H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Weird Tales, then about twenty-eight years old, was in its final decade. During the late ’40s and early ’50s, the magazine had sunk into the doldrums, largely due, I suppose, to the decline in quality of its contributors. Over its long life Weird Tales had published an enormous number of writers, but it was Howard and Smith and Lovecraft, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Quinn and Hamilton and Derleth, who set the tone and style and flavor of the magazine; in a sense they were the magazine. By 1950, the great triumvirate of Howard, Smith and Lovecraft—Edwin Baird discoveries all—were gone. Edmond Hamilton had moved on to science fiction years before, and had become very popular in that field, eschewing the sort of weird fantasy he had long written for Weird Tales, stories based on the backgrounds of myth; he eventually had a whole science fiction magazine built around his continuing series of lead novels, Captain Future.

  While Quinn and Derleth continued as faithful and steady contributors, they were not enough to carry the whole weight of the magazine. And none of the major writers that had been discovered by Farnsworth Wright —Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, and so on—stayed with the magazine long enough to become as completely identified with it as had their great predecessors.

  Moore and Kuttner first met in California back in 1937, when Bloch made the trek out to stay with Kuttner in Beverly Hills for an extended six weeks’ visit two months after Lovecraft died. Catherine L. Moore came out to California at about the same time for a vacation, and dropped around to meet Kuttner and Bloch. Moore and Kuttner were married in 1940 and stayed in California, making their home in South Laguna. Both writers, under their own individual names and under a number of pseudonyms, became very popular and highly regarded science fiction writers for Campbell’s Astounding, and both before long ceased writing for Weird Tales entirely.

  This was to be the peculiar doom of Weird Tales, and, in a word, it could be called “over-success.” WT was the first of scores of pulp magazines devoted to one or another branch of fantastic literature; but in the days when Howard, Smith and Lovecraft dominated the magazine, WT had no real competition. You either sold your story to Weird or you put it back on the shelf to gather dust, as Howard retired all those unsold “King Kull” yarns that had been bounced by Farnsworth Wright. But by the 1940s there were plenty of other magazines around you could write for, and some of them, such as Astounding, paid better money. Weird Tales simply could not keep its authors: Bloch, for example, discovered that Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures would take humorous, weird, or sf short stories written in a slangy Damon Runyon style, and he began turning out dozens of such for them. Fritz Leiber was lured away by Campbell, and sold the first of his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” tales to Campbell’s prestigious Unknown; these were Sword & Sorcery tales, more or less in the vein of Robert E. Howard, and would have naturally found a home in the pages of WT; but Unknown got them, and Astounding got the bulk of the rest of his early work, which was science fiction. Many more Weird Tales writers found no point in limiting their sales exclusively to that magazine. Frank Belknap Long began selling heavily to such science fiction pulps as Thrilling Wonder Stories, and a bit later, when Ray Bradbury came along, he found a steady demand for his stories and could sell them to just about any magazine in sight—Startling, Thrilling, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Planet Stories—every magazine, in fact, except for those edited by John Campbell, who evidently found Bradbury’s poetic style a bit hard to swallow. Weird Tales got mostly his earliest work and he, too, left them before long.

  Ray Bradbury and Manly Wade Wellman were probably the last important writers Weird Tales discovered; Wellman could sell science fiction if he wanted to, but his heart really belonged to Weird Tales and the best of his early work appeared therein, a series of linked stories about a sort of occult detective of the Jules de Grand in and John Silence variety called Joyn Thunstone. Such tales enlivened the last issues of Weird Tales, but the magazine was foundering by then, a victim of its own startling success. In proving there was a pulp magazine market for fantasy fiction, Weird Tales had encouraged a host of similar and competing publications which were to survive it.

  As Weird Tales celebrated its thirtieth birthday with an anniversary issue featuring many famous names from earlier issues, the end was in sight. One by one the science fiction magazines were going into the smaller, more popular, digest size; the age of the old- fashioned pulp magazine was over. Towards the last, Weird Tales, too, adopted the smaller size, and by 1953 the magazine was in such sad straits that it had begun reprinting stories and even illustrations and cover art from earlier issues in an obvious attempt to economize. It limped along for a year or so longer and towards the end a few new writers of talent began to emerge, such as Joseph Payne Brennan and Manly Bannister, but they arrived a bit too late to save the doomed magazine.

  Derleth had just begun a new series of stories with The Survivor, which appeared in the issue of July, 1954. This was the first of nine short stories or novelettes in the Cthulhu Mythos which were based on story ideas left undeveloped by Lovecraft. It was an exciting idea, and it makes me wonder why Derleth had don’t done it years before; but it was really too late to help Weird Tales.

  The next issue was dated September, 1954. It had a lovely Finlay cover, one of those reprint covers the magazine relied on in its last year or so, and the magazine was curiously shrunken. It had only six stories and two poems in it, and two of the stories were old ones from earlier issues. But that was the end. Weird Tales had published two hundred and seventy-nine issues, and now had published its last. The best, the greatest, the most important and beloved of all the fantasy magazines was gone forever.

  But in those two hundred and seventy-nine issues, Weird Tales had started something too big and too exciting to die with it, for the world of weird and fantastic literature had grown immeasurably in the thirty-one years since Weird Tales had been born, and many Weird Tales alumni had gone on to greater things. By 1954, August Derleth was the author of seventy-four books, a highly respected Wisconsin poet, regional novelist and anthologist, and a publisher of considerable repute (Arkham House issued its forty-eighth publication that year). Throughout its history, Arkham House continued to keep the memory of Weird Tales alive, by issuing collections of tales and poems by the great Weird Tales writers, even including the more recent discoveries, such as Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Joseph Payne Brennan and Manly Wade Wellman.

  By 1954, Robert Bloch was approaching major success. He had made the easy transition from horror fiction to psychological suspense and mystery novels, and some of his books were beginning to go to Hollywood (such as The Scarf, which became a film starring Mercedes McCambridge—low-budget, black and white, but very effective). He was to hit the top of his profession in a rather ironic way, through a novel called Psycho which he published in 1959. Film rights to Psycho were purchased, at an unexciting sum, by one of those faceless firms of go-betweens; in the case of Psycho, however, they were representing one of the greatest and most popular of all filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock, who turned the film into a masterpiece which was to make more money than any other black and white film ever made.

  Bloch, of course, had no share in the enormous profits; however, his agents quickly capitalized on the extraordinary success of the film, and something like twenty of his novels and collections of stories came pouring out of the paperback publishing houses, each labeled “By the author of PSYCHO,” in prominent letters. Bloch himself began writing for the movies and television but not, as is often erroneously said, because of the phenomenal success of Hitchcock’s Psycho. The fact of the matter is that Bloch was already in Hollywood writing scripts when Psycho was premiered. On this point Bloch is most insistent:

  I secured an agent, the agent secured me several additional assignments, and on the strength of all this I determined to make the move West with my family. A Writer’s Guild strike forestalled writing—so I stayed on the Coast and didn’t bring the family out until July, shor
tly after the strike was settled. By this time I’d also received my first screen assignment at Warner Brothers, plus more television... I go into this in detail, because most people think I was brought out to the Coast as a result of Psycho. Such was far from the case—and while this “by the author of Psycho” label did assuredly open doors in the years ahead, it really had nothing to do with my breaking into TV and films—I was already out here almost a year before the picture was released!

  Bloch, in some cases, began writing movies based on his own stories, in others he wrote original screenplays —for such films as The Cabinet of Caligari (1962), The Night Walker (1964), and Torture Garden (1968). He went on to become one of the few screen writers truly adept at psychological horror and suspense. Far from bearing a grudge against Hitchcock for purchasing Psycho so obliquely (and so inexpensively), Bloch subsequently sold twenty scripts or stories to the television series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” His most recent movie is called The House That Dripped Blood (1971), a deliciously shuddersome screen anthology of Bloch’s short stories, with an added attraction for nostalgic fans such as myself—for I remember reading these stories many, many years ago... in Weird Tales!

  ***

  1* Letter from Robert Bloch dated June 7, 1971.

  2* I count eleven of these posthumous collaborations as definitely belonging to the Mythos (see this book’s Appendix p. 192), although there are several others.

  15. The Last Disciple

  Derleth’s tireless championing of H. P. Lovecraft eventually paid off in some rather surprising ways. All those weird fiction anthologies he edited served not only to keep Lovecraft’s name alive, but to spread his fame among somewhat more literate circles than those of the readership of Weird Tales.

  The anthologies were handsomely produced, containing stories of obvious quality and authors of known repute, and they were very well received. There had always been a small, select group of influential literary people who retained a connoisseur’s affection for well- crafted tales of the macabre—gentlemen like Basil Davenport, a judge of the Book of the Month Club, and critic Vincent Starrett. By bringing Lovecraft to their attention, in the company of Algernon Blackwood and A. E. Coppard and “Saki” and other known writers, Derleth performed an invaluable service. Between the end of World War II and the present time, scores of paperback and hardcover anthologies of the macabre were published, and there is hardly a one of them that does not contain a story by Lovecraft. This is almost entirely due to August Derleth.

  Even Hollywood, which is very far away from Arkham, Massachusetts, in most ways, discovered H. P. Lovecraft. A comparatively new British movie company, Hammer Films, proved in the 1960s that the grand old Hollywood horror classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf-Man and The Mummy could be remade anew in color and earn their keep. Homegrown competition emerged in a firm called American-International, which tried to reach the same market and found that just about every fantasy or horror classic from King Kong to She already was being refilmed. A director of considerable talents named Roger Corman turned to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and signed up Hollywood character actor Vincent Price, who appeared in swift succession as a Poesque villain-hero in such movies as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Masque of the Red Death. When he found himself scraping the bottom of the bucket (Poe-wise), Corman was advised to turn to H. P. Lovecraft as the nearest next best. Five or six Lovecraft films have been made thus far, and not all of them are completely awful, although most of them sadly neglect the Lovecraftian mood and atmosphere, even those laid in “crumbling, witch-haunted old Arkham.” Perhaps the best of the lot, certainly the closest to the real Lovecraftian vein, was scripted by magazine writer Richard Matheson, himself a Weird Tales alumnus; it actually mentioned Cthulhu by name, and showed briefly on screen a copy of the Necronomicon. (In typically klutzy Hollywood style, the film was released —so help me!—as “Edgar Alan Poe’s The Haunted Palace.”)

  As the movies brought Lovecraft’s name before the film-going public, Arkham House continued to keep his work alive and in print. All of his stories, even his notebooks and juvenilia, have been preserved in hardcover by now, as have his poems. To date, three volumes of his Selected Letters have been published, with several more to come. And the fame of Lovecraft has been spread by such ways into most unusual areas, such as that of contemporary rock music. A rock group from Chicago, calling itself “The H. P. Lovecraft,” has been rather popular, and albums of their music have been issued. The group knows what it’s doing and did not merely pick the name at random or from idle whim. One of their songs is entitled “The White Ship,” and the group’s company is known as “Dunwich Productions,” while their music publishing affiliate is named “Yuggoth”—with, it should be pointed out, the amused permission of August Derleth.

  Unfortunately, even as Lovecraft himself was, the group seems to have been somewhat ahead of its time, and disbanded as recently as August, 1969. A new group is now recording for Warner Brothers under the name of “Lovecraft,” a correspondent informs me, but it is not composed of the same people.

  Through a unique combination of practical business acumen and inspired editorial taste, August Derleth guided Arkham House past every storm and shoal from 1939 to the present. He lost his “corner” on the market in the late 1940s when flocks of fantasy fans, then mature men with several years’ back pay socked away in stateside banks, came back from the war to launch short-lived publishing ventures comparable to Arkham House. One- or two-man firms with such names as Gnome Press, Fantasy Press, Shasta Press, Fantasy Publishing Company, Hadley Publishing Company, Prime Press, Carcosa House, etc., sprang up all over the place. Some of them lasted for years, and while most of the small specialty houses dipped more into the science fiction classics than into the pages of Weird Tales for their material, there was more than one occasion on which Arkham House lost an author —as when Gnome Press carried off Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore. One by one, however, all these publishing houses went under from a combination of bad luck, bad distribution, and want of sufficient funds. Only Arkham House has weathered the storm unimpaired. Today a new crop of more-or-less competing houses has arisen, including Advent, a Chicago publisher which has thus far limited its program to science fiction criticism, bibliography and memoirs, and Jack Chalker’s recently founded Mirage Press, which operates out of Baltimore. In time, I have no doubt, still other small firms specializing in science fiction, fantasy and weird literature or critica will arise; Arkham House (in 1972 in its thirty-second year) has shown that it can be done.

  Derleth wrote a bookful of his posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft and issued it under the Arkham House imprint as The Survivor and Others in 1957. The readership for books with Lovecraft’s name in the byline continued unappeased. Derleth had published various odds and ends of Lovecraftian criticism, memoirs and tributes for years, beginning with Marginalia in 1944, and continuing with Something About Cats in 1949. There was enough material around for several more of these, so he assembled The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces for publication in 1959; a last collection of miscellanea, The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces came out some years later. Early in 1962, or shortly before, he got the idea of editing an anthology for Arkham House of all-new stories by “Arkham authors,” and solicited tales from Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, David H. Keller and H. Russell Wakefield for a book to be called Dark Mind, Dark Heart. He was also lucky enough to locate unpublished stories by Robert E. Howard, William Hope Hodgson and M. P. Shiel.1*

  Derleth added to the contents the eighth of his posthumous Cthulhuoid collaborations with Lovecraft a tale with the distinctly unLovecraftian title of Witches’ Hollow, and also included a brief tale of his own, written under his “Stephen Grendon” pseudonym. The book appeared in 1962. The most notable among the seventeen stories in the book, if not exactly the best of the lot, was a first story by an otherwise unknown young British writer named J. Ramsey Campbell, called The Church in Hig
h Street, which teemed with references to such familiar matters as the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth, the forbidden plateau of Leng, dark Yuggoth on the rim, Azathoth, Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep. It was surely a story in the Cthulhu Mythos; the first Mythos story by a brand new writer. No new writer had entered the Mythos since Henry Kuttner published The Salem Horror in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

  This was no mere one-shot appearance; two years later Arkham House published a whole bookful of Campbell’s Mythos stories called The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). J. Ramsey Campbell became the first of a whole new school of Mythos writers.

  J. Ramsey Campbell—or Ramsey Campbell, as he now likes to sign his stories—is a young British Lovecraft fan, born in Liverpool in 1946. He began to write at the tender age of seven and sent Derleth some of his first stories in the Mythos when in his early teens; when Derleth published The Church in High Street in 1962, Campbell was only sixteen. Derleth told me that in those early stories Campbell made the mistake of attempting to use the familiar Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth locales without any real understanding or knowledge of the American landscape. Derleth sent them back with the suggestion that Campbell invent a British milieu for the stories, and this Campbell promptly did, inventing a mythical Severn Valley region which served as his own British version of the “Miskatonic County” invented by Lovecraft.