CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE BIRTH OF UBBO-SATHLA: SMITH, WANDREI, ALFRED KRAMER, AND THE BEGOTTEN SOURCE
Two of the most imaginative and important writers of the 1930s pulp scene were Clark Ashton Smith and Donald Wandrei. Each contributed unique and instantly recognizable fantasies to the magazines of the day, and each had his own small but devoted following. Smith concentrated on transfiguring prose into poetry; Wandrei worked to perfect the language of fear and wonder. Smith took inspiration from the realm of ancient mythology and from flights of pure fancy; Wandrei transplanted the scenes and images of his nightmares into fiction.
To readers familiar with the work of these two men it may seem that “creativity” is the only link between them, the only similarity, but evidence has begun to indicate other connections. We shouldn’t be too surprised by this: Smith and Wandrei were friends and correspondents for thirty-five years and read each other’s work with great interest. They exchanged many fantastic stories with one another, often in their early, formative states.
Case in point: there is clear evidence, I believe, of a Smith-Wandrei connection for Smith’s famous story, “Ubbo-Sathla”. Written in February 1932, the tale appeared in the July 1933 Issue of Weird Tales, having been accepted by editor Farnsworth Wright in May 1932 on a second submission. It belongs tangentially to Smith’s cycle of Hyperborean stories, and involves an ancient crystal sphere, said in The Book of Eibon to have the power over time. The title creature, Ubbo-Sathla, is a vast and formless mass, which presided over the fens of the steaming, new-made Earth at the very Beginning of Time. Both Ubbo-Sathla and The Book of Eibon were subsequently subsumed into the Cthulhu Mythos.
A certain amount of confusion has arisen as a result of this, particularly in regards to Ubbo-Sathla’s epithet (see Robert M. Price’s “Beget Me Not” in Crypt of Cthulhu #7, p. 30). August Derleth called him “the unforgotten source” in The Lurker at the Threshold, and this is no misprint—Derleth’s original typescript for the novel reads “unforgotten”. Elsewhere Ubbo-Sathla is referred to as “the unforgotten beginning” or “the unbegotten beginning”. But Smith gets the last word, of course: in a quotation from The Book of Eibon in “Ubbo-Sathla”, we find the creature is “the unbegotten source”, i.e., that which was never spawned.
But truth to tell, Ubbo-Sathla was not quite the motherless waif that Smith would have us believe, and this brings us to Donald Wandrei’s short story, “The Lives of Alfred Kramer”.
Smith read “Alfred Kramer” in manuscript in August 1931, thirteen months before its publication in Weird Tales. As is well known, Smith, Lovecraft, Wandrei, and Derleth often used their correspondence to circulate new short stories for criticism. “Alfred Kramer” made it first to HPL, then to Smith; Derleth may have seen it later. Smith seemed genuinely to like the yarn, although he made some suggestions towards revision. But before discussing these, a short description of “The Lives of Alfred Kramer” would be helpful. The story begins with the chance meeting in a smoking car of two late-night train passengers, Alfred Kramer and Wallace Forbes. The narrator, Forbes, is disturbed and oddly repelled by the pale and unmoving face of his new acquaintance, who tells him (rather abruptly) that he fears to fall asleep. Kramer eventually reveals that he is the inventor of the “Kappa Ray”, a form of cosmic energy that has the effect upon humans of invoking genetically stored memories of previous lives. He has generated this energy and stored it in a sort of battery, and by exposing himself to it before sleep has induced dreams which are “memories of the past”. In his first experimentation with the Kappa Ray, Kramer relived some experiences of his immediate ancestors (his father’s flight from the Chicago Fire and his grandfather’s shipwreck); subsequent attempts brought him memories of a medieval witch-burning, a Druidic sacrifice, an encounter with Christ, the sinking of Atlantis, and so on.
Unfortunately, at that point in his investigations Kramer discovered that his bodily form had also mimicked the temporal regression: his appearance had become that of a shaggy Neanderthal!
Needless to say, Kramer had resolved to put an end to his sleeping journeys, and in a fit of brutish rage he destroyed the Kappa battery. But he found to his horror that he continued to dream, and that each night drew him farther back along the evolutionary path. He dreamt of the years before the advent of Man, and inhabited the bodies of ever-cruder beasts. In the latest dream he was an invertebrate swimming sluggishly through the tepid and silty seas of Earth’s beginning.
Kramer tells Forbes that he has held himself awake for three full days, fearing that the next mental voyage will be his last. A lull in the conversation ensues, however, and Kramer dozes off. Forbes, with some intimation of what is to come, is in the process of ‘exiting stage-left’ when Kramer screams, jumps up, drops his mask and artificial hands, and dissolves into a pool of that substance near-and-dear to the Weird Tales crowd, fetid slime. The end.
Now, the idea of a drug or spell that would propel consciousness backward along the trail of memory was also popular in Weird Tales. Frank Belknap Long had used it in “The Hounds of Tindalos”, Clark Ashton Smith would build “The Chain of Aforgommon” around the same notion, and Wandrei himself would employ it again in his 1934 story “The Man Who Never Lived”. No doubt there are many other examples. But when Smith read and commented upon Wandrei’s story, he had no quarrel with its originality. And although Wandrei didn’t actually take Smith’s suggestions, it’s important for us to know what they were, and to keep them in mind for the following discussions. Writing first to August Derleth, he’d said:
I criticized “Alfred Kramer” pretty heavily myself, advising Wandrei to simplify the yarn and work in some sort of connecting thread among the ancestral incidents; perhaps a pursuing menace, which Kramer is finally forced to confront in its primordial lair as he goes back on the trail of memory. There seems to be a lack of point and significance as the tale stands; though the underlying notion is certainly a fine one. (Letter dated August 28, 1931)146
A letter to Lovecraft expressed the same misgivings, but was perhaps a bit more positive:
The story is excellent, with a strong ending; but I agree with you that it could be simplified to advantage. I also think that it could be made much more tremendous if there were more unity in the incidents remembered from ancestral lives by Kramer. There might be some recurrent haunting horror in many if not all of them—a horror which Kramer is forced to confront in its primordial lair by going back to the first genesis of organic life on the ‘ planet—or beyond organic life. (Undated letter.)147
(In fact, Smith was proposing a story rather like C. L. Moore’s “Tryst in Time”, published in the December 1936 issue of Astounding, in which a temporal explorer has a series of adventures in the past, and is met in each by a girl or woman in whom he sees a tantalizing hint of familiarity. It turns out that the man and woman are somehow fated for one another.)
So then, now that we know that Smith read “Alfred Kramer”, and held various opinions on it, what does this story have to do with “Ubbo-Sathla”? The evidence for a connection lies in a group of Smith’s plot-germs only recently discovered.
Roughly twenty pages of hand-written story synopses came to light in 1981, and were delivered by Smith’s literary executors to the Clark Ashton Smith Collection of Brown University in August of that year. The papers date from the period 1930-32 and contain the outlines of many of Smith’s most famous tales, as well as scores of ideas that he never finished into stories. One page in particular is relevant to this discussion. This page is also somewhat unique, in that we know without question which is the earlier-written side of the sheet, and which is the later: both the first entry on side one and the last entry on side two outline “The Beast of Averoigne,” and while the second occurrence is a complete description of the tale, the first is just a single sentence, representing Smith’s initial inspiration. This page contains the following items (dates of story completion, if applicable, are given in parentheses):
Side One:
The Beast of Averoigne (June 18, 1932)
The Inverse Avatar
The Double Shadow (March 14, 1932)
The Cosmic Sequel (may have served as an inspiration for “Double Cosmos”, begun in 1934. completed March 1940)
The Embassy to Tiirath
Side Two:
Ubbo-Sathla (February 15, 1932)
The Beast of Averoigne (June 18, 1932)
It seems reasonable to assign this page to the period “late 1931-early 1932,” a time shortly following Smith’s August 1931 critique of “The Lives of Alfred Kramer”.
One of the synopses, “The Inverse Avatar,” seems unquestionably to be Smith’s rephrasing of “Alfred Kramer”, with Wandrei’s weak point—as Smith saw it—explicitly corrected:
A man who remembers his incarnations in the future, and becomes convinced that his own chain of lives is moving backward in time—fleeing from a Nemesis that originated at the world’s end, and seeking a primal sanctuary.
In this synopsis we find the notions of (1) a string of incarnations extending from the main character to other times; (2) awareness of these lives via “ancestral memory”, however activated; and (3) a flight through these lives from a pursuing menace.
What Smith chose to do with Wandrei’s story, and his early suggestions for it, was to play the flip-side, so to speak: rather than having the hero confront the pursuing horror in its prehistoric lair, as he’d first suggested, the hero would seek refuge in prehistory, far from the post-historic lair of the Thing. He’d added his own twist to the plot-line Wandrei developed in “Alfred Kramer.”
Could this “flip side”, with its inverted logic, make it as a story? Well, Smith never went on to write it....
...But he did write “Ubbo-Sathla”. As that page of synopses indicates, soon after plotting “The Inverse Avatar” he plotted “Ubbo-Sathla”, which returns more to the story-line he had envisioned for “Alfred Kramer”, but which still contains elements of “The Inverse Avatar”:
“Ubbo-Sathla”
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 with the spawn of Ubbo-Sathla. He does not reemerge from his trance.
In this synopsis as well we find Smith discussing a mental flight backward in time, towards a goal. There is a Nemesis in its primordial lair, which the hero “confronts”, and this confrontation does indeed take place at “the first genesis of organic life...or beyond organic life,” as his letter to Lovecraft had suggested for “Alfred Kramer”. And just like the Wandrei story, the hero of “Ubbo-Sathla” is forced to inhabit the body of a primitive creature.
As I’m sure we all remember from the completed story, the main character Paul Tregardis is an incarnation of the Hyperborean wizard Zon Mezzamalech. (So we see that the concern with “previous’ lives” is maintained in “Ubbo-Sathla”, as is the notion of the Horror or Nemesis forming the link between them.) A misty globe of crystal, found in a pawn shop, magically connects the two men, whose lives are separated by millions of years. Mezzamalech seeks to retrieve the tablets of elder wisdom that lay beside Ubbo-Sathla, and it is his greed and determination that drags the passive Tregardis into the past, to his destruction.
This emphasis on a character living in the past (Mezzamalech), with a corresponding deemphasis of his future incarnation (Tregardis), represents a holdover from “The Inverse Avatar”. In that story’s inverted time-sequence, the main character would have been “the man of the past,” who knows of his future incarnations.
(As a last aside, we should note that the “memories of future incarnations” concept stayed with Smith a while longer. Six weeks after writing “Ubbo-Sathla” he completed “The Plutonian Drug”, in which a man takes a drug that enables him to visualize his future movements as an unbroken chain of self-images—his future selves—extending out of sight.)
None of the above analysis, of course, points to any mimicry or lack of imagination or originality on Smith’s part, regarding the genesis and development of “Ubbo-Sathla”. Rather, this discussion underscores his creativity—whatever its inspirations, “Ubbo-Sathla” remains very much a story by Clark Ashton Smith.