7. Lovecraft’s comments are written on Wright’s March 23, 1934 letter to Smith (see Roy A. Squires’ Catalog 8, item 123).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, February 7, 1947 (ms, SHSW).

Xeethra

Clark Ashton Smith’s heart-wrenching treatment of the Faust theme was completed on March 21, 1934, but like most of his stories the idea came to him much earlier. “The Traveller” (see Appendix 3), one of the prose poems in Ebony and Crystal, tells of a poor pilgrim who, when asked what it is he is searching for, replies “forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home.” A story idea may be found in the Black Book under that title:

A young goatherd of Zothique, leading his charges in a wild, mountainous region, who enters an unexplored cave giving on a strange underworld of beautiful, sinister trees laden with strange fruits. This region is an outlying part of the subterrene realms of Thasaidon, and the boy Xeethra is frightened back to the entrance by a glimpse of fearful demoniac entities and monsters that roam through the frightful groves. He steals, however, certain of the fruits, and devours one of them. Afterwards, a madness comes over him, and he imagines that he is no longer Xeethra, but the prince of a great land beyond the mountains. He goes forth to regain his empire, and finds only a desert tract with ruinous cities where outcasts and lepers mock him in his madness. In his despair an emissary of Thasaidon comes to him, and reveals the truth, that the eating of the fruit has awakened in him the memory of a long-past life when he was indeed the ruler of this vanished empire. In return for his sworn fealty to the god of Evil, Xeethra is promised a necromantic revival of all the grandeur of his former incarnation which he shall retain

as long as he decrees it

. He accepts the bond; and, reliving his past life, he forgets the existence as Xeethra and the compact with Thasaidon; and, finding again the ennui and emptiness of power, he wishes himself a simple goat-herd. Thereupon the whole vision vanishes, and he is again the boy Xeethra, lost among lepers and pariahs in a ruined city, and remembers confusedly a strange dream, unable to forget the dream, regretting its lost splendour; a creature half-mad thenceforward, and wholly accursed.

¹

The reader who is familiar with Smith’s life cannot help but wonder if Smith was recalling the acclaim he experienced as a youth when the San Francisco newspapers hailed him as the Boy Keats of the Sierras only to see his work fall out of critical favor. Smith was not one to wallow in self pity, but he certainly displayed a rather biting sense of ironic detachment that would have made Ambrose Bierce proud.

Smith fleshed out the above synopsis with additional details:

The emissary appears before him like a pillar of shadow growing up from the earth into gigantic semi-human form. At the very end this being comes to him again, and Xeethra cries out, saying

take my soul in fulfillment of the bond

. But the emissary tells him mockingly that his soul is already part of the empery of Thasaidon.

²

These entries in the Black Book appear several entries ahead of the one for “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” which was completed on May 1, 1932. Smith first mentions the story in correspondence at the end of August 1933, when he mentions that “With the completion of two more tales, ‘Xeethra,’ and ‘The Madness of Chronomage,’ I will have a series totalling about 60,000 words, all dealing with the future continent of Zothique.”³ He also used an excerpt from the “Song of Xeethra” as a heading to “The Dark Eidolon,” which was completed near the end of 1932.

Smith submitted “Xeethra” to Weird Tales, but it “was bowed politely from the palace of Pharnaces [Farnsworth Wright]” on the grounds that “it was more of a prose poem than a story,” the same complaint that he had made about “The Death of Malygris” and “The Coming of the White Worm.” These continued rejections did nothing to boost Smith’s confidence in his work: “I’m afraid Wright is more than right in thinking that the casual reader is purblind and even hostile toward literature of a poetic cast. And poetry itself, in this country… has fallen into the hands of a lot of literary gangsters.”⁴

Faced with the mounting costs of caring for his ailing parents, combined with the loss of incomes from his mother’s magazine sales,⁵ selling his stories became more important to Smith than any aesthetic aspirations he may have harbored earlier. As he described it, Smith “did a little topiary work on the verbiage, cutting it down from 8000 to 6800 words, and bringing out some of the ‘points’ a little more explicitly.”⁶ Wright accepted this version, paying sixty-eight dollars.⁷ “Xeethra” was published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales, and was collected in LW and RA.

There are obvious similarities between “Xeethra” and H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Quest of Iranon” (first published in the July/August 1935 issue of The Galleon). Smith read the story in manuscript in July 1930.⁸ The chief difference between the stories is that Iranon’s quest was a fool’s folly, and Xeethra found his kingdom and lost it again because of a tragic flaw.

The text of “Xeethra” was first restored by Steve Behrends as part of the Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith series published by Marc A. Michaud’s Necronomicon Press. Like Mr. Behrends, we compared the top copy of the typescript of the first version, which Barlow bound together with several other Smith typescripts and donated to the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, with the carbon of the published version among Smith’s papers at JHL. We have restored more of the text from the first version that seemed to us to be richer than that of published version.

1. BB item 34.

2. BB item 34a.

3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 29, 1933.

4. CAS, letter to AWD, April 4, 1934.

5. Mrs. Smith sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door to help support the family. See Violet Heyer, “Letter.” In One Hundred Years of Klarkash-Ton, Ed. Ronald Hilger (Averon Press, 1996): pp. 20–22.

6. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

7. WT, letter to CAS, October 25, 1935 (ms, JHL).

8. See HPL, letter to CAS, July 18, 1930.

The Last Hieroglyph

Clark Ashton Smith first mentioned “The Last Hieroglyph” in a letter to August Derleth in March 1934:

I have conceived a whale of a weird notion for a story to be called either The Last Hieroglyph or, In the Book of Agoma. It concerns a strange volume of hieroglyphic writings that belonged to a mysterious archimage. When he wished, he could bring one or more of the hieroglyphs to life in the forms that they represented, and could send them forth to do his bidding. In the story, a certain minor wizard enters the tower in which the book is kept—and is turned into a hieroglyph on the half-finished open page of the great volume.

¹

The first version of this story was completed on April 7, 1934. Farnsworth Wright rejected it “with the usual comment that he had enjoyed it and admired it personally. But he feared the c.r. [casual reader] would find it rather meaningless. He must have a bright lot of readers, if that is true.” Smith’s growing frustration showed itself when he added “Well, if I ever become any crazier than I am and have been, Wright’s criticism and rejections will certainly be one of the contributing causes.”²

Smith revised the story, changing the title to “In the Book of Vergama,” and resubmitted it. Wright rejected it a second time, explaining that “Beautiful though many of its passages are, yet there is so little plot, and the motivation seems so inadequate, that I am afraid it would disappoint many of our readers who expect almost perfection itself from you.”³ Looking over the twice-rejected manuscript, CAS allowed that “It is possible that the tale is a little overwrought; and I may, eventually, cut out the portions about the merman and the salamander”⁴ and solicited the opinions of Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. However, after completing a third revision, he informed Barlow that “You & Theobaldus [nickname for HPL] will be glad to know that I am not curtailing the Vergama story. On the contrary, I have done a longer version, detailing efforts of Nushain to sidestep his guides and evade the destiny that will turn him into a cipher. The guides, ironically, twit him with a lack of faith in his own horoscopic vaticinations! Vergama also waxes sardonic.”⁵ The third time did prove the charm, as Smith wrote to Derleth “Wright took my revision of ‘The Last Hieroglyph.’ I added about 2000 words to the tale and, I think, improved it considerably.”⁶