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.
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
Although 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.