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In his introductory essay to Arkham's Masters of Horror, editor Peter Ruber quotes with approval a statement by Stefan Dziemianowicz that "in fact we know that if it weren't for [August] Derleth, Lovecraft would not have near the reputation he has today," adding as a coda an even more emphatic declaration that "Without Derleth there would be no Lovecraft following today."(8)

This is in direct opposition to the view best expressed by S. T. Joshi in his H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, that "It cannot conclusively be stated that Lovecraft's work would never have been rediscovered had Derleth not done so,"(645) expressing the hypotheses that "future scholars of the pulps" or someone stumbling across the Lovecraft Papers at the John Hay Library would have ushered in a Lovecraft revival without the baggage associated with Derleth and his idiosyncratic handling of Lovecraft's legacy.

In between these two extremes is a criticism of Derleth for insisting on his original vision of three thick Lovecraft omnibuses, which resulted in the rejection of these manuscripts by every major publisher to whom Derleth and Donald Wandrei submitted them. According to this view, if Derleth had limited himself to a smaller selection, as he did in 1946 with the World Publishing Company's Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft, he could obtained publication of a book of Lovecraft's stories shortly after Lovecraft's death by a major publisher.

Let us examine this last view first. This assumes that Derleth could achieve something shortly after Lovecraft's death that Lovecraft, either by himself or with the aid of Wilfred B. Talman, Julius Schwartz, and Derleth himself, was not able to achieve. By the time that World approached Derleth about the possibility of publishing a selection of HPL's best work, it had already been proven that Lovecraft was marketable. Both The Outsider and Others and Beyond the Wall of Sleep were out of print and fetching high prices on the collector's market, and even a slight volume such as Marginalia was selling well. The Bart House paperbacks had proven that Lovecraft's appeal had a broad base of support, and he was regarded as popular enough that critical resources were allocated to issue an Armed Forces edition of his stories for the troops serving overseas during World War II. More and more anthologists were including stories by Lovecraft among their selections, including the landmark Wise and Fraser Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural and Boris Karloff's And the Darkness Falls. Lovecraft's marketability in 1946 was much different than it was in 1936, and most of that difference is attributable to Derleth's actions.

On the other hand, let us assume that Derleth, never in the best of health, followed Lovecraft into the void sometime before 1939. Without his immense energy and drive, there is no way that Arkham House could have succeeded, especially since the other partner, Donald Wandrei, was shortly to trade in his typewriter for a Garand and take part in the liberation of a horror greater than the twilit grotto under Exham Priory, the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen. Lovecraft's choice as his literary executor, Robert H. Barlow, lacked the contacts and the stability of a settled home to have effected the professional publication of Lovecraft's work. To be sure, he could have marketed HPL's older, unsold tales to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales as well as Derleth did, but any book publication which Barlow might have achieved would have been along the lines of the 1938 Futile Press edition of the Notes and Commonplace Book. Clark Ashton Smith recognized this when he wrote to Donald Wandrei regarding Lovecraft's selection of Barlow: "As to HPL's choice of B. for executor, I believe it can very readily be explained. I do not believe it occurred to HPL that there was any prospect of his work being brought out by a professional publishing firm; and from this angle he would have felt that he was imposing a thankless and futile task on Belknap, Loveman, or any of the older friends.

On the other hand, he would have felt that Barlow, with ambitions toward the establishment of a fine private press, might some day be in a position to print his work. This sounds logical to me." So far in this scenario we have eliminated Derleth, but allowed that Barlow would have sent stories such as "The Shunned House," "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," "The Quest of Iranon," "From Beyond," etc. to Weird Tales, where they would have appeared just as they did in reality. With Derleth absent, Donald Wandrei would probably have gnashed his teeth helplessly as "the Barlow pest" continued to exercise control of the Lovecraft literary estate, under a policy which would most probably been one of benign neglect due to the turbulent conditions of Barlow's life during this time and his ever-increasing interest in Mexico. It is possible that without Wandrei's smear-campaign Barlow's involvement in the fantasy field would have continued, but I cannot see how he could have issued anything more than the proposed Futile Press editions of "The Colour out of Space" and Supernatural Horror in Literature, both of which would not have received much in the way of critical attention due to the essential ephemeral nature of that most-appropriately named publishing firm.

But Derleth, Wandrei and Barlow were not the only ones who remembered Lovecraft. Howard Wandrei was responsible for the inclusion of "The Thing on the Doorstep" in the above-mentioned Karloff anthology. In real life he lent Karloff's agent his copy of The Outsider and Others, but in our alternate reality there is no reason why tearsheets from Weird Tales could not have sufficed. F. Orlin Tremayne, the editor of Astounding Stories who accepted the two Lovecraft stories that first appeared in that magazine, was later an editor at Bartholomew House, and according to David E. Schultz it was he who approached Derleth about the possibility of paperback editions of a selection of Lovecraft's work.

Provided that Barlow was taking his responsibilities seriously and responded to Tremayne's proposal in a timely manner (something which I am sure Barlow would have done), a decent selection of Lovecraft's stories would still have appeared from Bart House, probably including the two stories which Tremayne first accepted for Astounding Stories, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time." Another of Lovecraft's correspondents, Donald A. Wollheim, included this later story in the landmark anthology The Viking Portable Novels of Science. Many older science fiction fans who were now attaining positions of responsibility in the field, especially in the postwar sf boom, remembered Lovecraft with varying degrees of fondness. Anthologists such as Wollheim and Groff Conklin did not owe their knowledge of Lovecraft to Derleth's efforts. They may fit the description of Joshi's "scholars of the pulps," but literary archaeologists such as Sam Moskowitz, who were well-known for mining the pulps for literary gems, were still a few years in the future.

We must also not forget the efforts of Providence poet and critic Winfield Townley Scott, whose knowledge of Lovecraft predated The Outsider and Others, and whose fascination with this scion of the Antient Hill preserved many impressions of him by his fellow citizens of Providence.

One possible model for a literary resurrection of Lovecraft sans the actions of Derleth is that of William Hope Hodgson. When H. C. Koenig ran across "The Voice in the Night" in Colin De La Mare's anthology They Walk Again, he was so fascinated by the excellence of this story by a writer of whom he, a well-read collector in the field, had never heard of. During his life-time Lovecraft had been anthologized several times. Among the stories which found the dignity of cloth boards were "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Music of Erich Zann," and "The Rats in the Walls." It is inconceivable that future anthologists such as Mike Ashley, Richard Dalby, Hugh Lamb, and Moskowitz would not have recognized the merits of these stories and attempted to track down other works by this to-them unknown master of the macabre. A little research would have led them to O'Brien's Best Short Stories series, which awarded high ratings to such stories as "The Colour out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror," and even published a brief but succinct autobiographical notice. This in turn would have led to the discovery of other stories in Weird Tales, and the trail would eventually have led to Brown University.

But how different the Lovecraft Papers would have been without Derleth! While credit for establishing the collection belongs to Barlow, it was Derleth's publishing of Lovecraft and the subsequent critical attention from T. O. Mabbott, Vincent Starrett, and the Benets that motivated the John Hay Library to put any effort into the organization and preservation of these papers. In addition, while Barlow provided the core of this collection, it is the files of letters donated through the years by such Lovecraft correspondents as J. Vernon Shea, Duane Rimel, Helen Sully, and others, which occurred as an aftermath of the effort to preserve Lovecraft's letters instituted by Wandrei and Derleth immediately after his death, that form the true "jewel in the crown" of the H. P. Lovecraft Collection. More than any other writer, it is impossible to judge Lovecraft's achievement without reference to his letters; in fact, as Joshi has stated on several occasions, Lovecraft's greatest literary achievement may well be his voluminous correspondence! Barlow deposited HPL's letters to his aunt Lillian D. Clark and to his elderly correspondent, the Washington, D.C. poetess Elizabeth Toldridge, and after his death his own letters went to Brown, but the other files of correspondence all were ripples radiating outwards from the stone tossed by Wandrei and Derleth. Of course, the idea of issuing a volume of Lovecraft's letters was largely Wandrei's, but whether he would have continued in Derleth's absence given his distaste for Barlow is questionable; in any event his military service would have ended this project. Still, Wandrei's efforts, if he persevered, might have encouraged further deposits of letters at Brown, but I personally doubt if he would have continued.

It was not just through the preservation of the letters that Derleth positively influenced future Lovecraft studies. While scattered memoirs of Lovecraft appeared in the amateur press, culminating in W. Paul Cook's classic portrait, it was through Derleth's efforts that memoirs from many Lovecraft correspondents were preserved. In addition, Derleth preserved a wide variety of Lovecraft's work, ranging from the fiction through such major revisions as "The Mound" and "Out of the Eons," through poetry as diverse as the Fungi from Yuggoth and "Little Sam Perkins," essays from the amateur press and the fan press, and such philosophical and theoretical works as "Some Causes of Self-Immolation" and "Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction." It is inconceivable that a New York publisher would have ever sanctioned the preservation of these works, as vital as they may be to a full understanding of Lovecraft, for the simple reason that they are not commercially viable. Derleth was in fact doing the job of a university press in preserving works that were truly "marginalia," but hardly marginal.

H. P. Lovecraft is a major author in a minor field, and an important if secondary writer in the wider literary world, and his talents would have been recognized eventually regardless of whether August Derleth founded Arkham House or not. Having said that, this recognition would have been much longer in coming, and would have been centered almost entirely upon an interpretation of the stories themselves, divorced from any reference to HPL's wider philosophical views or aesthetic theories. While Post-structuralists and "New Critics" might applaud this concentration on the text, Lovecraft's work (fiction and letters and essays and poems) forms, as Timos Airaksinen has noted, all one huge metatext, and essentially we would have been denied access to the major portion of his legacy. Consider Peter Penzoldt's insightful if finally flawed interpretation of HPL in The Supernatural in Fiction, which was crippled by being deprived of access to the letters which might have given him insights into the philosophical foundations of Lovecraft's oeuvre. Lovecraft would undoubtedly have been discovered eventually without August Derleth, but I would like to suggest that without Derleth's founding of Arkham House, with its concentration on all of Lovecraft's work and not just the fiction, Lovecraft's critical acceptance would have been delayed even further than it already has been. At the risk of striking a panglossian note, we may indeed have experienced the best of all possible worlds regarding the preservation of Lovecraft's work. Now if Derleth had just not had this fascination with Hastur!

SOURCES

Airaksinen, Timo.
The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror. New Studies in Aesthetics vol. 29. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Joshi, S. T.
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995.

Ruber, Peter, ed.
Arkham's Masters of Horror. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2000.

Schultz, David E.
"Lovecraft's Best Supernatural Stories." Crypt of Cthulhu No. 66 (Lammas 1989): 15-17.
"The Bart House Paperbacks." Crypt of Cthulhu No. 65 (St. John's Eve 1989): 27-28.

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