Four Letters: 1932-34

Today’s installment is about the letters a teenage Bloch wrote to Weird Tales before he published “Lilies.” The first—and possibly Bloch’s first published piece of writing—appeared in Weird Tales in November 1932. In the brief letter, he argues that the magazine should stay as weird as it has always been by reprinting stories from the magazine’s previous issues only. He also railed against “cheap advertising” but did not provide an example that made it to print. He was in a critical mode in his next letter, which was published in September 1933. In it, he ranks Weird Tales writers, placing Lovecraft at the top followed by Clark Ashton Smith. Then, in a pile, he lumps Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, and E. Hoffmann Price into the next tier. He dismisses Seabury Quinn and Edmond Hamilton as unworthy of inclusion. Even at the tender age of sixteen, he had a keen eye for what might last! 

In a March 1934, letter, Bloch announced to the world his budding philosophy of the weird:

​Weirdness is a quality — a quality inspiring definite emotion and having certain definite forms of reaction-patterns. One of these emotions or reaction-forms is fear, the fundamental emotion. Now nothing occasions more fear than the unknown. Death comes under this heading — it is an embodiment, the essence, the symbol of the unknown — a mysterious, awesome, fearful state to mortals. Therefore death as such is weird, because it inspires fear, and the processes of decay that come with death take on that same weirdness due to associative powers. For this reason a skeleton, a grinning skull, or a rotted cadaver is fearful; and if, as in some stories, such a thing is reanimated with unnatural life, fear is born. If decay is not weird, then some of Poe’s, Bierce’s, Machen’s and Lovecraft’s best stories are not weird tales. If death and decay and chaos are not weird, then no unnatural transposition of commonplace phenomena can be considered so, for they are simply distortions of matter-of-fact embodiments. https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v23n03_1934-03_sas/page/390/mode/2up

His focus here was his objection to another letter writer who said there is nothing intrinsically weird about a corpse or other death imagery, that death was a natural thing. Bloch objected and, in doing so, we see a little bit of the growing sense of himself as a writer of weird fiction.
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His next letter was published only a month later. In it, Bloch rails against Conan, calling him “the Cimmerian Chipmunk.” He urges Howard to focus on Solomon Kane and the ancient Britons instead of Conan. I wonder what story he was writing about in particular. At the time of the letter’s publication, Howard’s most recent Conan story was “Rogues in the House,” which features Conan embroiled in political conflict involving two powerful men. Dan from Conan Chronology, who blogged about all of Howard’s Conan stories in chronological order, would likely disagree with Bloch’s assessment. He says this about “Rogues in the House”: 

​I might be one of the few people to put “Rogues in the House” this high. I think it’s earned, though. “Rogues” is perhaps the funniest story in the Conan canon, with some of the best characters we ever get to spend time with. Conan’s stuck with the Red Priest Nabonidus and the young aristocrat Murilo and their time together does make for a fun adventure that’s delivered in a fresh, tight package. It’s so seldom that Howard lets colorful characters really bounce off one another, but he does it here well. There are imaginative traps and gadgets all through this story that make for a very entertaining time. Conan’s climactic battle with the subhuman servant Thak led to so much iconic art for a reason. While all of the thief stories are pretty good, this is almost the best of the bunch. https://www.conanchronology.com/home/ranking-robert-e-howards-conan-stories 

It is interesting that Bloch should take such aim at one of the mainstays of Weird Tales and maybe especially poignant that Howard would end his life less that two years thereafter.

In writing this blog and the several books I have done on this era. I have come to rely heavily on both The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The Internet Archive. This site is truly amazing. It contains page scans of just about all of the early pulps, including the complete run of Weird Tales through this era. For this blog entry, I consult the ISFDB to see where Bloch’s letters appeared, searched archive.org for the title and date, and there it is on my screen! Both of these sites are treasures, offering a rare privilege to be able to read the stories as they originally looked—alongside ads for new religions (Psychiana!!) and lessons that will have you playing the piano like a virtuoso in only an hour. Fun!
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I don’t think I will blog about the many, many informal pieces of writing Bloch published over the years. Maybe when I am finished with the several hundred stories, I plan to blog about I will still be rolling along and come back to them. But I feel “The Feast in the Abbey” calling to me…