Πέμπτη 7 Σεπτεμβρίου 2017

Fact meets Fiction - Ανταρκτική - Βουνά της τρέλλας

Fiction meets fact.

Lovecraft meets Byrd.

Τα βουνά της τρέλας

Ανταρτική... Κάτσε.. εκεί δεν διαδραματίζεται η ιστορία στα "Βουνά της Τρέλας", το κορυφαίο βιβλίο τρόμου του Φίλιπς Έντουαρντ Λάβκραφτ με έναν ερευνητή να πηγαίνει με αεροπλάνα σε εξερεύνηση της Ανταρκτικής μέχρι που συναντούν μια οροσειρά με κάθετα βουνά και όταν ανεβαίνουν πάνω από αυτή βρίσκουν μια εγκατελειμένη αρχαία πόλη με τους "Μεγάλους Παλιούς" να τους καταδιώκουν? (δε λέω το τέλος μη το spoiler-άσω άλλο...)?

Ναύαρχος Byrd

Το βιβλίο "Βουνά της τρέλλας" γράφτηκε αρχές του 31' αφότου είχε επιστρέψει ο Ναύρχος Byrd (1928-1930) και σίγουρα μελέτησε ενδελεχώς τα δημοσιεύματα της εποχής για τον εξοπλισμό και τις περιπέτειες του εκεί, τον καιρό, τα φαινόμενα και φυσικά το ενδεχόμενο να υπάρχει κάτι περισσότερο από σκέτος πάγος.

(τα screenshots που ακολουθούν είναι από το New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, μια μεγάλη μελέτη/ανάλυση για τις επιρροές του συγγραφέα και αναφέρουν και τη σύνδεση με τον Byrd -σε επίπεδο έμπνευσης για το βιβλίο του-)

Περισσότερα στοιχεία για ομοιότητες/διαφορές μεταξύ fact/fiction των Byrd/Lovecraft όσον αφορά την αποστολή στην Ανταρκτική και το βιβλίο "τα Βουνά της τρέλλας" μπορούν να βρεθούν στο ακόλουθο κείμενο που έχει αλιευθεί από τον παρακάτω σύνδεσμο: https://archive.org/stream/Lovecraft_Studies_14v06n01_1987-Spring_CosmicJukebox/Lovecraft_Studies_14v06n01_1987-Spring_CosmicJukebox_djvu.txt

Full text of "Lovecraft Studies #14v06n01 (1987 Spring) (CosmicJukebox)"

See other formats

Lovecraft
Studies 14

CONTENTS

3 What Is the Cthulhu Mythos? A Panel Discussion

31 Behind the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft and the Antarctic

in 1930 Jason C. Eckhardt

39 Reviews:

H. P. Lovecraft, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
Reviewed by Steven J. Mariconda

Henry L. P. Beckwith, Lovecraft' s Providence and Adjacent Parts
Reviewed by Will Murray

Peter Cannon, The Chronology out of Time: Dates in the Fiction
of H. P. Lovecraft
Reviewed by S. T. Joshi

38,

44 Briefly Noted

Lovecraft Studies

Voltime 6, Number 1
Spring 1987

Published April 1, 1987

Cover by Jason C. Eckhardt

Lovecraft Studies is published twice a year, in Spring and in Fall. Price
per issue is $4.00 in U.S. funds. Orders should be sent to the publisher,
Necronomicon Press, 101 LocJcwood Street, West Warwick, RI 02893.

Articles and letters should be sent to the editor, S. T. Joshi, 281 4th
Street #3, Jersey City, NJ 07302, and must be accompanied by a self-ad-
dressed stamped envelope if return is desired. All reviews are assigned.
Literary rights for articles and reviews will reside with Lovecraft Studies
for one year after publication, at which time they shall revert to the
respective authors. Payment is made in contributor's copies.

What is the Cthulhu Mythos?

A Panel Discussion
with

Donald R. Burleson, S. T. Joshi, Will Murray,
Robert M. Price, and David E. Schultz

O n Friday, October 31, 1986, at the World Fantasy Convention in
Providence, R.I., a panel discussion was held on the question
of what constitutes the Cthulhu Mythos, Moderator S, T, Joshi
and the four other panelists discussed the question and related
issues for nearly two hours, beginning with preliminary state-
ments by each member and followed by discussion amongst the pan-
elists and intermittent questions and comments by members of the audience.
Nearly the whole of the discussion is transcribed below. Although each
panelist has slightly touched up his remarks, the flavour of the live dis-
cussion has been preserved; and every effort has been made to identify the
speakers from the floor. Quotations from Lovecraft, usually made off the
cuff, have been verified, although in many cases the panelists have merely
paraphrased Lovecraft' s words or put words into Lovecraft' s or others'
mouths rhetorically. Certain parts of the discussion not bearing on the
central topic have been excised . Appended to the panel discussion are sup-
plementary statements by each panelist , written specifically for appearance
here . — S. T. J.

Joshi: ... If you have kept up on the recent issues of Lovecraft
Studies and other things, you will know that one of the burning issues of
the day is the Cthulhu Mythos; namely, what is it, or is it anything? We
want to address this issue at the moment. ... I think there are very di~
vergent views as to what the Cthulhu Mythos is , or if it is anything at all ,
whether it exists or not, and I think we will start things off on that is-
sue.

Burleson: First of all, as has been quite widely discussed by now, the
term "Cthulhu Mythos" is one of which Lovecraft would probably not have ap-
proved had he ever heard it, which he didn't. Various substitutions have
been proposed, like "Lovecraft Mythos", "Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth", etc.,
etc., and now, of course, the issue has recently been raised whether there
should be any such term at all. So it becomes more and more difficult to
know exactly where we go from here. I am Inclined to think that such a
term is not entirely without its use. If we wanted to use such a term as
"Lovecraft Mythos", for example, we can perhaps do so productively, but I
think we need to give some thought to what it means, and what it does not

mean.

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SPRING

There has been an awful lot of ink spilled over, for example, what
stories "belong" to the Mythos, what stories do not "belong" to the Mythos;

I can remember years ago reading Lin Carter's A Look behind the Cthulhu
Mythos and seeing endless agonising over whether "The Colour out of Space"
or "The Hound" was a Mythos story. I'm inclined to think that that is
largely a waste of time — to try to decide which stories "are" Mythos sto-
ries and which stories "are not". In the first place, I have trouble my-
self with the notion that if the Mythos is anything, it is a collection of
works of some sort. I'm not sure that that's really the way the term "myth-
os" is customarily used.

There has been a lot written recently, for example, on the differences
between the "Lovecraft Mythos" (whatever that is) and the Christian mythos,
and I think we can look at that as a clue to how the word "mythos" should
and should not be used. Certainly, when we speak of the "Christian mythos",
for example, we don't meM a collection of works of some kind — at least, I
don't think that's what we mean: we don't mean the Bible and the works of
Thomas Aquinas and the wor)cs of various theologians euid so forth. I think
what we mean by a term like "mythos" in that setting is a sort of world
view, a philosophical system by which somebody tries to answer the question:
"What is the universe all about? What is the place of human)cind (if any)
in it?" I'm inclined to think that looking at the term "mythos" as meaning
something more like that, we can more nearly give meaning to the term "Love-
craft Mythos", because I think that that, if anything, is what the Love-
craft Mythos is. I think it's a unique expression of a world view.

I think that Lovecraft had a certain vision, I think he tried to ex-
press it through fiction and in other ways, and it seems to me that a lot
of the attempts at putting the stories "in" the Mythos or "out of" the Myth-
os are pointless; I think the most meaningful thing you can do ultimately
is to say, first of all, that the Mythos is a certain kind of world view
that sees the universe in a certain way (more edx>ut that, I hope, a little
later) , and I think that what basically Lovecraft is doing with some sto-
ries is more centrally expressing that world view emd with some other sto-
ries not so centrally expressing that world view. At least, by what I see
in the concept of the Lovecraft Mythos, I see a story like "The Shadow out
of Time" expressing a key idea in the Mythos very centrally, whereas I see
a story (albeit good in other ways) like "Cool Air", for example, as ex-
pressing the concept of the Mythos only very peripherally. My own feeling
about the thing is that it's not really a collection of works in which ^ one
can either pigeonhole certain items or not pigeonhole them; I think it's
an expression of a world view. I think there's an entire spectrum of pos-
sibility as to how strongly a given story reflects the world view or does
not do so.

Joshi: I think we all know, or should know, that the term "Cthulhu
Mythos" was really coined, or at least popularised, by August Derleth. Re-
cently David E. Schultz has done a great deal of work in tracing exactly
how Derleth went about giving birth to what we may call the adulterated

1987

WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

version of the Mythos. I think, Dave, you want to explain how Derleth went
about doing that; and if we can isolate the Derleth additions or misinter-
pretations and then clear those away, we can get a better view of what Love-
craft's own conceptions were.

Schultz: First of all, I agree with Don — he just said something that
rang a bell with me and hadn't occurred to me, and it put something in place
for me. I think that the Lovecraft Mythos is Lovecraft's world view. I
have a problem with the term, and maybe in time we may come to grow out of
that problem. "Lovecraft Mythos" may be seen by some as a substitute for
"Cthulhu Mythos", and so people may tend to think of it still as a certain
bunch of stories, along with stories written by other people, which somehow
form this body of work. I think that all of Lovecraft's stories reflect
his world view. All except a very few reflect it very strongly, including
a story like "Cool Air", which Don might say is peripheral. They all re-
flect his outlook and attitude, the way he saw things.

As S. T. said, August Derleth steered all this in a certain wrong di-
rection. In 1931 he had written to Lovecraft (we don't have the letter he
wrote to Lovecraft) and Lovecraft in reply said, "I don't think the term
'Mythology of Hastur' is a very good one to use to describe my stories."
Derleth substituted the word "Cthulhu" later , so it amounts to being the
same thing. So he came up with this idea long before Lovecraft died. When
Lovecraft died, he was free to exploit that term and develop it as he wanted
to. In writing to certain people, like Farnsworth Wright, Derleth would use
the term "Cthulhu mythology" and he seemed to perceive it as certain stories
that Lovecraft wrote, stories which “belonged" to this mythology. Unfortu-
nately, he misunderstood how other writers played this literary game: he
kept saying that Clark Ashton Smith "contributed" to the Mythos, that Frank
Belknap Long "contributed" to the Mythos. That's not true. These people
had written stories that Lovecraft, when he wrote a story, borrowed a term
or a name from, and that was the extent of that. So we supposedly have a
bunch of so-called "Mythos" stories by Smith that he didn't really write
that way — he didn't say, "Well, I'm going to write a story and borrow Love-
craft's mythology." In fact, Clark Ashton Smith had prepared a list for
August Derleth of what he called "Stories Using the Mythology of the Old
Ones", and he gave little synopses of what these stories are about, and he
says, "Here's where I introduce Tsathoggua," "Here's where I introduce the
wizard Eibon." In only one of those stories does he say anything about
Lovecraft's stuff: he says, "Here I use the name Yog-Sothoth but I spell
it differently."

So there is really no contribution to this body of stories; August Der-
leth interpreted it that way. He made a definite attempt to "contribute
stories; he wanted to get on the bandwagon. Lovecraft would tell Derleth,
"The reason you read that here and there — in my story and Smith's — is that
we just throw these things back and forth, for background." Lovecraft says
that a lot — these things are meant to be background. When Derleth uses
these elements, he puts them in the foreground: he writes stories about the
magical monsters, books, and all that stuff. Lovecraft didn't write about

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

those things per se; he wrote eUjout other things, and he used these elements
to form the background of whatever it was he wanted to talk about. So Der-
leth really gave this a bum steer very early. When Lovecraft died, there
was nobody to object, and everybody looked to August Derleth as being the
"main disciple", so he must be telling us what is right? he knew Lovecraft.
He wrote eibout nine Mythos stories before Lovecraft died, and I don't know
if Lovecraft ever saw any of them — he may have; they talked about them.

This was very much on Derleth' s mind — he wrote more Mythos stories than
Lovecraft did, if you want to use that term. Anyway, I think that Don
brought up a good point; if you want to use the term "Lovecraft Mythos",
it has to be recognised that we're not going to bring in all the things by
other people. "Lovecraft Mythos" is really a term that describes his en-
tire body of work, not just stories, but his essays, his poetry. They are
not stories alaout monsters, they're stories about him, about people. I see
a big area of study opening up if you look at that, and I hope sometime to
present more of this information eibout how the Cthulhu Mythos developed and
why maybe the concept ought to be laid to rest. It's OK to read Mythos fan
fiction, I suppose, but I wouldn't want to drag Lovecraft into it — he really
has nothing to do with that.

Joshi: Bob Price may or may not (if I understand him correctly) have a
different view on this matter, and perhaps his view does encompass the wri-
tings of others, and perhaps you want to elaborate on that.

Price: Well, I would really not disagree with what Don or Dave said. I
don't tend to refer to the philosophy or world view of Lovecraft when I talk
about the Mythos in Crypt of Cthulhu, for instance, or in a number of re-
lated things that I write, although that is an altogether proper way of
using the term; I see it as just a different kind of semantic thing, per-
haps. If one were to use the phrase "Lovecraft Mythos", that's no doubt
what it would best apply to; I tend to have a more inclusive but differently
focused thing in mind when I speak of the "Cthulhu Mythos", because I do in

fact have the work of others in view. What I am most interested in person-

ally, I suppose, is the group of gods, grimoires, and legends that Lovecraft
refers to, or has characters refer to, in his stories, under the rubric of

the "Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles of myth", as one character says in "The

Whisperer in Darkness"; and there he means, of course, as he says in one of
his letters, an "artificial mythology" or his "pantheon", as he speaks of
it elsewhere.

Now no fool would (well, perhaps some fools would, but this fool
wouldn't) say that Lovecraft believed in these gods and these books; of
course not. I met someone last night who did, but that's obviously out of
the question. But the thing is, I do find it interesting that Lovecraft
did such a good job of creating so convincing and realistic an analogue to
actual cycles of mythology. People go overboard when they try to system-
atise it into some kind of systematic theology of the Old Ones, as I've seen
people do; they can't imagine that there could be any inconsistencies in
Lovecraft, and that's just as foolish, especially since he was actually
trying to be inconsistent: he said he was trying to create the same kind

1987

WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

of inconsistency one sees in any ancient legend-cycle— variants here and
there, differences as to how this being and that are related, differences
as to what group and another thought of this or that being, you name it.
There are different conceptions of what the Necronomicon is; it changes
from story to story: is it an occult Bible? is it a daemonolatry that warns
you against what it's describing? It is different even within one story;
it's intentionally inconsistent. So there is no system, but there is a
cycle of mythological ideas amd entities. I know that a lot of other read-
ers of Lovecraft are no doubt fascinated by Lovecraft himself, Lovecraft's
ideas, Lovecraft's mood, his plots; I'm interested in all those, too, but
a lot of people like me are interested in the Cthulhu Mythos as the cycle
of artificial lore. I get a big kick out of fine-tuning and tinkering with
that, as I would with any real system of mythology, and I'm certain there
are a lot of readers who are similarly fascinated.

However, you do have to draw a lot of lines, even once you delimit the
subject that way, because there are various mythological creations of Love-
craft that would not even fit into that; his Dunsanian stories are not
"Cthulhu Mythos" stories, though some of those stories sometimes draw on
the Mythos. These are confusing but legitimate distinctions, I think.

I agree with everyone here that these stories by Lovecraft do not com-
prise the Cthulhu Mythos; that is an error. If you wanted, you could per-
haps speak of a "Cthulhu Mythos canon" of stories, maybe, but the Mythos
isn't stories, the Mythos is lore. Various stories of Lovecraft draw on
that lore to one degree or cmother. I think that's one of the great con-
tributions of Dirk Mosig to this whole topic, pointing out that fact, which
should have been self-evident but hasn't been to a lot of people.

Lovecraft was very meticulous in creating this mythology; he obviously
got quite a kick out of it himself: he was very taken up with this or that
god, he was tickled to be able to have Smith's Tsathoggua in one of his
stories, and so on. It's obvious that he enjoyed this, and a lot of fans
do today; I think Lovecraft would have gone along with that. This prob-
ably isn't the place to do it, but it would be easy to go into the partic-
ular relations between Lovecraft's own mythos and the parallel myth-cycles
of other writers; for instance. Smith. Smith did view himself as having
added to the Cthulhu Mythos; according to one reference in his letters to
Derleth, he said, "I believe I added about as much to the Mythos as I took
from it." And he said he thought that Tsathoggua and the Book of Bibon
were his additions to it; that's a couple less than most people would or-
dinarily think. And Lovecraft regarded other people's contributions as
just that: contributions to his expanding Mythos. So I think that the
"Lovecraft Mythos" would be in a sense smaller than the "Cthulhu Mythos".
Lovecraft himself blessed the additions of others to it; so I think that
"Cthulhu Mythos" is proper as a broader category.

There are some stories that we now think of as having to do with it
that probably don't; for example, I think that Frank Long's stories, "The
Hounds of Tindalos" and The Horror from the Hills, probably were intended
as having nothing to do with the Cthulhu Mythos, and probably Lovecraft

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

didn't think so, either. He made references to the Hounds and Chaugnar
Faugn elsewhere, but he also made references to the King in Yellow, and so
on — that doesn't mean that he wanted to incorporate them all. The problem
that created the kind of wild confusion that exists now in Cthulhu Mythos
fiction is what that great whipping-boy August Derleth did. There are a
couple of problems here: he added his "Elder Gods" business, he made the
Old Ones into elementals, and now it's almost clich€ that those were in-
credible mistakes. But the fundamental error that he made, or at least the
fundamental transformation, was that he did seem to go on the assumption
that stories "belong to" euid make up the Mythos, and once you go on that
assumption, it suddenly seems that every element that appears in any Mythos
story is automatically drafted into the Mythos; therefore, the Hounds of
Tindalos, Hbbo-Sathla, Clark Ashton Smith's grandmother, anything that hap-
pens to be mentioned is part of the Cthulhu Mythos! And of course, there
are many novels now written by various individuals that have everything but
the kitchen sink and probably that, too, in the Cthulhu Mythos, and that is
rank growth that does get hopelessly confusing. That doesn't necessarily
make it bad, though much of the fiction written on those assumptions happens
also to be bad. And as for fan fiction, enough said. (I say that as one
of the sinners in that category myself.)

You have to draw a lot of lines even to define the Cthulhu Mythos; you
have to know where it came from. I think it's perfectly legitimate to speak
of a Cthulhu Mythos contributed to by Lovecraft and his friends in his own
day, not as a body of stories but rather as a body of lore. The only dis-
tinction I would make is the transformation of the Mythos from Derleth on-
ward, compared to that which came before, with the line that I've just
drawn. If you know what you're talking about, I don't think you'r neces-
sarily foisting all these ideas on to Lovecraft merely by using the term
"Cthulhu Mythos"; you just have to make careful distinctions.

Joshi: Well, I'm not sure I agree with anything that anybody said here,
but in order to disagree still further, why don't we let Will Murray have
his say. He wrote a very interesting article — "An Uncompromising Look at
the Cthulhu Mythos" {Lovecraft Studies #12) — which in a way triggered this
whole controversy, and maybe he wants to get his two cents' worth in.

Murray: I should confess I wrote that article at S. T. 's behest, some-
what with tongue in cheek; by the time I finished writing the article I was
dead serious. I'm not sure what I really believe, but it's my feeling that
with "The Call of Cthulhu" Lovecraft did something fundamentally new and
different — which we don't need to recap — and it was recognised as a new
step in horror/ science fiction. Even though it appeared in a pulp maga-
zine, Weird Tales, it was clearly something new; it was a quantxim leap ahead
into a new kind of imaginative fiction. Lovecraft, after three or four sto-
ries, allowed himself to lose control over his creations, and it happened
this way: he wrote "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Colour out of Space" (which
I contend is a Mythos story, if in fact there is such a thing as a Mythos
story), and "The Dunwich Horror". You're all aware of the fact that the
Mythos began when writers began using Lovecraft ' s ideas and he their ideas —

1987

WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

Smith, Long, all those guys — and what happened in my opinion is that with
"The Whisperer in Darkness" Lovecraft begins to absorb other people's sto-
ries and concepts into his stories just as they had been doing with his
ideas, and he lost primacy over his own writing. He allowed something that
he should never have allowed as a writer, but something he obviously al-
lowed as a friend and as a kind of fan himself: he allowed other people to
use his ideas and he theirs. It was name-dropping, it was tipping the hat,
it was having fun, it was letting it build beyond Lovecraft's stories, it
was playing a joke on the Weird Tales readers — to see references to the
HecTonomicon , Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, etc., in stories by different writers,
including stuff Lovecraft ghosted — and it got out of control. Lovecraft
did some things in "The Whisperer in Darkness", mentioning the "Atlantean
high-priest Klarkash-Ton" (Clark Ashton Smith) — it's a joke, and it became
a series of jokes, and it reached its ultimate expression, I think, with
"The Haunter of the Dark", where he killed off Robert Bloch because Bloch
had killed him off in a previous story, "The Shambler from the Stars". And
then Bloch killed him off again. Lovecraft just lost control over whatever
he was doing — whether you want to call it the Lovecraft Mythos, the Cthulhu
Mythos, or anything else — wherever he was going.

You have to understand that a writer doesn't set down what he's going
to do in concrete: even when he has something in print, it doesn't mean
that he can't revise his ideas in later stories, and a contradiction may
occur and has occurred in Lovecraft in terms of nomenclature and concepts.
But a writer evolves over stories. His fiction, his ideas evolve; so wher-
ever Lovecraft was going in terms of a "pure vision", a world view, whatever
you want to call it, it stopped after three stories. It stopped dead, and
it got into a lot of horseplay. It never got back on track.

In fact, Lovecraft, by dropping the names of Hastur and Carcosa and
whatever from Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and certain other writers, started
that as a way of making his mythology seem as if it were an expression of
all mythologies. I think this is a fundamental thing about the Cthulhu
Mythos: Lovecraft wrote it in such a way that the Mythos was a reflection —
in fact, it was the truth behind mythologies all over the world, whether
Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs, or Grecian oracles, or whatever. "The Dun-
wich Horror" is very much a Greek myth made modern, made cosmic. So what
Lovecraft did was that he used other writers' ideas, he let other writers —
contemporary writers — use his ideas, and it all became a colossal literary
game. And it became less serious, even though the joke in the context of
the first printings of his stories was only known to his fellow writers.

Now we all know the in-jokes, we all know where it came from, and we lost
the sense of wonder, the sense of awe; although we've gained a lot of know-
ledge. I think that, wherever Lovecraft was going with the Mythos, he
hadn't developed it, it hadn't thought it through. He was revising it,
and it got derailed; and it remained derailed. And when he died prema-
turely, August Derleth took what was already building and tried to system-
atise it — a mistake — and ran off with it as a property; he took control
over it, which I believe he had no right to do.

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

And so, the Mythos, whatever it is, exists on several levels: it exists
with the first three stories that are pure Mythos stories, where Lovecraft
had a pure, serious vision that was evolving; and it exists subsequently
starting with "The Whisperer in DarJcness”, where it becomes a group activ-
ity; and then it exists on a third level, which is truly the Cthulhu Mythos,
where everybody jumps in and Lovecraft has nothing to do with it because
he's dead. And so we have three stages of the Mythos. Lovecraft also did
something else which makes it difficult to say what, even in terms of his
work, is Cthulhu Mythos or not; and that's his penchant for dropping ncunes
out of earlier stories: he pulled in Randolph Carter, he talked about his
"Arkham cycle" and yet Arkham began appearing in almost every story. So
ultimately everything becomes subsumed into what we would call the Love-
craft Mythos, because in his later Dunsanian stories, like The Dream-Quest
of Unknown Kadath, he mentions Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth, etc. Every-
thing becomes interconnected, almost inextricable, because he's cross-ref-
erencing things, and that became an aggravated form of this literary game.

So it's a mess; and it's a mess because of Lovecraft, not because of Der-
leth — although Derleth is to be held accountable for other sins — but be-
cause Lovecraft did not retain strict control over his characters and con-
cepts. And in part that was allowable because he didn't work with charac-
ters; nobody ripped off Wilbur Whateley or Peabodie or any of the other
human characters, the protagonists. (Lovecraft 's stories really don't have
protagonists.) They ripped off concepts, they ripped off tentacles, they
ripped off books — things that you can't copyright. If Lovecraft's stories
were about a single hero, you couldn't do that: no one could rip off James
Bond while Ian Fleming was alive, or Superman, or Tarzan, or Sherlock
Holmes. Lovecraft allowed this to happen and he paid the price, in terms
of losing the purity of his vision, in terms of losing control over what
he was trying to do, and in terms of never developing what he wanted to do
without interference: everybody was jumping in, including people he res-
pected and admired, and whom he allowed to jump in, like Clark Ashton Smith;
and everything got derailed.

Joshi: I think that every panelist now wants to disagree with every
other one, and they obviously have. I'm going to attempt to disagree with
all four simultaneously. I think we have to be a lot more careful in one
sense: It is not that the Cthulhu Mythos or the Lovecraft Mythos is Love-
craft's world view; Lovecraft's world view has a very specific term, and
he called it mechanistic materialism. Lovecraft knew enough about philos-
ophy to know what philosophical tradition he was working in: in metaphysics
he was a mechanistic materialist, in ethics he was more or less an Epicur-
ean/Nietzschean/Santayanan, if you will. He was very well read in philos-
ophy. The Lovecraft Mythos or Cthulhu Mythos is not the world view, but
(I think) a series of plot devices to implement the world view. If you
want to divide some stories into Mythos stories or not, you can, but it is
certainly true that not only all Lovecraft's stories but everything he ever
wrote is an expression of his world view. It's the world view that's the
core, and everything he wrote, from the least little postcard to "The Shadow

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out of Time”, is an expression of that view. Around 1926 (or even a little
earlier, perhaps, when he conceived “The Call of Cthulhu”) , he began to
sense: "Ah, here is one very ingenious or powerful way to implement or get
my world view across." Now what is that world view? The world view essen-
tially states that mankind occupies some very tiny, insignificant position
in the whole realm of space and time: we are atoms lost in the vortices of
infinity. Every story is an expression of that world view, every poem is
an expression of that view, although I confess that "Old Christmas" is a
little hard to fit into that category; every essay is directly or indirectly
an expression of his view of the world.

I think all that the Cthulhu Mythos is (if you want to call it any-
thing) is simply a series of little tricks that Lovecraft had to get this
world view across most powerfully. And the reason why Cthulhu Mythos writ-
ings by other writers fail is because they don't share Lovecraft' s world
view; certainly Derleth did not, and certainly someone like Brian Lumley
does not — he's poles apart from Lovecraft philosophically. And even people
who more or less share Lovecraft' s world view — like maybe Clark Ashton
Smith, I guess. Long perhaps, or later Ramsey Campbell — don't write very
effective Mythos stories because they're trying to put on the cloak of
someone else. Derleth was not writing anything that was natural to him
when he was writing Cthulhu Mythos stories. His world view was totally
different: he was a Catholic, he was raised in the Midwest, he didn't know
anything about New England, he certainly didn't subscribe to the whole cos-
mic philosophy of Lovecraft; so he tried to hammer his views into that
mould, and he couldn't do it very well.

So here we have the Cthulhu Mythos — these little plot elements Love-
craft threw in to get his world view across. That's why I don't agree with
Will Murray when he says that when he let other people into it, it was a
weakening element: I don't think that something like "The Shadow out of
Time", simply because it mentions the "serpent-men of Valusia" (which I
take it is from Robert E. Howard — a little tip of the hat to Robert E. How-
ard) has any bearing on the powerfulness of that story. The story is un-
believably powerful anyway, whether that mention is there or not. "The
Whisperer in Darkness" is not weakened because he throws in the "Commoriom
myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton" ; the cumu-
lative effect of that story is not diminished.

So everything Lovecraft wrote is an expression of the world view; the
Cthulhu Mythos is only something he came by because he found it very con-
venient to get that world view across. Now what is the Cthulhu Mythos?
what are the elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, if there are any? Well, I
guess it's the gods; it's the mythical places that he dreamed up, like
Arkham, Innsmouth, Dunwich; it's the grimoires, the Necronomicon , what have
you. But I don't think these were very important to Lovecraft, because in
his letters he constantly jokes about them: he signs a letter "Abdul Al-
hazred"; he writes a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, "From the bottomless well
of Yugguggon"; it's all a joke, in his letters anyway, and even in some ways
in his stories. But the power of his stories doesn't depend upon the men-

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tions of the Cthulhu Mythos, because there are stories not using these ele-
ments that are just as powerful, like "The Rats in the Walls". That's why
Lovecraft had no compunction mingling all these things together, mingling
Dunsanian stories with Mythos stories; in fact, I don't even think he con-
ceived it that way: he never said, "Here are my Dunsanian stories, here are
my Mythos stories, here are my Arkham stories." It was all one to him; and
that ' s why he had no compunction in throwing Randolph Carter into The Case
of Charles Dexter Ward, where he doesn't really "belong", we would think.

He didn't make clear-cut distinctions between groups of stories; it was all
his own work. So that's one way to approach it.

Eileen McNamara (from the floor): Can it not be said that Lovecraft 's
stories, instead of emphasising his world view, are revolts from it? After
all, the characters experience horror when confronting the notion of their
own cosmic unimportance. And aren't such characters as Joseph Curwen or
Keziah Mason symbols for man's transcendence over his limitations?

Joshi: I think that again is part of the trick. In a fictional con-
text you have to have something or someone with whom the reader can iden-
tify. Therefore, in "The Shadow out of Time" Peaslee is a sympathetic char-
acter; we start following him, we start taking an interest in what he does.
That's because Lovecraft wants us, at the end of the story, to experience
the incredibly powerful emotions that Peaslee does: here he is at the end
of the story, holding a manuscript that he wrote 150,000,000 years ago in
the alien body of an extra-terrestrial creature; he's standing in this place
and realising that the whole human race is some tiny little inkblot amongst
a whole vast spectrum of creatures that have lived and will continue to live
before and after mankind on this planet and on other planets. Naturally,
Peaslee doesn't like that vision of the world, but we're not supposed to,
either; that's the whole trick of Lovecraft. He wants to make us realise
what's going on. And as for those long-lived individuals, like Joseph Cur-
wen or Keziah Mason: we're not supposed to identify with them; those are
again devices of plot to get the world view across. We don't like them;
they're evil creatures, and they are part of the whole realm of what Love-
craft called "cosmic indifferentism", where we feel our inferiority in con-
trast to other creatures who are much more powerful than we are.

Is there anyone else on the panel who has other things to say about
what we've said?

Murray: I disagree when you say Lovecraft didn't subdivide his sto-
ries: he talked about his "Arkham cycle", he talked about his Dunsanian
stories; so you're wrong.

Joshi: What does the "Arkham cycle" mean? I've never figured it out.

Murray: I haven't either, but he knew.

Price: It would seem to me that it's a cycle of stories —

Joshi: Yes, but how do you designate them? "The Picture in the House"
would be part of the Arkham cycle, since that's where he created Arkham;
but nobody thinks of that as a Mythos story.

Price: I would think that it's not a set of places; in fact, for him
to designate it the "Arkham cycle" may mean that the setting is the most

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distinctive thing in it rather than other types of lore.

Josbi: Yes, but the thing again is that I don't think he made a clear-
cut distinction. He said, "I went through a Dunsanian phase," but that
didn't prevent him from borrowing various elements or characters from his
Dunsanian stories into other stories, and he never considered that any sort
of violation.

Murray: Because at a certain point he got into this very fannish sort
of name-dropping thing. There's a point at which he talked about his "Ark-
ham cycle" where in fact it was a valid thing up to that point; and there's
a point where everything he was doing was being affected and polluted by
other people, especially in terms of his letters. I think his letters are
as much of a factor in terms of what happened or didn't happen. You say
he jokes in his letters about Cthulhu; well, he does, and that's because
people are asking questions, people are probing; "Tell us edaout Cthulhu;
tells us cibout the Hecronomicon: is it real?" And as a reflex or a defence
he has reduced it to a joke.

Joshi: Joke on one level and not on another. I don't think he con-
ceived of his stories as a joke —

Murray: No, he took his stories very seriously, but in the context of
his serious stories, he's done a wink and nudge.

Joshi: Yes, but they're merely these glancing allusions that I don't
think have any bearing on the stories.

Murray: That's one factor. The other factor is that he would absorb
Tsathoggua from Smith and the Hounds of Tindalos from Long and vice versa.
It became a mix, it beceune very fluid. There are things going on subcon-
sciously. When a writer writes, he's better off left alone, he's better
off not talking adaout his work; that's a thing every writer will tell you:
you don't talk your story before you write it. And it doesn't help to talk
it afterwards, either: you don't overexplain what you're doing because it
causes different wheels to turn and makes you more self-conscious. Love-
craft became very self-conscious about what he was doing. He's writing in
the context of his little study and his little inkwell and his paper: "The
Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" are very serious stories, preg-
nant with horror, pregnant with a new vision; but when he had to talk about
it in person or through his letters, it became a shared thing. I mean, you
don't talk about your sex life; in the same way you don't talk about your
writing when you write about things that are important to you. It changes
how you look at it, how you feel about it. You erect fences. You can't
shield yourself if someone says, "Well, I think Cthulhu is X," or "I think
he should be Y," or "I have an idea for an edition of the Hecronomicon."

But Lovecraft was a nice guy; whether he liked it or not, he would cibsorb
those things and he would use them. He was not protecting himself.

Schultz: He just threw off those names. If you look at some of his
so-called uses, take what S. T. said — "the serpent-men of Valusia". So
what? If it were stricken, the story would be no different. He didn't
borrow ideas from people, he borrowed syllables or sounds. And he didn't
try foisting off ideas on people; he would say to somebody, "This is nice
background stuff," in other words, "Write your own story. If you want to

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throw in one of my words, that's fine." Now somebody like Smith understood
that, and he did that rather skilfully. Smith would write his own story,
tell his tale, share his idea, and a little nudge-nudge wink-wink with Love-
craft is one thing. But August Derleth would try to write a story about
Lovecraft's idea. He wouldn't try to write a story about his own ideas,
because he didn't have any ideas.

Murray: Oh, he had ideas —

Joshi: But not in his horror stories.

Schultz: Yes, in certain other works he is reflecting himself; those
things we value. I don't think Lovecraft's stories after "The Dunwich Hor-
ror" are somehow polluted or ruined, because they still reflect his core
ideas. I think "The Shadow out of Time" is every bit as strong as —

Murray: I agree that they're strong stories, but again what I'm trying
to get across is the fact that he had to share these things beyond the
printed page, in person, in letters, in cross-references. That had to alter
what he would have done otherwise.

Price: One way to put Will's point is that I think the later stories
are not that much different, but these devices, as S. T. properly calls
them, these plot devices may become a bit less effective after he starts
throwing in everything from everyone else, because now you either like or
dislike them for their own sake. I find that when I read through one of
these later stories and read about "Klarkash-Ton", I sort of flinch, I sort
of wish he hadn't done that. The story is just as good as ever, but the
name-dropping is more of a distraction.

Burleson: I think that when Lovecraft talks about his stories in let-
ters, he only pretends to talk about them. I've seen a number of instances
where you see what he says about a story in a letter, and yet you know
things about the story and about its writing and so forth, and he's really
only shewing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total corpus of his
thought .

Murray: He's trying to shield his ideas from intrusion.

Burleson: I don't know what his motives are; all I'm saying is that
he's not really telling anything like the whole story.

Joshi: One point you must keep in mind is this. He writes "The Call
of Cthulhu"; he never writes a story about Cthulhu any more. He writes "The
Dunwich Horror", which is about Yog-Sothoth; he never writes about Yog-Soth-
oth any more. He writes At the Mountains of Madness, which is about the
barrel-shaped Old Ones; he never writes about them any more (they enter into
"The Shadow out of Time", but only in a peripheral way). He writes "The
Shadow over Innsmouth"; he never writes about Innsmouth any more. Each time
he's exploring and expanding his vision, because he doesn't want to go back
and do things over again. All these devices of the Cthulhu Mythos were
still expanding in Lovecraft's day, like the expanding universe, and he
never repeated himself in that sense. He would never have written another
story about the Old Ones or the Great Race, after he had done it once. He
was exploring new visions.

Price: Whereas Derleth is writing not only the same story, but Love-

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craft's stories over and over again. It's Wilbur Whateley vs. Ephraim Gil-
man or something. He is constantly rewriting "The Shadow over Innsmouth"
or "The Dunwich Horror".

Schultz: "The two themes that Lovecraft manifestly intended to wed," as
Derleth told someone.

Murray: But everytime Lovecraft wrote eibout something, some other writer
jumped on it and used it, and Derleth just ran away with it.

Price: One other distinction that I'd like to throw in here about the
levels of seriousness with which Lovecraft and others took this stuff: it's
interesting, and I haven't heard it pointed out before, that in Derleth 's
stories and others in that tradition, the whole Mythos is taken as if it
were literally true. Not that the writers actually thought so, of course,
but the stories are written from the stcindpoint that there really are the
Old Ones, and Abdul Alhazred is their prophet, and that what's said in the
Hecronomicon is true, etc. Whereas in Lovecraft, the Mythos is what Love-
craft thought all actual religion is: a kind of pathetic creation on the
part of human beings to shield themselves from the awful truth of their own
insignificance. As the stories themselves read, you have these human beings
who are so foolish as to serve these outside entities, when their victory
will mean the human servants' own destruction. It's as if they're trying
to shield themselves from the awful implications of what they know about,
and there are a lot of digs in the stories against these poor fools, the
Cthulhu cultists, who can't raise their god from the deeps, and an earth-
quake happens to do it. Those beings in Antarctica are the real truth that
Alhazred only vaguely guessed at, only intimated; so even the whole Cthulhu
religion or Yog-Sothoth religion is false in Lovecraft. It's a kind of
comforting misconstrual of what Lovecraft says is really the horror in the
story; whereas for Derleth and the others, it's the truth, it's the truth
about the world.

Murray: That's what I was getting at earlier when I said that Lovecraft
wrote his stories so that they seemed to be a reflection of myth, or rather
that myth is a reflection of the reality of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Price: But the Cthulhu cult and all its items of lore are actually at-
tempts to shield the characters themselves from the truth. It's a buffer
against the awful truth, rather than a symbol of it.

Murray: I don't think Derleth took his Mythos stories very seriously.

Joshi: Oh, he makes all sorts of comments that they're not even worth
reading.

Schultz: One guy says The Mask of Cthulhu is his favourite book, and
Derleth writes, "Oh, that junk? Why read it more than once?" Then why
write it? Now, on the other hand, Lovecraft told Derleth, "I've got a lot
of ideas I'd like to shape, and they won't even have anything to do with
the Mythos" — ^these "Hastur figures" that Derleth favoured. After he died,
then Augie got his commonplace book and wrote all kinds of Mythos stories
on Lovecraft' s ideas that Lovecraft would probedily never have developed
that way. I think S. T. is right — he would never have written another of
those stories again, he would have found another thing to write edDout.

Again, the monsters aren't the focus of his stories.

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Burleson: I seem to remember Lovecraft saying at one point, "If I could
see the visions that I have in my head already written somewhere, already
preserved, already expressed, I wouldn't bother to write." And it seems
that that's what it took.

Schultz: Sure, because nobody else had his view.

Burleson: Yes, it was like a purgation: he had to express it and then
get on to whatever the next one was.

Schultz: Those ideas took a long time to get "purged", as you say. If
you look at his commonplace book, there are so many ideas that sit there for
six, seven, eight years, and then all of a sudden some little incident will
make things come together, and he will work furiously to write a story and
then it's over with.

Burleson: It is true that there are some things that he writes, then
drops, and replaces with something else. But there are some interesting
strains of continuity; for example, there are certain character types that
Lovecraft seems to have been almost obsessed with. By the time he finally
got to Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, he had actually
adumbrated Joseph Curwen four or five times, starting with "The Alchemist",
even. The character seems to grow through a number of stories, until it
finally comes to maturation, as it were, there.

Joshi: I think you could take each one of Lovecraft 's major stories
and find some dim and rather bungling predecessor amongst Lovecraft' s ear-
lier stories, of which it was a sort of foretaste. He wrote "Dagon"; nine
years later he wrote "The Call of Cthulhu", which is essentially the same
story except that it's given a tremendous cosmic dimension. He wrote "The
Nameless City", which I think is a very bad story; twelve years later he
wrote At the Mountains of Madness, a magnificent story basically on the
same plot. He wrote "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", which I still don't like,
although some people have defended it; about a decade later he wrote "The
Dreams in the Witch House", which is a much better story although it also
has its flaws; it's simply "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" writ large. So he
was constantly rewriting himself. . . .

It's interesting which groups of writers have other people contribute
to their fictional worlds and which don't. We have Sherlock Holmes and all
the pastiches there; and there are others. But nobody wrote stories based
upon Faulkner's Southern mythology, nobody wrote stories based upon Hardy's
Wessex mythology. Why did people seize upon Lovecraft? It is a peculiar
and curious thing. I think part of it has to do with the fact that Love-
craft had very close literary and personal ties with people like Derleth,
Wandrei, Bloch, Howard, Smith, Long; it was almost as if they were a com-
munity of writers, and perhaps they felt at liberty to borrow each other's
— not creations or even ideas, but their little terminologies. And Love-
craft — as you [Will Murray] pointed out glancingly, but I think it has to
be emphasised — was too much of a gentleman to prevent it; he wasn't going
to put his foot down even if he had wanted to, and he probably did. He read
a lot of these stories in ms.; he read The Horror from the Hills, which is
just the most unbelievably wretched story, and yet Lovecraft had some grud-

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WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

ging praise for it. He read some of Derleth's stories, which are incredibly
bad, and yet he managed to say something nice about them. And I think Der-
leth in particular misinterpreted this and said, "Oh, yes, Lovecraft ap-
proved of what I’m doing, and therefore I'll keep on doing it."

Murray: You remember that with "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
written by E. Hoffmann Price, a consummate hack of that time, Lovecraft did
have the opportunity and he changed everything. He re-made it totally.

Joshi: And yet he kept Price’s name on the byline, even though Price
didn’t want it.

Murray: But that’s an example of what he would have done had he been
empowered to rewrite Long or rewrite Smith —

Joshi: I don’t think he would have rewritten Smith.

Murray: Perhaps not Smith, but for some reason he felt he could get
into the Price story emd change it, and make it in his vision; and that’s
what he did. I’ve read both versions euid you have too, and they’re quite
a bit different.

Schultz: I hate to bring this up, but Lovecraft actually told Derleth,
"I like it when people borrow my stuff."

Murray: I’m sure he did on some level.

Schultz: He did, but when he said that to Derleth he didn’t mean "I
like it when you write stories about Cthulhu"; he meant, "I like it when
you drop neunes, because that makes your story and mine somehow click to-
gether — ’’

Joshi: And it makes the reader say, "Hey, didn’t I read that somewhere
before?"

Schultz: But August Derleth said, "Oh, I get it" (when he really did
not) , and "Later I took on the mantle of Lovecraft because he asked me to
write these stories." They published a letter in Weird Tales where he said
that, and I thought, "Well, that’s a little different from what Lovecraft
told him."

Burleson: Later he was telling people, "We own the name Yog-Sothoth. ’’

Joshi: While we’re at this point, I must read you this — this is the
discovery of David E. Schultz. There was one Thomas R. Smith, aged 15, who
had sent Derleth this story, "The Forest of the Ravens." Derleth wrote to
him (July 10, 1963) : "Your story fails for precisely the reason that you
wrote it. You are not yet equipped to treat portions of the Cthulhu Mythos,
and I should point out that the Mythos and its pantheon of Gods etc. are
under copyright and may not be used in fiction without the express permis-
sion of Arkham House. We are not niggardly with such permission, but we
do require that stories reach certain standards of excellence; I fear that
this story does not. As a matter of fact, it would be a considerably bet-
ter story with all the Cthulhu references excised — make it simply the story
of a dark pact between some ancient force and Ted — perhaps some offshoot of
Pan — and forget all about Shub-Niggurath (you evidently have never read ’The
Dweller in Darkness ’ , a Shub-Niggurath novella set in upstate Wisconsin) . ’’
The sheer arrogance of this guy — and to say "certain standards of excel-
lence": well, of course, Derleth’s stories reach that standard!

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Murray: It's obvious that Derleth didn't assume the "mantle" of Love-
craft; he pulled the rug out from under him!

Stefan Dziemianowicz (from the floor) : This question is directed to
Bob Price. He says that some of the discrepancies in the Mythos and in
stories individually were put there by Lovecraft to give a fuller sense of
latent myth, in which there are natural contradictions and differing inter-
pretations. Will Murray, on the other hand, seems to say that things got
off direction after the third or fourth story and Lovecraft seems to lose
control of the Mythos. Are these views mutually exclusive?

Price: Not at all, because the fact that there were different inter-
pretations would not be in conflict with Lovecraft 's idea that this was a
cycle of myths, not a system of myths; but he could have disliked the par-
ticular ideas that people came up with, perhaps; though we don't know that
he did, we more or less surmise that he would have disliked this or that.

But the idea that there were different interpretations of these gods — that
would, I think, be entirely in concert with the kind of variation you find
in his own work. Smith understood that: he warned Derleth that maybe he
was misunderstanding this, that the inconsistencies are there for a purpose;
and I believe Lovecraft himself says the same thing in his letters. He
wasn't trying for consistency, and in fact realised it would be less con-
vincing as a fictional device if it were entirely consistent.

Murray: I think there's another factor here. Again, as I mentioned
earlier, as a writer Lovecraft didn't see his stories after they'd been in
print as fixed in print; his ideas were still changing. He had no compunc-
tion about letting a fact be contradicted in a later story because he found
a better way of expressing it, as all writers do. There are contradictions
in many series where you think beyond the original work, and you decide to

let the original expression go by the boards and just update it, make it

better. Because it's in print doesn't mean it's in stone. As readers we
may be aggravated by that, but a creative writer is not going to let the
fact that he said something in print in one story hold him back from re-
vising that concept in a later story, to make it better, to push it in an-
other direction. Didn't Conan Doyle bring back Sherlock Holmes at one
point? He killed the guy off, and then brought him back in a revision of
history. It happens.

Joshi : Although Lovecraft did on occasion make some attempt to make
up a little story when he made some particularly obvious change. For ex-
ample, in "The Hound" he set Leng in central Asia; in At the Mountains of
Madness Leng is in Antarctica; and he actually has a sentence or two there

saying, "Well, some mythographers have set Leng in central Asia, but this

does not seem to be correct." And, of course, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton
Smith went through this complicated rigmarole about Tsathoggua, as to where
Tsathoggua originally came from. Lovecraft was writing "The Mound"; then
he received Smith's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" in the mail, and Love-
craft got all excited and said that it was a great story, and he used Tsath-
oggua in his story. But then there was some sort of contradiction later
on, and Smith had to come up with some convoluted reason why the two stories
don't really jive together. So there were attempts to smooth over some of

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the obvious contradictions. But there are other contradictions that never
got smoothed over. For example, I still can't make much sense of how the

dream-world and the real world are supposed to fit together in Lovecraft —

how the dream stories fit with the real-world stories. The geography
doesn't seem to jive very well. And in "Through the Gates of the Silver
Key" you have all the gods (Yog-Sothoth, etc.) in some sort of hyperspace
where they weren't before.

Price; Or the sequence of extraterrestrial races. In one story, "The
Whisperer in Darkness", he says that the Yuggoth-spawn were here during the
"fabulous epoch of Cthulhu", but in At the Mountains of Madness it's clear
that they come way after the Cthulhu spawn have shot it out with the octo-
puses and so on. The biggest whopping contradiction is the conception of
the Necronomicon within the single story "The Festival", because the worm-
people, or whatever they are, hold up this book as if it's the great sacred

scripture, and they all bow before it, yet the one quote from the book you

read warns that you'd better burn all wizards to ashes lest they become
these worm-critters I What's the deal here? What kind of a book is this?

Even within one stoiry it's a totally different type of book. So I think
it's not merely from one story to the next, but from one scene to the next.
What would be the most effective use one can put this book or this god to?

He just wasn't concerned with consistency.

Murray: Sometimes I think Lovecraft had a lot of personal investment
in certain names and such. Why change the Plateau of Leng's location when
you can just coin another name? I think in his mind — but never on paper —
there are a lot of explanations for things, there are a lot of rationaliza-
tions of things, there are a lot of meanings. For instance, the two gods
Nug and Yeb, which are mentioned in letters and alluded to in stories; if
you put them all together there's a rhyme and reason behind them; but they're
never explicated in a story in the same way that Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu were.
I think he had things in mind and they weren't fixed, they were fluid, they
changed, but he was very much hung up on certain things and certain names,
and he kept them; he changed them to fit stories and he wouldn't let go of
those ideas, and I'm not sure I know why that is. I think to some degree
it ' s all some crazy game .

Burleson; There are a lot of unwritten stories, you know. Think of
Chaucer, who never produced the whole Canterbury Tales —

Murray: But Lovecraft never let that get in the way of using things
that would have appeared in that unwritten story in later stories. It's a
very interesting way to work.

Question (from the floor): I've read somewhere that Lovecraft derived
a lot of his concepts from Sumerian mythology — but other people have said
that he really didn't know it, he just used some of the names.

Murray: Lovecraft in some letter talked about his stories expressing
or reflecting "fixed myth-patterns". When he spoke about fixed myth-pat-
terns, what I think he was saying was that, as anthropologists will tell
you, almost all myths in all countries have commonalities — common themes,
common sources, common characters and patterns and lessons, etc. I think
the human mind, wherever it evolves socially and culturally, will come up

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with certain fixed myth-patterns, like Jesus Christ, Buddha, Prometheus, or
whatever. There's always the myth of going to the sun, the myths of the
moon. There are myths all over the world linking frogs with the moon — and
Lovecraft used that in one of his stories, "The Moon-Bog". Lovecraft was
aware that myths all over the world have certain common features, patterns,
rhythms; I don't know what he made of that, but what he did with that in
his fiction was to say, "Yes, they all come from one source, and the Cth-
ulhu Mythos is the source, and the reason all these things are similar is
because everybody is remembering the Mythos, but they're reinterpreting it."
This is the point we were discussing earlier. Lovecraft may have based
some of his concepts, and did in fact base some of his concepts, on specific
myths from specific cultures; what he was trying to do in his stories was to
say that the myths he was using for his inspiration were actually inspired
by the thing he was creating!

Burleson: In "The Shadow over Innsmouth" he makes mention at one point
of the Deep Ones, and then says that that's how the stories of the mermaids
must have started. He actually has the nerve to make his concepts anterior
to their sources.

Price: As for the Sumerian thing, this has been popularised through
Simon's bogus Eecronomicon , where he tries to throw in Aleister Crowley and
who knows what-all; and he comes up with these bogus word-derivations that
Azathoth was derived in part from Thoth (Thoth was obviously derived from
Thoth in Egypt — no mystery about that) , but the first half of the word is
from Azag ("enchanter"), so it means "enchanter Thoth"; and Miskatonic comes
from the Greek root -chthonic. It's just a lot of crap — there's nothing to
it. In fact, S. T. , myself, and Lin Carter once went to hear this clown
lecture in New York, and boy! it was hard to sit through. It's just a lot
of nonsense. Lovecraft did try to find real ideas in ancient mythology,
as Will said, as when he says that the names Nug and Yeb are meant to sug-
gest the ring of Tartar and Tibetan folklore, and Will has found interesting
evidence that he may have had the Egyptian gods Nut and Geb in mind — a very
interesting possible parallel. So it's not out of the question, but that
particular theory (if you want to dignify it with that term) of Simon's is
pretty bogus.

Joshi: The thing is that Lovecraft wasn't really an authority on any
of these religions. He sort of puttered around, he picked up odd little
things from stray bits of learning, oftentimes embarrassingly at second-
hand. We've discovered recently that the very impressive list of crypto-
graphic authorities mentioned in "The Dunwich Horror" are lifted straight
from the "Cryptography" article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There's
a lot of other second-hand erudition in Lovecraft; he was never really an
authority on any of these things — except perhaps Greek mythology. And yet,
he censured Poe for doing the same thing he did!

Steven J. Mariconda (from the floor) : Bob, when you started making
your comments defining the Mythos, you mentioned that Lovecraft "gave his
blessing" to the elements that other writers had created, and in your re-
cent article, "H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos", you also said that

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WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

he "supervised" the progression of the Mythos. Can you talk about how you
decide what Lovecraft approved of and didn't approve of?

Price: Mainly by what he did or didn't use repeatedly in his stories,
and also by comments in his letters; for example, it's really obvious that
he adopted Tsathoggua into his pantheon — he put it that way — and once Bloch
had come up with Cultes des Goules and De Vermis Mysteriis, and Howard had
come up with Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Smith The Book of Eibon, he real-
ly loved it, and anytime one of Lovecraft' s characters would mention a bunch
of books, all those titles would be there, at least a number. He must have
liked that. And then there's Conover's Ghorl Nigral — Lovecraft said, "Yes,
that sounds good. I'll have to use it sometime." Or The Bltdown Shards
from Searight, or Kuttner's Book of lod. He waxed enthusiastic on both in
his letters and promised to use them. And so I would say that in those
cases he seemed pretty positive about it. There are other things, though,
like the name of the star in the primal language where the Elder Gods were
from in "The Return of Hastur": Derleth was running that by him, and Love-
craft said, "You might want to have a better name for the star — how about
this?" There he doesn't say, "By George, I like it!" And there you
couldn't really say what he thought of it. But in some of these cases he
seems to have waxed enthusiastic enough, even adopting them repeatedly into
his own stories. So I feel on safe ground there.

Schultz: But he's not "orchestrating" the Mythos; he's telling Augie,
"If you're going to write a story, why don't you consider doing this? But
remember, it's your work." He's not telling him, "I want you to write it
this way — "

Price: But that's what I'm saying: in that instance it's not clear
that he's welcoming that addition, because that's a neutral comment. You
couldn't say that in the case of Derleth Lovecraft approved of what he
wanted to add.

Joshi: You specifically use the term "supervise", and that sort of
sticks in my craw, because, for one thing, when Smith came up with Tsath-
oggua in the story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", Lovecraft knew nothing
about it — Smith merely sent him the story. Lovecraft liked the story, so
he used Tsathoggua. But he didn't "supervise" Smith, he didn't "supervise"
Howard, he didn't "supervise" Long. I have some vision of a Managing Ed-
itor with a stable of writers —

Schultz: Those stories were conceived independently —

Price: That's what I was about to say. It's not as if these things
were created as parts of the Mythos. They only became considered such when
Lovecraft himself said, "Gee, I'd like to use this." I don't mean to say
that he made assignments or anything like that.

Joshi: But I still think all these references are, as it were, in-
jokes, they're playful and don't mean much of anything.

Price: Oh, they don't, I admit that, it is just a matter of plot de-
vices; but such as it is, I think he did give his blessing to the eledjora-
tion of the Mythos. I agree that the stories are not about the Mythos, it's
not the most important thing. I agree with most of what everyone has said;

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it's just that, when all is said and done, it remains pretty evident that
Lovecraft did speak of a pantheon, a legend-cycle, etc. He may not have
taken it very seriously, but he had fun with it and a lot of readers still
have fun with it, and it's legitimate and Lovecraftian to do that.

Schultz; You know where the problem comes in? Long and Howard and
Smith and Lovecraft were all more mature writers. Somewhere along the way
younger writers, in their teens or early twenties, would say, "This looks
like fun. These guys are doing this, and I want to be a part of it." So
they start contributing: that's where this "contribution" idea comes in,
with Derleth. You can see in Conover's book [Lovecraft at Last] that Love-
craft says to Conover, "Well, maybe if you make up a book, I might have half
a mind to mention it in a story of mine." So Conover goes, "Wow! Lovecraft
is going to use my book! Well, I gotta figure out a way of making this come
into being." He thinks he's the guy making the contribution —

Price: I agree with you, and I agree with Will that once Lovecraft be-
gan to do that, it did open the door to trivialising it; so you can blame
Lovecraft for that. It would be aesthetically better in some ways if he
hadn ' t done that .

Schultz: The thing that opened the door, I think, was when he said,
"Well, it would be kinda nice," and these younger fellows thought he was
almost telling them to do that. To Conover he says, "This makes good back-
ground." But they say, "I'm going to write a story about Lovecraft 's Cth-
ulhu people — "

Price: You're right, that's a big mistake, or at least it's a transi-
tion into a whole different genre of stories.

Murray: You know what it was really like? Lovecraft, in creating the
Mythos, in creating Cthulhu, got hold of a tentacle in a dark room. He's
groping toward the centre to see what's there, first with "The Call of Cth-
ulhu", then "The Colour out of Space", then "The Dunwich Horror". And as
he's groping he says, "Hey, guys, I got a tentacle!" And Smith and Long
and Derleth and all the rest came along and each grabbed their own tenta-
cle. And they pulled it apart! That's what happened.

[APPLAUSE]

[Following a discussion of why Lovecraft films are so unsuccessful ,
and how Lovecraft' s methods of working are so different from those of film:]

Schultz: I think Lovecraft's stories are like paintings in that they
are static: there's no motion in them, no linear getting from one place to
another. At the beginning of the story, you have a pretty sketchy idea of
what will happen throughout the story as revealed in the ending; and he
puts his stories together like paintings. If you read "Supernatural Horror
in Literature" and "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction", all the descriptions
he gives on how to write a story use painting terms — "First you paint this,
then you sketch this," etc. — it's all painting lingo. And so what happens
is that in the beginning he sketches out what's going to happen in the
story, and then he proceeds to fill in things in more detail, so when you
get to the end you now have his complete vision. In fact, what you are

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WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

doing is looking at a completed painting. Nothing happens; it just becomes
more apparent. You have to stand back and see the thing; I think a lot of
people with the Mythos really bog down in some of these little details;
they're not seeing the whole picture.

Burleson; "The Strange High House in the Mist" is a story that works
that way. It is almost like looking at something painted on a canvas.

Joshi: Take a story like "The Shadow out of Time": the root conception
or the root image, if you will, is a frozen, static image — it is the image
of a man looking at something he wrote 150,000,000 years ago. Starting with
this conception, Lovecraft said, "This is a great idea. Now how can I jus-
tify it? How can I draw up a scenario of events that will lead plausibly
and powerfully to that conclusion?" The result is that he makes this in-
credibly convoluted story which makes this core image plausible — and he
makes a huge novelette out of it. But the root image was this flash of a
man looking at something that could not possibly be.

Schultz: All of his stories are like that. If you look in his common-
place book, you can see how the ideas in there were used. They're not plot
descriptions; the key idea in the commonplace book from which "The Call of
Cthulhu" was developed is actually a small thing thrown into the story, it's
not the plot of the story. The scene in the commonplace book is that of a
man who comes in to see a museum curator with a little statue. But that's
a very small part of the story. In fact, the note he wrote at the beginning
of the commonplace book when he presented it to a fan was: "These are just
impressions of weird things 1 would like somehow to make concrete in prose."
And so he would look at an idea and, as S. T. said, would figure out a way
to flesh out that idea, to achieve that single impact, like the scene at
the end of "The Shadow out of Time". So the things in the commonplace book
are not story plots; in fact, many of the things he just threw into stories.
August Derleth didn't understand what the notion of some of those entries
was, and he wrote whole stories as though the entries were plot summaries,
and so his stories don't really ring true, they don't really have anything
to do with Lovecraft.

Steven J. Mariconda (from the floor) : I get the impression that the
panel is in concurrence that the really important thing about Lovecraft is
the thematic concepts, or what Lovecraft called his "cosmic indifferentism" .
I wonder whether there is agreement also that the tendency of critics and
other writers to concentrate on the trivial details or background devices
or apparatus of the Mythos — the names, the gods, the fictional places and
books — has a tendency to obscure and detract attention away from what the
real value of Lovecraft is.

Murray; I don't agree with that, becaus I think it's precisely the
terms and the apparatus which cause people to focus in the first place.

If you dropped Cthulhu, if you dropped the Necronomicon , if you dropped all
that stuff, there wouldn't be these little touchstones for people to be fix-
ated on, and from which they can expand their awareness. If you take that
stuff away, the young, fannish readers who were reading Lovecraft from the

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twenties to the present would not be as fascinated. If you take away all
the strange words, and you just made it about the concepts, it would be too
dry and people wouldn't focus on it in the same way. You need those things;
Lovecraft appeals initially on a very pulpish level; he doesn't appeal on
an intellectual level, but on an emotional, pulpish level — he appeals to
what S. T. might call the "baser" literary or non-literary instincts. I
think that's where he gets his audience; he educates his audience, and his
audience grows with him when they stick with him. I think you need those
things; I would not have been as interested in Lovecraft without them. I
still like those things — the little names and apparatus . . .

Joshi: But I think it is our duty as critics to go beyond that, be-
cause I think there is too much attention in the serious critical industry
on Lovecraft — which is essentially Lovecraft Studies, Crypt of Cthulhu, and
a few other places — to concentrate on these little things at the expense of
shewing in greater detail what his whole world view was. I would in fact
recommend much less attention given to the stories per se and more atten-
tion given to his lesser- known bodies of work — his letters, his essays, his
poetry. How do they contribute to that vision? what place do they occupy?
Personally, I now like Lovecraft' s letters a whole hell of a lot more than
his stories; I get bored by Lovecraft's stories, frankly. I don't reread
them very often; I haven't reread a Lovecraft story in years, aside from
the damn galley proofs that I had to read for the Arkham House edition. And
after that, boyl I don't want to read Lovecraft for another ten years! But
those letters — I can reread them over and over again.

Murray: I think the names, the nomenclature, the weird language, the
grimoires, etc., are inextriccible from the concepts. Cthulhu is Cthulhu;
Cthulhu embodies everything; you can't take it away. If the story were
called "The Call of Charlie", a lot less people would read it.

Burleson: There's got to be some sort of vehicle to present the con-
cepts .

Schultz: I don't agree with Will. Unfortunately, Lovecraft's most pop-
ular stories when he was alive were "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Hound"
— those things were reprinted I don't know how many times in books, in Weird
Tales; those were always big draws. But when "The Shadow out of Time" ap-
peared in Astounding, everyone said, "Oh, no! not another one of these!" be-
cause they didn't like At the Mountains of Madness. They said, "We don't
understand these gods and stuff." And those were actually the teenage fans.
Well, some of them did understand, some of them didn't; if you look in the
letters to the editor, you'll recognise some typical names speaking in Love-
craft's behalf — people like Robert Barlow, Corwin Stickney, people who really
took a shine to him. But there were plenty of others who didn't. So I don't
know that it's that clear-cut, that everybody was attracted to the Mythos.
They like some of his "baser" stories also.

Mollie Burleson (from the floor): I think that's the magic of Lovecraft.
I can still remember reading my first story; I didn't understand who the
creatures were, and the names were strange to me, but that's what made it
exciting.

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WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

Schultz: Oh, they did that for me, too. I still don't think they're
what the stories are about. They do add a certain aura and they are im-
portant, but they're not what the stories are about, and I don't think they
deserve as much attention as they get sometimes.

SUPPLEMENTARY STATEMENTS

Donald R. Burleson: In summary, I should like to reiterate my conten-
tion that a mythos is not merely a canon of writings, but rather a philo-
sophical system that seeks to make sense out of the ultimate nature of the
universe — a mythos is, in other words, a world view expressed in some fash-
ion, whether that be by an oral tradition of myth or a body of writing.

When we speak of the Christian Mythos, for example, we mean a world view
with God at one end of the spectrum and Satan at the other, both intervening
in human affairs to fight the battle of good versus evil, a mental scenario
beyond which August Derleth could never seem to grow. When we speak of the
Lovecraft Mythos, we mean, or I think should mean, a world view vastly dif-
ferent — a world view informed by Lovecraft' s philosophy of mechanistic ma-
terialism, a world view expressed in varying degrees of intensity in his
writings, and a world view characterised by an ultimate sort of irony.

In Lovecraft's world, and in its expression in his works, while there
is no room for the concepts of good and evil, there is yet a fundamental
dichotomy. On the one hand, Lovecraft's stories are stories told through
the conduit of, and felt through the emotional framework of, his human char-
acters, so that they are in a sense anthropocentric; but on the other hand
they are as far as possible from anthropomorphism, for the implication of
what happens to Lovecraft's characters is that man, uniquely equipped eunong
earth's current dwellers to reflect upon and thus suffer from such a dis-
covery, is wholly insignificant — it is as if man is jerked to centre-stage
only to be given to understand that he doesn't belong there. This cosmic
species of irony creates a primal sort of tension, in effect a living para-
dox.

Throughout history, art has shifted between a human-centred point of
view and other points of view. In the discovery of perspective in painting,
for example, the point of view was snapped back to the human-centred; a
table was no longer a Platonic shadow-of-reality entity as if viewed in the
"mind of God", but rather was an object viewed by a person whose own place-
ment gave the table its particular lines and form. In literature, we have
recently seen the "fashion" shift from such nineteenth-century devices as
the omniscient point of view to the "central intelligence" point of view as
employed, say, in the impressionistic writings of Proust, where the mental
life of the character assumes overriding importance. Lovecraft, too, puts
the spotlight on the human point of view, but with a terrible difference:
with Lovecraft, man is indeed homo sapiens, the knowing animal, but what he
comes to know, as only he can, is that the universe wheels blindly onward
without the least concern for his vanishingly small part in its machinery.
The resulting paradoxical tension is an effect unique in literature, and is

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

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the ironic cornerstone of the Lovecraft Mythos; and I believe it will con-
tinue to fascinate literary scholar and more casual reader alike when less
mythically informed writers have been long forgotten.

S. T. Joshi; 1 have no particular interest in summarising my conclu-
sions on this matter; I suppose I have outlined my views in sufficient —
perhaps excessive — detail in my opening statement, a statement whose con-
clusions I see no reason to reject or qualify. Instead, I wish to touch
upon a few points made by other panelists upon which I did not have the
chance to comment.

First, as to Will Murray's contention that "The Call of Cthulhu", "The
Colour out of Space", and "The Dunwich Horror" are the only "pure" Mythos
stories: such a contention becomes problematical when one realises that in
"The Dunwich Horror" mention is made of John Dee ' s translation of the Nec-
ronomicon — a detail invented by Frank Belknap Long. Murray's point, I sup-
pose, is that it was only in "The Whisperer in Darkness" that other writers'
contributions were extensively noted; but I think the distinction here is
one of degree and not of kind. Moreover, Murray fails sufficiently to con-
sider the unusual status of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written after
"The Call of Cthulhu" and before "The Colour out of Space". This story con-
tains such important information on Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, and other mat-
ters that it must be considered the second Mythos story. And yet, this
story is at once a "Dunsanian" story, a "Mythos" story, and even a "New
England" story — something which again shews (pace Robert M. Price) that
Lovecraft did not establish clear-cut barriers between groups of his sto-
ries.

As to Price's notion that Lovecraft "approved" the Mythos additions
of other writers when he expressed enthusiasm over them and promised to use
them in his own stories: here again I think we are misconstruing Lovecraft 's
remarks and forgetting his tact and courtesy. I cannot conceive that he
would ever have used Conover's Ghorl Nigral or other things of the sort in
his stories, had he lived to write them: Lovecraft was simply being kind to
a fifteen-year-old fan. The unintended consequence of this was that it made
the whole name-dropping aspect of the Mythos gain undue importance and made
it appear frivolous and trivial — a "parlour game", as Maurice Levy termed it.
Perhaps it had become that toward the end of Lovecraft's life; but by then,
as I think Will Murray is right to emphasise, it was out of Lovecraft's
control .

I suppose I ought to qualify my own remark that I no longer ienjoy Love-
craft's stories. This of course is hyperbole, uttered for effect: in fact,

I feel that we have hardly scratched the surface in understanding Love-
craft's fiction. I do feel, however, that more attention should be paid to
other bodies of Lovecraft's work, if only the better to explicate the sto-
ries themselves.

In conclusion, I agree with Steven J. Mariconda that too much attention
is paid to the obvious features and elements of the Lovecraft Mythos: the

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WHAT IS THE CTHULHU MYTHOS?

underlying themes and concepts do become obscured when we spend too much
time, for example, categorising how many stories contain references to Ny-
arlathotep or the Hecronomicon , etc. All these elements are symbols: they
themselves (whenever they are not totally frivolous) mean something in the
context of the stories in which they appear, and that meaning will vary from
story to story. If attention must be paid to these Mythos elements, then
the attention should be of this sort: what does Nyarlathotep mean — literar-
ily and philosophically — in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath? how does this
meaning change in "The Whisperer in Darlcness"? It is through questions like
these that we may be able to escape the sense of triviality and fannishness
that infests so much of the criticism of the "Cthulhu Mythos".

Will Hurray: It's obvious to me now that the Cthulhu Mythos and the
Lovecraft Mythos both co-exist. The Lovecraft Mythos is all of Lovecraft's
lesser fiction which may be linked philosophically or by lesser connective
tissue like the Hecronomicon or Arkham. The Cthulhu Mythos is a legitimate
subset of the Lovecraft Mythos revolving around the lore of the Old Ones,
which August Derleth and others wrongly attempted to systematize.

Unfortunately, the term Cthulhu Mythos has attached itself, like a
sucker or an intrusive tentacle, to both the Lovecraft Mythos and Cthulhu
Mythos stories, blindly squeezing them into one struggling lump. We may
never separate the two as far as common usage goes, but I do think the term
Cthulhu Mythos is here to stay and is a valid analytical tool.

After we work beyond that problem, I think the true focal point of
Lovecraft fiction studies is the bizarre connectedness of Lovecraft's canon.
It did not begin as a connected mythos, which confuses some. When Love-
craft spoke of an "Arkham cycle", he was speaking in 1928 terms, and it was
a valid label for those stories which happen to have been set in Arkham.

His Ounsanian stories likewise possessed a separate validity. And his Cth-
ulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles — as he once styled them — were another tendril.
Many people forget that certain Mythos elements — the Hecronomicon, Aza-
thoth, and Yog-Sothoth as he appears in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward —
predate the Mythos and were subsumed into Lovecraft ' s bitter cosmology only
later.

Somewhere along the way, Lovecraft discovered the joys of self-pollen-
ation. Almost casually, a mention of the Terrible Old Man in "The Strange
High House in the Mist" connected that Dunsanian tale with the otherwise
incompatible "Terrible Old Man". The walls all came tumbling down with The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a story significantly written after Love-
craft's return to Providence following the failure of his marriage. In a
probable attempt to return to his fictional roots, he allowed to coalesce
in that novel Cthulhu, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Richard Upton Pickman, dog-
ghouls from "The Hound", and the entirety of his Dunsanian fancies. It was
a stew in which apples and potatoes, bananas and bits of chicken and fish,
boiled in a troubled matrix. Whatever psychological needs Lovecraft was

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

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exorcizing at that point, The Dream-Quest changed the direction of the en-
tirety of his later fiction. Years later he repeated the experiment with
"The Whisperer in Darkness", wherein Lovecraft wove a clever web of connec-
tions with the works of other writers. It was from this that the simplistic
Derlethian version of the Cthulhu Mythos springs.

Lovecraft plainly delighted in making connections. Between his work
and writers who preceded him. Between his ideas and those of his Weird
Tales contemporaries, and between his concepts and the "fixed myth-patterns"
of anthropology and science. I'm reminded of the parallel chronology "The
Dunwich Horror" and "The Whisperer in Darkness" share. It was as if Love-
craft's questing imagination could no longer be contained by the writing of
mere stories. He needed to do more.

I have an image of a writer whose intellectual growth outpaced his
taste for pulp horror fiction, but who stubbornly clung to the images and
devices of his childhood reading because his powerful imagination could
discover no other compatible creative outlet. Thus, Lovecraft' s continual
decrying in later years of the inferior quality of Weird Tales fiction. He
had grown up, why couldn't it? Yet he continued to read Weird Tales. And
he continued to write for it in a more powerful way. He had no other ve-
hicle with which to express his intellectual yearnings and his imaginative
fancies simultaneously. Nonfiction would not do.

That, perhaps, is the reason Lovecraft 's stuff is so powerful. He was
like a Da Vinci whose only form of expression was fingerpainting. And his
fingerpaints were magnificent.

Robert M. Price: I believe it is quite proper to speak of a "Cthulhu
Mythos or Mythology" in the sense that some of Lovecraft' s own characters
do, as when Henry Akeley refers to "the Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles".

That means, first, that the stories in which this Mythology figures do not
together form the Mythos, though there's no problem calling them "Mythos
stories" if we simply mean they utilize the lore of the Old Ones.

And, second, we have no business, if we wish to be faithful to Love-
craft, synthesizing and systematizing the Mythos lore, since Lovecraft makes
quite clear by both his practice and his plain statements that we have var-
iants, inconsistencies, contradictions, in other words a cycle of myths, not
a systematic theology. For instance, one need not choose between Lovecraft 's
genealogical chart of the Old Ones and Clark Ashton Smith's quite different
chart, as if one must be the "right" one. They are both pieces of lore,
like the two contradictory genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew
and Luke. Just as these latter tell New Testament scholars about early
Christian faith, not about the actual descent of Jesus, so the former do
not tell us "the truth" etbout Cthulhu as Lovecraft conceived it, but rather
create the literary semblance of a genuine ancient cult and its ragtag col-
lection of lore.

It is fairly easy to divide Lovecraft' s Mythos lore from that later

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WHAT IS THE CTHULHU HYTHOS?

supplied by Derleth and post-Derleth writers. One need only distinguish
which stage of the Cthulhu Mythos one means: "The Cthulhu Mythos as Love-
craft conceived it", or some such. Or even "the Cthulhu Mythos before Love-
craft and his friends began to trivialize it."

If I may be permitted another religious analogy, the problem we are
discussing is similar to that of the development of doctrine in Christian-
ity. Some generations ago. Liberal Protestant Adolph Harnach argued that
we ought to strip away all traditional dogma to distill the pure teaching
of the historical Jesus. That would be the kernel, all the rest discarded
husk. Will Murray is taking Harnach *s view on our question. Roman Cath-
olic Modernist Alfred Loisy argued instead that Jesus' message was the
acorn, and the luxuriant growth of dogma and tradition was the growing oak.
The oak ought to continue to grow. On the Mythos position, I think Loisy 's
analogues might be Brian Lumley and Lin Carter, who gladly adopt any con-
tribution by any post-Lovecraftian writer. Most of us would stand some-
where in between these extremes. But we probably do not need to find a
particular niche. Let's just chart the growth of the Mythos and enjoy what
stories, in what stage of Mythos evolution, that we will.

David E. Schultz: If I had one wish that would help rectify the past
misinterpretations of Lovecraft's work, it would be to eradicate the term
"Cthulhu Mythos" from the vocabulary of Lovecraf tians . It is a term that
remains loaded with undertones of meeining that will tend to linger even
though the sources of those undertones have been and continue to be dis-
credited. I cringe when I read statements, such as those of August Derleth,
that "His (Lovecraft's] crowning achievement was the creation of the Cthulhu
Mythos, to which a majority of his stories belong." The Mythos was not
Lovecraft's crowning achievement. The realism of his stories is. One might
say "Willicun Faulkner is known for having created the Yoknapatawpha Saga.

. . ." Both statements are true, but only in a very shallow way.

I like to think of the Mythos as being one of the tools that Lovecraft
brought into play when he wrote of his stories. Just as Faulkner's novels
are about people and not about his "postage stamp of native soil", so too
are Lovecraft's stories about people. They are rarely about extraterres-
trial or extradimens ional monsters or even a mythology. This is not to say
that Lovecraft was Faulkner's literary peer, or that their respective myth-
ological creations are of the same scope or depth. Lovecraft's fantasies
are interesting to us because they have an air of realism in the same way
that Faulkner's fiction has a realism that appeals to us. In fact, Love-
craft's achievement is more admireible because his mythology is fundament-
ally unreal but he makes it believable.

As Will Murray pointed out, we may feel that Lovecraft should have re-
tained greater control of his fictional creations. We cannot say for sure
why Lovecraft encouraged other writers to make allusions to the things he
wrote about in his stories. Lovecraft felt, perhaps mistakenly, that by
making casual references to the ideas and creations of other writers, and

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

they to his, he was bolstering the verisimilitude that he sought to create.
But it is not apparent, at least to me, that Lovecraft urged writers to
"contribute" to his mythology as August Derleth claims he did. Derleth
seems to be the only contemporary of Lovecraft 's who actually believed this.
My research into this matter seems to show that Derleth either misinterpreted
or exaggerated what Lovecraft said to him in the matter.

Unfortunately, Lovecraft could not have known that things would turn
out the way they did, and that his literary game was ultimately detrimental
to his work — that the achievement of the very realism he sought to create
was eroded and cheapened by the pastiches and parodies written not by his
peers, but by his fans. The fans, unlike Lovecraft's contemporaries Clark
Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, have been incapable of understanding that
Lovecraft's pseudomythological creations were merely one of the ways he was
cdjle to impart his world view in his works. They don't realize that no wri-
ter could expect to do successfully what Lovecraft did if that writer did
not share Lovecraft's world view himself.

The damage has been done. August Derleth' s attempts to categorize,
systematize and expand Lovecraft's milieu, for whatever reasons, have almost
reduced Lovecraft's stories to caricatures of what they were. It must be
admitted that the very features of Lovecraft ' s work that made it original
and unique are the features that may undermine it. The most enjoyable com-
position can become dreadfully annoying if its most brilliant passages are
copied by hundreds of lesser artists. Fortunately, the worst aspects of
the Mythos cult tend to stay within the cult and the amateur press. Love-
craft will survive his cult following. His recognition as a major writer
increases, and with patience we will see new avenues of study open as new
understanding of Lovecraft's work comes to light.

Finally, a parting note:

"I saw more of the program this year. ... I spent a pleasant couple
of hours with the Lovecraftian industry, represented by Brown University's
S. T. Joshi, Robert Price, Will Murray, David Schultz and Don Burleson.
After a certain number of years at cons one gets weary of watching famous
authors sidestepping the same old questions, so it was refreshing to hear
a group of well-informed fans passionately and learnedly dissecting HPL's
literary remains. As Murray remarked, 'Lovecraft studies are now so spec-
ialized they would strike most general readers as esoteric. ' Despite that,
he promised us an article in the near future." — Bob Collins, Fantasy Re-
view, November 1986, p. 4.

We are grateful for the kind words, although I suspect that at least
a few of us would cringe at being labelled "fans", however well-informed.
Murray is not alone in promising articles; much more will and ought to be
written on this subject. — Ed.

Behind the
Mountains of
Madness-'

Lovecraft and the Antarctic in 1930

by Jason C. Eckhardt

T he short novel At the Mountains of Madness is one of the most
powerful works in the oeuvre of H. P. Lovecraft, and a recog-
nised classic of horror literature. In many ways it is typical
of Lovecraft 's works — the learned narrator, the prehuman civil-
isation, and the "double-punch" climax — yet in other ways it is
very unique. But for the very beginning, the entire tale takes
place in Antarctica, far away and far different from Lovecraft' s usual New
England settings. There is also extensive use of aircraft, and a very spec-
ific brand of aircraft, too. Why the differences?

It has been suggested that the setting is owed to Edgar Allan Poe's
The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket; but while Lovecraft is known
to have been a great admirer of Poe and even makes references to Poe's story
in his own, the two tales are very different. Rather, consider Lovecraft's
own words on the frozen continent: "I think the Antarctic continent is real-
ly paramount in my geographico-fantastic imagination" (SL III. 218). And
this was not a new fascination, either: "About 1900 I became a passionate
devotee of geography and history, and an intense fanatic on the subject of
Antarctic exploration" (SL 1.37). Then there is also Lovecraft's extreme
aversion to cold to consider. Antarctica, with temperatures often below
-30°, would certainly hold much personal terror for a man who could not
safely go out "at all under +20°, since the effects are varied and disas-
trous" (SL IV. 83).

But there is also the basic consideration of size. In 1930, where else
could he have hidden two entire mountain ranges and a fantastically huge
city? Even the city of the Great Race of the later story "The Shadow out
of Time" had to be buried in order for it to be discovered. No, At the
Mountains of Madness demanded a place of colossal size to encompass both
its physical requirements and epic content.

And what of the airplanes, including "four large Dornier aSroplanes"?^
Their presence in the story is central, for it is in them that Lake and his
expedition (and later Dyer and his expedition) reach the Mountains of Mad-
ness and what lay beyond them. It can be argued that the airplane is much
faster than dog-teeim or tractor for exploring; but in a work of fiction,
where periods of weeks or months can be condens ed into a sentence or two,

1. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,
1985) , p. 4. Hereafter cited in the text as MM.

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

this hardly matters. To understand the use of airplanes (and Dornier air-
planes) and setting in this story, an examination of South Polar exploration
is called for.

Prior to Lovecraft's birth (1890) there had been various voyages of
importance around Antarctica, particularly those of Coolc, Ross, and Willces.
But it was not until after the turn of the century and the emergence of a
new class of explorer that the "Heroic Age" of exploring began. Roald Am-
undsen first attained the South Pole in 1911, followed only a month later
by the ill-fated Capt. Robert F. Scott. There were important expeditions
by Carstens E. Borchgrevin)c (whose trip was followed closely by the then
ten-year-old Lovecraft; cf. SL 1.37) ; Sir Ernest ShacJcleton (in 1904, 1914,
and 1922); Dr. Charcot (1903-05); Sir Douglas Mawson (1911-14 and 1929-31);
and others, many others, all through the teens and twenties.^ Hvunan flight
came to Antarctica on February 4, 1902, when Capt. Scott rose 800 feet on
a balloon from the ice,^ but powered flight would be more than twenty years
later in coming.

Yet for all this furious activity, the Antarctic remained stubbornly
inviolable. The coldest, windiest, highest, and driest continent awaited
the development of safer and more efficient means of human travel, and, in
the extreme cold, regularly swallowed up the lives of even the most seasoned
of explorers.

This brings us to the period 1928-31 and another reason for the setting
of At the Mountains of Madness. During this time four major expeditions
laid siege to the ice and snow: the Willcins-Hearst Expedition (1928-29) ;
the Riiser-Larsen Expedition (1929-30) ; the Australasian Expedition of 1929-
31; and the first Byrd Expedition (1928-30). All four bear an important
similarity to Lovecraft's Mislcatonic Expedition — the use of aircraft. One
of them bears a suspiciously large number of similarities to Lovecraft's.

The Wil)cins-Hearst Expedition, led by feuned aeronaut Sir Hubert Wil-
)cins, landed on Deception Island (cf. map, back cover) in November 1928.

From this base Wilkins became the first in powered flight over Antarctica
on December 30, 1928. Other flights "proved" that the Palmer Peninsula was
an archipelago. The Riiser-Larsen Expedition was headed by Hjalmar Riiser-
Larsen, one-time pilot for Amundsen. He explored by ship and two airplanes
the coast from Enderby Land to Seal Bay on the Weddell Sea, discovering sev-
eral previously unknown land and submarine areas. Mawson' s 1929-31 expedi-
tion (really two expeditions — 1929-30 and 1930-31) sailed much of the long
coast of Wilkes Land and part of Enderby Land and, like Risser-Larsen, made
extensive use of the aircraft they brought.** (Lovecraft's narrator in At
the Mountains of Madness [MM 103] voices concern that Mawson and his men
will explore too closely to the greater mountain range; but though they were
in that general area at the time, Mawson' s expedition was spared any such
monstrous revelations.)

2. William H. Kearns, Jr., and Beverly Britton, The Silent Continent (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1955), pp. 227-30.

3. W. L. G. Joerg, A Brief History of Polar Exploration since the Introduction of Flying
(New York: American Geographic Society, 1930), p. 3.

4. Kearns and Britton, pp. 230-31.

1987

JASON C. ECKHARDT

That Lovecraft knew of these expeditions is likely; but that he knew
of the Byrd Expedition cannot be doubted. It would be far more difficult
to believe that he didn't know cibout it, and a lot about it, too. Led by
Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, hero of the first North Polar flight as well
as many others, the expedition was covered by most major newspapers, the
August 1930 issue of National Geographic, and in Byrd's own book. Little
America (first published in October 1930, it was already in its third print-
ing by the end of the year) . ^ Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness
between February and March 22, 1931,® so would have had plenty of time to
read any of these sources and adapt the information to his own use. The
idea of a story about a lost Arctic or Antarctic civilisation had been with
him for years at this point, ^ but it is clear to see that all the exploring
activity must have provided him with fresh inspiration and a framework based
in fact. Here follows an examination of just how closely the two expedi-
tions (Byrd and Miskatonic) resemble each other.

The Byrd Expedition, with 42 members (excluding ships' crews), about
100 dogs, a Ford snow-tractor, wireless equipment, geological equipment,
and three airplanes, departed New York Harbor on August 25, 1928.® The Mis-
katonic Expedition leaves Boston Harbor almost exactly two years later, on
September 2, 1930, bringing with it a land expedition of 20 men, 55 dogs,
wireless and geological research equipment, and five airplanes (MM 6f.).

Both expeditions travel in two ships (Byrd's in the City of New York and
the Eleanor Bolling; Lovecraft 's in the brig Arkham and the barque Miska-
tonic) and both pass westward through the Panama Canal. Byrd stopped at
Dunedin, New Zealand, for supplies; while the two Miskatonic ships dock at
Hobart, Tasmania, for final supplies. After the ice-pack forced one of
Byrd's ships to turn back, the other finally reached the Bay of Whales on
December 28, 1928; and it was here that was erected their famous base, "Lit-
tle America". Across the great Ross Ice Shelf at Ross Island, Lovecraft's
protagonists land at the foot of Mt. Erebus on November 9, 1930, and unload
their "drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks,
experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras both ordinary and agrial, agroplane
parts, and other accessories" (MM 8). Both parties lift their aircraft from
the ships directly onto the ice-barrier for assembly; but unlike Byrd, Love-
craft preferred to keep his main base of operations aboard his ships. (Byrd
sent his ships north on February 21, 1929, to keep them from becoming locked
in the ice. Lovecraft's expedition didn't stay into the Antarctic winter,
so this wasn't a problem for them.)

A word here about the Antarctic cold. Along about this point, Love-
craft's narrator says that "our experience with New England winters" (MM 9)
had prepared them for the 0“-+25° temperatures they encounter on the ice.

5. Richard E. Byrd, Jr., Little America (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930), copyright

page.

6. Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., H. P. Lovecraft; His Life, His Work (Hest Harwlck, RI; Necro-
nomicon Press, 1979) , p. 35.

7. "Lost Arctic and Antarctic civilisations form a fascinating idea to me — I used it once
in 'Polaris' and expect to use it again . . ." (SL III. 38).

8. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Lost Explorer: The Adventures of Admiral Byrd (New York: John Day
Co., 1968), pp. 165-250. All subsequent Byrd Expedition information is from this source.

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

This echoes the fact that several of Byrd’s men trained in Labrador and New
Hampshire preparatory to the South Polar trip. This also points up Love-
craft's idea of really cold temperatures, temperatures which would be con-
sidered balmy at the South Pole.

At this point in both expeditions, the aircraft come into play. Byrd
made a flight on January 26, 1929, heading eastward into Edward VII Land
and discovering the Rockefeller Mountains. Lovecraft's narrator Dyer and
his companions fly almost due south on November 21, 1930, cross Beardmore
Glacier and establish a second base at Latitude 86°7', East Longitude 174“
23'. (This is one part of the narrative, airplanes aside, that owes more
to the journeys of Scott and Shackleton than to that of Byrd. Both Scott
and Shackleton journeyed south toward the Pole over Beardmore Glacier from
bases on Ross Island. Lovecraft's characters also recreate Shackleton' s
ascent of Mt. Erebus in 1908.®)

The Miskatonic's southern base is reminiscent of the string of supply
bases set up by Byrd in October 1929, after the long inaction of the Ant-
arctic winter. Such bases were essential because of the restricted range
of aircraft at that time. From this southern base Lovecraft sends a party
of three to scale Mt. Fritjof Nansen on December 13-15, and a flight of two
of the Dornier airplanes over the South Pole on January 6, 1931. Rear Ad-
miral Byrd and three others became the first to fly over the South Pole on
November 28-29, 1929, using the big Ford Tri-motor airplane the "Floyd Ben-
nett". We must backtrack a little here to take note of an interesting co-
incidence. On Byrd's flight southward, the plane was required to cross a
high pass between two mountains, one of which was Mt. Nansen. There were
15,000 pounds of fuel, provisions, and equipment aboard the "Floyd Bennett",
including several hundred pounds of photographic equipment, and it was only
by dumping out 250 pounds of food (considered, incredibly, the least impor-
tant) that they were able to clear the ice and bleak rocks of the pass.

This is very reminiscent of Dyer and Danforth's flight over the pass in
the Mountains of Madness, in a "lightened plane with aerial camera and geo-
logist’s outfit" (MM 40).

The Miskatonic's biologist Lake made a preliminary sledging and boring
journey on January 11-18, 1931; and on the 22nd, with eleven men, 36 dogs,
and all four Dornier aircraft, he flew over 700 miles northwestward. At
Latitude 76“15', Longitude 113“10' E., Lake radios that they have spotted
an enormous mountain chain. After some observation flights over the foot-
hills, and the exhumation of the Old Ones, Lake's group prepares to weather
a storm that rushes upon them from the heights. (Interestingly, the area
in Wilkes Land where Lovecraft places the end of his mountains is close to

9. Kearns and Britton, p. 228.

10. These coordinates should be taken as the airplane's location and not that of the
mountains; using the description of the mountain range on page 70 of the Arkham House edition,
these coordinates would still put Lake 100 miles away from it. This is possible, given the
immensity of the chain and the altitude of the aircraft, and probable too, since they fly
for another half hour (75 miles, at their rate of speed) before being forced down in the
foothills. See map on back cover for reference.

1987

JASON C. ECKHARDT

the windiest place on earth. Winds of 200 miles an hour have been reported
there. Here again we must look back at a remarkable similarity between
Lovecraft's and Byrd’s expeditions. On March 7, 1929, three members of
Byrd's party flew to the base of the newly discovered Rockefeller Mountains
for geological research. They were forced to remain there by the onset of
a storm, and attempted to secure their plane to keep the wind from damaging
it. They tied it to stakes in the ground and built a small snow-block wall
around it ; but the gale ’ s end found the plane torn apart by the wind * s fury .
They were rescued two weeks later by Byrd himself. Similarly, when Dyer
arrives with a rescue party on January 25, they find Lake’s camp in the fol-
lowing condition:

It is a fact that the wind wrought dreadful havoc. . . . One aeroplane shelter — all,
it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state— was nearly pulver-
ised; and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The ex-
posed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised to a high pol-
ish, and two of the tents were flattened despite their snow banking. (MM 31-32)

Dyer and Danforth cross the great mountain chain on January 26, explore the
city beyond, and return the seime day. The rescue expedition, in three of
the planes, returns to the southern base on the 27th, and back to Ross Is-
land on the 28th. The ships Arkham and Miskatonlc, with all aboard, pull
away from the ice shelf on February 2, 1931. Byrd’s expedition, after an-
other exploratory flight over the Ross Ice Shelf, quit the Antarctic on
February 18, 1930.

Thus we have the two expeditions, fact and fiction. It is clear that
Lovecraft, though not intending to "cash in” on the popularity of Byrd’s
exploits, certainly admired the man enough to use his travels as a basis
for his own flights of fancy. As for differences between the two, one of
the major ones is the direction of exploration (Byrd to the east. Love-
craft to the northwest) . But even here Lovecraft explains that his group
originally intended to head "500 miles to the eastward" (MM 11) from the
southern camp. That he sent them the other way is due to the far more un-
known aspect of the northwest. Another difference is in time spent — Byrd
was there fifteen months to Lovecraft’s three. This discrepancy is due
to two factors. One is the disaster at Lake’s camp; they might have stayed
another year, but for the horrific circumstances. Two is extremely good
luck. Even the narrator of Lovecraft’s tale says, "Our good luck and ef-
ficiency were almost uncanny" (MM 11). Compare, for example, the Miskatonic
expedition to Byrd’s second expedition (1933-35), during which the camp
doctor became seriously ill, four of their five snow-tractors either broke
down or burned, and Byrd himself almost suffocated while alone and far from
help.^^ Notwithstanding the horrors in the Old Ones’ city, the Miskatonic
crew was lucky indeed.

Given the state of exploration, then, it’s easy to see why the air-

11. James M. Darley, National Geographic Society Map of Antarctica, February 1963.

12. Hoyt, pp. 280-333.

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

planes appear in the story. But why Dornier airplanes? To answer this,
we must look to the adventures of that other great polar hero, Roald Amund-
sen. In 1924 Amundsen and American adventurer Lincoln Ellsworth prepared
to fly over the North Pole. The airplane upon which they finally decided
for the flight was the Dornier Do-J "Wal", a two-engine, single-wing flying
boat used primarily for passenger service. In his book Beyond Horizons
Ellsworth explains the pilot's choice:

In the first place, he sought a ship with a duralumin hull. Wooden hulls he deemed
unsuitable for landing on rough ice or in water filled with broken ice, because of
the danger of stripping the bottom. Duralumin, even lighter than steel, will bend
or dent under ordinary collisions but will not break much more readily than wood.

Several types of duralumin flying boats were then made in Europe. What deter-
mined the choice of the Dornler-Wal was the design of the hull itself. The lines
of other hulls were such that in snow they would push the snow aside, in the manner
of a plow. The Dornier-Wal had a lift forward that would enable it to climb over
snow, like a toboggan, and was the only hull of that design in Europe.

On the Antarctic continent, concern for drift ice would be unfounded; but
the duralumin would still be protection against sastrugi, the odd ice-
ripples found there. The handling in snow is more apt, since most of the
Antarctic is snow.

Ellsworth goes on to explain the advantages of the two Rolls-Royce
engines, one of which could keep the plane in the air and both of which
could lift the plane plus its own weight in cargo (about 8,000 lbs.). These
engines also contained heaters to keep oil and water from freezing, and 4%
glycerine was added to the water to keep it liquid at -17“ Celsius.^**

These were modifications peculiar to the two Dorniers that Amundsen
used. Of the 300 or so of the planes built, there were more than twenty
versions and many individual modifications.^^ This fits in well with Love-
craft's narrator's statement about their "huge planes built to our especial
orders for heavy machinery transportation" (MM 27) , planes "designed espec-
ially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau
and with added fuel-warming and quick starting devices" (MM 4) . With a
73-foot wingspan,^® the Wal would certainly qualify for the narrator's des-
cription of "huge".

As for the range of flight, the farthest the planes in the story are
required to fly in one jump is 700 miles (from the southern camp to Lake's
camp), and the Dornier-Wal was capable of nearly twice that (1,367 miles).

Of course, they planned to get back, too; but that could have been accom-
plished by ferrying fuel in one of the planes, just as they did from Ross
Island to the southern base (MM 12) .

13. Lincoln Ellsworth, Beyond Horizons (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), pp.
145-46.

14. Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, et al.. Our Polar Flight: The Amundsen-Ellsworth Polar Flight
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925), p. 153.

15. John Stroud, European Transport Aircraft since 1910 (Fallbrook, CA: Aero Publishers,
1966), p. 239.

16. Stroud, p. 242.

17. Ibid.

1987

JASON C. ECKHARDT

Another important factor in this plane's success would be its weight
capacity. This is especially relevant when dealing with food, for an ex-
pedition's provisions must all be brought along — Antarctica is a sterile
land. Using calculations worked up by Rear Admiral Byrd in Little Amer-
ica , and specifications for the Dornier-Wal, the following possible check-
list has been made for Lake's sub-expedition, for a sixty-day excursion:

ITEM(S) WEIGHT

12 men

2,400 lbs.

36 dogs (80 lbs. each)

2,880

human food

2,160

dog food

3 sledges (long Norwegian freight

3,888

sledges)

153

dog gear

navigation, surveying, and meteoro-

logical equipment

radio gear

300

safety devices

tools

personal equipment

700

gasoline

9,000

TOTAL

21,688

Considering that the Dornier-Wal was capcUsle of carrying 7,000 pounds
of cargo, it's plain that Lake's four Dorniers could handle what this trip
required of it, plus room for extra gasoline and PecJaodie's drilling and
melting apparatus (cUoout which we can only guess the weight) .

There are a couple of differences between the Wal and the planes men-
tioned in At the Mountains of Madness. One is the "landing s)tis" mentioned
on MM 49, and another is the narrator's telling cdiout getting "the engine
started" (MM 104), intimating one as opposed to the Wal's two. As for the
skis, it's been shown that the Wals wouldn't need them; but on the other
hand, they couldn't hurt. Most planes attempting the Antarctic, even to-
day, sport skis. As for the engines, the Wal's two engines were housed in
one nacelle, which could easily have been mistaken by Lovecraft for one
engine. The main problem with the Dornier-Wal is its ceiling, or mcucimum
altitude. Lovecraft has his plane clearing a pass of 24,000 feet, more
than twice the ceiling of the Wal. However, we must take Lovecraft's word
that his planes were suitctbly equipped for this rare height, and allow him
some artistic license.

Finally, a note on the mountains themselves. There are, unfortunately
(or fortunately) , no such mountains in that part of Antarctica; but hap-
pily, this was never disproved during Lovecraft's lifetime. "I have to

18. Byrd, pp. 257, 261, 277.

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

SPRING

Stop dreaming eibout an unknown realm (such as Antarctica or Aredjia Deserta)
as soon as the explorers enter it" (SL III. 140) . So wrote Lovecraft in
1930, and we are all very fortunate that the explorers stayed away long
enough for him to complete his story. The real "Mountains of Madness" (the
highest in Antarctica, anyway) were discovered in 1935 by Lincoln Ellsworth
on the first trans-Antarctic flight. He and his pilot passed far to the
west of them and christened them the Sentinel Mountains; but, like the char-
acters in At the Mountains of Madness, a haze hid the highest peaks from
them. Ellsworth and his pilot considered them a minor range, unaware that
the 14,000-foot peak of Vinson Massif lay just beyond their sight. Earlier
on the flight, the fliers had found and named the Eternity Range, for rea-
sons that sound remar )cably like something Lovecraft might have said:

We were Indeed the first Intruding mortals in this age-old region, wd looking down

on the mighty peaks I thought of eternity and man's insignificance.^’

At the Mountains of Madness thus stands as a monument to Lovecraft 's
imagination, his ability to capture the real and to make us believe the
unreal .

19. Ellsworth, p. 320.

BRIEFLY NOTED

We all Jtnow what Lovecraft thought of Lord Dunsany; in "Lord Dunsany
and His Work" he wrote a florid paean to the Irish fantaisiste, and in "Su-
pernatural Horror in Literature" he speaks of him in scarcely less adula-
tory a fashion. But what did Dunsany think of Lovecraft? Theinjcs to David
E. Schultz, we now have an answer to that question. Schultz has unearthed
the following letter written by the aged Dunsany to August Derleth, and it
speaks for itself:

Dunstall Priory
Shoreham Sevenoaks
March 28, 1952

Dear Mr. Derleth

I have been told of an article which I never saw in print, written
about my work by the late H. P. Lovecraft, in a book published by you called
Marginalia. It would be very kind of you if you would give me a copy of
this book because I cannot get one here, & have an odd interest in Love-
craft's work because in the few tales of his I have read I found that he
was writing in my style, entirely originally & without in any way borrowing
from me, & yet with my style & largely my material. It would much interest
me to see the book if you would be so kind as to send me a copy.

Yours sincerely,

Dunsany

Reviews

H. P. LOVECRAFT. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Selected by August Der-

leth, With Texts Edited by S. T. Joshi and an Introduction by T. E. D.

Klein. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1986. lii, 448 pp. $18.95 he.

Reviewed by Steven J. Mariconda.

Very little need be said in defence of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales —
the new edition from Arkham House makes a fitting capstone to the new tex-
tually corrected trilogy of Lovecraft's fiction. This volume differs even
more radically from the previous edition than either of its two companion
volumes, for aside from the attractive production and accurate texts it
features a few surprises.

One immediately notices, for example, that the first story in the vol-
ume is no longer the title story, but "The Tomb"! This is because the con-
tents — save the early tales (including the not-so-early "Transition of Juan
Romero"), the fragments, and "Supernatural Horror in Literature" — are now
presented in chronological order. This is a great boon, if one keeps in
mind the items that were placed in the other two volumes. These items (be-
ginning with 1919 's "Statement of Randolph Carter") were excluded because
August Derleth grouped the tales by quality and not chronology; they remain
in this grouping because of the copyright problems that would result for
Arkham House from a more extensive rearrangement.

But it is easy for us to track the order in which the stories were
written, thanks to the inclusion of textual editor S. T. Joshi' s compre-
hensive chronology of Lovecraft's fiction, handsomely set in small caps,
at the back of the volume. This replaces Derleth' s spurious chronology in
the previous edition. He simply arranged in alphabetical order the titles
for each year, not even making note of this approach — a perfect example of
the lazy scholarship that also contributed to the corruption of the texts.
Joshi' s chronology (first printed in his H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of
Criticism [1980] in a more cluttered format) covers everything from "The
Noble Eavesdropper" (1897?; non-extant) to "The Night Ocean" (with R. H.
Barlow; Autumn? 1936). It includes all Lovecraft's fiction and revisions,
even such obscure items as "Old Bugs" and "Sweet Ermengarde".

But the main attraction, as usual, are the texts themselves. Joshi
has added a more detailed textual introduction to this volume than he did
to the others, listing the manuscript sources for each item. As exhaustive
as the list is, it only hints at the amount of work that went into the
project, for Joshi does not detail the difficult choices and painstaking
word-for-word collation of all other manuscripts and relevant publications
that had to be accomplished for each work. One wishes for a full textual
apparatus here, so that we could see how Lovecraft revised his texts and

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what decisions Joshi made in arriving at his definitive versions. The ed-
itor covered some of this in his “Textual Problems in Lovecraft; A Prelim-
inary Survey" {Lovecraft Studies #6, Spring 1982), and perhaps we can hope
for a similar article from him on this topic in the future.

Some of the textual changes here are striking. "Facts concerning the
Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", "Under the Pyramids", and "Celephals"
(with diaeresis; note similarly the restoration of diacritical marks on
words such as "Argimenes" and "Merog") have finally been graced with their
proper titles, and "The Tomb", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", and "The Tree"
again have epigraphs. A more amusing restoration is the footnote to "Juan
Romero": "AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here is a lesson in scientific accuracy for fiction
writers. I have just looked up the moon's phases for October, 1894, to find
when a gibbous moon was visible at 2 a.m. , and have changed the dates to
fit!" (As hilarious as this is, it does reflect Lovecraft's lifelong con-
cern with accuracy in his fiction; his letters to Derleth, for example, are
full of long notations of geographical and other errors in the latter's
tales. )

Another thing that jumps out at the reader is the typographic devices
Lovecraft used for emphasis in certain tales, especially in the last line
of "The Alchemist" (which, in addition to the four exclamation points dis-
persed throughout, goes into italics and then into all caps) and "The Beast
in the Cave" (where the last word and its accompanying three exclamation
points are now in bold) . Lovecraft never quite lost his juvenile fondness
for such things, but, happily, became slightly more subtle as he progressed.
In "The Temple", the dramatic dialogue of the mad Klenze is one step more
emphatic, with the addition of underlining — " He is calling! ^ is calling!

I hear him! We must go!"; likewise for "The Other Gods", where Atal now
cries in horror of "the other gods! the other gods!"

Because most of the stories here were first printed in pulp magazines,
many had been reparagraphed for "easier" reading until this edition. A no-
table example is "The Hound", where the many divided paragraphs and two sen-
sational one-sentence paragraphs ("Then terror came" and "Then he collapsed,
an inert mass of mangled flesh" — as if this story needed any more floridity!)
have now been put right. Weird Tales, perhaps because of Lovecraft's early
injunction that they print his stories only on the condition that they fol-
low his texts, actually treated the stories better than did some others.

"The Doom That Came to Sarnath", which appeared in Marvel Tales, was almost
as horribly butchered as the men in that story are. Notice things like the
last sentence; before:

But half burled in the rushes was spied a curious green idol; an exceedingly an-
cient idol chisled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard.

and after:

But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol of stone; an exceed-
ingly ancient idol coated in seaweed and chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great
water-lizard.

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REVIEWS

Only six words omitted from the sentence in the previous edition — but unfor-
tunately this eunotints to one-fifth of the sentence! (The rest of the story
was equally corrupt, prompting Joshi to call it "a textual nightmaure". )

A very special part of this volume is "Supernatural Horror in Litera-
ture". We cam for the first time read Lovecraft’s great essay (generally
accepted as the finest critical survey of weird fiction ever written) as
he intended us to. Joshi notes in his introduction that this piece pre-
sented particular textual problems of its own; indeed, the preparation of
the text was originally as a project in itself, a critical edition that
never saw print. Joshi used the text from The Recluse, The Fantasy Fan,
and The Outsider and Others to compile his version, amd presents the most
complete and definitive version yet printed. He has even gone back to the
original sources (like Samuel Loveman's introduction to Twenty-one Letters
of Ambrose Bierce) from which Lovecraft cited, amd cleaned up transcription
errors in the passages Lovecraft quoted. The essay is made even more useful
by the index (yes, an index in an Arkham House book!) that is supplied.

The book is topped off by a 40-page introduction by leading weird fic-
tionist T. E. D. Klein. Klein reviews Lovecraft 's literary amd personal
fondness for Lord Dunsany, his New York "exile", amd his literary techniques
and themes. The latter discussion is quite comprehensive, if somewhat dis-
cursive, and touches on many important facets of Lovecraft* s work— things
like the use of the dream-city, amd the themes of degeneration, feaur of the
impermanent, and adventurous expectancy. Among Klein's mamy Insights is
that Lovecraft *s eaurly stories are often "minlatiires" of his later, greater
works. This is strikingly evident on rereading the stories in this volume.

In varying degrees, "The Moon-Bog" has much in common with "The Rats in the
Walls", "The Nameless City" with At the Mountains of Madness, "The T<»nb"
and "The Alchemist" with The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and "Facts con-
cerning the Late Arthur Jermyn amd His Family" with "The Shadow over Inns-
mouth". In all, the introduction contains a tremendous amount of informa-
tion, and will be am especial help to the new reader of Lovecraft. Klein
(who has a compulsive fondness for Lovecraft *s letters) uses copious quota-
tions to let the Providence dreauner do as much of the taDcing as possible,
and this gives the reader a good sense of Lovecraft *s personality.

Since this is the last volume of the definitive fiction, it is appro-
priate to congratulate once more S. T. Joshi on his rediscovery of the "real"
Lovecraft. His achievement will stand as a lasting monument to his many
contributions to Lovecraft studies. Jaunes Turner of Arkham House, who saw
Joshi* s work to print, should also be singled out. On reflection, it is a
sad and astonishing realization that it took fully forty years after Love-
craft's death for the event to come to pass. There are more intangible ben-
efits, also. These volumes will do much to speed the continuing progress of
Lovecraft from pulp hack to American artist. Anyone who approaches them
will not encounter the garish, shabby, and none-too-coherent editions which
have previously been the rule. Instead they will see the scholarly care,
effort, and editorial interest befitting an author of literary merit and
philosophical depth.

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HENRY L. P. BECKWITH, JR. Lovecraft's Providence and Adjacent Parts. West

Kingston, RI: Donald H. Grant, 1986. 95 pp. $15.00 he. Reviewed by

Will Murray.

First published in 1979, this handly little guide to the Rhode Island
haunts of H. P. Lovecraft has been reprinted. An outgrowth of a tour the
noted researcher conducted during the First World Fantasy Convention in
1975, Lovecraft’ s Providence and Adjacent Parts describes four separate
tours of the Providence area, and the important sites mentioned in Love-
craft's stories and letters. As someone who has frequently guided non-New
Englanders through the byzantine byways of Lovecraft's beloved natal city,
I've found it very useful, although the margin references designed to link
specific sites to textual sources are rendered useless because Beckwith re-
fers the reader to the hopelessly out-of-print Arkham editions of The Out-
sider and Beyond the Wall of Sleep — neither of which one is likely to tote
on a tour, assuming one owned them. Despite that puzzling fault, this is
a wonderful tool with which to discover the sites of "The Call of Cthulhu" ' s
Fleur-de-Lys Building and the imposing "Shunned House".

While the body of the text is virtually identical to the earlier ed-
ition, there are attempts to update old information. The blank pages headed
"Tour Notes" have been replaced with additional notes and updates of site
changes. Beckwith notes the demise of the Met Cafe — a mere pit stop not
having anything to do with Lovecraft — and one of the four tour maps reflects
its loss, but the addition of the new Hot Club, while keyed to that selfsame
map, is curiously not to be found. Another error is the failure to amend
the dedication to Beckwith's now-former wife — something the author could be
heard grumbling about at the recent World Fantasy Convention.

More useful changes include a new version of the photograph of Old
Narragansett Church in Wickford, a new back cover by David Ireland (who
also supplied the maps), and sharper reproduction of Ireland's near-perfect
front cover, depicting a Lovecraftian entity hovering over one of Love-
craft's favorite Providence buildings, the First Baptist Church. The in-
clusion of the Lovecraft family coat of arms, with its revelation that the
three canine heads — thought by Lovecraft to be foxes — are in fact wolves,
is a perfect close to this valuable book. Those who already own the first
edition may not need the second, but that's not likely to inhibit the true
Lovecraft collector. For those who don't own it, it's a must. And with
this edition limited to but 500 copies, it will not be long in print.

PETER CANNON. The Chronology out of Time: Dates in the Fiction of H. P.

Lovecraft. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1986. 33 pp. $3.95.

Reviewed by S. T. Joshi.

This is a book I would very much like to have written. Even the most
casual reader of Lovecraft must have sensed the unprecedented precision of

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Lovecraft's work — a precision not only of diction, construction, and phil-
osophical orientation, but a precision of setting. Aside from the Dunsanian
fantasies and the earlier Poe-esque tales (where such precision would in
fact be detrimental), Lovecraft's fiction is unquestionedsly rooted in a very
real time (the period of Lovecraft's own life) and place (the New England he
knew so well). There are not many authors in all literature — Dickens, Hardy,
and FauDcner are the ones that immediately come to mind — for whom Peter Can-
non could have done what he has done here: to make a chronology of events in
Lovecraft's stories from the early middle ages to 1935. It is amazing how
much there is to list: from the Renaissance to the twentieth century things
happen in Lovecraft, whether it be the various translations of the Necronom-
icon or the destruction of Dunwich. In horror fiction only M. R. James can
even approach the fanatical precision with which Lovecraft established this
mythical chronology, this bold rewriting of history.

The percimeters of Cannon's chronology might initially seem arbitrary,
but they ultimately justify themselves. Why limit the chronology to no ear-
lier than 700 (the floruit of Abdul Alhazred) and no later than 1935 (the
death of Robert Blake) ? It is because the events before and after these
dates — as far back as the heyday of the Great Race 150,000,000 years ago and
as far forward as the death of the sun — can all be found in At the Mountains
of Madness and "The Shadow out of Time", euid then only on the assumption (now
questioned by Robert M. Price) that the profound inconsistencies between the
two stories can be harmonised. Why include dates only from the two revisions
"The Mound" and "Out of the Eons"? Well, the other revisions don't actually
offer much in terms of dating anyhow.

We can learn much from this listing. One wonders, for example, why
Lovecraft set "The Picture in the House" in 1896, when he wrote the story
in 1920. The plot does not depend on this date, for the supernatural prem-
ise of the story — that the old man has outlived his normal span through can-
nibalism — could certainly have allowed the cheerful carnivore to live a few
more decades, closer to the time of the story's composition. This story —
as well, perhaps, as "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", set in 1901 but written in
1919 — may represent a transition from the never-never-land of "The Tomb" to
the contemporaneousness of "The Rats in the Walls".

Again, Cannon remarks that the sparseness of events in the nineteenth
century — indeed, if we remove the events uncovered by the newspaper reporter
in "The Haunter of the Dark", almost nothing remains between the death of
Joseph Cujrwen in 1771 and the fall of the meteorite in 1882, aside from the
endless cycle of births and deaths in "The Shunned House" — is a result of
Lovecraft's "antipathy to the Victorian age". There may be more to it than
that. Certainly Lovecraft had no fondness for the hypocrisy and shallowness
of Victorian society, but more than that the whole nineteenth century rep-
resented a sort of limbo — separate alike from the hallowed eighteenth cent-
ury and the grinding reality of the twentieth. It had for Lovecraft not yet
become history — and therefore he could not write about it as he did the
eighteenth century in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward — and it did not have
the immediacy of his own day.

All this makes me wonder why Lovecraft went to such trouble to refashion

LOVECRAFT STUDIES

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history in this way. To be more precise, it was not that he was rewriting
history; rather, he was simply filling in the gaps. Just as his whole aes-
thetic of weird fiction required that he create "supplements rather than
contradictions" of the "real” universe, so Lovecraft felt compelled to in-
sert nameless events into the underside of history. The past is not as
bland and straightforward as the history books tell us; other things have
happened that make our existence on this earth infinitely more precarious.
This is the secret of Lovecraft' s horrific effectiveness: it is not merely
that we must be on guard for things that will occur; it is that we are ren-
dered totally helpless because certain things have already occurred. R'lyeh
will rise again because it rose before; the Old Ones will take over because
they once ruled. It is this historical determinism that makes Lovecraft' s
world so profoundly dispiriting.

BRIEFLY NOTED

A token of Lovecraft' s ascending recognition in the academic world is
the emergence of two anthologies of Lovecraft criticism included in recent
library reference works. Twentieth-Century American Literature, Volume 4
(1986) , part of the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism, contains a
21-page selection of excerpts of Lovecraft criticism made by S. T. Joshi,
managing editor of the Chelsea House series. In Topics in Contemporary Lit-
erary Criticism, Volume 22 (1986), published by the Gale Research Co., Thomas
Ligotti has made a 40-page selection of similar material. It is surprising
how little overlap there is between the two. Joshi has included such things
as Clark Ashton Smith's exquisite "To Howard Phillips Lovecraft", excerpts
from W. Paul Cook's and Sonia H. Davis's memoirs, a large chunk of Peter Pen-
zoldt's discussion from The Supernatural in Fiction (1952), and such lengthy
essays as Paul Buhle's "Dystopia as Utopia", Donald R. Burleson's "The Myth-
ic Hero Archetype in 'The Dunwich Horror'", and Joshi 's own "Topical Refer-
ences in Lovecraft". Ligotti has included some rather odd items — Ursula K.

Le Guin's and Larry McMurtry's highly uninformed reviews of the de Camp
biography, Anton LaVey's peculiar "Metaphysics of Lovecraft" — plus lengthy
excerpts from Barton L. St Armand's two books, Burleson's Greenwood Press
study, and Joshi' s Starmont Reader's Guide. Joshi regrets not being able
to include anything by Robert M. Price, but declares that he would have
liked to use Price landmark "Demythologizing Cthulhu", included in Lig-
otti 's selection. Peter Cannon (whose forthcoming book on Lovecraft for
Twayne's United States Authors Series ought to be a revelation) was not
included in either selection, but Steven J. Mariconda was represented in
Joshi with his article on prose realism and in Ligotti with his article
on background in Lovecraft.