Speaking of a certain Gentleman from Providence, I was reading a collection of short stories from author Ramsey Campbell, a collection of some of his later "Lovecraftian" stories of less-than-novel-length,
Visions from Brichester, and one of the more recently published stories, that I'd read in an earlier anthology
(Black Wings of Cthulhu, ed. by ST Joshi
) has been on my mind, "The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash". It's an epistolary tale, where Campbell purports to have acquired a set of letters years ago from the eponymous Nash to H.P. Lovecraft, and has annotated them. Nash is a Brit who apparently started corresponding with Lovecraft as a fan, but then quickly moved to get Lovecraft to use his influence to place Nash’s stories in Weird Tales or another magazine. The relationship sours because Nash is clearly a nutcase with a bad temper and his stories (which we never see) are not saleable, and later, after lamenting that one or two stories he sent to Lovecraft were unable to be "placed", he becomes a bit miffed when more stories he mailed to Lovecraft were never returned to him. Things go south pretty soon thereafter. The letters are at turns hilarious and downright nasty, once Nash turns on Lovecraft and goes from gushing enthusiast to, over the years, a vicious critic. Frequent references are made to Lovecraft's publishing, the works of other "weird fiction" authors and members of The Lovecraft Circle with whom he had correspondence. The story is both blackly humorous but with a tinge of unease.
In 1968 August Derleth was sent a number of letters that had apparently been received by H. P. Lovecraft. The anonymous parcel bore no return address. Although the letters had been typed on a vintage machine and on paper that appeared to be decades old, Derleth was undecided whether they were authentic. For instance, he was unsure that someone living in a small English village in the 1920s would have had access to issues of Weird Tales, and he could find no obvious references to Nash in any of Lovecraft’s surviving correspondence. Derleth considered printing some or all of Nash’s letters in the Arkham Collector but decided against using them in the Winter 1969 issue devoted to Lovecraft. Later he asked me to think about writing an essay on Lovecraft for a new Lovecraftian volume that might offer the letters a home, but the project was shelved. Intrigued by his references to the Nash letters, | persuaded him to send me copies, including the other documents. It isn’t clear what happened to the originals. When I visited Arkham House in 1975, James Turner knew nothing about them, and he was subsequently unable to trace them. He did mention that in Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, Frank Belknap Long referred to an English writer who “thought it was amusing to call people names,” by whom Lovecraft had supposedly been troubled for several years. Since Long was unable to be more specific, Turner deleted the reference. I reproduce all the letters here, followed by the final documents. Nash’s signature is florid and extends across the page. It grows larger but less legible as the correspondence progresses.
The first letter, sent in 1925 is full of over the top praise:
May I come swiftly to my poor excuse for this intrusion into your inestimably precious time? I have sampled six issues of the Unique Magazine, and I am sure you must be aware that it has but a single claim to uniqueness—the contributions of your good self. I scarcely know whether to marvel or to be moved that you should allow them to appear amongst the motley fancies which infest the pages of the journal. Do you intend to educate the other contributors by your example? Are you not concerned that the ignorant reader may be repelled by this commonplace herd, thereby failing to discover the visions which you offer? The company in which you find yourself reads like the scribbling of hacks who have never dared to dream. I wish that the magazine would at least emblazon your name on the cover of every number which contains your prose. I promise you that on the occasion when I mistakenly bought an issue which had neglected to feature your work, I rent it into shreds so small that not a single vapid sentence could survive.
and by 1927 after gushing enthusiastically, and commenting on his own strange dreams that are inspiring him to write stories he's sent to HPL, the cracks start to form
Thank you for the list of living writers whose work you have praised in your essay. May I take it that you have withheld one name from me? Perhaps you intended me to be surprised upon reading it in the essay, unless you wished to spare my modesty. Let me reassure you that its presence would be no surprise and would cause me no embarrassment. If by any chance you decided that my work should not be discussed in the essay because of its basis in actual experience, pray do remind yourself that the material is cast in fictional form. In the case of such an omission, I trust that the error will be rectified before the essay sees publication.
Yours in urgency,
CTN
Nevertheless, it has some worth, for it convinces me that you are by no means the ideal agent for my work. I ignored your presumption in suggesting changes to my reports as if they were mere fiction, but I am troubled by the possibility that you may regard your work as in any way superior to mine. Is it conceivable that you altered the pieces which you submitted on my behalf? I suspect you of hindering them for fear that your fiction might be unfavourably compared to them, and in order that it might reach the editors ahead of them. I am sure that you excluded my work from your essay out of jealousy. | wonder if you may have resented my achievement ever since | gave you my honest appraisal of your Houdini hotchpotch. For these reasons and others which need not concern you, I hereby withdraw my work from your representation. Please return all of it immediately on receipt of this letter.
Sincerely,
Cameron Thaddeus Nash
By 1928, Nash is addressing HPL with names like "Loathecraft" and "Lovecramped" in his letters:
Your limits are painfully clear from your tale of the regurgitated island. Could you imagine nothing more alien than a giant with the head of an octopus? You might at least have painted it your non-existent colour. Giants were old when the Greeks were young, and your dreams are just as stale. No doubt your acolytes—Augur Dulldeath and Clerk Ashen Sniff and Dullard Wantdie and Stank Kidnap Pong and the rest of your motley entourage—will counterfeit some admiration of the tale.
The correspondence thins out in the 30s but Nash makes up for it with ranting, raving, insults to him and members of his circle, gloating over the hostile reader mail printed in Astounding Magazine about his stories printed there like "The Shadow Out of Time", accusations of being ripped off (in one letter having a "You're so vain/You probably think this song is about you") reaction to "The Haunter of the Dark" and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (
So you are dreaming about me, or so bereft of dreams that you have to write tales about me. | am a haunter of the dark, am I, and a shell which owes its vitality to the presence of a woman?) and swearing THIS IS THE LAST TIME, he's done with this, etc.
You are redundant, Cravecraft, and a burden on your scanty audience. Do you not see that your friends feel obliged to praise you? I believe your lack of inspiration has finally overwhelmed you, since your pen appears to have dribbled its last. You are reduced to disinterring the decayed carcasses of tales which should have been left in their unmarked graves. The fiddler Zann begs for pennies once more, and the white ape joins in with a jig. Why, you have given the tale of the ape a new name in the hope of misleading the reader that its publication is unique? I doubt that even Farthingsworth’s dull audience will be deluded. No mask can disguise material which is so uninspiringly familiar, and all the perfumes in the world cannot swamp the stench of rot.
You will be interested to learn that one of the conduits through which I was dreamed into the world has ceased to function. He leaves a sizeable amount of money and his fellow channel, my mother. Both are useful in relieving me of the need to remain in prosaic employment. As well as dealing with domestic matters, my mother will act as my envoy to the mundane world.
But there's two items appended to the letters, which induce a sense of unease in our humble editor and annotator, when taken in with some of Nash's ravings about his dreams and whatever it is he thinks is probing them and his mind...
= Halloween 4
