As I've told you many times, I have taken up the quest of reading a story from every issue of Weird Tales dated to the 1930s. Well, I haven't yet read anything from the July 1934 issue, so let's get on it!
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price
My interest in Lovecraft's Dream stories has always been limited, so I don't think I have ever read this one. It gets a pretty over-the-top endorsement from the editor in the pages of Weird Tales ("utterly amazing novelette...transcends human experiences...goes beyond anything ever printed before") where it first appears, so maybe I'm in for a life-changing experience?
(I'm reading "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" in my copy of the Corrected Ninth Printing of Arkham House's At The Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, where it clocks in at like 36 pages.)
Four years ago, Randolph Carter, one of the world's greatest mystics and experts on the occult, vanished after going to explore some cave in New England. Today three other mystics and one skeptic, a lawyer representing Carter's legal heirs, sit in a New Orleans house to apportion Carter's estate, even though many occult researchers believe Carter is not dead, but just in another "time-dimension" and may return.
We learn a little about Carter's ancestry and life (he's from a long line of New England wizards and first visited that cave as a kid) and then one of the three mystics, a "Hindoo" Brahmin swami with a turban, says he can explain to them the truth behind Carter's disappearance, and most of the story consists of him narrating Carter's adventure.
Carter had a silver key of great magical power, and in the cave used the key to cast a spell that allowed him to pass through a gate and free himself from his physical body and even his individual identity so he could float about the universe and hither and thither through time. He met mysterious beings who stood upon pedestals, the most powerful beings in the cosmos, and was invited to join them on a pedestal of his own. Then some being invited him to pass through another gate; beyond this gate he learns a lot of gobbledygook about how "that which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality." Carter learns that his "archetype," in human and inhuman forms, has lived in innumerable times and places, and he requests that he be sent to one of his facets that lives on a planet he has dreamed about, a world of metal towers where people part-insect and part-reptile, with "tapir snouts" and "noxious claws," war endlessly against subterranean foes, planet Yaddith.
On Yaddith his consciousness inhabits the body of an almost immortal wizard, Zkauba. Often the Carter facet is submerged below the Zkauba consciousness, which considers the Carter memories and personality a distraction from its wizardly duties, but other times the Carter mind gains ascendency and tries to figure out a way back to 20th-century Earth. After thousands of years he succeeds. Back on Earth, his lizard-bug body disguised, Carter works to get back his human body, and, we are told, enlists the "Hindoo" swami as an aid. The swami is at this New Orleans meeting to prove that Carter is still alive so his estate won't be dispersed, and he says that in a few months Carter will be back in his normal body and able to appear in the flesh.
The skeptic of course thinks this is all balderdash, and realizes that the "Hindoo" is no "Hindoo" at all, but somebody in disguise. He snatches at the man's mask and beard and thus reveals the shocking truth that we readers and the two other mystics have already suspected--this "Hindoo" is a disguised Randolph Carter, still inhabiting the lizard-insect body of Zkauba, wizard of Yaddith! The sight of the alien's face gives the skeptical lawyer a fatal heart attack, and Carter in his alien body escapes by occult means, never to be seen again--perhaps the stress of being exposed caused the Carter facet to lose control of the alien body permanently to its native personality, that of Zkauba, who has no interest in remaining on Earth with us stinky mammals.
I like all the stuff about Yaddith and Zkauba, but much of the text about floating around without body or identity among god-like beings, and the explanations of how time and space are all one and identity and place are mere illusions produced by limited points of view--Lovecraft and Price employ the metaphor of conic sections--are rough-going; this stuff can be tedious, repetitive, and required me to go online and renew my acquaintance with conic sections. Were the people who read Weird Tales in 1934 all familiar with conic sections? Yet another reason to suspect that education in the past was more rigorous than it has been during my lifetime....
While the ending is suitably horrific and downbeat, with the lawyer killed and Carter's thousands-year project foiled, much of "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is a contrast to the bulk of Lovecraft's body of work. Whereas I expect Lovecraft stories to generate cosmic horror--the realization that life is meaningless, science and religion are weak reeds of pretension and self-deception, and knowledge leads not to enlightenment but madness and death--the long middle section of "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" feels like a sense of wonder story, a story in which a special guy with special talents and hard-won knowledge becomes a god and explores the vast intricacies of the universe, a story which comes close to celebrating human potential instead of reminding us of human limitations. Maybe this is Price's influence? Or evidence of an evolution in Lovecraft's thought?
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" has, of course, been reprinted in many Lovecraft collections, but has not proven popular with anthologists. In 1951 super editor Donald Wollheim did include it in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 17, however.
"Wild Grapes" by August Derleth
This is a barely acceptable piece of filler that was later reprinted in Derleth collections and one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies of 100 brief stories edited by Robert Weinberg, Martin H. Greenberg and Stefan Dziemianowicz.
A guy was acting as caretaker of his uncle's farm; unc had a habit of going away for months at a time. Coveting the farm, the nephew murdered the old man. He buried the body on the edge of the farm and, to disguise the broken nature of the ground over the fresh grave, planted some wild grapes there. A month later he sees some white fog or something over the grave; he goes to check out this phenomena, assuming it is phosphorus rising from the decaying body, and the grape vines, instilled withhis vengeful uncle's soul, strangle him to death.
"The Disinterment of Venus" by Clark Ashton Smith
Some monks are dutifully tilling the soil in the monastery garden and find a life-sized Roman statue of Venus, a dazzling naked beauty in glorious marble! The sight of this work of art has a powerful effect on the monks, filling them with lascivious thoughts! Those who actually touched the statue in the course of unearthing it and drawing it out of the ground become total horndogs and sneak out of the monastery grounds to try to seduce peasant girls or hire whores! There must be some kind of fell enchantment on this statue!
The most pious and chaste of all the monks is also the the most handsome--this young monk is a regular Adonis, Smith tells us. He resolves to take a hammer and smash the statue of Venus to bits! But when he sees it he is stricken, and in a macabre turn he embraces the statue, and it falls over, dragging him into the hole out of which it was recovered--the statue's weight crushes the monk's skull, killing him. Smith implies that those who find him can see he ejaculated before dying! (At least I think that is what Smith is implying.) The head of the monastery has the hole filled up with Venus and her doomed admirer's corpse still in it.
This is a fun story, at least until that guy gets killed; I have to admit I was expecting the statue to come to life and the comely monk and Venus to live happily ever after in Faerieland or another dimension or something, and was a little surprised at the gruesome climax. Maybe this tale is a satire on prudes who fear pornography or nudity will drive men out of control. We might also note that Venus and a statue of her are prominent in a 1931 story of Smith's, "The Venus of Azombeii," which we read a little while ago.
"The Disinterment of Venus" has appeared in numerous Smith collections, starting with 1948's Genius Loci and Other Tales. I read it in an electronic library copy of The Maze of the Enchanter: Volume Four of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Conners and Ron Hilger, where the presented version of the story may be more explicit than the version in Weird Tales.
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| A 1974 British paperback edition of Genius Loci and Other Tales |
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My Weird Tales project slithers and slinks forward! More weird thrills next time!
I have always felt that Clark Ashton Smith was an underrated writer. I was thrilled when Night Shade Books reprinted Smith's short stories. Although, I love the British paperback cover artwork, too!
ReplyDeleteScott Conners and Ron Hilger did a great job with those Night Shade Books collections, offering tons of info on Smith's opinions of his own stories and how he developed them and his relationships with Lovecraft and other writers and with his publishers. Fascinating stuff.
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