Like one who confronts the Gorgon, I was frozen by her wide and sightless gaze. Then, behind her, where stood an array of carven Satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede, the walls and floors dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge. Outlined against that boiling measureless cauldron of malignant storm, Marta stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, the abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic statuary.
I think that I alone had beheld it; that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead, mindless face of Marta. He drew her close, he repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery. Then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, he snatched a heavy sculptor’s mallet from the table on which it was lying, and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modelled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the terror-maddened girl, crouching above a mass of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay.
APPENDIX ONE:
STORY NOTES
Abbreviations Used
:
AWD
August W. Derleth (1909-1971), Wisconsin novelist,
Weird Tales
author, and founder of Arkham House.
AY The Abominations of Yondo
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1960).
BB The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979).
BL
Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
CAS
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).
DAW
Donald A. Wandrei (1908-1937), poet,
Weird Tales
writer and co-founder of Arkham House.
EOD Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bio-Bibliography
by Donald Sidney-Fryer et al. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978).
ES The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume One.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006).
FFT The Freedom of Fantastic Things
. Ed. Scott Connors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006).
FW
Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), editor of
Weird Tales
from 1924 to 1939.
GL Genius Loci and Other Tales
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948).
HPL
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), informal leader of a circle of
writers for
Weird Tales
and related magazines, and probably the leading exponent of weird fiction in the twentieth century.
JHL
Clark Ashton Smith Papers and H. P. Lovecraft Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.
LL
Letters to H. P. Lovecraft
. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).
LW Lost Worlds
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).
MHS
Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.
OD Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).
OST Out of Space and Time
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).
PD Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays.
Ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).
PP Poems in Prose
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965).
RAA Rendezvous in Averoigne
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988).
RHB
Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951), correspondent and collector of manuscripts of CAS, HPL, and other
WT
writers.
RW Red World of Polaris
. Ed. Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).
SHSW
August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library.
SL Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith
. Ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003).
SS Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).
ST Strange Tales
, a pulp edited by Harry Bates in competition with
WT.
SU The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith.
Ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005).
TI Tales of India and Irony.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).
TSS Tales of Science and Sorcery
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).
WS Wonder Stories
, a pulp published by Hugo Gernsback and edited first by David Lasser and then Charles D. Hornig.
WT Weird Tales
, Smith’s primary market for fiction, edited by FW (1924-1940) and later Dorothy McIlwraith (1940-1954).
The Door to Saturn
Completed on July 26, 1930, “The Door to Saturn” was one of Smith’s favorites among his own tales “partly on account of its literary style.”1 (He later remarked that “I take out the ms. and read it over, when I am too bored to read anything in my book-cases!”2)CAS explained to HPL that “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. [...] The style of a yarn like ‘The Door to Saturn’” forms still another genre; and this tale seemed unusually successful to me in its unity of ‘tone.’” Unfortunately its “light ironic touch helped to make it seem ‘unconvincing’ to Wright,”3 who rejected it no fewer than three times.4 He would later fume to Lovecraft that
The style—or lack of it—required by nearly all magazine editors, would call for a separate treatise. The idea seems to be that everything should be phrased in a manner that will obviate mental effort on the part of the lowest grade moron. I was told the other day that my ‘Door to Saturn’ could be read only with a dictionary—also, that I would sell more stories if I were to simplify my vocabulary.
5
The story finally found a home at ST, whose editor, Harry Bates, appreciated “the slight humor that emerges from time to time.”6 Smith appreciated the irony of the situation, noting “It will be a josh if Strange Tales should take [‘The Door to Saturn’]” because ST paid “exactly double” what he “would have received from Wright” for the story.7 However, Bates had noticed that the typescript was somewhat battered from its repeated rejections, so he asked CAS “to tell him, for his own edification, what reasons other editors had given for turning it down.”8 Smith selected the story for inclusion in OST, but it was not collected until LW.9 Our text uses a carbon copy of the typescript held by the JHL.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, January 20, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (SL 137).
4. “The only way I can land a lot of my stuff is through repeated submission, revision, etc. One needs to be hard-boiled about rejections. I doubt, though, if I’ll ever achieve the persistence of Derleth, who says that he has sold some of his things to Wright on the tenth or eleventh trip! Three submissions of a tale (to Wright) has been my limit so far; but some of my things have gathered a multitude of ‘regrets’ before landing. ‘The Door to Saturn,’ for example, garnered at least six or seven rejections.” CAS, letter to HPL [c. mid-March 1932] (LL 35).