“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. V
izetelly, 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
The Last Hieroglyph Page 44