The Door to Saturn Read online

  Volume two of

  The Collected Fantasies Of

  Clark Ashton Smith

  Edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger

  With an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell

  Night Shade Books

  San Francisco

  The Door to Saturn © 2007 by The Estate of Clark Ashton Smith

  This edition of The Door to Saturn © 2007

  by Night Shade Books

  Jacket art © 2007 by Jason Van Hollander

  Jacket design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  All rights reserved.

  Introduction © 2007 by Tim Powers

  A Note on the Texts © 2007 by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger

  Story Notes © 2007 by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger

  Bibliography © 2007 by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-029-7

  Night Shade Books

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  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  INTRODUCTION

  Behind all the colorful gods and heroes of Greek and Roman mythology—behind even Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos who measured out and snipped off the length of a man’s life, and more unanswerable even than Zeus and Hera together—stood Fate. This force—not a person, personifying it would be as hard as personifying entropy—was what made Tantalus kill his own son and abominably serve him as dinner to the unwitting gods, what led Agamemnon to kill his daughter, what drove the Bacchantes to commit perverse murders incomprehensible even to themselves.

  Those figures, so remote in ancient history, helplessly acted out their fated, prophesied roles. Free will was a mocking lie for Theseus and Oedipus and Hercules. Foreordained fatal error was the true story.

  We live in a different universe now, or a differently-perceived one, at any rate. The Judeo-Christian world-view, even just coasting on past momentum as it mostly is these days, has introduced the ideas of justice and mercy—redemption. Even the Gnostic philosophy, with its bleak belief in an insane demiurge responsible for the creation of this world, acknowledged a perfect God, unapproachable but at least out there somewhere.

  Modern writers can write stories set in those ancient Fate-cursed days, but they can’t really assume or convey the perspective of being an organic part of that sort of world. Well, none of them besides Clark Ashton Smith.

  I leaned from some black precipice, to see

  The pits beneath. One came, not far from me,

  Who hurled therein the sockets of the stars

  And shells of worlds that rattled emptily.

  —Clark Ashton Smith

  Really it’s only in dreams, when the oldest catacombs of our brains serve up symbols that mystify as much as terrify, that we dimly comprehend the grammar of that merciless unredeemed universe. And dreams, like fairy tales, have their own compelling pre-rational “logic”—as Chesterton said of the stories in mythology, “we do not know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable.”

  We don’t know why the culminating event in Smith’s “The Testament of Athammaus,” impossible though it is, is clearly inevitable. The Singing Flame, in its vast temple in the weirdly besieged city of Ydmos, is an image that seems to spring authoritatively from the earliest dreams we ever had.

  I use the word “dreams,” not specifically “nightmares.” It would be careless to label Smith’s fantasies as “horror.” Certainly horror is an element in them, but the ugly or terrifying aspects are incidental features of a world that is simply not ours. They never seem to be the main point, and to focus on them is like paying attention only to the familiar-seeming instruments in a profoundly strange orchestra. The narrative voice often describes the most appalling scenes as dispassionately as it describes the most gorgeous ones. They’re often the same, in fact—the standard lumber of horror stories, all the decrepit old houses and possessed children and cosmopolitan vampires, fades to relative mundanity beside Smith’s vaultingly glamorous dooms.

  Smith’s stories are truly “magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” They’re shot through with an antediluvian beauty which is indifferent to human security or even comprehension, but which is more siren-like because of that remoteness. Each of the creatures who gladly immolates itself in the Singing Flame has made a vast pilgrimage to attain it. And even then, Fate scrawls the last, bitter hieroglyph.

  “And, leaning from the mouldered bed of lust,

  Love’s skeleton writes Nada in the dust.”

  —Clark Ashton Smith

  Not surprisingly, true love never seems to work out, in Smith’s worlds. Smith’s typical luckless protagonist is more likely to be endlessly seeking a long-lost lover, or endlessly mourning an irretrievably dead one, than enjoying the beloved’s company. Eroticism abounds, though, whether as dangerous as the variously deadly ladies in “The Kiss of Zoraida” and “A Rendezvous in Averoigne,” or as grotesque and ultimately funny as the “national mother” in “The Door to Saturn,” but it’s a fatal eroticism, and to give in to it is generally to be obliterated—though often we can queasily sympathize with the brave and foolhardy souls who choose just that. Lamiae, succubi, sirens—for the duration of a story, at least, Smith can convince you that plain love between a human man and woman is the lowest possible reading on a meter than stretches very high, though nearly all of the calibrations are in the red-lit danger zone.

  Ultimately we realize that the dazzling glamors we find in these stories are inextricable from, are in fact a consequence of, the merciless field-equations of Fate—the cold stone beneath the ornate and enchanted Bokhaira carpets. Even for the Emperor of Dreams, the narrator of Smith’s grandest poem, “The Hashish-Eater,” there waits at the end of all the splendors of a million universes,

  “... a huge white eyeless Face

  That fills the void and fills the universe,

  And bloats against the limits of the world

  With lips of flame that open…”

  Tim Powers

  March 2007

  A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  Clark Ashton Smith considered himself primarily as a poet and artist, but he began his publishing career with a series of Oriental contes cruels that were published in such magazines as the Overland Monthly and the Black Cat. He ceased the writing of short stories for many years, but, under the influence of his correspondent H. P. Lovecraft, he began experimenting with the weird tale when he wrote “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925. His friend Genevieve K. Sully suggested that writing for the pulps would be a reasonably congenial way for him to earn enough money to support himself and his parents.

  Between the years 1930 and 1935, the name of Clark Ashton Smith appeared on the contents page of Weird Tales no fewer than fifty-three times, leaving his closest competitors, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, and August W. Derleth, in the dust, with forty-six, thirty-three and thirty stories, respectively. This prodigious output did not come at the price of sloppy composition, but was distinguished by its richness of imagination and expression. Smith put the same effort into one of his stories that he did into a bejeweled and gorgeous sonnet. Donald Sidney-Fryer has described Smith’s method of composition in his 1978 bio-bibliography Emperor of Dreams (Donald M. Grant, West Kingston, R.I.) thus:

  First he would sketch the plot in longhand on some piece of note-paper, or in his notebook, The Black Book, which Smith used circa 1929-1961. He would then write the first draft, usually in longhand but occasionally directly on the typewriter. He would then rewrite the story 3 or 4 times (Smith’s own estimate); this he usually did directly on the typewriter. Also, he would subject eac
h draft to considerable alteration and correction in longhand, taking the ms. with him on a stroll and reading aloud to himself [. . .]. (19)

  Unlike Lovecraft, who would refuse to allow publication of his stories without assurances that they would be printed without editorial alteration, Clark Ashton Smith would revise a tale if it would ensure acceptance. Smith was not any less devoted to his art than his friend, but unlike HPL he had to consider his responsibilities in caring for his elderly and infirm parents. He tolerated these changes to his carefully crafted short stories with varying degrees of resentment, and vowed that if he ever had the opportunity to collect them between hard covers he would restore the excised text. Unfortunately, he experienced severe eyestrain during the preparation of his first Arkham House collections, so he provided magazine tear sheets to August Derleth for his secretary to use in the preparation of a manuscript.

  Lin Carter was the first of Smith’s editors to attempt to provide the reader with pure Smith, but the efforts of Steve Behrends and Mark Michaud have revealed the extent to which Smith’s prose was compromised. Through their series of pamphlets, the Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith, the reader and critic could see precisely the severity of these compromises; while in the collections Tales of Zothique and The Book of Hyperborea Behrends and Will Murray presented for the first time the stories just as Smith wrote them.

  In establishing what the editors believe to be what Smith would have preferred, we were fortunate in having access to several repositories of Smith’s manuscripts, most notably the Clark Ashton Smith Papers deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, but also including the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, Special Collections of Brigham Young University, the California State Library, and several private collections. Priority was given to the latest known typescript prepared by Smith, except where he had indicated that the changes were made solely to satisfy editorial requirements. In these instances we compared the last version that satisfied Smith with the version sold. Changes made include the restoration of deleted material, except only in those instances where the change of a word or phrase seems consistent with an attempt by Smith to improve the story, as opposed to the change of a word or phrase to a less Latinate, and less graceful, near-equivalent. This represents a hybrid or fusion of two competing versions, but it is the only way that we see that Smith’s intentions as author may be honored. In a few instances a word might be changed in the Arkham House collections that isn’t indicated on the typescript.

  We have also attempted to rationalize Smith’s spellings and hyphenation practices. Smith used British spellings early in his career but gradually switched to American usage. He could also vary spelling of certain words from story to story, e.g., “eerie” and “eery.” We have generally standardized on his later usage, except for certain distinct word choices such as “grey”. In doing so we have deviated from the “style sheet” prepared by the late Jim Turner for his 1988 omnibus collection for Arkham House, A Rendezvous in Averoigne. Turner did not have access to such a wonderful scholarly tool as Boyd Pearson’s website, www.eldritchdark.com. By combining its extremely useful search engine with consultation of Smith’s actual manuscripts and typescripts, as well as seeing how he spelled a particular word in a poem or letter, the editors believe that they have reflected accurately Smith’s idiosyncracies of expression.

  However, as Emerson reminds us, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Smith may have deliberately varied his spelling and usages depending upon the particular mood or atmosphere that he was trying to achieve in a particular story. As he explained in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft sometime in November 1930,

  The problem of “style” in writing is certainly fascinating and profound. I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate “tone.” If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. Obviously, the style of “Mohammed’s Tomb”1 wouldn’t do for “The Ghoul;” and one of my chief preoccupations in writing this last story was to exclude images, ideas and locutions which I would have used freely in a modern story. The same, of course, applies to “Sir John Maundeville,” which is a deliberate study in the archaic. (SL 137)

  Therefore we have allowed certain variations in spelling and usage that seem to us to be consistent with Smith’s stated principles as indicated above.

  Four of the stories included in this volume were published after Smith’s death in 1961. “Told in the Desert” was first published by August Derleth in an original anthology from Arkham House, and no manuscript or typescript survives in either the Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown University or the August Derleth Papers at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library in Madison, Wisconsin. A search of the remaining papers at Arkham House itself failed to locate any manuscript. “A Good Embalmer” was first published in Strange Shadows, a collection of unpublished stories, variants, fragments, synopses, notes, and other prose edited by Steve Behrends in 1989. A holograph manuscript exists at Brown’s John Hay Library. Two stories, “The Red World of Polaris” and “The Face by the River,” were long believed to be lost. A copy of the latter was located among the papers of the late Genevieve K. Sully. The original typescript of “The Red World of Polaris” was sold by Smith to a Brooklyn, New York fan named Michael DeAngelis, who planned to publish it in a fanzine. DeAngelis himself disappeared, and it was feared that the story disappeared with him. However, Ron Hilger located DeAngelis’ co-editor Alan Pesetsky, who found a typescript that he had made in preparation for that aborted fanzine appearance, which we published in 2003 as part of the collected adventures of Captain Volmar.

  Smith published six stories himself in a 1933 pamphlet, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, but later revised some of these for sale to Esquire (unsuccessfully) and Weird Tales (successfully) in the late 1930s. In these instances we use the version published by Smith himself.

  Typescripts exist at the JHL of two stories included here, “An Offering to the Moon” and “The Kingdom of the Worm” (also known as “A Tale of Sir John Maundeville”), but in both cases it appears that these are of an earlier draft. In the case of the former it seems to us that the published version is the superior, possibly the result of the Smith of 1950 revising his earlier work, and in the latter evidence exists that a revised version was submitted to Fantasy Fan editor Charles D. Hornig that leads us to favor that text.

  Although tearsheets from Weird Tales were used in the preparation of Out of Space and Time, the latter’s text differs from both the magazine appearance and the original typescript in a manner not reflected elsewhere in the Arkham House editions. The first involves the elimination of some text and the merging of two paragraphs into one. We suspect that this represents a transcription error on the part of Alice Conger, August Derleth’s secretary. The second occurs at the very end: both the typescript and Weird Tales have as the last line “But Fleurette was still bemused with wonder, and could only answer him with a kiss.” Out of Space and Time changes this to “respond to his words...” This last change could have easily been changed in any of the several copies of OST corrected by CAS that we have been fortunate to consult, and he did not. The first change, however, while also not reflected in any of the corrected copies, might have been allowed to stand since its correction would have involved quite a bit of effort and would have altered the meaning but slightly. However, since that meaning is altered, we have decided to restore the missing text.

  “The City of the Singing Flame” presents an unusual case. The text published in Out of Space and Time represents a fusion of this story with its sequel, “Beyond the Singing Flame” (Wonder Stories November 1931), that was carried out by Walter H. Gillings, editor of the British pulp magazine Tales of Wonder, when the stories were reprinted together in the Spring 1940 issue. Smith could provide Arkham House publisher August Derleth with neither the typescri
pt nor tear sheets from the Wonder Stories appearance, so he resorted to the one version that he had at hand. Smith’s financial situation was such at the time that it was imperative he hand in the book as soon as possible. When Jim Turner was preparing the text for Arkham House’s collection A Rendezvous in Averoigne, he reversed many but not all of the changes. His text differs from both the final typescript prepared by Smith as well as the story’s original appearance in the July 1931 issue of Wonder Stories.

  We regret that we cannot present a totally authoritative text for Smith’s stories. Such typescripts do not exist. All that we can do is to apply our knowledge of Smith to the existing manuscripts and attempt to combine them to present what Smith would have preferred to publish were he not beset by editorial malfeasance in varying degrees. In doing so we hope to present Smith’s words in their purest form to date so that the reader might experience what Ray Bradbury described in his foreword to A Rendezvous in Averoigne: “Take one step across the threshold of his stories, and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell, and texture—into language.”

  The editors wish to thank Douglas A. Anderson, Steve Behrends, Geoffrey Best, Joshua Bilmes, April Derleth, William A. Dorman, Don Herron, Margery Hill, Rah Hoffman, S. T. Joshi, Terence McVicker, Neil Mechem, Marc Michaud, Will Murray, Boyd Pearson, John Pelan, Alan H. Pesetsky, Rob Preston, Robert M. Price, Dennis Rickard, David E. Schultz, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and Jason Williams for their help, support, and encouragement of this project, as well as Holly Snyder and the staff of the John Hay Library of Brown University, and D. S. Black of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, for their assistance in the preparation of this collection. Needless to say, any errors are the sole responsibility of the editors.