APPENDIX ONE:
STORY NOTES

Abbreviations Used:

AHT Arkham House Transcripts: a set of transcriptions and excerpts from the letters of H. P. Lovecraft prepared by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth after Lovecraft’s death in preparation for what would be five volumes of Selected Letters (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–1976).

AWD August W. Derleth (1909–1971), Wisconsin novelist, Weird Tales author, and co-founder of Arkham House.

AY The Abominations of Yondo (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1960).

BB The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979).

BL Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

CAS Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961).

DAW Donald A. Wandrei (1908–1987), poet, Weird Tales writer and co-founder of Arkham House.

DS The Door to Saturn: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Two. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).

EOD Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bio-Bibliography by Donald Sidney-Fryer et al. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978).

ES The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume One. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006).

FFT The Freedom of Fantastic Things. Ed. Scott Connors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006).

F&SF The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a digest magazine founded in 1949 by Anthony Boucher and Robert Mills.

FW Farnsworth Wright (1888–1940), editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940.

GL Genius Loci and Other Tales (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948).

HPL Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), informal leader of a circle of writers for Weird Tales and related magazines, and probably the leading exponent of weird fiction in the twentieth century.

JHL Clark Ashton Smith Papers and H. P. Lovecraft Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

LL Letters to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).

LW Lost Worlds (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).

ME The Maze of the Enchanter: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Four. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2009).

MHS Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.

OD Other Dimensions (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

OST Out of Space and Time (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).

PD Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).

PP Poems in Prose (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965).

RA A Rendezvous in Averoigne (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988).

RHB Robert H. Barlow (1918–1951), correspondent and collector of manuscripts of CAS, HPL, and other WT writers.

SHSW August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library.

SL Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003).

SS Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

ST Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a pulp edited by Harry Bates in competition with WT.

TSS Tales of Science and Sorcery (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).

VA A Vintage from Atlantis: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Three. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).

WS Wonder Stories, a pulp published by Hugo Gernsback and edited first by David Lasser and then Charles D. Hornig.

WT Weird Tales, Smith’s primary market for fiction, edited by FW (1924–1940) and later Dorothy McIlwraith (1940–1954).

The Dark Age

When Clark Ashton Smith wrote “The Dark Age,” he intended to submit it to the Clayton Astounding, which had changed its policy to include a few occult-type stories.¹ It was finished by May 2, 1933, when he described the story as “my lousiest in many moons, largely, no doubt, because of the non-fantastic plot, which failed to engage my interest at any point. The one redeeming feature is the final paragraph, which takes a sly, underhanded crack at the benefits (?) of science.”² We have not been able to locate any letter of rejection for this story, so it is not known if it was rejected under the auspices of the dying Clayton regime at Astounding or by the incoming editorial team of F. Orlin Tremaine and Desmond Hall that had already accepted “The Demon of the Flower” for the December 1933 issue.

Hugo Gernsback sold Wonder Stories to Leo Margulies’ Better Publications on February 21, 1936. Mort Weisinger, who would later edit Superman during the so-called Silver Age of comics, took over from Charles D. Hornig as editor.³ It is not known if Smith was invited to contribute or if he just sent in the typescript on his own initiative, but CAS wrote to Virgil Finlay that “The sale of a pseudo-science short to Thrilling Wonder Stories at $55.00 [along with the sale of a carving] brings my September [1937] income to $62.50! If such sales continue, I shall become a bloated plutocrat!”⁴ “The Dark Age” appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories for April 1938. This appearance was accompanied by a brief essay by Smith entitled “The Decline of Civilisation”:

“The Dark Age” was written to illustrate how easily scientific knowledge and its resultant inventions could be lost to the human race following the complete breakdown of a mechanistic civilization such as the present one. The tale seems far from fantastic or impossible; and I have tried to bring out several points and to emphasize the part played by mere chance and by personal emotions and reactions.

I have shown the old knowledge conserved by a select few, the Custodians, who, in the beginning, are forced to isolate themselves completely because of the hostility displayed by the barbarians. Through habit, the isolation becomes permanent even when it is no longer necessary; and with the sole exception of Atullos, who has been expelled from the laboratory-fortress by his fellows, none of the Custodians tries to help the benighted people about them.

In the end, through human passion, prejudice, misunderstanding, the Custodians perish with all their lore; and the night of the Dark Age is complete. The reader will note certain ironic ifs and might-have-beens in the tale. Other points that I have stressed are the immense, well-nigh insuperable difficulties met by Atullos in his attempt to reconstruct, amid primitive conditions, a few of the lost inventions for the benefit of the savages; and the total frustration of Torquane’s studies and experiments through mere inability to read the books left by his dead father.

Also I have shown how a chemical, such as gunpowder, might be used by one who had learned its effects but was wholly ignorant of its origin and nature.⁵

Smith would later collect the tale in AY. The current text is based upon an undated typescript among the Clark Ashton Smith Papers held by the John Hay Library of Brown University.

1. See ME pp. 317–318.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, May 2, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

3. See Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936 (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004): 249–250.

4. CAS, letter to Virgil Finlay, September 27, 1937 (SL 317).

5. PD 55.

The Death of Malygris

When Smith completed “The Death of Malygris,” he mentioned to a fan correspondent that it contained “much genuine occultism and folklore,”¹ as can be seen from the following story idea found in the Black Book:

Malygris, in death, lies incorrupt in his black tower and still tyrannizes over Susran. Maranapion, his enemy, a rival sorcerer, instigated by the king of Poseidonis, undertakes to free the land from his spell. Employing the invultuation principle [the insertion of pins into a wax figure in order to bring harm to the person symbolized by the figure], he makes an image of Malygris from synthetic flesh, and causes the image to rot, thus producing a corresponding decay in Malygris himself. Afterwards, Maranapion, invading the black tower to exult over the decay of his ancient foe, is cursed by the rotting corpse, and begins while still alive to putrefy in the same fashion as the dead man. The companions of Maranapion flee, leaving him in the tower with Malygris.²

When Farnsworth Wright rejected “The Death of Malygris,” the words were by now all too familiar to Smith: “This seems more like a prose poem than a story; and we have learned from experience that our readers do not take to this type of story when it is more than three or four pages long. It is a beautiful thing, however, and the rhythmic prose fairly sings at times, but I don’t think the average reader would care for it at all.” He added this rather unhelpful piece of encouragement: “I think you would have something very, very fine if you would write this narrative to blank or rimed verse, but I don’t know where you would find a market for it.”³ August Derleth commiserated with Smith, adding that Wright “gives me a godawful pain every once in a while. Makes me feel definitely homicidal.”⁴

H. P. Lovecraft thought very highly of the story. He wrote to Robert Bloch that “Klarkash-Ton’s ‘Malygris’ is splendid—& it is just like the capricious Brother Farnsworth to turn down a thing like that! The thing is pure poetry in places—indeed, the Dunsanian style suits C.A.S. more than it does me.”⁵ He called the story “a gorgeous bit of onyx & ebony prose-poetry in which the crawling menace advances as to the sound of evil flutes & crotala.”⁶

After Wright accepted “The Flower-Women” upon resubmission, Smith decided to “try him again with ‘The Death of Malygris,’ a better tale than ‘The F.W.’ There is no excuse for his not accepting it.”⁷ Wright not only accepted “The Death of Malygris,” but he commissioned Smith to draw an illustration for it as well. When this appeared in the April 1934 issue, Smith wrote to Lovecraft that he was “inclined to think it the best of my W.T. illustrations so far.”⁸ Robert E. Howard wrote to Smith after the tale’s publication that “the Malygris story came up to expectations splendidly. In some ways I liked the illustration even better than that of ‘The Charnel God,’ though both were fine.”⁹ “The Death of Malygris” appears in both LW and RA. The current text is based upon an undated carbon copy at JHL.

1. CAS, letter to Lester Anderson, June 20, 1933 (ms, private collection).

2. BB 15.

3. FW, letter to CAS, May 16, 1933 (ms, JHL).

4. AWD, letter to CAS, May 27, 1933 (ms, JHL).

5. HPL, letter to Robert Bloch, June 9, 1933 (in Letters to Robert Bloch, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993]: p. 20).

6. HPL, letter to CAS, June 14, 1933 (ms, JHL).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, July 12, 1933 (SL 211).

8. CAS, letter to HPL, c. late January 1934 (SL 247).

9. Robert E. Howard, letter to CAS, May 21, 1934 (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 1933–1936, Ed. Rob Roehm [Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2008]: p. 208).

The Tomb-Spawn

A plot synopsis for this story may be found in the Black Book under the title of “The Tomb of Ossaru”:

A desert-buried tomb in Yoros where a strange being from an alien world was interred by the wizard he had served and was surrounded by an inner zone of enchantment rendering him incorruptible, and an outer zone causing instant death and decay in any who might intrude. Two merchants, travelling through Yoros, are pursued by robbers, and take refuge in a ruined building. The pavement gives way beneath them—and they [are] precipitated into the Tomb of Ossaru. One falls in the inner zone beside the seated incorruptible monster—and the other in the outer zone. While the first, in horror, is watching the decay of his companion, Ossaru awakes and proceeds to devour him.¹

Smith submitted the story to Wright under the title “The Tomb in the Desert” in July 1933;² since he submitted the story to Astounding, it would appear that Wright rejected it.³ CAS wrote to Lovecraft that Astounding held on to the typescript for a month but ultimately returned it, then announced later in the same letter its acceptance by Wright under the current title.⁴

Since Smith prepared a new typescript under the new title, he apparently rewrote the story, but the extent of the revision is not apparent since the only manuscript or typescript to survive is an incomplete (missing the final page) carbon of the version published in Weird Tales (May 1934); a copy of the WT appearance was consulted for the text from the missing page. Some idea may be found in a letter to Derleth wherein he remarked “Glad you liked ‘The Tomb-Spawn.’ That little tale certainly cost me enough work, so it ought to be good.”⁵ Smith received thirty-five dollars for “The Tomb-Spawn,”⁶ which was posthumously collected in TSS.

1. BB item 13.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, July 23, 1933 (SL 213).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, September 2, 1933 (SL 223).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-October 1933 (SL 228).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, June 4, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

6. WT, letter to CAS, November 30, 1934 (ms, JHL).

The Witchcraft of Ulua

Steve Behrends calls this “the first of Clark Ashton Smith’s short stories to be rejected for publication because of an erotic tone or content,”¹ although as we have noted earlier that dubious distinction belongs to “The Disinterment of Venus.”² CAS called the story, the first version of which was completed on August 22, 1933, “an erotic nightmare, and deals with a youth who had spurned a young witch and was bedevilled by her with various disagreeable sendings. He found amorous corpses in his bed, and was persecuted by peculiar succubi.”³

Smith complained to August Derleth that Wright rejected the story “saying that it is a sex story and therefore unsuitable for W.T. Perhaps he is right; though erotic imagery was employed in the tale merely to achieve a more varied sensation of weirdness. The net result is surely macabre rather than risqué. I am enclosing the ms. and would appreciate your opinion. Also, if you can think of any possible market you might mention it. I can think of none….”⁴ CAS denied any risqué intent, telling H. P. Lovecraft that he “was aiming mainly at weirdness; and whatever erotic imagery the tale contained was intended to be subordinate to its macabre qualities. Mere bawdiness is a bore, as far as I am concerned.” He noted the irony of Wright’s rejection: “Ye gods—when you consider the current cover of the magazine!”⁵ (referring to the usual nude by artist Margaret Brundage, this one a lesbian whipping scene illustrating Robert E. Howard’s “The Slithering Shadow”).

Lovecraft, who had suffered more from Wright’s rejections than any other writer, expressed his support and outrage: “Damn Satrap Pharnabazus for rejecting ‘Ulua’! He certainly is a pip for consistency—to howl about excessive eroticism after deliberately adopting a policy of ha’penny satyr-tickling in his damn cover-designs… a policy which amusingly causes his more subservient writers (not excluding the illustrious Quinn &—at times—even the sanguinary Two-Gun Bob) to go miles out of their way to drag in a costumeless wench! But then—consistency & Brother Farny never were very close associates.”⁶ E. Hoffmann Price took a contrary position, asking “Hellsfire, must we have castrated wizards, and fair witches who have been very thoughtfully provided with a zone of anaesthesia reaching from… well, from there to there?”⁷

Smith next tried submitting “Ulua” to Astounding after revising the temptation scene, although he explicitly denied this to Derleth.⁸ Earlier CAS told Derleth that he would not rewrite the story for resubmission to Weird Tales, adding “As to the so-called sexiness, it would not interest me to write a story dealing with anything so banal, hackneyed and limited as this type of theme is likely to be. Too many writers are doing it to death at the present time; and I have ended by revolting literarily against the whole business, and am prepared to maintain that a little Victorian reticence, combined with Puritan restraint, would harm nobody.”⁹ After the story was returned by Astounding, Smith, who was now more and more occupied with the care of his mother, now recuperating with a scalded foot, capitulated and submitted a third revised version to Wright, who accepted it on October 26, 1933 and offered thirty-three dollars.¹⁰ He admitted to Derleth that he had “toned down the temptation scene a little,” adding that “In the new version, Ulua teases the hero and twits him for his backwardness, instead of proffering her charms so flamboyantly. On the whole, it seems an improvement.”¹¹

Lovecraft read “The Witchcraft of Ulua” in typescript after its first rejection. He offered Smith his customary encouragement, calling it “a powerful piece—with intimations of horror & loathesomeness which do not soon leave the imagination. The style & atmosphere are admirable—prose-poetry in every line!”¹² He said much the same to Robert H. Barlow, adding “It has some terrific images.”¹³ (However, while commenting on the February 1934 issue of Weird Tales in which “Ulua” was published, HPL rated it “average.”¹⁴)

Despite the frustrations of rejection and revision, Smith was proud of “Ulua.” He wrote to Barlow “I feel that it is well-written; and it gives a certain variant note to my series of tales dealing with Zothique.”¹⁵ Later, noting the uncharacteristically moralistic stance of the story, Smith told the same correspondent “You are damned well right about aretology—the word itself is marked obsolete in my Webster, which is of no recent date either. If I’m not careful, the latter-day bigots of phallicism will lock me up in the Iron Maiden for such anaphrodisiacs as Ulua! By the way, don’t undervalue this tale; I wouldn’t have had the originality to write it a few years back.”¹⁶

The current text follows the lead of Steve Behrends, who based the text used in Necronomicon Press’ Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith series upon the carbon of the version ultimately published by Weird Tales, but replacing the published temptation scene with the version submitted to Astounding. We concur in his judgment that the writing in this version was not done under duress and that it represents an improvement over the original. The first and third versions may be found in Appendix 2. Smith originally wanted to include “The Witchcraft of Ulua” in his third Arkham House collection, GL, but space restrictions pushed it back to his fourth, AY. We have made slightly different word choices in establishing a text. All typescripts may be found among Smith’s papers at the John Hay Library of Brown University.

1. Steve Behrends, “Foreword,” in The Witchcraft of Ulua. By Clark Ashton Smith (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988): 5.

2. See ME 291–292.

3. CAS, letter to DAW, August 6, 1933 (SL 217).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933 (SL 219).

5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. September 1, 1933 (LL 40).

6. HPL, letter to CAS, September 11, 1933 (ms, JHL).

7. E. Hoffmann Price, letter to CAS, undated (ms, JHL).

8. CAS, letter to Derleth, September 26, 1933 (SL 223).

9. CAS, letter to Derleth, September 14, 1933 (SL 220).

10. FW, letter to CAS, October 2, 1933 (ms, JHL).

11. CAS, letter to AWD, November 6, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

12. HPL, letter to CAS, November 13, 1933 (AHT).

13. HPL, letter to RHB, November 13, 1934 (in O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow [Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2007]: p. 86).

14. HPL, letter to Robert Bloch, February 2, 1934 (in Letters to Robert Bloch, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993]: p. 47).

15. CAS, letter to RHB, October 4, 1933 (ms, JHL).

16. CAS, letter to RHB, December 5, 1933.

The Coming of the White Worm

Clark Ashton Smith probably had more fun writing “The Coming of the White Worm” than he did any other of his stories; he also probably experienced more frustration in getting it into print, and his remuneration was minimal at best. He announced the story in a postcard to H. P. Lovecraft: “I am doing the ‘IX Chapter of Eibon’ at present—a start on that much-requested cycle of occult elder lore!”¹ It appears that the impetus behind the story was the increasing number of readers who wanted to read more from such eldritch but imaginary tomes as the Necronomicon (Lovecraft), the Book of Eibon (Smith), or von Junzt’s Nameless Cults (Howard), numbers which swelled after the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales ran no fewer than three stories referring to such fonts of dark lore.² Smith described its composition in a letter to August Derleth:

It is hard to do, like most of my tales, because of the peculiar and carefully maintained style and tone-colour, which involves rejection of many words, images and locutions that might ordinarily be employed in writing. The story takes its text from a saying of the prophet Lith: “There is one that inhabits the place of utter cold, and One that respireth where none other may draw breath. In the days to come He shall issue forth among the isles and cities of men, and shall bring with Him as a white doom the wind that slumbereth in His dwelling”.³

Smith completed the story on September 15, 1933 and submitted it to Weird Tales. Farnsworth Wright’s letter of rejection sounded an all-too-familiar theme: “I enjoyed reading ‘The Coming of the White Worm,’ but I fear that we cannot use it. It would occupy eleven or twelve pages in Weird Tales, and many of our readers, I fear, would object strongly to reading a prose poem as long as this.”⁴

Lovecraft’s reactions to Smith’s stories are often as entertaining as the story itself, and his reaction after reading “The Coming of the White Worm” is a case in point: “Nggrrrhh… what a revelation! Thank God you spared your readers the worst & most paralysing hints—such as the secret of Yikith’s origin, the reason why it bore certain shapes not of this planet, & the history of Rlim Shaikorth before he oozed down to the solar system & the earth through the void from ___________ [HPL’s underscore]…. but I must not utter that name at which you, & Gaspard du Nord, & Eibon himself grew silent! Altogether, this is a stupendous fragment of primal horror & cosmic suggestion; & I shall call down the curses of Azathoth Itself if that ass Pharnabazus does not print it.”⁵ The story was next submitted to Astounding, which kept it for some time but ultimately returned it. CAS vented his frustrations to Derleth when he noted that “[Desmond] Hall, the sub-editor of that triply xxxed Astounding, deigned to drop me a line about their new policy following the rejection of the S-G with a blank, when he returned The White Worm after holding it for more than a month. I dare say one of these tales would have been bought if it hadn’t been for such laboratory-minded donkeys as [Forrest J.] Ackerman. Of course, the lower type of ‘fan’ is always the most vociferous. A dozen such birds, I dare say, can change the policy of a magazine.”⁶

Smith apparently gave the story to William L. Crawford for use in his semi-prozine Unusual Stories. Crawford, like many of his contemporaries, harbored a prejudice against weird stories (as witnessed by the contemporary exchange in the Fantasy Fan’s “Boiling Point” column discussed in earlier volumes⁷), but CAS felt that he was more open minded than many: “I should judge that his prejudice against weirdness applies largely to stuff dealing with stock superstitions. He seems to class work such as mine and Lovecraft’s as ‘pure fantasy.’”⁸ Crawford had been given stories by Lovecraft and by Robert E. Howard, which he ran in Marvel Tales, a sister magazine that was slanted more to the fantastic. The Summer 1935 issue of Marvel Tales contains an announcement that “The Coming of the White Worm” would appear in the next issue, which never appeared.

“The Coming of the White Worm” appears to have remained in limbo until late 1938. It was at this time that Smith received a letter from an unexpected source: John W. Campbell:

It has been a good many months since you appeared in Astounding, largely, I believe, because you have felt that fantasy wasn’t too welcome here, and science didn’t fit your style.

At any rate, I hope there has been no other reason. For recently, readers have shown a definite and growing interest in fantasy, and I’d like very much to see some of your newer work. I’d like particularly the type that involves human reactions, fairly normal human characters against a background that is fantastic, or involved in some tangled action that is not explained or explainable, perhaps, but still is real to the characters.

The kind I’d like to see would involve the humanness of the stories I’ve been trying to get in Astounding during the past year… but against a background of pure fantasy rather than science.⁹

Campbell was actually soliciting contributions for Unknown. Smith sent him “The Coming of the White Worm,” which received the following response: “This story does not involve the inter-relations of human beings in an atmosphere of fantasy. It is the latter type that I would rather see from you. This material is so entirely without human reactions that I am afraid it would be unsuitable for Unknown.”¹⁰ If Smith had been following what Campbell was doing in Astounding, he would not have been greatly surprised by the rejection. Nonetheless, he would still try later on to write something that Campbell might find acceptable. It is a shame that CAS did not submit a rewritten version of “The Voyage of King Euvoran” to Campbell. E. Hoffmann Price, Smith’s friend and collaborator, describes in his memoirs how he preferred Smith’s stories “because he presented credible human beings more frequently than did [HPL and Robert E. Howard]…. In Averoigne and in such tales as ‘The Voyage of King Euvoran,’ he portrayed human beings, not two dimensional and unconvincing simulacra which all too often rode unsteadily on a ‘mood’.”¹¹ (We would suggest that Campbell might also have found “The Last Hieroglyph” to his tastes had Wright not already published it.) Smith at his best was probably capable of writing a story that would pass muster with Campbell, but by the time Unknown arrived on the scene he was finding that his heart was no longer in fiction writing, but more in the writing of poetry, his first love, and in the carving of his marvelously outré figurines from native minerals found at a quarry owned by his uncle, Edwin C. Gaylord.

Farnsworth Wright wrote to Smith on November 23, 1938: “Since we are using your story, ‘The Double Shadow’, in our February issue, we are left without any manuscripts of yours on hand. This should not be.”¹² By this time myriad rejections of his best work, ignorant criticisms by hostile science fiction fans, the loss of Lovecraft, his most appreciative reader, and the deaths of his parents, which removed the captives to fortune that motivated much of his story production, had taken their toll, and Smith had not completed a new story since July 1937. He had already placed slightly revised versions of two stories from The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies with Wright, and 1939 would see the publication of two more from that collection. Although no correspondence exists, it appears that Wright capitulated and accepted a pruned-down version of “The Coming of the White Worm.” But once again Smith played fortune’s fool.

Late in 1938 Weird Tales was purchased by a New York businessman, William J. Delaney, who already published the highly successful pulp Short Stories. Delaney relocated the operation to New York City. Wright was kept on as editor and made the move, but was let go with the March 1940 issue. An interview with Delaney appeared in a fanzine at the time of Wright’s dismissal that boded ill for Smith. After promising that Weird Tales would continue to publish “all types of weird and fantasy fiction,” the interview went on to add:

There is one rule, however: Weird Tales does not want stories which center about sheer repulsiveness, stories which leave an impression not to be described by any other word than “nasty”. This is not to imply that the “grim” story, or the tale which leaves the reader gasping at the verge of the unknown, is eliminated. Mr. Delaney believes that the story which leaves a sickish feeling in the reader is not truly weird and has no place in Weird Tales.… And, finally, stories wherein the characters are continually talking in French, German, Latin, etc. will be frowned upon, as well as stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary.¹³

The interviewer was Robert A. W. Lowndes, who shed some light on this in a letter published years later:

Delaney, who was a pleasant and cultured man, was very fond of weird stories, but he was also a strict Catholic.… He also found some of the Clark Ashton Smith stories on the ‘disgusting’ side and told me that he had returned one that Wright had in his inventory when he left. It was about a monstrous worm which, when attacked and pierced, shed forth rivers of slime. Later in 1940, when Donald A. Wollheim was starting Stirring Science Stories, Smith sent him “The Coming of the White Worm” and Don used it. When I read it, there was no doubt that this was the story Delaney had been talking about.… Concerned about the magazine’s slipping circulation, he felt that the “more esoteric” type of story was a handicap, so this was mostly cut out.¹⁴

Smith wrote a letter around the time of Wright’s dismissal that listed Weird Tales’ remaining inventory of his material at two stories and four poems.¹⁵ Only one story, “The Enchantress of Sylaire” (Weird Tales July 1941) appeared between the date of that letter and the acceptance of Smith’s next WT story, “The Epiphany of Death,” early in 1942,¹⁶ so it would appear that one story was returned.

Further corroboration of these events may be found in the memoirs of E. Hoffmann Price, which illustrate just how frustrated and upset Smith was with magazine publishing. When Price visited him early in 1940, Smith presented him with the typescripts of two unpublished stories, “The House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord,” and told Price to do whatever he wanted with them: “Scrap the god-damn things if after all you don’t like them. The less I hear of them—.” Price interpreted this to mean that Smith realized “his stories did not fit into the publisher’s new pattern. Clark, fed up with adverse criticism or outright rejection, rejected the rejector, and gave me the scripts.”¹⁷

“The Coming of the White Worm” was finally published in Stirring Science Stories’ April 1941 issue. The story was placed by Donald A. Wollheim acting as Smith’s agent,¹⁸ but according to Harry Warner Jr. Stirring Science Stories was a non-paying market that relied upon donations.¹⁹ It was reprinted in the Canadian pulp Uncanny Tales that November, but by that time wartime restrictions prevented publishers from paying American writers.²⁰ “The Coming of the White Worm” was collected, in its pruned form, in both LW and RA. The original version was first published in SS. The current text is based upon the original typescript of the first version at the JHL.

1. CAS, postcard to HPL postmarked August 28, 1933 (ms, private collection).

2. See CAS’s letter to AWD, July 12, 1933 (SL 211): “I have… recently received a letter from some reader who was struck by the numerous references to The Book of Eibon in that issue, and wanted to know where he could procure this rare work!” The stories were “The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft; “The Horror in the Museum” by Hazel Heald (actually ghost-written by HPL); and Smith’s own “Ubbo-Sathla.”

3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933 (SL 219).

4. FW, letter to CAS, September 29, 1933 (ms, JHL).

5. HPL, letter to CAS, October 3, 1933 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, November 17th, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

7. See ME p. 298. See also Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, “The Non-Human Equation.” In Star Changes, by Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (Seattle, WA: Darkside Press, 2005): pp. 17–18.

8. CAS, letter to AWD, October 19, 1933 (SL 232).

9. John W. Campbell, letter to CAS, October 27, 1938 (ms, JHL).

10. John W. Campbell, letter to CAS, April 7, 1939 (ms, private collection).

11. E. Hoffmann Price, Book of the Dead. Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others (Memories of the Pulp Era). Ed. Peter Ruber (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2001): p. 125.

12. Farnsworth Wright, letter to CAS, November 23, 1938 (ms, JHL).

13. “Weird Tales Stays Weird.” Science Fiction Weekly (March 24, 1940): 1.

14. Robert A. W. Lowndes, “Letters.” Weird Tales Collector no. 5 (1979): 31.

15. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, February 22, 1940 (SL 328).

16. Dorothy McIlwraith, letter to CAS, February 24, 1942 (ms, JHL).

17. Price, Book of the Dead, pp. 112–113. Price dates this encounter to 1939, but in a letter quoted in Steve Behrends, “The Price-Smith Collaborations” (Crypt of Cthulhu no. 26 [Hallowmas 1986]: 32) he places the date as 1940. “House of the Monoceros” was published as “The Old Gods Eat” (Spicy Mystery Stories February 1941); “Dawn of Discord” (Spicy Mystery Stories October 1940). Price paid Smith half of the proceeds for these stories. Science fiction writer Jack Williamson joined Price in this visit. He described Smith at this meeting as “defeated and pathetic” (Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction [New York: Bluejay Books, 1984], p. 127).

18. See CAS, letter to AWD, November 6, 1944 (ms, SHSW).

19. Harry Warner, Jr. All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969): 79–80.

20. Ibid., p. 164.

The Seven Geases

Smith’s next story, “The Seven Geases,” was completed on October 1, 1933. It may have been inspired in part by the circumstances surrounding the tale immediately preceding it, “The Coming of the White Worm.” One of the readers who had requested to read more from the Book of Eibon was William Lumley (1880–1960), an eccentric correspondent of Lovecraft’s who asserted that HPL, CAS and their associates were “genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark & profound for human conception or comprehension. We may think we’re writing fiction, & may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, & other pleasant Outside gentry.”¹ Lovecraft was quite fond of Lumley in spite of these eccentric views, and revised his story “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (Weird Tales February 1938). Smith found Lumley to be quite the “rara avis, and I wish sincerely that there were more like him in this world of servile conformity to twentieth century skepticism and materialism! More power to such glorious heresy as that which he avows. I, for one, would hardly want the task of disproving his belief—even if I could disprove them. I must write him again before long.”²

In his response to Smith’s letter, Lovecraft seized upon these remarks to launch a defense of scientific materialism and skepticism:

As for the Lumleys & Summers’s of this world versus the Einsteins, Jeans’s, de Sitters, Bohrs, & Heisenbergs—I must confess that I am essentially on the side of prose & science! It is true that we can form no conception of ultimate reality, or of the limitless gulfs of cosmic space beyond a trifling radius, but it is also true that we have a fair working estimate of the phenomena within our own small radius. We may not know what—if anything, as is highly unlikely—the phenomena mean, but we do know what to expect within the circle of our experience. No matter what the constitution of the larger cosmos is, certain occurrences come inevitably & regularly, whilst other alleged occurrences—stories of which were invented in primitive times to explain unknown things now conclusively explained otherwise—can never be shewn to happen.³

Smith replied that “Of course, it would seem that the arguments of material science are pretty cogent. Perhaps it is only my innate romanticism that makes me at least hopeful that the Jeans and Einsteins have overlooked something. If ever I have the leisure and opportunity, I intend some first-hand investigation of obscure phenomena. Enough inexplicable things have happened in my own experience to make me wonder.”⁴ Confronted with Lovecraft’s “thoroughly modern disdain” for the otherwordly, one wonders if Ralibar Vooz doesn’t represent Smith’s true rebuttal.

The Black Book contains a plot synopsis under the title of “The Geas of Yzduggor.” It reads:

Yzduggor, wizard and hermit of the black Eiglophian Mts., is intruded upon during one of his experiments in evocation by an optimate from Commoriom who has gone forth with certain followers to hunt the alpine monsters known as the Voormis. Yzduggor, exceedingly wroth at the interruption, puts upon the optimate, Vooth Raluorn, a most terrible and ludicrous and demoniacal geas.⁵

The entry following it concerns “The spider-god, Atlach-Nacha, who weaves his webs across a Cimmerian gulf that has no other bridges.”⁶ Smith incorporated this note into the story as well.

Smith described the story’s conception and composition in a letter to Lovecraft: “I am now midway in ‘The Seven Geases,’ another of the Hyperborean series. The demon of irony wants to have a hand in this yarn; but I am trying to achieve horror in some of the episodes even if not in the tout ensemble.”⁷ Its completion presented Smith with a dilemma: “Tsathoggua alone knows what I can do with it. Bates, who liked ‘The Door to Saturn’ so well, would have grabbed it in all likelihood; but I don’t believe that the other fantasy editors have any sense of humour. It seems hard to think that the new Astounding editors could have: one of them, I understand, has just graduated from the editing of love story and confession magazines!”⁸ (Smith did not mention Weird Tales as a possibility, doubtless due to the succession of rejections documented in earlier notes.) Astounding Stories held on to the story for a month before finally rejecting it without comment.

Wright also rejected the story, saying that it was “very interesting, especially on account of the dry humour, but lacked plot…. No heroine, no cross-complications, no triumph over obstacles; merely, as W. so wittily puts it, ‘one geas after another’.”⁹ “But damn that ass Pharnabazus for turning down the ‘Seven Geases,’” wrote Lovecraft. “This silly worship of artificial ‘plot’—an element which I believe to be not only unnecessary but even intrinsically inartistic—certainly gets me seeing red.”¹⁰ Wright followed his by now familiar pattern: a month later he wrote that:

I submitted the word ‘geas’ to Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, editor-in-chief of the Standard Dictionary, and got the following reply: “The Celtic or Gaelic term geas is to be found in Gaelic dictionaries with the meaning ‘charm, sorcery, enchantment,’ and with the subordinate meaning ‘oath and adjuration or religious vow.’ In the latter senses it is used in expressions that translated would become ‘I solemnly charge you.’ Of the two Gaelic dictionaries on the Lexiconographer’s shelves, only one shows the formation of plurals, and gives the plural of geas as geasan. The word is entirely Celtic, and until modern times has not appeared in the works of English writers.”

I think I would like another look at “The Seven Geases,” if you have not already placed it elsewhere.¹¹

Smith received only seventy dollars for the story instead of the seventy-five dollars it should have received at the standard rate of one cent a word he usually received from Weird Tales, which did nothing to ease his increasing frustrations with editors.¹² Wright also used a drawing of Tsathoggua that Smith had shown him as an illustration when the story appeared in the October 1934 issue. He told Robert Barlow that “I am rather partial to [‘The Seven Geases’] myself. These grotesque and elaborate ironies come all too naturally to me.”¹³ It was included in LW and RA. The current text is based upon a carbon copy of the original typescript deposited at JHL.

CAS refers to “the antehuman sorcerer Haon-Dor” in the story. This character first appeared in an uncompleted story called “The House of Haon-Dor” that Smith had started in June or July 1933 but then set aside. A synopsis appears in the Black Book (item 18) and the unfinished story was included in SS. A contemporary story of black magic, “The House of Haon-Dor” has little relationship to “The Seven Geases.”

An event occurred during the writing of “The Seven Geases” that would have enormous repercussions for Smith and his parents. Sometime early in October 1933 Mary Frances “Fanny” Gaylord Smith, CAS’ mother, accidentally knocked over a pot of hot tea and badly scalded her foot, and “this unfortunate accident has thrown another monkey wrench into my literary programme. I am doctor, nurse, chief dish-washer and god knows what.”¹⁴

1. HPL, letter to CAS, October 3, 1933 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. late September 1933 (LL 41).

3. HPL, letter to CAS, October 22, 1933 (AHT).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early November 1933 (SL 236).

5. BB item 33. Item 20 is also obviously germane: “Geas (pronounced gesh or gass) a Celtic tabu, or compulsion or injunction laid on a person in some such form as ‘I place you under heavy geas, to do so and so.’ —Celtic plural, geases.” Smith came across the word in James Branch Cabell’s novel Figures of Earth (see letter to RHB, October 25, 1933 [SL 233]).

6. BB item 33a.

7. CAS, letter to HPL, c. late September 1933 (SL 226).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, October 4, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, November 17th, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

10. HPL, letter to CAS, November 29, 1933 (ms, JHL).

11. FW, letter to CAS, December 1, 1933 (ms, JHL).

12. CAS, letter to AWD, December 31, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

13. CAS, letter to RHB, December 30, 1933 (ms, JHL).

14. CAS, letter to RHB, October 25, 1933 (SL 234).

The Chain of Aforgomon

Although Clark Ashton Smith began “The Chain of Aforgomon” in April 1933, he did not complete the story until sometime early in1934. The synopsis for the tale in the Black Book, which was originally to be called “The Curse of the Time-God,” reads:

John Millwarp, novelist, is found dead in his room under circumstances of shocking and inexplicable mystery. His body, beneath the unmarked clothing, is charred in concentric circles, as if by rings of fire, and a strange symbol is clearly branded on his forehead. His literary executor, taking charge of his manuscripts, finds among them a sort of diary, in which Millwarp tells of his growing addiction to a rare drug, which had caused him to remember scenes from former lives, and had finally revived the recollection of an avatar in a world that had antedated the earth. In this life, Millwarp had been the high priest of the Time-God, Aforgonis, and through his love for a dead woman, and his use of a temporal necromancy, had committed blasphemy against the logic of the god. He is punished with fiery tortures by his fellow-priests, and is doomed by Aforgonis to remember, at some far date of the future in another world, the circumstances of his offense, and to perish through the memory of the tortures.¹

His description of its composition in a letter to Derleth gives some idea as to why the story was so difficult to complete:

I have nearly finished the long-deferred “Chain of Aforgomon”—a most infernal chore, since the original inspiration seems to have gone cold, leaving the tale immalleable as chilled iron. Anyway, it is a devilishly hard yarn to write: the problem being to create any illusion of reality in an episode that occurs like a dream within a dream. Through the use of a rare Oriental drug, the hero remembers a former life, in a world antedating the earth, when he had been a priest of the time-god Aforgomon. After the death of his sweet-heart, he had committed a weird temporal necromancy by evoking, with all its circumstances, one hour of the preceding autumn when he and his love had been happy together. This repetition of a past hour was enough to set incalculable disorder in all the workings of the cosmos henceforward; and it constituted blasphemy against the sacred logic of time, which was a cult in this world. The remainder of the tale deals with the strange doom, involving the entire sequence of his future lives, which the priest brought upon himself by this necromancy. You will realize the difficulty of treatment.²

Smith’s diminishing inspiration may be tracked not only to his ongoing frustrations with editorial capriciousness, but also to sheer physical exhaustion: his mother, Mary Frances “Fanny” Gaylord Smith, was severely injured when she upset a pot of tea on her foot and scalded it that October, which required Smith to take over as caregiver for her and his father, whose health was never that robust to begin with. He announced that it was finished on January 21, 1934 “after nearly finishing me,” but he had “little hope that Wright will buy it.”³ Wright did reject it, complaining that the story sagged toward the end; Smith proffered to Derleth that “Personally, I’d say that the sagging, if there is much, occurs in the middle.”⁴ Wright did accept it after some revision, and it was published in the December 1935 issue.

The theme of reincarnation, and the image of a chain of incarnations stretching into infinity, occurs early in Smith’s work. In “The Star-Treader” (1912) we find these lines:

Through years reversed and lit again

I followed that unending chain

Wherein the suns are links of light;

Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres

The twisting of the threads of years

In weavings wrought of noon and night;

Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,

Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.⁴

The circumstances of John Milwarp’s death recall the death of Smith’s associate, Boutwell Dunlap (1877–1930), who died suddenly under murky circumstances in his rooms at the Graystone Hotel in San Francisco on December 22, 1930.⁵ Dunlap was an attorney and historian who helped promote Smith’s first book in 1912. Since Dunlap had attempted to hog all the credit for Smith’s discovery, earning a rebuke from no less than Ambrose Bierce himself, Smith may not have been too well disposed toward Dunlap.⁶

Stefan Dziemianowicz has pointed out that the plot of “The Chain of Aforgomon” is similar to that of Universal Pictures’ 1931 film The Mummy (dir. Karl Freund, starring Boris Karloff). According to a March 15, 1933 letter to Robert H. Barlow, Smith missed seeing The Mummy when it came to Auburn.⁷

When Smith included “The Chain of Aforgomon” in his first Arkham House collection, OST, he received a nice fan letter from Hannes Bok, the well-regarded artist and pulp illustrator who drew the dust jacket. Bok singled out the story for special praise, writing that “I think that THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON is one of the most terrific things I’ve ever read. Most stories of ‘unspeakable’ blasphemies leave me cold, but here was a blasphemy which somehow convinced me. Yipes!”⁸ The story was also included in RA.

The current text is based upon a carbon copy at JHL.

1. BB item 17.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, January 10, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, January 21, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, “The Star-Treader.” In The Abyss Triumphant: The Complete Poetry and Translations Volume I. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008): p. 71.

5. See “Boutwell Dunlap, Noted California Historian, Dies,” San Francisco Examiner (December 23, 1930): 1; “Boutwell Dunlap Services Monday,” Auburn Journal (January 1, 1931): 1.

6. See Scott Connors, “Who Discovered Clark Ashton Smith?” Lost Worlds no. 1 (2004): 25–34.

7. CAS, letter to RHB, March 15, 1933 (ms, JHL).

8. Hannes Bok, letter to CAS, undated but sent with AWD’s letter dated August 13, 1942 (ms, JHL).

The Primal City

H. P. Lovecraft had described several of his recent dreams to Clark Ashton Smith, which drew forth the following account:

My own recent dreams have been pretty tame; but in the past I have had some that were memorable. One that comes to mind was fraught with all the supernatural horror of antique myth: I was standing somewhere on a bleak, terrible plain, while past me and over me, with appalling demonic speed and paces and voices of thunder, there swept a vast array of cloudy, titanic Shapes. One of these, as it went by, pealed out the sonorous words “Eiton euclarion”, which I somehow took to be the name of the cloudy entity or one of its fellows.¹

(Smith was later to clarify that he was still a boy when he had this dream.)²

In his return letter Lovecraft wrote that “Your unusual dreams are tremendously interesting, & much fuller of genuine, unhackneyed strangeness than any of mine. Eiton euclarion! Of what festering horror in space-time’s makeup have you had a veiled intimation?”³ Smith jotted down a story idea that stemmed from this dream in the Black Book under the title “The Cloud-People:” “A remote mountain-region, with lost cities and treasure, deserted by human beings, but guarded by strange clouds that take the forms of men, animals, or demons.”⁴ The story was underway during the second half of January 1934, and ready for submission to Weird Tales by February 5, 1934.⁵ At first Smith titled the story “The Cloud-Things,” then “The Clouds,” and finally “The Primal City.” Wright rejected the story as “lacking ‘plot’,” of which CAS had elsewhere said “Few of my stories… exhibit what is known in pulpdom as ‘plot’.”⁶ Smith accordingly rewrote the story in March 1934 and resubmitted it, only to meet with rejection yet again. “The nameless spawn of Yub & Yoth!” wrote Lovecraft upon reading Wright’s second rejection letter. “No wonder his damn’d magazine never prints anything worth reading except by accident! ‘The Clouds’ is magnificent—one of the most potent and moving things I’ve read in recent years. A breathless menace hangs over the scene from the first, & the doom—when it comes—is really adequate.”⁷ Lovecraft urged Smith to give the story to The Fantasy Fan if Wright did not finally accept it. This never happened, so the story first saw print in the November 1934 issue of Hornig’s fanzine, which was appropriately a special “Clark Ashton Smith” issue.

F. Orlin Tremaine was replaced as editor of Astounding Stories late in 1938. He edited another science fiction magazine, Comet Stories, and Smith sold him a pruned version of “The Primal City” for the December 1940 issue. The copy editor at Comet Stories changed Smith’s text in a number of places; one particularly egregious example is the change of the line “Their swiftness was that of mountain-sweeping winds” to “Their swiftness was that of powered aircraft.” When Smith was assembling GL, he did not have a carbon but instead sent to Derleth tear sheets with handwritten corrections. Presented with a choice between the version published in The Fantasy Fan or that in Comet Stories, he went with the “more concise… and therefore preferable” Comet Stories version.⁸ Both versions of this story have their strong points. The text included here represents a merger of the two versions that uses the typescript of the original version as a starting point. (Many of his later changes were written in pencil on this typescript.) However, the revisions in parts of the Comet Stories version are less poetic and imaginative, leading us to conclude these changes were done to achiece a sale.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-October 1933 (SL 228).

2. CAS, “Excerpts from The Black Book.” The Acolyte (Spring 1944). In BB p. 78.

3. HPL, letter to CAS, October 22, 1933 (AHT).

4. BB item 29.

5. See CAS, letter to AWD, January 21, 1934 (ms, SHSW); CAS, letter to AWD, February 5, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

6. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early November 1933 (SL 236).

7. Lovecraft’s comments are written on Wright’s March 23, 1934 letter to Smith (see Roy A. Squires’ Catalog 8, item 123).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, February 7, 1947 (ms, SHSW).

Xeethra

Clark Ashton Smith’s heart-wrenching treatment of the Faust theme was completed on March 21, 1934, but like most of his stories the idea came to him much earlier. “The Traveller” (see Appendix 3), one of the prose poems in Ebony and Crystal, tells of a poor pilgrim who, when asked what it is he is searching for, replies “forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home.” A story idea may be found in the Black Book under that title:

A young goatherd of Zothique, leading his charges in a wild, mountainous region, who enters an unexplored cave giving on a strange underworld of beautiful, sinister trees laden with strange fruits. This region is an outlying part of the subterrene realms of Thasaidon, and the boy Xeethra is frightened back to the entrance by a glimpse of fearful demoniac entities and monsters that roam through the frightful groves. He steals, however, certain of the fruits, and devours one of them. Afterwards, a madness comes over him, and he imagines that he is no longer Xeethra, but the prince of a great land beyond the mountains. He goes forth to regain his empire, and finds only a desert tract with ruinous cities where outcasts and lepers mock him in his madness. In his despair an emissary of Thasaidon comes to him, and reveals the truth, that the eating of the fruit has awakened in him the memory of a long-past life when he was indeed the ruler of this vanished empire. In return for his sworn fealty to the god of Evil, Xeethra is promised a necromantic revival of all the grandeur of his former incarnation which he shall retain as long as he decrees it. He accepts the bond; and, reliving his past life, he forgets the existence as Xeethra and the compact with Thasaidon; and, finding again the ennui and emptiness of power, he wishes himself a simple goat-herd. Thereupon the whole vision vanishes, and he is again the boy Xeethra, lost among lepers and pariahs in a ruined city, and remembers confusedly a strange dream, unable to forget the dream, regretting its lost splendour; a creature half-mad thenceforward, and wholly accursed.¹

The reader who is familiar with Smith’s life cannot help but wonder if Smith was recalling the acclaim he experienced as a youth when the San Francisco newspapers hailed him as the Boy Keats of the Sierras only to see his work fall out of critical favor. Smith was not one to wallow in self pity, but he certainly displayed a rather biting sense of ironic detachment that would have made Ambrose Bierce proud.

Smith fleshed out the above synopsis with additional details:

The emissary appears before him like a pillar of shadow growing up from the earth into gigantic semi-human form. At the very end this being comes to him again, and Xeethra cries out, saying take my soul in fulfillment of the bond. But the emissary tells him mockingly that his soul is already part of the empery of Thasaidon.²

These entries in the Black Book appear several entries ahead of the one for “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” which was completed on May 1, 1932. Smith first mentions the story in correspondence at the end of August 1933, when he mentions that “With the completion of two more tales, ‘Xeethra,’ and ‘The Madness of Chronomage,’ I will have a series totalling about 60,000 words, all dealing with the future continent of Zothique.”³ He also used an excerpt from the “Song of Xeethra” as a heading to “The Dark Eidolon,” which was completed near the end of 1932.

Smith submitted “Xeethra” to Weird Tales, but it “was bowed politely from the palace of Pharnaces [Farnsworth Wright]” on the grounds that “it was more of a prose poem than a story,” the same complaint that he had made about “The Death of Malygris” and “The Coming of the White Worm.” These continued rejections did nothing to boost Smith’s confidence in his work: “I’m afraid Wright is more than right in thinking that the casual reader is purblind and even hostile toward literature of a poetic cast. And poetry itself, in this country… has fallen into the hands of a lot of literary gangsters.”⁴

Faced with the mounting costs of caring for his ailing parents, combined with the loss of incomes from his mother’s magazine sales,⁵ selling his stories became more important to Smith than any aesthetic aspirations he may have harbored earlier. As he described it, Smith “did a little topiary work on the verbiage, cutting it down from 8000 to 6800 words, and bringing out some of the ‘points’ a little more explicitly.”⁶ Wright accepted this version, paying sixty-eight dollars.⁷ “Xeethra” was published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales, and was collected in LW and RA.

There are obvious similarities between “Xeethra” and H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Quest of Iranon” (first published in the July/August 1935 issue of The Galleon). Smith read the story in manuscript in July 1930.⁸ The chief difference between the stories is that Iranon’s quest was a fool’s folly, and Xeethra found his kingdom and lost it again because of a tragic flaw.

The text of “Xeethra” was first restored by Steve Behrends as part of the Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith series published by Marc A. Michaud’s Necronomicon Press. Like Mr. Behrends, we compared the top copy of the typescript of the first version, which Barlow bound together with several other Smith typescripts and donated to the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, with the carbon of the published version among Smith’s papers at JHL. We have restored more of the text from the first version that seemed to us to be richer than that of published version.

1. BB item 34.

2. BB item 34a.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933.

4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 4, 1934.

5. Mrs. Smith sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door to help support the family. See Violet Heyer, “Letter.” In One Hundred Years of Klarkash-Ton, Ed. Ronald Hilger (Averon Press, 1996): pp. 20–22.

6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

7. WT, letter to CAS, October 25, 1935 (ms, JHL).

8. See HPL, letter to CAS, July 18, 1930.

The Last Hieroglyph

Clark Ashton Smith first mentioned “The Last Hieroglyph” in a letter to August Derleth in March 1934:

I have conceived a whale of a weird notion for a story to be called either The Last Hieroglyph or, In the Book of Agoma. It concerns a strange volume of hieroglyphic writings that belonged to a mysterious archimage. When he wished, he could bring one or more of the hieroglyphs to life in the forms that they represented, and could send them forth to do his bidding. In the story, a certain minor wizard enters the tower in which the book is kept—and is turned into a hieroglyph on the half-finished open page of the great volume.¹

The first version of this story was completed on April 7, 1934. Farnsworth Wright rejected it “with the usual comment that he had enjoyed it and admired it personally. But he feared the c.r. [casual reader] would find it rather meaningless. He must have a bright lot of readers, if that is true.” Smith’s growing frustration showed itself when he added “Well, if I ever become any crazier than I am and have been, Wright’s criticism and rejections will certainly be one of the contributing causes.”²

Smith revised the story, changing the title to “In the Book of Vergama,” and resubmitted it. Wright rejected it a second time, explaining that “Beautiful though many of its passages are, yet there is so little plot, and the motivation seems so inadequate, that I am afraid it would disappoint many of our readers who expect almost perfection itself from you.”³ Looking over the twice-rejected manuscript, CAS allowed that “It is possible that the tale is a little overwrought; and I may, eventually, cut out the portions about the merman and the salamander”⁴ and solicited the opinions of Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. However, after completing a third revision, he informed Barlow that “You & Theobaldus [nickname for HPL] will be glad to know that I am not curtailing the Vergama story. On the contrary, I have done a longer version, detailing efforts of Nushain to sidestep his guides and evade the destiny that will turn him into a cipher. The guides, ironically, twit him with a lack of faith in his own horoscopic vaticinations! Vergama also waxes sardonic.”⁵ The third time did prove the charm, as Smith wrote to Derleth “Wright took my revision of ‘The Last Hieroglyph.’ I added about 2000 words to the tale and, I think, improved it considerably.”⁶

Smith’s correspondents were pleased with the results of all his efforts. Robert E. Howard mentioned that he “very much enjoyed” the story.⁷ E. Hoffmann Price told him that it:

has a strange charm… a certain humanity—I mean, the character and his two attendants have an appealing realness which gives force to the picture. The bungling, guessing astrologer, sometimes charlatan, sometimes (and perhaps coincidentally) giving a good prediction; he’s in a way a symbol of all endeavour. And his doom seems rather a fulfillment, not a punishment. For all its outré adornments, the story has a homely, human touch which persistently hold its own.⁸

CAS wrote to Barlow that the story would “form the concluding item of my Zothique series, if this series should ever appear between book-covers.”⁹

Wright included “The Last Hieroglyph” in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Smith received sixty dollars.¹⁰ It was included in OST and RA. A carbon copy of the published version from Smith’s papers at JHL was used to establish the current text.

One of the first anthologies to mine the rich resources of such pulps as Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds and Astounding Stories was The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination, edited by Phil Stong (1899–1957), a journalist and novelist who is best known for writing State Fair, the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name. Stong did not include a story by Smith, but the anthology does contain the following mention of “The Last Hieroglyph”: “Clark Ashton Smith is another fantasy writer, a very popular one, who frequently has excellent and original ideas and then casts them into a precious style that does not fit them. Only, his idol is not Poe but Lord Dunsany. Smith’s story of the magician [sic] who becomes an item of a cosmic manuscript is excellent, but there are too many Byzantine words.”¹¹ It was undoubtedly Smith’s encounters with sentiments such as these that inspired him when he composed two aphorisms that he published in his poetry collection Spells and Philtres. The first states that “The modern intolerance toward what is called ‘painted speech,’ toward ‘the grand manner,’ springs too often from the instinctive resentment inspired in vulgar minds by all that savors of loftiness, exaltation, nobility, sublimity and aristocracy.” The second expresses the realization that “It is a ghastly but tenable proposition that the world is now ruled by the insane, whose increasing plurality will, in a few generations, make probable the incarceration of all sane people born among them.”¹²

1. CAS, letter to AWD, March 18, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, April 17, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

3. FW, letter to CAS, April 25, 1934 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to RHB, April 30, 1934 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 18, 1934 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 4, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

7. Robert E, Howard, letter to CAS, July 23, 1935 (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 1933–1936, Ed. Rob Roehm [Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2008]: p. 366).

8. E. Hoffmann Price, letter to CAS, September 13, 1942 (ms, JHL).

9. CAS, letter to RHB, May 21, 1934 (SL 255).

10. WT, letter to CAS, March 31, 1936 (ms, JHL).

11. Phil Stong, “Note to Part III,” in The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), pp. 330–331.

12. CAS, “Epigrams and Apothegms.” Spells and Philtres (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1958): pp. 53, 54.

Necromancy in Naat

As discussed in the preceding note, “The Last Hieroglyph” was intended to be the final story of Zothique. However, Smith’s “benign, maleficent daemon” still had tales to tell of the last continent, and the first version of “Necromancy in Naat” was completed on February 6, 1935. Little survives concerning its composition or genesis. CAS told Donald Wandrei that he had “turned out several weirds, including ‘The Treader of the Dust,’ ‘Necromancy in Naat’ and ‘The Black Abbot of Puthuum.’… The last quarter of Necromancy in Naat, however, will have to be rewritten according to the specifications of the satrap (Damn!!....******)”¹ Wright’s letter of rejection apparently has not survived, so the exact nature of his objections are not known, but in a letter dated February 11, 1935 he acknowledges the receipt of a “new last page” for the story “and will get at the reading of that tale within a day or two.”² Since this occurs before Smith’s letter telling of its rejection, we can only speculate that either the last page somehow was lost or Smith decided to change the last page and sent it along. CAS spent the period between March 4 and March 25 rewriting the story, according to his notations on the typescript of the original version, and wrote to H. P. Lovecraft that “Naat” was one of several stories recently accepted by Wright.³ “Necromancy in Naat” appeared in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, where it was accompanied by another Virgil Finlay illustration, where it tied with Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” as the most popular story in the issue.⁴ Smith was paid seventy-three dollars for the story.⁵ Smith included “Necromancy in Naat” in LW, and it was later included in RA.

Smith wrote to August Derleth that “‘Necromancy in Naat’ seems the best of my more recently published weirds; though Wright forced me to mutilate the ending.”⁶ CAS cut the story by thirteen hundred words, eliminating much descriptive material. The biggest change that Smith made was to eliminate suggestions that Yadar and Dalili were proving Andrew Marvell wrong.⁷ Thanks to an anonymous private collector who generously provided us with a copy of the original version, we have been able to restore most of these cuts, leaving those changes that we thought Smith made out of choice, not compulsion, most notably the beautiful words with which the story ends.

1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28, 1935 (SL 261).

2. FW, letter to CAS, February 11, 1935 (ms, JHL).

3. CAS, postcard to HPL, April 5, 1935 (ms, private collection).

4. See “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales (October 1936), p. 384.

5. WT, letter to CAS, March 29, 1937 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, April 13, 1937 (CSL 287).

7. See Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress:” “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace.”

The Treader of the Dust

Clark Ashton Smith’s story “Xeethra” is prefaced by a quotation from an imaginary book entitled The Testaments of Carnamagos. This addition to the library of eldritch tomes stocked by the imaginations of H. P. Lovecraft’s circle of writers was first mentioned in Smith’s never-completed novel The Infernal Star. Smith went into much greater detail concerning the book and its disturbing history in “The Treader of the Dust,” which he completed on February 15, 1935. Wright surprised Smith “by taking ‘The Treader of the Dust’ offhand, without revision or re-submission.”¹ In his letter of acceptance, in which he offered Smith thirty dollars for the story, Wright told Smith that “I thought at first, while I was reading the story, that it would have a solution something like that given in ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ by Ambrose Bierce, but I was all wet in that surmise.”² “The Treader of the Dust” appeared in the August 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Smith included it in LW. The text is based upon that of a typescript deposited in Smith’s papers at JHL.

1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28. 1935 (SL 261).

2. FW, letter to CAS, February 22, 1935 (ms, JHL).

The Black Abbot of Puthuum

“The Black Abbot of Puthuum” is one of three stories that Clark Ashton Smith submitted to Weird Tales in February 1935, but, like “Necromancy in Naat,” it was rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright.¹ The idea for the story, another tale of Zothique, dates back to 1932 or earlier since the story was outlined in the Black Book several entries before that for “The Colossus of Ylourgne” (see note for “Xeethra”):

Two guardsmen and a palace-eunuch, bringing a purchased girl to the king of Yoros, find themselves lost among the enchantments of a strange desert. The enchantments lead them to a weird monastery inhabited by twelve black monks all of whom exactly resemble their superior, who is distinguished from them only by his garb. In the night, one of the guardsmen, wakeful and suspicious, steals from the chamber to which he and his fellow have been assigned. Wandering about the monastery, he stumbles on an altar to the dark demon, Thasaidon, and apprehends that the monks are devil-worshippers. Upon the altar are charred fragments of flesh and bone. Stealing back toward his room, the guardsman hears an outcry from the room where the girl sleeps, guarded by the eunuch. Rushing in, he meets the fleeing eunuch, whose eyes are wide with terror… In the gloom, above the girl’s bed, he sees a vague monstrous incubus about to settle upon her. The thing seems to float on black voluminous wings. He attacks it with his sword, and the incubus resolves itself into the black abbot. Then the figure seems to multiply before his eyes and the chamber is suddenly filled with the monks, who drag down the guardsman. His companion, who is an archer, enters at this moment and shoots at the abbot (standing apart from the melee) an arrows [sic] that had been dipped in the mummia of a saint, and was therefore fatal to sorcerers or demons. It is his last arrow, the others having been discharged at desert phantoms. It slays the abbot and the twelve monks vanish. The abbot’s body decays immediately, in a non-human fashion, and its long finger-nails slough away from the putrefying mass. One of the guardsmen puts the nails into his helmet, and he and his fellow draw lots for the girl. (The eunuch’s throat had been ripped open by the abbot.)²

While writing the story Smith added a comic subplot that revealed how the girl, Rubalsa, had been stolen at birth by the nomads, and included another character who turned out to be her father. She is identified by an amulet that was hanging around her neck when a baby (Smith anticipates “the great god Awto” by having the amulet bear the image of “Yuckla, patron of mirth and laughter”). When he revised the story for resubmission to Wright, he eliminated these elements, which cut approximately fifteen hundred words. Wright accepted the story.³ Smith received seventy-eight dollars for the story after it appeared in Weird Tales’ March 1936 issue.⁴ At that time H. P. Lovecraft wrote to Smith that the story was “tremendously fascinating—full of a malign sense of hidden horror & aeon-old charnel secrets. I doubt if anything else in the issue can approach it.”⁵ (Lovecraft had only read Smith’s story when he wrote that, as that issue contained the first appearance of Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats” as well as the penultimate installment of Robert E. Howard’s Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon.) Smith included the story in GL.

It is the opinion of the editors that Smith was correct in eliminating the romantic subplot. It noticeably detracted from the atmosphere and suspense and did not contribute to the tale’s unity of effect. The excised material is included in Appendix 4.

1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28, 1935 (SL 262).

2. BB item 47.

3. The original version of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” was given by Smith to R. H. Barlow. It eventually came into the possession of Smith friend and book seller Roy A. Squires. Terence A. McVicker published this version as an exquisitely printed chapbook in 2007.

4. WT, letter to CAS, February 25, 1937 (ms, JHL).

5. HPL, letter to CAS, March 23, 1936 (ms, JHL).

The Death of Ilalotha

This story, which Smith called a “somewhat poisonous little horror,”¹ was completed on February 22, 1937. He promptly submitted it to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright returned it for possible revision, stating that “I like ‘The Death of Ilalotha,’ and I like the language in which it is clothed. But, unfortunately, there is no story here; for the singularly gruesome ending does not tie in or connect with anything in the story; and the reader is given no hint as to who—or what—it was that had whispered in his ear, making the assignation. Such are my reactions to it.”² Smith completed the revisions on March 16, 1937, and Wright accepted it upon resubmission, offering forty dollars.³ “The Death of Ilalotha” was the most popular story in the September 1937 issue of Weird Tales, where it was complemented by one of Virgil Finlay’s illustrations. When that issue appeared, Smith derived some amusement from a brush with the censors: “I seem to have slipped something over on the PTA. The issue containing [‘The Death of Ilalotha’], I hear, was removed from the stands in Philadelphia because of the Brundage cover” [which depicted a scene from Seabury Quinn’s “Satan’s Palimpsest”].⁴

Smith offered Barlow an insight into his state of mind in another letter discussing the story:

Ilalotha is quite good, I believe, especially in style and atmosphere. It is unusually poisonous and exotic. Writing is hard for me, since circumstances here are dolorous and terrible. Improvement in my father’s condition is more than unlikely, and I am more isolated than ever. Also, I seem to have what psychologists call a “disgust mechanism” to contend with: a disgust at the ineffable stupidity of editors and readers.⁵

“The Death of Ilalotha” was included in OST, apparently at the suggestion of Derleth, and in RA. In establishing our current text we consulted two typescripts in the Smith Papers at JHL, a complete carbon of the published version and an incomplete copy of the original version.

1. CAS, letter to AWD, April 6, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

2. FW, letter to CAS, March 8, 1937 (ms, JHL).

3. FW, letter to CAS, March 24, 1937 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to RHB, September 9, 1937 (SL 313).

5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 302).

Mother of Toads

Just four days after completing the revision of “The Death of Ilalotha,” Clark Ashton Smith finished another story that he had begun almost two years earlier. Early in June, 1935, Smith told R. H. Barlow in a letter that “I have started a new Averoigne story, ‘Mother of Toads,’ which, I fear, will be too naughty for the chaste pages of W.T.” E. Hoffmann Price had been regularly selling stories to Spicy Mystery Stories, and after looking over a few issues Smith thought that he had gauged its editorial requirements: “This mag wants a combination of the lewd and the ghastly.” Smith did not think much of the magazine’s contents, but comforted himself with the rationalization that “after all, the genre is classic (vide Balzac’s ‘The Succubus’) and should have possibilities.”¹

The rejection of the story by its intended market fed Smith’s growing uncertainties about the writing of fiction:

“Mother of Toads” is a sort of carnal and erotic nightmare and I can’t decide on its merits. Spicy Mystery Stories rejected it after holding the ms. for nearly two months. I have now shipped it to Esquire, which, judging from the two issues I have read, will sometimes print stuff that would hardly make the grade with an honest pulp…. The magazine seems aimed at a rather naive class of readers who like to feel that they are wicked and sophisticated. I believe that a yarn like “Mother of Toads” would arouse considerable Sound and Fury if printed in that quaint periodical.²

But although Esquire’s editor seemed “to have considered [‘Mother of Toads’] rather favourably, and at least admitted that it was ‘well-done’,” Smith confronted the reality that Weird Tales, despite all of Wright’s apparent capriciousness, remained his only real market. Smith set about “gelding” the story, adding bitterly “With certain details omitted or left to the readers’ chaste imagination, Wright will no doubt use the yarn as a W.T. filler, and will pay me 25 or 26 pazoors for it some five or six months after publication.”³ Wright did indeed accept this bowdlerized text at the end of July,⁴ and it was published in the July 1938 issue. When informing Barlow of the story’s acceptance, Smith volunteered that “the tale remains a passable weird, with a sufficiently horrific ending, in which the hero is smothered to death by an army of diabolic toads after which he had refused the second dose of aphrodisiac offered him by the witch, La Mère des Crapauds.”⁵ It was this version of “Mother of Toads” that was collected in TSS.

In order to increase the chances of the story’s acceptance by Wright, Smith cut about three hundred words from the story consisting mostly of the more highly charged erotic descriptions. These were restored by consulting and comparing the following typescripts at JHL: Smith’s first version (original copy dated March 20, 1937, and the carbon); a complete carbon copy of the published version; and a working text that Smith used to work out the changes. “Mother of Toads” was part of Necronomicon Press’ Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith series, and we acknowledge Steve Behrends’ pioneering work on this story; however, we have made some different choices than did Mr. Behrends.

1. CAS, letter to RHB, c. June 1935 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 301–302).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, June 14, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, August 1, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

5. CAS, letter to RHW, September 9, 1937 (SL 312).

The Garden of Adompha

“I am working on a new weird, ‘The Garden of Adompha’ which is damnably hard and laborious,” Clark Ashton Smith wrote in a letter to August Derleth during the summer of 1937. Smith continued with an ominously prophetic observation: “I don’t mind hard work, if the results are satisfactory; but when they aren’t, it is certainly discouraging. No doubt most of the trouble is due to the fact that I am below par physically, and suffer from a sense of chronic fatigue.”¹ Smith completed the story on July 31, 1937, but his production of short stories, which stood at none for 1936 and only three for 1937, was about to stall once again, although he would continue to revise old stories and plot new ones. CAS wrote to Robert H. Barlow that he had sold “‘The Garden of Adompha,’ a tale which I am inclined to like” to Weird Tales, and that Farnsworth Wright “spoke of a possible cover-design by Finlay to go with the story.”² Smith received thirty-seven dollars for the story.³ It was published in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales, complete with a cover by Finlay, and was voted the most popular story in that issue by the readers. It was included in both GL and RA. The current text is based upon a carbon copy at the John Hay Library.

1. CAS, letter to AWD, July 20, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to RHB, September 9, 1937 (SL 312).

3. FW, letter to CAS, August 10, 1937 (ms, private collection).

The Great God Awto

Clark Ashton Smith was not fond of modern technology. For most of his life he lived without electricity or indoor plumbing, let alone a telephone, a radio, or an automobile. He harbored a strong dislike of the last listed invention. Consider the following excerpts from his letters:

I have not heard that the Indians were responsible for the fire; but I did talk with eyewitnesses who saw it start from a lighted cigarette that was tossed into the wayside grain by a passing auto, in which were four boys (unfortunately, not identified).… Crackers were popping merrily in Auburn all day and all night on the Fourth, and also on Sunday. And when I went in Sunday evening, the streets were a torrent of autos. After what I had been through, the reckless idiocy of the merry-making public simply made me boil. I fear that such conditions, and all their accompanying hazards, are going to get worse instead of better.¹

So Sultan Malik [E. Hoffmann Price] has gone into the garage business! Shades of the Silver Peacock and the Hashishins! Well, perhaps he is displaying a modicum of wisdom at that. No matter how serious the depression becomes, the U.S. population will go on running its chariots till the last tire blows out and the ultimate half-pint of gas is exhausted.²

And speaking of the Peacock Sultan, Lovecraft referred to E. Hoffmann Price’s 1928 Model “A” Ford as “Great Juggernaut.” It is apparent that “The Great God Awto” is an in-joke to a considerable extent, but one in which Smith’s sardonic and biting humor runs loose like a—, well, like a juggernaut. The story probably dates from the summer of 1937, when CAS wrote that “I have some science fiction (satire) under way at present; but confess that I don’t find it very congenial.”⁴ “The Great God Awto” was collected posthumously in TSS. The only surviving typescript among Smith’s papers at the John Hay Library was prepared by his wife, Carol, sometime during the 1950s, so the current text was taken from the February 1940 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

1. CAS, letter to Genevieve K. Sully, July 9, 1931 (SL 155–157).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. late February-early March 1934 (SL 252).

3. See E. Hoffmann Price, Book of the Dead. Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others (Memories of the Pulp Era). Ed. Peter Ruber (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2001): p. 53.

4. CAS, letter to AWD, September 8, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

Strange Shadows

After reading this story it would appear that Clark Ashton Smith was trying to write a story that would be acceptable to John W. Campbell and Unknown, but it is not known if any of the three known versions were ever submitted anywhere.¹ Three versions of the story exist, the third of which (with the variant title of “I Am Your Shadow”) is incomplete. We present version two, the latest complete version of the story available. The conclusion of “I Am Your Shadow,” along with the complete text of version one, may be found in Appendix 5.

1. This would seem to be the case from a letter Smith wrote to Derleth dated November 23, 1941 (ms, SHSW) that states “I am finding it easier to work now and have the ending of a tale (suitable, I think, for Unknown Worlds) which has baffled me for close to 18 months.” Its position on Smith’s log of completed stories would not invalidate this, as Smith would sometimes list a tale in the order it was started, not finished.

   

The Enchantress of Sylaire

Very little information is available concerning the writing of this story, Clark Ashton Smith’s final tale of Averoigne, which saw print in the July 1941 issue of Weird Tales. It does not appear in the table of contents for a proposed collection that Smith entitled Averoigne Chronicles, although a story with the similar title of “The Sorceress of Averoigne” does appear.¹ An outline for a story with this title, which Steve Behrends dates to October 1930, exists, but it bears little resemblance to the current story outside of the use of a mirror for divination.² “The Enchantress of Sylaire” appears to have been written between the summer of 1938 and Farnsworth Wright’s firing as editor of Weird Tales in February 1940, since Smith mentions that WT had two of his stories in its stock of forthcoming stories (see note for “The Coming of the White Worm”).³ The text of the story’s appearance in the July 1941 issue of WT was consulted, along with its appearance in AY.

1. BB item 60.

2. SS pp. 144–146.

3. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, February 22, 1940 (SL 328).

Double Cosmos

Although Clark Ashton Smith did not complete “Double Cosmos” until March 25, 1940, he had worked on it at intervals for several years. Back in 1934, when Smith still harbored hopes that Astounding Stories might yet become a regular market for his stories, he received a tip about one of Assistant Editor Desmond Hall’s pet subjects from August Derleth: “Thanks for the tip about Desmond Hall’s medical prepossessions. I am preparing a yarn with a semi-medical interest, dealing with a chemist who invents a strange, terrific drug that enables him to see the reality of the cosmos in toto. The revelation is rather staggering.... ‘Secondary Cosmos’ is the title: our universe proving but a sort of vestigial appendage of the real world, overlapping into a subsidiary space.”¹ Smith apparently drew upon the following entries in his Black Book. He called the first one “The Rift:” “A man who sees, following a brain-operation, a rift in the material world through which mysterious beings pass in enigmatic traffic. The rift is visible wherever he goes, as a sort of charm, in streets, buildings, fields, etc.”The entry immediately following “The Rift” is even more relevant: “A scientist who, investigating the so-called 4th dimension, discovers that he himself is merely a sort of organ or extension of a being that fruitions in this other world. He is, so to speak, a rather useless vestigial tail or appendix and, at a certain stage in the being’s evolution, this organ is to be discarded; this act of shedding entails the death of the investigator.” With Smith’s typical misanthropy, the title of this one was “The Appendix.”²

The story was set aside for three years. Smith described his current literary program in another letter to Derleth: “I am trying to finish a science fiction story, Secondary Cosmos, which I began two years ago; and may also add a third tale, The Rebirth of the Flame, to my Singing Flame stories. Other tales, begun and thoroughly plotted, are The Alkahest, and Sharia: a Tale of the Lost Planet. The last-named has great possibilities, I feel. Recent revisions include The Maze of the Enchanter, which I have pruned by more than a thousand words for re-submission to Esquire and W.T.”³

Smith didn’t do much with the story after its completion. He admitted that “None of the present fantasy markets (Unknown is the best, I guess) appeal to me greatly….”⁴ He later told Derleth that he had given the story to agent Julius Schwartz Jr. to sell, but did not know the story’s status.⁵ “Double Cosmos” remained unpublished until it was published in Robert M. Price’s fanzine Crypt of Cthulhu in 1983. It was included in SS.

1. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

2. BB items 37 and 38.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 1, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, April 21, 1940 (SL 330).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 6, 1948 (ms, SHSW).

Nemesis of the Unfinished

This is the only instance where Clark Ashton Smith actually collaborated on a story.¹ Don Carter was the husband of Natalie Carter, whose portrait of Smith appears on the back panel of the dust jacket of Smith’s Selected Poems (1971). The Carters lived in Bowman, California, a small community located just outside of Auburn, and were part of a small network of friends that helped Smith with gifts of clothing and food and the occasional odd job when he needed to earn some cash. “Nemesis of the Unfinished” was apparently written while Smith was recuperating at home from a broken ankle. An outline of the story under the present title (uncredited, but the handwriting is similar to that in known specimens of Carter’s handwriting) was found among Smith’s papers, so it appears that the basic idea of the story occurred to Carter (undoubtedly inspired by the boxes of papers kept at Smith’s cabin).² Two different versions of this story exist (an early draft of the first version is dated July 30, 1947). The first version is complete, but the second version, which incorporates significant deviation from Carter’s proposed plot, appears to be missing the last page. This version is included in Appendix 6.

1. “Seedling of Mars” was written from a plot provided by the winner of one of Hugo Gernsback’s magazine contests, while in the case of “The House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord” Smith gave completed stories to E. Hoffmann Price with instructions to do with them what he wanted; neither case involved the active interaction of two creative minds.

2. For Carter’s outline, see SS 40–43, 273–275.

The Master of the Crabs

Weird Tales celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with its March 1948 issue. In preparation for this, Associate Editor Lamont Buchanan invited Smith to contribute a new story in May 1947.¹ The idea for “The Master of the Crabs” may be found in the Black Book:

A wizard whose legs are trapped by falling rock in a sea-cavern. By hypnotic will-power, he gains control of an army of crabs, and forces them to overpower ship-wrecked seamen and feed him with shreds of flesh torn from their bodies. Tale to be told by one of the mariners, whose companions have disappeared mysteriously. Locale: desert isle. Wizard had perhaps gone there in quest of lost treasure. Possesses own eternal longevity. Crabs turn on and devour him when he loses his mesmeric power.2

This entry predates the story entry for “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” which was completed on May 1, 1932, so this story had a long gestation period. Smith wrote out a full outline of this story, which he called at first “The Crabs of Iribos.”³ (Smith may have been reminded of this story when he broke his ankle and was hospitalized for a time during that summer.) WT Editor Dorothy McIlwraith accepted the story that October and paid Smith forty-seven dollars.⁴ It appeared in the anniversary issue accompanied by a gruesome drawing by Lee Brown Coye. Smith included the story in AY.

It was through “The Master of the Crabs” that Smith made a minor but real impact on modern pagan religions. Smith refers to an arthame in the story, which is a type of dagger used by ceremonial magicians. He picked this word up from his copy of Grillot de Givry’s 1931 treatise Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the Englishman who helped bring the Wiccan religion into the public realm, apparently read the issue of Weird Tales containing this story while he was visiting America and picked up the word, which he inexplicably spelled as athame. According to Ronald Hutton, “There is no evidence to explain Gardner’s omission of the ‘r’ in the word; perhaps he first heard it orally and guessed at the spelling, perhaps he decided to simplify it, or perhaps the error was in a source he was copying.”⁵ The surviving manuscript of “The Master of the Crabs” was severely scorched in the fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin in September 1957. The text from WT was collated with the surviving fragments.

1. Lamont Buchanan, letter to CAS, May 7, 1947 (ms, JHL).

2. BB item 42.

3. This outline is too long to be included here, but it may be found in SS 148–150.

4. See Dorothy McIlwraith, letters to CAS, October 3, 1947 and October 31, 1947 (ms, JHL).

5. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999): p. 230.

Morthylla

Smith had one of his increasingly infrequent bursts of productivity in the autumn of 1953, completing two stories in the later part of September and beginning a third. One of these was “Morthylla”, “a tale of Zothique, concerning a pseudo-lamia who was really a normal woman trying to please the tastes of her eccentric poet-lover.”¹ Smith had worked out its plot in the Black Book:

Valzain, the young voluptuary, weary of feasting and debauchery leaves the house of a friend when the revels are at their height, and wanders forth from Umbri, city of the Delta, to an old necropolis on a mound-like hill half-way between Umbri and Psiom, the twin city. Here, in the moonlight, he meets a beautiful being who calls herself Morthizza, lamia and spirit of the tombs. Half-believing, half-disbelieving, in his weariness of mortality and of fleshly things, he falls in love with her. They meet night after night. His desires begin to revive, but she tantalizes him, refusing corporeal contact. One night, as playful proof that she is a vampire, Morthylla wounds him in the throat with her teeth, saying that this is the only kiss permitted between them. But, as proof of her love, she will not suck his blood. Valzain pleads for a further consummation. Wistfully, she tells him that he must know and love her as she really is before such a consummation would be possible. A day or two later Valzain, visiting the twin city Psiom, sees a woman in the street who has the very features of Morthylla. A friend tells him that she is Beldith, a woman of pleasure, who lately has been absenting herself from the orgies of Psiom, and has been seen going forth at night toward the old necropolis that was once common to both of the cities of the Delta. Valzain, disillusioned, realizes that she is identical with Morthylla, and that she has been playing a game with him. He seeks her out and taxes her with the deception, which she readily admits, at the same time asking if he cannot love her as a mortal woman, since she, all the time, had loved him as a man. Valzain, fearful of the revulsion of the flesh which, for him, has ensued from every carnal contact, tells her sorrowfully of his disenchantment, and without reproaches, bids her farewell. Later, unable to bear the tedium of existence, he commits suicide, stabbing himself in the throat with a sharp poignard at the same spot were Morthylla’s teeth had wounded him. After death, he finds himself at that point in time where he had first met Morthylla among the tombs, and the illusion begins to repeat itself for him, presumably with no danger of an awakening. The woman Beldith grows old and grey among the revelries of Psiom; but her intimates note that she seems often absent-minded between the wine-cups; and her young lovers sometimes complain that she is distrait and unresponsive in their arms.²

A poetic couplet that was entered a few entries before the above-quoted entry would appear in hindsight to have provided the germ of this idea:

For in your voice are voices from beyond the tomb.

And in your face a shadow risen from vast vaults.³

The Relationship of Valzain and Famurza resembles that of CAS and his mentor, George Sterling.

Weird Tales snatched this story up and published it in the May 1953 issue. The magazine would soon be reduced to digest size and would cease publication in little over a year. Smith included the story in TSS. Only a couple of pages of the typescript for “Morthylla” survive among Smith’s papers at JHL; most of the typescript perished in the September 1957 fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin.

1. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 371 [misdated 1953 in this appearance]).

2. BB item 99.

3. BB item 94.

Schizoid Creator

Psychoanalysis and psychiatrists were not subjects near to Clark Ashton Smith’s heart. In his 1934 essay “On Fantasy” he listed “Freudianism” as one of the chief forces working against the imagination in modern life, and in a 1949 symposium on science fiction he offered the quip “Sometimes I suspect that Freud should be included among the modern masters of science fiction!”² One of his epigrams states that “One can postulate anything, and people will accept it as religion, philosophy—or psychoanalysis.”³

Smith gave full vent to his contempt for Freud’s minions in one of two stories he wrote early in the autumn of 1952, “Schizoid Creator.” As he described the tale to L. Sprague de Camp, it was “a fantastic satire that mixes black magic with psychiatric shock-treatment (the patient being a demon!).”⁴ The “black magic” to which Smith refers is the use of the names of God to compel entities both demonic and divine to do the sayer’s will. Two consecutive items in Smith’s Black Book illuminate this further:

According to Jewish tradition, when Lilith refused to yield obedience to Adam, she uttered the Shemhamphorash, the ineffable name of Jehovah, and, by virtue of this, instantly flew away. This utterance gave her such power that even Jehovah could not coerce her.

According to widespread belief, the gods have kept their true names secret but other gods, or even men, should be able to conjure with them. To the Mohammedan, Allah is but an epithet in place of the Most Great Name; and the secret of the latter is committed to prophets and apostles alone. Those who know the Most Great Name can, by pronouncing it, transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead to life, and work other miracles.⁵

Smith refers to “Shem-hamphorash, the nameless name,” in his last poem, “Cycles.”⁶

The image of Satan caressing a flayed girl is a homage to his mentor, George Sterling. In his poem “A Wine of Wizardry” Sterling included the following lines:

But Fancy still is fugitive, and turns

To caverns where a demon altar burns,

And Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,

Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed,

Ere Lilith come his indolence to greet,

Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed

In chains so heated at their master’s fire

That one new-damned had thought their bright attire

Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance

So terribly that brilliance shall enhance.⁷

Smith submitted the story to Fantasy Fiction, a digest-sized competitor of Weird Tales that emulated the model of Unknown Worlds, where it appeared in the November 1953 issue. Only burned fragments survive of the typescript for this story, and what parts can still be read would seem to indicate that it was an earlier draft—there are differences with the published text, but the differences are cruder and less polished than what finally appeared. The current text is based upon the Fantasy Fiction text.

1. PD 38: “In short, all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized by Freudianism, by sociology, and by the five senses, are due for the critical horse-laugh.…”

2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 11, 1949 (SL 358).

3. CAS, The Devil’s Notebook. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Don Herron (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990): p. 71.

4. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 370). This letter is misdated 1953.

5. BB items 21 and 22.

6. CAS, “Cycles.” In The Wine of Summer: The Complete Poetry and Translations Volume 2. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008): p. 642.

7. George Sterling, “A Wine of Wizardry.” The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003): 150–151.

Monsters in the Night

Anthony Boucher (pseudonym of William A. P. White [1911–1968]) had given Clark Ashton Smith’s first two Arkham House collections favorable reviews, so when he became one of the founding editors of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he would appear to have been a reliable new market for Smith’s stories. Boucher even lived in nearby Berkeley, California, where Smith visited frequently to visit his friend George Haas, with whom Boucher was also acquainted.

Smith submitted “Thirteen Phantasms” to Boucher late in 1951. Boucher rejected the story on the grounds that it was too realistic, but took the time to offer Smith these observations, which unfortunately survive only in a burned fragment:

Personally I’ve been enjoying & admiring your fiction for twenty years & more—particularly that individually mordant humor that you display in such items as “The Monster of the Prophecy” and “The Weird of Avoosl Wutthuquan.” (I just checked & see that I misspelled that… but you’ll admit that’s doing well from memory!) But your type of highly elaborated & remote fantasy doesn’t [burned] to be what our readers want. They prefer a more simple treatment, a closer impingement of the fantastic [burned] people. [remainder burned]²

He concluded the letter with an invitation to drop in for a drink if Smith were ever in Berkeley.

Smith must have experienced a sensation of déjà vu at reading this: it was as if Farnsworth Wright were speaking from the next world. When he next submitted a story to F&SF, it was with a newly written story that lacked many of his characteristic rhetorical flourishes.

“Monsters in the Night,” one of Smith’s most frequently anthologized stories, was the next story that Smith submitted to Boucher. He rejected it with these observations: “Sorry, but—nice idea, this werewolf-vs-robot, but I’m afraid it tips itself to the reader too early, & is too bluntly resolved.”³ Boucher responded in a more positive manner after Smith rewrote the story and fixed those defects: “With a very slight change at the end, we want to accept ‘Monsters in the Night.’ Please advise if you approve of the following, which would replace your last two paragraphs on page 4: [. . . ] We think this is quite an effective windup to a highly unique story.”⁴ Smith agreed to the change, leading to a story contract, a check for forty-five dollars, and the story’s appearance in the October 1954 issue of F&SF (under the title of “A Prophecy of Monsters,” which was obviously a nod by Boucher to one of his favorite Smith stories).⁵It was collected posthumously in OD.

Since Smith readily agreed to Boucher’s suggested changes, and since he had a history of being open to such suggestions, we have retained the published ending. For the curious, here is what Smith originally wrote:

“Who—what—are you?” quavered the werewolf.

“I am a robot,” said the stranger.

Several different drafts exist of this story. Our text is based upon the typescript dated April 11, 1953 on which CAS had crossed out “Monsters in the Night” and had written in its place “A Prophecy of Monsters,” along with “To Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “1100 words.”

1. See FFT pp. 61

2. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, December 6, 1951 (ms, JHL).

3. Anthony Boucher, note to CAS, April 18, 1953 (ms, private collection).

4. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, May 17, 1953 (ms, JHL).

5. Robert Mills, letter to CAS and attached legal contract, June 2, 1953 (ms, JHL).

Phoenix

August Derleth invited Clark Ashton Smith to contribute a story to an original science fiction anthology, Time To Come, that he was editing for Farrar, Straus and Young. Smith wrote a new story based upon a plot idea he had jotted down in the Black Book. Entitled “Phoenix,” it described “An expedition sent from the earth to the extinct sun, for the purpose of rekindling it by means of atomic fission. The expedition is trapped by the tremendous gravity of the dead, solid orb but accomplishes its purpose, after sending back to earth a rocket containing reports, messages, etc.”¹ He completed the story sometime in September 1953 according to the typescript presented by Smith to George Haas, which was consulted for this text. It was collected posthumously in OD.

1. BB item 81. The title itself may be found at item 78.

The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles

Smith had entertained the idea of writing additional adventures of Satampra Zeiros when he plotted out a story in his Black Book that he called both “The Ancient Shadow” and “The Shadow from the Sarcophagus,” but the story never progressed beyond that stage.¹ “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles” was begun in October 1952, when he mentioned in a letter that he was working on the story,² but it was apparently not completed until just before April 25, 1957, when he announced its completion and submission to F&SF.³ Anthony Boucher delivered the news of its rejection in person, probably when they gathered together at George Haas’ home in Berkeley, but he typed out a letter putting forth his criticism: “It’s good to see the return of Satampra Zeiros after 26 years; but I’m afraid I can’t feel that THE THEFT OF THE THIRTY-NINE GIRDLES is really fantasy. The only fantasy element lies in its Hyperborean setting, & the events themselves, in your words (p 6), ‘though extraordinary, are not beyond nature.’ Result: an entertaining crime story in an extravagantly exotic setting rather than, strictly, a fantasy.”⁴ Smith submitted the story next to Fantastic Universe, but apparently editor Hans Stefan Santesson failed to appreciate its subtle humor. Donald A. Wollheim accepted the story for Saturn Science Fiction, a short-lived digest magazine, which published it under the less imaginative but also less suggestive title “The Powder of Hyperborea” in its March 1958 issue. It was collected posthumously in TSS.

Several different typescripts exist for this story, along with a holographic draft, but none of them appear to represent Smith’s final thoughts. We based our text upon the magazine appearance, although we did restore “Lament to Vixeela,” which we believe Smith removed on the theory that a 1950s-era sf magazine would not be a receptive venue for his poetry.

1. BB item 70. “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles” may be found in a listing of possible titles at item 210.

2. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 371). [letter was dated 1953].

3. CAS, letter to AWD, April 25, 1957 (ms, SHSW).

4. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, May 22, 1957 (ms, JHL).

Symposium of the Gorgon

This story was completed by Clark Ashton Smith on August 5, 1957. He submitted it to Anthony Boucher at the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and received the following response: “I like ‘Symposium of the Gorgon,’ but I fear it’s too absolute a fantasy for most modern tastes. Our readers seem to prefer a less tenuous liaison with reality, & a little more in the way of plot & character. This has the charm of verse, but not enough bones for fiction.”¹ It was accepted by Hans Stefan Santesson for Fantastic Universe. “Symposium of the Gorgon” appeared in the October 1958 issue. Curiously enough, the cover features a Virgil Finlay cover depicting the Gorgon and her statuary victims, but it was not illustrating any scene from Smith’s story.

Smith expressed some of the same ideas, albeit less acerbically, in his poem “The Centaur.”

The Smith Papers at the John Hay Library has no less than two typescripts of “Symposium of the Gorgon,” as well as fragments of an autograph manuscript, but all of these are apparently earlier drafts that differ significantly from the published version. These versions are much less polished than the published version, and to perpetuate any of these changes would not be to Smith’s credit. Besides Fantastic Universe, the editors consulted the story’s appearance in TSS, but this version had a number of typographical errors.

1. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, August 10, 1957 (ms, JHL).

The Dart of Rasasfa

We wish that we could say that Clark Ashton Smith’s final story was one of his best, that he went out at the top of his game, but we regret that we cannot. “The Dart of Rasasfa” was commissioned by Cele Goldsmith, editor of Fantastic, a digest-sized magazine that under her direction published a great deal of high-quality fantasy, including some of Fritz Leiber’s best tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Smith was supposed to write a story around a cover by artist George Barr. According to Donald Sidney-Fryer, Smith completed the story in July 1961. Smith was in ill health during that period, having been exhausted both physically and emotionally when he was forced by legal order to have a bulldozer fill in the well that he had helped his father dig years earlier. Steve Behrends quotes Carol Smith’s unpublished memoir, reporting that the story’s Gernsbackian flavor was meant to be ironic. After reading the manuscript of this story, Goldsmith wrote to Forrest J. Ackerman, who was acting as Smith’s agent, expressing her regrets in having to decline what would turn out to be Smith’s last story:

If you read it, I think you can understand why it puts us in the embarrassing position of having to return it. There is no story, no plot, nothing. It would be an injustice to Smith fans and to the magazine audience to think of printing this. It would only detract from the wonderful stories he has written in the past and from the excellent reputation that is attached to his name.

These remarks were written on August 15, 1961. Smith had died from a stroke the previous day, so he never knew that the story was rejected.

1. SS 252–254.

2. Cele Goldsmith, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, August 15, 1961 (ms, private collection).