I call your attention to the following two lines in “The Green Deeps”:
Intelligence doth grow itself within
The coral-palled, squat towers of Rulay.
Did you in composing this poem ever consider a more eccentric spelling of the last (and presumably invented?) word? “R’lyeh,” say. And going back three lines, did you consider spelling “Nath” (invented?) with an initial “p”—i.e., “Pnath”?
Also in the same poem:
The rampant dragon dreams in far Cathay
While snake-limbed Cutlu sleeps in deep Rulay.
The name “Cutlu” (once more, invented?) is of considerable interest to us. Did you have phonetic difficulty in choosing the letters to represent the sound you had in mind? Did you perhaps simplify in the interests of poetic clarity? At any time did “Cthulhu” ever occur to you?
(As you can see, we are discovering that the language of the collective unconscious is almost unpleasantly guttural and sibilant! All hawking and spitting, like German.)
Also, there is this quatrain in your impressive lyric, “Sea Tombs”:
Their spires underlie our deepest graves;
Lit are they by a light that man has seen.
Only the wingless worm can go between
Our daylight and their vault beneath the waves.
Were there some proofreading errors here? —or the equivalent. Specifically, in the second line should “that” be “no”? (And was the light you had in mind what you might call orange-blue or purplegreen, or both?) And, in the next line, how does “winged” rather than “wingless” strike you?
Finally, in regard to “Sea Tombs” and also the title poem of your book, Professor Peaslee has a question which he calls a “long shot” about the subterranean and submarine tunnels which you evoke. Did you ever have fantasies of such tunnels really existing in the area where you composed the poem? —the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, presumably, the Pacific Ocean being nearby. Did you perhaps try actually to trace the paths overlying these fancied tunnels? And did you happen to notice (excuse the strangeness of this question) an unusual number of venomous serpents along such routes? —rattlers, I would presume (in our area it would be copperheads, and in the South water moccasins and coral snakes). If so, do take care!
If such tunnels should by some strange coincidence actually exist, it would be scientifically possible to confirm the fact without any digging or drilling (or by discovering an existent opening), it may interest you to know. Even vacuity—i.e., nothing—leaves its traces, it appears! Two Miskatonic science professors, who are part of the interdepartmental program I mentioned, have devised a highly portable apparatus for the purpose, which they call a magneto-optic geoscanner. (That last hybrid word must sound a most clumsy and barbarous coinage to a poet, I’m sure, but you know scientists!) It is strange, is it not, to think of an investigation of dreams having geological repercussions? The clever though infelicitously named instrument is a simplified adaptation of one which has already discovered two new elements.
I shall be making a trip west early next year, to confer with a man in San Diego who happens to be the son of the scholarly recluse whose researches led to our interdepartmental program—Henry Wentworth Akeley. (The local poet—alas, deceased—to whom you pay such generous tribute, was another such pioneer, it happens oddly.) I shall be driving my own British sports car, a diminutive Austin. I am some thing of an automobile maniac, I must confess, even a speed demon! —however inappropriate that may be for an assistant English professor. I would be very pleased to make your further acquaintance at that time, if entirely agreeable to you. I might even bring along a geoscanner and we could check out those hypothetical tunnels!
But I perhaps anticipate and presume too far. Pardon me. I will be very grateful for any attention you are able to give this letter and its necessarily impertinent questions.
Once more, congratulations on The Tunneler!
Yrs. very truly,
Albert N. Wilmarth.
It is quite impossible to describe all at once my state of mind when I finished reading this letter. I can only do so by stages. To begin with, I was flattered and gratified, even acutely embarrassed, by his apparently sincere praise of my verses—as what young poet wouldn’t be? And that a psychologist and an old librarian (even an anatomist!) should admire them too—it was almost too much.
As soon as the man mentioned freshman English I realized that I had a vivid memory of him. Although I’d forgotten his name in the course of years, it came back to me like a shot when I glanced ahead at the end of the letter and saw it. He had been only an instructor then, a tall young man, cadaverously thin, always moving about with nervous rapidity, his shoulders hunched. He’d had a long jaw and a pale complexion, with dark-circled eyes which gave him a haunted look, as if he were constantly under some great strain to which he never alluded. He had the habit of jerking out a little notebook and making jottings without ceasing for a moment to discourse fluently, even brilliantly. He’d seemed incredibly well read and had had a lot to do with stimulating and deepening my interest in poetry. I even remembered his car—the other students used to joke about it with an undercurrent of envy. It had been a Model T Ford then, which he’d always driven at a brisk clip around the fringes of the Miskatonic campus, taking turns very sharply.
The program of interdepartmental research he described sounded very impressive, even exciting, but eminently plausible—I was just discovering Jung then and also semantics. And to be invited so graciously to take part in it—once again I was flattered. If I hadn’t been alone while I read it, I might have blushed.
One notion I got then did stop me briefly and for a moment almost turned me angrily against the whole thing—the sudden suspicion that the purpose of the program might not be the avowed one, that (the presence in it of a psychologist and a medical doctor influenced me in this) it was some sort of investigation of the delusions of crankish, imaginative people—not so much the incidental insights as the psychopathology of poets.
But he was so very gracious and reasonable—no, I was being paranoid, I told myself. Besides, as soon as I got a ways into his detailed questions it was an altogether different reaction that filled me—one of utter amazement…and fear.
For starters, he was so incredibly accurate in his guesses (for what else could they possibly be? I asked myself uneasily) about those invented names, that he had me gasping. I had first thought of spelling them “R’lyeh” and “Pnath” —exactly those letters, though of course memory can be tricky about such things.
And then that Cthulhu—seeing it spelled that way actually made me shiver, it so precisely conveyed the deep-pitched, harsh, inhuman cry or chant I’d imagined coming up from profound black abysses, and only finally rendered as “Cutlu” rather dubiously, but fearing anything more complex would seem affectation. (And, really, you can’t fit the inner rhythms of a sound like “Cthulhu” into English poetry.)
And then to find that he’d spotted those two proofreader’s errors, for they’d been just that. The first I’d missed. The second (“wingless” for “winged”) I’d caught, but then rather spinelessly let stand, feeling all of a sudden that I’d perpetuated something overly fantastic when I’d put a figure from my life’s one nightmare (a worm with wings) into a poem.
And topping even that, how in the name of all that’s wonderful could he have described unearthly colors I’d only dreamed of and never put into my poems at all? Using exactly the same color-words I’d used! I began to think that Miskatonic’s interdepartmental research project must have made some epochal discoveries about dreams and dreaming and the human imagination in general, enough to turn their scholars into wizards and dumbfound Adler, Freud, and even Jung.