A Vintage From Atlantis
Page 47
he wanted me to make some slight alterations before showing it to Clayton. He seemed to think there was an inconsistency in the development of the devil-plant; but, as I pointed out to him, the plant merely propagated itself through spores, after death, but had the power of extending its individual life-term through an extension of the root-system from one victim to another. However, I made several minor changes, adding some horrific details, and mentioning a second skull in the lattice-work of bones, roots, etc, in the burial-pit. Derleth’s suggestions were very good, but I rather like the thing as it stands. It might have been worked out more gradually, at greater length, as Wandrei suggests; but the present development, as far as I am concerned, has, through its very acceleration, a strong connotation of the unnatural, the diabolic, the supernatural.5
Bates accepted the revised story for Strange Tales, but now informed Smith that payment would have to wait until publication. This was a precursor to even worse news: facing the threat of bankruptcy, publisher William Clayton gave Bates orders to shut down the magazine with the January 1933 issue6. Bates had been holding three of Smith’s stories, including “Seed,” which he had already copy-edited and marked with instructions for the printer, and returned them to Smith. A new copy was promptly typed and submitted to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales; CAS took the opportunity to add a few details and “verbal emendations” that added “from my standpoint…to the literary value of the tale, which was a little hasty and hacky in spots before”.7 Wright rejected it, telling Smith that it had “many excellent features; but as a whole, it seems too long drawn out—at least, that is my reaction to it”.8 The next month Smith revised the story, eliminating “all repetitional detail [and] cutting the yarn to 4500 [words];” Wright accepted this trimmed version.9 Smith received forty-five dollars for the story after it appeared in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales.10 It was collected in TSS.
The current text is based upon the typescript edited by Harry Bates, which Smith had given to R. H. Barlow and who in turn donated it to the Bancroft Library, and the later typescripts at JHL. Some descriptive material from the first version that was cut for Weird Tales has been restored, but the repetitive material that Smith had cut—and there was a lot of repetition in the Bates-edited version—has not been restored.
1. HPL, letter to F. Lee Baldwin, March 27, 1934 (in FFT 66).
2. SS 167.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (SL 171-72).
6. 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. 203.
7. CAS, letter to AWD, October 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
8. FW, letter to CAS, October 21, 1932 (ms, JHL).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
10. Popular Fiction Publishing Company to CAS, February 24, 1934 (ms, JHL).
The Second Interment
As in the case of “An Adventure in Futurity” and “Seedling of Mars,” “The Second Interment” originated with a suggestion from one of Smith’s editors. Harry Bates forwarded to Smith the following suggestion from William Clayton:
Mr. Clayton recently suggested to me that he would like to see a story recounting the horror a man might feel at being buried alive. His sensations, all the awful things—the states of mind—he would go through. He might prolong his agony by shallow breathing a la Houdini. It would add to the horror of things if he had for years been afraid of being buried alive, and had an obsession that he would. Perhaps he had a push button or some other device in the casket of summoning aid just in case, and perhaps it does not work. Perhaps he has had one unfortunate experience from which he was rescued in time, which would give far more point and tension to a repetition of it for a climax.…The thing would, of course, be a naturalistic horror story.1
Smith apparently felt the suggestion a congenial one, for he had completed the story by January 29, 1932, less than a week after receiving the suggestion. He added to Clayton’s basic idea “the suggestion of foul play that was apprehended by Uther; and it seems to me that the thing could hardly have happened in any other way than through dirty work. The younger brother, with the dr.’s connivance, must have hustled him away in a terrible hurry, fearing that he might wake up at any moment, if they took the chance of committing him to an embalmer’s care. But maybe I should have inserted a more direct hint of this somewhere in this tale”.2
Although Smith called “The Second Interment” a “detailed and remorseless study in naturalistic horror”, the technique he used was vividly impressionistic in its depiction of the psychological and physiological agonies experienced by the unfortunate Uther Magbane. In doing so he perhaps unconsciously made reference to some of the nightmare visions found in “The Hashish-Eater.” The images of eyeless giants, the black Babel of a sunless world, and the huge Python of myth with unimaginable folds, are all reminiscent of this poem. The fevered rush from horror to horror also duplicates much of the tone used throughout Smith’s most famous poem, but the most striking similarity occurs in the final sentences of the story:
With inconceivable swiftness, the head of the anaconda became that of his brother Guy. It mocked him with a vast sneer, it appeared to swell and expand, to lose all human semblance or proportion, to become a blank, dark mass that rushed upon him in cyclonic gloom, driving him down into the space beyond space.
Compare the above paragraph with the final lines from “The Hashish-Eater:”
It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face,
That fills the void and fills the universe,
And bloats against the limits of the world
With lips of flame that open.3
“The Second Interment” appeared in the last issue of Strange Tales, January 1933. Donald Wandrei called the story “a fine piece of craftsmanship, one of the best tales you have yet spun. Derleth raised a question about insoluble problems of technique involved in such a presentation, but I answered with the simple assertion that certain types of potential or actual experience can not be handled at all except by such methods as were employed in your story; and of course, where the question is one of to have or not to have, the affirmative wins”.4 CAS agreed that “the method employed was the only feasible one. The tale was written to order, as I may have told you, and it is almost the only instance where I have done anything good under such conditions”.5 Smith confirmed his good opinion of the story by allowing August Derleth to include it in OST.6
1. Bates, letter to CAS, January 22, 1932 (ms, JHL).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, “The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil.” In The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002), p. 29.
4. DAW, letter to CAS, October 31, 1932 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to DAW, November 10, 1932 (SL 195).
6. See CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).
Ubbo-Sathla
Completed on February 15, 1932, “Ubbo-Sathla” originated in the following note:
A man, who, in trance, goes back in earthly time to the very beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the primal one, out of whom all terrestrial life has sprung, lay wallowing in the mist and slime, playing idiotically with the tablets on which are writ the wisdom of vanished pre-mundane gods. In his trance, the man believes that he has been sent to retrieve these tablets; but, approaching Ubbo-Sathla, he seems to revert to some primordial life-form; and forgetting his mission, wallows and ravens in the ooze with the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla. He does not re-emerge from the trance. Ubbo-Sathla is a vast, yeasty mass, sloughing off continuously various rudimentary life-forms.1
Douglas A. Anderson suggests that “Ubbo-Sathla” may have been influenced by Leonard Cline’s visionary novel The Dark
Chamber (1927),2 but as of December 1933 Smith had not read it.3 Cline’s novel may have exerted some influence at second hand, though, since Donald Wandrei is known to have read The Dark Chamber, and CAS wrote him that the story’s “ideation may remind you a little of your own tale, ‘[The Lives of] Alfred Kramer’” [WT, December 1932]. In the same letter CAS stated that “The main object of Ubbo-Sathla was to achieve a profound and manifold dissolution of what is known as reality—which, come to think of it, is the animus of nearly all my tales, more or less”.4
“Ubbo-Sathla” was submitted to Weird Tales, but was rejected. Wright’s rejection letter does not survive, but CAS remarked to HPL that he seemed “to think that it would be over the heads of his clientele”.5 He continued in the same vein in his next letter to Lovecraft:
Wright must have rejected ‘Ubbo-Sathla’ because it didn’t remind him of anything that had ever made a hit with his readers. I can’t see myself that it’s especially difficult or ‘high-brow.’ Where Wright errs is in playing safe when he can’t find a precedent for some particular tale—a method of selection that is none too favourable to originality. It will be interesting to see what he says to ‘The Double Shadow’—a tale that I am inclined (though I may be wrong) to rate above ‘Ubbo-Sathla’.6
Wright did accept the story upon re-submission, apparently after Lovecraft “had raked him over about the rejection”,7 publishing it in the July 1933 issue. This issue also contained Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” as well as Hazel Heald’s “The Horror in the Museum” (which was actually ghost-written by Lovecraft). All three stories contained references to the mythical Book of Eibon, which excited a lot of questions among credulous fans. Smith responded to one such query from Charles D. Hornig, David Lasser’s successor at Wonder Stories and editor of the fanzine Fantasy Fan:
“Necronomicon,” “Book of Eibon” etc I am sorry to say, are all fictitious. Lovecraft invented the first, I the second.…It is really too bad that they don’t exist as objective, bonafide compilations of the elder and darker Lore! I have been trying to remedy this, in some small measure, by cooking up a whole chapter of Eibon. It is still unfinished, and I am now entitling it “The Coming of the White Worm.”….8
After Hornig inadvertently published Smith’s letter in the November 1933 issue, CAS remarked in a postcard to Lovecraft: “ I was a little vexed by Brother Hornig’s ‘scoop’ in utilizing my letter about Eibon, etc. He asked me where and how the books could be obtained; and I didn’t think to stipulate that the answer was for his private information! Dumb of me, I’ll admit. However, as you say, the hoax might easily go too far”.9 CAS included “Ubbo-Sathla” among the “Hyperborean Grotesques” of OST. This text is derived from a carbon typescript at JHL.
1. SS 174.
2. Douglas A. Anderson, “Introduction.” In The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005), p. 9.
3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. December 4, 1933] (SL 240).
4. CAS, letter to DAW, February 17, 1932 (SL 170).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (SL 172).
6. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. mid-March 1932] (LL 35-36).
7. CAS, letter to DAW, May 4, 1932 (ms, MHS).
8. PD 29.
9. CAS, postmark to HPL, postmarked November 24, 1933 (private collection).
The Double Shadow
When H. P. Lovecraft first read “The Double Shadow,” he called it “magnificent… full of vivid colour & creeping menace, & with an atmosphere worthy of E. A. P.”.1 Smith thought that it was the “most demoniac of my recent tales”2 and called it a personal favorite.3 Yet Farnsworth Wright’s continued refusal to buy the story until Smith had almost ceased the composition of fiction was probably a contributing factor in that cessation, and led Smith to the drastic and ultimately unprofitable step of self-publication.
The germ of the story may be found in the following note: “A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and merging with it gradually, day by day; while coincidentally with this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed by an evil thing from unknown worlds. In his personality, the hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till his shadow is that which had followed him”.4 Smith completed it on March 14, 1932, and immediately submitted it to Weird Tales, perhaps feeling that its exotic setting in Atlantis might not be to the liking of the Babbitesque William Clayton. Wright’s original rejection letter apparently does not survive, but according to Smith he wrote “that it was ‘interesting, in a way,’ but he feared that his readers wouldn’t care for it. I fear that Wright, in his anxiety to publish nothing that would be disliked by any of his readers, will get to the point where he won’t publish anything that any one will like very much”.5 He then submitted it to Strange Tales, where much to his surprise it was accepted. However, there was a catch:
Both Mr. Clayton and I have tentatively approved both of them: but because of their type I can only buy one. I am hoping that one will be the longer, but at this time, with Strange Tales appearing so infrequently, I cannot make the decision. I hope you do not mind if I hold your two stories, “The Double Shadow” and “The Colossus of Ylourgne” for a while longer.6
Smith was therefore elated when Bates later wrote to him later “that in some mysterious manner, both ‘The Double Shadow’ and ‘The Colossus of Ylourgne’ have passed successfully through Mr. Clayton’s critical craw. I expect to buy both!”7 Unfortunately, in October 1932 Clayton ordered Bates to shut down both Strange Tales and Astounding Stories, which had the dual effect of drastically cutting down Smith’s sources of income (for all his philistine thickheadedness, Clayton paid better rates than any other genre publication) and leaving Wright in command of the field. “My own prospective income is sadly nicked by the failure of S.T.,” CAS wrote to Derleth. “I am out five hundred bucks, unless I can re-sell part or all of the unused tales to Wright. I don’t believe he will buy ‘The Double Shadow;’ but the chances seem fair for the other two”.8 Sadly, Smith’s prediction proved correct, as Wright once again rejected “The Double Shadow” in November.9 Smith finally ended up publishing the story himself as the title story of his first collection, which he published himself in 1933 utilizing the services of the local newspaper. In an advertising flyer that he printed to promote The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, he described the tale as “a strange tale of two Atlantean sorcerers, who made use of a dreadful antehuman spell, without knowing what would come in answer to their evocation.”
Smith’s fiction output fell off for several reasons starting in late 1933. However, Wright had a sufficient backlog of stories that this didn’t begin to become apparent until after 1936. Coupled with the deaths of Robert E. Howard in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft in 1937, this was a blow which lead to Wright frantically trying to get stories from one of his few remaining stars. Smith insisted that Wright first purchase stories that he had previously rejected, which brought about the appearance in Weird Tales of several stories from The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, including the title story. Ironically, when it appeared in the February 1939 in a slightly pruned version, “The Double Shadow” was voted the most popular story in that issue by the readers. Smith used tear sheets from that issue for OST, and he planned to include the story in Far from Time. We are using the text from a copy of The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies that features Smith’s handwritten corrections of typographical errors.
1. HPL, letter to DAW, March 26, 1932 (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. 304).
2. CAS, letter to DAW, April 6, 1932 (ms, MHS).
3. CAS, letter to DAW, April 14, 1932 (ms, MHS).
4. SS 174.
5. CAS, letter to AWD, April 5, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
6. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, June 11, 1932 (ms, JHL).
7. Quoted in CAS, letter to AWD, September 28, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
&n
bsp; 8. CAS, letter to AWD, October 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, November 15, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
The Plutonian Drug
Smith wrote August Derleth in February 1932 that “I’ve begun a short pseudo-scientific tale, dealing with a drug that changed a man’s perception of time into a sort of space-perception. He saw himself as a continuous body—a sort of infinite frieze—stretching both into the past and future.” He added that he found the writing of the story “hellishly hard to do.”1 He put the story aside for a month, completing it on April 5, 1932.
Although he had submitted stories to a wide variety of publications, CAS had so far managed to sell his stories to just three magazines with any degree of regularity. One pulp that he had yet to “crack” was the oldest of the “scientifiction” magazines, Amazing Stories. By late 1931 he made just about given up, telling Derleth that “The same editorial crew is still in force, and I understand there will be no change in policy. They seem to have a fixed prejudice against my stuff as not being sufficiently scientific”.2 With “The Plutonian Drug” CAS thought that he had managed to inject enough science that it might meet with success, so he submitted “The Plutonian Drug” to its editor, T. O’Conor Sloane (1851-1940).3 As was his practice, Sloane held on to the manuscript for several months before publishing it in the September 1934 issue of Amazing Stories. Smith received only ½ cent a word for the story,4 less than either Weird Tales (one cent) or Wonder Stories (¾ cent), and far less than the two cents paid by the Clayton Strange Tales. CAS collected it in LW. It also formed part of the proposed contents for Far from Time.