H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  How foolish all of this looks in retrospect! Other magazines, such as Astounding Stories, which was founded a little later, not only paid better word-rates than Weird Tales but would doubtless have been less finnicky about buying his work than Farnsworth Wright was, if only Lovecraft had bothered to submit manuscripts to them.

  But to do so —to “hawk” his own work— would have damaged Lovecraft’s carefully cultivated self-image as a gentleman-amateur. Then again, he conceived of Weird Tales as being several cuts above the other magazines in its literary excellence (and in this, for what it’s worth, he was quite correct), and he despised similar magazines as crude, commercial pulps for which only mass-production hacks would write.

  So he toyed with writing, vastly preferring to revise the work of another to producing original work of his own, and what little leisure and energy he had was expended mostly on his correspondence. Letter-writing rapidly came to occupy a major portion of his time; I suppose it became a substitute for the personal friendships most of us enjoy in our everyday lives. Lovecraft, who had no normal social life at all, poured his frustrated energies into his correspondence—which very soon got completely out of hand. His epistolary output became prodigious, both in the number of letters he wrote and in their length. Derleth remarks that his “growing tide of correspondence... steadily mounted to ten, then fifteen, and even twenty or more letters a day,” and that these letters sometimes “covered thirty, fifty, or seventy typewriter-size pages closely written.” Clark Ashton Smith once said that his letters from H.P.L. averaged 40,000 words a year, and L. Sprague de Camp estimates that Lovecraft wrote to between fifty and one hundred regular correspondents, and that this mad craze for writing letters consumed about half his working hours.

  Any author will tell you that writing letters is an insidious temptation and a trap into which writers all too frequently fall. A novelist myself, I know the temptation all too well. I don’t know about my fellow writers of fantasy or science fiction, but my own fan mail averages about two letters a day, day after day, week after week, month after month. Left unanswered, this soon accumulates into a hefty pile of letters. Tackling such a mass of mail easily consumes my working day, and yet to answer it as it comes in also cuts into my work since one almost inevitably goes on to write a few more letters to literary friends.

  This is precisely the trap into which Lovecraft fell, and in part this staggering epistolary production accounts for the fact that Lovecraft’s literary output in his final decade consists of only a few stories.

  In a certain sense, though, Lovecraft’s fantastic worldwide correspondence had a very beneficial and stimulating effect on his Cthulhu Mythos. This came about in a rather circuitous way. Many of Lovecraft’s I closest friends were young men of literary interests who 1 were beginning to become writers and make professional sales. The earliest of these disciples was Frank Belknap Long, whom he had met through the United Amateur Press Association as far back as 1920. The next of these was the gifted California poet, artist and sculptor, Clark Ashton Smith, whom he engaged in correspondence beginning with a letter dated August 12, 1922.

  And in 1926 he encountered an enthusiastic teen-aged boy in Wisconsin named August W. Derleth. Of his most recent discovery, he wrote to Smith on October 12th of that year: “I have just discovered a boy of seventeen who promises to develop into something of a fantaisiste. He is August W. Derleth, whose name you may have seen as author of some rather immature stories in Weird Tales. Finding my address through the magazine, he began corresponding with me; & turns out to be a veritable little prodigy; devoted to Dunsany & Arthur Machen, & ambitious to excel in their chosen field.”

  Lovecraft encouraged these and other writer-friends to try their hands at selling to Weird Tales. I have already mentioned how Lovecraft persuaded Edwin Baird to pursue young Smith, and how Baird purchased some of Smith’s verse for the magazine. Before long Smith began attempting fiction, and the first story he ever sold to Weird Tales was a minor effort called The Ninth Skeleton, which appeared in the September, 1928 issue. Smith was a slow starter, and it was to be some years before he followed this initial sale to Weird Tales with more of the same. However, during the next decade he contributed scores of excellent tales to the magazine and became one of its most popular writers, before allowing his production of fiction to fall off —for fairly mysterious reasons still not fully explained— whereupon he lapsed into obscurity again, save for his verse and sculpture.

  By this time Lovecraft had also made such friends as Donald Wandrei and Zealia Bishop, perhaps the most talented of his revision clients. Many of these friends began appearing in Weird Tales, and before long some of them were contributing new ideas to his Cthulhu Mythos, broadening its base, so to speak, and enriching its lore.

  Donald Wandrei was a young man in the Midwest. Lovecraft found him congenial company (through the medium of letters, mostly) and encouraged Wandrei’s early fiction. In fact, he became largely responsible for the sale of Wandrei’s most famous story, The Red Brain.

  Wandrei had submitted to Farnsworth Wright a manuscript entided The Twilight of Time, which Wright rejected, as was frequently his wont. Lovecraft admired the story and urged Wright to reconsider it. Wright eventually did, and this time he bought it, although changing the tide to The Red Brain. In a letter to Smith, Lovecraft jubilandy enthused over this—as he always enthused over his friends’ good luck—and remarked: “I am almost flattering myself that a letter of mine in praise of Wandrei may have had something to do with the change of attitude.”

  Zealia Bishop is a case in point. Early in 1928 he revised her story The Curse of Yig, selecting the title himself. The story was published in Weird Tales the following year. In a letter to Donald Wandrei written in March, 1928, he revealed that he wrote the story from Miss Bishop’s synoptic notes, adding that “all of the writing & most of the plot are mine.” Another letter, written that same month to Miss Bishop, discussed his “revision,” and tells us much about Lovecraft’s contribution to the story in question. He wrote:

  The deity in question is entirely a product of my own imaginative theogony—for like Dunsany, I love to invent gods and devils and kindred marvellous [sic] things. However, the Indians certainly had a snake-god; for as everyone knows, the great fabulous teacher and civiliser of the prehistoric Mexican cultures (called Quetzalcoatl by the Incan-Aztec groups and Kukulcan by the Mayas) was a feathered serpent. In working up the plot you will notice that I have added another “twist”—which I think increases the effectiveness of the impression. I took a great deal of care with this tale, and was especially anxious to get the beginning smoothly adjusted.

  For this considerable job of writing Lovecraft asked a fee of $17.50.

  This story, The Curse of Yig, is a very effective and even powerful tale of supernatural retribution, but it finds a place in the list of Cthulhu Mythos stories only in retrospect. That is, it mentions no single place-name or symbol from the Mythos, but later (in 1930, when he came to write The Whisperer in Darkness) Lovecraft mentioned the serpent-god Yig in such a manner as to incorporate the story into the Mythos after the fact, as it were.

  Several other stories by his writer-friends which appeared in Weird Tales became part of the growing Mythos in exactly the same manner. The earliest published of them all was Frank Belknap Long’s famous story, The Hounds of Tindalos (from the March, 1929, Weird Tales), followed by Robert E. Howard’s first “King Kull” story, The Shadow Kingdom (from Weird Tales for August of that same year). From these three stories, the first three Mythos tales that bore names other than Lovecraft’s in their bylines, H.P.L. selected “Yig” and Howard’s “serpent-men of Valusia” and Long’s “Hounds of Tindalos” for mention in The Whisperer in Darkness, thus putting his imprimatur on these stories. He encouraged his fellow writer-friends to add to the Mythos and gladly accepted their contributions by referring to the newly-invented names and symbols in his own stories.

  In this way the Mythos began to grow b
eyond Lovecraft’s own fiction. The process is still in action today among writers who never knew him at all; writers who, in some cases, were not even bom until after his death.

  The same year, 1928, that saw his revisions on The Curse of Yig saw Lovecraft produce the fifth of his Mythos tales, The Dunwich Horror.

  Dunwich is very much in the vein of The Call of Cthulhu, and it might seem typical of Lovecraft’s perversity that he wrote another major story—The Dunwich Horror runs to something like 18,250 words—in the style of a story Farnsworth Wright had already firmly rejected. However, the always-fickle Wright had in the interim asked to see Call again, and this time he decided to purchase it.

  Lovecraft was in high good humor, as his letters from this period reflect. Wright had paid him $165 for The Call of Cthulhu —an amount Lovecraft acknowledged as being “entirely adequate remuneration”— and exciting things were in the offing. An amateur friend with his own printing press was anxious to issue Lovecraft’s story, The Shunned House, in book form. About 250 copies of this slim little book were printed in hand-set type by the Driftwind Press in Athol, Mass. Technically, this was Lovecraft’s first “book” 3* —although, of course, it received hardly any distribution at all.

  Perhaps more exciting was the occurrence of Lovecraft’s first anthology sale. An anthologist named Christine Campbell Thompson bought The Horror at Red Hook for her collection of terror tales, which was published under the title, You’ll Need a Light, by Selwyn & Blount in London during 1928. This editrix seems to have been rather impressed with the little-known American master of the macabre whom she was the first to anthologize; she bought Pickman’s Model and The Rats in the Walls for two other anthologies, all published that same year. And as if these triumphs were not enough for any one year, Lovecraft also received in 1928 a genuine literary honor when two of his tales were “triple-starred” in the honor roll in the annual O’Brien collection of the best short stories of the year.

  Thus, it is not surprising that Lovecraft faced his writing-desk with new enthusiasm, producing The Dunwich Horror, which he began work on in June. The 48-page manuscript was finished by the end of August, and Lovecraft circulated it among some of his friends for their comments. He doubtless felt confident that “Famie” Wright would not reject this one. Weird Tales had suffered a sort of change of heart about Lovecraft; not only was Wright no longer capriciously bouncing Lovecraft’s best stories, but he was searching them out with vigor. The Lurking Fear had been resurrected from the pages of the now-defunct Home Brew and had appeared in Wright’s magazine.

  I don’t know why Farnsworth Wright suddenly became so receptive to Lovecraftian submissions, but he may have become just a bit worried about losing Lovecraft. After all, Amazing Stories had taken The Colour Out of Space, and, more recently, a brand new magazine devoted to horror fiction—and thus a direct competitor to Weird Tales—had recently appeared on the scene. The new magazine was Tales of Magic and Mystery, and its editor had promptly snapped up an unpublished Lovecraft story called Cool Air. At any rate, for whatever reasons, Farnsworth Wright was suddenly interested in the gentleman from Providence, and The Dunwich Horror was not rejected; Wright bought it on the spot.

  The Dunwich Horror is an excellent tale. In it Lovecraft began to explore his mythical region of Massachusetts—which I like to call “Miskatonic County,” although he never did—much of it set down on paper for the first time. There had been occasional references in earlier tales to such communities as Arkham and Kingsport, but here we get a guided tour in depth of the “Lovecraft region” and learn much we did not previously know about its geography.

  The tale is a back-country scandal: the cretinous Lavinia Whateley is “a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of 35, living with an aged and half- insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth.” This unappetizing damsel produces a child of unknown parentage, causing the village gossips to whisper scandalous things. The boy grows into a brilliant, remarkably ugly and repellent young genius, and the story follows his studies in certain forbidden subjects. In particular, his researches center about that abhorrent and blasphemous Necronomicon, and for the first time we learn that an English translation exists, that of an Elizabethan scholar, Dr. Dee. We also learn of the few libraries wherein copies of the Necronomicon are preserved in its various translations. We hear of the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham, for example, which crops up in most of the latter stories.

  The first really major quotation from Alhazred appears in this fifth Mythos story—some three hundred and eighty words from a single passage is quoted—and we notice here how Lovecraft is still using his technique of building on the lore he has given in earlier tales, for Cthulhu is mentioned, and so is Kadath, and a new divinity, Shub-Niggurath, makes her debut in print in this tale. But the center of the story is occupied by Yog-Sothoth, who was first introduced in a non-Mythos story, Charles Dexter Ward, as you will recall. Here we learn that Yog-Sothoth is one of the Great Old Ones and that he is considered “the key to the gate” and “the guardian of the gate,” by which word Lovecraft obviously means to suggest some sort of shortcut between the dimensions—a “Door to Outside.”

  The librarian at Miskatonic U, Dr. Henry Armitage, begins putting two and two together, much in the same manner as the nameless narrator of The Call of Cthulhu—but whereas that tale was pure exposition disguised as story, this one is all story, although containing relevant exposition. A mood of tension and gathering horror permeates the story, which culminates in a shattering climax when it gradually comes to light that this oddly repulsive, overgrown, and strangely mature youth is a half-human hybrid begotten upon the flesh of poor Lavinia Whateley by Yog-Sothoth himself.

  The ultimate horror lies in the discovery of the youth’s twin brother, kept imprisoned and pent up from the light of day all these years. In familiar fashion, Lovecraft reserves the full revelation for the final sentence, italicized for maximum impact. The towering, hideous, extraterrestrial monster thus discovered— “It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”

  ***

  1* Lovecraft seems to have considered his revisionary service as his main work and his own stories as ephemera. When given a story to edit, he would often completely rewrite it, using only a minimum of the original author’s plot or idea. In effect, he became a ghost-writer—a lamentable waste of a potentially brilliant talent!—and, even more lamentable, he charged such low prices that he could hardly even support himself by his revisions unless he devoted almost all of his time and effort to them. His charges began at an eighth of a cent per word. Eventually, he was charging a quarter of a cent a word, but this hardly adds up to a decent wage. As late as 1933 we see Lovecraft rewriting an 80,000 word novel—for $100.00!

  2* Derleth says flatly that The Case of Charles Dexter Ward “was never submitted to an editor during his lifetime,” and that Lovecraft was “comparatively reticent” about the tale, “other than to refer to its length and to his reluctance to prepare a typescript from the manuscript.”

  3* Not counting an essay in pamphlet form, The Materialist Today, which appeared in 1926.

  7. The Gathering of the Shadows

  As was ever his way, Lovecraft followed a period of renewed creativity with a period of dithering, selfdoubts, and nonproductivity. As though the extraordinary efforts involved in writing so major a story as The Dutiwich Horror had for a time exhausted his imagination, he produced nothing whatsoever in the following year, 1929.

  For one thing, he worried much about what he felt was a lack of originality in his work. He talked of his early imaginative feats by which he had projected himself into the colonial atmosphere of New England, and in a letter to Miss Elizabeth Toldridge, dated March 8, 1929, discussed how his romantic antiquarian interests dominated his own talent.

  My writing soon became distorted—till at length I wrote only as a means of re-creating around me the atmosphere of my 1
8th century favourites.... everything succumbed to my one intense purpose of thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of periwigs & long s’s which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal world. Thus was formed a habit of imitativeness which 1 can never wholly shake off. Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating something else!

  And to this plaint he added a most revealing cry—

  There are my “Poe” pieces & my “Dunsany” pieces —but alas—where are my Lovecraft pieces?

  As most authors will agree, this sort of doubt in one’s own powers or in the value of one’s own work can be very self-defeating. Many an author’s block has been bom in such moments of inner doubt. Self-confidence is basic equipment, and part of every professional’s gear.

  But Lovecraft had other problems besides this lack of confidence. The British anthologies that had reprinted some of his stories from Weird Tales had failed to pay for them, and Farnsworth Wright contemplated legal action against the publishers involved and attempted to enlist Lovecraft as a co-plaintiff. Lovecraft rather reluctantly agreed, but he was in particularly poor financial condition at the time and dared not risk incurring any expenses. Early in 1929 he wrote to Farnsworth Wright, agreeing to join the suit, saying:

  I suppose it’s all right so long as there is positively no obligation for expense on my part in case of defeat My financial stress is such that I am absolutely unable to incur any possible outgo or assessment beyond the barest necessities... Therefore—it being understood that I am in no position to share in the burdens of defeat—you may ask for me if you wish.

  He added with the pessimism typical of this low period, “I doubt if my profits will amount to very much in case of victory...

  The creative energy he would ordinarily have poured into his own work was diverted into other channels.