CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE SONG OF THE NECROMANCER: “LOSS” IN CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S FICTION

The writings of Clark Ashton Smith display a continuity of idea and image that can only be described as remarkable. Fantastic settings and happenings from his early poems crop up twenty years later as the bases for short stories; prose-poems written in Smith’s mid-twenties were fleshed into the elaborate fictions of his forties; he would write of Medusa in 1911, in his verse masterpiece “Medusa”, and in 1957, four years before his death, in the ironic tale “The Symposium of the Gorgon”. Evidence for the interconnectedness of Smith’s literary output is discernible in nearly every poem and story. The endurance of this imaginative vision should give us all pause.

Equally impressive is the tenacity with which Smith clung to certain emotional themes throughout his work; and of these themes, he returned most frequently to “loss”.

Perhaps a quarter of Smith’s fantastic stories (twenty-five or thirty out of some 110) deal in a basic fashion with the subject of loss, and in this essay we shall concern ourselves with the most prominent of these; but nearly every Smith tale and many of his poems make some reference to loss, or use an image of loss metaphorically to set an emotional tone.

In this article attention will be paid to the types of loss we find in Smith’s fiction (with some discussion as to why he chose to present those types), and to his attitude towards attempts to regain whatever was lost. The structure of the essay has been inspired by “The Song of the Necromancer”, a poem in Smith’s jotting notebook, The Black Book, that seems to encapsulate nearly all the major aspects of his relationship to loss. The poem strikes me as a piece of some importance for an understanding of Smith’s work in fiction:

I would recall a forfeit woe,

A buried bliss; my heart is fain

Ever to seek and find again

The lips whereon my lips have lain

In rose-red twilights long ago.

Lost are the lands of my desire,

Long fled, the hours of my delight,

The darkling splendor, fallen might:

In aeons past, the bournless night

Was rolled upon my rubied pyre.

In far oblivion blows the desert

Which was the lovely world I knew.

Quenched are the suns of gold and blue....

Into the nadir darkness thrust,

My world has gone as meteors go....

Coming from a man whose tales abound with mages and wizards, and who had a poetic image of himself as a solitary sorcerer (an entire cycle of his personal love-poems was to have been called “Wizard’s Love”), the poem’s title is a very suggestive one. In fact, “The Song of the Necromancer” is Smith’s own “song”.

Like any writer who has ever had to scramble to provide motivation for some character, Smith used loss as a plot-element in several of his tales, including “The Ghoul”, in which a man’s despair over the death of his wife drives him to bargain with a demon; “The Flower-Women”, wherein Maal Dweb’s yearning for his action-filled youth leads him to challenge the denizens of an untamed world; and “Thirteen Phantasms”, whose main character is plagued by bizarre hallucinations of his lost beloved. But for Smith there was an importance to loss that went far beyond plot: his real interest was not in what loss could make his characters do, but in how it could make them feel.

Smith created scores of situations in which individuals lose the things closest to their hearts, and live on only to regret their loss and to contrast their fallen state with the glory they once knew. He gave his characters the capacity to realize the extent of their loss, and to express the pain they felt; and he used their scrutiny—their comparisons of ‘now’ and ‘then’, of ‘what once had been’ and ‘what is no more’—to spotlight the emotions he wished to convey to his readers.

These emotions, attendant to ‘falls from grace’ of one sort or another, were very special to Smith, and he worked all their shadings and manifestations into his literary output: regret, nostalgia, homesickness, alienation, grief, ennui, loss of innocence, age, death, decay. Certain verbs and adjectives literally ring in our ears after a session with his stories or poems, so often do we encounter them: “sunken”, “faded”, “fallen”, “lost”, “irretrievable”, “longing”, “yearning”, “seeking”.

Having just argued for such a central role for ‘loss’ in Smith’s fiction, please permit me a brief aside. You have in your hands, dear reader, to the best of my knowledge, the very first essay to discuss the profound fixation Smith had with ‘loss’; I have previously never encountered the word linked to CAS in any context whatsoever. How, then, is it possible that this overarching concern of Smith’s literary life had gone entirely unnoticed by generations of his critics? Why has this ‘Pattern in Smith’s Carpet’, so to speak, not been recognized long before now? Good questions; but for all that I might speculate on their answers, my most honest reply really boils down to, ‘Beats me’.

But having said that... perhaps it’s partly been a case of mistaken identity. This has been the case, I believe, for those critics who view Smith as a writer preoccupied with Death. Fritz Leiber, for example, wrote that “Death in all its phases—from maggot-banquets to mere forgetting, erasing forever from all tables of memory—seems to be [Smith’s] chief inspiration and theme”. This is a misdiagnosis, however—a mistaking of the symptom for the disease. While it may be true (as L. Sprague de Camp would have it) that “no one since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse”, Death itself was never Smith’s fixation. Rather, an individual’s death, or the death of a world or a star for that matter, had the potential to open a certain significant door for Smith—a door that could be opened just as easily by ‘the passing of years’, ‘the corruption of innocence’, and so on—and through that door would come not Death, but Death’s hand-maidens, Yearning and Loss. These were the real subjects of Clark Ashton Smith’s obsession, the ground-notes to his emotional life. We hear Smith sounding them clearly, from the mouth of his character ‘John Milwarp’, writer of imaginative fiction and hero of “The Chain of Aforgomon”: “In the background of my mind there has lurked a sentiment of formless, melancholy desire, for some nameless beauty long perished out of time”.

Returning to “The Song of the Necromancer”, our guidebook to ‘loss’ in Smith, we cannot help but notice the itemized list of the Necromancer’s greatest losses: first up is ‘love’, followed by ‘youth / vigor / power’, and lastly ‘worlds of impossible splendour’. These three sources of loss will be discussed in turn in this essay. While it is indeed true that the causes for his characters’ feelings of loss were of lesser interest to Smith than the feelings themselves, this choice of organization is handy, and also provides a ghoulish opportunity for some biographical muckraking. We will take time to look for significant events and circumstances within Smith’s own life, the echoes or shadows of which may underlie the loss he crafted into his fiction. We conclude the essay by discussing the fates of those who choose “to seek and find again” whatever they have lost.

* * * * * * *

“...the lips whereon my lips have lain...”

As might be expected of a poet, Smith was greatly attracted to the strength of the emotion of love, and the fervor with which we cling to it and to our lovers. (Note that his love-poems certianly outnumber his more famous “fantastic” or “horrific” poems.) Since it looms so large in our lives, Smith found love an ideal thing for the characters of his stories to lose.

And as it happens, Smith himself had suffered such a loss. Facts are scanty at present, but Smith is known to have fallen in love with “Iris”, a “nymph of...harvest-colored hair” (as he said of her in an unpublished poem, “For Iris”), perhaps in the early 1920s. His eventual wife, Carol Jones Dorman, wrote that “he lavished his love upon his first, hopelessly ill beloved, who died of consumption before she was thirty.... And always, after the first tragedy of love for the beautiful blonde separated from her husband ...[Smith] chose brunettes for his deepest loves”. (Quotation from an unfinished memoir, The Man Who Walks the Stars, in the John Hay Library of Brown University.) And among the poems Smith wrote to or for his Iris, we find the following item, untitled and unpublished, from February 1923:

Your hair, a memory of gold

Alone remains from buried years:

What love was ours, what grief, or happy tears,

Is now a tale untold.

But Smith would tell the tale of this lost love, veiled and fictionalized perhaps, in many poems and stories.

The textbook example of such a “loss of love” story is “The Venus of Azombeii”. The central character of this tale, Julius Marsden, has felt throughout his life “the ineffable nostalgia of the far-off and the unknown” (compare this against Smith’s own “wild aspiration toward the unknown, the uncharted, the exotic, the utterly strange and ultra-terrestrial”, as he stated it to Lovecraft in October 1930), which compels him to make a journey to dark and mysterious Africa. In a wilderness region he meets a beautiful black woman, Wanaos, whom he comes to love. Marsden experiences a time of wild happiness: “A powerful fever exalted all my senses, a deep indolence bedrugged my brain. I lived, as never before, and never again, to the full capacity of my corporeal being.... The world and its fullness were ours” (emphasis added).

As Smith would have it, though, their life together is soon shattered through the treachery of a rival suitor to Wanaos. Both lovers are poisoned with a slow-killing brew, by which, please note, Smith gives them plenty of time to realize the sadness of their fate and the fullness of their loss. “Dead was all our former joy and happiness.... Love, it was true, was still ours, but love that already seemed to have entered the hideous gloom and nothingness of the grave.... The leaden lapse of funereal days, beneath heavens from which for us the very azure had departed ....” Smith shows us the high peak of their love, and in contrast the low ebb of their fallen state.

Identical in its emotions but with a slight twist to its development is the extended prose-poem “Told in the Desert”. A young traveller loses his way while crossing a desert expanse. He eventually stumbles upon a cool and fertile oasis where dwells a beautiful girl, Neria. We are told that the young man’s sojourn with Neria, like that of Marsden and Wanaos in “Azombeii”, was “a life remote from all the fevers of the world, and pure from every soilure; it was infinitely sweet and secure”.

Unlike Marsden in “Azombeii”, however, the hero of “Desert” abandons his idyllic love-nest, his “irretrievable Aidann”, rather than having it taken away from him. But Smith does not end the story there. The man comes to yearn for his “bygone year... of happiness”; and seeking in later years the splendor of the oasis, he is doomed to wander in vain, and all his days thereafter are filled with “only the fading visions of memory, the tortures and despairs and illusions of the quested miles, the waste whereon there falls no lightest shadow of any leaf, and the wells whose taste is fire and madness....”

The next two stories to be discussed, “The Chain of Aforgomon” and “The Last Incantation”, have necromancers as their main characters rather than adventurous young men, and possess some other common features to which we will return later.

In “Aforgomon” the sorcerer Calaspa invokes the powers of an evil god to win back a flown hour with his dead beloved, Belthoris. The past is temporarily regained through this necromancy, and in typical fashion Smith presents their resurrected love in the grandest of terms. “We dwelt alone in a universe of light, in a blossomed heaven. Exalted by love in the high harmony of those moments, we seemed to touch eternity”. We are left to contrast this with Calaspa’s mood after the hour has passed: “Sorrow and desolation choked my heart as ashes fill some urn consecrated to the dead; and all the hues and perfumes of the garden about me were redolent only of the bitterness of death”.

“The Last Incantation” contains some of Smith’s finest descriptions of the emotions of loss, and the story also serves as a bridge between the “loss of love” and “loss of the past” tales.

At the height of his powers as the mightiest sorcerer of Poseidonis, Malgyris the Mage sees only the empty, unchallenging years ahead of him, and the barren moments of the present, and takes but a cold and hollow joy from his exalted position. Smith’s description of this state of mind is worth quoting in full:

....and turning from the greyness of the present, from the darkness that seemed to close in upon the future, he groped among the shadows of memory, even as a blind man who has lost the sun and seeks it everywhere in vain. And all the vistas of time that had been so full of gold and splendor, the days of triumph that were colored like a soaring flame, the crimson and purple of the rich imperial years of his prime, all these were chill and dim and strangely faded now, and the rememberance thereof was no more than the stirring of dead embers.... There was nothing left but shadow and greyness and dust, nothing but the empty dark and the cold, and a clutching weight of insufferable weariness, of immedicable anguish.

Amid this desolation, Malgyris is sustained only by a gentle memory from his innocent youth which “like an alien star ...still burned with unfailing luster—the memory of the girl Nylissa whom he had loved in days ere the lust of unpermitted knowledge and necromantic dominion had ever entered his soul”.

Like the male protagonists of the other stories discussed, Malgyris aches for his lost love. Unlike the others, however, his mind also dwells upon the passing of his former, untarnished self, the “fervent and guileless heart” of his youth, and the glorious, sun-filled days of his past. This sentiment leads us to a group of stories featuring Smith’s second method for bringing loss and regret into the lives of his characters.

* * * * * * *

“...the darkling splendor, fallen might...”

Smith set his most famous cycle of stories, the tales of Zothique, in a “fallen” world where the past infinitely outweighs the future. “On Zothique, the last continent, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood”. There are constant reminders of age and decay, of a glory withered away by Time: vast deserts of tombs and buried cities, frequent references to the greater potency of the potions and spells of elder wizards, etc.

On the level of the individual, Smith dishes out the same bitter brew. His fiction is filled with characters haunted by memories of a more desirable past, from whom Time has stolen precious years. Depending on the character in question—again, Smith’s focus is on loss itself, not the object lost—they may desire the power and glory they once knew, the simplicity and vigor of the years of youth, a lost innocence, some splendrous state of being, or the vanished beauty and grandeur of incomparable cultures and beloved worlds. (Here, of course, one notes the title of Smith’s second collection of short stories, Lost Worlds, originally The Book of Lost Worlds.)

Just why Smith was so obsessed with the notion of ‘a fall from a past of grace’ is a matter for speculation, and we should bear in mind that ‘armchair psychoanalyst’ is a dubious profession. Still, it is possible that at the time he wrote the bulk of his stories, Smith felt that he had suffered a profound ‘fall from grace’. Smith’s late teens and early twenties had certainly been a heady period: he’d been taken under the wing of a personal idol, the poet George Sterling, and his first book of poetry had brought him comparisons to Keats and Shelley. This notoriety must surely have raised his standing in his small hometown, not to mention his own expectations for the future. And yet the Depression found Smith without a job or viable occupation, unable to eke out a living as a poet, with girfriends berating him for his lack of ambition. And while his switch to writing fiction for the pulps did put bread on the table, he found it a very distatsteful business at times—he once said to Sterling that writing prose was “a hateful task, for a poet, and [one which] wouldn’t be necessary in any true civilization”. In short, it may be that Smith suffered that variety of ‘let-down’ or loss peculiar to child prodigies.

As a simple example of this yearning for the past, consider the following paragraph from “The Testament of Athammaus”, a story which details the desertion of the Hyperborean capital Commoriom as seen through the eyes of the one-time public executioner.

Forgive an aged man if he seem to dwell, as is the habit of the old, among the youthful recollections that have gathered to themselves the kingly purple of removed horizons and the strange glory that illumes irretrievable things. Lo! I am made young again when I recall Commoriom, when in this grey city of the sunken years I behold in retrospect her walls that looked mountainously down upon the jungle....

Note that the years after Commoriom are “sunken”, and its glory is “irretrievable”. Also note that Athammaus is alone in his suffering: “And though others forget, or haply deem her no more than a vain and dubitable tale, I shall never cease to lament Commoriom”. While others are healed, Smith chose to center his tale on a man whose feelings of regret have remained strong and vivid.

In “Xeethra”, perhaps his most famous tale of Zothique, Smith presents multifold loss alongside monstrous irony. A young goatherd, Xeethra, eats an enchanted fruit and is henceforth tormented by the memories of a past life wherein he was Prince Amero, ruler of the fair kingdom of Calyz. The bewildered and newly awakened king is repelled by the rude and simple life of Xeethra; he longs for a dimly recalled life of opulence. He journeys in search of Calyz, but discovers that the land has become a parched desert. Xeethra/Amero is “whelmed by utter loss and despair” at the sight of his ruined and crumbled homeland.

At this point in the story an emissary from Thasaidon, the Satan of the future, appears and offers him a strange deal. At the price of his soul, the life Amero once knew will be returned to him—but it will remain only so long as he wishes it to. Not really understanding this clause, the young man accepts the bond; and suddenly the past lives again for him, and he is the king of a bountiful land. But in time he succumbs to ennui, and finds himself wishing for the simple life of a goatherd. In an instant he is back once more in the leper-peopled desert of Calyz. “His heart was a black chill of desolation, and he seemed to himself as one who had known... the loss of high splendor; and who stood now amid the extremity of age and decay.... Anguish choked the heart of Xeethra as if with the ashes of burnt-out pyres and the shards of heaped ruin.... In the end, there was only dust and dearth; and he, the doubly accursed, must remember and repent for evermore all that he had forfeited”, both the powerful life of a monarch, and the carefree and uncluttered life of a shepherd. He can never return to either life.

An even grander scale of suffering arising from ‘the loss of the past’ is displayed in the prose-poem “Sadastor”. On a distant planet, “dim and grey beneath a waning sun...a token of doom to fairer and younger worlds”, the demon Chamadis discovers the mermaid Lyspial wallowing in a small briny pool that had once been a far-flung ocean. She has witnessed the slow desiccation of the sea and the destruction of the glorious world of her past; she is tortured with the knowledge of her present state, and of all she has lost.

“Of the seas wherein I swam and sported at leisure... there remains only this fallen pool. Alas! my lovely seas, with their mingled perfumes of brine and weed.... Alas! the quinquiremes of cycle-ended wars, and the heavy-laden argosies with sails of cordage and byssus.... Alas! the dead captains, the beautiful dead sailors that were borne by the ebbing tide to my couches of amber seaweed.... Alas! the kisses that I laid on their cold and hueless lips....”

Another fallen world is presented in the prose-poem, “From the Crypts of Memory”. The setting is a shadowy planet orbiting “a star whose course [was] decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past”. The people of this world are unspeakably ancient and have fallen far from their golden past. Only in memories can they haltingly recapture “an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow”. But such memories only add to the burden of age and sorrow, and by contrast their lives are made to seem even more pale and ghostly: “Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women ...the same desire that the dead may feel”.

And it doesn’t stop there—for Smith’s characters, not even death is an end to yearning and despair. On the contrary: while “a living death” was used in “From the Crypts of Memory” as a metaphor for a great suffering, a literal ‘life in death’ is employed in “The Empire of the Necromancers” as a tool for generating feelings of loss. The legions of the dead, drawn forth from their tombs to serve as slaves to a pair of necromancers, find themselves living a sort of half-life: “the state to which they were summoned was empty and troublous and shadow-like. They knew no passion or desire, or delight....” We hear of their longings through the resurrected Prince of the people, who “knew that he had come back to a faded sun, to a hollow and spectral world. Like something lost and irretrievable, beyond prodigious gulfs, he recalled the pomp of his reign ...and the golden pride and exultation that had been his in youth.... Darkly he began to grieve for his fallen state”. Smith tormented the poor souls of this story with the loss of their glorious pasts, their very lives, and even the peace of oblivion.

* * * * * * *

“...Quenched are the suns of gold and blue...”

Now how do I top that?, Smith must have asked himself. We find his answer in a handful of stories in which individuals lose not simply the past, nor even life itself, but a glory beyond life, some ‘unnatural’ state or condition. In every case the ‘unnatural state of being’ is an ecstatic and desired one, and of course this makes perfect sense: Smith wanted his characters to long for the splendor they had experienced, beside which everyday life is wan and inadequate. And given such glorious experiences, they would naturally make the contrasts and comparisons of ‘then’ and ‘now’ that Smith liked to use, and feel the kind of regret and empty despair that so fascinated him.

The visions presented to these hapless characters are often so completely strange and wondrous that they can only be seen or understood in part. They are too far beyond the mundane sphere of human experience, like the image of incarnate Beauty glimpsed in Smith’s poem “A Dream of Beauty”: “Her face the light of fallen planets wore, / But as I gazed, in doubt and monderment, / Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more”. This itself is a technique Smith used to intensify and magnify the contrast of the inconceivable state of being, and the return to commonplace reality.

Stories in this category include “The City of the Singing Flame”, “The End of the Story”, “The Light from Beyond”, and “The White Sybil”. There is no need to describe the distinct wonders found in each of these tales. We need only note the similarity of their characters’ attitudes as they ‘come off the high’ of their unique experiences:

Words are futile to express what I have beheld and experienced.... Literature is nothing more than a shadow. Life, with its drawn-out length of monotonous, reiterative days, is unreal and without meaning, now.... (“The City of the Singing Flame”)

I have forgotten much of the delirium that ensued.... There were things too vast for memory to retain. And much that I remember could only be told in the language of Olympus.... Infinities were rolled before me.... I peered down upon the utmost heavens.... I am a mere remnant of my former self.... (“The Light From Beyond”)

Of all that followed, much was forgotten afterwards by Tortha. It was like a light too radiant to be endured.... ever afterward there was a cloudy dimness in his mind, a blur of unresolving shadow, like the dazzlement in eyes that have looked on some insupportable light. (“The White Sybil”)

For the heroes of these stories this past glory shall always be more resplendent and desirable than either the present or the future, a time always to be longed for. And for some it is a thing they must try to regain, whatever the cost.

* * * * * * *

“...I would recall...a buried bliss...”

“The Song of the Necromancer” has been our general guidebook to Smith’s relationship to loss, and we take note that it begins with a declaration of intent: the unhappy sorcerer (we learn of his unhappiness in the subsequent stanzas) would seek to resummon his lost past, and to draw back his dead love from the tomb. As we have seen, the same is true of several of the characters we find in Smith’s short stories.

Why Smith should have them strive to recapture what they’ve lost is obvious—such striving serves to underscore their unhappiness, and the depths of their dissatisfaction. That all these attempts either fail or end in self-destruction reflects Smith’s generally pessimistic outlook. “You can never go home again”, he’s telling us, “it’s no longer there”. Or if it is still there, and somehow you succeed in making it back, the achievement will amount to a very mixed blessing.

In a story like “Told in the Desert” what is sought after is literally unattainable, for though he may search the desert for the rest of his life, that young man will never again find the fertile oasis in which he lived so happily with Neria.

What Malgyris seeks in “The Last Incantation” is just as unattainable, though more figuratively so. Believing that he would be content to have his lost Nylissa beside him again, he summons her spectre from the grave. Once she has materialized, however, he begins to find fault with her manner and appearance. Dissatisfied and unsettled, he dismisses the phantom, at which point his familiar explains the true nature of his yearning and its predestined failure: “No necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless heart that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then”.

This same lesson is learned in Smith’s unfinished tale “Mnemoka”. Space-Alley Jon, a drifter of the space-lanes, purchases an illicit Martian drug which brings back memories with all the strength of real experiences. Jon intends to relive his first sexual experience, back in his innocent adolescence, with a girl named Sophia: “The thrill of that yielding... removed in time by years spent on half the solar worlds... remained poignant in memory”. But after downing the drug, he is haunted instead by visions of a brutal murder he recently committed. His life has become too soiled to allow retrieval of the moment he longed for. The boy who had lain with Sophia no longer existed. Jon, like Malygris, has learned that the same river can never be crossed twice.

Calaspa’s quest in “The Chain of Aforgomon” is also unsatisfying, and is self-destructive as well. His conjured hour with Belthoris vanishes back into the past just as a temporary spat develops between the two lovers. Ending on such a sour note, he proclaims that “vain, like all other hours, was the resummoned hour; doubly irredeemable was my loss”. Equally tragic is the price Calaspa pays, as he knew he must, for casting the time-distorting spell: he is tortured and killed by the local priesthood, and his soul is cursed to travel from body to body into the future, until in some other incarnation he shall die again for his crime.

Indeed, even when the acknowledged price is their own destruction, Smith’s men go forward unhaltingly to retrieve what they have lost, so great is their despair. The narrator of “The City of the Singing Flame” ends the tale by saying that he will return to the City and immolate himself in the Flame, that he might merge with the unearthly beauty and music that he had sampled and lost; and the hero of “The End of the Story” makes the same resolution, to die on the couch of a deadly lamia, from which he had been taken by force, rather than live out his years without her love:

I lamented the beautiful dream of which [I had been] deprived.... Never before had I experienced a passion of such intensity, such all-consuming ardor, as the one I conceived for [the lamia Nycea] ...and I know that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever rouse in me the same love and the same delight.

But whether they seek to regain their loss, or choose to suffer through a life of torment and regret, the characters in the stories we’ve discussed are all made to feel “the loss of high splendor”, to live through “sunken years”, and to long for the return of “a buried bliss”; and as each is the puppet-creation of Clark Ashton Smith, their songs of woe should be heard as those of the Necromancer himself.