The Last Hieroglyph (57 page)

Late in 1938
Weird Tales
was purchased by a New York businessman, William J. Delaney, who already published the highly successful pulp
Short Stories
. Delaney relocated the operation to New York City. Wright was kept on as editor and made the move, but was let go with the March 1940 issue. An interview with Delaney appeared in a fanzine at the time of Wright’s dismissal that boded ill for Smith. After promising that
Weird Tales
would continue to publish “all types of weird and fantasy fiction,” the interview went on to add:

There is one rule, however: Weird Tales does not want stories which center about sheer repulsiveness, stories which leave an impression not to be described by any other word than “nasty”. This is not to imply that the “grim” story, or the tale which leaves the reader gasping at the verge of the unknown, is eliminated. Mr. Delaney believes that the story which leaves a sickish feeling in the reader is not truly weird and has no place in Weird Tales.… And, finally, stories wherein the characters are continually talking in French, German, Latin, etc. will be frowned upon, as well as stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary.
¹³

The interviewer was Robert A. W. Lowndes, who shed some light on this in a letter published years later:

Delaney, who was a pleasant and cultured man, was very fond of weird stories, but he was also a strict Catholic.… He also found some of the Clark Ashton Smith stories on the ‘disgusting’ side and told me that he had returned one that Wright had in his inventory when he left. It was about a monstrous worm which, when attacked and pierced, shed forth rivers of slime. Later in 1940, when Donald A. Wollheim was starting Stirring Science Stories, Smith sent him “The Coming of the White Worm” and Don used it. When I read it, there was no doubt that this was the story Delaney had been talking about.… Concerned about the magazine’s slipping circulation, he felt that the “more esoteric” type of story was a handicap, so this was mostly cut out.
¹⁴

Smith wrote a letter around the time of Wright’s dismissal that listed
Weird Tales’
remaining inventory of his material at two stories and four poems.
¹⁵
Only one story, “The Enchantress of Sylaire” (
Weird Tales
July 1941) appeared between the date of that letter and the acceptance of Smith’s next
WT
story, “The Epiphany of Death,” early in 1942,
¹⁶
so it would appear that one story was returned.

Further corroboration of these events may be found in the memoirs of E. Hoffmann Price, which illustrate just how frustrated and upset Smith was with magazine publishing. When Price visited him early in 1940, Smith presented him with the typescripts of two unpublished stories, “The House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord,” and told Price to do whatever he wanted with them: “Scrap the god-damn things if after all you don’t like them. The less I hear of them—.” Price interpreted this to mean that Smith realized “his stories did not fit into the publisher’s new pattern. Clark, fed up with adverse criticism or outright rejection, rejected the rejector, and gave me the scripts.”
¹⁷

“The Coming of the White Worm” was finally published in
Stirring Science Stories’
April 1941 issue. The story was placed by Donald A. Wollheim acting as Smith’s agent,
¹⁸
but according to Harry Warner Jr.
Stirring Science Stories
was a non-paying market that relied upon donations.
¹⁹
It was reprinted in the Canadian pulp
Uncanny Tales
that November, but by that time wartime restrictions prevented publishers from paying American writers.
²⁰
“The Coming of the White Worm” was collected, in its pruned form, in both
LW
and
RA
. The original version was first published in
SS
. The current text is based upon the original typescript of the first version at the JHL.

1. CAS, postcard to HPL postmarked August 28, 1933 (ms, private collection).

2. See CAS’s letter to AWD, July 12, 1933 (
SL
211): “I have… recently received a letter from some reader who was struck by the numerous references to The Book of Eibon in that issue, and wanted to know where he could procure this rare work!” The stories were “The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft; “The Horror in the Museum” by Hazel Heald (actually ghost-written by HPL); and Smith’s own “Ubbo-Sathla.”

3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933 (
SL
219).

4. FW, letter to CAS, September 29, 1933 (ms, JHL).

5. HPL, letter to CAS, October 3, 1933 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, November 17th, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

7. See
ME
p. 298. See also Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, “The Non-Human Equation.” In
Star Changes
, by Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (Seattle, WA: Darkside Press, 2005): pp. 17–18.

8. CAS, letter to AWD, October 19, 1933 (
SL
232).

9. John W. Campbell, letter to CAS, October 27, 1938 (ms, JHL).

10. John W. Campbell, letter to CAS, April 7, 1939 (ms, private collection).

11. E. Hoffmann Price,
Book of the Dead. Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others (Memories of the Pulp Era
). Ed. Peter Ruber (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2001): p. 125.

12. Farnsworth Wright, letter to CAS, November 23, 1938 (ms, JHL).

13. “Weird Tales Stays Weird.”
Science Fiction Weekly
(March 24, 1940): 1.

14. Robert A. W. Lowndes, “Letters.”
Weird Tales Collector
no. 5 (1979): 31.

15. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, February 22, 1940 (
SL
328).

16. Dorothy McIlwraith, letter to CAS, February 24, 1942 (ms, JHL).

17. Price,
Book of the Dead,
pp. 112–113. Price dates this encounter to 1939, but in a letter quoted in Steve Behrends, “The Price-Smith Collaborations” (
Crypt of Cthulhu
no. 26 [Hallowmas 1986]: 32) he places the date as 1940. “House of the Monoceros” was published as “The Old Gods Eat” (
Spicy Mystery Stories
February 1941); “Dawn of Discord” (Spicy Mystery Stories October 1940). Price paid Smith half of the proceeds for these stories. Science fiction writer Jack Williamson joined Price in this visit. He described Smith at this meeting as “defeated and pathetic” (
Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction
[New York: Bluejay Books, 1984], p. 127).

18. See CAS, letter to AWD, November 6, 1944 (ms, SHSW).

19. Harry Warner, Jr.
All Our Yesterdays
(Chicago: Advent, 1969): 79–80.

20. Ibid., p. 164.

The Seven Geases

S
mith’s next story, “The Seven Geases,” was completed on October 1, 1933. It may have been inspired in part by the circumstances surrounding the tale immediately preceding it, “The Coming of the White Worm.” One of the readers who had requested to read more from the
Book of Eibon
was William Lumley (1880–1960), an eccentric correspondent of Lovecraft’s who asserted that HPL, CAS and their associates were “genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark & profound for human conception or comprehension. We may
think
we’re writing fiction, & may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, & other pleasant Outside gentry.”
¹
Lovecraft was quite fond of Lumley in spite of these eccentric views, and revised his story “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (
Weird Tales
February 1938). Smith found Lumley to be quite the “rara avis, and I wish sincerely that there were more like him in this world of servile conformity to twentieth century skepticism and materialism! More power to such glorious heresy as that which he avows. I, for one, would hardly want the task of disproving his belief—even if I could disprove them. I must write him again before long.”
²

In his response to Smith’s letter, Lovecraft seized upon these remarks to launch a defense of scientific materialism and skepticism:

As for the Lumleys & Summers’s of this world versus the Einsteins, Jeans’s, de Sitters, Bohrs, & Heisenbergs—I must confess that I am essentially on the side of prose & science! It is true that we can form no conception of ultimate reality, or of the limitless gulfs of cosmic space beyond a trifling radius, but it is also true that we have a fair working estimate of the phenomena within our own small radius. We may not know what—if anything, as is highly unlikely—the phenomena
mean,
but we do know what to expect within the circle of our experience. No matter what the constitution of the larger cosmos is, certain occurrences come inevitably & regularly, whilst other alleged occurrences—stories of which were invented in primitive times to explain unknown things now conclusively explained otherwise—can never be shewn to happen.
³

Smith replied that “Of course, it would seem that the arguments of material science are pretty cogent. Perhaps it is only my innate romanticism that makes me at least hopeful that the Jeans and Einsteins have overlooked something. If ever I have the leisure and opportunity, I intend some first-hand investigation of obscure phenomena. Enough inexplicable things have happened in my own experience to make me wonder.”
⁴
Confronted with Lovecraft’s “thoroughly modern disdain” for the otherwordly, one wonders if Ralibar Vooz doesn’t represent Smith’s true rebuttal.

The
Black Book
contains a plot synopsis under the title of “The Geas of Yzduggor
.”
It reads:

Yzduggor, wizard and hermit of the black Eiglophian Mts., is intruded upon during one of his experiments in evocation by an optimate from Commoriom who has gone forth with certain followers to hunt the alpine monsters known as the Voormis. Yzduggor, exceedingly wroth at the interruption, puts upon the optimate, Vooth Raluorn, a most terrible and ludicrous and demoniacal geas.
⁵

The entry following it concerns “The spider-god, Atlach-Nacha, who weaves his webs across a Cimmerian gulf that has no other bridges.”
⁶
Smith incorporated this note into the story as well.

Smith described the story’s conception and composition in a letter to Lovecraft: “I am now midway in ‘The Seven Geases,’ another of the Hyperborean series. The demon of irony wants to have a hand in this yarn; but I am trying to achieve horror in some of the episodes even if not in the tout ensemble.”
⁷
Its completion presented Smith with a dilemma: “Tsathoggua alone knows what I can do with it. Bates, who liked ‘The Door to Saturn’ so well, would have grabbed it in all likelihood; but I don’t believe that the other fantasy editors have any sense of humour. It seems hard to think that the new
Astounding
editors could have: one of them, I understand, has just graduated from the editing of love story and confession magazines!”
⁸
(Smith did not mention
Weird Tales
as a possibility, doubtless due to the succession of rejections documented in earlier notes.)
Astounding Stories
held on to the story for a month before finally rejecting it without comment.

Wright also rejected the story, saying that it was “very interesting, especially on account of the dry humour, but lacked plot…. No heroine, no cross-complications, no triumph over obstacles; merely, as W. so wittily puts it, ‘one geas after another’.”
⁹
“But damn that ass Pharnabazus for turning down the ‘Seven Geases,’” wrote Lovecraft. “This silly worship of artificial ‘plot’—an element which I believe to be not only unnecessary but even intrinsically inartistic—certainly gets me seeing red.”
¹⁰
Wright followed his by now familiar pattern: a month later he wrote that:

I submitted the word ‘geas’ to Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, editor-in-chief of the Standard Dictionary, and got the following reply: “The Celtic or Gaelic term
geas
is to be found in Gaelic dictionaries with the meaning ‘charm, sorcery, enchantment,’ and with the subordinate meaning ‘oath and adjuration or religious vow.’ In the latter senses it is used in expressions that translated would become ‘I solemnly charge you.’ Of the two Gaelic dictionaries on the Lexiconographer’s shelves, only one shows the formation of plurals, and gives the plural of
geas
as
geasan.
The word is entirely Celtic, and until modern times has not appeared in the works of English writers.”

I think I would like another look at “The Seven Geases,” if you have not already placed it elsewhere.
¹¹

Smith received only seventy dollars for the story instead of the seventy-five dollars it should have received at the standard rate of one cent a word he usually received from
Weird Tales
, which did nothing to ease his increasing frustrations with editors.
¹²
Wright also used a drawing of Tsathoggua that Smith had shown him as an illustration when the story appeared in the October 1934 issue. He told Robert Barlow that “I am rather partial to [‘The Seven Geases’] myself. These grotesque and elaborate ironies come all too naturally to me.”
¹³
It was included in
LW
and
RA.
The current text is based upon a carbon copy of the original typescript deposited at JHL.