The Door to Saturn (53 page)

Smith had formed the idea of what would later become “The Letter from Mohaun Los” the previous month, and he was struck by the coincidence: “Odd that the idea of time-travelling stories should have been so much in my mind of late. Not long ago, I received a letter from the
Wonder Stories
editor, suggesting that I write for him a yarn of this type dealing with the future. I cooked up a synopsis which was approved; and I am now going ahead with the junk as fast as my cold will permit [...] With the former I am depicting an earth modified by interplanetary commerce and immigration, with the problem of ‘unassimilable aliens’ from Mars and Venus.”
²
He finished the story on December 27, 1930, despite battling a severe cold, but confided to HPL that

the time-story strikes me as an awful piece of junk. The Venusian slaves and their Martian abettors are left to divide the earth at the end, while the remainder of humanity (which has been driven to the polar regions) takes flight for the farther asteroids. I agree with you that inter-cosmic immigration will never do! The Martians might smuggle in the Black Rot, which devours whole cities and turns half the elements known to chemistry into a fine black powder. Also, there is the Yellow Death, that microscopic aerial algae from Venus, which grows in the air, turning it to a saffron color, and causing all terrestrials who breathe it to die of slow asphyxiation with violent pneumonia symptoms.
³

Despite this frank appraisal of his story, Lovecraft (whose own personal aversion to immigrants is well known) wrote him that he found “An Adventure in Futurity” “really engrossing,” and congratulated CAS on being able “to hit on a tone acceptable to these eckshun-hounds without succumbing utterly to the mechanical banality of their ideal. But of course anybody not a slave to their mannerisms will inevitably encounter a high rejection-percentage.”
⁴

And what did Lasser have to say of the story when he published it in the April 1931 issue of
WS
?

The stories of Clark Ashton Smith ring with truth. He writes so well and so easily that the scenes that he tries to picture cannot help but be impressed on the minds of his readers.

To write a real story of the future, needs this unusual faculty of writing imaginatively. The author must describe something that has not happened, in an age that has not yet arrived. To do this requires skill of the highest sort. That our author has this skill will be evident from almost the first words of the present story.

The world of the future may not be the paradise that some people imagine. It is quite possible that for every advance in science there will comes with it some subtle damage to our bodies, our minds, our civilization. And it is quite possible that even when man thinks that he has found a golden age, he may realize, as the Greeks did, that destruction is just around the corner.
⁵

Our text is from a typescript at JHL; judging from Lovecraft’s letter to Smith of April 16, 1931, it appears that either Lasser or Gernsback made some “inane interpolations” to what Smith had written, which have been eliminated. The story was collected posthumously in
OD
.

1. David Lasser, letter to CAS, November 29, 1930 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-December 1930 (
LL
22).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early-January 1931 (
SL
141-142).

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

5. Editorial remarks to Clark Ashton Smith, “An Adventure in Futurity.”
WS
2, no. 11 (April 1931): 1232.

The Justice of the Elephant

C
ompleted on December 29, 1930, Smith described this to Lovecraft as being “grim and gruesome; but [FW]
might
take it, since it doesn’t involve the supernatural and is not at all poetic. The plot idea is quite similar to that of a tale which I sold to
The Black Cat
back in my boyhood.”
¹
(Smith refers to his story “The Mahout,” first published in
The Black Cat
for August 1911, collected posthumously in
OD
and
TI
.) FW accepted the story for the August 1931 issue of
Oriental Stories
and paid Smith the total of fourteen dollars.
²
It was collected posthumously in
OD
. JHL possesses the holograph first draft, the first, revised typed draft, and a carbon copy of the final version accepted by FW.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c
.
early January 1931 (
SL
142).

2. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS, October 28, 1931 (ms, JHL).

The Return of the Sorcerer

S
mith wrote to HPL on November 16, 1930 that “I seem to have had quite an influx of ghastly and gruesome ideas lately. Some of them will be real terrors, if they are developed properly. ...Another idea concerns a dismembered corpse, whose parts the murderer has buried in various spots. But presently he encounters some of the members running around and trying to re-unite and re-join the head, which he has kept in a locked closet!”
¹
Smith’s papers include the following synopsis for a proposed story to be called “The Re-union:” “A corpse has been dismembered, and its parts buried in different places by the murderer. He develops the hallucination that the pieces are trying to re-unite, and sees them running separately about in quest of each other.”
²
Smith embraced Lovecraft’s suggestion that “both the murderer and the victim [should be] practitioners of the Black Arts,” and acknowledged this debt by “introducing the
Necronomicon
—in its original Arabic text.”
³
The story went through several name changes, beginning with “Dismembered,” then “A Rendering from the Arabic,” before Smith settled on “The Return of Helman Carnby.” Needing a break from cranking out “pseudoscience” for
WS
, Smith completed a typed draft on January 4, 1930, but continued to make revisions even after mailing out the story for comments among his correspondents; for instance, he wrote Lovecraft “On looking over ‘Helman Carnby’, which I sent you the other day, the word ‘fragments’ strikes me as being too strained and incorrect. On p. 7 read: ‘a body hewn in many
portions
’; on p. 14: ‘I had buried the
portions
, etc.’; on p. 19, ‘lay facing the medley of
remnants
;’ and on p. 20, ‘the fresh
segments
of that other.’ There may be other slips—I wrote the story at white heat.”
⁴
After reading the typescript, Lovecraft suggested that “if there were any way of piling on another shudder, I’d say it would be by veiling the final horror a little more obscurely from actual sight, & trying to
hint
or
imply
the blasphemous abnormality which sent the secretary fleeing from that accursed habitation. I certainly hope that the tale will find a typographical haven.”
⁵
CAS “was greatly pleased and gratified by your reaction to

“Carnby”—a tale to which I devoted much thought. The more veiled ending you suggest as possible was my original intention—certainly it would have been the safest and most surely successful method. I think what tempted me to the bolder and more hazardous revelation, was the visualizing of the actual
collapse
of that hellishly vitalized abnormality. If the tale is rejected as too gruesome, I can try the other ending, and have the secretary unable to enter the room till
all
is over, and there are merely
two
heaps of human segments on the floor.
... I am going to adopt your suggestion about “Carnby” if it comes back from
Ghost Stories
. Here is the way it can be worked: the secretary finds himself physically unable to enter the room till
all
is over; but standing at the threshold, he
hears
the head as it breaks from the cupboard, and
sees
for a few moments the shadow of that headless monstrosity, and the singular disintegration of the shadows, followed by a sound that is not that of a
single
body falling, but of many. Then, entering, he flees from the inenarrable vision of that
confused heap
of human segments, some flesh and some putrefying, which are lying on the floor, with the surgeon’s saw still clutched in a half-decayed hand.
⁶

CAS had already submitted the story to
Ghost Stories
, drawn by its rate of two cents a word, despite his reservations about the magazine’s editorial policies: “it will be impossible to sell them anything that depends on subtle atmosphere. A lurid yarn like ‘Carnby’
might
get over on its dramatic suspense, despite the atmospheric element.”
⁷
(Smith had not sold any stories to the magazine, but had received encouraging personal letters with the returned manuscripts.) Sometime in February
Ghost Stories
returned the manuscript, so Smith rewrote the ending and submitted it again, only to have it rejected once more “a most amusing letter from the editor.”
⁸
The story was still “ ‘too horrific’— the editor told me very gravely that ‘the reactions of our staff-readers showed plainly that you have sinned in this respect’.’’
⁹
Smith next sent the story to
WT
, only to have FW return the story “because many of our readers would be sure to find it sickening.”
¹⁰
Smith changed the title to “The Return of the Sorcerer” when Harry Bates bought the story for the first issue of
Strange Tales
(September 1931), and it was included in
OST.

“The Return of the Sorcerer” represents Smith trying to achieve two goals that might be thought mutually contradictory: on the one hand, he hoped “to achieve the limit in sheer gruesomeness
,”
while at the same time he found the shadowy ending more satisfying personally: “One can usually get more horror out of shadows than out of the actual presented substance; on the same principle, I suppose, that one’s imagination or anticipation of some pleasure always exceeds hugely the reality.”
¹¹
One of Smith’s most famous stories, it has been repeatedly anthologized and also adapted into comic form by Richard Corben and for television as an episode for
Rod Serling’s Night Gallery,
starring Vincent Price as John and Helman Carnby. Our text is based upon the typescript dated January 6, 1931 at JHL. We are including the original ending, from the typescript dated January 4, 1931, also at JHL, as Appendix 2.

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

2.
SS
159.

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early January 1931 (
SL
142).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, January 10, 1931 (ms, JHL).

5. HPL, letter to CAS, January 1931 (Arkham House transcripts).

6. CAS, letter to HPL, c. January 27, 1931 (
SL
144).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, January 27, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

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

9. CAS, letter to DAW, March 24, 1931 (ms, MHS).

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

11. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early January 1931 (
SL
142); letter to AWD, February 26, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

The City of the Singing Flame

I
n the autumn of 1930 Smith sent Lovecraft a specimen of rock from Crater Ridge, near the Donner Pass in northern California near the Nevada border, whose form suggested various outré entities from his stories. Lovecraft was delighted with this gift, and bestowed upon it various nick-names such as “He Who Waits” and the Nameless Eikon. (Crater Ridge was also the site of the camping trip during which his friend Genevieve K. Sully first suggested to Smith that he ought to take up writing for the pulps as a reasonably congenial means of supporting his parents.) Perhaps because of these associations, Smith wrote a new story on January 15, 1931. He announced to HPL that he had written

a new trans-dimensional story, “The City of the Singing Flame”, in which I have utilized Crater Ridge (the place where I found the innominable Eikon) as a spring-board. Some day, I must look for those two boulders “with a vague resemblance to broken-down columns”. If you and other correspondents cease to hear from me thereafter, you can surmise what has happened! The description of the Ridge, by the way, has been praised for its realism by people who know the place.
¹

Lovecraft responded even more enthusiastically than usual:

Gad, Sir, but you have struck twelve with this latest opus! I don’t know when anything has given me such a kick in months—for the whole thing corresponds to just the sort of dreaming I relish, & just the sort of dimensional plunging I tend to invisage when faced by a flaming & apocalyptic sunset. When I passed near the Nameless Eikon with the manuscript in my hand, the leaves fluttered strangely—as if {?} in a wind, despite the still air of my shadowy & totally ______ chamber. The description of Crater Ridge gives It an enormously vivid immediate background, whilst other parts of th narrative raise disquieting apprehensions concerning its more ultimate provenance. Can it be that... but it is well to restrain the wilder & darker speculations of the curious fancy. I feel sure that both Derleth & Wandrei will take at once to the tale—& if Wright fails to accept it, I shall lose my last shred of respect for him.
²