H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  The Nameless City itself is essentially a trivial exercise in Poe-esque gothica; whatever importance now accrues to it derives, as I have said, from hindsight. But in this slight tale can be seen the first emergence of some of the themes that were later to occupy much of Lovecraft’s attention.

  For example, the narrator refers back to certain old books and to certain writers, not to document the historical milieu of the ancient ruined metropolis but to echo his own emotions of gathering fear. A line is quoted from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales; a verse from Thomas Moore is quoted; and there are cryptic references to books less familiar, such as “the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz” and “paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius.” (Neither writer can be identified with ease.)

  Most important of all, The Nameless City is the first tale of Lovecraft’s to mention the name of Abdul Alhazred, who later, of course, appears as the author of one of the most significant of all the imaginary literary authorities for the cosmology of the Cthulhu Mythos, the infamous Necronomicon itself. Lovecraft does not here identify Alhazred as the author of the Necronomicon; here he is simply referred to as “the mad Arab” and “the mad poet.” But the tale is also the first in which is quoted that famous couplet from the Necronomicon which goes:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.

  Lovecraft also uses this tale to make references back to earlier stories of his own. By way of emphasizing the antiquity of the city, the narrator “thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land Mnar when mankind was young, and of lb, that was carven of gray stone before mankind existed.”

  This use of his own imaginary inventions in the same breath—actually in the same sentence—with references to known historical kingdoms such as Chaldea is a technique Lovecraft would later develop more fully.

  For all the flaws that I have noted, the story is not without some effectiveness. Told in the form of a monologue by a single character, it has something of the evocative power of a coherent nightmare, and in this it hearkens back to some of Poe’s more effective tales, such as The Tell-Tale Heart.

  Lovecraft himself was powerfully moved by an emotion of awe and fascination when contemplating the mysterious ruins of unthinkable antiquity. This emotion he manages to convey in a sort of dreamlike manner, despite his coldly clinical use of adjectives. The mood is there; it is part of the style.

  This, the first story in the Cthulhu Mythos, and in retrospect, the most important of Lovecraft’s early tales, went virtually unnoticed at the time of its appearance. It was published in a science fiction fanzine read by a couple hundred people at most.

  The story behind its publication is an amusing anecdote, and it underscores the essentially amateurish nature of Lovecraft as a writer. Instead of seeking a professional market for the tale, he gave it away, years after it was written, to a fan friend who asked for a short story. This fan, a young man of about twenty at the time, was named Donald A. Wollheim, and he was editing a fanzine called Fanciful Tales. Some time during the 1920s, Lovecraft had permitted the story to appear in a very obscure amateur magazine called Transatlantic Circular. 4* Later, when Wollheim asked for a story of Lovecraft’s, H.P.L. sent him The Nameless City, which Wollheim published in the issue dated fall, 1936. A decade or more had passed since the first publication of the tale, and in all that time Lovecraft had not sought to sell the story professionally!

  Don Wollheim later became a distinguished editor of science fiction magazines and editor-in-chief of Ace Books, and he did not forget the kindness Lovecraft showed towards an unknown boy scarcely out of his teens. Years later, when he had the honor of editing the first science fiction anthology ever published in hardcover—the important and historically influential Novels of Science (Viking Portable Library, 1945)— Don Wollheim repayed the favor by including in the anthology Lovecraft’s finest story, The Shadow Out of Time.

  ***

  1* Thirty of Dunsany’s most brilliant and memorable short fantasies were collected in a book entitled At the Edge of the World, published by Ballantine in their Adult Fantasy Series in 1970. A second volume of similar selections, to be called Beyond the Fields We Know, will be published in 1972.

  2* The quotation may be found on page 66 of H.P.L.: A Memoir, as for the letter itself, I have not seen the complete text of it. The early volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters do not seem to include it

  3* I have already edited two volumes of Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian fiction for Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series. The first volume, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1970), contains, besides the title novel, which H.P.L. wrote in 1926, such stories as Celephais and The White Ship. The second collection, The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1971), contains, besides the title story, eleven stories written between 1917 and 1920, plus several more.

  4* So obscure, in fact, that no Lovecraft authority seems to know even the date of the issue in which the tale appeared.

  3. The Thing on the Newsstand

  With the writing of The Nameless City in 1921, the Cthulhu Mythos was launched—although no one in the world suspected at the time that this innocuous little tale signified the birth of a rather remarkable and long-lived literary phenomenon (least of all its author, to whom it was but another story).

  The following year was a landmark year in Lovecraft’s career for several reasons. The first event of importance was the writing of The Hound, which is of significance to us as it was the second story written in the Mythos.

  Here I must enter into a digression of some length to discuss the importance of The Hound: bear with me, if you will. This minor little tale was even slighter in substance and more slavishly Poe-esque in style than The Nameless City. The studied effects of baroque, decadent interior decor, in fact, are strongly suggestive of the gloomy and luxurious interiors in The Fall of the House of Usher. The sole importance of the tale lies in its relation to the birth of the Mythos, and in calling it the second tale in that sequence I diverge completely from the concerted opinion of most Lovecraftian bibliographers, including August Derleth himself, who was generally conceded to be the final authority on such matters.

  There have been several attempts, before the writing of this book, to catalogue or list those of Lovecraft’s stories which formed the original nucleus of the Cthulhu Mythos and which represent his own contributions thereto.

  The earliest such list known to me is that compiled by Derleth and given by him on page 69 of H.P.L.: A Memoir. His list runs to thirteen titles,1* and it does not include The Hound.

  The second such list known to me was compiled by Robert E. Briney and is found at the end of his excellent bibliography of Lovecraft, which appeared in Vol. VII of a mimeographed pamphlet series known as “The Lovecraft Collectors Library,” first published in a limited edition of seventy-five copies in 1955. Briney singles out fourteen stories by Lovecraft as the original nucleus of the Mythos; he differs from Derleth only by including the posthumous collaboration, The Lurker at the Threshold, which was published in the same year as H.P.L.: A Memoir. Briney also fails to consider The Hound a Mythos story.

  The third major list known to me was put together by Jack Laurence Chalker in 1962. It subsequently was revised and appeared in the Arkham House book, The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces, in 1966. I mention it here only because I shall be referring to it again: while it lists the Cthulhuoid stories and poems written by most of the other contributors to the Mythos, it neglects to single out Lovecraft’s own tales therein, and thus need not occupy us any further in this place.

  Finally, there is A Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos by Robert Weinberg, privately published as a mimeographed pamphlet in 1969. This list contains twelve Lovecraft stories2* and differs considerably from the Derleth and Briney lists. However, like them, it declines to consider The Hound as a component of the Mythos.

  There are yet other lists of Mythos stories, but these are the three most
accessible.

  Now, what exactly does it mean to say a story belongs to the Cthulhu Mythos? In order to so qualify, obviously a given tale must do more than just mention one of the Lovecraftian gods, such as Nyarlathotep (otherwise The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath qualifies; Nyarlathotep is one of the characters who appears therein), or one of the Lovecraftian place-names (otherwise The Picture in the House, set in Arkham, qualifies). The tale must, I think, present us with a significant item of information about the background lore of the Mythos, thus contributing important information to a common body of lore.

  By this standard, The Hound fully qualifies for inclusion in the Mythos, as did The Nameless City, which preceded it, and The Festival, which followed it. If you will examine these three stories in sequence, you will see how the Mythos began to grow, each tale adding more background information to that established in earlier tales. The Nameless City is the first tale to mention Abdul Alhazred; The Hound is the first tale to mention the Necronomicon and to identify Alhazred as its author; and The Festival sums up the previously given information about Alhazred and the Necronomicon and is the first tale to give a lengthy quotation from the imaginary book and to tell us something about its history (i.e., that Olaus Wormius translated it into Latin). It is also the first Mythos story to use witch-haunted Arkham as a setting.

  It was in this manner that the Mythos was launched, each new tale repeating the lore given before, adding new information, and passing the whole along to the next. Lovecraft continued in this way until the body of his background lore became excessively complex, whereupon he became more selective.

  Like most of Lovecraft’s fiction prior to 1922, The Nameless City had first appeared in an obscure amateur publication of uncertain viability and very limited circulation. Had Lovecraft continued giving away his tales to friends with printing presses involved in the amateur journalism movement, he would never have reached his wider audience or come to the world’s attention. What was needed was for him to find a professional market for his stories: this he did in 1922, which, as mentioned, was a landmark year for him in several ways. Thus The Hound and The Festival were luckier than the tales that preceded them, for they were first published in a genuine newsstand-distributed, money-paying magazine, not in mimeographed fanzines. And thus, Lovecraft finally, at the age of thirty-two, became a professional fiction writer. In a letter written to Frank Belknap Long, he described how this first happened:

  Our mutual friend George Julian Houtain has just embarked on a professional magazine venture, founding a piquant monthly to be called Home Brew... for this periodical he wishes me to write a series of gruesome tales at $5.00 each—a series of at least six.

  The six-part series was called Herbert West-Reanimator, and it ran in six consecutive issues of Home Brew during 1922. It was Lovecraft’s first sale, and it is not really bad stuff —a sort of fast-moving and light-handed parody on the old Frankenstein theme— written with a delightful verve and gusto. But Lovecraft himself professed to be most unhappy about the whole affair. As he remarked in a letter to Long:

  This is manifestly unartistic. To write to order, and to drag one figure [i.e., the protagonist] through a series of artificial episodes, involves the violation of all that spontaneity and singleness of impression which should characterise short story work. It reduces the unhappy author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and unimaginative hack-work. Nevertheless, when one needs the money one is not scrupulous...

  In this amusing preoccupation with his “art” and the deplorable circumstance of having to accept an assignment, Lovecraft displays another hallmark of the amateur.

  The publication of this series in Home Brew led to the birth of his professional career. And the following year he sold Houtain another yarn. This one was called The Lurking Fear, and while it is a more serious study in traditional horror, it lacks the light, almost joyous touch of Herbert West. The Lurking Fear ran in Home Brew in four parts, from January through the April issue.

  Home Brew did not for long survive its rather shaky financial underpinnings. However, there also occurred in 1923 an event even more momentous than these first professional sales, and that was the founding of the most brilliant and durable publication in the history of horror fiction, the immortal Weird Tales. In the pages of this, possibly the greatest of all the pulp magazines (as far as the fantasy enthusiast is concerned), more than four-fifths of Lovecraft’s lifework was to appear, and it was with this magazine that his name was to be principally identified.

  Weird Tales was founded in 1923, and its first issue appeared on the newsstands dated March of that year. The magazine’s first editor was Edwin Baird, and it was actually Baird who discovered Lovecraft, not his more famous successor, Farnsworth Wright, as is sometimes mistakenly repeated. The first issue, now a priceless collector’s item, was not promising. A glance at the contents reveals stories with such obvious titles as The Grave, The Place of Madness, The Ghoul and the Corpse, to which are affixed the bylines of a number of writers unknown to most connoisseurs. The only story of any consequence in that first historic issue was the cover story, Ooze, by Anthony Rudd, which has since not infrequently been reprinted and anthologized. There were twenty-four stories in that first issue, which ran to 192 pages and sold for 25c. The magazine looked, and was, shaky. Few readers could have foreseen that it would continue for over thirty years and would publish two hundred and seventy-nine consecutive issues.

  In 1923, Lovecraft entered into his major phase. As the saying goes, he began to come out of his shell with a vengeance. There were several factors that contributed to a tremendous spurt of creative activity at this time. In the first place, his jealously over-protective mother had, over the preceding several years, gone into a serious decline; in 1919 she had entered Butler Hospital “mentally and physically exhausted” (as Derleth describes it in H.P.L.: A Memoir), manifesting symptoms of considerable mental instability. For the next two years Lovecraft strove to pay the hospital bills, renting himself out as a professional ghost-writer and launching a literary revision service. In May, 1921, she died.

  His revision work led to a creative acquaintance with the young poet and fiction writer, Frank Belknap Long, who would be remembered as an early disciple of the “Lovecraft Circle” and as the first contributor to the growing Cthulhu Mythos. Also in 1921 Lovecraft had come into contact with a dark, vital, handsome and vigorous widow, Sonia H. Greene, then President of the United Amateur Press Association. Their friendship ripened throughout the year, and repeated references to her crop up in Lovecraft’s letters thereafter. She visited Lovecraft in Providence that September; she visited the city again the following June, and in August of 1922 he visited her in New York. They eventually married.

  Another factor in Lovecraft’s shifting into literary high gear was his discovery of Clark Ashton Smith. The California painter, poet and short story writer —Lovecraft’s junior by three years—had been discovered by Samuel Loveman, a New York poet who had known Ambrose Bierce and Hart Crane. During the New York trip, Lovecraft visited both Long and Loveman; Loveman showed him some of Smith’s verse and drawings and Lovecraft was properly ecstatic. He sensed immediately that here was a kindred spirit. In a letter dated August 12, 1922, Lovecraft first wrote to Smith. His letter, phrased in stiffly formal language very unlike the slangy, loquacious tone his personal letters usually adopted, praises those of Smith’s poems and drawings Loveman had shown him, concluding:

  I should deem it a great honour to hear from you if you have the leisure & inclination to address an obscurity, & to learn where I may behold other poems by the hand which created such works of art as Nero, The Star-Treader & the exquisite sonnets which companion them. That I have not work of even approximately equal genius to exhibit in reciprocation, is the fault of my mediocre ability & not of my inclination.

  I suspect that Lovecraft was genuinely sincere in expressing such sentiments, rather than fashionably modest. For the poems, such as Nero, are amazing
productions, written when Clark Ashton Smith was about 18, and are infinitely superior in every way to any of Lovecraft’s verse, with the sole possible exception of the “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnets (at this point yet unwritten). And of all the writers who were to belong to the Lovecraft Circle, Smith was the only one whose talents were equal if not superior to Lovecraft’s own. The two men became very good friends, although the harsh realities of geography kept the Rhode Islander and the Californian from ever actually meeting, and their letters depict a charming, old-fashioned literary friendship. Smith and Lovecraft were to influence each other’s work to a considerable degree. Moreover, in Smith Lovecraft had finally found a friend whose aspirations lay beyond the futilities of amateur publishing. It is very possible that the example of his new-found friend led Lovecraft to turn his attention seriously to professional writing, for Smith, although younger than Lovecraft, had made influential; literary friends in the arty Bohemian set in San Francisco, had already published three books of poems professionally, and had even sold a couple of prose poems to H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan of The Smart Set. Smith was well on his way; Lovecraft could not fail to be impressed.

  These varied stimuli spurred Lovecraft to a surge of renewed activity. For the first time he set to work on a novel, experimenting with the opening pages. It would be called Azathoth and would be written like Vathek, without division into chapters. The theme, he wrote in a letter to Frank Long, dated June 9, 1922, would be “imagination is the great refuge.” He confided to Long that he had planned the novel long ago but “only began work—or play—on it a few days ago. Probably I’ll never finish it—possibly I’ll never get even a chapter written3*—but it amuses me just now to pretend to myself that I’m going to write it.”