1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 128).
2. SS 159 .
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 129).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, August 2, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, May 23, 1933 (SL 206-207).
8. AWD, letter to HPL, July 17, 1933 (Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008], p. 594).
9. See Derleth’s remarks in the notes to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, ” VA, 307n6.
10. HPL, letter to AWD, July 23, 1933 (Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008], p. 595).
11. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 21, 1930 (LL 15).
12. CAS, letter to Lester Anderson, June 20, 1933 (SL 211).
The Disinterment of Venus
CAS mentioned to Derleth early in June 1931 that he had plotted three other tales of Averoigne, the first of which was “The Disinterment of Venus.”1 This story, which was inspired in part by Prosper de Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille” (1837), would describe what happened when
A marble Venus, exhumed in a monastery garden in Averoigne by some monks, which has a baleful influence on all who touch or behold it, inducing nympholepsy and a sort of pagan madness or possession. The statue is left standing in the field beside the pit from which it had been digged, and people fear to approach it. A young monk goes to it by night before moonrise, with a hammer, intending to smash it to fragments. The monk fails to return; and the next day it is seen that the statue has disappeared. People, among whom are the possessed and the unpossessed, visit the field, and find that the statue has fallen back into the pit, carrying with it the monk, who lies dead beneath its weight with his arms about the Venus, which is still unbroken.2
When Smith finished the story in July 1932, he described it to Derleth as “a rather wicked story”3—too wicked, as it turned out, for Farnsworth Wright, who rejected it with the indignant complaint that “satyriasis is not a suitable theme for a WT story.”4 Smith revised and retyped the story, although he feared “of all my recent tales, [it] will be the hardest to sell, since it combines the risque and the ghastly.”5 Wright accepted the story after four revisions, stating that he liked it “much better with the new ending” and offering thirty dollars.6 Although CAS told Derleth that this version, as published in the July 1934 issue of WT, “practically restored”7 the original ending, he may have forgotten just how suggestive the story was originally. The expenditure of so much effort for such minimal remuneration did not do much to endear “The Disinterment of Venus” to Smith, since when he presented the original typescript to Robert H. Barlow, he offered this assessment, that it wasn’t “much of a story in any of its phases.”8 The present text is based upon this copy, which was presented by Barlow to the Bancroft Library, with reference to CAS’ carbon of the WT version at the John Hay Library.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, June 6, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. SS 16-167.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, July 10, 1932 (SL 180).
4. FW, letter to CAS, July 13, 1932 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
6. FW, letter to CAS, February 9, 1934 (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, February 20, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
8. CAS, letter to RHB, June 15, 1934 (ms, JHL).
The White Sybil
It has often been remarked, by Farnsworth Wright, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and others, that many of Clark Ashton Smith’s ultra-imaginative short stories are extended poems in prose,1 and this is well illustrated by “The White Sybil.” As Smith was turning his creative energies exclusively toward fiction, his output of poetry fell drastically. Late in 1929, Smith was moved to compose a series of ten poems in prose, which he called “prose pastels” in echo, conscious or otherwise, of Stuart Merrill’s collection Pastels in Prose (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890). The third of these, completed on December 22, 1929, was “The Muse of Hyperborea” (see Appendix 3).
“The White Sybil of Polarion” is the second entry in Smith’s Black Book, which he described as “a notebook containing used and unused plot-germs, notes on occultism and magic, synopses of stories, fragments of verse, fantastic names for people and places, etc., etc.” when he allowed excerpts to appear in the Spring 1944 issue of Francis T. Laney’s fan magazine The Acolyte:2
A pale, beautiful, unearthly being, goddess or woman, who comes and goes mysteriously in the cities of Hyperborea, sometimes uttering strange prophecies or cryptic tidings. Tortha, the young poet, sometimes seeing her on the streets of Cerngoth in Mhu-Thulan, is deeply smitten, and seeks to follow and find her dwelling-place. Pursuing her into a bleak mountainous region verging on the eternal glaciers, he loses sight of her in a great snow-storm that falls suddenly from the clear summer heavens. Wandering in this storm, and losing his way, he emerges presently in an unknown fantastic land, where, in a faery bower, he is received by the White Sybil, who seems to look kindly upon him. She kisses him on the brow; but trying to clasp her, he finds a frozen mummy in his arms; and a moment later the trees and blossoms of the faery bower dissolve in whirling snow. Later, Tortha, with the mark of frost-bite on his brow, where the Sybil kissed him, is found on the barren mountain-side; and he recovers slowly, remembering only dimly what has happened.3
The genesis for this story may be traced to the earlier “prose pastel,” although we might suggest that this plot synopsis found among CAS’ papers may also have contributed to the development of the story:
“The Hyperborean City:” A lost explorer who is freezing to death in the Arctic falls, into a dream, in which he lives through a long drama that takes place in some ancient Hyperborean city, before the Ice Age. He is aroused by his companions at the moment when, in his dream, he is about to wed the lovely princess Alactyssa. Still possessed by the vision, which he cannot throw off, he wanders forth again in the snows, and is lost this time forever.4
Originally entitled “The White Sybil of Polarion,” Smith first mentions the story in a letter to Genevieve Sully, mentioning that it was “a title I have long had in mind to use, though I didn’t think up the story until recently,” and describing it as “poetic and romantic.”5 He completed the story on July 14, 1932 and submitted it to Weird Tales, but Wright, while acknowledging its “poetic quality,” reluctantly returned it.6 CAS put the story aside until mid-November, when he devoted his efforts to revising some rejected stories for resubmission. It was at this time he gave “The Beast of Averoigne” its new “twist to the climax,” and mentions “the similarly treated White Sybil.” The revision was completed on November 21; he cut out approximately two hundred words and changed the ending to a wryly romantic one. Unfortunately, while the effort paid off for “The Beast of Averoigne,” Wright still could not convince himself that the story would appeal to his readership.
When a teenage science fiction fan from Everett, Pennsylvania named William L. Crawford (1911-1984) solicited stories from CAS for a semi-professional magazine called Unusual Stories, Smith sent him the revised version, now called simply “The White Sybil.” Crawford, who would later publish Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth in book form, printed it, along with “Men of Avalon” by David H. Keller, as a pamphlet in 1934. When Lovecraft read the copy sent to him by CAS, he contrasted Smith’s tale with that of Dr. Keller, “whose tale is mawkish & naive, while its companion is a splendid specimen of Klarkash-Tonic fantasy.”7 (A year later, HPL would downgrade his estimate, writing to R. H. Barlow that “The White Sybil is good, but hardly stands out among other Clericashtonia.”8)
During the 1940s, Smith attempted to sell the story to Mary Gnaedinger of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, who had expressed interest in reprinting �
�The City of the Singing Flame,” as well as to Dorothy McIlwraith, Wright’s successor as editor at Weird Tales. Smith fumed about the latter, “I was rather disgusted last January when she fired back my White Sybil and Kingdom of the Worm after holding them for several months. They were ‘too poetic’ or something.”9
Smith presented the original typescript to Mrs. Sully, and did not keep a copy for his own files. We used this as the foundation for our text, along with reference both to the typescript sent to Crawford, now in a private collection, and to two copies of the 1934 pamphlet that Smith had corrected by hand. We have restored Smith’s original ending, but are including the published ending as Appendix 2.
1. See Wright’s remarks in the notes to “The Abomination of Yondo,” ES 256; also Sidney-Fryer, The Sorcerer Departs: Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) (Dole, France: Silver Key Press, 2007), p. 46: “Regarded more exactly as extended poems in prose, which is what many of them are....” S. T. Joshi, on the other hand, expressed a slightly more hesitant view in “Lands Forgotten or Unfound: The Prose Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith,” in FFT 147: “To the extent that nearly all Smith’s prose tales employ poetic prose, they could all be classed as prose poems.”
2. Reprinted in BB p. 77.
3. BB item 2.
4. SS 157.
5. CAS, letter to Genevieve K. Sully, July 12, 1932 (ms, private collection).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, August 21, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
7. HPL, letter to RHB, c. December 1, 1934 (O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [University of Tampa Press, 2007), p. 192).
8. HPL, letter to RHB, c. April 20, 1935 (O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [University of Tampa Press, 2007), p. 252).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, April 23, 1943 (ms, SHSW).
The Ice-Demon
Smith returned to Hyperborea with “The Ice Demon,” which he completed on July 22, 1932. A plot synopsis for this story forms the very first item in the Black Book:
Quangah the huntsman and two merchants of Mhu-Thulan, seeking the lost treasure of a king who had fled from the north before the glacial ice and had perished with his retainers in an outland region, enter the realms of eternal ice and snow during the summer season. They find the cave in which the treasure is hidden, together with the preserved bodies of the king and his followers; but departing with their loot, they are followed by an invisible icy presence. One of the merchants is found frozen to death on the morning after their first stop. Later, the second perishes in like fashion; and Quangah, fleeing into a warm, semi-tropic volcanic valley, is also overtaken, and dies of cold. The thing manifests itself as a sort of spiral wind or gust, enfolding the victims from head to foot. A kind of sub-auditory whispering is also connected with its presence.1
The story was first submitted to Strange Tales. Harry Bates apologized to CAS, writing “It happened that Mr. Clayton got to your story, ‘The Ice Demon,’ before I did, and the no he hung on it was sufficiently emphatic to render useless my reading it after him. Therefore I have to let it go back, without even some specific criticism or objection.”2 Smith complained to Derleth that Clayton’s “ideas of the disgusting must indeed be peculiar.”3 Wright also rejected the story upon first submission, which HPL called “a calamity, for we need a few tales in which the weirdness takes other than stock forms.”4 Wright accepted the story upon resubmission, after Smith revised the ending;5 unfortunately, there are no copies of the original version still extant, unless one such is held in a private collection. “The Ice Demon” appeared in the April 1933 issue of Weird Tales. The current text is based upon a carbon copy of the final revised version among Smith’s papers at the John Hay Library.
1. BB item 1.
2. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, September 16, 1932 (ms, JHL).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, September 28, 1932 (SL 191).
4. HPL, letter to CAS, postmarked August 27, 1932 (ms, private collection).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, October 27, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
The Isle of the Torturers
Completed on July 31, 1932, CAS called this story “a sort of companion to ‘The Empire of the Necromancers’.”1 He described it to August Derleth as “a strange mixture of eeriness, grotesquery, bright color, cruelty, and stark human tragedy,” and added “I think it is the best of the summer’s crop....”2 Lovecraft expressed the hope that Wright would take the story “in spite of the realistic details which might raise doubts in his milk-&-water judgment. It is full of magnificent atmosphere, & has a truly Dunsanian glamour & convincingness.”3
Smith received sixty dollars for the story when it was published in the March 1933 issue of WT.4 It was also reprinted by Christine Campbell Thomson for inclusion in Keep on the Light, which was part of the famous Not at Night! series of anthologies, making it the second of his stories to appear between boards. The present text is from a typescript presented to Genevieve K. Sully, and from a carbon copy in the CAS papers at Brown University.
1. CAS, letter to Lester Anderson, July 29, 1932 (ms, private collection).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 2, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
3. HPL, letter to CAS postmarked July 26, 1932 (ms, JHL).
4. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS, April 21, 1933 (ms, JHL).
The Dimension of Chance
The beginning of August 1932 saw Smith begin “a new scientific tale” that described “a universe in which the electrons did not form any regular patterns of behavior, and in which, therefore, the action of all natural forces was subject to no other law than that of chance. In such a world a plum-tree might bear avacadoes or grape-fruit—or both! The law of gravity might work in one place or at one time—and be non-effective at others—etc., etc.—a dizzy idea, n’est ce pas?”1
As in the case of “An Adventure in Futurity,” the idea for the story originated in a suggestion by Wonder Stories editor David Lasser, which caused H. P. Lovecraft to observe that Lasser and Gernsback were probably “brighter & more sensible in many ways than the philistines controlling Astounding & the technologists in charge of Amazing! Really, there is little doubt but that Wonder is the most generally interesting of the scientifiction magazines.”2 Lasser accepted “The Dimension of Chance” on August 25, 1932, but with reservations: he observed that “I would rather have had a little less description, if necessary, and more conflict with the residents of the dimension.”3
Smith did not think much of the story, noting that it “was probably better as a satire than anything else.” After the story was accepted by Lasser, Smith thought of changes that would improve it and sent in some new pages, but they arrived too late.4 As Steve Behrends has previously noted, those changes survive in the carbon copy of the story surviving at Brown University among Smith’s papers.5 They are incorporated into the present text. Attorney Ione Weber eventually collected sixty-five dollars for Smith for this story.6
“The Dimension of Chance” was first published in Wonder Stories’ November 1932 issue, and remained uncollected until it was posthumously included in OD.
1. CAS, letter to Genevieve K. Sully, August 4, 1932 (ms, private collection).
2. HPL, letter to CAS, postmarked August 27, 1932 (ms, Northern Illinois University).
3. David Lasser, letter to CAS, August 25, 1932 (ms, JHL).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, November 15, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. Steve Behrends, “Unpublished Revisions to ‘The Dimension of Chance’ by Clark Ashton Smith,” Dark Eidolon no. 2 (June 1989): 33.
6. Mike Ashley, “The Perils of Wonder: Clark Ashton Smith’s Experiences with Wonder Stories.” Dark Eidolon no. 2 (June 1989): 2-8.
The Dweller in the Gulf
Smith’s next story probably provided him with more headaches than the rest of his stories combined. He originally intended to call it “The Eidolon of the Blind.” He called it “a sort of running mate for ‘The Vaults of Yoh
-Vombis,’” and like its predecessor it suffered greatly from editorial tampering. Smith described the story as “equally monstrous and cruel.”1 (He was particularly proud of its “magnificent Dantesque ending.”) Wright rejected it for Weird Tales “on the plea that it was too horrific for his select circle of Babbits [sic] and Polyannas.”2 The story then went to Harry Bates before it finally landed at Wonder Stories, but not before Lasser and Gernsback required the addition of a “semi-scientific explanation” that he supplied through the addition of a new character.3 No mention was made that the horror element was objectionable.
When Smith saw its appearance in the March 1933 issue, he waxed apoplectic:
My triply unfortunate tale, “The Dweller in the Gulf,” is printed in the current Wonder Stories under the title of “Dweller in Martian Depths,” and has been utterly ruined by a crude attempt on the part of someone—presumably the office-boy—to rewrite the ending. Apart from this, paragraph after paragraph of imaginative description and atmosphere has been hewn bodily from the story. I have written to tell the editor what I thought of such Hunnish barbarity, and have also told him that I do not care to have my work printed at all unless it can appear verbatim or have the desired alterations made by my own hand. It shows what fine literature means to the Gernsback crew of hog-butchers.4
Gernsback had already demonstrated a tendency to change Smith’s titles, but he had generally allowed Smith himself to make any required revisions. CAS wrote that “The chief reason that I’ve had anything to do with them is that Gernsback has had the perspicacity to print some of my more out-of-the-way stuff which no one else would touch.”5 Even Lovecraft paid Gernsback a left-handed compliment, albeit in a tasteless manner of the sort that makes his present-day admirers cringe: “It’s odd, but in spite of that damn’d kike’s financial remissness & sharp dealings, I really think he offers a better & more vital range of scientifiction than either of his two competitors. He is not quite so rigid, in his demand for the commonplace & the stereotyped.”6 Smith now revised drastically his opinion of Gernsback and of Wonder Stories:
The Maze of the Enchanter Page 42
