A Vintage From Atlantis (61 page)

1. Brian Stableford, “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith,” In
FFT
161.

2.
Will Murray, “Introduction” to
Tales of Zothique
by Clark Ashton Smith (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995), p. 7-12.

3. Steve Behrends, chapter 2, “Zothique,”
Clark Ashton Smith
, Starmont Reader’s Guide 49 (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), pp. 24-37.

4. Jim Rockhill, “As Shadows Wait Upon the Sun: Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique,” In
FFT
277-92.

5.
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
(San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1912), p. 31.

6.
SS
245.

7. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, November 3, 1953 (
SL
374).

8.
ES
266.

9.
SS
165.

10.
SS
158.

11.
SS
170
.

12. CAS, letter to AWD, January 9, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

13. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).

The Seed from the Sepulcher

I
f we use the number of times a story has been anthologized as an indication of its popularity, then “The Seed from the Sepulcher,” at eight times (not counting different editions of the same anthology), is Smith’s most popular story, beating “The Return of the Sorcerer” (five times), “The City of the Singing Flame” (four times), “A Rendevous in Averoigne” (four times), and “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (three times)—and it wasn’t even included in one of his collections until after his death!

Timeus Ashton-Smith (1855-1937), the father of Clark Ashton Smith, was the son of a wealthy British industrialist who used his patrimony for travel and gambling. Based upon accounts received from his friend, H. P. Lovecraft described Timeus as “something of a soldier of fortune [who had] travelled in many odd corners of the earth, including the Amazon jungles of South America. Clark probably derives much of his exotic taste from the tales told him by his father when he was very small—he was especially impressed by accounts of the gorgeously plumed birds and bizarre tropical flowers of equatorial Brazil”.
¹
These stories undoubtedly were on Smith’s mind when he conceived of this story.

Steve Behrends, in his notes to Smith’s story-ideas published in
Strange Shadows
, identifies this plot germ, originally called “A Bottle on the Amazon” (later changed to “Orinoco”) as the genesis of “The Seed from the Sepulcher:”

A whisky-bottle floating in the ^Orinoco^ [Amazon] is picked up near the river’s mouth, and is found to contain a ms. which details the adventures of two explorers in an untrodden country of Venezuela. Here one of the two men is bitten by a monstrous fanged vegetable growth ^having a vague, distorted likeness to a human figure^, and shortly after, begins to show signs of an appalling transformation. Little by little he is turned into a replica of the thing that had bitten him. Finally, he takes root in the jungle—and stings the narrator of the story, just as the other is about to abandon him in horror and despair.
²

According to Behrends, this synopsis probably dates to the summer of 1931. He began working on the tale toward the end of January 1932, mentioning in a letter that he was “doing another story, ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher,’ for submission to
Strange Tales
… ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher’ will be the best of the lot, from my standpoint. It describes a monstrous plant growing out of a man’s skull, eyes, etc., and trellising the roots on all his bones,
while he was still alive
”
.
³
It was completed by February 10, since in a discussion of his recent stories Smith told Derleth “I like ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher’ best, for its imaginative touches, but am going to chuck the malignant plant idea after this. I don’t want to run it into the ground!”
⁴
When he submitted it to Harry Bates,

he wanted me to make some slight alterations before showing it to Clayton. He seemed to think there was an inconsistency in the development of the devil-plant; but, as I pointed out to him, the plant merely propagated itself through spores,
after death,
but had the power of extending its
individual life-term
through an extension of the root-system from one victim to another. However, I made several minor changes, adding some horrific details, and mentioning a
second skull
in the lattice-work of bones, roots, etc, in the burial-pit. Derleth’s suggestions were very good, but I rather like the thing as it stands. It might have been worked out more gradually, at greater length, as Wandrei suggests; but the present development, as far as I am concerned, has, through its very acceleration, a strong connotation of the unnatural, the diabolic, the supernatural.
⁵

Bates accepted the revised story for
Strange Tales
, but now informed Smith that payment would have to wait until publication. This was a precursor to even worse news: facing the threat of bankruptcy, publisher William Clayton gave Bates orders to shut down the magazine with the January 1933 issue
⁶
. Bates had been holding three of Smith’s stories, including “Seed,” which he had already copy-edited and marked with instructions for the printer, and returned them to Smith. A new copy was promptly typed and submitted to Farnsworth Wright at
Weird Tales
; CAS took the opportunity to add a few details and “verbal emendations” that added “from my standpoint…to the literary value of the tale, which was a little hasty and hacky in spots before”.
⁷
Wright rejected it, telling Smith that it had “many excellent features; but as a whole, it seems too long drawn out—at least, that is my reaction to it”.
⁸
The next month Smith revised the story, eliminating “all repetitional detail [and] cutting the yarn to 4500 [words];” Wright accepted this trimmed version.
⁹
Smith received forty-five dollars for the story after it appeared in the October 1933 issue of
Weird Tales
.
¹⁰
It was collected in
TSS
.

       The current text is based upon the typescript edited by Harry Bates, which Smith had given to R. H. Barlow and who in turn donated it to the Bancroft Library, and the later typescripts at JHL. Some descriptive material from the first version that was cut for
Weird Tales
has been restored, but the repetitive material that Smith had cut—and there was a lot of repetition in the Bates-edited version—has not been restored.

1. HPL, letter to F. Lee Baldwin, March 27, 1934 (in
FFT
66).

2.
SS
167.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (
SL
171-72).

6. Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes,
The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936
(Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004), p. 203.

7. CAS, letter to AWD, October 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

8. FW, letter to CAS, October 21, 1932 (ms, JHL).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

10. Popular Fiction Publishing Company to CAS, February 24, 1934 (ms, JHL).

The Second Interment

A
s in the case of “An Adventure in Futurity” and “Seedling of Mars,” “The Second Interment” originated with a suggestion from one of Smith’s editors. Harry Bates forwarded to Smith the following suggestion from William Clayton:

Mr. Clayton recently suggested to me that he would like to see a story recounting the horror a man might feel at being buried alive. His sensations, all the awful things—the states of mind—he would go through. He might prolong his agony by shallow breathing a la Houdini. It would add to the horror of things if he had for years been afraid of being buried alive, and had an obsession that he would. Perhaps he had a push button or some other device in the casket of summoning aid just in case, and perhaps it does not work. Perhaps he has had one unfortunate experience from which he was rescued in time, which would give far more point and tension to a repetition of it for a climax.…The thing would, of course, be a naturalistic horror story.
¹

Smith apparently felt the suggestion a congenial one, for he had completed the story by January 29, 1932, less than a week after receiving the suggestion. He added to Clayton’s basic idea “the suggestion of foul play that was apprehended by Uther; and it seems to me that the thing could hardly have happened in any other way than through dirty work. The younger brother, with the dr.’s connivance, must have hustled him away in a terrible hurry, fearing that he might wake up at any moment, if they took the chance of committing him to an embalmer’s care. But maybe I should have inserted a more direct hint of this somewhere in this tale”.
²

Although Smith called “The Second Interment” a “detailed and remorseless study in naturalistic horror”, the technique he used was vividly impressionistic in its depiction of the psychological and physiological agonies experienced by the unfortunate Uther Magbane. In doing so he perhaps unconsciously made reference to some of the nightmare visions found in “The Hashish-Eater.” The images of eyeless giants, the black Babel of a sunless world, and the huge Python of myth with unimaginable folds, are all reminiscent of this poem. The fevered rush from horror to horror also duplicates much of the tone used throughout Smith’s most famous poem, but the most striking similarity occurs in the final sentences of the story:

With inconceivable swiftness, the head of the anaconda became that of his brother Guy. It mocked him with a vast sneer, it appeared to swell and expand, to lose all human semblance or proportion, to become a blank, dark mass that rushed upon him in cyclonic gloom, driving him down into the space beyond space.

Compare the above paragraph with the final lines from “The Hashish-Eater:”

It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face,

That fills the void and fills the universe,

And bloats against the limits of the world

With lips of flame that open.
³

“The Second Interment” appeared in the last issue of
Strange Tales
, January 1933. Donald Wandrei called the story “a fine piece of craftsmanship, one of the best tales you have yet spun. Derleth raised a question about insoluble problems of technique involved in such a presentation, but I answered with the simple assertion that certain types of potential or actual experience can not be handled at all except by such methods as were employed in your story; and of course, where the question is one of to have or not to have, the affirmative wins”.
⁴
CAS agreed that “the method employed was the only feasible one. The tale was written to order, as I may have told you, and it is almost the only instance where I have done anything good under such conditions”.
⁵
Smith confirmed his good opinion of the story by allowing August Derleth to include it in
OST
.
⁶

1. Bates, letter to CAS, January 22, 1932 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, “The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil.” In
The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith
, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002), p. 29.

4. DAW, letter to CAS, October 31, 1932 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to DAW, November 10, 1932 (
SL
195).

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

Ubbo-Sathla

C
ompleted on February 15, 1932, “Ubbo-Sathla” originated in the following note:

A man, who, in trance, goes back in earthly time to the very beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the primal one, out of whom all terrestrial life has sprung, lay wallowing in the mist and slime, playing idiotically with the tablets on which are writ the wisdom of vanished pre-mundane gods. In his trance, the man believes that he has been sent to retrieve these tablets; but, approaching Ubbo-Sathla, he seems to revert to some primordial life-form; and forgetting his mission, wallows and ravens in the ooze with the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla. He does not re-emerge from the trance. Ubbo-Sathla is a vast, yeasty mass, sloughing off continuously various rudimentary life-forms.
¹

Douglas A. Anderson suggests that “Ubbo-Sathla” may have been influenced by Leonard Cline’s visionary novel
The Dark Chamber
(1927),
²
but as of December 1933 Smith had not read it.
³
Cline’s novel may have exerted some influence at second hand, though, since Donald Wandrei is known to have read
The Dark Chamber,
and CAS wrote him that the story’s “ideation may remind you a little of your own tale, ‘[The Lives of] Alfred Kramer’” [
WT
, December 1932]. In the same letter CAS stated that “The main object of Ubbo-Sathla was to achieve a profound and manifold dissolution of what is known as reality—which, come to think of it, is the animus of nearly all my tales, more or less”.
⁴