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In the process of getting down to my
article on the Call of Cthulhu*
game, at long last, I fell to browsing over my treasured issues of your
magazine and am really very impressed at what you've piled together through the
years. It is an excellent running commentary on HPL and the various roots and
branches trailing from him and I am moved again to congratulate you on the high
quality of your continuing effort.
I suppose, no, let's make that I am sure
that a complete file of Crypt will become one of those items collectors
of HPLiania will have to have even if the children starve, and that appalling
prices will be paid at auctions for copies of it, some badly watermarked with
missing pages and occasional obscene annotations scrawled in the margins, some
in mint condition --- unreadable due to being sealed up in blocks of plastic,
true, but definitely in mint condition --- and there will be indexes and
concordances and scholarly references and God only knows what else, and
something living in a settlement revolving around a star in Orion will stay up
late because it has just purchased a complete set, the actual original, printed
on paper held together with those metal things (how do you suppose they got them
on, anyhow?), and it knows it ought to dematerialize or it'll be all sticky in
the morning, but it has to have one last look, one last touch of the pages, one
last gloat over actually owning the legendary thing.
Take good care of yourself and keep 'em
coming.
--- Gahan
Wilson
New York, NY
*[in an upcoming
issue of The Twilight Zone]
Thanks for Crypt #20 and for HPL's Saturnalia.
Your publications are always interesting, and I was particularly interested to
see the Lovecraft booklet. As Joshi aptly remarks, while HPL's verse may not be
brilliant, it is of interest --- to his fans certainly. You are doing here what
I view as the essential purpose of the fan press: making worthwhile esoterica
readily available to an appreciative readership. Far more praiseworthy than
contrived deloox first editions of the latest billion-seller mass-market opera
from Asimov, King, etc. Keep up the fine work!
--- Karl
Edward Wagner
Chapel Hill, NC
I'm down with the flu, so only a few lines
to thank you for a fine Crypt and a spectacular Saturnalia --- the
latter is particularly appreciated, and both will help me through my
convalescence.
--- Robert
Bloch
Los Angeles, CA
I was delighted to receive my
complimentary copies of Crypt of Cthulhu 19. It was good to see my
story and Brian's sequel together again and reaching a wider audience, as I
doubt many will have seen Jon Harvey's Spectre Press edition in the USA. Your
piece on Lumley is excellent! It is thorough and critically honest and I enjoyed
it a lot. Brian's interview was direct --- he's that sort of guy! So all in all,
a good issue, I thought, though maybe rather lightweight on artwork. I'd prefer
to see illustrations at the beginning or in the text of stories, rather than as
tail-pieces, but that's a personal taste.
--- David A.
Sutton
Birmingham, England
What ho!
Crypt #19 was a fine issue (they
all are) and I sat right down and read it cover to cover the day I got it (I
always do). I found this issue of particular interest, because Brian Lumley and
I are old friends, and I like his stuff. We've never met, but we've exchanged
many a letter over the years.
It was great to see two new Mythos stories
from his hand! Brian and I are just about the only two full-time professional
writers who still produce regularly in the Mythos, and we have this little game:
he'll pick up some new invented lore from a recent yarn of mine and drop
references to it in whatever he's writing, and I usually return the favor, when
I can. A good guy and a grand writer.
I thought "Brian Lumley ---
Reanimator" was a fair and just overall examination, and done with just the
right touch of lightness. Nothing kills the Mythos for me more than to see it
dealt with in tones of solemn reverence. The Mythos is fun stuff, and not to be
taken all that seriously.
Hope I come in for the same sort of just
and fair appraisal when the long-delayed, eagerly awaited "Carter
issue" appears.
Happy Magic!
--- Lin
Carter
New York, NY
I was puzzled at some of Brian Lumley's
remarks on Lovecraft scholarship in your interview with him in Crypt #19,
hence I feel obliged to explain the intentions of myself and other critics. In
the first place, Lumley repeats the old attack on critics --- that any writer
with creativity will wish to write fiction rather than criticism. In fact the
best critics are drawn to criticism not through inability to write
fiction (there are any number of examples of writers who have been both critics
and fictionists or poets --- Samuel Johnson, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Henry
James, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, John Fowles ---
and Lovecraft!) but through differing inclination. There is just as much
"creativity" in a brilliant analysis as in any work of fiction.
Lumley's remarks on textual scholarship I
find particularly hard to understand --- doesn't he want to read
unadulterated Lovecraft? I for one am very concerned to know whether Homer wrote
theos or deos, whether Vergil wrote vita or vitta,
whether Schiller wrote schon or schön, and whether Lovecraft
wrote metal or mental (an actual textual error in his work). There
need be no fanaticism here: we need only understand how apparently
inconsequential things such as orthography or punctuation can make a difference
in the interpretation or appreciation of a work; frequently such slight errors
do make a difference, and in any case the effect of most textual errors is
cumulative --- like the 1500 errors in the current text of At the Mountains
of Madness.
--- S. T.
Joshi
Princeton, NJ
Professor of psychology Dirk W. Mosig's
essay on HPL's poem "The City" [Crypt #20] tells us more about
Professor Mosig than it does about HPL or his "haunting poem", as
Mosig calls it. The fact is, Mosig has no idea whatsoever what HPL was
writing about in this poem, and his application of a "Jungian frame of
analysis" --- quite unusual for a self-professed "Skinnerian" ---
only beclouds everything HPL sought to convey in the poem.
Mosig interprets the poem as an allegory
for man's quest for personal, psychic, and spiritual integration and wholeness
of Self, a chief drive in Jungian psychoanalysis. This must be what Mosig
subliminally craved when he read and interpreted the poem. Hopefully he found
balm in "The City" for his own sense of fragmentation. But putting
aside his kind of rampant subjectivism in literary commentary, what is HPL's
poem really about?
The poem mentions a "City of
Light" --- unnamed, unplaced. Yet we are given important clues: its
architecture is dominated by white marble, containing a sculptured array
"of long-bearded, commanding, grave men", one of whom is "dismantled
and broken, its bearded face battered away." The City is deserted.
The poem conveys a mordant sense of dread
so terrible that HPL's "soul" speeds in "panic" as he flees
"from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead." A powerful link is
forged between this dread and a profound fear of the approach of winter's cold,
"brain-numbing" and "ghastly".
A puzzle? To Mosig, perhaps. In the poem,
the poet feels he knows the key to its solution, which lies "eons
behind". But just when he seeks to pass back to "visit the past unconfin'd",
the terror climaxes and he becomes afraid to dream any more, afraid to remember,
so he flees from the knowledge about to dawn upon him.
Professor Mosig missed something
immediately apparent. The very same city is described in HPL's short story
"Polaris", but there its name, place, and even date are given. It is called
"Olathoe" in the "Land of Lomar", "six and twenty thousand
years" ago. It is described in exactly the same way as in "The City",
but in prose: of "ghastly marble", with rows of carven "images of
grave-bearded men". The only difference is, in "Polaris", the City is still
populated. Again, we find the narrator in "Polaris" experiencing an
overwhelming sense of dread linked somehow to the autumnal winds from the north
which herald the approach of winter's cold. We find the narrator in the uncanny
predicament of the legendary Chuang-Tzu; he is confused as to whether he is a
present day man living in a stone house near a swamp dreaming he is a sentinel
on an outpost of Olathoe, or whether he is the sentinel dreaming of the
swamp-dweller!
So the City has a history, and is not
merely a metaphor for the refulgent "goal of selfhood" as per Mosig?
Indeed it has --- and something more besides, more than we bargain for, much
more, and this is the source of HPL's dread:
The narrator of "Polaris"
describes two fantastically different constellated skies. From the vantage point
of the swamp-dweller, he describes the sky as it appears on a late autumn night.
But from the vantage point of the sentinel in Olathoe, he sees something
bizarre: the pole star, Polaris, is near the zenith, and "red
Aldebaran" never sets! HPL is envisioning a city as it existed when the Earth's
celestial pole was different, i.e., when the Earth's axis had a
drastically different orientation than it does now relative to the sun and fixed
stars!
Was there ever such a time? Did Olathoe
exist? Open questions. All we can say is that HPL gives us powerful visions of a
time "six and twenty thousand years" ago when hordes of squat, yellow
"Esquimaux"-like "Inuto" barbarians fled the advance of
great sheets of advancing cold and ice as the Earth's axis tipped toward what is
now the pole star, Polaris. The glaciers came, ending the "Halcyon
clime" of the City of the "Pnakotic manuscripts", Olathoe, which fell
before the hordes and was desolated.
In"Polaris", the star of the same
name becomes a symbol of HPL's dread. The narrator calls it "evil and
monstrous", because in this bizarre prehistoric vision of Olathoe, he could not
see Polaris through a north-facing window as we are accustomed to seeing
it, but only through an aperture in the roof directly overhead!
The sense of dread in "The City"
is this awful knowledge of the Earth having tipped twenty-six thousand years
ago, knowledge of a great, unknown prehistoric civilization "battered"
by fiendish hordes fleeing the onslaught of great waves of ice --- or perhaps
worse!
Jungian? Not at all. Velikovskian? Abit. Lovecraftian? Purely!
I pointed all of this out to Professor
Mosig years ago when his essay first appeared in the Miskatonic (Vol. 6,
No. 1, Whole No. 21, February 1978). All he could say in a private
correspondence with me was that no one (as far as he knew, I must add)
"had ever noticed this before" and that (unknown to me at the time)
HPL "oddly enough wrote both 'The City' and 'Polaris' at about the same
time."
Did HPL concern himself with Mosig's
Jungian question, "Can man be himself?" and attain psychic and
spiritual wholeness? I don't know. I don't care. But certainly not in
"The City"! For enlightenment on the question of attaining
''wholeness" people do turn to the writings of Carl Jung or --- with
greater profit --- Hemingway, Steinbeck, O'Neill, et al. But not to HPL!
Professor Mosig's kind of "literary
commentary" proves once again that decades of study, training, and teaching
in psychology do not compensate for lack of certain kinds of basic hermeneutical
competence. While Mosig showed an open mind in disavowing the Freudian, "gonadocephalic"
(as he once aptly called it) interpretations of HPL, he seems to have lost this
salutory skepticism in distorting the meaning of HPL's "The City", forcing
a "Jungian frame of analysis" on it.
--- Phil
Panaggio
Bloomfield, NJ
I thought Will Murray's article on "Mearle
Prout and 'The House of the Worm'" (Crypt #18) was most interesting
for its insight into Lovecraft's character. HPL's goodwill towards a newcomer ---
even one who had so obviously mimicked his style --- is typical, I think, of his
personality. It must indeed have been Lovecraft's "gentlemanly manners", as
Murray puts it, which kept him from mentioning to Clark Ashton Smith the
similarity of passages in Prout's tale to "The Call of Cthulhu"; for
in a letter to Alfred Galpin of October 25, 1933, Lovecraft said:
"The House of the Worm" is by a
new writer wholly unknown to me, but I think it shows a real promise beneath
obvious crudities. It has real atmosphere --- & that is the big thing in
spectral fiction. Yes --- I thought I saw touches of my own style here &
there. It would amuse me if some writer were to build upon my work and achieve a
fabric infinitely surpassing the original (MS, John Hay Library).
Here we see Lovecraft reluctantly
admitting to the similarity only after Galpin brought it up first! To me the
last sentence epitomizes the unselfish nature of HPL --- or as Samuel Loveman put
it in his memoir in Something About Cats; "I have never known a
human being to secrete less envy, malice, morbidity and intolerance, than did
Howard."
About William Fulwiler's ingenious
suggestion that Lovecraft's "The House of the Worm" was
the provisional title of "The Shunned House" (Crypt #19) --- a passage
in Selected Letters I.357 indicates that this could not be so:
. . . on the northeast corner of Bridge
Street and Elizabeth Avenue [in Elizabeth, NJ] is a terrible old house --- a
hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early
seventeen-hundreds --- with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof,
and an outside flight of steps leading to the second story, suffocatingly
embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or
corpse-fed. . . . Later its image came up again with renewed vividness, finally
causing me to write a new horror story with its scene in Providence. . . . It is
called "The Shunned House", and I finished it last Sunday night.
Lovecraft's description of "The
Shunned House" as "a new horror story" in a letter written
eight months after his letter mentioning "The House of the Worm", and
having a specific locale in New Jersey as its immediate inspiration, shows that
the two titles have no connection.
--- Steve Mariconda
Pompton Lakes, NJ
About two weeks ago, I found a copy of
Crypt #12; which was the first time I'd seen it in the bookstore. Maybe they
got in a new set of back issues just before I got there. . . . I liked the
articles on HPL's prose style; I agree that a lot of people who disagree with his
choice of words seem to think he did it unconsciously. It's strange that the Reader's
Guide to Fantasy (mentioned in Steve Mariconda's article) condemns HPL's
writing and praises Mervyn Peake's, since they can both be wordy --- Peake even
more so than Lovecraft! I like them both, though --- I sort of enjoy reading dense
books.
--- Chris
Gross
Oradell, NJ
Today I received the Crypt, number twenty,
A magazine of times with humor a plenty.
I looked in vain for what I love best:
Oh
where, oh where is Donna Death?
Oh where can Donna Death have gone?
Where, oh where can she be,
With her skirt so short and her hair so long,
Oh where, oh where can she be?
Perhaps the editor her column mislayed
Because her anatomy too much displayed?
Or are the reins in those hands without
humor?
'Tis a pity to see the Crypt wax
gloomier.
Please forgive this scribe's protest, But
where the hell is Donna Death?
--- Richard
Hyll
Christiansted, St. Croix
Virgin Islands
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