H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Astounding bought the yarn and serialized it in somewhat abridged form in the issues dated February, March, and April, 1936.

  And here again we can see how Lovecraft’s lack of professionalism hampered what little career he had. Wouldn’t you think that, having sold a story through an agent, he would have continued to let an agent handle his stories, thus relieving him of the drudgery of bookkeeping and shielding him from the psychic shock of rejection?

  He never used an agent again.

  And wouldn’t you also think, considering how promptly Astounding Stories bought a tale rejected as unpublishable by Weird Tales, that Lovecraft would have sent more stories to that new market?

  He never again submitted a story to Astounding.

  ***

  1* It is a curiously ironic circumstance that the numerical Majority of my friends live in & near New York—a town I detest so heartily!” he wrote that April, concerning this trip.

  2* Lovecraft’s name for the planet Pluto, discovered the same year in which he wrote Whisperer and promptly snapped up by him as part of his apparatus. Lovecraft was always interested in astronomy; it was a favorite boyhood hobby.

  3* The central stories in this cycle were collected into a book entitled Bran Mak Morn (Dell Books, 1969).

  4* Writing elsewhere, Bloch solemnly extended the joke yet another notch by adding the information that Luveh-Keraphf was “apparently contemporaneous with Klarkash-Ton.”

  8. The Spawn of the Old Ones

  Despite his occasional trips to old cities of antiquarian interest, Lovecraft persisted in locking himself away and living in the interior realms of his own imagination, rather fastidously avoiding the noisy, brawling, daylit world around him.

  He had so very few personal friends even in Providence that it can truthfully be said that he was an outsider in his own home town, and he lived and died in the Rhode Island metropolis largely a stranger to his fellow inhabitants.

  All of his frustrated friendly inclinations he poured into his correspondence, writing thousands of affectionate, self-revealing, chatty letters to men he would never meet in person.

  Many of these correspondents were writers of weird fiction and contributors to Weird Tales. Lovecraft had already paid small joking compliments to some of them by considering various of their imaginative inventions worthy of praise and making straight-faced references to these in his Cthulhuoid stories, as mentioned earlier. Thus, when Clark Ashton Smith invented his Hyperborean demon god, Tsathoggua, Lovecraft gleefully adopted Smith’s creation into the growing pantheon of the Old Ones. In fact, Lovecraft invited his writer-friends to invent new things for the Mythos, to write stories within it, or to utilize some of his apparatus in stories of their own.

  Probably the first of his friends to do so was Clark Ashton Smith. In the September 1931 issue of Strange Tales, Smith published a very successful horror story called The Return of the Sorcerer. 1* The story tells of a young scholar hired by a wealthy recluse in Oakland/California—who prompdy sets him to work at translating passages from the Necronomicon. And there, smack in the middle of a story by Smith, baffled readers encountered a long passage of ominous and enigmatic Alhazredic prose, which must have roused questions in their minds, such as: If two different writers quote from the same book, is it possible that the Necronomicon is a real book?

  Smith followed this tale into print a couple of months later with the earliest of his Hyperborean stories, introducing Tsathoggua as a dark demon god worshipped in remote eons. Another tale in the same sequence, called The Door to Saturn, which appeared in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales, introduced Eibon, the famed Hyperborean wizard, and presented the reader with more data on Tsathoggua, naming the beings that had spawned him in elder eons, the planet from which he had descended to earth, etc. In this story Smith revealed that Tsathoggua’s worship was “incalculably older than man,” and that he “had come down by way of other worlds from a foreign universe, in primeval times when the earth was still no more than a steaming morass” —all of which is very Lovecraftiani in tone.

  And only a few months later, Smith presented another story in Strange Tales called The Nameless Offspring, which opened with a weird, mysterious quotation, given as epigraph to the story:

  Many and multiform are the dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from the prime. They sleep beneath the unturned stone; they rise with the tree from its root; they move beneath the sea and in subterranean places; they dwell in the inmost adyta; they emerge betimes from the shutten sepulchre of haughty bronze and the low grave that is sealed with clay. There be some that are long known to man, and others as yet unknown that abide the terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are the most dreadful and the loathliest of all are haply still to be declared. But among those that have revealed themselves aforetime and have made manifest their veritable presence, there is one which may not openly be named for its exceeding foulness. It is that spawn which the hidden dwellers in the vaults has begotten upon mortality.

  This story-heading bears the solemn ascription: “from the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred.”

  These were only the first of the ten or so stories Smith was to contribute to the Cthulhu Mythos. In them, Smith set the pattern for later writers, and his contributions formed the prototype of the other non-Lovecraft tales which would be written. Rather than remain content to merely use the apparatus of names and books and places thought up by Lovecraft himself, Smith devised an apparatus of his own and established his own little private comer of the Mythos. To the central apparatus Smith contributed the several new” members of the pantheon—first Tsathoggua, then Ubbo-Sathla, Abhoth, and Atlach-Natcha; and, rather than merely continue to invent quotations from Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, Smith made up a text of nameless lore all his own called the Book of Eibon, written by that powerful Hyperborean wizard he had I introduced in The Door to Saturn. In a later story Ubbo-Sathla (which introduced the dark divinity of that name and first appeared in Weird Tales of July 1933), Smith invented two quotations from this “collection of dark and baleful myths, of liturgies, rituals and incantations both evil and esoteric.”2*

  Others among Lovecraft’s writer-friends were soon to follow Smith in contributing to the Mythos, and, like him, they preferred to invent their own apparatus of gods and books and symbols, rather than merely to imitate what Lovecraft had already done.

  Thus, Frank Belknap Long wrote a short novel called The Horror From the Hills (serialized in Weird Tales, the issues of January, February and March, 1931), the germ of which was a long, complicated “Roman dream” that Lovecraft had experienced and described in a lengthy letter, the text of which Long had inserted, virtually intact, into his novella. In this story Long introduced a new member of the pantheon called Chaugnar Faugn.

  And Robert E. Howard was not long in joining in the game. The earliest story of his that was deliberately written as a contribution to the Mythos was a short, tale called The Children of the Night (Weird Tales April-May, 1931). In that story he mentioned the Necronomicon, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Tsathoggua, and invented a minor godling called Gol-goroth and another of those ancient books of eldritch lore, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, by a German scholar named Von Junzt.

  In writing these Lovecraftian tales, Howard and his colleagues generally followed Lovecraft’s example. A case in point is this tome by Von Junzt. In another Cthulhuoid story, The Black Stone (Weird Tales, November, 1931), Howard picked up and elaborated on the data presented in the earlier story: the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (he tells us) was published in Dusseldorf in 1839; the title translates as Nameless Cults; the tome is sometimes known as “the Black Book”; a cheap and faulty English translation was pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845; a carefully expurgated edition appeared from the Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909. All of this specific data —places, dates, names of translators, bibliographical data on editions— tends to half-convince the reader that the book in question is real. In fact, unless you happen
to be a bibliographical expert, you are hard put to say with any certitude whether this or that book mentioned in a Mythos story is real or was invented by the author of the story!

  Also in The Black Stone Howard invents a “mad poet” of his own, a sort of English-speaking version of Abdul Alhazred named Justin Geoffrey, author of a nightmarish poem entitled “The People of the Monolith.” A versifier of considerable gifts, Howard gives us a morsel of Geoffrey’s talent by quoting a few lines of his as the heading to this story:

  They say foul beings of Old Times still lurk

  In dark forgotten comers of the world,

  And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,

  Shapes pent in Hell.

  Another story, The Thing on the Roof, picks up and elaborates on both Justin Geoffrey and Von Junzt, and introduces Xuthltan, who plays a major part in yet another tale, The Fire of Asshurbanipal, not to be published for some years. Thus, just as Smith carved out a niche of his own in the Cthulhu Mythos, and placed therein the Book of Eibon, Tsathoggua, Ubbo-Sathla, etc., so did Howard make his own niche, with the Nameless Cults of Von Junzt, Gol-goroth, the mad poet Justin Geoffrey, Xuthltan, and so on. From this point on, most of the members of the Lovecraft Circle who added substantially to the Cthulhu Mythos followed this method, and it is still being followed to this day.

  As for Lovecraft’s own writing, he produced two stories during 1932.

  The first of these 3* was The Dreams in the Witch-House, the ninth story Lovecraft wrote in the Cthulhu Mythos. A minor effort, although totaling 15,400 words, Dreams is set in “legend-haunted Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days,” and concerns a student who becomes gradually affected by the residue of ancient horrors yet clinging about the fabric of an old house. Lovecraft used this story to mention in print—and thus give the imprimatur of his approval to—Howard’s inventions, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, and Smith’s Book of Eibon, both here mentioned by Lovecraft in a story for the first time.

  Despite all that this story has going for it, it remains singularly one-dimensional, curiously unsatisfying. Lovecraft did not really have his heart in it, and it shows.

  That same year he also produced a story called Through the Gates of the Silver Key, written in collaboration with his old friend and fellow Weird Tales veteran, E. Hoffman Price. A sort of sequel to one of the last of the Dreamlands stories written during his Dunsanian period (The Silver Key, 1926), it is not properly speaking a part of the Cthulhu Mythos, although it does present the reader with some new Cthulhuoid data.

  It seems that Price became intrigued with the loose ends of the plot Lovecraft had left dangling in The Silver Key and urged H.P.L. to write a sequel to that tale. Well past his Dunsanian period and deeply into developing the Mythos, however, Lovecraft never got around to doing so. Finally, Price wrote a sequel himself and showed it to Lovecraft.

  Price recalls the events leading up to this collaboration in a memoir of his friendship with Lovecraft which first appeared in a fanzine called The Acolyte in 1944. “One of my favorite HPL stories was, and still is, The Silver Key,” he wrote. “In telling him of the pleasure I had had in rereading it, I suggested a sequel to account for Randolph Carter’s doings after his disappearance. My interest in the story stimulated him, and his appreciative response in turn stimulated me, so that before the session was over, we had seriously resolved to undertake the task. Some months later, I wrote a six thousand word first draft.”

  Rarely able to leave another writer’s story untouched, Lovecraft began playing around with Price’s tale, eventually revising and expanding it thoroughly. “Thoroughly” may perhaps be an understatement— “completely” is more like it, for, as Price tells the anecdote, “he mailed me a 14,000 word elaboration, in the Lovecraft manner, of what I had sent him. I had bogged down, of course. The idea of doing a sequel to one of his stories was more fantastic than any fantasy he has ever written. When I deciphered his manuscript, I estimated that he had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words: one passage which he considered to be not only rich and colorful in its own right, but also compatible with the style of his own composition.”

  Having myself collaborated with another writer on a few short stories and a couple of novels, I know that few professionals would accept with equanimity a revision so drastic. Price was the exception, however, as his generous comments indicate: “He was right of course in discarding all but the basic outline. I could only marvel that he had made so much of my adequate and bungling start. What I had done, in effect, was to prod him, by that start, into creating something. Today, I like to tell myself that that one short passage of mine which he incorporated into the script must have been good; and that without doubt, I fared better than any of those others whose botched beginnings he rewrote bodily.”

  The story appeared two years later in Weird Tales under a dual byline as a genuine collaboration—the only time, in fact, that any of Lovecraft’s revisions were openly admitted to be the work of two writers. Without exception, the other tales, such as those written with Hazel Heald or Zealia Bishop, were published without public acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s share in the task.

  Through the Gates of the Silver Key has the most confused plot imaginable, and since it is not really a part of the Cthulhu Mythos, but only a borderline tale, we need not linger over it here with any lengthy synopsis. But I must add a note about the amusing origin of two of the characters in the story—one of them “the distinguished Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny,” the other, “an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island” named Ward Phillips.

  De Marigny was invented by Price and Lovecraft as a sort of pen-name. They had decided at one point in their friendship that it would be a good idea to collaborate on many stories—to capitalize on what Lovecraft called Price’s speed of composition. Rather than; use a dual byline, they planned to create a joint nom-de-plume, “Etienne Marmaduke de Marigny,” and in this mood of grandiose whimsy (as Price calls it), they decided that de Marigny’s output would “conservatively estimated, amount to a million words a month.” This plan eventually fell through, but the name itself, slightly altered, was preserved as that of a character in the one fiction upon which they did collaborate.

  The other name, Ward Phillips, which is, of course, drawn from the middle of “Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” is a very early pen-name of Lovecraft’s own devisal. Several pieces of his amateur work were signed with that name, such as the poem “Astrophobos,” first published in 1918. 4*

  This collaboration is primarily of interest to us as it gives a new quotation from the Necronomicon, mentions the Elder Sign, and refers to the otherwise unknown “Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng.” Also, recalling the planet Yuggoth which Lovecraft introduced in Whisperer in Darkness, this yarn cuts loose with a slather of new planets—enough to fill a medium-sized solar system—“Kythamil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus,” “trans- galactic Stronti,” as well as “Yaddith, Mthura, Kath, the triple star Nython, Kynarth,” and other worlds in “the twenty-eight galaxies accessible to the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith.”

  Price, something of an amateur Orientalist, used a lot of Eastern lore and mysticism in his own stories, and some of this sort of thing seeped over into Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Price also knew quite a bit about modern occult literature—far more than Lovecraft, anyway—and some of the terms from this wide reading got into Gates and, through Gates, into the Mythos proper—such terms, for example, as “the primal Naacal language,” which came from Churchward’s “Mu” books, or the reference to “the Children of the Fire Mist [who] came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man,” which Price got from Madame Blavatsky, it being part of the rather gaudy and spectacular cosmogony of the Theosophical system. Thus, tainted with mysticism, a confused jumble of complex plot, G
ates is a weak, even a bad, story.

  All in all, then, 1932 was not a good year as far as Lovecraft’s writing went.

  ***

  1* The story has since been reprinted and anthologized a number of times, and during the 1940s it was dramatized on a radio program called The House of Mystery. Lovecraft’s own story, The Rats in the Walls, was once performed on another program, called Suspense, by a cast headed by Ronald Colman.

  2* Another Hyperborean story, The Coming of the White Worm, which was not published until 1941, was actually sented as an entire chapter from the Book of Eibon!

  3* Happily for us long-suffering Lovecraft scholars, in the last year of his life Lovecraft set down in a letter to a friend a list of his completed stories (fifty in all), with the date of the writing of each story; so we do not have to comb his correspondence in an effort to establish the correct dating of his tales.

  4* Years after Lovecraft’s death, when August Derleth came to compose the novel The Lurker at the Threshold, which was published in book form by Arkham House as a posthumous collaboration, he used “the Rev. Ward Phillips” as the author of one of those imaginary tomes wherewith the Lovecraftian library is so richly filled: Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan. It reads rather like a work of Cotton Mather, from the few quotations from it we possess.

  9. The Elder Gods

  Although Lovecraft himself was writing fewer and fewer stories in the Cthulhu Mythos, his writer-friends, and in particular his younger proteges, became more and more fascinated by the wealth of background lore the Mythos contained, and by the plot potentials it offered them.

  I get the feeling that they contributed new stories, new symbols, new books and demons to the Mythos rather in a sense of play. Some of the members of the Lovecraft Circle to whom I have written assure me of this. Nobody, they tell me, took the Mythos seriously (least of all Lovecraft), and they began to vie with one another to build up the pantheon and add to the gradually evolving mythology. This they did very much as a sort of game, and it is quite significant that after Lovecraft’s death the game lost its savor for many of them. The Mythos stories written when he was no longer alive to enjoy them were done more in a spirit of commemoration than in fun, Robert Bloch tells me. But we shall look into this later on.