A Note on the Texts
Clark Ashton Smith considered himself primarily a poet, 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, Clark Ashton Smith was one of the most prolific contributors to Weird Tales. 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 each 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 these stories just as Smith wrote them.
In establishing what the editors believe to be what Smith would have preferred, we were able to consult 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” 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.
Typescripts do not exist in some cases, notably “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” while in other cases the existing typescript is incomplete, as is the case with “The Tomb-Spawn.” An arsonist destroyed Smith’s cabin in the 1950s, which resulted in some typescripts surviving only as burned fragments (“The Master of the Crabs,” “Morthylla”). Still others survive only as earlier drafts that are noticeably less polished than the published texts (“Schizoid Creator,” “Symposium of the Gorgon”). In the case of some stories that were only published long after Smith’s death, several different versions exist, requiring the editors to use our best judgment in selecting a text that we hope would not displease Smith.
Three stories exist in versions that differ considerably from the published texts. We include the original version of “The Coming of the White Worm” without reference to the version published in Stirring Science Stories. We restore the cuts made to “Necromancy in Naat” while maintaining some very real improvements that Smith made when the tale was published in Weird Tales. On the other hand, the rejected version of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” contained unsuccessful attempts at romantic comedy that detracted from the story’s cumulative effect.
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 own 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, Azédarac, Steve Behrends, Gregory Belt, Geoffrey Best, Joshua Bilmes, Christopher Crites, April Derleth, William A. Dorman, Alan Gullette, Don Herron, Margery Hill, Rah Hoffman, S. T. Joshi, Terence McVicker, Marc Michaud, Andrew Migliore, Will Murray, Boyd Pearson, John Pelan, Alan H. Pesetsky, Rob Preston, Robert M. Price, Dennis Rickard, Jim Rockhill, David E. Schultz, Donald Sidney-Fryer, James Thompson, Henry Vester, Jason Williams, and especially Martin Andersson 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.