The Maze of the Enchanter (54 page)

Smith was proud of this story, stating “As far as I know, it is almost the only attempt to convey the profound disturbance of function and sensation that would inevitably be experienced by a human being on an alien world.”
⁷
After reading the story in manuscript, Derleth passed it along to Lovecraft with the comment that “This is not very good, I regret to say.”
⁸
This could be attributed to AWD’s antipathy toward contemporary sf,
⁹
but in his response Lovecraft agreed, observing that “The
idea
is magnificent—but as you say, the mode of handling is mediocre.”
¹⁰
CAS was undoubtedly handicapped by the necessity of using the trappings of Gernsbackian “scientifiction” in his treatment, since as he once remarked to HPL“the mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”
¹¹

After the story appeared, sf fan Forrest J. Ackerman objected to the appearance of stories such as “A Star-Change” in the pages of
Wonder Stories
(see note to “The Dweller in the Gulf” for further details). Smith wrote in a letter to a fan living in the San Francisco Bay area that “The funny part of this is, that this tale is about a hundred times closer to genuine reality in conveying the problematic sensations of an interplanetary traveler than the usual tales dealing with such themes. Oh, well... what’s the use?”
¹²

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

C
AS 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

I
t 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

S
mith 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