On many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars
Lin(wood) (Vrooman) Carter was a poet & a scholar: but the spirit of the times made his life a hideous thing.
Allow one (or, to be honest, allow me to allow Jessica Amanda Salmonson) to illustrate:
http://www.violetbooks.com/lin-carter.html
The last section, "A Closing Remembrance", being of particular importance to those wondering who, exactly, this Lin Carter fellow would be? (though one is not quite sure why it was of such particular importance that his violent girlfriend was black - A Haggard "African Queen" hommage, or just monkey business?). One has not read a single Carter tale that was not amusingly rococo kitch, but both his fiction & criticism show a sound literary taste - all the more surprising considering the soul - stifling sterility of post WWII America, & that he was mentored by L (yon) Sprauge de Camp, who probably spent long weary hours marvelling why Carter wrote about Tragelaphos & Ant - Lion, instead of the Glory of Efficient Machinery. This becomes obvious especially in Carters Lovecraftian pastiches; though as ill - advised as any other of their ilk (characteristically, Mr. Lovecrafts characters are religiously and/or aesthetically motivated: Carters go to their Doom for cold cash), at least one of them ("The Dweller in the Tomb") actually manages to capture an relatively arcane facet of the True Mythos - buildings as Gothic Horrors (a feat, oddly enough, the engineering - fixated de Camp could not ever hope to dream, sorry, be positive to "mentally construct" to achieve). And while many of his comments on other writers are predictably naive - James Branch Cabell is described as satirizing religion, but Carter seems blissfully oblivious to how ambivalent that satire is: Mr. Lovecraft is criticized for "telling, not showing", an approach perhaps better suited to school essays & journalistic prose than Lovecraftian neo - classical figurative language (not that he was always beyond criticism in applying such a style, especially in his early works, as pointed out by Mr. Kenneth Hite in his
http://princeofcairo.livejournal.com/97564.html
- Carter still was able to dimly intuit their value. Indeed, he came close to that rare thing, a serious analysis of Professor Tolkiens working methods, and had even started to apply them to his unfinished lifes work Khymyrium: The City of the Hundred Kings, from the Coming of Aviathar the Lion to the Passing of Spheridion the Doomed. Alas, in a self - proclaimed rational age like the twentieth century it was unwise for a man of learning to talk about wild sights and strange scenes, because the only way to do so was to directly alter ones brain chemistry through drugs: and thereby a hideous series of tragedies suddenly burst into being, & yet another opportunity for fantasy to redeem its intellectual fame was forever lost.
Carter also, as it happened, shewed the youthful writer of this essay daemoniacal hints of truth of writers that never should be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. But Carter helped loose them - Mr. Lovecraft, Mr. Cabell, Professor Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, Sir Haggard: fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism.