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 When Price visited him early in 1940, Smith presented him with the typescripts of two unpublished stories, “The House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord,” and told Price to do whatever he wanted with them: “Scrap the god-damn things if after all you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
Smith’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.