Ephraim’s desire to change gender. Indeed, “The Thing
on the Doorstep” is the only story in Lovecraft’s fiction where gender becomes a major issue for discussion. The crux of the story revolves around the
fact that while the body of Asenath is female, the consciousness that drives
that body is male—that of Ephraim Waite:
What do we make of this man-concealing womanly exterior, this woman in
whom—the interiority here is clearly suggestive of the fact that Ephraim has
“raped” his daughter in the most extreme way, usurping her very mental identity; he is illicitly inside her—in whom lurks a concealed male presence? 36
The confusion of gender explains certain odd behaviors, such as when Asenath “would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable
kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her
present situation” at an all-girls school. 37 Ephraim had taken on his daughter’s body to extend his existence, but once in that body became aware of
certain esoteric limitations: “Her crowning rage, however, was that she was
not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and farreaching cosmic powers. Given a man’s brain, she declared, she could not
only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces.” 38 Joshi is
quick to note that this passage is not quite as openly misogynistic as it
appears, and he quotes a 1934 letter by Lovecraft to show that Lovecraft
believed in a difference in kind of intelligence rather than degree: “The
feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is
probably little if any inferior in total quality.” 39
A similarly easy-to-mistake sentiment is voiced in the passage “She
wanted to be a man—to be fully human—that was why she had got hold of
him.” 40 It is to be remembered that Asenath’s physical body is only halfhuman, the mother by inference a Deep One—this causing Burleson to note,
“No feminist critic need see in this any remark to the effect that a woman’s
humanity is in question.” 41
When the dual nature of the character is intuited by Edward Derby, his
confusion over the true “gender” of his wife causes such confusion—“‘I’ll
kill her if she ever sends me there again. . . . I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him,
it . . . I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own hands!’”—that he is forced to declare
Asenath/Ephraim without gender, a neuter “it.” 42 This issue of gender language is reinforced elsewhere in the story, as the narrative drives the reader
to identify Ephraim/Asenath less as a human being—with the revelation of
Asenath’s Innsmouth blood—and finally to recognize “it” as an inhuman
“thing,” left lying on a doorstep.
The literal reversal of gender suggests the reversal of typical gender roles
in Lovecraft’s marriage. In her own testament Sonia claims to have been
deferential in many matters, but it is a sad fact that Lovecraft’s inability to
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secure work in New York made her the sole income for the couple—in an era
when the husband typically provided for the wife. That Sonia was aware of
his possible feelings of emasculation is made clear in her own account:
I effaced myself entirely and deferred to him upon all matters and domestic
problems regardless of what they were in order to remove or reduce if possible
some of the complexes he might have had. Even to the spending of my own
earned money I not only consulted him but tried to make him feel that he was
the “Head of the House.” 43
Despite this assertion, Sonia was undoubtedly the dominant force in the
relationship—the one who pushed for both their marriage and their divorce,
and who always precipitated sex. Whether Lovecraft consciously drew on his
relationship or not, the reversal of cultural gender roles in Lovecraft and
Sonia’s marriage may well have inspired the literal assumption of the position (and body) of the incapable Edward by the masterly and domineering
Asenath.
It is relatively easy to consider “The Thing on the Doorstep” an early
example of transgender or transsexual speculative fiction—if not a particularly sympathetic one, given that the transformations and relationships are
forced and possessive, the masculine warring to overcome or escape from the
feminine. Yet the eternal interest for this tale lies in the questions that naturally arise from the gender-bending or body-switching about the sexuality
and gender identities of Derby and “Asenath.” Joshi asks, “If, as the story
suggests, Lovecraft regarded the mind or personality (rather than the body)
as the essence of an individual, is this marriage homosexual?” 44 A few more
questions assert themselves. Asenath’s body may be biologically female, but
the mind or soul that drives it is male—and carries with it stereotypical male
attitudes and behaviors. Does that make Asenath a prototypical transgender
character? If “she” considers herself male and had sex with the male Derby,
does that make “her” homosexual or bisexual? What does Derby feel about
the situation, particularly when he is literally emasculated, transposed into
his wife’s body for a period of time—and how much of what Asenath did in
Derby’s body would countenance sexual abuse? While never addressed, the
possibility that Asenath-in-Derby’s body had relations with Derby-in-Asenath’s body is also a possibility. Finally, what to make of all these questions
with regard to what we know of Lovecraft? Of his friends, his mother, his
marriage? These are questions without definitive answers; Lovecraft is dead
and his letters are silent as to particulars. What is left is speculation and
interpretation—but such questions go unasked and unanswered in the story
itself.
Probably it was a deliberate aesthetic choice. Lovecraft was surely versed
in marriage rites and knew more of sexuality and homosexuals at that point
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than ever before in his life. To make no mention of it, but not provide some
narrative escape mechanism for the marriage bed, would be perfectly in
keeping with the idea that a gentleman simply does not discuss certain subjects. Possibly it was an omission of the mind: Lovecraft was so far removed
from thinking about intercourse that he wrote the story without giving the
gender-bending implications any consideration beyond the hideous facts behind the survival of the Ephraim intellect. The result is what it is: a threshold
of speculation crossed by many later scholars, critics, readers, and authors.
CONCLUSION
Considering the different “faces” of Lovecraft’s sexuality casts his use of
gender and character relationships in sharp relief, which may provide valuable insight into the stories and characters—the prevalence of asexual reproduction in his advanced alien civilizations, for example, takes on very different implications if considered from the perspectives of each face. Likewise,
there are specific interpretations of Lovecraft and his fiction where an understanding of the different faces is useful for parsing a given depiction of him
or his work, such as in the 2007 film Cthulhu, where the stressful homecoming of the homosexual protagonist parallels in many respects the “otherness”
experienced by the narrator of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” on which it is
based. 45
The key to the four faces of Lovecraft is the acceptance that Lovecraft
was a sexual being and that there is—or could be—a sexual dimension to his
work. A writer’s intent cannot be gleaned through his or her works; it can
only be construed and interpreted. In this way, many readers have made a
mirror of Lovecraft’s fiction, finding their own values reflected in it. In
looking at the four faces of Lovecraft’s sexuality, it is important to distinguish the biographical facts from the literary supposition. For most of his life
Lovecraft lived a chaste existence, and his one confirmed episode of sexual
behavior was his marriage to Sonia Haft Greene, after which he returned to a
genteel and sexless bachelordom—so the predominant scholarly views of
Lovecraft see him as heterosexual or asexual; relatively few scholars have
expressed the opinion that H. P. Lovecraft was homosexual or transsexual.
Yet to the reader, there is sufficient ambiguity that the scholarly positions on
Lovecraft’s life need not determine their understanding of his fiction; it is
possible to read interpretations of Lovecraft’s fiction from the standpoint of
different sexualities, without ignoring the facts of his life, and those readings
are no less correct than any other.
Which is not to say that Lovecraft himself drew any conscious distinction
regarding which face he turned to the story when writing any individual
piece of fiction; there is no evidence that he ever consciously considered his
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sexuality in that matter, nor are there any distinct phases in his fiction where
one face appears more often than any other. Indeed, there are stories like
“The Outsider,” which can be, and have been, interpreted in terms of both the
homosexual Lovecraft and the transsexual Lovecraft; 46 both of which are
valid interpretations—no matter what H. P. Lovecraft might have intended.
NOTES
1. Victoria Nelson, “H. P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies,” in The Secret Life of Puppets
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 136.
2. Cf. Dirk W. Mosig, “The Four Faces of ‘The Outsider,’” in Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at Lovecraft (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1997), 55–74.
3. Barton Levi St. Armand, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977), 65.
4. H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, ed. August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James
Turner (Sauk City, WI: Arkham Hose, 1965–1976), 5.163.
5. Ibid., 3.65.
6. Ibid., 3.425.
7. Such as Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 3.425, 4.234–35.
8. Ibid., 2.50.
9. H. P. Lovecraft, O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow, ed. S.
T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 2007), 246–48.
10. H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft
and August Derleth, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press,
2008), 2.542.
11. Bruce Lord, “The Genetics of Horror: Sex and Racism in H. P. Lovecraft’s Fiction.”
Retrieved from contrasoma.com/writing/lovecraft.html.
12. Rosemary Hathaway, “No Paradise Lost: Deconstructing the Myth of Domestic Affection in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in Trajectories of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from
the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Michael A. Morrison
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 17–18.
13. S. T. Joshi, “Lovecraft’s Alien Civilizations: A Political Interpretation,” in Selected
Papers on Lovecraft (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1989), 4–5.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. Sonia H. Davis, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, rev. ed. (West Warwick, RI:
Necronomicon Press, 1992), 15.
16. Ibid., 22.
17. S. T. Joshi, A Subtler Magic: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, 2nd ed.
(Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 1996), 37.
18. L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography (1975; New York: Barnes & Noble,
2006), 189.
19. The best summary of these arguments is made by Stanley C. Sargent in an interview
with Peter Worthy, see “Stanley C. Sargent” (1997), at reocities.com/Athens/forum/4162/sargent.html.
20. Lovecraft and Derleth, Essential Solitude, 2.545–46.
21. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.280–82.
22. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York:
Hippocampus Press, 2010), 427.
23. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1.251.
24. Ibid., 1.292.
25. Joshi, I Am Providence, 427.
26. Peter Cannon, Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long (Stockport, UK:
British Fantasy Society, 1997), 33.
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27. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 4.234–35.
28. Ibid., 4.356.
29. Lovecraft, O Fortunate Floridian, 91.
30. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 4.235.
31. Robert M. Price, “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider,’” Crypt of Cthulhu, no. 8 (Michaelmas 1982): 11–12.
32. David E. Schultz, “On ‘The Loved Dead,’” Crypt of Cthulhu, no. 17 (Hallowmass
1983): 25–28.
33. Joshi, I Am Providence, 65–66.
34. H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), 66.
35. Cf. Mollie L. Burleson, “The Outsider: A Woman?” Lovecraft Studies, nos. 22–23 (Fall
1990): 22–23.
36. Donald R. Burleson, “Lovecraft and Gender,” Lovecraft Studies, no. 27 (Fall 1992):
21–25.
37. H. P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi
(New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 345.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 441.
40. Ibid., 351.
41. Burleson, “Lovecraft and Gender,” 23.
42. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep, 350.
43. Davis, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, 12.
44. Joshi, I Am Providence, 582.
45. Ironically, Robert M. Price suggested a homosexual interpretation of “The Shadow over
Innsmouth” in a footnote to “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider’” several years earlier.
46. “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider’” and “The Outsider: A Woman?,” respectively.
Chapter Eight
Evolutionary Otherness
Anthropological Anxiety in
Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” 1
Jeffrey H. Shanks
“Worms of the Earth” is one of Robert E. Howard’s best-known short stories
and is often described, anecdotally, as one of his best. 2 Published in the
November 1932 issue of Weird Tales, the story features Bran Mak Morn, the
last king of the Picts, who fights to preserve his people and their culture from
the ever-encroaching military might of the Roman Empire. The main conflict
in the story revolves around Bran’s quest for vengeance against a Roman
governor and the boundaries he is willing to cross in achieving that goal—
not only risking his life and sanity, but perhaps even his very humanity. The
story contains numerous examples of the themes and genre elements that
have come to exemplify Howard’s work. “Worms” can be categorized as
heroic fantasy, historical adventure, or weird fiction. It contains Howard’s
favorite ancient people, the Picts; it makes reference to Lovecraftian Mythos
elements; it explores the “barbarism versus civilization” theme that pervades
so much of his work; and it reflects on the implications of evolutionary
theory and on what it means to be human. It is this last aspect of the story that
will be the focus of this chapter as I discuss how “Worms of the Earth” and
other similar stories are informed by the anthropological and cultural anxieties of the post-Darwin period and how those anxieties are exploited by
Howard to achieve the desired state of existential unease in the reader.
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Jeffrey H. Shanks
“WORMS OF THE EARTH”
“Worms of the Earth” begins with Bran witnessing the crucifixion of one of
his Pictish subjects at the hands of the Roman governor in Britain. 3 Bran
vows revenge on the governor and his troops, but knows that he lacks the
military force to take on the Romans in a head-to-head conflict. Instead he
seeks out aid from a more ancient enemy of his people: a degenerate, subterranean race of not-quite-human creatures known as the Children of the Night
or, less euphemistically, the Worms of the Earth. 4 This race was the remnant
of the prehistoric aboriginal people of Britain who were driven into the
hinterlands by the invading Picts during the Neolithic period. Ultimately
forced to live in caves and underground tunnels, these prehistoric people
began to degenerate culturally and even devolve physically into the short,
deformed, and inhuman creatures that would give rise to the tales of fairies,
elves, and dwarfs in folklore.
Bran learns of a way to secure the assistance of the Worms of the Earth
from a mysterious witch named Atla, though her knowledge comes at the
price of sexual favors. Atla tells Bran the location of a Black Stone that is
sacred to the Worms; he steals the stone and, confronting a group of the
creatures within one of their caves, uses it to blackmail them into carrying
out his revenge on the Roman governor:
As far as he could see floated a glittering ocean of slanted yellow eyes upturned. But the owners of those eyes kept carefully beyond the dim circle of
torchlight and of their bodies he could see nothing. Their low hissing speech
floated up to him and he shuddered as his imagination visualized, not a throng
of biped creatures, but a swarming, swaying myriad of serpents, gazing up at
him with their glittering unwinking eyes. 5
With Atla translating, the bargain is struck. The following night the Worms
burrow under the Roman fortress, collapsing it and killing the inhabitants.
They kidnap the governor, carrying him underground through their tunnels,
and eventually deposit him before Bran at the appointed meeting place. Seeing the wretched state of the now insane Roman, Bran realizes with horror
and regret that his unleashing of these ancient inhuman creatures upon his
fellow man was a far worse crime than anything the Romans had done. Atla,
now revealed as less than fully human herself, mocks him as he rides away
and declares that through his actions he has tainted himself and sealed the
doom of his people. 6
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121
RACIST ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE PYGMY THEORY
“Worms of the Earth” is one of several stories in which Howard makes use of
this “Little People” motif with a subterranean nonhuman race that functions
as a euhemeristic source for the legends of elves, dwarfs, and other fairylike
creatures. This idea can be traced back to the now-discredited Turanian pygmy theory current in late nineteenth-century anthropological thought. 7 The
most prominent proponent of the theory, Scottish folklorist David MacRitchie, 8, argued that Neolithic Britain was populated by pre-Celtic aboriginal
pygmies belonging to the so-called Mongoloid or Turanian race.
MacRitchie’s insistence on a racial categorization for his proposed pygmies and its significance for the purposes of this chapter require some historical contextualization. Most anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, following Thomas Henry Huxley, Paul Topinard, and
others, divided humankind into four major races: Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid (or Turanian), and Australoid. These races were defined primarily
based on perceived differences in cranial shape. In his influential 1899 work
The Races of Europe, William Ripley further subdivided the Caucasian race
into three groups: the Mediterraneans, the Alpines, and the Teutonics (Nordics or Aryans). During the Victorian and Edwardian periods there was considerable time spent and ink spilt trying to classify various ethnic groups as
belonging to one of these races or subraces. This was equally true of modern
groups like the Basques and Lapps as it was for prehistoric peoples such as
MacRitchie’s hypothetical pygmies. This kind of racialist classification has
long since been discredited and discarded by anthropologists, but it was still
the prevailing thought in MacRitchie’s day and even up through Howard’s
and Lovecraft’s time. 9
MacRitchie suggested that his proposed pygmies lived partially underground, claiming that a number of archaeological sites such as barrows and
sunken house structures served as their places of habitation. 10 In his two
main works, The Testimony of Tradition (1890) and Fians, Fairies, and Picts
(1893), MacRitchie argued that the later invading Bronze Age Celts created
their legends of fairies and dwarfs based on this Neolithic people whom they
displaced and whose modern-day descendants were the Finns, Lapps,
Basques, and Picts. Folktales of fairy brides and babies abducted and replaced by changelings were then said to be the distorted remembrances of
sexual interaction, both consensual and nonconsensual, between “non-Aryan” Turanian pygmies and “Aryan” Celts. 11 The Little People motif thus
became racialized and informed by the colonialist fears of miscegenation and
cultural contamination through contact with the Other.
MacRitchie’s pygmy theory met with mixed reactions. Some criticized
his lack of supporting archaeological evidence for this supposed short-statured Neolithic race, but there were many who did support his views as it
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meshed well with then popular conceptions of evolutionary theory—this Turanian pygmy race would have been a more primitive form of human, intermediate between Homo sapiens and the so-called missing link. Others proposed variants on the theory, such as folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, who
agreed that a short, dark Neolithic race was the source of fairy folktales, but
argued that they were not of Asian origin, but rather of the Mediterranean
race. 12
This euhemeristic concept of a primitive subterranean pygmy race as the
source of fairy stories soon began to permeate Victorian popular culture,
often in the form of degenerate and regressive modern-day survivals of this
race. The theme appears prominently in John Buchan’s The Watcher at the
Threshold and in William Morris’s The Wood beyond the World, for example. But perhaps the best-known, and for our purposes the most important,
use of this theme in Victorian fiction is in the Little People stories of Welsh
writer Arthur Machen. In his works “The Red Hand,” “Novel of the Black
Seal” (a segment in the episodic novel The Three Impostors), and “The
Shining Pyramid” Machen depicts a lost race of cave-dwelling, subhuman,
dwarflike creatures terrorizing the Welsh countryside. In “The Shining Pyramid,” first published in 1895, one of the protagonists theorizes that the creatures are “the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the country, who were cave
dwellers,” 13 clearly borrowing from MacRitchie’s pygmy theory. Machen’s
description of the creatures inspired Howard’s vision of the Worms of the
Earth nearly four decades later:
[H]e peered into the quaking mass and saw faintly that there were things like
faces and human limbs, and yet he felt his inmost soul chill with the sure belief
that no fellow soul or human thing stirred in all that tossing and hissing host.
He looked aghast, choking back sobs of horror, and at length the loathsome
forms gathered thickest about some vague object in the middle of the hollow,
and the hissing of their speech grew more venomous, and he saw in the
uncertain light the abominable limbs, vague and yet too plainly seen, writhe
and intertwine, and he thought he heard, very faint, a low human moan striking
through the noise of speech that was not of man. 14
Machen’s Little People tales, reprinted in the United States in the 1920s,
were an important influence on many of the Weird Tales writers, especially
Lovecraft and Howard. In “The Lurking Fear,” serialized in Home Brew
magazine from January to April 1923 and reprinted in Weird Tales in June
1928, 15 Lovecraft actually makes use of the Little People theme of subterranean devolution several months before he discovered Machen. 16 In Lovecraft’s version the Little People are the descendants of an isolated family that
has degenerated and devolved over the generations into misshapen apelike
creatures.
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123
Howard would have certainly read “The Lurking Fear” when it was published in Weird Tales, and it no doubt had an influence on him, but he had
already begun to explore the theme in his own work in a story published the
year before. 17
HOWARD AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE TROPE
Howard’s first effort in the Machenian vein was “The Lost Race,” 18 published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. In this story, a Briton
encounters a tribe of primitive Picts living in caves. In contrast to “Worms of
the Earth,” written five years later, in this, the first of Howard’s Little People
stories, it is the Picts, having been driven underground by the Bronze Age
Celts, who are the subterranean race and the source of the fairy legends. Here
the Picts are described as a Mediterranean people rather than the Asian
Turanian race of MacRitchie. This was the variant of the pygmy theory
originally favored by Baring-Gould and by the early twentieth century, the
idea that the Neolithic people of Europe were of the so-called Mediterranean
race rather than a Turanian or Mongoloid race had become predominant.
Howard’s source for this idea was likely G. F. Scott Elliot, who in his 1912
book The Romance of Early British Life used the term Picts to refer to these
supposed Mediterranean people 19 and suggested that they were the source of
the Little People legends:
At a much later period the . . . Pict is himself overcome by the Gaelic Celt.
Then it is his turn to become a malignant gnome, a dark little dwarf, whose
stone arrows are to be dreaded. . . . It is by no means improbable that the “little
people”—that is, the small dark Picts—did live on for many years in those
underground houses of theirs. 20
A more overt homage to Machen was the story entitled “The Little People,” 21 written by Howard around 1928, though not published until the
1960s. In this tale, which makes a direct reference to “The Shining Pyramid,”
a brother must rescue his sister who is abducted by cave-dwelling dwarfs.
The brother refers to the dwarfs as “Turanians, Picts, [and] Mediterraneans,”
conflating the two different racialist versions of the pygmy theory (Turanian
race vs. Mediterranean race) and showing that Howard was somewhat confused about the various terms being used by Machen, Scott Elliot, and others.
Some of this confusion may have resulted from the fact that his sources on
prehistoric Europe disagreed with one another on the subject. One of the
older works in his library, E. A. Allen’s 1885 book The Prehistoric World, or
Vanished Races, argued for a Neolithic Turanian or Mongoloid people, 22 as
did Arthur Machen in his stories. Scott Elliot, as we saw, argued for a
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Mediterranean people, as did another important source for Howard, H. G.
Wells’s The Outline of History. 23
By 1930, Howard had begun his voluminous correspondence with Lovecraft and very early on the conversation turned to the racial makeup of the
Neolithic Europeans and their relationship to the Little People stories, sounding much like the exchanges of the proponents of racist anthropological
theory from the previous century. Lovecraft agreed that the pre-Celtic people
of Europe whose modern descendants survived as Lapps, Basques, and Picts
were Mediterraneans; he argued, however, that they were preceded by the
diminutive Turanian/Mongoloid race and that it was the latter that gave rise
to the tales of fairies, dwarfs, and elves, not the former:
It’s true that the Celts share most vigorously the myth cycle of fairies, gnomes,
and little people, which anthropologists find all over western Europe . . . and
attribute to vague memories of contact with the Mongoloids, . . . Since these
fair Nordic Celts found a smaller, darker race in Britain and Ireland [i.e., the
Mediterraneans], there is a tendency . . . to assume that the “little people”
legends allude to contact with those dark aborigines. 24
Lovecraft further observes that the Celtic legends describe the “little people”
as “repulsive and monstrous, subterraneous in their habits of dwelling, and
given to a queer kind of hissing discourse” 25 and concludes that a Mongoloid
or Turanian race would fit this bill better than a Mediterranean people. He
was, in effect, trying to reconcile MacRitchie’s older Turanian pygmy idea
with the more recent Mediterranean theory by arguing for two Neolithic races
in Europe, one following the other. 26
This argument seemed to convince Howard:
Your observations regarding the Mongoloid aborigines and their relation to the
fairy-tales of western Europe especially interested me. I had supposed, without
inquiring very deeply into the matter, that these legends were based on contact
with the earlier Mediterraneans, and indeed, wrote a story on that assumption
which appeared some years ago in Weird Tales—“The Lost Race.” I readily
see the truth of your remarks that a Mongoloid race must have been responsible for the myths of the Little People, and sincerely thank you for the information. 27
Not long after this exchange in 1930, Howard would take Lovecraft’s observation and use it as the main premise for three of his most famous Little
People stories.
“The Children of the Night,” “People of the Dark,” and “Worms of the
Earth” all form a loosely connected trilogy of sorts, with the common denominator being the subterranean creatures encountered by Bran in
“Worms.” Following Lovecraft’s suggestion (rather than his earlier story
“The Lost Race”), Howard made these creatures an aboriginal Turanian/
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125
Mongoloid people driven underground by the Mediterranean Picts during the
Neolithic period. The Picts in turn were overrun themselves at beginning of
the Bronze Age by the Celts and pushed back further by later invaders: the
Gaels, the Britons, and eventually the Romans. In effect, Howard took his
own ideas about the “little people” legends, modified them with Lovecraft’s
theories, and crafted a fictional saga of Neolithic ethnic cleansing.
The first of this trilogy, “The Children of the Night,” 28 was published in
the April–May 1931 issue of Weird Tales. The story begins in modern times
with a group of acquaintances having a debate on the very subject Howard
and Lovecraft had been discussing in their letters: the various racial theories
surrounding the Neolithic peoples of Europe and the origins of the fairy
legends. 29 While conversing they also examine an ancient stone ax from their
host’s collection of artifacts. The narrator of the story is accidently struck in
the head with the ax by one of the others named Ketrick. Losing consciousness, the narrator finds himself reliving a past life as a Celtic warrior named
Aryara at the dawn of the Bronze Age—a member of one of the first groups
of Celts to have entered Britain. He encounters a tribe of the Turanian dwarfs
living in a village of partially subterranean houses and fights them to the
death, eventually succumbing to their overwhelming numbers. With Aryara’s
death, the narrator awakens in the present, but in a crazed state he attacks
Ketrick, whom he believes has the “tainted” blood of the Turanian dwarfs in
his veins due to Ketrick’s slight Asian-like features.
The second of these stories, “People of the Dark,” 30 published in the June
1932 issue of Strange Tales, is similar to “The Children of the Night” in that
it also involves a reincarnation theme. The narrator follows the woman he
loves and another suitor into an underground cave network with the intention
of killing his rival. He falls and hits his head and, like his counterpart in “The
Children of the Night,” experiences a previous life, this time as an Iron Age
Gaelic reaver named Conan. 31 He encounters the past life versions of his
lover and her other suitor, as well as the subterranean dwarflike creatures,
here described as less human than they were in “The Children of the Night.”
All three are eventually killed or driven to their deaths by the creatures and
the narrator awakens back in the present. He finds the couple that he was
following, but they are all attacked by one of the creatures, apparently the
last of its kind. The creature is now no longer human at all, its race having
continued to devolve over the last three millennia. The narrator uses his
memory of the caves from his past life to kill the creature and lead the others
to safety.
The third and final story in this series is “Worms of the Earth,” described
earlier. Taken together, the three stories depict the subterranean race at four
different points in history: the beginning of the British Bronze Age around
2000 BCE, the Iron Age around 500 BCE, the height of Roman Britain in the
second century CE, and finally the early twentieth century. We can see them
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as they regress culturally and devolve physically, becoming less human and
more reptilian as the centuries pass. In the Bronze Age they were still living
above ground and used stone tools and weapons. During the Iron Age they
were living in caves and had lost most of their material culture. In Bran’s
time they are much less human in form. By the twentieth century they were
no longer human at all and the last of them had become a hideous snakelike
creature.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANXIETY IN “WORMS OF THE EARTH”
This motif of cultural regression and physical devolution is one that is not
uncommon in the speculative fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Virginia Richter has identified this and other tropes related to
evolutionary theory as being expressions of what she calls the “anthropological anxiety” of Western culture in the post-Darwin period. 32 In her 2011
study Literature after Darwin, she applies her anthropological anxiety model
to the works of H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and other authors who
we know inspired and influenced Howard.
At the heart of evolutionary theory is the ultimate question of human
nature—as Thomas Henry Huxley phrased it, “the ascertainment of the place
which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of
things.” 33 Richter’s model addresses the cultural consequences of the answer
to that question and how those consequences manifest themselves in art and
literature. She examines the forms and tropes that expose the underlying
tension between mankind’s former role as a divine being separate from and
ascendant over the animal world and its new position as just another bestial
species among many. In popular Victorian and modernist fiction, she identifies four main tropes: 34
1. Regression/degeneration: the fear of biological or cultural devolution
in the form of atavistic individuals or behavior.
2. Plasticity of the body: the consequence of the physical body (human
and animal) no longer being fixed and immutable.
3. Simianation: the blurring of the boundaries between human and ape
(or beast) as one tries to become more like the other, often in the form
of missing links or humanized apes.
4. Assimilation: the threat of cultural and biological “pollution” through
contact with the Other in the form of native “savages,” lost races, or
missing links. It is often expressed in the form of regression, miscegenation, and even cannibalism.
Evolutionary Otherness
127
One can find examples and variants of these tropes throughout Howard’s
works in the form of atavists and lost tribes, ape-men and man-apes, and
other expressions of evolutionary oddities. 35 “Worms of the Earth” and the
other Little People stories in particular contain examples of all these tropes,
and it could even be said that anthropological anxiety is the very matrix upon
which these stories are constructed.
Most obviously, regression and degeneration are exemplified by the
Worms themselves, as they devolve over the centuries in their underground
tunnels. The subterranean dwellers also demonstrate the plasticity or mutability of the human form as they begin to lose their humanoid shape and
take on the physical characteristics of more chthonic creatures like snakes
and worms. Simianation or becoming “ape-ified” is usually expressed in the
form of hominids and ape-men. Howard’s Little People are likewise animalhuman hybrids in transitional form, though interestingly he has the so-called
Turanian pygmy race devolve not into ape-men, but into more reptilian-like
creatures. Perhaps “herponation” would be a more accurate term in this case.
But if the changing morphology of the Worms is the overt expression of
anthropological anxiety in Howard’s Little People stories, it is the threat of
assimilation that creates the effective tension in the story. This would have
been particularly true for readers in Howard’s time still living during the last
gasp of the Western colonialist system. The Worms and their Turanian pygmy ancestors are the victims of the Neolithic colonization of Britain by the
Picts. The Picts in turn become the victims of colonization themselves, first
by the Bronze Age Celts and later by the Romans.
Like the Worms, the Picts too, begin to undergo the degenerative effects
of geographic marginalization, as well as assimilation. Bran is described as a
pure-blooded example of the old Mediterranean race, while most of the common Picts had been changed physically through intermarriage with various
invading peoples. So to the Romans, the Picts represent the Other; to the
Picts, the Worms are the Other. Cultural and physical degeneration serves to
increase the sense of Otherness between these groups, but continued contact
between them increases the possibility of assimilation, primarily through
miscegenation.
Within the context of these stories, the most horrific example of assimilation comes through miscegenation with the ultimate Other: the Worms of the
Earth. In “Children of the Night” we see this in the character of Ketrick, who
exhibits atavistic traits that are a result of one of his ancestors breeding with
one of the Worms. Ketrick is the descendant of one of the changeling babies
of folklore, whose appearance stirs up ancient racial hatreds within the
crazed narrator. In “Worms of the Earth,” Atla plays the role of the fairy
bride, seducing Bran by taking advantage of his drive for revenge. The true
“reveal” at the end of the story comes when the facade of Atla’s humanity is
fully stripped away, showing her to be related in some way to the Worms—
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perhaps a changeling herself. She is both familiar and alien, repulsive and
attractive—a perfect avatar of Freud’s uncanny. The Worms are an expression of Csicsery-Ronay’s science-fictional grotesque—a “conflation of disparate elements,” human and reptile, that “disturbs the sense of rational,
natural categorization.” 36 Much of Bran’s horror comes from the realization
that he, the pure-blooded chief of the Picts, had tainted himself, symbolically
if not physically and psychologically, and by extension doomed his people
through his interaction with Atla and the grotesque Worms. This is a twist on
the doomed King Arthur–Morgan le Fay union, but instead of incest, the
sexual sin is miscegenation with the less-than-human Other.
In the early twentieth-century popular conception of Darwinist theory,
evolution was often erroneously seen as teleological—a linear progression
from simpler organisms to more complex ones. This implied, however, that a
regression from complex to simple was also a possibility. The stripping away
of mankind’s special status in the post-Darwinist period meant that humanity
was subject to these same conditions. For the Western colonialist mind,
assimilation through miscegenation was the primary mechanism through
which such regression in humans could occur. These expressions of cultural
anxiety formed the basis of many of the racialist and often racist anthropological theories of the nineteenth century—like MacRitchie’s pygmy theory.
These theories (and anxieties) in turn were mediated through Victorian and
Modernist art and literature, including the Little People stories of Machen,
Lovecraft, and Howard. The effectiveness of these stories, such as “Worms
of the Earth,” were therefore due in no small part to the way in which they
exploited the subconscious fears and anxieties of the post-Darwin generations that were still wrestling with the implications of what it means to be
human.
NOTES
1. Numerous individuals provided assistance and advice with the article, directly or indirectly, and I would like to thank, in no particular order, Patrice Louinet, Rusty Burke, Mark
Finn, S. T. Joshi, Morgan Holmes, and Deuce Richardson.
2. See, for example, Rusty Burke, “Introduction,” in Robert E. Howard, The Horror Stories
of Robert E. Howard (New York: Del Rey, 2008), xxii.
3. Howard, Horror Stories, 240–43.
4. Ibid., 247.
5. Ibid., 262.
6. Ibid., 265–67.
7. Morgan Holmes, “Lost in the Black Mists,” Forgotten Ages 106 (compiled with Robert
E. Howard United Press Association Mailing 224, August 2010, ed. Bill Cavalier; copy on file
at Jerome Library, Bowling Green University), 3–4.
8. See David MacRitchie, The Testimony of Tradition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner, 1890), and also Fians, Fairies and Picts (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner,
1893).
Evolutionary Otherness
129
9. For further discussion see Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 401–12; Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166–210; and George W. Stocking,
Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 56–66.
10. Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, Fairies and Victorian Consciousness
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47–50.
11. Ibid., 73, 97–99.
12. Ibid., 73.
13. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (Welches,
OR: Arcane Wisdom, 2009), 220–21.
14. Ibid., 214.
15. H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T.
Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2004), 62–81. The later reprinting of the story in the 1928 issue is
more significant for the purposes of this chapter, as that is the version that Howard would have
seen.
16. Epistorary evidence suggests that Lovecraft first discovered Machen in the summer of
1923, several months after “The Lurking Fear” was written and published. See S. T. Joshi, I Am
Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 29.
17. S. T. Joshi has noted that certain of Howard’s word choices in “Worms of the Earth”
may have been inspired by similar phrases in “The Lurking Fear.” See S. T. Joshi, The Rise and
Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos, 2008), 133–34. As we will see,
Howard’s and Lovecraft’s epistemological exchanges would also have a great impact on Howard’s later Little People stories, though the primary literary influence in this case was Arthur
Machen.
18. Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (New York: Del Rey, 2005),
167–86.
19. G. F. Scott Elliot, The Romance of Early British Life (London: Seeley, 1909), 80–81.
The influence of this book on Howard’s depiction of the Picts has been well documented (see
Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet, “Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn, and the Picts,” in
Howard, Bran Mak Morn, 344–46).
20. Scott Elliot, Romance of Early British Life, 317–18.
21. Howard, Bran Mak Morn, 197–206.
22. E. A. Allen, The Prehistoric World, or Vanished Races (Cincinnati: Central Publishing
House, 1885), 210–15.
23. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, 4th rev.
ed., 4 vols. (New York: Review of Reviews, 1922), 144–45.
24. S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke, eds., A Means to Freedom: The Letters
of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, 2 vols. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009), 1.27
(emphasis in original).
25. Ibid.
26. One of Lovecraft’s sources on this topic (see Joshi et al., Means to Freedom, 38) was
anthropologist Margaret A. Murray’s popular work The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), which was controversial even upon its release. Murray
was one of the few holdouts who still subscribed to MacRitichie’s pygmy theory by the 1920s.
She made no attempt to speculate on their racial or ethnic makeup, though she did support the
notion that stories of fairy brides and changelings had a foundation in reality: “The dwarf race
which at one time inhabited Europe has left few concrete remains, but it has survived in
innumerable stories of fairies and elves. Nothing, however, is known of the religious beliefs
and cults of these early peoples, except the fact that every seven years they made a human
sacrifice to their god—‘And aye at every seven years they pay the teind to hell’—and that like
the Khonds they stole children from the neighbouring races and brought them up to be the
victims” (238).
27. Joshi et al., Means to Freedom, 1.32–33.
28. Howard, Horror Stories, 143–57.
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29. Specifically, he has the character Taveral suggest that the Picts were the source of the
Little People legends, while the character of Conrad presents Lovecraft’s thesis that only a
“Mongoloid” race could “excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples” (ibid., 147).
30. Ibid., 201–16.
31. Not to be confused with Howard’s more famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian, who
would appear a few months later.
32. Virginia Richter, Literature after Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction,
1859–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6–8.
33. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams &
Norgate, 1863), 57.
34. Richter, Literature after Darwin, 8–15.
35. And they can be found in the stories of many other Weird Tales contributors as well. On
this, see Jonas Prida’s section on Weird Darwin in his chapter in this volume.
36. Istanu Csicsery-Ronay Jr., “On the Grotesque in SF,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 1
(March 2002): 71.
Chapter Nine
Eugenic Thought in the
Works of Robert E. Howard
Justin Everett
Before beginning his epistolary relationship with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E.
Howard was already on his way to a promising career as a writer of adventure fiction. Early in his career he created Kull of Atlantis, the brooding
barbarian king of ancient Valusia, who had to remain ever watchful for
shadowy usurpers, and Solomon Kane, the dour Puritan swordsman who trod
the ghost-haunted ruins of decayed cities to confront unnamable evils.
Though he had also written traditional adventure tales featuring the likes of
merchant seaman Steve Costigan and the mercenary Francis X. Gordon, in
Kull and Kane could be seen the beginnings of what dark fantasy would
become. When Howard began exchanging letters with Lovecraft in 1930, the
two shared regional photographs and folklore, debated mythology, exchanged writing, and discussed the publishing business. Among the topics
the two discussed at length were theories of race, with the bulk of this debate
taking place between 1930 and 1932. Both were clearly well-read in the
popular race theories of the day. This chapter will consider the influence of
the Lovecraft-Howard discussions on the development of Howard’s theories
of race, and particularly the evolution of eugenic thought in several of his
stories, including his Little People stories, “Worms of the Earth,” and “Beyond the Black River.”
THE ORIGIN OF EUGENICS
In concert with Herbert Spencer’s promotion of the idea of “survival of the
fittest,” 1 Darwin’s nephew Francis Galton developed the theory of eugenics,
the science of improving the race through careful breeding. Though Galton
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emphasized “increasing the productivity of the best stock,” 2 many of his
followers were more concerned that “there are elements, some ancestral and
others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value, or are positively harmful.” 3 Though Galton’s work gave it the legitimacy of science, the
fear of cultural degeneration began shortly after Darwin published The Origin of Species. This fear was most powerfully expressed in the Continental
idea of the fin de siècle, or “the end of the century.” Two themes of the
movement were (1) the fear of cultural degeneration as a result of modernization and the theory of evolution, and (2) the fear of atavism, or the appearance of degenerate physical characteristics representative of an earlier stage
of human evolution. Cesare Lomboroso’s two popular treatises, Criminal
Man (1876–1897 in five editions) and Criminal Woman (1895), expressed
these fears. Lombroso used the questionable science of craniometry (skull
measurement) to claim that certain individuals are “born criminals” and can
be identified by physical and behavioral characteristics, which were signs of
regression to an earlier stage in human development:
Atavism remains one of the most constant characteristics of the born criminal,
in spite of, or rather together with, psychology. . . . [M]any of the characteristics of primitive man are also commonly found in the born criminal, including
low, sloping foreheads, overdeveloped sinuses . . . overdevelopment of the jaw
and cheekbones, prognathism, oblique and large eye sockets, dark skin, thick
and curly head hair, large or protuberant ears, long arms, similarity between
the sexes, left-handedness, waywardness among women, low sensitivity to
pain, complete absence of moral and affective sensibility, laziness, absence of
remorse and foresight, great vanity, and fleeting, violent passions. 4
Another writer who considered the theme of degeneration, and one Howard was known to have read, was H. G. Wells, who in his 1891 essay
“Zoological Retrogression” critiqued the scientific optimism of the period,
pointing out that “rapid progress has often been followed by rapid extinction
or degeneration.” 5 Wells uses the example of the sea squirt, in a reversal of
the then-popular “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” argument, to demonstrate that an organism can move down the evolutionary ladder in its life
cycle. Likewise, Herbert Spencer, the father of social Darwinism, noted that
primitive cultures, unfit to compete and advance, are forced into unfavorable
climates where they degenerate to an extent that they are not capable of
adapting and advancing: “The more-evolved societies drive the less-evolved
societies into unfavorable habitats; and so entail on them decrease of size, or
decay of structure, or both.” 6 What is interesting here is Spencer’s concept
that so-called savages, unable to compete with their superiors, are driven into
places where they become adapted to inhospitable climates. This description,
taken along with Wells’s idea of evolutionary reversion (or more accurately,
adaptation to conditions that, from a modern human perspective, are de-
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
133
scribed as reversion), accurately describes the underground dwellers Howard
depicts in his Little People tales.
RACIAL DEGENERATION IN THE LITTLE PEOPLE STORIES
Howard was certainly unfamiliar with the intimate details of the scientific
and social debates that surrounding eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s. However, as a study of his reading habits reveals, he was familiar with the work of
Spencer and Wells, and had some knowledge of public understandings of
eugenics prevalent at the time. Though he took high school biology just as
eugenic materials in biology textbooks was achieving its peak, 7 Howard’s
own high school biology notebook 8 contains exercises from a lab manual
designed to accompany Hunter’s Essentials of Biology Presented in Problems (1911), 9 which contains only passing references to selective breeding,
whereas his A Civic Biology (1914) is harshly eugenic and advocates the
extermination of “inferior” family lines. As the lab manual would have been
more than ten years old at the time Howard took biology, it is difficult to say
for certain which biology text he used, and no records exist to indicate which
book would have been in use at his school.
It is known that Howard borrowed books from a traveling library as well
as the library at the Cross Plains school, but since the school burned down
(twice) since 1936, no record of Howard’s borrowing habits exist. His personal library and correspondence provide a few more clues regarding his
views on eugenics. In a book about boxing he gave him, Howard’s friend
Truett Vinson wrote, “Don’t forget our opinions on other subjects ranging
from prizefighting to birth control!” 10 The chapter on eugenics in a book in
his personal library entitled Fewer and Better Babies: Birth Control states,
“About the unquestionably insane, imbeciles, morons, and perverts . . .
[s]ociety will have to take care of them by sterilizing them or segregating
them.” 11
Better clues of Howard’s eugenic views can be found in his letters to
Lovecraft, and in the Cthulhu Mythos stories themselves. Howard and Lovecraft’s discussion of race began when Howard sent a letter to Farnsworth
Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, pointing out that Lovecraft had his character regress into speaking Gaelic rather than Cymric, presuming that this was
an intentional reference to the theory that the Gaels had settled Britain.
Impressed that this young author knew the difference, Lovecraft responded,
beginning a long exchange in which the race theories of each author are
outlined. Early in this correspondence Howard suggests that legends of the
Little People must have originated when the Nordics encountered the shorter,
darker Mediterraneans in Britain. In a 1930 letter Lovecraft disagrees, suggesting that “Mongoloids” were the origin of the legends of the Little People:
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After the ensuing conquest the defeated Mongoloids took to deep woods and
caves, & survived for a long time as malignantly vindictive foes of their huge
blond conquerors—carrying on a guerilla harassing & sinking so low in the
anthropological scale that they became the bywords of dread and repulsion. 12
Accepting this argument, Howard expresses fear of racial degeneration when
he comments to Lovecraft that
a Mongoloid race must have been responsible for the myths of the Little
People. . . . As the present Mongolian is more or less repellant in appearance to
the present-day Aryan, how much more must the primitive or retrograded type
of Mongoloid repelled the original Aryan, who was probably superior in physical comliness to moderns! 13
This comment reflects the fear that the so-called Aryan had degraded from
the original, with the implied threat of further degeneration. Racial degeneration as a result of environmental factors (cf. Spencer) is the fate of Howard’s
Little People, who are chased underground by the superior Aryans and devolve over time until they become the serpent-like monster featured at the
end of “The Children of the Night.”
Howard’s timeline in developing his mythos of the Little People is important here relative to Lovecraft’s influence on him. Patrice Louinet dates
Howard’s incomplete typescript of the untitled draft story commonly known
as “The Little People” to “the second half of 1928.” 14 This story was clearly
written in response to Machen’s The Shining Pyramid. Like Machen’s, Howard’s Little People are about four feet tall and carry primitive flint weapons.
Machen’s “represent a tradition of the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the
country, who were cave dwellers . . . accustomed to live in darkness, possessing stone instruments, and familiar with the Mongolian cast of features,” 15
whereas Howard associates them with the darker race of the Mediterraneans,
having possibly migrated from Asia: “They are known variously as Turanians, Picts, Mediterraneans, and Garlic-eaters. A race of small, dark people,
traces of their type may be found in primitive sections of Europe and Asia
today, among the Basques of Spain, the Scotch of Galloway and the
Lapps.” 16 Though it is clear from Machen’s description he is thinking of
Asians, Howard’s description is more problematic, as Jeffrey Shanks has
discussed. Howard had apparently confused contemporary understandings of
“Turanian” (of Persian origin) with “Mediterranean” (shorter, darker Europeans of Aryan extraction) in this early fragment but had sorted this out by
the time he wrote “The Children of the Night.” 17 To this version Howard
adds the concept of “racial memories” 18 of his viewpoint character’s Celtic
ancestors, “wherein stunted creatures pursued white limbed women across
fens such as these.” 19 This is the first hint Howard provides in the Little
People stories of his fear of degeneration via racial mixing.
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
135
Following his exchange with Lovecraft he abandoned “The Little People”
in favor of “The Children of the Night,” wherein the theme of racial memory
is further developed and the concept of natural racial enemies introduced.
Howard increases the racial stakes when the narrator reveals that the antagonist “Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to
some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood—a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family show such traces.” 20 Here Ketrick represents
the dual threat of exactly the same sort of evolutionary reversion that Lombroso described in Criminal Man, along with the suggestion that a racial
hybrid could be living among us and polluting the gene pool. This is consistent with contemporary fears that “race suicide,” or degeneration through
racial mixing, would lead to the disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon race. 21
The second threat, gradual racial devolution due to environmental factors,
is represented by Howard’s fictional history of the Little People. Rather than
take these stories in the order in which they were written, it might be useful
to construct a timeline of the author’s fictional history of this unfortunate
race. “The Children of the Night” (Weird Tales, April–May 1931) takes us to
the earliest point in this timeline, when O’Donnel is hit on the head by
Ketrick and transported back to a Neolithic Britain, where he awakens as the
aptly named Aryara and encounters the Little People at an early point in their
evolutionary decline:
They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny
bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with
flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed
ears. . . . And they conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing,
reptilian speech that filled me with dread and loathing. 22
For the first time Howard describes them as “reptiles,” one “squealing like a
monstrous lizard,” and “snake-like,” and a “serpent-path” 23 leading to their
“subterraneous dwellings.” 24
The second story in the timeline, “People of the Dark” (Strange Tales,
June 1932) follows a similar frame narrative. This time John O’Brien, an
American of Irish decent, ventures into a cave where he falls and hits his
head. O’Brien awakens as his Gaelic ancestor Conan, who encounters the
creatures in the bowels of Dagon’s Cave:
Erect, it could not have been five feet in height. Its body was scrawny and
deformed, its head disproportionately large. Lank, snaky hair fell over square
inhuman face with flabby writhing lips that bared yellow fangs, flat spreading
nostrils and great yellow slant eyes. I knew the creature must be able to see in
the dark as well as a cat. Centuries of skulking in dim caverns had lent the race
terrible and inhuman attributes. But the most repellent feature was its skin:
scaly, yellow and mottled, like the hide of a serpent. A loin-clout made of real
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snake’s skin girt its lean loins, and its taloned hands gripped a short stonetipped spear and a sinister-looking mallet of polished flint. 25
In this story the Gael Conan competes with a Briton named Vertorix for the
affections of a woman named Tamera. Because of this, the story can probably be placed at least a little later than “The Children of the Night.” At this
point in the timeline the subterranean race becomes further developed. While
they retain their Mongolian characteristics, the creatures have become increasingly snakelike.
THE THREAT OF RACIAL MIXING IN “WORMS OF THE EARTH”
Yet these creatures achieve their most horrifying form in what is perhaps
Howard’s most powerful story, “Worms of the Earth,” where Bran Mak
Morn, the last king of the degenerate Picts, seeks revenge against Titus Sulla,
the Roman military commander of Eboracum, who has executed and persecuted his people.
Throughout the story is the theme of fear of the foreigner in our midst. In
The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Madison Grant recommends placing
immigrants in ghettoes, sterilizing them, and preventing them from intermarrying with Anglo-Saxons. In “Worms of the Earth,” when Bran tells the
ancient druid Gonar of his plans to seek their help against Sulla, Gonar warns
him, “[T]here are some weapons too foul to use, even against Rome!” and
adds, “But you can not even reach the being you seek. . . . For untold
centuries they have dwelt apart. There is no door by which you can come to
them. Long ago they severed the bonds that bound them to the world we
know.” 26 This passage eerily echoes the arguments made by Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and other contemporary advocates of eugenics for the
isolation and sterilization of so-called inferiors. Commonly these individuals
were isolated in state-run insane asylums where they “dwelt apart.” As barbarian with a close connection with the natural world, Bran reminds Gonar
that we are all connected in the web of life:
“Long ago,” answered Bran somberly, “you told me that nothing in the universe was separated from the stream of Life—a saying the truth of which I
have often seen evident. No race, no form of life but is close-knit somehow, by
some manner, to the rest of Life and the world. Somewhere there is a link
connecting those I seek to the world I know. Somewhere there is a door. And
somewhere among the bleak fens of the west I will find it.” 27
While this statement is not intended as a critique of contemporary eugenics
programs, it suggests a kinship of all life, and in this context life that is at
least human in some form. The subtle question that this story, then, asks is
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
137
whether all human life, however different, is somehow connected by a common thread of humanity. To social reformers such as Franz Boas, the answer
to this question was an unqualified yes. For eugenicists, however, the answer
was that certain human lives were more valuable than others, and certain
groups of people can become so dangerous to society that they need to be
isolated and prevented from reproducing themselves. This is a question Bran
would have to sort out by the end of the tale.
Following his meeting with Gonar, Bran seeks the assistance of the halfhuman Atla, the witch-woman of the moors, in finding his way to a cave
sacred to the Worms:
Bran entered silently and sat him down on a broken bench while the woman
busied herself with the scanty meal cooking over an open fire on the squalid
hearth. He studied her lithe, almost serpentine motions, the ears which were
almost pointed, the yellow eyes which slanted curiously.
“What do you seek in the fens, my lord?” she asked, turning toward him
with a supple twist of her whole body.
“I seek a Door,” he answered, chin resting on his fist. “I have a song to
sing to the worms of the earth!”
She started upright, a jar falling from her hands to shatter on the hearth.
“This is an ill saying, even spoken by chance,” she stammered.
“I speak not by chance but intent,” he answered.
She shook her head. “I know not what you mean.”
“Well you know,” he returned. “Aye, you know well! My race is very
old—they reigned in Britain before the nations of the Celts and the Hellenes
were born out of the womb of peoples. But my people were not the first in
Britain. By the mottles of your skin, by the slanting of your eyes, by the taint
in your veins, I speak with full knowledge and meaning!” 28
This passage is perhaps the most revealing in “Worms of the Earth” in
addressing Howard’s fear of mongrelism as a potential source of racial degeneration. As a half-breed, Atla is human enough to be attractive, though
Bran is repulsed by her inhuman features. As such she is a representative of
the shunned Creole, the “half-breed,” and particularly the individual of both
white and black blood. She is also suggestive of the greatest threat of the
eugenic period—an individual who could perhaps pass as white and attract a
white man to mate with her. She represents a threat to the imagined purity of
the Anglo-Saxon race. This is made even clearer when she names the price
for her assistance—“the kisses of a king!” 29
What happens next underscores the threat. As Bran prepares to make love
to her, “An involuntary shudder shook him at the feel of her sleek skin.” 30
Her “sleek skin” reinforces the idea that she is at least somewhat desirable,
while Bran’s “involuntary shudder” reinforces the horror of what he is about
to do. The real danger is not that she might put a knife in Bran’s back as
much as that she might produce his child—a child, more human yet, who
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might, like Ketrick in “The Children of the Night,” pass for human, while
over generations tainting human blood with characteristics that might lie
dormant for centuries, only to surface with the occasional birth of an atavistic
child. The danger of eugenics, then, lay not so much in the obvious throwbacks such as Lombroso’s criminals, but in the undetected individuals who
were silently passing along tainted characteristics to the population as a
whole.
In spite of Bran’s sympathy for Atla, to whose human side Bran appears
to feel a connection, it is with greater trepidation that he faces the “worms” in
their subterranean cavern as he bargains with them for his revenge against
Sulla: “He realized the horror of his position, but did not fear, though he
confronted the ultimate Horror of the dreams and legends of his race.” 31 As
Bran speaks, the creatures are but yellow eyes glinting in the darkness. It is
not until he seals the bargain, with Atla translating their hissing speech, that
he has a glimpse of them:
Bran nodded and turning, climbed up the stair with Atla close behind him. At
the top he turned and looked down once more. As far as he could see floated a
glittering ocean of slanted yellow eyes upturned. But the owners of those eyes
kept carefully beyond the dim circle of torchlight and of their bodies he could
see nothing. Their low hissing speech floated up to him and he shuddered as
his imagination visualized, not a throng of biped creatures, but a swarming,
swaying myriad of serpents, gazing up at him with their glittering unwinking
eyes. 32
This is the horror of the madhouse. Like the state asylums of the eugenics
period, here we find a people isolated and locked away for their undesirable
characteristics. In both cases, the narrative is eugenic. Unable to compete
with the masses (Spencer), the degenerates have had to be safely removed
from the population as a whole. The difference is that in the eugenics period
it was a forced isolation as the result of government programs, and in the
Little People tales they were out-competed by their evolutionary superiors
and retreated into the bowels of the earth. In Bran Mak Morn’s case the
lunatics are literally in charge of the asylum.
It is at this point that the story takes a Lovecraftian turn. In his earlier
conversation with Gonar, Bran hinted at a common linkage with the Little
People as a part of the greater web of life. However, by this point in the
narrative Bran realizes these creatures have become so removed from humanity that they strike in even his iron heart a degree of trepidation:
He felt the gnawing of a strange misgiving, as if he had tampered with powers
of an unknown breadth and depth, and he had loosed forces which he could not
control. Each time he remembered that reptilian murmur, those slanted eyes of
the night before, a cold breath passed over him. They had been abhorrent
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
139
enough when his people drove Them into caverns under the hills, ages ago;
what had long centuries of retrogression made of them? In their nighted,
subterranean life, had They retained any of the attributes of humanity at all? 33
This nagging doubt would next be confirmed when the Worms fulfill their
agreement with Bran by burrowing beneath Sulla’s tower and pulling him
down through the floor. When Bran returns to the cavern to retrieve his
enemy, he finds him mad, in a fashion not unlike the ill-fated protagonists of
Lovecraft’s tales, driven insane by their inability to reconcile the deeper
reality of what they have seen with what they know of nature. Here Bran
drives a sword through Sulla’s heart, but in an unusual turn for a Howardian
hero, the stroke is delivered out of mercy rather than the desire for revenge. It
is in this scene that Bran finally sees the “worms” clearly:
One segment of the mass detached itself for an instant and Bran cried out in
fierce revulsion, though he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had
only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing
lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish
body. 34
His kinship at this moment is with his Roman enemy Sulla, who lies dead at
his feet. They are both human at least, and perhaps too late Bran realizes that
there are greater threats in the world than his differences with the Romans.
This realization causes Bran to declare, this time in a state of horror more
characteristic of the terrified protagonists of Lovecraft’s stories than Howard’s swashbuckling barbarians:
Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous—but gods, ye have
become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Worms of the earth,
back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth
the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right—there are shapes
to foul to use even against Rome! 35
This brings to mind the arguments made by Charles Davenport, Madison
Grant, and Earnest Hooten. There were certain people whose “germ plasm”
was so dangerous to the rest of the population that they needed to be isolated
and contained (negative eugenics), while the best individuals should be encouraged to breed, moving humanity up the evolutionary ladder (positive
eugenics). The horror of the Little People is in part the fear of the failure of
negative eugenics. When the degenerates can no longer be contained, they
may produce hybrids (like Atla) who may go on to breed with individuals of
the purer races (like Bran), and move humanity down the evolutionary ladder. Viewed in this way, part of the horror of this tale is Bran’s choice to
mate with Atla, which represents a threat to the purity of his line.
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EVOLUTIONARY PLACE IN THE
BARBARISM-CIVILIZATION DEBATE
Further understanding of Howard’s views of eugenics can be obtained
through an analysis of the letters Howard and Lovecraft exchanged between
1930 and 1934. At first Howard appears to concede the opinions of the senior
writer, though this begins to change with time as Howard becomes more
confident and Lovecraft’s views become too much for Howard to bear. This
disagreement, known informally as the “civilization-barbarism debate,”
while largely political in nature, was inherently racial at the same time, as
Lovecraft (and probably Howard as well) was incapable of separating eugenic thought from his political opinions. As the debate reached its climax in
July 1934, Howard conceived of one of his most-loved stories, “Beyond the
Black River,” which was most likely written in August 1934 and eventually
published in Weird Tales for May and June 1935. Its authorship at the height
of this debate makes it possible to view the story as Howard’s rejection of
Lovecraft’s argument favoring fascism, and along with it certain aspects of
theories of racial ranking.
We have already considered Howard’s opinions regarding his Little People and the influence on the idea of evolutionary degeneration as a result of
environmental factors and racial mixing. Both the threat of the degeneration
of the Anglo-Saxon race due to environmental factors (such as lack of exercise) and racial mixing are primary themes for Madison Grant and other
eugenic writers in this period. To this may be added the tension that built up
between Lovecraft and Howard during this epistolary exchange regarding
their different perceived positions in the European racial hierarchy. Popular
eugenicists, following Madison Grant and others, commonly ranked Europeans into superior Germanic Aryans, mixed-blood Alpines, and inferior
Mediterraneans. While Lovecraft clearly viewed himself as a pure AngloSaxon Aryan, Howard’s position was more problematic. While he clearly
identifies most of his barbarians with the Aryan race (including Araya from
“The Children of the Night,” but also Conan, Kull, El Borak, and others), his
fondness for the Picts causes him to struggle against contemporary racist
depictions of them and elevate their status. In a 1932 letter to Lovecraft he
writes,
I had always felt a strange interest in the term [Picts] and the people, and now I
feel a driving absorption regarding them. The writer [of a book found in a
Canal Street library in New Orleans] painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were
made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which
followed—which is doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this
people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with
ancient times. I made them a strong warlike race of barbarians, gave them an
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
141
honorable history of past glories and created for them a great king—Bran Mak
Morn. 36
In this exchange we can see not only the evolution of Howard’s Picts from
his own research to the barbarians he would create for his Kull stories,
perfect in the Bran Mak Morn tales and eventually degenerate in “Beyond
the Black River,” but we also get a glimpse of Howard’s own struggle with
his evolutionary position within Lovecraft’s scheme. Here we sense Howard’s admiration for a so-called inferior race that he reimagines with characteristics that Madison Grant would probably recognize as Aryan or Nordic.
Howard unquestionably identifies his Irish as Aryan when he writes in his
first letter to Lovecraft in 1930: “I believe that the Gaels were those Celts
who remained in the original homeland of the Aryans after the ancestors of
the Brythonic races moved westward.” 37 While Lovecraft’s response allows
for Howard’s assumption that the original Gaels were “purely Nordic-Aryan,” in the next lines he attests that the later British Celts were of mixed
Mediterranean/Aryan blood, 38 which would classify them as Alpines in Madison Grant’s scheme. We can imagine Howard struggling to understand his
own place in this hierarchy, since he self-identifies with the Irish, and thus a
group Lovecraft would view as a mixed Alpine race of lower status than the
Anglo-Saxons. It is this racial positioning, I contend, that fuels the barbarism-civilization debate.
The racial characteristics described here are important not only because
they form the racial and cultural foundations of Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and
Conan, but also because Howard’s fondness for tawny-skinned, dark-haired,
sullen-eyed barbarians over their Roman opponents forms the backdrop of
Howard and Lovecraft’s debate. In a letter dated August 9, 1930, Howard
appears to agree with Lovecraft when he writes, “I believe, like you, that
civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence,” though he begins to
reveal his differences with Lovecraft when he concludes, “whether for good
or evil I am not prepared to state.” 39 However, as the two exchange letters, it
is clear that Lovecraft’s elitism begins to rub Howard the wrong way. Whereas Howard says that were he to live in another age he would be most at home
among the barbarian Gaels and Goths, Lovecraft prefers the ruling class of
ancient Rome in the same period. “I . . . have pride and exultation in all
Roman victories, enmity toward all foes of Rome, and deep melancholy at
the downfall of the Roman world,” he writes in October 1931. His sense of
superiority becomes more evident a few paragraphs later when he adds: “I
felt that one good Roman pagan was worth any six dozen of the cringing
slum riffraff who took up with a fanatical belief” (Christianity). 40 In a December 1931 letter Howard responds, imagining himself as the outsider who
could gaze on the trappings of civilization but never be a part of it:
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Roman Britain! There is a magic charm to the phrase—the very, repeating of
which brings up in my mind vague images, tantalizing, alluring and beautiful—white roads, marble palaces amid leafy groves, armor gleaming among
the great trees, blue meres set in the tranquill [sic] slumber of waving forests,
strange-eyed women whose rippling golden hair falls to their waists, the everlasting quiet of green hills in the summer sun, standards gleaming with gold—
though it is always as an alien that I visualize these things. It is as a skin-clad
barbarian that I stride the white roads, loiter in the shade of the green whispering groves, listen to the far elfin echo of the distant trumpet call, and gaze, half
in awe and half in desire, at the white-armed women whose feet have never
known the rasp of the heather, whose soft hands have never known the labor of
fire-making and the cooking of meat over the open flame. I am of Britain, but
it is the Britain of Pict and Gael. 41
This passage is instructive. Here we can see the developing relationship
between Howard’s identification with the Celts and his evolving political
position. What is most interesting about this passage, however, might be his
identification with “Pict and Gael” instead of the Gael alone—an Alpine, a
barbarian of mixed blood, who in Grant’s scheme and Lovecraft’s view
would be positioned below the pure Nordic. Second, this illustrates that
Howard’s political position favoring the barbarism of the Alpine over the
civilization of the Nordic is tied to his understanding of the popular eugenics
of the time.
While the perceived racial and cultural differences between Howard and
Lovecraft set the stage for their debate, it is in a letter from December 1930
that Howard reacts formally to Lovecraft’s philosophical position. Specifically, he reacts to an article Lovecraft enclosed with that letter, almost certainly an essay entitled “The Materialist Today,” which Lovecraft published
in Driftwind in October 1926:
That life is chaotic, unjust, and apparently blind and without reason or direction, anyone can see; if the universe leans either way it is toward evil rather
than good, as regards life and humanity. That there is any eventual goal for the
human race than extinction, I do not believe nor do I have any faith in the
eventual Superman. Yet the trend of so many materialists to suppress all
primitive emotions is against my every instinct. Civilization, no doubt, requires it, and peace of mind demands it, yet for myself I had rather be dead
than to live in an emotionless world. The clear white lamp of science and the
passionless pursuit of knowledge are not enough for me; I must live deeply
and listen to the call of the common clay in me, if I am to live at all. Without
emotion and instinct, I would be a dead, stagnant thing. 42
This passage illustrates not only Howard’s opposition to the technocracy of
fascism and his belief that science cannot overcome evolution and instinct,
but his insistence on independence and personal freedom, even in the face of
personal risk. In Howard’s view, as he aptly illustrates in later letters to
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
143
Lovecraft, representatives of the government, such as the police, are not to be
trusted because they are apt to abuse their power for their own ends. A man
must rely on himself and the gifts evolution has given him.
Another aspect of this debate concerns Howard’s perception that Lovecraft viewed intellectual activity as superior to physical action. It is perhaps
Lovecraft’s unfortunate comments not only about physical labor, but also
about sports, that rubbed Howard the wrong way and moved him to respond
that physical work was one of the necessities of life. In a particularly heated
response in September 1932, Howard uses his father, a country doctor, as a
prime example of the dual necessity of mental and physical work in the
conduct of daily life:
I have sat in colleges and listened to dried up professors mouthing their supercilious viewpoints on life and death, and I could scarcely restrain my mirth,
when I compared them with my father, who, while they were sitting at ease in
some dusty nook, analyzing the universe from a detached and superior point of
view, he was grappling with the raw, elemental vitals of existence in the city
slums or the backwood hills. . . . He went into miserable shacks and huts, and
without weapons save his own will and intelligence and a few simple medicines of the time, grappled the destroyer and repeatedly overthrew him. Science? My father knows science; it is not an empty word or theory to him; it has
been a spear with which he has ten thousand times hurled back death from the
quivering body of a helpless victim. 43
Beyond the image of his father as a hero beating back the specter of death
with a bloody scalpel, this passage reveals the raw harshness of life in west
Texas in the early twentieth century, and, in Howard’s mind, the absolute
triviality of thought without action. Intellect without application in the real
world was a useless thing. Pure intellectualism Howard associated with civilization, and as inherently artificial and distant from the raw brutality of life.
It is this distance and failure to apply thought to action, in Howard’s mind,
that doomed civilizations like Rome to fail.
The debate continued into 1934 with both men summarizing and firming
up their positions. However, a particularly curt passage in a letter Lovecraft
wrote to Howard in July 1934, just a few weeks before Howard wrote “Beyond the Black River,” resonates with the themes that Howard would address
in his yarn:
What I admire is human development away from the unicellular stage—development of all the powers latent within man, and encouragement of such conditions as give them scope. What I detest is human degradation and retardation
in any form—violence, ugliness, ignorance, sensuality, brutality, cruelty, abnormality, filth, cloddishness, rapacity, egotism, encroachment, violations of
physical or spiritual integrity, and everything that goes with a dull acquiescence in the animal patterns of the lower part of creation. 44
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It is this argument, and this letter in particular, that I believe inspired Howard
to respond publicly in the form of “Beyond the Black River.” It is in this
story that Howard argues the opposite position: that civilization is unnatural
and ultimately doomed to fail. It was “the animal patterns of the lower part of
creation” that Howard viewed as essential to life. It is humanity’s animal
nature, the combination of intelligence and instinct, that permits it to survive.
The primary evidence for this exists within the story itself. First, in this
tale Conan has a companion, Bathus, an Aquilonian scout who erroneously
believes he knows how to survive in the Pictish wilderness. In most of the
tales, when Conan has a companion, it is usually a female love interest whose
primary duty in the tale seems to be getting carried around by Conan and
getting her clothes ripped off. Only twice has Conan been furnished with an
equal in the form of the pirate queen Belit and the warrior Valeria. Never did
he have a male companion who shared the story with him. Further, Balthus
serves as the primary viewpoint character, something that happens in no
other Conan tale, and the story largely consists of dialogue between Conan
and Balthus, with the latter asking questions and learning from the barbarian.
It is also telling that Balthus’s name is similar to “Bassus,” one of the Roman
names Lovecraft mentions in a 1931 letter as being particularly inspiring to
him. 45 In a 1933 letter, Howard responds to Lovecraft’s comment that Howard glorifies barbarians by saying that “your barbarian who suffers so bitterly is no barbarian at all, but a Twentieth Century scholar brutally thrust
into alien and barbaric environments.” 46 This is an apt description of Balthus,
who, though he is a scout, as a courtier and a civilized man learns all too
quickly that he is not suited for surviving the Pictish wilderness. For these
reasons, I believe that Balthus is a representation not only of Lovecraft’s
viewpoint in their argument, but of Lovecraft himself.
Race may also be a consideration here. Just as Howard aligns himself
with Gaels and Picts and Lovecraft considers himself a Nordic Anglo-Saxon,
so Conan is best compared to Picts along the lines of Bran Mak Morn and
Balthus to a Nordic Aryan. While it is true that Conan is a Cimmerian who is
supposed to be a descendent of Kull’s race and thus an Atlantean, and also in
some sense Aryan, the mythical makeup of Conan’s heritage matters less
here than the political and social positioning of Conan in relation to Balthus.
Culturally Balthus occupies a higher social position, and in the minds of the
Aquilonians he is of a superior type, just as the Nordic was viewed as superior to the Alpine. Viewed in this way, the Conan–Balthus relationship mirrors
both the racial and political aspects of the Howard–Lovecraft relationship.
Another racial feature of the story concerns the position of the Picts themselves. In the Kull tales, the Picts are at their evolutionary high point, and by
the time Bran Mak Morn arrives in the Roman period they have degenerated
into gnarled shadows of their former selves, perhaps more suggestive of the
Picts found in the Canal Street library book than the noble barbarians Ho-
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
145
ward would have them be. In between these two historical moments is the
Hyborian Age, where, while the Picts are still physically robust, they have
culturally degenerated into a position of savagery. This aspect of the story,
along with its wider arc, mirrors the evolutionary degeneration illustrated by
the Little People tales.
A second feature of this tale that makes it unusual is its thinly disguised
western setting. While Aqulonia may be compared to the Roman Empire and
the Pictish wilderness to ancient Germania, the plot of the story and the
language used is strongly suggestive of a western tale. This is particularly
relevant to the barbarism-civilization debate, because in the letters Howard
often fell back upon discussions of the Old West as his primary evidence of
the frailty and corruption of civilization. The plot involves Pictish attacks
surrounding the suspiciously Spanish-sounding Conojahara, an Aquilonian
“fort” between the Black and Thunder Rivers surrounded by “settler’s cabins.” On the Aquilonian side of the river are Roman-sounding place-names
like Velitrium, whereas on the Pictish side of the river are names, in addition
to the two western-sounding rivers already mentioned, called Scalp Creek
and Gwawela, the village of the Pictish wizard Zogar Sag. Further, the mohawked and war-painted Picts in this story paddle about in dugout canoes
and are described more in keeping with Native Americans than with the
barbarian warriors of the Bran Mak Morn stories.
Early in the story Howard establishes Balthus’s admiration for Conan’s
primary trait of instinct, which sets him apart from civilized men:
The Cimmerians were barbarians as ferocious as the Picts, and much more
intelligent. Evidently Conan had spent much time among civilized men,
though that contact had obviously not softened him, nor weakened any of his
primitive instincts. Balthus’ apprehension turned to admiration as he marked
the easy catlike stride, the effortless silence with which the Cimmerian moved
along the trail. The oiled links of his armor did not clink, and Balthus knew
Conan could glide through the deepest thicket or the most tangled copse as
noiselessly as any Pict who ever lived. 47
In contrast, Conan comments on how Aquilonians, even woodsmen, are ill
prepared for the wilderness when he states, “I’ve seen good woodsmen from
the Tauran. But the Bossonians have sheltered you Aquilonians from the
outer wilderness for too many centuries. You need hardening.” 48
Later in the story this point is emphasized again when Conan, Balthus,
and other frontiersmen are captured and tied to posts by Zogar Sag’s Picts.
Though like other civilized men he doubts the wizard’s magic as Pictish
superstition, Balthus is enlightened when he witnesses the wizard’s control
over a saber-toothed cat and a giant venomous snake. After the cat has ripped
one of his companions from his stake and the snake is about to kill Balthus,
Conan “streaked from the shadows of the huts, and the great reptile whipped
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about and went into instant convulsions. As in a dream Balthus saw a short
throwing spear transfixing the mighty neck, just below the gaping jaws.” 49
A few pages later Conan illustrates how both his knowledge of the world
and his gift of primal instinct are keys to his survival. As they flee, Balthus
realizes that the wizard’s cat is on their tail. When Balthus wonders why
Zogar Sag can command some beasts and not others, Conan informs him that
“[o]nly such as remember [the ancient wizard] Jhebbal Sag” can be commanded; “[o]nce all living things worshipped him. That was long ago, when
beasts and men spoke the same tongue.” 50 Conan elaborates further:
“Civilized men laugh,” said Conan. “But not one can tell me how Zogar Sag
can call pythons and tigers and leopards out of the wilderness and make them
do his bidding. They would say it is a lie, if they dared. That’s the way with
civilized men. When they can’t explain something by their half-baked science,
they refuse to believe it.” 51
This comment, I believe, is directed toward Lovecraft and their debate. Howard argues here that intellect alone counts for nothing, but is only worthwhile when it is coupled with instinct a few lines later. Conan applies the
knowledge he has gained in his travels by drawing in the dirt an image that
he “saw carved in the rock of a cave no human had visited in a million
years.” 52 Balthus realizes how much Conan has in common with the beast as
he watches the cat inspect the sigil:
The barbarian’s eyes were smoldering with fires that never lit the eyes of men
bred to the ideas of civilization. In that instant he was all wild, and had
forgotten the man at his side. In his burning gaze Balthus glimpsed and vaguely recognized pristine images and half-embedded memories, shadows from
Life’s dawn, forgotten and repudiated by sophisticated races—ancient, primeval phantasms unnamed and nameless. 53
“We’ve no more to fear from the beasts,” 54 Conan declares after a moment. It
is then that Balthus recognizes that Conan is possessed of an animal instinct
he himself does not have at his disposal. As a civilized man, he is but half a
man. Conan, possessed of both intelligence and instinct, is a complete man.
The rest of the story consists of the Picts’ attack on the fort and the
settlers’ cabins. In contrast to other tales, Conan concedes defeat and tells
Balthus that the only hope they have is to retreat back across the river. That
Balthus has learned a lesson from Conan is evident when he says, “They’ll
not rebuild the fort,” 55 and states the tale’s theme when he says, “Barbarism
is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of
circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.” 56 Though civilization-barbarism debate would continue until Howard’s suicide in 1936, including a passage in one of Lovecraft’s letters that seems to respond to the
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
147
story’s appearance in Weird Tales, this story is Howard’s best, if not final,
word on the subject.
CODA
Throughout this chapter we have considered the influence of eugenic thought
on Howard’s work. This does not imply that Howard was familiar with the
details of the then-current science of eugenics as revealed in the work of
Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and others; rather, he
appears to have absorbed popular culture notions of eugenics as understood
by the public at large. In particular, we have considered the influence of fear
of evolutionary degeneration and atavism, especially as revealed in Howard’s Little People stories; the idea of isolating “degenerates” in asylums in
order to prevent inbreeding and the appearance of racial hybrids as revealed
in “The Worms of the Earth,” and—perhaps most important of all—Howard’s own struggle with his place within the eugenic evolutionary hierarchy
as illustrated by his barbarism-civilization debate with H. P. Lovecraft and
his probable response in “Beyond the Black River.” In this argument Howard
is positioned between his self-identification as an Anglo-Saxon Nordic and
his attraction to the lower-order Mediterraneans, who, in his imagination, are
closer to nature, free of the weaknesses provided by civilization, and better
suited to survive. With this in mind, while Howard endorsed the ideas of
scientific racism so prevalent in his time, he also questioned them. The
legacy we are left with is the knowledge that the new genres produced in this
time, including Howard’s own contribution of sword-and-sorcery, have eugenic DNA. Where they come from is less important than what we do with
them now and in the future.
NOTES
1. Principles of Biology, Vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864), 444.
2. Francis Galton, “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed,” in Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 24.
3. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: J. M. Dent
& Sons, 1907), 2.
4. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 222.
5. H. G. Wells, “Zoological Retrogression,” Gentleman’s Magazine 271 (1891): 246–53.
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zoological_Retrogression (accessed January 27, 2015).
6. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1906), 1.97.
7. Ronald Ladouceur, “Eugenics in High School and College Texts Graphed,” Textbook
History, www.textbookhistory.com/eugenics-high-school-college-texts-graphed (accessed January 26, 2014).
8. I am indebted to Rusty Burke and Rob Rohm for their help in securing a photocopy of
Howard’s high school biology notebook.
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9. Richard W. Sharpe, A Laboratory Manual for the Solution of Problems in Biology (New
York: American Book Co., 1911), 4.
10. Rusty Burke, “Witwer, H. C.,” The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf (n.p.: Robert E. Howard Amateur Press Association, 1998), www.rehupa.com/OLDWEB/ bookshelf_w (accessed
July 5, 2014).
11. William J. Robinson, Fewer and Better Babies: Birth Control, or The Limitation of
Offspring by Prevention (New York: Eugenics, 1927), 124.
12. S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke, eds., A Means to Freedom: The Letters
of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009), 27.
13. Ibid., 33.
14. Patrice Louinet, email message to Pulp Studies List, July 2, 2014.
15. Arthur Machen, “The Shining Pyramid,” Project Gutenberg Australia, gutenberg.net.au/
ebooks06/0606971.txt (accessed July 6, 2014).
16. Robert E. Howard, The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, ed. Rusty Burke (New
York: Del Rey, 2008), 44.
17. Jeffrey Shanks, “Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E. Howard’s ‘Worms of the Earth’” (paper presented at the thirty-fifth annual Conference for the
Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 21, 2014). See also Shanks’s chapter in this volume.
18. Howard, Horror Stories, 44.
19. Ibid., 47.
20. Ibid., 144.
21. “Race suicide,” through breeding with non-Anglo-Saxon stock, was a common theme of
the popular eugenics of the time, as illustrated in the popularity of Madison Grant’s The
Passing of the Great Race, which went through four editions between 1916 and 1921. The
popularity of this book in the 1920s and early 1930s is verified by the fact that the fourth
edition underwent seven printings between August 1921 and May 1932.
22. Howard, Horror Stories, 148.
23. Ibid., 151.
24. Ibid., 152.
25. Ibid., 208.
26. Ibid., 247.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 252.
29. Ibid., 253.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 261.
32. Ibid., 262.
33. Ibid., 264.
34. Ibid., 267.
35. Ibid.
36. Joshi et al., Means to Freedom, 254–55.
37. Ibid., 18.
38. Ibid., 25.
39. Ibid., 37.
40. Ibid., 234.
41. Ibid., 238.
42. Ibid., 112.
43. Ibid., 380.
44. Ibid., 798.
45. Ibid., 234.
46. Ibid., 597.
47. Robert E. Howard, The Conquering Sword of Conan, ed. Patrice Louinet (New York:
Del Rey, 2005), 48.
48. Ibid., 49.
49. Ibid., 70.
50. Ibid., 75.
Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 76.
Ibid.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid.
149
Part III
Masters of the Weird:
Other Authors of Weird Tales
Chapter Ten
Pegasus Unbridled
Clark Ashton Smith and the
Ghettoization of the Fantastic 1
Scott Connors
I know the freedom of fantastic things,
Ranging in fantasy.
I leap and bound and run
Below another sun.
Was it not well to flee
Long, long ago, lest man should bridle me?
—Clark Ashton Smith, “The Centaur”
Robert Bloch, the acclaimed author of Psycho, once speculated, in a 1941
article for Writer’s Digest, upon the reception that Edgar Allan Poe would
receive were he to write an acknowledged classic such as “The Pit and the
Pendulum” today. If Poe had asked him for advice on where to submit it,
Bloch would not have been encouraging:
You, Mr. Poe, usually submitted your tales to the leading literary periodicals
of your day. But don’t try it now. Do you think Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s
want such material? Not on your life. Neither does Esquire or The Saturday
Evening Post.
Of course, you might try the pulps. Go ahead, Mr. Poe. Try the pulps with
your classic. I’ve got a list of magazines with titles right up your alley. Thrilling Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales, Dime Mystery.
But submit your yarn and see what you get. A mimeographed “page”
giving a formula for saleable fantasy. 2
Bloch was not the first to note that selling quality fiction dealing with the
macabre, the weird, or the supernatural had become problematic. Henry S.
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Scott Connors
Whitehead had observed as early as 1926 that Weird Tales was the “only . . .
market in the English-speaking world for the occult short story.” 3 Yet it was
not so long ago, he related, that such stories could be found in popular
magazines such as the British Strand, and that a substantial portion of the
work of such well-known writers as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and W. W. Jacobs fell into the genre. For instance, the issue of Collier’s
for December 16, 1905, contained F. Marion Crawford’s vampire story “For
the Blood Is the Life,” and Edith Wharton’s ghostly tale “Afterward” was
first published in the Century for January 1910. Both stories have been
frequently anthologized.
“It is a still unanswered question,” writes S. T. Joshi, “whether the emergence of the pulps caused mainstream magazines to scorn weird fiction . . . or
whether the departure of weird fiction from mainstream magazines led to or
fostered the development of the pulps.” 4 Regardless of the answer to this
riddle, it is quite clear that as the divide between so-called highbrow and
lowbrow cultures widened, many literary people came to regard all pulp
literature as “basically trash, or something very close to it.” 5 We need look
no further than Edmund Wilson’s dismissal of H. P. Lovecraft, whose work
he scorned as “hack-work contributed to such publications as Weird Tales
and Astounding Stories, where, in my opinion, they ought to have been left.” 6
Regardless of the cause, by the time Clark Ashton Smith started writing such
stories, Weird Tales and its peers were the only venues that were receptive to
imaginative or fantastic works such as his.
Smith was a California poet and painter who, between 1929 and 1935,
wrote approximately one hundred extraordinary tales “of inconceivable fear
and unimaginable love.” 7 Smith’s poetry had been published in such venues
as the Yale Review, Poetry, Current Literature, the London Academy, the
London Mercury, Ainslee’s, Pearson’s Magazine, the Saturday Review, the
Laughing Horse, and other publications reflecting both mainstream and
avant-garde sensibilities, but the market for his stories was largely confined
to such publications as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and Wonder Stories. He
had begun his career as a published author with a series of Oriental contes
cruels and adventure stories that were published in the Black Cat and the
Overland Monthly. Under the mentorship of the renowned California poet
George Sterling, Smith came to think of himself primarily as a poet. As such
he regarded prose as a lesser form of expression, as evidenced in such statements as “I don’t blame you for writing prose, if you can make money by it.
But it’s a hateful task, for a poet, and wouldn’t be necessary, in any true
civilization.” 8 Except for two exercises in romantic irony that he sold to
risqué publications such as 10 Story Book, Smith’s only prose writings consisted of the prose poems that he collected in Ebony and Crystal (1922).
His correspondence with Lovecraft proved to Smith that there were artistic possibilities in the weird tale, and in 1925 he wrote “The Abominations of
Pegasus Unbridled
155
Yondo,” the first of his stories that could accurately be described as “weird
fiction” or fantasy. Smith had submitted it to Weird Tales, Lovecraft’s chief
venue and a market to which he had sold many poems since it was founded in
1923, but editor Farnsworth Wright rejected it as being “a prose poem rather
than a weird narrative.” 9 Sterling arranged for it to be published in the
Overland Monthly. Much to Smith’s delight, Sterling passed along the report
that it had “awoke many protests from the mentally infirm.” 10
Sterling had earlier warned Smith that “[y]ou are truly naїve in imagining
that you could have the ‘Yondo’ poem accepted by any magazine that pays!”
He went on to warn Smith, “All highbrows think the ‘Yondo’ material outworn and childish. The daemonic is done for, for the present, so far as our
contemporaries go, and imagination must seek other fields.” 11 This is hardly
a sentiment that one would expect from the poet who wrote “The blue-eyed
vampire, sated at her feast, / Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.” 12
But in the years since Sterling first penned those lines in “A Wine of Wizardry,” his self-confidence began to waver before repeated attacks on his work
by critics such as Harriet Monroe. As he grew older, Sterling was befriended
by writers such as Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, who were hardly
advocates of the type of romantic or symbolist fantasy that had first drawn
Smith to the older poet’s work.
In his penultimate letter to his young protégé, Sterling asserted that “[it] is
disquieting to observe that the whole intellectual (including of course the
esthetic) trend is increasingly against admiration of the daemonic, the supernatural. Such elements now seem only to awaken smiles, as being childish in
their nature and no part of the future vision of the race.” 13 This is surprising
at first glance: it had not been long since Arthur Machen achieved cult status,
thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts such as Vincent Starrett and Carl Van
Vechten; that James Branch Cabell was at the height of his popularity and
critical acclaim; and that Lord Dunsany’s books and plays made him America’s favorite lord. Wesley D. Sweetser reminds us that the 1920s were a
decade of literary experimentation, where the realism espoused by Ben
Hecht, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway could coexist with the last
gasps of the aesthetic-decadent school with which not only Machen but also
Sterling and Smith were associated. 14 But by 1926 the market had collapsed
for Machen’s books, so that his royalties from his American publisher for
this period amounted to a mere twenty-five dollars; 15 Cabell’s reputation had
begun its downward spiral as a result of overexposure through the massive
eighteen-volume Storisende edition of the Biography of the Life of Manuel; 16
and Dunsany was in the process of abandoning his earlier style of fantasy: as
Lovecraft observed, “As he gained in age and sophistication, he lost in freshness and simplicity.” 17
It appears as though Sterling had been won over by the new humanists, a
critical movement led by Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (who was a men-
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tor of T. S. Eliot). They stressed the human elements of experience over
supernatural and attacked romanticism for its embrace of individualism and
emotionalism. Babbitt taught that literature was most “vital” when it was
subordinate to the affirmation of “a general nature, a core of normal experience” that was open to most normal people. 18 Sterling expressed this shift in
his aesthetic views in a 1925 letter to Smith wherein he wrote, “As one grows
older, one takes pleasure in writing things that have a vital value, a human
relationship, as apart from ‘the literature of escape.’” 19
Smith rejected the judgment of Sterling’s “highbrows,” asserting,
I can’t agree with the high-brows that the weird is dead either in poetry or
anywhere else. They’re all suffering from mechanized imaginations. But, I, for
one, refuse to submit to the arid, earth-bound spirit of the time; and I think
there is sure to be a romantic revival sooner or later—a revolt against mechanization and over-socialization, etc. If there isn’t then I hope to hell my next
incarnation will be in some happier and freer planet. Neither the ethics nor the
aesthetics of the ant-hill have any attraction for me. 20
Smith rejected the charge of escapism, asserting that “[a]nything that the
human imagination can conceive of becomes thereby a part of life, and
poetry such as mine, properly considered, is not an escape, but an extension.” 21 He would later expand upon this in a letter to Lovecraft, asserting
that “there is absolutely no justification for literature unless it serves to
release the imagination from the bounds of every-day life. I have undergone
a complete revulsion against the purely realistic school, including the French,
and can no longer stomach even Anatole France,” 22 as well as in a series of
letters and essays printed in the fantastic pulps and the “fanzines” that grew
up around them.
By 1927 Smith was struggling to support his aged and increasingly infirm
parents. During a camping trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains in September
of that year, Smith’s friend Genevieve K. Sully took him “to task for idleness” and suggested that he try his hand at writing fiction for the pulps. Smith
responded by pledging himself to the task, and later said, “Once started, the
pledge has not been hard to keep.” Besides the remuneration that fiction sales
would bring to the family coffers, Smith confided, “I need an imaginative
escape from the human aquarium—and, moreover, a ‘safety-valve’ to keep
from blowing up and disrupting the whole countryside. And, beyond all this,
I am finding a pleasure in fiction-writing, and deriving a mental ‘kick’ from
it which I seldom got from poetry.” 23
Between September 1929, when he wrote “The Last Incantation,” and
December 1929, Smith completed no fewer than ten stories, five of which
were promptly accepted by Farnsworth Wright for Weird Tales, with two
more eventually being accepted after reconsideration or revision. Smith duly
reported this activity to his literary admirers. While Smith acknowledged that
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his stories were “hardly representative of the fashionable thing among the
‘intelligentia’” [sic], he apologetically explained that “they are the only sort
of fiction that amuses me.” 24
Smith’s correspondence contains ample evidence that he was greatly enjoying the freedom of expression that his fiction writing provided him. For
instance, he wrote to his patron Albert M. Bender, “I have derived no end of
fun from the concoction of these stories”; 25 and to Donald Wandrei, “I’ve
gotten a huge kick out of writing these stories”; 26 and to August Derleth,
“My fiction writing is mainly a matter of the past year and I could wish I had
applied myself to it sooner.” 27 Smith’s letters during the early months of his
career as a pulp fictioneer bubble with optimism. He reveled in their composition, bragging that “there seems to be no limit to the prose, some of which I
write with as much facility as if it were being dictated to me!” 28 In another
letter to Wandrei, Smith demonstrated his conversion to the notion that
“[t]here is undoubtedly a public for fantastic fiction” 29 and had visions of
books by him, as well as by Lovecraft and Wandrei, dancing in his head.
Such melioristic pronouncements as “It may seem a bold project to make a
living from fantastic fiction of a high literary type, but I believe it can be
done” went in tandem with the dire realization that “[i]n fact, I shall have to
do it—or else take to ditch-digging. I have no other alternative, since I am
not fitted for business or any of the professions.” 30 The realities of modern
publishing would, unfortunately, temper this initial optimism. It would soon
become clear that his stories were too outré for the slicks and too sophisticated for all but a handful of pulp editors.
Smith’s main, and for some little while only, market for the fantastic was
Weird Tales, which was established in 1923 by J. C. Henneberger, who also
published College Humor, a predecessor of National Lampoon. Whereas
earlier pulps, such as those published by Frank A. Munsey, offered a wide
variety of fiction, including so-called queer stories such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Under the Moons of Mars” (All Story, February–July 1912) or
Irvin S. Cobb’s “Fishhead” (Cavalier, January 11, 1913), a new class of
magazines that were aimed at specifically targeted audiences, mostly male
and working class, had begun to appear during the Great War, with one of the
earliest beginning Street and Smith’s Detective Story Weekly (1915). Joshi
observes, “It was in the pulps that the genres as we know them—the western,
the horror story, the detective story, the love story, the science fiction tale—
all became viable forms of popular writing.” But, as noted earlier, as these
specialty publications appeared it became more and more rare for the socalled slicks to publish “genre fiction . . . except when written by especially
eminent authors.” 31 For instance, not long before “The Abominations of
Yondo” appeared in the Overland Monthly, one of the greatest ghost stories
of all time appeared in the July 1926 issue of Harper’s Bazaar: D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”
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Smith himself recognized this early on, in terms that foreshadowed those
used by Bloch quoted earlier:
[M]any of the yarns in “Wonder Stories” and “Amazing Stories” [are] interesting for their ideas. One can’t even find ideas in the other classes of magazines—all of them, from the “Atlantic” to the wild-west thrillers, are hidebound and hog-tied with traditions of unutterable dullness. The other day,
when I got out the “W. T.” containing your “Dunwich Horror,” to loan to a
friend, I noticed that it also included a reprint of “The Diamond Lens” by FitzJames O’Brien, which first appeared in the “Atlantic” back in 1858. I couldn’t
help musing on what would be the fate of this fine story if it were submitted to
the “Atlantic” now for the first time. 32
“The end result,” Joshi asserts, “was the ghettoization of these genres” so
that “even today certain snobbish critics still disdain this work on principle”
despite the appearance in the pulps of such writers as Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft,
and of course Clark Ashton Smith. 33
The editor of Weird Tales for the period of Smith’s greatest productivity
as a fiction writer was Farnsworth Wright (1888–1940). Wright was an educated man of good taste; like Smith he was a native Californian and had work
published in the Overland Monthly. However, due to the magazine’s precarious financial condition, Wright had a regrettable habit of underestimating the
taste of his readership and turned down worthwhile stories, some of which
are now regarded as classics, because he was unsure whether the hypothetical
“average reader” would be turned off by them. His rejections of Lovecraft’s
best work have become legendary, but he also turned down, at least initially,
such stories as Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain,” August Derleth’s “The
Panelled Room,” and Carl Jacobi’s “Revelations in Black.” Despite this,
Smith defended the magazine because “in spite of certain cheapnesses
[Weird Tales] is about the only periodical in America that is hospitable to
imaginative literature of a high class.” 34
Between September 1929 and the end of 1930, Smith submitted twentysix stories to Wright. Of these, Wright accepted eleven for Weird Tales on
first submission (plus two that were published in Weird Tales’s companion
magazine Magic Carpet/Oriental Stories); rejected but ultimately accepted
three stories; and rejected the remainder (although he would accept three of
these toward the end of his tenure as editor, since other stories by Smith were
not forthcoming). Of the ten stories that Wright rejected outright, Smith was
able to find paying markets for four of them. Wright’s most frequent excuse
for rejecting a story was that it was “unconvincing,” but in regard to the
others Wright expressed the fear that they would not appeal to his readership,
while assuring Smith that he had personally enjoyed them. At first Smith
took these rejections in stride, more or less: “Wright is certainly capricious in
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his rejections and acceptances; though I, for one, am the last to blame him for
trying to please his public. But it seems to me that he makes mistakes even
from this view-point.” 35 Wright would occasionally surprise Smith by accepting a story that he expected would not meet with approval, as with “The
Uncharted Isle,” which he thought unsellable due to its “subversive pessimism and nihilism.” 36 By the end of 1930 Wright had no fewer than eight
stories or novelettes by Smith in inventory. He had effectively saturated this
market. The news that Weird Tales would become a bimonthly magazine in
1931 seemed to be the final nail in the coffin, even though this new schedule
would only last for a few issues.
One factor that might have affected Wright’s rejection of several Smith
stories was the possibility of the seizure or banning of an issue by censors. As
Sam Moskowitz has observed, some of Smith’s stories “all but exceed the
tolerance factor for physical horror of the average reader.” 37 Wright rejected
stories such as “The Return of the Sorcerer” and “The Dweller in the Gulf”
for gruesomeness. Weird Tales had run into difficulty with authorities in
Indiana when C. M. Eddy Jr.’s story “The Loved Dead” (which was either
extensively revised or ghostwritten by Lovecraft) was published in the
May–June–July 1924 issue; “ever since,” complained Lovecraft, Wright “has
been in a continual panic about censorship.” 38 Other forms of popular entertainment continued to encounter similar problems, so Wright’s jitteriness
was not unrealistic. Motion pictures such as The Island of Lost Souls (1932)
and The Raven (1935) were considered shocking at the time and were greeted
with outrage by civic groups and cuts from film censors. To cite just one
example: after the James Whale–directed 1931 version of Frankenstein was
released, civic groups pressured the Motion Picture Theatre Owners Association to discourage producers from making horror movies. 39
The issue of censorship brings us back again to the question of whether
the pulps drove weird fiction from the slicks, or if they were filling a vacuum
caused by the reluctance of mainstream periodicals to publish tales of the
mysterious and macabre. These incidents suggest that a vocal portion of
consumers of popular culture found physical horror objectionable enough to
warrant state intervention. When considered along with other actions of censorship undertaken against modernist writers such as James Joyce, it suggests
that the editors of these magazines decided to avoid controversy by exercising their role as literary gatekeepers in a proscriptive manner, refusing to
publish anything that, as Thomas Benediktsson observed, “could not be read
by the women of the family circle.” 40
From the start Smith tried to develop new markets for his fiction. He
consulted trade journals such as Writer’s Digest for information on possible
targets and read samples of magazines to develop a “feel” for what each
editor was seeking. Although he would sometimes take a chance on nonpulp
markets, submitting stories to the Atlantic Monthly 41 or even the New Or-
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leans Times–Picayune (to which he sent “The Devotee of Evil”), 42 Smith
proved himself to be an accurate prognosticator when he wryly observed to
Derleth: “Personally, I can see that I’m doomed to the writing of scientifiction.” 43
The oldest of the science fiction magazines was Amazing Stories. Although Smith professed to be “appalled by the increasing pedantry of its
contents,” 44 he still submitted “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” to its editor, T.
O’Conor Sloane. 45 He also wrote “The Immeasurable Horror” specifically
for Amazing, only to see it ultimately end up with Weird Tales. 46 Sloane
could take as long as six months to respond to story submissions. 47 This was
apparently not uncommon among the more unscrupulous pulp editors, since
it allowed them to maintain their story inventories at no cost until actual
publication. 48 After repeated rejections, Smith concluded that Sloane seemed
“to have a fixed prejudice against my stuff as not being sufficiently scientific.” 49 Ultimately Smith placed only one story, “The Plutonian Drug,” with
Amazing Stories, which was submitted in April 1932 50 but not published
until September 1934. Amazing Stories paid only one-half cent per word,
which was less than any of Smith’s other prospective markets.
Astounding Stories of Super-Science was one of several magazines published by William Clayton. Smith did not think much of it, describing it as
the “crudest of the pseudo-scientific group.” 51 It specialized in what Smith
described, in a letter published in Amazing Stories, as “ordinary adventure
stories with a futuristic or ultra-planetary setting.” 52 However, it paid two
cents a word on acceptance, making it the best paying of the fantastic pulps.
Unfortunately, all Smith’s submissions were rejected by editor Harry Bates
“as being ‘too high-brow’ or as ‘lacking action.’” 53 As we shall see later,
Smith would later establish an excellent relationship with Bates, but despite
his attempts to put more action into such stories as “The Invisible City” and
“The Immortals of Mercury,” Bates would continue to reject his science
fiction because it lacked “human interest, which is doubtless true.” 54
A much more favorable market opened up to Smith when Clayton decided to publish Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a competitor to Weird
Tales. While the new magazine, also edited by Bates, would match or exceed
its companion magazines’ word rates, Smith worried that it would also “bank
pretty strongly on popular plot-appeal, like the other Clayton publications.” 55
He was pleasantly surprised to discover that, at least as regarding weird
fiction, “Bates seems to have a glimmering of taste” and was permitted by
the publisher to print “an occasional tale of the poetic and atmospheric
type.” 56 Bates would publish five of Smith stories and accept three more.
Some of these stories had been rejected by Wright as “unconvincing” (“The
Door to Saturn”) 57 or as too gruesome (“The Return of the Sorcerer”), which
struck Smith as fortuitous, since he ended up with twice the usual Weird
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Tales rate. 58 Unfortunately, Strange Tales ceased publication with its March
1933 issue, when the Clayton magazines went out of business.
Although Amazing Stories was the earliest science fiction magazine, the
senior publisher of the still-novel genre was Hugo Gernsback. He was a
Luxemburg-born immigrant with an evangelical zeal who had founded the
magazine in 1926 for the purpose of promoting science fiction as a force for
the popularization of science fact. Gernsback lost control of the magazine
early in 1929, but almost immediately he started a new magazine that went
through several name changes until it finally was called Wonder Stories.
Smith’s first sale was a Wright reject, “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension,”
which Gernsback’s editor, David Lasser, accepted for a companion magazine, Amazing Detective Stories. It was fortunate for Smith that his entry into
the field coincided with a realization by Lasser that the literary quality of the
stories in their magazines needed improvement. “We needed more imagination in the stories,” Lasser would later tell Eric Leif Davin, and Clark Ashton
Smith was just the man to provide it. 59
Clark Ashton Smith was probably, as Mike Ashley notes, the most original writer to appear in Wonder Stories, 60 but the relationship was never a
comfortable fit for either party. After the first story that Smith wrote especially for Wonder Stories, “Marooned in Andromeda” (October 1930), was
accepted, Lasser asked him to write an entire series featuring the same characters. Smith was excited about the “undeniable possibilities in such stories—even though I would rather drop the stale paraphernalia of ether-ships,
gas-masks, etc., and the personnel of terrestrial explorers, and plunge into
something wholly ultra-terrene and belonging to the Beyond.” 61 Lasser and
Smith quickly established a working relationship that was not without a
certain amount of friction, as the former attempted to develop Smith into a
more conventional pulp writer. He suggested specific story ideas that Smith
utilized, with varying degrees of enthusiasm; this resulted in such stories as
“An Adventure in Futurity” and “The Dimension of Chance,” neither of
which are likely to show up on any list of Smith’s best stories. But Lasser
and Gernsback also had “the perspicacity to print some of [his] more out-ofthe-way stuff which no one else would touch,” 62 such as “A Star-Change”
(published as “The Visitors from Mlok,” Wonder Stories, May 1933) and
“The Eternal World” (Wonder Stories, March 1932).
Competition from Astounding Stories, which led all the fantastic pulps in
sales, prompted changes in Wonder Stories’s editorial policy. Ashley quotes
a letter that Gernsback wrote to Edmond Hamilton earlier that year to the
effect that “we are besieged by our readers to incorporate more action in our
stories.” 63 Not only did Gernsback reject “The Red World of Polaris,” the
sequel to “Marooned in Andromeda” that Smith wrote specifically at Lasser’s request, but Lasser clarified Wonder Stories’s editorial requirements,
which Smith summarized rather acerbically in his own correspondence:
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“A play of human motives, with alien worlds for a background.” But if human
motives are mainly what they want, why bother about going to other planets—
where one might conceivably escape from the human equation? The idea of
using the worlds of Alioth or Altair as a mere setting for the squabbles and
heroics of the crew on a space-ship (which, in essence, is about what they are
suggesting) is too rich for any use. 64
Action was the new word of the day, and atmosphere was no longer
required. Lasser warned Smith that Wonder Stories was “not interested in
weird tales” or any “bizarre scientific themes,” which of course was Smith’s
forte. 65 As regards individual stories, Lasser wrote of “The Eternal World”
that while it had “an excellent idea,” Smith’s descriptions relied too heavily
on “strange and bizarre words,” and that they were “so long that the story
hardly moves and although it is true that you are describing a timeless world
in which nothing happens, you cannot afford to have your story be a ‘timeless one.’” 66 The friction culminated when Lasser rewrote the ending of
Smith’s tale of horror set in the caverns of Mars, “The Dweller in the Gulf.”
Editorial philistinism was not the only problem that Smith encountered
while writing for the science fiction pulps. Some science fiction fans hoped
that science fiction might become more respectable by embracing the form, if
not the substance, of realism. As early as 1932, a letter published in Amazing
Stories stated that the proper intent of a science fiction story was “to show a
cross-section of a man’s life, at a point where he is faced with some problem”
and to portray “the breakdown or building up of his character, or the way he
reacts to the test.” 67 Smith replied that this definition of literature was “rather
narrow and limited” and offered the opposing opinion that “imaginative stories offer a welcome and salutary release from the somewhat oppressive
tyranny of the homocentric, and help to correct the deeply introverted, ingrowing values that are fostered by present-day ‘humanism’ and realistic
literature with its unhealthy materialism and earth-bound trend.” 68 This type
of fan would return to plague Smith.
For a glorious period in the early 1930s, Smith was selling his stories
regularly to Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and Wonder Stories. He would often
have two, even three stories, on the newsstands at the same time. This allowed him more freedom in his writing, as what one editor rejected might be
accepted by another. It is probable that “The Nameless Offspring” would not
have been written, let alone published, had Strange Tales not existed, since
Smith recognized that “its commercial chances are pretty nil” 69 as far as
Wright was concerned, because he would probably have been too squeamish
to take the story because of the necrophagia and also the sexual element.
Bates, on the other hand, was more open to purely gruesome material, such
as “The Return of the Sorcerer,” also rejected by Wright, while also being
personally receptive to Smith’s more outré stories such as “The Door to
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Saturn.” However, selling to a mere three markets limited Smith’s possible
sales, since no matter how many stories Smith wrote, he could only appear in
a mere eighteen to thirty issues a year (Wonder Stories was a monthly, Weird
Tales a monthly except for a brief period in 1931, and Strange Tales was on a
bimonthly schedule). Most markets paid on publication (the Clayton magazines theoretically paid upon acceptance, but contemporary circumstances
often frustrated their intentions). Another factor that limited Smith’s sales
was editorial reluctance to have too many stories by one author in stock.
Smith’s friend E. Hoffmann Price pointed out that “to have an oversupply of
any writer’s work might prevent his accepting desirable and quite different
scripts.” 70
Smith continued to seek out new markets. He sold “The Satyr” to La
Paree Stories, which was a borderline pornographic magazine featuring
photographs of nude women, and “The Willow Landscape” to the Philippine
Magazine in Manila, but neither of them had the potential for repeat sales
(although he did sell a “prose pastel” to the latter).
One particularly desirable market was Ghost Stories, which, like the
Clayton magazines, paid two cents a word. It was published by Bernarr
Macfadden, a publisher who specialized in “true confession” magazines and
featured allegedly true accounts of hauntings and other psychic occurrences,
illustrated by trick photography. While Ghost Stories did publish writers
such as Algernon Blackwood, E. F. Benson, and Lady Cynthia Asquith
(sometimes pseudonymously, often reprinted), Smith’s assessment is fairly
accurate: “[O]ne or two of the ‘Weird Tales’ contributors have had stories in
it; so there may be a chance for me. W. T. at its worst is a compendium of
classics in comparison.” 71
The editor at this time was Harold Hersey, with whom Smith had a prior
editorial relationship (Hersey had purchased some of Smith’s sonnets for the
Thrill Book), and initial correspondence was promising: “The stuff I have
sent in, such as ‘Medusa’ and ‘The Ghoul,’ has evidently been read carefully,
and has drawn personal letters. I even submitted ‘The Willow Landscape,’
though with no idea that it would have any real chance, and drew the only
editorial compliment (‘very charming and poetic’) which this tale has yet
received.” 72
Despite this encouragement, Smith never sold to Ghost Stories, for much
the same reasons Will Murray gave to explain why Lovecraft never sold to
them: “Ghost Stories had an ironclad slant and it sold respectably for many
years. It was not interested in stories out of tune with its intended audience,
which would seem to have been primarily women interested in spiritualism
and astrology—much the same readers who bought Macfadden’s confession
titles.” 73
Hugo Gernsback’s editorial tampering with the ending of “The Dweller in
the Gulf,” combined with his reluctance to pay his authors monies owed
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them, so infuriated Smith that he never submitted to him again, even after
Lasser was replaced by wunderkind fanzine editor Charles D. Hornig, who
would dedicate an issue of the Fantasy Fan to him: Smith would rather give
away stories to a nonpaying market than suffer such rude treatment at the
hands of the man he and Lovecraft called “Hugo the Rat.” The simultaneous
collapse of Strange Tales “certainly sends my financial prospects glimmering. Also, it leaves Wright the monarch of all he surveys, as far as weird
fiction is concerned. It’s bad all around.” 74
The publication of “The Dweller in the Gulf” in Wonder Stories (under
the title “The Dweller in the Martian Depths”) precipitated a backlash among
a contingent of science fiction fans who objected to anything that smacked of
the fantastical or supernatural in their “scientifiction,” a backlash that was
similar to that which occurred when some of the readers of Astounding
Stories attacked Lovecraft when that magazine published At the Mountains of
Madness and “The Shadow out of Time.” Forrest J. Ackerman’s attack on
the story, and on Smith in general, that appeared in the Fantasy Fan’s “The
Boiling Point” column is the best known, but other letters that lacked even
the veneer of civility affected by Ackerman soon appeared both in the Fantasy Fan and the letter columns of Wonder Stories. 75
The aftershocks of this ruckus continued for several months. After the
failure of the Clayton magazines, Astounding Stories was purchased by
Street & Smith and resumed publication with the October 1933 issue under
the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine. The new magazine at first indicated that
it would be receptive to one or two weird stories per issue, and Smith was
surprised when it accepted “The Demon of the Flower” for the December
1933 issue. Smith sent Lovecraft a hopeful postcard stating, “It is certainly
encouraging if they will buy work so out-of-the-way as that yarn, which
Wright and Clayton thought too recherché.” 76
Donald Wandrei had become a regular contributor to the Tremaine-edited
Astounding, which Smith duly noted:
I have followed your stories in “Astounding,” always with interest. The magazine, it strikes me, is an improvement on its Clayton avatar: at least, there are
fewer stories with formula plots, and more stress on ideas. Certainly it offers a
first-rate market; and I must try to revive my one-time interest in the writing of
science fiction. The idiotic criticisms of a certain class of readers have disgusted me deeply; but one should remember that the unimaginative and the
literal-minded are always with us. However, it is a mystery why they should
read anything that avowedly partakes of fantasy. 77
The reaction of scientifiction fans to this hybrid editorial policy may be
inferred from a memoir by Robert A. W. Lowndes that describes his reaction
to the first three issues of the Tremaine Astounding Stories: “Worse still,
several of the stories were clearly supernatural.” 78 Ultimately the Ackermans
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of science fiction fandom prevailed, and Astounding Stories would return to a
pure science fiction format.
Dime Mystery Magazine had been published since 1931, but beginning
with the October 1933 issue it adopted a new editorial policy that put it into
competition with Weird Tales, in a race-to-the-bottom manner. Its stories
now followed the manner of the Grand Guignol Theatre of Paris, with a
touch of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothicism wherein an apparently supernatural
threat is explained away in a rational manner after the heroine-in-distress is
rescued. 79 Smith looked over the magazine and was not impressed: “Dime
Mystery is wretched stuff—the crudest kind of physical horror, written in a
style so cheap and staccato as to be simply ridiculous.” 80 Smith nevertheless
felt that they might be amenable to a story such as “The Return of the
Sorcerer,” and submitted to them “Mother of Toads,” a tale that Wright had
rejected for being too sexually explicit. Two of Smith’s friends, E. Hoffmann
Price and Henry Kuttner, successfully sold to this new market, which soon
spawned its own imitators such as Terror Tales. Kuttner shared with Smith
the formula Price used to sell them “nearly a hundred tales . . . the formula is
sex, sadism, and destruction of valuable property.” 81 Smith would never sell
a story to the terror pulps by himself. As a market they were not interested in
innovation or imagination, only formula.
The publication of Donald Wandrei’s “The Eye and the Finger” in the
December 1936 issue of Esquire held the promise that this market might be
equally receptive to Smith’s work, so he submitted a reworked version of
“The Maze of the Enchanter.” Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich rejected it as
“‘reminiscent of both Burroughs and Cabell’; a criticism that amazed and
disgusted me. I was not aware that Burroughs had any copyright on jungle
hunters, or that Cabell had acquired a monopoly of irony.
*******!!******** I fear that Mr. Gingrich is a better judge of garbage than
of literature.**********!!” 82
Weird Tales remained Smith’s only reliable market; yet beginning in
1936 he appeared there more and more infrequently. Smith’s mother had
been severely scalded in an accident in late 1933, which necessitated his
transition from writer to nurse, cook, and housekeeper for both her and his
equally fragile father. The decline in his productivity was not readily apparent, as Wright had sufficient stories on hand to last him through 1935. But
then the larder was empty. He wrote to Smith on November 23, 1938: “Since
we are using your story, ‘The Double Shadow’, in our February issue, we are
left without any manuscripts of yours on hand. This should not be.” 83 By this
time myriad rejections of his best work; ignorant criticisms by hostile science
fiction fans; the death of Lovecraft, his most appreciative reader; and the
deaths of his parents, which removed much of the motivation for him to write
fiction, had taken their toll. Smith resubmitted several stories that Wright had
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previously rejected, and Wright accepted them. But once again Smith played
fortune’s fool.
Late in 1938 Weird Tales was purchased by a New York businessman,
William J. Delaney, who already published the highly successful pulp Short
Stories. Delaney relocated the operation to New York City. Wright was kept
on as editor and made the move, but was let go with the March 1940 issue.
Robert A. W. Lowndes interviewed Delaney and found him to be a pleasant
and cultured man who was very fond of weird stories, “but he was also a
strict Catholic. He also found some of the Clark Ashton Smith stories on the
‘disgusting’ side and told me that he had returned one that Wright had in his
inventory when he left.” 84
Shortly after Lovecraft’s death, Smith wrote to Robert H. Barlow, stating,
“Writing is hard for me, since circumstances here are dolorous and terrible.
Improvement in my father’s condition is more than unlikely, and I am more
isolated than ever. Also, I seem to have what psychologists call a ‘disgust
mechanism’ to contend with: a disgust at the ineffable stupidity of editors
and readers.” 85 The hostility of the new Weird Tales management proved to
be the final straw. When E. Hoffmann Price visited him early in 1940, Smith
presented him with the typescripts of two unpublished stories, “The House of
the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord,” and told Price to do whatever he
wanted with them: “Scrap the god-damn things if after all you don’t like
them. The less I hear of them—.” Price interpreted this to mean that Smith
realized “his stories did not fit into the publisher’s new pattern. Clark, fed up
with adverse criticism or outright rejection, rejected the rejector, and gave me
the scripts.” 86 Smith did not respond to invitations to submit to Strange
Stories, a pulp edited by Leo Margulies for Standard Publications whose
contents seemed to consist mostly of stories rejected by Weird Tales. 87 Even
when John W. Campbell Jr. solicited Smith for contributions to what would
become Unknown, he would only make some half-hearted attempts to write
something suitable. 88
Smith began writing his unique style of fantastic fiction for the pulps
based upon two premises: that his writing would not find favor among the
literary mainstream, and that the editors, readers, and publishers who favored
forms of expression that did not share the “thirst for literalism . . . which
would proscribe the infinitudes of imagination” and recognized that “the
highest intellects have always delighted in poetic fancy and paradox, and that
everything perceived or conceived as actuality is merely one phase of that
which has or may have innumerable aspects.” 89 The closest that he came to
discovering such an El Dorado was in the pages of Weird Tales, yet even
there Farnsworth Wright’s timidity and habit of underestimating the taste of
his readership proved a source of constant frustration. Wright’s replacement
as editor, by Short Stories editor Dorothy McIlwraith, dealt a fell blow to
what little motivation Smith had to continue writing fiction.
Pegasus Unbridled
167
The establishment of Arkham House by August Derleth and Donald
Wandrei was initially devoted to the preservation of the works of H. P.
Lovecraft, but as soon as the opportunity presented itself, Derleth expanded
its scope to include other writers of the Weird Tales school, and Clark Ashton
Smith was the first writer besides Lovecraft and Derleth to benefit from
this. 90 When Arkham House published Smith’s second story collection, Lost
Worlds, in 1944, a review appeared in the New York Times by Kenyon Review contributor Marjorie Farber. According to Farber, Smith’s work was
“exhumed” from Weird Tales and its peers and was “enshrined” in hardcovers. When she referred to its “horrifying” predecessors from Arkham House,
one suspects that she was using the word not in the sense of “to cause to feel
fear,” but rather of “to fill with distaste.” 91 It “deserves to be put on the shelf
and admired,” because “it cannot be read.” 92 Yet other critics, such as Anthony Boucher and William Rose Benét, proved more appreciative. Smith finally saw the pendulum begin to swing back toward imaginative writing when
his work, and that of Lovecraft, began to be appreciated by the surrealists. 93
Unfortunately, Smith was unable to take advantage of this newly receptive atmosphere. He found the carving of outré figurines from native stone to
be easier, both in creating and in selling, and returned to his first love, poetry.
Thanks to Derleth’s encouragement, Smith made sporadic attempts to write
new stories in the late 1940s and early ’50s, but he experienced difficulties in
producing saleable work even for sympathetic editors such as Boucher (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) or Cele Goldsmith (Fantastic), who
commissioned what turned out to be his last story, “The Dart of Rasasfa”;
unfortunately, it was not publishable. Clark Ashton Smith was condemned to
suffer the same fate as Moses: to see the promised land, but not to enter it.
Around 1943 a new writer named Ray Bradbury, who credited Smith with
his decision to become a writer, began to be noticed, and not just by pulp
fans. 94 Bradbury was the last undoubted master of weird fiction to emerge
from Weird Tales, yet the magazine’s editors accepted his lyrically dreamlike
stories only with reluctance and tried to steer him toward more conventional
horror fare. 95 Bradbury was able to sell stories such as “The Man Upstairs”
and “The Homecoming” to Harper’s and Mademoiselle, and soon achieved
recognition as one of the most important and respected American literary
figures of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, H. P. Lovecraft had begun his long ascent to canonical status, despite occasional reactionary attacks, beginning in France and the United Kingdom and culminating in the publication of his H. P. Lovecraft: Tales by the Library of America
in 2005.
When Clark Ashton Smith died in 1961, Arkham House had not managed
to sell all the copies of his 1947 collection Genius Loci and Other Tales. 96 In
the years following his death, Smith’s work has become more widely known
and appreciated. While paperback editions of his work have not been as
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Scott Connors
popular as those of Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard, they are treasured by
those fortunate enough to have discovered them. Books by Smith have been
published in many languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Greek, and Japanese.
Critics and writers as diverse as Michael Dirda, Fred Chappell, and Jack
Foley have praised his work, and Smith has been embraced by the “new
weird” movement and such writers as China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer.
There have been several recent editions of his work, including The Dark
Eidolon and Other Fantasies, a hefty selection of his fiction, poetry, and
poems in prose, edited by S. T. Joshi, which was published by Penguin
Classics, and both his poetry and short fiction have been collected into critical editions. The ghetto wall has been breached at last.
NOTES
1. The assistance of Randall D. Larson in obtaining some of these sources is gratefully
acknowledged. All errors are of course the responsibility of the author.
2. Robert Bloch, “Yoo Hoo! Mr. Delacorte,” Writer’s Digest 21 (July 1941): 41.
3. Henry S. Whitehead, “The Occult Story,” in The Free-Lance Writer’s Handbook, ed.
William Dorsey Kennedy and Margaret Gordon (Cambridge, MA: Writer’s Publishing Co.,
1926), 70. Whitehead pointed out that this was due in large part to the reluctance of more
“mainstream” magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post to publish what he referred to as
the “occult story.”
4. S. T. Joshi, Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (Hornsea, UK: PS
Publishing, 2012), 2.495.
5. J. A. Cuddon, “Pulp,” Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 757.
6. Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” (1945), in H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 47.
7. Clark Ashton Smith, “To the Daemon,” in The End of the Story, vol. 1 of Collected
Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night
Shade, 2006), 1.
8. Clark Ashton Smith, letter to George Sterling, October 27, 1926, in The Shadow of the
Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and
S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), 283. Hereafter referred to as SU.
9. Farnsworth Wright, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 21, 1925, Clark Ashton Smith
Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University. Hereafter referred to as JHL.
10. Sterling, letter to Smith, April 18, 1926, SU, 271.
11. Sterling, letter to Smith, November 28, 1925, SU, 263.
12. Sterling, “A Wine of Wizardry,” in The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror,
ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 152.
13. Sterling, letter to Smith, October 31, 1926, SU, 283.
14. Wesley D. Sweetser, Arthur Machen (New York: Twayne, 1964), 41.
15. Ibid., 44.
16. See Michael Swanwick, What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage? James Branch Cabell
in the Twenty-First Century (West Montclair, NJ: Temporary Culture, 2007), 1: “This remarkable feat of self-obliteration was accomplished through diligence, hard work, and a perverse
brilliance of timing on Cabell’s part. His chief tool was a uniform edition of his works.”
Swanwick argues that by presenting his works as a unified whole, he alienated readers by
forcing them to slog through much inferior work to get to the good parts.
Pegasus Unbridled
169
17. H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Fritz Leiber, November 15, 1936, in Selected Letters, ed.
August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner, 5 vols. (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,
1965–1976), 5.354.
18. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (New York: Meridian, 1955), 27.
19. Sterling, letter to Smith, October 16, 1925, SU, 260.
20. Smith, letter to Sterling, December 1, 1925, SU, 264.
21. Smith, letter to Sterling, October 27, 1926, SU, 282–83.
22. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. late October 1933; Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith,
ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003), 123. Hereafter
referred to as SL.
23. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. January 27, 1931, SL, 145.
24. Smith, letter to Helen Hoyt, May 16, 1930, SL, 114.
25. Smith, letter to Albert M. Bender, December 9, 1929, Albert M. Bender Papers, Mills
College, Oakland, CA.
26. Smith, letter to Donald Wandrei, January 24, 1930, Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota
Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. Hereafter referred to as MHS.
27. Smith, letter to August Derleth, November 11, 1930, August Derleth Papers, Wisconsin
Historical Society, Madison, WI. Hereafter referred to as WSH.
28. Smith, letter to Wandrei, October 9, 1930, SL, 125.
29. Smith, letter to Wandrei, June 4, 1930, MHS.
30. Smith, letter to Wandrei, October 9, 1930, MHS.
31. Joshi, Unutterable Horror, 2.494.
32. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. mid-September 1930, SL, 119.
33. Joshi, Unutterable Horror, 2.494.
34. Smith, letter to Albert M. Bender, December 14, 1930, SL, 140.
35. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. late October 1930, SL, 122.
36. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. November 16,1930, SL, 135.
37. Sam Moskowitz, “Letter,” in Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bio-Bibliography, ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978), 162.
38. Lovecraft, letter to Lillian D. Clark, December 13, 1925, in Letters from New York, ed.
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2005), 252.
39. Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studios Classic Films, 1931–1946, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 44. There is a legend that the
furor surrounding this brush with the censors led to an increase in sales that saved Weird Tales,
but this is doubtful given business practices in common use at the time. Weird Tales, like all
pulp magazines, was at the mercy of the distributors who supplied the newsstands and drugstores of the nation. They would typically purchase the entire print run of a magazine at half the
cover price, with the publisher buying any unsold copies back at a slightly higher price to
compensate for the return shipping (Jerry K. Westerfield, “The Sky’s No Limit,” in Pulp
Fictioneers: Adventures in the Storytelling Business, ed. John Locke [Silver Spring, MD:
Adventure House, 2004], 87). In the case of Weird Tales the news company held “back
payment always for three full issues, a sum which we cannot tap” (Farnsworth Wright, letter to
Dr. I. M. Howard, September 6, 1936, in The Collected Letters of Doctor Isaac M. Howard, ed.
Rob Roehm [n.p.: The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2011], 104). Seizure of an issue by
the police would have precipitated a serious cash flow crisis as well as a souring of good will
with the distributors who had purchased the impounded issue.
40. Thomas Benediktsson, George Sterling (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 62.
41. Smith, letter to Derleth, November 2, 1930, SL, 131.
42. Times-Picayune (New Orleans), letter to Clark Ashton Smith, June 20, 1932, JHL. He
also submitted “The Devotee of Evil” to Illustrated Detective Magazine, “which is said to favor
the psychic and the subtle rather than what is usually known as the detective story.” Smith,
letter to August Derleth, July 10, 1932, SL, 180.
43. Smith, letter to Derleth, December 1, 1930, SL, 139.
44. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, November 26, 1929, in Letters to H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Steve
Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987), 3.
45. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, December 10, 1929, SL, 106.
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Scott Connors
46. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, July 30, 1930, SL, 116.
47. Smith, letter to Derleth, February 1, 1933, SL, 200.
48. Allan K. Echols, “The Waning Woodpile,” in Locke, Pulp Fictioneers, 200.
49. Smith, letter to Derleth, October 15, 1931, WHS.
50. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. early April 1932, SL, 175.
51. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, April 23, 1930, SL, 114.
52. Smith, letter to Amazing Stories, in Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark
Ashton Smith, ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973), 15. Hereafter referred to
as PD.
53. Smith, letter to Derleth, November 20, 1930, WHS.
54. Smith, letter to Derleth, February 16, 1932, SL, 169.
55. Smith, letter to Derleth, April 9, 1932, SL, 150.
56. Smith, letter to Derleth, July 30, 1931, WHS.
57. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. November 16, 1930, SL, 137.
58. Smith, letter to Wandrei, August 7, 1931, MHS.
59. Eric Leif Davin, Pioneers of Wonder (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1999), 48.
60. Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days (Holicong, PA: Wildside
Press, 2004), 175.
61. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. mid-September 1930, SL, 119.
62. Smith, letter to Wandrei, November 10, 1932, SL, 195–96.
63. Hugo Gernsback, letter to Edmond Hamilton, February 25, 1930, quoted in Ashley and
Lowndes, Gernsback Days, 164–65.
64. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, April 2, 1930, SL, 112.
65. David Lasser, letter to Smith, August 11, 1932, JHL.
66. Lasser, letter to Smith, October 21, 1931, JHL. Wonder Stories publisher Hugo Gernsback disliked Smith’s use of language. In a 1932 article in Writer’s Digest, “Authors I Dislike,”
he wrote, “Then, of course, we have the well-meaning but misguided author who must use
difficult and obscure words in his manuscript to impress others with his ‘learning.’ In a popular
magazine, ‘hallfalutin’ English of this sort has no reason for being. The average man does not
like to read a story with a dictionary in his lap. You will find that the greatest authors were
those who used the simplest words.” Reprinted in Locke, Pulp Fictioneers, 47.
67. Julian Gray, “We Still Feel Science Fiction Will Play an Important Role in the Literature
of Tomorrow” (letter), Amazing Stories 7, no. 3 (June 1932): 281.
68. Smith, letter to Amazing Stories, PD, 14.
69. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. early November 1931, SL, 166.
70. E. Hoffmann Price, Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear—Fictioneers & Others, ed.
Peter Ruber (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2001), 13.
71. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. October 24, 1930, SL, 127.
72. Smith, letter to Lovecraft, c. January 27, 1931, SL, 144.
73. Will Murray, “Lovecraft and the Pulp Magazine Tradition,” in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. David E. Schultz and
S. T. Joshi (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), 111.
74. Smith, letter to Derleth, October 8, 1932, SL, 194.
75. The complete text of the “Boiling Point” debate was published as The Boiling Point by
Clark Ashton Smith, Forrest J. Ackerman, H. P. Lovecraft, et al. (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1985). Lance Thingmaker reprinted the entire run of the Fantasy Fan as a
facsimile hardcover in 2010. It will also be included in a forthcoming edition of Smith’s
collected essays and published letters edited by the current writer.
76. Smith, postcard to H. P. Lovecraft, postmarked October 5, 1933, private collection.
77. Smith, letter to Wandrei, October 16, 1934, MHS.
78. Ashley and Lowndes, Gernsback Days, 354.
79. See Robert Kenneth Jones, The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Pulps of
the 1930s (West Lynn, OR: FAX Collector’s Editions, 1975), 6.
80. Smith, letter to Lester Anderson, July 31, 1934, SL, 260.
81. Henry Kuttner, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, September 5, 1937, private collection.
82. Smith, letter to R. H. Barlow, September 9, 1937, SL, 312.
Pegasus Unbridled
171
83. Farnsworth Wright, letter to Smith, November 23, 1938, JHL.
84. Robert A. W. Lowndes, “Letters,” Weird Tales Collector, no. 5 (1979): 31. See also
“Weird Tales Stays Weird,” Science Fiction Weekly, March 24, 1940, 1.
85. Smith, letter to Barlow, May 16, 1937, SL, 302.
86. Price, Book of the Dead, 125.
87. Julius Schwartz, postcard to Smith, postmarked August 2, 1938, private collection.
88. John W. Campbell Jr., letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 27, 1938, JHL.
89. Smith, “On Fantasy,” PD, 39.
90. A detailed history of August Derleth’s efforts in the preservation of Smith’s work may
be found in John Haefele, “Far from Time: Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and Arkham
House,” Weird Fiction Review, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 154–89. Much of the credit for the preservation of Smith’s literary work belongs to Derleth and his partner, Donald Wandrei.
91. Merriam-Webster.com, s.v. “horrifying,” www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/horrifying (accessed February 2015).
92. Marjorie Farber, “Atlantis, Xiccarph” (review of Lost Worlds), New York Times Book
Review, November 19, 1944, rpt. Klarkash-Ton, no. 1 (June 1988): 26.
93. See Robert Allerton Parker, “Such Pulps as Dreams Are Made On,” VVV (1943), rpt.
Radical America, January 1970, 70–77, www.eldritchdark.com/articles/criticism/31/such-pulpas-dreams-are-made-on-%28h.-p.-lovecraft-and-clark-ashton-Smith%29 (accessed February
23, 2015).
94. Ray Bradbury, “Introduction,” in Smith’s A Rendezvous in Averoigne (Sauk City, WI:
Arkham House, 2003), ix.
95. Jonathan R. Eller, textual apparatus to “The Lake,” The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition, ed. William A. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller, Vol. 1 (Kent, OH:
Kent State University Press, 2010), 415.
96. Genius Loci remained in print until late 1967. August Derleth, letter to Carol Smith,
October 25, 1967, WHS.
Chapter Eleven
“A Round Cipher”
Word-Building and World-Building in the
Weird Works of Clark Ashton Smith
Geoffrey Reiter
In 1924, one year into its run, Weird Tales published an editorial (now
ascribed to Otis Adelbert Kline) that served as a mission statement for the
magazine. 1 “Why Weird Tales?” placed the pulp publication in the long run
of great imaginative literary writers, from Homer to H. G. Wells, with special
emphasis on Edgar Allan Poe, celebrating them because, “[t]o the imaginative writer, the upper reaches of the ether, the outer limits of the galactic ring,
the great void that gapes beyond, and the infinity of universes that may, for
all we know, lie still further on, are as accessible as his own garden.” 2
Perhaps no contributor to Weird Tales exemplified this approach to the imagination better than Clark Ashton Smith, who published more than fifty stories
in the magazine, many of them occurring within various story-cycles, such as
Hyperborea (a prehistoric northern continent), Averoigne (a mythical province in medieval France), Poseidonis (an island of Atlantis), and Zothique (a
dying far-future realm). 3 Smith rejected the hardline materialism of friends
and correspondents like H. P. Lovecraft, contending that for all anyone knew,
reality itself might be illusory and that, as a result, an author’s fictional
worlds could be just as “real” as the mundane human world. This philosophy
permeates his entire corpus, from his juvenilia and poetry to his best stories,
including many classics first published in Weird Tales. The creative artist or
writer is thus invested with an immense, well-nigh godlike power; but that
power must be wielded skillfully, lest the artist lose control and be consumed
by his or her own creation. It was that belief in the powers of descriptive
language that allowed Smith to be so effective as a writer and would later
173
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Geoffrey Reiter
influence such future authors as Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, who has
written that Clark Ashton Smith’s stories “thrashed out of me my ignorance
about the limits of language.” 4
Smith was never reticent to discuss his views on the limitations of the
material world and the significance of the creative imagination. For instance,
in his brief essay “On Fantasy,” he wrote,
From paretic to psychoanalyst, from poet to rag-picker, we are all in flight
from the real. Truth is what we desire it to be, and the facts of life are a
masquerade in which we imagine that we have identified the maskers. The
highest intellects have always delighted in poetic fancy and philosophical
paradox, knowing well that the universe itself is multiform fantasy and paradox, and that everything perceived or conceived as actuality is merely one
phase of that which has or may have innumerable aspects. In this phantom
whirl of the infinite, among these veils of Maya that are sevenfold behind
sevenfold, nothing is too absurd, too lovely, or dreadful to be impossible. 5
The universe itself, the real world, is for Smith but a “multiform fantasy.”
Thus, the sophisticated fantasy writers can create fictions that are no less real
than the world around them.
Such an attitude places Smith in the line of other theorists and practitioners of fantasy such as George MacDonald and J. R. R. Tolkien, even if they
operated within a Christian worldview that Smith would reject. In his essay
“The Fantastic Imagination,” George MacDonald articulates a theory of writing fantasy that resembles Smith’s own:
The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way
of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may
suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of
his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up
new forms—which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When
such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the
Imagination. 6
J. R. R. Tolkien advocates a similar theory in distinguishing between the real
“primary world” and the artist’s “secondary world”: “What really happens is
that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a secondary
world which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it
accords with the laws of that world.” 7
Both MacDonald and Tolkien are adamant, however, that while an author
might create a new world with new laws, the moral and ethical guidelines of
that world must not vary from those of the primary world. MacDonald insists, “In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new
forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not
“A Round Cipher”
175
meddle with the relation of live souls.” 8 For Tolkien, too, the purpose of
fantasy is not escapism, a flight from participation in the primary world.
Rather, a significant aspect of the “faery story” is Recovery, which he defines as “a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things
as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture
to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’—as things apart
from ourselves.” 9 Thus, both MacDonald and Tolkien see tales of the fantastic as fundamentally moral and ethical exercises.
Though Smith eschews the overtly Christian backdrop against which
MacDonald and Tolkien would operate in their own fiction, his own attitude
toward the imagination parallels theirs in many ways. The emphasis that both
authors place on the creative role of the imagination is one Smith could find
accord with. Like MacDonald, he sought to “invent a little world of his own,
with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new
forms.” And like both MacDonald and Tolkien, the rules of his poems and
story-cycles are generally kept internally consistent.
The comparisons become a little more difficult regarding the moral and
ethical functions of fiction. Some critics have suggested that Smith violates
MacDonald’s maxim that a writer “must invent nothing” in the moral realm,
particularly in his poetry. Donald Sidney-Fryer, for instance, maintains that
the poems “Satan Unrepentant” and “A Vision of Lucifer” are “remarkably
sympathetic to Satan-Lucifer, no less than undeniably hostile to the usual
portrait of the God limned in the Old Testament of the Bible, whom Smith
perceives in terms of some Oriental despot, or tyrant-king.” 10 And there is
some truth in Sidney-Fryer’s claim. Smith’s writings often evince a hostility
to traditional moral and religious categories, especially during his poetic
phase—roughly 1910 to 1930. Throughout his life, he littered his letters and
stories with arcane occult references. And he found literature that dwelt on
mundane human themes to be unimaginative, believing “[o]ne could attack
the current literary humanism, with its scorn of all that has no direct anthropological bearing, as a phase of the general gross materialism of the times.” 11
Yet despite these contrarian attitudes, Smith’s corpus often falls within
more traditional moral parameters. W. C. Farmer, who knew Smith later in
life, attests to his moral convictions:
Clark was not an occultist but had a very considerable respect for real evil; he
acknowledged its existence as a palpable reality, and not just as a value judgment upon random events. He had read the writings of the Buddha, respected
them as any contemplative mind would, yet agreed that the Western notion of
vicarious sacrifice was more humane when practiced than simply feeling deep
sympathy for life’s pathetic victims. It is reasonably clear in his earliest writings . . . that he had early on absorbed the Victorian era’s understanding of
Christian morality, decency, and sanctity of one’s person. Yet the failure of
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Geoffrey Reiter
most “Christians” to even begin to approach the standard they espoused turned
him away from the dominant Protestantism of his environment. 12
Likewise, according to John Kipling Hitz, “Smith once said that he was
compelled to believe that evil exists in some absolute sense because of its
manifestations. . . . [T]he horror in Smith’s tales derives from the human
center in evil.” 13 While never condoning such evil, Smith’s jaundiced view
of human nature means his stories are often bleak or ironic; he once wrote
that communism was “about as practical, and likely to be practised, as the
Golden Rule of Jesus Christ,” 14 though his condemnation of the former as
materialistic and “anti-religious” demonstrates his support for the latter.
Smith thus resembles MacDonald and Tolkien in his substantial respect
for the role of the imagination in creating fantastic and coherent “secondary
worlds.” Also like them, his writing, particularly his fiction, is not without
suggestions of a moral code, though such morality tends to be less pronounced, as Smith remained aloof from any doctrinal religious belief system.
Moreover, Smith differs from the other fantasists in that he reduces—perhaps
even demolishes—the boundary between secondary worlds and the primary
world, since both to him could be seen as equally illusory.
In his juvenalia, before even his major poetic phase, Smith’s emphasis on
the artist as creator is more muted than it would later become. Somewhere in
his later teenage years, he abandoned his adventure tales in favor of poetry,
writing that “for some unfathomable reason, I switched suddenly and entirely
to verse.” 15 Smith published his first volume, The Star-Treader and Other
Poems, when he was nineteen, and he soon established a correspondence
with fellow Californian George Sterling, whose own poetry was beginning to
receive some acclaim, particularly from Ambrose Bierce. These poets—
Bierce, Sterling, Smith, Nora May French, Robinson Jeffers—are sometimes
referred to as the “California romantics,” a brief regional phenomenon of
writers who employed universal themes and cosmic imagery in their works,
as opposed to the modernistic realism that was dominating most “literary”
circles of the day.
It is hardly coincidence that Smith’s poetry should be called “romantic,”
for his attitude toward the imagination bears some resemblance to the English romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. To many romantics, the
poet or artist takes on the roles once traditional ascribed to God of creator
and redeemer. As Morse Peckham puts it, for the romantic poet “the self does
not emerge through the perception of order and value in the world; rather,
order and value emerge from the perception of the self.” 16 Similarly, M. H.
Abrams observes that in romanticism “it is the subject, mind, or spirit which
is primary and takes over the initiative and functions which had once been
the prerogatives of deity.” 17 This attitude toward the role of the imaginative
artist can be found both in the original British romantics and in their Califor-
“A Round Cipher”
177
nian counterparts. In examining the California romantics, Donald SidneyFryer marks five characteristics of the movement, the third of which is “a
love of and unswerving loyalty to the individual artist’s own perception of
truth: above all, following one’s own initiative/intuition or ‘fantasy’ (in the
sense of fancy or natural inclination) or imaginative imperative.” 18
Smith’s poetry also bears the imprint of the French symbolists, who
sought, perhaps even more than the English romantics, to build worlds from
their words. Fred Chappell, who has analyzed the symbolist influence on
Smith’s poetry, observes that “Smith’s poems do add up to a coherent pattern, a vision that for all its scope and variety is isomorphic in its constituent
parts. Taken together, almost all these poems would compose an artificial
universe. The idea of a self-enclosed, hermetic universe purely visionary,
impervious to the sordidness and distractions of daily life, was one to which
the great French Symbolist writers aspired.” 19 This idea sounds remarkably
like the secondary worlds of Tolkien, though closer to Smith’s own taste in
that the “hermetic universe” possesses a reality all its own. This reality is
inextricably tied to the use of language—images and word pictures—as
Chappell notes when he asserts that Smith “hoped to cast, as a wizard casts
with his magical incantations and concoctions, a more-than-verbal enchantment over his readers, following Symbolist tradition.” 20 Smith himself said
as much when he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft: “My own conscious ideal has
been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of
which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counterpoint, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.” 21 Smith’s
vintage poetry manifests this approach to the imagination, particularly his
longest and perhaps best-known poem, “The Hashish-Eater; or The Apocalypse of Evil,” which seeks to delve into the vast cosmic potentialities of
human thought. This work is framed as a series of visions experienced by the
eponymous narrator, visions that to many readers initially seem rather plotless and disconnected. S. T. Joshi has rightly noted that there is in fact a
subtle but important structural arc to “The Hashish-Eater,” which he divides
into four segments. The poem moves from its narrator’s proclamation of
supreme sovereignty toward the eventual collapse of that sovereignty, as he
is overwhelmed by visions he has sought to control. 22
The poem begins with the hashish-eater’s declaration, “Bow down: I am
the emperor of dreams,” 23 immediately establishing Smith’s theme that the
imaginative individual possesses great power. The speaker grants himself
regal, even godlike, authority, commanding the audience to bow before him.
By describing himself as an “emperor of dreams,” he asserts that he not only
has visions in his drug-induced state, but that he is also sovereign over those
visions. He eventually grows even more explicit in ascribing to himself the
qualities of deity, calling himself “Supreme / In culminant omniscience man-
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ifold,” knowing everything that occurs in his cosmic dream-world. Though
his visions are many and varied, he claims to be able to “attend / At once
their myriad witness.” 24
Yet for all the power he insists upon, the hashish-eater is in fact not
Smith’s ideal artist, nor does he ultimately wield the imperial authority he
claims for himself. A close examination of the poem reveals that he is not a
writer but a reader, and his control over the narrative is far more precarious
than he initially lets on. His reference to a “Babel of . . . visions” 25 connotes
that there is at least some sense in which he cannot comprehend the very
vision he is experiencing, that the language of these apparitions has become
confused, as in the biblical Babel.
Sometimes, the hashish-eater gives the impression that even if he is not a
creator, he is at least the supreme interpreter. Smith often underscores the
hashish-eater’s voyeuristic attention to the words and symbols of his vision.
Many of the long, convoluted clauses in the poem begin with “I know,” “I
behold,” “I read,” or other such phrases. Yet there is clear evidence from the
poem that the narrator’s power is usurped, and that even his abilities as a
visionary are tenuous. Smith sets him up from the start as a Satanic figure,
evident even in the subtitle, “The Apocalypse of Evil.” Dan Clore looks at
the poem’s title and three possible meanings of “apocalypse”—as “a religious revelation in the form of a vision,” as “a (written) description of such a
vision,” and as the specific Apocalypse of John, the biblical book of Revelation. 26 Drawing together these ideas, he sees “The Hashish-Eater” as representing a cosmic battle “drawing heavily on the myths of Prometheus and
Satan/Lucifer that formed commonplace topoi of the Romantic-DecadentSymbolist trajectory from which Smith’s aesthetic derives.” 27 The narrator’s
ambition is in a sense to out-Satan Satan. The biblical—or at least the Miltonic—Lucifer sought to rule over heaven, to supplant God from His throne,
but he was nonetheless well aware of God’s omnipotence and omniscience.
The hashish-eater, on the other hand, denies the biblical God any special
merit; He is but one of “the gods that are or gods to be,” 28 on no different
plane from the demon Asmodeus or the Egyptian deity Set. Even other mere
humans can exceed His knowledge, for the narrator mentions later that “the
sorcerers / Of hooded stars inscrutable to God / surrender me their demonwrested scrolls” 29 (emphasis mine).
But despite his pretensions to kingship and deity, the hashish-eater finds
his own power, his own rebellion, threatened as the poem progresses. Ironically, he often finds that he has no words for his terror. It is “a fear / That
found no name in Babel” 30 and “[a] monstrous dread unnamed in any hell.” 31
This fear is one previously foreign to the brazen hashish-eater, who never
had the ability to create, and now is losing the ability to know.
As the poem climaxes, its narrator finds himself finally overwhelmed by
the vastness of all that he has sought to circumscribe. The glut of sensory
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179
input that the hashish-eater has attempted to assimilate ultimately proves
more than he is able to control, or perhaps even survive—he is, in the end,
not a god:
But when I reach
The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom
To measure with my gaze the dread descent,
I see a tiny star within the depths—
A light that stays me while the wings of doom
Convene their thickening thousands: for the star
Increases, taking to its hueless orb,
With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,
The light as of a million million moons;
And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed
It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face
That fills the void and fills the universe,
And bloats against the limits of the world
With lips of flame that open. 32
Dan Clore correctly observes that this ending serves “to indicate a negative view of cosmic consciousness as unbearable to a mere human.” 33 Smith
himself wrote to Samuel J. Sackett, “It is my own theory that if the infinite
worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be
overwhelmed by horror in the end, like the hero of this poem.” 34
The poem’s final image—“lips of flame that open”—is significant because it once again carries connotations of language. It was an unintelligible
word that first struck fear into the heart of the hashish-eater, and now, once
again, he is threatened by what may be a spoken word, a final cosmic word.
While the “lips of flame” may open to swallow him, they are perhaps also
opening to speak, to subsume him finally beneath his own inability to “read”
the text of his visions. Smith elsewhere called the immense visage “the face
of infinity itself, in all its awful blankness.” 35 The narrator has sought to
guzzle down the infinite and is justly recompensed for his hubris.
There are many reasons the hashish-eater is flawed, even evil. His Satanic
desire to rebel, coupled with a tyrannical and domineering spirit worse than
the deities he seeks to supplant, marks him as a less than admirable character.
But more immediately, he is at best an observer, at worst a destroyer. He is
not an artist—a creator—but a reader, maybe even a critic. The true creator
in the poem is really the poet. Despite his protestations, the hashish-eater is
never in control; the cavalcade of images that pile up on him are all conveyed
by the god of the work, its writer—none other than Clark Ashton Smith
himself. Fred Chappell, who considers “The Hashish-Eater” one of Smith’s
weaker poems, believes that it “seems to exploit the drug of its title as an
excuse to geyser forth a flood of flimsily connected images.” 36 This assessment is absolutely true, but then, the poem is supposed to be a series of
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images, a created cosmos. The narrator’s problem is that he cannot accept his
role as a participant in the world described by the poet, the god who stands
outside the work looking in. The hashish-eater plays Prometheus to Smith’s
Jove, Satan to Smith’s God. And like Prometheus and Lucifer, he is punished
for his transgression.
A similar psychology is at play in many of Smith’s poems, such as
“Nero,” which Smith described as “the emperor’s soliloquy after he has
watched the burning of Rome.” 37 Like the hashish-eater, Nero is a tyrant who
aspires to deity, and like the hashish-eater, he is an inveterate watcher. But
Smith’s Nero differs from the hashish-eater in that the former is actually far
more self-conscious of his role within the created world of the poem. Nero
knows he is not a god, not a creator, and in fact is not even interested in
creation. Rather, his great interest is in destruction. In this way, Nero does
not desire the greatest quality of God—the ability to be a creator. The hashish-eater seeks to observe creation and Nero seeks to destroy it, but neither
seeks to make a world of his own. Unlike the narrators of his poems, then,
Smith himself believes it to be his duty to play god in his poetry, to “compose an artificial universe,” as Chappell puts it. 38
Smith develops this theme most profoundly in his prose fiction. As a
creative artist himself, Smith frequently invests variations of supreme creative power into characters who are either artists of some kind or at least
sensitive souls who reject the pragmatism of society at large. For example, in
“The Maker of Gargoyles,” the sculptor Reynard’s creations come to life and
manifest his subconscious impulses. Tortha, the poet of “The White Sybil,”
follows his Muse, the titular Sybil, to the discovery that her mystical realm
“was real beyond all that mean deem reality.” 39 In other cases, the main
characters are not necessarily artists themselves but recognize the value of
supreme creativity, allowing them to transcend mundane existence for more
imaginative planes. The protagonist of “The Willow Landscape,” Shih-Liang, “like all his ancestors, was a scholar, a poet, and a lover of both art and
nature”; 40 and he escapes the unscrupulous creditor Mung Li by entering into
the willow landscape depicted on his inherited tapestry. The antiquarian
Francis Melchior in “The Planet of the Dead” empathetically experiences life
and love on a dying world; since emerging from this vision, “always he is
troubled by a dull regret that he should ever have awakened (if awakening it
was) from the death that he died in the palace of Altanoman, with Thameera
in his arms and Thameera’s kisses on his lips.” 41
But it is magic above all arts that Smith emphasizes in his works; more
than any other figures, magicians dominate his short fiction. They are the
most frequent analogues for creative artists to appear in his prose works. This
is hardly surprising: after all, had not Smith told Lovecraft that he saw his
writing “as a sort of verbal black magic . . . as a sort of incantation”? 42 Yet
Smith does not exhibit uncritical approval of his magician-artist figures. On
“A Round Cipher”
181
the contrary, while his magicians do demonstrate the great power inherent in
the creative artist, they also serve as warnings of the ways that power can be
abused.
Smith was hardly a social activist and indeed held little love for the
politically charged literature of his day. Still, he was quite aware of the ways
in which power could be abused. The least sympathetic of his magicians are
those who manipulate their verbal sorcery for their own advantage at the
expense of others. Such is the case, for instance, with the first story in
Smith’s Zothique cycle, “The Empire of the Necromancers.” Here, two corrupt sorcerers establish a realm of dead servants, where, “[d]reaming of
conquest, and of vaster necromancies, they grew fat and slothful as worms
that have installed themselves in a charnel rich with corruption.” 43 Appropriately, some of these undead denizens revolt, killing their overlords. Similarly, Abnon-Tha, a necromancer in “The Charnel God,” becomes the presumptive victim of the death-god Mordiggian’s monstrous priests after attempting
to revive and control the beautiful Arctela (whom he himself had slain). In
“The Double Shadow,” part of Smith’s Poseidonis cycle, the wizard Avyctes
and his acolyte Pharpetron find themselves consumed by a mysterious darkness after delving into forbidden lore. “The Witchcraft of Ulua,” another
Zothique tale, contrasts the destructive voluptuousness of Ulua’s spells with
the magic of Sabmon, whose interest in sorcery is far less manipulative. He
saves his virtuous young nephew Amalzain from Ulua and the destruction of
her home city of Miraab, concluding, “It is needless to moralize on what has
happened. . . . You have learned the true nature of carnal desire, and have
likewise beheld the history of mundane corruption. Now, being wise, you
will turn early to those things which are incorruptible and beyond the
world.” 44
Indeed, many of Smith’s more positively portrayed wizards fall in the
same category as Sabmon, and they use their power of words to exact justice
upon abusive authority. 45 In “The Seven Geases,” the sorcerer Ezdagor
curses the Lord Ralibar Vooz. 46 A corrupt moneylender is similarly cursed
by a poor prophet in “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.” Some of his
magicians lack the piety of Sabmon but are still agents of judgment on the
unimaginative philistines around them; Smith frequently penned stories in
which nary a virtuous character can be found. The nameless wizard at the
beginning of “The Voyage of King Euvoran” 47 practices the forbidden art of
necromancy but also casts the spell that sends the materialistic Euvoran on
his ironic and fateful journey. And in several cases, equally malevolent figures cancel each other out with their abuses of the supernatural. Namirrha,
wizard of “The Dark Eidolon,” is driven mad in search of vengeance against
Zotulla, the emperor who has harmed him, and initiates a battle that results in
mutual annihilation. And the fearsome Malygris is able to bring his scheming
rivals down with himself in “The Death of Malygris.”
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The great creative power of Malygris is even more evident in one of
Smith’s first stories, “The Last Incantation.” In this brief early work, an
aging Malygris conjures up the image of his lost love, Nylissa. Yet in this
case, Smith suggests a rare limitation to the verbal black magic of his character, for the image of Nylissa fails ultimately to satisfy him: “Your necromancy was potent up to this point,” Malygris’s familiar tells him, “but no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and
guileless heart that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then.” 48
Such an acknowledgment of limitations occurs even among some of Smith’s
most powerful wizards, many of whom possess the kind of well-nigh godlike
powers that the hashish-eater vainly supposed himself to have. One example
of such a powerful being is Maal Dweb, who dominates the action in “The
Maze of the Enchanter” 49 and “The Flower-Women.” In the former tale, the
barbarian Tiglari attempts to rescue Athlé, the object of his affections, from
Maal Dweb’s dominion. But the youth really stands no chance in this competition; indeed, as with Malygris, the only limit to Maal Dweb’s creative
power is that he cannot make himself content because he cannot create beings with agency. In “The Last Incantation,” the Nylissa simulacra cannot be
Nylissa herself. “The Maze of the Enchanter” concludes by depicting Maal
Dweb’s conversation with a sycophantic automaton. He contends that “the
repetition of even the most remarkable thaumaturgies can grow monotonous
after a certain number of times.” 50 In “The Flower-Women,” Maal Dweb’s
ennui is briefly interrupted when he chooses to perform an act of compassion, saving the Flower Women from the ruthless Ispazars: “The struggle had
been difficult, even dangerous; and he reflected that his boredom had been
thoroughly overcome, at least for the nonce.” 51 Yet even this implies that the
omnipotent sorcerer may soon grow weary of his all-powerful existence, as
he will be left alone once more with a bevy of statues and preternatural yesmen.
But arguably no work in the Smith corpus plays out his philosophy better
than “The Last Hieroglyph,” which he had appropriately envisioned as the
last work of his Zothique cycle. 52 It begins with an epigraph labeled “Old
prophecy of Zothique,” which reads, “The world itself, in the end, shall be
turned to a round cipher.” 53 This “quotation” is indeed at the heart not only
of this story but of Smith’s entire aesthetic. “The Last Hieroglyph” follows
the exploits of Nushain the astrologer. Like the hashish-eater, he is not a
creator but a reader/interpreter, and not a very good one at that. His attempts
to read the stars as an astrologer are at best hit-or-miss, and as a result, Smith
paints him as an exceedingly pathetic figure. Nushain worships a mysterious
godlike entity, Vergama, “who, throughout the whole continent of Zothique,
was deemed the most powerful and mysterious of the genii, and was thought
to rule over the heavens as well as the earth.” 54 Nushain creates a new
horoscope to accommodate a star that has recently appeared in the sky, only
“A Round Cipher”
183
to discover that additional figures begin appearing, first on his horoscope and
then in reality. Three characters—a mummy, a merman, and a salamander—
appear as guides, conducting him at last to the fabled “house of Vergama.”
Vergama appears as a cowled and cryptic figure. His words to Nushain,
however, make his identity explicitly clear: “I am Vergama, whose other
name is Destiny; Vergama, on whom you have called so ignorantly and idly,
as men are wont to call on their hidden lords; Vergama, who has summoned
you on the journey which all men must make at one time or another, in one
way or another. Come forward, O Nushain, and read a little in my book.” 55
Vergama shows Nushain a book, the pages of “which were covered with a
myriad signs written in inks of various colors, and representing men, gods,
fishes, birds, monsters, animals, constellations, and many other things.” 56
Indeed, Nushain sees his own life depicted as well. At last, Vergama declares,
In my book . . . the characters of all things are written and preserved. All
visible forms, in the beginning, were but symbols written by me; and at the last
they shall exist only as the writing of my book. For a season they issue forth,
taking to themselves that which is known as substance. . . . It was I, O Nushain, who set in the heavens the stars that foretold your journey; I, who sent
the three guides. And these things, having served their purpose, are now but
infoliate ciphers, as before. . . . Vainly do men seek to resist or evade that
destiny which turns them to ciphers in the end. In my book, O Nushain, there
is room even for a bad astrologer. 57
The story ends with Nushain himself being transformed into a hieroglyph,
after which Vergama turns the page of his book.
Who ultimately is Vergama? He is, of course, a stand-in for the creator of
Zothique, its “god,” as it were: Clark Ashton Smith. As the story’s epigraph
establishes, the world—at least the world of Zothique—is indeed a round
cipher, a symbol, a creation on a page by the authorial figure of Smith. It is
he who controls the destiny of his characters, he who ordains the world
which they inhabit. In the course of the story, which essentially describes the
process of Nushain’s death and judgment, one can see Smith tearing away
the layers of his world, essentially un-creating it, which is not surprising
since, for Nushain, the world is ending. Nushain himself might very well
represent Smith’s readers and interpreters, competent to understand his project only by fits and starts. But the figure in the end, the massive mysterious
Vergama writing in his book, is for Smith the perfect metaphor for the entire
imaginative process as he saw it. Nushain and his worlds are real, because
Smith has created them.
If such attitudes seem arrogant or self-aggrandizing, one must note that
Smith was working within a long tradition. In creating internally consistent
worlds of words, he is following in the footsteps of George MacDonald and
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Geoffrey Reiter
J. R. R. Tolkien, though his lack of doctrinal Christian mooring results in an
even higher view of the artist, not as subcreator but as an almost fully fledged
creator of an alternate reality, hampered only by the inability to craft characters with true volition and independence. This high estimation of the imaginative artist’s ability to make new worlds follows the romantics and the
symbolists. And even if one finds his approach extravagant or excessive, it is
important to note that the result was some of the most inventive and fantastic
stories and poetry of the early twentieth century. Clark Ashton Smith may
not have been a god, but he was an immensely creative individual, and on
that level at least his works can still be enjoyed today.
NOTES
1. Robert Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (West Linn, OR: FAX Collector’s Editions,
1977), 16.
2. Quoted in Weinberg, “Weird Tales” Story, 17.
3. For a survey of pulp readers’ responses to Smith’s fiction, see T. G. Cockcroft, “The
Reader Speaks: Reaction to Clark Ashton Smith in the Pulps,” Dark Eidolon, no. 2 (1989):
15–20. Though Smith frequently complained in his letters about Weird Tales editor Farnsworth
Wright, the magazine was his most reliable publication venue, and his works seem to have been
generally well received by its audience.
4. Harlan Ellison, “Clark Ashton Smith: Out of Space and Time,” in Horror: 100 Best
Books, ed. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988), 100.
5. Clark Ashton Smith, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith
(London: Gollancz, 2002), 2.
6. George MacDonald, The Complete Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1999),
5–6.
7. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 60.
8. MacDonald, Complete Fairy Tales, 6.
9. Tolkien, Tolkien Reader, 77.
10. Donald Sidney-Fryer, “James Blish versus Ashton Smith; to Wit, the Young Turk Syndrome: A Riposte,” in The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton
Smith, ed. Scott Connors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006), 79.
11. Clark Ashton Smith, Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and
Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003), 95.
12. W. C. Farmer, “Clark Ashton Smith: A Memoir,” in Smith’s The Sword of Zagan and
Other Writings, ed. W. C. Farmer (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), 179–80.
13. John Kipling Hitz, “Clark Ashton Smith: Master of the Macabre,” in Connors, Freedom
of Fantastic Things, 175.
14. Smith, Selected Letters, 296.
15. Ibid., 249.
16. Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism: II. Reconsiderations,” Studies in
Romanticism 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1961): 5.
17. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 91.
18. Donald Sidney-Fryer, “A Statement for Imagination: George Sterling and Clark Ashton
Smith,” Romantist 6–8 (1982–1984): 14.
19. Fred Chappell, “Communicable Mysteries: The Last True Symbolist,” in Connors, Freedom of Fantastic Things, 93.
20. Ibid., 93–94.
21. Smith, Selected Letters, 126 (emphasis in original).
“A Round Cipher”
185
22. S. T. Joshi, Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry (Sydney, NSW: P’Rea
Press, 2008), 21–22.
23. Clark Ashton Smith, The Complete Poetry and Translations, Vol. 1, The Abyss Triumphant, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus, 2nd ed. 2012), 207 (l.
1).
24. Ibid., 208 (ll. 49–50).
25. Ibid. (l. 55).
26. Dan Clore, “The Babel of Visions: The Structuration of Clark Ashton Smith’s The
Hashish-Eater,” in Connors, Freedom of Fantastic Things, 109–10.
27. Ibid., 110.
28. Smith, The Complete Poetry and Translations, 208 (l. 47).
29. Ibid., 211 (ll. 167–69).
30. Ibid., 216 (ll. 368–69).
31. Ibid., 218 (l. 466).
32. Ibid., 221 (ll. 568–81).
33. Clore, “The Babel of Visions,” 122.
34. Smith, Selected Letters, 366.
35. Smith, Strange Shadows, 246.
36. Chappell, “Communicable Mysteries,” 91.
37. Smith, Selected Letters, 11.
38. Chappell, “Communicable Mysteries,” 93.
39. Clark Ashton Smith, The Maze of the Enchanter, vol. 4 of Collected Fantasies of Clark
Ashton Smith, ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2009), 49.
40. Clark Ashton Smith, The Door to Saturn, vol. 2 of Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton
Smith, ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2007), 51.
41. Clark Ashton Smith, The End of the Story, vol. 1 of Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton
Smith, ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2006), 178.
42. Smith, Selected Letters, 126.
43. Clark Ashton Smith, A Vintage from Atlantis, vol. 3 of Collected Fantasies of Clark
Ashton Smith, ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2007), 197.
44. Clark Ashton Smith, The Last Hieroglyph, vol. 5 of Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton
Smith, ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2010), 38.
45. Despite the overall ethical arc to his work, Smith’s interest in storytelling over pontificating makes it an oversimplification to suggest that his magicians always fall into the two
categories of power-hungry necromancer and old, wise, otherworldly sage. Some of his stories
do feature manipulative wizards who persist in their behaviors until the end without the prospect of judgment. Such could be said of works like “The Holiness of Azédarac,” “Necromancy
in Naat,” or “The Enchantress of Sylaire.”
46. I have elsewhere examined Ezdagor’s role as one of Smith’s poet/priest figures. See
Geoffrey Reiter, “‘A Thoroughly Modern Disdain’: The Materialist’s Descent into Hell in ‘The
Seven Geases,’” Lost Worlds 5 (2008): 7–9.
47. “The Voyage of King Euvoran” was first printed in Smith’s 1933 self-published collection The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. It was substantially altered for its reprinting in
Weird Tales, where it appeared under the title “The Quest of the Gazolba.” For an analysis of
the ways in which these alterations muted Smith’s linguistic world-building, see Jim Rockhill,
“The Poetics of Morbidity: The Original Text to Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of Maal
Dweb’ and Other Works First Published in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,” Lost
Worlds 1 (2004): 24–25.
48. Smith, End of the Story, 20.
49. Like “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” “The Maze of the Enchanter” first appeared in The
Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. Its altered reprinting in Weird Tales appeared under the
title “The Maze of Maal Dweb.” The revision excised or modified some of Smith’s customarily
florid prose, as it had when “The Voyage of King Euvoran” became “The Quest of the Gazolba.” See Rockhill, “The Poetics of Morbidity,” 21–23.
50. Smith, Maze of the Enchanter, 120.
51. Ibid., 283.
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Geoffrey Reiter
52. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger observe that Smith, in his correspondence, seems to have
intended “The Last Hieroglyph” to be his final Zothique tale, though he soon continued on to
“Necromancy in Naat.” See Connors and Hilger, “Appendix One: Story Notes,” in Smith’s
Last Hieroglyph, 320–22.
53. Smith, Last Hieroglyph, 105.
54. Ibid., 106.
55. Ibid., 115–16.
56. Ibid., 116.
57. Ibid., 116–17.
Chapter Twelve
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage,
and Jirel of Joiry
Women and Gender in the October 1934 Weird Tales
Jonathan Helland
The October 1934 issue of Weird Tales was a special one. It was in this issue
that Catherine Lucille Moore (hereafter C. L. Moore) published “The Black
God’s Kiss,” featuring Jirel of Joiry—the world’s first female sword-andsorcery hero. Moore had published her first short story, “Shambleau,” in
Weird Tales the previous year and was already one of the magazine’s most
popular regular authors, but “The Black God’s Kiss” was the first (and only)
of Moore’s stories to be honored with a cover illustration. That cover was
painted by Margaret Brundage, one of the most prolific, popular, and controversial Weird Tales cover artists. Moore was neither the first woman writer in
Weird Tales nor the most prolific, but she was arguably the most popular and
certainly the most enduring. She and Brundage would go on to be, without
question, the two best-known women associated with the magazine, and the
October 1934 cover was their only collaboration. However, prior to October
1934, most readers assumed they both were men. That is what makes the
October 1934 issue so special: it was in this issue that editor Farnsworth
Wright revealed Brundage’s first name, and therefore her gender, to the
world, thereby stirring the pot of an ongoing controversy about her erotically
charged artwork.
Moore’s first publication, “Shambleau,” appeared in Weird Tales in November 1933 and made her one of the most popular of the magazine’s regular
contributors. “The Black God’s Kiss,” taken by itself, is a work that challenges patriarchy and undermines traditional gender constructs. It tells the
story of a strong female warrior and leader who is undermined by male
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power and goes to extraordinary lengths to regain her power. However, when
readers first encountered this story, it was in the larger context of the October
1934 issue of Weird Tales, inclusive of the artwork, advertisements, letter
column, stories by other authors, and even the public perception of the magazine and of pulp magazines in general.
Margaret Brundage’s artwork first graced the cover of Weird Tales in
September 1932. She went on to become both one of the most popular and
controversial artists for the magazine. This controversy was carried out in the
pages of the magazine’s letter column, “The Eyrie.” Those speaking out
against nudity in the cover art rarely admitted distaste; rather, they tended to
claim that the erotic covers misrepresented Weird Tales. For example, one
reader wrote,
Can’t something be done about those lurid covers? . . . I have not the least
objection to nudity. . . . I much prefer the overgrown spiders, the hideous
lizards, and the exotic flora and fauna that we don’t learn about in school. They
typify the bizarre contents of the magazine, while the scantily clad chorus girls
would look more at home on French Follies. 1
These reactions were always printed among an equal or greater number of
letters praising Brundage’s covers and recommending that “he” be allowed to
continue to paint nudes. The anxiety felt by some was grounded in the need
to separate Weird Tales from the “sex magazines.” 2 Popular pulp magazines
with titles such as Spicy Adventure Stories and Saucy Movie Tales would
have been a common sight on the newsstands throughout the 1930s. These
magazines featured stories that would probably earn a PG-13 rating in a
modern film, but were nevertheless marketed entirely for their prurient qualities. The covers of these magazines, ironically, almost never featured actual
nudity—the women on sex magazines were much more likely to appear as if
they were about to be exposed. Given the desire for pulp readers to legitimize
their favorite fiction, 3 it is hardly surprising that some Weird Tales readers
wanted to distance themselves from magazines that were disreputable even
by the standards of pulp.
While the letters and editorials defending Brundage’s nudes positioned
themselves in favor of artistic license and against censorship, economic
forces were at the heart of the matter. While Brundage had the freedom to
draw any scene she wished from the month’s top story, it was editor Farnsworth Wright and business manager William Sprenger who encouraged her
to draw nude (and nearly nude) women. According to Brundage, “Wright
told me that the nude covers did better than those that did not feature
nudes. . . . I would submit several sketches to Wright and Sprenger and they
always wanted the ones with the scantiest clad girls. I drew what they
wanted.” 4 Brundage, who had failed to find work as a fashion artist 5 and had
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry
189
a son to support and a husband who drank and contributed little to the
household, 6 depended on the $90 she earned for each Weird Tales cover
illustration. The editorial preference for suggestive cover art also served as
an incentive for the writers to include scenes with nudity or damsels in
distress. The writer with the greatest number of cover stories during Brundage’s tenure was Seabury Quinn. Seabury Quinn mostly wrote about the
occult detective Jules de Grandin, a sort of French Sherlock Holmes. Largely
forgotten now, he was one of the magazine’s most popular authors in the
1920s and 1930s. Brundage herself attributes Quinn’s near domination of the
magazine’s cover art to good business sense: “He realized immediately that
Wright was having me do a nude for every cover. So, he made sure that each
de Grandin story had at least one sequence where the heroine shed her
clothes.” 7 Nevertheless, Brundage’s art has been considered subversive by
some, and, in many cases, the women portrayed on the cover of Weird Tales,
no matter how they are dressed, seemed to be stronger and more compelling
than the women in the stories, 8 although this is clearly not the case with Jirel
of Joiry.
In the August 1934 issue Farnsworth Wright wrote an official comment
on the issue of Brundage’s nudes:
The argument about the covers by M. Brundage, instead of subsiding, seems to
grow hotter and more furious. Many of you have written to the Eyrie protesting against nudes and near nudes on our covers. . . . So far, those who like
Brundage’s covers are a great majority, to judge by the letters that pour in to
the editor’s desk; but those who object to nude womanhood on the cover of
Weird Tales are very emphatic. 9
It seems that Wright is intentionally stirring up the controversy here. By
pointing to a “majority” of readers who like Brundage’s nudes, he creates the
impression that Weird Tales operates democratically, and that the way to
create change is to write more letters. Wright ends his editorial cementing
this impression by claiming, “the magazine belongs to you, the readers, and
if you wish us to banish nudity from our covers, we will do so.” 10 Considering that the motivation for putting nudes on the cover was clearly economic
and was the result of Wright’s own machinations, this seems somewhat
disingenuous.
Neither Brundage’s cover painting, nor Moore’s story can be fully understood outside of their original context in an issue of a pulp magazine. In
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, D. F. McKenzie argues for a new
bibliographical approach to texts, one that “examines every stage of their
production, transmission, and consumption.” 11 In this view, every reading is
influenced by the material form of the text. 12 Therefore, any examination of
C. L. Moore’s fiction as a whole text must be historicized and contextualized
in relation to its original publication history. McKenzie’s principles are per-
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haps nowhere more important than when dealing with the pulp magazines.
The pulps were literally defined by their material—cheap paper made from
wood pulp. This physical fact of their publication had an additional symbolic
meaning to readers and writers in the pulp era. They were cheap, disposable,
“trashy.” 13 The position of the pulps, relative to class and economics and
therefore on the continuum between “high culture and low,” 14 is encapsulated in and represented by the gritty texture and yellowing color of every page.
In Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form,
David M. Earle goes further: “The idea of the pulp as sensational counterpoint to artistic fiction is best illustrated in the connotations of the word
itself; in recent years, the moniker of ‘pulp’ has grown to mean trashy,
popular forms of fiction.” 15
According the Erin A. Smith, in Hard-Boiled: Working Class Readers
and Pulp Magazines, pulp magazines were marketed to specific niche audiences determined demographically. 16 Smith argues that the most important
of these demographics was gender: “Though the vast majority of pulp titles
were action and adventure magazines aimed at men, every major pulp publisher had at least one romance pulp for women. The circulation of women’s
pulps usually topped all the others, so male readers of pulp fiction probably
did not out number female readers.” 17 Nevertheless, Smith attests, the detective, action, and adventure pulps aggressively sought out male readers and
touted the masculine qualities of their stories. Black Mask, for instance, bore
the subtitle “The He-Man’s Magazine.” 18 However, Smith’s tight focus on
Black Mask is problematic, especially when she uses this to generalize about
the pulp magazine market in general.
Earle is highly critical of this approach: “Erin Smith . . . has attempted to
re-create the typical pulp reader based solely on the hard-boiled genre, particularly Black Mask magazine. . . . There were, in fact, millions of female
readers of the ‘love’ and true confession type pulps. . . . Hard-boiled fiction
was not the most prevalent genre, just the most ‘literary.’” 19 He goes on to
suggest that the common portrayal of pulp magazines as a male-dominated
market is the product of a narrow, elitist, and “androcentric” approach to the
study of the pulps by the academia. 20 Certainly, the tendency of critics and
scholars to focus their attention on Black Mask among the hundreds of pulp
titles from the same era has much to do with the relative “legitimacy” held by
editor H. L. Mencken and the subsequent canonization of Dashiel Hammett, 21 and probably less to do with any particular significance that Black
Mask might have had at the time of its publication.
Weird Tales cannot be painted with the same brush as Black Mask. The
editors of Weird Tales certainly did not make such anxious attempts to prove
the masculinity of its content (except, perhaps, through the cover art), nor did
it market itself solely to men. However, the assumption of male readership
and male authorship does seem to have been prevalent, if much less so than
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry
191
in Black Mask. “The Eyrie” published many letters by women. Smith describes letters from women in Black Mask being labeled with headlines such
as “From the ladies” and “A mere woman.” 22 However, unlike Black Mask,
“The Eyrie” allowed letters from women to be presented without comment,
identified as women only by their first names and the occasional “Miss.”
Remarkably, women make up at least 26.7 percent of the people who wrote
into “The Eyrie.” 23 From this I think it is safe to say that the editors of Weird
Tales did not find it necessary to try and portray their magazine as a “male
space” or to exaggerate the “manliness” of their stories or their readership in
the same way as the detective pulps.
On the other hand, nearly all of those who wrote letters to Weird Tales
assumed that the authors were all or mostly men. Both Moore and Brundage
are referred to in the letters as “he,” even though the editors were very careful
to use only gender-neutral terms to describe them. (For example, the biography attached to “The Black God’s Kiss” refers to “this writer’s first story,
‘Shambleau’” 24 [emphasis mine].) In her introduction to Women of Wonder:
The Classic Years, Pamela Sargent insists that Moore was not interested in
concealing her sex from her readers: “Some have assumed that Moore used
her initials in her by-line instead of her real name, Catherine, to conceal her
sex. In fact, she was trying to keep the management of the bank where she
worked from finding out that [she] was writing for pulp magazines.” 25 This
may also have been true, but Moore did conceal her gender from her readers
and sometimes took some pains to do so. For example, Moore’s 1936 “Autobiographical Sketch” manages never to reveal or even to hint at her gender.
This could almost have been accidental. After all, English doesn’t have gendered first-person pronouns. However, when describing her writing process,
she writes, “[C]uriously, the Jirel stories run more smoothly [than the Northwest Smith stories].” 26 Why is that curious? It is not curious if you think that
Jirel is a character that Moore would identify with more closely. In describing Jirel’s origins in this same essay, Moore takes on a decidedly masculine
tone when mentioning the “belligerent dame who must have been her progenitor.” 27 Additionally, we can see that Farnsworth Wright had many opportunities to reveal her gender (without necessarily revealing her first name
to her employer), in the introductions to the stories or in “The Eyrie.” It is no
wonder that most of Moore’s biggest fans assumed that she was a man. In
1936, when Moore’s future husband, Henry Kuttner, got her address from H.
P. Lovecraft, he addressed his fan letter to “Mr. C. L. Moore.” 28
This deception, however, wasn’t necessary for Moore to achieve legitimacy and respect as a Weird Tales writer. In a study of all the writers published
in the magazine, Eric Leif Davin identified 114 women whose stories appeared before Moore’s first published tale in 1933, none of whom felt the
need to use masculine pseudonyms. 29 The total number of women to publish
stories in Weird Tales during its entire run (1923–1954) was 127. 30 Overall,
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17 percent of the fiction writers for the magazine are known to have been
women. 31 This was, according to Davin, comparable to other fantasy magazines and a little more balanced than the science fiction pulps. 32 Despite
these facts, there may nevertheless have been an assumption (as there is now)
that the divide between male and female writers was much greater, and
Moore may well have believed that her stories would be read and understood
differently if the readers knew she was a woman.
The presence of a sizable minority of women writers and woman readers
in Weird Tales does not necessarily excuse the magazine from all accusations
of sexism. Total exclusion is not the only way to manifest patriarchal hegemony. It may well be that cultural, editorial, and economic pressures resulted
in a presentation of women in pulp magazines that can be seen as an exploitation of male sexual fantasies about women. In the case of Weird Tales, this
was often manifested in the artwork.
“The Black God’s Kiss” was the only one of C. L. Moore’s stories to be
featured in the cover illustration. The cover of the October 1934 issue of
Weird Tales is striking. The statue of the titular black god stands out against a
bright orange background. He is vaguely reminiscent of Buddha in his crosslegged posture. He is also highly racialized: the broad nose and thick lips of
the statue’s face look like a racist caricature of African features, made alien
by a single oversized eye in the middle of the face. These racial characterizations are nowhere to be found in Moore’s description in the text, 33 but they
add an extra element of miscegenation and taboo to Brundage’s cover.
Brundage’s depiction of the heroine is typical of her highly erotic style:
Jirel is draped over the statue, leaning in for the kiss, her eyes closed, her red
curls hanging back from her head. Her posture and presentation are overtly
sexual and submissive as she arches her back and presses her body against
the statue; her mail hauberk is formfitting and shaped more like a chemise (or
perhaps a particularly daring flapper’s party dress) than any armor ever worn.
It hangs from the shoulders by thin impractical straps, barely covers the
buttocks (clearly defined), and is slit up to the hips. Jirel is bare legged and
barefoot—her toes are pointed like a ballerina’s.
Moore did not take the Seabury Quinn approach with “The Black God’s
Kiss.” Jirel of Joiry is not put into the sort of situations that would make for
memorable Margaret Brundage paintings. Yet the artwork seems determined
to make Moore’s character more sexual and more vulnerably feminine. The
interior art for “The Black God’s Kiss” is a drawing by H. R. Hammond in
which Jirel is being held topless by two soldiers. In the text of the scene
being illustrated, Jirel is dressed from head to toe in armor. The only undressing taking place in Moore’s version of Jirel’s capture is the removal of her
helmet. Hammond’s drawing, even more than Brundage’s, seems to be at
odds with the subversive message of Moore’s story. The sense of helpless-
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry
Cover for the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales by Margaret Brundage
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Jonathan Helland
ness and vulnerability implied by Hammond’s image could form a first impression of Jirel that tempers Moore’s strongly feminist approach.
The October 1934 issue of Weird Tales can be seen as a battlefield in
which alternating visions of femininity compete in the person of Jirel of
Joiry. Margaret Brundage’s Jirel is sensual and sexual, but she is not merely
a sex object; she is presented on the cover as the initiator of a taboo sexual
Interior illustration for “The Black God’s Kiss” by H. R. Hammond
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry
195
act. H. R. Hammond’s Jirel, on the other hand, is a captive damsel in distress
who has been laid bare and dominated by the men around her. Her nudity
seems as much in service of vulnerability as of sexuality. It is interesting that
Farnsworth Wright chose the October 1934 issue to reveal to his readers that
M. Brundage, the source of so much controversy and discussion, was in fact
a woman. It may be that he was aware of the significance gender played in
the magazine that featured the first female sword-and-sorcery protagonist.
This knowledge may force the reader to reevaluate the cover illustration:
what was once a male sexual fantasy becomes something else. It is possible
to see Brundage’s Jirel not only in terms of sexual exploitation, but also of
sexual liberation. The taboo act of physical intimacy moments away from
occurring on the cover of the October 1934 Weird Tales appears to be entirely within her control. While the H. R. Hammond illustration places Jirel in
the traditional context of weakness expected of women in pulp fiction,
Brundage’s image can be seen as a femme fatale—eroticized but still dangerous, a seductress. The femme fatale goes back to the nineteenth century, and
a woman who is at once sexually available to men and dangerous to them can
be seen as a symbol of patriarchy’s fear of female sexuality. 34
Yet Moore’s Jirel directly rebels against both of these characterizations.
Jirel begins the story captive, but by no means helpless. She fights back
viciously when they cut the straps holding her helmet; she curses and insults
her captors, and even breaks free from the men holding her. 35 And unlike the
femme fatale, Jirel doesn’t use her sexuality as a weapon. When she is caught
again by Guillaume and kissed against her will, Moore passes on the opportunity to talk about her soft feminine lips or to have her swoon in his masculine arms. Rather, kissing Jirel is “like kissing a sword-blade,” and Jirel takes
her proximity to her captor as an opportunity to kill him with her bare teeth:
“[S]he missed the jugular by a fraction of an inch.” 36 When Jirel is knocked
unconscious, she is neither bound nor naked, and when she finally does
undress it has no hint of exhibitionism, but rather a sense of preparing for
battle:
Jirel got herself out of her armor alone, somehow, after much striving and
twisting. Her doeskin shirt was stiff with sweat and stained blood. She tossed it
disdainfully into a corner. The fury in her eyes had cooled now to contained
and secret flame. She smiled to herself as she slipped a fresh shirt of doeskin
over her tousled red head and donned a brief tunic of link-mail. 37
Another story that begins with a woman being kissed by her captor and
features a dramatic change of clothes could find a home in the pages of Spicy
Adventure Stories. Moore, however, denies the readers this titillation by focusing on her heroine’s harder qualities (“sweat and stained blood,” “fury”),
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by never presenting her as weak or helpless, and by insisting on attitudes,
behaviors, and clothes that have been constructed as masculine.
Yet this rebellious subtext is somewhat undermined by the artwork,
which in both cases emphasizes a quality of feminine beauty that Moore
explicitly denies to her protagonist. It is impossible to reconcile Brundage’s
languid beauty with Moore’s description: “[T]he face above the mail may not
have been fair in a woman’s head-dress, but in the steel setting of her armor
it had a biting, sword-edge beauty as keen as the flash of blades.” 38 And
while Hammond may have come closer to capturing a face with a hard-edged
beauty, he abandons its “steel setting” in favor of bare flesh. However, the
artists are not alone in denying Jirel’s more masculine qualities: Guillaume,
the story’s antagonist, does the same. He instantly nicknames her “pretty
one” and describes her mouth as “fair.” 39 The use of “fair” and “not fair” to
describe the same person on the same page is surely no coincidence. Guillaume can be seen to represent the same patriarchal process of constructing
femininity that seems to be at work with the artistic representations of Jirel in
the issue. In the story, Guillaume’s attempt to feminize Jirel only brings her
aggressively unfeminine qualities into sharper context until the very end
when her complete revenge fills her with the love for her captor. Yet it is
unclear whether the conflicting messages provided by the illustrations and
other stories in the magazine draw the subversive nature of Moore’s text into
contrast or whether the effect is one of muting and muddling the issue.
Certainly, Jirel’s strength of will and ferocity stands apart from the stereotypically weak and helpless women more common in the pulps, but the multiple
depictions of her within the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales can be seen as
having a softening effect on Jirel’s more disruptively gender ambiguous
traits.
The relationship between the text of Moore’s stories and their material
form in the pulp magazines is tangled and complex. At the beginning of her
career, Moore did apparently feel it necessary to conceal her gender identity
from the readers of Weird Tales. But this does not mean that Moore’s work is
significant and nuanced despite its having been written for pulp magazines;
rather, Moore’s fiction is in dialogue with the work that is being done in
these magazines and relies on the contrasts and comparison for some of their
effect. It does not undermine Moore’s rhetoric about gender that it had to
compete against alternate and opposing texts. However, it is worth asking if
some of those texts, particularly the artwork related to the story itself, served
to conceal these themes from the reader. Readers confronted with Margaret
Brundage’s cover illustration and H. R. Hammond’s interior art, or one who
is accustomed to approaching the stories in Weird Tales in an uncritical way,
may well blind themselves to the psychosexual depths of “The Black God’s
Kiss.” But to the many readers for whom questions of gender and sexuality
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry
197
were already troubling, C. L. Moore’s unique story must have been a revelation.
“The Black God’s Kiss” was the fifth story C. L. Moore had published in
Weird Tales. The first four, starting with the memorable “Shambleau,” featured her male protagonist, Northwest Smith. The Northwest Smith stories
tended to follow a pattern in which the roguish hero would find himself
helpless and at the mercy of (often female) alien forces. In many ways,
Northwest Smith can be seen as a distillation of male pulp heroes; he carries
shades of the western wandering gunslinger and the noir amoral antihero. He
has the iron will and fearsome reputation of a Robert E. Howard larger-thanlife warrior. But all that strength and ability is rendered meaningless by his
helplessness in the face of the cosmically powerful threats he faced, from
which he usually needed some rescue from without. Jirel of Joiry’s adventures, similarly, follow a repeating pattern: involuntary travel to another
realm where she faces strange forces (usually male), which she then overcomes through inner reserves of willpower and resolve. These forces often
try, and fail, to force her to conform to a traditionally female role of submission for a state against which she wholeheartedly rebels. This was a significant and meaningful reversal of the gender roles assumed by most readers
and writers in 1934.
Some feminists argue that taking on male behaviors and roles is not
enough to advance female agendas or perspectives. In Feminism and Science
Fiction, Sarah Lefanu suggests that Jirel of Joiry, particularly in the story
“Jirel Meets Magic,” fails to challenge the sexist conventions of speculative
fiction, despite the female protagonist. 40 This argument is made in the context of criticizing Pamela Sargent’s More Women of Wonder collection for
anthologizing works with female protagonists without concerning herself
with whether they challenge patriarchy or further feminist values. 41 This is,
of course, a valid concern; a female protagonist is never reason enough to
label a work “feminist,” any more than is a female author. Furthermore,
Lefanu’s subsequent suggestion that either “Shambleau” or “No Woman
Born” (a later work outside the scope of this paper) would have been more
compelling representations of C. L. Moore’s fiction 42 is no doubt true. However, Lefanu is too quick to disregard the transgressive nature of Jirel as a
character. Lefanu gives no indication that she has read any Jirel stories other
than “Magic,” and this may be part of the problem. However, later in Feminism and Science Fiction, Lefanu illuminates a problem not with Jirel specifically, but with the archetype that Jirel helped establish in fantasy fiction:
“Attempts have been made to reclaim Amazons for women if not for feminists by taking the heroes of sword-and-sorcery fiction and giving them
breasts. . . . The problem with the role reversal stories—as with role-reversal
societies—is that they do not necessarily challenge the gender stereotypes
that they have reversed.” 43 This is true to an extent; a pure reversal maintains
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the assumptions of gender as binary and gender as hierarchy. However, it is
reductive to utterly dismiss the value of role reversal as a tool in speculative
fiction. Janice Bogstad argues that, while role-reversal stories have been used
to uphold patriarchal assumptions in the past, 44 they can also serve to sever
the ties between sex and gender and undermine the perceived inevitability of
those gender-role assignments. 45
In all her Jirel of Joiry stories Moore actively subverts the language and
stereotypes of her era, not only those that appeared in the pages of Weird
Tales, but also those from other pulp magazines and popular culture in general. In the 1930s, the language didn’t exist to launch a frontal assault on the
artificiality of the socially constructed gender binary, or against the inequality of the socially prescribed gender roles. Moore, however, took advantage
of the flexibility of fantasy and science fiction to confront those issues anyway. Where language and society was lacking, alien beings and magical
forces picked up the slack. Questions that were impossible to ask in America
in the 1930s echoed through Martian canals and strange otherworlds. The
result not only was subversive in relation to her contemporary society, but
remains extremely amenable to analysis within the nuanced and sophisticated
framework of modern feminist theory.
However, whatever open challenge to patriarchal hegemony may exist in
the text of “The Black God’s Kiss” is complicated and compromised, if not
actually undermined, by the rest of the material text. The artwork by Brundage and Hammond, the letters, the other stories appearing alongside it, and
even the cultural perception of the pulp fiction magazine as a whole would
have had a profound influence on how this story would have been understood
and interpreted by its original readers. Nevertheless, the gestalt effect
achieved by the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales is far from an unambiguous endorsement of the status quo. Rather it can be seen as a lively conversation, full of nuance and contradiction.
NOTES
1. Weird Tales, August 1934, 268.
2. Weird Tales, October 1934, 524.
3. Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 34.
4. Quoted in Robert Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (West Linn, OR: FAX Collector’s Editions, 1977), 68.
5. Weinberg, “Weird Tales” Story, 66.
6. Paula Guran, “Our Queen, Our Mother, Our Margaret: How One Artist’s Magazine
Covers Shaped the Vision of a Genre for a Gender,” Weird Tales 65, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 25.
7. Weinberg, “Weird Tales” Story, 68.
8. Guran, “Our Queen,” 21.
9. Weird Tales, August 1934: 266.
10. Ibid.
C. L. Moore, M. Brundage, and Jirel of Joiry
199
11. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15.
12. Ibid., 25.
13. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 204.
14. Mark McGurl, “Making ‘Literature’ of It: Hammett and High Culture,” American Literary History 9, no. 4 (1997): 702.
15. David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 74.
16. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 27.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 28.
19. Earle, Re-covering Modernism, 78.
20. Ibid., 79.
21. McGurl, “Making ‘Literature’ of It,” 706.
22. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 29.
23. Eric Leif Davin, Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction,
1926–1965 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006), 65.
24. Weird Tales, October 1934, 403.
25. Pamela Sargent, “Introduction,” in Women of Wonder: The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 4.
26. C. L. Moore, “An Autobiographical Sketch of C. L. Moore,” in Echoes of Valor II, ed.
Karl Edward Wagner (New York: Tor, 1990), 38.
27. Ibid., 37.
28. Robert Silverberg, “‘No Woman Born’: Flowing from Ring to Ring,” in Science Fiction
101 (New York: ibooks, 1987, 2001), 196.
29. Davin, Partners in Wonder, 68.
30. Ibid., 68.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 69.
33. “The image was of some substance of nameless black, unlike the material which composed the building, for even in the dark she could see it clearly. It was a semi-human figure,
crouching forward with outthrust head, sexless and strange. Its one central eye was closed as if
in rapture, and its mouth was pursed for a kiss.” Weird Tales, October 1934, 416.
34. Mary A. Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 3.
35. Weird Tales, October 1934, 404.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 405.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Sarah Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), 16.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 17.
43. Ibid., 35.
44. Janice Bogstad, “Gender, Power and Reversal in Contemporary Anglo-American and
French Feminist Science Fiction” (PhD diss.: University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1992), 35.
45. Ibid., 45.
Chapter Thirteen
Psycho-ology 101
Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch
Paul W. Shovlin
Robert Bloch and Sigmund Freud had much in common. Both were prolific
writers and their collected works are still sought out and read. Both ruminated on the nature of psycho- and sociopathy in their writing. For Freud,
notably in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, nearly every quirk or
mistaken pronunciation or instance of forgetfulness originates from our subconscious in manifestations of neuroses. 1 Bloch, in many of his weird tales,
exploits our tendency to attempt to normalize that which does not fit normal
expectations, rather than come to the conclusion that reality can’t be explained away with neat explanations by psychology. While Freud searched
for inconsistencies as evidence leading back to psychological trauma that
might be named and treated, Bloch artfully wove tales that utilized such
inconsistencies to emulate psychological trauma in the controlled and safe
environment of the reader’s armchair. The writing they did was interested in
and reflected on real cases of the mentally disturbed, from the case of “the
Rat Man” in Freud to that of Norman Bates in Bloch, notably inspired by Ed
Gein. The sheer scope and variety of each of their texts show minds at work,
not merely displaying fully thought-out representations, but teasing out nuances and perspectives and recursively evolving their differing projects. For
Freud, it is obvious that his disciplinary audience (although he also wrote for
the general public on occasion), professional and academic psychologists and
psychiatrists, motivated and nourished his writing. In the case of Bloch, we
can see how the American pulp magazine industry served as an early safe
haven and catalyst, and its resulting audience similarly served Bloch while he
developed and tested his theories on the psychology of the horror tale. In this
chapter, I will apply Freud’s notion of the uncanny—experience that begins
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to diverge from normalcy or what is expected—to the method in which
Bloch’s stories hinge on psychology in order to get at Bloch’s concept of the
psychology of horror or, more fittingly, the horror of psychology, and how it
obfuscates rather than clarifies.
Before I get to the analysis and given the nature of the chapters in this
volume, I am interested in ways that the “medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously put it in Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man, and how the medium of a pulp magazine such as Weird Tales affected
its writers, such as Bloch and the stories he told. 2 As we survey Bloch’s
weird tales and paying special attention to those in which madness is a
central concern, it becomes evident that the medium of publication had an
effect on the work that is likely to be forgotten or ignored as his short stories
go through republication in other forms. Bloch’s “The Weird Tailor,” 3 for
example, is a tale about a magical suit that has the ability to animate corpses
or mannequins it is placed on. The story isn’t very remarkable, even given its
inclusion of a corpse in a freezer, a satisfying bludgeoning, and madness on
the part of two characters. It seems a bit long and convoluted (certainly in a
way that doesn’t fall in line with Bloch’s ability to write concisely and to
carefully design particular stories), and given the nature of pulp writing, with
payment often based per word, it makes sense that writers such as Bloch
were being conditioned to write in those ways, in terms of their audiences’
and editors’ preferences, but also in terms of the limitations and opportunities
pulp publishing offered. Bloch writes, “In order to make a living it was often
necessary to write material more or less geared to the requirements of the
pulp-magazine markets.” 4 I mention this before I begin my analysis because
I believe this is one of the blind spots of literary criticism that must be noted
and considered, especially in terms of authors relatively recently joining the
ranks of canonization, but also because it lends credence to the unique venue
of Weird Tales for nourishing so many great American writers, for example,
Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and talents such as a young Tennessee
Williams. In considering the broader impact of a cultural phenomenon such
as Weird Tales, it is clear that the community, editorial process, and medium
of the pulp magazine interacted in a unique way, contributing to an explosion
in new American literary forms, 5 such as the hard-boiled detective yarn,
sword-and-sorcery, the Cthulhu mythos, and so forth. Regardless of which
particular titles they originated in, these genres and their creators cut their
teeth in Weird Tales.
That noted, in this chapter I will focus on the work of Robert Bloch,
known mostly for his dark humor and for how psychology figures in his
stories. Given their uncanny connection with Freud, I am interested in how
Weird Tales was a sandbox for a young Robert Bloch as his handling of
psychology and horror evolved toward later better-known works such as
Psycho. In “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” for example, issues of sanity,
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mental health, and the efficacy of psychologists are central to its outcome, in
which a seemingly crazy man is vindicated in light of his odd theories and a
psychologist becomes the threat. “Enoch” offers another view of a crazed
killer who speaks at length with a psychologist regarding his impulse to kill.
In stories such as these, we see Bloch recursively circling different positions—that of patient, doctor, madman, imagination, the nature of sanity, the
affirmation of superstition, the reality of evil. Freud’s notion of a “talking
cure” can be inversely applied to these stories. Both contain dialogues between doctors and patients, 6 which rather than culminating in the salvaging
of sanity come to a crescendo of madness and the supernatural. But his
notion can also be used as a meta-theory for considering the function of
Weird Tales as a psychosocial moratorium, a series of psychoanalytic sessions, if you will, for the evolution of psychological terror in the work of
Bloch. I am arguing that we might view his work leading to Psycho as a
series of sessions delving deeper and into different aspects of the nature of
the horror of psychology. While this analysis will be useful for considering
the work of Bloch, it could be further extended to consider how theoretical
concepts, such as Howard’s “dark barbarism” 7 or Lovecraft’s cosmic horror,
were similarly nurtured in the Petri dish of Weird Tales.
The story “Enoch” 8 hinges on discourse, much like psychoanalysis, and
much like the story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” We get the story as a
stream of consciousness from the narrator, Seth. As we peel back the layers
of the onion, we see his story revolving around dialogue between him and
Enoch, a tiny creature presumed to be some sort of devil or demon who
resides on his skull and whispers in his ear. Seth asks the reader: “Have you
ever felt the tread of little feet walking across the top of your skull? . . . It
starts like that.” 9 But Enoch is not satisfied with merely traipsing about on
people’s heads; he also “wriggles down the back of your neck and whispers
in your ear.” Seth relates that Enoch asks him to do wicked things and
compels him to obey. Enoch asks Seth to kill for him.
Part of the appeal of the story and, to use Freud’s term, the uncanniness of
it is the narrator’s perspective, which posits Enoch as a real being. Literally,
because we are reading words on a page, we are a captive audience to Seth’s
narrative, but that reality mirrors the kind of response Seth might get from a
psychologist or confidant. When confronted with his claims that a tiny imp
lives inside his head and asks him to kill people, the safe bet is to remain
calm and go along with Seth’s story, in order to delve deeper into what may
actually be at the root of his (dangerous) hallucinations. But the detached
perspective of the psychologist also suggests some sort of fascination with
the object of insanity and a lack of humanity on the part of the doctor. Part of
the draw of Bloch’s stories rests in how they punish those who think they
know best. In the case of Seth, we may believe the narrator is unable to
discern the difference between reality or hallucination, and his testimonial
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colors our own perception. Borrowing from the language of psychology, we
might imagine Enoch as an extension of Seth’s id, his aggressive drive,
manifesting itself outside of his subconscious. Or, listening, like a therapist,
we may suspect Enoch is an alter ego or an aspect of a multiple personality
disorder or schizophrenia. But the truth is, we don’t know for sure. When I
teach popular genres and we cover Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” one of my
favorite questions to ask students is why the narrator killed the old man. They
usually reply that it was because of his eye, giving their answer from the
narrator’s perspective. The answer is completely reasonable within the
framework Poe offers us, that of the narrator. It was because of the old man’s
vulture eye. None of my students answer by stating the narrator killed the old
man because he is a raving lunatic.
Freud describes uncanniness as a kind of “common reality” that has been
slowly invaded by hints of that which has been repressed. 10 In the horror
genre, this is why the supernatural elements often start slowly, because at
first the main characters (and we as readers) must be able to attempt to
normalize them. First, normalcy and context must be established, then one
small, strange thing happens and then another and the weirdness works itself
up to a frightening pitch, because we begin to realize the horror is real. This
strategy is evident in the haunted house genre or classical ghostly tales such
as those of M. R. James. Obviously, as readers of the genre we suspect the
ultimate end of the process of uncovering the nature of what is transpiring,
but we go along with the characters for the ride. In real-life Wisconsin, when
sheriff Arthur Schley walked into Ed Gein’s garage and found the butchered
carcass of his deputy’s mother hanging from the beams “dressed out like a
deer,” it is likely that for a split second his mind attempted to make what he
saw a part of “common reality” rather than what it was, mind-blasting terror. 11 As the police searched the house and found Gein’s other souvenirs,
Freud’s notion of the uncanny turned into full-blown psychosis (what theorist
Julia Kristeva, in The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, refers to as
abjection). 12 Likewise, Bloch’s tales tease readers via our armchair knowledge of psychology to attempt to dismiss the genuine horror of what human
beings are capable of by (psycho)analyzing the discourse of madmen, which
constitutes our only tenuous link to the common reality of the fictive realm.
We use psychology to normalize what we experience within the narrative
confines of the story. In these cases, the uncanny becomes that which we are
unable to dispel with our mostly empirical construction of knowledge.
Part of the thrill of “Enoch” is that, as a weird tale, we are unsure of
whether the story is a supernatural one or a depiction of insanity. Probably,
as a reader of Weird Tales (or, as Bloch might put it, connoisseurs of horror),
we are more likely to desire Enoch to be real, as part of the nature of the
genre we take pleasure in. In real life, this indetermination marks the uncanniness of extreme mental disorders that simply can’t make sense to us as
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rational people. Bloch imagines the mind-set, quite realistically, in a way that
suggests he is perhaps capable at getting into the head of a serial killer, much
as Enoch does. As an author, Bloch does exactly that. Seth (and Enoch, for
that matter) is Bloch’s marionette. The story serves as a (likely) conscious
metaphor for the creative act and the artist. As we will see later, “Yours
Truly, Jack the Ripper” also includes metaphors for writing and makes wry
commentary on the nature of artists, as does the title of “The Weird Tailor.”
This ability to write characters that are quite normal in some regards, but
crazy or possessed in other ways, casts doubt on the sanity or nature of
humanity of the author. Bloch was aware of this, as evidenced by his wry
humor in well-known quotes such as “Despite my ghoulish nature, I really
have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.” 13
In “Enoch,” Seth’s murderous crimes are discovered after he killed Emily
Robbins, a blonde driving through the swamp. He disposed of the body and
car by sinking them in quicksand. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
The stories of Seth and Norman Bates run parallel in a few ways, in terms of
some small details like these, and in terms of a perception of reality mostly
filtered through an insane protagonist, each of whom has a monkey on his
back as a result of a domineering mother. It is arguable that the inclusion of
the so-called transvestite tendencies of Norman Bates complicates the impact
of perspective in the novel, more so than in “Enoch.” This is because, dressed
up as his mother and in makeup, Norman Bates is seen by victims such as
Mary who identify their killer as a crazed old lady. In the case of “Enoch,”
told entirely from the point of view of Seth, we only hear about the district
attorney, Edwin Cassidy, who is taken over by Enoch from Seth. We don’t
get an internal register from Cassidy, which can aid our armchair psychological analysis of Seth. Psycho shows us that even if we did, witnesses are
unreliable.
In his jail cell, like a good patient, Seth tells Dr. Silversmith, probably a
psychiatrist, about his mother. Seth tells us, “Enoch has protected me, just as
my mother planned. She knew I couldn’t get along alone.” 14 Presumably,
Seth’s mother is a witch who summoned Enoch, a familiar, imp, devil, or
demon, to guide her son. To readers, this is clearly the implication, given the
details Seth offers and the very inclusion of the story in Weird Tales. This is
important because it gets at the nature of the weird tale. In the traditional
ghost story, the uncanny, those unfamiliar details and almost inexplicable
happenings are a pleasurable and suspenseful, exquisite move toward the
terror of realizing the bogeyman is real. But weird tales begin with that
supposition. The uncanny becomes a string of clues a reader follows with a
joyful feeling of suspense on determining just where and how exactly they
lead not just to the supernatural, but also to the weirdness or strangeness that
Weird Tales promises.
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Within the confines of the story, Silversmith is a victim of casting, a
stereotypical psychiatrist. Bloch’s depiction of Silversmith “lean[ing] forward and strok[ing] his little beard and [saying] ‘Yes, yes’ over and over
again” offers the image of psychiatrist as Freudian dupe, a specialist who
does not understand the psychosis of the patients he serves, one who is driven
by therapy for therapy’s sake, the prestige of the trappings, and ingrained
with paternalistic and belittling views toward the mentally afflicted. 15 Seth
reads him well, saying, “I could feel his eyes watching me. The same kind as
the people in the mob. Mean eyes. Eyes that don’t trust you when they see
you. Prying peeping eyes.” 16 In some ways, Bloch seems to be referencing
our perspectives of and responses to mental illness as well.
Afterward, the DA, Edwin Cassidy, visits Seth in his cell in order to
extract some sort of confession and to get Seth to act during trial as if he is
not crazy (i.e., not to mention Enoch). It is clear he wants an open and shut
case. We are told that the doctor mentioned Enoch to Cassidy. Seth says,
“That doctor thinks I’m crazy.” Cassidy assures Seth that he believes he isn’t
crazy. The DA asks Enoch to come to him, in an attempt to mollify Seth and
keep him quiet about his little buddy. Cassidy later returns later, begging to
have him removed. Cassidy mutters, “Enoch—that thing of yours—I thought
you were crazy—maybe I’m the crazy one—but take him off!” He locks
himself in a cell to keep from killing for Enoch, scratching and tearing at the
back of his head. As Cassidy slumps to the floor, we hear about “the big red
hole . . . eaten in the back of his head.” 17
It isn’t until the end of the story that our ability to explain away Enoch as
Seth’s psychosis is strained. Uncanniness is achieved through our inability to
process noncredible narration. What we have are two dependent threads of
narrative running through our heads. We understand what Seth is telling us,
his version of reality, and we interpret that through what we know or believe
we know. The disconnect comes with Cassidy’s conversion and death. In
order to normalize these elements of the story we strain plausibility by believing Seth’s psychosis is somehow contagious and Cassidy has literally
clawed a hole in his own head as a result, or that Enoch is indeed real. This is
the pleasure of the horror tale written by Robert Bloch. Our own ability to
filter “reality” is called into question. Further, Bloch shows his deft ability to
handle these different threads of narrative convincingly. Like Enoch, he can
get inside the head of a madman and of us as well. Our own perceptions of
madness suggest that the imagination of an author and the mental state of a
psychotic may be intertwined. As I noted earlier, we may suspect the sanity
of artists like Bloch who come too close to realistically representing characters similar to lunatics like Ed Gein.
Perceptions of reality, our tendency to normalize, and a reader’s trust of a
narrative thread figure importantly in the popular weird tale “Yours Truly,
Jack the Ripper.” “Yours Truly” opens with Sir Guy Hollis, of the British
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Embassy, meeting John Carmody, a psychiatrist, in Chicago, in 1945. Hollis
wants to speak of Jack the Ripper. After describing the Whitechapel murders,
he suggests something ostensibly crazy: that Jack the Ripper is alive and in
Chicago. Carmody has already begun evaluating Hollis, noting, “He was so
wrapped up in his obsession he even talked that way. Well—I was willing to
listen. We psychiatrists get paid for listening.” 18 At this point in the story, we
accept John Carmody at face value as a psychiatrist—we have no reason to
doubt him. Hollis does sound like a madman and Carmody is a convincing
psychiatrist. Again, Bloch capitalizes on the uncanniness of mental
(in)stability, appearances and embodiments, and has complete control of his
characters, while understanding his readers and their journey through the
narrative arc. Many years later, Thomas Harris would introduce to the world
another psychiatrist who would turn out to be a serial killer, Dr. Hannibal
Lecter.
When Carmody presses Hollis for evidence the killer could be alive after
all these years, Hollis mentions following a trail of crimes across continents.
Specifically, he cites some real killings, such as the Cleveland Torso Murders, which bespeaks Bloch’s knowledge of and influence by such events.
Ironically, Hollis believes that the killer may be part of the “lunatic fringe” of
intelligentsia and mentions “writers, painters, poets” as likely suspects. 19
Given the community of writers and the nature of the writing published in
Weird Tales, it is hard not to imagine that Bloch was poking fun at his fellow
writers in a conscious way.
Again, Bloch settles on the uncanniness of mental disorder. Hollis tells
Carmody that the Ripper is “perfectly normal. Except on certain nights. . . .
Then he becomes an ageless pathological monster, crouching to kill.” 20 We
are reminded of the tenuous nature of common reality and how narrow is the
distinction between “perfectly normal” and the “pathological monster.” Like
Hollis’s Ripper, artists such as Bloch are, most of the time, perfectly normal,
only turning into pathological monsters when they get into the head of madmen via their imaginations and the stories they weave.
Hollis attends the party with Carmody and is introduced to an odd assortment of artists of different kinds. As he eventually declares his mission,
Carmody muses on the nature of concealment and the illusion of normalcy:
“But for the first time I saw these people in a new light. I wondered about
their lives—their secret lives beyond the scenes of parties. How many of
them were playing a part, concealing something?” 21 He begins to suspect
Hollis himself: “I wondered idly just what was really wrong with him. Why
he had this odd fixation concerning Jack the Ripper. Maybe he was hiding
secrets, too.” 22 While Carmody’s aside deflects our suspicion of him on the
first read of the story, on a second reading it is likely to produce a frisson as
we imagine the implications of this insight given his real identity. The fact
that a seemingly deranged individual like Hollis is suspicious of everyone
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isn’t remarkable. But the fact that a wolf in sheep’s clothing is experiencing a
new kind of suspicious filter is intriguing.
Bloch’s emphasis on the psychology of horror or the horror of psychology in his career has been successful because it touches one of humanity’s
open wounds—that of the inscrutability and instability of the psyche. In the
real world, time and again, until it becomes a parody of itself, we hear people
describe killers, kidnappers, rapists as “just the quiet type.” Neighbors muse
over their inability to detect anything was wrong in the past. A bloodied and
naked captive escaped from Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment of death and was
returned to him by the police only to be subsequently murdered. It is not
enough in Bloch’s stories that we may find out one of the characters may be
mad; it is not enough that we may question the sanity of a writer who can
imagine a functioning murderer. Bloch makes us doubt the world around us
and, more importantly, suggests that we even begin suspecting ourselves. He
is merely writing the tales—we are the avid readers who get pleasure from
the form and content.
At the end of the story, Carmody convinces Sir Guy to hand over his gun
after he has had a few too many drinks. They wander down an alley and Sir
Guy reveals the true motive behind his search, as Carmody listens. Again, the
patient-psychiatrist exchange centers on Sir Guy’s mother, one of Jack’s
original victims. Unfortunately for Sir Guy, as a trained psychiatrist Carmody knows all too well that a man’s relationship with his mother often leads to
dogged obsessions and unstoppable drives. Bloch identifies John Carmody,
as he approaches Sir Guy with the resonating line, “‘Never mind the “John,”’
I whispered, raising the knife. ‘Just call me . . . Jack.’” 23
When I read the story as a teenager, it was effective and I remember
smiling at the end and the impression that Bloch had pulled one over on me.
Like Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” this kind of
twist ending 24 has been used many more times and in many other contexts. It
can seem old hat in modern contexts. Bloch himself says, “[‘Yours Truly’ is]
not my idea of a well-written story,” although I disagree. 25 I believe John
Carmody is more interesting during a second read, in the context of the
ending. In that context, the reader is kept attentive considering the perspective of the story from John Carmody, the lack of access to his internal state
and musings, the piecemeal details he gives in the course of the story without
revealing his true nature. A reader can see that it’s not just a neat trick that
Bloch is pulling off, but that each comment, each response, each detail and
its form has been thoughtfully crafted to depict Carmody as a rounded character who is only flattened by Sir Guy’s (and our) assumptions.
In the phenomenon of serial killing, there is a trend known as the copycat
killer. Like artists influence other artists, in deranged way a murderous act
can influence other murderous acts. Critics have made much of the coincidences between the behavior and background of Norman Bates and the
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crimes of Ed Gein, which occurred in 1957, not far from where Bloch was
living at the time. They look at the basis of Bloch’s novel as fundamentally
informed by Gein’s ghoulish crimes. It’s absolutely true that Bloch was
thoughtful of Gein when he produced Psycho. But rather than the eerie similarities between Gein’s murderous mental state and Bloch’s novel, what’s
really strange is how “Enoch” and other stories published in Weird Tales ten
years before Gein’s crimes coincide with depictions in the novel and coincidences with Gein’s odd brand of madness. Far from a copycat plagiarism of a
real murderer, Psycho stands as a project Bloch had been working on in
different forms through publications in pulps for many years. Readers can
find other examples of early studies of perspective and madness by Bloch in
Weird Tales, for example. “Floral Tribute” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” are
two of them, although they function a bit differently than the two I’ve focused on here. Through an analysis of “Enoch” and “Yours Truly, Jack the
Ripper” we can see Bloch getting into the head of madmen, murderers, and
readers. He leverages our unease with the reliability of psychology and perspective. The horror of it all is not how the real world has affected the work
of Robert Bloch, but how his work offers us insight on the real world, how
much we really don’t know about others, how much we don’t know about
ourselves, and, finally, how psychology will only offer us little help in understanding it all.
NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. A. A. Brill (London: T.
Fisher Unwin, 1914).
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet,
1964).
3. Robert Bloch, “The Weird Tailor,” Weird Tales, July 1950, 3–17. The title itself, however, is notably a play on words. One can consider Bloch himself as a “weird taler,” someone
who works at designing horror stories. The final line reads, “Only a connoisseur of horrors
would have appreciated Erik Conrad’s window-dummy as it loomed over him, clad in the silver
suit of enchanted Life—with its waxen fingers clamped in a grip of death about Erik Conrad’s
throat” (17). Bloch, in all his meta-awareness, is specifically describing his audience reading
the story that he tailored for them. In this case, the tailor’s dummy comes back to kill the tailor.
We can see Bloch’s wry sense of dark humor at work in this example. “The Weird Tailor”
features in Bloch’s script for the movie Asylum, a fitting repository for it, given the focus of this
essay.
4. Robert Bloch, “Author’s Afterword,” in The Best of Robert Bloch, ed. Lester Del Rey
(New York: Ballantine, 1977), 394.
5. For research on this, see Brian Stableford’s chapter “Science Fiction between the Wars:
1916–1939,” in Anatomy of Wonder, ed. Neil Barron (New Providence, NJ: R. R. Bowker,
1995); David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of
Form (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009); Paul Kinkaid, “On the Origins of Genre,” in Speculations on Speculation, ed. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2005), and Farah Mendelsohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
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6. The reliance on dialogue in “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” has been noted by Randall
D. Larson in “Ripping Good Yarns: Robert Bloch’s Partnership with Jack the Ripper” in
Benjamin Szumskyj’s edited collection of critical essays on Bloch entitled The Man Who
Collected Psychos (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).
7. Don Herron, The Dark Barbarian: The Writing of Robert E. Howard: A Critical Anthology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).
8. Bloch tells us “Enoch” “was written under pressure, at a single sitting.” See Robert
Bloch, “Author’s Afterword,” in The Best of Robert Bloch, ed. Lester Del Rey (New York:
Balantine, 1977), 395.
9. Robert Bloch, “Enoch,” Weird Tales, September 1946, 28.
10. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Freud, Vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 218–52.
11. Harold Schechter, Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein the Original Psycho
(New York: Pocket, 1989), 85.
12. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
13. This is an oft-repeated quotation. According to the Wikipedia entry on Robert Bloch,
Stephen King has opined it is one of his favorites and used it so many times it is often
misattributed to him. Wikipedia, s.v. “Robert Bloch,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bloch.
14. Bloch, “Enoch,” 31.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 35.
18. Robert Bloch, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” Weird Tales, July 1943, 95.
19. Ibid., 88.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 90.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 95.
24. I refer to these endings as “whoops endings.” For example, whoops, I’m a ghost (i.e.,
The Sixth Sense). Or, whoops, I’m dead. Or, another good one, whoops, I’m the devil.
25. Bloch, “Author’s Afterword,” 395.
Chapter Fourteen
“To Hell and Gone”
Harold Lawlor’s Self-Effacing Pulp Metafiction
Sidney Sondergard
You see, I write fantastic stories, stories of free imagination, about ghosts and
goblins and djinns and werewolves and other assorted horrors; and while I
may be no beacon light in American letters, my friends are always careful to
say they like my stories, or to lie like gentlemen if they don’t.
—Harold Lawlor, “The Unknown Lady” 1
The twenty-nine short stories published by Harold Lawlor (1910–1992) in
Weird Tales, spanning two of the three decades of the magazine’s hallmark
run, are characterized by their self-conscious conflation of pulp conventions
and mainstream literary techniques (most often parodying the former and
quietly incorporating the latter), offering his readers an engaging synthesis of
the urbane and the fantastic. Employing a narrative voice that melds wistful
reflection on personal accomplishments with a yearning to escape the mundane, Lawlor modestly shuns the cosmic/eldritch resonance of Lovecraft’s
fiction, the dynamics and passion of Howard’s horror fantasy, and the baroque, apocalyptic atmosphere of Clark Ashton Smith’s narratives to create
an interface between supernatural/fantasy elements and the verisimilitude of
the glossy monthlies’ literary fiction during the same period.
His stories are frequently whimsical and self-deprecating, but also learned
in their literary/cultural allusions, often narrated by middle-class characters
whose intellectual aspirations considerably outstrip their material means, or
by successful characters who still possess a bourgeois consumerist mentality.
Either way, the figures were constructed to offer a range of appeal to readers,
resulting in the sympathetic protagonists who first attracted an audience for
his work in Fantastic Adventures (1942–1943). While Lawlor today is not as
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Sidney Sondergard
recognizably synonymous with the Weird Tales run of the 1940s and ’50s as
Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, Edmond Hamilton, and Seabury Quinn, his name was featured on the cover of Weird Tales multiple
times (beginning with the March 1945 issue and concluding with the July
1952 issue), 2 reflecting his popularity with readers.
Popular magazines such as Collier’s, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal,
and Saturday Evening Post sold copies in the millions. While sales of copies
of all-fiction magazines from Argosy to Doc Savage, All-Story to The Shadow, numbered only in the hundreds of thousands, “the all-fiction magazines
outnumbered their more polished cousins, and all told they probably had a far
larger audience.” 3 The disparity between the mass market monthlies and a
pulp such as Weird Tales was vast: circulation for the Saturday Evening Post
by 1930, for example, was already 2,891,773, 4 whereas even at the height of
Weird Tales’s popularity the periodical never topped 50,000 in circulation in
the years prior to its September 1954 issue. 5 A writer like Lawlor, who wrote
primarily for a single pulp, didn’t make a living from his published work;
hence he was simply mirroring personal experience in creating characters
who aspired to literary success but were resigned to the reality of unfulfilled
ambitions.
FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, WEIRD TALES, AND
LAWLOR’S CONFLATION OF GENRES
Lawlor’s stories for Weird Tales exhibit facility with a range of popular
genres from romance to detective fiction and hence are quite eclectic in the
narrative voices they portray. In the October–November 1953 issue of Fantastic Universe, 6 he was identified as one of the “stfantasy [i.e., scientifantasy] stand-bys” along with such authors as Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury—a testament to his ability to synthesize diverse genre elements. His
specific entry into what Lovecraft had characterized as “imaginative fiction,” 7 with its interweaving of the mundane with the extraordinary, combining horror, fantasy, and science fiction elements, appears in the stories he
published in Fantastic Adventures. “The Eternal Priestess” (April 1942), his
first story for the pulps, reveals how Terry Leach, the nephew of a prominent
Egyptologist, falls in love with an exotic woman named T’Risha, only to
learn that for having stolen Nefertiti’s lover she has been cursed with an
inversion of the myth of Tithonus: “My body ever young—my mind and my
memory weighted, sickened with the evil of the world—appalled by the
things I’ve witnessed!” 8 The male lover’s body has been perfectly preserved
to resist decay for three millennia (specifically to torment T’Risha), but when
Terry learns of it his only frame of reference for understanding such a phe-
“To Hell and Gone”
213
nomenon is his boyhood memory of the public display of Enrico Caruso’s
corpse. 9
While Mary F. Corey has noted the New Yorker’s penchant in the first
half of the twentieth century for either exoticizing or lionizing ethnic others
“while concurrently patronizing them,” 10 Lawlor’s early stories display a
multiculturalism that is informed, respectful, and consciously resistant to
stereotypes. “The Manchu Coffin” (December 1942), for example, features a
character named Piet Van Druten (“not the stolid, phlegmatic Dutchman of
fiction, but a man of great personal magnetism and immense nervous energy—a heritage, no doubt, from his Javanese mother” 11), who discovers the
coffin that “first held the body of Kung Fu-tse, the philosopher” 12 (i.e.,
Confucius), and was reputed to bring back to life any body placed within it.
Its operating principle, however, is derived from Jungian psychology: it only
works on someone who “didn’t entirely lose his hold on his soul, his animus.” 13 Reflecting the wartime setting of the narrative, Van Druten hopes to
use the coffin to resurrect scientist Frederic Robles, who died while perfecting a device (for amplifying high-frequency sound waves) that could have
ended the war swiftly in favor of the allies.
Quickly finding an audience with the readers of Fantastic Adventures and
favor with editor Ray Palmer, Lawlor published two linked stories there that
ran in concurrent issues: “Daughters of Darkness” (April 1943) and “The
Irresistible Perfume” (May 1943). Their protagonist, feature-writing journalist Bill Mitchell, meets a former stripper named Maribel and falls in love
with her just as she is being recruited to provide entertainment in Hell for its
frustrated denizens. Satan (Maribel coyly refers to Lucifer as “Lucy”) has
already recruited the most illustrious beauties of the ancient world, including
Salome, the Queen of Sheba, and Cleopatra, to little avail, as the damned
clamor for more exciting entertainment. Maribel uses iconic associations to
belittle her iconic rivals (“No wonder Cleopatra takes the men out on a barge.
That’s the only way she can keep ’em from running away”; “Poor Sheba.
Can’t get to first-base with men unless she gives ’em presents” 14), and
proves to be more than Satan and his captive audience can handle (“If that
gave Herod a thrill,” exclaims Maribel, “my Red Garter number back on
Earth would have sent him into convulsions!” 15). To his blend of historical
and biblical narrative, Lawlor adds the world-weary tone of the noir detective, as Bill closes by allowing as how “there are times when I look back on
Hell rather longingly” after three years of marriage to Maribel. 16
Bill and Maribel find Satan waiting for them in “The Irresistible Perfume,” returning home to find him drinking a highball and listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on their phonograph, taking the opportunity to
relax: he has been harried by “the hordes of Nazis and Japs we’re receiving
down here” and says that “a coal shortage is rumored, so [he’s] busy installing electric ovens to take care of the overflow.” 17 A villain named Golgoth
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(for the archetypal site of villainy, Golgotha) kidnaps a feisty waitress named
Chotsy (cf. German schatzi, or darling), who has been soaked in an experimental perfume that no male can resist, and sabotages Allied factories supporting the war effort by drawing workers to pursue his feminine hostage.
Bill is irresistibly drawn into the spy intrigue/science fiction conflict, employing the hard-boiled private investigator’s diction as he notes, “I may look
like a gorilla, but I got a heart could be stirred with a spoon,” and recalling
after being hit over the head, “I went out like a match in a high wind.” 18 The
stories in Fantastic Adventures already display Lawlor’s pleasure in multilingual cultural allusions and in the conflation of popular genres. While the pulp
was printed as a monthly during the span of the five stories he published
there (1942–1943), its subsequent cutback to a bimonthly schedule likely
helped to persuade Lawlor to continue submitting to Weird Tales, where his
first story was published in May 1943.
The proliferation of fiction subgenres in the pulps during Weird Tales’s
first era of publication interestingly parallels what Tony Tanner has described as the “unusually strong tendency towards that schematic” in
American literary fiction, the “attempt to evoke a personal stability and clarification as a result of a marked lack of confidence in the presence and
pressures” of the wartime and post-wartime environment. 19 The period between the world wars gave rise in American literature to “every possible
mood and trend of thought”: “Fright, pessimism, fortitude, exaltation, selfishness, altruism, corruption, idealism—all these could easily be found.” 20
The pulps reflected this simultaneity of moods and the desire for “a personal
stability” by offering specific subgenre niches where readers could find the
values, plots, and degree of realism or escapism that was personally rewarding. Weird Tales persisted in its support for supernatural/occult and fantasy
stories, but increasingly also looked back nostalgically on the period when
Lovecraft and Howard were first contributing to it. The magazine’s tradition
of reprinting earlier stories, beginning in 1928, may have contributed in the
later years of its run to readers turning to other entertainment sources. 21
Certainly, the magazine explicitly acknowledged its respect for well-developed narratives: in the March 1947 issue, for example, editor Dorothy McIlwraith defends “a slightly smaller total of stories” with the rationale that “we
are bringing you three long novelettes,” including one by “Harold Lawlor
who can always be counted on to shake a mean bit of horror and fantasy your
way.” 22
With the exception of the occasional tale that displays a more conventionally formulaic approach to horror fiction, 23 Lawlor most often sets up surprising reversals of reader expectations. “The Dark Brothers” (September
1945), a horror variant on the Cain and Abel narrative of brothers as polar
opposites, is given a classical turn when the two brothers are revealed to be
“Night’s dusky children,” 24 literally, Sleep and Death. “The Unknown Lady”
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215
(September 1950) inverts the ghost story: the thoroughly unlikable braggart
Greg Leyden (“I never liked him, and always will,” remarks Al, the story’s
writer protagonist, himself a writer of horror stories and accused of having “a
diseased imagination” by Leyden 25) is told by all his acquaintances at a party
that the most beautiful woman they have ever seen wants to meet him. After
building his expectation, he is led to an empty chair, where the others pretend
to speak to the nonexistent lady; Leyden, however, proceeds to fall in love
with the woman, leading the others to conclude that he is either crazy or
having them on. A final twist surprises even Al the author of weird tales, as
the imaginary woman turns out to have been a genuine ghost.
There is a pervasive element of self-parody in much of Lawlor’s work for
Weird Tales, of the sort that Richard Poirier recognizes in the work of popular authors of literary fiction of that time. It supersedes “the mere questioning
of the validity of any given invention by proposing the unimpeded opportunity for making new ones,” 26 particularly insofar as it complements the conflation of subject matter and genres so prevalent in Lawlor’s stories. As even
the title of “Djinn and Bitters” (September 1950) suggests, there is a palpable
degree of disaffection in narrator Pete Bartlett’s jealous conflict with a djinn
over his new wife, Connie, and the author’s own frustrations intersect with
his protagonist’s, arguing that the djinn has had the easier life by far (“You
think you’ve got it tough? You should try living in the post-war world”)
while enduring the djinn’s insinuations about Connie (who’s “one smart-type
tomato”: “Married to her, I’d hang onto my gold teeth with both hands, if I
were you”). 27 The romantic conflict, spiced with the sardonic humor of hardboiled mystery dialogue, is further enhanced by self-conscious allusion to the
narrative he is writing (“To think that I thought then that the situation was
grave! Had I but known, as they say in the mystery novels!”) and to his
narrator’s self-awareness as a fictional construct (“Almost it will seem to you
as if I’m stepping out of character,” Pete solemnly tells Connie). 28 This
typifies Lawlor’s technique of creating rapport with his audience by foregrounding their mutual experience as readers and then revealing to them the
mechanisms by which the narrative has been created.
METAFICTION AS A BRIDGE FROM PULP TO POP
Lawlor’s work reminds us that metafiction—fiction that depicts the very act
of its creation, or that embeds the aesthetic process or decisions of the writer
within the narrative—was not exclusively a product of John Barth and the
post–World War II period. His stories regularly reference authors of literary
fiction—Homer, Shakespeare, Pope, Edward FitzGerald, Poe, Yeats, even
contemporary writers such as W. Somerset Maugham and E. Phillips Oppenheim 29—with his acknowledgment of them and of the act of writing func-
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tioning as a trope in his Weird Tales stories. His characters, frequently writers who are constrained by self-doubts or more tangible restrictions, nevertheless find ways to express their creative urges; even Kerry Murnane, consigned to “an institution for the mentally afflicted” in “Tatiana” (January
1945), successfully solicits from his attendant, Myles, “paper and ink to
write,” though “not a letter, as Myles thought, but a story.” 30
Lawlor invests the sentences of his writers with rhetorical power that the
characters sometimes find themselves obliged to autoexplicate: take, for example, the phrase, “Constance Emerson was agitated,” from “The Previous
Incarnation” (July 1949): “That’s a simple declarative sentence to those of
you who never knew her; but to others like myself, it’s a statement as startling as if I was to tell you, in all earnest, that the Wrigley Building had just
gone for a short stroll down Michigan Boulevard.” 31 In addition to establishing the personalities of Constance and of the narrator here, Lawlor uses this
commentary to cue the reader to imagine an image too absurd to exist—a
creative analogue, perhaps, of Lovecraft’s inexpressible or unthinkable terror.
Since metafiction emphasizes “the world as a construction or artifice,” 32
readers of metafiction are prompted “to question how their own worlds are
similar textually” to the metafictional worlds they encounter. 33 Like every
one of Lawlor’s readers, visual artist Byron Kane, the narrator of “The Cinnabar Redhead” (July 1946), is continually facing the pressures of one deadline or another (“There was that painting he was doing for Denta Toothpaste;
there was the March cover for Metropolitan, still unfinished” 34). When he
finds the title’s beauty at the site of an auto crash, she warns him not to take
Canyon Road, then blurs and disappears; when the same thing recurs, Byron
calls upon a lawyer friend to help him identify her and learns that the woman
is Miss Fleury Lennon, a torch singer at the Cinnabar Café. Driving on
Canyon Road to catch up with her, he finds Fleury dead at the scene of an
accident, tries to flag down an oncoming car, but is also hit. Shifting into
second-person narrative voice, Lawlor forces the reader to experience the
scene just as Byron, the visual artist, might imagine it being depicted: “You
lay there at the road’s edge, your limbs bent at crazy angles, jagged red
streaks of pain etching themselves against the black of your waning consciousness.” 35 The language of the artist (“red streaks,” “etching”) reaffirms
that this is a constructed world, a matter of artifice, yet it also connects us to
the abstract threat of imagined experience that is at the heart of horror fiction’s emotional power.
Lawlor’s narrative voice, when moving in a metafictional direction, continually vacillates between a serious authorial self-consciousness and a playful pop culture sensibility that enjoys mocking the seriousness of the writer’s
self-image. “Djinn and Bitters” accomplishes this by linking the reader directly to popular culture. The djinn complains of his imprisonment, saying
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217
that he was “[b]ottled up like a pickled onion” until he asks himself, “[A]m I
working for Heinz?” A hotel dining room is dismissed as the kind of place
that “Duncan Hines would certainly never recommend.” Connie wishes for
the djinn to make hubby Pete the perfect man, combining “the charm of
Charles Boyer, the physique of Victor Mature, and the looks of Tyrone
Power,” but suddenly has a change of heart and commands the djinn to
restore Pete’s former looks, “Before you could say Jack Robinson.” 36 Embedded in the familiar, and hence evoking a degree of verisimilitude, such
references orient the reader while freeing Lawlor to explore his own unique
approaches to the weird tale.
Hence his description of antagonist Martin Cox in “Grotesquerie” (November 1950) resists the stereotypical pulp image by drawing attention to the
crafting of it: “None of this obvious eyes-too-close-together business—that
description so beloved of authors in delineating villainy.” 37 The effect is to
encourage the reader, as an appreciative co-conspirator, to poke fun at the
pulps themselves, a tactic subsequently perfected in 1952 under the editorship of Harvey Kurtzman at Mad magazine. Readers were also being progressively drawn away from the horror pulps to horror comics. 38 Under Bill
Gaines, EC Comics’ International Crime Patrol (already retitled from International Comics in 1947) in 1948 began running horror stories, which were
sufficiently successful that the comic was retitled The Crypt of Terror for its
April–May 1950 issue (no. 17). Including additional titles The Haunt of Fear
and The Vault of Horror, Gaines employed a series of creepy narrators—the
Old Witch, the Vault-Keeper, and the Crypt-Keeper—to introduce each tale,
with the kinds of prefatory taglines reminiscent of the opening illustrations
and story excerpts in Weird Tales, further emphasizing the smorgasbord of
horror subgenres on offer. 39 These tactics worked so well that by the advent
of Atlas Comics’ Menace, Stan Lee, who was writing all four of the tales in
each issue (from no. 1 [March 1953] to no. 4 [September 1953]), would
include a similar range of subgenres plus a label in the opening panel of each
story (like the later self-aggrandizement in 1960s Marvel comics) that read,
“A Tale of Maddening Menace!” The weird comics market was on the rise,
and unfortunately Weird Tales was already in decline by the time Lawlor was
becoming recognized as a regular contributor to the pulp’s pages.
PULP CONSUMPTION: THE EPHEMERAL AND THE TIMELESS
Part of Lawlor’s strategy for constructing his tales is to embrace the transient
nature of the pulp medium itself by offering his readers the chance to enjoy a
taste of “the good life” while engaged in the act of devouring his narratives.
The diction of his characters remains conversational and accessible even
when he alludes to sophisticated concepts, to the lifestyles associated with
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financial success, or to high art. Just as in noir discourse, where a character’s
world is often redefined after catalytic events “in terms of self-interest and
personal possession,” 40 Lawlor’s characters can be damaged or enhanced by
financial good fortune, depending upon their personal philosophies and essential moral compasses. In “Nemesis” (May 1948), George, a self-described
“dull, prosy bachelor lawyer of forty-two years,” marries the popular actress
Madeline Ames, and though they eat their meals at a “long mahogany table
bearing its delicate litter of lace and silver and crystal” and lead a life of
luxury, their idea of a before-bed treat is to “split a bottle of beer.” 41 And
while “a copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, its chrome yellows thick and vivid
against the dark background of the wall,” hangs above their “mirror-fronted
credenza,” 42 the many signs of their material success cannot disguise a guilty
secret that eventually catches up with Madeline.
The once-glamorous though now faded Hollywood heroine Sheila Sayre
of “The Beasts That Tread the World” (September 1948), anticipating the
similar portrait of Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard by
two years, offers another glimpse of a glamorous lifestyle, though without
the self-deprecating, bourgeois sensibility of George, the narrator of “Nemesis,” as a balance. Sheila has staved off aging through “strict diet, rigid
massage” and “careful beauty-parlor ministrations,” and while her eighthfloor luxury apartment is “quite a come-down” from “her Beverly Hills mansion, and Malibu Beach ‘cottage,’ and her pied-à-terre in New York,” she
still sleeps on “sheets of palest pink crepe de chine” and attends a benefit
dinner not to be charitable, but in order to show off “a bewildering creation
of black net and sequins, with bird-of-paradise feathers in her high-piled
hair.” 43 The tale’s narrator, Dr. John Derry, whose success has been hard
earned (“I work long hours as a doctor”), realizes that Sheila has literally
been trying to outrun “fear of old age,” and finally succumbs to a macabre
end suggested by lines from W. B. Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen
(“The years like Great Black Oxen tread the world, / And God the herdsman
goads them on behind!”). 44 Sheila’s desperate ephemerality is underscored
by the figurative resonance of ageless poetry as Derry discovers her literally
trampled corpse.
Frequent referencing of classical music is another of Lawlor’s stylistic
tropes, highlighting and complementing the cultural literacy of his characters, signifying the timelessness of art that often accompanies the ephemera
of wealth. His first story for Weird Tales, “The Specter in the Steel” (May
1943), revolves around the central mystery of Cio-Cio-San’s sadly hopeful
aria from Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, “Un bel di vedremo” (“One
fine day we’ll see”), issuing in a beautiful tenor voice from the walls of the
Trevor Building where no singer is present. Though the building’s governing
board pay Arthur Reynolds, the building manager, five hundred dollars a
month, he is unable to solve the matter—and when he tries to suggest super-
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219
natural causes behind it, “the board made it clear, they preferred reading
fantastic mystery stories in books and magazines.” 45 Opera is cited again in
“Mayaya’s Little Green Men” (November 1946), when Jay, the story’s soapopera-writing narrator, is caught in a meditative moment “at the piano, picking out with one finger” the “Méditation Religieuse” from act 2 of Massenet’s Thaïs. 46 These operatic pieces connote a melancholic beauty that cannily underscores the emotional conflict behind the mysteries in each of the
stories.
Even Lawlor’s entirely fictional references to classical music are contextualized with an intriguing foundation in reality. The duo pianists Marcatti
and Ebsen, for example, who are playing at Orchestra Hall in “The Cinnabar
Redhead,” may be figments of the author’s imagination, but the famed La
Scala opera house, cited as one place where torch singer Fleury would never
perform, is not. 47 But the most detailed of Lawlor’s fictitious classical music
references appears in “The Terror in Teakwood” (March 1947), a variation
on the Hands of Orlac story (most recently remade at the time as Mad Love
in 1935, with Peter Lorre). Pianist Ondia Hurok announces that he intends to
perform Czarnowitz’s Seventh Piano Concerto, despite the fact that Hurok
refuses to rehearse the piece with the accompanying orchestra prior to performance (though demanding “a Mason and Hamlin for him to practice on”),
and as the story’s mild-mannered narrator, Giles Welch, tells his beloved,
“Czarnowitz had a phenomenal handspan. Abnormal, really. Nobody on
God’s earth ever had a pair of hands like his. Those chords on the Seventh,
Leonie! They’re impossible to anyone else.” 48 While the knowledge of music
implied in these allusions undoubtedly says something significant about
Lawlor himself, his incorporation of them plays a crucial role in the development of his narrator-protagonists as sensitive individuals.
LAWLOR’S MILQUETOAST PROTAGONISTS:
WHEN BASHFUL MEETS BIZARRE
Caspar Milquetoast, the “soul” of H. T. Webster’s syndicated cartoon The
Timid Soul and a recurring pop culture icon throughout the duration of Lawlor’s Weird Tales publication run, provides an aesthetic touchstone for Lawlor’s protagonists who are most typically lovable but lacking in confidence,
earnest and hard working but unrecognized and underappreciated, honest but
often scorned for it. Webster’s close friend, Philo Calhoun, recognizes that
the cartoonist and his timorous creation share many of the same endearing
qualities of self-deprecation: “an almost hypersensitive consideration for the
other fellow’s feelings with an inherent distaste for rows,” resulting in “a
cautious approach to many normal situations” 49 Unlike Webster’s Caspar
Milquetoast, Lawlor’s milquetoast characters are prompted by fantastic cata-
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lysts into self-affirming action that rewards and empowers them, instead of
simply leaving them bewildered. The very timidity and self-consciousness
that predispose them toward nervousness and hence make them ideal for
what John W. Campbell Jr., editor of Weird Tales’s fantasy rival Unknown/
Unknown Worlds (1939–1943), characterized as “the grim and ghardsley”
story, 50 can, however, be recoded in Lawlor’s stories as appealing qualities.
Hence Henry Hildreth, mild-mannered curator of the Forest Refuge Museum,
is selected as the perfect man by the amorous Stinklyn, talking title character
of “The Wayward Skunk” (September 1944), who articulates a reactionary
aesthetic: “[Y]ou get tired of wide-shouldered, slim-hipped heroes. It’s a
relief to meet a narrow-shouldered guy with a paunch.” 51 The initially unwanted attention from Stinklyn eventually boosts Henry’s self-esteem before
the lady skunk finally concedes that the relationship must end.
Indeed, the encounters with strange phenomena that are the trademarks of
Weird Tales inevitably trigger significant changes in these reticent characters. Kerry Murnane, the “quiet twin—the shy one, overlooked in the background” of “Tatiana,” is typical of the milquetoast narrator in Lawlor’s fiction, expressing a deficiency of self-esteem that makes other characters all
seem vastly more powerful, appealing, and successful. Tim, Kerry’s brother,
has a way “of making my every word and action seem the ineffectual fumblings of a fool.” 52 Once the clairvoyance of the title character begins to
manifest itself and she predicts that Kerry will “grow to hate Tim for coming
between us,” he first becomes assertive, even dictating orders to his previously condescending brother, before his growing resentment escalates fatally.
Affluent but timid Mr. Galloway, in “The Door Beyond” (May 1949),
blames himself for his May–December marriage to Sylvia not working out as
he wished: he was “a humble man, despite his wealth, and deemed it due to
some lack in himself that he was unable to inspire love.” And like Lawlor’s
other sympathetic protagonists, he “read a great deal and he had his library of
recorded music.” 53 When he discovers that a particular painting in his collection has the power to draw viewers into it, Galloway maneuvers the unfaithful Sylvia and her lover into walking into it and through a door from which
he ensures they will never return.
George’s apologetic remark in “Nemesis,” that the “legal profession is
hardly conducive to the exercise of imagination, but I tried my best to reconstruct the story I’d just heard, to interpret it according to my suspicions,” 54
reflects the kinds of self-doubts that Lawlor’s milquetoast characters routinely place upon themselves and their abilities. Kenny Wilcox, the ignominious
“saloon reporter for a daily paper, covering the night club beat” in “The
Girdle of Venus” (September 1947), takes no pleasure from the amorous
advances of Baby or from her support for his professional work (figuring “he
was probably awfully intelligent, nearly,” because, she asserts as proof,
“You’re a reporter on a newspaper!”), until she dons the girdle that makes
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221
her irresistible to all men. Then when she is gone one morning, he blames
himself: “Love couldn’t feed on thin air. His indifference these past few
months must have killed whatever love she’d felt for him.” 55 Press agent
Pete Bartlett, in “Djinn and Bitters,” makes his pre-djinn criticisms of new
wife, Connie, but not without including self-denigration as their complement:
“You are please not to believe that I’m trying to set myself up here as her
superior. I’ve had my bird-brained moments, too, and plenty of them.” 56 J. P.
Telotte has argued that the lesson of horror narratives like John Carpenter’s
Halloween is that “we must open our eyes more fully to our human surroundings, seeing more responsibly and staying more aware of our role in the
world in which we dwell.” 57 For Lawlor’s docile and self-doubting protagonists, this seems to be precisely what they cannot do—until they are transformed by encountering the uncanny and the fantastic, no longer able to
remain reticent and disengaged.
“WRITERS WOULD LEAD HAPPIER LIVES”:
THE AUTHOR AS FICTION
In an interview, Lawlor reveals, “I wrote my first story at the age of nine,” in
1919, and enthusiastically read Weird Tales “and Poe and Sax Rohmer instead of homework,” but then “the Muse went into hiding for quite a while,”
during which time he held the variety of jobs “which seems to be the common lot of all writers. (And incidentally is becoming as corny for publicity
purposes as the erstwhile convent background of every actress.)” He notes
that the desire to write returned to him during the Depression: for “escape,
probably—increasing deafness made jobs hard for me to get.” Regarding his
Weird Tales story “Specter in the Steel,” Lawlor notes that it “came from
nowhere. One of those ‘blue moon’ stories. All of a sudden it was just
there—plot, characters, background and all.” But this recollection also triggers a telling remark: “I don’t mind adding that if this sort of thing happened
oftener writers would lead happier lives.” 58 Or as disgruntled writer Eddie
Walsh, in Lawlor’s “The Peripatetic Corpse” (March 1945), puts it when he
is afraid that he might be washed up, thanks to a dry spell: “I will be if I don’t
write another story soon, before editors forget me. If I could only think of an
opening.” 59
The opening section of “Tamara, the Georgian Queen” (July 1943) reveals that after eight “lean years of marriage,” Thorn and Eve Wallace “were
at last on top of the world. For I’d written a best-seller. It was one of those
phenomena of the publishing world that make critics tear their hair out by the
roots. It wasn’t a good book. The critics panned it to hell and gone.” 60 But
the book is “full of the good old corn,” so the “public loved it,” three film
companies vie for the rights to it, and Olympic Productions wins the bidding
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war with “a sum running into six figures,” 61 at a time when an issue of Weird
Tales cost fifteen cents. Here is both the fantasy of the author making it big
and the frustration of writing for pay rather than for prestige. 62 In the Weird
Tales interview, Lawlor revealed that he had to keep “writing, tearing up,
throwing away” this story, “until at last the opening felt right and said what I
wanted it to say. The rest of the story went along all right then.” 63
While Weird Tales persisted in its commitment to narratives of the supernatural and the fantastic, the market began to shift in favor of quasi-realistic
new subgenres like the “weird menace” stories, introduced by Dime Mystery
in 1933, that “excluded the supernatural, and featured elaborate scenes of
sadistic and bizarre torture.” 64 The visceral impact of such narrative violence
(which continues to resonate with audiences of contemporary horror film
franchises) and their consequent popularity with readers looking for new
thrills increasingly became a driving factor for pulp editors hiring writers
“who could turn out stories based on a title idea supplied by an editor” or on
“a cover illustration that had been commissioned before anyone had written
anything to go with it.” 65 Artistically and aesthetically, this was antithetical
to Lawlor’s wry, original approach to imaginative fiction.
Despite working in a disposable medium and receiving surprisingly little
attention from archivists and historians of the Weird Tales oeuvre, 66 Lawlor
didn’t disappear entirely from the popular consciousness. In part because
Weird Tales “was to become the most anthologized pulp of all time,” 67
Hollywood didn’t forget about Lawlor in the decades following the publication of his stories. The television program Thriller (hosted by Boris Karloff)
purchased rights to four of his stories and filmed episodes adapting three of
them, 68 while “What Beckoning Ghost?” was made into a feature-length
film, Dominique (1978), directed by Michael Anderson.
Employing an authorial voice that privileges irony and the use of supernatural/fantasy elements to amplify character development rather than to
satisfy genre specifications or to exist for their own sake, Lawlor draws upon
the exoticism of pulp romance, the canny world-weariness of noir fiction,
and the fantasy/science fiction/horror composite that typifies early Weird
Tales narratives, to invent stories that revel in their temporality (displaying a
metafictional consciousness of the medium’s ephemerality). 69 All the while
they remain accessible and engaging, modestly acknowledging that they
share the smallest of spaces in the literary continuum with the world of high
art to which they frequently allude. By daring to be as grounded in the
mundane as he is in the extraordinary, Harold Lawlor models the kind of
literary realism that anticipated later mainstream writers of speculative fiction, from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling.
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NOTES
1. Weird Tales 42, no. 6 (September 1950): 55.
2. The November 1945 issue devotes the cover art to a Lawlor tale (with copy highlighting
“A tale of awful amber doom . . . Harold Lawlor’s ‘The Cranberry Goblet’”). The March 1947
issue features an advertisement promising that the next Weird Tales, coming out March 1,
would contain stories by Seabury Quinn and Harold Lawlor (“In the next Weird Tales,” Weird
Tales 39, no. 10 [March 1947]: 68). Lawlor’s story title “The Peripatetic Corpse” appears on
the March 1945 cover; “The Dark Brothers” appears on the cover of the September 1945 issue;
Lawlor’s name appears on the covers of the September 1946 issue (which included the story
“Xerxes’ Hut”), the May 1947 issue (including “The Black Madonna”), the September 1947
issue (including “The Girdle of Venus”), and the July 1948 issue (including “What Beckoning
Ghost?”); the title “Which’s Witch?” is featured on the cover of the July 1952 issue.
3. Frank M. Robinson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 1998), 8. At the same time, journals of political opinion, like the Nation and the New
Republic, were even more dependent upon “a loyal readership,” as “neither had a circulation
above 40,000.” Merrill D. Peterson, Coming of Age with the New Republic 1938–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 6.
4. Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 307n18.
5. Peter Haining, “Weird Tales”: A Selection in Facsimile of the Best from the World’s
Most Famous Fantasy Magazine (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990), 11.
6. Jeff Prucher, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 223.
7. Imaginative fiction for Lovecraft includes a “poetic element” that explicitly foregrounds
“the imagination, which groups isolated impressions into gorgeous patterns and finds strange
relations and associations among the objects of visible and invisible Nature.” H. P. Lovecraft,
“In Defence of Dagon,” in Miscellaneous Writings, ed. S. T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham
House, 1995), 147.
8. Harold Lawlor, “The Eternal Priestess,” Fantastic Adventures 4, no. 4 (April 1942): 112.
With Terry occupying the position of the genre detective here, Lawlor includes exchanges that
might be heard in any pulp P.I.’s office: Terry notes that T’Risha is “an unusual name,” and she
replies, “I’m—an unusual person” (111).
9. Ibid., 115. Caruso’s wife allowed morticians from Napoli who were renowned as mummifiers to preserve her husband’s body when he died in 1921: “For seven or eight years, opera
lovers made their pilgrimages to the tomb” to pay tribute to the fallen idol. Heather Pringle, The
Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead (New York: Hyperion,
2001), 295.
10. Mary F. Corey, The World through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 122; see also 80–81, 123.
11. Harold Lawlor, “The Manchu Coffin,” Fantastic Adventures 4, no. 12 (December 1942):
206. Such references to non-Western cultures are regular features of Lawlor’s stories. He
portrays similar multiethnicity in “The Black Madonna,” Weird Tales 39, no. 11 (May 1947):
68, where narrator Paul’s Aunt Bea lives on a California estate, “La Casa Encantada,” and
proudly owns the painting of the story’s title, commissioned by “the archbishop of the Coptic
Cathedral at Cairo” in “the fourteenth or fifteenth century.” The painting was once vandalized
by Muslim pillagers of the church, “the painted cheek of the Madonna . . . scarred” by a
“crescent”-shaped “sabre-thrust” (Lawlor, “The Black Madonna,” 71). As George Phelps and
his wife watch a pair of pelicans behaving strangely like their friend, Carl, and his former
beloved, Rose Morley, Nell remarks of the Hindus, “Aren’t they the ones who believe in the
transmigration of souls?” “Lovers’ Meeting,” Weird Tales 44, no. 2 (January 1952): 61.
12. Lawlor, “The Manchu Coffin,” 208.
13. Ibid., 211. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of pop psychology and its presence in
Lawlor’s pulp fiction. The references permeate most of Lawlor’s stories; twenty-four years
before Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy
Tales, “Which’s Witch?” explains the effectiveness of a voodoo doll by noting that “there
224
Sidney Sondergard
remains the subconscious, or unconscious mind to be reckoned with. Witness the way all of us
believe, as children, in the grim horror of fairy tales” (Harold Lawlor, “Which’s Witch?” Weird
Tales 44, no. 5 [July 1952]: 28). But he can also articulate the pop culture dismissal of
psychiatrists: “He’d tell me I was seeing the girl because I hated my parents because I was
frightened by a caterpillar at the age of three!” (Harold Lawlor, “The Cinnabar Redhead,”
Weird Tales 39, no. 6 [July 1946], 68).
14. Harold Lawlor, “Daughters of Darkness,” Fantastic Adventures 5, no. 4 (April 1943):
96.
15. Ibid., 97.
16. Ibid., 98.
17. Harold Lawlor, “The Irresistible Perfume,” Fantastic Adventures 5, no. 5 (May 1943):
114.
18. Ibid., 106, 109. Cf. the calculatedly learned diction of George describing the pelicans in
“Lovers’ Meeting”: “They’re like long-nosed, supercilious Puritans, pompous and solemn, and
yet with an underlying and paradoxical rakishness” that “is somehow endearing” (60).
19. Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (New York: Harper & Row,
1971), 48–49.
20. Robert E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States, 4th ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1978), 1254.
21. A letter from reader Dave Hammond, for example, supports the notion of reprints, “but
wonder[s] if this is not making it harder for the new names in the field to get ahead,” a problem
since reprints tended to be longer, more developed pieces: “Doesn’t seem to balance right
somehow.” “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales 45, no. 1 (March 1953): 71. This “imbalance” of preference for the more literary work of the previous generation—generally shared by the readers
who regularly write in to praise the reprint work of Lovecraft et al.—might have persuaded
innovative novice writers to send their work elsewhere, perhaps contributing to the end of
Weird Tales just eighteen months later.
22. “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales 39, no. 10 (March 1947): 94.
23. Lawlor demonstrates his familiarity and facility with the conventions of Lovecraftian
horror in “The Legend of 228,” perhaps his most mainstream example of genre fiction (and
hence his personally most atypical Weird Tales story), where the house referenced by the title is
painted a “scabrous” gray and issues forth “strange guttural mutterings,” and the area’s inhabitants “have kept to themselves and inter-married as to be almost a race apart” (Weird Tales 38,
no. 5 [May 1945]: 43). The monster inhabiting the house is characterized as “the hairless,
furless, featherless monstrosity, its hideous body gleaming like slimy, wet red rubber, its
opalescent eyes, glaring,” the only sound reaching the people in the street being “viscid bubbling” (50). Cf. the less formulaic but also less successful “Lover in Scarlet,” which fails to
achieve Lawlor’s ordinarily smooth synthesis of pulp genres, featuring the ne’er-do-well gambler Fred “Lucky” Kolbey (“Hunches. He got ’em. He played ’em, he always won”), who is
eventually approached by the skeletal figure of the title: “‘Sweetheart!’ it grated in a hideous
travesty of a voice” (Weird Tales 41, no. 2 [January 1949]: 53–54).
24. Harold Lawlor, “The Dark Brothers,” Weird Tales 39, no. 1 (September 1945): 73.
25. Lawlor, “The Unknown Lady,” 54–55. In a turn of delightful self-reflexive irony, Lawlor has Al reply to Leyden’s question of whether he really believes in all the supernatural
nonsense when he writes, “If I didn’t believe in it at least while I was writing it, how do you
think I could ever convince my readers, if any, that it really happened?” (55).
26. Richard Poirier, “The Politics of Self-Parody,” Partisan Review 35, no. 3 (Summer
1968): 353.
27. Harold Lawlor, “Djinn and Bitters,” Weird Tales 42, no. 4 (May 1950): 25, 28.
28. Ibid., 29, 33. There’s a similar degree of self-conscious/self-parodic artifice in “Xerxes’
Hut,” where the narrator, Danny, alludes to the “grisly denouement” that lies ahead in his story.
Like other boys who believe the local legends (ultimately proven false) of Xerxes Andreapolous being a murderer, Danny relates his suspicions to the reader, implicating himself as
another author of the eerie myth of Xerxes: “I think we almost expected to see a thin river of
blood—‘gore,’ we would have called it—flow suddenly from under the plank door of the
cabin.” Harold Lawlor, “Xerxes’ Hut,” Weird Tales 39, no. 7 (September 1946): 84, 86.
“To Hell and Gone”
225
29. Referenced, respectively (though not exclusively), in “The Diversions of Mme. Gamorra,” Weird Tales 39, no. 3 (January 1946): 74, 79; “Unknown Lady,” 56; “What Beckoning
Ghost?” Weird Tales 40, no. 5 (July 1948): 26; “Nemesis,” Weird Tales 40, no. 4 (May 1948):
26; “Lovers’ Meeting,” Weird Tales 44, no. 2 (January 1952): 59; “The Beasts That Tread the
World,” Weird Tales 40, no. 6 (September 1948), 55; “The Peripatetic Corpse,” Weird Tales
38, no. 4 (March 1945): 28; and “Grotesquerie,” Weird Tales 43, no. 1 (November 1950): 48.
30. Harold Lawlor, “Tatiana,” Weird Tales 38, no. 3 (January 1945): 82–83.
31. Harold Lawlor, “The Previous Incarnation,” Weird Tales 41, no. 5 (July 1949): 74.
32. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (New
York: Methuen, 1984), 9.
33. Grant Stirling, “Neurotic Narrative: Metafiction and Object-Relations Theory,” College
Literature 27, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 82.
34. Lawlor, “The Cinnabar Redhead,” 66.
35. Ibid., 71.
36. Lawlor, “Djinn and Bitters,” 25, 30–31.
37. Lawlor, “Grotesquerie,” 53.
38. Paul Lopes notes that the dominant tradition “of ‘realism’ in comic book illustration”
ironically “came from illustration found in pulp magazines or pulp comic strips” (Demanding
Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book [Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2009], 4). An acknowledgment of the comics’ growing market power compared to the pulps’
appears in the November 1940 issue of Weird Tales, when it began offering its own illustrated
section, Irwin J. Weill’s “Superstitions and Taboos” feature, combining cultural/historical information with comic book–like line drawings in page layout reminiscent of Ripley’s Believe It
or Not (which had been running in syndication under that title since 1919). Capitalizing on the
realistic elements of the pulp narratives, comic books also began bringing the “sexuality,
violence, and gore of the pulps” to life (Lopes, Demanding Respect, 5).
39. In The Haunt of Fear, no. 17 (September–October 1950), for example, this included
captions for the stories “Nightmare!” (“A Psychological Study,” 1), “Television Terror!” (“A
Journey into the Supernatural,” 9), “Monster Maker!” (“A Scientific SuspenStory,” 17), and
“Horror Beneath the Streets!” (“The Witch’s Cauldron!” 25).
40. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 212.
41. Lawlor, “Nemesis,” 24. Inverting this formula, a Lawlor character might come from a
comfortable background but choose to live in reduced circumstances in order to remain true to
personal beliefs: Paul, for example, has been residing “in a trailer he’d rented in a camp on the
Old Mill Road,” studying demonology, in hopes of summoning evil and then restraining it
forever: “No more death, nor sickness, nor poverty! No more war, nor tragic accidents, nor
cruelty! No more grief, nor fear, nor hatred!” Harold Lawlor, “Amok!” Weird Tales 43, no. 5
(July 1951)]: 88, 93.
42. Lawlor, “Nemesis,” 27. Cf. the description of “Van Gogh’s gloomy painting, The Potato-Eaters” in Lawlor, “Grotesquerie,” 54.
43. Lawlor, “The Beasts That Tread the World,” 49–52.
44. Ibid., 54–55. One of the most memorable artifacts of the wealthy in Lawlor’s narratives
appears in “The Cranberry Goblet” (November 1945), a story notable both for the ornate goblet
of the title, “[s]quare at the top, slightly convex at the sides, its bowl is the color of ripe
cranberries—a live glowing scarlet, deepening sometimes to ruby; its stem and base are of rock
crystal, clear and beautifully cut.” Weird Tales 39, no. 2 (November 1945), 32), and for its rare
female narrator, Mrs. Ann Whittington. Lawlor’s eye for detail in such descriptions is consistently nuanced, encouraging the illusion of verisimilitude.
45. Harold Lawlor, “The Specter in the Steel,” Weird Tales 36, no. 11 (May 1943): 54.
46. Harold Lawlor, “Mayaya’s Little Green Men,” Weird Tales 39, no. 8 (November 1946):
38.
47. Lawlor, “The Cinnabar Redhead,” 66, 69.
48. Harold Lawlor, “The Terror in Teakwood,” Weird Tales 39, no. 10 (March 1947): 75.
Linking Lawlor’s penchant for literary and musical allusions, “Djinn and Bitters” quotes from
226
Sidney Sondergard
Bishop Reginald Heber’s hymn, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (lyrics, 1819): “Every
prospect pleases, and only man is vile” (Lawlor, “Djinn and Bitters,” 31).
49. Philo Calhoun, “A Biographical Sketch,” in The Best of H. T. Webster: A Memorial
Collection (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 12.
50. Stefan D. Dziemianowicz, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (San
Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1991), 7.
51. Harold Lawlor, “The Wayward Skunk,” Weird Tales 38, no. 1 (September 1944): 69.
Henry Hildreth, whom Stinklyn also praises by noting that “he’s full of the milk of human
kindness—a quality rare in the male” (69), hence represents a continuation of William Makepeace Potts, Lawlor’s earliest explicit milquetoast character, from “The Irresistible Perfume”
(Fantastic Adventures, May 1943). The human-beast interaction here is reminiscent of another
of his Fantastic Adventures tales, “Dinky Winky Woo” (August 1943), in which Hubert Ransom, “an amiable nonentity” who “side-stepped trouble whenever possible,” a “civilized,
peace-loving soul” who had “never yet found anything he wanted to fight for,” learns that he
will receive a $3 million bequest from his Uncle Cyril if he cares for Dinky Winky Woo until
the animal’s death. The catch is that the creature is a “sixty-five foot dinosaur, covered with
scaly armor.” “Dinky Winky Woo,” Fantastic Adventures 5, no. 8 (August 1943): 168, 173.
The adoring dinosaur emboldens Hubert to pursue Roxie, a former carnival snake charmer, and
rewards him with an affectionate lick that reflects the opposite of Lovecraft’s “inexpressible
horror”: “inexpressible tenderness” (173).
52. Lawlor, “Tatiana,” 83, 89.
53. Harold Lawlor, “The Door Beyond,” Weird Tales 41, no. 4 (May 1949): 32.
54. Lawlor, “Nemesis,” 32.
55. Harold Lawlor, “The Girdle of Venus,” Weird Tales 39, no. 12 (September 1947):
87–88, 92. This kind of self-loathing is frequently expressed—either sarcastically or seriously—by Lawlor’s introverted characters, like investment counselor Irving Burnett in “Grotesquerie,” who berates himself for temerity when he can’t bring himself to look at the face of his
longtime client, Vera Witmack, mauled by a leopard, when she lifts her veil to show him: “I
winced and hastily averted my glance. I hated myself for it. My face and neck grew red with
shame” (49).
56. Lawlor, “Djinn and Bitters,” 25.
57. J. P. Telotte, “Through a Pumpkin’s Eye: The Reflexive Nature of Horror,” in American
Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press), 127.
58. “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales 36, no. 12 (July 1943): 107–8.
59. Lawlor, “The Peripatetic Corpse,” 39.
60. Cf. Donald “Donnie” Haines, who takes a job as a chauffeur-gardener to wealthy Ballard Powell in order “to work on the novel” he’d been trying to write, since “the job left [him]
time enough to write.” However, he finds when “alone in [his] own apartment, that the book
was far from [his] mind.” “What Beckoning Ghost?” Weird Tales 40, no. 5 (July 1948): 27, 31.
Lawlor’s writers never have an easy time of it.
61. Harold Lawlor, “Tamara, the Georgian Queen,” Weird Tales 36, no. 12 (July 1943):
96–97.
62. Like Jay, the soap-opera-writing narrator of “Mayaya’s Little Green Men,” who asks,
“[W]here would we be if I didn’t get an installment out every day” on “the fictional woes of Ma
Costello and her brood”? When Scooter, his toddler son, interrupts him, Jay is forced to leave
Ma Costello “in the middle of a garrulous, valiant speech, her head bloody but still unbowed as
it were” (Lawlor, “Mayaya’s Little Green Men,” 37–38, 40). Al, the narrator of “The Unknown
Lady,” is a writer of strange tales like Lawlor, who nevertheless has no illusions about the
quality of his work or the literary talents of his ilk: “[F]iction writers are as hammy at heart as
operatic divas” (Lawlor, “The Unknown Lady,” 55). Murray, narrator of “Which’s Witch?”
and author of the daily newspaper feature The Jaundiced Eye, shares Lawlor’s sardonic, ironic
attitude about writing: the “trouble with humorous writing” is that “it sometimes runs away
with you,” causing one’s “critical facilities to go to sleep, and you treat your subject matter too
irreverently, too flippantly” (Lawlor, “Which’s Witch?” 23–24).
“To Hell and Gone”
227
63. “The Eyrie,” 108. Following his description of the writer’s fear upon finishing a story
and sending it off, that there’s nothing left, Lawlor asks, “Who’d want to be a writer?” Then, he
adds, another idea starts to form, and he’s off and running again: “Who wouldn’t want to be a
writer?” (108, emphasis in original).
64. Lee Server, Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers (New York: Facts on File, 2002), 171.
As early as 1939, Weird Tales “found its monopoly of the bizarre challenged. Having launched
Startling Stories, Standard Magazines now issued Strange Stories. The first issue was dated
February 1939 and featured all of Weird Tales’s popular authors: Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Mark Schorer, Otis Adelbert Kline, Henry Kuttner, and Manly Wade Wellman. Bloch,
Derleth, and Kuttner in particular dominated the magazine under their own names and pseudonyms with stories in almost every issue.” Mike Ashley, The Time Machines: The Story of the
Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2000), 139.
65. Server, Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, 96–97.
66. Robert Weinberg’s history of Weird Tales is curiously devoid of any mention of Lawlor.
Even when he reproduces a cover illustration for one of Lawlor’s stories, identifying it as a Lee
Brown Coye cover (“Typical of his work during this period was his cover for ‘The Cranberry
Goblet’ [Fig. 70]”), Weinberg fails to mention the fact that the story is one of Lawlor’s.
Weinberg, The “Weird Tales” Story (West Linn, OR: FAX Collector’s Editions, 1977), 76–77.
67. Frank M. Robinson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (Portland, OR: Collectors Press, 1998), 159.
68. The stories that were filmed included “The Terror in Teakwood” (season 1, episode 33);
“The Black Madonna,” retitled as “The Grim Reaper” (season 1, episode 37); and “What
Beckoning Ghost?” (season 2, episode 1). The script for “Tamara, the Georgian Queen” was
also purchased by Thriller, with Herschel Daugherty selected to direct, but never filmed. Alan
Warren, This Is a Thriller: An Episode Guide, History and Analysis of the Classic 1960s
Television Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 21.
69. Lee Server outlines the full range of the pulp aesthetic that Lawlor clearly embraced:
“[P]ulp as a genus of imaginative reading matter distinguished by mass production, affordability, an intended audience of common as opposed to elite readers, a dependence on formula and
genre; and pulp as a literature aimed at the pleasure centers of the reader, primarily concerned
with sensation and escape.” Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, xi.
Index
10 Story Book, 154
Abbot, Edwin, 85
abjection, 204
“The Abominations of Yondo” (Smith),
70, 154–155, 157
Abrams, M. H., 176
Ackerman, Forest J., 164–165
Acheron, 69
“Adept’s Gambit” (Leiber), 76
Adorno, Theodor W., 7
“An Adventure in Futurity” (Smith), 161
Afghanistan, 69
“Afterward” (Wharton), 154
Alfred, King, 75
Allen, E. A., 123
Allan Quatermain (novel), 63
Allison, James, 69
All-Story Magazine (periodical), x, 63–64,
78n11, 157, 212
Alpine (race), 121
Amazing Detective Stories (periodical),
161
Amazing Stories (periodical), ix, 71, 77,
158, 160–161, 162
American Mercury (periodical), 4
Anderson, Michael, 222
Anderson, Paul L., 64
Anderson, Poul, 77
Anderson, Sherwood, xii
anthropocentrism, 84, 86, 87
anthropology, xvii, 121, 124, 125, 126,
127, 128
ape-men. See hominids
Aquilonia, 69
Archer, Denis, 79n19
Argosy (periodical), x, 8, 64, 78n9, 78n11,
212
Argosy All-Story Weekly. See Argosy
(periodical)
“Arhl-a of the Caves”, 64
Arkham House, 167
Arthurian romance, 76
Aryan (race), 66, 69, 121, 124, 130n29,
134, 140
Aryara, 125
Ashley, Mike, 161
Asmodeus, 178
Asquinth, Lady Cynthia, 163
Assurah, 75
Assyria, 67
Astounding Stories (pulp magazine), ix, 77,
154, 160, 161, 164–165
Asylum (film), 209n3
At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft),
77, 95, 106–107, 164
atavism, 132, 135, 137
Athak, 73
Athelstane, 66
Atla, 120, 127–128
Atlantic Monthly (periodical), 153, 158,
159
229
230
Index
Atlantis, 65–66, 67, 71, 73, 75, 78n12. See
also Lemuria
Atlas Comics, 217
atomic, 20, 20–21
Australoid (race), 121
Author & Journalist (periodical), 55
Averoigne, 70, 73, 173
Babbitt, Irving, 155–156
Babel, 178
Baird, Edwin, xi, xii, xii–xiii, xviii, 4, 7, 8,
20, 70
Ball, Clifford, 77, 79n22
Baring-Gould, Sabine, 122, 123
Barlow, Robert H., 106, 111, 112, 166
Barker, Clive, xv
Barsoom, 78n11
Basques, 121, 124
Bates, Harry, 160, 162
Bates, Norman, xiv, 201, 205, 208
Barth, John, 215
Baudelaire, Charles, 70
“The Beast of Averoigne” (Smith), 70
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 213
Belit, 69
Bender, Albert M., 157
Benediktsson, Thomas, 159
Benét, William Rose, 167
Bennett, Sylvia, 68
Benson, E. F., 163
“Beyond the Black River” (Howard), xvii,
69, 70, 137–146
“Beyond the Phoenix” (Kuttner), 75
Bible, 175, 176, 178
Bierce, Ambrose, x, xii, 176, 208
Biography of the Life of Manuel (Cabell),
155
Bishop, Zealia Brown Reed, 108
Bitzer, Lloyd, xi
“The Black Abbott of Puthuum” (Smith),
72
The Black Cat (periodical), x, 70, 154
“The Black God’s Kiss” (Moore), xvii, 72,
187, 191, 192–196, 197, 198
“Black God’s Shadow” (Moore), 73
Black Mask (periodical), 68, 190
Black Mass, 24–26
Black Stone, 120
Blackwood, Algernon, 163
Bloch, Robert, x, xiii, xiv, xviii, 47n6,
74–75, 77, 153, 158, 201–208, 209n3,
210n8, 210n13, 211, 227n64. See also
Bates, Norman
Blue Book Magazine (periodical), x, 8
Boas, Franz, 136
Boucher, Anthony, 167
Bourdieu, Pierre, 6
Boyer, Charles, 216
Brackett, Leigh, 77
Bradbury, Ray, xiii, 158, 167, 174, 211,
212
Bran Mak Morn, 66, 67, 119–120, 124,
126, 127–128, 136–139
Brenryk, Wladislaw, 78n8
Britain, 66, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127;
Britons, 123, 125; Romano-Britons, 76
Bronze Age, 66, 121, 123, 125–126, 127
Bruffee, Kenneth, 53, 60
Brule the Spear-slayer, 65
Brundage, Margaret, xiii, xvii, 187,
188–189, 191, 192–194
Buchan, John, 122
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, x
Burke, Rusty, 128n1
Burks, Arthur J., 18–19, 24, 27n14, 28n22
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, x, 63, 65, 78n11,
126, 157, 165. See also Carter, John (of
Mars); Tarzan
“By This Axe, I Rule!” (Howard), 67
Cabell, James Branch, 155, 165, 168n16
Cain and Abel, 214
“The Call of Cthulhu” (Lovecraft), 84
Cannon, Peter, 111
Campbell, John W., Jr., xiii, 76, 166, 219
Campbell, Ramsey, xv
“The Caravan” (Smith), 70
Carney, Jason Ray, xi, xvi, 32, 47n3, 47n8,
47n14
Carpenter, John, 220
Carter, John (of Mars), 63, 69, 78n11
Carter, Lin, xiii, xv
Carter, Randolph, 86, 88, 90, 91–93, 94,
96, 97–98
Caruso, Enrico, 212, 223n9
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
(Lovecraft), 108
Caucasian (race), 121
Index
Cavalier (periodical), 157
cave men. See prehistoric fiction
Celts, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127
censorship, 159, 169n39
“The Centaur” (Smith), 153
Century Magazine (periodical), 154
“The Challenge from Beyond” (Moore et
al.), 61
Chandler, Raymond, 158
Chappell, Fred, 167, 177, 179–180
“The Charnal God” (Smith), 72, 181
Chaugnar Faugn, 68
Children of the Night (creatures). See
Worms of the Earth (creatures)
“The Children of the Night” (Howard), 66,
124–125, 127, 134–135
“The City of Spiders” (Munn), 23
Clayton, William, 160, 163, 164
Cleopatra, 213
Cleveland Torso Murders, 207
Clore, Dan, 178, 179
Cobb, Irvin S., 157
collaboration, 51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61
collaborative writing practices, 51, 52, 53
College Humor (periodical), x, 157
Collier’s Weekly (periodical), 154, 212
colonialism, xv, 16–17, 18, 26, 121, 127,
128. See also empire
“The Colour out of Space” (Lovecraft), 77,
106
“The Coming of the White Worm”
(Smith), 76
Commoriom, 71
Conan (the Reaver), 125
Conan the Cimmerian, xv, 50n71, 58, 59,
67–69, 70, 77, 130n31, 144–146
Confucius, 213
Connors, Scott, xvii, 186
Conrad, 130n29
Continental Op, 68
“Corkscrew” (Hammett), 79n17
cosmic consciousness. See cosmicism
cosmic horror (genre). See horror (genre)
cosmicism, 177, 179
Coye, Lee Brown, 227n66
Crane, Hart, 111
Crawford, F. Marion, xii, 154
Crone, Randall, 73
Crusades, 70, 79n16
231
The Crypt of Terror (comic book), 217
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, xiv, 35, 128
Cthulhu, 89, 106, 107; Cthulhu Mythos,
119, 202
Cthulhu (film), 116
Cummings, Ray, 63
Cyrene, 75
Dahmer, Jeffrey, 208
“The Dark Eidolon” (Smith), 181
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
(Smith), 168
“The Dark Isle” (Bloch), 74
“The Dark Land” (Moore), 73
“The Dark Man” (Howard), 66
“The Dart of Rasasfa” (Smith), 167
Darwin, Charles, 22–23, 119, 126, 128,
130n35, 131
Davenport, Charles, 136
Davin, Eric Leif, 161
“Dawn of Discord” (Smith), 166
Day, Rhoda, 73
De Grandin, Jules, 70, 74
“The Death of Malygris” (Smith), 71, 182
Deep Ones, 75
defamiliarization, 35, 48n27
Delaney, Samuel, xv
Delaney, Willam J., 166
Deleuze, Gilles, xvii, 86, 87, 93–99
“The Demon of the Flower” (Smith), 164
DeMontour, 64
Derleth, August, xiii, 106, 157, 158, 160,
167, 171n90, 211, 227n64
Derrie, Bobby, xvii
Detective Story Weekly (periodical), 157
“The Devil in Iron” (Howard), 69
“The Devotee of Evil” (Smith), 160,
169n42
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer
and Adorno), 7
“The Diamond Lens” (O’Brien), 158
Dickens, Charles, xii
Dime Mystery Magazine (periodical), 153,
165, 222
“The Dimension of Chance” (Smith), 161
Dirda, Michael, 168
discourse community, ix, xi, xii, xvi, xvii,
xviii, 51, 52–53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61;
in Weird Tales, 53, 55–56, 57, 58,
232
Index
60–61
Doc Savage (periodical), 212
Dominique (film), 222
“The Door to Saturn” (Smith), 160, 162
“The Double Shadow” (Smith), 71, 165,
181
Doyle, Arthur Conan, x, 112, 126, 154
“Dragon Moon” (Kuttner), 75, 79n25
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
(Lovecraft), 106
“The Dreams in the Witch House”
(Lovecraft), 110
Dreiser, Theodore, 155
“Duar the Accursed” (Ball), 79n22
Dumas, Alexandre, 64
“The Dunwich Horror” (Lovecraft), 49n45,
85, 106, 109, 158
“The Dweller in the Gulf” (Smith), 159,
162, 163–164
“The Dweller in the Martian Depths”
(Smith). See “The Dweller in the Gulf”
(Smith)
Dyalhis, Nictzin, 73–74, 77
Eadie, Arlton, 69
Earle, David M., 6, 32–33
Ebony and Crystal (Smith), 70, 154
EC Comics, 217
Eddy, Clifford M. (C. M.), Jr., 64, 112, 159
Egypt, 67
Elak of Atlantis, 75, 79n24
Eliot, T. S., 12, 15, 21, 23, 24, 155
Ellis, Havelock, 111
Ellis, Novalyne Price, 68
Ellison, Harlan, 174
Emmelhainz, Nicole, xvi
empire, 16–18. See also colonialism
“The Empire of the Necromancers”
(Smith), 72, 181
“The Enchantress of Sylaire” (Smith), 185
“The End of the Story” (Smith), 70
Enoch, 203–204, 205, 206
“Enoch” (Bloch), 203–206, 209, 210n8
Eric Bright-Eyes (Haggard), 63
Ernst, Paul, 69
Esquire (periodical), 153, 165
Essara, 75
“The Eternal World” (Smith), 161, 162
ethics, 174–176, 181–182
eugenics, xvii, 131–132, 133, 136; asylums
and, 138; racial degeneration in,
131–136, 137, 138, 139, 144;
sterilization in, 136. See also Aryan;
atavism; Grant, Madison
Everett, Justin, xvii
evil, 84
evolution, xvii, 119, 122, 126, 127, 128;
devolution, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128
“The Eye and the Finger” (Wandrei), 165
“The Eyrie” (letter column). See Weird
Tales
“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn
and His Family” (Lovecraft), 108
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, 76
fairies. See Little People (folklore)
fandom, ix, xiv, 46n2, 77, 106, 162, 164,
165
Fantastic (periodical), 167
Fantastic Adventures (periodical), 76, 211,
213
Fantastic Universe (periodical), 212
fantasy (genre), ix, x, xiv, xv–xvi, xvii,
xviii, 154, 155, 164; heroic, 78n4;
intrusion, xv; science, 72; sword-andsorcery, xv, xvi, xvii, 59–60, 63–64, 65,
66, 70, 70–77, 79n22, 202
Fantasy Fan (periodical), 47n10, 164,
170n75; “The Boiling Point” (letter
column), 164, 170n75
Fantasy Magazine (periodical), 61
fanzines, xvi, 47n10, 61, 156, 164
Farber, Marjorie, 167
Farmer, W. C., 175
Farnese, Harold S., 47n5
femininity, xvii, 73
Fians, Fairies, and Picts (MacRitchie),
121
Finlay, Virgil, 75
Finn, Mark,8n1
Finns, 121
“Fishhead”, 157
FitzGerald, Edward, 215
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 155
Flatland (Abbot), 85
Flaubert, Gustave, 70
“Floral Tribute” (Bloch), 209
“The Flower-Women” (Smith), 182
Index
Flynn, Errol, 75, 79n24
Foley, Jack, 168
“The Footfalls Within” (Howard), 67
“For Blood is the Life” (Crawford), 154
Fox, Gardner F., xv, 77
France, 70, 72
Frankenstein (Shelley), 107; film
adaptation, 159
French, Nora May, 176
French symbolists, 177, 178, 183
Freud, Sigmund, 85, 128, 201, 203–204,
206
“The Frost Giant’s Daughter” (Howard),
69
Fulbra, King, 72
Gaels, 125
Gaiman, Neil, xv
Gaines, Bill, 217
Galpin, Alfred, 111
Galton, Francis, 131
Gein, Ed, 201, 204, 206, 209
Genius Loci and Other Tales (Smith), 167
Gernsback, Hugo, 161, 163–164, 170n66
Gesti, 75
Ghost Stories (periodical), 163
“The Ghoul” (Smith), 163
Giesy, J. U., 63
Gingrich, Arnold, 165
“The Globe of Memories” (Quinn), 74
“The Goddess Awakes” (Ball), 74
“The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” (Howard), 66,
78n15
“Golden Blood” (Williamson), 63
Goldsmith, Cele, 167
Golgotha, 213
Gothic, xi, xii, xv, 64–65, 69, 70, 72, 73,
75, 77, 78, 165
“Gotterdaemmurung” (Quinn), 64
Grand Guignol Theatre, 165
Grant, Madison, 136, 140, 141, 142. See
also The Passing of the Great Race
“The Graveyard Rats” (Kuttner), 75
“The Great Brain of Kaldar” (Hamilton),
63
Greene, Sonia Haft. See Lovecraft, Sonia
Greenland, 71
the grotesque, science-fictional, xiv, 128
Guattari, Félix, 87, 93–98, 99
233
Guillaume (the Conqueror), 72–73
Gunnar, Hugo, 64
H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Lovecraft), 167
Haggard, H. Rider, x, 63, 65, 126
Haiti, 17, 18–19, 26
Halloween (film), 220
Hamilton, Edmond, xiii, 21, 63, 76, 161,
211
Hammett, Dashiell, 68, 158, 190
Hammond, H. R., 192–194, 196
Hands of Orloc (film), 219
hard-boiled detective (genre), 202
Harman, Graham, 85, 89, 90
Harper’s Bazaar (periodical), 157
Harper’s Magazine (periodical), 153, 167
Harris, Thomas, 207
“The Hashish-Eater; or The Apocalypse of
Evil” (Smith), 177–179, 182
hate, 84
Hatfield, Gordon, 111
The Haunt of Fear (comic book), 217,
225n39
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, x
Hayonwontha, 76
“The Heart of Atlantan” (Dyalhis), 74
Heber, Bishop Reginald, 225n48
Hecht, Ben, 6, 63, 155
Helland, Jonathon, xvii
“Hellsgarde” (Moore), 73
Hemingway, Ernest, 155
Hemken, Gertrude, 33, 47n4
Henneberger, J. C. (Jacob Clark), x, xi, xii,
xiii, 5–6, 8, 32, 63, 157
“Herbert West—Reanimator” (Lovecraft),
107
Herod, 213
Herron, Don, 63
Hersey, Harold, 8, 54–56, 61, 163
Hess, Aaron, xi
Hilger, Ron, 186
“The Hills of the Dead” (Howard), 66
historical fiction, xv–xvi, 64, 78
Hitz, John Kipling, 176
“The Holiness of Azédarac” (Smith), 185
Holmes, Morgan, xvi, 128n1
Home Brew (periodical), 122
“The Homecoming” (Bradbury), 167
Homer, 173
234
Index
hominids, 126, 127. See also prehistoric
fiction
Hooten, Earnest, 139
Horkheimer, Max, 7
Hornig, Charles D., 164
horror (genre), ix, x, xii, xiv–xvi, xvii,
xviii, 165, 202, 204; cosmic, x, xiv–xv,
xvi, 77, 203; nameless, 83–84, 87, 88,
90, 91, 95, 97, 98
“The Horror at Red Hook” (Lovecraft),
39–40
“The Horror from the Hills” (Long), 68
Horror Stories (periodical), 153
Houellebecq, Michel, 5
Hough, Emerson, 63, 64
“The Hound” (Lovecraft), 113
The Hour of the Dragon (Howard), 69
“The House of the Monoceros” (Smith),
166
Howard, Robert E., x, xiii–xvii, xviii, 13,
15–16, 24, 42–45, 51, 53, 58–61,
64–67, 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 75, 77,
78n11, 78n14, 79n16, 79n19, 79n22,
119–120, 121–126, 127, 128, 129n15,
129n17, 129n19, 130n31, 133–135,
140–145, 167, 202, 203, 211, 214;
civilization-barbarism debate, 140–146;
correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft,
124, 133–135, 140–144; life of, 42; on
race, 124, 134–135, 137, 139, 140–141,
144. See also Bran Mak Morn; Conan
the Cimmerian; Hyborian Age; Kane,
Solomon; Kull; Worms of the Earth
(creatures)
human experience, limits of, 84, 85, 86, 87,
90, 92, 95, 98–99, 155
humanist movement, 155
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 121, 126
Huyssen, Andreas, 3
Hyborian Age, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74
Hyne, C. Cutliffe, 78n12
Hyperborea, 71, 173
Illustrated Detective Magazine
(periodical), 169n42
“The Immeasurable Horror” (Smith), 160
“The Immortals of Mercury” (Smith), 160
imperialism. See empire
“In Kashla’s Garden” (Schisgall), 17–18
“In the Forest of Villefere” (Howard), 64
International Comics (comic book), 217
International Crime Patrol (comic book),
217
“The Invisible City” (Smith), 160
Ireland, 124
Iron Age, 125–126
Irving, Washington, x
The Island of Lost Souls (film), 159
Isle of Mona, 74
“The Isle of the Torturers” (Smith), 72
Ixtlil, 73
Jack the Ripper, 207–208
Jacobi, Carl, 158
Jacobs, W. W., 154
Jakes, John, xv
James, M. R., 204
Japanese, 213
Jeffers, Robinson, 176
“Jirel Meets Magic” (Moore), 73, 197
Jirel of Joiry, 72–73, 77, 193, 194
Joshi, S. T., 58–59, 61, 84, 108, 109, 111,
114, 115, 128n1, 129n17, 154, 157,
158, 168, 177
Jove. See Jupiter (god)
Joyce, James, 12, 15, 21, 23, 159
Jupiter (god), 180
Jungian psychology, 213
Kairos , xi, xii, xviii
Kane, Solomon, 65, 66, 67
Kant, Immanuel, xiv, 89
Karan, King, 73
Karkora, 75
Karloff, Boris, 222
Kaye, Marvin, xiii
Kenyon Review, 167
Ketrick, 125, 127
King, Stephen, xv, 210n13, 222
King Arthur, 76, 128
King of the World’s Edge (Munn), 76
King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 63
“Kings of the Night”, 66, 78n15
Kipling, Rudyard, 70, 126, 154
Kiriath, 75
Kline, Otis Adelbert, x, xii, xiii, 63, 173,
227n64
Kristeva, Julia, 204
Index
Kull, 43–45, 65, 66, 71, 78n13
Kurtzman, Harvey, 217
Kuttner, Henry, xv, 73, 74–75, 75, 77,
79n25, 165, 191, 227n64
La Paree Stories (periodical), 163
La Scala opera house, 219
Ladies’ Home Journal (periodical), 212
lamia, 70
language, limits of, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93,
98–99
Lansinger, J. M., x
Lapps, 121, 124
Larson, Randall D., 168n1
Lasser, David, 161, 162, 164
“The Last Atlantide” (MacIsaac), 78n12
“The Last Hieroglyph” (Smith), 182–183,
186
“The Last Incantation” (Smith), 71, 156,
182
Lawlor, Harold, xviii, 211–222, 223n2,
223n8, 223n11, 223n13, 224n23,
224n25, 225n41, 225n44, 225n48,
226n51, 226n55, 226n60,
226n62–227n63, 227n66, 227n69
Lawrence, D. H., 21, 22, 23, 24, 157
Le Loup, 65
Lechter, Hannibal, 207
Leiber, Fritz, xiii, xv, 63, 76
Lemer, Marshall, 33
Lemuria, 65. See also Atlantis
Library of America, 167
Ligotti, Thomas, xv
Literature after Darwin (Richter), 126
little magazines, 10
Little People (folklore), xvii, 120, 121,
122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129n17,
129n26, 130n29, 134
“The Little People” (Howard), 123
The Little Review (periodical), 4, 9
Loeb, Jacques, 21
logic, limits of, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88–89,
91, 93, 98–99
Lombroso, Cesare, 131, 135, 137
London, Jack, 70
Long, Frank Belknap, xiii, 12, 61, 68, 111
Lord, Bruce, 107
Lord Dunsany, x, 56, 155
The Lost Continent (Hyne), 78n12
235
“Lost Elysium” (Hamilton), 76–77
“The Lost Race” (Howard), 65, 123, 124,
125
lost races, 63, 76
Lost Worlds (Smith), 167
Louinet, Patrice, 58, 128n1
Lovecraft, H. P., x, xii–xvi, xvi–xvii, xviii,
3, 9, 12–13, 15, 16, 27n2, 30, 36,
37–41, 51, 56, 57, 58–59, 60–61, 64,
66–67, 69, 70, 71, 74–75, 77, 78n7,
83–99, 105–116, 119, 121, 122,
124–125, 128, 129n16–129n17,
129n26, 130n29, 154, 155, 156, 157,
158–159, 163–164, 165, 166, 167, 173,
177, 180, 191, 202, 203; life of, 37, 39;
Lovecraft Circle, xvi, 29–30, 31, 32, 33,
35, 45–46, 46n2, 47n9, 71, 73. See also
Carter, Randolph; Cthulhu; Cthulhu
Mythos; Deep Ones
Lovecraft, Sonia, 106, 109, 113, 114–115,
116
“The Loved Dead” (Eddy and Lovecraft),
112, 159
Loveman, Samuel, 3, 12, 111
Lowndes, Robert A. W., 164, 166
“The Lurking Fear” (Lovecraft), 113,
122–123, 129n15–129n17
lycanthropy, 78n8. See also werewolf
Lycon, 75
MacDonald, George, xvii, 174–175, 183
MacFadden, Bernarr, 163
Machen, Arthur, x, 112, 122, 123, 128,
129n16–129n17, 134, 155
MacIsaac, Fred, 78n12
MacRitchie, David, 121–122, 123, 124,
128, 128n8, 129n26
Mademoiselle (periodical), 167
madness. See mental illness
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(periodical), 167
Magic Carpet (periodical), 158. See also
Oriental Stories (periodical)
“The Maker of Gargoyles”, 180
Malygris, 71
“The Man of Stone” (Heald and
Lovecraft), 109–110
“The Man Upstairs” (Bradbury), 167
Manton, Joel, 88, 90
236
Index
Margulies, Leo, 166
“Marooned in Andromeda” (Smith), 161
Martin, George R. R., xvi
Marzoni, Pettersen, 20
masculinity, xv
the Master, 78n8
Maupassant, Guy de, xii
“The Maze of Maal Dweb” (Smith), 185
“The Maze of the Enchanter” (Smith), 165,
182, 185
McHenry, F. Douglas, 22
McIlwraith, Dorothy, xiii, 76, 166
McLuhan, Marshall, 202
Mediterranean (race), 121, 122–125, 127
“Medusa” (Smith), 163
“Medusa’s Coil” (Bishop and Lovecraft),
109–110
Menace (comic book), 217
Mencken, H. L., 155, 190
Mendlesohn, Farah, xv
mental illness, 83, 84, 85, 87, 98–99,
201–202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207
“Mephistopheles and Company Ltd.”
(Quinn), 25, 26
Merritt, Abraham, x, 61, 73
“The Metal Giants” (Hamilton), 21
Miéville, China, xv, 168
“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” (Howard),
65
miscegenation, 121, 126, 127–128, 137,
139
modernism (literary), xi, xii, xvi, 3, 15–16,
20, 21, 22–23, 24, 25, 26, 28n38, 126,
128, 159; high modernism, 12;
periodical culture of, 4, 10
Mongoloid (race). See Turanian (race)
Mongoloid dwarves. See Worms of the
Earth (creatures)
Monroe, Harriet, 155
“The Moon of Skulls” (Howard), 66
Moorcock, Michael, xv, 63
Moore, Catherine L. (C. L.), x, xiii, xiv, xv,
xvi, xvii, xviii, 13, 72–73, 77, 187, 189,
191, 192–198. See also Jirel of Joiry;
Smith, Northwest
morality. See ethics
Morand, Christophe, 70
Morgan, Bassett, 25–26
Morgan le Fay, 128
Morris, William, x, 122
Moskowitz, Sam, 159
“Mother of Toads” (Smith), 165
“The Mound” (Bishop and Lovecraft), 108,
109–110, 112
Mound Builders, 76
multiplicity, 83
mummy, 72
Munn, H. Warner, 23, 64, 72, 76, 78n8
Munsey, Frank A.
“A Murder in the Fourth Dimension”
(Smith), 161
Murray, Margaret, 129n26
Murray, Will, 163
Myrdhinn, 76
“The Nameless Offspring” (Smith), 162
“Necromancy in Naat” (Smith), 185, 186
Negroid (race), 121
Nelson, Victoria, 105
Neolithic period, xvii, 120, 121–124, 125,
127
Nero, 74, 180
“Nero” (Smith), 180
New Orleans Times–Picayune (periodical),
160
New York Times (periodical), 5, 11, 167
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 23
Niord, 69
Nordic (race). See Aryan (race)
“Novel of the Black Seal” (Machen), 122
Nyikos, Daniel, xvi
“The Oath of Hul Jok” (Dyalhis), 74
O’Brien, Fitz-James, xii, 158
O’Brien, Turlogh, 66
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
(Bierce), 208
Ompallios, Tirouv, 71
“On Fantasy” (Smith), 174
“Ooze” (Rud), x
Orander, King, 75
Oriental Stories (periodical), 70, 79n16,
158. See also Magic Carpet (periodical)
The Outline of History (Wells), 124
“The Outsider” (Lovecraft), 116
Overland Monthly (periodical), 154, 155,
157, 158
Index
The Passing of the Great Race (Grant), 136
Peckham, Morse, 176
Penguin Classics, 168
“The People of the Black Circle”
(Howard), 69
“People of the Dark” (Howard), 66, 124,
125, 135–136
Phariom, 72
Philippine Magazine (periodical), 163
“The Phoenix on the Sword”, 67
Phrygior, King, 75
“Pickman’s Model” (Lovecraft), 106
Picts, 65, 66, 67, 69, 78n14, 119–120, 121,
123–124, 125, 127, 128, 129n19,
130n29
Pikhts, 75
“The Pit and the Pendulum” (Poe), 153
“The Planet of the Dead” (Smith), 180
Planet Stories (periodical), 77
planetary romance. See science fiction
Plato, 65
Plunkett, Edward John Moreton Drax. See
Lord Dusany
“The Plutonian Drug” (Smith), 160
Poe, Edgar Allan, x, xii, 30, 64, 105, 126,
153, 173, 204
Poetry (periodical), 4
popular culture, xvi, xviii, 9
Porter, James, 52
Poseidonis, 71, 173, 181
postmodernism, xvii, 86, 87, 93
poststructuralism, 86, 87, 93
Pound, Ezra, 12
The Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection (Kristeva), 204
prehistoric fiction, 63, 64
The Prehistoric World, or Vanished Races
(Allen), 123
Price, E. Hoffman, xiii, 55, 163, 165, 166
Price, Novalyne. See Ellis, Novalyne Price
Price, Robert M., 118n45
Prida, Jonas, xvi
primary world. See subcreation
“The Princess Almeena” (Smith), 70
A Princess of Mars (Burroughs), 63
Prydwen (Munn), 76
Psycho (Bloch), xviii, 74, 153, 202–203,
205, 209
psychology, 201, 202–204, 205, 208, 209
237
pulp magazines, ix, x, xi, xii, xvi, 153, 154,
156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 169n39,
201–202; advertising, 10; as lowbrow
culture, 154; marketplace, 13
pygmies, xvii, 121–122, 123, 124, 125,
127, 128, 129n26. See also Little
People (folklore)
Quatermain, Allan, 63
“Queen of the Black Coast” (Howard),
50n71, 69, 70
“The Quest of the Gazolba” (Smith), 185
“Quest of the Starstone” (Moore), 73
Quinn, Seabury, x, xiii, 22, 23, 25–26, 70,
73, 188, 192
The Races of Europe (Ripley), 121
racial memory, 66, 134–135. See also
reincarnation
Radcliffe, Ann, 165
Rat Man, 201. See also Freud, Sigmund
“The Rats in the Walls”, xii
“Rattle of Bones” (Howard), 65
The Raven (film), 159
Real Detective Tales (periodical), x, xiii
reality, 84, 89, 91–92, 95
Re-covering Modernism (Earle), 32–33
“Red Ether” (Marzoni), 20–21
“The Red Hand” (Machen), 112, 122
“Red Nails” (Howard), 69–70, 77
“Red Shadows” (Howard), 65, 78n9
“The Red Witch” (Dyalhis), 73
“The Red World of Polaris” (Smith), 161
reincarnation, 125
Reiter, Geoffrey, xvii
“A Rendezvous in Averoigne” (Smith), 70
“The Return of the Sorcerer” (Smith), 159,
160, 162, 165
Reynolds, B. M., 34
Richardson, Deuce, 128n1
Richter, Virginia, 126
Ripley, William, 121
“Roads” (Quinn), 74
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” (Lawrence),
157
The Romance of Early British Life (Scott
Elliot), 123, 129n19
Romans, 119–120, 125, 127
238
Index
romanticism, 176, 178, 183; California
romantics, 176–177
Rud, Anthony, x
Rulers of the Future (Ernst), 69
Rural Publications, Inc., x, xiii
Sabatini, Rafael, 64
Salem Witch Trials, 78n8
“The Sapphire Goddess” (Dyalhis), 74
Sargent, Stanley C., 117n19
Sarhaddon, 75
“Satan Unrepentant” (Smith), 175
Saturday Evening Post (periodical), 153
“The Satyr” (Smith), 163
Saucy Movie Tales, 188
Saunders, Charles, xv
“The Scarlet Citadel” (Howard), 68, 69
Schisgall, Oscar, 17, 24
Schultz, David E., 112
Schwartz, Julius, 61
Schweitzer, Darrell, xiii
science fiction (genre), ix–x, x, xii, xiv, 72,
77, 160–165; planetary romance, 63,
65; space opera, 63, 73
scientifiction. See science ficiton
Scott Elliot, G. F., 123
“The Sea Witch”, 74
secondary worlds. See subcreation
sensation, 83, 88, 89
serpent-men, 65
Set (god), 178
Seth, 203–206
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
(Csicsery-Ronay), 35
“The Seven Geases” (Smith), 181, 185
“The Seventh Devil” (McHenry), 22, 23
Sexual Inversions (Ellis and Symonds),
111
sexuality, xvii; asexuality, 106–108;
bisexuality, 115; homosexuality,
110–113, 115; transsexuality, 113–115,
205
“The Shadow Kingdom” (Howard), 43–45,
65, 78n9
“The Shadow out of Time” (Lovecraft), 77,
106, 107, 164
“The Shadow over Innsmouth”
(Lovecraft), 108, 112, 116, 118n45
“Shambleau” (Moore), 187, 191, 197
Shanks, Jeffrey, xvii, 59, 60
Shea, J. Vernon, 106, 111
Shelley, Mary, x, 107
Sherlock Holmes, 112
“The Shining Land” (Hamilton), 76
“The Shining Pyramid” (Machen), 112,
122, 123, 134
Short Stories (periodical), xiii, 76, 166
Shovlin, Paul, xviii
Sidney-Fryer, Donald, 175, 176
Silver Death, 72
“The Silver Key” (Lovecraft), 91
“Skulls in the Stars” (Howard), 65
“The Slithering Shadow” (Howard), 69
Sloane, T. O’Conor, 160
Smith, Clancy, xvii
Smith, Clark Ashton, x, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi,
xvii, 13, 51, 53, 56–57, 58, 69–72, 72,
73, 74, 75, 76–77, 77, 106, 153,
154–168, 169n42, 170n66, 171n90,
173–184, 184, 185, 186;
correspondence of, 157; language, use
of, 173, 177, 179, 180–182; poetry of,
154, 163, 167; sculpture by, 167; world
building, 173–174, 176, 180–183, 185.
See also Averoigne; Hyperborea;
Malygris; Poseidonis; Zothique
Smith, Northwest, 72, 73, 77
Sondergard, Sidney, xviii
A Song of Ice and Fire (Martin), xvi
sorcerer, 181–183, 185
“Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Bloch), 209
“Spawn of Dagon” (Kuttner), 75
“Spear and Fang” (Howard), 64
Spencer, Herbert, 22, 23, 131, 132
Spicy Adventure Stories (periodical), 188
Sprenger, William, 188
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 78n8
Standard Publications, 166
“A Star-Change” (Smith), 161
Starrett, Vincent, 155
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
(Smith), 70, 176
Sterling, George, 70, 154–156, 176
Stilson, Charles B., 63
Stirring Science Stories (periodical), 71
Stoker, Bram, 66
Strand Magazine (periodical), 154
Index
Strange Stories (periodical, Rural
Publications), 66, 76, 78n15
Strange Stories (periodical, Standard
Publications), xiii, 166
Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror
(periodical), 66, 71, 125, 154, 160,
162–163, 164
Straub, Peter, xv
Street & Smith Publications, 164
subcreation, xvii; primary worlds, 174;
secondary worlds, 174, 176, 177
the sublime: mathematical, xiv; sciencefictional, xiv
Sully, Genevieve K., 156
“Supernatural Horror in Literature”
(Lovecraft), 36–37, 48n31
surrealists, 167
Swales, John, ix, xi
Swanwick, Michael, 168n16
Sweetser, Wesley D., 155
sword-and-planet (genre). See planetary
romance
sword-and-sorcery (genre). See fantasy
(genre)
Symonds, J. A., 111
“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (Smith), 71,
160
“Tales of the Werewolf Clan” (Munn),
78n8
Tarzan, 63, 69, 77, 78n11
Taveral, 130n29
taxonomy, 83, 86–87, 91, 96
technology, xv, 17, 20, 21, 28n22
Tekala, 74
“The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe), 204
Terror Tales (periodical), 153, 165
“The Testament of Atthammaus” (Smith),
71
The Testimony of Tradition (MacRitchie),
121
Teutonic (race). See Aryan (race)
Thacker, Eugene, 95, 98
Thackeray, William, xii
“The Thief of Forthe” (Ball), 79n22
“The Thing on the Doorstep” (Lovecraft),
106, 107, 112, 113–115
Thirty Years’ War, 78n8
Thingmaker, Lance, 170n75
239
“This King Business” (Hammett), 79n17
The Three Impostors (Machen), 112, 122
A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and
Guattari), 87, 96
Thrill Book (periodical), x, 163
Thrilling Mystery (periodical), 153
“Through the Gates of the Silver Key”
(Lovecraft and Price), 86, 93, 94, 96
“Thunder in the Dawn” (Kuttner), 75
“To Hell and Gone” (Lawlor), xviii
Tolkien, J. R. R., xv–xvi, xvii, 174,
174–175, 177, 183
Topinard, Paul, 121
“Tower of the Elephant” (Howard), 68
The Trail of the Cloven Hoof (Eadie), 69
“The Trap” (Lovecraft and Whitehead),
113
Tremaine, F. Orlin, 164
Tsathoggua, 71
Tuatha de Danann, 76
Turanian (race), 121–124, 125, 127,
130n29
“Twilight of the Gods” (Hamilton), 77
Tyr, 76
Uccastrog, 72
the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), 85, 201,
204, 205. See also Freud, Sigmund
“The Uncharted Isle” (Smith), 158
understanding, 83, 88, 89
Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man (McLuhan), 202
“Under the Moons of Mars” (Burroughs),
63, 157
Unknown (periodical), xiii, 76, 166
“The Unnameable” (Lovecraft), 38–39, 88
“The Valley of the Worm” (Howard), 69
The Vault of Horror (comic book), 217
Valusia, 65
vampire, 86
Van Vechten, Carl, 155
Vance, Jack, xv
VanderMeer, Ann, xiii
VanderMeer, Jeff, 168
Varro, Ventidius, 76
Verne, Jules, x
vikings, 66, 73, 75
Vincius the Reaper, 74
240
Index
Vinson, Truett, 133
“A Vision of Lucifer” (Smith), 175
“The Visitors from Mlok”. See “A StarChange”
“The Voyage of King Euvoran” (Smith),
181, 185
Wagner, Karl Edward, xv
Walton, Bryce, 77
Walton, Mélanie, 88
The Wanderer’s Necklace (Haggard), 63
Wandrei, Donald, xiii, 157, 158, 164, 165,
167, 171n90
The Waste Land (Eliot), 12
The Watcher at the Threshold (Buchan),
122
“The Weaver in the Vault” (Smith), 72
weird fiction (genre), x, xi, xii, xii–xiii,
xvi, xvii, xviii, 88, 153–154, 156, 159,
162, 167, 205; the new weird, xviii, 168
“The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan”
(Smith), 181
weird menace (genre), 165. See also Dime
Mystery Magazine; Horror Stories;
Terror Tales; Thrilling Mystery
“The Weird Tailor” (Bloch), 202, 205,
209n3
Weird Tales (periodical), ix–xi, xii,
xiii–xvi, xvii–xviii, 51, 54–57, 63–67,
68, 69, 70, 71, 72–75, 76–77, 77, 78n2,
79n16, 79n19, 79n22, 84, 87, 119,
122–123, 124, 125, 130n35, 153–154,
156, 157–160, 162–163, 165–167,
169n39, 173, 184, 185, 187–189,
190–198, 202–205, 207, 209;
circulation, 8; “The Eyrie” (letter
column), ix, xi, xii, 10–11, 12, 16, 24,
33, 34, 47n4–47n6, 48n23–48n24, 65,
68, 74, 77, 188, 190–191; woman
authors of, 191–192. See also Baird,
Edwin; Delany, William J.;
Henneberger, J. C.; McIlwraith,
Dorothy; Wright, Farnsworth
Weisenger, Mort, xiii
Wellman, Manly Wade, xiii
Wells, H. G., x, 124, 126, 132, 173
werewolf, 64, 86
“The Werewolf of Ponkert” (Munn), 64
“The Werewolf’s Daughter” (Munn), 64
Whale, James, 159
Wharton, Edith, 154
Whately, Wilbur, 85
“When the Green Star Waned” (Dyalhis),
73–74
“The White Sybil” (Smith), 180
Whitehead, Henry S., 113, 153, 168n3
“Why Weird Tales?” (Kline), xii–xiii
Williams, Tennessee, xiii, 158, 202
Williamson, Jack, 63, 68
“The Willow Landscape” (Smith), 163,
180
Wilson, Edmund, 154
Wilson, G. M., 34, 48n23
“A Wine of Wizardry” (Sterling), 155
“Wings in the Night” (Howard), 67
“The Witchcraft of Ulua” (Smith), 181
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
(Murray), 124
“With Weapons of Stone” (Eddy), 64
wizard. See sorcerer
“Wolfshead” (Howard), 64
Wolverson, Eric, 76
Wonder Stories (periodical), 77, 154, 158,
161, 162–163, 164, 170n66
The Wood beyond the World (Morris)
“World of the Dark Dwellers” (Hamilton),
63
world-building. See subcreation
Worms of the Earth (creatures), 66, 67,
120, 122, 124–126, 127–128, 137, 138,
139
“Worms of the Earth” (Howard), xvii, 67,
119–120, 121, 123, 124, 125–126, 127,
128, 129n17, 136–139
Worthy, Peter, 117n19
Wright, Farnsworth, x, xiii–xiv, xviii,
10–11, 12, 20, 33, 35, 51, 53, 55–57,
58, 59–60, 66, 69, 70, 71, 74, 74–75,
76, 78n2, 78n13, 84, 155, 156,
158–159, 162, 164, 165–166, 184, 187,
188–189, 194
writer: amateur, 55; professional, 55, 202;
solitary writing genius, 52–53
Writer’s Digest (periodical), 6–7, 153, 159,
170n66
Wyn, A. A., 11–12
Xandar, 75
Index
Yag-Kosha, 68
Yeats, William Butler, 23, 24
yellow peril, 63
Yoros, 72
“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (Bloch),
202–203, 205, 206–208, 210n6
Zeiros, Satampra, 71
Zend, 75
Zeulas, Prince, 75
zombie, 66
Zothique, 72, 173, 181, 182, 183, 186
241
About the Editors and Contributors
Justin Everett is associate professor and director of writing programs at the
University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. His research is focused in two
very different areas: writing program administration, where he has written on
assessment and the evolution of independent writing programs and popular
culture, with a particular focus on speculative fiction. He created the pulp
studies area for the Popular Culture Association.
Jeffrey H. Shanks is an archaeologist with the National Park Service whose
research interests include the use of anthropological and sociological themes
in early twentieth-century pulp fiction. In addition to his archaeological publications, he has authored a number of popular and scholarly articles on
Robert E. Howard, including recent essays in Conan Meets the Academy,
Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the ’20s and ’30s, and Undead in the West
II. He currently serves as cochair of the pulp studies area for the Popular
Culture Association.
***
Jason Ray Carney received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University. His doctoral thesis treats the relationship between literary modernism
and interwar pulp fiction. He teaches in the English Department at Christopher Newport University.
Scott Connors is an independent scholar with degrees in English, history,
and nursing. He was the editor of the five-volume Collected Fantasies of
Clark Ashton Smith, considered to be the definitive versions of those texts.
He was also the editor of the Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith and The
243
244
About the Editors and Contributors
Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith. He
has contributed numerous essays on Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Machen, M. R. James, and other topics to a wide variety of
publications.
Bobby Derie is a weird fiction scholar and the author of Sex and the Cthulhu
Mythos (2014) and The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard—Index and
Addenda (2015).
Nicole Emmelhainz is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at
Christopher Newport University. Her research interests include collaboration
and writing as a community as well as feminism and weird literature.
Jonathan Helland lives and works in Vermont where he’s currently completing his MFA in creative writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He
also has an MA in English literature from the University of Wisconsin Eau
Claire. His MA thesis was an exploration of feminist themes in C. L.
Moore’s contributions to Weird Tales.
Morgan Holmes is an independent scholar and pulp historian. He has contributed numerous popular and scholarly articles on Robert E. Howard to a
variety of publications, including the journals The Dark Man, The Cimmerian, and several essay collections.
Dániel Nyikos received his PhD in English from the University of Nebraska
at Lincoln. He is a creative writer whose interest in weird fiction was kindled
by reading the stories of Conan as a boy. His other literary interests include
science fiction and American and British fiction in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. He is currently teaching at the University of Szeged in
Hungary.
Jonas Prida is an associate professor of English and division chair of arts
and sciences at the College of St. Joseph, located in Rutland, Vermont. In
addition to his work on Weird Tales, he has published articles on H. P.
Lovecraft and the American popular writer George Lippard for the American
Writers series. He also edited Conan Meets the Academy, a collection of
multidisciplinary essays on Conan the Barbarian.
Geoffrey Reiter received his PhD in English from Baylor University and is
assistant professor of English at the Baptist College of Florida and associate
editor at the website Christ and Pop Culture. He has previously published
essays on such authors as Arthur Machen, George MacDonald, William Peter
Blatty, and Peter S. Beagle.
About the Editors and Contributors
245
Paul Shovlin is director of the Writing Center at Binghamton University
(State University of New York). His research spans from labor issues related
to writing program administrators, practices with technology in the writing
classroom from the standpoint of critical pedagogy and pulp studies. He lives
in Binghamton, New York, with his wife, two sons, and two cats.
Clancy Smith is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He specializes in philosophical themes in popular culture and has published a number of articles and essays in this area. His recent research has focused on
philosophy and the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
Sidney Sondergard is the Piskor Professor of English at St. Lawrence University. He is the author of nine books and numerous articles of literary
criticism and explorations of popular culture. His published work on speculative fiction includes recent articles on H. P. Lovecraft, Chuck Palahniuk, and
Mary Shelly.