A Readers' Guide to The Hastur Cycle

Chaosium's The Hastur Cycle is a classic in the field of Robert W. Chambers-inspired media.  When it was published in 1993, it was the only such anthology, and made classics like James Blish's More Light and Karl E. Wagner's The River of Night's Dreaming widely available, where they were otherwise only in out-of-print paperbacks in a pre-Abebooks world in which those paperbacks might be cheap, but you had to physically hunt for them.  

Back then, The Hastur Cycle was a lifeline for us Chambers nerds who wanted to expand out to the legacy he'd inspired.  

Today, however, it's hard to recommend. 

It is out of print, and commands challenging prices on the used market.  And for its price, it contains quite a bit of public domain material, material that is otherwise available online and in less expensive books, and material only very tenuously related to Chambers' work.  Several items are included just for being connected to H. P. Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness, which itself has barely anything at all to do with Chambers.  In this post, I'd like to provide a readers' guide to alternative sources for the stories and poems in The Hastur Cycle.  

• Robert M. Price's introduction is, as far as I'm aware, unique to the book.  It does include as a header Richard L. Tierney's poem Carcosa, which first appeared in the Summer 1969 edition of The Arkham Collector, available in PDF here (page 150 - PDF page 14).  
• Ambrose Bierce's Haïta the Shepherd and An Inhabitant of Carcosa are both from his collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, which is in the public domain. The collection is a classic of American literature, and is worth having in your library in any case.
  
• Chambers' The Repairer of Reputations and The Yellow Sign are of course from The King in Yellow, which is also in the public domain.  
• Karl E. Wagner's The River of Night's Dreaming was collected in the excellent In a Lonely Place, which was a sought-after collectible paperback for some time, but is now in print in an edition by Valancourt Books.  I strongly recommend it even absent the Chambers connection; Wagner's horror work is outstanding and underappreciated.  
• More Light by James Blish was originally printed in the anthology Alchemy and Academe edited by Anne McCaffrey.  It is long out of print, but went into so many editions that it's available affordably on the used market. 
• Arthur Machen's The Novel of the Black Seal is a tenuous inclusion.  I'm not entirely certain why it was included, but the introduction suggests it may be because it's an early "lost race" story which makes it influential on The Whisperer in Darkness.  It's possible I'm missing something.  But in any case, it's a good read in its own right.  It originated in Machen's The Three Impostors, which is in the public domain.  
• The Whisperer in Darkness is the story people are thinking of when they say Lovecraft incorporated Chambers' mythos into his fiction.  This is somewhat overstating the case.  Whisperer namedrops concepts from Chambers in Lovecraft's characteristic "parade of Yog-Sothothery" strings, but does not develop or build on them.  If you want just the Chambers material, here it is:  "I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum..."  If you want the full story (and again, it's a very good one on its own merits), it too is in the public domain.  
• Richard A. Lupoff's Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley is related only in the sense that it is a sequel to The Whisperer in Darkness.  It has, as far as I can tell, no references to Chambers.  It is currently in print in Lupoff's collection The Doom That Came to Dunwich: Weird mysteries of the Cthulhu Mythos. 
• Ramsey Campbell's The Mine on Yuggoth is, again, only included because it references the events of The Whisperer in Darkness.  It has no Chambers connection.  Still, it's Ramsey Campbell and is worth a read for its own sake.  It is available in his classic collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants.
•  James Wade's Planetfall on Yuggoth is, once again, included only for the Whisperer connection.  It's a very short (two and one-third pages in my copy) story of a future human astronaut making the first landing on Pluto.  It was reprinted in the late E. P. Berglund's magazine Nightscape, and like so many pieces he published, he was kind enough to mirror it on his website.
•  August Derleth's original "Hastur as kaiju god" story, The Return of Hastur is the ultimate reason so much King in Yellow fanart has tentacles.  It was originally published in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales, and like all Weird Tales it is available on Archive.org.
•  Joseph Payne Brennan's The Feaster from Afar is in a sense yet another take on Whisperer, but this one does at least include an entity called "Hastur."  It has no significant connection beyond that to the works of Robert W. Chambers, except that a character takes a wander in the woods with a fowling piece.  If you're really dedicated to completeness you can get it in the anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu, but that costs around thirty bucks used at time of writing, and you'd be pushing "just buy The Hastur Cycle" territory at that point.  
• The final "story" in the book is called "Tatters of the King" by Lin Carter.  This is in fact an assemblage of Carter's Carcosa work collected from different places.  It begins with a cycle of four sonnets collectively called the "Litany to Hastur."  They may originate a family of "dark pulp fantasy" Carcosa stories and poems that are inspired by Derleth but take it in a different direction, as later developed by writers like Michael Summerleigh and Thomas M. Egan.  These are entirely out of print as far as I know.  At this precise moment, the least expensive source I see is Carter's collection Dreams from R'lyeh, which is another thirty-something dollar book.  The remaining parts of this section are Carter's notes for an unfinished "Carcosa Story About Hali," and The King in Yellow: a Tragedy in Verse, a stab at a text of the fictional play.  Neither is, as far as I can tell, readily available outside this anthology.  

So there you are.  The Hastur Cycle was extremely influential and important in its time, and if it were still in print it would be an automatic recommendation from me.  But today it's a hard sell for the prices it commands, particularly if you want it specifically for a Chambers-inspired library.  If you're looking into that field and want to spend your money wisely, it may be worthwhile to source the Chambers-inspired work elsewhere and put your budget into other anthologies. 

Robert W. Chambers fanart: 1947 edition

 In the late 1940s, Neil Austin did a series of these one-page "Masters of Fantasy" profiles for several great weird fiction writers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith to Arthur Machen--  ...to our friend Robert W. Chambers.  

I love this style of genuine, enthusiastic illustration in 20th century genre pulps.  I believe we have in this one The Demoiselle d'Ys, the Maker of Moons, and the King in Yellow.  I'm not certain who the monk in the upper right is, and the lower left most likely depicts the titular demoiselle's chateau.  

Archive.org has a surprisingly high resolution scan of the whole issue.

Back to the Back to the Future of the Past

Here's an interesting one.  

Today we look back at the "flash forward" to 1920 at the beginning of The Repairer of Reputations as partly a curiosity of retro-futurism and mostly an expression of the narrator's unreliability, but how was it received in its own time?  

I couldn't tell you about 1895, but here's a perspective from just over a year before 1920, and just weeks after the end of the Great War.  

This is a column from the November 30, 1918 issue of The New Republic, in which "F.H." (whom I assume is editor Francis Hackett) reviews Chambers' "prophecy" and New York's progress toward it.  It's at least as notable for what it leaves out as for what it covers:  this is a Progressive perspective protesting a lack of progress, so you get a recap of the beautiful riverside parks, but not of the cleansing of Jews and black people.  Hackett, an Irish immigrant, does not mention "the checking of immigration [and] the new laws concerning naturalization," because he wants to tell a story of the City not living up to a utopian prediction.  There is a reference to lethal chambers, but only figuratively and not in quotation, presumably a wink to the reader already familiar with the original.  

Though of course, it's possible that last one might not even have been seen as darkly as we do:  in 1918 Progressive intellectuals had not yet reformed their positions on eugenics, and indeed the reference at the end of the column to "the lessons of medical inspection [...being] applied to human welfare" may be just such a suggestion, though I'd charitably assume a New Republic writer would more likely approve of "mere" sterilization than of euthanasia.  Chambers would likely have had something picturesque to say, if he were reading The New Republic.  

In any case, this is not F.H.'s point:  he is concerned here primarily with economic matters, which he contrasts with a Chambers prediction which he asserts sees progress "aesthetically, but only aesthetically."  "The reorganizations of society," Hackett says, "did not interest him."  I don't think that's entirely accurate:  Chambers speaks for example of "the colossal Congress of Religions," after which "bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together."  But certainly any moral reformation of society in this "prediction" (such as it is a prediction) is far removed from the Progressives' vision of fundamental economic and class transformation.  

In any case, here it is.  An immigrant in New York City evaluating the approaching year of 1920 in light of (a very carefully chosen subset of) the "predictions" in The Repairer of Reputations: 

WHAT will New York be like in 1945? It is a brave man who'll risk a prophecy but no braver than Mr. Robert W. Chambers was in 1895 when he dared to foretell the New York of 1920. Now that 1920 is just round the corner it is amusing to pick up The King in Yellow and read the cool forecast which opens the first story, The Repairer of Reputations. Strange to say, the words that leap out of the first paragraph are "the war with Germany," a war which he imagines just completed, and the dominant note all through the story is the note of militarism and military service. Shooting at an object he could not see, across a wild space of years, Mr. Chambers scored such hits as this: "the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the throes of Anarchy." But these are only the broad circumstances of his story. He goes into fine particulars about the 1920 New York.  

It is natural that a former art-student like Mr. Chambers should have seen the future New York as a beautiful New York; he spoke first of all of architectural changes. "Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a godsend to the population."  

The subways have indeed come, and stone quays. But the stone quays, all that there are, are rented by the city to the highest bidders, and the elevated roads still scar great thoroughfares. The real source of New York's downtown congestion, the skyscraper, has never been severely regulated. It acts as a ferocious suction-pump to draw up and spew back hundreds of thousands of downtown workers a day, and until this dilation of New York's heart can be reduced the city will remain a monstrosity in transportation. "Squares laid out"! Manhattan Island is a tight, over-crowded flat, with each piece of furniture fighting every other piece of furniture for the last inch of space. Nothing but legislative dynamite can clear it out--or taxation on the top-layers of Manhattan that will make congestion a fool's game. The city of Mr. Chambers's dream is not much nearer in 1920 than in 1895. And New York's worst enemies are still its best citizens.

"The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of the Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio." So the prophecy continues.

These are rather thin ideas, borrowed from contemporary England and France, but they indicate Mr. Chambers's desire for fine arts institutionalized. What has happened? The moving pictures, chewing-gum of the arts, have become the great popular institution, quite unforeseen by Mr. Chambers. The thickening of apartment-house walls has not kept pace with the spread of mechanical music. Fine arts have no representative in the cabinet, save in the beadledom of Mr. Burleson. And the National Academy of Design is, indeed, like European institutions of the same kind. The things we still need an incubator for young artists, a lethal chamber for old ones, a better means of introducing painters to patrons and students to teachers--these remain to be organized. Perhaps 1945 will see them here.

What will New York be like in 1945? It is impossible to imagine a better New York, a radically better New York, without a change first of all in the avenues of human opportunity. How can you rectify a city that has at its base a foolish wage system, and how foolish is a wage system that looks on the wage-earner as a person without a past or a future, and pretends to protect him in all his inevitable incapacitations--his childhood, his unemployment, his sickness, his old age, his birth and death and marriage--by the puerile counselling of "thrift." So long as there is nothing but "thrift" between millions of New Yorkers and the breakdown of their civilization, you will be bound to have a population that nothing can lift up--not all the penitentiaries and orphan asylums and dispensaries and anti-poverty leagues and money-lenders and public libraries and drinking troughs and fresh air funds and anti-cruelty societies and charity organizations and beggars' licenses and human dog-pounds and free burial and bread-lines in the world. It doesn't much matter, even, whether or not you have "public squares well laid out." Unless the wage system is also well laid out, you'll have little but human driftwood cast up on the park benches, to reproach a clear-
eyed sky.

But of course a right wage system is only the foundation. Think of the visible results in the New York of the next generation if profit did not decide the site of factories. Imagine the shores of the Hudson without its stinking glucose factories on one side and its baleful railroads on the other. Imagine the Hudson River turned to those great uses of recreation and beauty which it so obviously invites, instead of trammelled and polluted by the profiteer. And suppose that the persons who were to find part of their recreation by the shores of the Hudson were persons who had really been permitted to have an education, instead of running the gauntlet of slum mortality and child labor and disease and destitution and misdirected instinct. These are only a few of the rectifications that would have to precede that ennobled city which Mr. Chambers attempted to envisage in the despondency of 1895. He saw it aesthetically, but only aesthetically. The reorganizations of society did not interest him. The better New York, as he saw it, was really the smartened New York as it might have appealed to a man writing to Mr. Dana's New York Sun.  

If the wage-earner gets his title to civilization guaranteed, then 1945 may smile on New Yorkers. It will not simply be a new city because the roofs will be flat to receive airplanes, and the flushing of the streets will be arranged in the same clever way that central heating is to be arranged, and snow-melting and dust-cleansing. There will be newness in the emulative power of the great guilds of workmen that control hours and labor conditions and wages and patents and safety appliances, that thrust aside all the silly limitations of profit and profiteers and have the same respect for tangible values in time of peace that a frightened state has in time of war. It will be the grotesqueries of advertising, however, that will be flung out of newspapers when the guilds are in control, not the genuine free discussion of vital issues. And the lessons of medical inspection and chemical laboratories and scientific cooperation will be applied to human welfare rather than destruction, in this remote era when New York will be a great city of free men and women.  

Putting it down for 1945 is rather too sanguine. One had better say, the year One of Democracy.

Robert W. Chambers' secret Manhattan studio

Chambers is best known as a resident of Broadalbin, NY, but spent his winters in New York City.  In that less private environment, he found it useful to maintain a separate space for writing, away from the distractions of New York society life. 

Broadalbin historian Lewis Cornell is sadly no longer with us.  But in the 2000s his successor, Jay Nellis, passed on his recollections to Chambers researcher Larry Loc, who posted the relevant correspondence on his website:

Mr. Chambers kept as a secret the location of his New York City office.  [His chauffeur, Leon] Crannel left him at a club each morning, from where he walked to his office. He was then picked up at the club following the day’s work.

This echoes Stanley J. Kunitz's 1934 biographical reference book Authors Today and Yesterday, which says:  

During the winter months Chambers lives in New York City and has an office, the location of which not even his family knows. Here he writes daily from ten to six, secure from distraction. He says his stories have the most erratic way of developing. "Sometimes I begin with the last chapter, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes I lay out an elaborate skeleton. The despair of my publisher is this uncertainty of working method. I have sometimes written thirty thousand words, waited two weeks to decide what should happen next, and torn up the whole thirty thousand to get rid of the dilemma. It was much easier for me to do that than to doctor the manuscript."  

This has for quite some time been spoken of as a lost location, kept so secret that future researchers were unable to find it.  I don't know how much serious effort has been made and how much of this talk is truth or myth, but I do believe I may have found it.  

Late-1920s editions of The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association include membership rolls, complete with addresses.  Several list Mr. Chambers thus: 

 

 Chambers, Robert W. - 43 East 83rd St., New York.  

At first I'd thought this was the family home, not a secret studio.  Chambers' wife Elsie was active in the NYC art and antique community (contemporary sources note her making donations of paintings and furniture to institutions), so it seemed unlikely Chambers would use a private address in a context that would be published.  But of course, the sources and oral history may have overstated the absolute secrecy for effect, and the world was so much less searchable back then.  

This weekend I got ahold of Chambers' 1934 New York Times obituary (which is paywalled and not available through my library's Newspapers.com subscription, so I hadn't read it before) and it very briefly mentions the location as well:

In his studio off Fifth Avenue, Mr. Chambers painted while the light was good, then wrote stories in the evenings. 

The building at 43 E 83rd no longer exists, but the lot is a block from Fifth Avenue, right down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in fact. That's not proof-positive, but it's pretty persuasive, and an attractive location for such a devotee of art and beauty as Chambers. 

"A Writer of Romance" by Duffield Osborne: an early positive review of Chambers' weird fiction

  

In addition to my bibliography of Chambers-inspired work, I'm always collecting cited details about his life, appearances of his work in periodicals (almost all, but not quite all of which were reprinted in books), and writing about Chambers, trying to build the fullest picture I can of the man and his work. 

Today I found a real prize.

People frequently ask about the reception of The King in Yellow in its own time, and the answer is always unsatisfying: literary critics dismissed Chambers in general, and references to his weird work are usually in passing, even his fans generally preferring his historical fiction. 

 But check this out: an 1898 review from The Overland Monthly covering Chambers' early weird books The King in Yellow and The Mystery of Choice, and an overwhelmingly positive one. 

 Note that in this article, when the writer speaks of "romance," etc. he is referring to the Romantic movement in literature, which by Chambers' time had been mostly displaced by Realism and made him read as dated to fashionable critics. He doesn't necessarily mean "love stories" in particular. 

 

A Writer of Romance

by Duffield Osborne

IN VIEW of the recent and almost simultaneous publications of "Lorraine" and "The Mystery of Choice," the moment seems auspicious for a short resumé of Robert W. Chambers' work. To say that, all things considered, Mr. Chambers stands foremost among the American writers of fiction who are alive today, may occasion a stir of surprise among a certain great public that knows little of his claims, may call up a sentiment of languid indignation among some half dozen authors who have gotten into the habit of patting each other on the back and assuming it as axiomatic that the best name lies somewhere within their little circle. Mr. Chambers may be fairly termed an out sider. He did not begin by writing down to the standard of magazine commonplace nor up (?) to the flattery of society complaisance. He was not unobjectionable from the standpoint of the young female person of North Shelby Center, nor did he fire the heart of the matinee girl with impossible pictures of her truly godlike though four-hundredesque hero. He just wrote what was in him to write; and the name and locale of his first publisher would have sufficed to cause the literary pharisees to lift up their hands and make the usual pharisaical comments, had not the aforesaid pharisees felt it quite impossible for them to notice a book bearing such an imprint.

Fortunately, however, we have in this country a small but ever widening class of readers who can recognize and enjoy what is really good; and "The King in Yellow" won at least a name for its author, where a name was best worth having. I maintain now, as I have maintained from the first, that there are no better short stories in the language than "The Demoiselle D'ys," "The Court of the Dragon," "The Street of the Four Winds," and "Rue Barrée": nothing more weirdly imaginative, nothing finer in sentiment, nothing more finished in execution, and nothing more absorbing in interest. At times it has seemed to me as if Poe had come to life; but Poe with an added lightness of touch and shading, Poe with a newly developed sense of humor.

Previously to "The King in Yellow," another book had been put out by the same publisher: a novel which, though showing unmistakable promise, had failed somewhat of fulfillment. Later appeared from a New York house a second collection of stories, called "The Maker of Moons," wherein was the same remarkable combination of weirdness, naturalness, and humor. Several of the tales, including the title story, "The Silent Land" and perhaps "A Pleasant Evening," were fully up to the high standard of the earlier works. Then came two novels and they came like a fulfilled vaunt of triumphant versatility. In "A King and a Few Dukes," Mr. Chambers sauntered over into Anthony Hope's home grounds and beat him handily at his own game; while in "The Red Republic" he wrote an historical romance of Paris under the Commune which is warranted to hold the interest of any living reader, not to mention a few who have not been too long deceased. I do not speak of Mr. Chambers' book of poems: "With the Band" because they hardly seem to be truly Mr. Chambers'. What he himself may do in poetry is better foreshadowed by some stray dedication or introduction or scraps here and there under the titles of his tales.

And now to open the new books. "The Mystery of Choice," contains several stories that show their author at his best, such as "Pompe Funebre," "The Messenger," and "Passeur;" while, if in two or three instances both here and in the "Maker of Moons," he has revealed a trace of the blighting magazine impulse, it cannot be said that he has ever forgotten to be interesting, and it is perhaps his misfortune that the author of "The Demoiselle D'ys" and "Rue Barrée" has condemned himself to be judged by a higher standard than most of us. As for "Lorraine," it is another historical romance - a tale of the Franco-Prussian war, and unquestionably the best of Mr.Chambers' longer works - best in style, proportion, truth, and sustained interest.

And now a general word by way of conclusion. I have not ventured to use the term "great" in this paper. It is one that is used much too freely now-adays. Nor do I feel that an individual critic is justified in applying it unless supported by a very general critical sentiment. Besides, I am a confessed adherent of the romantic cult and might fairly be said to have some measure of bias. [I] do not mean by this, that there are not realistic novels that have aroused my strongest enthusiasm and interest - but these novels are not by the professed, and if I may say so, professional realists. The latter parties may be pretty safely counted upon either to evolve some pitiful libel on humanity or to invite you to meet a lot of people who would bore you to death in the flesh and whom I find equally competent when translated into type. I do not affect such hosts whether they be social or literary. It is he who writes well what is known as romance, that tells me of things which, while they may not happen very generally, certainly ought to - if only to enliven life; who takes his guests away on short vacations-away from the sordid details of office and shop, away from the monotonous routine of domesticity and society, and who presents them to people they have perhaps never known - people very pleasant to meet-people whom, for the moment at least, you feel convinced you might have met had you only turned that last corner in the other direction. Is not this the highest art? To me the best realist is only a painter of portraits and landscapes; a man endowed with observation, judgment, taste, and skill. The best romanticist must be all of these but he must also be a creator of great compositions, a thinker of great thoughts. It is to Robert W. Chambers, the romanticist that I pay my respects.

 

Why does nobody ever talk about the 1983 HBO adaptation of The King in Yellow?

 

 

I kid, but it's an interesting weird-adjacent bit of trivia.  

I first became aware of it while reading Kenneth Hite's excellent Appendix II:  The King in Yellow - The Encores in Arc Dream's excellent annotated King in Yellow.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in Robert W. Chambers:  it has the best scholarship on the subject ever printed, as far as I've seen.  

In his discussion of works inspired by TKiY, Hite says:  
 

Raymond Chandler references the book (or perhaps the Play?) in his own crime story “The King in Yellow” (1938), in which detective Steve Grayce sees trumpeter “King” Leopardi dead in yellow pajamas and muses, “The King in Yellow. I read a book with that title once.  

It's just a namedrop, but back then as a fan of weird fiction you took what you could get.  I have a pet theory that the 1938 D. Appleton-Century Company edition of TKiY jogged some memories and got some creative juices flowing, because before that there was very little Chambers-inspired weird fiction. and then all of a sudden we have Chandler's story, Starrett's Cordelia's Song in 1938 as well, and Derleth's The Return of Hastur in 1939.  

In any case, Chandler's story first appeared in the March 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.  The text of this version is available on the Wayback machine.

In 1945, the story was collected in the book Five Sinister Characters, reworked into a Philip Marlowe story (sorry, Grayce).  

Two years later, a radio adaptation was broadcast as the July 8, 1947 episode of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe radio show. Once again, archive.org comes to the rescue, and you can listen to it here. 

Finally, coming around to my cheeky title, the story was adapted for television as the April 23, 1983 episode of Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. 

This is how things were for Chambers fans before True Detective made The King in Yellow a household name, and before even the "modern era" of Carcosa stories kicked off in the 1980s in weird fiction circles.  It may be the only time TKiY was referenced at all in mainstream popular media in the entire 20th century. 

Robert M. Price on the pronunciation of "Cthulhu"

You say ca-TOO-loo; I say ca-THOO-loo-- ...let's call the whole thing off.

Back in the 90s, when Lovecraft was so niche that trying to talk about this tentacle-headed thing required you to start by explaining what the pulps were, my friend group of high school nerds was insular. They'd discovered Lovecraft by way of Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, and later I found the tabletop roleplaying game while bored during a game of Gurps at a local game store, so we were able to seek out his stories in the back corner of Waldenbooks and the wonderful old used book stores that were bursting with 20th century paperbacks back then. But outside the half dozen or so of us, nobody knew what we were talking about.  We were on our own for context and, relevant to this post, pronunciation.  

We decided it was "CHOO-loo."  Later I settled on "CTHOO-loo," with no schwa between the C and TH, and that's still what I use today. 

It was only later that I heard the common pronunciations with the schwa (ca-THOO...) and soft and hard TH, and read that epistolar excerpt everybody copy/pastes from Wikipedia in which HPL instructs us to hawk out KHLOOLHLOO! wetly as though we're trying to cough out a slug stuck in the throat.  But it turns out that if I'd come along a bit earlier and been following the 'zine culture of the 1980s, I'd have had a much more complete answer much earlier.  

In the Fall 1987 issue of Lovecraft Studies, Robert M. Price's essay "Mythos Names and How to Say them" collected multiple documented pronunciations of the name which Lovecraft said can only be approximated "as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it," but which he, according to his friends and colleagues, attempted to approximate many times in writing and in person.  

For starters, Lovecraft's letter to Duane W. Rimel does indeed say:  

The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it--may be taken as something like Khlul-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced very gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered--the l being unrepresented.  

In Medusa’s Coil and Winged Death, ("collaborations" with Bishop and Heald, respectively) the unfortunately stereotyped African characters reference "Clooloo" and "Clulu," respectively, backing up this pronunciation.   

The next account adds a detail small but telling:  

Two years later, Lovecraft recommended pretty much the same version to Willis Conover: "The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly formed syllables Cluh-Lhu with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth"

Experimentally, that detail about welding your tongue to the roof of your mouth distinctly does add an inhuman weight to the name, defying my instinct to flap the Ls.  

These accounts paint a consistent picture, but we have additional descriptions from people very close to him demonstrating that, in person, Lovecraft used a variety of pronunciations.  

[...] Lovecraft's close friend and literary executor Robert Barlow recalled that "Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu as Koot-u-lew".  While even an eyewitness report must yield in authority to first-person sources like the letters just quoted, Barlow's recollection does receive support from Lovecraft's tale "The Mound", where the underground dwellers in K'n-yan worship the primeval octopus-headed god "Tulu".  

[...]

Another close friend of Lovecraft, W. Paul Cook, whose encouragement was instrumental in getting Lovecraft to start (and later to continue) his fiction writing, recalled that "Lovecraft denied any derivative or phonetic source or system for the combination of letters making up that word and others. The reader must pronounce to suit himself. In that especial case, however, he suggested 'Thulu,' both 'u's' long. Some of them are less easy."

Yet another friend of Lovecraft, Donald Wandrei, shared his recollection of Lovecraft' s pronunciation: "I referred to [The Call of Cthulhu] one day, pronouncing the strange word as though it were spelled K-Thool-Hoo. Lovecraft looked blank for an instant, then corrected me firmly, informing me that the word was pronounced, as nearly as I can put it down in print, K-Lütl-Lütl. I was surprised, and asked why he didn't spell it that way if such was the pronunciation. He replied in all seriousness that the word was originated by the denizens of the story and that he had only recorded their own way of spelling it."

Whence all the unsuspected "t's" and "l's"? Recall that Lovecraft had written to Conover that one must keep the tip of one's tongue fixed to the roof of one's mouth while (as he told Rimel) enunciating the syllables gutturally. Keeping all this in mind, Wandrei's transcription matches pretty closely what we might expect Lovecraft' s prescribed pronunciation to sound like.

Finally, there is an even weirder account of HPL himself "pronouncing" Cthulhu:   

Nelson Bridwell writes: "In the August 1947 Famous Fantastic Mysteries there is a one-page feature on Lovecraft which describes Cthulhu as 'a word which only he could properly whistle.' I once asked [Lovecraft's former literary agent] Julie Schwartz about this, and he confirmed having heard HPL do just that--and said my own whistling was quite close to his."  Cf. Lovecraft's words to Rimel: "The kind of ... noise made in this way is not really like speaking, but is more like the sound a man makes when he tries to imitate a steam-whistle"

I admit, going into this essay I had not expected to be told to attempt to whistle the Old Octopoid's name.  I can get a bit of a tooth-whistle into the KHLUL-hlu mouthful, but perhaps mercifully I can't run my attempt by Lovecraft for his opinion. 

In short, even within the fictional reality of Arkham no pronunciation a human being can make is "correct," and it appears Lovecraft himself experimented in real life both with ways to make it variously alien, and with casual pronunciations kinder to conversation.  If a body wants to bark out KHLHOOOHLOOO each time with tongue planted on roof of mouth while blasting air past his teeth like a steam whistle, I won't judge.  Or at least I won't say he's wrong.  But I also don't judge people who prefer a more casual, human-friendly pronunciation like "kuh-thoo-loo" or "kuh-too-loo," both of which were endorsed at times by Lovecraft.  However you say it, all our minds will all be rent by the unmasked reality of the universe on his rising, so it doesn't do to fret too much on the details.