The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith Read Free

serials per issue during this period. While Farnsworth Wright was willing to publish stories that he perhaps thought might be too good for his readership (the list of tales that the fickle Farnsworth originally rejected includes H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain,” Carl Jacobi’s “Revelations in Black,” Robert E. Howard’s “The Phoenix on the Sword” [the first adventure of Conan of Cimmeria], Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” and “The Seven Geases,” among many others), he was much more conservative in his choice of serials; of all the serials that ran in Weird Tales , only those by Robert E. Howard, as well as Jack Williamson’s “Golden Blood” (April to September 1933) are generally well-regarded today. One reason why “The Infernal Star”(which according to a fragmentary holograph first draft was originally to be titled “The Dark Star”) grew was that it seemed that CAS wanted to use it in the same manner that Lovecraft did “The Whisperer in Darkness,” tying together elements of his own invented mythologies (Hyperborea, Averoigne, Poseidonis, Zothique) along with those of Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce. Smith eventually bowed to reality and put “The Infernal Star”aside “since there is no prospect of landing it as a serial even if completed. Wright is so heavily loaded down with long tales (all of them tripe, I dare say) that he can’t even consider anything over 15,000 words till next year” ( SL 203).
    After a brief spurt of productivity in the early fifties, Smith began to exhibit a reluctance to write anything, even letters. He had toyed with the idea of completing “The Infernal Star”, and August Derleth encouraged him with an offer of Arkham House publication despite his own lack of enthusiasm for the work itself.
    “Dawn of Discord” and “House of Monoceros” appear on Smith’s completed stories log after “Double Cosmos” (originally “Secondary Cosmos”), which was completed on March 25, 1940 although he had been working on it intermittently since 1934.
    Late in 1938 Weird Tales was purchased by a New York businessman, William J. Delaney, who already published the highly successful pulp Short Stories . Delaney relocated the operation to New York City. Wright was kept on as editor and made the move, but was let go with the March 1940 issue. An interview with Delaney appeared in a fanzine at the time of Wright’s dismissal that boded ill for Smith. After promising that Weird Tales would continue to publish “all types of weird and fantasy fiction,” the interview went on to add:

There is one rule, however: Weird Tales does not want stories which center about sheer repulsiveness, stories which leave an impression not to be described by any other word than “nasty”. This is not to imply that the “grim” story, or the tale which leaves the reader gasping at the verge of the unknown, is eliminated. Mr. Delaney believes that the story which leaves a sickish feeling in the reader is not truly weird and has no place in Weird Tales . . . . And, finally, stories wherein the characters are continually talking in French, German, Latin, etc. will be frowned upon, as well as stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary. 8

    The interviewer was Robert A. W. Lowndes, who shed some light on this in a letter published years later:
Delaney, who was a pleasant and cultured man, was very fond of weird stories, but he was also a strict Catholic. . . . He also found some of the Clark Ashton Smith stories on the ‘disgusting’ side and told me that he had returned one that Wright had in his inventory when he left. It was about a monstrous worm which, when attacked and pierced, shed forth rivers of slime. Later in 1940, when Donald A. Wollheim was starting Stirring Science Stories , Smith sent him ‘The Coming of the White Worm’ and Don used it. When I read it, there was no doubt that this was