One complaint: "Hindoo" is misspelled.
<http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/cheaptru.3>
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$ INTERVIEW WITH THE MARTYR 0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$
We got hold of H. P. Lovecraft. Never mind how. There are things in the Cross Plains Dairy Queen that are best left unspoken. At any rate we had the gentleman in the CHEAP TRUTH offices in late March, 1983 -- some 46 years after his death. Lovecraft was dressed in a cruddy-looking black wrinkled suit with a skinny tie and celluloid collar. His nose was sunburned. He looked rather pasty and gaunt -- we had called him up from about 1935, when his diet of graham crackers and canned spaghetti was definitely beginning to kill him.
CT: Mr. Lovecraft -- may we call you Eich-Pi-El? -- this is a great pleasure. Please, just toss the cat out of the chair, there, and have a seat.
HPL: I wouldn't dream of disturbing puss. He's a fine, swart beast, isn't he? (Spectrally) The cat is cousin to the Sphynx, but remembers secrets she has long forgotten.
CT: Far out. Can I get you anything? A beer, maybe? HPL: Liquor has never passed my lips. CT: Some coffee? HPL: That would be splendid. With five sugars, please. (sips) Very good. This costs five cents a cup, you know. Quite a sum when you're living on seventeen cents a day. I made quite a science out of poverty, in my last days. But I was never a -- businessman. You can't make a businessman out of a corpse.
CT: Please, have all you like. The Cheap Truth publishing empire covers the globe. That's one of the reasons we called you up, Eich-Pi-El. You are, after all, the paragon -- the very archetype of the starving science fiction writer. Were you aware that your premature death would set the model for an entire lifestyle?
HPL: Actually, no. I died with the firm conviction that my work would be completely eclipsed, swept out with the rest of the illiterate pulp trash. I knew what was good, you see. I read Proust, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser. I knew what was good, and what was cheap garbage.
CT: And yet you died in pursuit of your art.
HPL: (shrugs) At that point it really didn't matter much. I had reached the culmination of my philosophy -- what I called psychological self-annihilation. I saw things from a cosmic perspective. The tragedy of one atom -- even if it was myself -- was simply irrelevant.
CT: Destroy desire and you destroy unhappiness, is that it?
HPL: Exactly.
CT: But that's Buddhism. Classic Buddhist enlightenment, in fact. All that ascetic discipline of yours --
HPL: (bristles) What? The spineless fatalism of the Hindu? I'm the scion of blue-eyed Nordic conquerors.
CT: (uncomfortably) OK, that's cool. Is it true that you and Clark Ashton Smith used to call Hugo Gernsback "Hugo the Rat"?
HPL: Yes. But we never hated him as much as we despised that crawling horror, Farnsworth Wright. He starved us, cheated us. He rejected my best work. He made his magazine into a pigsty for cheap scribblers. My stories appeared cheek by jowl with truss ads. Was it any wonder that I began to write letters instead? (Begins to talk faster and faster) At first dozens, then hundreds, and at last a steady stream of them -- that instead of publishing I wrote everything in longhand? Each time, for an audience of one. A writer MUST speak, even if he has to pay for the privilege in postage and starvation.
CT: I understand perfectly, Mr. Lovecraft. May I say that I've always admired you? I suppose that your fiction WAS mostly garbage, but you are more than that -- you're an avatar, a symbol. I wonder how many young writers have found courage in your example. "After all, what's the worst thing that can happen to me if I write SF? At worst, I'll simply die a slow, miserable death by inches like H. P. Lovecraft." You never compromised -- you stayed shabby-genteel to the end, and died without ever doing one single practical thing. Your rejection of the world was total. It was the act of a saint.
HPL: Are you Jewish?
CT: (startled) No. Thanks for coming, Mr. Lovecraft.
HPL: You have a funny swarthy look about you. I can tell you're a dago of some kind. "Omniaveritas" -- what kind of name is that? Not Anglo-Saxon. Let me see the shape of your head -- (He suddenly fades away. He is, after all, dead.)
-- Andy