I
would
have told Wright to go chase himself in regard to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”, if I didn’t have the support of my parents, and debts to pay off. For this reason it’s important for me to place as many stories as possible and have them coming out at a tolerably early date. However, I did not reduce the tale by as much as Wright suggested, and I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents of the preliminary section. What I did do, mainly, was to condense the descriptive matter, some of which had a slight suspicion of prolixity anyhow. But I shall restore most of it, if the tale is ever brought out in book form. W. accepted the revised version by return mail.
9
Smith completed the desired revisions on October 24, 1931, and he then resubmitted “Yoh-Vombis” to Weird Tales. Wright was enthusiastic about the story, writing in his letter of acceptance that it was “a tremendous tale, a powerful story”.10 Smith received sixty-three dollars for the story, wryly noting to Derleth that “I mulcted myself out of 17 dollars on the price by the surgical excisions which I performed”.11 It appeared in the May 1932 issue, where it tied with David H. Keller’s “The Last Magician” as the most popular story in that issue. The tale is included in OST and RA. Smith also included it among the contents of Far from Time, a collection of his stories that he submitted to Ballantine Books in the 1950s; Ray Bradbury wrote a foreword for this anthology that was included in Jack L. Chalker’s tribute collection In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith (Baltimore: Anthem, 1963), and later in RA. The present text was established by a comparison of the typescript of the original version, originally presented by Smith to Robert H. Barlow and now in a private collection (a photocopy of which was provided by Rah Hoffman), with the typescript of the published version, with consultation of the published versions in WT and OST.
In describing the origins of “The Vault of Yoh-Vombis,” as well as in determining its present text, the current editors must acknowledge the pioneering work of Steve Behrends. It is impossible to walk this path without following his footsteps.
1. SS 162-63.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931; quoted in Steve Behrends, “Introduction” to The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith: The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, March 1988), p. 5.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931 (SL 162).
4. HPL to DAW, September 25, 1931, (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002], p. 286).
5. AWD, letter to CAS, 18 September 1931 (ms, JHL). Behrends (supra) notes that Smith incorporated the suggested changes. In his response to Derleth on September 19, 1931 (ms, SHSW), CAS explained his earlier choices: “‘Foreprescience’ was both punk and needless, and probably it isn’t in any dictionary. I must have wanted a trisyllable for the rhythm, or something, and didn’t stop to consider its exact meaning. ‘Presentiment’ would fill the bill; and ‘anything of the sort’ could be put ‘anything of peril’.”
6. CAS, letter to AWD, September 19, 1931 (ms, SHSW). Part of Derleth’s objection to the setting of the story on Mars may be due to his attitude towards contemporary science fiction: “As a rule I don’t read scientifiction stuff at all. I regard it as a sort of bastard growth on the true weird tale, though I suppose that would be a sort of blasphemy to H. P. and his stressing of the ‘cosmic beyond’. …” AWD, letter to CAS, October 26 [1931] (ms, JHL).
7. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. 20 October 1931] (LL 31).
8. HPL, letter to CAS [Postmarked October 30, 1931] (ms, private collection).
9. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (SL 165). Smith took a different slant on the subject in correspondence with Derleth. On November 12, 1931, he wrote that “‘Yoh-Vombis’ was injured little if at all by the excisions which I made, since I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents, and merely condensed the preliminary descriptive matter. There were certain paragraphs that had a suspicion of prolixity anyhow” (ms, SHSW).
10. FW, letter to CAS, October 29, 1931 (ms, JHL).
11. CAS, letter to AWD, November 3, 1931 (SL 164).
The Eternal World
Smith called “The Eternal World” the “best and most original of my super-scientific tales”.1 He described the story to August Derleth on September 22, 1931 as having a “speculative basis [that] would give Einstein a headache”.2 On that same day he jotted down the basic plot for a story that he then called “Across the Time-Stream:”
A man invents a mechanism, utilizing a force which can project him
laterally
in universal time, thus achieving instantaneous space-transit. The force projects him
beyond
time and space, as we know them, into a universe with different properties, into a sort of eternity, peopled with strange, frozen figures, where he and his machine are unable to function, as if they were caught in a block of ice, though he maintains a sort of consciousness, such as might characterize the unmoving things about him. Into this timelessness, there come invading entities, who, by means of some sort of super-magnetic force, are able to move and live, albeit sluggishly. They take the explorer in his mechanism, and certain of the timeless ones, back to their own world, intending to enslave them and release the dynamic power of the eternal beings in a war against rival peoples. Evidently they have taken the explorer for one of the timeless things.
In this world, subject to ordinary time-space conditions, the statue-like entities become instantly alive and tremendously active and defy all control of their captors. They burst like genii the time-traversing mechanism in which they are confined, catch up the human explorer, and proceed to devastate the planet by means of cataclysmic and varied force-manifestations, before going back to eternity. On their way to the timelessness, they drop the human back into his own world.
3
Although CAS wrote to Derleth that the writing of this story was “the toughest job I have ever attempted”,4 he completed the story the next day. The story was then submitted to Wonder Stories. David Lasser’s reaction is recorded in his letter of October 21, 1931: the story possessed “an excellent idea”, but Smith’s descriptions relied too heavily on “strange and bizarre words” and that they were “so long that the story hardly moves and although it is true that you are describing a timeless world in which nothing happens, you cannot afford to have your story be a ‘timeless one’”.5 Smith undertook the required revisions, eliminating what he considered to be some genuine redundancies, but characterized the admonition to “put ‘more realism’ into my future stories [because] the late ones were ‘verging dangerously on the weird’” as “really quite a josh—as well as a compliment”.6 The story appeared in the March 1932 issue, and Smith was eventually paid the sum of sixty dollars. “The Eternal World” was collected in GL, and was slated for inclusion in Far from Time.