The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (3 page)

During the preparation of his
Selected Poems,
Smith would slightly revise the poem, removing many commas and asterisks and adding a few lines and word-changes. He would also replace such British spellings as
colour, harbour
, and
rigour
, with standard American. More significantly, Smith increased the number of episodes from ten to twelve, perhaps to impart more of a classic aesthetic structure. Although this revised version has superseded the original as Smith’s own preferred text, the editors felt it important to keep the
Ebony and Crystal
version in print as well for the sake of the CAS scholar who may wish to compare texts or, perhaps, who wish to experience Smith’s
magnum opus
exactly as it appeared in 1922.

Unlike the other works that we have included in the Night Shade Books edition of Clark Ashton Smith, “The Hashish-Eater” is not prose, yet it contains so many germs and ideas that would find maturation in his short stories that its inclusion is warranted. This may also be said of the other pieces included in this collection: they do not represent his best work, but for the devout acolyte at the altar of Klarkash-Ton they provide glimpses of ideas that failed to come together for some reason, as well as signs and portents of wonders yet to come.

Notes

1. Clark Ashton Smith, “Story-Writing Hints” (Ms, Clark Ashton Smith Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University).

2. Donald Sidney-Fryer,
Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography
(West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978): 19.

3. F. E. Dyer (President, The Shortstory Publishing Co.), letter to Clark Ashton Smith, April 13, 1910 (TLS, Clark Ashton Smith Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University).

4. L. Sprague de Camp, “Sierra Shaman.”
Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976): 198.

5.
Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith
, ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003): 11 (hence
SL
).

6.
The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith
, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005): 86.

7.
The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
, ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979), item 65.

8. “
Weird Tales
Stays Weird.”
Science Fiction Weekly
(March 24, 1940): 1.

9. Robert A. W. Lowndes, “Letters.”
Weird Tales Collector
no. 5 (1979): 31.

10. Henry Kuttner, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, September 5, 1937 (TLS, private collection).

11. See Don Herron, “Notes on Clark Ashton Smith,
” Hyperborian League
mailing 12 (July 1978).

12. See William C. Farmer, “Clark Ashton Smith: A Memoir,” in Smith’s
The Sword of Zagan and Other Writing
, ed. W. C. Farmer (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004): 178.

13. Quoted in George Haas, “Memories of Klarkash-Ton.” In The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979): 137.

T
HE
S
ORCERER
D
EPARTS

Donald Sidney-Fryer

I pass… but in this lone and crumbling tower,

Builded against the burrowing seas of chaos,

My volumes and my philtres shall abide:

Poisons more dear than any mithridate,

And spells far sweeter than the speech of love…

Half-shapen dooms shall slumber in my vaults

And in my volumes cryptic runes that shall

Outblast the pestilence, outgnaw the worm

When loosed by alien wizards on strange years

Under the blackened moon and paling sun.

“The Sorcerer Departs”

Clark Ashton Smith

Fragment of unfinished poem (
The Acolyte
, Spring 1944).

A
B
IOGRAPHY OF
C
LARK
A
SHTON
S
MITH

  or those of us who recognize in the late Clark Ashton Smith a poet and a poet in prose as remarkable as the French genius Baudelaire, the preceding “fragment”—actually far more complete than many a longer poem—cannot but possess certain poignant autobiographical associations. The eventuality stated symbolically in the last lines is devoutly to be wished: that
connoisseurs
of fantasy, whether in the immediate or the far future, shall indeed come to know the canon of Smith’s works and appreciate his quite considerable achievement, and that Smith shall thus come to realize the only type of immortality any human being may reasonably expect, at least as far as such is known.

When Clark Ashton Smith died on August 14th, 1961, his death passed almost completely unnoticed, apart from a few local newspapers in his native state of California. No
Saturday Review of Literature
, no
Atlantic Monthly
devoted an entire memorial issue to the man and his writings. To the knowledge of the present writer, not a single science fiction or fantasy magazine even mentioned the fact of his death. Smith’s connections with the main literary river of his own time were at best tenuous, if not just about non-existent; his connections with the tributary or sub-tributary of the science fiction and fantasy magazines, proved only a little less gossamer. The echoes of his earlier poetic fame in the Bohemian circles of San Francisco and Monterey had long since died away, and thus he died, little better than unknown to his own time.

The biography of Smith’s external life is relatively uneventful, although still significant; but this relative uneventfulness places a greater importance on the life of the inner man, on the inner life of the literary creator, where such is known to us and where it is revealed in his works. However, it will still be to some purpose to review the more salient facts of biography with particular emphasis on those details which strongly relate to his creative life.

Smith was born of Yankee and English parentage on January 13th, 1893, in Long Valley, California, about six miles south of Auburn, in the house of his maternal grandparents (the Gaylords) located along the old road leading south of Folsom out of Auburn, and about five miles from the northern reaches of Boulder Ridge where Smith was to spend the major portion of his life. In 1902, his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith, moved to Boulder Ridge, to a spot about a mile south of Auburn and about one-fourth of a mile east of the Folsom Road. Here his father with the help of the then nine-year-old boy, built a cabin and dug a well, and here Smith lived almost continuously until 1954, apart from visits to Sacramento, San Francisco, Monterey, the neighboring state of Nevada, and a few other places. He almost visited New York City sometime in 1942 under the ægis of his friends Benjamin and Bio De Casseres.

One can easily imagine the effect that the surrounding countryside had on the sensitive and imaginative boy; a countryside that was and still is a veritable garden of fruit trees—pear, plum, peach, cherry, apple—located on the rolling foothills of the Sierras and alternating with copses of evergreen and deciduous trees and with broad park-like areas; the foothills filled with deserted mines, some of them still containing gold; and arching overhead, the diurnal or nocturnal immensitudes of the heavens rendered remarkably clear in the clean smog-free country air.

He attended the equivalent of the first three grades of grammar school (in Smith’s own words) “at the little red schoolhouse of the precinct.” He completed the five remaining grades of grammar school in Auburn. Smith wrote later that “As a schoolboy, I believe that I was distinguished more for devilment than scholarship. Much of my childhood was spent in the neighborhood of an alleged gold mine; which may be the reason why the romance of California gold mining failed to get under my skin.” However, in spite of his disclaimer, this neighboring gold mine—the “Old Gaylord Mine” close to his grandparents’ property—evidently had some influence on the young Smith because his mature literary work, both poetry and prose, abounds in mining and geological terms. Without realizing it, he had succumbed to the greater romance of telluric splendor, as numerous references to precious and semi-precious metals and stones attest in his poems and in his tales.

Smith did not go on to either high school or college; he preferred to conduct his own education and later, when he turned down the opportunity for a Guggenheim scholarship, it was for the same reason. Thus early in his life he manifested what was to be his lifelong independence. To judge by his creative work, we may be sure that Smith—always an omnivorous but discerning reader—proved to be his own best teacher.

From the very first Smith seems to have been attracted to the exotic, the far away, and the literally astronomically far away. The gold mine near his grandparents’ home, with its hints of precious, untold wealth, may account to some minor degree for Smith’s predilection for the exotic. The fact that his father Timeus Smith had travelled extensively as a young man, and that he would often reminisce to his son about those travels, may also explain Smith’s early attraction to the far away and the fabled, to the Orient and to those mysterious lands of the imagination so beloved by visionary youth.

The last receives ample confirmation when Smith would later report that his “first literary efforts at the age of eleven, took the form of fairy tales and imitations of
The Arabian Nights
. Later, I wrote long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life, and much mediocre verse.” These “long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life” culminated in Smith’s first professional short-story appearances in magazines: “The Malay Krise” and “The Ghost of Mohammed Din” in the then well-known West Coast literary magazine
The Overland Monthly
, in the issues for October and November 1910, respectively; and “The Mahout” and “The Raja and the Tiger” in
The Black Cat
, in the issues for August 1911 and February 1912, respectively. Significantly enough, all these tales are laid in the Orient, the first-named in the area of Singapore and the last three in India. “The Ghost of Mohammed Din” is important as being Smith’s first professional story in which he features the element of the supernatural (handled with considerable skill, it may be added). In “The Raja and the Tiger” the climactic action of the story takes place in the Jain cave temple where “Huge stone pillars, elaborately sculptured, supported the roof, and around the sides great gods and goddesses of the Jain mythology, called Arhats, glared downward. The torch illuminated dimly, leaving much in shadow,
and in the shadow imagination created strange fantasies.
” (The present writer’s italics.) Smith later re-used the theme of “The Mahout,” of a mahout who trains and uses an elephant to wreak his revenge upon a hated Oriental despot. When Farnsworth Wright, the editor of
Weird Tales
, came to found in 1930 a companion magazine called
Oriental Stories
(later changed to
The Magic Carpet Magazine
), Smith contributed two tales: “The Justice of the Elephant” in the Autumn 1931 issue of
Oriental Stories
, and “The Kiss of Zoraida” in the July 1933 issue of
The Magic Carpet Magazine
. In the former laid in India, Smith used again, in slightly altered form, the theme of “The Mahout.” In the latter laid in Damascus, appears one of Smith’s principal inspirations, the manifestation of death. The Oriental background continued in “The Kingdom of the Worm,” a tale of the mediæval adventurer Sir John Maundeville, published in
The Fantasy Fan
for October 1933; and it continued in “The Ghoul,” published in the same amateur magazine for January 1934; this last is a tale laid in Bagdad during the reign of the Caliph Vathek, William Beckford’s fictional “grandson” of Haroun al Raschid.