The Door to Saturn (54 page)

Instead of submitting it to
WT
(who “might have taken the tale; but God knows when they would have printed it”
³
), CAS submitted it to Hugo Gernsback and
WS
, who published it in the July 1931 issue (and paid Smith the sum of fifty-two dollars in early April 1932.) It proved popular enough with the readership that a sequel was commissioned and published in the November issue as “Beyond the Singing Flame.” David Lasser’s successor as editor of
WS
, Charles D. Hornig, included “The City of the Singing Flame” as number seven on a list of the ten most popular stories ever printed by the magazine, as published in the January 1935 issue.
⁴

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. January 27, 1931 (
SL
144-145).

2. HPL, letter to CAS, February 8, 1931 ( ms, MHS).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, March 25, 1931 (ms., SHSW).

4. See T. G. L. Cockcroft, “The Reader Speaks: Reaction to Clark Ashton Smith in the Pulps.”  
Dark Eidolon
no. 2 (June 1989): 16.

A Good Embalmer

I
n the same letter where he first mentioned the plot germ that became “The Return of the Sorcerer,” Smith discussed another idea (which should really take the palm for macabre grotesquerie) concerning

two undertakers, business partners, whom (for temporary convenience) we might call Jake and John. John has a very poor opinion of Jake’s professional abilities, especially as an embalmer, and tells him one day that if he (John) should die before Jake does, and has to be subjected to the latter’s mercies, he will rise up from the dead... Well—John eventually dies, and his partner is about to begin operations on the corpse, when John suddenly sits up. Jake drops dead from heart-failure at the shock... Next morning,
two
corpses are found laid out in the undertaking establishment; and it is discovered that the corpse of
Jake
has been very efficiently embalmed....
¹

This is the same story outlined among Smith’s papers as “The Undertakers:”

Two undertakers, one of whom has a poor opinion of his partner’s abilities, particularly as an embalmer. He tells him, ‘If I die before you do, and you try to embalm me, by God, I’ll get up and embalm
you
!’ Years later he dies suddenly. His partner takes charge of the body, and is about to begin professional operations, when the corpse suddenly sits up. The living partner drops dead through shock. The next morning, two corpses are found laid out in the parlor; and the one that
died last
has been carefully 
embalmed
.
²

Smith spent three days working on the story before completing it on February 7, 1931. He remained dubious of its merits, telling August Derleth that it “may not even have the dubious merit of being salable.”
³
Part of the problem was that Smith knew “next to nothing about the subject; so you might warn me if I have ‘pulled any boners.’ Anyway, it didn’t seem necessary or advisable to dwell on the technical side.”
⁴
(Lovecraft reassured him “No—I can’t pick any flaws in the embalming tale; for despite my authorship of the banned ‘In the Vault’ I have not a shred of inside knowledge of the profession! One has to bluff beyond one’s scholastic means now & then….”
⁵
) Derleth wrote that “the plot is okeh, but I don’t think you were feeling particularly good when you wrote it. It seems disconnected, and somehow you do not hit the end right. It is the kind of story Wright might take in a pinch but a reader would forget it the moment he had read the last word,” adding “Of course, it does not at all compare with anything else of yours I have recently seen.”
⁶

CAS almost managed to sell the story to
ST
. According to editor Harry Bates, “I liked it myself, and would have bought it, but Mr. Clayton thought we had better not. I did not support it very strongly, for I just as leave have something of greater length to represent you next time.”
⁷
Smith then appears to have given the story to Charles D. Hornig for his fanzine
The Fantasy Fan
, since an announcement for a story called “The Embalmers of Ramsville,” by Michael Weir, appears on page 96 of the February 1934 issue. “Michael Weir” is almost certainly a pseudonym of Smith’s, probably derived from Poe’s poem “Ulalume.” The story remained unpublished until 1989, when Steve Behrends included it in
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Our text is based upon the original holograph manuscript at JHL.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, November 16, 1930 (
SL
136).

2.
SS
159.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, February 7, 1931(ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. February 15-23, 1931 (ms, JHL).

5. HPL, letter to CAS, March 26, 1931 (
Arkham House Transcripts
31.77).

6. AWD, letter to CAS, May 20, 1931 (ms, JHL).

7. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, July 7, 1931 (ms, JHL).

The Testament of Athammaus

S
mith completed this, the third of his tales of Hyperborea, on February 22, 1931, although he had conceived of the plot as early as April 1930: “Athammaus, the public executioner of Commoriom, beheads the outlaw, Nicautal Zhaun, and afterwards oversees his entombment. The next day, Nicautal Zhaun reappears on the streets of Commoriom, is again captured, beheaded, and interred. Seven times is this repeated, till all the people flee from Commoriom, taking it as an evil and supernatural portent. The baffled Athammaus, mocked by Nicautal Zhaun, reluctantly follows them.”
¹
He elaborated on this to Lovecraft, explaining how “this outlaw (who was connected with Tsathoggua on his mother’s side) managed to
leak
or
ooze
from the tomb on each occasion,” concluding that “The tale should make a rollicking hell-raiser.”
²
After completing the story, Smith wrote that “I really think he (or it) is about my best monster to date,” after admitting “In my more civic moods, I sometimes think of the clean-up which an entity like Knygathin Zhaum would make in a modern town.”
³

Smith wrote that he would “be rather peeved if Wright turns [‘Athammaus’] down; since it is about as good as I can do in the line of unearthly horror.”
⁴
Wright wrote Smith on March 21, 1931 that “if is with real reluctance that I am returning ‘The Testament of Athammaus,’ for it is an ingenious and well-told tale. However, our readers have shown a dislike for stories of cannibalism,” adding “It may be, if the story remains vividly in my mind for six months, as did ‘Satampra Zeiros,’ that I will sometime ask you to send this to me again.”
⁵

Lovecraft offered this assessment: “Wright is... just old Farnsworth. Eternally the same! He’ll be asking for ‘Athammaus’ all over again before long. It probably never occurred to him that the ‘cannibalism’ connected with prehistoric anthropophagous monsters is something entirely different in its emotional implications from such realistic cannibalism as might occur among actual human beings in a contemporary setting.”
⁶
Smith remarked to Derleth that “Wright seems to have lost what little nerve he ever had. He has returned my two best horror tales, on the plea that they would be too strong for his readers. I think, though, that he will take ‘The Testament of Athammaus’ later on—it seems to have impressed him greatly. But ‘Helman Carnby’ is quite beyond the pale. This latter tale really seems to be something of a goat-getter.”
⁷

The story apparently remained very vivid in Wright’s memory, since Smith bragged to Donald Wandrei “Have I mentioned Wright’s final acceptance of ‘The Testament of Athammaus’, a month after he had declined it?”
⁸
Smith’s memory may have been slightly off, since he mentions its rejection by Bates and
ST
to AWD in May 1931.
⁹
“The Testament of Athammaus” was the second most popular story in the October 1932 issue of
WT,
being beaten out by Jack Williamson’s “The Wand of Doom.” Smith included it in
OST.
The present text is from a typescript given to R. H. Barlow and later presented by him to the Bancroft Library.

Following his assessment of Knygathin Zhaum as his “best monster to date,” Smith offered the following commentary upon his conception of Hyperborea:

This primal continent seems to have been particularly subject to incursions of “outsideness”—more so, in fact, than any of the other continents and terrene realms that lie behind us in the time stream. But I have heard it hinted in certain obscure and arcanic prophecies that the far-future continent called Gnydron by some and Zothique by others, which is to rise millions of years hence in what is now the South Atlantic, will surpass even Hyperborea in this regard and will witness the intrusion of Things from galaxies not yet visible; and, worse than this, a hideously chaotic
breaking-down
of dimensional barriers which will leave
parts
of our world in other dimensions, and vice versa. When things get to that stage, there will be no telling where even the briefest journey or morning stroll might end. The conditions will shift, too; so there will be no possibility of charting them and thus knowing when or where one might step off into the unknown.

1.
SS
157-158.

2. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (
SL
112 ).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. February 15-23, 1931 (
SL
149).

4. Quoted by Steve Behrends, “An Annotated Chronology of the Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith.” In
FFT
340.

5. FW, letter to CAS, March 21, 1931 (ms, JHL).

6. HPL, letter to CAS, April 16, 1931 (ms, JHL).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, April 9, 1931 (
SL
150-151).

8. CAS, letter to DAW, August 7, 1931 (ms, MHS).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (
SL
153).

A Captivity in Serpens

A
fter
WS
editor David Lasser rejected “The Red World of Polaris,” he clarified
WS
’s editorial requirements in a letter which unfortunately does not survive among Smith’s papers at JHL, but from which CAS quoted liberally (and bitterly) in his own correspondence. As Smith recounted to Lovecraft, Lasser and Gernsback wanted:

“A play of human motives, with alien worlds for a background.” But if human motives are mainly what they want, why bother about going to other planets—where one might conceivably escape from the human equation? The idea of using the worlds of Alioth or Altair as a mere setting for the squabbles and heroics of the crew on a space-ship (which, in essence, is about what they are suggesting) is too rich for any use. Evidently
Astounding Stories
is setting the pace for them with its type of stellar-wild-west yarn. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of putting over any really good work, and a survey of the magazine field in general is truly discouraging.
¹

After being informed of these editorial requirements, Smith put aside a third Volmar story, “The Ocean-World of Alioth,” which he had already outlined and begun, and began work on “A Captivity in Serpens,” at 17,000 words the longest piece of mature fiction he would complete. He vowed to Lovecraft that “I’ll give them their ‘action’ this time,”
²
and Lasser must have agreed, as it was not only accepted but also received the cover illustration when it appeared in the Summer 1931 issue of
Wonder Stories Quarterly
as “The Amazing Planet.” In accepting the story Lasser told Smith that “we were quite pleased with the story and believe it strikes the proper note for effective interplanetary atmosphere.”
³

The typescript at JHL is missing several pages, so the text of its original magazine appearance was consulted. It was collected posthumously in
OD
and included with the other Volmar stories in
RW
.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (
SL
134).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10 1930 (
SL
132).

3. David Lasser, letter to CAS, March 27, 1931 (ms, JHL).

The Letter from Mohaun Los

A
ccording to surviving notes, Smith originally intended to call this story “An Excursion in Time:” “The time-travelling machine, which goes into the future... and lands in a foreign world when it stops, because it has stood still in space while the earth and the solar system {...} whirling on”.
¹
He developed this idea further in correspondence:

By the way, I may tackle the well-worn idea of a time-travelling machine some day, and bring it to its logical denouement. A journey behind or ahead of earth-time would, it seems to me, land the voyager in some alien corner of space, unless he had made special provision for accompanying the movement of the earth and the solar system during the same backward or forward period. If he went far enough into the future, he might find himself in some world of Hercules! But this is an abstruse subject!
²

The first version of this tale was completed by April 9, 1931, but failed to sell. The reason for its rejection may have been a weak ending, as CAS intimated to Derleth: “Funny—I seem to have more trouble with the endings of stories than anything else. God knows how many I have had to re-write. I have a dud on hand now—‘Jim Knox and the Giantess’ [
original title of “The Root of Ampoi”
]—which will have to be given a brand-new wind-up if it is ever to sell. The same applies to my 10,000 word pseudo-scientific, ‘The Letter from Mohaun Los’.”
³
Finishing the revision on March 29, 1932, Smith submitted the story to Wright, who held it for over three weeks before returning it. However, by the end of May Smith could announce that “
Wonder Stories
has accepted ‘The Letter from Mohaun Los,’ which will appear in the Aug. issue under a new title, Flight into Super-Time, which fails to elicit my enthusiasm. This tale contains a fair amount of satire, like ‘The Monster of the Prophecy.’ Among other things, there is an uproarious fight between a Robot and a time-machine, in which the two mechanical monstrosities succeed in annihilating each other.”
⁴
Smith would later include the story in
LW
, referring to it at the time as “one of my more ironic
Wonder Stories
contributions but I’m sure most of its readers missed the double-barrelled satire.”
⁵