The Last Hieroglyph (58 page)

CAS refers to “the antehuman sorcerer Haon-Dor” in the story. This character first appeared in an uncompleted story called “The House of Haon-Dor” that Smith had started in June or July 1933 but then set aside. A synopsis appears in the
Black Book
(item 18) and the unfinished story was included in
SS
. A contemporary story of black magic, “The House of Haon-Dor” has little relationship to “The Seven Geases.”

An event occurred during the writing of “The Seven Geases” that would have enormous repercussions for Smith and his parents. Sometime early in October 1933 Mary Frances “Fanny” Gaylord Smith, CAS’ mother, accidentally knocked over a pot of hot tea and badly scalded her foot, and “this unfortunate accident has thrown another monkey wrench into my literary programme. I am doctor, nurse, chief dish-washer and god knows what.”
¹⁴

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

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. late September 1933 (
LL
41).

3. HPL, letter to CAS, October 22, 1933 (AHT).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early November 1933 (
SL
236).

5.
BB
item 33. Item 20 is also obviously germane: “Geas (pronounced gesh or gass) a Celtic tabu, or compulsion or injunction laid on a person in some such form as ‘I place you under heavy geas, to do so and so.’ —Celtic plural,
geases.”
Smith came across the word in James Branch Cabell’s novel
Figures of Earth
(see letter to RHB, October 25, 1933 [
SL
233]).

6.
BB
item 33a.

7. CAS, letter to HPL, c. late September 1933 (
SL
226).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, October 4, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

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

10. HPL, letter to CAS, November 29, 1933 (ms, JHL).

11. FW, letter to CAS, December 1, 1933 (ms, JHL).

12. CAS, letter to AWD, December 31, 1933 (ms, SHSW).

13. CAS, letter to RHB, December 30, 1933 (ms, JHL).

14. CAS, letter to RHB, October 25, 1933 (
SL
234).

The Chain of Aforgomon

A
lthough Clark Ashton Smith began “The Chain of Aforgomon” in April 1933, he did not complete the story until sometime early in1934. The synopsis for the tale in the
Black Book
, which was originally to be called “The Curse of the Time-God,” reads:

John Millwarp, novelist, is found dead in his room under circumstances of shocking and inexplicable mystery. His body, beneath the unmarked clothing, is charred in concentric circles, as if by rings of fire, and a strange symbol is clearly branded on his forehead. His literary executor, taking charge of his manuscripts, finds among them a sort of diary, in which Millwarp tells of his growing addiction to a rare drug, which had caused him to remember scenes from former lives, and had finally revived the recollection of an avatar in a world that had antedated the earth. In this life, Millwarp had been the high priest of the Time-God, Aforgonis, and through his love for a dead woman, and his use of a temporal necromancy, had committed blasphemy against the logic of the god. He is punished with fiery tortures by his fellow-priests, and is doomed by Aforgonis to remember, at some far date of the future in another world, the circumstances of his offense, and to perish through the memory of the tortures.
¹

His description of its composition in a letter to Derleth gives some idea as to why the story was so difficult to complete:

I have nearly finished the long-deferred “Chain of Aforgomon”—a most infernal chore, since the original inspiration seems to have gone cold, leaving the tale immalleable as chilled iron. Anyway, it is a devilishly hard yarn to write: the problem being to create any illusion of reality in an episode that occurs like a dream within a dream. Through the use of a rare Oriental drug, the hero remembers a former life, in a world antedating the earth, when he had been a priest of the time-god Aforgomon. After the death of his sweet-heart, he had committed a weird temporal necromancy by evoking, with all its circumstances,
one hour
of the preceding autumn when he and his love had been happy together. This
repetition
of a past hour was enough to set incalculable disorder in all the workings of the cosmos henceforward; and it constituted blasphemy against the sacred logic of time, which was a cult in this world. The remainder of the tale deals with the strange doom, involving the entire sequence of his future lives, which the priest brought upon himself by this necromancy. You will realize the difficulty of treatment.
²

Smith’s diminishing inspiration may be tracked not only to his ongoing frustrations with editorial capriciousness, but also to sheer physical exhaustion: his mother, Mary Frances “Fanny” Gaylord Smith, was severely injured when she upset a pot of tea on her foot and scalded it that October, which required Smith to take over as caregiver for her and his father, whose health was never that robust to begin with. He announced that it was finished on January 21, 1934 “after nearly finishing me,” but he had “little hope that Wright will buy it.”
³
Wright did reject it, complaining that the story sagged toward the end; Smith proffered to Derleth that “Personally, I’d say that the sagging, if there is much, occurs in the middle.”
⁴
Wright did accept it after some revision, and it was published in the December 1935 issue.

The theme of reincarnation, and the image of a chain of incarnations stretching into infinity, occurs early in Smith’s work. In “The Star-Treader” (1912) we find these lines:

Through years reversed and lit again

I followed that unending chain

Wherein the suns are links of light;

Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres

The twisting of the threads of years

In weavings wrought of noon and night;

Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,

Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.
⁴

The circumstances of John Milwarp’s death recall the death of Smith’s associate, Boutwell Dunlap (1877–1930), who died suddenly under murky circumstances in his rooms at the Graystone Hotel in San Francisco on December 22, 1930.
⁵
Dunlap was an attorney and historian who helped promote Smith’s first book in 1912. Since Dunlap had attempted to hog all the credit for Smith’s discovery, earning a rebuke from no less than Ambrose Bierce himself, Smith may not have been too well disposed toward Dunlap.
⁶

Stefan Dziemianowicz has pointed out that the plot of “The Chain of Aforgomon” is similar to that of Universal Pictures’ 1931 film
The Mummy
(dir. Karl Freund, starring Boris Karloff). According to a March 15, 1933 letter to Robert H. Barlow, Smith missed seeing
The Mummy
when it came to Auburn.
⁷

When Smith included “The Chain of Aforgomon” in his first Arkham House collection,
OST
, he received a nice fan letter from Hannes Bok, the well-regarded artist and pulp illustrator who drew the dust jacket. Bok singled out the story for special praise, writing that “I think that THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON is one of the most terrific things I’ve ever read. Most stories of ‘unspeakable’ blasphemies leave me cold, but here was a blasphemy which somehow convinced me. Yipes!”
⁸
The story was also included in
RA.

The current text is based upon a carbon copy at JHL.

1.
BB
item 17.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, January 10, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, January 21, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, “The Star-Treader.” In
The Abyss Triumphant: The Complete Poetry and Translations
Volume I
. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008): p. 71.

5. See “Boutwell Dunlap, Noted California Historian, Dies,”
San Francisco Examiner
(December 23, 1930): 1; “Boutwell Dunlap Services Monday,”
Auburn Journal
(January 1, 1931): 1.

6. See Scott Connors, “Who Discovered Clark Ashton Smith?”
Lost Worlds
no. 1 (2004): 25–34.

7. CAS, letter to RHB, March 15, 1933 (ms, JHL).

8. Hannes Bok, letter to CAS, undated but sent with AWD’s letter dated August 13, 1942 (ms, JHL).

The Primal City

H
. P. Lovecraft had described several of his recent dreams to Clark Ashton Smith, which drew forth the following account:

My own recent dreams have been pretty tame; but in the past I have had some that were memorable. One that comes to mind was fraught with all the supernatural horror of antique myth: I was standing somewhere on a bleak, terrible plain, while past me and over me, with appalling demonic speed and paces and voices of thunder, there swept a vast array of cloudy, titanic Shapes. One of these, as it went by, pealed out the sonorous words “Eiton euclarion”, which I somehow took to be the name of the cloudy entity or one of its fellows.
¹

(Smith was later to clarify that he was still a boy when he had this dream.)
²

In his return letter Lovecraft wrote that “Your unusual dreams are tremendously interesting, & much fuller of genuine, unhackneyed strangeness than any of mine.
Eiton euclarion!
Of what festering horror in space-time’s makeup have you had a veiled intimation?”
³
Smith jotted down a story idea that stemmed from this dream in the
Black Book
under the title “The Cloud-People:” “A remote mountain-region, with lost cities and treasure, deserted by human beings, but guarded by strange clouds that take the forms of men, animals, or demons.”
⁴
The story was underway during the second half of January 1934, and ready for submission to
Weird Tales
by February 5, 1934.
⁵
At first Smith titled the story “The Cloud-Things,” then “The Clouds,” and finally “The Primal City.” Wright rejected the story as “lacking ‘plot’,” of which CAS had elsewhere said “Few of my stories… exhibit what is known in pulpdom as ‘plot’.”
⁶
Smith accordingly rewrote the story in March 1934 and resubmitted it, only to meet with rejection yet again. “The nameless spawn of Yub & Yoth!” wrote Lovecraft upon reading Wright’s second rejection letter. “No wonder his damn’d magazine never prints anything worth reading except by accident! ‘The Clouds’ is
magnificent
—one of the most potent and moving things I’ve read in recent years. A breathless menace hangs over the scene from the first, & the doom—when it comes—is
really adequate.
”
⁷
Lovecraft urged Smith to give the story to
The Fantasy Fan
if Wright did not finally accept it. This never happened, so the story first saw print in the November 1934 issue of Hornig’s fanzine, which was appropriately a special “Clark Ashton Smith” issue.

F. Orlin Tremaine was replaced as editor of
Astounding Stories
late in 1938. He edited another science fiction magazine,
Comet Stories
, and Smith sold him a pruned version of “The Primal City” for the December 1940 issue. The copy editor at
Comet Stories
changed Smith’s text in a number of places; one particularly egregious example is the change of the line “Their swiftness was that of mountain-sweeping winds” to “Their swiftness was that of powered aircraft.” When Smith was assembling
GL
, he did not have a carbon but instead sent to Derleth tear sheets with handwritten corrections. Presented with a choice between the version published in
The Fantasy Fan
or that in
Comet Stories
, he went with the “more concise… and therefore preferable”
Comet Stories
version.
⁸
Both versions of this story have their strong points. The text included here represents a merger of the two versions that uses the typescript of the original version as a starting point. (Many of his later changes were written in pencil on this typescript.) However, the revisions in parts of the
Comet Stories
version are less poetic and imaginative, leading us to conclude these changes were done to achiece a sale.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-October 1933 (
SL
228).

2. CAS, “Excerpts from
The Black Book.” The Acolyte
(Spring 1944). In
BB
p. 78.

3. HPL, letter to CAS, October 22, 1933 (AHT).

4.
BB
item 29.

5. See CAS, letter to AWD, January 21, 1934 (ms, SHSW); CAS, letter to AWD, February 5, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

6. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early November 1933 (
SL
236).

7. Lovecraft’s comments are written on Wright’s March 23, 1934 letter to Smith (see Roy A. Squires’ Catalog 8, item 123).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, February 7, 1947 (ms, SHSW).

Xeethra

C
lark Ashton Smith’s heart-wrenching treatment of the Faust theme was completed on March 21, 1934, but like most of his stories the idea came to him much earlier. “The Traveller” (see Appendix 3), one of the prose poems in
Ebony and Crystal,
tells of a poor pilgrim who, when asked what it is he is searching for, replies “forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home.” A story idea may be found in the
Black Book
under that title: