“Simple Speller’s Tale, The.”
Poem (56 lines); probably written in early 1915. First published in the Conservative(April 1915). An attack on simplified spelling. Its final couplet (“Yet why on us your angry hand or wrath use?/We do but ape Professor B———M———!”) alludes to the American critic Brander Matthews, a vigorous proponent of simplified spelling. See also HPL’s essay “The Simple Spelling Mania” ( United Cooperative,December 1918).
Single,———.
The narrator of “The Tree on the Hill” who discovers and photographs a strange tree in a landscape lit by three suns.
Slater (Slaader), Joe.
In “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” the vagabond hunter from the Catskill Mountain region, who is committed to the state psychopathic institution because of his peculiar behavior and supposed murder of Peter Slader, his neighbor. He is the victim of mind exchange with an unknown “cosmic entity.” In “The Shadow out of Time,” he is alluded to as an amnesia victim, like Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who undergoes mind exchange with a member of an alien race.
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Slauenwite, Dr. Thomas (1885–1932).
In “Winged Death,” a physician who discovers an insect whose bite is fatal and that supposedly takes on its victim’s soul or personality. He uses the insect to kill a colleague, Dr. Henry Moore, but later finds that he is pursued by an insect that appears to exhibit Moore’s personality. When he himself dies, his own soul enters the body of the insect, and he tells of his plight by dipping his insect body in ink and writing his message on the ceiling.
Sleght, Adriaen.
In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” a man of Dutch ancestry who marries Trintje van der Heyl (daughter of Dirck van der Heyl) and thereby establishes a genealogical link with the narrator of the story. Smith, Charles W. (1852–1948),
amateur journalist and friend of HPL. Smith, residing at 408 Groveland Street in Haverhill, Mass., edited the Tryout(a NAPA paper) for more than three decades (1914–1946); it contained many poems by HPL, along with prose articles as well as the first appearances of some of HPL’s fiction (“The Cats of Ulthar” [November 1920]; “The Terrible Old Man” [July 1921]; “The Tree” [October 1921]; “In the Vault” [November 1925]). HPL came in touch with Smith by correspondence as early as 1917, when Smith urged HPL to join the NAPA, which HPL did. HPL visited Smith in Haverhill on June 9, 1921, being charmed by Smith’s naïveté and devotion to the “boy printer” ideal of the NAPA (Smith had a printing press in a shed behind his house). HPL wrote of his visit in the essay “The Haverhill Convention” ( Tryout,July 1921; rpt. as “‘408 Groveland Street,’” Boys’ Herald,January 1943). He visited Smith again on August 25, 1921. Smith supplied the central suggestion for “In the Vault”; in gratitude HPL dedicated the story to him. Smith’s return to Haverhill from a trip is commemorated in HPL’s poem “The Return” ( Tryout,December 1926). On August 30, 1927, HPL visited Smith again, recording the visit in a rather dry and compressed travelogue, “The Trip of Theobald” ( Tryout,September 1927). HPL met Smith for the last time on August 24, 1934, in Lawrence, Mass. In 1932 HPL and Smith jointly published a booklet of poems by Eugene B.Kuntz, Thoughts and Pictures;the title page states that it was “Cooperatively published by H.P.Loveracft and C.W.Smith”—representative of the typographical errors (which HPL called “tryoutisms”) that riddled the Tryoutand other of Smith’s publications. Smith was for a time the owner of the C.W. Smith Box Co.; his writings were published in Youth’s Companionand other magazines. Smith, Clark Ashton (1893–1961),
poet, fantaisiste, artist, sculptor, and correspondent of HPL (1922–37). Born in Long Valley, Calif., and residing for most of his life in the small town of Auburn in the Sierra foothills, Smith read precociously as a child and began writing fantastic tales and poems at an early age. In 1911 he came in touch with George Sterling, the reigning poet of San Francisco, who found tremendous promise in Smith’s poetry. With Sterling’s aid Smith published The Star-Treader and Other Poems(1912) at the age of nineteen, causing a sensation on the West Coast and eliciting comparisons to Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne. Other volumes of poetry followed: Odes and Sonnets(published in 1918 by the prestigious Book Club of California), Ebony and Crystal(1922), and Sandal
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wood(1925). In the summer of 1922 some of HPL’s associates gave HPL copies of these volumes; HPL was so taken with them that he wrote a “fan” letter to Smith on August 12, 1922. Thereupon ensued a voluminous correspondence that lasted until HPL’s death, although the two men never met. HPL persuaded WTeditor Edwin Baird to rescind the magazine’s “no poetry” policy and accept Smith’s verse. In late 1926 Smith put Donald Wandrei in touch with HPL, thereby initiating an association that would last to the end of HPL’s life.
Possibly from HPL’s example, Smith resumed the writing of fiction in the mid- to late 1920s, first producing “The Abominations of Yondo” (1925) and then, in the fall of 1929, “The Last Incantation,” the first of more than 100 stories he would write in the next six years. HPL was greatly taken with “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (written November 16, 1929; published WT,November 1931), and he borrowed Smith’s invented god Tsathoggua for both “The Mound” (1929–30) and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930); as the latter story appeared in WTin August 1931, HPL’s mention of the entity achieved print first, so that Smith appeared to have borrowed from HPL. Smith also invented The Book of Eibonas an analogue to HPL’s Necronomicon . “The Epiphany of Death” (written January 25, 1930; Fantasy Fan,July 1934) is dedicated to HPL. Most of Smith’s tales fall into various cycles: Zothique (a continent of the far future); Hyperborea (a continent in mankind’s early history); Averoigne (a province in medieval France); Atlantis; Xiccarph (a planet); Mars. Smith’s stories emphasize fantasy more than horror, although “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” ( WT,June–July 1932) is a powerful horror tale set on Mars. More representative is “The City of the Singing Flame” ( Wonder Stories,January 1931), an exotic science fiction/fantasy hybrid. Relatively few of Smith’s tales bear any direct influence from HPL: he admitted that “The Statement of Randolph Carter” inspired “The Epiphany of Death,” and “Pickman’s Model” inspired “The Hunters from Beyond” ( Strange Tales, October 1932). However, both Smith and HPL influenced each other’s fiction by discussing, in correspondence, various plot ideas and offering suggestions for revision.
Smith was frustrated at the lack of recognition of both his scintillating poetry (some of the finest formal poetry written by any American writer of the twentieth century) and his weird fiction. In 1933 he self-published The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,consisting of six stories rejected by WT Smith appeared widely in science fiction and weird fiction pulp magazines—WT , Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories,and others—and was more willing than HPL to revise his tales for the sake of a sale, as he had two aging parents, both in poor health, to look after. By 1935 his enthusiasm for writing fiction began to wane, and he turned to the carving of weird sculptures; several of them were inspired by HPL’s invented gods and monsters (a photograph of some of them was used as the dust jacket illustration for HPL’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep[1943]). HPL expressed great enthusiasm for these carvings, as well as for Smith’s paintings and drawings, hundreds of which he had seen in the collection of Samuel Loveman and also on loan from Smith.