Fordítókat keresünk S. T. Joshi és David E. Schultz könyvének fordításához!

To Maurice W. Moe, April 5, 1931 (AHT).

The whole keynote of my personality, aside from my antiquarianism, is individual revolt against meaningless convention; yet the whole family’s branchage behind me is about as solidly conventional a mess as you could well imagine. Any sort of aesthete is rare as a hen’s tooth, and intellect doesn’t sparkle a bit—but that’s to be expected, since I ain’t no arc light myself. The overwhelming majority—virtually totality—of my ancestry on both sides is of the staid and stolid country-gentry class, with an abnormally high percentage of clergymen droning their amiably well-meaning matins and liturgies across the well-clipt hedges of a subdu’d and commonplace rural mead. I can scare up a full-fledged clerick—the Rev. Francis Fulford, Vicar of Dunsford—in four generations—that is, he is my great-great-grandfather—and by two generations behind him they come up thick and fast. Then on my mother’s side, also they rant and rave—only here they tend to be Puritans and other freaks instead of sober Anglicans. That screechy old Quaker gal hang’d in Boston Common in 1660—Mary Dyer—is among my doubtfully revered progenitrices. Mediocrity seems quite the rule; for the three or four really great lines I touch—Musgrave of Edenhall, Cumberland, Chichester; Carew of Haccombe; Legge, Lord Dartmouth; etc. etc.—are so far back that no trait from them could conceivably have any perceptible share in moulding me. [. . .] In direct male line, I can’t get back to the Conquest at all; the family of Lovecroft (early spelling) first appearing in Devonshire, in the valley of the Teign, circa 1450. I can’t push my own lineal stem back to 1560 plus or minus, when John Lovecraft (present spelling) of Minster Hall near Newton-Abbot bore the present arms of the family: a chevron, engrailed, Or, between three foxes’ heads, erased, Or, on a field Vert. Following his progeny down the line, I don’t find a single mark of distinction above the mediocre country-gentry average. Clergymen to burn (though there was no Queen Mary to get it done), just plain squires who probably talked with a dialect almost as broad as their tenants’, Captains, Colonels, occasional marriages into old lines but mostly marriages into small-time lines whose charted antecedents don’t reach the Domesday Book—that’s the bulk of the germ-plasm that made up Grandpa’s paternal half. One curious strain is that of Washington—a branch with no discoverable relation to that which emigrated to Virginia and produc’d the arch-rebel. But not a damn thing to indicate a revolt against commonplace unintelligence or a taste for the weird and the cosmic. No philosophers—no artists—no writers—not a cursed soul I could possibly talk to without getting a pain in the neck. [. . .]

To Robert E. Howard, August 14, 1930 (AHT).

Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.—let me confess that this is all a synthetic concoction of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany’s “Pegāna”. The reason for its echoes in Dr. de Castro’s work is that the latter gentleman is a revision-client of mine—into whose tales I have stuck these glancing references for sheer fun. If any other clients of mine get work placed in W.T., you will perhaps find a still-wider spread of the cult of Azathoth, Cthulhu, and the Great Old Ones! The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is likewise something which must yet be written in order to possess objective reality. Abdul is a favourite dream-character of mine—indeed that is what I used to call myself when I was five years old and a transported devotee of Andrew Lang’s version of the Arabian Nights. A few years ago I prepared a mock-erudite synopsis of Abdul’s life, and of the posthumous vicissitudes and translations of his hideous and unmentionable work Al Azif (called To Nekronomikon{Greek} by the Byzantine Monk Theodoras Philetas, who translated it into late Greek in A.D. 900!)—a synopsis which I shall follow in future references to the dark and accursed thing. Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his—in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation. I ought, though, to write Mr. O’Neail and disabuse him of the idea that there is a large blind spot in his mythological erudition![1] Clark Ashton Smith is launching another mock mythology revolving around the black, furry toad-god Tsathoggua, whose name had variant forms amongst the Atlanteans, Lemurians, and Hyperboreans who worshipped him after he emerged from inner Earth (whither he came from Outer Space, with Saturn as a stepping-stone). I am using Tsathoggua in several tales of my own and of revision-clients—although Wright rejected the Smith tale in which he originally appeared.[2] It would be amusing to identify your Kathulos with my Cthulhu—indeed, I may so adopt him in some future black allusion.

[1]. N. J. O’Neail had written a letter to the editor of Weird Tales (published in the March 1930 issue) asking whether Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and Howard’s Kathulos (an entity cited in “Skull-Face” [Weird Tales, October/November/December 1929]) were related.

[2]. The story in question was “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” later accepted by Wright and published in Weird Tales for November 1931. As a result, however, Tsathoggua was first mentioned in print in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), published in Weird Tales for August 1931.

To Frank Belknap Long, November 22, 1930 (AHT).

We are bidden to accept, as the one paradoxical certainty of experience, the fact that we can never have any other ultimate certainty. All conclusions for an infinite time to come, barring wholly unexpected data, must be regarded as no more than competitive probabilities. So far as actual knowledge is concerned, the theistic myths of tradition are as absolutely and finally dethroned from all pretension to authority as are any of the earlier conclusions of science. Ancient tradition and earlier science must alike resign all former claims to truth which they may ever have put forward. They, together with every other possible attempt to explain the cosmos, now stand on a basis of complete and fundamental equality so far as their original claims are concerned. The old game is over, and the cards are shuffled again. Nothing whatever can now be done toward reaching probabilities in the matter of cosmic organisation, except by assembling all the tentative data of 1930 and forming a fresh chain of partial indications based exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1930, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, correlating, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. Let this last point be supremely plain, for it is through a deliberate and dishonest ignoring of it that every contemporary claim of traditional theism is advanced. Nothing but shoddy emotionalism and irresponsible irrationality can account for the pathetick and contemptible asininity with which the Chestertons and Eliots, and even the Fosdicks and Eddingtons and Osborns,[1] try to brush it aside or cover it up in their attempts to capitalise the new uncertainty of everything in the interest of historical mythology. What this means—and it means it just as plainly, for all the jaunty flippancy of touch-and-go epigrammatists who dare not put their fallacies to the test of honest reason and original cerebration—is simply this: that although each of the conflicting orthodoxies of the past, founded on known fallacies among primitive and ignorant races, certainly has an equal theoretical chance with any other orthodoxy or with any theory of science of being true, it most positively has no greater chance than has ANY RANDOM SYSTEM OF FICTION, DEVISED CAPRICIOUSLY BY IGNORANCE, DISEASE, WHIM, ACCIDENT, EMOTION, GREED, OR ANY OTHER AGENCY INCLUDING CONSCIOUS MENDACITY, HALLUCINATION, POLITICAL OR SOCIAL INTEREST, AND ULTERIOR CONSIDERATIONS IN GENERAL.  […]

[1]. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), American clergyman and author; Arthur S. Eddington (1882–1944), English astronomer; Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), American paleontologist. All these thinkers attempted in various ways to harmonize the findings of modern science with religious belief.