H. P. Lovecraft, Ghost Writer
The Horror Master Made More Money From Revisions Than Writing
Aug 2, 2009
H.P. Lovecraft wasn't happy about his profession; in fact he complained endlessly about the "rubbish" he was forced to work with in letters to his friends. Unfortunately, he was ill-suited to much else.
Born August 20, 1890, Lovecraft was raised a child of privilege, instilled with the sensibilities of an old New England heritage. He was precocious and read deeply in his grandfather's extensive library of classical works. A sickly constitution as well as lack of interest in common children's activities, kept him isolated from his peers.
Abrupt reversals of the family's fortunes and the sudden death of his grandfather (Lovecraft's father had died when the boy was 8) left young Howard and his mother in precarious financial straits. They moved in with his two aunts to share expenses.
Products of their times, none of the women thought to provide young Howard with any employable skills. In high school he suffered what he later termed a 'nervous breakdown,' and never completed his education.
In his late teens, Lovecraft got involved in national amateur journalism, a popular movement of the time whose members wrote essays, criticism, poetry and fiction which were then published in amateur journals.
Lovecraft quickly rose to prominence, eventually becoming president of one of the two rival organizations. His early grounding in the classics plus a thorough command of English made his contributions highly sought after.
H.P. Lovecraft, Gentleman to a Fault
Soon, his friends were encouraging to take up editorial and revision work. His self-image of a New England gentleman bred an extreme distaste for 'commercialism,' so at first he worked for free. As he moved into his twenties, a growing awareness of his dismal financial situation forced him to charge as well as advertise.
L. Sprague de Camp, in his biography, Lovecraft, states that the author originally charged a ridiculously low 1/8¢ per word. De Camp reproduces Lovecraft's rate card from 1933 showing he had raised his rates considerably. Unfortunately, not everyone paid their bills,and he would not stoop to the un-gentlemanly act of dunning those clients, so that he often made even less per word.
The majority of his work was correcting punctuation and grammar or metrical mistakes. One of his first regular clients was Rev. David Van Bush, who remained a steady client until the mid-1920s, hiring Lovecraft to ghost-write books such as Pike's Peak or Bust, Practical Psychology and Sex Life, Grit and Gumption, and Character Analysis (How to Read People at Sight.) Lovecraft chafed at the inane material and at Bush's success, but as Bush provided his most steady income stream for many years, Lovecraft had to maintain the relationship.
When it came to his own writing, Lovecraft's attitude ratcheted up a notch, to that of 'Artist.' He disdained anyone who wrote to please the masses, or, in other words,with the intent to make money. An artist wrote for himself, not the expectations of others.
As his fiction began to find acceptance, he made attempts to find other work besides ghost-writing. He met with little success. In his late twenties, he had no employment record, no practical skills; and a resistance to any work that he didn't consider 'genteel.'
He interviewed for several editorial positions with trade magazines without success. Sadly, the one editorial position he was offered, at Weird Tales in 1924, he turned down because he could not bring himself to leave Providence for Chicago.
Over the years he worked briefly as a collection agent, ticket taker at a movie theatre, and at grading school papers. He always came back to ghost-writing.
The Price of Fame
His popularity in Weird Tales attracted would-be fiction writers as clients. Again, the revisions were largely editorial, but whenever a story piqued his interest, he would often toss out everything but the basic idea and re-write it to the point that it was more a Lovecraft original than a revision or collaboration. A number of people took advantage of this: Zealia Bishop, Adophe de Castro and Hazel Heald all had multiple stories ghost-written by Lovecraft, which they then sold to Weird Tales. De Castro sold "The Last Executioner" for $175; Lovecraft received $16. Bishop often would not pay her bill at all, though she did contribute part of a fee to Lovecraft's family after his death.
Lovecraft's two most interesting clients were his friend, C,M. Eddy, Jr, and Houdini. For Eddy, he did mostly minor surgery, but one story, "The Loved Dead," is largely Lovecraft's work, though published under Eddy's byline, The non-supernatural story of a necrophiliac who works in a morgue outraged public taste across the nation, causing that issue of Weird Tales to be pulled from many newsstands.
In 1924, Joseph Henneberger, publisher of Weird Tales, was trying to build circulation. He met Houdini, and asked the famous magician to write a regular column for the magazine. Houdini was agreeable but not a writer, so Henneberger chose Lovecraft to ghost the column, Instead, Lovecraft wrote an original story, "Imprisoned with the Pharoahs,' told in the first person and describing Houdini's being kidnapped and taken to a secret vault beneath the Great Pyramid.
Houdini then suggested that he and Lovecraft collaborate on a book to be called The Cancer of Superstition, a subject they were both passionate about. Lovecraft recruited Eddy to help, and together they prepared an outline and a sample chapter. Unfortunately, Houdini died and the project was never completed.
Lovecraft continued to write his own stories, but the frequency slowed almost in inverse proportion to the growth of his fame. Ghost-writing continued to provide as much as two-thirds of his annual income even as his financial situation continued to deteriorate. By the time of his death in 1937, he was eating little more than canned chili, several cups of coffee and little ice cream per day.
Fans lament the fact that ghost-writing, along with his voluminous correspondence, robbed literature of more of his own stories. Ultimately, however, his fiction,letters, essays and revisions provide a more rounded and complex portrait of a fascinating, flawed yet highly influential personality than any one of them could provide on their own.
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