H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  The letters he wrote during 1929 became longer and longer; one of them, written during February and March of that year, sprawls across twenty-eight printed pages in the second volume of the Selected Letters. We can, I think, get a glimpse of the sort of internal selfquestioning Lovecraft seems to have been suffering through all that year from a phrase or two in a letter he wrote to Clark Ashton Smith on March 22nd. Smith had sent him a sheaf of recent poems, and Lovecraft replied:

  There isn’t one which failed to charm me... your never-ending genius & fertility are both marvelous and enviable. I can’t write except when blessed with reposeful leisure—haven’t produced a thing since The Dunwich Horror.

  Despite his chronic state of impecuniosity, Lovecraft did a bit of traveling that year. In early spring he ventured to Yonkers for a brief visit with a friend named Vrest Orton. 1* The trip soon turned into an antiquarian orgy: he visited his favorite museums and old buildings, noting with a pang of dismay how the quaint colonial appearance of certain portions of Greenwich Village were swiftly passing. Then, with Orton, came a motor trip to visit W. Paul Cook in Athol, Massachusetts.

  This lengthy excursion was followed by even more extensive travels, for in late April he went to Philadelphia and then on to Richmond, Virginia—quite a change of pace for Lovecraft, who never spent a single night away from his own home until he was fully thirty years old! His letters from Virginia enthuse over the antiquarian treasures of Williamsburg and Yorktown and their wealth of historical associations. He becomes almost ecstatic when visiting Jamestown:

  Jamestown is one of the most powerful imaginative stimuli I have ever received. To stand upon the soil where Elizabethan gentlemen-adventurers first broke ground for the settlement of the western world is to experience a thrill that nothing else can give.

  This he wrote to Elizabeth Toldridge on May 4. Still more travels followed—to Washington, to Philadelphia again, and from thence back to New York, where Frank Belknap Long and his parents drove Lovecraft up the Hudson to Kingston, the home of his and Long’s correspondent-friend, Bernard Austin Dwyer, whom neither he nor Long had met. They visited Dwyer for several days, Lovecraft digging with great curiosity into the early colonial and even Indian history of the region. His description of the towns around Kingston and their history filled ten full pages in another letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, written May 29th when he was back in Providence.

  Most likely, Lovecraft’s only fiction during 1929 was his lengthy and poorly-paid revisions of the work of others. He seems to have been sorely missed, and his absence from the pages of Weird Tales may have fomented something in the nature of a crisis.

  Farnsworth Wright had published The Call of Cthulhu in his issue for February, 1928. Even that major piece of Lovecraftiana did not satisfy the readers for long, and they were clamoring for more. Wright had only two unpublished Lovecraft manuscripts on hand, one being The Silver Key, a Dunsanian fable completed three years before. Wright ran that minor tale in his January, 1929 issue, but that was only a stopgap. The readers wanted more Cthulhu! So Wright included The Dunwich Horror in his April 1929 issue. If anything, this new tale was even more of a major work than Call, so instead of glutting the hunger of Lovecraft’s readers, The Dunwich Horror exacerbated it, and the demand increased.

  But Farnsworth Wright had no more unpublished Lovecraft on hand, and none seemed forthcoming from Providence. So, for his September issue, Wright did something quite unprecedented and reprinted The Hound. This becomes all the more unusual upon recalling that Wright had first published this tale only a few years before, in his February 1924 issue. I think the fact of this surprising reprint suggests quite definitely that Weird Tales was receiving an extraordinary spate of letters demanding more and more Lovecraft.

  At any rate, the following year saw Lovecraft, his year-long “vacation” concluded, return to work on his own fiction once again, and that year he produced yet a third Mythos tale of considerable length: The Whisperer in Darkness.

  Lovecraft had been steadily getting further and further away from the short story lengths he had first mastered—following Poe’s brilliant examples of horror fiction in the shorter lengths. The Call of Cthulhu had totaled about thirteen thousand words; The Dunwich Horror had exceeded eighteen thousand; now, with Whisperer, Lovecraft produced a tale of twenty-five thousand words, his longest story in the Mythos yet. It is, I think, the opinion of most authorities that, in achieving novella length, Lovecraft found the perfect story size to fit his particular kind of writing. With 25,000 words to play around with, he could not only develop plot and characterization—both of which had from the first been his major lacks—but he also had the space to fit in the sort of elaborate background lore and exposition he needed for the stories in the Mythos.

  Whisperer is a very good story, one of his best. As the plot goes, Professor Wilmarth, folklorist and literature instructor at Miskatonic University, is studying obscure superstitions in backwoods New England. A correspondence springs up between Wilmarth and an eccentric Vermont recluse named Akeley, whose researches along the same lines have led him to the brink of astounding and terrible discoveries. Through an exchange of correspondence (which Lovecraft quotes verbatim), Akeley tantalizes Wilmarth’s curiosity with cryptic references to certain ancient books, among them the Necronomicon. It becomes gradually apparent that the hilly region in which Akeley makes his home is a focal point of activity by strange forces and even stranger beings, monstrous and shadowy things which, legend whispers, came down from the stars in the Elder Days, and which may have broken through the barriers again.

  Lovecraft develops the subtle mood of tension beautifully, using his now-familiar documentary technique. Akeley sends Wilmarth photographs of his discoveries, and even a phonograph recording of a strange ritual overheard by night in the woods. Lovecraft reproduces a complete transcript of this recording. Names begin to appear in the narrative, names with which Lovecraft’s readers had by now a shuddering familiarity—Yog- Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, Cthulhu, the Pnakotic Manuscripts.

  Wilmarth, his curiosity stimulated, travels into the ancient wooded hills of Vermont to visit Akeley, for suddenly the note of gathering horror that has rung through the letters from the recluse vanishes, and is replaced by a very untypical acceptance of the mysterious phenomena. The culminating horror comes when Wilmarth, now a guest in Akeley’s home, discovers that his host has been done away with and that it is one of the monsters from beyond in disguise that he has taken for Akeley all this while.

  In many ways, The Whisperer in Darkness is a tale of pivotal significance in the history of the Mythos and its evolution. I have already remarked that in this tale Lovecraft, by quoting names and symbols invented by his friends, incorporated (after the fact, as it were) several of their stories within the context of his own mythos—such stories as Howard’s The Shadow Kingdom and Long’s The Hounds of Tindalos and Bishop’s The curse of Yig. But in this tale he goes further even than that. In a spate of enthusiasm he mentions Hastur and Carcosa and Hali, inventions of Ambrose Bierce. He was not the first to do so: before him, the turn-of-the-century American novelist, Robert W. Chambers, had also borrowed these names from Bierce, spinning them into the context of his own early stories, published in book form under the title The King in Yellow. We sometimes call these interconnected Bierce/Chambers stories the “Carcosa Mythos.” (As I have already reprinted several of these tales in a recent anthology called The Spawn of Cthulhu, I will not linger over the matter here. See my notes to that anthology.)

  Lovecraft also uses Whisperer to tie together most of the scattered bits of lore he had used in earlier stories. Azathoth reappears herein; so does that mysterious Plateau of Leng, first mentioned ten years earlier in Celephais. New names are produced, such as Yuggoth, 2* the dark planet on the rim of the Solar System; and a system of subterranean cavem-worlds beneath the earth’s crust—“blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai”�
�later explained in Zealia Bishop’s short novel The Mound, another Lovecraft revision.

  Rather curiously, this story also marks the first appearance in print of Bran and Tsathoggua, the brainchildren, respectively, of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. According to Howard, Bran was a mighty chieftain of the Caledonian Picts in ancient times, and his name lived long in the ancestral legends of his people.3* No story in this cycle had yet been published when Lovecraft wrote Whisperer; the first such tale, Men of the Shadows, did not find its way to print for many years, and the first published tale oft Howard’s to mention Bran was thus Kings of the Night which appeared in the November, 1930 issue of Weird Tales. How, then, did Lovecraft know of Bran? The answer is simple: just as he circulated his manuscripts among his writer-friends for their comment, so they sent’ their stories to Lovecraft.

  The same held true in the case of Tsathoggua. This entity was introduced in one of Smith’s gorgeous Hyperborean fantasies. The story in which Tsathoggua made his debut was The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, which did not appear in Weird Tales until the issue of November, 1931 —a year after Lovecraft mentioned him in Whisperer.

  Neither Bran nor, for that matter, Tsathoggua are presented by Howard or Smith in those initial stories as members of the Cthulhuoid pantheon. They were “appropriated” by Lovecraft, who mentioned them in Whisperer, as he also mentioned Yig and the Hounds of Tindalos and others, as a sort of compliment to his writer-friends, and also as a sort of in-joke whose point would be gotten only by members of the Lovecraft Circle.

  For although his stories are solemn and quite humorless, Lovecraft’s letters display a delightful sense of humor and a fondness for jokes. Most of the straight faced in-jokes he inserted into his stories went unnoticed by the readers of the day—such as naming his character, in The Call of Cthulhu, George Gammell “Angell” after Angell Street, his address in Providence for so many years.

  Other in-jokes were subtly worked into the texture of his Mythos tales. In Whisperer, for example, he has Akeley toss off a pseudo-learned reference: “It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came—you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commorion myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean bigh-priest Klarkash-Ton.” I have already noted that Tsathoggua is a demon-god of elder Hyperborea, invented by Clark Ashton Smith for his cycle of tales set in such immemorial (and imaginary) cities as Commoriom and Uzuldaroum. In a straight-faced manner, Lovecraft pretends these Hyperborean stories are redactions of genuine ancient myth. But the in-joke here is that “Klarkash-Ton” is Lovecraft’s pet nickname for Smith. Similarly, he was later to call August Derleth “the Comte d’Erlette” and incorporate him into the Mythos as author of the equally imaginary Cultes des Goules, yet another of those eldritch books of forbidden lore.

  Lovecraft had nicknames for all of his correspondents: Donald Wandrei became “Melmoth the Wandrei,” a pun on the tide of the old Gothic masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer; Frank Belknap Long became Romanized into “Belknapius,” and so on. Entering into the spirit of the thing, his correspondents vied with one another to make jokes on his own name, frequently referring to H.P.L. as “Eich-Pi-El.” It was the young Robert Bloch, however, who topped them all: in a shuddersome yarn called The Grinning Ghoul he refers to another tome of nameless lore—“the grotesque Black Rites of mystic Luveh-Keraphf, the priest of cryptic Bast.” The pun on Lovecraft’s name is a trifle broad, but anyone who loved cats as much as Lovecraft could aptly be termed a priest of Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess. 4*

  Farnsworth Wright was still striving to satisfy the ravenous demands of his readers for more Lovecraft. While waiting for H.P.L. to finish puttering around with the text of Whisperer, he was forced to revive yet another story from the recent past, and thus The Rats in the Walls, which had appeared in Weird Tales only six years earlier, reappeared in the pages of the June 1930 issue.

  Lovecraft discovered that working in the novella length cut down his story productivity. Always a dilettante, a putterer, a “gentleman toying with letters,” with little ambition and no real faith in his own abilities, Lovecraft only finished a story or two a year during his final phase. And he did not always bother trying to sell even the few stories he did produce.

  In 1931, for example, he wrote two stories, both of them very long tales. The first was a 26,000-word novella entitled The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which was the seventh story he wrote in the Mythos. The eighth Mythos tale, written that same year, was the great novella of Antarctic horror, At The Mountains of Madness.

  Shadow revives the imaginary “Miskatonic County” town of Innsmouth, first mentioned in Celephais (1920). In it, the narrator becomes involved in genealogical research concerning the Marsh family, whose fortunes were founded by the South Seas merchant captain, Obed Marsh. It gradually comes to light that the Marshes intermarried with mysterious ocean-dwellers called “the Deep Ones,” producing recurrent hybrid births in each generation and gradually undermining; the town, eventuating in a decadent cult called “The Esoteric Order of Dagon.” The rambling gossip of a half-crazy old derelict named Zadok Allen provides some colorful, slangy dialogue and in time reveals thel full horror of this genetic “shadow” which has blighted the once-great Massachusetts seaport. Cthulhu and R’lyeh are mentioned again, and “Father Dagon and mother Hydra” are introduced as minor members of he Cthulhuoid pantheon, here appearing in print for the first time as leaders of the Deep Ones, the sea-dwellers who serve as Cthulhu’s minions. Also mentioned for the first time in this tale are the submerged city of Y’ha-nthlei and the devil-beasts Lovecraft called “shoggoths.”

  Derleth has praised this story for “the powerful hold it has upon the imagination of its readers,” calling it “a dark, brooding story, typical of Lovecraft at his best.” Farnsworth Wright did not think so, however, and rejected it (probably on the basis of its length, generally a point of contention between Lovecraft and the editor of Weird Tales). An amateur writer at heart, Lovecraft was always plunged into despondency at a rejection, and thus he made no further attempt to sell the story elsewhere. He gave it to an amateur printer in Everett, Pennsylvania, a friend of his from the United Amateur Press days who ran the so-called Visionary Press. The tale was illustrated by Frank Utpatel and published as a slim little book in a very limited printing in 1936, the year before Lovecraft’s death.

  Only about 200 copies of the book were bound and circulated—initially at $1.00 each—although many more copies were printed. For some reason, they were sold without a dust-jacket, although jackets do exist for this rare little book, which now commands fabulous prices as a rarity among collectors of Lovecraftiana. Since only two hundred readers saw the book at best, the impact of this major addition to the Mythos was vitiated. In a word, when Farnsworth Wright returned the story, Lovecraft virtually threw it away!

  The second story written during 1931 was saved from sharing the same fate by a fluke—or rather, by the efforts and devotion of one of Lovecraft’s friends, Donald Wandrei. I refer to At The Mountains of Madness, which must be the longest work of fiction Lovecraft ever attempted—it totals about 39,600 words. In it he brought to bear several interests which he seldom f utilized: his youthful enthusiasm for geology and the history of Antarctic exploration, and his extreme fondness for Poe’s unfinished novel of South Polar mystery, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

  Lovecraft loathed cold weather, and this was more than just an emotional aversion: he suffered violent physical reactions if exposed to low temperatures. It has been suggested that his hypersensitivity to cold weather was either an allergic reaction or perhaps psychosomatic —neither allergies nor psychosomatic medicine had moved from the textbooks into general medical practice as early as the 1930s— but at any rate, Lovecraft flourished best at temperatures around 90° F. Below 80° F he became increasingly uncomfortable; at 10° F he was “stiff, sniffling, and gasping.” An incident is related in which Lovecraft went out one evening
into the Providence streets on an errand of mercy of some sort. The temperature, which had been around 60° F when he left the house, dropped before long to 30° F. Lovecraft collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drugstore, where a passing physician revived him.

  The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing, and the pages of Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest.

  The story is immensely complex, the plot sluggish and slow-moving in the extreme. It tells of an expedition to Antarctica launched by some scientists from Miskatonic University in Arkham, and their discovery of a prehistoric city, dead for geological eons, long buried beneath the ice fields. Lovecraft used the story to reveal a considerable portion of earth’s prehistoric lore, working this into the Mythos and dropping hints he would later develop when he came to write The Shadow Out of Time. In the course of the tale he brings in the shoggoths, first introduced in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and develops hints from earlier tales about primordial and pre-human races which came to this planet from distant stars and worlds before the evolution of man.

  Lovecraft thought quite highly of this short novel and sent it off to Wright. Wright, of course, rejected it flatly, thus plunging the sensitive gentleman-author into another prolonged fit of depression. To one of his friends, Lovecraft wrote:

  At the Mountains of Madness represents the most serious work I have attempted, and its rejection was a very discouraging influence.

  So discouraging that Lovecraft withdrew it from submission and let it gather dust on the shelf.

  But this particular incident had a happy ending. Lovecraft’s friends admired the story and eventually pried it away from him, and it was submitted through an agent, Julius Schwartz, to a science fiction magazine called Astounding Stories. This was, by the way, the one and only time Lovecraft ever used an agent to sell one of his stories.