The Door to Saturn (51 page)

Smith would later include “The Willow Landscape” in
DS
, describing it on an advertising flyer he prepared for the booklet as “A fanciful Chinese tale, about an impoverished scholar and the old landscape painting with which he was loath to part.” FW later accepted the story and published in the June-July 1939 issue of
WT
, accompanied by a fine illustration by Virgil Finlay. It was included in
GL
. However, “The Willow Landscape” has the singular distinction in Smith’s work of being selected for performance by the monologist “Brother Theodore” (Theodore Gottlieb) on his 1959 LP album
Coral Records Presents Theodore In Stereo.
The present text comes from a typescript presented to Genevieve K. Sully that was checked against
DS
.

1. FW, letter to CAS, September 22, 1930 (ms, JHL).

2. HPL, letter to CAS, October 17, 1930 (ms, JHL).

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

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

5. CAS, letter to AWD, June 15, 1931 (
SL
154).

A Rendezvous in Averoigne

O
ne of Smith’s most popular and most reprinted stories, “A Rendezvous in Averoigne” was completed on September 13, 1930. As discussed in the notes to “The Satyr” (
ES
271-272), Lovecraft encouraged Smith to write further stories set in his imaginary medieval French province, and that summer CAS wrote him that “I think of beginning one as soon as I can work out a suitable plot, and will carry it on alternately with new ‘shorts’ and novelettes. Averoigne in medieval times might be a fruitful milieu.”
¹
FW snapped the story up, telling CAS that “I would be insensible to the appeal of pure beauty if I rejected this story, ‘A Rendezvous in Averoigne.’ I am only sorry that we cannot pay a higher rate for it.”
²
(Wright paid Smith fifty-six dollars for the tale.) Lovecraft waxed rhapsodic in an undated postcard:

Magnificent!! It’s a wonder Wright took it—but I guess he was charmed into recognizing merit & laying aside his cheap-tradesmen standards for once in his life! I don’t know when I’ve ever seen so fine an evocation of malign & sinister atmosphere. Rotting, unwholesome ambiguity drips & oozes & festers on every page! Averoigne is surely a place where one had better keep to the high-roads! The central idea makes me think of something I was going to write—albeit in a very different way—one of the notes in my commonplace book reads: “A very ancient tomb in a deep wood where a 17
^th
century Virginia manor-house once stood. The bloated, undecayed thing found inside it.” My tale would probably be of a Randolph Carterish sort—but quasi-realistic, & contemporary in period! There would be an historic antecedent, harking back to the earliest days of Jamestown, & a moldy document found & perused with nightmare trepidation.
³

Smith responded that “I am greatly pleased to learn that the new Averoigne tale was so much to your taste. It is one of my own favorites—in fact, I like it much better than the celebrated ‘End of the Story’.”
⁴
A few days earlier Smith contrasted the composition of stories such as this with the stories he was writing for
WS
, complaining that “I would vastly prefer to write tales of the supernatural and the purely fantastic like ‘Averoigne’,”
⁵
which illustrates how he came to prefer to set his stories in secondary worlds that he invented out of whole cloth. The story was published in the April-May 1931 issue of
WT
, and was voted the most popular story in that issue by the readers in its letter column, “The Eyrie.”

When the John Day Company published the anthology
Creeps By Night
, which was ostensibly edited by Dashiell Hammett, they approached both Wright and Derleth for story recommendations, and both recommended “A Rendezvous in Averoigne;” unfortunately, it did not achieve the dignity of hard covers until it was collected in
OST
. It provided the title for Arkham House’s 1989 omnibus of “the best of Clark Ashton Smith.” The text for this story is derived from the carbon copy of the typescript at JHL, compared with the original
WT
appearance and a copy of
OST
that was corrected by Smith.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, June 29, 1930 (ms, JHL).

2. FW, letter to CAS, September 22, 1930 (ms, JHL).

3. Private collection.

4. CAS, letter to HPL,
c. October 24, 1930 (
SL
129).

5. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 21, 1930 (
LL
15).

The Gorgon

Originally titled “Medusa,” this story was completed on October 2, 1930. The theme was long a favorite of Smith’s, dating as far back as his first collections of poetry:
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
(San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1912) contained the poems “Medusa” and “The Medusa of the Skies,” and “The Medusa of Despair” was included both in
Odes and Sonnets
(San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1918) and
Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose
(Auburn, CA: Auburn Journal Press, 1922). Lovecraft called the story “really splendid, & I read it over twice with increasing admiration. You strike an atmospheric note to which I am particularly susceptible—the mystery of unknown, ancient, & labyrinthine streets—& I have never seen that alluring theme more effectively handled. If Wright doesn’t snap that up, he’s absolutely out of his head!”
¹
Naturally, Wright rejected the story, calling it “unconvincing,” only to accept it a year later upon resubmission.
²
Smith also submitted the story to
Ghost Stories
, which returned the manuscript “after holding it six weeks, with a personal letter expressing interest in my work and a desire to see more of it. I’m surprised to infer, from this, that they gave the story serious consideration—which was hardly to be expected in view of their standards, which seem to call for a combination of spookiness and raw human interest.”
³
Harry Bates of
ST
also didn’t care for the story and returned it.
⁴

After August Derleth pointed out to Smith that
WT
had published a story called “Medusa” several years earlier (“Medusa” by Royal W. Jimerson appeared in the April 1928 issue). Smith changed the title to “Medusa’s Head” and finally to “The Gorgon.” Wright used the story as filler in the April 1932 issue of
WT.
“The Gorgon,” along with “The Venus of Azombeii,” received third ranking in the
O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1932
, edited by Blanche Colton Williams (New York: Doubleday, 1932); Smith remarked that “Personally, I think it’s a long way from being my best. But there you are. Judges, editors, critics, all of them are more or less bughouse. And I suppose that any kind of a weird tale is lucky to receive official mention in an age tyrannized over by realism.”
⁵
Text is based upon the typescript at JHL; BL has a carbon that CAS presented to Donald Wandrei, but this copy lacks several handwritten changes found on the JHL copy.

1. HPL, letter to CAS, October 17, 1930.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, October 23, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

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

4. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, May 20, 1931 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 24, 1932 (
SL
197).

An Offering to the Moon

As CAS continued to write and sell stories to
WT
,
WS
, and other markets, he and HPL began a discussion of their respective theories regarding aesthetics, realism versus romanticism, and related topics. On October 17, 1930, Lovecraft revealed the following personal glimpse in support of his “conception of phantasy, as a genuine art-form, is
an extension rather than a negation of reality
”;

In fact I
know
that my most poignant emotional experiences are those which concern the lure of unplumbed space, the terror of the encroaching outer void, & the struggle of the ego to transcend the known & established order of time, [...] space, matter, force, geometry, & natural law in tantalising mnemonic fragments expressed in unknown or half-known architectural or landscape vistas, especially in connexion with a sunset. Some instantaneous fragment of a picture will well up suddenly through some chain of subconscious association—the immediate excitant being usually half-irrelevant on the surface—& fill me with a sense of wistful memory & bafflement; with the impression that the scene in question represents something I have seen & visited before under circumstances of superhuman liberation & adventurous expectancy, yet which I have almost completely forgotten, & which is so bewilderingly uncorrelated & unoriented as to be forever inaccessible in the future.
¹

Smith replied that

I don’t think I have had anything quite like the pseudo-mnemonic flashes you describe. What I have had sometimes is the nocturnal dream-experience of stepping into some totally alien state of entity, with its own memories, hopes, desires, its own past and future-none of which I can ever remember for very long on awakening. This experience has suggested such tales as “The Planet of the Dead”, “The Necromantic Tale,” and “An Offering to the Moon”. I think I have spoken of the place-images which often rise before me without apparent relevance, and persist in attaching themselves to some train of emotion or even abstract thought. These, doubtless, are akin to the images of which you speak, though they are always clearly realistic.
²

Completed no later than October 21, 1930, “An Offering to the Moon” may have resulted from Smith’s recent reading: “The book by James Churchward,
The Lost Continent of Mu
,
[...] is truly interesting, especially in the mass of data relating to South Sea ruins which is presented.”
³
Although he recognized that it “perhaps isn’t quite my best,” Smith was eager to learn what HPL made of the tale.
⁴
Lovecraft enjoyed the story, adding that

Mnemonic tales, vaguely suggesting reincarnation or other-dimensional existence, are peculiarly fascinating to me; & nothing stirs my fancy more than the inexplicable stone ruins of the Pacific. [...] Your sense of totally alien worlds must be vastly more fascinating than my own fragmentary & incomplete detachments, & you certainly make effective use of them in tales like ‘An Offering to the Moon.’ The place-images are likewise highly alluring, & I hope to see many fictional reflections of them.
⁵

FW rejected it, calling it “wordy and somehow—I do not know why—unconvincing; though that is a splendid paragraph on page 14 describing the death of Morley on the altar. Part of what follows seems anti-climax....”
⁶
Smith remarked that “... I suspect, too, that ‘An Offering to the Moon’ was doubtless queered with him by the addition of an element which was far from weird—that is to say, the full development of the stodgy Thorway as a foil to Morley. Of course, the ‘action’ was held up by the archaeological discussion which brought out this difference.”
⁷
Smith tried the story on other markets, including
Ghost Stories
and the
Philippine Magazine
, before re-submitting the story to
WT
. Wright rejected it once more, adding that it was “not a bad story—in fact I don’t think you have ever sent me a truly poor story; but it seems far from being your best work.”
⁸
(One reason why it might have been rejected the second time is that it was submitted along with “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” which FW accepted, so it seemed all the poorer by comparison. In addition, most publishers do not view too great a backlog of stories by any one writer as a good thing.)

The story languished until 1950, when Smith sent three unpublished stories to Derleth for use in a possible original anthology. (The other two were “The Metamorphosis of the World” and “Told in the Desert.”) Dorothy McIlwraith
,
Wright’s successor at
WT
, accepted the story for its September 1953 issue, but as of October 1954 the magazine had not paid Smith for the story; and as it went bankrupt after publishing the September 1954 issue, he might never have received his check for the tale.

A carbon of the original typescript may be found at JHL, but it differs considerably from the version published in
WT
and later collected posthumously in
OD.
Smith’s letter to August Derleth of November 3, 1931 suggests that the second submission to FW may have represented a rewritten version, but no such version has yet come to light.
⁹
It is even possible that Derleth rewrote part of the story and submitted this to McIlwraith on Smith’s behalf, although we have no evidence to suggest that this is the case except for Derleth’s history of such alteration to stories by William Hope Hodgson and others. Insomuch as the version published in
WT
addressed FW’s main objection—that some of the story after Morley’s death was an anti-climax—we have chosen to regard the JHL typescript as an earlier draft and use the published version for our text. And when all is said and done, we feel that the version published by
WT
represents the better text.

1. HPL, letter to CAS, October 17, 1930 (
Selected Letters III
, Ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei [Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971]: 196-197.).