Frank Belknap Long Letters,

Written to Michael E. Ambrose,

1976-1979

Katherine Kerestman

---

DESPITE THE FACT THAT H. P. LOVECRAFT would often refer to himself as the Old Man or Grandpa when writing to his numerous correspondents—and that he tended to address Frank Belknap Long as “Sonny,” “grandson” or “Belknapius”—Lovecraft’s deep affection for Long was that of a Best Friend Forever (BFF) or big brother. The writer’s peculiar choice of endearments may be better understood when one recognizes that, with at least one of his feet firmly planted in the Eighteenth Century, Lovecraft must always have felt older than most of his peers. Long understood this eccentricity. He also understood Lovecraft.

When, subsequent to his marriage to Sonia H. Greene, Lovecraft took up residence in New York City, Lovecraft and Belknap began meeting twice or thrice a week. Regrettably, the Lovecraft marriage was foredoomed: simply put, Lovecraft was unable to endure living in an alien and threatening Gotham (alien and threatening were the same to him), particularly after Sonia, whose millinery earnings supported them both, lost her job. Lovecraft desperately missed home—genteel, old-moneyed Providence, with all its familiar, endearing quirks and old-fashioned attitudes, as he wrote to his Aunt Lillian D. Clark:

I am always an outsider—to all scenes and all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that is New England I must [Lovecraft’s italics] have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence. (Lovecraft, Lord of a Visible World, 198)

Lovecraft’s desperate need for the old, the stable, and the familiar is most poignantly expressed in his sonnet “Background,” from Fungi from Yuggoth:

I never can be tied to raw, new things,

For I first saw the light in an old town,

Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down

To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.

Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams

Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,

And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes—

These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams. (Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth, 69)

It was only the society of fellow thinkers and writers, especially Frank Belknap Long, that enabled him, emotionally, to endure living in New York. For a time. These writer friends on whom Lovecraft so desperately depended, the Kalem Club—named thus because the members’ names all started with K, L, or M—along with other occasional literary visitors, provided Lovecraft with fertile minds with whom to exchange ideas. While Lovecraft was set in his ways, as are so many writers, new friendships and ongoing discussions with fellow writers in New York helped to gradually moderate his inherited social dogmatism and to prepare his mind to consider new ideas.

Following his flight from the menacing metropolis back to the sanctuary of Providence, on the verge of a breakdown, a newly-stirred Lovecraft began to travel as much as he could; and travel augmented the slow processes of psychological and philosophical maturation that had first been stimulated in New York by an enlarged social circle. Unfortunately, Lovecraft died in his forties, much too soon to fully reap the benefit of an expanding and mature vision.

Even more unfortunately, H. P. Lovecraft has been made the poster-boy of an entire generation born into a culture characterized by outdated ideas, mostly related to race. In Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, for instance, David J. Goodwin is given to frequent expressions of wonder at Lovecraft’s having had so many non-Aryan friends, when he so often iterated scathing and xenophobic remarks about this group, that race, or another culture. Of Sonia H. Greene, a Jewish immigrant divorcee—with whom he surprised himself by falling in love—for instance, Lovecraft wrote:

Mme. G. is certainly a person of the most admirable qualities, whose generous and kindly cast of mind is by no means feigned, & whose intelligence and devotion to art merit the sincerest approbation. The volatility incidental to a Continental and non-Aryan heritage should not blind the analytical observer to the solid work & genuine cultivation which underlie it. (Goodwin, 31)

—one such exception to the rule he was taught about Jewish people. Such a paradox is not in the least mystifying, however, when one considers that a person learns inductively to distrust an inherited axiom by encountering one exception to a rule at a time, repeatedly, as Lovecraft did in New York: many exceptions belie a rule. Even so, an empathetic person may still understand why Howard Lovecraft clung so feverishly to his obsolete ideas of class and race as long as he could, when she considers just how vital it was to his self-esteem to style himself an eighteenth-century Gentleman, albeit an impoverished gentleman, after prosperity had fled his home. Having lost their familial manse after the death of his grandfather, Lovecraft and his mother and aunts were reduced to renting an ever-cheaper series of lodgings, as their inheritance and their social standing diminished. This essay, however, does not concern itself with whether either H. P. Lovecraft or Frank Belknap Long was racist. Lovecraft’s aesthetic and philosophical stances are mentioned here merely to provide necessary context for references to them in Belknap’s letters.

*

Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long had much in common. Each had grown up a cherished son in an indulgent home, and each, deeming himself a writer, had scorned to adopt a remunerative profession; accordingly, in adulthood, each of them would suffer the miseries of penury. And yet, throughout their whole lives, both remained sociable, affable, and generous literary men. Long, for example, in his later life—he lived twice as long as Lovecraft—still liked to entertain guests, albeit with such humble fare as he could provide—“hot dogs on paper plates,” according to respected Lovecraftian scholar and personal friend of the departed Long, Peter Cannon, whom I had the honor of meeting at the “Master of Hounds and More: Frank Belknap Long” panel at Necronomicon 2024.

There is one conspicuous dissimilarity between the two writers: while Lovecraft elected for near-starvation over surrendering his gentlemanly, or art-for-art’s sake, approach to writing, Long was willing to crank out pulp stories and paperback novels as fast as he could type them—he wrote them for the pulp market in order to pay the rent. This is not to say that Long was not a very good writer. His oeuvre includes many superb tales, in his own unique and lovely style—or really styles—but he had not always the leisure to write as he pleased, nor as well as he could, with deadlines looming and creditors dunning him. Long knew the difference between good writing and hack work that paid the bills: when he had the time, he produced work that “remains memorable, distinctive, even visionary” (Joshi, 7). Unfortunately, Long’s recognition, in both the long-term and the short run, has been diminished by his proximity to the luminary Lovecraft. As mentioned above, while Lovecraft dwelt in New York, the two met frequently; but, when they were apart, thousands of pages of lengthy letters traveled back and forth between Grandpa and Sonny. Their whole circle of literary friends was extraordinarily epistolary, as well. Lovecraft is thought to have penned tens of thousands of very, very long letters himself.

*

This essay examines a recently unearthed cache of letters written by Frank Belknap Long to Michael E. Ambrose. At the time of their writing, Dreamer on the Nightside, Long’s affectionate memoir of his friend Howard, had just been released. Dreamer on the Nightside presents Lovecraft’s life story as told to Long by Lovecraft. In it, Long asks his reader to consider the milieu in which Lovecraft lived when rendering judgment upon him; to that end, Long explains that, for most of Lovecraft’s lifetime, a pulp magazine called Weird Tales was the sole venue for fantastic fiction. Mainstream publishers would not touch such stories, regardless of their literary or philosophical merit; therefore, Lovecraft’s commercial and literary successes were essentially in the hands of a single man who edited a lone periodical, and who was endeavoring to select the stories he thought would increase his magazine’s circulation. When Lovecraft could have remedied his dire financial situation by accepting the offer of a position as Editor of Weird Tales, he had to decline the opportunity, for the position would have required him to leave Providence again.

Time-travel to 1975: Dreamer has been published, speculative fiction is in the ascendant, Lovecraft’s work is all the rage in academia, and Lovecraft has become a “cult figure” (Long, Dreamer, 19) in popular culture, too. Dreamer numbers the French and American publications which vie in their hyperboles to extoll Lovecraft’s oeuvre as equal to or surpassing the literary feats of Edgar Allan Poe; and it makes the point that, while the numerous film adaptations of his stories would have “appalled” Lovecraft for their corruption of his Mythos, the sheer number of films derived from his work can leave no room for doubt about Lovecraft’s cultural influence (Long, Dreamer, 13). In 1975, major publishers are rereleasing Lovecraft’s stories in both hardcover and paperback. The intelligentsia, meanwhile, are devouring Lovecraft’s correspondence:

Most astonishing of all, perhaps, is the interest displayed in Lovecraft by various intellectual groups. HPL of course was the most fascinating of letter writers—his philosophical, aesthetic, and socio-political views are set forth on page after page in which no reading pause becomes possible. As an explorer of the unknown unique in our time, Lovecraft has aroused the admiration of many divergent philosophical circles which among themselves hold totally irreconcilable approaches to reality. (Long, Dreamer, 13)

Lovecraft’s own mind was a pulsating reactor encompassing colliding thoughts, the implosions enabling his greatness:

HPL has also received many tributes from writers whose views are of an entirely non-surrealistic nature and who believe that only experimental laboratory science is capable of forging a key that can unlock the portals which guard the major mysteries. And this is as it should be. An author who lacks the capacity to set diametrically opposing schools into conflict can never be other than minor, for there are contradictions in every aspect of human experience with which the significant writer must struggle. Unless he has been whirled about by a few maelstroms of the inner mind, his guidance on a mountain-scaling expedition is unlikely to prove of much value, particularly in the realm of the unknown. (Long, Dreamer, 14)

At bottom, Lovecraft believed in a mechanistic universe:

HPL was never a narrow, rigidly unyielding positivist, but he did have a great deal of respect for [. ..] “sound science” and refused to abandon what he believed might well be the truth about the universe: that it was wholly mechanistic, some vast unknowable kind of rhythmic pulsation that had always existed and would always exist, and that this rhythm creates for us everything we perceive as reality—the whole of nature, animate and inanimate, on this planet and throughout the universe of stars. (Long, Dreamer, 14)

With experience, Lovecraft was required to test his social views against his cosmic position, and he was obliged to amend his initial, and once strongly held, opinions on government:

To Howard, the modern titan was Einstein (not Freud), and the Victorian counterpart, Darwin. He probably would have conceded, if pressed, that Marx was another titan, but he was never a Marxist, even though in his last few years he became converted, first to a New Deal liberalism, and finally to a kind of democratic socialism that was closely in accord with the ideology of Norman Thomas or Carl Sandburg. Since he started off as an ultra-conservative in the socio-political domain, a change of magnitude for him could scarcely have constituted a more dramatic reversal. (Long, Dreamer, 70)

A thinking man, Lovecraft processed new ideas as he came upon them, and he was willing to modify his own views in light of new experiences, as reason necessitated, and even at personal cost.

*

Michael E. Ambrose was, at first, to me, the enigmatic recipient of the cache of Belknap letters that I happened upon at a nefarious vendor’s booth at Author Con 2024 in Williamsburg.¹ Wasting no time in gaining possession of said correspondence, I brandished my credit card!² A few months later, at Necronomicon 2024, I strove to elucidate some of the less obvious references in the letters. Eventually, with the aid of several Lovecraftian co-conspirators—Perry Grayson, Jerry Meyer, Tim Lonegan, David E. Schultz, and also Michael Eury and Ed Catto of Two Morrows Press—who, as fate would have it, had published work by M. E. Ambrose, as well as some of my own journalism—I was able to positively I.D. the mysterious Michael E. Ambrose. As I muddled through my initial forays, I was confused by a singular coincidence: investigating Macabre magazine, referred to by Long in his letters to Ambrose, I came across Joseph Payne Brennan’s weird fiction periodical (1957-1977) named Macabre. Was this a red herring? Subsequent sleuthing uncovered the curious fact that Ambrose was the much-loved and recently deceased publisher of two periodicals from Argo Press—one of which bore the name of Macabre, the three issues of which fanzine were published in 1972 and 1976, and another titled Argonaut (1977-1995). Furthermore, Ambrose had contributed some of his own stories to Joseph Payne Brennan’s Macabre magazine. There had been two Macabre magazines—both of which contained fiction by Michael E Ambrose!

The plot thickens. Among his other achievements, Frank Belknap Long was a prolific staff-writer of comic books for Standard Comics, and he freelanced for other comics publishers, too.³ In the wake of an outbreak of anti-comic book activity, which culminated in the Comic Code Authority (1954), Long’s employment in comic production was adversely affected. Fawcett, the home of Captain Marvel, dropped its comic book division and laid off its staff; subsequently, its properties were purchased by Charlton Comics Group (Cooke, 64). In 2022, Two Morrows Publishing released the Charlton Companion by Jon D. Cooke, an homage to the Charlton Comics Group, Argo Press; Michael E. Ambrose, who was a consultant on the project, died just before it was completed (Cooke, 2). Most likely, Long and Ambrose crossed paths in comics land, as well as in fantasy magazines.

*

The letters, four in number dated from 17 March 1976 to 27 February 1979, are all hand-written; the cache also includes two Doubleday Books announcements of a new Long publication (The Early Long), one of which appears to have been enclosed in one of the letters. In these several missives, Long thanks Michael Ambrose for sending him complimentary copies of Macabre and Argonaut, reminisces about H. P. Lovecraft and describes his marriage to Sonia, discusses the critical reception of Dreamer on the Nightside, rails against the publishing rat-race, talks of the surviving members of the Kalem Club and other writers, and confesses to some of his own stressors. These holograph documents provide a fleeting glimpse into the mind of a harried and under-appreciated master of weird literature who endeavored to keep in touch with his friends on an impossible schedule.

Letter 1 (March 17, 1976)

The first letter, dated March 17, 1976, is written on Long’s wife’s stationery. With a fountain pen, Long adds the surname “Long,” after “Lyda Arco” (his wife’s maiden name); the rest of the printed inscription is “Artist’s Representative” (Letter 1). Long pens, beneath the above line, “Frank Belknap Long, Free-wheeling Scientifantasy Writer” (Letter 1). He opens,

Dear Mr. Ambrose:

Your letter gave me great pleasure. With the exception of three letters from “inner circle” Lovecraftians, who knew HPL almost as well as I did, none of the 25 or 30 letters I’ve received since the publication of “The Dreamer” gave me as much pleasure and none gave me more. (Letter 1)

Long is delighted by the reviews of Dreamer on the Nightside, most of which are positive, with “one exception, which was distinctly in the brickbat category, but I anticipated considerable flack, since HPL was, and remains, a highly controversial figure” (Letter 1). He maintains that, when looking at Lovecraft’s views, one must take into account their relation to the time in which he was living:

I’ve always felt that in a biography—even in a somewhat informal memoir—a serious attempt must be made to dwell upon the period as well, since otherwise the subject will seem to exist in a vacuum [. . .] [I] willed myself to become again the boy of 18-to-22 who was once my present self. (Letter 1)

Long bemoans the drudgery of writing for a living: “I have to write at least four paperback novels a year to keep afloat economically” (Letter 1).

Doubleday Book Announcement (2 copies)

An envelope postmarked May 28, 1977 contains one of the Doubleday announcements of the publication of The Early Long, priced at “$7.95, 211 pgs” (Doubleday Announcement 1). This circular features blurbs from Robert Bloch, who calls Long “A Master of fantasy and horror” (Doubleday Announcement 1), and Ray Bradbury, who states, “Frank Belknap Long has lived through a major part of s-f history in the United States and helped shape the field when most of us were still in our early teens” (Doubleday Announcement 1). The notice also includes paeans from Screen Stories, Scholastic Magazine, Whispers magazine, Future Retrospective, Milton Subotsky (producer of Tales From the Crypt), Xylophile, Barry Malzberg, Prof. Joseph Neyer, Audrey L. Bilker, and S. Merlin. The return address on the envelope is

Frank B. Long

421 West 21 St.

New York, NY 10011

It is addressed to

Mr. M. E. Ambrose

2408 Leon, #206-A

Austin,

Texas, 78705

Across the top of the second copy of the Doubleday announcement of The Early Long, Belknap has written, “‘The Early’ chalked up a sale at close to 5,000 copies within a week or so of publication and before the appearance of a single review. It seemingly stunned Doubleday as much as it did me!” (Doubleday Announcement 2).  The accompanying envelope is postmarked March 21, 1976, and the announcement may have been enclosed with the March, 17, 1976 letter.

Letter 2 (June 15, 1976)

The letter of June 15, 1976 (the envelope is postmarked June 16) is written on onion-skin paper, which, for those readers who may not have lived long enough to know, was used for typing carbon copies or writing airmail letters, when thickness and weight mattered. Long opens by thanking Ambrose for a letter that cheered a “gloomy day” (Letter 2), and he bemoans the fact that he is under the “terrific pressure” of publishers’ deadlines, which “can often go a long way toward making gloomy days more frequent” (Letter 2). Thanking Ambrose for his good review of Dreamer, Long boasts that all but three of the “20 or 22 reviews have been positive” (Letter 2). What makes Ambrose’s review especially good is that it “covered all of the matters that are of importance in giving the reader a well-rounded idea of what he will find between its covers” (Letter 2), an important matter in a review, “apart from praise or blame” (Letter 2).

Long continues that there are “quite a few 1920-1930 period Lovecraftian survivors—three of them Kalem Club members, and others who either attended occasional Kalem gatherings or were in NY during that period” (Letter 2). Members of the Kalem Club included H. P. Lovecraft, Long, Reinhart Kleiner, Herman Charles Koenig, Arthur Leeds, Samuel Loveman, Henry Everett McNeil, James F. Morton, Wilfred Branch Talman, and Vrest Orton. Long writes that Loveman died within the last month, “and his passing at the age of 89 immeasurably saddened me” (Letter 2). He goes on to say,

And Wilfred Talman, Vrest Orton (He is 12 years or so my senior and still turns out books continuously for a major publisher) Alfred Galpin and Don Wandrei are all still very much extant. I have lost touch in recent years with 3 or 4 other early Lovecraftians who met and talked with him quite often. (Letter 2)

Long concludes this letter by admiring Ambrose’s “stories and poems in Macabre” (Letter 2), thanking him for sending him a copy, and offering to “dig out” (Letter 2) some piece of his own to contribute to his magazine. And he apologizes for taking so long to answer: “I had every intention of doing so within a fortnight, but at about that time an avalanche of obligations descended upon me, and my correspondence has been piling up for weeks” (Letter 2).

Letter 3 (May 24, 1977)

Long’s stress level has not abated when he writes his May 24, 1977 letter to Ambrose, the penmanship of which is significantly less steady than that of the previous letters. He adds addendums to the top and side of the first page. Across the top of the first page of the letter, which is written mostly in ink, Long writes in pencil, “That many-oared ship of unknown origin in interplanetary space has already begun to haunt my dreams”⁴ (Letter 3). This sentence appears to be a quotation, but there are no quotation marks around it. A line drawn beneath it separates this sentence from the return address and salutation of the letter. Portions of the letter are written in ink and parts are in pencil. After “Dear M. E. A.” in this letter, instead of the customary “Dear Mr. Ambrose,” and thanking Ambrose for the copy he sent of Argonaut, Long apologizes once more for his tardiness in responding to his last letter, “as I’ve been writing under great pressure” (Letter 3).

He then discusses Albert J. Manachino, whose story, perhaps, appeared in the issue of Argonaut he has just received from Michael Ambrose: “an extremely talented writer—restrained in style and approach, with a perceptive awareness of the precise point in a story when an abyss of ultimate horror should be allowed to widen” (Letter 3). Perhaps Long is responding to something Ambrose wrote in his letter about Manachino, or a letter by Manachino published in Argonaut, when he writes that

in [Manachino’s] letter anent HPL he is laboring, I think, under a misconception. I have never said that HPL was not racially prejudiced. Of course he was.* But this prejudice was shared by from 60% to 80% of the residents of Providence and other New England cities in the early years of the present century. There can be no gainsaying this. It was tragic, and seems in a present-day frame of reference, as I’ve pointed out in my preface to Michaud’s reissue of The Conservative, totally unforgivable. But one has to realize that HPL was born and raised in an extremely provincial society—in a great many of its aspects. He triumphed over that and more as he grew older and ended by totally repudiating these early views. Despite all that has been said to the contrary, he was the kindest, most generous-minded individual it has ever been my privilege to know. (Letter 3)

The asterisk in the quote refers to a sentence Long has insinuated in the left margin: “*But not in his personal relationships with friends of the period. In that area he was kindliness and courtesy personified” (Letter 3). A squiggly line separates this sentence from the body of the letter.

Sonia and her marriage to H. P. Lovecraft are the next theme in this jumbled missive. No paragraph break separates all these topics on the first page. This portion in pencil:

And Sonia was not ‘reasonably well off for those times.’ [Here, it sounds as if Long is responding to something said by Manachino.] She lost her high-paying millinery job right after they were married, and there was a great deal of extreme economic hardship in the next two years. Economic factors were unquestionably chiefly responsible for the marriage failure. (Letter 3)

In Dreamer, Long vehemently asserts that the Lovecraft marriage failed—not because of a sex problem—but because Lovecraft could not stand New York City another minute: his mental health necessitated an immediate return to Providence. Thus, Lovecraft’s friends wrote to his aunts to call him home (Long, Dreamer, 118-119).

On page 2—where the second paragraph of the letter begins—Long resumes his self-interrupted assessment of his exposition of Lovecraft’s xenophobic views in Dreamer:

The portrait I’ve drawn of HPL in ‘The Dreamer’ is entirely in accord with what I said in an interview in Meade Frieson’s fanzine five years ago, so I can hardly be accused of participating in a “white wash” as a recent fan reviewer has proclaimed. At that time the present fierce controversy had not arisen, and I spoke casually and freely. It did not even occur to me that I would be writing, a few years later, a book-length HPL memoir. In my letters in recent EOD mailings (To Indick, Reg Smith and others, and in a recent letter to Fantasy Crossroads) I’ve tried to clarify a few points I did not stress quite as much as I might have done in ‘The Dreamer.’ Meade also published two supplements to that first HPL huge memorial ‘zine some two years later, to which I contributed letters. If Manachino could read all of this material he would, I feel, modify—[here, inserted in pencil, with a caret “even”] if only slightly—what he has set forth in his letter, for he impresses me as an unusually fair-minded guy. Of course, Sonia found HPL a little hard to live with at times. I can think of no man of letters in the entire course of English literature who would have been easy for a woman to live with. Genius always presents a problem of that nature. (Letter 3)

In Dreamer, Long states that one key factor which prompted H. P. Lovecraft’s repudiation of his earlier opinions was his learning of the atrocities committed by Hitler (Long, Dreamer, 160).    

Long assures Michael Ambrose that it is fine with him that Ambrose has published one of Long’s letters, and that Ambrose has Long’s permission to publish this one, too:

Only on rare occasions do I object to the fullest publication of my letters, and when such an occasion arises I always caution a correspondent in advance or try to—once or twice in recent months a slight indiscretion has slipped past me in that area, but that happens to all letter-writers, and has to be taken in stride. (Letter 3)

Always remembering past kindnesses, he asks Ambrose to relay to someone named Chad, who is mentioned in Ambrose’s “editorial comments” in the issue of Argonaut, that “I still remember the kind things he said a quarter of a century ago, about two of my stories in the old Standard Publications, in one of the letter columns” (Letter 3). He closes this letter by citing a favorable review of Dreamer by Edward Wagonknect, a “distinguished scholar” (Letter 3), who called his memoir “a vivid portrait,” (Letter 3) and a review by Richard Lupoff in Algol.

Letter 4 (February 27, 1977)

The final letter in this packet, dated February 27, 1979 and written on the front and back of a sheet of onion skin, may be said to be scrawled. There are more scratchings out and more insertions with squiggly lines drawn around them than previously, so that it is difficult to decipher the sequence in which the various parts should be read. Two such segments occupy the top third of the first page. The main body of the letter begins a third of the way down the page. The page itself is only about sixty percent of the length it should be—the bottom has been cut off. Small ink marks reveal that something was once written at the bottom of the first page. Yet, the letter is finished and signed on the back; thus, the paper was cut before Long finished the letter on the reverse side.

Once again, pressure is the leading topic, beginning with the main body of the letter. Long cites “at least 30” (Letter 4) unanswered letters, some of them decreeing four-week deadlines for manuscripts. He paints a dismal picture:

If you could glance into my study you would perhaps understand why letter-writing has been difficult for me—at least 30 still-to-be-answered letters on both sides of my desk, two un-completed manuscripts with story-deadline tags attached to them—“Get this in within the next four weeks or else!!” Bills in abundance—many still unpaid—fan group talk requests—Lyda’s party plans, symbolized by five just-purchased bottles of Scotch—she gives at least three parties a month and I can’t talk her out of it etc. etc. Never attempt to be a free-lance writer, and the husband of a socially-active wife at one and the same time, if you can possibly find some saner way of carrying on in the most high-pressure society on Earth! (Letter 4)

What Long elides in this portrait of his conjugal life is the true nature of his marriage.

During the Frank Belknap Long panel at Necronomicon 2024, Peter Cannon spoke soberly of the Longs’ marriage: Lyda, he said, was verbally abusive to Frank. In Long Memories, his memoir of his own relationship with Long, Cannon renders many affecting, and sadly characteristic, scenes in the Long household: for instance, Lyda announcing in front of her mortified husband, “Once, when I first knew him, I was kissing him passionately and one of his teeth came out. Can you imagine, the son of a rich orthopedist [sic], and he doesn’t have a tooth to call his own in his head!” (Cannon, 18)⁵

Between the Longs’ marital disharmony and their poverty, Cannon and his wife, Julie, ceased their visits to the Longs at their apartment, preferring to meet Frank at other places. Cannon describes their first visit to the Long abode: he and Julie were served vodka in filthy glasses and deli take-out in deli containers; and the Longs had finished their own meal before their guests arrived and had started drinking in advance of their guests, too. Their only other guests were cockroaches. Cannon depicts Lyda as a manic afflicted with delusions and grandiose ideas, such as that President Reagan is sending her to Russia as a “cultural envoy,” as well as prolonged periods of depression. Cannon and his wife cannot stand her (Cannon, 54). Nonetheless, Cannon comes to love her; and he fills the void in the Longs’ family life as a sort of adopted son. Frank Belknap and Lyda Arco Long are styled gifted artists—Lyda had been a singer—who married in haste, suffered physical and mental decline, as well as poverty, metamorphosed into a cantankerous old couple whose grandiose delusions sustained them through their losses, irritated Peter Cannon, and endeared them to him.

Page two of the 1979 letter begins with a new paragraph, the topic of which is Long’s triumphant return from the World Fantasy Convention in Fort Worth. Long enthuses about the change of scenery: “Texas is so BIG it makes NY seem small by contrast. I even find myself missing the Longhorns, pony express riders, and Phantom Apaches, not to mention the wagon trains” (Letter 4). “We” [Lyda and himself?] returned by bus and enjoyed the opportunity to see the Deep South on the drive. In Texas, Long received the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award, which

meant a great deal to [him], particularly in view of its HPL association aspects, and the previous recipients—Bloch, Leiber, Bradbury. To be in such company still leaves me in a slight state of shock. When I saw that Borges and John Collier were among the nominees this year—well, the possibility that I might receive it seemed remote. As you perhaps know, it involved an additional surprise—the G of H choice, along with Stephen King, at the Providence gathering in October. (Letter 4)

He closes this missive by admiring the latest issue of Argonaut, and especially Manachino’s story, “St. George and the Mushroom.” At the bottom of the page, in a wavy box in the left corner, he writes, “The Vestburgh cover was marvelous—a Time voyage in itself” (Letter 4).  In the squiggly boxes at the top of the first page, Long apologizes

for less than tidy-appearing epistles and occasional inked-out words in virtually all my letters this past few months. It’s simply an indication of the tremendous pressure of recent events etc. Otherwise I’d have to postpone writing for an even longer period, for recopying [“re-“ in “recopying” is inserted with a caret] is just about the most time-consuming task I can think of—at least for me. (Letter 4)

And, he says,

A really important letter – and this is one of that nature – seems to have a way, at times, of having an extremely “dashed-off” aspect. (Letter 4)

*

Clearly, by 1979, Frank Belknap Long’s best writing days were behind him. Advanced age, poor life organizational skills, poverty, diminished health, and a high-pressure spouse with psychological issues were the mire in which his literary ship foundered. From weird writer to “scientifantasy” pioneer, Long dwindled to hack writer struggling to survive. Yet, every so often, among the ashes of his former glory blazed the spark of consummate artistry and innovative vision which characterize the first writer of Twentieth-Century science fiction. Frank Belknap Long clothed the nakedness of his human frailty in reminiscences which sustained him through the lean years, as he approached the abyss.

I have attempted to trace the provenance of these letters. The vendor from whom I purchased them said that his father had bought them from Bats over Books, a rare book dealer, but I have received no response to my inquiries regarding where they obtained the letters, such as an estate sale after Ambrose’s passing. It has been a pleasure interacting with the Belknapian/Lovecraftian community as I endeavored to fully enter into the mind of Frank Belknap Long during the period when he wrote these letters to Michael E. Ambrose.

Notes

[1] —as well as two issues of Tryout (1917 and 1919), an amateur press periodical published by Charles W. Smith of the Amateur Press Association, issues which contain several poems by H. P. Lovecraft, some of them under pseudonyms.

2 Sharing with Lovecraft some old-fashioned sensibilities, I would dearly love to say that I proffered my letter of credit.

3 Perry Grayson, of Tsathoggua Press, related in an email to this author that Long, in fact, “wrote the entire first issue of the pre-EC (and pre-comic code) horror comic book, Adventures into the Unknown, in 1948.” (Email 24 Nov 2024)

4 David E. Schultz obligingly scanned a volume of Frank Belknap Long’s poetry and did not find this line. I still hope to learn whether it is a quotation or not, and, if so, its source.

5 Perry Grayson, who is writing a biography of Frank Belknap Long, shared this anecdote:

In a phone interview I conducted with literary agent and comic book impresario Julius Schwartz in 1995, I gained further insight into Lyda’s wacky mannerisms [. . . T]he public humiliation of FBL only escalated with time. Though Julie Schwartz hung out with FBL in the 1930s, he hadn’t crossed paths with him in years by the 1980s. Julie recalled that at the rather ramshackle Long residence, Lyda propositioned him in front of her hubby and the rest of the guests: ‘Want to fuck?’ Julie was taken aback—absolutely mortified. He reminded me that he was already in his early 80s at the time. (Email 13 Feb 2025)

Works Cited

Cannon, Peter. Long Memories and Other Writings. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2022.

Cooke, Jon B. The Charlton Companion. Raleigh NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2022.

Goodwin, David J. Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024.

Joshi, S. T. Introduction. The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction: Frank Belknap Long,

edited by S. T. Joshi. Lakewood CO: Centipede Press, 2022, 7-14.

Long, Frank Belknap. Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside. 1975. Rockville MD: Wildside Press, LLC, 2016.

—Letter 1. Letterer to Michael E. Ambrose. March 17, 1976. Author’s personal collection

—Letter 2. Letter to Michael E. Ambrose. June 15, 1976. Author’s personal collection

—Letter 3. Letter to Michael E. Ambrose. May 24, 1977. Author’s personal collection

—Letter 4. Letter to Michael E. Ambrose. February 27, 1979. Author’s personal collection

Lovecraft, H. P. Letter to Lillian D. Clark. March 29, 1926. In Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019.

—Fungi from Yuggoth, An Annotated Edition, edited by David E. Schultz, New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017.