CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A REVIEW OF THE DEVIL’S NOOTBOOK
The Devil’s Notebook: Collected Epigrams and Pensees, by Clark Ashton Smith (ed. Don Herron and Donald Sidney-Fryer; Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1991.)
As an inexperienced reviewer of books, I nearly failed to realize the perspective from which this review should be written. I had been thinking that little needed to be said, really, about this collection of Smith’s epigrams: such revealing material by Clark Ashton Smith is self-evidently of interest, and its publication can only be welcomed with open arms and uncapped pens. This is still true. But what is also true is that this book will probably hold little value for the majority of Smith’s readers, those drawn to Smith as a storyteller or poet, and those who admire the richness of his imagination. For all that Zothique is mentioned at one point amongst these one-liners, this is not a book in which Smith wears his “fantaisiste” hat (or beret). The Devil’s Notebook, then, fills a niche most closely analogous to that filled by Lovecraft’s essays, on politics or domestic animals or dropped eggs or whatever: mere irrelevant verbiage to the Yog-Sothothians, but the very Library of Babel to students of the man. In this case, however, given the relative thinness of The Devil’s Notebook, we’re probably talking “Babelian Reading Room” here.
The epigrams in The Devil’s Notebook were composed in the early 1920s, prior to Smith’s fiction-writing period but after several poetry volumes had appeared, and were published for the most part in Smith’s column for The Auburn Journal, his local newspaper. Given the opportunity to have his drops of wisdom—and acid—put into print, Smith skirted the down-home homilies the editors might have expected, and cranked out instead a slew of acerbic jabs. A lot of these little things are tremendously humorous, and many are unquestionably insightful. Equally many are drawn from a side of Smith that is often missing from his other writings, apart from satires like “The Monster of the Prophecy”: at a level of intensity which almost shocks us, these epigrams are bitter, anti-social, self-serving, elitist, and sexist (or perhaps “cruel to women” is a better phrase to use than our modem one). The only other source I’m aware of which comes even close to rivaling the bitterness and dissatisfaction of these epigrams is Smith’s letters to George Sterling, many of which were written around the time of his Auburn Journal column. In later years (the 1930s and beyond), at least to judge from his other letters, Smith became more even-tempered and even-handed in his reactions to his acquaintances, to Auburn, to people in general. Or perhaps he simply became more resigned. In any event, The Devil’s Notebook is invaluable for giving us this nearly unprecedented glimpse of an earlier Smith, one in whom—for all that he was approaching thirty at the time—the youthful fires and intolerances were still burning very brightly.
Smith’s targets are many; most of them he hits square-on. Here are a few of the subjects on which Smith is not reluctant to share an opinion: modern poetry (“Vers librist: a Bolshevik trying to start something in Parnassus”); utility vs. value (“It does not follow that onions are superior to narcissi, because they happen to be edible”—surely aimed at his “get-a-job” critics); his anti-intellectual stance (“Philosopher: A victim of thought who mistakes the disease for the remedy, and failing to cure himself, sets out to inoculate others”); the New Politics (“Socialist: one who believes that tigers should go halves with jackals”). The wickedest barbs are reserved for gossip, propriety, and the provincial mentality: one senses that these particular epigrams were Smith’s way of taking revenge on Auburn for being Auburn (“Small town snobbery: the cutworm putting on airs when it meets the potato-bug”). One also senses that a subset of epigrams flaunt Smith’s amorous affairs with Auburn’s housewives148—we are given numerous meditations on the subjects of rouge and shoulder straps, for instance.
And what a critical luxury (for someone who did a lot of synopsifying for the Smith Reader’s Guide) to be able to quote some favorite pieces from this collection in full!
Morality: the theory that nature went wrong in creating women with legs.
The ascetic and the sensualist are animated by the same illusion. One through denial, the other through indulgence, dreams that he can escape from himself.
Dance: a device for determining in public just how far it is safe to go in private.
How delightful to be a priest! So many things are forbidden to priests!
One can always learn something from adversity and misfortune. One can at least learn the world’s inhumanity.
As we see, Smith by turns sugared his pronouncements with humor, glazed them with sarcasm, or left their scornful taste untouched. We can appreciate them as scholars with an interest in Smith’s life and thought; and we can react to them as opinionated individuals ourselves, while holding in mind and heart an observation by Don Herron that couldn’t be more true: that “these collected epigrams would not honestly deserve his title The Devil’s Notebook if they left everyone unoffended.”
148. The real details of this situation are not known to me—I can only hope that Smith scholarship will shortly pursue this significant subject!