The End of the Story (50 page)

matter, observing stoically “Perhaps I’m doing well to ‘put over’ a novelette on any terms at this early stage. I couldn’t altogether grasp Wright’s objection, though. The full text can be restored if the tale is ever brought out.”
⁶
Wright featured the story on the cover of the January 1932 issue, where it was voted best story. CAS included it in both
OST
and in
Far from Time
.

The current text was determined by comparing carbons of the first version rejected by Wright and the second version that he accepted, along with the published versions from both
WT
and
OST
(A third typescript, prepared by Carol Smith for
Far From Time
, does not differ from
OST
.) Behrends notes some small changes between the second carbon and the published version, and suggests that these are due to late changes made by Smith to the original sent to Wright. We differ from Behrends in a couple of his decisions as to which word choice to utilize, but acknowledge his pioneering scholarship in restoring Smith’s texts.

Smith contemplated a sequel, “Vizaphmal in Ophiuchus,” for which he prepared a plot synopsis in April 1930:

I. Tsandai, a savant of Zothique, a world of one of the suns of Ophiuchus, has fallen foul of the local scientific fraternity in general; and they are about to turn him, by the use of a transforming-ray, into a low, brainless type of monster. Vizaphmal, the Antarean wizard-scientist, using his space-annihilator at random, for the sake of adventure, appears in the chamber where the transformation is about to take place. Comprehending the situation telepathically, he rescues Tsandai and carries him away to the uninhabited equatorial zones of the planet.

II. Here Vizaphmal brings the space-annihilator to rest, while Tsandai explains the ideas that had brought him into disrepute with his confreres. While they are conversing, the annihilator is surrounded by a forest of night-growing vegetable organisms, which attack and try to devour it, though unsuccessfully . Vizaphmal is about to start for one of the moons of Zothique, where Tsandai has expressed a desire to be taken, when the mechanism of the annihilator refuses to work.

III. In the meanwhile, the annihilator has been televisually located by the savants of Zothique, who follow and capture it, blasting with zero-rays the exuberant vegetation that has surrounded it. The annihilator, with Tsandai and Vizaphmal inside, is carried like a cage to Mlair, the city from which Vizaphmal had rescued Tsandai. Here the savants try to break it open in vain, since the material of which it is made resists every force or element of which they are masters.

IV. At last they drop the annihilator into a bottomless pit in their insane rage; Vizaphmal and Tsandai are stunned by the shock of the fall. When they recover, the annihilator is floating in a subterranean sea of burning bitumen. Vizaphmal finds that the fall has restored the mechanism to working-order; and they re-ascend to the surface of the world.

V. Here they find that the persecution of Tsandai, who is immensely popular with the people in general, has brought about an uprising against the authority of the scientists, who had virtually ruled Zothique. Tsandai and Vizaphmal are received with acclamations; and leaving Tsandai in a position of impregnable power, the Antarean departs for other worlds.
⁷

This synopsis was never utilized, although Smith would later use the name “Zothique” to refer to the last continent of earth under a dying red sun.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, November 26, 1929 (
SL
104).

2. Steve Behrends, “Introduction.”
The Monster of the Prophecy
by Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988): 5.

3. CAS, letter to HPL, December 10, 1929 (
SL
105-106).

4. HPL, letter to CAS, December 19, 1929 (ms, JHL).

5. FW, letter to CAS, January 18, 1930 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (
SL
109).

7. SS 143-144.     

The Metamorphosis of the World

T
his story is referred to exclusively as “The Metamorphosis of the World” in CAS’s correspondence and “Completed Stories” log until the fifties. The title change to “The Metamorphosis of Earth” was made by AWD when he solicited the story for a science fiction anthology that became
Beachheads in Space
(Pelligrini and Cudahy, 1952) and marketed it on Smith’s behalf to Dorothy McIlwraith, Wright’s successor at
WT,
who accepted it for the September 1951 issue.
¹
Despite its late appearance, the story was written in late 1929, although CAS wrote that he was still “dragging on at present” with it in early 1930, noting gleefully how he was “engaged in killing off an odious bunch of scientists.”
²
The typescript at JHL is undated. By late January he could write to HPL that “I finished ‘The Metamorphosis of the World’, and am trying it out on the ‘scientifiction’ magazines. I don’t know that you would care for it: probably the best element is the satire.”
³
Smith submitted it to
Science Wonder Stories
, only to see the story rejected because his explanation and description of the scientific processes involved was overly technical, something which came as a great surprise to him since “I was afraid I didn’t know enough about scientific technicalities to hit their requirements! And lo, I’ve overshot the mark!”
⁴
It was then rejected by
Amazing Stories
.

CAS did not think highly of the story, referring to it as “about the nearest I have come to” hack work.
⁵
Several years later he called the tale “passably written, but suffers from triteness of plot: this because I wrote it at a time when I had not read enough science fiction to avoid the more obvious plot-ideas.”
⁶
However, he did regard the story as being “based on a far from bad idea, that of the atomic transformation of our planet by people from Venus, into a replica of Venus with all of the latter’s atmospheric, geologic and climatic conditions: this in order that it might become inhabitable for the overcrowded Venerians.”
⁷
It was collected posthumously in
OD
.

1. AWD, letter to CAS, August 23, 1950 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, January 9, 1930 (
SL
107).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (
SL
109).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, March 11, 1930 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to DAW, January 24, 1930 (ms, MHS).

6. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (
SL
301).

7. CAS, letter to RHB, February 5, 1936 (ms, JHL).

The Epiphany of Death

I
nspired by a re-reading of Lovecraft’s story “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (
WT
February 1925), Smith wrote “The Epiphany of Death” in about three hours on January 25, 1930.
¹
He presented HPL with a copy on January 27 that bore the present dedication, of which the latter remarked

I can’t say how flattered I feel by the dedication of “The Epiphany of Death”! That is the most haunting & fascinating thing I have read anywhere in aeons—& the style is full of a grave, stately music which makes me think of Poe as he first impressed me long decades ago. I have always dreamed of the rare delight of finding something
new
by Poe—something I have never read, but which will furnish the same pristine thrill that Poe furnished back in 1897 & 1898. “The Epiphany of Death” comes the closest to realising that ideal of anything so far—& to have it inscribed to me heightens the pleasure of the perusal. If a reading of “Randolph Carter” bore such fruit, I shall feel at last the existence of that tale is justified!
²

Smith remarked to August Derleth that the story “ may remind you a little of Lovecraft’s ‘Outsider’—but it was written before I had read this latter.”
³

Smith apparently did not do anything with the story for some time. However, when a new competitor to 
WT
arose in the form of the Clayton Magazine
Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror
 (seven issues were published between September 1931 and January 1933), paid two cents a word upon acceptance as opposed to the one cent or less that
WT
paid upon publication (sometimes several months after publication), Smith submitted several stories to its editor, Harry Bates. CAS reported that Bates liked “The Epiphany of Death,” but returned it “on account of its brevity” and the acceptance of several other Smith stories, adding that Bates remarked “that he finds it hard to get atmospheric stuff.”
⁴
He then submitted the story to Wright, who also rejected it: “I like [“The Epiphany of Death”], but I fear our readers would find it lacking in plot and left somewhat up in the air.” Smith then donated the story, along with several others that he was unable to sell, to Carl Swanson, a fan from Washburn, North Dakota who planned to bring out a magazine called
Galaxy
. Swanson never published the story, but Charles D. Hornig did when CAS let him have the some of the same stories for his fanzine
The Fantasy Fan
, which published the tale in the July 1934 issue. Dorothy McIlwraith accepted the story for twenty dollars, publishing it as “Who Are the Living?” in the September 1942 issue.
⁶
It was included in
AY
under the original title. The current text generally follows the January 25, 1930 typescript.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, January 27, 1930 (
SL
109); “The Epiphany of Death” (ms, JHL).

2. HPL, letter to CAS, February 2, 1930 (ms, JHL).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, November 2, 1930 (
SL
131); HPL, “The Outsider” (
WT
April 1926).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 9, 1931 (
SL
150).

5. FW, letter to CAS, October 29, 1931 (ms, JHL).

6. Dorothy McIlwraith, letter to CAS, March 2, 1942 (ms, JHL).

A Murder in the Fourth Dimension

C
ompleted on January 30, 1930, “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension” was rejected by Wright, who “thought the first part … was ‘unconvincing’.”
¹
It was accepted by David Lasser, science fiction editor for Hugo Gernsback’s magazines, who published it in
Amazing Detective Stories
(October 1930), thus making it the first sale by Smith to the man whom he and Lovecraft would come to refer to as “Hugo the Rat.” It was collected posthumously in
OD
.

Smith was not an admirer of detective stories, observing that “the true lover of mysteries is not likely to feel any lasting interest in detective stories. Not the least proof of Poe’s genius is that he abandoned this genre of writing as soon as he had mastered it.”
²

1. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (
SL
111).

2.
BB
item 167, p. 54.

The Devotee of Evil

L
ike “The Monster of the Prophecy,” “The Devotee of Evil” presents a somewhat complicated textual history, but in this case the revisions were made by Smith for aesthetic reasons and not to achieve commercial sale, which in fact he never achieved. The earliest mention of the story occurs in a letter to Lovecraft in which he discusses it under an early title as one among several stories that CAS was considering writing: “‘The Satanist’ won’t deal with ordinary devil-worship, but with the evocation of absolute cosmic evil, in the form of a
black
radiation that leaves the devotee petrified into a sable image of eternal horror.”
¹
(CAS had earlier used this imagery in his poem “Nyctalops” (
WT
October 1929),
²
and would revisit it in an uncompleted novel, “The Infernal Star,” that he began as a possible serial for
WT
early in 1933.) A synopsis was found among Smith’s papers using the title “The Manichaean,” which he crossed out and replaced with the final title: “A devotee of absolute cosmic evil, who finally evokes {pure} evil in the form of a black radiation that leaves him petrified into a {…} image of eternal horror and {…}.”
³
He completed the story on March 9, 1930, and submitted it to
WT
along with “The Epiphany of Death” and “A Murder in the Fourth Dimension,” but while Wright liked the story, CAS observed caustically “but not quite well enough”.
⁴
Smith then submitted it to Harold Hersey’s
Ghost Stories
, but again to no avail. CAS put the story aside for several months before revising it “with a view to ridding it of certain vague verbosities; and I also cut down on the pseudo-scientific element.”
⁵
Unfortunately, Wright rejected the story once more, noting that while “it has its points of excellence… I think it better to follow my usual custom of rejecting when in doubt.”
⁶
CAS then donated the story to Carl Swanson (see “The Epiphany of Death” above), but Swanson of course never published it. He then tried submitting it to
Illustrated Detective Magazine
, “which is said to favor the psychic and the subtle rather than what is usually known as a detective story,”
⁷
and to the New Orleans
Times-Picayune,
only meet with rejection yet again.
⁸
CAS finally included the revised version in
The Double Shadow
, describing it on the advertising flyer which he circulated as “The story of a man who sought to evoke the ultra-cosmic radiation of Evil in its absolute purity—and succeeded.” Several years later, CAS let Donald A. Wollheim publish it in the February 1941 issue of
Stirring Science Stories
, where it was graced with a fine illustration by Hannes Bok. Unfortunately, like Swanson’s
Galaxy
,
Stirring Science Stories
depended upon free stories at first, with payment forthcoming once the magazine was profitable, so it is unlikely that CAS received any payment for this appearance.
⁹