The Last Hieroglyph (2 page)

Even the mystery of Milwarp’s death, baffling to both law and science, has evoked but a passing interest, an excitement quickly lulled and forgotten.

I was well acquainted with Milwarp over a term of years. But my recollection of the man is becoming strangely blurred, like an image in a misted mirror. His dark, half-alien personality, his preoccupation with the occult, his immense knowledge of Eastern life and lore, are things I remember with such effort and vagueness as attends the recovery of a dream. Sometimes I almost doubt that he ever existed. It is as if the man, and all that pertains to him, were being erased from human record by some mysterious acceleration of the common process of obliteration.

This is what academics refer to as recursive narration: a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer.... It is hard not to believe that this is Smith writing about Smith, if not the actual man struggling against a difficult fate on that hardscrabble mountainside above Auburn, California, then the Clark Ashton Smith of his own fantasies, the Emperor of Dreams.

“The Chain of Aforgomon” may not be the greatest of Smith’s stories. It is certainly not the most famous. But it has a very special place in my personal list of favorites.

What, indeed, did Smith think of himself and his works? With what endorsement did he leave his remarkably extensive body of prose and poetry—and painting and sculpture!—to the world?

I recently came across the text of Charles Baudelaire’s famous and scandalous volume,
Flowers of Evil.
Let me share with you just a few lines from Baudelaire’s introduction:

You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (
Fleurs du mal
) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people... ...(My detractors) deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don’t care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron.

Just so, the collected works of Clark Ashton Smith will make their way into the memory of our own lettered public. They will stand on a plain with the best prose and poetry of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert Ervin Howard. He was their equal; I am tempted to say more than that but will not. Each had his merits. Those of Clark Ashton Smith are lovingly displayed in this and its companion volumes of his collected fantasies.

In the same 1937 letter earlier cited, Smith referred to one of his stories, “The Death of Ilalotha,” as “unusually poisonous and exotic.” That story is included in this volume, and the reader is invited to consider it in the light of the author’s assessment. How aptly the phrase applies to Smith—whose works, however glowingly lovely, were seldom optimistic and never Pollyannaish—as well as to Baudelaire!

As you read this book or any collection Smith’s wondrous gems, do not hasten to the next story, the next scene, or even the next paragraph. Turn the clock to the wall. Put your wristwatch in a drawer. Disconnect the telephone and shut off your cell phone. Draw the blinds. Make yourself comfortable with the book in your lap, and perhaps with a glass of some fine, rare vintage at your elbow. Wade into the warm, scented sea of words. Give yourself over to the experience. Do not worry about emerging.

All too soon the world will summon you back to reality. The spell will be broken. When this happens, do not be ashamed to weep.

—Richard A. Lupoff

Berkeley, California

2010

A
N
OTE ON THE
T
EXTS

C
lark Ashton Smith considered himself primarily a poet, but he began his publishing career with a series of Oriental
contes cruels
that were published in such magazines as the
Overland Monthly
and the
Black Cat
. He ceased the writing of short stories for many years, but, under the influence of his correspondent H. P. Lovecraft, he began experimenting with the weird tale when he wrote “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925. His friend Genevieve K. Sully suggested that writing for the pulps would be a reasonably congenial way for him to earn enough money to support himself and his parents.

Between the years 1930 and 1935, Clark Ashton Smith was one of the most prolific contributors to
Weird Tales.
This prodigious output did not come at the price of sloppy composition, but was distinguished by its richness of imagination and expression. Smith put the same effort into one of his stories that he did into a bejeweled and gorgeous sonnet. Donald Sidney-Fryer has described Smith’s method of composition in his 1978 bio-bibliography
Emperor of Dreams
(Donald M. Grant, West Kingston, R.I.) thus:

First he would sketch the plot in longhand on some piece of note-paper, or in his notebook,
The Black Book
, which Smith used circa 1929–1961. He would then write the first draft, usually in longhand but occasionally directly on the typewriter. He would then rewrite the story 3 or 4 times (Smith’s own estimate); this he usually did directly on the typewriter. Also, he would subject each draft to considerable alteration and correction in longhand, taking the ms. with him on a stroll and reading aloud to himself (19).

Unlike Lovecraft, who would refuse to allow publication of his stories without assurances that they would be printed without editorial alteration, Clark Ashton Smith would revise a tale if it would ensure acceptance. Smith was not any less devoted to his art than his friend, but unlike HPL he had to consider his responsibilities in caring for his elderly and infirm parents. He tolerated these changes to his carefully crafted short stories with varying degrees of resentment, and vowed that if he ever had the opportunity to collect them between hard covers he would restore the excised text. Unfortunately, he experienced severe eyestrain during the preparation of his first Arkham House collections, so he provided magazine tear sheets to August Derleth for his secretary to use in the preparation of a manuscript.

Lin Carter was the first of Smith’s editors to attempt to provide the reader with pure Smith, but the efforts of Steve Behrends and Mark Michaud have revealed the extent to which Smith’s prose was compromised. Through their series of pamphlets, the
Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith
,
the reader and critic could see precisely the severity of these compromises; while, in the collections
Tales of Zothique
and
The Book of Hyperborea
, Behrends and Will Murray presented for the first time these stories just as Smith wrote them.

In establishing what the editors believe to be what Smith would have preferred, we were able to consult several repositories of Smith’s manuscripts, most notably the Clark Ashton Smith Papers deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, but also including the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, Special Collections of Brigham Young University, the California State Library, and several private collections. Priority was given to the latest known typescript prepared by Smith, except where he had indicated that the changes were made solely to satisfy editorial requirements. In these instances we compared the last version that satisfied Smith with the version sold. Changes made include the restoration of deleted material, except only in those instances where the change of a word or phrase seems consistent with an attempt by Smith to improve the story, as opposed to the change of a word or phrase to a less Latinate, and less graceful, near-equivalent. This represents a hybrid or fusion of two competing versions, but it is the only way that we see that Smith’s intentions as author may be honored. In a few instances a word might be changed in the Arkham House collections that isn’t indicated on the typescript.

We have also attempted to rationalize Smith’s spellings and hyphenation practices. Smith used British spellings early in his career but gradually switched to American usage. He could also vary spelling of certain words from story to story, e.g., “eerie” and “eery.” We have generally standardized on his later usage, except for certain distinct word choices such as “grey.” In doing so we have deviated from the “style sheet” prepared by the late Jim Turner for his 1988 omnibus collection for Arkham House,
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
. Turner did not have access to such a wonderful scholarly tool as Boyd Pearson’s website, www.eldritchdark.com. By combining its extremely useful search engine with consultation of Smith’s actual manuscripts and typescripts, as well as seeing how he spelled a particular word in a poem or letter, the editors believe that they have reflected accurately Smith’s idiosyncracies of expression.

However, as Emerson reminds us, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Smith may have deliberately varied his spelling and usages depending upon the particular mood or atmosphere that he was trying to achieve in a particular story. As he explained in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft sometime in November 1930,

The problem of “style” in writing is certainly fascinating and profound. I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate “tone.” If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. Obviously, the style of “Mohammed’s Tomb” wouldn’t do for “The Ghoul”; and one of my chief preoccupations in writing this last story was to
exclude
images, ideas and locutions which I would have used freely in a modern story. The same, of course, applies to “Sir John Maundeville,” which is a deliberate study in the archaic. (
SL
137)

Therefore we have allowed certain variations in spelling and usage that seem to us to be consistent with Smith’s stated principles as indicated above.

Typescripts do not exist in some cases, notably “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” while in other cases the existing typescript is incomplete, as is the case with “The Tomb-Spawn.” An arsonist destroyed Smith’s cabin in the 1950s, which resulted in some typescripts surviving only as burned fragments (“The Master of the Crabs,” “Morthylla”). Still others survive only as earlier drafts that are noticeably less polished than the published texts (“Schizoid Creator,” “Symposium of the Gorgon”). In the case of some stories that were only published long after Smith’s death, several different versions exist, requiring the editors to use our best judgment in selecting a text that we hope would not displease Smith.

Three stories exist in versions that differ considerably from the published texts. We include the original version of “The Coming of the White Worm” without reference to the version published in 
Stirring Science Stories.
We restore the cuts made to “Necromancy in Naat” while maintaining some very real improvements that Smith made when the tale was published in
Weird Tales
. On the other hand, the rejected version of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” contained unsuccessful attempts at romantic comedy that detracted from the story’s cumulative effect.

We regret that we cannot present a totally authoritative text for Smith’s stories. Such typescripts do not exist. All that we can do is to apply our knowledge of Smith to the existing manuscripts and attempt to combine them to present what Smith would have preferred to publish were he not beset by editorial malfeasance in varying degrees. In doing so we hope to present Smith’s own words in their purest form to date so that the reader might experience what Ray Bradbury described in his foreword to
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
: “Take one step across the threshold of his stories, and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell, and texture—into language.”

The editors wish to thank Douglas A. Anderson, Azédarac, Steve Behrends, Gregory Belt, Geoffrey Best, Joshua Bilmes, Christopher Crites, April Derleth, William A. Dorman, Alan Gullette, Don Herron, Margery Hill, Rah Hoffman, S. T. Joshi, Terence McVicker, Marc Michaud, Andrew Migliore, Will Murray, Boyd Pearson, John Pelan, Alan H. Pesetsky, Rob Preston, Robert M. Price, Dennis Rickard, Jim Rockhill, David E. Schultz, Donald Sidney-Fryer, James Thompson, Henry Vester, Jason Williams, and especially Martin Andersson for their help, support, and encouragement of this project, as well as Holly Snyder and the staff of the John Hay Library of Brown University, and D. S. Black of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, for their assistance in the preparation of this collection. Needless to say, any errors are the sole responsibility of the editors.

T
HE
D
ARK
A
GE

T
he laboratory was like a citadel. It stood on a steep eminence, overtopped only by the loftier mountains, and looked out across numberless fir-thick valleys and serried ridges. The morning sunlight came to it above peaks of perennial snow; and the sunsets burned beyond a rivered plain, where forest saplings had taken the battlefields of yesteryear, and skin-clad savages prowled amid the mounded ruins of sybaritic cities.

They who had built the laboratory, in the years when Earth’s loftiest civilization was crumbling swiftly, had designed it for a fortress of science, in which something of man’s lore and wisdom should be preserved throughout the long descent into barbaric night.

The walls were of squared boulders from a glacial moraine; and the woodwork was of mountain cedar, mightily beamed as that which was used in Solomon’s temple. High above the main edifice there soared an observatory tower, from which the heavens and the surrounding lands could be watched with equal facility. The hill-top had been cleared of pine and fir. Behind the building there were sheer cliffs that forbade approach; and all around it a zone of repellent force, which could be made lethally destructive if desired, was maintained by machines that conserved the solar radiations and turned them into electricity.