Hespire Wrote:
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I'd like to
> leave behind this passage from Clark Ashton Smith,
> in a letter he wrote to August Derleth, dated
> April 13th, 1937:
>
> From what you say, it would seem that some
> remarkable inspiration, either subliminal or
> external, is involved. My theory (not favored by
> scientists!) is that some world, or many worlds,
> of pure mentation may exist. The individual mind
> may lapse into this common reservoir at death,
> just as the atoms of the individual body lapse
> into grosser elements. Therefore, no idea or image
> is ever lost from the universe. Living minds,
> subconsciously, may tap the reservoir according to
> their own degree and kind of receptivity. HPL
> would have argued that no mentation could survive
> the destruction of the physical brain; but against
> this it might be maintained that energy and
> matter, brain and ideation, can never quite be
> destroyed no matter what changes they undergo, The
> sea of Being persists, though the waves of
> individual entity rise and fall eternally, The
> truth about life and death is perhaps simpler and
> more complex than we dream.
>

Does anyone want to explore this Smith passage as compared with HPL, REH? HPL is the only one of the three I feel like I know very well, and I think Smith's right about him, but was he?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 17 Aug 23 | 10:03PM by Dale Nelson.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Hmmm... about six hours later no response, so
> maybe I can prod this discussion a little.
>
> My sense with Howard is that he is actually a
> pretty typical modern person. He does not
> experience himself as receiving attention or value
> from any inscrutable agency. Heredity is
> extremely important to him, but it is not
> something finally mystical; it is just the
> accumulated experience of his ancestors
> transmitted to him down through the ages and
> giving him certain potentials, proclivities,
> liabilities (melancholy) and assets. The gun in
> his desk drawer (or wherever he kept it)
> symbolizes his unquestioned right to do with his
> own life as he pleases.
>
> On heredity -- I think heredity was important to
> Lovecraft too, but more his sense of a cultural
> inheritance belonging to his Anglo-Saxon forbears.
> I don't think "blood" was nearly as important to
> Lovecraft as to Howard. But whether "cultural
> inheritance" or "blood," no reference to mystical
> entities was needed to account for one's identity,
> or any thing that happens. They were buffered
> against such experience like the rest of us who
> have had modern educations, etc.
>
> Agreed?
>
> What about Smith?


I agree with your perspective on Howard, Dale. If there is any one thing that characterizes the tone of his letters, from the few I've seen, it is what you've described -- fierce independence. All 3 of these writers needed that to cope with the economic depression. This distinguishes them from Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber, who some would say surpassed them, certainly. Leiber struggled the loss of his spouse, and seems to have identified with Howard more than with the other two. I wonder if of all these writers the least prolific of them all, Lovecraft, will over time be more read for his letters than his fiction. About all of them have been published in durable scholarly editions, and it seems to me that their lasting influence may outlive that of his tales. I'm not taking anything away from his fiction. But I was early on exposed to the letters in my college library. If my guess is correct, HPL will be remembered as Samuel Johnson is-- the idiosyncratic scholar of a golden age of sorts in the development of the fantasy genres. Anecdotally, one of his letters to Elizabeth Toldridge, who challenged his materiallistic views a bit, revealed that I might be distantly related to Lovecraft's maternal line by marriage, through my own maternal Dutch grandmother. Lovecraft was relating some of his genealogical research to Ms. Toldridge about John Carter, who ran a printing establishment in Providence called Shakespeare's Head. One of his daughters married a guy named Walter Raleigh Danforth, (another name fictionally employed by HPL) and Danforth was the cousin of the father of Lovecraft's eldest aunt's husband. John Carter was also the brother-in-law of a Captain John Updike, who owned the house right next to Carter's printing business. HPL sketched the two houses (Updike's had been torn down), noting that the name Updike is "of remote Dutch derivation-- Op Dyck" (Selected Letters Ii, p. 354). So this made me curious since my grandma's maiden name was Updike, and I knew she had registered as a Daughter of the American Revolution. One of her six children, my Uncle Edward Deeds, mentioned his having done some research on the Updikes and had a photograph of an Updike family reunion. These are the kinds of things that abound in Lovecraft's letters, displaying his knowledge of New England history. In my graduate program I had a seminar on New England Regionalism in which I read two of Edith Wharton's novels, but Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman appealed more to my Lovecraftian side.

jkh

Kipling, that's cool about your genealogical explorations, whether they lead to HPL in the end or not. I haven't gotten into genealogy yet, but my wife has and has enjoyed some surprises that came up. I do have a good start, though -- a former boss of my late father became a genealogy buff and did the research for Dad's side of my family -- just names. I don't know if any of them are those of interesting folks.

That's interesting about interest in Lovecraft's letters as maybe someday being greater than in his stories! I have wondered if a group of people now young who grew up on texting will, in years to come, perhaps be fascinated by the epistolary culture they never knew, and will feel strongly a regret that they have no files of letters from friends and family preserved throughout the years.

You may have seen statements about how some young people don't know how to address an envelope.

When I moved to a new town before my 14th birthday, my best friend and I began a correspondence that lasted for about 15 years (and we got back in touch years later). I had saved all of his letters, about 160 of them, and sent scans to him. Unfortunately, though he had saved my letters, his mom threw them away without his knowing about it.

Back to Lovecraft -- I wish someone would edit a one-volume anthology, 200-300 pages, of his letters that emphasized Lovecraft's walks, his reading, his antiquarian interests, his circle of friends, and the like. The enormous amount of material expounding mechanistic materialism could be dispatched in a page or two. The edition should have photographs from "then and now" of places he roamed around.

I read the first volume of Arkham's five of HPL's letters almost 50 years ago. My impression is that he maintains a persona from letter to letter. This isn't a criticism of what he was doing; he didn't represent himself (did he?) as writing to reveal himself so much as to set forth his opinions and a selection of his experiences. But put it this way: A Lovecraft letter could never "fall into the wrong hands" -- except letters in which he expressed an opinion of someone that he would not want that person to see.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 26 Aug 23 | 12:38PM by Dale Nelson.

Those letters of yours shouldn't have been tossed! The same thing happened to Henry S. Whitehead's correspondence--his housekeeper disposed of it all. Did you read anything by him? What's your opinion of Fritz Leiber? There is one book collecting Lovecraft's essays on his antiquarian ramblings, from Hippocampus Press.... but your idea for judiciously edited letter extracts is good.

jkh



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 26 Aug 23 | 06:19PM by Kipling.

Back in the 1980s I did get one or two Whitehead books on interlibrary loan and read at least a bit of his fiction. I think it seemed OK to me, no captivating.

I read a lot of Leiber in the 1970s. He's not an author who has stuck with me, in general; but "A Pail of Air" is one of my favorite short stories, and I used to use it every semester when I taught Introduction to Literature and had a unit on science fiction. Much of his writing would be distasteful to me now, e.g. the late Fafhrd and Mouser story in which the heroes are hot for a girl who looks 13 years old.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Back in the 1980s I did get one or two Whitehead
> books on interlibrary loan and read at least a bit
> of his fiction. I think it seemed OK to me, no
> captivating.
>
> I read a lot of Leiber in the 1970s. He's not an
> author who has stuck with me, in general; but "A
> Pail of Air" is one of my favorite short stories,
> and I used to use it every semester when I taught
> Introduction to Literature and had a unit on
> science fiction. Much of his writing would be
> distasteful to me now, e.g. the late Fafhrd and
> Mouser story in which the heroes are hot for a
> girl who looks 13 years old.

Did you ever encounter Barry Malzberg?

Very constrained stylistic palette and this emphasized his themes of psychosis and paranoia, especially as mankind begins to explore space.

He was all about unreliable POV, too.

Very interesting but gets stale pretty quickly. Just as HArlan Ellison did, for me.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Dale Nelson Wrote:
------------------------------------------
>
> I read a lot of Leiber in the 1970s. He's not an
> author who has stuck with me, in general; but "A
> Pail of Air" is one of my favorite short stories,
> and I used to use it every semester when I taught
> Introduction to Literature and had a unit on
> science fiction. Much of his writing would be
> distasteful to me now, e.g. the late Fafhrd and
> Mouser story in which the heroes are hot for a
> girl who looks 13 years old.

Leiber moved from Chicago to San Francisco, where he wrote Our Lady of Darkness, which was a solid weird novel. Jack Koblas recalled going with a friend to see him. Koblas wrote about meeting and interviewing various pulp authors in his book The Lovecraft Circle and Others As I Remember Them. Charles De Vet told him about one sci-fi writer who wrote great letters, so they became friends, but in person the guy was a total buffoon. He would boast of sales of stories that hadn't been written yet, failed to thank De Vet's wife for a sumptuous dinner she cooked for him, and broke De Vet's windshield when it was caked with ice without apologizing, just Oops... "You got insurance"? He conned a rich man into investing in his idea of a device that would "take over for the heart" in the event of cardiac arrest (before pacemakers existed), and told De Vet he was marrying a rich girl with 4 kids, hadn't met her father yet, but would be taking control of the home she shared with her Father. De Vet said he felt that to be successful as a pulp writer you had to have an unrealistic idea about future events in your life, which is why he was "telling on" this deceased author friend of his. Funny stuff!

jkh



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 27 Aug 23 | 06:39PM by Kipling.

The author in question is Rog Phillips, one of many pseudonyms of Roger Phillip Graham. Definitely not a buffoon,just had his weaknesses like anyone else. He was good. Wrote prolifically for AMAZING and then during the Cold War years for IF, OTHER WORLDS, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, etcetera. Hugo-Nominated for 1959 short story ("Rat in the Skull"). The most significant figure figure in fandom as editor/columnist of "The Club House", convention planning & so on.

jkh



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 28 Aug 23 | 10:09AM by Kipling.

This bears reference to Clark Ashton Smith's abandonment of the pulp market game. I was at the Chicago World Fantasy Convention, where I got to see a few of his stunning watercolor landscape paintings up close. There was a Smith panel presentation and someone in the audience asked why Smith quit writing fiction prior to 1940. The panel, with Donald Sidney-Fryer, Roy Squires, and a couple of others shrugged off the suggestion that Lovecraft's death had something to do with it (you can guess who posed the suggestion). Of course Robert E. Howard had died also, so his and Lovecraft's deaths were naturally and deeply discouraging. But the real reasons were closer to home. He was sick of dealing with the pulp editors and there was no chance of it getting any better. He wasn't a sci-fi writer by choice anyway; he was drafted. What was the situation with Weird Tales at that time?

jkh

Kipling, I think that's a very plausible explanation. I had always gotten the idea that he was treating his short stories a lot the same way that an arts fair potter spun standard pots. They were production to allow him a level of income, and it might enable him to work on much more personally satisfying projects: new glazes, experimental forms.

An interesting data point would be if he established a domestic relationship at about the same time, thus alleviating him of the need to spin so many commercial-grade pots.

But damn! They were nice pots... :^)

--Sawfish

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kipling, I've been following this discussion with much interest, though with nothing much to add myself. I'm a huge admirer of CAS' watercolors, technical quality be damned, so I was curious to know if you remember any of those paintings from the convention. Any specific details? Anything especially note-worthy?

Regarding sci-fi, CAS occasionally complained about the very existence of sci-fi. He felt such stories had no justification (at least in the weird market) unless they were primarily atmospheric, much like his Martian tales. Sometimes I wonder how unique his science-fiction could have been if he were allowed to continue his early Yondo/Sadastor style, using the cosmos as a backdrop for otherworldly prose-poems. Certainly I've never seen anything like those two stories, nor his poems that use cosmic backdrops for scenes of a mythological rather than scientific spirit.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 29 Aug 23 | 11:03AM by Hespire.