H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  4* Which has not only been adapted—and quite well adapted too—into a television drama, but also has been made into a feature movie. The movie, oddly enough, was titled (for some reason known only to those students of abnormal psychology who have delved into the innermost psyche of film producers) Burn, Witch, Burn—which must have greatly confused any devotees of A. Merritt who happened to be in the audience.

  5* A disease characterized by the presence of albumin in the urine and heightened blood pressure; it is named after the English physician who was the first to describe it.

  12. Beyond the Tomb

  When Howard Phillips Lovecraft died, early in the morning of March 15, 1937, he was only forty-six years and seven months old. I suppose it would be somewhat inaccurate to say that those who knew him I were shocked and surprised to hear of his death at so I early an age, although of course they were deeply saddened at the death of their dear friend and comrade. But Lovecraft had always been sickly and had lived much of his life like a semi-invalid. Donald A. Wollheim, who knew Lovecraft, tells me that it was quite obvious to anyone who met him during his last years that something was seriously wrong with his health. His sickly pallor, his thinness, and his “air of an invalid” all suggested that he was not at all a well man.

  The news, however, caught most of his friends unawares. August Derleth had gone into the country for the day; there, in the marshes below his home in Sauk City, Wisconsin, he had strolled with his morning’s mail and a copy of Thoreau’s Journal, heading for a favorite spot where it was his custom to sit in the sun and read. Among the day’s mail was a letter from Donald Wandrei’s brother, Howard, who was then in New York and who was one of the first to hear that Lovecraft was dead. Derleth recalled that he read the letter during his walk into the marshes; stunned, his book set aside and forgotten, he sat down at a railroad trestle beside a brook and thought of his friend and mentor. It occurred to him then that Lovecraft’s best stories should be rescued from the oblivion of old pulp magazines and preserved in the dignity of a hardcover book. He could not have dreamed at the time how this thought was to grow into a publishing enterprise that was to occupy much of his time for the rest of his life.

  In Chicago, word of Lovecraft’s death came to Farnsworth Wright, who was putting together his June issue. The two men had had their differences, surely, and it may have rankled Wright for a long time that Lovecraft had been Henneberger’s first choice for the editorial chair of Weird Tales. But Wright sat down at his desk deeply moved and wrote a eulogy that ran to a column and a half:

  Sad indeed is the news that tells us of H. P. Lovecraft’s death. He was a titan of weird and fantastic literature, whose literary achievements and impeccable craftsmanship were acclaimed throughout the English-speaking world. He was only forty-six years of age, yet had built up a following such as few authors ever had.

  Wright went on to describe what he knew of Lovecraft’s childhood and life interests, and to discuss his many accomplishments, concluding sadly:

  His death is a serious loss to weird and fantastic fiction, but to the editors of Weird Tales the personal loss takes precedence. We admired him for his great literary achievements, but we loved him for himself; for he was a courtly and noble gentleman, and a dear friend. Peace be to his shade!

  I suppose the most deeply stricken of Lovecraft’s friends were the younger writers, those still not quite beyond the neophyte phase. Some, like Derleth, were beginning to find broader recognition of their talents than even the pages of Weird Tales could offer.1* One such writer, just getting started, was Robert Bloch. Years later, Bloch was asked how much of an influence Lovecraft had been on his own work. He replied, “A tremendous influence. I consciously imitated him for several years, as did Henry Kuttner and a number of other, then-neophyte, writers. He criticized my writing and helped direct it through correspondence.” Elsewhere, Bloch wrote that, had he known how serious Lovecraft’s condition really was towards the end, he would if necessary have crawled on his hands and knees to have been at his bedside.

  Letters from Lovecraft’s fellow writers, both those whom he had known personally and those who had merely shared a contents page or two with him, began to pour into the office of Weird Tales—there being no better forum than the letters column of the magazine to which he had contributed so many stories. From New York City, Manly Wade Wellman wrote, sadly remarking: “I had hoped to meet Mr. Lovecraft, and mourn my ill luck in not doing so; I can say, at least, that he was my early inspiration and constant study in this field, as he must have been for many younger writers ... let me express my shocked feeling of sorrow and loss at the passing of this consistently fine artist.”

  From California, Clark Ashton Smith wrote: “I— alas! —never met him, but we had corresponded for about seventeen years, and I felt that I knew him better than most people with whom I was thrown in daily intimacy... there are few tales of his that I have not read and re-read many times... I am profoundly saddened at the news of [his] death after a month of painful illness. The loss seems an intolerable one, and I am sure that it will be felt deeply and permanently by the whole weird fiction public. Most of all it will be felt by the myriad friends who knew Lovecraft through face-to-face meeting or correspondence.”

  Edmond Hamilton wrote from Pennsylvania: “I just heard the news of H. P. Lovecraft’s recent death. This is quite a shock, coming so soon after the death of Howard. While I never met either of them, I have been appearing with them in Weird Tales for so long that I had a dim feeling of acquaintance... It is too bad that he is gone—there will never be another like him.”

  Henry Kuttner, then living in Beverley Hills, California, wrote: “I’ve been feeling extremely depressed about Lovecraft’s death. Even now I can’t realize it. He was my literary idol since the days of The Horror at Red Hook, and lately a personal friend as well. The loss to literature is a very great one, but the loss to HPL’s friends is greater. He seemed, somehow, to have been an integral part of my literary life—and the shock was more severe because I had not known that his illness was serious.”

  From Brooklyn, New York, Seabury Quinn wrote: “Lovecraft, whom I had the pleasure of knowing personally, was both a scholar and a gentleman, and his writings disclosed both his scholarship and his gentility, as well as a genius which has not been observable since the death of Poe and Hawthorne. We who knew him personally shall miss his quiet humor and his always-interesting conversation; thousands of those who bad never met the man will join with us in deploring the loss of his contributions to a field of literature which he had made peculiarly his own. God rest his soul.”

  These are selections from only a few of the letters that came pouring into Weird Tales from famous writers and unknown readers alike, each letter filled with shock and sorrow and with the certain cognizance of the very great importance of Lovecraft’s contribution to the literature of the macabre.

  I think the most moving of all the tributes and eulogies was one written by Clark Ashton Smith.

  Smith, himself rather frail and much of a recluse in those days, was living alone in a small rustic cabin in the wooded hills just outside of Auburn, a small California town, when the news of Lovecraft’s death reached him. Because he was alone, we have no record of the emotion that shook him, but I feel certain that his fine aristocratic features saddened and that his eyes misted as he thought of the friend, only three years his senior, who now was gone.

  He sat down at his desk and wrote:

  Lover of hills and fields and towns antique,

  How hast thou wandered hence

  On ways not found before,

  Beyond the dawnward spires of Providence?

  Hast thou gone forth to seek

  Some older bourn than these—

  Some Arkham of the prime and central wizardries?

  Or, with familiar felidae,

  Dost now some new and secret wood explore,

  A little past the senses’ farther wall—

  Where spring and
sunset charm the eternal path

  From Earth to ether in dimensions nemoral?

  Or hath the Silver Key

  Opened perchance for thee

  Wonders and dreams and worlds ulterior?

  Hast thou gone home to Ulthar or to Pnath?

  Has the high king who reigns on dim Kadath

  Called back his courtly, sage ambassador?

  Or darkling Cthulhu sent

  The sign which makes thee now a councilor

  Within that foundered fortress of the deep

  Where the Old Ones stir in sleep

  Till mighty temblors shake their slumbering continent?

  Smith completed the poem, with seventeen additonal lines, and mailed it to Farnsworth Wright.

  Weird Tales published it in the July 1937 issue.

  There were also tributes in verse from Emil Petaja and Francis Flagg, August Derleth and Henry Kuttner, Frank Belknap Long and Vincent Starrett.

  But ultimately the most lasting and important of memorials to Lovecraft’s memory was that created by Derleth and Donald Wandrei. It grew from the idea that crossed Derleth’s mind as he sat there by the railroad trestle in that Wisconsin spring morning, holding Howard Wandrei’s letter in his hand.

  Years later Derleth recalled the thoughts that had run through his mind that day:

  I had no illusions about the difficulty of persuading a New York publisher to bring out such a collection, for, in the broadest sense, Lovecraft was relatively obscure, he wrote in a vein for which there has never been any very large audience in the United States, and all his previous submissions of book manuscripts to publishers like Putnam, Knopf and others had been futile—though it should be said in favor of the publishers and their readers that Lovecraft, negative in his attitude about his work, customarily submitted dog-eared, hardly legible, single-spaced manuscripts, which were certainly enough to discourage the most hardy readers and editors.

  Derleth returned home and later in the day wrote to Donald Wandrei suggesting that something should certainly be done to keep Lovecraft’s better stories in print. Wandrei replied to the effect that not only the stories but the poems as well, and even the “marvelously instructive and entertaining letters” Lovecraft had written to his many friends, should be preserved.

  Derleth swiftly compiled the manuscript of a book of the better Lovecraft stories. The title was an obvious choice: The Outsider and Others—obvious not only because The Outsider was an all-time favorite among Weird Tales readers, but also because Lovecraft himself had been an outsider in his own time.

  In his memoir of this incident Derleth neglected to record yet a third reason, which he may have forgotten—that Weird Tales at one time had briefly considered bringing out a Lovecraft book under the title The Outsider. This notion probably had been allowed to lapse because of Weird Tales’ unfortunate experience with the one book of stories reprinted from early issues which they did publish. This volume, entitled The Moon Terror, included stories by Vincent Starrett and A. G. Birch, and that famous story, Ooze, by Anthony M. Rud, which was the only memorable tale in the historic first issue. (The book also included a story called An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension, by none other than Farnsworth Wright.)

  Looking back on the event, I get the impression that The Moon Terror was one of the most resounding flops in the history of book publishing. The book is advertised in the earliest copy of Weird Tales in my collection, the issue of August 1928, and flipping through the years I notice those early ads vigorously hail the book as (variously) “The Popular Book of the Year” (1928), “While They Last! The Book Requested by Thousands” (1929), and “Tremendously Popular!” (1930).

  By 1934, Weird Tales was getting a bit desperate, and offered the thing free if you bought a subscription to the magazine for $1.50. In 1935 poor Farnsworth Wright was pushing it in his December issue, obviously with an eye on the Christmas shopper, as “A Valuable Gift.” By 1937 he was back to charging hard cash for it, with the headline “While They Last! At Special Close-out Price—50c.” They continued to “last” into 1939, and by 1940 Wright was warning his book- hungry horde of readers that “supplies are strictly limited,” and I sometimes wonder if they ever did manage to unload the thing.

  At any rate, you can readily understand why Weird Tales thought twice about bringing out another book.

  Derleth sent the manuscript of The Outsider and Others to his own publisher: Scribners. “They were sympathetic to the project and recognized the literary value of Lovecraft’s fiction; but in the end they were forced to reject the manuscript because the cost of producing so bulky a book, combined with the public’s then sturdy resistance to buying short story collections and the comparative obscurity of H. P. Lovecraft as a writer, made the project financially prohibitive,” Derleth later recalled. The book went to Simon & Schuster next, and drew much the same response.

  As Derleth told the tale:

  It was at this point that the idea of publishing the omnibus under an imprint of our own occurred to me. I wrote again to Donald Wandrei, setting forth my plan. Both of us were impecunious writers—and how rare is the writer who is not!—but I was at that time building a home for which a local bank had advanced a considerable sum (not, however, without four times the amount of the loan in mortgage and insurance policies collateral, as is the invariable custom of banks), and it seemed to me that one manifest course was open to a Would-be publisher—to advertise for advance prepaid orders, and to pay off the printer from the sum of my loan. To this, Donald Wandrei added what small sum he could scrape together at that time, at great personal sacrifice, amounting to 20% of the production cost; and, with the full co-operation of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Mrs. Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, and Robert H. Barlow, whom Lovecraft had named his literary executor... the project took shape.

  The two neophyte publishers chose “Arkham House” as the name of their newly-launched enterprise, which at that time they envisioned at lasting only long enough to publish three large-sized volumes of Lovecraftiana. Derleth recalled: “There was never any question about the name of our publishing house. Arkham House suggested itself at once, since it was Lovecraft’s own well-known, widely-used place-name for legend-haunted Salem. It seemed to us that this was fitting and that Lovecraft himself would have approved it enthusiastically.”

  And so plans were underway to publish the first major collection of Lovecraft in hardcover. A printer and binder had to be located, money had to be raised to finance the project, advertising had to be planned—there were many things to be done.

  But it was started....

  The young Florida poet and fantasy connoisseur, Robert H. Barlow, was the person named by Lovecraft to assume control over his literary properties. Barlow made the long trek up from Florida to pack up Lovecraft’s voluminous papers, of which he was now in charge.

  For months after Lovecraft’s death the letters column of Weird Tales reverberated with his name, as readers and fellow-writers expressed their anguish at his death. Farnsworth Wright was anxious to preserve in print any unpublished material Lovecraft might have left. During Lovecraft’s last year, he had published, in his January issue, The Thing on the Doorstep; in his March issue he had reprinted The Picture in the House. In the issue that followed the announcement of Lovecraft’s death—July—Wright published a sonnet that H.P.L. had written to Virgil Finlay. Obviously, he could reprint more stories from past issues—but he was hungry to get new, unpublished stories with the Lovecraft byline.

  Weird Tales, at this point, seems to have been having another bout of financial troubles of the sort that plagued the magazine off and on throughout its entire career. Trouble was again cropping up; the magazine had been sold to Short Stories, Inc., and the offices were moved to 9 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Farnsworth Wright retained his position, even moving to New York himself, but he was an old man now, and beginning to fail. With a new management to satisfy, Weird Tales had to show some comfortable profits.

  O
ne thing that would help was new Lovecraft material, for not only had Lovecraft been one of Wright’s most popular writers, with a large, devoted and enthusiastic following, but the grief of his loss was still fresh in the minds of the readers. Derleth and Wandrei were obviously the people to talk to, for, although Barlow had the manuscripts, it was the two older men who were actively engaged in preserving the work of their friend. Derleth obligingly sent Wright the text of a few of the early Dunsanian stories that Lovecraft had published decades before in some of the amateur magazines, and a batch of poems. Wright did not pass them up, but rushed them into print. Perhaps now he wished he had not so capriciously rejected all of those stories...

  Throughout that year, 1938, Wright published a Lovecraft poem in five different issues, besides reprinting The Tree and The Nameless City, which were the tales Derleth had sent him. Poems were all right—they kept Lovecraft on the contents page—but it was stories he really wanted. There was no telling what unpublished manuscripts lurked undiscovered among the Lovecraft papers which Barlow had carted home to Florida.

  Barlow proved uncommunicative and uncooperative. He never catalogued the manuscripts, never seems to have even gone through them, and had no idea what was there. His distant manner and the time-lag in his replies to a letter alienated both Wright and Wandrei, who found him impossible to work with; Derleth, on the other hand, carefully maintained a friendly relationship with the aloof Floridian and occasionally got some cooperation from him. But not much.

  Early in 1939, Wright must have been delighted to receive in the mail an unpublished manuscript with the Lovecraft byline. It came from an old friend and correspondent of Lovecraft’s and it was called The Evil Clergyman. Neither Derleth nor Wandrei had ever heard of it. While the story was so markedly inferior to the Master’s later accomplishments as to rouse grave doubts of its authenticity in the mind of anyone but an editor, Wright snapped it up and rushed it into the April issue, changing the title to The Wicked Clergyman, for some Wrightish reason, and hailing it as “a brief posthumous tale by a great master of eery fiction.” I get the impression that the tale was included in that April issue at the last moment—too late even to get Lovecraft’s name on the cover. I may be wrong here, but significantly the story was not announced as forthcoming in the previous issue, which implies that it was a last-minute arrival.