It is at this point scarcely profitable to examine some of the misinterpretations foisted upon the Lovecraft Mythos by August Derleth; the only value in so doing is to serve as a prelude to examining what the mythos actually meant to Lovecraft. The principal error is that Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ can be differentiated between ‘Elder Gods’, who represent the forces of good, and the ‘Old Ones’, who are the forces of evil.
Derleth, a practising Catholic, was unable to endure Lovecraft’s bleak atheistic vision, and so he invented out of whole cloth the ‘Elder Gods’ as a counterweight to the ‘evil’ Old Ones, who had been ‘expelled’ from the earth but are eternally preparing to reemerge and destroy humanity. This invention of ‘Elder Gods’ allowed him to maintain that the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is substantially akin to Christianity, therefore making it acceptable to people of his conventional temperament. An important piece of ‘evidence’ that Derleth repeatedly cited to bolster his claims was the following ‘quotation’, presumably from a letter by Lovecraft:
All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.
In spite of its superficial similarity with the ‘Now all my tales …’ quotation previously cited (with which Derleth was familiar), this quotation does not sound at all like Lovecraft—at any rate, it is entirely in conflict with the thrust of his philosophy. When Derleth in later years was asked to produce the actual letter from which this quotation was purportedly taken, he could not do so, and for a very good reason: it does not in fact occur in any letter by Lovecraft. It comes from a letter to Derleth written by Harold S. Farnese, the composer who had corresponded briefly with Lovecraft and who severely misconstrued the direction of Lovecraft’s work and thought very much as Derleth did.21 But Derleth seized upon this ‘quotation’ as a trump card for his erroneous views.
There is now little need to rehash this entire matter. There is no cosmic ‘good-versus-evil’ struggle in Lovecraft’s tales; there are no ‘Elder Gods’ whose goal is to protect humanity from the ‘evil’ Old Ones; the Old Ones were not ‘expelled’ by anyone and are not (aside from Cthulhu) ‘trapped’ in the earth or elsewhere. Lovecraft’s vision is far less cheerfuclass="underline" humanity is not at centre stage in the cosmos, and there is no one to help us against the entities who have from time to time descended upon the earth and wreaked havoc; indeed, the ‘gods’ of the Mythos are not really gods at all, but merely extraterrestrials who occasionally manipulate their human followers for their own advantage.
And it is here that we finally approach the heart of the Lovecraft Mythos. What Lovecraft was really doing was creating (as David E. Schultz has felicitously expressed it22) an anti-mythology. What is the purpose behind most religions and mythologies? It is to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.23 Human beings have always considered themselves at the centre of the universe; they have peopled the universe with gods of varying natures and capacities as a means of explaining natural phenomena, of accounting for their own existence, and of shielding themselves from the grim prospect of oblivion after death. Every religion and mythology has established some vital connection between gods and human beings, and it is exactly this connection that Lovecraft is seeking to subvert with his pseudomythology.
From the cosmicism of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to the apparent mundaneness of ‘Pickman’s Model’—written, apprently, in early September—seems a long step backward; and, while this tale cannot be deemed one of Lovecraft’s best, it contains some features of interest. The narrator, Thurber, writing in a colloquial style very unusual for Lovecraft, tells of the painter Richard Upton Pickman of Boston, whose spectacularly horrific paintings violently disturb him. Later Thurber learns that the monsters depicted by Pickman in his paintings are taken ‘from life’.
No reader can have failed to predict this conclusion, but the tale is more interesting not for its actual plot but for its setting and its aesthetics. The setting—the North End of Boston, then (as now) a largely Italian district—is portrayed quite faithfully, right down to many of the street names; but, less than a year after writing the story, Lovecraft was disappointed to find that much of the area had been razed to make way for new development. Aside from its topographical accuracy, ‘Pickman’s Model’ expresses, in fictionalized form, many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that Lovecraft had just outlined in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ was initially rejected by Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, but it is predictable that Wright would snap up the more conventional ‘Pickman’s Model’, publishing it in the October 1927 issue.
Lovecraft was doing more than writing original fiction; he was no doubt continuing to make a meagre living by revision, and in the process was slowly attracting would-be weird writers who offered him stories for correction. In the summer of 1926 his new friend Wilfred B. Talman came to him with a story entitled ‘Two Black Bottles’. Lovecraft found promise in the tale—Talman, let us recall, was only twenty-two at this time, and writing was not his principal creative outlet—but felt that changes were in order. By October the tale was finished, more or less to both writers’ satisfaction. The end result is nothing to write home about, but it managed to land with Weird Tales and appeared in the August 1927 issue.
A revision job of a very different sort on which Lovecraft worked in October was The Cancer of Superstition. This appears to have been a collaborative project on which Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy worked at the instigation of Harry Houdini. Houdini performed in Providence in early October, at which time he asked Lovecraft to do a rush job—an article attacking astrology—for which he paid $75.00. This article has not come to light; but perhaps it supplied the nucleus for what was apparently to be a full-length polemic against superstitions of all sorts. Houdini had himself written several works of this kind—including A Magician among the Spirits (1924), a copy of which he gave to Lovecraft with an inscription— but he now wished something with more scholarly rigour.
But Houdini’s sudden death on 31 October put an end to the endeavour, as his wife did not wish to pursue it. This may have been just as well, for the existing material is undistinguished and largely lacks the academic support a work of this kind needs. Lovecraft may have been well versed in anthropology for a layman, but neither he nor Eddy had the scholarly authority to bring this venture to a suitable conclusion.