I removed the following passage from the Wikipedia entry on Robert E Howard:

Quote:

H. P. Lovecraft was severely affected by the death of his friend, and within a year would die himself of intestinal cancer. Clark Ashton Smith (the third member of the great triumvirate of Weird Tales) was stricken by the deaths of Howard and Lovecraft as well as those of his own parents, and soon stopped writing fiction himself, fading from the scene.

This rash act has prompted the apparent author, Leo Grin, to complain loudly. In any case, apart from the ridiculous implication that Howard's death caused Lovecraft's cancer, there is also the claim, for which no source is given, that Smith stopped writing as a direct result of it. So is there in fact any evidence that this might have been the case, or is the whole thing just an attempt to create a spurious connection between the death of Howard and the general decline of Weird Tales?

Hmm...I know HPL was affected by R.E. Howard's death. It did seem like both CAS and HPL were nearing the end of their energies for writing by that time. I think we need a J.T. Joshi for CAS to organize and shed light on the matter.

It seems to me the standard story is that Smith stopped writing for reasons that are not well understood.

My understanding is that CAS never fully explained why he largely stopped writing stories, but that the most likely reasons are as follows: He no longer felt as much need to do so for financial reasons, after his parents died; he was tired of the strictures of pulp editors and their demands that he re-write his stories; upon Lovecraft's death, he no longer benefited from Lovecraft's personal inspiration and encouragement (It's remarkable, to me, anyway, how much of Lovecraft's and CAS's correspondence was devoted to discussing business matters related to writing for the pulps).

I know of no evidence that Howard and CAS were particularly close, even as correspondents, let alone that CAS was strongly affected personally or professionally by Howard's suicide. If anyone's death profoundly affected CAS, then it would be Lovecraft's, but even then, I see that fact as the least compelling of the three reasons I cited, above. Scott Connors would be able to clarify the matter, though, so, with luck, he'll see this thread and reply.

Smith quit writing short fiction, except for a couple of spurts here and there, for several reasons. The death of his parents removed most of the economic impetus for such sales. The death of Lovecraft left him without his most appreciative and simpatico reader. We must also take into account his growing disgust with the lack of literary standards among and capriciousness of pulp editors; the slowness of WEIRD TALES to pay him what he was owed, and the necessity to hire a lawyer to collect what Gernsback owed him; disgust with "scientifiction" fans like Forrest J. Ackerman who harbored a prejudice against pure fantasy, but would accept any crap so long as it had a pseudoscientific explanation; and the sale of WEIRD TALES, his most reliable market, to a NY businessman named William J. Delaney, who found Smith's stories "disgusting" and apparently returned a bunch of stories that Farnsworth Wright had accepted before he was fired in 1940; Delaney also didn't like big words or stories in made-up lands like Averoigne, Hyperborea, or Zothique. (Dorothy McIlwraith, Wright's successor, would later get this somewhat relaxed.) But generally speaking, the spark left him. Clark found writing short stories to be the most difficult of the arts he mastered; then came poetry, then painting and drawing, and finally carving, which he found quite easy. Is it any wonder that in his later years he concentrated mainly on carvings, which he could sell readily at a price that made it worth his while to create them, along with some original poetry?

Scott



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 30 Sep 08 | 07:34PM by Scott Connors.

Exactly.

I think the CAS comment may be a stretch, but from the letters of both Lovecraft and Howard the HPL segment seems true. So why he removed the entire passage is suspect. It's not like the author was saying that Howard's death caused Lovecraft's cancer.

Eldritch Frog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It's not like the author was
> saying that Howard's death caused Lovecraft's
> cancer.

Well, it seems to me there are two possibilities. Either 1. he did in fact intend to say that Howard's death caused Lovecraft's cancer, which is ludicrous, or 2. his lack of command of good writing skills caused him to imply it anyway.

Here is another, even more hilarious, example of the same kind of error, from the Wikipedia entry on "Historical pederastic couples" (which, I should point out, I came upon quite innocently by clicking through from the "Jean Cocteau" article). It has since been changed, but let us see if you can spot the problem:

Quote:

Over the course of history there have been a number of known pederastic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys. In some of these cases both members became well-known historical figures, while in others, only one of the two did.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Eldritch Frog Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > It's not like the author was
> > saying that Howard's death caused Lovecraft's
> > cancer.
>
> Well, it seems to me there are two possibilities.
> Either 1. he did in fact intend to say that
> Howard's death caused Lovecraft's cancer, which is
> ludicrous, or 2. his lack of command of good
> writing skills caused him to imply it anyway.
>
> Here is another, even more hilarious, example of
> the same kind of error, from the Wikipedia entry
> on "Historical pederastic couples" (which, I
> should point out, I came upon quite innocently by
> clicking through from the "Jean Cocteau" article).
> It has since been changed, but let us see if you
> can spot the problem:
>
> Over the course of history there have been a
> number of known pederastic relationships between
> adult men and adolescent boys. In some of these
> cases both members became well-known historical
> figures, while in others, only one of the two did.
Are you the one who edited his entry? If so, why not take it up with him?

As a neutral reader, I don't read that into his sentence at all. But the fact that I enjoy REH, CAS, and HPL probably gives me a more balanced view. But maybe if I was HPL/CAS only I would think otherwise. I do think the CAS statement is really stretching it as I have yet to read anything by CAS to indicate that. But Lovecraft was very close to REH and wrote a very glowing "remembrance" piece for him after his death. But no, REH's death did not in anyway cause cancer to spring up in Lovecraft and I don't gather that from the statement. In fact Leo says that is not what he is implying in the very article you link above.

sverba Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hmm...I know HPL was affected by R.E. Howard's
> death. It did seem like both CAS and HPL were
> nearing the end of their energies for writing by
> that time. I think we need a J.T. Joshi for CAS to
> organize and shed light on the matter.


dear friends, two items - referring to Joshi as an authority in matters where he cannot possibly know, not having known the man is a bit obtuse it seems to me - and in fact in the above matters Scott Connor's is the most astute student of CAS that I have found, and his answer in this matter is certainly closest to the truth. As to Howard's death a causal factor, the answer is absolutely not -- Scott is right about the carving, but Clark did not stop writing - he stopped writing stories for publication. He continued to write poetry, but with extraordinary care, lingering over the work sometimes for months - again without thought of publication. I don't know what became of them all, I owned several holographs, and largely across the years gave them to aspiring writers (students) to encourage them and as a reward for good work - that, of course, in the years when I thought Clark had completely vanished and had no readers outside a very, very few - so when I found a student who knew him, I was amazed and delighted. Finding those poems now would be impossible, but I have hope that those 3 that I remember giving out may one day show up - I have of course completely lost track of the students I gave them to - though I remember one's name. Again, Scott's answer to this thread is the most accurate, I would only add that philosopically, Clark would have thought that all events are interconnected in a cosmic sense, and felt, to use a modern phrase, "a disturbance in the Force".

Just as a point of clarification (?), I don't want to speak for sverba, but I think he means that what we need in this matter is the equivalent for CAS of a Joshi, and not Joshi, himself. In other words, someone who bears the same expertise in relation to CAS as Joshi bears to Lovecraft. Scott Connors is certainly that person, which is why I mentioned him in my first post. Of course, Calonlan's first-person reminiscences of the elder CAS are of great value, as well.

That said, I think that my answer was also substantially the same as Scott's (although Scott provided more, and much appreciated, detail), but who's counting? ;-)

Thanks Kyberean. You are correct. I did not mean we need Joshi, but rather someone with the same credentials for CAS. There is a moral to this story. What one writes and how it is received can be two different things entirely. I expect that no-one meant to imply that Howard's death cause HPL's cancer.

That being said, I was just re-reading Mariconda's work on Reader Response approach to HPL in the "Emergence of Cthulhu" and these men were bound together on many levels, including a shared aesthetic sensibility, shared contribution to the Mythos, shared frustrations with WT editorial policy and shared struggles for understanding from WT audiences just to mention a few.

CAS losing both his fellow travelers could not have been easy.

Steve

sverba Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I expect that
> no-one meant to imply that Howard's death cause
> HPL's cancer.

I was going to say "No, but it annoys me that the man insists that his poor writing, which contains a mistake such as a small child might make, should not be tampered with." But then I noticed a picture that he recently posted of himself that makes clear that he is, in fact, little more than a child and, as such, is perhaps excused for not knowing better.

> H. P. Lovecraft was severely affected by the death
> of his friend, and within a year would die himself
> of intestinal cancer.

To my reading of this shoddy entry, I would say the author is suggesting that there is some link between the grief caused by Howard's death and Lovecraft's eventual demise. I think this is just a case of the author romanticising the deaths of these two great friends. We love to mythologies death. Makes a nice story that HP dies of grief but...

In fairness he isn't the only person in the world to presume stress causing cancer: a friend of mine was accused by his father (they didn't get on) of causing his mother's death by brain tumour due to the stress he caused he. While I have little doubt that my friend was a cause of constant stress to the family due to his mental illness (paranoid schizophrenic) and drug use, I seriously doubt that he caused a brain tumour to grow in his mum's brain. Ironically these words were probably - at least - partially responsible for his son's eventual death by suicide/accidental overdose, as he spent the last few years of his life racked by guilt.

However the CAS suggestion sounds - at least - realistic, but I imagine was only a contributing factor.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 4 Oct 08 | 10:53AM by The English Assassin.

I borrowed a copy of de Camp's HPL bio. from the local library a few years ago, and it had several amusing notations in the text from one of the previous readers. And in the margin beside a statement that HPL's wife Sonia tried to make Lovecraft eat "bran muffins", the annotator wrote, "Sonia knew!" -i.e., she knew something was off with his digestion and was trying to help him. Kind of interesting.

It's rather eerie, too, that Lovecraft's youthful nightmares involved Night Gaunts lifting him out of bed and "tickling his stomach".....