George Sterling to Clark Ashton Smith - 28 November 1925 – (263) – highbrow magazines

think the weird - "outworn and childish" "The daemonic is done for, for the present" "you
have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drops!) and should touch and should
touch on it only infrequently" "The swine don't want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish
to change their tastes"

The pulps won't accept the story "The Abominations of Yondo" as any other paying
magazine.

December 1st 1925 – to Sterling – (264)

the highbrows think the "weird" is dead – Smith is waiting for a revolt against the
"mechanization and over-socialization". The present editor of WT is "more commercial" and
won't accept it.

Poe, Baudelaire

Donald Wandrei Overland Monthly 1926.12 – 380 - “Ebony and Crystal” belongs on that shelf with Poe,
Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Baudelaire.

wondrous beauty and a strange fear,

Here and there may be found a poppy-flower, an orchid from the hot-bed of Hell, the whisper of an eldritch wind, a breath
from the burning sands of regions infernal. The wizard calls, and at his imperious summons come genie, witch, and daemon to
open the portal to the haunted realms of faery;

The sky is burning. Stars hurtle to destruction or waste away. All mysteries are uncurtained. One may watch a landscape of the
moon, the seas of Saturn, the sunken fanes of old Atlantis, wars and wonders on some distant star.

381
There is no place in the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith for the conventional, the trite, the outworn. It is useless to search his work
for offerings, to popular desire.

The poems are laden with a pagan, exotic beauty and imagery.

Booklet published by W. Paul Cook in 1928 of Lovecraft's "The Shunned House" with a
preface written by Frank Belknap Long – in "a weird writer in our midst" (51) – "analogies to
contemporary "terror tales", to the work of Lord Dunsany and Artrhur Machen and Algernon
Blackwood. … only a mathematician… could write such a story"

He goes on to say that the story would "probably be rejected by every editor in America"
and this is reason enough to like it. Yet he also mentions that "Mr. O'Brien has included one
of Lovecraft's stories in his Roll of Honor and that it may "afford critical support to those who
are wary of acclaiming work that is bizarre and vivid and new"
The Best American Series is a series of anthologies that is published annually by Mariner Books,
an imprint of HarperCollins

Edward O'Brien - The Best American Short Stories

The roll of honor – 3 stars stories – 1928 – the colour out of space, 1929 – the dunwich
horror

1
The Lovecraft Circle – 1924-1927 – The Kalem Club – George Kirk, Reinhart Kleiner, George
Kirk, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur Leeds, Samuel Loveman, Everett McNeil, James Ferdinand
Morton.

Arthur Leeds published in WT – November 1925 – regular horror ghost stories but very few.

Samuel Loveman – book trader and amateur poet – published some letters of Bierce

George Kirk – book seller

Everett McNeil – writing adventure stories for children magazines

James Morton - amateur journalism

Clark Ashton Smith

Vret Orton – another acquaintance during the Kalem years.

Donald Wandrei

August Derleth – 1926 (July) – looking for books mentioned by Lovecraft in the Eyrie –
Lovecraft mentions W. Paul Cook as a source to get the book
Bernard Austin Dwyer

The Vagrant was an amateur press magazine specialising in the supernatural produced by W

illiam Paul Cook between 1915 and 1927, with a total of 15 issues. 

In the November 1919 issue Cook somewhat slams Lovecraft's poetry and early stories but lauds his
Dagon and compares his prose to Poe, Maupassant and Bierce (38).

Paul Cook's The Vagrant and the Recluse

Perusing letters sent by, and to, Lovecraft in the years 1924-1930 one gets the
relatively clear picture of a group enamored by the Weird and centered around it. The
names of those who seemed more enthusiastic than others about the genre and its
trajectory were Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Donald Wandrei, Frank Belknap
Long, Samuel Loveman, George Kirk, Everett McNeil, James Morton, Arthur Leeds
(who also published one story in WT), Vret Orton, August Derleth, Paul W. Cook and
Bernard Austin Dwyer. Some of these personas belonging to the Kalem Club,
discussed in the previous chapter, and most were involved in Amateur Journalism or
semi-commercial book publishing. The leading figures here, aside from Lovecraft and
Smith, are Paul W. Cook, Samuel Loveman and a group of young men whom

2
Lovecraft introduced into the world of weird fiction. Cook was a wandering printer
who dabbled in Amateur Journalism to a point where he became one of the most well-
known figures in this small sphere. Cook would publish one of the earliest non-
commercial Weird magazines – the one shot The Recluse whose single issue appeared
in 1927 and included Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature" alongside short
stories and poems by WT regulars (together with three essays - on poet George
Sterling, author Hubert Crackanthorpe and on early Vermont minstrelsy). Wandrei
and Derleth are important here, aside from them being WT regulars, because they are
regarded by Lovecraft, the hub of this Weird fan correspondence, as the quintessential
Weird enthusiasts. Furthermore, the two would take their enthusiasm for Lovecraft to
the next level in 1939 when they opened a publishing house, Arkham House, meant to
valorize Lovecraft's oeuvre and Weird fiction in general. Loveman and Kirk, as book
collectors, provided weird novels to the group. They are also mentioned in the letters
as attending, and at times hosting, soirees for the group and even helping each other
with lodgings and work. Some of them also sent letters to WT.1 Dwyer, Wandrei,
Long and Derleth served as the next generation of authors whom the older generation
of Smith, Lovecraft, Loveman and Cook referred to one another as to cultivate those
prodigies who "happened to possess […] aesthetic interests more or less akin" to their
own tastes.2 The bulk of this chapter discusses Lovecrfaft's letters to Smith, Derleth,
Wandrei, Long and Dwyer and the way they describe how Weird fiction (and WT) is
treated by the group (and especially in relation to Smith, Derleth and Wandrei). Aside
from this I also discuss Paul W. Cook's The Recluse and end the chapter with a new
form of fan magazines that began to appear just a couple of months before the end of
this period. All of this sheds light on a more fanatical group of enthusiasts who saw
the growth of the Weird as their mission. Unlike the Dialogic layerwhich was
unproportionally in favor of SF, or the Horror-centered Commerical one, the overall
vector of their type of Weird is more Fantasy in tone.

The Masters Convene

When we consider those authors involved in WT, during the years 1924-1930, who
were more serious about genre Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps the quintessential
figure. Locked away at his elderly parents' farm in Auburn, California, Smith tried to
1
Perhaps the name "Dwyer" would ring a bell to the reader as his letter to the "Eyrie"
was discussed in the "Dialogues" section of this chapter.
2
SL.2. "Letter to Zealia Bishop, Feb. 13, 1928", 225.

3
hone his skills as a fledgling poet in those years. Refusing to adhere to advices by his
mentor, poet George Sterling, Smith saw the Weird as the only fitting mode of
writing. In 1925, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Sterling started to convince
Smith that he should outgrow the Weird. Smith himself was perhaps shocked to get a
letter from Sterling in which the senior poet tells him that his own "Wine and
Wizardry" (1908) , Sterling's "Weirdest" poem, is considered almost childish now by
the poet and futile as it deals with "impossible" material. 3 Sterling goes on to explain
that "the whole intellectual (including of course the esthetic) trend is increasingly
against admiration of the demonic, the supernatural" and only seems childish today.4
This letter came in response to Smith's angry epistolary exchange about considering
his work "escapist" rather than a "service".5 The exact nature of this service is
discovered in Smith's last letter to Sterling, just before the latter's suicide. In this last
letter Smith explains that his poetry goes against the materialistic madness of the
times which he sees as detrimental to human imagination and development. 6He also
promises to publish an article that will defend imaginative poetry. 7 In fact, the little
quarrel between the two poets was partially a result of an article published by another
WT contributor, Donald Wandrei, in the Overland Monthly journal which praised
Smith's poetry. I will discuss the article later but suffices to say now that Smith saw
Wandrei as fellow crusader for the Weird. He goes on to say that "Wandrei has a
theory that the literature of the future, since purely human topics are pretty well
worked out, will concern itself more and more with the fantastic and cosmic". 8 This
leads Smith to announce an aesthetic war against "that supreme superstition, reality". 9
The fact that Smith saw Wandrei and others of the Lovecraft circle as fellow
combatants gives their milieu in WT a more fanatic inclination to shape the Weird.
Unlike other authors in WT who saw the Weird as just another genre that pays the
bills these writers truly believed that cultivating this type of fiction is a calling rather
than a business opportunity.

3
The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith. "Sterling's
letter to Smith. 31 October, 1926". 283.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. "Smith's Letter to Sterling. 27 October 1926", 283. The whole episode started from a short
story by Smith sent to WT ("The Abominations of Yondo"), and rejected, which Sterling saw as an
affront to Smith's poetic cultivation.
6
Ibid. "Smith's Letter to Sterling. 4 November 1926", 284.
7
The article was never published by Smith but a manuscript of its draft is in John Hay Library.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.

4
As mentioned in the previous chapter Lovecraft saw Smith as his superior and the fact
that he often tries to coax Smith into showing his poems and drawings to Farnsworth
Wright during those years shows how much Smith's notion of the Weird paralleled
Lovecraft's.10 Though the two wrote in a very different style they both shared an
understanding that the Weird must be established as a serious genre. In February 1926
Lovecraft writes Smith about the promises of Wright to make WT less puerile and
pulpy. Yet, in the same letter Lovecraft also mentions his enthusiasm for the
publication of a non-professional magazine called The Recluse.

"Serious" Weird Amateurs

Another acquaintance of Lovecraft, from his Amateur Journalism circle, was Paul W.
Cook who published several obscure amateur journals at those years. While Cook's
first journal, The Vagrant (its 15 issues published between 1915 to 1927), had
sometimes touched upon Weird fiction it was only in 1927 that Cook started to
publish amateur journals that were more Weird than anything else. The first – The
Recluse (only one issue, January 1927, was ever published) was dominated by
Lovecraft's circle and its aesthetic tastes. The one issue includes a poem by C.A.
Smith, an essay on the poetry of Smith's late mentor George Sterling, short stories by
Donald Wandrei and H. Warner Munn and poems by Wandrei, Long and Vret Orton
(another acquaintance of Lovecraft and the Kalem club). This sole issue also includes
Lovecraft's now-famous essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" discussed before in
this dissertation. The content of the poems and short stories is mostly dream-like
fantasy and horror that corresponds to what these authors published in WT at those
years. The cover art for this issue, by Vret Orton, strongly resembles today's Dark
Fantasy (at least in its more trashy, 1980s revival style – almost like the cover of a
Heavy Metal album) and represents a monkish old man at his lonely study surrounded
by alchemical vials and ancient tomes. Cook's later journals, published after the
period discussed in this chapter, also bear "Weird" names such as The Revenant and
The Ghost. The overall tones from both the Kalem club, the epistolary correspondence
we have seen and Paul W. Cook's journal show that the first members of cultic Weird
fiction, coalesced around mid-1926 and early 1927. Most of them also came from the
world of amateur journalism, had aesthetic preferences to dream-like Fantasy poetry
10
In a January 20th 1926 letter Lovecraft writes Smtih that he "wishes to Pegāna " Farnsworth Wright
could see Smith's drawings. Pegāna being the fictional Fantasy land that Anglo-Irish writer Lord
Dunsany created in the early 20th century.

5
and they had a very complex attitude towards the commercial world of popular
fiction.

In 1928 this same W. Paul Cook published a booklet containing Lovecraft's Weird
story "The Shunned House" with a preface written by Frank Belknap Long. In it, he
finds "analogies to contemporary "terror tales", to the work of Lord Dunsany and
Artrhur Machen and Algernon Blackwood within Lovecraft's fiction. 11 From all of
these names only that of Lord Dunsany, mostly recognized today as a Fantasy author,
does not appear in WT during those years which means that the Cultic layer was more
inclined towards Fantasy than the other two layers.

Long also goes on to say that "The Shunned House" would "probably be rejected by
every editor in America" and this is reason enough to like it. 12 Yet he also mentions a
Mr. O'Brien that has included one of Lovecraft's stories in his Roll of Honor and that
it may "afford critical support to those who are wary of acclaiming work that is
bizarre and vivid and new".13 This O'Brien was Edward O'Brien who edited the "Best
American Series" - a series of anthologies that started in 1915 and is still active today.
The series was published annually by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
O'Brien served as editor until his death in 1941. The Roll of Honor was a list of short
story titles that O'Brien deemed worthy to receive mention. The fact that Long seems
quite pleased about O'Brien's choice of Lovecraft's stories – a proof of Lovecraft's
success in commercial spheres – stands in contrast to his ridicule of the story probably
being rejected "by every editor in America". Such ambivalence towards the
commercial sphere is the silver lining in the Cultic layer.

Back to Smith and Lovecraft's epistolary exchange during those years one gets the
notion that both authors wanted the Weird to be more Fantastic. For example
Lovecraft tells Smith in March 1926 that he is "all agog" over a Dunsanian scene
Smith is about to draw as he is "a particular devotee of the noble fantaisiste". 14 Smith's
response to Lovecraft's enthusiasm about his Fantasy art is that his drawings "simply
represent a quest for exotic beauty, weirdness, and fantasy". 15 As seen in the Dialogic
layer the word "beauty" is used here to denote a dream-like Fantasy theme. Smith is

11
in "a weird writer in our midst" (51)
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
"Letter from February 26th 1926". The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, 100.
15
May 9th 1926. Ibid., 103.

6
also very interested in this letter about the opinions of what he calls "the gang" which
mostly means the Kalem club and other fellow enthusiasts about the Weird within the
Lovecraft circle. This "gang" also included August Derleth who was younger than
seventeen when he started his correspondence with Lovecraft. Derleth, who mostly
wrote generic ghost stories for WT was probably known to Smith who published some
poems to the magazine at the time. Lovecraft first mentions Derleth to Smith as
"someone" who tricked him into reading a pulpy, sub-literary Sax Rohmer
Supernatural story (though in a letter to Derleth Lovecraft thanks the young author for
recommending such an interesting piece). Nevertheless, in a later letter Lovecraft tells
Smith that he hopes to turn Derleth into "something of a fantasiste" who is also
"devoted to Dunsany & Arthur Machen".16 Together with this new "discovery"
Lovecraft also enquires about another youth, Donald Wandrei, who seems to be
"sensitive to the fantastic".17 The two older "fantasistes" enthusiastically groom the
new generation of Weird writers. As Lord Dunsany seems to be the major figure in
defining such a genre one must assume that the "nerve center" of cultic layer at this
period – Lovecraft and Smith – believes the Weird to be more Fantasy than Horror or
SF. Lovecraft explains to the kindred-spirit Smith that "fantasy is something
altogether different" to stories about conventional variants of life as it is "an art based
on the imaginative life of the human mind".18 The meaning of "Fantasy" is explained
by Lovecraft as envisioning a well-defined imaginary world like Dunsany did. 19That
is not to say that Lovecraft and Smith discarded the rise of SF completely or treated
the Weird as only a dream-like (later Cosmic) dark Fantasy. This is only to say that
they wanted to cultivate that part of the Weird more than the others.

In 1926 Lovecraft and Smith begin to notice other "weird" pulp magazines such as
Ghost Stories and the Sf magazine Amazing Stories. In March 1926 Lovecraft tells
Smith about Amazing Stories and how it can form "a second market" for his writings.
He describes the magazine as a enterprise that publishes "pseudo-scientific" material
"like Jules Verne".20 Ghost Stories and Tales of Magic and Mystery receive much less
attention from him a month later when he confesses to Smith that their Supernatural

16
October 12th 1926, 110.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 113.
19
Ibid.
20
101

7
"mediocre" material lacks the "genuine colour of strangeness & interplanetary
magic".21 From these instances we can learn that by the end of 1926 the Cultic layer
was quite fond of SF and its "interplanetary" scope yet science and its effects on
humanity were not the reason they endorsed this type of fiction. Rather, they viewed
SF as a vehicle of portraying otherworldly vistas on bizarre planets. Such tendencies
continued in 1927 with Lovecraft praising the "gang's" new discovery of Donald
Wandrei whose "truly cosmic & fantastic" vision pleases Lovecraft. The overall
importance of WT in this discussion is that it is a better paying magazine than
Amazing Stories, it is much better in content than Ghost Stories and that its editor is a
cultivated person who must cater to the "crudity" of many Weird readers. 22 As such
WT has become the most important publishing place for the cultic layer even though
they did not consider the magazine as lofty as their own amateur magazine The
Recluse which came out at the same time. By late 1928 the Cultic layer becomes more
focused on prose than poetry and Smith himself starts publishing short stories to
WT ,more or less, regularly. Nevertheless, as Lovecraft phrases it, these stories are
still nightmare-like, almost poetic, tales rather than solid prose. Although written in
1926 (and rejected by WT) Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" is published by WT in
1928 and at the same year it seems the Cultic layer veers closer to Cosmic horror with
some letters by members of the Lovecraft's Circle praising the outer dimensional
horrors in one another's' tales.

Since 1926 there is some effort by the Cultic layer to publish anthologies of Weird
stories by members of the Lovecraft's circle – many of them contributors to WT. For
example, Lovecraft writes Clark Ashton Smith in December 1928 to tell him about a
Thomas E. Harre who contacted both him and H. Warner Munn (whom we discussed
in the Commercial layer) for an anthology of horror stories. 23 Aside from amateur
publications of anthologies, such as Cook's endeavors that we have seen, the Cult
layer wanted broader recognition of the authors it crowned as masters. WT itself
becomes a space of great anxiety. Lovecraft describes most of WT's contributors in
1929 thus: "the doughty cohort of space-fillers whose works usurps the greater
number of W.T.'s pages".24 The word "usurps" hints that Lovecraft wants WT's
content to be dominated by material his Cultic layer appreciates. Such phrases by him
21
106
22
Ibid., 147
23
167.
24
178.

8
do not exist in response to other Speculative pulps which shows how WT, while
ridiculed by the cultic layer, is quite important to them and not only from a monetary
point of view. At the end of 1929 the Lovecraft circle understands that the SF
magazines are pretty far in scope from their generic tastes and the other Horror pulps
are so sub-literary as to be an affront to their efforts. As Lovecraft phrases it "only
W.T. forms a market" for stories such as Smith's "The End of the Story" and "The
Tale of Satampra Zeiros" –the first being a supernatural Gothic tale and the second a
Dark Fantasy yarn.25 In fact Smith laments to Lovecraft in a follow letter about the
lack of a "real weird magazine" meaning a magazine whose contents are mostly Dark
Fantasy, poetic nightmare-like tales and Cosmic Horror.26 WT, it appears, had such
content but at this time it was far from the majority of its action pulpy Supernatural
Horror tales. Lovecraft explains to Smith that he wants to dabble in SF but that his
stories would not be the "Edmond Hamilton, Ray Cummings" type but rather about
dead planets with huge ancient ruins.27 A later letter strengthens this conception This
shows how the Cultic layer did not perceive SF as something to do with science at all
but, again, as an opportunity to explore nightmarish interplanetary vistas. In this same
letter Lovecraft praises Smith's Fantasy story "Satampra Zeiros" as having a
"Dunsanian touch" which makes it so good. The "real" weird is ,again, inherently a
Fantasy tale which often incorporates Dark themes, poetic beauty, decadence, ruins,
the grotesque and the Cosmic in its horrifying form. Such conception of the weird

It seems that the Kalem club had some interest in Weird fiction but most of them did
not look at it as a genre or even as fans of such Literature. They may have dabbled in
it. The only members of the group who may have been more serious about it were
Samuel Loveman, Frank Belknap Long and Lovecraft himself. In 1926, the
Lovecraft's circle slowly expanded beyond the Kalem Club and C.A. Smith to also
include Donald Wandrei and August Derleth.

Donald Wandrei writes about Clark Ashton smith's poetry in the Californian journal
the Overland Monthly:

[W[ondrous beauty and a strange fear. Here and there may be found a poppy-flower,
an orchid from the hot-bed of Hell, the whisper of an eldritch wind, a breath from the
25
184. and also Smith's letter to Lovecraft concerning Amazing Stories saying that most of its material
"reek so much of the laboratory" (191).
26
186
27
187.

9
 burning sands of regions infernal. The wizard calls, and at his imperious summons
come genie, witch, and daemon to open the portal to the haunted realms of faery; The
sky is burning. Stars hurtle to destruction or waste away. All mysteries are
uncurtained. One may watch a landscape of the moon, the seas of Saturn, the sunken
fanes of old Atlantis, wars and wonders on some distant star. 28

For those who read WT during that time it was very easy to connect that imagery to
the stories in the magazine. Horror ("strange fear") SF ("wars and wonders on some
distant stars") and Fantasy ("the wizard calls […] to the haunted realms of faery") are
all entwined here. Much like the Dialogic layer the purpose of such mixture is escape
from the mundane as "There is no place in the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith for the
conventional, the trite, the outworn. It is useless to search his work for offerings, to
29
popular desire. The poems are laden with a pagan, exotic beauty and imagery" .
Again, we see here a deep distaste for the popular and to "popular desires".
Nevertheless, unlike the Dialogic layer, with its strong preference to Pulp action and
pornographic sadomasochistic scenes, the great annihilator of the mundane is strange
beauty – a "haunted realm of faery" the "landscape of the moon". This shows a great
aversion from the popular even when it does use "Weird" elements in its myriad
forms. When an exotic, Fantastic thing becomes popular it can no longer remain
"Weird" as it ceases to wonder, its mysteries all revealed. This portrays the nigh-
impossible task of Weird prose. In poetry such imagery can easily be brought forward
by vague, over laden, lines ripe with misty vampires, sleeping dragons and distant
galaxies. Therefore, it invites a Literary style that can never be Pulp and one that will
always veer on the ambivalent, semi-poetic and complex. Weird and Pulp are
antithetical to one another not because they are politically antagonized (as scholars
and authors such as China Mieville may think) but because they are aesthetic enemies.
In other words – the only "escape" that the Weird allows is a dream-like retreat that
transcends the known, the simple, the popular. As such SF seems quite out of place
here and only the outlandish (or nightmarish) imagery it provides can be accepted.
Technology and its effect on humanity or any technological extrapolations are of no
interest to the Weird author. By 1930 some of the Lovecraft Circle have tried
publishing to these magazines but ,as Smith rephrased it, the Circle's favored content
was "too literary & poetical" for the "strictly technological" style of these

28
Overland Monthly. 1926.12, 380.
29
Ibid. 381.

10
magazines.30 Nevertheless, the Circle members who published regularly did try their
luck in submitting manuscripts to Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories and
Astounding when WT rejected them and vice versa.31 Still, there seems to be some
acceptance of the SF magazines as having potential for a Weird writer in the letters.32

H.P. Lovecraft and Smith started using their invented mythologies in a more fan-like,
tongue-in-cheek method since 1930. For example, Smith sometimes signed his letters
to Lovecraft "Ci-Ay-Ess, the evangelist of Tsathoggua, and the archivist of Mu and
Antares" while Lovecraft signed "E'ch-pi-el, Priest of Cthulhu".33

Protégés

Frank Belknap Long was one of the first contributors to WT whom Lovecraft saw as a
protégée. The two began their correspondence in 1920 and Lovecraft published some
of Long's poems in his own Amateur Journal The Conservative (1915-1923).
Lovecraft refers to himself in his letters to Long as "grandpa" and calls Long "sonny"
which strengthens Lovecraft's function in their relationship as an experienced guide.
In their correspondence they mostly discuss mutual acquaintances (mostly the Kalem
club), architecture and inspirations for Horror stories. In a typical racist manner
Lovecraft describes to Long, for example, assumed "rites and orgies" within local
synagogues in Providence filled with "unholy marks from the cabala and the
Necronomicon" while "slug-like beings (half Jew and half Negro, apparently)" crawl
around the place.34 The items passed between the two authors mostly include Fantasy
art by Smith, manuscripts for WT, Weird fiction novels (by authors such as De la
Mare, Dunsany and Poe) and revisions of Lovecraft's "History of Supernatural Horror
in Literature" before being sent to Cook.35 One small point of conflict between the
two is about city life and racial diversity in the U.S. Lovecraft maintains a return to
rural life and his Aesthetic inclinations tends toward racial purity and a Fantastic
Aryan mythical past. For instance, he tells Long that the majority of Jews in America
cannot be assimilated as their spiritual nature is opposed to the Aryans: "us, by every
law of Nature are virile, warlike, and beauty-loving pagans and Northern polytheists!
We, who should shout our laughter to Odin and Thor, are constrained to bend like
30
199.
31
208/
32
For instance,
33
217
34
SL.2, "Letter to Long, April 23, 1926", 43.
35
Long's also idolized Edgar Allan Poe. (Hart and Joshi, 155).

11
Eastern slaves […] it sickens my blond Teuton soul".36 Therefore, it is not surprising
that Lovecraft finds only Horror in the wave of immigrants that flooded American
cities and saw a somber Fantasy land with various god-like beings and mythical
monsters as a fitting alternative to realist portrayals of contemporary U.S. Long, on
the other hand believed that "spiritual" tendencies are a manner of choice and
education and are not embedded in race or Ethnicity. He also asked Lovecraft to come
and visit him in N.Y. several times to which Lovecraft was sometimes reluctant. In
1926, Long published a book of poems (with a preface by Samuel Loveman) in which
there is the poem "Manhatten Skyline" that includes the lines "Did Marlowe dream
such topless towers\ Shivering in his tavern rags?". These lines represent awe and
reverence to modernity and some aversion from the past. As such, it could be said that
Long was less inclined towards racial mythologies. 37 Still, A Man from Genoa, Long's
poetry book, also include the poem "on reading Arthur Machen" and "Two Stanzas
for Master Francois Villon". Long's emphasis on Machen, famous for his
atmospheric, Supernatural Horror stories, and Villon, the mischievous 15th century
poet, show some infatuation with the medieval period and with Horror. It would be a
later semi-protégée of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, that would far surpass Lovecraft
in focusing his stories around such racial myths. 38 Nevertheless, Long and Lovecraft
agreed that WT was a trashy magazine catering to idiots with no Literary inclination. 39
Much like Smith, and even Lovecraft at times, Long viewed himself foremost as a
poet at this time so it is not surprising that they he saw the magazine's pulp prose as
vulgar.40 The inclination towards the poetic and the desire to reconcile a mythical
Fantastic past with the Horrors of modernity return in another member of Lovecraft's
circle at this period – Wandrei.

Donald Wandrei's first story, "The Red Brain", appeared in WT in October 1927.
However, Wandrei's inauguration into Weird fiction started some months earlier when
he started an epistolary correspondence with Lovecraft which culminated in the
former visiting the latter in Providence for an antiquarian tour of New England. This
36
SL.2. "Letter to FBL, Aug. 21, 1926", 67.
37
Long's story "The dog Eared-God" (1926.11), for example, has a Jewish professor that, while not
represented as benign or perfectly law abiding, is far from Lovecraft's Jewish mongrels represented at
about the same time in "The Horror at Red Hook" (1927.1).
38
Howard would, somewhat, join the Lovecraft Circle in 1931 and as such this episode will be
discussed in the next chapter.
39
For example, Lovecraft calls WT's readership "the great 'literary' publick!". SL.2 "Letter to FBL, May
20, 1926. 53.
40
Hart and Joshi, Lovecraft's New York Circle, 155.

12
correspondence, together with Wandrei's willingness for such a tour, shows a clear
fascination with a mythical past in an almost Romanticist way. The fact that
Wandrei's first tale is more SF and Horror than Fantasy does not detract from his
aesthetic inclinations towards a Fantastic, dream-like, past. One of Lovecraft's first
letters to Wandrei emphasizes the path the senior author wants this would-be-protégée
to explore. In it, Lovecraft points to Wandrei the racial impurity of New York, and
other cities in America, and how they are detrimental to the "growth of the Nordic,
Anglo-American stream of civilization".41 The master instructs the student about his
own, more wholesome, aesthetic inclinations of "the beauty of wonder, of antiquity,
of landscape, architecture, of horror […] of mystic memory & hallowed tradition". 42
Though, Lovecraft soon refutes himself when he says he wants to discuss "the stars or
the hills or the abbey towers of dim, far lands" and the "breathless mysteries &
inconceivable vistas" of science.43 It appears Lovecraft's "hallowed tradition" is not of
his own, familiar, Providence, but of "far lands" and other worlds. One can say that
Lovecraft instructs Wandrei to shape his literary pursuits around invented
mythologies of Fantasy lands but ones that can only be gleaned by a New England
antiquarian. In other words, he offers Wandrei to become a Fantasy writer. To point
the author in the right direction he offers him to meet Paul.W. Cook, Samuel
Loveman, Frank Belknap Long, Bernard Dwyer and august Derleth who are those of
the rare breed of people interested in the weird, though Lovecraft also calls them his
"Gothic circle".44 Indeed, it seems that Lovecraft views the Gothic tradition as the first
modern emanation of the Weird, as seen in his essay, published at about the same
time, "Supernatural Horror in Literature". He also humorously calls Wandrei who
travels the U.S. to become a better poet, "Melmoth", or "Donald the Wandrei" which
is an allusion to Charles Maturin's Gothic novel "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820). Yet,
he also tells Wandrei about his desire to "call up visions of some vast & remote realm
of entity beyond the universe of matter & energy". 45 Again, we see here two
conflicting aesthetics – the antiquarian Gothic and some "vast realms" beyond our
world. It can be said that since the mid 1920s to the end of this decade Lovecraft and
his circle try to reconcile two trends – the Gothic and the Cosmic – and often manage

41
SL.2. "Letter to Wandrei, Feb. 10, 1927", 101.
42
Ibid., 103.
43
Ibid.
44
S.L.2. "Letter to Wandrei. March 27, 1927", 121.
45
SL.2. "Letter to Wandrei. May 19, 1927", 127.

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to do so in the realm of Fantasy where ancient, Gothic or Romantic, vistas are
intertwined with magical, unfamiliar worlds.

August Derleth

First "Fans"

In early1927 young farmer and woodcraftsman Bernard Austin (William) Dwyer

contacted Lovecraft through WT and even sent the Weird author a drawing based on
Lovecraft's story "Pickman's Model" after Lovecraft had sent him a manuscript of the
story (written September 1926 but not yet published in WT). Soon, Lovecraft began to
write lengthy letters to Dwyer in which he rambles about the inspiration for his stories
and about the aesthetic origin of his style. Lovecraft's letters to Dwyer, aside from
providing some personal, real-life experiences that Lovecraft claims to have shaped
his style (such as his horrible sojourn in an immigrant neighborhood in N.Y., or his
dreams) also provide important information about his views on art as they were
portrayed to a fan. This can show what Lovecraft desired the quintessential Weird fan
to be. Dwyer was not far in taking Lovecraft's bread-crumb trail and follow his
incentives.Even more so than in his letters to Long, Wandrei and Derleth Lovecraft
spills his infatuation with rural New England and stresses that his "fantasy" tales are
his most artistic but alas, WT barely accepts them.46 For example, in a letter from
March 1927 Lovecraft tells Dwyer that "The White Ship is the only one of my frankly
fantastic things that Weird Tales ever accepted".47 In this same letter Lovecraft also
lists his interests "the past and the unknown or the strange". 48 He goes on to describe
his most favored vistas which he uses as his muse, and ones he coaxes Dwyer to
explore, as "winding roads that skirt ancient woods and ramble on between stone
walls to some marvelous meeting-place of the fauns or some cryptic gate to another
world".49 This very Fantastic description shows that Lovecraft would prefer more
refined fans and ones that like Fantasy.

A more potent example of Lovecraft's conviction that Dwyer should follow Fantasy
fiction is from Lovecraft's letter to him in June 1927. In this letter the author tells

46

47
SL.2. "Letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer. March 3, 1927", 105.
48
Ibid., 111
49
Ibid., 112.

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Dwyer that contemporary art could never aesthetically succeed as long as it is built
upon "big business, structural steel, universal suffrage, aeroplanes, The League of
Nations, Greenwich Village, the radio, Henry Ford, the Rotary club, McCormick
harvesters, soviets, the American Mercury, H.G. Wells, Dadaism".50 This anger
towards everything modern shows a clear aversion from futuristic themes and
technology. Lovecraft goes on to explain, to the almost-rustic Dwyer, about the only
three ways to escape this modern attack on "true" art. The first is leading rustic life
"amidst ancient hills and woods a farmsteads".51 The second is to remain true "to the
lore and memories of the old, simple, rural things" by writing on "former ages".52 This
method sometimes results in "autumnal, sunset colours of a purely decadent art". 53
The third option, which Lovecraft seems most enthusiastic about, is "the fantastic art
and literature of escape" such as that of "Blackwood, Dunsany, Stephens, de la Mare,
Machen" that "in all its phases depend upon the past". 54 Lovecraft directs Dwyer's
enthusiasm with the weird to Fantasy fiction that portrays former ages which is easily
identified today as being familiar to every person who have read Tolkien or played
Dungeons and Dragons.

This fixation on the past and on history repeats in other letters to Dwyer where the
two discuss Roman history and Lovecraft's desire to write a story based upon a dream
he had where he was a Roman.55 Unlike his discussion with his protégées that had the
possibility of including Cosmic vistas and outré, exotic, elements in fiction here,
discussing such matters with a fan (who is not a professional writer), Lovecraft
stresses the importance of the past itself as a sole source of the fantastic and one that
stands as a bastion against the evils of modernity.

Fans Outside the Circle

Thrill Book – "vastly superior to WT"

Bernard Austin Dwyer – "true fantaisiste" – fan – Lovecraft correspondence.

Dialogic – more SF centered and the most conflicted.

50
133.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
218.

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Commercial – more Supernatural Horror centered and race seems to be a major
influence on generic tendencies. More pornographic and pulpy.

Cultic – more Fantasy centered. Dream-like, poetic, beauty, exotic.

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