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March 22, 1982
Dear Dr. Price:
The brevity of this card in no wise indicates any
shortage of enthusiasm for CRYPT OF CTHULHU #4, the content of which I found
engrossing and rewarding. And the distinguished names in your letter column
attest that I'm not alone in my appreciation.
A brief note to CTHUL-HU-it-may-concern: it is my
hunch that "Alhazred" is HPL's pun on "All-has-read",
referring to the erudition of the mad Arab.
Many thanks for a most Cthulhvean --- and Cryptic
--- issue!
Robert Bloch
Los Angeles, CA
27 March 82
Dear Bob:
Many thanks for CRYPT OF CTHULHU #4. Here is a
little datum for your readers in connection with [your Robert E. Howard] issue:
You know the scene in SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT where Conan challenges the pirate
chief Sergius, kills him, and becomes chief in his stead? Not many of your
readers are old enough to remember a movie, silent but in color, starring
Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., called THE BLACK PIRATE, about 1928. This has a scene
virtually identical with that from SHADOWS, and Howard was devoted to movies of
that kind. Draw your own conclusions.
Kaor,
L. Sprague deCamp
Villanova, PA
March 23, 1982
Dear Mr. Price:
Five thousand, three hundred and ten thanks for the
three issues of Crypt of Cthulhu you were so kind as to send rne. That so
variegated and splendid an approach to the Mythos by a round-table assemblage of
gifted writers rolls back the years for me in a very special way needs, I'm
quite sure, no underscoring on my part. I was there, as of course you
know, when the cosmic clouds first parted and the terrifying strangeness first
appeared on Terra, shaking both Howard and the entire Circle more than
you might suspect. Ah yes, there were mysteries, still unrevealed and
unsuspected, and it is my firm intention, if time is kind to me, to write more
fully about some of them than I've hitherto done. Much of the present
scholarship is sound, but some of it, here and there, is clouded by
misconceptions as to the extent of Howard's own gathering of source material. In
many respects it was very much of an "in" thing, sometimes undertaken
in a spontaneous light-hearted way that would seem incredible to many readers. I
drew some of the names out of thin air --- including the fabled
"Plateau of Leng", simply because it seemed an excellent
Tibetan-sounding name. The rest of it was wholly Lovecraftian, however. He took
it from there. Was there something deeper, unsuspected, semi-mystical underlying
all of it? I've often wondered, as Howard did himself, as a few of his letters
to me reveal. In fact, you quote one such passage in Crypt of Cthulhu,
encased in a box. ["Was Lovecraft
Pentecostal?," vol. 1, no. 2, p. 8.]
Nevil Kingston-Brown's article was both erudite and
brilliant in a dozen respects, but I can assure him that Howard knew nothing
whatever about any scientific theory that could have rendered Einstein's
theories untenable or could have superseded them. Every one of HPL's
speculations in that realm were wholly of an imaginatively fictional
nature. They were shared by many other SF writers of the period,
including myself. It is really a quite simple matter to predict the collapse of
some prestigious theory, since so many of them do collapse in the course
of so short a period as half a century, precisely as much of Freud appears to be
collapsing today, particularly some of his haywire notions concerning infantile
sexuality. Darwin is more than holding his own, but even some aspects of natural
selection are standing up a little less steadily in the winds of change than
they did in my youth.
The entire concept, of course, of curved and angled
space, which Kingston-Brown finds so astonishing in "Whisperer in
Darkness" had no existence until I created it in "The Hounds of
Tindalos". Howard incorporated [it] into the Mythos much later. And
the simple fact that cause and effect may be wholly disconnected, and the nature
of ultimate reality totally different from our ordinary perceptions of it, is
actually not in any respect original with Howard and the Mythos. It forms
the basis of a hundred and one theosophical, general philosophical, and even
fairly sober scientific speculations, some dating back a century or more.
There's no real need to drag in black holes --- about which Howard knew nothing
and we still know very little --- to round out the picture. It can all be summed
up quite simply as follows: "Modern physics more and more confirms that the
whole of human knowledge supplies not the slightest clue as to the nature of
ultimate reality." (I'm far from sure that this is really so, but it is
certainly a strong possibility. )
It is simply not true that "the first faint
rumblings of the accepted scientific foundations began with the writings of
Howard Phillips Lovecraft", as I've stressed. To make that a little less on
the wild side, it could perhaps be phrased as follows: "No writer of
fiction in modern times came as close as Lovecraft to depicting the dark,
terrible chaos --- the idiot chaos, if you will --- that a great many physicists
are beginning to feel may be the core reality of man's unfathomable entrapment
in space and time."
The influence of HPL in the scientific world today
--- in physics new and old, and other areas, is so close to non-existent
that to categorize it as Nevil Kingston-Brown does creates an injustice to his
actual stature as a serious literary figure in an important branch of
literature, perhaps the peer of Poe. His exact standing in the glory realm still
remains for the future to determine but, despite certain defects of style, I
have never for a moment doubted that it will be a very high one. (That is, if
man doesn't blow himself off the face of the planet In the next quarter of a
century, reducing all human value systems to atomic vapor!)
I created both "The Hounds of Tindalos"
and John Dee's translation of the Necronomicon out of thin air also. The
Hounds, because the word "Tindalos" leapt into my mind while I was
searching about for something suggestive of fierceness. Dee's translation I
placed at the head of "The Space Eaters" in Weird Tales, when
the Mythos was still in a somewhat rudimentary stage. Now a vast, supposedly
learned treatise has been written about Dee's non-existent translation! !
[See George Hay (ed. ), The Necronomicon, the Book of Dead Names.]
The Hounds of Tindalos, incidentally, has
just appeared in Spain (in 1981) in the most impressive paperback volume of its
kind I've ever seen (a huge, trade-type paperback, with a cover illustration of
the Hounds in full color that delighted me as much as the Bok drawing on the
cover of the 1945 Arkham House edition. Just a shade more frightful!)
One final comment. Many readers of otherwise great
discernment and no small measure of academic distinction persist in believing
that Howard kept something back --- that he actually believed in the total,
objective reality of the Mythos but was afraid to come right out and say so, and
for self-protection took refuge in no more than vague hints, and occult-type
mystification. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I was just kidding
when I hinted at that in the opening paragraph of this letter. And yet --- and
yet --- as I, knew him there were very rare occasions when --- Ah, well! As Jung
has stressed, all things are possible in an unfathomable cosmos.
Yours very cordially,
Frank Belknap Long
New York, New York
30 March 1982
Dear Bob ---
I was, needless to say, vastly interested to read Ed
Babinski's charming attack on the Master in the 3rd Crypt of Cthulhu,
and, as HPL's reputed reincarnation (no doubt HPL somehow offended the fates,
since his soul has passed into the lower life-form of a "foreigner"),
I feel it incumbent upon me to vindicate Lovecraft from some of Ed's
accusations. (And shame on you for feeling that Ed has "scored some pretty
legitimate points against HPL"! I shall by all means not forgive
you!)
First, the remark that "HPL was a gross
horror stylist; he lacks subtle adjectives." This complaint has been made
very frequently, but does not take into consideration the manner in which
Lovecraft uses his adjectives: their real function is not to be taken literally
but to indicate the state of mind of the narrator; this is why the
adjectives are piled on toward the end of a tale, since they keenly
reveal the narrator's increasing loss of self-control as he encounters the
horror. Rather than "lacking subtlety", they brilliantly convey the
narrator's psychological state. And I know few descriptives more powerful than
some coined by HPL: I think particularly of compounds such as
"horror-glimpse", "fright-mad", "fiend-born", and
the like, which convey an almost Homeric or epic grandeur.
As for the belief that HPL was not capable of
conveying moods other than that of stark horror, I think this too falls to the
ground. "The Outsider" is at once one of the most poignant and most
horrific tales ever written, and the delicate pathos of "The Quest of
Iranon" has made me rank it as one of Lovecraft's ten best tales. The local
colour of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is just as convincing as the
aeon-spanning cosmicism of "The Shadow out of Time". A tale of intense
personal conflict ("The Thing on the Doorstep") can be juxtaposed to
one where man becomes merely a "joke or mistake" (At the Mountains
of Madness). "The Unnamable" and "In the Vault" have the
bitter cynicism of Bierce, while "The Silver Key" is merely a
philosophical vignette given a supernatural dimension. In any case, Ed's
complaint that all HPL's tales have the same pattern --- "boy meets
thing" --- can actually be interpreted as a strong point, a sign of the
fundamental unity of HPL's work; and surely one cannot fail to note the
vastly differing treatments of this one theme in Lovecraft's greatest
tales.
I think Ed gives away his position by remarking that
"Poe could twist my heart strings round his pinky." This is not the
place for a comparison of Poe and Lovecraft --- let me only say that Lovecraft,
if nothing else, reveals a cosmic vision that Poe could not have begun to
conceive. But Ed clearly enjoys Poe more than Lovecraft; and there is, of
course, nothing wrong with this so long as it does not get in the way of his
evaluating both authors objectively. This Ed does not seem to have done when he
makes note of "HPL's literary inadequacies". A similar case could
surely be made for Poe's "inadequacies": his pseudo-scholarship,
bombastic style, lack of substance in his shorter tales, constant harping on
"the death of a beautiful woman", etc., etc. But such remarks only
reveal that failure to distinguish subjective taste from objective
assessment which is surely the hallmark of the true critic. (I myself am
more moved when reading Lucretius than when reading Vergil, but reluctantly
admit that the latter is probably slightly greater as a poet.) Let Ed go on
liking Poe; but let him also admit that Lovecraft was a great artist who, in
aiming for wholly different effects, produced work which is in truth
significantly different (but in many cases as or more brilliant) than that of
the writer whom he called his "God of Fiction". I think Poe and
Lovecraft stand pretty much on equal ground as fiction-writers; and I am
convinced that there is much more substance to Lovecraft as a thinker than there
is to Poe. But the world is, I think, big enough to encompass both Poe
enthusiasts and Lovecraft enthusiasts.
Yrs for the Magna Mater,
S. T. Joshi
Providence, RI
April 5, 1982
Dear Bob,
Now that you've run Don Burleson's article on
Lovecraft and outre mathematics, allow me to supply a note on "HPL
and Euclidean Geometry".
In "The Call of Cthulhu" the narrator
Francis Wayland Thurston speaks of the "abnormal, non-Euclidean
geometry" of the Cyclopean masonry on Cthulhu's island, while in "The
Dreams in the Witch House" we hear of "odd" and "peculiar
angles" in the construction of Keziah Mason's attic room. But in one tale,
"The Shadow out of Time", Lovecraft supplies an instance of ordinary
plane geometry that is perhaps just as problematical as these more esoteric
examples.
In recalling his dream world, Nathaniel Wingate
Peaslee describes a floor made up "of massive octagonal flagstones"
and also "a cyclopean corridor" that is "paved with octagonal
blocks". Now the mathematical fact is, in this or any other galaxy, that
one cannot "tile the plane" with octagons. The only polygons that can
tile the plane are the triangle, square, and hexagon. In order to create a
continuous "octagonal" surface, smaller squares would have to fill in
the gaps.
The first question is, was HPL aware that octagons
do not fit together to form an uninterrupted surface? And the next is, if he
were aware of it, why did he bother to use such an inaccurate geometric image ?
Probably Lovecraft (despite his 92 in plane geometry
in high school, according to DeCamp) did not think of the matter when he wrote
"The Shadow out of Time". On the other hand, if he had, he may simply
have decided that it was too awkward to qualify his description with a phrase
like: "paved with octagonal blocks with smaller square blocks in
between." He was willing to sacrifice mathematical precision for the sake
of avoiding pedantry.
Why, then, did he not employ one of the three
regular polygons that do tile the plane? No doubt he dismissed the triangle and
square as too prosaic, and the hexagon on account of its common association with
bathroom floors. The octagon served his aesthetic intentions best, because it is
a sufficiently exotic polygon and at the same time not so obvious an absurdity
for plane-paving purposes as, say, the pentagon (a possible candidate since HPL
did dwell on fivefold symmetry in At the Mountains of Madness) or any
higher order polygon (with the concomitant cumbersome nomenclature).
Yours axiomatically,
Peter Cannon
New York, NY
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