4
Smith readily accepted Bates’ suggestion, “since it lifts the whole business more into the realm of the supernatural to have the monster vanish utterly”.5 It appeared in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales. It was not collected until the last Arkham House collection to be published in Smith’s lifetime, AY. The current text is based on a carbon typescript at JHL.
It is probable that “The Nameless Offspring” would not have been written, let alone published, had Strange Tales not existed, since Smith recognized that “its commercial chances are pretty nil.”6 As Lovecraft mentioned, Wright would probably have been too squeamish to take the story, both because of the necrophagia and the sexual element; Smith felt that the latter was no worse than in Machen’s story or even Lovecraft’s own “The Dunwich Horror”, but fumed that “by some curious twist of convention, editors will probably think that it is”.7 Bates, on the other hand, was more open to purely gruesome material, such as “The Return of the Sorcerer,” also rejected by Wright, while also being personally receptive to Smith’s more outré stories such as “The Door to Saturn” and “The Demon of the Flower.” At the time CAS wrote “The Nameless Offspring” he was writing regularly for three main markets, WT, WS, and ST, and was still trying to crack magazines such as Ghost Stories. The worsening depression would soon lead to the collapse of the Clayton and McFadden magazines, would also adversely affect the ability of those that survived to pay in a timely manner, and would do nothing to encourage Smith to continue the writing of fiction.
Having Henry Chaldane running a bee ranch in Canada was a tip of the hat to Smith’s correspondent Frank Lillie Pollock (1876-1957), who operated just such a facility in Shedden, Ontario.8
1. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. January 27, 1931] (SL 145-46).
2. HPL, letter to CAS, February 8, 1931 (ms, MHS; included in part in Selected Letters III, Ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei [Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1972], p. 286).
3. HPL, letter to CAS [early December 1931 ] (ms, JHL).
4. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, December 15, 1931 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 31, 1931 (SL 168).
6. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. early November 1931] (SL 166).
7. CAS, letter to AWD, November 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
8. See notes to “The Planet of the Dead,” ES 273.
A Vintage from Atlantis
Farnsworth Wright used short stories of three thousand words or less as “filler” to occupy the holes left in each issue by the larger stories, and many of Smith’s stories (“The Gorgon,” “The Supernumerary Corpse,” etc.) fall into this category. By late 1931 Wright had published all such stories of Smith’s, leading CAS wrote to Derleth in late November 1931 that he was composing a filler of this title that dealt “with the unique brand of d.t. induced in a crew of pirates by drinking the contents of an antique wine-jar, crusted with barnacles and corals, which they had found cast up on the beach of a West Indian isle”.1 A plot synopsis found among his papers describes his conception thus:
A crew of pirates have landed on a desert West Indian isle to bury their loot, and find a strange antique jar that has been washed up out of the sea. The thing is made of a strong, heavy, almost infrangible earthenware; but they manage to break off the neck with hammers, and discover that the jar is filled with a dark, aromatic wine. All of them drink the wine, excepting one Puritan abstainer, who tells the story. After drinking it, they go mad and begin to babble in an unknown tongue, and to perform strange rites on the beach, including the sacrifice, in a very peculiar manner, of the pirate captain on an improvised altar. Some of them seize the Puritan, and make him swallow a little of the wine; and though he does not become so demented as the others, he has a shadowy vision of some monstrous being that comes up out of the sea, and of shimmering, mirage-like domes and walls that rise from the waters. He is overcome with terror, and flees in one of the boats to the ship, leaving the others to continue their mad revel, which ends in death.
2
Wright was ambivalent about the story, writing “I think it best to follow my usual practice of rejecting when in doubt”.3 The rejection puzzled Smith, but he accepted it philosophically, observing “I dare say he goes by precedent; and this tale, in style and substance, was a little off the beaten track”.4 Lovecraft encouraged him to submit the story to Strange Tales, adding that the tale “surely grips the reader by the throat by the time it is ended! It has a touch of Dunsanian phantasy about it, & ought to be acceptable to Bates if he liked ‘The Door to Saturn’ or Whitehead’s ‘Moon Dial’. Those visions are really tremendous, & the climax is satisfyingly adequate”.5 Bates rejected it on December 15. Wright finally ended up taking the story after Smith’s third revision, publishing it in the September 1933 issue.6 It was collected in AY. The current text is based upon an undated carbon copy of the typescript at JHL.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, November 21, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
2. SS 168.
3. FW, letter to CAS, December 1, 1931 (ms, JHL)
4. CAS, letter to AWD, December 12, 1931 (ms, SHSW).
5. HPL, letter to CAS, [c. early December 1931] (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to AWD, October 8, 1932 (SL 193).
The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan
One of Smith’s most frequently reprinted stories, this tale was completed on November 25, 1931. A plot synopsis found among his papers describes the story thus:
^Ootal^ [Zoon] Wuthoqquan, rich usurer of Uzuldaroum, denies an alms to aged beggar on the street. Thereupon the beggar proceeds to utter a cryptically disagreeable prophecy concerning Ootal Wuthoqquan’s future fate. This prophecy is fulfilled. A strange man appears and asks the usurer for a loan of money, offering three huge emeralds as security. The loan is accorded; but that night, as Ootal Wuthoqquan is looking at the emeralds, they start to roll away from him, as if bewitched. He follows them; but keeping just beyond his reach, they lead him through the nocturnal streets of the moonlit city and into the country. Here they vanish into a hole or cave. Wild with avarice, the usurer still follows, and finds himself in a phosphorescent cavern heaped with jewels, where a terrible, formless, multiform entity broods on a pile of gems. This creature proceeds to devour the unfortunate usurer.
1
Smith submitted the story to Harry Bates, telling Derleth that he felt “Wright would perhaps consider it too fantastic”,2 but it failed to get past publisher William Clayton.3 Wright accepted the story apparently without hesitation and offered Smith thirty-three dollars for it.4 It appeared in the June 1932 issue of Weird Tales, and was collected in OST and RA. Smith also planned to include it in Far from Time, which indicates that he possibly regarded it as more than a mere filler.