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Toward the middle of June 1971, my wife and I flew
to Minneapolis to attend a local science fiction conference held annually there,
called the Minicon, to which I had been invited as guest of honor.
My wife Noel had gone to college in Minneapolis and
was eager to revisit the city and lookup old friends, while I had never been to
the Twin Cities before. So we decided to take a few extra days and do a bit of
traveling and sight-seeing, stopping off for three days in Chicago on the way
home.
We ended up visiting the Midwest for eight days. I
had been much too busy during the first half of the year to take anything
remotely resembling a vacation. For one thing, I had been working night and day
for the past four months on a major writing project; this was a full-length
study of H. P. Lovecraft, of those of his friends and fellow-writers who had
contributed to the literature of the Cthulhu Mythos, and of the Mythos itself.
After all this work I was ripe for a rest and a bit of new scenery, so this trip
became our vacation.
It was Noel who pointed out that August Derleth
lived not very far from Minneapolis (as the airplane flies). Although I had been
exchanging letters with Augie Derleth for the past seventeen years, we had never
met. This looked like the perfect opportunity to do so. My travel agent informed
me that the nearest city to Derleth's home town --- Madison, Wisconsin --- had
an airport and was only fifty minutes flying time from Minneapolis. After a
little juggling of schedules and hotel reservations, we decided to fly to
Madison after the convention, spend the day of June 22 with Derleth, and fly out
that evening for Chicago.
Derleth was delighted at the idea, and promised to
meet us in Madison and drive us to Sauk City. He and I had been in almost
constant touch the past four months while I had been researching my book on
Lovecraft. We had exchanged endless letters of questions and answers, long phone
calls almost weekly, and he had recently taken the time out of his busy schedule
to read and criticize the first one hundred and four pages of my Lovecraft
manuscript.
Our plane arrived at Madison at 11:40 a.m., and
Derleth and his secretary, Caitlin, met us at the gate. I recognized him
instantly; he was exactly what I had expected him to be: a huge, burly man with
a tanned face and graying, close-cropped straight hair, with twinkling eyes and
an affable grin. He wore a short-sleeved bright red sports shirt, open at the
throat, and slacks. He had lost a lot of weight during his recent serious
illness and hospitalization, but was still a large man. Kay was an attractive,
dark-haired girl in her middle or late twenties.
After lunch in the airport cafe, Kay drove us to
Sauk City. The drive took about an hour and we chatted all the way. Noel, an
Arkham House collector and Lovecraft buff, was as eager as I to meet Augie
Derleth. She told him about the Victorian dolls-house she was working on, and
was very impressed, having mentioned casually that the house was supposed to be
the home of Sir Lionel Barton, at his appreciative chuckle and knowing comment
that there should be a dacoit or two lurking in the shrubbery. (Sir Lionel is a
character in a couple of the earlier Fu Manchu books, and of all the scores and
scores of people who have seen or heard about the dolls-house, Augie was the
only one who recognized the name.)
Sauk City is a small, neat, pleasant town filled
with handsome old farmhouses; we took a circuitous route, Derleth pointing out
the homes of several real-life people who had served as models for leading
characters in his Sac Prairie Saga novels. These would have meant more to me but
I have never read his regional fictions; he did, however, point out the vacant
lot which was the site of his weird yarn, "The Lonesome Place", which
was disappointingly prosaic and unscary by daylight.
Place of Hawks, the home Derleth built for himself
and his family, lies far back off a country road a mile or so outside of Sauk
City proper, behind a screen of pine trees. It's a big, comfortable place, built
of wood and fieldstone, nestled under tall pines, with seclusion and quiet and
privacy. Derleth's two big, friendly dogs met us as we got out of the car, tails
wagging, and his mother, a serene, hospitable woman whose warm smile and unlined
face belied her eighty-six years, greeted us at the door.
Augie took us upstairs to the long, low-ceiling room
on the second floor that served him as his study and writing room. The walls
were lined with books; an enormous fieldstone fireplace took up much of one
wall; tall French doors opened amidst thick pine boughs. A crescent-shaped desk
covered with neat stacks of manuscript, correspondence and notebooks was backed
into one corner. While Augie showed my wife a couple of his recent books of
verse, I roamed around exploring the bookshelves and stumbled upon his
collection of the sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith, which stood in a row along
the top of the bookshelves. There were nearly forty of them, ranging in size
from about two inches to six inches in height, and they were carved from a wide
variety of minerals.
Derleth told me he had the largest collection of
Smith's sculptures in the world, by one piece; the runner-up was George Haas of
Berkeley. He was particularly proud of owning Smith's very first sculpture, a
gaunt head called "The Outsider". (In recent letters, he and I had
discussed Smith's sculptures, for I had been trying to buy an example of
Klarkash-Ton's work in the recalcitrant medium of stone, but neither Carol Smith
nor Roy Squires --- whom I had asked --- were willing to sell me one; Derleth,
before the day was over, raised the question by offering me not one but two,
a matched pair of lava bookends titled "Treasure Guardians" which he
was willing to sell as they were larger than the rest of his pieces and he was
less fond of them. I bought them on the spot and carried them home by hand. (As
he gave them to me, Derleth ruefully commented that now he had the second-best
collection, and George Haas the largest.)
We talked for hours, mostly about books, including
the collection of my macabre verse that Derleth wanted to bring out with the
Arkham imprint under the title of Dreams from R'lyeh. At my request, he
dug out some rare Lovecraft manuscripts for our perusal, including the
hand-written and illustrated "Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy" HPL
had done as a teenager. He also showed us around his study, which was actually a
suite; the second room, with desk and "backup" typewriter, held his
magnificent collection of American comic strips, including a framed Walt Kelly
original signed to him. Derleth recounted how he had been one of the first to
see Kelly's work, back when he had been a contributor to "Animal
Comics" in the days before "Pogo". A third room was given over to
Derleth's odd hobby of picking, drying and selling a succulent species of
mushroom called morels. Augie remarked that during one stage of the drying
process morels exuded an odor identical with that of male semen, which
occasioned a few ribald jests.
He took us on a house tour. His sixteen-year-old
daughter, April, met us clad only in a bikini and a sun-tan after a day of
swimming. We also met his son Wally, about thirteen. Derleth's home was rustic
and comfortable, all knotty pine paneling and stone fireplaces and rag rugs. The
bulk of his superb collection of books was kept in one large room of the
finished basement. That's where we ended up for another long conversation, with
me prowling the shelves and coming up with exciting finds like autographed
things by M. P. Shiel and Arthur Machen. Augie kept his dual collection of
mystery fiction and supernatural horror down here, as his Arkham collection and
file of his own published work fills the shelves of his study to overflowing.
We discussed mutual friends. I conveyed to him the
greetings of Evangeline Walton, who had been our guest on Long Island recently,
on her way home to Arizona from a trip to Greece and Crete. Derleth, of course,
had published her weird novel Witch House, which had been brought to his
attention by bookseller/publisher Ben Abramson, while I had published her novel The
Island of the Mighty in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, it having been
brought to my attention by Paul Spencer. Derleth told us a lot about his plans
for forthcoming books, the new novel he was working on, The Watchers Out of
Time, which was to be the latest of his posthumous collaborations with
Lovecraft.
After we explored Place of Hawks, he took us on a
tour of the grounds. There is a sort of gravel-paved courtyard ringed in with
sheds and outbuildings and dominated by an enormous tree about two hundred years
old, whose trunk is encircled by a rustic wooden bench. One outbuilding is the
Arkham warehouse, filled with wooden dollies piled high with cartons of books;
you have to weave your way through these stacks of Arkham House books by means
of narrow aisles. The farther end of the warehouse is filled with a long counter
stacked with flat, unfolded mailing cartons and pads of mailing labels. Here are
kept the books that have just come in and those that are in very short supply,
and from this counter the orders are filled. Noel and I took the opportunity to
buy twenty dollars worth of books, mostly Solar Pons titles which Derleth
promised to inscribe to us and mail later. These were quite likely the last few
books he ever autographed, and we received them two days before his sudden
death.
The afternoon was wearing on; we made our farewells
to his mother, and Derleth drove us into town for cocktails at the home of his
secretary. Then we were his guests for dinner at an excellent steak house. We
lingered over the meal and martinis, but eventually he had to drive us into
Madison to make our flight to Chicago, which was scheduled to leave at 8:10 p.m.
All in all, we spent about eight hours as Derleth's guests, and a more genial,
affable, friendly host could hardly be imagined.
Derleth's great-grandfather had been a French count,
and the people of Sauk City treated him with all the deference of a local
squire. I noticed, in the restaurant at dinner, one waitress was called over to
serve him; she knew just how he liked his steak (dry, with all the juice poured
off), and the particular brandy he wanted with his coffee. Noel and I were
amused at the way he was treated by the people of Sauk City, all of whom seemed
to know who he was by sight. Obviously he was the local celebrity.
We also noticed that the nearness of death was
continually on his mind. He brought the subject up innumerable times during the
day. Showing us unpublished book-manuscripts slated for future publication under
the Arkham House imprint, he remarked that "in case anything happened"
he had enough manuscripts on hand to keep the House going for two years or so.
When I happened to remark that I was sorry not to be able to meet Rick Meng, the
young man he had recently hired to relieve him of most of the routine publishing
chores, Derleth idly said that he was grooming the young man to take over things
"when he was gone".
After a hearty dinner, while he and his secretary
lingered in the airport waiting to see us off, he was troubled by a touch of
indigestion. But to him it was perhaps a warning sign of another heart attack,
and his genial good humor flagged, worrying about the slight discomfort. It was
very much on his mind that another attack could carry him off at any time. This
hearty, strong, powerhouse of a man who, as a novelist, teacher, publisher,
poet, lecturer, book reviewer, had pushed himself without rest for dozens of
years, had held up under a crowded workload that would have exhausted two
ordinary men, but his stamina had failed him at last, and he knew it.
Thirteen days later he was dead.
On the morning of July 5 I went out to get the
morning paper about 7 a. m. I was planning to go into the city to do some
business at Ballantine, and since I am the sort of writer who generally works
all night and goes to bed when other people are getting up to go to work, the
only way I can visit the office during working hours is not to go to bed at all.
That morning I brewed a cup of coffee and sat drinking it on my front porch,
idly leafing through the paper. The obituary in the New York Times caught
my eye: the headline read--
AUGUST DERLETH,
PROLIFIC AUTHOR
I stared at the page, my eyes widening in
unbelieving horror, and I looked away, stunned. For as long as I could remember,
Derleth had always been there, only a postage stamp away. Now he was no longer
there, and never would be again.
Then the irony of it struck me: I had spent the
night composing a very long, complicated letter to him, filled with questions
--- questions which now would never be answered. I had planned to carry the
letter into the city with me, to mail it at the post office midway between the
offices of Ballantine and of my agent. Now I would never mail it.
For even as I had been writing the letter, Augie Derleth was dead.
Published in Is, #4, October 1971; reprinted
with permission of Tom Collins.
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THE
FOUR WINDS --- Derleth had four air elementals, Hastur, Ithaqua, Lloigor,
and Zhar. But in "Lair of the Star Spawn", the last two are
pictured with "tentacles", like Hastur in "The Gable
Window". In The Lurker at the Threshold, Lloigor is said to
be the same as Ithaqua, though in "The Sandwin Compact", they
are distinct. Huh? |
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