1. BB item 60.
2. SS pp. 144–146.
3. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, February 22, 1940 (SL 328).
Double Cosmos
Although Clark Ashton Smith did not complete “Double Cosmos” until March 25, 1940, he had worked on it at intervals for several years. Back in 1934, when Smith still harbored hopes that Astounding Stories might yet become a regular market for his stories, he received a tip about one of Assistant Editor Desmond Hall’s pet subjects from August Derleth: “Thanks for the tip about Desmond Hall’s medical prepossessions. I am preparing a yarn with a semi-medical interest, dealing with a chemist who invents a strange, terrific drug that enables him to see the reality of the cosmos in toto. The revelation is rather staggering.... ‘Secondary Cosmos’ is the title: our universe proving but a sort of vestigial appendage of the real world, overlapping into a subsidiary space.”1 Smith apparently drew upon the following entries in his Black Book. He called the first one “The Rift:” “A man who sees, following a brain-operation, a rift in the material world through which mysterious beings pass in enigmatic traffic. The rift is visible wherever he goes, as a sort of charm, in streets, buildings, fields, etc.”The entry immediately following “The Rift” is even more relevant: “A scientist who, investigating the so-called 4th dimension, discovers that he himself is merely a sort of organ or extension of a being that fruitions in this other world. He is, so to speak, a rather useless vestigial tail or appendix and, at a certain stage in the being’s evolution, this organ is to be discarded; this act of shedding entails the death of the investigator.” With Smith’s typical misanthropy, the title of this one was “The Appendix.”2
The story was set aside for three years. Smith described his current literary program in another letter to Derleth: “I am trying to finish a science fiction story, Secondary Cosmos, which I began two years ago; and may also add a third tale, The Rebirth of the Flame, to my Singing Flame stories. Other tales, begun and thoroughly plotted, are The Alkahest, and Sharia: a Tale of the Lost Planet. The last-named has great possibilities, I feel. Recent revisions include The Maze of the Enchanter, which I have pruned by more than a thousand words for re-submission to Esquire and W.T.”3
Smith didn’t do much with the story after its completion. He admitted that “None of the present fantasy markets (Unknown is the best, I guess) appeal to me greatly….”4 He later told Derleth that he had given the story to agent Julius Schwartz Jr. to sell, but did not know the story’s status.5 “Double Cosmos” remained unpublished until it was published in Robert M. Price’s fanzine Crypt of Cthulhu in 1983. It was included in SS.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
2. BB items 37 and 38.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 1, 1937 (ms, SHSW).
4. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, April 21, 1940 (SL 330).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 6, 1948 (ms, SHSW).
Nemesis of the Unfinished
This is the only instance where Clark Ashton Smith actually collaborated on a story.1 Don Carter was the husband of Natalie Carter, whose portrait of Smith appears on the back panel of the dust jacket of Smith’s Selected Poems (1971). The Carters lived in Bowman, California, a small community located just outside of Auburn, and were part of a small network of friends that helped Smith with gifts of clothing and food and the occasional odd job when he needed to earn some cash. “Nemesis of the Unfinished” was apparently written while Smith was recuperating at home from a broken ankle. An outline of the story under the present title (uncredited, but the handwriting is similar to that in known specimens of Carter’s handwriting) was found among Smith’s papers, so it appears that the basic idea of the story occurred to Carter (undoubtedly inspired by the boxes of papers kept at Smith’s cabin).2 Two different versions of this story exist (an early draft of the first version is dated July 30, 1947). The first version is complete, but the second version, which incorporates significant deviation from Carter’s proposed plot, appears to be missing the last page. This version is included in Appendix 6.
1. “Seedling of Mars” was written from a plot provided by the winner of one of Hugo Gernsback’s magazine contests, while in the case of “The House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord” Smith gave completed stories to E. Hoffmann Price with instructions to do with them what he wanted; neither case involved the active interaction of two creative minds.
2. For Carter’s outline, see SS 40–43, 273–275.
The Master of the Crabs
Weird Tales celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with its March 1948 issue. In preparation for this, Associate Editor Lamont Buchanan invited Smith to contribute a new story in May 1947.1 The idea for “The Master of the Crabs” may be found in the Black Book:
A wizard whose legs are trapped by falling rock in a sea-cavern. By hypnotic will-power, he gains control of an army of crabs, and forces them to overpower ship-wrecked seamen and feed him with shreds of flesh torn from their bodies. Tale to be told by one of the mariners, whose companions have disappeared mysteriously. Locale: desert isle. Wizard had perhaps gone there in quest of lost treasure. Possesses own eternal longevity. Crabs turn on and devour him when he loses his mesmeric power.2
This entry predates the story entry for “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” which was completed on May 1, 1932, so this story had a long gestation period. Smith wrote out a full outline of this story, which he called at first “The Crabs of Iribos.”3 (Smith may have been reminded of this story when he broke his ankle and was hospitalized for a time during that summer.) WT Editor Dorothy McIlwraith accepted the story that October and paid Smith forty-seven dollars.4 It appeared in the anniversary issue accompanied by a gruesome drawing by Lee Brown Coye. Smith included the story in AY.
It was through “The Master of the Crabs” that Smith made a minor but real impact on modern pagan religions. Smith refers to an arthame in the story, which is a type of dagger used by ceremonial magicians. He picked this word up from his copy of Grillot de Givry’s 1931 treatise Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the Englishman who helped bring the Wiccan religion into the public realm, apparently read the issue of Weird Tales containing this story while he was visiting America and picked up the word, which he inexplicably spelled as athame. According to Ronald Hutton, “There is no evidence to explain Gardner’s omission of the ‘r’ in the word; perhaps he first heard it orally and guessed at the spelling, perhaps he decided to simplify it, or perhaps the error was in a source he was copying.”5 The surviving manuscript of “The Master of the Crabs” was severely scorched in the fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin in September 1957. The text from WT was collated with the surviving fragments.
1. Lamont Buchanan, letter to CAS, May 7, 1947 (ms, JHL).
2. BB item 42.
3. This outline is too long to be included here, but it may be found in SS 148–150.
4. See Dorothy McIlwraith, letters to CAS, October 3, 1947 and October 31, 1947 (ms, JHL).
5. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999): p. 230.
Morthylla
Smith had one of his increasingly infrequent bursts of productivity in the autumn of 1953, completing two stories in the later part of September and beginning a third. One of these was “Morthylla”, “a tale of Zothique, concerning a pseudo-lamia who was really a normal woman trying to please the tastes of her eccentric poet-lover.”1 Smith had worked out its plot in the Black Book: