“A time came three decades ago, when I found I must choose
between going out into the wider world or traveling widely in the microcosmos
of Sac Prairie. I had been away from Sac Prairie scarcely half a year, immured
in a city at editorial work, and I could ill bear separation from the village, the
river, the hills, and the lowlands among which I had put down roots and with
which I had come to terms of a sort … When the opportunity came, I went back
to Sac Prairie without regret … I set about to write so that I might afford
the leisure in which to improve my acquaintance with the setting and the
inhabitants–hills, trees, ponds, people, birds, animals, sun, moon, stars–of
the region I had chosen to inhabit, not as a retreat, but as a base of
operations into a life more full in the knowledge of what went on in the woods
as well as in the houses along the streets of Sac Prairie and in the human
heart.” – August Derleth, “Prologue” to Walden West
“Home is one’s ideal setting if one is to develop one’s best
attributes … A man belongs where he has roots–where the landscape & milieu
have some relation to his thoughts & feelings, by virtue of having formed
them.” – H. P. Lovecraft
(Letter to August Derleth, October 6, 1929)
WISCONSIN IN HIS BONES
By Boyd White and Lloyd Currey
For scholars, collectors, and readers, August Derleth (1909-1971) unfortunately
begins and ends with Arkham House. Derleth is primarily remembered for preserving
the literary legacy of H. P. Lovecraft, as well as Robert E. Howard and Clark
Ashton Smith, in addition to publishing first books by Ray Bradbury, Robert
Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Ramsey Campbell. A relentless self-promoter, somewhat
understandably given the non-existent profit margins of specialty press
publishing, Derleth flirted with self-parody throughout his career, particularly
after the demise of Weird Tales in
1954 when his focus became codifying and exploiting the Cthulhu Mythos as the
defining element of Lovecraft’s fiction in order to keep flagging public
interest in the author’s work–and by extension Arkham House–alive, providing
a template for an unending flood of bad Lovecraft pastiches in a variety of
media that shows no signs of abating even today.
By devoting so much energy and resources to ensuring Lovecraft’s
legacy, keeping Arkham House afloat, financially supporting an older generation
of all but forgotten pulp writers, and encouraging promising new talent, Derleth
inadvertently sabotaged his own literary career, ensuring his reputation as an
author with substantial contributions to American literature would be
overshadowed and neglected. Derleth considered his supernatural fiction
mediocre at best, derivative and formulaic work that, along with his mystery
stories and detective novels, provided him not only with the means to be a full-time
writer with the leisure to pursue his more literary ambitions but also, later
in his career, with the ability to meet his obligations as a publisher. “My
prolificacy,” he once wrote, “is a matter of economic necessity, and
I have no doubt that the quality of my work has suffered to some extent because
of its necessary quantity.”
In “The Un-Demonizing of August Derleth,” Peter Ruber notes
that Derleth is the only member of the Weird
Tales circle “who had the ability, ambition, and determination to rise
above the level of a pulp writer,” a sentiment shared by H. P.
Lovecraft. When Derleth’s story
“Five Alone,” first published in Pagany,
received a three-star mention in Edward J. O’Brien’s Honor Roll in The Best American Short Stories of 1932,
Lovecraft wrote to E. Hoffmann Price, “You will see in these things a
writer absolutely alien to the facile little hack who grinds out minor W.T. [Weird Tales] junk. There is nothing in common betwixt
Derleth A and Derleth B–no point of contact in their mental worlds–and yet
one brain houses them both … artist and businessman … Nearly all the gang agree
that the kid will go far in literature–probably farther than any of the rest.”
Lovecraft’s remarks, however, also highlight the tension that would haunt
Derleth throughout his career as his continued immersion in the cesspool of
market-driven fantastic fiction kept him from being recognized as a major
Midwestern author of the twentieth century. As Peter Ruber states, “To the
world outside his home state, Derleth was a man of many literary personas, and
they frequently clashed: the critical establishment looked down on Derleth’s
continued involvement with pulp-type writing and ignored his serious works. They
simply didn’t understand his versatility.”
Derleth always referred to his literary efforts as his “serious
work.” His greatest achievement in this vein is the Sac Prairie Saga, a deeply
personal, frank, detailed account of the rural Midwest that draws upon his lifetime
of personal experiences in and around the twin Wisconsin villages of Sauk City
and Prairie du Sac. Derleth originally conceived of this saga as a sequence of
fifty books consisting of novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, journal
extracts, and nature writing. In an interview with Norbert Blei from 1971,
Derleth remarks of his hometown, “This is the microcosm that reflects the
macrocosm. Everything is to be found here–hate, greed, lust, love, sacrifice,
courage. I saw it. It’s all here! I can find every kind of perversity, sexual
or otherwise.” From the publication of Place
of Hawks in 1935 to Return to Walden
West in 1970, the Sac Prairie Saga reflects Derleth’s adherence to the transcendentalism
of Emerson and Thoreau and the literary influences of Thomas Hardy, Sherwood
Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost. Displaying Derleth’s vast
knowledge of regional history and nature, Sac Prairie, Wisconsin, is as fully
rendered as Willa Cather’s Nebraska plains or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha
County. Novels such as Still Is the Summer Night (1937), short
story collections such as Country Growth
(1940), and volumes of poetry such as West
of Morning (1960) are infused with the rhythms of the land and the people
who live there, what is locked away in their hearts and the region itself, a
beautiful but unforgiving landscape in which the villagers of Sac Prairie struggle
with frustrated ambitions and lost ideals, a world fraught with loneliness,
insanity, alcoholism, and suicide. In a 1945 article in Esquire, Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis writes of Derleth,
“His series of the ‘Sac Prairie Saga,’ most of them novels, is already
formidable. He has not trotted off to New York literary cocktail parties or to
the Hollywood studios. He has stayed home and built up a solid work that
demands the attention of anybody who believes that American fiction is at last
growing up … He is a champion and justification of regionalism.” Likewise,
John O. Stark describes Walden West
(1961) and Return to Walden West,
Derleth’s masterpieces, “as the closest thing we have to essential
literary illuminations of life in Wisconsin … In both books Derleth alternates
descriptions of nature and vignettes about Sac Prairie people … Derleth
compares the human and natural realms, pointing out the transience of the
former, the constancy of the latter, the desperation of the former, the peace
of the latter.”
Key works from the Sac Prairie Saga include the short story collections
that Derleth considered his finest works–Country
Growth, Sac Prairie People (1948),
and Wisconsin in Their Bones–as well
as Walden West and Return to Walden West. The intimate,
poetic observations of village life in these books introduce readers to finely
drawn heartbreaking characters portrayed with sincere pathos, including Ella
Bickford, who goes insane when her parents prevent her from marrying, and
Norman Kralz, whose mother tries to poison him. Far more chilling than
Derleth’s supernatural fiction are the superb midwestern Gothics scattered throughout
the Sac Prairie Saga, particularly the studies of aberrant psychology in The House of Moonlight (1953), which
traces the mental and physical breakdown of concert pianist Joel Merrihew when
he returns to Sac Prairie after a long absence, and “Where the Worm Dieth
Not” (from Sac Prairie People)
in which young lovers Horace Burdace and Laura Kelton run afoul of Horace’s
murderous uncle Anson Nohr. Historical novels such as The House on the Mound (1958) and The Shadow on the Glass (1963) form the backdrop against which
Derleth develops the Sac Prairie Saga as they chronicle the lives of prominent
Wisconsinites from the state’s formative years, including Hercules Dousman, a
fur trader and real estate speculator who became a millionaire, and Nelson
Dewey, Wisconsin’s first governor who oversaw the transition from territorial
to state government. Collections of poetry, including Here on a Darkling Plain (1940), Rind of Earth (1942), and The
Edge of Night (1945), feature some of Derleth’s most carefully crafted,
moving writing, such as his epitaph for Effie Kahlmann, who “left behind
in needlework most exquisitely made, her tears, her loneliness, the hidden
places of her heart.”
Derleth’s deep connection to his native Wisconsin extends to the author’s
strongest non-supernatural genre fiction as well. Sac Prairie serves as the
setting not only for Derleth’s Judge Peck detective novels, such as Murder Stalks the Wakely Family (1934) and
The Seven Who Waited (1943), but also
for the majority of his books for juveniles, including the Steve-Sim mysteries with
the Mill Creek Irregulars. Set in the 1920s, this series follows Stephen
“Steve” Grendon and Simoleon “Sim” Jones as they foil a
variety of criminal plots during their summer adventures in the Wisconsin River
Valley. As Steve’s description of the scene of one of his and Sim’s nighttime
rambles illustrates, these young adult mysteries exhibit the same keen
attention to the natural word–the light, weather, and water–as Derleth’s
poetry and fiction for adults: “All along the south now, between us and
the river, where the marshes were and the lowland meadows, a thin bank of fog
was rising. With moonlight on it, it looked like a distant lake. And with the
fireflies flickering on it by the thousands, it looked as if a sunken city lay
far beneath the surface of that mysterious lake out of which came the far sound
of cow bells from cattle in the night pasture.” Not surprisingly, Steve
Grendon is August Derleth’s fictional alter ego, and his recurrence throughout
much of Derleth’s fiction–as an adolescent boy detective in The Moon Tenders (1958), a high school
student in love in Evening In Spring
(1941) and a budding writer in The Shield
of the Valiant (1945)–shapes Derleth’s work, as does the setting of Sac
Prairie, into a living, breathing world subject to the same forces, both good
and bad, we all encounter as we age and grow.
In his foreword to 1962’s 100 Books by August Derleth, Donald Wandrei perhaps best sums ups Derleth’s career, which still had nearly a decade to go, when he writes, “This variety of interest makes it impossible to identify the work of August Derleth by any label or to classify him easily–he is sui generis … But only the distant verdict of time can determine which of his works will have the most enduring value.” As George Feinstein was praising Return to Walden West in The Los Angeles Times by proclaiming, “One needs to be reminded that America has never been all big city. The village plays its role–and in August Derleth–has found a Homer,” Derleth’s reputation, even as regionalist, was already waning. When he died a year later in 1971, he had received very little of the recognition as a writer that he so desperately craved and deserved. These days, when every cramped note or itemized budget Lovecraft managed to scribble on the back of an envelope is endlessly analyzed and scrupulously annotated, Derleth’s considerable oeuvre, flawed as it is, lies fallow with no major critical overview or appraisal in sight. Upon publication of Hawk on the Wind (1938), Derleth’s first book of poetry, Edgar Lee Masters wrote, “The music and imagination of these poems, the originality of the verse schemes in this day when so many experiments have been made and so many have failed–these cannot be forgotten.” The same could easily be said of the best of Derleth’s work. Let us hope this is the case.
PLEASE VISIT LWCURREY.COM to see the selection of works by August Derleth:
https://www.lwcurrey.com/searchResults.php?category_id=20292&action=catalog&browseLetter=A&orderBy=author
