Although Smith called “The Second Interment” a “detailed and remorseless study in naturalistic horror”, the technique he used was vividly impressionistic in its depiction of the psychological and physiological agonies experienced by the unfortunate Uther Magbane. In doing so he perhaps unconsciously made reference to some of the nightmare visions found in “The Hashish-Eater.” The images of eyeless giants, the black Babel of a sunless world, and the huge Python of myth with unimaginable folds, are all reminiscent of this poem. The fevered rush from horror to horror also duplicates much of the tone used throughout Smith’s most famous poem, but the most striking similarity occurs in the final sentences of the story:
With inconceivable swiftness, the head of the anaconda became that of his brother Guy. It mocked him with a vast sneer, it appeared to swell and expand, to lose all human semblance or proportion, to become a blank, dark mass that rushed upon him in cyclonic gloom, driving him down into the space beyond space.
Compare the above paragraph with the final lines from “The Hashish-Eater:”
It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face,
That fills the void and fills the universe,
And bloats against the limits of the world
With lips of flame that open.
3
“The Second Interment” appeared in the last issue of Strange Tales, January 1933. Donald Wandrei called the story “a fine piece of craftsmanship, one of the best tales you have yet spun. Derleth raised a question about insoluble problems of technique involved in such a presentation, but I answered with the simple assertion that certain types of potential or actual experience can not be handled at all except by such methods as were employed in your story; and of course, where the question is one of to have or not to have, the affirmative wins”.4 CAS agreed that “the method employed was the only feasible one. The tale was written to order, as I may have told you, and it is almost the only instance where I have done anything good under such conditions”.5 Smith confirmed his good opinion of the story by allowing August Derleth to include it in OST.6
1. Bates, letter to CAS, January 22, 1932 (ms, JHL).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 24, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
3. CAS, “The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil.” In The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith, Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002), p. 29.
4. DAW, letter to CAS, October 31, 1932 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to DAW, November 10, 1932 (SL 195).
6. See CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).
Ubbo-Sathla
Completed on February 15, 1932, “Ubbo-Sathla” originated in the following note:
A man, who, in trance, goes back in earthly time to the very beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the primal one, out of whom all terrestrial life has sprung, lay wallowing in the mist and slime, playing idiotically with the tablets on which are writ the wisdom of vanished pre-mundane gods. In his trance, the man believes that he has been sent to retrieve these tablets; but, approaching Ubbo-Sathla, he seems to revert to some primordial life-form; and forgetting his mission, wallows and ravens in the ooze with the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla. He does not re-emerge from the trance. Ubbo-Sathla is a vast, yeasty mass, sloughing off continuously various rudimentary life-forms.
1
Douglas A. Anderson suggests that “Ubbo-Sathla” may have been influenced by Leonard Cline’s visionary novel The Dark Chamber (1927),2 but as of December 1933 Smith had not read it.3 Cline’s novel may have exerted some influence at second hand, though, since Donald Wandrei is known to have read The Dark Chamber, and CAS wrote him that the story’s “ideation may remind you a little of your own tale, ‘[The Lives of] Alfred Kramer’” [WT, December 1932]. In the same letter CAS stated that “The main object of Ubbo-Sathla was to achieve a profound and manifold dissolution of what is known as reality—which, come to think of it, is the animus of nearly all my tales, more or less”.4
“Ubbo-Sathla” was submitted to Weird Tales, but was rejected. Wright’s rejection letter does not survive, but CAS remarked to HPL that he seemed “to think that it would be over the heads of his clientele”.5 He continued in the same vein in his next letter to Lovecraft:
Wright must have rejected ‘Ubbo-Sathla’ because it didn’t remind him of anything that had ever made a hit with his readers. I can’t see myself that it’s especially difficult or ‘high-brow.’ Where Wright errs is in playing safe when he can’t find a precedent for some particular tale—a method of selection that is none too favourable to originality. It will be interesting to see what he says to ‘The Double Shadow’—a tale that I am inclined (though I may be wrong) to rate above ‘Ubbo-Sathla’.
6
Wright did accept the story upon re-submission, apparently after Lovecraft “had raked him over about the rejection”,7 publishing it in the July 1933 issue. This issue also contained Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” as well as Hazel Heald’s “The Horror in the Museum” (which was actually ghost-written by Lovecraft). All three stories contained references to the mythical Book of Eibon, which excited a lot of questions among credulous fans. Smith responded to one such query from Charles D. Hornig, David Lasser’s successor at Wonder Stories and editor of the fanzine Fantasy Fan:
“Necronomicon,” “Book of Eibon” etc I am sorry to say, are all fictitious. Lovecraft invented the first, I the second.…It is really too bad that they don’t exist as objective, bonafide compilations of the elder and darker Lore! I have been trying to remedy this, in some small measure, by cooking up a whole chapter of Eibon. It is still unfinished, and I am now entitling it “The Coming of the White Worm.”….
8
After Hornig inadvertently published Smith’s letter in the November 1933 issue, CAS remarked in a postcard to Lovecraft: “ I was a little vexed by Brother Hornig’s ‘scoop’ in utilizing my letter about Eibon, etc. He asked me where and how the books could be obtained; and I didn’t think to stipulate that the answer was for his private information! Dumb of me, I’ll admit. However, as you say, the hoax might easily go too far”.9 CAS included “Ubbo-Sathla” among the “Hyperborean Grotesques” of OST. This text is derived from a carbon typescript at JHL.
1. SS 174.
2. Douglas A. Anderson, “Introduction.” In The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005), p. 9.
3. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. December 4, 1933] (SL 240).
4. CAS, letter to DAW, February 17, 1932 (SL 170).
5. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. March 1932] (SL 172).
6. CAS, letter to HPL, [c. mid-March 1932] (LL 35-36).
7. CAS, letter to DAW, May 4, 1932 (ms, MHS).