1. BB item 34.
2. BB item 34a.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933.
4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 4, 1934.
5. Mrs. Smith sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door to help support the family. See Violet Heyer, “Letter.” In One Hundred Years of Klarkash-Ton, Ed. Ronald Hilger (Averon Press, 1996): pp. 20–22.
6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
7. WT, letter to CAS, October 25, 1935 (ms, JHL).
8. See HPL, letter to CAS, July 18, 1930.
The Last Hieroglyph
Clark Ashton Smith first mentioned “The Last Hieroglyph” in a letter to August Derleth in March 1934:
I have conceived a whale of a weird notion for a story to be called either The Last Hieroglyph or, In the Book of Agoma. It concerns a strange volume of hieroglyphic writings that belonged to a mysterious archimage. When he wished, he could bring one or more of the hieroglyphs to life in the forms that they represented, and could send them forth to do his bidding. In the story, a certain minor wizard enters the tower in which the book is kept—and is turned into a hieroglyph on the half-finished open page of the great volume.
1
The first version of this story was completed on April 7, 1934. Farnsworth Wright rejected it “with the usual comment that he had enjoyed it and admired it personally. But he feared the c.r. [casual reader] would find it rather meaningless. He must have a bright lot of readers, if that is true.” Smith’s growing frustration showed itself when he added “Well, if I ever become any crazier than I am and have been, Wright’s criticism and rejections will certainly be one of the contributing causes.”2
Smith revised the story, changing the title to “In the Book of Vergama,” and resubmitted it. Wright rejected it a second time, explaining that “Beautiful though many of its passages are, yet there is so little plot, and the motivation seems so inadequate, that I am afraid it would disappoint many of our readers who expect almost perfection itself from you.”3 Looking over the twice-rejected manuscript, CAS allowed that “It is possible that the tale is a little overwrought; and I may, eventually, cut out the portions about the merman and the salamander”4 and solicited the opinions of Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. However, after completing a third revision, he informed Barlow that “You & Theobaldus [nickname for HPL] will be glad to know that I am not curtailing the Vergama story. On the contrary, I have done a longer version, detailing efforts of Nushain to sidestep his guides and evade the destiny that will turn him into a cipher. The guides, ironically, twit him with a lack of faith in his own horoscopic vaticinations! Vergama also waxes sardonic.”5 The third time did prove the charm, as Smith wrote to Derleth “Wright took my revision of ‘The Last Hieroglyph.’ I added about 2000 words to the tale and, I think, improved it considerably.”6
Smith’s correspondents were pleased with the results of all his efforts. Robert E. Howard mentioned that he “very much enjoyed” the story.7 E. Hoffmann Price told him that it:
has a strange charm… a certain humanity—I mean, the character and his two attendants have an appealing realness which gives force to the picture. The bungling, guessing astrologer, sometimes charlatan, sometimes (and perhaps coincidentally) giving a good prediction; he’s in a way a symbol of all endeavour. And his doom seems rather a fulfillment, not a punishment. For all its outré adornments, the story has a homely, human touch which persistently hold its own.
8
CAS wrote to Barlow that the story would “form the concluding item of my Zothique series, if this series should ever appear between book-covers.”9
Wright included “The Last Hieroglyph” in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Smith received sixty dollars.10 It was included in OST and RA. A carbon copy of the published version from Smith’s papers at JHL was used to establish the current text.
One of the first anthologies to mine the rich resources of such pulps as Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds and Astounding Stories was The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination, edited by Phil Stong (1899–1957), a journalist and novelist who is best known for writing State Fair, the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name. Stong did not include a story by Smith, but the anthology does contain the following mention of “The Last Hieroglyph”: “Clark Ashton Smith is another fantasy writer, a very popular one, who frequently has excellent and original ideas and then casts them into a precious style that does not fit them. Only, his idol is not Poe but Lord Dunsany. Smith’s story of the magician [sic] who becomes an item of a cosmic manuscript is excellent, but there are too many Byzantine words.”11 It was undoubtedly Smith’s encounters with sentiments such as these that inspired him when he composed two aphorisms that he published in his poetry collection Spells and Philtres. The first states that “The modern intolerance toward what is called ‘painted speech,’ toward ‘the grand manner,’ springs too often from the instinctive resentment inspired in vulgar minds by all that savors of loftiness, exaltation, nobility, sublimity and aristocracy.” The second expresses the realization that “It is a ghastly but tenable proposition that the world is now ruled by the insane, whose increasing plurality will, in a few generations, make probable the incarceration of all sane people born among them.”12
1. CAS, letter to AWD, March 18, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, April 17, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
3. FW, letter to CAS, April 25, 1934 (ms, JHL).
4. CAS, letter to RHB, April 30, 1934 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 18, 1934 (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 4, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
7. Robert E, Howard, letter to CAS, July 23, 1935 (Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 1933–1936, Ed. Rob Roehm [Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2008]: p. 366).
8. E. Hoffmann Price, letter to CAS, September 13, 1942 (ms, JHL).
9. CAS, letter to RHB, May 21, 1934 (SL 255).
10. WT, letter to CAS, March 31, 1936 (ms, JHL).
11. Phil Stong, “Note to Part III,” in The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), pp. 330–331.
12. CAS, “Epigrams and Apothegms.” Spells and Philtres (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1958): pp. 53, 54.
Necromancy in Naat
As discussed in the preceding note, “The Last Hieroglyph” was intended to be the final story of Zothique. However, Smith’s “benign, maleficent daemon” still had tales to tell of the last continent, and the first version of “Necromancy in Naat” was completed on February 6, 1935. Little survives concerning its composition or genesis. CAS told Donald Wandrei that he had “turned out several weirds, including ‘The Treader of the Dust,’ ‘Necromancy in Naat’ and ‘The Black Abbot of Puthuum.’… The last quarter of Necromancy in Naat, however, will have to be rewritten according to the specifications of the satrap (Damn!!....******)”1 Wright’s letter of rejection apparently has not survived, so the exact nature of his objections are not known, but in a letter dated February 11, 1935 he acknowledges the receipt of a “new last page” for the story “and will get at the reading of that tale within a day or two.”2 Since this occurs before Smith’s letter telling of its rejection, we can only speculate that either the last page somehow was lost or Smith decided to change the last page and sent it along. CAS spent the period between March 4 and March 25 rewriting the story, according to his notations on the typescript of the original version, and wrote to H. P. Lovecraft that “Naat” was one of several stories recently accepted by Wright.3 “Necromancy in Naat” appeared in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, where it was accompanied by another Virgil Finlay illustration, where it tied with Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” as the most popular story in the issue.4 Smith was paid seventy-three dollars for the story.5 Smith included “Necromancy in Naat” in LW, and it was later included in RA.