Smith sold the only typescripts of two stories, “The Red World of Polaris” and “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” (written circa October 1930), to Michael DeAngelis, a fan then living in Brooklyn, New York who had reprinted CAS’ poem “The Ghoul and the Seraph” as a limited edition pamphlet in 1950. DeAngelis planned to publish the two stories either as separate pamphlets or in a fanzine, but vanished, taking the typescript with him. (It is believed that he had sold the typescript for “Like Mohammed’s Tomb” to another Brooklyn fan, but it remains at this time still lost.) Numerous attempts to locate DeAngelis were made over the years by Smith, Derleth, Roy Squires, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Douglas A. Anderson, and Steve Behrends, but all met with failure until Ron Hilger thought to contact DeAngelis’ co-editor for the fanzine Asmodeus, Alan H. Pesetsky, in May 2003. Pesetsky located a typed copy of the story that he had prepared for publication in their fanzine, and was kind enough to provide us with a copy. It was first published as the title story of the collected Volmar stories by Night Shade Books in 2003.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, August 22, 1930 (SL 117-118). (Note: this letter was incorrectly described as to CAS by David Lasser in both ES (275, n5) and our introduction to RW, “The Magellan of the Constellations,” page 3.)
2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (SL 119-120).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (LL 15).
4. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10 [1930] (SL 132).
5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 301).
6. Mike Ashley, “Evoking Wonder.” Lost Worlds no. 3 (2006): 31.
Told in the Desert
This story was conceived in late 1929 and according to Smith’s “Completed Stories” log was written after the completion of “The Red World of Polaris” in late August 1930 but before “The Willow Landscape.” According to a surviving synopsis, it was to have been originally entitled “Neria”:
A wanderer in the desert, who finds an oasis inhabited only by a beautiful girl, named Neria. He loves her, and is content to dwell with her for awhile; but at last he feels that he must return to the world for awhile, in spite of the girl’s warning that he will never find her again if he does. He goes away, and later seeks to find the oasis again, but spends his whole life searching for it in vain.
1
Smith sent August Derleth the typescripts of three unpublished stories, “The Metamorphosis of the World,” “An Offering to the Moon,” and this, late in the summer of 1950; in his letter Smith described the tale as “a lengthy and rather uneven prose-poem.”2 While Derleth was able to place the first two stories with WT, “Told in the Desert” remained unpublished until 1964, when Derleth included it in an anthology of original or unpublished stories, Over the Edge, published by Arkham House. No manuscript or typescript survives at either JHL or SHSW, and a search of the remaining archives at Arkham House failed to locate the tale. It was collected posthumously in OD.
1. SS 157.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 7, 1950.
The Willow Landscape
Completed on September 8, 1930, “The Willow Landscape” was rejected by FW “as it does not seem exactly suited to Weird Tales, and it lacks the swift action that we want for Oriental Stories.”1 This evoked the following response from Lovecraft: “It is like Wright to reject ‘The Willow Landscape’. The damn fool! Action—hell, what a standard! And yet I know that is the god of the herd.”2 Smith then submitted it to Ghost Stories where it “drew the only editorial compliment (‘very charming and poetic’) which this tale has yet received.”3 As an example of the lengths to which Smith was willing to pursue a sale, he finally managed to place the tale with the Philippine Magazine, noting that “The rates are nothing very gaudy; but the editor seems to be appreciative.”4 It was published in the May 1931 issue “with a very charming illustration by a native artist.”5
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
One 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.