The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (3 page)

By this time a cadre of Smith scholars began probing his work more profoundly. Smith himself had maintained that, when he came to issue his stories in book form, he would restore the cuts and other editing that he had been compelled to make for sale to the pulp magazines, but he inexplicably failed to do so when he assembled his tales for Arkham House. After Smith's papers were deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, the Smith scholar Steve Behrends consulted manuscripts of his tales and issued a succession of slim pamphlets presenting restored editions of several Smith stories. This work was continued by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger in their landmark five-volume edition of Smith's
Collected Fantasies
(
2006
–
10
). Meanwhile, David E. Schultz had been spending decades gathering Smith's published and unpublished poetry, and, with my collaboration, he edited Smith's
Complete Poetry and Translations
in three volumes (
2007
–
8
). Smith's prose poems, essays, and letters have also been published, and more editions are in the works.

Smith's final place in the history of both American poetry and the literature of fantasy has yet to be determined, but that he has an honored place is without question. It would be narrow and simplistic to maintain that he merely created a succession of fantasy realms as an escape from “real” life and its concerns; in fact, those realms serve as the backdrop for keen investigations of human emotions—the poignancy of loss in “Xeethra,” the inescapable lure of the bizarre in “The City of the Singing Flame,” the soul-annihilating terror of an encounter with the utterly alien in “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” and so on. Like Lovecraft, Smith believed that “the main object [of the weird tale] is the creation of a supernatural, extra-human atmosphere; the real actors are the terrible arcanic forces, the esoteric cosmic malignities.”
16
He differed from Lovecraft in that he rejected realism as the means to this end, writing that “weird, fantastic writing, by its emphasis of the environing cosmic wonder and spirit of things, may actually be truer to the spirit of life than the work which merely concerns itself with literalities, as most modern fiction does.”
17

Smith's cultivation of a prose and poetic idiom of richness, depth, and luxuriance—reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, Lord Dunsany, and others—was avowed and deliberate, as he wrote to Lovecraft: “My own
conscious
ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.”
18
Such a style may not have been in favor in the heyday of Hemingway, but a more expansive understanding of the effectiveness of prose for the purposes for which it is designed may help us to appreciate Smith's idiom as an essential element in the exotic fantasy he was seeking to create. His devotion to “lands forgotten and unfound”
19
was unremitting, and out of his unbridled imagination he created realms of beauty and terror that have permanently enriched the literature of fantasy.

S. T. JOSHI

PRIMARY

Smith's earliest book publications were volumes of poetry. The volumes of poetry published in his lifetime have been cited in the Introduction. After his death, his literary executor, Roy A. Squires, issued a number of small-press editions beginning with
The Hill of Dionysus
(
1962
). It was only in the
1980
s that David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi began amassing the entirety of Smith's poetic output; their work finally achieved fruition in
The Complete Poetry and Translations
(Hippocampus Press,
2007
–
8
; three vols.), the first two volumes of which contained original poetry (including hundreds of unpublished and uncollected poems), and the third volume of which contained his translations from Baudelaire's
Fleurs du mal
and other French and Spanish poets.

Smith had to issue his first collection of stories,
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
(
1933
), himself, under the imprint of the
Auburn Journal.
Arkham House's book publications of Smith's tales have been cited in the Introduction. Various paperback editions, initially in Lin Carter's adult fantasy series, appeared in the
1970
s and
1980
s, with limited success. Steve Behrends issued several pamphlets (Necronomicon Press,
1987
–
88
) featuring corrected editions of individual stories, based on consultation of original manuscripts. This work culminated in Scott Connors and Ron Hilger's edition of Smith's
Collected Fantasies
(Night Shade,
2006
–
10
; five vols.); a sixth volume of
Miscellaneous Writings
appeared in
2011
.

Two novels that Smith wrote as a teenager have been published by Hippocampus Press:
The Black Diamonds
(
2002
) and
The Sword of Zagan
(
2004
). Will Murray published a novella called
As It Is Written
(Donald M. Grant,
1982
; as by De Lysle Ferrée Cass), purporting to be by Smith; but it was later established that Cass was an actual author of the period.

Some of Smith's prose poems were included in
Ebony and Crystal,
but were not collected until Donald Sidney-Fryer assembled them in
Poems in Prose
(Arkham House,
1965
). A more exhaustive edition, based on original manuscripts, was edited by Marc and Susan Michaud, Steve Behrends, and S. T. Joshi:
Nostalgia of the Unknown: The Complete Prose Poetry
(Necronomicon Press,
1988
,
1993
). A still more comprehensive edition is being prepared by Scott Connors.

Smith's essays were collected by Charles K. Wolfe as
Planets and Dimensions
(Mirage Press,
1973
). His
Black Book,
containing plot germs and other interesting data, was edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Arkham House,
1979
). His epigrams were collected by Don Herron as
The Devil's Notebook
(Starmont House,
1990
). Steve Behrends edited an important edition of uncollected stories, fragmentary stories, plot synopses, and other matter:
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith
(Greenwood Press,
1989
).

Steve Behrends edited Smith's
Letters to H. P. Lovecraft
(Necronomicon Press,
1987
), but the letters were heavily abridged. Scott Connors and David E. Schultz edited a generous sampling of letters in
Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith
(Arkham House,
2003
). Schultz and S. T. Joshi edited the joint correspondence of Smith and George Sterling as
The Shadow of the Unattained
(Hippocampus Press,
2005
); the same editors are editing the joint correspondence of Smith and H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, forthcoming).

Two volumes pertaining to Smith's artwork are of note:
Grotesques and Fantastiques
(Gerry de la Ree,
1973
) and Dennis Rickard's edition of
The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith
(Mirage Press,
1973
).

SECONDARY

Donald Sidney-Fryer's
Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography
(Donald M. Grant,
1978
) was a towering work of research begun in Smith's lifetime, but is now sadly out of date and incomplete in its citations. A more comprehensive bibliography is being assembled by S. T. Joshi, Scott Connors, and David E. Schultz.

There is no full-length biography of Smith, but much biographical information is contained in the introductory matter in Sidney-Fryer's
Emperor of Dreams.
The various editions of Smith's letters also provide a window into Smith's life, family, associates, and thought.

Jack L. Chalker's small-press anthology
In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith
(Anthem,
1963
) has some meritorious biographical and critical pieces, but is now largely of historical interest. The August
1972
issue of
Nyctalops
was devoted to Smith and still contains material of interest. Around the same time, Donald Sidney-Fryer's slim monograph
The Last of the Great Romantic Poets
(Silver Scarab Press,
1972
) appeared. The first full-length study of Smith was Steve Behrends's
Clark Ashton Smith
(Starmont House,
1990
). Ronald S. Hilger's anthology
One Hundred Years of Klarkash-Ton
(Averon Press,
1993
) contains several interesting items. An exhaustive collection of many of the better recent articles on Smith is Scott Connors's
The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith
(Hippocampus Press,
2006
), containing original and reprinted articles by such scholars as Steve Behrends, Fred Chappell, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Lauric Guillaud, S. T. Joshi, Jim Rockhill, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and Brian Stableford.

Two journals devoted to Smith are
Klarkash-Ton
(last two issues titled
Dark Eidolon
), edited by Steve Behrends (three issues,
1988
–
93
) and
Lost Worlds,
edited by Scott Connors and Ronald S. Hilger (five issues,
2004
–
8
).

Other noteworthy articles on Smith include:

Ashley, Mike. “The Perils of Wonder: Clark Ashton Smith's Experiences with
Wonder Stories,
”
Dark Eidolon
2
(July
1989
):
2
–
8
.

Comtois, Pierre. “Clark Ashton Smith and the French Romantics,”
Dark Eidolon
3
(Winter
1993
):
28
–
33
.

Connors, Scott. “Who Discovered Clark Ashton Smith?”
Lost Worlds
1
(
2004
):
25
–
34
.

de Camp, L. Sprague. “Sierran Shaman: Clark Ashton Smith,” in de Camp's
Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,
1976
),
195
–
214
.

Ellison, Harlan. “
Out of Space and Time
by Clark Ashton Smith,” in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, ed.,
Horror:
100
Best Books
(London: Xanadu,
1988
; New York: Carroll & Graf,
1988
),
135
–
39
.

Marigny, Jean. S. T. Joshi, trans. “Clark Ashton Smith and His World of Fantasy,”
Crypt of Cthulhu
26
(Hallowmas
1984
):
3
–
12
.

Price, E. Hoffmann, “Clark Ashton Smith,” in Price's
Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,
2004
),
94
–
125
.

Reiter, Geoffrey. “‘A Thoroughly Modern Disdain': The Materialist's Descent into Hell in ‘The Seven Geases,'”
Lost Worlds
5
(
2008
):
5
–
14
.

Sidney-Fryer, Donald. “A Statement for Imagination: George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith,”
Romantist
6
–
7
–
8
(
1982
–
83
–
84
):
13
–
23
.

The texts of Smith's short stories are derived from the
Collected Fantasies
(
2006
–
10
), the first edition of Smith's tales to be based on consultation of original and revised typescripts, magazine publications, and other sources. The texts of Smith's prose poems derive from
Nostalgia of the Unknown
(revised edition,
1993
). The texts of Smith's poetry derive from
The Complete Poetry and Translations
(
2007
–
8
). Minor typographical errors in each of these editions have been corrected.

My selection of works seeks to present the broadest range of Smith's work within the constraints of a single volume. Among the stories, I have selected tales of each of Smith's major cycles (Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, et cetera), along with other independent tales. The selection of prose poems was particularly difficult, since so many of them are of stellar quality. I have also presented a wide chronological spectrum of Smith's poetry, from selections written as a teenager to a poem he wrote weeks before his death.

The editor is happy to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Martin Andersson, Scott Connors, and Ron Hilger in the preparation of the text and commentary.

I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers. I shall write it with the violet juice of the
suvana-
palm, which turns to a blood-red rubric with the passage of years, on a strong vellum that is made from the skin of the mastodon, as a warning to all good thieves and adventurers who may hear some lying legend of the lost treasures of Commoriom and be tempted thereby.

Now, Tirouv Ompallios was my life-long friend and my trustworthy companion in all such enterprises as require deft fingers and a habit of mind both agile and adroit. I can say without flattering myself, or Tirouv Ompallios either, that we carried to an incomparable success more than one undertaking from which fellow-craftsmen of a much wider renown than ourselves might well have recoiled in dismay. To be more explicit, I refer to the theft of the jewels of Queen Cunambria, which were kept in a room where two-score venomous reptiles wandered at will; and the breaking of the adamantine box of Acromi, in which were all the medallions of an early dynasty of Hyperborean kings. It is true that these medallions were difficult and perilous to dispose of, and that we sold them at a dire sacrifice to the captain of a barbarian vessel from remote Lemuria:
1
but nevertheless, the breaking of that box was a glorious feat, for it had to be done in absolute silence, on account of the proximity of a dozen guards who were all armed with tridents. We made use of a rare and mordant acid . . . but I must not linger too long and too garrulously by the way, however great the temptation to ramble on amid heroic memories and the high glamour of valiant or sleightful deeds.

In our occupation, as in all others, the vicissitudes of fortune are oftentimes to be reckoned with; and the goddess Chance is not always prodigal of her favors. So it was that Tirouv Ompallios and I, at the time of which I write, had found ourselves in a condition of pecuniary depletion, which, though temporary, was nevertheless extreme, and was quite inconvenient and annoying, coming as it did on the heel of more prosperous days, of more profitable midnights. People had become accursedly chary of their jewels and other valuables, windows and doors were double-barred, new and perplexing locks were in use, guards had grown more vigilant or less somnolent,—in short, all the natural difficulties of our profession had multiplied themselves. At one time we were reduced to the stealing of more bulky and less precious merchandise than that in which we customarily dealt; and even this had its dangers. Even now, it humiliates me to remember the night when we were nearly caught with a sack of red yams; and I mention all this that I may not seem in any wise vainglorious.

One evening, in an alley of the more humble quarter of Uzuldaroum, we stopped to count our available resources, and found that we had between us exactly three pazoors—enough to buy a large bottle of pomegranate wine or two loaves of bread. We debated the problem of expenditure.

“The bread,” contended Tirouv Ompallios, “will nurture our bodies, will lend a new and more expeditious force to our spent limbs, and our toil-worn fingers.”

“The pomegranate wine,” said I, “will ennoble our thoughts, will inspire and illuminate our minds, and perchance will reveal to us a mode of escape from our present difficulties.”

Tirouv Ompallios yielded without undue argument to my superior reasoning, and we sought the doors of an adjacent tavern. The wine was not of the best, in regard to flavor, but the quantity and strength were all that could be desired. We sat in the crowded tavern, and sipped it at leisure, till all the fire of the bright red liquor had transferred itself to our brains. The darkness and dubiety of our future ways became illumined as by the light of rosy cressets, and the harsh aspect of the world was marvellously softened. Anon, there came to me an inspiration.

“Tirouv Ompallios,” I said, “is there any reason why you and I, who are brave men and nowise subject to the fears and superstitions of the multitude, should not avail ourselves of the kingly treasures of Commoriom? A day's journey from this tiresome town, a pleasant sojourn in the country, an afternoon or forenoon of archaeological research—and who knows what we should find?”

“You speak wisely and valiantly, my dear friend,” rejoined Tirouv Ompallios. “Indeed, there is no reason why we should not replenish our deflated finances at the expense of a few dead kings or gods.”

Now Commoriom, as all the world knows, was deserted many hundred years ago because of the prophecy of the White Sybil of Polarion,
2
who foretold an undescribed and abominable doom for all mortal beings who should dare to tarry within its environs. Some say that this doom was a pestilence that would have come from the northern waste by the paths of the jungle tribes; others, that it was a form of madness; at any rate, no one, neither king nor priest nor merchant nor laborer nor thief, remained in Commoriom to abide its arrival, but all departed in a single migration to found at the distance of a day's journey the new capital, Uzuldaroum. And strange tales are told, of horrors and terrors not to be faced or overcome by man, that haunt forevermore the shrines and mausoleums and palaces of Commoriom. And still it stands, a luster of marble, a magnificence of granite, all a-throng with spires and cupolas and obelisks that the mighty trees of the jungle have not yet overtowered, in a fertile inland valley of Hyperborea. And men say that in its unbroken vaults there lies entire and undespoiled as of yore the rich treasure of olden monarchs; that the high-built tombs retain the gems and electrum that were buried with their mummies; that the fanes have still their golden altar-vessels and furnishings, the idols their precious stones in ear and mouth and nostril and navel.

I think that we should have set out that very night, if we had only had the encouragement and inspiration of a second bottle of pomegranate wine. As it was, we decided to start at early dawn: the fact that we had no funds for our journey was of small moment, for, unless our former dexterity had altogether failed us, we could levy a modicum of involuntary tribute from the guileless folk of the country-side. In the meanwhile, we repaired to our lodgings, where the landlord met us with a grudging welcome and a most ungracious demand for his money. But the golden promise of the morrow had armed us against all such trivial annoyances, and we waved the fellow aside with a disdain that appeared to astonish if not to subdue him.

We slept late, and the sun had ascended far upon the azure acclivity of the heavens when we left the gates of Uzuldaroum and took the northern road that leads toward Commoriom. We breakfasted well on some amber melons, and a stolen fowl that we cooked in the woods, and then resumed our wayfaring. In spite of a fatigue that increased upon us toward the end of the day, our trip was a pleasurable one, and we found much to divert us in the varying landscapes through which we passed, and in their people. Some of these people, I am sure, must still remember us with regret, for we did not deny ourselves anything procurable that tempted our fancy or our appetites.

It was an agreeable country, full of farms and orchards and running waters and green, flowery woods. At last, somewhile in the course of the afternoon, we came to the ancient road, long disused and well-nigh overgrown, which runs from the highway through the elder jungle to Commoriom.

No one saw us enter this road, and thenceforward we met no one. At a single step, we passed from all human ken; and it seemed that the silence of the forest around us had lain unstirred by mortal footfall ever since the departure of the legendary king and his people so many centuries before. The trees were vaster than any we had ever seen, they were interwoven by the endless labyrinthine volumes, the eternal web-like convolutions of creepers almost as old as they themselves. The flowers were unwholesomely large, their petals bore a lethal pallor or a sanguinary scarlet; and their perfumes were overpoweringly sweet or fetid. The fruits along our way were of great size, with purple and orange and russet colors, but somehow we did not dare to eat them.

The woods grew thicker and more rampant as we went on, and the road, though paved with granite slabs, was more and more overgrown, for trees had rooted themselves in the interstices, often forcing the wide blocks apart. Though the sun had not yet neared the horizon, the shades that were cast upon us from gigantic boles and branches became ever denser, and we moved in a dark-green twilight fraught with oppressive odors of lush growth and of vegetable corruption. There were no birds nor animals, such as one would think to find in any wholesome forest, but at rare intervals a stealthy viper with pale and heavy coils glided away from our feet among the rank leaves of the roadside, or some enormous moth with baroque and evil-colored mottlings flew before us and disappeared in the dimness of the jungle. Abroad already in the half-light, huge purpureal bats with eyes like tiny rubies arose at our approach from the poisonous-looking fruits on which they feasted, and watched us with malign attention as they hovered noiselessly in the air above. And we felt, somehow, that we were being watched by other and invisible presences; and a sort of awe fell upon us, and a vague fear of the monstrous jungle; and we no longer spoke aloud, or frequently, but only in rare whispers.

Among other things, we had contrived to procure along our way a large leathern bottle full of palm-spirit. A few sips of the ardent liquor had already served to lighten more than once the tedium of our journey; and now it was to stand us in good stead. Each of us drank a liberal draught, and presently the jungle became less awesome; and we wondered why we had allowed the silence and the gloom, the watchful bats and the brooding immensity, to weigh upon our spirits even for a brief while; and I think that after a second draught we began to sing.

When twilight came, and a waxing moon shone high in the heavens after the hidden daystar had gone down, we were so imbued with the fervor of adventure that we decided to push on and reach Commoriom that very night. We supped on food that we had levied from the country-people, and the leathern bottle passed between us several times. Then, considerably fortified, and replete with hardihood and the valor of a lofty enterprise, we resumed our journeying.

Indeed, we had not much farther to go. Even as we were debating between ourselves, with an ardor that made us oblivious of our long wayfaring, what costly loot we would first choose from among all the mythical treasures of Commoriom, we saw in the moonlight the gleam of marble cupolas above the tree-tops, and then between the boughs and boles the wan pillars of shadowy porticoes. A few more steps, and we trod upon paven streets that ran transversely from the high-road we were following, into the tall, luxuriant woods on either side, where the fronds of mammoth palm-ferns overtopped the roofs of ancient houses.

We paused, and again the silence of an elder desolation claimed our lips. For the houses were white and still as sepulchers, and the deep shadows that lay around and upon them were chill and sinister and mysterious as the very shadow of death. It seemed that the sun could not have shone for ages in this place—that nothing warmer than the spectral beams of the cadaverous moon had touched the marble and granite ever since that universal migration prompted by the prophecy of the White Sybil of Polarion.

“I wish it were daylight,” murmured Tirouv Ompallios. His low tones were oddly sibilant, were unnaturally audible in the dead stillness.

“Tirouv Ompallios,” I replied, “I trust that you are not growing superstitious. I should be loath to think that you are succumbing to the infantile fancies of the multitude. Howbeit, let us have another drink.”

We lightened the leathern bottle appreciably by the demand we now made upon its contents, and were marvellously cheered thereby—so much so, indeed, that we forthwith started to explore a left-hand avenue, which, though it had been laid out with mathematical directness, vanished at no great distance among the fronded trees. Here, somewhat apart from the other buildings, in a sort of square that the jungle had not yet wholly usurped, we found a small temple of antique architecture which gave the impression of being far older even than the adjoining edifices. It also differed from these in its material, for it was builded of a dark basaltic stone heavily encrusted with lichens that seemed of a coeval antiquity. It was square in form, and had no domes nor spires, no façade of pillars, and only a few narrow windows high above the ground. Such temples are rare in Hyperborea nowadays; but we knew it for a shrine of Tsathoggua, one of the elder gods, who receives no longer any worship from men, but before whose ashen altars, people say, the furtive and ferocious beasts of the jungle, the ape, the giant sloth and the long-toothed tiger, have sometimes been seen to make obeisance and have been heard to howl or whine their inarticulate prayers.

The temple, like the other buildings, was in a state of well-nigh perfect preservation: the only signs of decay were in the carven lintel of the door, which had crumbled and splintered away in several places. The door itself, wrought of a swarthy bronze all overgreened by time, stood slightly ajar. Knowing that there should be a jewelled idol within, not to mention the various altar-pieces of valuable metals, we felt the urge of temptation.

Surmising that strength might be required to force open the verdigris-covered door, we drank deeply, and then applied ourselves to the task. Of course, the hinges were rusted; and only by dint of mighty and muscular heavings did the door at last begin to move. As we renewed our efforts, it swung slowly inward with a hideous grating and grinding that mounted to an almost vocal screech, in which we seemed to hear the tones of some unhuman entity. The black interior of the temple yawned before us, and from it there surged an odor of long-imprisoned mustiness combined with a queer and unfamiliar fetidity. To this, however, we gave little heed in the natural excitement of the moment.