10. SS 158.
11. SS 170.
12. CAS, letter to AWD, January 9, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
13. HPL, letter to CAS [postmarked January 28, 1932] (ms, JHL).
The Seed from the Sepulcher
If we use the number of times a story has been anthologized as an indication of its popularity, then “The Seed from the Sepulcher,” at eight times (not counting different editions of the same anthology), is Smith’s most popular story, beating “The Return of the Sorcerer” (five times), “The City of the Singing Flame” (four times), “A Rendevous in Averoigne” (four times), and “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” (three times)—and it wasn’t even included in one of his collections until after his death!
Timeus Ashton-Smith (1855-1937), the father of Clark Ashton Smith, was the son of a wealthy British industrialist who used his patrimony for travel and gambling. Based upon accounts received from his friend, H. P. Lovecraft described Timeus as “something of a soldier of fortune [who had] travelled in many odd corners of the earth, including the Amazon jungles of South America. Clark probably derives much of his exotic taste from the tales told him by his father when he was very small—he was especially impressed by accounts of the gorgeously plumed birds and bizarre tropical flowers of equatorial Brazil”.1 These stories undoubtedly were on Smith’s mind when he conceived of this story.
Steve Behrends, in his notes to Smith’s story-ideas published in Strange Shadows, identifies this plot germ, originally called “A Bottle on the Amazon” (later changed to “Orinoco”) as the genesis of “The Seed from the Sepulcher:”
A whisky-bottle floating in the ^Orinoco^ [Amazon] is picked up near the river’s mouth, and is found to contain a ms. which details the adventures of two explorers in an untrodden country of Venezuela. Here one of the two men is bitten by a monstrous fanged vegetable growth ^having a vague, distorted likeness to a human figure^, and shortly after, begins to show signs of an appalling transformation. Little by little he is turned into a replica of the thing that had bitten him. Finally, he takes root in the jungle—and stings the narrator of the story, just as the other is about to abandon him in horror and despair.
2
According to Behrends, this synopsis probably dates to the summer of 1931. He began working on the tale toward the end of January 1932, mentioning in a letter that he was “doing another story, ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher,’ for submission to Strange Tales… ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher’ will be the best of the lot, from my standpoint. It describes a monstrous plant growing out of a man’s skull, eyes, etc., and trellising the roots on all his bones, while he was still alive”.3 It was completed by February 10, since in a discussion of his recent stories Smith told Derleth “I like ‘The Seed from the Sepulcher’ best, for its imaginative touches, but am going to chuck the malignant plant idea after this. I don’t want to run it into the ground!”4 When he submitted it to Harry Bates,
he wanted me to make some slight alterations before showing it to Clayton. He seemed to think there was an inconsistency in the development of the devil-plant; but, as I pointed out to him, the plant merely propagated itself through spores,
after death,
but had the power of extending its
individual life-term
through an extension of the root-system from one victim to another. However, I made several minor changes, adding some horrific details, and mentioning a
second skull
in the lattice-work of bones, roots, etc, in the burial-pit. Derleth’s suggestions were very good, but I rather like the thing as it stands. It might have been worked out more gradually, at greater length, as Wandrei suggests; but the present development, as far as I am concerned, has, through its very acceleration, a strong connotation of the unnatural, the diabolic, the supernatural.
5
Bates accepted the revised story for Strange Tales, but now informed Smith that payment would have to wait until publication. This was a precursor to even worse news: facing the threat of bankruptcy, publisher William Clayton gave Bates orders to shut down the magazine with the January 1933 issue6. Bates had been holding three of Smith’s stories, including “Seed,” which he had already copy-edited and marked with instructions for the printer, and returned them to Smith. A new copy was promptly typed and submitted to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales; CAS took the opportunity to add a few details and “verbal emendations” that added “from my standpoint…to the literary value of the tale, which was a little hasty and hacky in spots before”.7 Wright rejected it, telling Smith that it had “many excellent features; but as a whole, it seems too long drawn out—at least, that is my reaction to it”.8 The next month Smith revised the story, eliminating “all repetitional detail [and] cutting the yarn to 4500 [words];” Wright accepted this trimmed version.9 Smith received forty-five dollars for the story after it appeared in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales.10 It was collected in TSS.
The current text is based upon the typescript edited by Harry Bates, which Smith had given to R. H. Barlow and who in turn donated it to the Bancroft Library, and the later typescripts at JHL. Some descriptive material from the first version that was cut for Weird Tales has been restored, but the repetitive material that Smith had cut—and there was a lot of repetition in the Bates-edited version—has not been restored.
1. HPL, letter to F. Lee Baldwin, March 27, 1934 (in FFT 66).
2. SS 167.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, January 31, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, February 10, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (SL 171-72).
6. Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936 (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004), p. 203.
7. CAS, letter to AWD, October 16, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
8. FW, letter to CAS, October 21, 1932 (ms, JHL).
9. CAS, letter to AWD, December 3, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
10. Popular Fiction Publishing Company to CAS, February 24, 1934 (ms, JHL).
The Second Interment
As in the case of “An Adventure in Futurity” and “Seedling of Mars,” “The Second Interment” originated with a suggestion from one of Smith’s editors. Harry Bates forwarded to Smith the following suggestion from William Clayton:
Mr. Clayton recently suggested to me that he would like to see a story recounting the horror a man might feel at being buried alive. His sensations, all the awful things—the states of mind—he would go through. He might prolong his agony by shallow breathing a la Houdini. It would add to the horror of things if he had for years been afraid of being buried alive, and had an obsession that he would. Perhaps he had a push button or some other device in the casket of summoning aid just in case, and perhaps it does not work. Perhaps he has had one unfortunate experience from which he was rescued in time, which would give far more point and tension to a repetition of it for a climax.…The thing would, of course, be a naturalistic horror story.
1
Smith apparently felt the suggestion a congenial one, for he had completed the story by January 29, 1932, less than a week after receiving the suggestion. He added to Clayton’s basic idea “the suggestion of foul play that was apprehended by Uther; and it seems to me that the thing could hardly have happened in any other way than through dirty work. The younger brother, with the dr.’s connivance, must have hustled him away in a terrible hurry, fearing that he might wake up at any moment, if they took the chance of committing him to an embalmer’s care. But maybe I should have inserted a more direct hint of this somewhere in this tale”.2