L'Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy

How authors' estates are managed (or not) has long interested me. This book, L’Affaire Barlow, by Marcos Legaria, details the quarrels and back-stabbing among the friends of H.P. Lovecraft who sought to control Lovecraft’s literary estate. Lovecraft himself had chosen for this role R.H. Barlow, who would turn 19 a few months after Lovecraft’s death in March 1937. Some of Lovecraft’s friends resented this appointment and disliked Barlow. In particular, the Wandrei brothers, Donald and Howard, along with poet and bookseller Sam Loveman, launched a very mean-spirited campaign against Barlow, and Derleth aided and abetted them on the one hand, while duplicitously pretending to be Barlow’s friend on the other. It’s a sad story of how they basically pushed Barlow out of the field of fantastic literature, as Derleth set up his own small empire known as Arkham House.

It's all spelled out in letters quoted in this book. Donald Wandrei wrote about his campaign against Barlow, two years after it had begun, to Derleth in April 1939:  “I shall continue to assail and attack him wherever and whenever possible,” and Wandrei did so long after Barlow’s suicide in 1951, and up through Wandrei’s own death in 1987.

Derleth also admitted what he was doing:  “For my part I am keeping up surface relations with Barlow deeming it best for one half of this combination to keep an eye on the doings of Barlow” (5 January 1939).  And then, prophetically: “Of course we can be proprietors of HPL’s work, and we are, even though we don’t get royalties. Those go to Mrs. Gamwell [HPL’s surviving aunt] in any event—BUT once she is dead, all income from the Lovecraft material is to come to us. Savvy?” (10 January 1939). Mrs. Gamwell died in January 1941. But here, two years earlier, is the seed of what Derleth did for the next thirty-some years, until his own death in 1971.

Ken Faig, Jr., contributes a Foreword to this book, with much sense and much of interest, yet he tries to minimize these events as a “long-ago feud” that “deserves to be forgotten.” Well, no. It is all highly significant to the development of the popularity and acclaim for Lovecraft, and in the publishing history of his writings. Anyone interested in how a modern literary estate was usurped can learn from the vitriol and scheming profusely detailed in this book.

I note one small detail not mentioned by Legaria. Barlow always used as his byline “R.H. Barlow”—doubtless following the rhythm of the name of his mentor “H.P. Lovecraft”. Barlow always signed his name in letters as “Bob.”  But Derleth in letters repeatedly referred to him as “Bobby Barlow” or “little Bobby Barlow” (and later as “Robert H. Barlow”--another form of his name that Barlow did not use)—as a way to emphasize his youth and evident insignificance. Despite the huge amount of help Barlow gave Derleth on the first two Arkham Lovecraft volumes, The Outsider and Others (1939) and Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943), Derleth gave no public acknowledgement at all to Barlow, and even made Barlow pay for his own copy of the first book (the first copy, if actually sent, was supposedly lost in the mail, and the second copy also took an extended amount of time to reach Barlow). Derleth comes across as scheming, duplicitous, and extremely petty. The evidence is all here.

NB:  I note that the photograph on page 36 of the book is said to be of Barlow, but it is not. It is Duane W. Rimel, another of Lovecraft’s young correspondents. It was added to the book by the publisher, not the author. This photo also appears on the web as supposedly being of Barlow.

The Thunderstorm Collectors - a new book of essays

Tartarus Press have just announced the publication of The Thunderstorm Collectors, a new volume of 29 essays. These comprise:

8 essays on classic supernatural fiction writers, including Walter de la Mare, M R James, Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson and other writers of modern ghost stories

7 essays on lesser-known writers, including J. Mills Whitham, Norman Davey, writers who experimented with time, and poets of the fantastic such as Park Barnitz, Ralph Cheever Dunning, the avant-garde poets of 1920, and a gloomy Cambridge coterie

6 essays on antiquities, folklore and legends, including a landscape detective of the Nineteen Thirties, wanderers and wayfarers of the interwar period, the Red Lion inn sign, the figure of Arthur in the Nineteen Seventies, the secrets of the muniments chest and English Almanacs

5 essays on book-collecting byways, including finding David Lindsay titles, the joys of obscure journals, a celebration of thunderstorm chasers, the odd ephemera at village hall flea markets, and a browsing expedition in the Marches

3 essays on eccentric figures, including Baron Corvo, Colin Still, who explored the mysteries of The Tempest, and lost kings, emperors and consuls

Some of these pieces will be familiar in earlier forms to readers of this blog, but about half are either previously unpublished or only easily available in this collection.

The Thunderstorm Collectors is in a limited, signed hardback edition of 350 copies, with photographs by Jo Valentine and design by R B Russell. 

Also available: Qx and other pieces (Zagava); Lost Estates: Stories (Swan River Press) (low stock).

(Mark Valentine)

 

The Book Forger

In the early Eighties I published a poetry and punk music zine called the incurable. The first two issues were duplicated booklets, and later ones were single double-sided ‘beat sheets.’ In between these, the third consisted of half a dozen A4 side-stapled sheets and featured just two young poets, Davyd Mills and Michael Maguire.

About twenty years later or more, a friend sent me a link to an online auction that had just ended. A copy of the incurable 3, folded in half and a bit scruffy, had sold for over £100. Not because of any discerning collector of my work, since my name was nowhere mentioned in the description, nor was the incurable much known. No: the high bidding was no doubt because there are very keen collectors of any punk zines, few of which survive (the same is true for Sixties underground magazines).

Well, I said to myself, I’ll just pop to the copy shop (to paraphrase ‘Roadrunner’) and get a few more run off. I didn’t, of course, but I am sure it would have been quite possible to, ahem, “discover” some in the attic. And since punk zines were not comprehensively documented at the time, you could even, with sufficient ingenuity and application, invent and recreate some previously unknown titles: throw a few collages onto the page, reconstruct a few gig reviews of likely-sounding far-flung bands. Zines often listed other zines, so you could mention more, and then make them too. And so on. A nice little industry.

The story told in Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger: the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world (Penguin, 2024) is in one sense similar to this sort of wheeze: a distinguished bookseller faked previously unknown private pamphlet editions by famous Victorian poets, and sold them for fat prices. Some years later, in the interwar period, two contrasting characters, a corduroy-clad Communist and a languid man-about-town, became suspicious, investigated these together, and revealed the deception. It is a well-known, notorious episode in bibliographical and bookselling circles.

Hone gives us the background, which originated in the first edition craze (still very much a fad today) and recounts the origins of the scheme, run by Thomas Wise, an alert and audacious chancer. He explains how he began with legitimate and overt “facsimile” editions of well-known rarities and then hit upon his more profitable plot. He would find a relatively obscure piece by a well-known poet (Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne), for example from a fugitive periodical, and then spread the idea that a few copies were also printed for the poet’s private use. These he would then concoct, thus making a ‘newly discovered’ first edition. He went to some pains to perfect the incidental details of the supposed publication, using knowledge of each poet’s life and work, and to get the right paper, type and design. His work convinced eager collectors, but it was not quite precise enough to fool a really forensic examination, as the detecting duo were much later to find.

It is indeed a fascinating story, particularly for book-lovers. Hone alternates scenes from Wise’s career with the interwar investigation, an approach which works quite well. Hone, or his publisher, or both, have been clever in positioning this as a sort of Art Deco mystery in the vogue of Lord Peter Wimsey, who is evoked: they have seen that the Thirties milieu might appear more glamorous than the late-Victorian skullduggery. Hone has used the relatively few direct sources shrewdly and colourfully and quite endears us to his investigators. In fact, I thought that a series of fictional sequels featuring this literary duo might be rather fun.

I don’t think there was quite enough material for the story to comprise a full-length study (other than perhaps a technical bibliographic one) and so there’s a certain amount of imaginative reconstruction of the duo’s meetings and discussions, together with general background on earlier literary forgers, and also a diversion on the interesting but largely irrelevant fact (in this context) that the earnest Communist was in fact spying for British Intelligence.

Also, this being an awkward real-life mystery, not a yarn, there’s a sort of fading-away at the end: things were debated, denied, smoothed over, deferred, managed-away, and then the clouds of war and many more pressing concerns. But the book certainly kept me reading and I enjoyed its Golden Age detective style approach. 

(Mark Valentine)