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.