Page:Lovecraft letter to Henneberger 1924-02-02.pdf/4

 market price and telling the author why—and then have the raw material completely re-written "by some staff writer of competent training, who could add his name as collaborator or not, according to the amount of work he puts into it. In this way, I am confident, you could get many better things than you could by excluding all MSS. below a certain technical standard. It isn't always the college man, or even the reasonably proficient writer, who has the mental slant that makes vivid ideas. Of course, there would hardly be an abundance of these notable but inadequate MSS., yet I think there would be enough to warrant their acceptance and re-writing. I know I've many a time doctored up something for another fellow which seemed very crude at first, but when after completion made me wish I were its full author. But at best it's hard work getting convincing horror material. Among even the most eminent the true touch of sublime and delirious fear is deucedly hard to find. Arthur Machen is the only living master—in the full sense of the word I could possibly name in this field … a point which I think anyone can appreciate by comparing his episode of "The White powder" in "The Three Impostors" with every other tale of terror known to this generation. I think, though, that with the requisite capital, a magazine could train up a group of effective weird writers by offering them a free and lucrative field, and letting some expert give them recommendations as to reading—what authors to avoid, and what ones to emulate. I know a kid—a junior at Columbia named Frank B. long, Jr.,—who could give you some creepy stuff if he could be persuaded to write out half the ideas he has. I'm inducing him to send in a poem—"An Old Wife Speaketh It"—to WEIRD TALES, and if he receives encouragement he may furnish more. There must be more like him—if one has the time to look them up. A youth in your own city—Alfred Galpin Jr., now holding a post-graduate fellowship at the university of Chicago—wrote something at sixteen which would chill any average blood; but circumstance—and the general scholastic genius which is going to make an eminent professor of him some day—sidetracked this phase of his genius.

What you say about writing up and amplifying real horrors and ghastly tragedies is interesting and probably sensible from the standpoint of popular interest. It ought to attract readers because of its appeal to the strings of memory—nearly everyone will have heard each theme mentioned in Associated press items, hence will feel an added sense of shuddering reality. Yet from the art standpoint—from the standpoint of effective evocation of nameless ecstacies of keen-edged and titillating fear—I don't think anything can equal good weird fiction. There is only a passing horror in sordid, sanguinary gruesomeness—in bloody axe murders and sadistic morbidities. What really moves the profoundest springs of human fear and unholy fascination is something which suggests black infinite vistas of cryptic, brooding, half-inscrutable monstrosities for ever lurking behind nature and as capable of being manifested again as in the case treated. The supreme principle of this sort of horror is any suggestion of the major violation of some, basic law of nature—the breaking down of the line betwixt life and death, man and the other animals, etc.—or the annihilation of the principle of time and space, bringing vastly remote age or localities