The Black Abbot of Puthuum
“The Black Abbot of Puthuum” is one of three stories that Clark Ashton Smith submitted to Weird Tales in February 1935, but, like “Necromancy in Naat,” it was rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright.1 The idea for the story, another tale of Zothique, dates back to 1932 or earlier since the story was outlined in the Black Book several entries before that for “The Colossus of Ylourgne” (see note for “Xeethra”):
Two guardsmen and a palace-eunuch, bringing a purchased girl to the king of Yoros, find themselves lost among the enchantments of a strange desert. The enchantments lead them to a weird monastery inhabited by twelve black monks all of whom exactly resemble their superior, who is distinguished from them only by his garb. In the night, one of the guardsmen, wakeful and suspicious, steals from the chamber to which he and his fellow have been assigned. Wandering about the monastery, he stumbles on an altar to the dark demon, Thasaidon, and apprehends that the monks are devil-worshippers. Upon the altar are charred fragments of flesh and bone. Stealing back toward his room, the guardsman hears an outcry from the room where the girl sleeps, guarded by the eunuch. Rushing in, he meets the fleeing eunuch, whose eyes are wide with terror… In the gloom, above the girl’s bed, he sees a vague monstrous incubus about to settle upon her. The thing seems to float on black voluminous wings. He attacks it with his sword, and the incubus resolves itself into the black abbot. Then the figure seems to multiply before his eyes and the chamber is suddenly filled with the monks, who drag down the guardsman. His companion, who is an archer, enters at this moment and shoots at the abbot (standing apart from the melee) an arrows [
sic
] that had been dipped in the mummia of a saint, and was therefore fatal to sorcerers or demons. It is his last arrow, the others having been discharged at desert phantoms. It slays the abbot and the twelve monks vanish. The abbot’s body decays immediately, in a non-human fashion, and its long finger-nails slough away from the putrefying mass. One of the guardsmen puts the nails into his helmet, and he and his fellow draw lots for the girl. (The eunuch’s throat had been ripped open by the abbot.)
2
While writing the story Smith added a comic subplot that revealed how the girl, Rubalsa, had been stolen at birth by the nomads, and included another character who turned out to be her father. She is identified by an amulet that was hanging around her neck when a baby (Smith anticipates “the great god Awto” by having the amulet bear the image of “Yuckla, patron of mirth and laughter”). When he revised the story for resubmission to Wright, he eliminated these elements, which cut approximately fifteen hundred words. Wright accepted the story.3 Smith received seventy-eight dollars for the story after it appeared in Weird Tales’ March 1936 issue.4 At that time H. P. Lovecraft wrote to Smith that the story was “tremendously fascinating—full of a malign sense of hidden horror & aeon-old charnel secrets. I doubt if anything else in the issue can approach it.”5 (Lovecraft had only read Smith’s story when he wrote that, as that issue contained the first appearance of Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats” as well as the penultimate installment of Robert E. Howard’s Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon.) Smith included the story in GL.
It is the opinion of the editors that Smith was correct in eliminating the romantic subplot. It noticeably detracted from the atmosphere and suspense and did not contribute to the tale’s unity of effect. The excised material is included in Appendix 4.
1. CAS, letter to DAW, February 28, 1935 (SL 262).
2. BB item 47.
3. The original version of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” was given by Smith to R. H. Barlow. It eventually came into the possession of Smith friend and book seller Roy A. Squires. Terence A. McVicker published this version as an exquisitely printed chapbook in 2007.
4. WT, letter to CAS, February 25, 1937 (ms, JHL).
5. HPL, letter to CAS, March 23, 1936 (ms, JHL).
The Death of Ilalotha
This story, which Smith called a “somewhat poisonous little horror,”1 was completed on February 22, 1937. He promptly submitted it to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright returned it for possible revision, stating that “I like ‘The Death of Ilalotha,’ and I like the language in which it is clothed. But, unfortunately, there is no story here; for the singularly gruesome ending does not tie in or connect with anything in the story; and the reader is given no hint as to who—or what—it was that had whispered in his ear, making the assignation. Such are my reactions to it.”2 Smith completed the revisions on March 16, 1937, and Wright accepted it upon resubmission, offering forty dollars.3 “The Death of Ilalotha” was the most popular story in the September 1937 issue of Weird Tales, where it was complemented by one of Virgil Finlay’s illustrations. When that issue appeared, Smith derived some amusement from a brush with the censors: “I seem to have slipped something over on the PTA. The issue containing [‘The Death of Ilalotha’], I hear, was removed from the stands in Philadelphia because of the Brundage cover” [which depicted a scene from Seabury Quinn’s “Satan’s Palimpsest”].4
Smith offered Barlow an insight into his state of mind in another letter discussing the story:
Ilalotha is quite good, I believe, especially in style and atmosphere. It is unusually poisonous and exotic. Writing is hard for me, since circumstances here are dolorous and terrible. Improvement in my father’s condition is more than unlikely, and I am more isolated than ever. Also, I seem to have what psychologists call a “disgust mechanism” to contend with: a disgust at the ineffable stupidity of editors and readers.
5
“The Death of Ilalotha” was included in OST, apparently at the suggestion of Derleth, and in RA. In establishing our current text we consulted two typescripts in the Smith Papers at JHL, a complete carbon of the published version and an incomplete copy of the original version.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, April 6, 1937 (ms, SHSW).
2. FW, letter to CAS, March 8, 1937 (ms, JHL).
3. FW, letter to CAS, March 24, 1937 (ms, JHL).
4. CAS, letter to RHB, September 9, 1937 (SL 313).
5. CAS, letter to RHB, May 16, 1937 (SL 302).
Mother of Toads
Just four days after completing the revision of “The Death of Ilalotha,” Clark Ashton Smith finished another story that he had begun almost two years earlier. Early in June, 1935, Smith told R. H. Barlow in a letter that “I have started a new Averoigne story, ‘Mother of Toads,’ which, I fear, will be too naughty for the chaste pages of W.T.” E. Hoffmann Price had been regularly selling stories to Spicy Mystery Stories, and after looking over a few issues Smith thought that he had gauged its editorial requirements: “This mag wants a combination of the lewd and the ghastly.” Smith did not think much of the magazine’s contents, but comforted himself with the rationalization that “after all, the genre is classic (vide Balzac’s ‘The Succubus’) and should have possibilities.”1
The rejection of the story by its intended market fed Smith’s growing uncertainties about the writing of fiction:
“Mother of Toads” is a sort of carnal and erotic nightmare and I can’t decide on its merits.
Spicy Mystery Stories
rejected it after holding the ms. for nearly two months. I have now shipped it to
Esquire
, which, judging from the two issues I have read, will sometimes print stuff that would hardly make the grade with an honest pulp…. The magazine seems aimed at a rather naive class of readers who like to feel that they are wicked and sophisticated. I believe that a yarn like “Mother of Toads” would arouse considerable Sound and Fury if printed in that quaint periodical.