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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 1, whole no. 9, Winter 1945
Page 28
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that no objection existed to their publication. Barlow was shown as co-author of the one list because several titles had been added to it in his handwriting. We shall be on our guard against similar happenings in the future. --FTL ---oo0oo--- An Excerpt from a letter written by CLARK ASHTON SMITH to R. A. Hoffman 9-9-44: ...As for a third volume of stories, I haven't settled on all the titles yet and am hoping that I may have some new work to include by the time Arkham House is ready to publish it. Definitely, however, the book will contain: The Garden of Adompha, Genius Loci, The Charnel God, The Colossus of Ylourgne, The Disinterment of Venus, Vulthoom, The Devotee of Evil, the Voyage of King Euvoran, The Willow Landscape, The Eternal World, The Black Abbott of Puthuum, The Witchcraft of Ulua, The Phantoms of the Fire, and The Ice-Demon. I haven't a title yet for this volume. My prose pastels will be included in the collection of my poetry which Derleth and Wandrei hope to bring out in 1945 or 1946. This will be entitled The Hashish-Eater and Other Poems and will be uniform in size, format, etc. with the volumes of tales. For the past week I have been exhuming ancient mss. and even retouching some of them in preparation for the immense job of typing which Wandrei has set me. He wants a copy of every poem I have ever written! Incidentally, he wants to use a reproduction of one of my paintings (not yet selected) i n full color as a frontispiece. ---oo0oo--- ROBERT BLOCH joins us from Milwaukee, Wisconsin: There's stimulation in Price's note, but before responding to it, I'd better insert a preamble. Back in 1934 I wrote a letter to WT in which I expressed my opinion that Howard's Conan stories were vastly inferior to his Kull or Solomon Kane tales, and deplored the intemperate shedding of gore in the Conan series. Well....by the time my letter appeared, I had my own first story scheduled for the next issue of WT. Result--Conanophiles rose and denounced me as "an author criticizing another author". Since that time I've shied off any commentary...and will take care to keep my remarks inspired by Prince's articles generalized so that I won't step on the toes of anybody. Price refers to HPL as an "amateur". How true that is! And how often I have been impressed, while reading through reams of critical commentary on HPL's work, by the fact that most of these appraisals are superficial in the extreme. (No, I'm not referring to Fritz Leiber's splendid notes in the current Acolyte; they are impressive and authoritative.) But the bulk of HPL's critics, when seeking to explain his genius, miss the mark entirely. They try to dissect the secret in his "style" or his "approach"...and they enter the glib jargonesque realms of "genre" and the like. But Price hits the nail on the head. H. P. Lovecraft wrote the kind of stories he did because of the kind of person he was. That doesn't sound either very grammatical or very profound, does it? Yet it contains, in essence, a truth about authorship all too frequently overlooked. When they moan, "Where will we find another like HPL?", they completely overlook the obvious answer...another HPL will be found only in the person of an author with commensurate intellect who lives with comparative individuality of outlook. -- 28 --
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that no objection existed to their publication. Barlow was shown as co-author of the one list because several titles had been added to it in his handwriting. We shall be on our guard against similar happenings in the future. --FTL ---oo0oo--- An Excerpt from a letter written by CLARK ASHTON SMITH to R. A. Hoffman 9-9-44: ...As for a third volume of stories, I haven't settled on all the titles yet and am hoping that I may have some new work to include by the time Arkham House is ready to publish it. Definitely, however, the book will contain: The Garden of Adompha, Genius Loci, The Charnel God, The Colossus of Ylourgne, The Disinterment of Venus, Vulthoom, The Devotee of Evil, the Voyage of King Euvoran, The Willow Landscape, The Eternal World, The Black Abbott of Puthuum, The Witchcraft of Ulua, The Phantoms of the Fire, and The Ice-Demon. I haven't a title yet for this volume. My prose pastels will be included in the collection of my poetry which Derleth and Wandrei hope to bring out in 1945 or 1946. This will be entitled The Hashish-Eater and Other Poems and will be uniform in size, format, etc. with the volumes of tales. For the past week I have been exhuming ancient mss. and even retouching some of them in preparation for the immense job of typing which Wandrei has set me. He wants a copy of every poem I have ever written! Incidentally, he wants to use a reproduction of one of my paintings (not yet selected) i n full color as a frontispiece. ---oo0oo--- ROBERT BLOCH joins us from Milwaukee, Wisconsin: There's stimulation in Price's note, but before responding to it, I'd better insert a preamble. Back in 1934 I wrote a letter to WT in which I expressed my opinion that Howard's Conan stories were vastly inferior to his Kull or Solomon Kane tales, and deplored the intemperate shedding of gore in the Conan series. Well....by the time my letter appeared, I had my own first story scheduled for the next issue of WT. Result--Conanophiles rose and denounced me as "an author criticizing another author". Since that time I've shied off any commentary...and will take care to keep my remarks inspired by Prince's articles generalized so that I won't step on the toes of anybody. Price refers to HPL as an "amateur". How true that is! And how often I have been impressed, while reading through reams of critical commentary on HPL's work, by the fact that most of these appraisals are superficial in the extreme. (No, I'm not referring to Fritz Leiber's splendid notes in the current Acolyte; they are impressive and authoritative.) But the bulk of HPL's critics, when seeking to explain his genius, miss the mark entirely. They try to dissect the secret in his "style" or his "approach"...and they enter the glib jargonesque realms of "genre" and the like. But Price hits the nail on the head. H. P. Lovecraft wrote the kind of stories he did because of the kind of person he was. That doesn't sound either very grammatical or very profound, does it? Yet it contains, in essence, a truth about authorship all too frequently overlooked. When they moan, "Where will we find another like HPL?", they completely overlook the obvious answer...another HPL will be found only in the person of an author with commensurate intellect who lives with comparative individuality of outlook. -- 28 --
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