Donald Wandrei and his brother Howard sold some weird stories to Esquire in 1937. Seeing a possible new market, Smith revised the story in an attempt to make it more acceptable, by cutting approximately one thousand words and modifying the language.7 The story also reverted to a version of the original title, “The Maze of Maal Dweb.” (“I think it should be admitted,” wrote CAS of this, “that some of my nomenclature achieves certain nuances of suggestive and atmospheric associative value.”) Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich rejected it as “‘reminiscent of both Burroughs and Cabell;’ a criticism that amazed and disgusted me. I was not aware that Burroughs had any copyright on jungle hunters, or that Cabell had acquired a monopoly of irony. *******!!******** I fear that Mr. Gingrich is a better judge of garbage than of literature.**********!!”8 After all these travels, “The Maze of Maal Dweb” ended up where it began when Wright accepted this version, which was published in the October 1938 issue of Weird Tales.
Since Smith himself selected the present text for inclusion in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, a venture that was as much a gesture of defiance at the editorially-dictated mediocrity he saw infesting the pulps as iy was an attempt at financial independence, it is abundantly clear that this is the version he wished to present to the world. While he would ultimately come to prefer “The Maze of Maal Dweb” as a title, this has come entwined with the “abridged and pruned” version published in Weird Tales and included in OST and RA. The editors have decided to retain “The Maze of the Enchanter” to distinguish between the two.
“Maze” also has the distinction of being the second story of Smith’s to be reprinted in a hardcover anthology, and also the second item by Smith to be included in a school textbook (the first being a poem, “The Cherry-Snows,” which was included in a grade school text book). William Whittingham Lyman (1885-1983) was a correspondent of Smith’s and also an instructor at Los Angeles Junior College. In 1935 he edited, along with two of his colleagues, a textbook called Today’s Literature. Smith contributed “Maze” and four poems. Since this was a textbook, several questions were offered “for study and discussion;” we would have enjoyed being the proverbial “fly on the wall” for the classroom discussions that ensued!
For study and discussion
1. How much do the names in the story add to the weird effect?
2. Note that the sentences have a definite cadence. Do you find this effect pleasing?
3. Did you expect a happy ending? Did the conclusion surprise you?
4. Compare the story and the others in the volume The Maze of the Enchanter and Other Stories [sic] with A Dreamer’s Tales by Lord Dunsany. Which do you prefer?
5. Compare them with John Silence by Algernon Blackwood.
6. What other writers of terror stories do you know?
For themes
1. The modern literature of terror.
2. The intellectual (or moral) value of the terror story.9
1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 11, 1932 (SL 188).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 20, 1932 (SL 190).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, September 28, 1932 (SL 192).
4. HPL, letter to AWD, October 11, 1932 (in Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008], p. 503).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, October 10, 1932 (SL 193).
6. CAS, letter to RHB, November 16, 1933 (ms, JHL).
7. For a discussion of how “making the tale more commercially acceptable and closer to the assumed reading level of the herd ... brought about a corresponding loss to the finer shades of meaning,” see Jim Rockhill, “The Poetics of Morbidity: The Original Text to Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of the Enchanter’ and Other Works First Published in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,” Lost Worlds no. 1 (2004): 20-25.
8. CAS, letter to RHB, September 9, 1937 (SL 312).
9. Dudley Chadwick Gordon, Vernon Rupert King, and William Whittingham Lyman, eds. Today’s Literature. An Omnibus of Short Stories, Novelettes, Poems, Plays, Profiles, and Essays (New York: American Book Company, 1935), p. 950.
The Third Episode of Vathek:
The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah
“Posthumous collaborations,” a practice of which it has been said that the writers involved should trade places, is a controversial yopic, and the stories that have been written by divers hands from notes or fragments by Clark Ashton Smith have generally not been well regarded except possibly as homages. It is a little ironic that Smith himself was a practitioner of this particular form of literary necromancy, and that “The Third Episode of Vathek” holds up well.
William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek (1786), which Smith first read when he was fifteen, was one of his chief literary influences.1 Beckford had also written a series of separate stories, The Episodes of Vathek, in French, in which each of the princes awaiting their damnation along with Vathek at the end of the novel recounts the series of events that brought them to their ultimate fate. The last of these, “The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and the Prince Kalilah,” (hereafter referred to as “Zulkaïs”) was left unfinished by Beckford. An English translation by Sir Frank T. Marzials was published in 1922, and in the course of time a copy found its way into the library of H. P. Lovecraft, whose 1926 novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was heavily influenced by Vathek.2 Lovecraft, along with his friend James F. Morton, thought that Smith would be the ideal candidate for completing the unfinished “Zulkaïs:”
Regarding “Episodes of Vathek”—my copy is even now on its way to you as a long-term loan, & it is my hope that—as interest—you will ere long shew me a completion of the 3d Episode which shall out-Beckford Beckford! Possibly you may not wish to write the text in French, as Beckford did, but I am sure you can capture the general atmosphere better than anyone else in the gang. [W. Paul] Cook once had a wild idea of letting us all try our hands at this job of completion, & of publishing the collected results in book form. That plan has now evaporated, but I don’t think literature has lost very much thereby—since most of us would be very inept at this form of composition. You, however, are really well fitted for it—& Morton & I were impressed with the idea of what a splendid result you could obtain. I’ll wager Wright would publish the episode with your ending—& perhaps a brief explanatory introduction.
3
After reading the Episodes, Smith was sanguine about the project, noting that “the unfinished one is particularly good, and certainly merits an ending. I hope I can do something that won’t fall too far short. The development that Beckford intended is obvious enough.”4 As enticing as the completion was to CAS as an artistic challenge, he was worried about whether he would be able to recoup the time and money invested:5 “I don’t feel at all sure, though, that [Farnsworth] Wright will be receptive: the length of the tale will militate against it—also, perhaps, the slight hint of perversity in the affection of Zulkaïs and Kalilah.”6