#robert barlow

i doubt that i will ever finish this drawing (it was supposed to be New Year art), so i'll post the unfinished version

HP Lovecraft, RH Barlow and humble me, ha ha

The Night Ocean (2017)

HP Lovecraft tells it like it is in a letter to Robert Barlow dated June 25 1931.

In the 30′s HP Lovecraft was writing a bunch of letters to this kid Robert Barlow, and they worked on some weird fiction short stories together. Lovecraft, who notoriously hated leaving his Providence home, took several trips down to Florida to spend time with this boy, he evidently had a great time, and then right before dying from cancer, Lovecraft made an unofficial will to leave all of his manuscripts to this young kid who barely knew what he was doing at the time. 

Eventually people started trying to publish Lovecraft, and Barlow ended up donating the manuscripts to Brown University because he didn’t know what to do with them and the others were pressuring/harassing him to give up Lovecraft’s publishing rights.

In the 40′s Barlow had to move to Mexico and he started teaching anthropology at Mexico City College to American students who were there as veterans funded by the GI bill, and this group of students just so happened to include William Burroughs, the beat generation writer. 

William Burroughs was in Mexico at the time because he and his wife were trying to avoid some drug charges in the states, Burroughs took Barlow’s class and went on field trips with him, and then in a letter he wrote to Allen Ginsberg in the 50′s, it was casually brought up that “one of his professors was outed as queer and killed himself”, and that professor was Robert Barlow. Apparently some student threatened to out him and he was afraid of the consequences, which, I’ve heard people say was also the reason why he left America in the first place. What did he study in Mexico while he was alive? Ancient, or, dare I say, eldritch gods from dead religions that belonged to some extremely old human civilization.  

In 1931, Robert Barlow and Lovecraft began their friendship in the same manner that many of Lovecraft’s friendships began, through written correspondence. Barlow was a fan of Lovecraft’s regular contributions to Weird Tales, and asked all the usual fanboy questions, inquiring as to when he began to write, if he was working on anything currently, and of course, that age-old question, ‘is the Necronomicon real?’

Within the next week, Lovecraft had written him back, as it is a well-known fact that Lovecraft was a voluminous correspondent. In his relatively short lifetime, he wrote more than fifty thousand letters, second only to Voltaire in surviving correspondence. This letter was the beginning of a rather strange friendship, one that changed the course of Robert Barlow’s young life, and changed Lovecraft’s life as well.

Robert Barlow, whose father was an army colonel, had grown up on various military bases in the Southern United States, until increasing paranoid delusions ended his father’s military career, and the family settled in a “sturdy and defensible” home in Florida. With this recent relocation and the nomadic lifestyle of his early years, Barlow had no friends, and he would have been hard-pressed to find anyone nearby with interests similar to his own.  He played the piano, sculpted in clay, painted, and collected weird fiction. When the mood struck him, Barlow was also known to hunt snakes and bind books with their skin.

In a memoir about the summer he spent with Lovecraft, Robert Barlow wrote: “I had no friends nor studies except in a sphere bound together by the U.S. mails.”

Barlow and Lovecraft’s friendship grew, as Barlow typed several of Lovecraft’s manuscripts, and Lovecraft revised several of Barlow’s stories. Eventually, in the spring of 1934, Lovecraft received an invitation from Barlow to visit his family in Florida. Lovecraft acquiesced, but was surprised to be greeted by a sixteen year old boy when he alighted from the bus in DeLand, Florida. Lovecraft was forty-three, and Barlow had never mentioned his age.

The two of them certainly made a strange pair, the older man in a rumpled suit, and the slender, bespeckled youth, as they composed couplets together, rowed on the nearby lake, and collected berries in the woods.

Lovecraft enjoyed the Florida weather, writing: “I feel like a new person—as spry as a youth,” and enjoyed Barlow’s company. “Never before in the course of a long lifetime have I seen such a versatile child.”

In fact, Lovecraft made a return trip to Florida the following summer, in 1935, and stayed for an extended period of more than two months. On this vacation, he and Barlow worked on the construction of a cabin on the family property, and explored a nearby cypress jungle. The following summer, Barlow visited Lovecraft in Providence, and together they visited Salem and Marblehead, two locales Lovecraft had featured heavily in is fictional output.

 Some Lovecraft and literary scholars have speculated that Lovecraft was secretly gay, but the defining feature of his sexuality was how blasé his attitude appeared to be towards sex. Lovecraft’s former wife, Sonia Greene, described him as an “adequately excellent lover,” which is certainly faint praise. However, Lovecraft regularly associated with younger gay writers, such as Barlow himself, Samuel Loveman, and Hart Crane, though he was quick to condemn homosexuality in his letters, and would later discourage Barlow from writing homoerotic fiction.

Robert Barlow, on the other hand, was gay, and apparently sexually active during his adult years. A line in the published version of his 1944 memoir reads: “Life was all literary then.” However, the unedited typescript includes a more telling version of that sentence. “Life, save for secret desires which I knew must be suppressed, and which centered about a charming young creature with the sensitivity of a… was all literary then.”

Barlow came to Providence immediately upon receiving a telegram from Lovecraft's aunt Annie Gamwell about Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft's "Instructions In Case Of Decease", a separate document from his will, appointed Barlow his literary executor. This was intended as an honor, but for Barlow it was an unmitigated disaster.

Two of Lovecraft’s devoted literary followers, Donald Wanderi and the infamous August Derleth, demanded that Barlow give them Lovecraft’s manuscripts, and jealously spread rumors that Barlow had stolen them without legitimate permission. When a fellow member of the Lovecraft Circle, Clark Ashton Smith, heard these rumors he wrote to Barlow: “Please do not write me or try to communicate with me in any way. I do not wish to see you or hear from you after your conduct in regard to the estate of a late beloved friend.”

The effect of this letter, Barlow wrote, “was of cutting out my entrails with a meat cleaver.” He had lost all of his friends and literary acquaintances, and was practically in exile. He pondered suicide, but instead began to study anthropology at Berkeley.  In 1943, Barlow moved to Mexico and travelled to the Yucatán to study the Mayans, and to western Guerrero, to study the Tepuztecs. He taught anthropology at Mexico City College, founded two scholarly journals, and published around a hundred and fifty articles, pamphlets, and books.

However, he was constantly unhappy.

Barlow had written as early as 1944 that he had "a subtle feeling that my curious and uneasy life is not destined to prolong itself.” This presentiment came to pass, when in 1950, after a disgruntled student threatened to expose him as gay, Barlow committed suicide at his home in Azcapotzalco on the first or second of January.  On that afternoon, he locked himself in his room, took twenty six capsules of Seconal, leaving pinned upon his door in Mayan pictographs "Do not disturb me. I want to sleep a long time."

Though Lovecraft’s legacy continues to resound through horror fiction to this day, his friend, fan, and frequent collaborator Robert Barlow is all but forgotten. His greatest piece of weird fiction, “The Night Ocean,” is almost entirely attributed to Lovecraft now, though he added merely a few sentences to Barlow’s story. Perhaps, as we Lovecraft aficionados celebrate pride month, we can spare a few moments to read one of R.H. Barlow’s spooky stories, and raise a glass in memoriam of a promising life cut short by the homophobia of an unkind world.

 Sources:

 La Farge, P. (2017). The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans. The New Yorker.