The Horror in the Museum (2 page)

In this corrected edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s revisions and collaborations, we have attempted not merely to restore the texts but to arrange the tales in accordance with the presumed degree of Lovecraft’s involvement with them. What we have called “primary” revisions are those that were wholly or almost wholly written by Lovecraft (although a plot-germ or occasionally an actual draft was supplied by the revision client); the “secondary” revisions are those in which Lovecraft merely touched up—albeit sometimes extensively—a preexisting draft.

The two collaborations with Winifred Virginia Jackson, “The Green Meadow” and “The Crawling Chaos,” are interesting in that they are among the few works (the others are “Poetry and the Gods,” “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and “In the Walls of Eryx”) where Lovecraft affixed his name along with that of his collaborator, even though here both used pseudonyms. Nevertheless, there is little evidence to suggest that Jackson contributed any prose to either tale.

For the two tales revised for Adolphe de Castro, “The Last Test” and “The Electric Executioner,” we have de Castro’s original versions: they were published in his collection
In’the Confessional
(1893), under the titles “A Sacrifice to Science” and “The
Automatic Executioner.” Lovecraft has rewritten both stories completely, preserving only the skeleton of each work. It should be noted that in Lovecraft’s only reference to the first tale he calls it “Clarendon’s Last Test”; it is not certain whether he or someone else made the change. Lovecraft also speaks in letters of a third story revised for de Castro, but this has evidently been lost.

All three stories revised for Zealia Bishop—”The Curse of Yig,” “The Mound,” and “Medusa’s Coil”—were, as Lovecraft notes, based on the scantiest of plot-germs and are accordingly close to original works by Lovecraft. The persistent rumor that Frank Belknap Long assisted in the writing of “The Mound” is false: Long, as Zealia Bishop’s agent, merely abridged the story in a vain attempt to place it with a pulp magazine; after these efforts failed, the original version of the story as written by Lovecraft was restored, remaining in manuscript until Lovecraft’s death. August Derleth then radically revised and abridged both “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil” and marketed them to
Weird Tales.
This edition represents the first unadulterated publication of both works.

There is abundant evidence that Lovecraft wrote nearly the entirety of all five stories revised for Hazel Heald; Heald’s contention that Lovecraft’s role in “The Man of Stone” was somewhat less extensive than in the others does not seem to be borne out by the text.

For “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” we have both a draft by William Lumley (the title is his) and Lovecraft’s rewriting. Again Lovecraft has preserved only the nucleus of the plot, and all the prose is his. Lumley’s draft was first published (along with the original versions of the two Adolphe de Castro tales) in a special edition of
Crypt of Cthulhu, Ashes and Others
(1982).

Of the secondary revisions, Sonia H. Greene (Davis) reports that Lovecraft “revised and edited” “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (the title “The Invisible Monster” was supplied by
Weird Tales),
hence we can assume a preexisting draft. The other tale by Greene thought to be revised by Lovecraft, “Four O’Clock,” was written, as Greene tells us, only at Lovecraft’s suggestion and does not seem to bear any Lovecraftian prose or content; it has accordingly been omitted from this edition.

In recent years Lovecraft’s revisory hand has been detected in a number of tales by his friends and colleagues, and five stories have been added to this edition. Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., first observed that Lovecraft in letters refers to four tales revised for C. M. Eddy, Jr.; all were probably based on existing drafts by Eddy, who wrote
many tales in his own right. “Ashes” appears to be the earliest of these stories, and Lovecraft’s hand in it is probably very light. In the other three—”The Ghost-Eater,” “The Loved Dead,” and “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind”—the two authors probably contributed equally.

It is difficult to ascertain how much of Lovecraft remains in Wilfred Blanch Talman’s “Two Black Bottles,” as Lovecraft’s letters suggest that Talman was annoyed at Lovecraft’s extensive revisions in the story and may perhaps have reinstated his own prose in the final draft.

I discovered Lovecraft’s role in Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Trap”; in a letter to R. H. Barlow (25 February 1932) he reports writing the entire central section of the story. In letters Lovecraft refers to another story by Whitehead, “The Bruise,” for which he supplied a synopsis; and although William Fulwiler, who brought this matter to our attention, believes that Lovecraft may have actually written the story (published as “Bothon” in
West India Lights),
I am not convinced that Lovecraft contributed any prose to this work.

Lovecraft’s letters to Duane W. Rimel indicate that he was reading and reviewing many of Rimel’s tales during the 1930s, and in two of them he seems to have had a hand. Scott Connors noted Lovecraft’s involvement in “The Tree on the Hill,” and Robert M. Price and I confirmed it. Rimel has stated that Lovecraft wrote the entire third section of the tale, as well as the citation from the mythical
Chronicle of Nath
in the second section. Will Murray first suspected, on internal evidence, Lovecraft’s role in “The Disinterment.” Rimel maintains that Lovecraft’s revisions in the story were very light, and letters by Lovecraft unearthed by Murray and myself appear to confirm that claim.

For R. H. Barlow’s “Till A’ the Seas’“ we have a typescript by Barlow (apparently a second draft) with exhaustive revisions by Lovecraft in pen. Dirk W. Mosig discovered Lovecraft’s hand in Barlow’s “The Night Ocean,” as cited in a letter to Hyman Bradofsky (4 November 1936). Mosig believed the tale to be nearly entirely written by Lovecraft; but documents subsequently consulted by me suggest that he played a much smaller role in the genesis and writing of the tale. The work was probably largely Barlow’s, although with heavy revisions and additions by Lovecraft at random points.

For a more detailed discussion of the degree of Lovecraft’s involvement in these stories, see my article “Lovecraft’s Revisions:
How Much of Them Did He Write?”
Crypt of Cthulhu
2 (Candlemas 1983): 3-14.

Our editorial practice for this disparate body of work must of necessity be cautious. Autograph manuscripts (or Lovecraft’s autograph corrections) exist for only two tales in this volume—”Till A’ the Seas’“ and “The Diary of Alonzo Typer.” Typescripts exist only for “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil,” although both were prepared by Frank Belknap Long and contain several errors and incoherencies, the apparent result of Long’s inability to read Lovecraft’s handwriting. The texts for all other works must be based upon publications in amateur journals or pulp magazines. For the primary revisions we have reinstated Lovecraft’s normal punctuational, stylistic, and syntactic usages, on the principle that nearly all the prose in these tales is his; for the secondary revisions we have only corrected obvious misprints or internal inconsistencies of usage in the original publications.

Many colleagues have assisted in the compilation of this volume, and I am especially grateful to Donald R. Burleson, Kenneth R. Johnson, Marc A. Michaud, Dirk W. Mosig, Will Murray, and Robert M. Price. The advice of James Turner has been invaluable both in the overall arrangement of this edition and in countless points of difficulty in the texts themselves.

S. T. J
OSHI

However paradoxical it may seem, in view of his present posthumous fame as a master of the macabre, Howard Phillips Love-craft made his scant living principally by revising and correcting manuscripts of prose and poetry sent to him by a variety of hopeful writers. The greater number of his clients seldom achieved publication in any but amateur-press magazines, but his revision of the stories by a small group of writers with reasonably strong themes but a concomitant lack of literary skills or prose style enlisted a greater share of his interest and assistance—amounting often to the complete rewriting of a submitted manuscript—and so found their way into print.

Lovecraft’s revision work can be divided into two classes. The bulk of it amounted to little more than professional correction of language, syntax, punctuation, and the like, but a minority of tales in the domain of the macabre aroused his personal interest to the extent of active participation. Even this small group of tales was subdivided into areas of lesser and major interest. Some, as in the case of Sonia H. Greene’s story, the early work of Hazel Heald, and the tales of his old Providence friend C. M. Eddy, Jr., required less drastic revision and more or less advisory assistance. Writing on 30 September 1944 of one such story, “The Man of Stone,” the late
Hazel Heald admitted, “Lovecraft helped me on this story as much as on the others, and did actually rewrite paragraphs. He would criticize paragraph after paragraph and pencil remarks beside them, and then make me rewrite them until they pleased him.” But of course Lovecraft did considerably more with Hazel Heald’s later stories: he rewrote them from beginning to end so that they are essentially Lovecraft stories, retaining only the plot or central theme of the author whose by-line appeared over the work—and not even this in every case. The kind of revision to which Mrs. Heald here referred is illustrated in the manuscript of R. H. Barlow’s tale, “Till A’ the Seas,’“ in the Lovecraft Collection of the John Hay Library of Brown University, a specimen page from which appears as the frontispiece to the present volume.

Zealia Bishop, in her 1953 memoir “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View,” sets forth an experience central to the majority of the writers represented in this collection, one shared by only a relatively few of Lovecraft’s clients: “The stories I sent him always came back so revised from their basic idea that I felt I was a complete failure as a writer.” The extent to which she felt herself indebted to Lovecraft was indicated by her insistence that half the fee paid by
Weird Tales
for “Medusa’s Coil,” published after Love-craft’s untimely death in 1937, be sent to his surviving aunt, Mrs. Annie E. Phillips GamwelL “I had learned from him fundamental principles of writing technique and the appreciation of literature…. My debt to Lovecraft is great. I count myself fortunate that I was one of his epistolary friends and pupils.”

Lovecraft also encouraged his fiction clients to turn a hand to the macabre, since this after all was his specialized field, in which he was far more at home than in the popular contemporary veins of romance or realism; fantasy was the one literary genre in which he could be of greatest service to his patrons. Even the most casual reading of the revisions collected herein offers patent evidence that with Hazel Heald’s tale, “The Horror in the Museum,” Lovecraft saw himself rather more as collaborator than as revisionist. The story is pure Lovecraft, even to the introduction of names from the Cthulhu Mythos, and the same circumstance obtains with “Out of the Aeons.”

And this to some extent is true, too, of many of the other stories: William Lumley’s “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” Hazel Heald’s “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” Adolphe de Castro’s “The Last Test” and “The Electric Executioner,” and the three by Zealia
Bishop, “The Curse of Yig,” “Medusa’s Coil,” and the short novel “The Mound,” one of the most impressive tales in this book.

One can well imagine the pleasure Lovecraft took in reworking some of these tales, for next to creating a new story of his own, he enjoyed nothing more than giving his vivid imagination free rein in revising fiction that belonged to his favorite field. His letters are crowded with references to his revision work; he wrote about the drudgery of trying to advise amateur poets, of “revising” their poems; he wrote about the difficulties of working with some writers who fancied themselves geniuses and had not a grain of ability—but he never once complained about rewriting a story in the domain of fantasy and the macabre, and there are frequent paragraphs listing stories in current issues of
Weird Tales
in which he “had a hand.”

These “revisions,” which are either largely or totally by Love-craft, properly belong in the Lovecraft canon. They are uneven in manner and flavor, but Lovecraft’s imagination and writing hand are not to be denied in the pages that follow. The best of these tales are certainly good enough to stand among Lovecraft’s stories—and why not?—since he wrote most of what is memorable in them!

A
UGUST
D
ERLETH

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following very singular narrative or record of impressions was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary that they deserve careful description. On the evening of Wednesday, August 27, 1913, at about 8:30 o’clock, the population of the small seaside village of Potowonket, Maine, U.S.A., was aroused by a thunderous report accompanied by a blinding flash; and persons near the shore beheld a mammoth ball of fire dart from the heavens into the sea but a short distance out, sending up a prodigious column of water. The following Sunday a fishing party composed of John Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon Canfield caught in their trawl and dragged ashore a mass of metallic rock, weighing 360 pounds, and looking (as Mr. Can-field said) like a piece of slag. Most of the inhabitants agreed that this heavy body was none other than the fireball which had fallen from the sky four days before; and Dr. Richmond M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that it must be an aerolite or meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to send to an expert Boston analyst, Dr. Jones discovered imbedded in the semi-metallic mass the strange book containing the ensuing tale, which is still in his possession.

In form the discovery resembles an ordinary notebook, about
5 × 3
inches in size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however, it presents marked peculiarities. The covers are apparently
of some dark stony substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by any mechanical means. No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The leaves are much the same, save that they are lighter in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be quite flexible. The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process involving the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. These substances cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force. The writing is
Greek of the purest classical quality,
and several students of palaeography declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about the second century B. C. There is little in the text to determine the date. The mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. During the course of analytical efforts made by the late Prof. Chambers of Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the narrative, were blurred to the point of utter effacement before being read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable loss. What remains of the contents was done into modern Greek letters by the palaeographer Rutherford and in this form submitted to the translators.

Prof. May field of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an opinion in which Dr. von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Prof. Bradley of Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic ground; pointing out that certain utterly unknown ingredients are present in large quantities, and warning that no classification is as yet possible.

The presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so momentous a problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The text, as far as preserved, is here rendered as literally as our language permits, in the hope that some reader may eventually hit upon an interpretation and solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of recent years.

—E.N.B.—L.T.,Jun.