H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  The other major classification into which Arkham House authors fell during that first decade in the House’s history was somewhat more literary. Along with the popular Weird Tales crew, Derleth approached the most distinguished of living weird fiction writers on the other side of the Atlantic. He was not rebuffed: his entry into those literary strata (a bit more elegantly rarified than the steamy pulp magazine lowlands) was eased by his own reputation and accomplishments, for Derleth was by now an internationally recognized author and poet; a regionalist, in the sense that Thomas Hardy was a regionalist.

  Some of the writers he signed to contract did, however, tend to be a bit sniffy, dealing with a mere American. Especially those authors with titles. Derleth recently discussed this period with me and assured me that while Lord Dunsany was a delightful gentleman, as friendly and cooperative as one could have wished, other of the British gentry were a bit tough to bear, such as Lady Cynthia Asquith, who was not exactly over-cooperative—at first, anyway. “As soon as I caught on to the nature of the problem,” Derleth told me with a smile, “I made certain that she understood that my great-grandfather had been a French count. We got along famously thereafter!”

  Such problems quickly resolved, Arkham House launched a series of books by many of the most celebrated of living writers, and before its first decade was concluded the House catalogue sparkled with such distinguished names as Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, L. P. Hartley, William Hope Hodgson, A. E. Coppard, H. Russell Wakefield, Lord Dunsany, and S. Fowler Wright, to say nothing of Lady Asquith. Derleth has subsequently followed these names with those of Colin Wilson, Arthur Machen and Walter de la Mare, and has long since announced at least two books by M. P. Shiel.

  As Arkham House grew and became increasingly a full-time occupation for Derleth, he did not neglect Weird Tales, where everything had begun. Wright’s readers still yearned for more Lovecraft, and a poem or two now and then was not sufficient to still their cries. In desperation, Wright continued to turn to August Derleth, and Derleth continued to search out Lovecraftiana for the magazine.

  Whenever possible, Derleth came up with a Lovecraft story; when such were not forthcoming, Derleth hearkened back to the days when he and Mark Schorer had ventured briefly into Lovecraftian territory with the writing of The Lair of the Star-Spawn, and concocted some Cthulhuoid fiction of his own for Weird Tales. The first of these was a quite respectable yam called The Return of Hastur, which introduced a new divinity into the pantheon (new, that is, to the Mythos; Hastur had been invented more than forty years earlier by Ambrose Bierce). The tale appeared in the issue of Weird Tales dated March, 1939. It was followed by another, called The Sandwin Compact, in November, 1940.

  These pastiches—rather good pastiches, in fact, although Derleth was to write very much better ones before long—helped to satisfy the readership a little (and, incidentally, helped to keep the memory of Lovecraft fresh in the readers’ minds—a fact certainly not overlooked in the mind of the publisher of The Outsider and Others!). But what was really needed was a good, solid work of Lovecraft’s Cthulhuoid fiction.

  And Derleth and Wandrei were hot on the track of just that: a lost Lovecraft masterpiece few eyes had ever seen and few people had ever heard of. I refer to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which Lovecraft had written a dozen years before but which had not ever been submitted anywhere, and which was presumed still extant. A careful going-through of the Lovecraft papers, which Barlow still held, turned up a chunk of the manuscript; desperate queries were fired off to all known Lovecraft correspondents; piece by piece a complete manuscript was painstakingly assembled and eventually dispatched to the Weird Tales offices at 9 Rockefeller Plaza.

  I imagine Farnsworth Wright would have been delighted beyond words to receive The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for as readers of that tale know well, it is a splendid work of fiction; one of the best things Lovecraft ever wrote. But it was a young woman named Dorothy McEwraith who guided the tale through press, for Farnsworth Wright was dead. The old man who had commanded the helm of the magazine since Edwin Baird fell from favor in 1924 had long been failing. Now he was gone.

  A moving eulogy by longtime Weird Tales contributor Seabury Quinn announced his death in the issue of November, 1940.1* Quinn wrote:

  There is today hardly a writer of fantasy whose success does not date from the encouragement he received from Mr. Wright, and there is certainly no one engaged in creative work who ever dealt with Farnsworth Wright who does not think kindly of him. To those of us who were privileged to know him personally, the loss is even greater. We knew him as a cultured gentleman, a charming host, an incomparably congenial companion, and a true and loyal friend... as for his abilities, his work provides the finest monument possible. In the old files of Weird Tales can be read the biography of a man whose genius made possible a magazine which was and is truly unique. As to his epitaph: if it is true that in imitation lies the sincerest form of flattery, Farnsworth Wright has been eloquently acclaimed. When he assumed the editorial chair of Weird Tales almost twenty years ago he was a lone adventurer setting out to bring a highly specialized form of entertainment to the reading public. A recent issue of Author & Journalist lists twenty-two magazines devoted exclusively to fantasy of pseudoscientific fiction. Could any greater or more sincere compliment be paid his vision or his work?

  Wright’s health had been failing him for some time, and eventually he had been forced to resign his post and turn the magazine over to another hand to guide it The last issue which carried his name on the contents page was dated March, 1940. As for the new editrix, Miss Mcllwraith, she was a diminutive blonde Scotswoman with a wry, puckish sense of humor, and she took up her new executive tasks swiftly and professionally. If the readers, long familiar with the style and taste of Farnsworth Wright, had any qualms about what might happen to their favorite magazine under the aegis of a newcomer—a stranger; and a lady, to boot! —she soon laid their fears to rest. The magazine continued to print the same authors and the same kind of stories as it had during Wright’s sixteen-year regime.

  A few changes, unobtrusive ones, did soon emerge-The new artist Hannes Bok had done a cover or two for Farnsworth Wright, indeed, one of his most gorgeous canvases adorned the last issue which bore Wright’s name. Bok began to appear much more frequently thereafter. Another of his covers appeared on the first issue which carried Miss Mcllwraith’s name as editor, and he rapidly became the most popular cover artist of the magazine’s new era. Miss Mcllwraith seemed quite fond of his particular kind of art; he began to dominate the interior illustrations. As Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay began to dwindle, Bok was on the rise. With the third Mcllwraith issue, the editrix had Bok design a colophon for the “Shape of Thrills to Come” page on which the stories in the next issue were plugged. For the fifth Mcllwraith issue, he designed a new colophon for the contents page; the colophon was to head the contents page for the next ten years. The number of Bok illustrations in each issue rose rapidly. Under Wright he had been doing an average of three interior illustrations per issue; by the seventh Mcllwraith issue, dated May, 1941, he was all over the magazine, and besides doing the cover and the headings for the contents page and the “Thrills to Come” blurb, he had no fewer than six interior illustrations.

  Having just taken over the magazine, Miss Mcllwraith was doubdess delighted to secure the “new” Lovecraft novel. It was a major coup for Weird Tales, and she was quick to capitalize on it to the fullest possible degree.

  The magazine had always shunned the pulp practice of blurbing forthcoming yarns in bottom-of-the-page items, reserving such blurbs for a dignified page advertising the next issue. Breaking with this tradition,

  - Miss Mcllwraith ran a special half-page news item in her March issue, under a thundering headline that read

  LOVECRAFT MANUSCRIPT DISCOVERED

  Will Be Published for First Time

  in WEIRD TALES

  That was on page 45; on page 102, the regular “
Shape of Thrills to Come” page, the news about Lovecraft shoved everything else in the next issue into a smallish box and most of the page was filled with headlines like

  THE RETURN OF THE GREAT LOVECRAFT

  —and so on. The excitement continued with a brief capsule interview with Derleth and Wandrei (reproduced below), which was featured under a headline that ran—

  THE LAST OF THE LOVECRAFTS

  As far as is known, this is the “Last of the Lovecrafts” —although there is a bare possibility that Weird Tales may be able to present just one more at some future date. August W. Derleth, discoverer of Charles Ward, writes: “A year ago Donald Wandrei and I learnt that there existed two unpublished HOWARD LOVECRAFT novels, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. We found the first fifty-one pages of Kadath, and all of Ward last summer. To the best of our knowledge the remainder of Kadath has been lost, though we are still searching. There is no other Lovecraft story—and the possibility of Kadath turning up is remote.”

  Here, then, is a chance that you cannot afford to miss —for this novel is the very last of the LOVECRAFT works... unless, of course, August Derleth’s quest for The Dream-Quest should be successful.

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward certainly dominated the May, 1941 issue. The name LOVECRAFT stretched across the top portion of the cover in heavy block lettering, an incandescent canary yellow against a greenish black background, in letters three-eighths of an inch high—the largest type ever used on a Weird Tales cover to blazon forth the name of an author—any author. Even Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson never had it so good, when they appeared in the august pages of WT.2*

  The amusing upshot of all the publicity was that The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was eventually discovered and rescued from oblivion—and Weird Tales rejected it!

  The novella did not vanish again, despite this rebuff. Derleth ran it in consecutive issues of The Arkham Sampler, a short-lived periodical which the House published during 1948 and 1949; and the complete text was preserved in the second of the two big omnibus volumes of Lovecraftiana, Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

  While Weird Tales moved forward under new leadership, back in Sauk City in his big house amid the pines on a lonely country road, Derleth was hard at work building a publishing venture that was to be unique in the history of that enterprise. But his work with Lovecraft was not merely limited to the issuance of H.P.L.’s oeuvre in hardcover. Beginning in 1944 with Sleep No More, published in New York by Farrar & Rinehart, Derleth began an ambitious program of editing anthologies of science fiction and weird literature. In his first anthology, he included Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls. In 1946 he included The Shunned House in another Rinehart anthology entitled Who Knocks?; in 1947 came an anthology of macabre verse, Dark of the Moon, with a hefty selection of Lovecraft’s verse; and in swift succession there followed The Night Side, The Sleeping and the Dead, Strange Ports of Call, The Other Side of the Moon, Nights Yawning Peal, Worlds of Tomorrow, and Dark Mind, Dark Heart. Each of them contained a tale by Lovecraft. Anthology after anthology rolled from Derleth’s assembly-line—twenty-four anthologies are known to me, and there may well be others—and the effects of this kind of “public relations” on the growth of Lovecraft’s fame and popularity is incalculable.

  It is to the indefatigable efforts of August Derleth, more than any other influence in the world, that the credit for making H. P. Lovecraft an internationally known writer belongs. In 1926, when he casually sent off a friendly reply to a fan letter from a seventeen-year- old reader in Sauk City, Wisconsin, Lovecraft could hardly have guessed that he had made the friend who was in time to make him famous.

  ***

  1* This book has not discussed Quinn, since he had little or nothing to do with Lovecraft and never wrote anything in the Mythos. But I must remark that Quinn was no stranger to the fine art of composing eulogies, and that he came by his interest in ghoulish fiction most legitimately. Quinn, you see, was Profession editor of Casket and Sunny side, a trade journal for morticians; he had been writing tales for WT on the side, moonlighting all those years!

  2* And that goes for Tennessee Williams, Sax Rohmer, Ray Bradbury, and A. Merritt, too; each at one time or another contributed to Weird Tales.

  14. End of an Epoch

  By the early 1940’s the Cthulhu Mythos had dwindled and very little new material was being written. Lovecraft’s example and encouragement had stimulated several of his friends and fellow writers into adding new stories to the growing literature more as a sort of a private game between a small circle of colleagues than as a major literary movement. Now Lovecraft himself was dead, and Howard as well; Smith had completely stopped writing fiction years before; Long and Wandrei had never actually written stories in the Mythos, but had authored a tale here and there influenced by the Mythos. As for Robert Bloch, he had by the 1940s blossomed into a very popular pulp fiction writer, but his last Mythos story had been published in the year Lovecraft died. Bloch has told me that, for him at least, working in the Mythos was a sort of playful game—at least while Lovecraft himself was alive to appreciate it; once Lovecraft was no longer there, it became more solemn and less fun. The fun, the sense of play was gone. And, anyway, Bloch’s career was rapidly expanding, bringing him further away from the Pulps and towards his eventual fame in radio, movies, and television. By 1939 he was doing radio dramas, solicited from him by a Milwaukee advertising agency, and in 1945 he was approached by a Chicago producer named John Neblett, who wanted him to adapt thirty-nine of his Weird Tales stories into radio plays for a new series called Stay Tuned for Terror.

  But Derleth had, by now, a vested interest in keeping Lovecraft’s name alive, and in keeping the Mythos in the public eye, so to speak. He began writing Lovecraftian pastiches for Dorothy Mcllwraith, and they were quite popular with the readers. He wrote Beyond the Threshold for her September 1941 issue; a novelette entitled The Trail of Cthulhu followed. He used his new series of pastiches to rework the scattered data of the original Lovecraftian Mythos into a formal system. This had never really been attempted; Lovecraft had simply invented new data, new books and demon-gods, and new settings as each particular story needed.

  Bloch wrote to me recently concerning this point. He explained how Lovecraft had assisted in the creation of the data about Ludvig Prinn and his De Vermis Mysteriis, and how other young writers on the edges of the Circle were just beginning to get into the swing of the game. “But by then HPL was gone,” he said sadly. “I’m sure we would have, inevitably, worked out some sort of mutually-agreed-upon bibliography of books of evil wisdom. Probably we’d have set up a definitive pantheon, as well, had not Lovecraft’s death taken such associational items out of the ‘fun’ category for those of us who mourned him. After his passing, I think most of us who continued briefly to use some of the Lovecraftian references did so in the spirit of commemoration more than anything else.”1*

  Derleth began shaping the Mythos anew. It was Derleth who imposed the classification system upon the various members of the Lovecraftian pantheon. Based at first on hints and conjectures in the Lovecraftian stories, Derleth’s own stories described Cthulhu as a water elemental, Shub-Niggurath as a fertility myth, Hastur as an air elemental, and so on, giving the data of the Mythos an overall flavor of formal anthropological relevance straight out of The Golden Bough. Much more so than had Lovecraft, Derleth built each new story on the data structure introduced in previous stories; new books or mythological entities mentioned in one yam reappeared in fuller detail in the next. The Dweller in Darkness (November, 1944) had new things to say about Nyarlathotep; The Watcher from the Sky (July, 1945) took those things for granted. Derleth’s pastiches were solidly constructed stories, not merely exercises in the Lovecraftian style; in fact, with rare perception, he chose not to attempt to imitate the convoluted and adjectival Lovecraftian prose, but to tell his own stories in his own quiet and understated prose.

  Lovecraft’s last survivi
ng aunt died; Robert H. Barlow, the nominal executor of the estate, moved to Mexico and died under rather curious circumstances. Derleth eventually became both the legal executor and the owner of the estate itself, which greatly facilitated his work in this field from then on. Now that he had possession of the Lovecraft papers, he went through them and found fragments of stories as well as outlines and notes. Derleth explored these and was particularly attracted to a piece of writing, entitled The Round Tower, probably based on that minor enigma of American archaeology, the so-called “Round Tower” of Newport. Another fragment, bearing no obvious or textual relationship to the Tower fragment, discussed a curious “rose window.” The two fragments together totaled about twelve hundred words. As Derleth recounted this incident, which was the genesis of The Lurker at the Threshold: The possibility exists that the two sets of fragments were for different stories; yet they appealed to me as manifestly related and as possible to connect, and out of them I constructed and wrote The Lurker at the Threshold, which had nowhere been laid out, planned, or plotted by Lovecraft, but was evoked from his fragments and notes.

  Lurker was published as a full-length original novel, by Arkham House in 1945, under the dual byline of Lovecraft and Derleth. To my taste, is is certainly the best of all the several “posthumous collaborations” which have appeared since under the shared byline.2*

  Most of Derleth’s new Cthulhu Mythos stories appeared in Weird Tales: between 1939 and 1949, Derleth contributed no fewer than ten stories to the growing Mythos, not counting Lurker, most of them novelette length, and all but one of them for Weird Tales. During that decade his was the name most intimately associated with Lovecraft’s, and the two became virtually indistinguishable in the mind of the readers. In 1950, Bloch returned briefly to the Mythos with a new story called The Shadow from the Steeple, a nostalgic sequel to Lovecraft’s last story, The Haunter of the Dark. That year and the year following, he contributed a couple of new Mythos stories, his last being Notebook Found in a Deserted House, which appeared in the issue dated May 1951. (Bloch was then becoming a familiar name on television, but as “a sort of permanent guest panelist,” not as a writer quite yet. For six years during the decade of the ’50s he appeared every week on a Milwaukee-based quiz show called It’s A Draw.) During the same period, Derleth continued appearing in Weird Tales with new Mythos stories, such as Something from Out There in the January 1951 issue, The Keeper of the Key in the May issue, and The Black Island in the issue dated January 1952.