CHAPTER ONE
OVERVIEW OF LIFE AND WORK
In the fall of 1930, not long after the onset of his major fiction-writing campaign, Clark Ashton Smith told his friend and colleague, H. P. Lovecraft: “My own standpoint is that there is absolutely no justification for literature unless it serves to release the imagination from the bounds of everyday life”.1 These words lie at the heart of Smith’s artistic principles. They were the outgrowth of an isolated, impoverished, dreary, and at times desperate existence, where the only means of escape lay in the exercise of imagination.
For fifty years, Smith’s home was a small cabin in the Sierra Mountains of northern California. There he wrote poetry and fiction, painted in water-color, sketched in crayon, and sculpted local rocks into fantastic forms—and there he suffered years of loneliness and hardship. A brief period of notoriety came his way in 1912, at the age of nineteen, with the publication of his first poetry collection; twenty years later, he became a leading contributor to the now-legendary pulp magazine, Weird Tales (with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith is often hailed as one of “The Three Musketeers” of Weird Tales). But in the main, Smith’s work met with little notice or approval. He is known today primarily for his extravagantly imaginative short stories, particularly those set in the fantasy realms of Zothique and Averoigne, and for his exotic science fictions. Though he thought himself a poet for most of his life, his verse resides in a handful of small press collections, years out of print, and his artwork has never seen any large distribution.
But whatever the medium of expression, the works of Clark Ashton Smith carry a considerable appeal. Smith was a unique stylist; his writings are artfully crafted, sensual, and rich in color and inventiveness. And taken together, they display an astonishing continuity of theme and image, all the more astonishing when one realizes that his literary output spans a period of nearly fifty years. His ideals, and even certain scenes and settings, remained true to him all his life.
Broadly speaking, Smith’s works all share a wish for escape, for a widening of the horizons of experience. His simple and uneventful life bred “a wild aspiration toward the unknown, the uncharted, the exotic, the utterly strange and ultra-terrestrial”, an aspiration that “could never be satisfied by anything on earth or in actual life, but only through dream-ventures such as those in my poems, paintings and stories”.2 The realism that characterized the literature of the 1920s and 1930s held no attraction for Smith, for he felt it confined art to “the archives of the ant-hill, and the annals of the hogsty”.3 Thus his “dream-ventures” were strongly at odds with the artistic conventions of his day.
Smith saw himself as an outsider, in his own words “a fantastic, eccentric, impractical, improvident devil: that weIl-nigh fabulous being, a poet”.4 Born in Long Valley, California, on the 13th of January, 1893,5 Clark Ashton Smith was the only child of Timeus Smith and Mary Francis (Gaylord) Smith. His British father, who travelled extensively before settling in California (visiting Brazil, Australia, and elsewhere), worked as night-clerk at a local hotel. His mother was born in the Midwest, and sold magazine subscriptions locally to help support the family. When Clark was nine, they moved some six miles to a thirty-nine-acre spread on Boulder Ridge (also called Indian Hill), two miles outside the small town of Auburn, and father and son together built the family cabin. Smith described the site as “a rather arid volcanic hilltop [whose] best feature is the wide and elevated view; since, on the west we see a long stretch of the Sacramento Valley and the Coast Range mountains; and on the east the higher foothills topped by more than a hundred miles of snowy Sierran peaks”.6 Certainly he did not lack visual stimulus for his poetic fancy. His childhood was uneventful (as was all his life), though marred by illnesses and a sense of isolation brought on by the remoteness of the family’s homestead.
He attended the local grammar school for the required years, though high school was bypassed in favor of an education at home. He later judged that his education really began “with the reading of Robinson Crusoe (unabridged), Gulliver’s Travels, the fairy tales of Anderson and the Countess D’Aulnoy, The Arabian Nights, and (at the age of thirteen) Poe’s poems”.7 He is also reported to have read Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary from cover to cover. At the age of eleven, he began producing short stories in imitation of the fairy tales he admired, and poetry soon followed. Four of these early tales, contes cruels (biting vignettes) with Oriental themes, found publication in 1910-12.
At the instigation of a local high school teacher who admired his verse, Smith made contact in early 1911 with George Sterling, a well known West Coast poet, who became and remained a friend and supporter of Smith until Sterling’s suicide in November 1926. Smith made several trips to San Francisco and Carmel to visit with the elder poet. Sterling also helped in the preparation of Smith’s first book of poetry, The Star Treader and Other Poems, published in San Francisco in 1912 by Sterling’s publisher, A. M. Robertson.
In this collection of verse we see the beginnings of Smith’s literary esthetic. As is implied by the title, the scope of these poems is grand and distant, with settings and subjects far outside everyday experience. A handful of pieces take a common beauty of nature as a springboard, while for others the point of departure is some classic myth or figure (classicism was a mark of erudition for Smith). The more characteristic poems of the volume concern celestial matters, including poems to the sun and other stars, an ode to the Abyss, a song of the Comet, etc.
These early poems, rich with imaginative color and evocative metaphor, clearly place emotion over idea. They stand as the first illustration of Smith’s lifelong principle that “weighty ideation and application to the problems, acts, emotions of so-called real life have...nothing to do with the true poetic magic, which is wholly a matter of exalted and sublime estheticism”.8 He later applied this dictum with equal fervor to his fiction-writing.
Despite youthful excesses, the acclaim for Smith’s poetry was widespread, and he was hailed variously by the San Francisco newspapers as “Auburn’s Precocious Genius”, “Keats’ Equal”, and a “New Shelley”. This early acclaim enabled Smith to publish some of his work in established journals, such as The Yale Review, Poetry, and H. L. Mencken’s The Smart Set. And in June 1918 the Book Club of California published a small collection of Smith’s verse, under the title Odes and Sonnets.
Sadly, this literary notoriety did little to change what Smith saw as his dull and tedious life. Possibly in reaction to this situation, Smith’s stability faltered. From 1913 to 1921, he suffered what he later described as “nervous breakdown and incipient t.b.”9; and during these years he was feeble and undernourished: at 5 feet 11 inches in height, his weight dropped to 100 pounds, some forty pounds less than his normal weight. He escaped the 1917 draft as a consequence.
Around 1918 Smith took up painting and drawing, without instruction or training beyond what he might have had in grammar school. He worked in pencil, pen, crayon, and watercolor, illustrating images from his own fancy, his poetry, and, later, scenes from Lovecraft’s stories as well as from his own fiction.10 Estimates of the number of pieces produced run into the hundreds; his letters to the poet Samuel Loveman, as well as those to other correspondents, often included one or two demonic profiles. Though amateurish in execution, his pictorial work otherwise parallels his literary work: the landscapes and figures he produced are fantastically imaginative and make a rich use of color. The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith (1973) and Grotesques and Fantastiques (1973; this latter book consists solely of pieces from the Loveman letters) give us a glimpse into this facet of Smith’s artistic life, but unfortunately the illustrations in both collections are in black and white, and much of the charm of Smith’s works is to be found in his use of color. There remain technical difficulties to reprinting the artwork as well, for the drawing paper Smith used, which was often cheap and coarse, together with his use of the crayon medium, has given certain works a subtle, almost pointillist quality that is lost in reproduction.
By the summer of 1922, Smith was corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft, who was then just beginning to write the many stories of weird fiction which would later bring him great renown, albeit posthumously. In Lovecraft, Smith found a kindred spirit; over the years of their correspondence, which continued until Lovecraft’s death in 1937, they greatly encouraged each other in their respective literary pursuits.
Later in 1922 Smith published, at his own expense and through the auspices of the local newspaper The Auburn Journal, the second major collection of his poetry, Ebony and Crystal. This volume contains less of the cosmicism and grandeur of The Star Treader, and on the whole its emotions are truer to the everyday experiences of a sensitive young man. Much later Smith was to admit that “many years, emotions, sensations, inspirations”11 found their expression in Ebony and Crystal. The outstanding exception to these more earthbound productions is “The Hashish-Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil”, an extensive (576-line) narrative poem of unbridled imagination. The collection also includes a selection of prose-poems, works in a genre that represented for Smith the epitome of prose writing.
To partially defray the printing costs for Ebony and Crystal, Smith wrote a column for The Auburn Journal consisting of poems and sharp-tongued epigrams. The incongruity of the poet and his surroundings is superbly embodied by these contributions to the newspaper: Hal Rubin has noted that “a Journal reader often encountered lines like, ‘Seal my lips on throat and bosom fair’, on the same page as an ad for Cohen’s muslin undergarments”.12
“Clark Ashton Smith’s Column” lasted a little under three years. At about this time, he began a study of French and experimented in writing French verse. Over the next few years, Smith also wrote a handful of undistinguished, non-fantastic short stories, dealing in an ironic fashion with commonplace social situations. Only one (“Something New”) was published during his lifetime. And late in 1927, he began a translation of Baudelaire’s volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal, though he had little prospect of ever seeing it published.
In the summer of 1929, when his then-girlfriend Genevieve Sully demanded that he give up his idleness and apply himself to something renumerative, Smith chose to work at writing imaginative fiction. Over the next four years, he wrote some one hundred short stories and novelettes that he sold to the monthly pulp magazines, particularly to Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright, and to Wonder Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. To Wonder Stories, Smith contributed some very original and then-controversial science fiction. As an author of fantasy and science fiction, Smith hoped to obtain both the independence of means and freedom of imagination he needed constitutionally; and at no point did he doubt his ability to succeed at this new vocation. In a revealing comment to the fledgling writer August Derleth, he stated that “any good poet can always write good prose, if he wants to”. We shall see, however, that Smith’s own idea of “good prose” was highly idiosyncratic, though entirely in keeping with his imaginative esthetic.
At the time of his entry into fiction, Smith re-read Poe’s macabre tales, and read most of Lovecraft’s stories from manuscripts loaned by their author. The reading and writing of weird fiction became “an imaginative escape from the human aquarium—and moreover, a ‘safety-valve’ to keep [Smith] from blowing up and disrupting the whole countryside”.13 After a year or so of fiction-writing, Smith had nearly ceased to think of himself as a poet, and told his correspondents: “my main possibilities henceforward are in prose”,14 and “I am finding a pleasure in fiction-writing and deriving a mental ‘kick’ from it which I seldom got from poetry”.15
All of Smith’s short stories demonstrate an overriding concern with atmosphere, sensuality, and imagination, with plot and character development greatly deemphasized or completely absent. Smith’s stress on mood, at the expense of action, made his stories difficult to market, and he often complained that his finest stories gathered the most rejection slips.
Smith continued to write fiction at what was for him a remarkable rate—averaging almost three stories per month—until 1933, when a number of frustrations and distractions reached a critical point. In addition to a growing impatience with the constraints imposed by his editors, he had a falling-out with Wonder Stories in February over his story, “The Dweller in the Gulf’ (we shall discuss this later), and as a result one of his most receptive markets was closed to him. The worsening health of his aging parents, to whom he was devoted, began to take a heavier toll on both his time for writing and his nerves. He also chose this period to issue, at his own expense, a pamphlet of his best unpublished tales, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. From February to June 1933 he was engaged in the tiresome aspects of its production, and he soon judged the venture “ill-omened and disastrous”.16 At nearly the same time, Smith fell prey to the lure of his old love, poetry: in May, Smith was asked by George Work, author of the novel White Man’s Burden, to prepare a selection of his poetry for possible publication in Britain. The project came to nothing, but as Smith became involved in the revising of his old work, his interest rekindled and new poems soon followed. Smith reasoned that “a brief layoff from fiction may be a good thing”.17
When these difficulties and distractions were behind him, others took their place. In August 1933, Smith’s mother overturned a pot of tea upon herself and was confined to bed for months, with all the household chores falling to her son. Her health continued poor, and she died in May 1935 at the age of eighty-five. Smith’s father followed her in December 1937, after Smith had spent several terrible weeks “keeping him alive with wine and liquor”.18 And Howard Phillips Lovecraft, perhaps Smith’s greatest source of encouragement, passed on earlier in the year.
Once again, amidst his troubles, Smith found a pleasant diversion. In the spring of 1935, he discovered that some small colorful stones, which he had collected a year earlier with fellow pulp-writer E. Hoffmann Price, could easily be carved into demonic heads and busts. Smith filled his few idle hours with this new hobby, and by his own estimate, he had carved over two-hundred pieces by the mid 1940s.
Smith had always found writing prose especially difficult. His habitual recastings and revisions demanded “long grueling, sweaty hours to get anything done even half-way satisfactorily”, whereas painting and sculpture were “child’s-play by comparison”.19 Now Smith seemed to lack the time, energy, and forbearance for fiction-writing, and for dealing with the stresses and disappointments involved in the marketing of his works.
All of these many and varied factors seem to have contributed to what was nearly a complete cessation from fiction-writing on Smith’s part. Though after 1937 Smith lived for twenty four more years, he finished only sixteen more stories.
His ordeals had drained Smith emotionally, physically, and financially. He drank to excess, complaining of “nerve fatigue” and a sort of general intolerance that he called a “disgust mechanism”. And though he was thoroughly sick of his solitary life (“it is killing me by inches”, he wrote in 194420) and had a strong desire to leave California—and perhaps even the U.S.—he remained in the Auburn cabin.
With no further checks forthcoming from Weird Tales, his financial situation worsened, and he suffered several extremely poor years. In 1942, to pay off the debt incurred by his father’s funeral, he sold all but two acres of his Boulder Ridge land. Later that same year he tried for a job at Southern Pacific Rail but was turned down because of high blood pressure. He took to selling his sculptures by mail, and from time to time he marketed a new poem. World War II brought him a summer supply of orchard and ranch work, but after 1945 Smith’s life had bleak and desperate moments. In November 1948, he wrote to Donald Wandrei, saying: “the last two years have been rather hellish ones for me, since I have had had almost no money to live on, and have been stone broke for weeks at a time. Oct. 1947 was the worst period”.21 In the winter of 1950, he could not even afford postage stamps.
The monotony of his life was broken only by love affairs, and visits from friends, correspondents, and fans of his work. Notable is the special friendship he shared with dancer Madelynne Greene and her husband, the poet Eric Barker, out of which grew Smith’s cycle of love poems, “The Hill of Dionysus”. Between 1940 and the early 1950s Smith met fellow writers August Derleth, Donald Wandrei (whose first visit had been in 1934), Robert H. Barlow, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, and Fritz Leiber; he may even have met Philip K. Dick sometime in 1954 or 1955. Numerous fans also made the pilgrimage to Auburn, notably Francis Laney and Rah Hoffman, editors of the famous early fanzine, The Acolyte; as a result of these visits the magazine published several items by Smith, including excerpts from the Black Book, his playfully-named literary notebook.
During the 1940s, Smith taught himself Spanish and became proficient enough to write verse in that language. He also seems to have indulged in the study of magic and, occasionally, in its practice, though little is known on this score. One anecdote, however, relates a strange rite performed by Smith on the tarmac of the small airfield built near his former property: clad only in a nightshirt, Smith is said to have conducted a stately dance late one evening, complete with obeisances to the Four Quarters.22
The most important event for Smith in the 1940s was the decision by Arkham House Publishers, a firm founded by his friends Derleth and Wandrei to preserve the work of H. P. Lovecraft in book form, to issue collections of Smith’s own short stories. Out of Space and Time was released in a one-thousand copy edition in August 1942 and had sold out by June 1944.23 It was followed by five others, three of which appeared during Smith’s lifetime. Smith also worked to compile his Selected Poems for Arkham House from 1944 to 1949, although this did not see print until 1971; the delay in its publication prompted Derleth to issue two small interim collections of poems, The Dark Chateau (1951) and Spells and Philtres (1958).
Smith’s solitary life took an abrupt turn late in 1954, when the Barkers (to whom he had dedicated his Selected Poems) introduced him to Carolyn Jones Dorman, a divorced mother of three living in Pacific Grove, California. They were wed a few months later, and by the end of the year the two had moved into Carol’s home, although the Auburn cabin was kept as a retreat. Clark spent the remaining seven years of his life in Pacific Grove (called “Piggy” by the couple), half a block from Monterey Bay, with a one-way telephone and $106 coming in monthly from Social Security, his health steadily declining. Some reports have it that he suffered a stroke in Auburn in 1952 or 1953, and by his own admission he experienced an attack of “heat prostration and nervous exhaustion”24—very possibly a stroke—after some odd-job gardening in September 1956. That same year saw the first attack of vandalism on the Auburn cabin, which culminated a few years later in its complete destruction by fire.
In May 1956 Smith gave a prose and poetry reading in nearby Carmel, which he advertised as “An evening in the land of Poe, with Clark Ashton Smith, poet-dean of American Science Fiction and tales of the supernatural”; but the life of the “poet-dean” was ending in obscurity, penury, and feebleness.
In April 1961 the Smith’s were compelled under court order to fill in an old mining shaft on the Auburn property, dug by father and son, that had been used in later years as a food cellar. Carol Smith describes the affair:
We worked a week or 10 days ourselves—then [brought in] the bulldozer (driven at 1/4 the cost, by a son of the man who, Ashton said, “sat with me the night my father died, brought me a load of firewood, too”). However, as the bulldozer started the first fill, Ashton stepped forward, and would have been hit had I not stopped him. I knew then, he was, as we crudely say, “not long for this world”. 25
Smith was deeply hurt by this incident, which he no doubt saw as a desecration of his past. After their return to Pacific Grove, Carol became convinced that Smith was consciously setting his affairs in order and preparing himself for death. Five months later, on August 14, 1961, Clark Ashton Smith died of a stroke at the age of sixty-eight.
In December, Smith’s cremated remains were buried in an urn, beside what was left of his Auburn cabin; the grave was more permanently settled in August 1962, when his ashes were placed beneath a lichen-spotted boulder.
Some years later Carol Smith married Frank Wakefield, the artist responsible for the cover of Smith’s 1948 story collection, Genius Loci. She died of cancer in January 1973; her fictionalized biography of Clark, The Man Who Walks the Stars, had barely gone beyond the contents page.
* * * * * * *
Smith began and ended his literary career as a poet, while his venture as a professional fiction writer spanned a period of less than ten years. Yet, it is this latter work for which he is remembered today and which has exerted the greatest influence on his contemporaries and successors, and it is arguable that in fiction his voice is the most distinctive. In poetry, Smith descended from the lineage of Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling (though, of course, Smith’s verse is marked by his own striking imagination), but his fantasies and the best of his science fictions mine new ground: he remained a poet while writing short stories, and held himself to the standards of a poet rather than to those of a yarn-spinner. Though the wings of his fancy were often clipped by market-minded editors, his obstinate disregard for conventional standards of plotting and development, and his meticulous concern for the construction of atmosphere and emotional tone, distinguish Smith from the other fantasists of his time.
Smith’s interest in prose lay in the glittering surface of the writing, not the intellectual or thematic depths. He reveled in exoticism and the ultra-human, in coined names, in descriptions of unearthly flora and strange, vapor-hung sunsets. An early critic, Arthur Hillman, wrote that “Clark Ashton Smith may be a Prophet of Doom, but he is robed in hues of gorgeous purple and gold. Although the fatalistic acceptance of the utter inhumanity [of the universe] runs like a somber thread through his tapestries, all are beautiful”.26 Carrying this imagery further, Smith might be likened to a maker of fine carpets (of the flying variety, to strain the metaphor), who, to insure the sale of his product at times employed conventional patterns, but whose delight came from the rich color of his thread and the delicate perfection of his weave.
His prose writings partake of skills developed earlier as a poet. A favorite technique involved the heavy use of metaphor and simile, by which an object or scene is likened to something of purer or more intense emotional content. Smith’s preference was to describe what something is like, rather than what it is, forsaking realism and exactitude for emotional power. As a result, his descriptive passages are imbued with meaning, and are evocative in the true sense of the word. The interplay of descriptions with story-lines, or the tensions underlying his scenes, ranges from the obvious (a wizard preparing to announce his curse is said to have lips “like a pale-red seal on a shut parchment of doom”27) to the more subtle (a group of dead sailors, the victims of an arctic demon, stare with eyes “like ice in deep pools fast frozen to the bottom”28). And occasionally, the use of metaphor enables a description to presage or contain within itself some future scene or happening. For example, in “The Voyage of King Euvoran” a necromancer causes a stuffed bird to fly from the crown of a king and to head out over the orient sea; the utterance that accomplishes this reanimation is “shrill and eldritch as the crying of migrant fowl that pass over toward unknown shores in the night”.
These and other literary techniques were employed to establish a definite atmosphere for each of the stories. Smith likened his authorial role to that of a sorcerer: he believed he was practicing a “verbal black magic...of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation”.29 The resulting prose-style (like the somewhat similar style of contemporary author Jack Vance) is instantly recognizable, and so great is the degree of continuity in Smith’s writing that prime examples of this prose-style are easy to come by. But Smith himself gave us an explicitly characteristic—and deliberately self-parodic—exemplar of his writing. In 1934, by which time Smith had established himself as a major fantasy writer, he was asked by Fantasy Magazine to produce a characteristic piece of prose. The magazine’s editors asked the “top writers” in the field to describe a lit cigarette in such a way that the author’s identity would be instantly apparent. Smith’s entry reads:
Ignited in the rich and multi-hued Antarean dusk, the tip of the space pilot’s cigarette began to glow and foulder like the small scarlet eye of some cavern-dwelling chimera; and an opal-grey vapor fumed in gyrant spirals, like incense from an altar of pagany, across the high auroral flames that soared from the setting of the giant sun.
Included in this exemplary paragraph are an allusion to classical mythology (the chimera), examples of his elaborate vocabulary (“foulder”, “gyrant, “pagany”), and two instances of metaphor. And we note that the setting Smith chose for this “Cigarette Characterization” (as the magazine’s series was called) is a grand, colorful, and exotic one.
This ornate and erudite writing-style is a matter of taste, and while for some readers the beauty and power of the stories are “part and parcel of the style”,30 others find the prose verbose and obfuscatory (“His complex descriptions border on redundancy and his words merge into uncomfortable, over-extended conceits”31). Smith was aware of the peculiarities of his style, but held that it was better in literature “to err on the side of over-flamboyance or exuberance than to prune everything down to a drab, dead and flat level. The former vice is at least on the side of growth; the latter represses or even tends to extirpate all growth”.32 And the use of an arcane vocabulary, he believed, produced “effects of language and rhythm which could not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to what is known as basic English”.33
The transition from poetry to pulp-market story-writing involved only a grudging acceptance of the traditional elements of adventure fiction. In Smith’s best and most characteristic stories (such as “The Empire of the Necromancers”, “The Last Incantation”, and “The Voyage to Sfanomoë”), the role of plot is kept to a minimum, and only in some of his “scientifictional hackwork” (“The Immortals of Mercury”, “The Amazing Planet”) do we see the helter-skelter dashing-about of heroic main characters, so loved by magazine editors. In the more extreme examples of this abandonment of plot, the ‘action’ of the story is reduced to the mechanistic fulfillment of some doom, pronounced in detail at the beginning of the piece. Donald Sidney-Fryer, a pioneering critic of Smith’s writings, has called this the “effect of inevitability”,34 but in all likelihood it is less an intentional structural technique, employed for its own sake, than a way of skirting complications of plot. Certainly there is little of the unpredictable in Smith’s stories, and much of the inexorable. None of his works employ “surprise” or “twist” endings, although many rely on the improbable conjunction of circumstances or on deus ex machina.
Because Smith believed that atmosphere was more important than action or characterization in weird fiction, he created a series of story-cycles in which invented backgrounds act as the connecting element, rather than any set of common characters. The settings he developed were distanced from the modem world by time and space—and the farther from the contemporary and commonplace, the more appealing to Smith: “Though I have sometimes written tales with an actual setting, I am more at ease when I can weave the entire web on the loom of fantasy.... No doubt my own preference is motivated by a certain amount of distaste for the local and the modern, and a sort of nostalgia for impossible and unattainable dreamlands”.35 The stories set in these imaginary worlds are almost never sequels to one another in the conventional sense (Smith preferred to call them simply “running-mates” or “companions” to one another) and are linked only by their occasional geographical or historical references.
The primary story-cycles are those of the far future continent called Zothique, the Medieval French province of Averoigne, and the ancient northern realm, Hyperborea. Lesser cycles include tales set in Poseidonis (“the last isle of foundering Atlantis”36) and on the planet Mars. Smith gave each of these worlds or settings its own attributes and characteristics, which he used to generate particular emotional and atmospheric tones. He tailored his composition to support and accentuate these differences: archaisms of language abound in the tales of Averoigne; a formal, ironic, hyperbolic style occurs throughout the Hyperborean tales; and a somber and metaphorically-rich prose is common to the stories set in Zothique.
In addition to the above story-cycles, each of which is defined by a common constructed world or place, Smith created three series that employ the more conventional linkage of a common main character or characters. Two tales have the omnipotent wizard Maal Dweb as the hero (“The Maze of Maal Dweb” and “The Flower-Women”; this pair of stories has erroneously been called the “Xiccarph series”, though only the first takes place on this extraterrestrial planet); three stories and one projected story detail the adventures of the space-flyer Alcyone and her crew (“Marooned in Andromeda”, “A Captivity in Serpens”—published as “The Amazing Planet”—“The Red World of Polaris”, and “The Ocean-World of AIioth”37); and Smith’s character Philip Hastane, fiction-writer of Auburn, California, appears in three stories and two projected stories (“The Devotee of Evil”, “Beyond the Singing Flame”, “The Hunters from Beyond”, “The Rebirth of the Flame”, and “The Music of Death”). Smith had once considered writing under the penname of Philip Hastane.
Of the five major invented settings, four are doomed: the final continent of Zothique shall suffer the darkening of the sun; prehistoric Hyperborea will perish in an Ice Age; Poseidonis will vanish in the final whelming of Atlantis by the sea; and Mars awaits its eventual desiccation. And of the five, all save Averoigne is a “fallen” land. Here we see a manifestation of Smith’s fixation with loss (a major theme in Smith, as we shall discuss), as well as his sense of the impermanence of material things extending to encompass civilizations, worlds, and suns.
This nihilism forms the basis of many of Smith’s attitudes, as expressed in his literary work. His writings clearly demonstrate a belief in the insignificance of humanity and human ideals, and the pettiness of our causes and concerns. Humanism was an aggrandizement of trivialities, “a sort of cosmic provincialism; the egomania of the species...the religion of Lilliput”.38 He considered human beings “the stupidest, greediest, and most cruel of the fauna on this particular planet”39—even his phraseology reflects his distant viewpoint. On an intellectual level these beliefs made Smith a belittler of human achievements, a profound skeptic of science, psychology, and religion, and a champion of the inviolate wonder and mystery of the universe, which were “the only elements that make existence tolerable”.40 As a fictioneer, he infused his work with an indifference towards human affairs that many editors and readers found difficult to swallow. Characters are rewarded or sacrificed with an astonishing offhandedness, and his habit of destroying or debilitating sympathetic heroes was particularly irksome to his editors, especially when no obvious function was served or moral presented. His projections of Mankind’s future seldom included the Utopian visions common to the work of his contemporaries; a favorite target for satire was human pride, pretension, and self-importance.
Smith’s characters are frequently made to suffer from weariness and ennui, or to yearn for a Lethean oblivion or the peace of death (consider the necromantically-risen giant of “The Colossus of Ylourgne”, whose first independent act is to dig itself a vast grave.) In this way Smith presents the notion that emptiness lies at the heart of all things human, that everything we cherish is pale and meaningless. The weariness of kings constitutes an especially delicate vintage, and one for which Smith particularly cared: though all the world is at hand, nothing can be found to relieve the boredom or despair of the king, who has tasted all earthly pleasures and found them wanting. This situation is presented in the prose-poem “Ennui”, the short stories “The Garden of Adompha” and “The Flower-Women”, and other works.
The question of reality versus illusion arises often in Smith’s work, and his early interest in the subject may have acted as a spur to the development of his distant philosophical perspective. He believed humanity to be physically incapable of piercing the veils of illusion and perceiving the world as it truly is. This underscored for him the extent of our ignorance and the falsity of our grand and sweeping claims. The short story “A Star-Change” and the prose poem “The Touchstone” are direct studies of this subject, but many other works at least touch upon the biased nature of our perceptions of the external world, or our equivocal knowledge of reality. While by no means a unique doctrine, Smith’s Idealist views were deeply held and bear connections to his other beliefs and convictions.
It is at least plausible to assert that these rationalized beliefs began as an intuitive knowledge gained in fever-dreams. As a child, Smith had suffered vivid nightmares and hallucinations brought about by poor health and scarlet fever. Nearly forty years later, he fictionalized his experiences in the posthumously published “Double Cosmos” (1940, SS):
“Even in my childhood, I began to suspect that the world about us was perhaps only the curtain of hidden things. The suspicion was born following my recovery from an attack of scarlet fever attended by intervals of delirium. In that delirium...I had seemed to live in a monstrous world peopled by strange misshapen beings whose actions were fraught with terror or menace.... This realm of shadow had seemed no less real than the world perceived by my normal senses; and during my convalescence I believed that it still existed somewhere beyond the comers of the familiar room....
The arbitrariness of the line dividing illusion from substance was one of Smith’s primary reasons for ridiculing both the “realist” movement in fiction and the scientific materialism of his day: both venerated the direct and detailed observation of what was for him the “supreme superstition, Reality”.41 “The bare truth about the nature of things may be more fantastic than anything any of us have yet cooked up. I, for one, find it as hard to swallow the dogmas of the physicists as it is to down those of the ecclesiasts.... Five senses and three dimensions hardly scratch the hither surface of infinitude”.42
As Donald Sidney-Fryer has noted, when Smith wrote to escape the mundanity of ‘real life’, he worked to attain to “a greater and eternal reality beyond”.43 In his own eyes, Smith was writing of realms only slightly less substantial than the sordid worlds described by John Steinbeck and The Scientific American. In fact, he held that his imaginary realms were possessed of a certain peculiar permanence: a fragment of poetry from his Black Book reads,
Taught by me, they will
Reject the fading phantoms called the Real,
And choose in place of them those other phantoms
That fade not, being immaterial.44
It is natural to wonder what Smith thought lay behind most people’s inadequate picture of Reality. In contrast to Arthur Machen or William Blake, who saw the world suffused with the inner light of an unattainable glory, Clark Ashton Smith suspected that the perceived surface of things cloaked some unfathomable abyss, or curtained an impenetrable darkness. Stripped of “the friendly mirages that make our existence possible”,45 Smith saw no reason to believe that whatever lay beneath them—what Michael Moorcock has so brilliantly termed “the skull beneath the paint”—would be at all hospitable or congenial. “It is my own theory that if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in the end”.46 He wrote his famous poem “The Hashish-Eater” to dramatize this destructive impact of an unveiled cosmos.
Smith shared his belief in the hostility of the realms “outside” the human universe with his friend Lovecraft. Like Smith, Lovecraft wrote from a viewpoint that was distant, iconoclastic, and generally unsympathetic to human concerns and ideals. This was a manifestation of Lovecraft’s “cosmic” perspective, his sense of Earth’s inconsequential placement among the stars and the vastness of the universe. His stories center on the encroachment of unknowable cosmic forces and entities into the human sphere, and the devastating effects they have upon an unprepared humanity.
Smith’s own perspective, as we have said, is characterized by a sense of the littleness of Mankind, but this may have evolved more from misanthropy than from the “cosmic” perspective Lovecraft espoused. While Smith’s early poems clearly show an awareness of, and interest in, other worlds and suns, one feels that other attitudes were welded to this interest to yield his own distant perspective. Under close examination of his work, Smith’s focus is not on the impersonal universe as often as on the foibles, extravagances, and posturings of an absurd humanity. His characters encounter worlds that are frequently more “antihuman” than “non-human” (consider “Marooned in Andromeda”, in which an earthman is swallowed by a carnivorous plant and is promptly spat out as unpalatable); his viewpoint seems more hostile than indifferent. In short, for Lovecraft there was the immensity of the astronomical universe, for Smith the lack of kinship with his fellows.
But quite apart from any intellectual or philosophical concerns on his part, a sense of loss pervades much of Smith’s literary output. His fictional characters are forced time and again to lose someone or something precious, to live ever afterward a life of regret and sorrow; time and again they stray from the path of happiness and strive desperately to refind it. On a grander scale, we are given whole worlds that have “fallen from grace”, that have descended from grand heights into worn-out presents. In Smith’s verse, emotions of loss frequently color the images he presents: gardens are overgrown, roses stand brown or without petal, a swath of grass where love had once been made is now unruffled and undistinguished. Other poems, such as “Necromancy” (1934; S&P, SP), have loss as their primary concern:
My heart is made a necromancer’s glass,
Where homeless forms and exile phantoms teem,
Where faces of forgotten sorrows gleam
And dead despairs archaic peer and pass:
Grey longings of some weary heart that was
Possess me, and the multiple, supreme,
Unwildered hope and star-emblazoned dream
Of questing armies.... Ancient queen and lass,
Risen vampire-like from out the wormy mould,
Deep in the magic mirror of my heart
Behold their perished beauty, and depart.
And now, from black aphelions far and cold,
Swimming in deathly light on charnel skies,
The enormous ghosts of bygone worlds arise.
As with all his verse, Smith adorned this piece with color and imagery (a process he quotes Keats as calling “loading the rifts with gold”47), in this case macabre; but the intent of the poem is clearly to generate a mood of relentless remorse and sorrow for the passing of gladness and grandeur. Further examples of Smith’s fascination with such emotions are legion, but one may choose to mention the short stories “The Last Incantation”, “The Venus of Azombeii”, “Mnemoka”, and “The Chain of Aforgomon”, in which loves are lost or re-sought; “Xeethra” and “The Empire of the Necromancers”, in which characters lose some glad and glorious past; “The City of the Singing Flame”, “The End of the Story”, “The Light from Beyond”, and “The White Sybil”, in which a glory beyond everyday life is lost. Several prose-poems, including “Sadastor”, “Told in the Desert”, “The Frozen Waterfall”, and “From the Crypts of Memory”, also deal with loss in fundamental ways.
One can speculate as to the factors that led to this sensitivity to loss. Smith is known to have fallen in love with a blond-haired woman named Iris, who died of tuberculosis sometime before February 1923; this experience may have inspired or colored such works as “The Venus of Azombeii” and “The Chain of Aforgomon”.48 Also, the substantial acclaim he had received for his early poetry—which surely turned the head of the then nineteen-year-old Smith—dissipated within a very short time, leaving him at the end a poor and unemployed young man. His early fame may well have looked quite golden to Smith in later years; perhaps he experienced at first hand the type of loss peculiar to child prodigies.
* * * * * * *
In any attempt to discuss the life and works of Clark Ashton Smith, certain particular problems present themselves. In the realm of the short story, Smith created many memorable pieces, but few masterworks—the oft-reprinted “City of the Singing Flame” and “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” being perhaps the only agreed-upon entries in this category. What remains are one hundred and ten completed fantasies available for discussion, many of which are of roughly equal merit. There would perhaps be just enough room here to briefly discuss each one. This option being unacceptable, choices must be made. As a result, the favorite stories of some readers are sure to be neglected, and for this we apologize. This is but one many books that could be written towards an understanding of Smith’s fiction.
Troublesome as well is the fact that Smith’s fiction-writing period was so short that a chronological discussion of the stories is meaningless. Although we note that his later productions (stories from the 1940s and 1950s) are written in a somewhat simpler prose-style than his works from the 1930s, Smith did not greatly evolve as a prose writer.
As for his verse, the huge amount of material Smith produced has made it impossible to discuss this important branch of his artistic life in any detail. While stressing the interconnectedness of Smith’s literary output, the task of evaluating his poetry is left to future criticism. This Reader’s Guide will emphasize Smith’s fantastic short fiction, although a brief survey chapter on the verse is included.
At the time of this writing, Clark Ashton Smith is twenty-five years dead, his closest friends have followed him, and precious little has been left in the way of autobiographies, memoirs, or reminiscences by which we might come to understand him as an individual. This, of course, presents problems for any analysis of Smith’s life and work, and this lack of material may have served to discourage such analysis.49 Critical appraisals of Smith are indeed scarce, and in addition, many are somewhat limited in scope. Smith was a poetic, emotional writer, and previous Smith criticism has tended to approach his work after the fashion of the work itself: on the whole, writings about Smith have been expressive and appreciative, rather than critical or analytical. By contrast, Lovecraft’s stories are precise and veridical, and this has attracted and engendered a like criticism.
But whatever the level of critical recognition—or acceptance—of Clark Ashton Smith’s work, it can be said that he accomplished in fiction what he had set out to accomplish. Through the sensual power of his writing, readers can wander for a time through richly colored realms of imagination. In so doing they walk away from the everyday world, and are reminded that the “real world” they have left behind is not the only one imaginable. Smith himself travelled these same fanciful roads.
1. Letter to H. P. Lovecraft (letter #13, LL), ca. early October 1930.
2. Letter to Lovecraft (#15, LL), ca. 24 October 1930.
3. Letter to Lovecraft (#13, LL), ca. early October 1930.
4. Letter to August Derleth, 29 October 1941.
5. Smith habitually gave his birthdate as “Friday the 13th”.
6. Letter to Virgil Finlay, 27 September 1937 (KT).
7. Letter to L. Sprague de Camp, 21 October 1951.
8. Letter to Derleth, 5 September 1934.
9. Letter to Derleth, 29 October 1941.
10. “The Weaver in the Vault,” “The Charnal God,” “The Death of Malygris,” “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” “Xeethra,” and “The Seven Geases” each appeared in Weird Tales magazine with pen-and-ink illustrations by Smith.
11. Letter to Derleth, 20 December 1930.
1212. Hal Rubin, “Clark Ashton Smith—Ill-fated Master of Fantasy” (see Sec. Bib.).
13. Letter to Lovecraft (#20, LL), ca. 27 January 1931.
14. Letter to Derleth, 25 March 1932.
15. Letter to Derleth, 22 November 1936; letter to Lovecraft (#20, LL), ca. 27 January 1931.
16. Letter to Lovecraft (#39, LL), ca. late February 1934. The edition of one thousand copies cost Smith $125. Over six hundred copies were left unsold by 1937, and many of the absent four hundred had been presentation copies given to friends and neighbors.
17. Letter to Derleth, 23 May 1933.
18. Letter to Robert H. Barlow, 5 December 1937.
19. Letters to Derleth, 26 September 1931 and 13 May 1937.
20. Letter to Derleth, 22 October 1944.
21. Quoted in Donald Wandrei’s letter to Derleth of 8 November 1948.
22. Hal Rubin, “Clark Ashton Smith—Ill-fated Master of Fantasy” (see Sec. Bib.)
23. The title of the collection came from August Derleth. Smith had suggested The End of the Story and Other Tales, Warlocks and Others, The Book of Lost Worlds, and Planets and Dimensions as possible titles.
24. Letter to an unknown correspondent, never mailed, ca. February 1957.
25. Letter from Carol Smith to Rah Hoffman, 15 September 1961.
26. Arthur Hillman, “The Lure of Clark Ashton Smith” (review of Genius Loci), Fantasy Review, February-March 1949.
27. “The Dark Eidolon”.
28. “The Coming of the White Worm”.
29. Letter to Lovecraft (#15, LL), ca. 24 October 1930.
30. Stanley Mullen, “Cartouche: Clark Ashton Smith”, The Gorgon, July 1947.
31. John Jacobs, “Two Reviews” (review of the prose poem “The Mortuary”,) Nyctalops #8, August 1972 (Clark Ashton Smith Issue).
32. BB, Item 171.
33. Letter to S. J. Sackett, 11 July 1950.
34. Donald Sidney-Fryer, “The Alleged Influence of Lord Dunsany on Clark Ashton Smith” (see Sec. Bib.). Examples of the kind of story being discussed include “The Last Hieroglyph”, “The Tomb Spawn”, “Morthylla”, “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan”, and “The Return of the Sorcerer.”
35. Letter to Virgil Finlay, 27 September 1937 (KT).
36. “A Voyage to Sfanomoë”.
37. This series at one time had the potential for becoming extensive. In August 1930, Wonder Stories magazine suggested that Smith write a continuing series of stories about the Alcyone’s adventures, with a new installment to appear every other month. For various reasons, Smith declined the offer. We note that “The Plutonian Drug” also belongs to the same future cycle, but does not involve the Alcyone.
38. From an epigram (BB, Appendix II).
39. Letter to Barlow, 16 May 1937.
40. From an epigram, Item 175 of BB.
41. Letter to George Sterling, 4 Nov. 1926.
42. Letter to Lovecraft (#35, LL), ca. Mid-October 1933.
43. Donald Sidney-Fryer, “The Sorcerer Departs” (see Sec. Bib.).
44. BB, Item 128.
45. “The Touchstone” (PP).
46. Letter to S. J. Sackett, 11 July 1950.
47. BB, Item 114.
48. Of his published verse, the uncollected poem “Brumal” or “Winter Song”, which appeared in The Auburn Journal in November 1923, was almost certainly written in memory of Iris’ passing:
Life is a tale half-told, / Love is a broken song; / Beauty, besought so long, / Is a legend lost and old.
Winter and silence and woe / Have come, like the end of all: / Slowly the last leaves fall / At sunset over the snow.
Here on the darkening wold, / In the bleak wind blown from space, / I recall thy fugitive grace, / And sigh for thy hair’s lost gold.
4949. Robert Bloch suggests that Smith’s relative obscurity—at least when compared to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the two contemporaries with whom he is most often grouped—can be attributed to this paucity of personal information, information that might otherwise have built up the image of an intriguing writer-personality. See Introduction, SS