The End of the Story

by Clark Ashton Smith

  CAS did not think highly of the story, referring to it as “about the nearest I have come to” hack work.5 Several years later he called the tale “passably written, but suffers from triteness of plot: this because I wrote it at a time when I had not read enough science fiction to avoid the more obvious plot-ideas.”6 However, he did regard the story as being “based on a far from bad idea, that of the atomic transformation of our planet by people from Venus, into a replica of Venus with all of the latter’s atmospheric, geologic and climatic conditions: this in order that it might become inhabitable for the overcrowded Venerians.”7 It was collected posthumously in OD.

  1. AWD, letter to CAS, August 23, 1950 (ms, JHL).

  2. CAS, letter to HPL, January 9, 1930 (SL 107).

  3. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (SL 109).

  4. CAS, letter to HPL, March 11, 1930 (ms, JHL).

  5. CAS, letter to DAW, January 24, 1930 (ms, MHS).

  6. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 301).

  7. CAS, letter to RHB, February 5, 1936 (ms, JHL).

  The Epiphany of Death

  Inspired by a re-reading of Lovecraft’s story “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (WT February 1925), Smith wrote “The Epiphany of Death” in about three hours on January 25, 1930.1 He presented HPL with a copy on January 27 that bore the present dedication, of which the latter remarked

  I can’t say how flattered I feel by the dedication of “The Epiphany of Death”! That is the most haunting & fascinating thing I have read anywhere in aeons—& the style is full of a grave, stately music which makes me think of Poe as he first impressed me long decades ago. I have always dreamed of the rare delight of finding something new by Poe—something I have never read, but which will furnish the same pristine thrill that Poe furnished back in 1897 & 1898. “The Epiphany of Death” comes the closest to realising that ideal of anything so far—& to have it inscribed to me heightens the pleasure of the perusal. If a reading of “Randolph Carter” bore such fruit, I shall feel at last the existence of that tale is justified!2

  Smith remarked to August Derleth that the story “ may remind you a little of Lovecraft’s ‘Outsider’—but it was written before I had read this latter.”3

  Smith apparently did not do anything with the story for some time. However, when a new competitor to WT arose in the form of the Clayton Magazine Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror (seven issues were published between September 1931 and January 1933), paid two cents a word upon acceptance as opposed to the one cent or less that WT paid upon publication (sometimes several months after publication), Smith submitted several stories to its editor, Harry Bates. CAS reported that Bates liked “The Epiphany of Death,” but returned it “on account of its brevity” and the acceptance of several other Smith stories, adding that Bates remarked “that he finds it hard to get atmospheric stuff.”4 He then submitted the story to Wright, who also rejected it: “I like [“The Epiphany of Death”], but I fear our readers would find it lacking in plot and left somewhat up in the air.” Smith then donated the story, along with several others that he was unable to sell, to Carl Swanson, a fan from Washburn, North Dakota who planned to bring out a magazine called Galaxy. Swanson never published the story, but Charles D. Hornig did when CAS let him have the some of the same stories for his fanzine The Fantasy Fan, which published the tale in the July 1934 issue. Dorothy McIlwraith accepted the story for twenty dollars, publishing it as “Who Are the Living?” in the September 1942 issue.6 It was included in AY under the original title. The current text generally follows the January 25, 1930 typescript.

  1. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (SL 109); “The Epiphany of Death” (ms, JHL).

  2. HPL, letter to CAS, February 2, 1930 (ms, JHL).

  3. CAS, letter to AWD, November 2, 1930 (SL 131); HPL, “The Outsider” (WT April 1926).

  4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 9, 1931 (SL 150).

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

  6. Dorothy McIlwraith, letter to CAS, March 2, 1942 (ms, JHL).

  A Murder in the Fourth Dimension

  Completed on January 30, 1930, “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension” was rejected by Wright, who “thought the first part … was ‘unconvincing’.”1 It was accepted by David Lasser, science fiction editor for Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, who published it in Amazing Detective Stories (October 1930), thus making it the first sale by Smith to the man whom he and Lovecraft would come to refer to as “Hugo the Rat.” It was collected posthumously in OD.

  Smith was not an admirer of detective stories, observing that “the true lover of mysteries is not likely to feel any lasting interest in detective stories. Not the least proof of Poe’s genius is that he abandoned this genre of writing as soon as he had mastered it.”2

  1. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (SL 111).

  2. BB item 167, p. 54.

  The Devotee of Evil

  Like “The Monster of the Prophecy,” “The Devotee of Evil” presents a somewhat complicated textual history, but in this case the revisions were made by Smith for aesthetic reasons and not to achieve commercial sale, which in fact he never achieved. The earliest mention of the story occurs in a letter to Lovecraft in which he discusses it under an early title as one among several stories that CAS was considering writing: “‘The Satanist’ won’t deal with ordinary devil-worship, but with the evocation of absolute cosmic evil, in the form of a black radiation that leaves the devotee petrified into a sable image of eternal horror.”1 (CAS had earlier used this imagery in his poem “Nyctalops” (WT October 1929),2 and would revisit it in an uncompleted novel, “The Infernal Star,” that he began as a possible serial for WT early in 1933.) A synopsis was found among Smith’s papers using the title “The Manichaean,” which he crossed out and replaced with the final title: “A devotee of absolute cosmic evil, who finally evokes {pure} evil in the form of a black radiation that leaves him petrified into a {…} image of eternal horror and {…}.”3 He completed the story on March 9, 1930, and submitted it to WT along with “The Epiphany of Death” and “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension,” but while Wright liked the story, CAS observed caustically “but not quite well enough”.4 Smith then submitted it to Harold Hersey’s Ghost Stories, but again to no avail. CAS put the story aside for several months before revising it “with a view to ridding it of certain vague verbosities; and I also cut down on the pseudo-scientific element.”5 Unfortunately, Wright rejected the story once more, noting that while “it has its points of excellence… I think it better to follow my usual custom of rejecting when in doubt.”6 CAS then donated the story to Carl Swanson (see “The Epiphany of Death” above), but Swanson of course never published it. He then tried submitting it to Illustrated Detective Magazine, “which is said to favor the psychic and the subtle rather than what is usually known as a detective story,”7 and to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, only meet with rejection yet again.8 CAS finally included the revised version in The Double Shadow, describing it on the advertising flyer which he circulated as “The story of a man who sought to evoke the ultra-cosmic radiation of Evil in its absolute purity—and succeeded.” Several years later, CAS let Donald A. Wollheim publish it in the February 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories, where it was graced with a fine illustration by Hannes Bok. Unfortunately, like Swanson’s Galaxy, Stirring Science Stories depended upon free stories at first, with payment forthcoming once the magazine was profitable, so it is unlikely that CAS received any payment for this appearance.9

  Smith may have been inspired by an actual tragedy that occurred in Auburn in 1904, when Adolph Weber murdered both of his parents, his brother

  and his sister, and set fire to their home. (Weber was hanged at the nearby Folsom Prison in 1906.)10 The house that he describes was based upon an actual domicile at 153 Sacramento Street (now demolished after being gutted in a fire), which was reputed to be haunted.11

  Smith included the story in AY. Our current text follows The Double Shadow, checked against the re
vised version for errors.

  1. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (SL 110).

  2. The last stanza reads:

  We have seen fair colors

  That dwell not in the light—

  Intenser gold and iris

  Occult and recondite;

  We have seen the black suns

  Pouring forth the night.

  (The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002]: 75.)

  3. SS 157

  4. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (ms, JHL).

  5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early November 1931 (SL 166).

  6. FW, letter to CAS, November 12, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  7. CAS, letter to AWD, July 10, 1932 (SL 180).

  8. Times-Picayune [New Orleans], letter to CAS, June 20, 1932 (ms, JHL).

  9. See Harry Warner Jr., All Our Yesterdays (Chicago, IL: Advent, 1969), pp. 79-80.

  10. See M. E. Gilberg, Auburn: A California mining camp comes of age (Newcastle, CA: Gilmar Press, 1986), pp. 84-85.

  11. CAS, letter to HPL, March 11, 1930 (LL 8).

  The Satyr

  The Satyr,” which CAS completed on March 31, 1930, was the second story set in the medieval French province of Averoigne that he introduced in “The End of the Story.” Lovecraft wrote that

  You have admirably suggested the subtle, brooding horror of gnarled & immemorially ancient woods—a feeling one likewise catches with especial poignancy in certain of Arthur Machen’s descriptive passages. You might well prepare a whole series of “Averoigne” tales—evolving a definite fantastic milieu in which the landscape & manners of olden France blend imperceptibly with those of the misty mid-region of Weir.1

  CAS responded “Yes, I might write a whole series, with Averoigne for the milieu; but I have so many ideas, with geographical locations in widely scattered realms of myth and fancy, that I may not get around to Averoigne again for awhile! But certainly it’s a temptation to repeat some scene or character….”2 Unfortunately, Wright rejected it on April 9, 1930.

  Smith continued to send the story around, telling Derleth that it “has had nine or ten rejections, most magazines, for some unknown reason, appearing to regard it as overly risque. If I were only famous, I might have sold it to the Cosmopolitan for a thousand or two!”3 At some point CAS decided to tone down the ending, apparently to make it more appealing to a wider audience, and finally succeeded in selling it to La Paree Stories  (“high-class medium, eh, what?”)4 for $10.50.5 Years later he would send Derleth a “slightly revised and snapped-up” version for possible submission to Playboy;6 unfortunately, that version has not been located.

  “The Satyr” represents our most radical restoration of a Smith text, since the version published in La Paree Stories was used when he prepared GL. However, we feel that the inclusion of the original ending changes what has been up to now a light if somewhat macabre romantic comedy into a much more powerful tragedy that evokes associations with such medieval romances as the legends of Tristan and Iseult. The published conclusion is included in the Appendix 2.

  1. HPL, letter to CAS, April 10, 1930 (ms, JHL).

  2. CAS, letter to HPL, April 23, 1930 (SL 113).

  3. CAS, letter to AWD, June 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

  4. CAS, letter to DAW, August 7, 1931 (ms, MHS).

  5. Merwil Publishing Co. (Merle W. Hersey), letter to CAS, June 2, 1931 (ms, JHL).

  6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 3 [1956] (SL 380).

  The Planet of the Dead

  The origins of “The Planet of the Dead” may be found in the prose poem “From the Crypts of Memory” (Bohemia April 1917), which was included in his collections Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (Auburn Journal, 1922), OST, and PP. (See Appendix 3.) The chief difference, he explained to Lovecraft, involved “an earthly hero, drawn to this planet by his spiritual affinity with the inhabitants.”1 His notes for the story consist of the following: “An amateur astronomer is studying a certain remote, obscure star, which fascinates him greatly, when he falls into a cataleptic condition. In this state, which lasts for hours, he undergoes a psychic experience which seems to cover years. He finds himself in a world of dim, tremendous antiquity, lit by an aging sun. When a catastrophe overtakes this sun, he returns to mortal life, and finds that the star he was studying has vanished.”2 In writing the story, he may have been influenced by Theosophist ideas regarding astral projection; the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, who popularized the idea of palingenesis, which held that the souls of the dead inhabited other worlds; and Frank L. Pollack’s short story “Finis” (Argosy June 1906), which recounts the last night of two lovers on a doomed earth.3 Completed on April 6, 1930, Wright readily accepted it for WT “somewhat to my surprise,”4 paying Smith forty dollars for its appearance in the March 1932 issue.5 CAS included it in his inaugural collection, OST.

  Smith went further into the story’s origins in another letter to Lovecraft that also sheds light on several of Smith’s stories and poems:

  I don’t think I have had anything quite 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.6

  1. CAS, letter to HPL, December 10, 1929 (SL 105).

  2. SS 158.

  3. Frank Lillie Pollack (1876-1957) corresponded with Smith for several years.

  4. CAS, letter to HPL, April 23, 1930 (SL 111).

  5. FW, letter to CAS, April 12, 1930 (ms, JHL).

  6. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 128).

  The Uncharted Isle

  “The Uncharted Isle” was completed on April 21, 1930. It was accepted on first submission by WT, which published it in the November 1930 issue. One of Smith’s favorites among his tales, he selected it for both OST and Far from Time.

  When asked to contribute to the anthology My Best Science Fiction Story by editors Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend (Merlin Press, 1949), Smith selected “The Uncharted Isle,” explaining his choice thus:

  Although better known for my writings in the fantasy field, I have at different times turned out what is called the straight science fiction story. After due thought I have chosen “The Uncharted Isle” as my best—or, at least, my favorite—for several reasons. Of these,

  the first is that, while having a basis in theoretic science, the tale is not merely an ordinary science fiction story, but it can be read as an allegory of human disorientation.

  Then, too, it is written in what I think is a literate style while at the same time being free from conventional plot complications. Neither is it cumbered with pseudo-technical explanatory matter. And lastly, because my work is always selected for fantasy, this story has not been selected for inclusion in other anthologies, leaving me happily free to offer it herewith as a fresh science fiction item.1

  Three typescripts at JHL were examined, along with its appearances in WT and OST. No major discrepancies outside of spelling and punctuation were found among any of the extant versions.

  1. PD 73.

  Marooned in Andromeda

  On January 24, 1930, Smith wrote to Donald Wandrei that “I am now beginning a yarn about three mutineers on a space-flier, who are put off to shift for themselves on some unknown world in Andromeda.”1 This was “Marooned in Andromeda”, which he believed would offer “an excellent peg for a lot of fantasy, horror, grotesquery, and satire.”2 By mid-March he put the story aside and began composit
ion of “The Devotee of Evil,” returning to it the next month and completing the typescript on May 19.3 Lovecraft told Smith that “you have escaped marvellously from the range of the stereotyped in handling interplanetary adventure.”4 It was submitted to Wonder Stories, whose editor, David Lasser, not only accepted the story but 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.”5 Smith was hesitant about committing to such a series, noting with some trepidation the problems that his and Lovecraft’s friend Frank Belknap Long had in securing payment for a story that Gernsback had published. He agreed to do the series once he had received payment for this story, which arrived in the form of a ninety dollar check in mid-September.6 “Marooned in Andromeda” was the cover story for the October 1930 issue of Wonder Stories, where Lasser singled Smith out for “special commendation due to his daring and far-reaching vision in depicting conditions as they might exist on a distant planet in another universe.”7 Smith recounted two further adventures of Captain Volmar and the crew of the Alcyone: “The Red World of Polaris” and “A Captivity in Serpens,” and began a fourth, “The Ocean-World of Alioth.” “Marooned in Andromeda” was collected in OD. Night Shade Books published for the first time the complete Volmar series as Red World of Polaris in 2003.