A Vintage From Atlantis

by Clark Ashton Smith

  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.

  RW Red World of Polaris. Ed. Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).

  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.

  TI Tales of India and Irony. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).

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

  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 Holiness of Azédarac

  Smith began the composition of “The Holiness of Azédarac” (originally called “The Satanic Prelate”) in late April 1931, but put it aside in order to write “The Hunters from Beyond.”1 He completed the story on May 21, and it was readily accepted by Farnsworth Wright, appearing in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Smith received eighty dollars for this tale.2 August Derleth apparently did not find it sufficiently outré, since CAS wrote to him “I agree with you about ‘Azédarac’, which is more piquant than weird. But I like to do something in lighter vein occasionally.”3 This text is based upon a carbon of the original typescript at JHL. It was collected in both LW and RA.

  At one point CAS contemplated writing a sequel to the story, which he would have called “The Doom of Azédarac”:

  Azédarac, sorcerer-bishop of Ximes, supposedly dying in the odour of sanctity, in reality transports himself to an other-dimensional world which represents an alternative development of the Earth-sphere from the same primal causes and origins. In this world, many peculiar laws and conditions prevail, together with certain distorted resemblances to the Earth. Azédarac finds himself in a curiously topsy-turvy Averoigne whose people are only vaguely human. He meets a being who is the otherworld alternative of himself, and a weird duel ensues between the two, each using all his resources of wizardry and necromancy. In the end Azédarac, being out of his normal element, loses, and is absorbed like a shadow by the other.4

  1. CAS, letter to AWD, May 1, 1931 (SHSW).

  2. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letters to CAS, March 30, 1934 and April 28, 1934 (ms, JHL).

  3. CAS, letter to AWD, June 15, 1931 (SL 154).

  4. BB item 49.

  The Maker of Gargoyles

  During the summer of 1931 Smith had an idea for a story about “a gargoyle on the new-built cathedral of Vyônes which comes to life at night and terrorizes the town with eerie and prankish depredations.” The plot took a more sinister turn as he expanded this germ into what he called “The Carver of Gargoyles,” later changed to “The Maker of Gargoyles:”

  Two gargoyles, wrought by the same carver, on the new-built cathedral of Vyônes, one of which is expressive of malignant hatred, and the other of unclean lust. These gargoyles come to life at night, and terrorize the town, appearing in different places, as if they were seeking someone. At last they find the house of the carver, who has recently married a girl of Vyônes. The next day, the carver is found dead, with a torn throat, and his wife raving mad, with her clothing in shreds. On the teeth of the malignant gargoyle, in its usual position in the cathedral cornice, is human blood; and there are fragments of a woman’s dress on the claws of the other.1

  The story was completed on June 16, 1931, and promptly submitted to Harry Bates at Strange Tales.

  Smith circulated the carbon copy among the Lovecraft Circle for their comments and suggestions. By coincidence, the plot of “The Maker of Gargoyles” is similar to a story-idea recorded by Lovecraft in his “Commonplace Book.”2 Smith expressed the “hope [that] you won’t let any coincidence of idea in the gargoyle yarn prevent you from developing your own tale. Your treatment, I imagine, would be quite different from mine; and certainly there is plenty of room. I’ve never seen a story at all similar to the ‘Maker of Gargoyles’; but the notion is one that might readily occur to imaginative minds”.3

  Derleth liked the story, but “found one thing about which I might make a suggestion—the end”:

  I think it’s pretty evident what’s causing all the trouble, since you play up the gargoyles so, so that the climax being the maker’s realization seems weak to the reader. Why not have him go up and destroy the gargoyles, and in their destruction, himself be killed? Say he goes up to roof, there is a moment of cataclysmic realization; then in sudden repentant horror he seizes something and begins to demolish them, tumbling them from the roof. Suddenly he feels something pulling at him, he loses his hold and plunges downward. In the morning he is found crushed on the cathedral steps, his clothes still caught firmly on a claw of one of the gargoyle s—a claw on a limb distended in a fashion which the bishop or whoever sees knows was not wrought in the original stone.4

  Smith wrote back to Derleth that he thought “[y]our suggestion anent ‘The Maker of Gargoyles’ is damn good, and I shall adopt it if the tale comes back from [Harry] Bates, who is evidently holding it for the publisher’s reaction …”, adding “Funny—I seem to have more trouble with the endings of stories than anything else. God knows how many I have had to re-write”.5 Bates returned the story, so CAS rewrote the ending on August 27, 1932, and submitted the revised version to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales.6

  Unfortunately, “[s]omewhat to my disgust, Wright] returned ‘Gargoyles’ as melodramatic and unconvincing’,”7 leading to a resubmission of the revised version to Bates. He rejected it once more, but admitted “that the new ending was better and that the story was now ‘right on the line’ and could possibly be bought”.8 After this Smith put the story aside for several months before rewriting two paragraphs “so as to make the fight between Reynard and the gargoyles a little more plausible”. In his letter to Derleth announcing the sale, Smith added that “I certainly admire your perseverance in sending in stuff as much as ten or twelve times—so far, I haven’t had the nerve to go beyond a third submission”.9Weird Tales paid Smith fifty-six dollars and published it in the August 1932 issue.10 It was collected posthumously in TSS. This text is based upon a carbon copy of the final revised typescript at JHL. (A copy of the original version presented to HPL forms part of their Lovecraft Collection.)

  1. SS 167.

  2. Item 76 of HPL’s “Commonplace Book,” written in 1919, reads: “Ancient cathedral—hideous gargoyle—man seeks to rob—found dead—gargoyle’s jaw bloody.” (Miscellaneous Writings, Ed. S. T. Joshi [Sauk City, WI: 1995], p. 91.)

  3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. late August 1931] (LL 30).

  4. AWD, letter to CAS, 14 August [1931] (ms, SHSW).

  5. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (SL 160).

  6. CAS, letter to AWD, August 28, 1931 (SL 161).

  7. CAS, letter to AWD, October 23, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  8. CAS, letter to AWD, November 21, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  9. CAS to AWD, March 15, 1932 (SL 173).

  10. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS, July 27, 1932 (ms, JHL).

  Beyond the Singing Flame

  As a result of the success of “The City of the Singing Flame,” Smith undertook the writing
of a sequel, completing it on June 30, 1931. In his cover letter to David Lasser of Wonder Stories, which published “Beyond the Singing Flame” in the November 1931 issue, Smith wrote that

  I have found it advisable to maintain the same suggestive vagueness that characterized the other story; though I have explained many things that were left obscure in the other. The description of the Inner Dimension is a daring flight; and I seem almost to have set myself the impossible task which Dante attempted in his account of Paradise. Granting that human beings could survive the process of revibration in the Flame, I think that the new-sense-faculties and powers developed by Hastane, Angarth and Ebbonly are quite logical and possible. Most writers of trans-dimensional tales do not seem to postulate any change of this nature; but it is really quite obvious that there might be something of the kind, since the laws and conditions of existence would be totally different in the new realm.1

  Smith wrote to Donald Wandrei that “This is, by all odds, my best recent story”.2 He eventually received sixty-eight dollars from the notoriously delinquent Hugo Gernsback, after engaging the services of New York attorney Ione Weber.3

  In 1940 Walter Gillings, editor of the British science fiction magazine Tales of Wonder, reprinted both “The City of the Singing Flame” and “Beyond the Singing Flame” together for the first time. Rather than reprinting them separately, Gillings edited them together, rewriting portions of Smith’s prose and adding a bridging paragraph. Mr. Gillings admitted this to Donald Sidney-Fryer some years later.4 When CAS was putting together OST, he could not locate either his carbon of “The City of the Singing Flame” or the original WS appearance, so he sent along tear sheets from the Spring 1940 issue of Tales of Wonder containing the conjoined stories. This text was duly included in both OST and in August Derleth’s 1949 anthology The Other Side of the Moon (Pellegrini & Cudahy), but not, contrary to what we stated in DS 298, in From Off This World, a collection of “Hall of Fame” stories reprinted in the pulp magazine Startling Stories, edited by Oscar Friend and Leo Margulies (Merlin Press, 1949), which published each tale separately. The present text is based upon a carbon of the original typescript at JHL.

  1. PD 11.

  2. CAS, letter to DAW, August 18, 1931 (ms, MHS).

  3. See Mike Ashley, “The Perils of Wonder: Clark Ashton Smith’s Experiences with Wonder Stories.” Dark Eidolon no. 2 (July 1989): 2-8.

  4. EOD 175.

  Seedling of Mars

  Hugo Gernsback had some unique ideas regarding how his writers should be compensated, preferring to hold contests rather than offering authors a fixed scale of payment. Since the purpose of his magazines was to increase popular interest in scientific progress in general, and space travel in particular, he and editor David Lasser announced a contest for the best interplanetary plot in the Spring 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly. The readers who submitted the best seven plots would win a cash prize, and the plot would be assigned to a professional writer for further development. E. M. Johnston (1873-1946), of Collingwood, Ontario, won Second Prize for an idea called “The Martian.”1 Lasser offered Smith the assignment of turning Johnston’s raw conception into a story, adding “We have no objections of your revising the plots for the purpose of the story as long as the fundamental idea is retained. We are perfectly willing to pay you our usual rate for your completed story”.2 Smith wrote the 16,000 word story in less than a week, completing it on July 20. He wrote to Lovecraft that “the plot … was pretty good, so the job wasn’t so disagreeable as it sounds.” Smith was to have received one hundred and eighteen dollars for “The Martian,” which was published under the title “The Planet Entity” in the Fall 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly. Smith later changed the title to “Seedling of Mars” when he assembled the contents of his fifth Arkham House collection, TSS, which was published posthumously.

  1. 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), p. 187.

  2. David Lasser, letter to CAS, July 10, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early August 1931] (SL 159).

  The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

  The following plot synopsis was found among Smith’s papers (which he originally titled “The Vaults of Abomi”):

  Some human explorers on a dying world who are driven to take shelter in subterranean vaults by a strange, crawling, mat-like monstrosity called the vortlup. The vaults are evidently of mausolean nature, and contain the mummies of an unknown race, some of which lack the upper portion of the head. The explorers become separated in the dark, winding passages, and one is lost from the others. They hear a muffled cry at some distance, followed by silence; and going in the direction of the cry with their flashlights, meet a terrible sight—the body of their comrade which still walks erect, with a great black, slug-like creature attached to the half-eaten head. The thing is controlling the corpses which passes its friends, enters another catacomb, and removes a heavy boulder from the mouth of a deeper vault, beneath the direction of the slug. Following, the others shoot the creature, which dissolves in a sort of liquid putrescence, and, at the same time, the animated corpse drops dead. Then, from the uncovered pit, there emerges a hoard of the black monsters, and the men flee. They are not followed into the sunlight; and fortunately the vortlup has disappeared.1

  At some point Smith changed “Abomi” to “Yoh-Vombis” and the references to a “dying world” and “unknown race” to “a deserted ancient city on Mars” and “ancient Martian;” perhaps the composition of “Seedling of Mars” had stimulated his interest in the Red Planet. Steve Behrends also suggests that the setting might have been influenced by a series of wildfires that Smith battled during the summer of 1931, pointing out that in a letter to August Derleth he described the sky after one such blaze as being “as dark and dingy as the burnt-out sky of the planet Mars”.2 The story, which he described to Derleth as a “rather ambitious hunk of extra-planetary weirdness”,3 was completed on September 12, 1931.

  We have not seen Lovecraft’s original remarks to Smith regarding the story, but he wrote to Donald Wandrei at the time that he thought it was “great—replete with the musty, tenebrous, & menacing atmosphere of alien & unholy arcana.” Derleth’s response was more qualified, taking issue with the choice of some words and adding that he “would have liked it much much better had it been set on earth, minus the interplanetary Martian angle.”45 Smith defended the extraterrestrial setting of “Yoh-Vombis” against objections that it might well be set among the ruins of an earthly antiquity: “I suppose the interplanetary angle is a matter of taste. As far as I am concerned, it adds considerably to the interest, particularly since the tale has little or nothing in common with the usual science fiction stuff”.6

  Wright rejected “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” on its first submission, telling Smith “to speed up the first half… on the plea that many of his readers would never get to the interesting portion as it stands.” This did not please Smith: “Oh hell… I suppose I can leave out a lot of descriptive matter; but it’s a crime all the same.7 Lovecraft encouraged him to stand his ground, writing “if I were in your place I’d tell Wright to go to Hades & take my chances on rejection. He would probably take the tale in the end, even if not now; & any change in so well-balanced a narrative would be the sheerest vandalism”.8 But as Smith poignantly pointed out, his situation was different from that of Lovecraft:

  I would have told Wright to go chase himself in regard to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”, if I didn’t have the support of my parents, and debts to pay off. For this reason it’s important for me to place as many stories as possible and have them coming out at a tolerably early date. However, I did not reduce the tale by as much as Wright suggested, and I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents of the preliminary section. What I did do, mainly, was to condense the descriptive matter, some of which had a slight suspicion of prolixity anyhow. But I shall
restore most of it, if the tale is ever brought out in book form. W. accepted the revised version by return mail.9

  Smith completed the desired revisions on October 24, 1931, and he then resubmitted “Yoh-Vombis” to Weird Tales. Wright was enthusiastic about the story, writing in his letter of acceptance that it was “a tremendous tale, a powerful story”.10 Smith received sixty-three dollars for the story, wryly noting to Derleth that “I mulcted myself out of 17 dollars on the price by the surgical excisions which I performed”.11 It appeared in the May 1932 issue, where it tied with David H. Keller’s “The Last Magician” as the most popular story in that issue. The tale is included in OST and RA. Smith also included it among the contents of Far from Time, a collection of his stories that he submitted to Ballantine Books in the 1950s; Ray Bradbury wrote a foreword for this anthology that was included in Jack L. Chalker’s tribute collection In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith (Baltimore: Anthem, 1963), and later in RA. The present text was established by a comparison of the typescript of the original version, originally presented by Smith to Robert H. Barlow and now in a private collection (a photocopy of which was provided by Rah Hoffman), with the typescript of the published version, with consultation of the published versions in WT and OST.

  In describing the origins of “The Vault of Yoh-Vombis,” as well as in determining its present text, the current editors must acknowledge the pioneering work of Steve Behrends. It is impossible to walk this path without following his footsteps.

  1. SS 162-63.

  2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931; quoted in Steve Behrends, “Introduction” to The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith: The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, March 1988), p. 5.