Conan and the Dweller Part 4: Some Notes on William Lumley by Daniel Harms, Michael Lesner, and Bobby Derie

Despite his role in lives of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, we know less about Lumley than most others of Lovecraft’s circle.  Six letters in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters were written to him (SL 3.372-3, 450; 5.207, 213-4, 273, 420), but none of them truly reveal anything other than that he was interested in occultism, mythology, and Lovecraft’s dreams; a bit more is revealed in scattered references from the letters Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith discussing their correspondence with Lumley, or the appearance of his work in print.

William Lumley’s most notable work is the short story “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” as revised by H. P. Lovecraft and finally published in Weird Tales (Feb 1938). Lumley’s original draft, published in Crypt of Cthulhu #10 (1982) and reprinted in Price’s Black Forbidden Things and Medusa’s Coil and Others, has its interesting moments, but it consists mainly of an undated, rambling set of entries. No information was given for the author or the diary, save that it was “found after his mysterious disappearance.” The piece has no clear purpose or conclusion, and the only virtue is that this brings it a touch of authenticity.

Lovecraft did a considerable amount of work on the manuscript. He wrote the introduction setting the scene in Lumley’s New York state near Buffalo, describing the village of Chorazin and the history of the van der Heyl family, provided a chronological framework for most of the work, and introduced the idea of Typer being a relative of the van der Heyl family. This, of course, was in addition to dropping the names of a few Mythos tomes. Oddly enough, the insertions of Theosophical lore (the city of Shamballah, the Book of Dzyan) are Lovecraft’s.

Lovecraft’s finances were already running out, but as he considered this collaboration philanthropy (OFF 299), he accepted only a copy of E. A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Book of the Dead as payment for the revision (SL 5.208). Lovecraft supposed the story would land with William Crawford at Marvel Tales, but instead Lumley sent it to Weird Tales. (ES 2.711-2) When Farnsworth Wright accepted the story and inquired as to why it sounded so similar to Lovecraft, Lumley revealed to the editor that Lovecraft had revised many pieces that had appeared in the magazine under the names of others (SL 5.207). Despite this acceptance, Wright held on to the story for over two years.

In his letters, Lovecraft gives little biographical data on his correspondent. Lumley is described regularly as “old,” and while described as living in Buffalo, New York in 1931 (ES 1.339), the only full address given is in 1933, which Lovecraft lists as 742 William St. (LRBO 55) L. Sprague de Camp quotes a letter from Lovecraft to Robert Bloch stating that Lumley:

who claims to be an old sailor who has witnessed incredible wonders in all parts of the world, & to have studied works of Elder Wisdom far stronger than your Cultes des Goules or my Necronomicon. (HPL 407)

However, de Cramp but provides no source, and the quote does not appear in any of Lovecraft’s published correspondence. Yet, the possibility that Lumley may have been a seaman is valid, for in another letter Lovecraft says that Lumley: “has been at sea & seen odd parts of the earth[.]” (LFO 153)

Lumley was a common name in Buffalo in the early-mid 1930s, and four or five William Lumleys can be found in the city directories for the period, but only one lived at 742 William Street. The directories list a William Lumley who had lived in this building for a few years (having moved there from 450 Niagara Drive). The building in question stood at the corner of William and Smith Streets in Buffalo, but has since been demolished. It appears to have been a business and attached carriage house, the second floor of which was let out to lodgers. When Mr. Harms visited the site around 2000, the building was abandoned. A paint store had been the last occupant of the storefront on William St. The bulk of the structure, extending down Smith Street from the intersection, was painted deep green and had a decided tilt to one side.

Weird Tales Feb. 1938

Lumley dropped in and out of the city directory over the years.  He never appeared again after he left 742 William St. The only other information given was an entry that he worked as a “watchman” at an unspecified business.

A systematic search of the cemeteries in Buffalo found one record of a “William Lumley” in the French and German Cemetery, and a search of the plots turned up Lumley’s unmarked grave.  The cemetery records stated that Mr. Lumley was born on March 20, 1880, and died on May 31, 1960 of coronary sclerosis.  His death occurred in Alden, New York (a town to the east of Buffalo where the Erie County Home and Infirmary is based), and welfare paid for his burial expenses.  The dates appeared to be right – Lovecraft implied that Lumley as an older man – but it was difficult to say whether this was the Lumley who lived at 742 William St.

In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” Alden, New York, south of Attica, is Typer’s last stop in civilized areas before walking to the town of Chorazin. If Lumley’s character followed the actual geography, it is likely that Typer would have walked to the van der Heyl mansion in this direction, as the landscape is much hillier than that elsewhere in the area. The region’s legends include mentions of Native American mounds in this area, as well as at least one mysterious stone structure, most likely the remnants of a former house, which could have provided some inspiration for Lumley’s handwritten draft. Still, no town named Chorazin exists in the area, and no one ever built a house in this region that has dates near those of the van der Heyl mansion: these were elements that came from Lovecraft’s imagination.

In the Alden Town Clerk’s Office is the death certificate for the Lumley buried in the French and German Cemetery, who was listed as a watchman for the American Agrico Chemical Company.  Because of the profession and name, we can be fairly certain that this Lumley was our man.  The certificate noted that William Lumley was born to Edward Lumley and Isabel Johnson in New York City, and that he was single. His last address in Buffalo was 8 Park Street (within a few miles of the two addresses already mentioned), but in 1958 he was moved to the Erie County Home and Infirmary in Alden, where he passed away two years later. Any records at that institution would have been destroyed in a fire, according to a clerk there.

This is where the trail went cold. While we now know Lumley’s whereabouts for the end of his eighty-year life, the man himself remains an enigma. Did he stay in Buffalo all of his life, or did he move about the country in search of work before returning home? Were his trips to China and India that Lovecraft mentioned products of Lumley’s (or Lovecraft’s) imagination, or did they really occur?

Writing the John Hay Library, we discovered that a few letters by Lumley – totaling six pages – had been preserved. Lumley’s letters, for the most part, discuss his favorite tales in the pulp magazines and fan journals. In addition to Lovecraft, his two main correspondents seem to have been Smith and C. L. Moore, both of whom encouraged him in his fiction. Lumley submitted many pieces of fiction, including the titles “The Phantasy” and “Dread Words,” to Marvel Tales and other magazines, apparently to no avail. He and Lovecraft shared a love of cats, and one of Lumley’s letters discusses the worship of Bast at some length. Those looking for more clues as to Lumley’s past are given only a few items of interest – a brief mention that Lumley had been in Port Said in Egypt, and that he had once owned a black panther from Sumatra who had been given to a circus. (The most likely candidate, the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, has no record of any such transaction.)

At this point, our research into Lumley’s life has to be put on the back burner, yet we hope that someday more investigation into this fascinating figure’s life will be done. What we have now is merely a skeleton.

Works Cited

CL       Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (3 vols. + Index and Addenda)

ES        Essential Solitude (2 vols.)

HPL     H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography

LFO     Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel, and Nils Frome

LRBO  Letters to Robert Bloch and Others

MF      A Means to Freedom (2 vols.)

MTS    Mysteries of Time & Spirit

OFF    O Fortunate Floridian!

SL        Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (5 vols.)

SLCAS Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith

Thanks to E. P. Berglund, Monika Bolino, Derrick Hussey, Cheri Lessner, Donovan Loucks, and Mason Winfield.  Special thanks to John Stanley and the John Hay Library.

Conan and the Dweller, Part 3 by Bobby Derie

We hear nothing from Howard about Lumley for some time, though this is to be understood as they only shared the venue of The Fantasy Fan. Howard and Lumley seem not to have written directly to one another, Howard’s correspondence with Clark Ashton Smith was sporadic and marked by long gaps, and Lovecraft’s scarce mentions Lumley at all in his letters to Howard.

Late in 1935, Lovecraft broke his rule against collaboration to revise and rewrite a manuscript by William Lumley. The story that resulted was “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” which Lovecraft hoped to sell to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales or William Crawford of Marvel Tales. (OFF 296, 299; ES 2.711-2, 719) The story was accepted by Wright, with Lovecraft sending his congratulations:

Just received yours of the 12th telling of Alonzo’s (The Diary of Alonzo Typer) acceptance. Congratulations!! Your reply to Wright’s letter seems to me exactly right. I suppose he was curious about getting stories from several authors—Heald, de Castro, Reed, &c (besides parts of mss. From Barlow, Bloch, Rimel, &c)—which contained earmarks of my style. I have no objection at all to Wright’s knowing of my share in polishing off the MS. And I think that what you said was admirable. (SL5.207)

Lovecraft insisted Lumley accept full payment ($70) for the story; and considering the nearly illiterate state of Lumley’s draft (published in Crypt #10, 1982), this was true philanthropy. (HPLE 68) In gratitude, Lumley sent Lovecraft a copy of E. Wallis Budge’s translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (OFF 301, 308; SL5.208) However, for whatever reason the story was not actually published in Weird Tales until February 1938, long after both Howard and Lovecraft were dead—and credited solely to Lumley. E. Hoffmann Price, on reading the story, immediately detected Lovecraft’s hand in it, and wrote a letter to the Eyrie affirming as much, and adding:

If William Lumley wrote that yarn without consultation with HPL, he has succeeded in a feat I had deemed utterly impossibly: writing a story that is more like Lovecraft than Lovecraft himself! Whatever its history, I was glad to see it in print. The references to Shamballah reminded me of many a letter HPL and I exchanged, and of our own collaboration, a few years ago. Now here is a challenge to one or more of Lovecraft’s followers: The Old Master had pondered, for some time before his death, on this matter of a weird story whose locale was to be the Valley of Teotihuacan—‘the dwelling of the gods’—in the now bleak and desolate expanse of country somewhat north of Lake Texcoco, nearly forty minutes’ drive from Mexico City. I had sent HPL photos, data, personal impressions and reactions to the pyramids and crypts of the valley. We had even planned, whimsically of course, to have Robert E. Howard join us in one expedition to Teotihuacan: I to be chauffeur, R. E. H. swordsman and gunner, and HPL to be necromancer for the party. And whenever I see their names it reminds me of a plan that was really not impossible, up until that tragic day in June of 1936 when R. E. H. went on an exploration unaccompanied by any of his friends. This whole issue, I might say, reminds me of the dead that have no equals among the survivors: Lovecraft, Howard, Whitehead. Like the Valley of Teotihuacan, the February issue is a memento of dead giants. Well, what valiant acolyte of HPL will fictionalize the mysterious Valley of Teotihuacan? Me, I am not equal to the task [...] (WT Apr 1938)

Works Cited


AMtF       A Means to Freedom (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols.)
CL            Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (Robert E. Howard                                                Foundation, 3 vols. + Index and Addenda)
ES            Essential Solitude (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols.)
HPLE       The H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Hippocampus Press)
LRBO      Letters to Robert Bloch and Others (Hippocampus Press)
MTS        Mysteries of Time and Spirit (Night Shade Books)
OFF         O Fortunate Floridian (University of Tampa Press)
SL            Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (Arkham House, 5 vols.)
SLCAS    Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith (Arkham House)
TFF         The Fantasy Fan (Lance Thingmaker)
UL           H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters (Necronomicon Press)

Part 1, Part 2

Conan and the Dweller, Part 2 by Bobby Derie

By 1933, William Lumley was a fixture among Lovecraft’s correspondents, and on the circulation list for manuscripts (SLCAS 226; MTS 364, 372; OFF 205) Few other details were forthcoming, that Lovecraft expanded on Lumley’s claims, saying that the aged mystic claimed to see ghosts and “Talks sometimes of being persecuted by enemies” (LRBO 55), as well to have:

[W]itnessed monstrous rites in deserted cities, has slept in pre-human ruins and awaked 20 years older, has seen strange elemental spirits in all lands (including Buffalo, N. Y.—where he frequently visits a haunted valley and sees a white, misty Presence), has written and collaborated on powerful dramas, has conversed with incredibly wise and monstrously ancient wizards in remote Asiatic fastnesses [...] His own sorceries, I judge, are of a somewhat modest kind; though he has had very strange and marvelous results from clay images and from certain cryptical incantations. (SL4.270-1)

Clark Ashton Smith

With regard to the various and interlocking myth-cycles of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft et al., the Gent from Providence assured Smith in one letter:

He is firmly convinced that all our gang—you, Two-Gun Bob, Sony Belknap, Grandpa E’ch-Pi-El, and the rest—are genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark and profound for human conception or comprehension. We may think we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry. Indeed—Bill tells me that he has fully identified my Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep ……. So that he can tell me more about ‘em that I know myself. With a little encouragement, good old Bill would unfold limitless chronicles from beyond the border—but I liked the old boy so well that I never make fun of him. (SL4.270-271)

In this belief, Lumley was several decades ahead of the occultist Kenneth Grant, who made the hidden occult reality of the Mythos crafted by Lovecraft & co. a crucial part of his Typhonian Trilogies, beginning with Dreaming Out of Space (1971) and The Magical Revival (1972).

At this point in 1933, Lumley was corresponding with both Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith—as was Robert E. Howard. As a consequence, Howard began to hear of Lumley from both men. While none of Smith’s letters to Howard survive, from references in Howard’s letters to Smith we know they spoke of Lumley, who is presumably “the correspondent who maintains that reptile-men once existed.” (CL3.137) In a November 1933 letter to Lovecraft, Smith wrote of Lumley: “The idea of a primeval serpent-race seems to be a favourite one with him, since he refers to it in his last letter as well as in one or two previous epistles.” (SLCAS 236)

WT Oct. 1934

Likely the reference to serpent-men arose because Smith was at that point working on “The Seven Geases” (WT Oct 1934), which contains a section referring to a race of Serpent-Men, or else perhaps because he made comment or reference to Howard’s own serpent-folk in “The Shadow Kingdom” (WT Aug 1929). There is an outside possibility that Lumley was familiar with Maurice Doreal (sometimes given as Morris Doreal, real name apparently Claude Doggins), the founder of the Brotherhood of the White Temple. Doreal’s poem “The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean” appeared in mimeographed form in the 1930s, and describes the secret history of a shape-changing Serpent Race which have strong parallels to Howard’s story “The Shadow Kingdom.” Another reference to Lumley from Smith’s letters to Howard mentions a “seven-headed goddess of hate,” which intrigued the Texan. (CL3.151)

The story William Lumley was working on, “The City of Dim Faces” was never published—possibly never completed—but Lovecraft continued to encourage Lumley’s creative efforts, telling Robert Bloch: “Probably has a strong latent literary gift—thwarted by ignorance. Some of his weird verses are really good—even if misspelt & mis-capitalised.” (LRBO 55) Lumley had better luck with his verses, which were published in issues of The Fantasy Fan, alongside the work of Howard, Lovecraft, Smith, Derleth and others.

The Fantasy Fan Feb. 1934

“The Dweller” (“Dread and potent broods a Dweller”) appeared in the February 1934 issue The Fantasy Fan, which Lovecraft described to editor Charles D. Hornig as “haunting and excellent” (UL 13), Fantasy Fan regulars Bob Tucker and Duane W. Rimel described it as “a masterpiece” and “certainly have a touch of the bizarre that grips one,” (TFF 97, 114) and Clark Ashton Smith as “a fine thing” (SLCAS 250). Robert E. Howard wrote to Smith:

I read Lumley’s “Dweller” in the Fantasy Fan and liked it very much; it certainly reflects a depth of profound imagination seldom encountered. I hope the Fan will use more of his verse. (CL3.197)

Howard repeated the sentiment in a letter to the Fantasy Fan in a subsequent letter (CL3.203). Hornig obliged with Lumley’s “Shadows” (“There’s a city wrought of shadows”) in the May 1934 number. Clark Ashton Smith wrote to the Fantasy Fan:

I wish to commend Mr. Lumley’s remarkable poem, ‘Shadows,’ in the May TFF. The poem seems to have in it all the mystic immemorial anguish and melancholy of China. (TFF 162)

Apparently, Lumley at some point lost a statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, and Lovecraft endeavored to help replace it. (SLCAS 253) The solution came in the form of Lovecraft’s young friend and correspondent R. H. Barlow, who had recently begun doing some amateur sculpting (including a bas-relief of Cthulhu), who endeavored to make an image of Ganesha for Lumley. (ES 2.636, SL4.411, SLCAS 259, AMtF 2.801; cf. TFF 164) Lumley also received a Cthulhu print that Barlow had made. (OFF 153)

Lumley’s success at publication in the Fantasy Fan was due largely to Lovecraft’s editing of his verses, which the man from Providence freely admitted to Barlow:

Incidentally—old Bill Lumley is getting ahead of me …. Sending more verse than I can possibly attend to. Unless he can find one or more supplementary “angels” I fear his reputation—either for fecundity or for quality—is going to encounter a downward curve! (OFF 180)

Lumley’s final verse publication was “The Elder Thing” (“Oh, have you seen the Elder Thing”) in January 1935—an issue he shared with Robert E. Howard’s “Voices of the Night 2. Babel” (“Now in the gloom the pulsing drums repeat”). This was the penultimate issue of The Fantasy Fan, and though Lovecraft recommended Lumley to Donald Wollheim of The Phantagraph (which would later publish Howard’s The Hyborian Age), nothing came of it. (LRBO 313)

Works Cited


AMtF       A Means to Freedom (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols.)
CL            Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (Robert E. Howard                                                Foundation, 3 vols. + Index and Addenda)
ES            Essential Solitude (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols.)
HPLE       The H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Hippocampus Press)
LRBO      Letters to Robert Bloch and Others (Hippocampus Press)
MTS        Mysteries of Time and Spirit (Night Shade Books)
OFF         O Fortunate Floridian (University of Tampa Press)
SL            Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (Arkham House, 5 vols.)
SLCAS    Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith (Arkham House)
TFF         The Fantasy Fan (Lance Thingmaker)
UL           H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters (Necronomicon Press)

Part 1, Part 3

Conan and the Dweller, Part 1 by Bobby Derie

The idea of a land of darkness is excellent, and one footnote telling of ancient MSS. Which even the Egyptian priests could not read excited my imagination tremendously. That kind of thing resembles my own (purely mythical) “Pnakotic Manuscripts”; which are supposed to be the work of “Elder Ones” preceding the human race on this planet, and handed down through an early human civilization which once existed around the north pole.—H. P. Lovecraft to William Lumley, 12 May 1931, SL3.372-3

Farnsworth Wright

     A few months before Farnsworth Wright forwarded a letter from Robert E.Weird Tales put Lovecraft in touch with another fan: William Lumley (1880-1960) of Buffalo, New York, a watchman for the Agrico Chemical Company. (HPLE 159) According to Lovecraft, Lumley was a firm believer in the occult, having studied Albertus Magnus (Grand Albert and Petit Albert), Cornelius Agrippa (De Occulta Philosophia libri tres), Hermes Trismegistus (Corpus Hermeticum), Martin Delrio (Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex), Paracelsus (probably the Archidoxes of Magic), and Remigius (Nicholas Rémy, Daemonolatreiae libri tres); references to Appolonius of Tyana, Geber, and Pythagorus were likely taken from Éliphas Lévi’s History of Magic—although Lovecraft goes on to add “Eibon, von Junzt , and Abdul Alhazred,” so HPL could have been exaggerating for effect, drawing on his own reading in the history of medieval grimoires. Like Howard and many of Lovecraft’s others correspondents, Lumley inquired into the reality of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and the rest of the artificial mythology. (AMtF 1.287-8, ES 1.339, SL4.270-1)

     Lumley and Lovecraft’s correspondence developed in parallel with Lovecraft and Howard’s. The Buffalo occultist was grateful enough to Lovecraft to gift him a copy of William Bradford’s Vathek in 1931 (ES 1.339) and Edward Lucas White’s Lukundoo & Other Stories in 1933 (LRBO 32), and Lovecraft in return planned to send Lumley a copy of an occult catalogue (ES 1.345). Despite being described by Lovecraft as “semi-illiterate” and “very crude in some ways,” he also claimed Lumley was “amazingly erudite in the lore of mediaeval magic, & possessed of a keen & genuine sense of the fantastic” (ES 1.448-9), “& with a streak of genuine weird sensitiveness not very far removed from a certain sort of blind, rhapsodic genius.” (ES 2.486)

H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft continued to answer his letters, including Lumley in his regular circle of correspondence. In a letter dated 7 May 1932, Lovecraft first describes Lumley to Robert E. Howard:

He claims to have traveled to all the secret places of the world—India, China, Nepal, Egypt, Thibet, etc.—and to have picked up all sorts of forbidden elder lore; also to have read Paracelsus, Remigius, Cornelius Agrippa, and all the other esoteric authors whom most of us merely talk about and refer to as we do to the Necronomicon and Black Book. He believes in occult mysteries, and is always telling about “manifestations” he sees in haunted houses and shunned valleys. He also speaks often of a mysterious friend of his—“The Oriental Ancient”—who is going to get him a forbidden book (as a loan, and not to be touched without certain ceremonies of mystical purification) from some hidden and unnamed monastery in India. Lumley is semi-illiterate—with no command of spelling or capitalisation—yet has a marvelously active and poetic imagination. He is going to write a story called “The City of Dim Faces”, and from what he says of it I honestly believe it will be excellent in a strange, mystical, atmospheric way. The fellow has a remarkable sort of natural eloquence—a chanting, imageful style which almost triumphs over its illiteracies. If he finishes this tale I think I’ll help him knock it into shape for submission to Wright. There is real charm—as well as real pathos—about this wistful old boy, who seems to be well long in years and in rather uncertain health. He obviously has a higher-grade mind than Olson could ever have had—for even now there is a certain wild beauty and consistency, with not the least touch of incoherence, in his epistolary extravagances. Young Brobst (as I told you, nurse in a mental hospital) thinks a touch of real insanity is present, but I regard the case as a borderline one. I always answer his letters in as kindly a fashion as possible. (AMtF 1.287-8; cf. ES 1.448-9)

Henry S. Whitehead

     The “Olson” in question is another semi-literate Weird Tales fan that believed in the occult, but in contrast to Lovecraft’s description of Lumley as a “good old soul,” Olson wrote harassing, nonsensical letters to Henry S. Whitehead, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. (ES 339) Lumley apparently received the book from the “Oriental ancient” which was “not to be touched without certain ceremonies of mystical purification” is reflective of the European grimoire tradition with works like the Lesser Key of Solomon or the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage; in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft expanded that these ceremonies included “the donning of a white robe,” which is characteristic for purification rituals in both works. (SL4.270)

     The Texan was intrigued enough by Lovecraft’s description to inquire further about Lumley in his answering letter:

I was much interested in what you said of the man Lumley, of Buffalo. He must be indeed an interesting study; possibly of such a sensitive and delicate nature that he has, more or less unconsciously, taken refuge from reality in misty imaginings and occult dreams. I hope he completes his story, and that it is published. Do you believe the “Oriental Ancient” has any existence outside his imagination? There is to me a terrible pathos in a man’s vain wanderings on occult paths, and clutching at non-existent things, as a refuge from the soul-crushing stark realities of life. (AMtF 1.292, CL2.354)

     Howard’s sentiment echoes the theme of his King Kull story “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” (WT Sep 1929), but he found it interesting enough to pass along an abridged version of Lovecraft’s account to Tevis Clyde Smith:

Lovecraft tells me about an old fellow who writes him all sorts of phantasies about esoteric subjects, and relates spectral manifestations glimpsed in haunted houses and the like; he professes to have pried into all the mysterious corners of the world, and to be hand-in-glove with a cryptic being he calls “the Oriental ancient” who apparently bobs up unexpectedly from behind sofas and well-curbs, gives vent to philosophic gems and utterances, and vanishes again. Lovecraft thinks the old gentleman is on the border-line of sanity, but one Brobst, a brain student, thinks he is nuts. (CL2.369)

Robert E. Howard

Lovecraft replied to Howard at length:

This fellow Lumley, on the other hand, is a really fascinating character—in a way, a sort of thwarted poet. It is very hard to tell where his sense of fact begins to give way to imaginative embroidery—but I think he usually enlarges on some actual nucleus. He has, I imagine, really knocked about the world quite a bit—hence his dreams of visiting Nepal, darkest Africa, the interior of China, and so on. I fancy there is some old fellow corresponding to his idealised figure of “The Oriental Ancient”—perhaps an aged and talkative Chinese laundryman, or perhaps even some “Swami” of the sort now found in increasing numbers wherever the field for faddist-cult organisation seems promising. Providence, for example, has several of these swarthy Eastern ascetics nowadays. Lumley is naturally in touch with all sorts of freak cults from Rosicrucians to Theosophists. I surely hope he will finish his “City of Dim Faces”, for anything written uncommercially—from the pure self-expression motive—is a welcome rarity nowadays. There is surely, as you say, a tremendous pathos in the case of those who clutch at unreality as a compensation for inadequate or uncongenial realities. (AMtF 1.307)

     Lovecraft and Howard were both generally unversed in the details of the occult, though each worked to expand their knowledge through reading and correspondence, aided in part by a collection of materials on theosophy supplied by E. Hoffmann Price and circulated among the group. The influence of theosophy in particular on both authors has been examined in essays like HPL and HPB: Lovecraft’s Use of Theosophy by Robert M. Price and Theosophy and the Thurian Age by Jeffrey Shanks.

Works Cited

AMtF       A Means to Freedom (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols.)
CL            Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (Robert E. Howard                                                Foundation, 3 vols. + Index and Addenda)
ES            Essential Solitude (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols.)
HPLE       The H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Hippocampus Press)
LRBO      Letters to Robert Bloch and Others (Hippocampus Press)
MTS        Mysteries of Time and Spirit (Night Shade Books)
OFF         O Fortunate Floridian (University of Tampa Press)
SL            Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (Arkham House, 5 vols.)
SLCAS    Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith (Arkham House)
TFF         The Fantasy Fan (Lance Thingmaker)
UL           H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters (Necronomicon Press)