¹

Smith replied that

I don’t think I have had anything quite like the pseudo-mnemonic flashes you describe. What I have had sometimes is the nocturnal dream-experience of stepping into some totally alien state of entity, with its own memories, hopes, desires, its own past and future-none of which I can ever remember for very long on awakening. This experience has suggested such tales as “The Planet of the Dead”, “The Necromantic Tale,” and “An Offering to the Moon”. I think I have spoken of the place-images which often rise before me without apparent relevance, and persist in attaching themselves to some train of emotion or even abstract thought. These, doubtless, are akin to the images of which you speak, though they are always clearly realistic.

²

Completed no later than October 21, 1930, “An Offering to the Moon” may have resulted from Smith’s recent reading: “The book by James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, [...] is truly interesting, especially in the mass of data relating to South Sea ruins which is presented.”³ Although he recognized that it “perhaps isn’t quite my best,” Smith was eager to learn what HPL made of the tale.⁴ Lovecraft enjoyed the story, adding that

Mnemonic tales, vaguely suggesting reincarnation or other-dimensional existence, are peculiarly fascinating to me; & nothing stirs my fancy more than the inexplicable stone ruins of the Pacific. [...] Your sense of totally alien worlds must be vastly more fascinating than my own fragmentary & incomplete detachments, & you certainly make effective use of them in tales like ‘An Offering to the Moon.’ The place-images are likewise highly alluring, & I hope to see many fictional reflections of them.

⁵

FW rejected it, calling it “wordy and somehow—I do not know why—unconvincing; though that is a splendid paragraph on page 14 describing the death of Morley on the altar. Part of what follows seems anti-climax....”⁶ Smith remarked that “... I suspect, too, that ‘An Offering to the Moon’ was doubtless queered with him by the addition of an element which was far from weird—that is to say, the full development of the stodgy Thorway as a foil to Morley. Of course, the ‘action’ was held up by the archaeological discussion which brought out this difference.”⁷ Smith tried the story on other markets, including Ghost Stories and the Philippine Magazine, before re-submitting the story to WT. Wright rejected it once more, adding that it was “not a bad story—in fact I don’t think you have ever sent me a truly poor story; but it seems far from being your best work.”⁸ (One reason why it might have been rejected the second time is that it was submitted along with “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” which FW accepted, so it seemed all the poorer by comparison. In addition, most publishers do not view too great a backlog of stories by any one writer as a good thing.)

The story languished until 1950, when Smith sent three unpublished stories to Derleth for use in a possible original anthology. (The other two were “The Metamorphosis of the World” and “Told in the Desert.”) Dorothy McIlwraith, Wright’s successor at WT, accepted the story for its September 1953 issue, but as of October 1954 the magazine had not paid Smith for the story; and as it went bankrupt after publishing the September 1954 issue, he might never have received his check for the tale.

A carbon of the original typescript may be found at JHL, but it differs considerably from the version published in WT and later collected posthumously in OD. Smith’s letter to August Derleth of November 3, 1931 suggests that the second submission to FW may have represented a rewritten version, but no such version has yet come to light.⁹ It is even possible that Derleth rewrote part of the story and submitted this to McIlwraith on Smith’s behalf, although we have no evidence to suggest that this is the case except for Derleth’s history of such alteration to stories by William Hope Hodgson and others. Insomuch as the version published in WT addressed FW’s main objection—that some of the story after Morley’s death was an anti-climax—we have chosen to regard the JHL typescript as an earlier draft and use the published version for our text. And when all is said and done, we feel that the version published by WT represents the better text.

1. HPL, letter to CAS, October 17, 1930 (Selected Letters III, Ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei [Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971]: 196-197.).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 24, 1930 (SL 128).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, November 16, 1930 (SL 135).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10, 1930 (SL 132).

5. HPL, letter to CAS, November 7, 1930 (ms, private collection).

6. FW, letter to CAS, November 11, 1930 (ms, JHL).

7. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (SL 137).

8. FW, letter to CAS, October 29, 1931 (ms, JHL).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, November 3, 1931 (SL 164).

The Kiss of Zoraida

FW announced during the summer of 1930 plans to launch a new magazine, Oriental Stories (later renamed The Magic Carpet). Smith may have had this market in mind when he completed this story on October 15, 1930. He described it to Lovecraft a few days later as “an ungodly piece of pseudo-Oriental junk.”¹ FW rejected it at first, but later accepted it on grounds that it was “ ‘distinctively Oriental’ when I sent it in last year. The insertion of a few thees and thous in the dialogue, and the omission of one or two ironic touches that were more universal than Eastern, seem to have changed his opinion.”² Smith would describe the story as “not a weird tale at all, but what the French would call un conte cruel. It is well enough done, with some touches of terrific irony.”³ The story first appeared in The Magic Carpet for July 1933, and was reprinted posthumously in OD. The present text comes from a typescript presented to Genevieve K. Sully.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, c. October 21, 1930 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, November 3, 1931 (SL 164).

3. CAS, letter to AWD, November 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

The Face by the River

Written on October 29, 1930, CAS wrote Lovecraft that he composed the tale in a single day, and described it as not having “much of the cosmic in it; but it might interest you as an attempt at psychological realism.”¹ There is no record of Smith’s having submitted it anywhere, but in his reply of November 7, 1930, Lovecraft observed that “The element of relentless Nemesis-pursuit in ‘The Face’ is very effectively handled—& given a realism too seldom cultivated in tales with this theme.”²

Its genesis may be found in some remarks he had penned a few days earlier, also to HPL. As part of an ongoing exchange regarding realism, romanticism, and aesthetic theory in general, CAS informed his correspondent that “I have undergone a complete revulsion against the purely realistic school, including the French, and can no longer stomach even Anatole France.”³ Yet here he has written a story that deals with “the morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as ‘incest’.”⁴ He further clarified his objections to realism as being based upon an aversion to “the limiting and sterilizing influence of a too slavish, uninspired literalism,” and singled out Thomas Hardy as an example of realism which included “an ever-present apprehension of the cosmic mysteries and fatalities that environ life.”⁵ Smith’s onetime literary executor Roy A. Squires found a copy of the manuscript among Smith’s papers after his death, but by the time these papers had been deposited at JHL it was no longer there. A carbon copy was found among the papers of Genevieve K. Sully. It was first published in the premiere issue of the scholarly journal Lost Worlds: The Journal of Clark Ashton Smith Studies in 2003.