1. Bates, letter to CAS, January 22, 1932 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

3. CAS, “The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil.” In The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002), p. 29.

4. DAW, letter to CAS, October 31, 1932 (ms, JHL).

5. CAS, letter to DAW, November 10, 1932 (SL 195).

6. See CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).

Ubbo-Sathla

Completed on February 15, 1932, “Ubbo-Sathla” originated in the following note:

A man, who, in trance, goes back in earthly time to the very beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the primal one, out of whom all terrestrial life has sprung, lay wallowing in the mist and slime, playing idiotically with the tablets on which are writ the wisdom of vanished pre-mundane gods. In his trance, the man believes that he has been sent to retrieve these tablets; but, approaching Ubbo-Sathla, he seems to revert to some primordial life-form; and forgetting his mission, wallows and ravens in the ooze with the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla. He does not re-emerge from the trance. Ubbo-Sathla is a vast, yeasty mass, sloughing off continuously various rudimentary life-forms.

¹

Douglas A. Anderson suggests that “Ubbo-Sathla” may have been influenced by Leonard Cline’s visionary novel The Dark Chamber (1927),² but as of December 1933 Smith had not read it.³ Cline’s novel may have exerted some influence at second hand, though, since Donald Wandrei is known to have read The Dark Chamber, and CAS wrote him that the story’s “ideation may remind you a little of your own tale, ‘[The Lives of] Alfred Kramer’” [WT, December 1932]. In the same letter CAS stated that “The main object of Ubbo-Sathla was to achieve a profound and manifold dissolution of what is known as reality—which, come to think of it, is the animus of nearly all my tales, more or less”.⁴

“Ubbo-Sathla” was submitted to Weird Tales, but was rejected. Wright’s rejection letter does not survive, but CAS remarked to HPL that he seemed “to think that it would be over the heads of his clientele”.⁵ He continued in the same vein in his next letter to Lovecraft:

Wright must have rejected ‘Ubbo-Sathla’ because it didn’t remind him of anything that had ever made a hit with his readers. I can’t see myself that it’s especially difficult or ‘high-brow.’ Where Wright errs is in playing safe when he can’t find a precedent for some particular tale—a method of selection that is none too favourable to originality. It will be interesting to see what he says to ‘The Double Shadow’—a tale that I am inclined (though I may be wrong) to rate above ‘Ubbo-Sathla’.

⁶

Wright did accept the story upon re-submission, apparently after Lovecraft “had raked him over about the rejection”,⁷ publishing it in the July 1933 issue. This issue also contained Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” as well as Hazel Heald’s “The Horror in the Museum” (which was actually ghost-written by Lovecraft). All three stories contained references to the mythical Book of Eibon, which excited a lot of questions among credulous fans. Smith responded to one such query from Charles D. Hornig, David Lasser’s successor at Wonder Stories and editor of the fanzine Fantasy Fan:

“Necronomicon,” “Book of Eibon” etc I am sorry to say, are all fictitious. Lovecraft invented the first, I the second.…It is really too bad that they don’t exist as objective, bonafide compilations of the elder and darker Lore! I have been trying to remedy this, in some small measure, by cooking up a whole chapter of Eibon. It is still unfinished, and I am now entitling it “The Coming of the White Worm.”….

⁸

After Hornig inadvertently published Smith’s letter in the November 1933 issue, CAS remarked in a postcard to Lovecraft: “ I was a little vexed by Brother Hornig’s ‘scoop’ in utilizing my letter about Eibon, etc. He asked me where and how the books could be obtained; and I didn’t think to stipulate that the answer was for his private information! Dumb of me, I’ll admit. However, as you say, the hoax might easily go too far”.⁹ CAS included “Ubbo-Sathla” among the “Hyperborean Grotesques” of OST. This text is derived from a carbon typescript at JHL.

1. SS 174.

2. Douglas A. Anderson, “Introduction.” In The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005), p. 9.

3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. December 4, 1933] (SL 240).

4. CAS, letter to DAW, February 17, 1932 (SL 170).

5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (SL 172).

6. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. mid-March 1932] (LL 35-36).

7. CAS, letter to DAW, May 4, 1932 (ms, MHS).

8. PD 29.

9. CAS, postmark to HPL, postmarked November 24, 1933 (private collection).

The Double Shadow

When H. P. Lovecraft first read “The Double Shadow,” he called it “magnificent… full of vivid colour & creeping menace, & with an atmosphere worthy of E. A. P.”.¹ Smith thought that it was the “most demoniac of my recent tales”² and called it a personal favorite.³ Yet Farnsworth Wright’s continued refusal to buy the story until Smith had almost ceased the composition of fiction was probably a contributing factor in that cessation, and led Smith to the drastic and ultimately unprofitable step of self-publication.

The germ of the story may be found in the following note: “A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and merging with it gradually, day by day; while coincidentally with this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed by an evil thing from unknown worlds. In his personality, the hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till his shadow is that which had followed him”.⁴ Smith completed it on March 14, 1932, and immediately submitted it to Weird Tales, perhaps feeling that its exotic setting in Atlantis might not be to the liking of the Babbitesque William Clayton. Wright’s original rejection letter apparently does not survive, but according to Smith he wrote “that it was ‘interesting, in a way,’ but he feared that his readers wouldn’t care for it. I fear that Wright, in his anxiety to publish nothing that would be disliked by any of his readers, will get to the point where he won’t publish anything that any one will like very much”.⁵ He then submitted it to Strange Tales, where much to his surprise it was accepted. However, there was a catch:

Both Mr. Clayton and I have tentatively approved both of them: but because of their type I can only buy one. I am hoping that one will be the longer, but at this time, with

Strange Tales

appearing so infrequently, I cannot make the decision. I hope you do not mind if I hold your two stories, “The Double Shadow” and “The Colossus of Ylourgne” for a while longer.

⁶

Smith was therefore elated when Bates later wrote to him later “that in some mysterious manner, both ‘The Double Shadow’ and ‘The Colossus of Ylourgne’ have passed successfully through Mr. Clayton’s critical craw. I expect to buy both!”⁷ Unfortunately, in October 1932 Clayton ordered Bates to shut down both Strange Tales and Astounding Stories, which had the dual effect of drastically cutting down Smith’s sources of income (for all his philistine thickheadedness, Clayton paid better rates than any other genre publication) and leaving Wright in command of the field. “My own prospective income is sadly nicked by the failure of S.T.,” CAS wrote to Derleth. “I am out five hundred bucks, unless I can re-sell part or all of the unused tales to Wright. I don’t believe he will buy ‘The Double Shadow;’ but the chances seem fair for the other two”.⁸ Sadly, Smith’s prediction proved correct, as Wright once again rejected “The Double Shadow” in November.⁹ Smith finally ended up publishing the story himself as the title story of his first collection, which he published himself in 1933 utilizing the services of the local newspaper. In an advertising flyer that he printed to promote The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, he described the tale as “a strange tale of two Atlantean sorcerers, who made use of a dreadful antehuman spell, without knowing what would come in answer to their evocation.”