one likes to have his name or his work recognized; mere recognition is subtle flattery. . . .
"Weird Tales?" I asked.
Again he nodded. "I've been a Weird Tales addict since 1928."
He had sold his New Hartford farm in 1928.
"What do you think of H. P. Lovecraft's tales?" I asked him, though that date, 1928, was beginning to whirl around in the back of my brain. Fred said something polite and went and got two lawn chairs, and the three of us sat down in a compact little triangle, Fred and Doctor Bowen in the lawn chairs and I on the bench, and for about half an hour Doctor Bowen and I talked about Lovecraft. But all the time we were talking I felt the peculiar conviction that Doctor Bowen was deliberately withholding information that he knew would interest me, information, moreover, that he desperately wanted to give me.
Finally I asked him, point-blank, "What's on your mind, Doc? Here we are talking about Lovecraft, but you're really not thinking about Lovecraft at all; you're thinking about something entirely different."
He parried that with a nervous little laugh, and a question of his own.
"Tell me, McClusky, do you fellows really believe the stories you write? I'll elaborate on that—of course, I know that fiction is fiction, and that names and dates and places are changed—but do you really have any belief in the plausibility of the basic material you use?"
I lit a cigarette, thinking my answer out carefully before I replied.
"Here's my own personal conviction," I told him, then. "I don't believe any writer in the world ever turned out a story without the notion—no matter how faint or obscured—somewhere in his mind that the incidents he relates might somewhere, sometime, somehow, come to pass. That statement is especially difficult to apply to the so-called fantastic type of story. Nevertheless it is true that, in almost every instance, these so implausible seeming stories have a definite foundation, a definite genesis, either in legend—and remember that wherever there is smoke there is fire—or in the workings of observable phenomena which have not yet been satisfactorily explained, or in imaginative prophecy. Have you read Lo, by Charles Fort?"
"No, I haven't."
"Well, in Lo, Fort collected a tremendous mass of evidence detailing phenomena all of which is beyond mundane explanation. Those events occurred; there's not a doubt of that; they're all well authenticated. And—this may come as a distinct surprise to you—there's plenty of pretty grim historical evidence behind those New England stories Lovecraft wrote. In some instances you can even definitely tell what family legends he was shooting at; he was so certain that what he wrote would be taken for out-and-out fiction that, although he always meticulously altered all names, he left many of the dates as they actually were."
"I didn't know that," he muttered, and I could see that he was surprised.
"Well, it's so," I told him, "and we can take it for what it's worth. Lovecraft worked, more often than not, from meager material—old letters, courthouse records, genealogies, obituary notices. Aware that the mundanely inexplicable had occurred, he tried his hand at explanation. Perhaps some of his explanations are far-fetched; perhaps some of them approach, however
