A Vintage From Atlantis (58 page)

1. See Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes,
The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936
(Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004), p. 187.

2. David Lasser, letter to CAS, July 10, 1931 (ms, JHL).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early August 1931] (
SL
159).

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

T
he following plot synopsis was found among Smith’s papers (which he originally titled “The Vaults of Abomi”):

Some human explorers on a dying world who are driven to take shelter in subterranean vaults by a strange, crawling, mat-like monstrosity called the
vortlup
. The vaults are evidently of mausolean nature, and contain the mummies of an unknown race, some of which lack the upper portion of the head. The explorers become separated in the dark, winding passages, and one is lost from the others. They hear a muffled cry at some distance, followed by silence; and going in the direction of the cry with their flashlights, meet a terrible sight—the body of their comrade which still walks erect, with a great black, slug-like creature attached to the half-eaten head. The thing is controlling the corpses which passes its friends, enters another catacomb, and removes a heavy boulder from the mouth of a deeper vault, beneath the direction of the slug. Following, the others shoot the creature, which dissolves in a sort of liquid putrescence, and, at the same time, the animated corpse drops dead. Then, from the uncovered pit, there emerges a hoard of the black monsters, and the men flee. They are not followed into the sunlight; and fortunately the
vortlup
has disappeared.
¹

At some point Smith changed “Abomi” to “Yoh-Vombis” and the references to a “dying world” and “unknown race” to “a deserted ancient city on Mars” and “ancient Martian;” perhaps the composition of “Seedling of Mars” had stimulated his interest in the Red Planet. Steve Behrends also suggests that the setting might have been influenced by a series of wildfires that Smith battled during the summer of 1931, pointing out that in a letter to August Derleth he described the sky after one such blaze as being “as dark and dingy as the burnt-out sky of the planet Mars”.
²
The story, which he described to Derleth as a “rather ambitious hunk of extra-planetary weirdness”,
³
was completed on September 12, 1931.

We have not seen Lovecraft’s original remarks to Smith regarding the story, but he wrote to Donald Wandrei at the time that he thought it was “great—replete with the musty, tenebrous, & menacing atmosphere of alien & unholy arcana.” Derleth’s response was more qualified, taking issue with the choice of some words and adding that he “would have liked it much much better had it been set on earth, minus the interplanetary Martian angle.”
^4
5
Smith defended the extraterrestrial setting of “Yoh-Vombis” against objections that it might well be set among the ruins of an earthly antiquity: “I suppose the interplanetary angle is a matter of taste. As far as I am concerned, it adds considerably to the interest, particularly since the tale has little or nothing in common with the usual science fiction stuff”.
⁶

Wright rejected “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” on its first submission, telling Smith “to speed up the first half… on the plea that many of his readers would never get to the interesting portion as it stands.” This did not please Smith: “Oh hell… I suppose I can leave out a lot of descriptive matter; but it’s a crime all the same.
⁷
Lovecraft encouraged him to stand his ground, writing “if I were in your place I’d tell Wright to go to Hades & take my chances on rejection. He would probably take the tale in the end, even if not now; & any change in so well-balanced a narrative would be the sheerest vandalism”.
⁸
But as Smith poignantly pointed out, his situation was different from that of Lovecraft:

I
would
have told Wright to go chase himself in regard to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”, if I didn’t have the support of my parents, and debts to pay off. For this reason it’s important for me to place as many stories as possible and have them coming out at a tolerably early date. However, I did not reduce the tale by as much as Wright suggested, and I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents of the preliminary section. What I did do, mainly, was to condense the descriptive matter, some of which had a slight suspicion of prolixity anyhow. But I shall restore most of it, if the tale is ever brought out in book form. W. accepted the revised version by return mail.
⁹

Smith completed the desired revisions on October 24, 1931, and he then resubmitted “Yoh-Vombis” to
Weird Tales
. Wright was enthusiastic about the story, writing in his letter of acceptance that it was “a tremendous tale, a powerful story”.
¹⁰
Smith received sixty-three dollars for the story, wryly noting to Derleth that “I mulcted myself out of 17 dollars on the price by the surgical excisions which I performed”.
¹¹
It appeared in the May 1932 issue, where it tied with David H. Keller’s “The Last Magician” as the most popular story in that issue. The tale is included in
OST
and
RA
. Smith also included it among the contents of
Far from Time
, a collection of his stories that he submitted to Ballantine Books in the 1950s; Ray Bradbury wrote a foreword for this anthology that was included in Jack L. Chalker’s tribute collection
In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith
(Baltimore: Anthem, 1963), and later in
RA.
The present text was established by a comparison of the typescript of the original version, originally presented by Smith to Robert H. Barlow and now in a private collection (a photocopy of which was provided by Rah Hoffman), with the typescript of the published version, with consultation of the published versions in
WT
and
OST.

In describing the origins of “The Vault of Yoh-Vombis,” as well as in determining its present text, the current editors must acknowledge the pioneering work of Steve Behrends. It is impossible to walk this path without following his footsteps.

1.
SS
162-63.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931; quoted in Steve Behrends, “Introduction” to
The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith: The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
(West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, March 1988), p. 5.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931 (
SL
162).

4. HPL to DAW, September 25, 1931, (
Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei
, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002], p. 286).

5. AWD, letter to CAS, 18 September 1931 (ms, JHL). Behrends (
supra
) notes that Smith incorporated the suggested changes. In his response to Derleth on September 19, 1931 (ms, SHSW), CAS explained his earlier choices: “‘Foreprescience’ was both punk and needless, and probably it
isn’t
in any dictionary. I must have wanted a trisyllable for the rhythm, or something, and didn’t stop to consider its exact meaning. ‘Presentiment’ would fill the bill; and ‘anything of the sort’ could be put ‘anything of peril’.”

6. CAS, letter to AWD, September 19, 1931 (ms, SHSW). Part of Derleth’s objection to the setting of the story on Mars may be due to his attitude towards contemporary science fiction: “As a rule I don’t read scientifiction stuff at all. I regard it as a sort of bastard growth on the true weird tale, though I suppose that would be a sort of blasphemy to H. P. and his stressing of the ‘cosmic beyond’. …” AWD, letter to CAS, October 26 [1931] (ms, JHL).

7. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. 20 October 1931]
(
LL
31).

8. HPL, letter to CAS [Postmarked October 30, 1931] (ms, private collection).

9. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (
SL
165). Smith took a different slant on the subject in correspondence with Derleth. On November 12, 1931, he wrote that “‘Yoh-Vombis’ was injured little if at all by the excisions which I made, since I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents, and merely condensed the preliminary descriptive matter. There were certain paragraphs that had a suspicion of prolixity anyhow” (ms, SHSW).

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

11. CAS, letter to AWD, November 3, 1931 (
SL
164).

The Eternal World

S
mith called “The Eternal World” the “best and most original of my super-scientific tales”.
¹
He described the story to August Derleth on September 22, 1931 as having a “speculative basis [that] would give Einstein a headache”.
²
On that same day he jotted down the basic plot for a story that he then called “Across the Time-Stream:”

A man invents a mechanism, utilizing a force which can project him
laterally
in universal time, thus achieving instantaneous space-transit. The force projects him
beyond
time and space, as we know them, into a universe with different properties, into a sort of eternity, peopled with strange, frozen figures, where he and his machine are unable to function, as if they were caught in a block of ice, though he maintains a sort of consciousness, such as might characterize the unmoving things about him. Into this timelessness, there come invading entities, who, by means of some sort of super-magnetic force, are able to move and live, albeit sluggishly. They take the explorer in his mechanism, and certain of the timeless ones, back to their own world, intending to enslave them and release the dynamic power of the eternal beings in a war against rival peoples. Evidently they have taken the explorer for one of the timeless things.

In this world, subject to ordinary time-space conditions, the statue-like entities become instantly alive and tremendously active and defy all control of their captors. They burst like genii the time-traversing mechanism in which they are confined, catch up the human explorer, and proceed to devastate the planet by means of cataclysmic and varied force-manifestations, before going back to eternity. On their way to the timelessness, they drop the human back into his own world.
³

Although CAS wrote to Derleth that the writing of this story was “the toughest job I have ever attempted”,
⁴
he completed the story the next day. The story was then submitted to
Wonder Stories
. David Lasser’s reaction is recorded in his letter of October 21, 1931: the story possessed “an excellent idea”, but Smith’s descriptions relied too heavily on “strange and bizarre words” and that they were “so long that the story hardly moves and although it is true that you are describing a timeless world in which nothing happens, you cannot afford to have your story be a ‘timeless one’”.
⁵
Smith undertook the required revisions, eliminating what he considered to be some genuine redundancies, but characterized the admonition to “put ‘more realism’ into my future stories [because] the late ones were ‘verging dangerously on the weird’” as “really quite a josh—as well as a compliment”.
⁶
The story appeared in the March 1932 issue, and Smith was eventually paid the sum of sixty dollars. “The Eternal World” was collected in
GL
, and was slated for inclusion in
Far from Time
.

The current text is based upon a carbon of a typescript at JHL dated September 27, 1931. Despite telling both Derleth and Lovecraft that he had pruned the story (he noted that “The tale really needed it in places, since there were genuine redundancies of thought and image”
⁷
), this manuscript, which would appear to predate any revisions, does not differ markedly from the published versions, outside of the simplification of a few words. Perhaps Smith was able to replace just the affected pages and did not bother retyping the entire story.

1. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW). See also Smith’s remarks in “An Autobiography of Clark Ashton Smith,”
Science Fiction Fan
, August 1936 (
PD
43): “Of all the tales published in science fiction magazines, ‘The Eternal World’ and ‘The City of the Singing Flame,’ are in my opinion, the most outstanding”.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 22, 1931 (ms. SHSW).

3.
SS
172.

4. CAS, letter to AWD, September 26, 1931 (
SL
163).

5. David Lasser, letter to CAS, October 21, 1931 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, November 21, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

7. CAS to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (
SL
166).

The Demon of the Flower

“T
he Demon of the Flower” is an expansion of an earlier prose poem, “The Flower-Devil,” that appeared in his self-published collection
Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Prose and Verse
(
Auburn Journal
, 1922). CAS completed the tale on October 17, 1931, and sent it along to Harry Bates. Derleth wrote to Smith that he “found it very colourful, got a strong impression of colour-movement due to your vivid descriptive phrases and sentences. I don’t think Bates will take this, however, good as it is. Not enough action. Still, he took ‘The Door to Saturn;’ but this latter was more whimsical, not so?”
¹
But Bates surprised both Smith and Derleth by tentatively accepting the tale for
Strange Tales
; unfortunately, the magazine’s publisher, William Clayton, ended up vetoing it.
²
Farnsworth Wright rejected it “with some quibbling comments about the diction, which he seems to think might prove a trifle too recherché, for the semi-illiterates among his readers”.
³
Smith resubmitted it with some minor changes, but to no avail.