Thoughts on August Derleth

[enthusiast]

Would you consider August Derleth to be somewhat underrated as a writer?

Most of the comments on Derleth that I found online tend to be negative and I understand that viewpoint to some extent. Certainly most of his Lovecraftian stories are tacky and they misrepresent Lovecraft's ideas. Unfortunately, it's these particular stories of Derleth's that are the most widely available, in books like THE MASK OF CTHULHU and THE TRAIL OF CTHULHU.

I think Derleth would be better represented through an examination of some of his non-Lovecraftian horror stories. We have for example "The Drifting Snow," a traditional yet finely crafted tale of vampires. Other good Derleth stories are "A Wig for Miss Devore," adapted as an episode of Boris Karloff's T.V. series, Thriller, and "The Slayers and the Slain," with its eerie depiction of a newpaper archive. Perhaps if an editor assembled a collection of Derleth's best horror stories outside the Cthulhu Mythos his reputation might improve a little.

There's also a vast body of work of Derleth's outside the horror field like his poetry, the Sac Prairie series etc., but I've only just begun to sample this.

I look forward to any opinions on this interesting man.

[Odalisque]

I would like to enjoy August Derleth's writing more than I do. Unfortunately, a lot of his non-Lovecraftian horror stories are distinctly poor. I suppose that's only to be expected given the large number of stories he submitted to Weird Tales. I've heard that the Sac Prairie series is much better, but I suspect that I'll never read it given that (a) I'm a slow reader and (b) there are a huge number of probably excellent books that I'll never read. My choice of reading matter relies very much upon what fate throws under my feet, and there's no sign of my tripping over the Sac Prairie series.

[G. S. Carnivals]

Some of August Derleth's best short fiction was published under the name Stephen Grendon. Seventeen of these stories appeared in the collection Mr. George and Other Odd Persons. Well worth seeking out.

[Jezetha]

Although I unfortunately can't vouch for it personally, Derleth seems to have written the best Sherlock Holmes-influenced stories around (Solar Pons is the name of his sleuth). So he has excelled at something, apart from keeping Lovecraft's name alive during the early years (and that of CAS, too). Come to think of it - why not celebrate Arkham House as Derleth's greatest single achievement?

For Solar Pons, look here:

http://www.tartaruspress.com/solar.html

[Odalisque]

Quote Originally Posted by Jezetha

Come to think of it - why not celebrate Arkham House as Derleth's greatest single achievement?

I'm with you on that, Johan. I own (and treasure) quite a few Arkham House books. Derleth also edited some excellent anthologies (When Evil Wakes may be my absolute favourite). Arkham House and the anthologies are the reasons I wish I liked Augie's fiction more than I do. But his work as a publisher and editor is surely enough of an acheivement for anyone.

[hopfrog]

We've had much discussion re: Derleth in the Esoteric Order of Dagon apa, much of it pro, all of it intelligent. I doubt that I'd be writing fiction if it wasn't for Derleth. People say that others would have brought Lovecraft to the attention of publishers, but no one could have done so as thoroughly as Augie. And who could have created a house like Arkham House? Arkham books felt magical when I first discovered them, and they still do. When S. T. Joshi bought my new novelette for his forthcoming anthology of Lovecraftian fiction, Black Wings, and told me that April Derleth is extremely interested in publishing the book -- it was WOW WOW WOW! I've had two deep-rooted wishes as a Lovecraftian author: to sell a story to Weird Tales and to appear in an Arkham House anthology. I had a tale in WT this year, and now my other wish may come true.
Much of Derleth's fiction was rush'd hack-work written to pay the bills; but he wrote some excellent weird tales. He's such an amazingly interesting figure. So complex. People disliked him for many reasons: his sexuality, his claim of owning Lovecraft and ye Mythos, his ego, &c &c. But when we look at the man's accomplishments, I cannot help but be impressed. He created the Mythos, and it was that creation that beguiled me when I was in my early twenties and lured me into writing weird fiction. He knew that stuff like Mask and Trail of Cthulhu were junk and often said so. His posthumous collaborations "with" HPL are problematic, and yet I consider "The Survivor" an excellent weird tale, except for the portion in which the Mythos lore is dragged in, which adds nothing to the plot.
It's because of Derleth's efforts that HPL is now a world-famous writer. Maybe others would have done it differently but the fact is it was Derleth who set the entire thing in motion. Blessings to his memory.

[The New Nonsense]

I'm a big fan of Derleth. I realize many accuse Derleth of mimicking Lovecraft's style and tone, and this may be true to some degree (along with hundreds of other horror authors); however, we must remember he started writing at a very young age, 19, I think. He started out as a "fan boy", after all. Later on, as he matured as a writer, he developed his own unique voice. Like Lovecraft, Derleth's writing was greatly influenced by local folklore (Wisconsin instead of New England). Of course I'm somewhat biased, as Derleth's home/Arkham House is just a short drive from where I live, and many of his stories take place right around where I live in Wisconsin, an area I consider "Derleth Country".


Derleth is buried right across the street from Arkham House in St. Aloysius Cem. It's an interesting grave marker; a marble bench topped with a sundial and a quote from Henry David Thoreau's Walden,

"I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.."

The grave beckons one to sit and quietly ponder one's mortality.

I've read all of his weird tales, though I'm fairly unacquainted with his non-horror fiction. I haven't read any of his Solar Pons stories nor his Sac Prairie stories. I hear Walden West is quite good.

In 1996 I attended a celebration held by the August Derleth society on the 25th anniversary of his death. I spoke to a lot of people who knew him personally, including his daughter, April. It seems he was really a unique character. Everyone else in attendance was a fan of his non-horror fiction, so I kind of stood out as an anomaly.

It's my opinion that without Derlelth keeping Lovecraft in print, it would have taken perhaps another fifty years before someone seriously took notice of Lovecraft's genius. Sadly, now that Arkham House's main cash cow (Lovecraft) is in the public domain, its future remains uncertain.

[hopfrog]

I've just had a bit of a shock -- I was trying to organize the chaos that is my library and going through my two huge cardboard boxes of paperback books, looking for my pb Lovecraft titles; and I found an old Panther Horror edition of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS AND OTHER NOVELS OF TERROR; & I read the introduction by Derleth, which is, I believe, from the old un-corrected Arkham House hardcover edition of the 1960's (the copyright is 1964 -- is that ye year when the original edition of MOUNTAINS was publish'd by Arkham [but hark! I can check in my handy copy of S. T. Joshi's Sixty Years of Arkham House: {oh, bloody hell, I've just dropped my bagel onto the book and now its dust jacket is smear'd with ichor -- i.e. cream cheese} -- yes, 1964; & this introduction is ye original that Augie wrote for that book -- okay, where the hell was I with my brackets, um...this one, I think] -- & I was simply amaz'd at how clueless Derleth was about the facts of Lovecraft's life hisotry! Almoft as bad as flipping Lin Carter prov'd hisself to be in his flipping Lovecraft: a look behind ye Cthulhu Mythos (but that is matter for another thread, perhaps to be entitl'd "Ye Blasphamies of Carter") -- -- --
thus I quote:--

"The most ambitious of these is undoubtedly The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, originally written in 1927-1928, but not published until 1941, when an abridged version appeared in Weird Tales. The first full-length version was published in 1943 in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, since which time it has been separately published in England, and in America has been turned into a typical horror movie with Vincent Price in the leading role -- titled, hilariously enough, with typical Hollywood vagary, Edgar Allan Poe's Haunted Palace!...

"The third, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, was very probably conceived and written well in advance of the other novels, sometime in the early or mid-1920's, but, unlike those novels, it was evidently never extensively revised and remains the least satisfactory of them. ...

"....It is very probable that The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was begun not long after and evidence suggests that it was worked on at intervals over several years, for its general looseness suggests that Lovecraft initially ay least had no very clear plan for it.

"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was put aside for future revision but the Cthulhu Mythos enlisted most of his creative interests from the mid-1920's onward."

Here we have Derleth speaking like the very knowledgable Lovecraftian scholar he liked to pose as -- and he is flipping wrong in every instance! Shocking! How cou'd he not know, having worked on editing Lovecraft's letters for years, having been one of HPL's constant correspondents, that Charles Dexter Ward and Dream-Quest were written immediately after each other (Quest begun in October 1926 and completed January 22, 1927; Ward begun immediately afterward, in late January 1927 and completed on March 1)? Ward was in no way revised, as Derleth states -- as he should have known, for Lovecraft made no secret of his horror at the idea of revising & polishing it for publication.

And the time of his writing of these novels was exactly the same time that Lovecraft began his correspondence with Derleth, and he did indeed discuss them in his letters to Derleth's. In Essential Solitude Vol. I, page 67, Lovecraft writes: "The other day I finished my novelette--which came to 110 pages--& have provisionally named it "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". Heav'n only knows how I dread the typing! Meanwhile I'm writing a new tale in more horrible & less fantastic vein -- something with a Providence setting. I'll let you see it when it's done & typed." So, Derleth was told absolutely at the time of the origins of both works. In a letter of March 2nd Lovecraft wrote to Derleth, "Well! I've just finished my second novelette, & it came to 147 pages before I could give it a decently rounded finish. As you say, this & its immediate predecessor could well be joined as a full-sized dual book--if there were anyone willing to publish it!" Thus, HPL told Derleth directly that Ward was an "immediate predecessor" of "Quest". Wherefore, then, did Augie come up with this bizarre theory that Dream-Quest was an early work that evolv'd over time? He had only to check his personal correspondence (which surely he was overlooking in preparation of the Selected Letters) to learn the facts.

I find this all extremely problematic. And it shews, profoundly, the huge debt we owe to S. T. Joshi, who has dedicated his life to getting the facts correct and widely known. No thanks to Derleth, who seemed bent on keeping the facts buried, concealed, so that he could perpetrate his misleading bull####. This whole thing about Lovecraft setting aside Dream-Quest because the Cthulhu Mythos enlisted all of Lovecraft's attention -- what bleedin' crap! The Cthulhu Mythos did not exist in Lovecraft's mind as the entity it became under Derleth's madness to ape Lovecraft. (Okay, maybe that was a bit bunch -- shame on me.)

We owe Derleth a deep gratitude, yes; but we cannot ignore what seems to be his deliberate perpetration of deceits as he posed as the world's leading Lovecraft authority -- a thing he never became.

[The New Nonsense]

I mostly agree with you, Wilum. However, in Derleth's defense, we must remind ourselves Derleth was far more of a businessman than a scholar. I'm sure Derleth never imagined Lovecraft's body of work would one day be treated as seriously as Poe or Hawthorne (though he may have hoped!). Therefore, he may have not have felt the need to be as dilegent as one would be when handling the works of a great American author. I think he was much more concerned with simply keeping HPL in print (in whatever mangled form) and his business afloat. I don't agree with Derleth's interpretation of the Mythos, but I also don't feel he was deliberately trying to obfuscate HPL's legacy or re-write the facts; rather, I feel it was simply poor reseach and analysis on his part.

[hopfrog]

I love Derleth, and I love that he shocks and at time really pisses me off. It's fascinating to see how people react to him. One of the most demented (in my eyes) such testimonials is Peter Ruber's book, Arkham's Masters of Terrors (Arkham House 2000). The foremost raison d'etre of this book was to come to Derleth's defense, but Ruber makes a pathetic mockery of himself by slagging everyone else (Bradbury, C. A. Smith, R.E.H. & especially Lovecraft) as losers. His opening essay in the book, "The Un-Demonizing of August Derleth," is --for me -- a failure, because there is so much about Augie that simply defies commonsense. Probably the finest examination of the Lovecraft/Derleth connection are the two Essential Solitude volumes published last year by Hippocampus, with an extremely thoughtful, respectful and well-balanced Schultz/Joshi introduction. Derleth is fascinating. Has anyone that biography that came out, written by some woman whose name escapes me? I've heard various comments on it but don't know anyone who has actually read the book. I wish someone would write a definitive biography of Derleth, in which everything was dealt with, including Augie's sexuality. Was he in fact lovers with Marc Schorer, and were their collaborations written when they lived together in some romantic cabin? Sprague de Camp told me once that Derleth had a huband and wife stay at his place for a week-end; first Derelth tried to seduce the husband, then the wife. There are many such rumors -- but are any of them true, or is it just pathetic gossip with no fondation in reality? Is it really any of our business? I think it is -- and that biography can serve as one of its functions the setting down of solid facts. But should such a thing be published while Derleth's beloved children are still living -- that's another issue. I'm becoming rather obsessed with learning more about Derleth, because he utterly fascinates me, and as a queer and Lovecraftian author I feel a bond with him such as I don't feel for other writers, including Lovecraft.