Guest of Honor
Acceptance Speech
from the First World
Fantasy Convention
(transcribed from an audio recording)
by Robert Bloch
Acceptance Speech
from the First World
Fantasy Convention
(transcribed from an audio recording)
by Robert Bloch
Thank you, Gahan…I think. You gave me a terrible moment there, you folks in the audience—you stood up, I thought you were going to leave.
About two months ago in London at Coyle’s Bookshop, they gave one of their monthly luncheons. This one was in honor of a gentleman I don’t think you are aware of—a music hall performer named Arthur Askey. It was the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday and the publication of his book. Arthur said something which I find strangely apropos at this moment. He looked around the table and said, “This luncheon is not a work of fiction, because everybody at this table is either living or dead.” I have much the same feeling.
This is of course formerly the Arkham Hilton, and probably Mr. Lovecraft did spend a night or two here. I know that last night the sounds I heard could have been the inspiration for “The Rats in the Walls.” I knew I was in the right place when I came here. I walked into the bar and I heard somebody ordering a gin and Miskatonic.
I must say a few words, for he insisted that I do so, about Gahan Wilson. I was rather surprised at his appearance when I met him (two words unintelligible) when I suddenly realized he had the Innsmouth look—the results of generations of inbreeding. Then I discovered he doesn’t have a room at the hotel—he’s sleeping in the swimming pool—at the bottom, the surface being covered with green slime. And it bothered me. I began to analyze my reactions to Gahan Wilson. Strange name. Until I realized—I wrote it out—that this is merely Nosliw Nahag spelled backwards. You people who have read the Necronomicon all realize who Nosliw Nahag was—he went to school with Don Wolhein. The two of them got into the Girl Scouts together—until the teacher found out. So much for Gahan Wilson. Gahan has a tremendous talent as an artist and as a writer. I hate talent. To be quite clear before we leave the subject, I’ll tell you that my own name spelled backwards is Trebor Hcolb. If I have a little too much on the nose I can just see myself walking into a room saying, “Hi, I’m Trebor Hcolb!” But I don’t do that.
Now, if I may be less serious for a moment, I want to tell you, as Gahan has, what an honor I consider this to be. And I’m not being humble or falsely modest when I say that I really don’t think I deserve it, for I realize that I’m in the presence of men here who in my way of thinking are far more equipped to play the role of guest of honor, who have known Howard Phillips Lovecraft personally; they’ve written of him so brilliantly that all I can say is that I consider this perhaps the most lucky moment of my life. I thank you all for allowing me to be here. In a sense, of course, we’re all honored to have been associated with H.P.L. in some way. He has been eulogized here, and rightfully so. I don’t believe we could say any more about him as a man, as an artist, as a warm, outgoing personality, of his influence on the field of fantasy. Some of the people here knew him from amateur journals; some knew him because they were his personal friends and colleagues—he knew them in New York. Others knew him because of his assistance in their writing careers. Some knew him at the time, or discovered him later, as a writer, but to all of us I think he was a very important influence.
Now, we have heard, because of the number of people who have had a closer association, a great deal of personal reminiscence. At the risk of boring you, I think that I should place myself in that perspective just for a moment.
When I was a kid ten years of age, I was of course greatly influenced by fantasy reading at the time. I had seen fantasy films—I had seen the work of Lon Chaney Sr. Living in Chicago, one day in the northwest railroad depot, visiting my aunt, she asked, “Would you like a magazine to read on the train?” I said yes. “Any magazine you want.” So, with all the naiveté of a ten-year-old, I immediately spotted a magazine with a naked girl on the cover and said, “That’s for me!” No, actually, it did not have a naked girl on the cover. But I bought the magazine, read it, and found my first story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Ten years later, during the Depression, I was again reading that magazine. And I must tell you something you younger people are not aware of. Weird Tales occupied an unusual position in the 1920s. It called itself the unique magazine, and it was. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Weird Tales was sort of a Playboy for psychopaths. The centerfold was the Slaymate of the Month. It printed the works of Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, Manly Wade Wellman, H. Warner Munn, and so many others, and we youngsters read these stories with great fascination.
I was living in a suburb of Chicago called Maywood, Illinois, for example, and nearby was a place called Hines Veterans Hospital where veterans of World War I were sequestered, and it had a large field—a field where airplanes could stop. They called them airplanes in those days. Believe it or not, when you heard the sound of a plane overhead you came running out of the house to look at it. None of us could envision that a young man who was working in that field at that time named Charles A. Lindbergh was going to fly the Atlantic the following year, and I’m sure it didn’t occur to most of us, looking up there in the sky, that we would ever ourselves fly in an airplane. It was just inconceivable.
There’s this big nostalgia craze now, but to us there was no nostalgia because we lived through it. To us, reading the Tarzan books, there was still a possibility that there might be a Tarzan in Africa because Africa was the Dark Continent, it hadn’t been explored, there could be lost cities. When we read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, this was a possibility. There might somewhere in South America be a realm inhabited by prehistoric dinosaurs and Ackerman. Some of us half believed that there was a kindly old physician named Dr. Fu Manchu. And there were, in this world that I imagined, headhunters, cannibals in the South Seas. There were unexplored regions in the Arctic, the Antarctic.
Consequently, the wonders that we read about in WT were not treated entirely in the youthful mind as fantasies, but sometimes as possibilities. Well, nobody treated the wonders that we read about in WT with the grace and style and conviction of H. P. Lovecraft. So Weird Tales had a great appeal to us which those of you who were not young in those days couldn’t quite understand. The Depression came; the time that I was speaking of, the early 1930s. And those of us who lived through the Depression had other problems. If we enjoyed reading fantasy, well, money was hard to come by. We didn’t have it. There were very, very few books of fantasy available. There were no paperbacks. Nothing was reprinted. You read a story in the pulp magazines when it came out, and then it vanished forever. If you saw a film, when it disappeared, it disappeared for good—there was no television to bring it back on “The Late Late Show.”
And times were very hard. WT cost twenty-five cents in a day when most pulp magazines cost a dime. I remember that meant a lot to me. I was living at 620 East Knapp Street at the time, and I recall what I’d do. I got an allowance of twenty-five cents a week, and one week’s allowance had to be set aside for WT, which generally came on the newsstand the last day of the month or the first day of the following month. And I would get up very, very early on the last day of the month. We had a block away from us a little combination tobacco store-magazine store, and to get to it I would run through the alley. The alley was a grim and forbidding place at six o’clock in the morning. And over on the left was a huge, ancient, domed edifice called the Wood Dairy. And the thing about this horrible-looking place that looked as if belonged on Federal Hill—I suddenly realized that I had never even seen a single cow in that dairy.
Anyway, I would go through there, rush into this combination tobacco-store-magazine store which was run by two spinster ladies, one of whom sold cigars, and the other of whom smoked them, and I would look for WT. I’d get it in my hot little hands, and depending on the nature of the illustration, I would put it under my coat or bring it home openly to my parents, whom I tried to shield from such things. In the letters section I would read references to the stories by H.P. Lovecraft which I’d never been able to see, and which were not then available in back issues which were occasionally offered by WT. And I wanted to get my hands on those stories. So when I was fifteen I sat down and wrote my first fan letter to Lovecraft in care of WT, and asked H.P. Lovecraft where I could read his stories. Many of you know what happened. He answered, and he courteously offered to loan me any or all of the magazines that I requested which contained his stories. He also said, “I’m moving to 10 Barnes Street this month, and I have just catalogued my fantasy library. I’m enclosing a copy of the list those books, and if there are any of those you’d like to borrow, I’d be happy to loan them.”
Now to a fifteen-year-old kid living in the Midwest this came as a (three words unintelligible). It really meant something to me to find myself suddenly corresponding with this great idol of mine, an actual living published professional writer from the mysterious East. So we struck up this correspondence, and along about the third or fourth letter he said, “There’s something about your letters that suggest to me that perhaps you might like to try your hand at writing a professional story yourself. Why don’t you do so? I’d be glad to look at it and suggest a few criticisms.” I did. And H.P.L., God bless him, didn’t criticize them. He encouraged me; to the point where I was determined that I was somehow going to do some writing myself.
Not only did he encourage me, but he gave me a list of other writers with whom he was in contact. He said, “Why not drop them a line, get acquainted with the people that are in the field.” And some of these people were E. Hoffman Price, Clark Ashton Smith, a fan of his named Bernard Austin Dwyer, Robert Barlow, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, August Derleth, and another correspondent named J. Vernon Shea. I remember being very impressed by J. Vernon Shea because he was very much more sophisticated than I was and four years older, and that still holds true in part. He’s still much more sophisticated, but now he’s ten years older than I am.
So before too long, through my correspondence with Derleth, I was invited to his home in Sauk City, Wisconsin, which was about a hundred and twenty-five miles away. I took the Greyhound bus, went out to Sauk City, and was greeted by Mr. Derleth. And here was this man who acted like something out of Der Rosenkavalier. And not only that, but he fulfilled my expectations as a writer by wearing this purple velvet smoking jacket. That impressed me even more because Derleth didn’t even smoke. We became friendly, our correspondence went on, and Lovecraft gave me his encouragement. I went down to Chicago and visited Farnsworth Wright, the editor of WT. I met the first WT writer outside of Derleth I ever encountered—Otto Binder. And naturally, being enthusiastic, I tried to proselyte other people. In my English class we were asked to do themes or essays on writers, and I did one on H.P. Lovecraft—got thrown out of class.
Then it was 1934, and I was seventeen when I graduated. The Depression was still going on, and it was a grim picture. You were either in the Civilian Conservation Corps or you starved. The Civilian Conservation Corps, again for those of you who weren’t around, was a federally endowed chain gang of people who were paid to dig ditches, build bridges, dam rivers, for the princely sum of thirty dollars a month. And that was pretty good pay, until I found out that they sent fifteen bucks home to your parents.
So I had this problem—work or starve. So I thought I’d combine the two and decided to become a writer. Of course I had no expectations of going to college to prepare myself for what I didn’t need. But I had Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft was my university. So I got myself a second-hand typewriter, put it on a secondhand card table, and went to work. I’d done several items already for the fan press—one story called “Lilies,” and one story called “Black Lotus.” I figured I’d better do something different or I’d end up as a florist. I wrote a story, and lo and behold, it sold to WT, the same magazine in which my idol was published.
That was a great day. It was an even greater day when I could walk into that cigar store on the first of November 1934 and pick up a copy of that magazine. I’d already fouled myself up by making some disparaging remarks about the Conan stories of the illustrious Robert E. Howard. I alleged as how I much preferred his non-Conan efforts, and this was regarded as very unprofessional conduct. Of course at the time I wrote the letter I was not a professional. But fortunately for me I lucked out. It didn’t cause all the readers to turn their backs on me, so I continued to write stories. And it was all due to that man from Providence. I can safely say therefore that I owe my writing career to an act of Providence.
I won’t bother to tell you, for you are all aware of the fact, that I wrote a story in which I disposed of Lovecraft, and he wrote a sequel in which he disposed of me, and believe me, beyond all doubt, I don’t know anyone else whom I’d rather be killed by. And then, tragically, Lovecraft died in 1937 and part of me died with him, I guess, not only because he was not a god, he was mortal, that is true, but because he had so little recognition in his own lifetime. There were no novels or collections published, no great realization, even here in Providence, of what was lost. And I realized that while he had a following, he hadn’t even been WT’s most popular author. I don’t think that during his lifetime he ever had a cover story in WT.
Then, as you know, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei decided to rectify the omission of his work in hardcovers, and they founded Arkham House and they put out The Outsider and Others. We know also that this was not a success at the beginning, but they persevered. And then a series of circumstances started to bring Lovecraft into prominence. There was an Armed Services edition of a reprint of his work that sold several million copies, and a whole new generation of young people became familiar with him. The paperbacks started and have been reprinted, but more important than that was that Lovecraft was discovered by foreign critics. But things looked grim there for a while.
I was doing some research for a little introduction that I wrote for a supernatural story written by Lovecraft acolytes, if we can call them such, and I came across something interesting in a book called Golden Multitudes in which were discussed best sellers in this country. In the twenties, by their standards, a good best seller was a book that sold a million or more copies in hardcover, because that’s the only way they sold them. Well, 1928 was the year that I knew about. There were no books that fulfilled these qualifications. The most popular books were these—Earl Derr Biggers’ Behind That Curtain, Vifia Delmar’s Bad Girl, and Ernest Dimnet’s The Art of Thinking. These were widely reviewed and widely praised. In that same year, the February issue of WT published “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P.L. There were no reviews of this particular story, and yet today those widely selling and widely acclaimed books are forgotten. Earl Derr Biggers is overshadowed by the character he created, Charlie Chan. Vifia Delmar I don’t think has attained any great prominence, though I know that she’s been reprinted recently. As far as The Art of Thinking is concerned, you can tell by looking at the world today what influence he had. And yet that obscure story in an obscure magazine by an obscure writer inaugurated an entire renaissance, and entire cottage industry, you might say, which is now known as the Cthulhu Mythos.
I think one of the reasons it has endured is because Lovecraft created his own new world of legend. There are, of course, in his concept of the universe dominated by the Old Ones various religious parables, and there are some things that have been likened to Jung, the psychiatrist, in which Lovecraft touched the nerve endings which exist in all of us, such as our primordial fears of the unknown and certain paranoid suspicions that there may be forces greater than ourselves which dominate our lives and our thinking. Now, forty-seven years after “The Call of Cthulhu,” Howard Phillips Lovecraft, thanks to his rediscovery, and to his critical acclaim, thanks to foreign recognition, his friends, thanks to a whole new generation of readers, is a far more potent literary figure in the field of fantasy than anyone else since the late Edgar Allan Poe. This convention is of course gathered here to honor him for his work in the city where he lived, and where, thirty-six years ago, he died.
Now to those of us who were privileged to know him personally, to those of us who were inspired or influenced by his work, to those of us who owe so much to his kindness, there is a verse he wrote in “The Call of Cthulhu” that I think has great meaning. You remember it—“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.” I say to all of you, H.P. Lovecraft is not dead. He lives forever in our hearts and in our memories. Thank you.
From First World Fantasy Awards (1977), Gahan Wilson, ed. This site gratefully thanks George Chastain for awareness of the availability of this piece.
About two months ago in London at Coyle’s Bookshop, they gave one of their monthly luncheons. This one was in honor of a gentleman I don’t think you are aware of—a music hall performer named Arthur Askey. It was the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday and the publication of his book. Arthur said something which I find strangely apropos at this moment. He looked around the table and said, “This luncheon is not a work of fiction, because everybody at this table is either living or dead.” I have much the same feeling.
This is of course formerly the Arkham Hilton, and probably Mr. Lovecraft did spend a night or two here. I know that last night the sounds I heard could have been the inspiration for “The Rats in the Walls.” I knew I was in the right place when I came here. I walked into the bar and I heard somebody ordering a gin and Miskatonic.
I must say a few words, for he insisted that I do so, about Gahan Wilson. I was rather surprised at his appearance when I met him (two words unintelligible) when I suddenly realized he had the Innsmouth look—the results of generations of inbreeding. Then I discovered he doesn’t have a room at the hotel—he’s sleeping in the swimming pool—at the bottom, the surface being covered with green slime. And it bothered me. I began to analyze my reactions to Gahan Wilson. Strange name. Until I realized—I wrote it out—that this is merely Nosliw Nahag spelled backwards. You people who have read the Necronomicon all realize who Nosliw Nahag was—he went to school with Don Wolhein. The two of them got into the Girl Scouts together—until the teacher found out. So much for Gahan Wilson. Gahan has a tremendous talent as an artist and as a writer. I hate talent. To be quite clear before we leave the subject, I’ll tell you that my own name spelled backwards is Trebor Hcolb. If I have a little too much on the nose I can just see myself walking into a room saying, “Hi, I’m Trebor Hcolb!” But I don’t do that.
Now, if I may be less serious for a moment, I want to tell you, as Gahan has, what an honor I consider this to be. And I’m not being humble or falsely modest when I say that I really don’t think I deserve it, for I realize that I’m in the presence of men here who in my way of thinking are far more equipped to play the role of guest of honor, who have known Howard Phillips Lovecraft personally; they’ve written of him so brilliantly that all I can say is that I consider this perhaps the most lucky moment of my life. I thank you all for allowing me to be here. In a sense, of course, we’re all honored to have been associated with H.P.L. in some way. He has been eulogized here, and rightfully so. I don’t believe we could say any more about him as a man, as an artist, as a warm, outgoing personality, of his influence on the field of fantasy. Some of the people here knew him from amateur journals; some knew him because they were his personal friends and colleagues—he knew them in New York. Others knew him because of his assistance in their writing careers. Some knew him at the time, or discovered him later, as a writer, but to all of us I think he was a very important influence.
Now, we have heard, because of the number of people who have had a closer association, a great deal of personal reminiscence. At the risk of boring you, I think that I should place myself in that perspective just for a moment.
When I was a kid ten years of age, I was of course greatly influenced by fantasy reading at the time. I had seen fantasy films—I had seen the work of Lon Chaney Sr. Living in Chicago, one day in the northwest railroad depot, visiting my aunt, she asked, “Would you like a magazine to read on the train?” I said yes. “Any magazine you want.” So, with all the naiveté of a ten-year-old, I immediately spotted a magazine with a naked girl on the cover and said, “That’s for me!” No, actually, it did not have a naked girl on the cover. But I bought the magazine, read it, and found my first story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Ten years later, during the Depression, I was again reading that magazine. And I must tell you something you younger people are not aware of. Weird Tales occupied an unusual position in the 1920s. It called itself the unique magazine, and it was. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Weird Tales was sort of a Playboy for psychopaths. The centerfold was the Slaymate of the Month. It printed the works of Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, Manly Wade Wellman, H. Warner Munn, and so many others, and we youngsters read these stories with great fascination.
I was living in a suburb of Chicago called Maywood, Illinois, for example, and nearby was a place called Hines Veterans Hospital where veterans of World War I were sequestered, and it had a large field—a field where airplanes could stop. They called them airplanes in those days. Believe it or not, when you heard the sound of a plane overhead you came running out of the house to look at it. None of us could envision that a young man who was working in that field at that time named Charles A. Lindbergh was going to fly the Atlantic the following year, and I’m sure it didn’t occur to most of us, looking up there in the sky, that we would ever ourselves fly in an airplane. It was just inconceivable.
There’s this big nostalgia craze now, but to us there was no nostalgia because we lived through it. To us, reading the Tarzan books, there was still a possibility that there might be a Tarzan in Africa because Africa was the Dark Continent, it hadn’t been explored, there could be lost cities. When we read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, this was a possibility. There might somewhere in South America be a realm inhabited by prehistoric dinosaurs and Ackerman. Some of us half believed that there was a kindly old physician named Dr. Fu Manchu. And there were, in this world that I imagined, headhunters, cannibals in the South Seas. There were unexplored regions in the Arctic, the Antarctic.
Consequently, the wonders that we read about in WT were not treated entirely in the youthful mind as fantasies, but sometimes as possibilities. Well, nobody treated the wonders that we read about in WT with the grace and style and conviction of H. P. Lovecraft. So Weird Tales had a great appeal to us which those of you who were not young in those days couldn’t quite understand. The Depression came; the time that I was speaking of, the early 1930s. And those of us who lived through the Depression had other problems. If we enjoyed reading fantasy, well, money was hard to come by. We didn’t have it. There were very, very few books of fantasy available. There were no paperbacks. Nothing was reprinted. You read a story in the pulp magazines when it came out, and then it vanished forever. If you saw a film, when it disappeared, it disappeared for good—there was no television to bring it back on “The Late Late Show.”
And times were very hard. WT cost twenty-five cents in a day when most pulp magazines cost a dime. I remember that meant a lot to me. I was living at 620 East Knapp Street at the time, and I recall what I’d do. I got an allowance of twenty-five cents a week, and one week’s allowance had to be set aside for WT, which generally came on the newsstand the last day of the month or the first day of the following month. And I would get up very, very early on the last day of the month. We had a block away from us a little combination tobacco store-magazine store, and to get to it I would run through the alley. The alley was a grim and forbidding place at six o’clock in the morning. And over on the left was a huge, ancient, domed edifice called the Wood Dairy. And the thing about this horrible-looking place that looked as if belonged on Federal Hill—I suddenly realized that I had never even seen a single cow in that dairy.
Anyway, I would go through there, rush into this combination tobacco-store-magazine store which was run by two spinster ladies, one of whom sold cigars, and the other of whom smoked them, and I would look for WT. I’d get it in my hot little hands, and depending on the nature of the illustration, I would put it under my coat or bring it home openly to my parents, whom I tried to shield from such things. In the letters section I would read references to the stories by H.P. Lovecraft which I’d never been able to see, and which were not then available in back issues which were occasionally offered by WT. And I wanted to get my hands on those stories. So when I was fifteen I sat down and wrote my first fan letter to Lovecraft in care of WT, and asked H.P. Lovecraft where I could read his stories. Many of you know what happened. He answered, and he courteously offered to loan me any or all of the magazines that I requested which contained his stories. He also said, “I’m moving to 10 Barnes Street this month, and I have just catalogued my fantasy library. I’m enclosing a copy of the list those books, and if there are any of those you’d like to borrow, I’d be happy to loan them.”
Now to a fifteen-year-old kid living in the Midwest this came as a (three words unintelligible). It really meant something to me to find myself suddenly corresponding with this great idol of mine, an actual living published professional writer from the mysterious East. So we struck up this correspondence, and along about the third or fourth letter he said, “There’s something about your letters that suggest to me that perhaps you might like to try your hand at writing a professional story yourself. Why don’t you do so? I’d be glad to look at it and suggest a few criticisms.” I did. And H.P.L., God bless him, didn’t criticize them. He encouraged me; to the point where I was determined that I was somehow going to do some writing myself.
Not only did he encourage me, but he gave me a list of other writers with whom he was in contact. He said, “Why not drop them a line, get acquainted with the people that are in the field.” And some of these people were E. Hoffman Price, Clark Ashton Smith, a fan of his named Bernard Austin Dwyer, Robert Barlow, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, August Derleth, and another correspondent named J. Vernon Shea. I remember being very impressed by J. Vernon Shea because he was very much more sophisticated than I was and four years older, and that still holds true in part. He’s still much more sophisticated, but now he’s ten years older than I am.
So before too long, through my correspondence with Derleth, I was invited to his home in Sauk City, Wisconsin, which was about a hundred and twenty-five miles away. I took the Greyhound bus, went out to Sauk City, and was greeted by Mr. Derleth. And here was this man who acted like something out of Der Rosenkavalier. And not only that, but he fulfilled my expectations as a writer by wearing this purple velvet smoking jacket. That impressed me even more because Derleth didn’t even smoke. We became friendly, our correspondence went on, and Lovecraft gave me his encouragement. I went down to Chicago and visited Farnsworth Wright, the editor of WT. I met the first WT writer outside of Derleth I ever encountered—Otto Binder. And naturally, being enthusiastic, I tried to proselyte other people. In my English class we were asked to do themes or essays on writers, and I did one on H.P. Lovecraft—got thrown out of class.
Then it was 1934, and I was seventeen when I graduated. The Depression was still going on, and it was a grim picture. You were either in the Civilian Conservation Corps or you starved. The Civilian Conservation Corps, again for those of you who weren’t around, was a federally endowed chain gang of people who were paid to dig ditches, build bridges, dam rivers, for the princely sum of thirty dollars a month. And that was pretty good pay, until I found out that they sent fifteen bucks home to your parents.
So I had this problem—work or starve. So I thought I’d combine the two and decided to become a writer. Of course I had no expectations of going to college to prepare myself for what I didn’t need. But I had Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft was my university. So I got myself a second-hand typewriter, put it on a secondhand card table, and went to work. I’d done several items already for the fan press—one story called “Lilies,” and one story called “Black Lotus.” I figured I’d better do something different or I’d end up as a florist. I wrote a story, and lo and behold, it sold to WT, the same magazine in which my idol was published.
That was a great day. It was an even greater day when I could walk into that cigar store on the first of November 1934 and pick up a copy of that magazine. I’d already fouled myself up by making some disparaging remarks about the Conan stories of the illustrious Robert E. Howard. I alleged as how I much preferred his non-Conan efforts, and this was regarded as very unprofessional conduct. Of course at the time I wrote the letter I was not a professional. But fortunately for me I lucked out. It didn’t cause all the readers to turn their backs on me, so I continued to write stories. And it was all due to that man from Providence. I can safely say therefore that I owe my writing career to an act of Providence.
I won’t bother to tell you, for you are all aware of the fact, that I wrote a story in which I disposed of Lovecraft, and he wrote a sequel in which he disposed of me, and believe me, beyond all doubt, I don’t know anyone else whom I’d rather be killed by. And then, tragically, Lovecraft died in 1937 and part of me died with him, I guess, not only because he was not a god, he was mortal, that is true, but because he had so little recognition in his own lifetime. There were no novels or collections published, no great realization, even here in Providence, of what was lost. And I realized that while he had a following, he hadn’t even been WT’s most popular author. I don’t think that during his lifetime he ever had a cover story in WT.
Then, as you know, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei decided to rectify the omission of his work in hardcovers, and they founded Arkham House and they put out The Outsider and Others. We know also that this was not a success at the beginning, but they persevered. And then a series of circumstances started to bring Lovecraft into prominence. There was an Armed Services edition of a reprint of his work that sold several million copies, and a whole new generation of young people became familiar with him. The paperbacks started and have been reprinted, but more important than that was that Lovecraft was discovered by foreign critics. But things looked grim there for a while.
I was doing some research for a little introduction that I wrote for a supernatural story written by Lovecraft acolytes, if we can call them such, and I came across something interesting in a book called Golden Multitudes in which were discussed best sellers in this country. In the twenties, by their standards, a good best seller was a book that sold a million or more copies in hardcover, because that’s the only way they sold them. Well, 1928 was the year that I knew about. There were no books that fulfilled these qualifications. The most popular books were these—Earl Derr Biggers’ Behind That Curtain, Vifia Delmar’s Bad Girl, and Ernest Dimnet’s The Art of Thinking. These were widely reviewed and widely praised. In that same year, the February issue of WT published “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P.L. There were no reviews of this particular story, and yet today those widely selling and widely acclaimed books are forgotten. Earl Derr Biggers is overshadowed by the character he created, Charlie Chan. Vifia Delmar I don’t think has attained any great prominence, though I know that she’s been reprinted recently. As far as The Art of Thinking is concerned, you can tell by looking at the world today what influence he had. And yet that obscure story in an obscure magazine by an obscure writer inaugurated an entire renaissance, and entire cottage industry, you might say, which is now known as the Cthulhu Mythos.
I think one of the reasons it has endured is because Lovecraft created his own new world of legend. There are, of course, in his concept of the universe dominated by the Old Ones various religious parables, and there are some things that have been likened to Jung, the psychiatrist, in which Lovecraft touched the nerve endings which exist in all of us, such as our primordial fears of the unknown and certain paranoid suspicions that there may be forces greater than ourselves which dominate our lives and our thinking. Now, forty-seven years after “The Call of Cthulhu,” Howard Phillips Lovecraft, thanks to his rediscovery, and to his critical acclaim, thanks to foreign recognition, his friends, thanks to a whole new generation of readers, is a far more potent literary figure in the field of fantasy than anyone else since the late Edgar Allan Poe. This convention is of course gathered here to honor him for his work in the city where he lived, and where, thirty-six years ago, he died.
Now to those of us who were privileged to know him personally, to those of us who were inspired or influenced by his work, to those of us who owe so much to his kindness, there is a verse he wrote in “The Call of Cthulhu” that I think has great meaning. You remember it—“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.” I say to all of you, H.P. Lovecraft is not dead. He lives forever in our hearts and in our memories. Thank you.
From First World Fantasy Awards (1977), Gahan Wilson, ed. This site gratefully thanks George Chastain for awareness of the availability of this piece.