Lost Revisions?

by Robert M. Price

August Derleth counted it as one of his four "myths" about Lovecraft "that many of Lovecraft's manuscripts were lost" (Some Notes on H. P. Lovecraft, p. viii). And this, no doubt, is a myth. Yet it is quite likely that some of his revision pieces have either been lost sight of since being published under the name of Lovecraft's clients, or actually been lost in manuscript. In his Lovecraft: A Biography, L. Sprague deCamp tells us that indeed one of the revisions did disappear after its submission for publication. "He once ghost-wrote a story for an unnamed client, about Clark Ashton Smith's toad-god Tsathoggua. When the client sent the story to Weird Tales, [editor Farnsworth] Wright rejected it, and the story has not been heard of since" (p. 411). Yes it has; the story in question is probably "The Mound", ghost-written for Zealia Bishop, as S. T. Joshi has pointed out.

But strangely enough, there does seem to have been a revision tale involving Tsathoggua which has since been lost (or lost sight of). Lovecraft notes that "I've revised several tales for [Adolphe] de Castro" (Selected Letters V, p. 44). How many are implied by "several"? Lovecraft himself tells us elsewhere: "I did accidentally land. . . three tales of Old Dolph's" (Selected Letters III, p. 204). Joshi was the first to point out that this means a third De Castro revision besides "The Last Test" and "The Electric Executioner". But a further clue has thus far been neglected. In a letter to Emil Petaja, May 31, 1935, Lovecraft mentions that "I've also put Yog-Sothoth and Tsathoggua in yarns ghost-written for Adolphe de Castro. . . ." (Selected Letters V, 1, 173). Yog-Sothoth appears in both known De Castro revisions, but Tsathoggua appears in neither. Thus the third De Castro revision tale was definitely a CthuIhu Mythos story.

Might this lost story be the one referred to by DeCamp? No, because DeCamp's information did not identify HPL's revision client, and because Lovecraft says he did manage to "land" this story, whereas the one DeCamp mentions was rejected. ("The Mound" was rejected by Weird Tales.) The fact that the third De Castro revision is said to have been accepted makes the whole enigma even more baffling, since it still has not been traced. Perhaps it may yet come to light.

Has yet another "missing" revision actually been identified? Steve Behrends recently uncovered a letter from Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth. March 18, 1934, in which Smith comments on the latest issue of Weird Tales. "I liked the ghost-written 'Grey Death' [by Loual Sugarman] in the current W. T., surmising at once, from the solidity of the writing, that H.P.L. was the 'ghost'." Yet, whatever Smith meant by the "solidity of the writing", the tale does not read like Lovecraft. Also, HPL never mentions Sugarman in his published letters. Mythos references had earlier led Smith correctly to detect Lovecraft's hand in three stories credited to Hazel Heald, and it may have been similarly formal considerations which prompted him to imagine Lovecraftian involvement in "The Grey Death". The story starts out with the device used in "Pickman's Model" and "Cool Air", in which the narrator gives apologetic account of peculiar behavior, in this case why he was rude to a friend's wife simply because she was wearing the color gray. It seems that years ago on an expedition to Central America, he had seen his colleague and friend engulfed by a huge, amorphous gray fungus. Granted, in bare outline, this premise may sound faintly Lovecraftian, but neither the development nor the prose style is reminiscent of HPL. We suspect that Smith was over-hasty in his judgment. Derleth seems not to have agreed with him, since after all he did not include "The Grey Death" in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.