3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. late August 1931] (LL 30).
4. AWD, letter to CAS, 14 August [1931] (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (SL 160).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, August 28, 1931 (SL 161).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, October 23, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
8. CAS, letter to AWD, November 21, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
9. CAS to AWD, March 15, 1932 (SL 173).
10. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS, July 27, 1932 (ms, JHL).
Beyond the Singing Flame
As a result of the success of “The City of the Singing Flame,” Smith undertook the writing of a sequel, completing it on June 30, 1931. In his cover letter to David Lasser of Wonder Stories, which published “Beyond the Singing Flame” in the November 1931 issue, Smith wrote that
I have found it advisable to maintain the same suggestive vagueness that characterized the other story; though I have explained many things that were left obscure in the other. The description of the Inner Dimension is a daring flight; and I seem almost to have set myself the impossible task which Dante attempted in his account of Paradise. Granting that human beings could survive the process of revibration in the Flame, I think that the new-sense-faculties and powers developed by Hastane, Angarth and Ebbonly are quite logical and possible. Most writers of trans-dimensional tales do not seem to postulate any change of this nature; but it is really quite obvious that there might be something of the kind, since the laws and conditions of existence would be totally different in the new realm.
1
Smith wrote to Donald Wandrei that “This is, by all odds, my best recent story”.2 He eventually received sixty-eight dollars from the notoriously delinquent Hugo Gernsback, after engaging the services of New York attorney Ione Weber.3
In 1940 Walter Gillings, editor of the British science fiction magazine Tales of Wonder, reprinted both “The City of the Singing Flame” and “Beyond the Singing Flame” together for the first time. Rather than reprinting them separately, Gillings edited them together, rewriting portions of Smith’s prose and adding a bridging paragraph. Mr. Gillings admitted this to Donald Sidney-Fryer some years later.4 When CAS was putting together OST, he could not locate either his carbon of “The City of the Singing Flame” or the original WS appearance, so he sent along tear sheets from the Spring 1940 issue of Tales of Wonder containing the conjoined stories. This text was duly included in both OST and in August Derleth’s 1949 anthology The Other Side of the Moon (Pellegrini & Cudahy), but not, contrary to what we stated in DS 298, in From Off This World, a collection of “Hall of Fame” stories reprinted in the pulp magazine Startling Stories, edited by Oscar Friend and Leo Margulies (Merlin Press, 1949), which published each tale separately. The present text is based upon a carbon of the original typescript at JHL.
1. PD 11.
2. CAS, letter to DAW, August 18, 1931 (ms, MHS).
3. See Mike Ashley, “The Perils of Wonder: Clark Ashton Smith’s Experiences with Wonder Stories.” Dark Eidolon no. 2 (July 1989): 2-8.
4. EOD 175.
Seedling of Mars
Hugo Gernsback had some unique ideas regarding how his writers should be compensated, preferring to hold contests rather than offering authors a fixed scale of payment. Since the purpose of his magazines was to increase popular interest in scientific progress in general, and space travel in particular, he and editor David Lasser announced a contest for the best interplanetary plot in the Spring 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly. The readers who submitted the best seven plots would win a cash prize, and the plot would be assigned to a professional writer for further development. E. M. Johnston (1873-1946), of Collingwood, Ontario, won Second Prize for an idea called “The Martian.”1 Lasser offered Smith the assignment of turning Johnston’s raw conception into a story, adding “We have no objections of your revising the plots for the purpose of the story as long as the fundamental idea is retained. We are perfectly willing to pay you our usual rate for your completed story”.2 Smith wrote the 16,000 word story in less than a week, completing it on July 20. He wrote to Lovecraft that “the plot … was pretty good, so the job wasn’t so disagreeable as it sounds.” Smith was to have received one hundred and eighteen dollars for “The Martian,” which was published under the title “The Planet Entity” in the Fall 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly. Smith later changed the title to “Seedling of Mars” when he assembled the contents of his fifth Arkham House collection, TSS, which was published posthumously.
1. See Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936 (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004), p. 187.
2. David Lasser, letter to CAS, July 10, 1931 (ms, JHL).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early August 1931] (SL 159).
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
The following plot synopsis was found among Smith’s papers (which he originally titled “The Vaults of Abomi”):
Some human explorers on a dying world who are driven to take shelter in subterranean vaults by a strange, crawling, mat-like monstrosity called the
vortlup
. The vaults are evidently of mausolean nature, and contain the mummies of an unknown race, some of which lack the upper portion of the head. The explorers become separated in the dark, winding passages, and one is lost from the others. They hear a muffled cry at some distance, followed by silence; and going in the direction of the cry with their flashlights, meet a terrible sight—the body of their comrade which still walks erect, with a great black, slug-like creature attached to the half-eaten head. The thing is controlling the corpses which passes its friends, enters another catacomb, and removes a heavy boulder from the mouth of a deeper vault, beneath the direction of the slug. Following, the others shoot the creature, which dissolves in a sort of liquid putrescence, and, at the same time, the animated corpse drops dead. Then, from the uncovered pit, there emerges a hoard of the black monsters, and the men flee. They are not followed into the sunlight; and fortunately the
vortlup
has disappeared.
1
At some point Smith changed “Abomi” to “Yoh-Vombis” and the references to a “dying world” and “unknown race” to “a deserted ancient city on Mars” and “ancient Martian;” perhaps the composition of “Seedling of Mars” had stimulated his interest in the Red Planet. Steve Behrends also suggests that the setting might have been influenced by a series of wildfires that Smith battled during the summer of 1931, pointing out that in a letter to August Derleth he described the sky after one such blaze as being “as dark and dingy as the burnt-out sky of the planet Mars”.2 The story, which he described to Derleth as a “rather ambitious hunk of extra-planetary weirdness”,3 was completed on September 12, 1931.
We have not seen Lovecraft’s original remarks to Smith regarding the story, but he wrote to Donald Wandrei at the time that he thought it was “great—replete with the musty, tenebrous, & menacing atmosphere of alien & unholy arcana.” Derleth’s response was more qualified, taking issue with the choice of some words and adding that he “would have liked it much much better had it been set on earth, minus the interplanetary Martian angle.”45 Smith defended the extraterrestrial setting of “Yoh-Vombis” against objections that it might well be set among the ruins of an earthly antiquity: “I suppose the interplanetary angle is a matter of taste. As far as I am concerned, it adds considerably to the interest, particularly since the tale has little or nothing in common with the usual science fiction stuff”.6