Odhanan
Adventurer
No. It actually was a mutual feeling. Lovecraft admired the writings of Leiber he found provocative and insightful if still a bit raw, and Leiber was a huge admirer of Lovecraft obviously. There was a remarkable correspondance between Leiber and Lovecraft, during the later part of his life, of course.
From this letter from March 1937 found at his desk after he was taken to the hospital (where he would die) you can read HPL writing: Young Fritz (twenty-five, a University of Chicago graduate, and entering his father's profession) has one of the keenest minds I have ever encountered, and in the interval since last November has become one of the star correspondents on my desperately crowded list. His understanding of the profound emotions behind the groping for cosmic concepts surpasses that of almost anyone else with whom I've discussed the matter ; and his own tales and poems, while not without marks of the beginner, shew infinite insight and promise. Papa's genius certainly reached the second generation in this case — for whether or not Fritz Jun. equals his sire on the boards, he'll certainly get somewhere in literature if he keeps on at his present rate.
(...)
There will shortly be circulated among the gang (you can be on the list if you like) a remarkable unpublished novelette by young Leiber — Adept's Gambit, rejected by Wright and now under revision according to my suggestions. It is a very brilliant piece of fantastic imagination — with suggestions of Cabell, Beckford, Dunsany, and even Two-Gun Bob — and ought to see publication some day. Being wholly out of the cheap tradesman tradition, it has small chance of early magazine placement — hence the idea of circulation amongst the members of the circle. This novelette is part of a very unusual myth-cycle spontaneously evolved in the correspondence of young Leiber and his closest friend — Harry 0. Fischer of lately-inundated Louisville. Fischer has also come within my congested epistolary circle, and is in some ways even more remarkable than Leiber — he has more imaginative fertility, though less concentrated emotional power and philosophic insight. Their myth-cycle, originally started by Fischer, involves my own pantheon of Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, etc., and revolves round the adventures of two roving characters (Fafhrd the Viking, modelled after Leiber — who is six feet four — and the Gray Mouser, modelled after the diminutive Fischer) in a vague congeries of fabulous and half-fabulous worlds of the remote past. Fischer's parts of this cycle are vivid but unformulated and disjointed, so that at present Leiber — the better cratfsman — is the only publicly visible author of the pair. Adept's Gambit is laid in the Syria of the earlier Hellenistic period, but soon moves away from Tyre and Ephesus to a fabulous mountain realm of inland Asia. Fischer's wife is an accomplished artist, and has made several very effective pastel drawings of some of the inconceivable Entities in the Fafhrd-Mouser cycle.
This, by my book, is actually extremely recent on a literary scale.
