Dr. Gerard wrote:I think, to be fair, that ASG's main point in bringing up de Camp was actually to say that Derleth gets flack for being a bad foster parent for Lovecraft's work, but at least he didn't butcher the fiction like de Camp did to REH. I thought he was pretty harsh on de Camp, deservedly. I hadn't known that Novalyne Price Ellis's memoir was a response to de Camp's self-flattering bio of REH. Hilarious.
Yes, you're right. That was his main point. But I thought it worth correcting what was a casual aside, because it's those things that prolong misconceptions.
Derleth does get attacked, and there's a case in both directions. Derleth did devote a lot of time to promoting Lovecraft and pushing book deals that would keep Lovecraft in print. On the downside he did try to pass off some of his own Mythos writing as "by H. P. Lovecraft", with the result that some careless critics were put off Lovecraft by Derleth stories. He did claim some form of copyright over the Mythos and blocked fan fiction which was not helpful. On the other hand, he did develop new young writers he liked, such as Ramsey Campbell and Garry Myers. And, as said, he didn't tamper seriously with Lovecraft's texts (just made transcription errors due to Lovecraft's famously bad handwriting).
De Camp seems to be in the same position, until you get passed his version of events and then you find that his actions are much more self-serving than Derleth's (who was also looking after number one). De Camp is heavily editing and inserting his own material to claim copyright over the whole Conan property. His version of Howard as a paranoid, oedipal, schizophrenic, man-child is at best unsympathetic (to be fair, he's building on comments made by E. Hoffmann Price, who spent a couple of days with Howard). Harold Preece, a Texan friend of Howard's, who knew him for some years, objected to de Camp's depiction and believed that de Camp disliked Texas as a place and its people. I don't know on what he based that opinion, but it's an interesting one in light of de Camp's Howard biography. Perhaps de Camp's biggest "crime" was stopping Baen Books for issuing a Conan volume in their series of Howard paperbacks in the 1990s. When the supposed "champion" of a writer is actively keeping his works out of print something has gone very wrong! The irony, which I think de Camp was aware of, is that Howard's name will survive much longer than de Camp's, for all his efforts to hijack it!
I think Derleth can be praised as a publisher and editor. L. Sprague de Camp, however, must stand on the reputation of his own fiction -- his adventures with Howard's legacy are rarely commendable.
Anyway, this is straying away from Cthulhu role playing. So let me say that I'm actually in agreement with ASG over Derleth. While he's not a good writer he had as much right to contribute to the growth of the Mythos as any of the other friends of Lovecraft, and even his silliest contribution can be reworked into something more interesting. Where would CoC be without Elder Signs? Also, people should remember that the Mythos is not one consistent mythology, but a series of interconnected, and often conflicting, myths. So a Christian monk like Clithanus might cast the Mythos as a conflict between good Elder Gods and bad Old Ones and write that in his book, but it doesn't mean it's true. Evidence suggests that the Elder Gods are not nice, while Dr Shrewsbury uses Hastur, an Old One, in his fight against Cthulhu, anther Old One. Again, the idea that the Old Ones correspond to the Elements (Fire, Earth, Water, Air) is a human concept imposed on alien gods. Clearly it doesn't work, but that doesn't mean it needs "throwing out", just understanding as the patina of a mythology.