by Lin Carter
Henneberger was hot to get Lovecraft, I repeat. He tried to sell Lovecraft on the notion of writing a short novel of some 25,000 words for the magazine. Lovecraft, who was still convinced he was someday going to write the novel Azathoth, set that notion aside and briefly thought about a novel-idea entided The House of the Worm; a dilatory writer at best, he wrote neither.
Impressed with the manner in which Lovecraft had whipped the Houdini narrative into shape (Henneberger hopped a train to Tennessee to show the manuscript to Houdini himself; Houdini lapped it up, and wrote Lovecraft a grateful note) he offered H.P.L. the editorship of the magazine, suggesting that Lovecraft take it in hand and reshape it into an entirely new publication: “He has in mind a brand new magazine to cover the field of Poe-Machen shudders,” wrote Lovecraft in a letter to Long on March 21. But the offer was made with the proviso that the Lovecrafts move to Chicago, where the editorial offices were then located.
It is fascinating to contemplate how Lovecraft’s entire life, it’s direction and shape and impetus, might have been radically changed had he and Weird Tales’ publisher managed to come to terms. Imagine the sheltered, coddled, sickly semi-invalid suddenly thrust into brawling, industrial Chicago, at the helm of a great magazine, enjoying for the first time in his life a responsible, decently paid job for which his literary taste and artistic enthusiasm superbly fitted him!
Cthulhu only knows what would have happened— Lovecraft might have taken hold, delighted in his new maturity and position, and he might have built Weird Tales into a great institution. He might, in fact, still be alive today (Sonia Greene still is), and might even at 82, still be writing.
But everything went wrong. Lovecraft had come out of his shell, but not far enough: the prospect of moving to Chicago (of all places!) shook him to the heart. “This I can hardly contemplate without a shiver,” he wrote to Long in that same letter quoted above; “think of the tragedy of such a move for an aged antiquarian” [he was, of course, only 34 at the time, but one of his affectations was to write and to think of himself as a very old gentleman] “just settled down in enjoyment of the reliques of venerable New-Amsterdam! S. H.” [by these initials he refers to his wife] “wouldn’t mind living in Chicago at all—but it is Colonial atmosphere which supplies my very breath of life. I would not consider such a move, big though the proposition would be... without previously exhausting every sort of rhetoric in an effort to persuade Henneberger to let me edit at long distance....”
For the next five months or so, Lovecraft dithered and Henneberger dangled. Weird Tales hung in temporary suspension—the issue which eventually followed that king-sized May-June-July number bore the date of November, 1924—and then the roof fell in.
First, Sonia launched forth on a solo business venture, starting her own hat shop. It soon foundered, and with no checks coming from Weird Tales during its period of suspension, the money grew very tight. Lovecraft actually went out looking for work, prowling around publishers offices and answering advertisements, which must have galled his sensitive, gentlemanly soul. Things went from worse to even worser: the Lovecrafts sold Sonia’s piano, and Lovecraft himself became so desperate for employment that he actually applied for, and got, a job as a door-to-door salesman! Lovecraft was about as unfit for such a job as he would have been for the profession of dock stevedore or Arctic explorer, and he realized it before the first exhausting and humiliating day was finished.
Mrs. Lovecraft soon found what she described as “an exceedingly well-paid job out of town.” She, quite naturally, expected Lovecraft to follow her out, once she was settled; he balked, saying he loathed the midwest, and expressed the desire to remain in New York where he had a few good friends. She acquiesced, perhaps unwisely; for they began to drift apart, seeing each other only at intervals, when she could make the trip to Brooklyn. Lovecraft’s aunts suggested he store Sonia’s furniture and find a place of his own so that he could live with the old, familiar furniture he had used back in Providence; he amiably went along with 1 this idea, moving to a new address on Clinton Street, where he lived quietly while she sent him weekly checks to live on.
While New York had many fine old colonial churches and similar landmarks he joyed in, the city began to cast a suffocating pall over his spirits, now that he was without Sonia’s bracing presence. He hated the subway crowds, the foreigners in the parks, the noisy children playing in the Brooklyn streets. All through the 1920s, New York was continually inundated with wave upon wave of new immigrants, few of whom spoke English well. Lovecraft despised them.
The “beady-eyed, rat-faced Asiatics,” he called them, principally referring to the Semitic peoples. To his turn | of mind, all foreigners were lumped under a single, unappetizing label—“mongrels.”
Forgive me if I seem to malign the dead, but it must be admitted frankly that Lovecraft’s dislike of anyone who could be described as a “foreigner”—and of Jews in particular—is inadequately described by so mild a verb as dislike. Detestation or loathing describe his emotions more accurately; hatred sounds very ugly, but it is a just choice.
Sonia mentions an incident which occurred long before their marriage, when, in a personal letter he remarked, concerning his friend Samuel Loveman, for whom he had a great and genuine admiration, that the only “discrepancy” he could find in Loveman was that he was Jewish. Sonia replied with utter amazement at such blatant prejudice, and reminded him firmly that she herself came of Jewish parentage. During their friendship, and perhaps even their marriage, she was forced repeatedly to call this to his attention, for his revulsion at people or things Jewish evidently cropped up frequently.
From the descriptions I have read of Lovecraft’s racial and religious prejudices, as well as from the frequent ranting passages in his letters which laud what he deems “the Nordic race” in terms that would not sound out of place in the mouth of the late Dr. Goebbels, his loathing for “Jews and foreigners” was something more than merely the snobbery of one of “pure” English descent, soured by the provincialism of his Rhode Island background. It was, I suppose, nearly if not actually pathological.
Sonia Greene describes Lovecraft in one of these moods. “Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage [the italics are my own —L.C.] He seemed almost to lose his mind.”2*
Before long, Lovecraft felt he could no longer tolerate living in New York. His disgust at the modern city, the vastly overgrown metropolis, with its thronged and labyrinthine ways, its dehumanizing atmosphere, all brick and dingy stone and dismal squalor, had germinated in him, producing a piece of literary vitriol called The Horror at Red Hook. Sonia was now firmly ensconced in Cincinnati. The long-proffered editorial position at Weird Tales was now lost—whether from his own inability to make up his mind or through the publisher’s failure to offer proper terms, history has failed to make clear, but anyway the job had gone to Farnsworth Wright, whom Lovecraft disparagingly refers to as “a mediocre Chicago writer”. At Sonia’s own suggestion (she records) he moved back home to Providence. It split a marriage that was already somewhat divided. Lovecraft said to her: “If I could... live in Providence, the blessed city where I was borb and reared,... I am sure, there, I could be happy.”
She replied: “I’d love nothing better than to live in Providence... if I could do my work there.”
And so he returned to the comfortable life of his familiar old residence, surrounded on all sides by motherly and doting aunts. Lovecraft seemed content with things as they were—happy, you might say, to conduct their marriage through the medium of correspondence. Eventually, Sonia made a final attempt to bring them together again. “We held a conference with the aunts,” her memoir records. “I suggested I take a large house in Providence, hire a maid, pay the expenses, and we all live together; our family to use one side of the house, I to use the other for a business venture of my own. The aunts gently but firmly informed me that neither they nor Howard could affo
rd to have Howard’s wife work for a living in Providence.”
To which Sonia added a succinct colophon: “That was that.”
Technically, the marriage lasted for some years more, and the final divorce did not come until 1929. The parting was very amicable; they continued to exchange letters, even occasional small gifts. Sonia recalls that when she visited Europe three years after their divorce, she wrote him from England, Germany and France, and “sent him books and pictures of every conceivable thing I thought might interest him.”
The marriage had probably been doomed from the start. In fact, its very beginning was hedged about with ominous signs of trouble. The night before he left for New York and the solemnities at St. Paul’s Chapel, Lovecraft stayed up till dawn typing the Houdini ghostwriting job for which Weird Tales was waiting. Then he lost it in the cavernous, echoing bam that was the Providence railroad station, so H.P.L. and his wife spent their first married night together, she reading his notes which he had prudently carried with him on the train, “while he pounded at a typewriter borrowed from the hotel in Philadelphia where we were spending our first day and night,” her memoir recalls. It has an ironic postscript: “When the manuscript was finished we were too tired and exhausted for honeymooning or anything else.”
So Lovecraft returned to Providence, to his aunts, to his old familiar haunts, and to the way of life to which his long bachelorhood had accustomed him. As for Sonia, she eventually married a former professor at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
But Lovecraft, his one venture into the world a failure, went back into his shell again. This time for keeps.
***
1* Reading the first draft of this manuscript, August Derleth remarked that there was nothing really so surprising in all of this. “Sonia was a magnetic, sexually and physically attractive woman of more than average mental endowment—she was just the type of woman who could attract H.P.L.,” he noted.
2* “In a letter to me, Derleth remarked on this point: “The key to this dislike lies in what the foreign element did to the old quarters and areas Lovecraft loved—it was not ethnic at base, and this should be made clear.”
5. The Coming of Cthulhu
Once back in his beloved Providence, surrounded and coddled by his aunts, in the environment he knew and loved so much, the noisy outside world hidden away behind the window curtains, Lovecraft settled down and experienced a spurt of creative activity quite unusual for him.
In one single year, 1926, he produced a literary outpouring of prodigious wordage and importance. During that year he wrote The Call of Cthulhu, Cool Air, The Descendent, Pickman’s Model, The Silver Key, The Strange High House in the Mist, and the 38,000 word short novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
That is an impressive list of remarkable stories. Cool Air and Pickman’s Model, neither of which belongs to the Mythos, are the most “professional” examples of weird fiction he had yet produced; they have both since been anthologized over and over again in standard collections of horror fiction, and they have been extremely popular. Unlike the Mythos tales, which draw upon and themselves lend strength to each other, these two tales stand alone, absolutely self-contained. They are quite good stories, although perhaps Cool Air does somewhat too closely savor of Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.
As for The Silver Key, it is a lovely little fable in the mood and style of Celephais, and The Strange High House in the Mist is also strongly Dunsanian. But by this point, Lovecraft had almost gotten through his Dunsanian period, and he would shortly thereafter have absorbed and transmuted the influence of the great Anglo-Irish fantasy writer whose work had for so long molded and influenced his style. The final Dunsanian venture, the culmination of this phase of his career, came in the writing of that extraordinary Vathek-like short novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. As the complete text of this little-known fantasy novel appeared in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in 1971, and as it is not a part of the Cthulhu Mythos itself, I do not feel I need to describe it at any length here. But it is noteworthy that, having launched the Mythos and its system of internal references whereby the stories in the Mythos are interconnected, Lovecraft seems to have been in a “codifying” mood and to have used Dream-Quest as a means of tying together more or less thoroughly all of the stories of his Dunsanian period. If you will examine the novel carefully, you will note therein references to cities, characters, places and symbols that appear in the other Dunsanian stories—particularly Polaris, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, The White Ship, The Cats of Ulthar, Celephais, The Other Gods, and The Strange High House in the Mist.
But even while writing this prodigious dream- fantasy, certainly the most ambitious literary project on which he had yet embarked, Lovecraft was thinking about the Cthulhu Mythos somewhere in the back of his mind. Ideas kept occurring to him, which he inserted into Dream-Quest rather at random, or so it looks in hindsight, and many of them he returned to again to develop as contributions to the background lore of the Mythos.
The personages, place names, elder texts, and symbols that are mentioned for the first time in the pages of Dream-Quest, and which were all later absorbed into the apparatus of the Cthulhu Mythos, include: The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan,1* the Sign of Koth, the dholes, the Shantak-birds, the gugs and the ghasts, the Elder Sign, the Peaks of Throk, and the divinity Azathoth itself, later to become the progenitor of the Great Old Ones. Azathoth enters the tale in a superb burst of florid rhetoric that is Lovecraftian hyperbole at its adjective-studded best (or worst), to wit:
That shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity —the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.
What with all the Cthulhuoid nomenclature clanking around within the interminable paragraphs of Dream-Quest, and especially considering those names listed above which make their debut therein, you might expect Dream-Quest to be included in my list of the tales in the Mythos. However, it is not. Despite the criteria established in my discussion of The Hound, we cannot consider the dream-novel as part of the Mythos —except in a certain sense, as being on its periphery.
Let me see if I can phrase the distinction succinctly: Lovecraft wrote two cycles of tales; both cycles interconnect in certain places; both cycles certainly share the same universe in common; but each cycle is and must be considered peripheral to the other. Despite the fact that Dream-Quest contains the first appearance of the names listed above—to say nothing of the other Mythos names it mentions (names first mentioned in earlier stories), such as Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, Nyarlathotep, Nodens the Lord of the Great Abyss, the Pnakotic Manuscript, the Plateau of Leng and its silk-masked, mysterious lama, the “hairy cannibal Gnophkehs,”2* and Kadath in the Cold Waste itself—Dream-Quest most definitely does not belong to the Mythos.
This is the opinion, not only of myself, but also of those other authorities who have attempted to isolate on one list the Cthulhu tales, such as Briney and Weinberg, and of course, August Derleth.
I have a letter from Derleth, dated January 7, 1971, discussing this very point. It reads:
I write two kinds or two series or two sagas in my historical novels series. One is the Sac Prairie Saga, the other the Wisconsin Saga. Characters from both intermingle; yet one is definitely SP, the other definitely Wisconsin. In the same way HPL’s Cthulhu Mythos is related to the predominantly “non-Mythos” tales like Dream-Quest. In spite of the appurtenances you list [that is, the Cthulhuoid names and symbols used in the novella—L.Q.] we just don’t consider DQ a Mythos tale because it relates to the Randolph Carter vein; they are “related” tales, but DQ isn’t integrally a Cthulhu Mythos tale... DQ was never in HPL�
�s mind “finished” and he never revised it. It was early work... and the Cthulhu Mythos appurtenances were rather lifted from it than the other way around.
If Dream-Quest really does not belong to the Mythos, another story written that same year, 1926, genuinely and importantly does. I refer to a 13,000 word novelette entitled The Call of Cthulhu.
This is the story from which the Mythos took its name. That is, it was after the first magazine appearance of this story—in Weird Tales, the issue of February, 1928—that Lovecraft’s readers began to recognize that certain of his tales formed a connected sequence. This became obvious in the recurrence of names and symbols peculiar to Lovecraft—Arkham, the Necronomicon, Dunwich, Shub-Niggurath, and (especially) Cthulhu. They became aware, say, with the appearance of The Dunwich Horror on their newsstands in 1933, that here was “another Cthulhu story.” Lovecraft’s correspondents, fellow Weird Tales writers, and literary friends, began referring to these stories as “the Cthulhu Mythos stories,” and the name caught on.
But this was a gradual, private thing. Lovecraft himself never mentioned the Cthulhu Mythos by name, and it was (as I have elsewhere remarked) August Derleth who seems to have been the first to use the term in print.
The Call of Cthulhu was the fourth story written in the Mythos, and it was the first really major story. For these reasons, let us look at it in some detail.
As in the previous Mythos tales, the actual plot of the story is probably its least important element: an unnamed narrator inherits a clay tablet bearing unknown hieroglyphs and the portrait of a hideous monster in relief. Also in the collection he inherited the narrator finds newspaper clippings and other documents which seem to have a mystic relationship with the image on the tablet—among them, the account of a New Orleans police inspector who broke up a degenerate bayou cult that conducted human sacrifices before a similar idol, while chanting a meaningless phrase. Yet further evidence of a world-wide monster- worshipping cult emerges: the same phrase the police inspector heard howled in the swamps of Louisiana— “Ph’nglui mglw’najh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” —had also been heard uttered by an Eskimo wizard in the frozen Arctic. Finally the last link in this chain of incidents is found in a newspaper clipping that tells of a mysterious tragedy at sea in which a ship sights an unknown and unmapped island covered with Cyclopean ruins, dripping with ooze as if just emerged from beneath the sea, and several sailors are chased by a horrible monster resembling the idol found in the Louisiana bayous and on the bas-relief.
