Page:Lovecraft letter to Henneberger 1924-02-02.pdf/1



My dear Mr. Henneberger:

I was very glad to hear from you, and to receive so many sidelights on WEIRD TALES, whose chosen field makes me very eager for its success. I know the financial end of magazine publishing must be a tremendous and often discouraging responsibility, and I have a sincere respect for the pluck and determination of anybody who undertakes such a venture. Most certainly do I hope that some favourable turn will gradually transform your burdensome debt on the two magazines into an increasingly gratifying profit—and it seems to me that many facts warrant such optimism, for in the weird field you are practically alone and with a good start, whilst in the detective field there sees to be an insatiable demand for new material. Still, I know that marketing is a venturesome and uncertain process—especially with dealers in the unscrupulous state of mind you describe!

I assure you that I was not at all disconcerted by the presence of "The Transparent Ghost" beside my "Hound". In the first place, I don't take myself too seriously; and in the second place, I can appreciate the sort of humour involved in such touches of "comic relief"—like the gravedigger in "Hamlet" or the porter in "Macbeth". When a magazine covers a popular clientele and appeals to one particular interest, it is peculiarly apt to elicit literary—or more or less-literary—contributions from its readers; so that I suppose a very large proportion of those who have seen WEIRD TALES have flooded the office with unacceptable manuscripts. To them the whole subject of impossible contributions has become a live issue, so that the exploitation of some comically illiterate attempt carries a piquancy which they can feel and smile at even though others may find it somewhat tedious and inapropos. "The Transparent Ghost" may not be an austerely literary asset, yet I cannot doubt but that it will make many friends for the magazine, and perhaps assuage more than one subtle sting left behind by rejected MSS.

I hope, anyway, that this matter won't be instrumental in deposing Mr. Baird from the editorship until he is himself ready to relinquish it; for I feel that he must have done very well on the whole, considering the adverse conditions encountered in the quest for really weird stories. That he could get hold of as many as five perfectly satisfactory yarns is an almost remarkable phenomenon in view of the lack of truly artistic and individual expression among professional fiction-writers. When I see a magazine tending toward the commonplace, the last people I blame are the editors and publishers; for even a cursory survey of the professional writing field shows that the trouble is something infinitely deeper and wider—something concerning no one publication, but the whole atmosphere and temperament of the American fiction business. And even when I get to such large units as this, I can't be any too savage about the blaming—because I realise that much of the trouble is absolutely inevitable—as incapable of human remedy as the fate of any protagonist in the Greek drama. Here in America we have a very conventional and half-educated public—a public trained under one phase or another of the Puritan tradition, and almost dulled to aesthetic sensitiveness because of the monotonous and omnipresent overstressing of the ethical element. We have millions who lack the intellectual independence, courage, and flexibility to get an artistic thrill out of a bizarre situation, and who enter sympathetically into a story only when it ignores the colour and vividness of actual human emotions and conventionally presents a simple plot based on artificial, ethically sugar-coated values and leading to a flat denouement which shall vindicate every current platitude and leave no mystery unexplained by the shallow comprehension of the most mediocre reader.