A Vintage From Atlantis (62 page)

“Ubbo-Sathla” was submitted to
Weird Tales
, but was rejected. Wright’s rejection letter does not survive, but CAS remarked to HPL that he seemed “to think that it would be over the heads of his clientele”.
⁵
He continued in the same vein in his next letter to Lovecraft:

Wright must have rejected ‘Ubbo-Sathla’ because it didn’t remind him of anything that had ever made a hit with his readers. I can’t see myself that it’s especially difficult or ‘high-brow.’ Where Wright errs is in playing safe when he can’t find a precedent for some particular tale—a method of selection that is none too favourable to originality. It will be interesting to see what he says to ‘The Double Shadow’—a tale that I am inclined (though I may be wrong) to rate above ‘Ubbo-Sathla’.
⁶

Wright did accept the story upon re-submission, apparently after Lovecraft “had raked him over about the rejection”,
⁷
publishing it in the July 1933 issue. This issue also contained Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” as well as Hazel Heald’s “The Horror in the Museum” (which was actually ghost-written by Lovecraft). All three stories contained references to the mythical
Book of Eibon
, which excited a lot of questions among credulous fans. Smith responded to one such query from Charles D. Hornig, David Lasser’s successor at
Wonder Stories
and editor of the fanzine
Fantasy Fan
:

“Necronomicon,” “Book of Eibon” etc I am sorry to say, are all fictitious. Lovecraft invented the first, I the second.…It is really too bad that they don’t exist as objective, bonafide compilations of the elder and darker Lore! I have been trying to remedy this, in some small measure, by cooking up a whole chapter of Eibon. It is still unfinished, and I am now entitling it “The Coming of the White Worm.”….
⁸

After Hornig inadvertently published Smith’s letter in the November 1933 issue, CAS remarked in a postcard to Lovecraft: “ I was a little vexed by Brother Hornig’s ‘scoop’ in utilizing my letter about Eibon, etc. He asked me where and how the books could be obtained; and I didn’t think to stipulate that the answer was for his private information! Dumb of me, I’ll admit. However, as you say, the hoax might easily go too far”.
⁹
CAS included “Ubbo-Sathla” among the “Hyperborean Grotesques” of
OST.
This text is derived from a carbon typescript at JHL.

1.
SS
174.

2. Douglas A. Anderson, “Introduction.” In
The Dark Chamber
by Leonard Cline (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005), p. 9.

3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. December 4, 1933] (
SL
240).

4. CAS, letter to DAW, February 17, 1932 (
SL
170).

5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (
SL
172).

6. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. mid-March 1932] (
LL
35-36).

7. CAS, letter to DAW, May 4, 1932 (ms, MHS).

8.
PD
29.

9. CAS, postmark to HPL, postmarked November 24, 1933 (private collection).

The Double Shadow

W
hen H. P. Lovecraft first read “The Double Shadow,” he called it “magnificent… full of vivid colour & creeping menace, & with an atmosphere worthy of E. A. P.”.
¹
Smith thought that it was the “most demoniac of my recent tales”
²
and called it a personal favorite.
³
Yet Farnsworth Wright’s continued refusal to buy the story until Smith had almost ceased the composition of fiction was probably a contributing factor in that cessation, and led Smith to the drastic and ultimately unprofitable step of self-publication.

The germ of the story may be found in the following note: “A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and merging with it gradually, day by day; while coincidentally with this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed by an evil thing from unknown worlds. In his personality, the hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till his shadow is that which had followed him”.
⁴
Smith completed it on March 14, 1932, and immediately submitted it to
Weird Tales
, perhaps feeling that its exotic setting in Atlantis might not be to the liking of the Babbitesque William Clayton. Wright’s original rejection letter apparently does not survive, but according to Smith he wrote “that it was ‘interesting, in a way,’ but he feared that his readers wouldn’t care for it. I fear that Wright, in his anxiety to publish nothing that would be disliked by any of his readers, will get to the point where he won’t publish anything that any one will like very much”.
⁵
He then submitted it to
Strange Tales
, where much to his surprise it was accepted. However, there was a catch:

Both Mr. Clayton and I have tentatively approved both of them: but because of their type I can only buy one. I am hoping that one will be the longer, but at this time, with
Strange Tales
appearing so infrequently, I cannot make the decision. I hope you do not mind if I hold your two stories, “The Double Shadow” and “The Colossus of Ylourgne” for a while longer.
⁶

Smith was therefore elated when Bates later wrote to him later “that in some mysterious manner, both ‘The Double Shadow’ and ‘The Colossus of Ylourgne’ have passed successfully through Mr. Clayton’s critical craw. I expect to buy both!”
⁷
Unfortunately, in October 1932 Clayton ordered Bates to shut down both
Strange Tales
and
Astounding Stories
, which had the dual effect of drastically cutting down Smith’s sources of income (for all his philistine thickheadedness, Clayton paid better rates than any other genre publication) and leaving Wright in command of the field. “My own prospective income is sadly nicked by the failure of S.T.,” CAS wrote to Derleth. “I am out five hundred bucks, unless I can re-sell part or all of the unused tales to Wright. I don’t believe he will buy ‘The Double Shadow;’ but the chances seem fair for the other two”.
⁸
Sadly, Smith’s prediction proved correct, as Wright once again rejected “The Double Shadow” in November.
⁹
Smith finally ended up publishing the story himself as the title story of his first collection, which he published himself in 1933 utilizing the services of the local newspaper. In an advertising flyer that he printed to promote
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
, he described the tale as “a strange tale of two Atlantean sorcerers, who made use of a dreadful antehuman spell, without knowing what would come in answer to their evocation.”

Smith’s fiction output fell off for several reasons starting in late 1933. However, Wright had a sufficient backlog of stories that this didn’t begin to become apparent until after 1936. Coupled with the deaths of Robert E. Howard in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft in 1937, this was a blow which lead to Wright frantically trying to get stories from one of his few remaining stars. Smith insisted that Wright first purchase stories that he had previously rejected, which brought about the appearance in
Weird Tales
of several stories from
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
, including the title story. Ironically, when it appeared in the February 1939 in a slightly pruned version, “The Double Shadow” was voted the most popular story in that issue by the readers. Smith used tear sheets from that issue for
OST
, and he planned to include the story in
Far from Time
. We are using the text from a copy of
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
that features Smith’s handwritten corrections of typographical errors.

1. HPL, letter to DAW, March 26, 1932 (
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. 304).

2. CAS, letter to DAW, April 6, 1932 (ms, MHS).

3. CAS, letter to DAW, April 14, 1932 (ms, MHS).

4.
SS
174.

5. CAS, letter to AWD, April 5, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

6. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, June 11, 1932 (ms, JHL).

7. Quoted in CAS, letter to AWD, September 28, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, October 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, November 15, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

The Plutonian Drug

S
mith wrote August Derleth in February 1932 that “I’ve begun a short pseudo-scientific tale, dealing with a drug that changed a man’s perception of time into a sort of space-perception. He saw himself as a continuous body—a sort of infinite frieze—stretching both into the past and future.” He added that he found the writing of the story “hellishly hard to do.”
¹
He put the story aside for a month, completing it on April 5, 1932.

Although he had submitted stories to a wide variety of publications, CAS had so far managed to sell his stories to just three magazines with any degree of regularity. One pulp that he had yet to “crack” was the oldest of the “scientifiction” magazines,
Amazing Stories
. By late 1931 he made just about given up, telling Derleth that “The same editorial crew is still in force, and I understand there will be no change in policy. They seem to have a fixed prejudice against my stuff as not being sufficiently scientific”.
²
With “The Plutonian Drug” CAS thought that he had managed to inject enough science that it might meet with success, so he submitted “The Plutonian Drug” to its editor, T. O’Conor Sloane (1851-1940).
³
As was his practice, Sloane held on to the manuscript for several months before publishing it in the September 1934 issue of
Amazing Stories
. Smith received only ½ cent a word for the story,
⁴
less than either
Weird Tales
(one cent) or
Wonder Stories
(¾ cent), and far less than the two cents paid by the Clayton
Strange Tales
. CAS collected it in
LW
. It also formed part of the proposed contents for
Far from Time
.

In 1951 August Derleth asked Smith to select a favorite story for an anthology. He chose this story:

“The Plutonian Drug” is, in my opinion, among my best in the genre of science-fiction. For one thing, it is the sort of tale that can hardly become “dated” in spite of changing vogues and varying themes. And it has the advantages of conciseness and brevity.

The field of speculation that it opens is a fascinating one, and hardly to be exhausted. Benjamin Paul Blood (and, no doubt, others) has hinted that our deepest perceptions of reality may come to us beneath the influence of drugs: a proposition equally impossible to prove or disprove.
Quien Sabe?
⁵

1. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, October 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early April 1932] (
SL
175).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, October 27, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

5.
PD
74.

The Supernumerary Corpse

T
he concept of “The Supernumerary Corpse” occurred to Smith early in his career as a fiction writer, the title appears in a list of possible titles that dates to late 1929. His notes for the story describe it succinctly: “A man dies, and leaves two corpses, in two different places”.
¹
CAS first discusses the story in a letter to Lovecraft in mid-November 1930.
²
It apparently failed to fire his imagination sufficiently as it was not completed until April 10, 1932. CAS submitted it to Wright, wryly noting that it “may be punk enough for him to buy,” and adding that he could not decide if “the carbon is worth circulating”.
³
It was published in the November 1932 issue, and remained uncollected until after Smith’s death, in
OD
. The current text is based upon a carbon of the typescript at JHL.

1.
SS
159.

2. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. November 16, 1930] (
SL
136).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early April 1932] (ms, JHL).

The Colossus of Ylourgne

T
he story germ of this story may be found in Smith’s “Black Book,” which he described in the fanzine the
Acolyte
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.”,
¹
under the title “The Colossal Incarnation”:

An immense giant, moulded from innumerable dead bodies by a sorcerer. The tale to be told by one of his assistants, who has helped to collect the bodies, stealing them from graves and charnels. Having read his own horoscope, and knowing that his death is imminent, the sorcerer plans to have his spirit pass into the vast body through which, among other things, he will take revenge on a city that had flouted him. But the body, being composed of the dead, is not sufficiently subject to his control. Its elements long only for sleep and oblivion; and instead of destroying the city, it proceeds to dig itself a colossal grave.
²

Completed on May 1, 1932, Smith described the story as “about the most horrific of my tales dealing with the mythical province of Averoigne”.
³
It was accepted by Harry Bates for
Strange Tales
, but as in the case of “The Double Shadow” and “The Seed from the Sepulcher,” it was returned to Smith after the magazine folded. It was the most popular story in the June 1934 issue of
Weird Tales
and was included in both
GL
and
RA
.