THE DEEP ONES: "The Coming of the White Worm" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Coming of the White Worm" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins September 18th.

First published in in the April 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/28

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?56999

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Book of Eibon
The Monster of the Prophecy
The Last Hieroglyph
A Treasury of Modern Fantasy

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith_deities
http://www.thecimmerian.com/emperor-of-dreams-remembering-clark-ashton-smith/
http://tinyurl.com/jw4od3p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
http://tinyurl.com/qe2uzuw

I've got lots of options here. I think I'll probably read it in A Rendezvous in Averoigne, unless I need it to be portable for reading on my commute, in which case I'll use Hyperborea. And I'll go to The Book of Eibon for Price's notes.

The Last Hieroglyph for me.

>3 RandyStafford:

Me, too. I'm tempted to go back to The Monster of the Prophecy for old time's sake, but why put a venerable paperback through any more grief?

The Book of Eibon for me. That is, as soon as I've located my copy ;-(

Sorcerers! Submit to bloody-teared worm god Rlim Shaikorth and see the world!

I enjoyed this tale very much, from the idea of the floating "ice-berg" fortress to the sudden and brutal demise of our hero, Evagh the Warlock:

Then, as he tottered and grew giddy on the stair-head, he was swept away and was hurled to his death on the ice-steps far below.

So, this is the first story to refer to The Book of Eibon, and it constitutes the supposed ninth chapter of that book. It's a clever notion: the records of various magi of prehistory, as communicated through the akasha.

Rlim Shaikorth seems too big and powerful to sustain himself on a provender of a handful of sorcerers, taken at great intervals, but I guess we just have to take it on faith.

How do you pronounce "Evagh"? I'm inclined to a sort of German pronunciation, like eh-FACH, where the last consonant is an open guttural.

In The Last Hieroglyph, editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger note

Clark Ashton Smith probably had more fun writing "The Coming of the White Worm" than any of his other stories; he also probably experienced more frustration in getting it into print, and remuneration was minimal at best.

Farnsworth Wright and John W. Campbell each requested submissions from CAS, but both subsequently turned down this story. The Stirring Science Stories publication might not have paid at all, or at best only minimally.

7 > I also wondered about the intended pronunciation of "Evagh". Mentally I settled for a more English-like ee-VAH with 'ah' like in father.

Perhaps oddly, I perceived no such hesitation with "Rlim Shaikorth", tho on reflection the "rrr-LIM SHY-korth" I assumed may not be the most likely one intended by an anglophone.

Note that Eibon himself was introduced earlier, I think first in "The Door to Saturn" (an excellent tale, filled with CAS's best sardonic humour).

I was a bit surprised at the turn the story took once Evagh was aboard Yikilth. There was a shift of tone from the purely ominous to dark humour, particularly in the attitudes of the other sorcerers.

> 9
That's how I read "Evagh", too - with the stress on the second syllable. I can't imagine Smith intended a homophone of "Eva"!

It struck me that, if Smith had written (and managed to sell) further chapters of the Book of Eibon, it would have ended up looking a bit like an EC Horror comic, with Eibon in the role of Crypt Keeper.

I agree that, once he was transported to ("snatched up by"? "shanghai'ed on"?) the magical iceberg, the story took a turn towards dark, faux naïf fairytale. But that's a quality that I've seen in decadent literature, and Smith was definitely a decadent, albeit a late example. I don't think the fairytale element is a weakness in plotting or anything of that sort, it's rather that this is just what Smith does, being the type of artist that he is.

> 10 transported to ("snatched up by"? "shanghai'ed on"?)

I think it's pressed to serve on. But the lack of demanded labor is a big tip-off that he will be served up at some point.

> 11

Boom-Tish!

One of my favorite Smith stories. This is at least the fourth time I've read it.

Incidentally, years ago, Tim Powers, on the news group that discusses his work, said Philip K. Dick liked Smith, and this story was a particular favorite of his.

White is not, in the West, a color normally associated with death, but Smith makes it so here.

The opening bit with the galleys of frozen men showing up on the shores of Mhu Thalen is a sign of a sort of plague seizing the land, and they reminded me of the plague ship that sailed into Genoa in 1347 and introduced Europe to the Black Death.

There seems to be sort a sorcerous conservation of energy when Rlim's boiling "blood" issues forth from the wound.

There are bits of Lovecraftian language like "ultramundane". Connor and Hilger's notes in The Last Hieroglyph say Smith was trying to answer inquiries on "that much-requested cycle of occult elder lore", The Book of Eibon . Lovecraft's response was quite favorable. He appreciated the "primal horror & cosmic suggestion" of the story. I think it succeeds there too. As Smith noted, a lot of the success of this story involves "rejection of many words ... that might ordinarily be employed in writing."

There were echoes of Christian parody. The god devours his followers yet their souls are separate from him, seemingly. It struck me as having suggestions of the Eucharist and Trinity though the correspondences are far from being exactly inverted. The magical feeding of the sorcerers struck me, along with their purported mission to be sort of prophets of Rlim, as reminiscent of the manna the Israelites were fed with and Moses' mission from God. (I have never seen anything suggesting Smith intended this.)

I liked the imagery of houses and beings both strange and familiar being contained by the berg.

And, finally, there's Smith's rueful take on willful human blindness and gullibility as all but Evagh fail to see the obvious and prefer the consoling fiction of divine transformation and specialness.

> 13

For all that HLP has the rep for obscure vocabulary, "ultramundane" seems more like CAS's own diction to me.

I like your observations on Christian parody here. I'm inclined to believe that it was a deliberate move on Smith's part, since I've made similar notes about "Necromancy in Naat."

HPL's lexical extravagances are often of scientific origin - biological terms like rugose or squamous, archaeological ones like cyclopean - while CAS's more often strike me as literary or simply archaic. It follows that CAS's diction seems more obscure to me, but it's undoubtedly different for people with different backgrounds.

>14 paradoxosalpha: Thanks very much for the link. "Necromancy in Naat" was before my time with the group. You have definitely convinced me we have to see a certain decadent parody of Christianity as a Smith theme.

>15 AndreasJ: An aside on Smith's vocabulary. A few years back my wife at a garage sale bought a two volume Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary. I exasperatingly asked, "Did we need another dictionary in the house?" However, it's from 1937, and, since then, I've found it a way better source to check out Smith's vocabulary than any others including the compact edition of the OED. I take, from that, that Smith's vocabulary may not have been as outré for his time as we think. And, yes, "ultramundane" is in it.

Using an uncomfortable conjunction of two words to subtly convey a heightened sense of meaning was an HPL specialty. "Ultramundane" could well have been a stylistic wink from one author to another.