3
CAS described it to Derleth as “high-grade science fiction,” and thought that it might “be eligible for ‘Amazing,’ but probably won’t have enough plot or excitement for” either WS or Astounding Stories.4 He completed it on or about July 4, 1932. Smith submitted the story first to Weird Tales, but Wright returned it as “too descriptive and actionless.”5Amazing held on to it for five months before returning it,6 after which it was submitted to, and accepted by WS, where it was published in the May 1933 issue as “The Visitors from Mlok,” another victim of Hugo Gernsback’s penchant for changing titles. Smith was to have received fifty dollars for the story, but as discussed in the note for “The Dweller in the Gulf” he had to resort to legal action to collect.
Smith was proud of this story, stating “As far as I know, it is almost the only attempt to convey the profound disturbance of function and sensation that would inevitably be experienced by a human being on an alien world.”7 After reading the story in manuscript, Derleth passed it along to Lovecraft with the comment that “This is not very good, I regret to say.”8 This could be attributed to AWD’s antipathy toward contemporary sf,9 but in his response Lovecraft agreed, observing that “The idea is magnificent—but as you say, the mode of handling is mediocre.”10 CAS was undoubtedly handicapped by the necessity of using the trappings of Gernsbackian “scientifiction” in his treatment, since as he once remarked to HPL“the mythology of science is not one that intrigues me very deeply.”11
After the story appeared, sf fan Forrest J. Ackerman objected to the appearance of stories such as “A Star-Change” in the pages of Wonder Stories (see note to “The Dweller in the Gulf” for further details). Smith wrote in a letter to a fan living in the San Francisco Bay area that “The funny part of this is, that this tale is about a hundred times closer to genuine reality in conveying the problematic sensations of an interplanetary traveler than the usual tales dealing with such themes. Oh, well... what’s the use?”12
1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 128).
2. SS 159 .
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 129).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, August 2, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, May 23, 1933 (SL 206-207).
8. AWD, letter to HPL, July 17, 1933 (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. 594).
9. See Derleth’s remarks in the notes to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, ” VA, 307n6.
10. HPL, letter to AWD, July 23, 1933 (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. 595).
11. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 21, 1930 (LL 15).
12. CAS, letter to Lester Anderson, June 20, 1933 (SL 211).
The Disinterment of Venus
CAS mentioned to Derleth early in June 1931 that he had plotted three other tales of Averoigne, the first of which was “The Disinterment of Venus.”1 This story, which was inspired in part by Prosper de Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille” (1837), would describe what happened when
A marble Venus, exhumed in a monastery garden in Averoigne by some monks, which has a baleful influence on all who touch or behold it, inducing nympholepsy and a sort of pagan madness or possession. The statue is left standing in the field beside the pit from which it had been digged, and people fear to approach it. A young monk goes to it by night before moonrise, with a hammer, intending to smash it to fragments. The monk fails to return; and the next day it is seen that the statue has disappeared. People, among whom are the possessed and the unpossessed, visit the field, and find that the statue has fallen back into the pit, carrying with it the monk, who lies dead beneath its weight with his arms about the Venus, which is still unbroken.
2
When Smith finished the story in July 1932, he described it to Derleth as “a rather wicked story”3—too wicked, as it turned out, for Farnsworth Wright, who rejected it with the indignant complaint that “satyriasis is not a suitable theme for a WT story.”4 Smith revised and retyped the story, although he feared “of all my recent tales, [it] will be the hardest to sell, since it combines the risque and the ghastly.”5 Wright accepted the story after four revisions, stating that he liked it “much better with the new ending” and offering thirty dollars.6 Although CAS told Derleth that this version, as published in the July 1934 issue of WT, “practically restored”7 the original ending, he may have forgotten just how suggestive the story was originally. The expenditure of so much effort for such minimal remuneration did not do much to endear “The Disinterment of Venus” to Smith, since when he presented the original typescript to Robert H. Barlow, he offered this assessment, that it wasn’t “much of a story in any of its phases.”8 The present text is based upon this copy, which was presented by Barlow to the Bancroft Library, with reference to CAS’ carbon of the WT version at the John Hay Library.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, June 6, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. SS 16-167.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, July 10, 1932 (SL 180).
4. FW, letter to CAS, July 13, 1932 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
6. FW, letter to CAS, February 9, 1934 (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, February 20, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
8. CAS, letter to RHB, June 15, 1934 (ms, JHL).
The White Sybil
It has often been remarked, by Farnsworth Wright, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and others, that many of Clark Ashton Smith’s ultra-imaginative short stories are extended poems in prose,1 and this is well illustrated by “The White Sybil.” As Smith was turning his creative energies exclusively toward fiction, his output of poetry fell drastically. Late in 1929, Smith was moved to compose a series of ten poems in prose, which he called “prose pastels” in echo, conscious or otherwise, of Stuart Merrill’s collection Pastels in Prose (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890). The third of these, completed on December 22, 1929, was “The Muse of Hyperborea” (see Appendix 3).
“The White Sybil of Polarion” is the second entry in Smith’s Black Book, which he described as “a notebook containing used and unused plot-germs, notes on occultism and magic, synopses of stories, fragments of verse, fantastic names for people and places, etc., etc.” when he allowed excerpts to appear in the Spring 1944 issue of Francis T. Laney’s fan magazine The Acolyte:2
A pale, beautiful, unearthly being, goddess or woman, who comes and goes mysteriously in the cities of Hyperborea, sometimes uttering strange prophecies or cryptic tidings. Tortha, the young poet, sometimes seeing her on the streets of Cerngoth in Mhu-Thulan, is deeply smitten, and seeks to follow and find her dwelling-place. Pursuing her into a bleak mountainous region verging on the eternal glaciers, he loses sight of her in a great snow-storm that falls suddenly from the clear summer heavens. Wandering in this storm, and losing his way, he emerges presently in an unknown fantastic land, where, in a faery bower, he is received by the White Sybil, who seems to look kindly upon him. She kisses him on the brow; but trying to clasp her, he finds a frozen mummy in his arms; and a moment later the trees and blossoms of the faery bower dissolve in whirling snow. Later, Tortha, with the mark of frost-bite on his brow, where the Sybil kissed him, is found on the barren mountain-side; and he recovers slowly, remembering only dimly what has happened.