A Vintage From Atlantis

by Clark Ashton Smith

  3. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931 (SL 162).

  4. HPL to DAW, September 25, 1931, (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002], p. 286).

  5. AWD, letter to CAS, 18 September 1931 (ms, JHL). Behrends (supra) notes that Smith incorporated the suggested changes. In his response to Derleth on September 19, 1931 (ms, SHSW), CAS explained his earlier choices: “‘Foreprescience’ was both punk and needless, and probably it isn’t in any dictionary. I must have wanted a trisyllable for the rhythm, or something, and didn’t stop to consider its exact meaning. ‘Presentiment’ would fill the bill; and ‘anything of the sort’ could be put ‘anything of peril’.”

  6. CAS, letter to AWD, September 19, 1931 (ms, SHSW). Part of Derleth’s objection to the setting of the story on Mars may be due to his attitude towards contemporary science fiction: “As a rule I don’t read scientifiction stuff at all. I regard it as a sort of bastard growth on the true weird tale, though I suppose that would be a sort of blasphemy to H. P. and his stressing of the ‘cosmic beyond’. …” AWD, letter to CAS, October 26 [1931] (ms, JHL).

  7. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. 20 October 1931] (LL 31).

  8. HPL, letter to CAS [Postmarked October 30, 1931] (ms, private collection).

  9. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (SL 165). Smith took a different slant on the subject in correspondence with Derleth. On November 12, 1931, he wrote that “‘Yoh-Vombis’ was injured little if at all by the excisions which I made, since I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents, and merely condensed the preliminary descriptive matter. There were certain paragraphs that had a suspicion of prolixity anyhow” (ms, SHSW).

  10. FW, letter to CAS, October 29, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  11. CAS, letter to AWD, November 3, 1931 (SL 164).

  The Eternal World

  Smith called “The Eternal World” the “best and most original of my super-scientific tales”.1 He described the story to August Derleth on September 22, 1931 as having a “speculative basis [that] would give Einstein a headache”.2 On that same day he jotted down the basic plot for a story that he then called “Across the Time-Stream:”

  A man invents a mechanism, utilizing a force which can project him laterally in universal time, thus achieving instantaneous space-transit. The force projects him beyond time and space, as we know them, into a universe with different properties, into a sort of eternity, peopled with strange, frozen figures, where he and his machine are unable to function, as if they were caught in a block of ice, though he maintains a sort of consciousness, such as might characterize the unmoving things about him. Into this timelessness, there come invading entities, who, by means of some sort of super-magnetic force, are able to move and live, albeit sluggishly. They take the explorer in his mechanism, and certain of the timeless ones, back to their own world, intending to enslave them and release the dynamic power of the eternal beings in a war against rival peoples. Evidently they have taken the explorer for one of the timeless things.

  In this world, subject to ordinary time-space conditions, the statue-like entities become instantly alive and tremendously active and defy all control of their captors. They burst like genii the time-traversing mechanism in which they are confined, catch up the human explorer, and proceed to devastate the planet by means of cataclysmic and varied force-manifestations, before going back to eternity. On their way to the timelessness, they drop the human back into his own world.3

  Although CAS wrote to Derleth that the writing of this story was “the toughest job I have ever attempted”,4 he completed the story the next day. The story was then submitted to Wonder Stories. David Lasser’s reaction is recorded in his letter of October 21, 1931: the story possessed “an excellent idea”, but Smith’s descriptions relied too heavily on “strange and bizarre words” and that they were “so long that the story hardly moves and although it is true that you are describing a timeless world in which nothing happens, you cannot afford to have your story be a ‘timeless one’”.5 Smith undertook the required revisions, eliminating what he considered to be some genuine redundancies, but characterized the admonition to “put ‘more realism’ into my future stories [because] the late ones were ‘verging dangerously on the weird’” as “really quite a josh—as well as a compliment”.6 The story appeared in the March 1932 issue, and Smith was eventually paid the sum of sixty dollars. “The Eternal World” was collected in GL, and was slated for inclusion in Far from Time.

  The current text is based upon a carbon of a typescript at JHL dated September 27, 1931. Despite telling both Derleth and Lovecraft that he had pruned the story (he noted that “The tale really needed it in places, since there were genuine redundancies of thought and image”7), this manuscript, which would appear to predate any revisions, does not differ markedly from the published versions, outside of the simplification of a few words. Perhaps Smith was able to replace just the affected pages and did not bother retyping the entire story.

  1. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW). See also Smith’s remarks in “An Autobiography of Clark Ashton Smith,” Science Fiction Fan, August 1936 (PD 43): “Of all the tales published in science fiction magazines, ‘The Eternal World’ and ‘The City of the Singing Flame,’ are in my opinion, the most outstanding”.

  2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 22, 1931 (ms. SHSW).

  3. SS 172.

  4. CAS, letter to AWD, September 26, 1931 (SL 163).

  5. David Lasser, letter to CAS, October 21, 1931 (ms, JHL).

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

  7. CAS to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (SL 166).

  The Demon of the Flower

  “The Demon of the Flower” is an expansion of an earlier prose poem, “The Flower-Devil,” that appeared in his self-published collection Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Prose and Verse (Auburn Journal, 1922). CAS completed the tale on October 17, 1931, and sent it along to Harry Bates. Derleth wrote to Smith that he “found it very colourful, got a strong impression of colour-movement due to your vivid descriptive phrases and sentences. I don’t think Bates will take this, however, good as it is. Not enough action. Still, he took ‘The Door to Saturn;’ but this latter was more whimsical, not so?”1 But Bates surprised both Smith and Derleth by tentatively accepting the tale for Strange Tales; unfortunately, the magazine’s publisher, William Clayton, ended up vetoing it.2 Farnsworth Wright rejected it “with some quibbling comments about the diction, which he seems to think might prove a trifle too recherché, for the semi-illiterates among his readers”.3 Smith resubmitted it with some minor changes, but to no avail.

  Smith at one point considered including “The Demon of the Flower” in a pamphlet of stories he had the Auburn Journal print for him (The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, 1933), but when F. Orlin Tremaine took over the editorship of Astounding Stories he submitted several stories there, and Tremaine accepted the story for the December 1933 issue. Smith included it in LW. The current text is based upon a copy of the October 17, 1931 version forming part of the papers of Genevieve K. Sully.

  1. AWD, letter to CAS, 26 October [1931] (ms, JHL).

  2. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, December 15, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  3. CAS, letter to AWD, January 9, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

  The Nameless Offspring

  Although completed on November 12, 1931, the origins of this story date to January 1931. Smith had been re-reading Arthur Machen’s collection The House of Souls, lent to him by Bernard Austin Dwyer (a mutual correspondent from upstate New York). As he described to Lovecraft:

  “Pan”…has suggested to me an idea so hellish that I am almost afraid to work it out in story-form. It involves a cataleptic woman who was placed alive in the family vaults. Days later, a scream was heard within the family vaults, the door was unlocked, and the woman was found sitting up in her open coffin, babbling deliriously of some terrible dem
oniac face whose vision had awakened her from her death-like sleep. Eight or nine months afterwards, she gives birth to a child and dies. The child is so monstrous that no one is permitted to see it. It is kept in a locked room; but many years later, after the death of the woman’s husband, it escapes; and co-incidentally the corpse of the deceased is found in a condition not to be described. Also, there are monstrous footprints leading toward the vaults, but not away from them. If I do this tale, I shall head it with a text from the Necronomicon, which certainly did great service in “Carnby”. The “atmosphere” wouldn’t have been half so good without it…1

  Lovecraft’s response was typically encouraging and enthusiastic:

  That daemoniac-spawn plot of yours is tremendously powerful—a genuine improvement, I think, on the idea of which Machen is so fond—“Great God Pan”, “Black Seal”, &c. I once had the idea of having a daemon begotten through some hellish evocation, & having the birth attended by the death, from shock, of both mother & physician—followed by the swift growth of the nameless thing which escapes unseen from the fateful birth-chamber. The thing was to be a terror of the night in the rural region concerned—a looker into windows & devourer of lone travellers. But I gave up the notion when I saw how Machen had used it before me. Your tomb idea, though, is new—implying that the begetting entity was one of Those whom Harley Warren glimpsed far down beneath the archaic necropolis before he perished from fright—in the darkness. The way you subsequently dispose of the ghoul-spawn—including Its final exit—is truly powerful & terrifying. In describing the way the Thing is kept locked in secret, you might get an idea or two from the similar (though not supernatural) situation in that Austrian play which made such a furore a few years ago—“Goat Song”, by Franz Werfel. If you can’t get the text of that, H. Warner Munn could lend it to you. I am sure that the Necronomicon, at least in the original Arabic version, must have some nighted text balefully appropriate as a motto for such a narrative. Of course, you would have to use great care & subtlety in suiting the tale to Wright’s idea of its reception by the Indiana Parent-Teacher Association—& even so, his timidity might bring about rejection in the end. Poor nechap—he’ll never forget the row that Eddy’s “Loved Dead” stirred up some seven years ago! But the thing is abundantly worth trying, & I certainly hope you’ll go to it. It will certainly have a highly appreciative MS. reading amongst the gang, whatever its professional fortunes may be.2

  Smith then composed the tremendous passage from the Necronomicon that prefaces the tale, but the remainder of the story was not completed until November 12, 1931. Lovecraft wrote after reading it “Nggrrhh… I can still hear that clawing! I think you managed the terrestrial setting very well—indeed, I think your results in that line are always excellent, even though the process of achievement may not be congenial. For my part, I like to delineate a prosaic earthly setting—& then let the cosmic abnormality intrude”.3

  CAS submitted it directly to Harry Bates, who accepted it immediately, but offered the following suggestion, which he told Smith he was free to use or reject:

  It occurs to me that two little things would improve this last story somewhat. I wonder if you will agree. If somewhere in the body of the story you inserted the idea that the ghoul would eat human flesh, you would not have to be so specific on page 22 where you say in so many words that Sir John had been partly devoured. In this place you could just hint at something too horrible and gruesome to be put into the words: the reader will know that the man has been partly devoured. Then, I think it would improve the end of the story to have the ghoul followed into the vault and a search made—a search which would reveal no trace of it. This would be more reasonable than to cut short the pursuit at the gate of the vault, which would enable the monster to get out for dirty work on other occasions; also I think it would give a slightly better “feeling” to the end.4

  Smith readily accepted Bates’ suggestion, “since it lifts the whole business more into the realm of the supernatural to have the monster vanish utterly”.5 It appeared in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales. It was not collected until the last Arkham House collection to be published in Smith’s lifetime, AY. The current text is based on a carbon typescript at JHL.

  It is probable that “The Nameless Offspring” would not have been written, let alone published, had Strange Tales not existed, since Smith recognized that “its commercial chances are pretty nil.”6 As Lovecraft mentioned, Wright would probably have been too squeamish to take the story, both because of the necrophagia and the sexual element; Smith felt that the latter was no worse than in Machen’s story or even Lovecraft’s own “The Dunwich Horror”, but fumed that “by some curious twist of convention, editors will probably think that it is”.7 Bates, on the other hand, was more open to purely gruesome material, such as “The Return of the Sorcerer,” also rejected by Wright, while also being personally receptive to Smith’s more outré stories such as “The Door to Saturn” and “The Demon of the Flower.” At the time CAS wrote “The Nameless Offspring” he was writing regularly for three main markets, WT, WS, and ST, and was still trying to crack magazines such as Ghost Stories. The worsening depression would soon lead to the collapse of the Clayton and McFadden magazines, would also adversely affect the ability of those that survived to pay in a timely manner, and would do nothing to encourage Smith to continue the writing of fiction.

  Having Henry Chaldane running a bee ranch in Canada was a tip of the hat to Smith’s correspondent Frank Lillie Pollock (1876-1957), who operated just such a facility in Shedden, Ontario.8

  1. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. January 27, 1931] (SL 145-46).

  2. HPL, letter to CAS, February 8, 1931 (ms, MHS; included in part in Selected Letters III, Ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei [Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1972], p. 286).

  3. HPL, letter to CAS [early December 1931 ] (ms, JHL).

  4. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, December 15, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 31, 1931 (SL 168).

  6. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (SL 166).

  7. CAS, letter to AWD, November 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  8. See notes to “The Planet of the Dead,” ES 273.

  A Vintage from Atlantis

  Farnsworth Wright used short stories of three thousand words or less as “filler” to occupy the holes left in each issue by the larger stories, and many of Smith’s stories (“The Gorgon,” “The Supernumerary Corpse,” etc.) fall into this category. By late 1931 Wright had published all such stories of Smith’s, leading CAS wrote to Derleth in late November 1931 that he was composing a filler of this title that dealt “with the unique brand of d.t. induced in a crew of pirates by drinking the contents of an antique wine-jar, crusted with barnacles and corals, which they had found cast up on the beach of a West Indian isle”.1 A plot synopsis found among his papers describes his conception thus:

  A crew of pirates have landed on a desert West Indian isle to bury their loot, and find a strange antique jar that has been washed up out of the sea. The thing is made of a strong, heavy, almost infrangible earthenware; but they manage to break off the neck with hammers, and discover that the jar is filled with a dark, aromatic wine. All of them drink the wine, excepting one Puritan abstainer, who tells the story. After drinking it, they go mad and begin to babble in an unknown tongue, and to perform strange rites on the beach, including the sacrifice, in a very peculiar manner, of the pirate captain on an improvised altar. Some of them seize the Puritan, and make him swallow a little of the wine; and though he does not become so demented as the others, he has a shadowy vision of some monstrous being that comes up out of the sea, and of shimmering, mirage-like domes and walls that rise from the waters. He is overcome with terror, and flees in one of the boats to the ship, leaving the others to continue their mad revel, which ends in death.2

  Wright was ambivalent about the story, writing “I think it best to follow my usual practice of rejecting when in doubt”.3 The rejection puzzled Smi
th, but he accepted it philosophically, observing “I dare say he goes by precedent; and this tale, in style and substance, was a little off the beaten track”.4 Lovecraft encouraged him to submit the story to Strange Tales, adding that the tale “surely grips the reader by the throat by the time it is ended! It has a touch of Dunsanian phantasy about it, & ought to be acceptable to Bates if he liked ‘The Door to Saturn’ or Whitehead’s ‘Moon Dial’. Those visions are really tremendous, & the climax is satisfyingly adequate”.5 Bates rejected it on December 15. Wright finally ended up taking the story after Smith’s third revision, publishing it in the September 1933 issue.6 It was collected in AY. The current text is based upon an undated carbon copy of the typescript at JHL.

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

  2. SS 168.

  3. FW, letter to CAS, December 1, 1931 (ms, JHL)

  4. CAS, letter to AWD, December 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  5. HPL, letter to CAS, [c. early December 1931] (ms, JHL).

  6. CAS, letter to AWD, October 8, 1932 (SL 193).

  The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan

  One of Smith’s most frequently reprinted stories, this tale was completed on November 25, 1931. A plot synopsis found among his papers describes the story thus:

  ^Ootal^ [Zoon] Wuthoqquan, rich usurer of Uzuldaroum, denies an alms to aged beggar on the street. Thereupon the beggar proceeds to utter a cryptically disagreeable prophecy concerning Ootal Wuthoqquan’s future fate. This prophecy is fulfilled. A strange man appears and asks the usurer for a loan of money, offering three huge emeralds as security. The loan is accorded; but that night, as Ootal Wuthoqquan is looking at the emeralds, they start to roll away from him, as if bewitched. He follows them; but keeping just beyond his reach, they lead him through the nocturnal streets of the moonlit city and into the country. Here they vanish into a hole or cave. Wild with avarice, the usurer still follows, and finds himself in a phosphorescent cavern heaped with jewels, where a terrible, formless, multiform entity broods on a pile of gems. This creature proceeds to devour the unfortunate usurer.1