The Door to Saturn (50 page)

FFT The Freedom of Fantastic Things
. Ed. Scott Connors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006).

FW
Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), editor of
Weird Tales
from 1924 to 1939.

GL Genius Loci and Other Tales
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948).

HPL
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), informal leader of a circle of
writers for
Weird Tales
and related magazines, and probably the leading exponent of weird fiction in the twentieth century.

JHL
Clark Ashton Smith Papers and H. P. Lovecraft Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

LL
Letters to H. P. Lovecraft
. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).

LW Lost Worlds
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).

MHS
Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.

OD Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

OST Out of Space and Time
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).

PD Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays.
Ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).

PP Poems in Prose
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965).

RAA Rendezvous in Averoigne
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988).

RHB
Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951), correspondent and collector of manuscripts of CAS, HPL, and other
WT
writers.

RW Red World of Polaris
. Ed. Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).

SHSW
August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library.

SL Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith
. Ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003).

SS Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

ST Strange Tales
, a pulp edited by Harry Bates in competition with
WT.

SU The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005).

TI Tales of India and Irony.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).

TSS Tales of Science and Sorcery
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).

WS Wonder Stories
, a pulp published by Hugo Gernsback and edited first by David Lasser and then Charles D. Hornig.

WT Weird Tales
, Smith’s primary market for fiction, edited by FW (1924-1940) and later Dorothy McIlwraith (1940-1954).

The Door to Saturn

C
ompleted on July 26, 1930, “The Door to Saturn” was one of Smith’s favorites among his own tales “partly on account of its literary style.”
¹
(He later remarked that “I take out the ms. and read it over, when I am too bored to read anything in my book-cases!”
²
)
CAS explained to HPL that “I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate ‘tone.’ If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. [...] The style of a yarn like ‘The Door to Saturn’” forms still another genre; and this tale seemed unusually successful to me in its unity of ‘tone.’” Unfortunately its “light ironic touch helped to make it seem ‘unconvincing’ to Wright,”
³
who rejected it no fewer than three times.
⁴
He would later fume to Lovecraft that

The style—or lack of it—required by nearly all magazine editors, would call for a separate treatise. The idea seems to be that everything should be phrased in a manner that will obviate mental effort on the part of the lowest grade moron. I was told the other day that my ‘Door to Saturn’ could be read only with a dictionary—also, that I would sell more stories if I were to simplify my vocabulary.
⁵

The story finally found a home at
ST
, whose editor, Harry Bates, appreciated “the slight humor that emerges from time to time.”
⁶
Smith appreciated the irony of the situation, noting “It will be a josh if
Strange Tales
should take [‘The Door to Saturn’]” because
ST
paid “exactly double” what he “would have received from Wright” for the story.
⁷
However, Bates had noticed that the typescript was somewhat battered from its repeated rejections, so he asked CAS “to tell him, for his own edification, what reasons other editors had given for turning it down.”
⁸
Smith selected the story for inclusion in
OST
, but it was not collected until
LW
.
⁹
Our text uses a carbon copy of the typescript held by the JHL.

1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, January 20, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (
SL
137).

4. “The only way I can land a lot of my stuff is through repeated submission, revision, etc. One needs to be hard-boiled about rejections. I doubt, though, if I’ll ever achieve the persistence of Derleth, who says that he has sold some of his things to Wright on the tenth or eleventh trip! Three submissions of a tale (to Wright) has been my limit so far; but some of my things have gathered a multitude of ‘regrets’ before landing. ‘The Door to Saturn,’ for example, garnered at least six or seven rejections.” CAS, letter to HPL [c. mid-March 1932] (
LL
35).

5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-December 1930 (
LL
23).

6. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, July 31, 1931 (ms, JHL).

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

8. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (
SL
333).

The Red World of Polaris

A
s was described in
ES
(274-75), Captain Volmar and the crew of the ether-ship
Alcyone
made their first appearance in “Marooned in Andromeda” (
WS
October 1930). David Lasser, who edited the magazine for publisher Hugo Gernsback, surprised Smith by proposing “a series of tales about the same crew of characters (Capt. Volmar, etc.) and their adventures on different planets, saying that they would use a novelette of this type every other month.”
He described it as “pseudo-scientific with a vengeance: it deals with a race of people who had their brains transplanted into indestructible metal bodies, and who were going to perform the same office for the humans who visited their world.” He added that “there are possibilities in this type of story, though I’d prefer writing something even more extra-terrestrial, with no human characters at all.” Smith completed the first draft during a camping trip to the nearby Sierra mountains late in August 1930, wryly telling HPL that the magnificent scenery “is more likely to be a source of distraction than inspiration, except in retrospect.”
¹
He would later reconsider
this, admitting that “Probably the mountain scenery was a stimulant to my writing—but it was so tremendous that it temporarily altered and confused my sense of values. Mere words didn’t seem to stand up in the presence of those peaks and cliffs. But now, amid the perspectives of familiar surroundings, ‘The Red World’ doesn’t seem so bad. The last chapter could afford themes for Doré or Martin, in regard to cataclysmic scope at any rate.”
²

Smith wrote to Lovecraft a couple of months later that the editors were requesting that he add some action to the story, objecting that the first part was “almost wholly descriptive;” he added that “this pretense of being scientific gives me a pain. The mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”
³
Other complaints by Lasser may have found their way into another letter to Lovecraft: “Most interplanetary yarns might as well have been laid on earth—as far as I can see—the characters seem no more affected by their alien milieu than if they were in some exotic terrestrial region. But certainly, the usual editorial requirements militate against any attempt at a sound psychological treatment... ‘The story is too leisurely.’ ‘No plot, no complications.’ ‘Put some more action in it.’”
⁴

Despite some perfunctory attempts at revision, Lasser finally ended up rejecting the story. Smith would later describe the story to Robert H. Barlow as “passably written, but suffers from triteness of plot.”
⁵
This may be the reason why he did not spend any further effort on revising the story, since at 13,000 words he had already invested a relatively tremendous amount of time and effort into the tale. This is too bad, because while “The Red World of Polaris” would not have fit into the “Cowboys-and-Indians-in-space” formula of
Astounding Stories
at this time, Mike Ashley suggests that “it would almost certainly have appealed to F. Orlin Tremaine when he became editor of
Astounding Stories
a few years later, in 1933, when the magazine was developing its ‘thought variant’ stories,” or even with a little rewrite to FW at
WT
itself.
⁶

Smith sold the only typescripts of two stories, “The Red World of Polaris” and “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” (written
circa
October 1930), to Michael DeAngelis, a fan then living in Brooklyn, New York who had reprinted CAS’ poem “The Ghoul and the Seraph” as a limited edition pamphlet in 1950. DeAngelis planned to publish the two stories either as separate pamphlets or in a fanzine, but vanished, taking the typescript with him. (It is believed that he had sold the typescript for “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” to another Brooklyn fan, but it remains at this time still lost.) Numerous attempts to locate DeAngelis were made over the years by Smith, Derleth, Roy Squires, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Douglas A. Anderson, and Steve Behrends, but all met with failure until Ron Hilger thought to contact DeAngelis’ co-editor for the fanzine
Asmodeus
, Alan H. Pesetsky, in May 2003. Pesetsky located a typed copy of the story that he had prepared for publication in their fanzine, and was kind enough to provide us with a copy. It was first published as the title story of the collected Volmar stories by Night Shade Books in 2003.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, August 22, 1930 (
SL
117-118). (Note: this letter was incorrectly described as
to
CAS
by
David Lasser in both
ES
(275, n5) and our introduction to
RW
, “The Magellan of the Constellations,” page 3.)

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (
SL
119-120).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (
LL
15).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10 [1930] (
SL
132).

5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (
SL
301).

6. Mike Ashley, “Evoking Wonder.”
Lost Worlds
no. 3 (2006): 31.

Told in the Desert

T
his story was conceived in late 1929 and according to Smith’s “Completed Stories” log was written after the completion of “The Red World of Polaris” in late August 1930 but before “The Willow Landscape.” According to a surviving synopsis, it was to have been originally entitled “Neria”:

A wanderer in the desert, who finds an oasis inhabited only by a beautiful girl, named Neria. He loves her, and is content to dwell with her for awhile; but at last he feels that he must return to the world for awhile, in spite of the girl’s warning that he will never find her again if he does. He goes away, and later seeks to find the oasis again, but spends his whole life searching for it in vain.
¹

Smith sent August Derleth the typescripts of three unpublished stories, “The Metamorphosis of the World,” “An Offering to the Moon,” and this, late in the summer of 1950; in his letter Smith described the tale as “a lengthy and rather uneven prose-poem.”
²
While Derleth was able to place the first two stories with
WT
, “Told in the Desert” remained unpublished until 1964, when Derleth included it in an anthology of original or unpublished stories,
Over the Edge
, published by Arkham House. No manuscript or typescript survives at either JHL or SHSW, and a search of the remaining archives at Arkham House failed to locate the tale. It was collected posthumously in
OD
.

1.
SS
157.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 7, 1950.

The Willow Landscape

C
ompleted on September 8, 1930, “The Willow Landscape” was rejected by FW “as it does not seem exactly suited to
Weird Tales
, and it lacks the swift action that we want for
Oriental Stories
.”
¹
This evoked the following response from Lovecraft: “It is like Wright to reject ‘The Willow Landscape’. The damn fool!
Action
—hell, what a standard! And yet I know that is the god of the herd.”
²
Smith then submitted it to
Ghost Stories
where it “drew the only editorial compliment (‘very charming and poetic’) which this tale has yet received.”
³
As an example of the lengths to which Smith was willing to pursue a sale, he finally managed to place the tale with the
Philippine Magazine
, noting that “The rates are nothing very gaudy; but the editor seems to be appreciative.”
⁴
It was published in the May 1931 issue “with a very charming illustration by a native artist.”
⁵