The Horror in the Museum Read Free Page A

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

Primary Revisions

Translated by Elizabeth Neville Berkeley
and Lewis Theobald, Jun.

The Green