Howard Phillips Lovecraft--Dreamer on the Nightside by Frank Belknap Long

Author:Frank Belknap Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, cthulhu, mythos, biography, H.P. Lovecraft
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

All reputable dictionaries define a saga as: One—an Old Norse story of heroic deeds; Two—any modern heroic narrative. There would be no need to extend the second definition metaphorically in order to embrace a detailed account of the major contributions to HPL’s fame by the magazine Weird Tales and, posthumously, by Arkham House.

Heroic deeds accompanied every stage of HPL’s progression from obscurity to fame: by Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, who could so easily have shared the views of several other, less courageous editors who feared that HPL’s stories might be lacking in popular appeal; by HPL himself, who refused to compromise his artistic integrity by writing a single line with a newsstand magazine audience in mind; and by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who rescued almost all of HPL’s macabre fiction from threatened oblivion after his death. The publication of these stories by Arkham House was indeed Norse-like in its adventurousness, and summons up an image of two Icelandic navigators at the helm of a Viking ship, braving uncharted seas.

In April 1923, just one year after Howard’s first visit to New York, he submitted five stories to Weird Tales: The Hound, Dagon, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Cats of Ulthar, and Arthur Jermyn. His manuscripts were accompanied by a letter that no editor could possibly have read without amazement, or at the very least, a feeling of stunned incredulity.

At that time the magazine was edited by Edwin F. Baird, who was far more interested in detective fiction than stories of supernatural horror, and who in any case was soon to be succeeded by Farnsworth Wright. Baird had read widely in many fields, however, and was a very able editor possessing a keen awareness of the vast gulfs which might exist, not just between a good story and a bad one, but between genuine literary excellence and the sort of mediocre offering which all editors are compelled to accept occasionally when nothing better is available.

There can be little doubt that Baird must have thought HPL’s work excellent, for the covering letter would have ordinarily made an instant rejection inevitable. Howard went out of his way to castigate editors in general, not only for a total lack of discrimination, but for committing the unforgivable sin of changing so much as a single line of a story submitted by a writer of high artistic integrity. That such integrity should be perceptible at a glance was not open to question, he contended, and it was the unconscionable tampering with manuscripts by editors that was largely responsible for the deplorable state of contemporary American letters. If Baird could not see to publish the stories exactly as written, their return by the next post would be greatly appreciated.

Baird did return the stories, but only with the plea that Howard retype them, for the single-spacing would not have permitted him to make the few necessary interlineations of a wholly typographical nature which were intended solely for the printer and thus totally unrelated to the literary content.

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