Page:Lovecraft letter to Henneberger 1924-02-02.pdf/3

 Now weird fiction, even in America, is not subject to the limitations of general fiction. When a person—the sort of person forming the readers of macabre fiction—wants an outré narrative at all, he is willing and anxious to take something removed from the beaten track of the national tradition; the tradition of conventional insipidity. Here is our real exception—the man who wants something original—but in the face of a general tradition which usurps all the education of our story-tellers, we can only ask in tragic accents, who is going to give it to him? Popular custom dins it into every young author that he must conform to patterns and reflect a smug artificial world and psychology. How can he beat this game of loaded dice in the one matter of the weird, which as a minority branch can hardly be expected to develop a school all its own in defiance of general fictional custom? I've yet to see the person who can answer that question. I've tried to take in hand a bright young chap in this town—a fellow with a conventional start, but who is now anxious to succeed with the weird. Time and again I alter his work, deleting commonplace situations, images, and reactions, and introducing touches which he never thought of, but which I consider dramatically effective in that kind of work. Time and again I do this, yet with the most discouraging results. I succeed for a time—then in some knotty tangle his old training asserts itself and he surmounts a situation in the stereotyped, unimaginative popular way. And all the time I am trying to help him I have a curiously contrary sensation of guilt, in that I may be spoiling him for salable work in the non-weird field by shaking his faith in flashy conventions!

So when I read WEIRD TALES, and note here and there a story full of hackneyed stuff—the laboratory, the club-room with well-groomed men around the fire, the beautiful queen of remote planets, the ghost that is a human villain trying to scare somebody out of a house … etc. etc. … I never think of blaming Mr. Baird; for out of a somewhat wide knowledge of non-eminent writers, gained through various club affiliations, I am perfectly well aware that he had to take the stuff because no man living could get enough of anything else to fill the required number of pages at the required intervals. I don't believe there is enough first-rate weird fiction written in America to fill a monthly magazine the size of WEIRD TALES—and it could be developed only by catching the author young and making it possible for him to abstain from doing conventional fiction. The best you'll ever get is from men of liberal culture who do that sort of thing as an avocation—for the sheer thrill of it, and not with a professional frame of mind. I should say Paul Suter is like-that—or Burton Peter Thom, or Seabury Quinn, or M. Humphreys, or Anthony M. Rud (though he's had a book published), or sevaral [sic] others I don't recall plainly by name. These people have all been represented by excellent work, and I believe it would almost be better to have more than one take by each in a single issue than to use less vivid material merely for the sake of non-repeating on the same table of contents. "Beyond the Door" was a finely effective piece—as were "The Floor Above", "Ooze", and "The Phantom Farmhouse". Another thing I noted—some of the best ideas—the ideas which showed the most original power and understanding of the essence of the terrible and grotesque—were handled by obvious novices or at least writers with no command of technique or sense of literary balance. I'm quite enthusiastic about "The Weaving Shadows", by W.H.Holmes in your very first issue. That thing is bungling and halting so far as form goes—but I'll be hanged if it hasn't got a thrill which no commonplace person, however highly trained, could ever duplicate. "The Open Window" by Frank Owen (January) is not dissimilar as a case of first-rate idea and third-rate development; though here the poignancy of the idea and the crudeness of the narration are both less marked. I honestly believe that one way to get good weird material is to tell the editor to sharpen his scent for the genuinely bizarre irrespective of technique, accept any powerful plot or atmospheric triumph irrespective of technique or even literacy—paying half the usual