The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (2 page)

Despite these reservations, Smith would attempt some short stories before 1925. CAS wrote Sterling on September 9, 1915 that he had “a few short-story plots” (
SU
132). Sterling had some influence with a romance magazine called
Snappy Stories
, and he encouraged Smith to submit some of his work, such as the prose poem “In Cocaigne.” CAS reported that “
Snappy Stories
has accepted a little prose-sketch of mine, entitled ‘The Flirt.’ They pay 2 cents a word for prose. Maybe I’ll do some more whore-mongering, at that price” (
SL
65). For many years the only clue to the publication of “The Flirt” was a tear sheet or galley proof of the story found among the papers of Smith’s friend Genevieve K. Sully. In 2007 Phil Stephensen-Payne announced on Fictionmags ( a Yahoo newsgroup) that he had located “The Flirt” in the March 1, 1923 issue of
Live Stories
, a companion magazine to
Snappy Stories.

Another sketch, “Something New,” appeared in the August 1924 issue of
10 Story Book
, for which CAS received the munificent sum of $6. He told Sterling that “the story was rotten, anyhow—except for the spanking—which was what I
ought
to have administered, some time back, to a certain badly spoiled female person.” (
SU
242)

After completing (on February 28, 1923), and failing to sell, “The Perfect Woman,” Smith would not write another short story until early 1925, when he wrote his first true weird tale, “The Abominations of Yondo.” When he began the composition of short stories for commercial markets in late 1929, CAS directed most of his efforts to markets such as
Weird Tales
and
Wonder Stories
, but he apparently still harbored hopes that he might expand upon his prior beachhead in the realm of “sophisticated” adult irony by writing “The Parrot” (also “The Pawnbroker’s Parrot” and “The Parrot in the Pawn-Shop” [written January 5, 1930]), “A Copy of Burns” (February 27, 1930), “Checkmate” (November 7, 1930). It does not appear that Clark ever submitted these to any markets. All of these stories, along with “A Platonic Entanglement” and “The Expert Lover,” are discussed in more detail by Donald Sidney-Fryer in his essay “O Amor Atque Realitas!” elsewhere in this volume.

Although we have generally decided not to include fragmentary stories in this edition (these are available in
Strange Shadows
, edited by Steve Behrends, and published by Greenwood Press in 1989), it was decided that “The Infernal Star”, which is even in its unfinished state still one of Clark Ashton Smith’s longest chunks of prose, deserves inclusion. Smith recorded its germ in his notebook of story ideas, the fabled
Black Book
, thus: “An extra-galactic world from which an influence of stupendous evil emanates, seeping through the farthest reaches of the cosmos”.
⁷
This theme, which would appear to be an expansion of the core idea of “The Devotee of Evil,” also appears in the famous lines from “Nyctalops,” “We have seen the black suns/ Pouring forth the night.” He described it in a letter to August Derleth as

a weird-interstellar novelette de luxe. The tale involves a harmless bibliophile in a series of wild mysterious happenings, ending in his translation to Yamil Zacra, a star which is the fountain-head of all the evil and bale and sorcery in the universe. It mixes wizardry and necromancy with the latest scientific theory of “radiogens,” or atoms of sun-fire, burning at a temperature of 1500 Centigrade in the human body. I am using the innocuousness of the hero’s normal personality as a foil to that which he temporarily assumes beneath the influence of an amulet that stimulates those particles in his body which have come from Yamil Zacra. (
SL
199)

As Smith worked on “The Infernal Star”
he realized that it was rapidly becoming a novel.
Weird Tales
ran one or two serials per issue during this period. While Farnsworth Wright was willing to publish stories that he perhaps thought might be too good for his readership (the list of tales that the fickle Farnsworth originally rejected includes H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain,” Carl Jacobi’s “Revelations in Black,” Robert E. Howard’s “The Phoenix on the Sword” [the first adventure of Conan of Cimmeria], Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” and “The Seven Geases,” among many others), he was much more conservative in his choice of serials; of all the serials that ran in
Weird Tales
, only those by Robert E. Howard, as well as Jack Williamson’s “Golden Blood” (April to September 1933) are generally well-regarded today. One reason why “The Infernal Star”
(which according to a fragmentary holograph first draft was originally to be titled “The Dark Star”) grew was that it seemed that CAS wanted to use it in the same manner that Lovecraft did “The Whisperer in Darkness,” tying together elements of his own invented mythologies (Hyperborea, Averoigne, Poseidonis, Zothique) along with those of Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce. Smith eventually bowed to reality and put “The Infernal Star”
aside “since there is no prospect of landing it as a serial even if completed. Wright is so heavily loaded down with long tales (all of them tripe, I dare say) that he can’t even consider anything over 15,000 words till next year” (
SL
203).

After a brief spurt of productivity in the early fifties, Smith began to exhibit a reluctance to write anything, even letters. He had toyed with the idea of completing “The Infernal Star”, and August Derleth encouraged him with an offer of Arkham House publication despite his own lack of enthusiasm for the work itself.

“Dawn of Discord” and “House of Monoceros” appear on Smith’s completed stories log after “Double Cosmos” (originally “Secondary Cosmos”), which was completed on March 25, 1940 although he had been working on it intermittently since 1934.

Late in 1938
Weird Tales
was purchased by a New York businessman, William J. Delaney, who already published the highly successful pulp
Short Stories
. Delaney relocated the operation to New York City. Wright was kept on as editor and made the move, but was let go with the March 1940 issue. An interview with Delaney appeared in a fanzine at the time of Wright’s dismissal that boded ill for Smith. After promising that
Weird Tales
would continue to publish “all types of weird and fantasy fiction,” the interview went on to add:

There is one rule, however:
Weird Tales
does not want stories which center about sheer repulsiveness, stories which leave an impression not to be described by any other word than “nasty”. This is not to imply that the “grim” story, or the tale which leaves the reader gasping at the verge of the unknown, is eliminated. Mr. Delaney believes that the story which leaves a sickish feeling in the reader is not truly weird and has no place in
Weird Tales
. . . . And, finally, stories wherein the characters are continually talking in French, German, Latin, etc. will be frowned upon, as well as stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary.
⁸

The interviewer was Robert A. W. Lowndes, who shed some light on this in a letter published years later:

Delaney, who was a pleasant and cultured man, was very fond of weird stories, but he was also a strict Catholic. . . . He also found some of the Clark Ashton Smith stories on the ‘disgusting’ side and told me that he had returned one that Wright had in his inventory when he left. It was about a monstrous worm which, when attacked and pierced, shed forth rivers of slime. Later in 1940, when Donald A. Wollheim was starting
Stirring Science Stories
, Smith sent him ‘The Coming of the White Worm’ and Don used it. When I read it, there was no doubt that this was the story Delaney had been talking about. . . . Concerned about the magazine’s slipping circulation, he felt that the “more esoteric” type of story was a handicap, so this was mostly cut out.
⁹

The memoirs of E. Hoffmann Price illustrate just how frustrated and upset Smith was with this development and with magazine publishing in general. When Price visited Smith later that year, Smith presented him with the typescripts of “House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord.” Smith told Price to do what he wanted to do with them: “Scrap the god-damn things if after all you don’t like them. The less I hear of them—.”
Price’s take on this was that Smith realized “his stories did not fit into the publisher’s new pattern. Clark, fed up with adverse criticism or outright rejection, rejected the rejector, and gave me the scripts.”
¹⁰

The
Spicy
line of pulps that were published by Culture Publications (a subsidiary imprint of Harry Donenfeld’s Trojan Publications) were one of Price’s main markets, and he pared Smith’s prose to fit their formula, which he, according to fellow writer Henry Kuttner, described as “sex, sadism, and destruction of valuable property.”
¹¹
(Kuttner also observed that “words over three syllables seem to be out, definitely.”) “Dawn of Discord” appeared in the October 1940 issue of
Spicy Mystery Stories
, while “House of the Monoceros” was published (as “The Old Gods Eat”) in the February 1941 issue. According to Price’s records, the proceeds were split 33-67 in CAS’ favor,
¹²
although both stories appeared under Price’s byline alone. Smith did acknowledge his authorship to friends, writing in a letter that “My latest yarn is a filthy mixture of sex and pseudo science...which won’t appear under my own name but under that of a friend, a very successful pulp-writer, who had more commissions on hand than he could get through with.” (
SL
330) “House of the Monoceros” was reprinted, under its original title, in Price’s collection
Far Lands, Other Days
(Carcosa, 1975), without credit to Smith, but “Dawn of Discord” has not been reprinted until now.

When Price was asked about the whereabouts of CAS’ original versions many years later, Price claimed that he destroyed them, stating that “Scripts were not sacred relics.” In the absence of Smith’s original manuscript it is impossible to determine just where Smith ends and Price begins, but it is still possible to wager a guess. “Dawn of Discord” resembles the science fiction stories that CAS had written for Hugo Gernsback, especially “The Letter from Mohaun Los” and “The Dark Age,” but the misanthropy that had long embued Smith’s work had taken center stage. Smith’s letters make it clear that he was observing the deteriorating world situation with alarm. Writing shortly after Lovecraft’s death to R. H. Barlow, who was at that time advocating communism as a panacea to contemporary social-economic problems, Smith observed bitterly that:

I have no faith in
any
political or economic isms, schisms, and panaceas. Theoretically, almost any kind of a system might serve well enough, if human beings were not the stupidest and greediest and most cruel of the fauna on this particular planet. No matter what system you have—capitalism, Fascism, Bolshevism—the greed and power-lust of men will produce the same widespread injustice, the same evils and abuses: or, will merely force them to take slightly different forms.

He concluded “In my opinion, the whole fabric of western civilization is nearly due for a grand debacle” (
SL
300). A few letters later, he told Barlow that “the word ‘civilization’ would make a jackal vomit in view of the general situation” (
SL
313) We speculate that the conclusion of Smith’s version of “Dawn of Discord” ended with the discovery that John King’s temporal excursion itself was responsible for introducing warfare into history, but unless the original typescript should turn up in the late Mr. Price’s papers, it remains mere conjecture.

We suspect that “House of the Monoceros” originally was similar to Smith’s contemporary horror stories such as “The Nameless Offspring,” but where bits of Smith occasionally flash through in “Dawn of Discord,” little remains outside of the name Treganneth and the word “monoceros” itself. There may be little of Smith’s original concepts left in these two stories, but the Smith afficionado may find something of interest in them.

“The Dead Will Cuckold You” was described by Smith as one of his “few unpublished masterpieces” (
SL
373). While the author’s omnipresent touch of irony was almost certainly not entirely absent from this evaluation, this play in blank verse (written during the winter of 1951 and revised in 1956) his penultimate story set in Zothique (the last continent of earth under a dying red sun) contains some of his most vivid, and most macabre, writing. Although it remained unpublished until after Smith’s death, he and his friends enjoyed acting out or reading aloud its sonorous, rhythmic lines.
¹³

“The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil” is Clark Ashton Smith’s longest and most well-known poem; and was described by his friend H.P. Lovecraft as “the greatest imaginative orgy in English literature.”
⁴
Written in early 1922 and published later that same year in
Ebony and Crystal,
this epic poem owes at least some of its inspiration to George Sterling and “A Wine of Wizardry,”
which the young Smith discovered in the pages of
Cosmopolitan
in 1907. Smith would later describe his intentions and rationale behind his cosmic masterpiece in a letter to S.J. Sackett: (
SL
259)

. . .
The Hashish-Eater
, a much misunderstood poem, which was intended as a study in cosmic consciousness, drawing heavily on myth and fable for much of its imagery. It is my own theory that, if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in the end, like the hero of the poem.