For in your voice are voices from beyond the tomb.
And in your face a shadow risen from vast vaults.
3
The Relationship of Valzain and Famurza resembles that of CAS and his mentor, George Sterling.
Weird Tales snatched this story up and published it in the May 1953 issue. The magazine would soon be reduced to digest size and would cease publication in little over a year. Smith included the story in TSS. Only a couple of pages of the typescript for “Morthylla” survive among Smith’s papers at JHL; most of the typescript perished in the September 1957 fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin.
1. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 371 [misdated 1953 in this appearance]).
2. BB item 99.
3. BB item 94.
Schizoid Creator
Psychoanalysis and psychiatrists were not subjects near to Clark Ashton Smith’s heart. In his 1934 essay “On Fantasy” he listed “Freudianism” as one of the chief forces working against the imagination in modern life, and in a 1949 symposium on science fiction he offered the quip “Sometimes I suspect that Freud should be included among the modern masters of science fiction!”2 One of his epigrams states that “One can postulate anything, and people will accept it as religion, philosophy—or psychoanalysis.”3
Smith gave full vent to his contempt for Freud’s minions in one of two stories he wrote early in the autumn of 1952, “Schizoid Creator.” As he described the tale to L. Sprague de Camp, it was “a fantastic satire that mixes black magic with psychiatric shock-treatment (the patient being a demon!).”4 The “black magic” to which Smith refers is the use of the names of God to compel entities both demonic and divine to do the sayer’s will. Two consecutive items in Smith’s Black Book illuminate this further:
According to Jewish tradition, when Lilith refused to yield obedience to Adam, she uttered the Shemhamphorash, the ineffable name of Jehovah, and, by virtue of this, instantly flew away. This utterance gave her such power that even Jehovah could not coerce her.
According to widespread belief, the gods have kept their true names secret but other gods, or even men, should be able to conjure with them. To the Mohammedan, Allah is but an epithet in place of the Most Great Name; and the secret of the latter is committed to prophets and apostles alone. Those who know the Most Great Name can, by pronouncing it, transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead to life, and work other miracles.
5
Smith refers to “Shem-hamphorash, the nameless name,” in his last poem, “Cycles.”6
The image of Satan caressing a flayed girl is a homage to his mentor, George Sterling. In his poem “A Wine of Wizardry” Sterling included the following lines:
But Fancy still is fugitive, and turns
To caverns where a demon altar burns,
And Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed,
Ere Lilith come his indolence to greet,
Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed
In chains so heated at their master’s fire
That one new-damned had thought their bright attire
Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance
So terribly that brilliance shall enhance.7
Smith submitted the story to Fantasy Fiction, a digest-sized competitor of Weird Tales that emulated the model of Unknown Worlds, where it appeared in the November 1953 issue. Only burned fragments survive of the typescript for this story, and what parts can still be read would seem to indicate that it was an earlier draft—there are differences with the published text, but the differences are cruder and less polished than what finally appeared. The current text is based upon the Fantasy Fiction text.
1. PD 38: “In short, all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized by Freudianism, by sociology, and by the five senses, are due for the critical horse-laugh.…”
2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 11, 1949 (SL 358).
3. CAS, The Devil’s Notebook. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Don Herron (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990): p. 71.
4. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 370). This letter is misdated 1953.
5. BB items 21 and 22.
6. CAS, “Cycles.” In The Wine of Summer: The Complete Poetry and Translations Volume 2. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008): p. 642.
7. George Sterling, “A Wine of Wizardry.” The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003): 150–151.
Monsters in the Night
Anthony Boucher (pseudonym of William A. P. White [1911–1968]) had given Clark Ashton Smith’s first two Arkham House collections favorable reviews, so when he became one of the founding editors of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he would appear to have been a reliable new market for Smith’s stories. Boucher even lived in nearby Berkeley, California, where Smith visited frequently to visit his friend George Haas, with whom Boucher was also acquainted.
Smith submitted “Thirteen Phantasms” to Boucher late in 1951. Boucher rejected the story on the grounds that it was too realistic, but took the time to offer Smith these observations, which unfortunately survive only in a burned fragment:
Personally I’ve been enjoying & admiring your fiction for twenty years & more—particularly that individually mordant humor that you display in such items as “The Monster of the Prophecy” and “The Weird of Avoosl Wutthuquan.” (I just checked & see that I misspelled that… but you’ll admit that’s doing well from memory!) But your type of highly elaborated & remote fantasy doesn’t [
burned
] to be what our readers want. They prefer a more simple treatment, a closer impingement of the fantastic [
burned
] people. [
remainder burned
]
2
He concluded the letter with an invitation to drop in for a drink if Smith were ever in Berkeley.
Smith must have experienced a sensation of déjà vu at reading this: it was as if Farnsworth Wright were speaking from the next world. When he next submitted a story to F&SF, it was with a newly written story that lacked many of his characteristic rhetorical flourishes.
“Monsters in the Night,” one of Smith’s most frequently anthologized stories, was the next story that Smith submitted to Boucher. He rejected it with these observations: “Sorry, but—nice idea, this werewolf-vs-robot, but I’m afraid it tips itself to the reader too early, & is too bluntly resolved.”3 Boucher responded in a more positive manner after Smith rewrote the story and fixed those defects: “With a very slight change at the end, we want to accept ‘Monsters in the Night.’ Please advise if you approve of the following, which would replace your last two paragraphs on page 4: [. . . ] We think this is quite an effective windup to a highly unique story.”4 Smith agreed to the change, leading to a story contract, a check for forty-five dollars, and the story’s appearance in the October 1954 issue of F&SF (under the title of “A Prophecy of Monsters,” which was obviously a nod by Boucher to one of his favorite Smith stories).5It was collected posthumously in OD.