#letters of comment

[evilhorse]

Text piece and letter column from Sliders: Darkest Hour #3 (circa December 1996)

[kalitera-stin-erimia]

Impressions of reading the letter column in Crypt of Cthulhu

I read through about twenty issues of the Crypt of Cthulhu, Lovecraft-themed fanzine from the 80s-00s (the ones I read were mostly from the 80s), mostly the letter column, and these are my impressions so far:

- Brian Lumley really likes stirring shit. He's constantly saying something hostile and controversial even in the few issues I read, often humorously, but the message stays clear. The peak of it was a rant about critics and how the job of critic is useless that ran for several issues and exasperated many readers.

- Lots of people hate on Brian Lumley and Lin Carter. Nevertheless, they are everywhere in the zine. Apparently, they were some of the most famous Lovecraftian writers in the 80s, which is jarring today when they are not even that well-remembered.

- I wouldn't say that August Derleth and the concept of Cthulhu Mythos are universally disliked, but some people have major hateboners for them. It seems it was a common feature of the zine Lovecraft fandom in the 70s and 80s, at least a more "highbrow" part of it.

- Speaking of highbrow, Donald Burleson is another controversial author precisely because of that. There was a discussion with a lot of complains that his essays were hard to read, while he was defending post-structuralism, modern approaches to Lovecraft and such. I felt kinda sorry for him, but his essays were indeed hard to read. :D

- Sprague de Camp provides some interesting "DVD commentary" to his biography of Lovecraft, mostly answering to complaints about it. He sounds admirably calm (especially considering how widely disliked his book was in the zine fandom) but very rigid.

- S.T. Joshi is a rabid Lovecraft fanboy. But of course, one doesn't need to read the zine to learn this.

- The humor, in particularly cartoons and columns by Robert M. Price, is boomer from the capital B. I didn't come across any "wife bad" jokes with Lovecraftian spin, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there were any.

- The treatment of some issues is exactly as one would imagine it. The two-page essay "Homosexual Panic in “The Outsider”, published in the issue #8, had been receiving criticism as far as in the issue #25. The zine has some essays as far-reaching as the one comparing HPL with Isadora Duncan yet such important theme as Lovecraft's racism, while awknowledged, is discussed very little. The letter criticising the zine for being a sausage fest brought largely defensive replies (to be fair, when someone aswered with a long argument that women are just not interested in horror, readers mostly disagreed). And so on and so forth.

[kalitera-stin-erimia]

Pugmire being iconic: part 6394th

"I fear I found Eddy's tale somewhat dull. I rarely enjoy these tales that begin with two tired old men placidly discussing the wonders and terrors of life. I cannot relate to those kinds of characters, and if I were to write such a tale one of the men wou'd be applying vermilion lipstick while the other carves Lovecraftian adjectives into his flesh."

- Wilum Pugmire in the letter to Crypt of Cthulhu #68

[kalitera-stin-erimia]

Joel D. Lane's letter

Found Joel D. Lane's letter in Crypt of Cthulhu #25. It's a bit less judgemental than I thought, but still more harsh than discussions in the zine tended to be. Some interesting thoughts here - I think he has a point about the "recurrent fear of the male seducer", and the comparisons with Wilde, while seemingly far-fetched, may have sense especially considering that Lovecraft did appreciate his writing and even wrote a poem about his fairy-tales.

"I haven't seen your article on "Homosexual Panic in 'The Outsider'," so don't know exactly what your argument was; but the readers' letters on this subject are very interesting. The obvious barrier to any discussion of homosexual elements in Lovecraft is the tendency of some readers to consider the very word an appalling slur. It really doesn't count for much one way or another whether he had an "abnormal" childhood or was oppressed by his mother--if one allows that these influences contributed to his rather isolated and solipsistic adult life, it is an arid kind of special pleading to argue that they may have "induced" latent homosexual tendecies. As for whether Lovecraft's fiction is implicitly misogynistic (the spot-the-symbolic-pudendum argument)--surely this is a common feature of heterosexual psychology. One is more inclined to doubt the emotional maturity of a thirty-year old man who writers something as twee and limp-wristed as "The Quest of Iranon" than of one who plunges resolutely into the darkest abysses his imagination can evolve.

I don't know whether you have remarked on or noticed the extreme similarity of "The Outsider" to Wilde's "The Birthday of the Infanta." There is a strong Wildean tinge to "Hypnos," a story which could well be said to bear homosexual undertones. There is a recurrent fear of the male seducer, personified as an untrustworthy guide and initiator in many stories: Abdul Reis; the handsome young man with "the fascination of a dark gold or fallen archangel" who represents Nyarlathotep; Joseph Curwen; the whisperer in darkness; the evil clergyman. Usually the victim is at risk when dreaming, and the seducer (whose real nature is corrupt) invades the victim's body and usurps his identity."

[kalitera-stin-erimia]

Shitposts about Necronomicon from the Crypt of Cthulhu fanzine

Apparently, Crypt of Cthulhu #23 published the "quote from John Dee translation of the Necronomicon" written by Lin Carter, and in the next issues the readers had a field day with it in the zine's letter column:

[Joseph Curwen (Darrell Schweitzer)]: "I fear that you and your equally illustrious readers have been the victim of an hoax: to wit, the purported passage from the Necronomicon presented by a certain Mr. Carter in the 48th number of your amusing journal. My reasons for recognizing the Falseness of it are these: Primus, that the writer seems to think that one achieves an "archaic" effect by using the wrong word, "bestride" when "astride" is meant, "didst" in the first person, etc. Both Dr. Dee and Alhazred (who was a poet of repute before he turned to the Elder Mysteries) were better, not to mention more grammatical writers than that. Secundus, that when the Yemenite (c. 750 A.D.) partakes of the Black Lotus and views the panorama of the Past, he sees the Third Crusade (late 12th century A.D.), over four centuries in his future. Surely that must have impressed you as curious, Mr. Editor, to say the least? And tertius that no such passage occurs in my use-proven and time-honored copy of the Necronomicon. The careful scholar must reject the whole narrative of the Black Lotus out of hand, not merely because of (obvious) apocryphal elements, but because there merely seems to be no reason to accept it."

[Wilum Pugmire]: "In his "Notes" on ye translation of Dee's Necronomicon, Carter writes how members of ye Lovecraft Circle "...obviously had access to a copy of Dee's Necronomicon..." How can this be so? I always understood that one copy of this translation existed, and was given to Wilbur Whateley by his grandfather. If so, how could those other gents have access to it? If it never was translated, how did Lin Carter get ahold of it? Did he steal it from ye Whateley Farmhouse? Did Wilbur have it with him at ye scene of his death, and did someone get it then and, by means unknown. Carter discovered this and obtained it? I want some answers."

[Basile M. Bourque, Jr]: "In regards to the Lin Carter version of the John Dee translation of the Necronomicon in issue #23, it appears to be from a deliberately inaccurate edition probably printed by the Roman Inquisition about 1650. A late professor of anthropology at Miskatonic University showed me photo-copies off similar material seven years ago. This version while containing some authentic portions is mostly papal doggerel. The clear-cut struggle between the Elder Gods and the Old Ones was apparently an inclusion, albeit unconscious, of Catholic dogma into the forgery. Its purpose was to entrap Protestant scholars. Evidently the spells or invocations (calling up that which is beyond) do not contain puissant protections from that which is called up. In other words, the (heretically) intellectually curious were being led to their deaths or worse. Not a suprising action on the part of an organization which twenty years before had tried Galileo.

Scientific comparison proved the connection. The chemical compositions of the paper proved it a production of Italy or Spain, not England or northern Europe. The actual print was even more revealing. Evidently some of the type font used in the production of this book, when studies under the microscope, is identical to that used by Giovanni Ucello's shop. This establishment regularly published tracts under the sigil of the Roman Inquisition.

Unfortunately I cannot furnish proof of my assertions. The professor, carrying his notebooks, jumped into an operating carding maching on a sheep station in New Zealand while on a field trip. Miskatonic University was unable to locate any copies of his unpublished material. His rooms were totally destroyed one week after his departure in a fire of suspicious origin."

[kalitera-stin-erimia]

Some interesting comments from Crypt of Cthulhu 26

All are the answers to the letter of some Joel D. Lane from the previous issue. This Lane seems to be, ahem, a fun guy with wonderful ideas (no).

About Nyarlathotep:

[Peter Cannon]: "Regarding Joel D. Lane's remarks concerning HPL and homosexual undertones in his fiction. For at least one instance that he cites, the handsome young man with "the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel" (from the Dream-Quest), one can point to a literary source. As I've shown in my article comparing the two works, HPL was greatly influenced in writing the Dream-Quest by William Beckford's Vathek. An uninhibited homosexual, Beckford consciously stocked his novel with attractive young men. I suspect the naive Lovecraft derived the image of the boyish Nyarlathotep from Beckford, without realizing the homoerotic implications."

And about The Quest of Iranon:

[S. T. Joshi]: "One other strange remark made by Mr. Lane: he calls "The Quest of Iranon" a "limp-wristed" story--a puzzling statement, since to my mind the philosophical position expressed in the tale (that art and music are of greater worth to the human spirit than the plodding grind of manual labor) seems to me a perfectly sensible and rational one; and if Mr. Lane would read the story more carefully, he would find some very nasty satire on the Protestant Work Ethic in the tale. The prose is some of the most musical in all Lovecraft, I think."

[Darrell Schweitzer]: "I might add that Mr. Lane may be reading too much into "The Quest of Iranon. " We need not question the author's emotional maturity. The story is simply imitation-Dunsany, and a specimen of the sort of romanticism between beautiful and merely pretty, with a "farewell cruel world" theme which doesn't quite convince. It is comparable to several Dunsany stories, such as "Carcassone" and "The Sorrow of the Search," although it adds an element of (seeming) self-pity not found in Dunsany."

All this sounds very plausible. I read Vathek at 14, in the book of old Gothic stories where it was the only one not dull enough for me to finish it, and I still remember how impressed I was by the description of Eblis, which even among the general homoeroticism stood out almost as much as the description of Nyarlathotep in the Dream-quest. As for Iranon, I'm definitely not in the camp that slams this story for being too immature and self-pitying, and I do think that it (perhaps unconsciously) criticizes the values of that sort of society that Lovecraft grew in.