R. H. Barlow

For other people named Robert Barlow, see Robert Barlow (disambiguation).
Robert Hayward Barlow
Born May 18, 1918
Leavenworth, Kansas
Died January 2, 1951(1951-01-02) (aged 32)
Azcapotzalco, Mexico City
Cause of death Barbiturate overdose (suicide)
Occupation Author; anthropologist

Robert Hayward Barlow (May 18, 1918 – January 1 or 2, 1951[1]) was an American author, avant-garde poet, anthropologist and historian of early Mexico, and expert in the Nahuatl language. He was a correspondent and friend of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and was appointed by Lovecraft the executor of his literary estate.

Born at a time when his father Lieutenant Colonel Everett Darius Barlow, was serving with the American Forces in France, Barlow spent much of his youth at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father was stationed. Around 1932 Col. Barlow received a medical discharge and settled his wife (Sraha Barlow) and son in the small town of DeLand, in central Florida. Family difficulties later forced Robert H. Barlow to move to Washington, D.C., and Kansas. He received training at the Kansas City Art Institute and subsequently at San Francisco Junior College. He went to Mexico in 1940-41, studied at the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biologicas, and upon his return to California received the B.A. degree at the University of California in 1942. Returning to Mexico as a permanent resident, he joined the staff of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. In 1944 he received a Rockefeller Foundation and in 1946-48 a Guggenheim Fellowship. He became head of the Department of Anthropology at Mexico City College, which position he held at the time of his passing on January 2, 1951.

According to fellow anthropologist Charles E. Dibble, "In the brief span of a decade, Barlow gave Middle American research an impetus and perspective of enduring consequence. His contributions in Mexican archaeology, classical and modern Nahuatl, Mexican colonial history, and what he preferred to call "Bilderhandschriften" are of lasting importance." Dibble compared Barlow's zeal for searching for and deciphering little known or dimly recalled codices and colonial manuscripts to that of Zelia Nuttall.[2] Basrlow has been referred to ass "the T.E. Lawrence of Mexico [3]

Life and career

Lovecraft associate

Barlow had been a friend of writers H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard since he was 13. He collaborated with Lovecraft on six stories (among them Till A’the Seas and The Night Ocean), and Lovecraft made several extended visits to the young Barlow at his home in DeLand, Florida.

Barlow attempted to bind and distribute Lovecraft's story The Shunned House (1928) but bound only a few copies (Arkham House distributed some bound versions of the original Barlow project as late as the 1970s).

Barlow aided significantly in the preservation of Lovecraft's manuscripts by typing texts in exchange for autograph manuscripts.

At his death, Lovecraft's will named Barlow his literary executor. Barlow came to Providence shortly thereafter, donating most of the manuscripts and some printed matter to the John Hay Library of Brown University.

Barlow transcribed Lovecraft's story "The Shadow Out of Time" and had the manuscript still in his possession when he secured a teaching position at Mexico City College. When he later became Chairman of the Department of Anthropology, he met June Ripley, a post-graduate student studying the Nahuatl language, Barlow's specialty. The two apparently became friends and Barlow entrusted the manuscript to Ripley before his suicide. She remained in Mexico for seven more years, then taught at several places in the United States before retiring in 1993. She died December 28, 1994 and the long-lost Lovecraft manuscript was found by Ripley's sister-in-law Lucille Shreve. The manuscript, written in pencil in a child's notebook, was donated by Nelson and Lucille Shreve to the Lovecraft collection of John Hay Library.

Author, publisher

Barlow was interested in printing and after becoming involved in the early 'fan' scene relating to fantasy and science fiction, published several important journals - The Dragon-Fly (two issues - Oct 15, 1935 and May 15, 1936); and Leaves (two issues - Summer 1937; Winter 1938/39). . He was also proprietor of his imprint, the Dragon-Fly Press (Cassia, Florida) and under that imprint published two important works by members of the Lovecraft Circle - The Goblin Tower (the first verse collection by Frank Belknap Long - Lovecraft helped Barlow set the type for this) and The Cats of Ulthar, a story by H.P. Lovecraft.

Barlow's fiction career was interrupted in 1937 by a variety of circumstances, including the death of his friend and mentor Lovecraft, and his own uprooting from Florida because of family troubles. In 1938 he edited Lovecraft's Notes and Commonplace Book and in 1939 edited After Sunset (John Howell, 1939), a collection of the best poems written by George Sterling in the last years before Sterling's suicide in 1926.

In 1943, Barlow lent assistance to the first bibliography of Lovecraft (by Francis T. Laney and William H. Evans). His poignant memoir of Lovecraft, "The Wind That is in the Grass" can be found in Marginalia (Arkham House, 1944). Barlow also contributed the introduction for the 1944 Arkham House volume Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales by his fellow Floridian and Weird Tales author Henry S. Whitehead.

Sculptor

Barlow was highly regarded as a sculptor, before his move into anthropology, and in one letter (to Clark Ashton Smith, 16 May 1937) he complained that people took this work more seriously than his writings. But it appears that none of his sculptural work has survived.

Anthropologist

Barlow moved permanently to Mexico around 1943, where he taught at several colleges, and in 1948 became chairman of the anthropology department at Mexico City College and a distinguished anthropologist of Indigenous Mesoamerican culture. He taught classes at Mexico City College, to mostly American students who were mostly there under funding from the post-war G.I. Bill. The famous writer William S. Burroughs, who lived in Mexico from 1950-52, studied the Mayan Codices under Barlow in the first half of 1950. Burroughs went on at least one field trip with him to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacan. The Mayan symbolism and political structure he found there later featured heavily in Burroughs' fiction.

At the same time Barlow cooperated with Prof. Salvador Mateos Higuera in a descriptive study of Mexican codices. Within a brief three years he had cooperated with George T. Smisor to plan and edit Tlalocan, a journal of source materials on native cultures of Mexico. Beginning in 1943 with the appearance of Tlalocan his productivity attained added momentum and his articles appeared with increasing frequency in the scholarly journals of Mexico, United States and Europe. Concern for minutiae led to such works of detail as "The 18th Century Relaciones Geograficas".[2]

In 1950 he published Mexihkatl itonalama ("The Mexican's calendar"), a Nahuatl-language newspaper. His work in Mesoamerican anthropology is of pioneering significance, and his collected anthropological papers are in the process of publication in Mexico. At this time Barlow was also continuing his work a poet, writing both formalist verse and experimental verse of the Activist school pioneered by Lawrence Hart.

Suicide

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".[4] He killed himself at his home in Azcapotzalco, D.F, Mexico, on the first or second of January, 1951, apparently fearing the exposure of his homosexuality by a disgruntled student.[5][6] 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." [7]

William S. Burroughs, then studying Spanish, the Mexican codices and the Mayan language under Barlow, briefly described his death in a letter to Allen Ginsberg, dated January 11: "A queer Professor from K.C., Mo., head of the Anthropology dept. here at M.C.C. [Mexico City College] where I collect my $75 per month, knocked himself off a few days ago with overdose of goof balls. Vomit all over the bed. I can’t see this suicide kick."[8]

Bibliography

Books by Barlow

Posthumous publications

Books edited by Barlow

Journals edited by Barlow

Books and journals about Barlow (see references for articles and further reading)

Notes

  1. ↑ Joshi & Schultz (2007): p. xx.
  2. 1 2 Charles E. Dibble. "Robert Hayward Barlow - 1918–1951". American Antiquity 16 (4): 347.
  3. ↑ Mooser, 1968
  4. ↑ Joshi & Schultz (2007): p. 408.
  5. ↑ Joshi & Schultz (2007): p. yy.
  6. ↑ L. Sprague de Camp (1975). Lovecraft: a Biography. p. 432. ISBN 0-385-00578-4. ... he was being blackmailed for his relations with Mexican youths.
  7. ↑ . Lawrence Hart. Accent on Barlow: A Comemmorative [sic] Anthology' San Rafael CA, p. 9, 1962; quoted in Leon H. Abrams, Jr, Katunob 16 (1981) Greeley Co: Museum of Anthropology, University of North Colorado, 1981, p. 13
  8. ↑ Burroughs (1993): pp. 77–78.

References

Abrams, H. Leon (1983). "Insights Into the Creative Genius of Robert Hayward Barlow". Notas Mesoamericanas (Cholula, Mexico.: Universidad de las Americas, A.C.) (9, Otono): 16–23.  Note: this essay includes reprints of five of Barlow's poems with Mesoamerican themes - "Of the Names of the Zapotec Kings", "Stela of a Mayan Penitent", "The Conquered", "The Chichimecs", and "Tepuzteca, Tepehua".
Abrams, H. Leon (1981). "Robert Hayward Barlow: An Annotated Bibliography with Commentary". Katunob Occasional Publication in Mesoamerican Anthropology (Greeley Co: Museum of Anthropology, Univ of Northern Colorado) (16): 32 in all.  Note: Pp19-32 is a chronological checklist of Barlow's works including some published posthumously. PP 1-18 contains biographical information in the form of reprints of two essays on Barlow - George T. Smisor, "R.H. Barlow and 'Tlalocan'" (from Tlalocan Vol III, 97-102, 1949-57) and (in Spanish) Fernando Horcasitas, "Para la Historia de la Revista 'Tlalocan' (1943-1976)" from Tlalacan Vol VII, 11-13, 15-16, 1977; plus a reprint of Lawrence Hart's introduction to Accent on Barlow: A Commemorative Anthology, 1962) and notes on the Activist poetry movement by both Lawrence Hart and his wife Jeanne McGahey Hart.
Hart, Lawrence (May 1951). "A Note on Robert Barlow". Poetry (78): 115–16.  :Smisor, George T. "R.H. Barlow and Tlalocan". Tlalocan 3, No 2 (1952): 97–102. 
Burroughs, William S. (1993). Oliver Harris, ed. The Letters of William S. Burroughs: Volume I, 1945–1959. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-009452-0. 
Dibble, Charles E. (April 1951). "Robert Hayward Barlow - 1918–1951". American Antiquity 16 (4): 347. 
Barlow, Robert H. (1978). "Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, "Robert H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft: A Reflection"". Annals of the Jinns. [Necronomicon Press. 
Joshi, S.T.; Schultz, David E. "Robert H. Barlow". An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Wesport, Ct.: Greenwood Press. pp. 15–16. 
Joshi, S.T.; Schultz, David E., eds. (2007). O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft's Letters to R. H. Barlow. Tampa, Florida: University of Tampa Press. ISBN 978-1-59732-034-4. 
McQuown, Norman A. (1951). "Robert Hamilton [sic] Barlow, 1918–1951". American Anthropologist 53 (4): 543. doi:10.1525/aa.1951.53.4.02a00070. 
Mooser, Claire (1968). "A Study of Robert Barlow: The T.E. Lawrence of Mexico". Mexico Quarterly Review (3, No. 2): 5–12. 
Ramos, Cesar Lizardi (1951). "El Historiador Robert H. Barlow". The Americas 8 (2): 223–224. 
"Students and faculty mourn passing of Professor Barlow" (PDF). Mexico City Collegian. January 18, 1951. p. 3. 
Wetzel, George (1976). "Lovecraft's Literary Executor". Continuity 3, No 1 (October 1976): 3–41.  Rpt. Fantasy Commentator 4, No 1 (Winter 1978-79): 34-43.
Jordan, Stephen J. (Fall 2001). "H.P. Lovecraft in Florida". Lovecraft Studies (30 (Spring 1994)): 14–21. 

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