1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, January 20, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (SL 137).
4. “The only way I can land a lot of my stuff is through repeated submission, revision, etc. One needs to be hard-boiled about rejections. I doubt, though, if I’ll ever achieve the persistence of Derleth, who says that he has sold some of his things to Wright on the tenth or eleventh trip! Three submissions of a tale (to Wright) has been my limit so far; but some of my things have gathered a multitude of ‘regrets’ before landing. ‘The Door to Saturn,’ for example, garnered at least six or seven rejections.” CAS, letter to HPL [c. mid-March 1932] (LL 35).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-December 1930 (LL 23).
6. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, July 31, 1931 (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to DAW, August 7, 1931 (ms, MHS).
8. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).
The Red World of Polaris
As was described in ES (274-75), Captain Volmar and the crew of the ether-ship Alcyone made their first appearance in “Marooned in Andromeda” (WS October 1930). David Lasser, who edited the magazine for publisher Hugo Gernsback, surprised Smith by proposing “a series of tales about the same crew of characters (Capt. Volmar, etc.) and their adventures on different planets, saying that they would use a novelette of this type every other month.”He described it as “pseudo-scientific with a vengeance: it deals with a race of people who had their brains transplanted into indestructible metal bodies, and who were going to perform the same office for the humans who visited their world.” He added that “there are possibilities in this type of story, though I’d prefer writing something even more extra-terrestrial, with no human characters at all.” Smith completed the first draft during a camping trip to the nearby Sierra mountains late in August 1930, wryly telling HPL that the magnificent scenery “is more likely to be a source of distraction than inspiration, except in retrospect.”1 He would later reconsiderthis, admitting that “Probably the mountain scenery was a stimulant to my writing—but it was so tremendous that it temporarily altered and confused my sense of values. Mere words didn’t seem to stand up in the presence of those peaks and cliffs. But now, amid the perspectives of familiar surroundings, ‘The Red World’ doesn’t seem so bad. The last chapter could afford themes for Doré or Martin, in regard to cataclysmic scope at any rate.”2
Smith wrote to Lovecraft a couple of months later that the editors were requesting that he add some action to the story, objecting that the first part was “almost wholly descriptive;” he added that “this pretense of being scientific gives me a pain. The mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”3 Other complaints by Lasser may have found their way into another letter to Lovecraft: “Most interplanetary yarns might as well have been laid on earth—as far as I can see—the characters seem no more affected by their alien milieu than if they were in some exotic terrestrial region. But certainly, the usual editorial requirements militate against any attempt at a sound psychological treatment... ‘The story is too leisurely.’ ‘No plot, no complications.’ ‘Put some more action in it.’”4
Despite some perfunctory attempts at revision, Lasser finally ended up rejecting the story. Smith would later describe the story to Robert H. Barlow as “passably written, but suffers from triteness of plot.”5 This may be the reason why he did not spend any further effort on revising the story, since at 13,000 words he had already invested a relatively tremendous amount of time and effort into the tale. This is too bad, because while “The Red World of Polaris” would not have fit into the “Cowboys-and-Indians-in-space” formula of Astounding Stories at this time, Mike Ashley suggests that “it would almost certainly have appealed to F. Orlin Tremaine when he became editor of Astounding Stories a few years later, in 1933, when the magazine was developing its ‘thought variant’ stories,” or even with a little rewrite to FW at WT itself.6
Smith sold the only typescripts of two stories, “The Red World of Polaris” and “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” (written circa October 1930), to Michael DeAngelis, a fan then living in Brooklyn, New York who had reprinted CAS’ poem “The Ghoul and the Seraph” as a limited edition pamphlet in 1950. DeAngelis planned to publish the two stories either as separate pamphlets or in a fanzine, but vanished, taking the typescript with him. (It is believed that he had sold the typescript for “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” to another Brooklyn fan, but it remains at this time still lost.) Numerous attempts to locate DeAngelis were made over the years by Smith, Derleth, Roy Squires, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Douglas A. Anderson, and Steve Behrends, but all met with failure until Ron Hilger thought to contact DeAngelis’ co-editor for the fanzine Asmodeus, Alan H. Pesetsky, in May 2003. Pesetsky located a typed copy of the story that he had prepared for publication in their fanzine, and was kind enough to provide us with a copy. It was first published as the title story of the collected Volmar stories by Night Shade Books in 2003.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, August 22, 1930 (SL 117-118). (Note: this letter was incorrectly described as to CAS by David Lasser in both ES (275, n5) and our introduction to RW, “The Magellan of the Constellations,” page 3.)
2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (SL 119-120).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (LL 15).
4. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10 [1930] (SL 132).
5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 301).
6. Mike Ashley, “Evoking Wonder.” Lost Worlds no. 3 (2006): 31.
Told in the Desert
This story was conceived in late 1929 and according to Smith’s “Completed Stories” log was written after the completion of “The Red World of Polaris” in late August 1930 but before “The Willow Landscape.” According to a surviving synopsis, it was to have been originally entitled “Neria”:
A wanderer in the desert, who finds an oasis inhabited only by a beautiful girl, named Neria. He loves her, and is content to dwell with her for awhile; but at last he feels that he must return to the world for awhile, in spite of the girl’s warning that he will never find her again if he does. He goes away, and later seeks to find the oasis again, but spends his whole life searching for it in vain.1
Smith sent August Derleth the typescripts of three unpublished stories, “The Metamorphosis of the World,” “An Offering to the Moon,” and this, late in the summer of 1950; in his letter Smith described the tale as “a lengthy and rather uneven prose-poem.”2 While Derleth was able to place the first two stories with WT, “Told in the Desert” remained unpublished until 1964, when Derleth included it in an anthology of original or unpublished stories, Over the Edge, published by Arkham House. No manuscript or typescript survives at either JHL or SHSW, and a search of the remaining archives at Arkham House failed to locate the tale. It was collected posthumously in OD.
1. SS 157.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 7, 1950.
The Willow Landscape
Completed on September 8, 1930, “The Willow Landscape” was rejected by FW “as it does not seem exactly suited to Weird Tales, and it lacks the swift action that we want for Oriental Stories.”1 This evoked the following response from Lovecraft: “It is like Wright to reject ‘The Willow Landscape’. The damn fool! Action—hell, what a standard! And yet I know that is the god of the herd.”2 Smith then submitted it to Ghost Stories where it “drew the only editorial compliment (‘very charming and poetic’) which this tale has yet received.”3 As an example of the lengths to which Smith was willing to pursue a sale, he finally managed to place the tale with the Philippine Magazine, noting that “The rates are nothing very gaudy; but the editor seems to be appreciative.”4 It was published in the May 1931 issue “with a very charming illustration by a native artist.”5
Smith would later include “The Willow Landscape” in DS, describing it on an advertising flyer he prep
ared for the booklet as “A fanciful Chinese tale, about an impoverished scholar and the old landscape painting with which he was loath to part.” FW later accepted the story and published in the June-July 1939 issue of WT, accompanied by a fine illustration by Virgil Finlay. It was included in GL. However, “The Willow Landscape” has the singular distinction in Smith’s work of being selected for performance by the monologist “Brother Theodore” (Theodore Gottlieb) on his 1959 LP album Coral Records Presents Theodore In Stereo. The present text comes from a typescript presented to Genevieve K. Sully that was checked against DS.
1. FW, letter to CAS, September 22, 1930 (ms, JHL).
2. HPL, letter to CAS, October 17, 1930 (ms, JHL).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. January 27, 1931 (SL 144).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (SL 153).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, June 15, 1931 (SL 154).
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
One of Smith’s most popular and most reprinted stories, “A Rendezvous in Averoigne” was completed on September 13, 1930. As discussed in the notes to “The Satyr” (ES 271-272), Lovecraft encouraged Smith to write further stories set in his imaginary medieval French province, and that summer CAS wrote him that “I think of beginning one as soon as I can work out a suitable plot, and will carry it on alternately with new ‘shorts’ and novelettes. Averoigne in medieval times might be a fruitful milieu.”1 FW snapped the story up, telling CAS that “I would be insensible to the appeal of pure beauty if I rejected this story, ‘A Rendezvous in Averoigne.’ I am only sorry that we cannot pay a higher rate for it.”2 (Wright paid Smith fifty-six dollars for the tale.) Lovecraft waxed rhapsodic in an undated postcard:
Magnificent!! It’s a wonder Wright took it—but I guess he was charmed into recognizing merit & laying aside his cheap-tradesmen standards for once in his life! I don’t know when I’ve ever seen so fine an evocation of malign & sinister atmosphere. Rotting, unwholesome ambiguity drips & oozes & festers on every page! Averoigne is surely a place where one had better keep to the high-roads! The central idea makes me think of something I was going to write—albeit in a very different way—one of the notes in my commonplace book reads: “A very ancient tomb in a deep wood where a 17th century Virginia manor-house once stood. The bloated, undecayed thing found inside it.” My tale would probably be of a Randolph Carterish sort—but quasi-realistic, & contemporary in period! There would be an historic antecedent, harking back to the earliest days of Jamestown, & a moldy document found & perused with nightmare trepidation.3
Smith responded that “I am greatly pleased to learn that the new Averoigne tale was so much to your taste. It is one of my own favorites—in fact, I like it much better than the celebrated ‘End of the Story’.”4 A few days earlier Smith contrasted the composition of stories such as this with the stories he was writing for WS, complaining that “I would vastly prefer to write tales of the supernatural and the purely fantastic like ‘Averoigne’,”5 which illustrates how he came to prefer to set his stories in secondary worlds that he invented out of whole cloth. The story was published in the April-May 1931 issue of WT, and was voted the most popular story in that issue by the readers in its letter column, “The Eyrie.”
When the John Day Company published the anthology Creeps By Night, which was ostensibly edited by Dashiell Hammett, they approached both Wright and Derleth for story recommendations, and both recommended “A Rendezvous in Averoigne;” unfortunately, it did not achieve the dignity of hard covers until it was collected in OST. It provided the title for Arkham House’s 1989 omnibus of “the best of Clark Ashton Smith.” The text for this story is derived from the carbon copy of the typescript at JHL, compared with the original WT appearance and a copy of OST that was corrected by Smith.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, June 29, 1930 (ms, JHL).
2. FW, letter to CAS, September 22, 1930 (ms, JHL).
3. Private collection.
4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 129).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 21, 1930 (LL 15).
The Gorgon
Originally titled “Medusa,” this story was completed on October 2, 1930. The theme was long a favorite of Smith’s, dating as far back as his first collections of poetry: The Star-Treader and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1912) contained the poems “Medusa” and “The Medusa of the Skies,” and “The Medusa of Despair” was included both in Odes and Sonnets (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1918) and Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (Auburn, CA: Auburn Journal Press, 1922). Lovecraft called the story “really splendid, & I read it over twice with increasing admiration. You strike an atmospheric note to which I am particularly susceptible—the mystery of unknown, ancient, & labyrinthine streets—& I have never seen that alluring theme more effectively handled. If Wright doesn’t snap that up, he’s absolutely out of his head!”1 Naturally, Wright rejected the story, calling it “unconvincing,” only to accept it a year later upon resubmission.2 Smith also submitted the story to Ghost Stories, which returned the manuscript “after holding it six weeks, with a personal letter expressing interest in my work and a desire to see more of it. I’m surprised to infer, from this, that they gave the story serious consideration—which was hardly to be expected in view of their standards, which seem to call for a combination of spookiness and raw human interest.”3 Harry Bates of ST also didn’t care for the story and returned it.4
After August Derleth pointed out to Smith that WT had published a story called “Medusa” several years earlier (“Medusa” by Royal W. Jimerson appeared in the April 1928 issue). Smith changed the title to “Medusa’s Head” and finally to “The Gorgon.” Wright used the story as filler in the April 1932 issue of WT.“The Gorgon,” along with “The Venus of Azombeii,” received third ranking in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1932, edited by Blanche Colton Williams (New York: Doubleday, 1932); Smith remarked that “Personally, I think it’s a long way from being my best. But there you are. Judges, editors, critics, all of them are more or less bughouse. And I suppose that any kind of a weird tale is lucky to receive official mention in an age tyrannized over by realism.”5 Text is based upon the typescript at JHL; BL has a carbon that CAS presented to Donald Wandrei, but this copy lacks several handwritten changes found on the JHL copy.
1. HPL, letter to CAS, October 17, 1930.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, October 23, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (SL 134).
4. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, May 20, 1931 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 24, 1932 (SL 197).
An Offering to the Moon
As CAS continued to write and sell stories to WT, WS, and other markets, he and HPL began a discussion of their respective theories regarding aesthetics, realism versus romanticism, and related topics. On October 17, 1930, Lovecraft revealed the following personal glimpse in support of his “conception of phantasy, as a genuine art-form, is an extension rather than a negation of reality”;
In fact I know that my most poignant emotional experiences are those which concern the lure of unplumbed space, the terror of the encroaching outer void, & the struggle of the ego to transcend the known & established order of time, [...] space, matter, force, geometry, & natural law in tantalising mnemonic fragments expressed in unknown or half-known architectural or landscape vistas, especially in connexion with a sunset. Some instantaneous fragment of a picture will well up suddenly through some chain of subconscious association—the immediate excitant being usually half-irrelevant on the surface—& fill me with a sense of wistful memory & bafflement; with the impression that the scene in question represents something I have seen & visited before under circumstances of superhuman liberation & adventurous expectancy, yet which I have almost completely forgotten, & which is so bewilderingly uncorrelated & unoriented as to be forever inaccessible in the future.1
Smith replied that
I don’t think I have had anything q
uite like the pseudo-mnemonic flashes you describe. What I have had sometimes is the nocturnal dream-experience of stepping into some totally alien state of entity, with its own memories, hopes, desires, its own past and future-none of which I can ever remember for very long on awakening. This experience has suggested such tales as “The Planet of the Dead”, “The Necromantic Tale,” and “An Offering to the Moon”. I think I have spoken of the place-images which often rise before me without apparent relevance, and persist in attaching themselves to some train of emotion or even abstract thought. These, doubtless, are akin to the images of which you speak, though they are always clearly realistic.2
Completed no later than October 21, 1930, “An Offering to the Moon” may have resulted from Smith’s recent reading: “The book by James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, [...] is truly interesting, especially in the mass of data relating to South Sea ruins which is presented.”3 Although he recognized that it “perhaps isn’t quite my best,” Smith was eager to learn what HPL made of the tale.4 Lovecraft enjoyed the story, adding that
Mnemonic tales, vaguely suggesting reincarnation or other-dimensional existence, are peculiarly fascinating to me; & nothing stirs my fancy more than the inexplicable stone ruins of the Pacific. [...] Your sense of totally alien worlds must be vastly more fascinating than my own fragmentary & incomplete detachments, & you certainly make effective use of them in tales like ‘An Offering to the Moon.’ The place-images are likewise highly alluring, & I hope to see many fictional reflections of them.5
The Door to Saturn Page 39
