H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Among the younger proteges of Lovecraft, the first to make a major contribution to the Mythos was August Derleth. He began collaborating on short stories with Mark Schorer during the summer of 1931. The two had first become friends during their high-school years, and the friendship persisted and began to bear fruit as each of the young men became apprentice writers. An entire book of Derleth/Schorer tales has recently been published by Arkham House.1*

  In their preface to that book, August Derleth and Mark Schorer recalled the circumstances that led to their decade of collaboration: “That summer,” they wrote, “one of us was home from a year of teaching at a military academy in Missouri and preparing for postgraduate work at Wisconsin and Harvard,” while “the other was back to stay in Sauk City, Wisconsin, having resigned an editorial position with Fawcett Publications in order to do or die as a writer.” Both young men had their homes in Sauk City, but, as Derleth recounted it, “we chose not to work in them but to rent what had once been a summer cottage on the village’s main street... Into this cottage we moved typewriters and all the paraphernalia incidental to writing, and got to work.”

  One of the first of the collaborative efforts produced in this manner was a story in the Cthulhu Mythos—Derleth’s first, so far as he was able to recall. The Lair of the Star-Spawn was its title, and it appeared in the August 1932 issue of Weird Tales. In it the two authors introduced some innovations. An explorer named Eric Marsh penetrates the hidden depths of jungled Burma and discovers the mysterious Plateau of Sung, when dwell the legended “Tcho-Tcho people” in the age-old lost city of Alaozar. “Not without base do ancient legends of China speak of the long-lost city on the Isle of Stars in the Lake of Dread,” as a character in the tale remarks; and Marsh soon discovers that this is the dominion of two of the Great Old Ones —Lloigor and Zhar, “the Twin Obscenities,” who came down from the stars ages before, with Cthulhu and other beings, this tale is the first in all the Mythos to recount how the Elder Gods battled against and overwhelmed the Great Old Ones, with the result that “Hastur was exiled to Hali in the Hyades, Cthulhu was banished to the lost sea kingdom of R’lyeh, while Lloigor and Zhar were buried alive in the inner fastnesses of Asia—beneath the accursed Plateau of Sung!”

  This rather slender and seemingly innocuous little story, which went unreprinted, completely neglected, and virtually forgotten for decades until revived in book form in 1966, is actually one of the most overwhelmingly important of all the tales that comprise the Mythos.

  It was the first story to introduce Lloigor and Zhar, and also the first story in which “Hastur the Unspeakable” is set forth as a member of the pantheon. 2* It was also the first tale to mention the Tcho-Tcho people, here given as minions of Lloigor and Zhar, just as the Deep Ones are minions of Cthulhu.

  Star-Spawn also merits our attention as being August Derleth’s initial effort in the growth of the Mythos. Derleth, in the years that followed, became the most indefatigable of Lovecraft’s disciples, reshaping and guiding the development of the Mythos after the death of Lovecraft, and eventually becoming the second most important writer to contribute thereto. In the light of his later significance, this story is feeble and confused.

  Derleth did not keep his terminology straight; he used such phrases as “the Old Ones,” “the Elder Gods,” and “the Ancient Ones” interchangeably, creating a bit of a mix-up. In later stories, of course, he resolved his name system and established his terms firmly.

  Lovecraft, of course, must have seen Star-Spawn, but no record is extant of what he thought of it or of his opinion of what Derleth had done to the Mythos. Derleth himself cannot recall H.P.L.’s reaction, which is a great pity. Lovecraft, as we have seen, frequently set his seal of approval on some of his friends’ contributions to the apparatus of the Mythos by using the new additions in one of his own Mythos stories: It may, or it may not, be significant that he did not in any future story mention this theme of the Elder Gods v. the Great Old Ones; neither did he incorporate references to Hastur, Zhar or Lloigor in any story of his, although he did pick up the Tcho-Tcho people. I think it rather likely, though, that this failure to use Derleth’s then newly-coined apparatus in one of his stories was just an oversight on Lovecraft’s part. Lovecraft did not take the Mythos at all seriously and vigorously encouraged his friends to use it as they liked in their own stories, so it can be safely assumed that whether or not he approved of Derleth’s simplistic cosmic war theme, he really did not care.

  The following year, 1933, Lovecraft wrote only one story, The Thing on the Doorstep. This low rate of production seems inexplicable, but we must keep in mind that, to Lovecraft, his own stories were of minimal importance: he continued to regard his revisions of the stories of others as his prime work.

  He had at this time just finished revising a story called Out of the Eons by a new client, Hazel Heald. It was a delightful story, and as it stands, I imagine it is at least 60 percent Lovecraft. He poured into it any number of references to the staples of the Mythos—the Necronomicon, “black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu,” the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, the Book of Eibon, and so on. He also used the opportunity afforded by this revision to add to the canon Long’s devil-god from The Horror from the Hills in a reference to “proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn,” which, in context, indicates that this entity was a member of the Great Old Ones. In the same tale appears a reference to the Derleth/Schorer story Lair of the Star-Spawn, confirming that Lovecraft had in fact seen it: “Do you remember what I told you about that ruined city in Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived?” asks one of the characters. There is also a reference to “Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice,” which hearkens back to Polaris of many years before.

  Out of the Eons concerns the discovery of a dead city frozen under the Arctic ice, forgotten for three million years, and thus forming a rather amusing counterpart of the lost ice-buried city in the Antarctic, the setting for At the Mountains of Madness. The story is chiefly significant in that it adds a new divinity to the pantheon: Rhan-Tegoth, a member of the Great Old Ones who came down to this earth from Yuggoth.

  Yet another new devil-god made his debut, in the January 1933 issue of Strange Tales, in a new story by August Derleth (a solo performance, this time) called The Thing That Walked on the Wind. This tale marks the first appearance of Derleth’s Ithaqua the Wind- Walker, a variation on the familiar Wendigo myth popularized by Algernon Blackwood in his famous horror tale, The Wendigo,3* Derleth established here, for the first time in the Mythos, the notion that the various members of the pantheon, or some of them at least, are elementals; Ithaqua is referred to as an air elemental. Derleth later developed this theme more fully, References to Leng, the Tcho-Tcho people of Burma, and “accursed R’lyeh, where slumbering Cthulhu is waiting to rise and destroy the world,” anchor the story firmly within the context of the Mythos.

  But to return to Lovecraft. His tale, The Thing on the Doorstep, is, again, curiously minor and somehow unsatisfying. Perhaps we readers had been spoiled by such superlative stories as The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, and The Whisperer in Darkness: we expected each new tale in the cycle to be even bigger and better than the one before. At any rate, Thing fails to electrify the imagination. From themes of cosmic horror and cataclysmic (impending) doom, the scope here has dwindled to a sordid little domestic tragedy that might be dismissed as the tale of a man with an overdomineering wife, if one wished to sound facetious.

  Some amusing things crop up in this tenth Mythos tale, however. Lovecraft’s protagonist is a young poet of near genius named Edward Derby, and we are told that “in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title of Azathoth and Other Horrors.” Then, remembering Robert E. Howard’s mad poet in The Black Stone and other stories, Lovecraft adds with a straight face: “He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died scream
ing in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.”

  Although a grisly shocker in the approved tradition the tale is insignificant and wholly lacking in the sort of cosmic vision that makes Lovecraft’s best stories so memorable. It is less than ten thousand words long.

  Otherwise not very important, as far as things Lovecraftian go, 1933 is worthy of note because of a new friend H.P.L. made that year. This was a fifteen-year- old boy in the Midwest, with whom Lovecraft began a correspondence that was to continue steadily throughout the final four years of his life.

  His new correspondent was named Robert Bloch.

  Bloch was, at this time, just a high-school boy living in Milwaukee. He had been born in Chicago in 1917, but he grew up in Milwaukee. He began to correspond with the older writer when he was about fifteen, and this provided the stimulus and encouragement he needed to begin seriously working towards a professional career in fiction, just as similar correspondence had for Long and for Derleth himself. Lovecraft’s friendship seems to have done this sort of thing for lots of young beginners.

  At any rate, young Bloch became in time another Lovecraft discovery, and one of prime importance. Like Derleth, Robert Bloch sold his first story to Weird Tales while he was still in his teens, and he eventually became a member of Farnsworth Wright’s “stable,” contributing scores of tales to the magazine over decades.

  Sometime after young Bloch first became acquainted with Lovecraft through the medium of letters, his family moved to upstate Wisconsin, and he thus came into much closer contact with Derleth, due to their proximity. Lovecraft had “introduced” the two budding authors, Bloch tells me, by mail, as was his usual fashion. The Providence writer also performed the same service on Bloch’s behalf with Clark Ashton Smith, J. Vernon Shea, Jr., and several other members of Lovecraft’s private literary salon. But it was Derleth with whom Bloch formed the closest friendship. “Since Derleth lived just a few hours’ bus-ride away from me,” Bloch informed me in a recent letter, “I visited him at his home and he in turn met with me in Milwaukee.”

  Bloch and Derleth, in fact, planned at one point to get Lovecraft out to Wisconsin—which is not really as far-fetched as it might seem, for, even considering his sedentary and almost hermitlike mode of life, Lovecraft did some extensive traveling in his last years. He visited Robert H. Barlow in Florida, and Barlow has left us a memoir of the visit. And he was visiting friends in New Orleans—of all places!—when he first met E. Hoffman Price. In fact, it was during his visit to New Orleans that Lovecraft and Price first discussed the notion of a sequel to The Silver Key, a meeting which, as mentioned earlier, resulted in their collaboration on Through the Gates of the Silver Key.

  But the Wisconsin trip was never to come to pass, and although Bloch was to exchange many letters with Lovecraft during the older writer’s last few years, the two were never to meet in person, which Bloch deeply regrets to this day.

  ***

  1* I refer to Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People which Arkham House published in 1966. The collection includes seventeen stories, first published between 1930-1939 in Weird Tales, Strange Stories, and similar magazines.

  2* In The Whisperer in Darkness, written two years before the publication of Star-Spawn, Lovecraft had first mentioned Hastur, Carcosa and Hali in passing, but had done nothing further with the names. He listed them in a sequence of names which included some borrowed from Dunsany, Howard and other writers -he, himself, had gotten them from Bierce and Chambers- but it was Derleth and Schorer who firmly fixed Hastur’s place as a member of the Great Old Ones and explained Carcosa and Hali as the places of his banishment.

  3* This is doubtless where Derleth got the idea. At least, he knew the tale, for in this story he has one of his characters remark, “Blackwood has written of these things.”

  10. Invaders From Yesterday

  As he came nearer to the end of his life, Lovecraft’s production of stories, never exactly prodigious, slowed almost to a standstill. In 1934, for example, he toyed with a story called The Book but set it aside languidly and never returned to it. He also sketched out a little tale called The Thing in the Moonlight, whose origin can easily be traced to the horribly vivid dreams from which he suffered all his life. This sketch, too, he set aside and did not try to sell—did not even finish, in fact.1*

  But that same year he shrugged off the feeling of lassitude or futility and produced his eleventh and next-to-last story in the Cthulhu Mythos—The Shadow Out of Time.

  Not only is this one of the longest of his stories— running to about 24,600 words—but it is one of the very best. In my opinion, for what it’s worth, The Shadow Out of Time is, in fact, his single greatest achievement in fiction. The form and substance of this extraordinary novella, its amazing scope and sense of cosmic immensitude, the gulfs of time it opens, the titanic sweep of the narrative—these elements convince me that here is one of the most tremendously exciting imaginative experiences I have yet found in fantastic fiction, and the story has haunted me for years.

  The tale is intricately and carefully plotted and includes an element of suspense seldom found in Lovecraft. Quite literally, the tale is constructed in the style of a detective story—like one of those intellectual puzzles John Dickson Carr puts together with such enormous skill. Both the reader and the narrator are ignorant of what has happened; piece by piece the evidence fits together until the final shattering revelation. As an exercise in plotting ingenuity alone, the tale would be a delight; as a glimpse of the cosmic horrors that may lie hidden in the remoteness of time, geological epochs from our own day, and of the un- guessable and terrible secrets earth’s unknown past conceals, the story is a thing of mounting horror and tension screwed to the last notch of suspense.

  Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, an instructor in political economy at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Mass., was struck by a sudden and inexplicable attack of total amnesia while in the midst of a lecture. Five years later he regained his memory, lacking the slightest hint as to events during this lengthy period. His own memory of that time is a confused jumble of chaotic dreams —vivid and detailed dreams, to be sure, but dreams of such bizarre and monstrous surroundings and such strange beings that they must be the illusions conjured up by a disordered brain.

  He discovers that his behavior during this five-yearlong bout of total amnesia was bizarre in the extreme. He had collapsed on the podium during a lecture, fallen into deep unconsciousness, and was gradually aroused by physicians. However, when he was brought back to consciousness, the doctors were amazed to discover that their patient seemed to be unfamiliar with the uses of his own body. His speech was awkward, as if his use of his vocal organs was a new experience to be carefully mastered; his diction was stilted and foreign, as if he had learned the English language from books alone. Even his expressions and gestures were clumsy and untrained, and he seemed almost to require re-education in the use of his arms, legs and hands. Once up and around, Peaslee began studying subjects oddly at variance with his earlier pursuits of history, science, art, language, folklore. Never in the slightest having evinced any interest in the occult “sciences” or mystical subjects, he began exploring strange old books, consorting with the most unlikely cultists, and, in time, he embarked on a series of travels seemingly at random— to the Himalayas, where he spent a month, through the unexplored desert wastes of Arabia, even to the remote Arctic and the vast limestone caverns of Virginia— travels without apparent purpose. Eventually, as if disappointed at the lack of results from these studies and journeys, Peaslee was observed to fall into a sort of ennui; he spoke vaguely (and, many thought, insincerely) of flashes of returning memory. Then followed his construction in secret of an odd mechanism, which later vanished quite mysteriously. And, just as mysteriously, Peaslee suddenly regained his memory—except for any knowledge of his activities during die period of amnesia.

  Gradually the full truth emerges, and the reader is treated to one of Lovec
raft’s most spectacular creations: “the Great Race of Yith,” nonhuman entities of pure mind who migrate across the ages, inhabiting the bodies of race after race. Centered in a prehistoric city in the wastes of inner Australia, one of these mental invaders had stolen Peaslee’s body in order to research his particular era. During the interim, Peaslee’s own intelligence was housed in one of the cone-shaped host- bodies possessed by the Race.

  Lovecraft exposes the full impact of this discovery in a sequence of tantalizing hints; it adds up to a sensational work of imagination—so sensational that Farnsworth Wright (by this time one could almost add, “of course—”) rejected it.

  In all fairness to the memory of a great editor, however, there may have been extenuating circumstances. Derleth has recorded (in H.P.L.: A Memoir) that Lovecraft often submitted manuscripts in a state of very unprofessional sloppiness:

  It must be pointed out that Lovecraft, burdened with his revision work, often sent out manuscripts in a bad state of disrepair. I saw In the Vault after its rejection by Wright, and found it all but unreadable; I retyped it, I sent the new copy off to Wright, and in a short time Lovecraft had Wright’s letter of acceptance. Donald Wandrei did the same thing with other manuscripts and I arranged for their sale to Astounding Stories. Rejection of a tale which had involved considerable creative energy was a harsh blow for Lovecraft; he had none of the ego, so necessary to writers, to sustain him in the face of rejection; however much he assailed the judgment of the editor in question, everything he said and did goes, to show that secretly he believed the editor might very well be right, because this was what he himself thought.