The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (5 page)

The secretary of the Book Club of California, Alfred M. Bender, wrote: “Thank you for your wonderful poem, ‘The Hashish-Eater.’ The subject may seem unappealing to many, but it has such richness of imagination, sustained thought, and stately beauty of expression that I am sure it will enhance your reputation and bring you new laurels. It should be an inward satisfaction to add another star to the firmament of California literature. Your place is growing firmer with each new effort.” Smith’s great friend and mentor George Sterling wrote: “‘The Hashish-Eater’ is indeed a most amazing production. It contains more imagination than anything else I have ever read.” In the poetry journal
L’Alouette
for January 1924, appeared a highly favorable review of
Ebony and Crystal
by Smith’s correspondent living across the continent, H.P. Lovecraft, who gave unstinted and eloquent praise to the volume, especially to its crowning achievement “The Hashish-Eater.”

Unfortunately, the fact that Smith himself privately published
Ebony and Crystal
in a limited edition (as he did the following volume
Sandalwood
), prevented it from reaching a nationwide audience, with the consequent larger critical recognition. To what extent its poetic originality and excellence, its oftentimes extraordinary cosmic vision, would have found appreciation is a moot question, since the year 1922 saw the beginning of the apotheosis of that modernist poet par excellence, T.S. Eliot, who had won the $2000 Dial Award for his 434-line poem “The Waste Land” (1922). It would be interesting and amusing (if nothing else) to compare Eliot’s extended ode on sterility and desiccation to Smith’s longest poem, the 576-line “The Hashish-Eater.” One had summed up in a thoroughly modernist manner the disillusionment, the disenchantment of a postwar generation of the first half of the twentieth century of the Christian Era. The other, who rarely bothered himself in the least with his own age, without the manifest gesture of even turning his back on his own times, celebrated in a highly original and inventive manner the eternal, ever-renewing, even if perverse, splendors of the cosmos.

Acclaim of his own age or not, Smith continued on his own supremely independent way, letting no external clamors or censures interfere with the voice of his own personal
dæmon
. During the 1920s Smith was contributing to a wide range of magazines, from those of national or international circulation to the “little” magazines. The poetry journal
The Step-Ladder
honored Smith by devoting its entire issue of May 1927 to his poems (principally from
Ebony and Crystal
and
Sandalwood
). Among this wide range of magazines was one whose founding in 1923 and existence up until 1954, was to play a pivotal role when Smith later came to write short stories. This was
Weird Tales
“The Unique Magazine” (as the subtitle ran), in which Smith first appeared in the issue for January 1924 with the poems “The Red Moon” and “The Garden of Evil” (later collected into
Sandalwood
as “Moon-Dawn” and “Duality,” respectively).

During the first half of the 1920s, to repay part of his indebtedness to the owner-editor of
The Auburn Journal
for printing
Ebony and Crystal,
Smith became a “journalist” and thus contributed to the town’s chief newspaper 101 installments of a column entitled “Clark Ashton Smith’s Column”: the first column is dated April 5, 1923, the last is dated January 7, 1926. To this column Smith contributed both poetry and epigrams, largely the former: in all, 81 poems (59 original poems and 22 translations from Baudelaire) and 329 original, and 17 selected, epigrams and pensées. (To the
Journal
overall, Smith contributed 84 poems.) The majority of the poems in
Sandalwood
—that is, 49 of the total 61 poems in that collection (37 of the 42 original poems and 12 of the 19 translations from Baudelaire)—appeared in this column of Smith’s, most of them previously to their publication in
Sandalwood
. While most of the poems first published in the
Journal
have since appeared elsewhere, virtually all of the 329, or 346, epigrams and pensées have not, although publication of a selection of them (made by Smith) was tentatively considered by an eastern publisher in the early 1940s. The epigrams and pensées appeared in the
Journal
under the following titles:
Epigrams
(once),
Cocktails and Crème de Menthe
,
Points for the Pious
,
Unpopular Sayings
(once),
New Teeth For Old Saws
(once),
The Devil’s Notebook
(which title has its obvious analogy with that of
The Devil’s Dictionary
by Ambrose Bierce, originally entitled
The Cynic’s Word-Book
), and
Paradox and Persiflage.
In 1990, Starmont House brought out a complete edition—or as complete as then possible—of Smith’s epigrams and pensées under the title
The Devil’s Notebook
, edited by Don Herron.

In October 1925, again in Auburn, Smith published his third major poetry collection
Sandalwood
, dedicated to George Sterling: a volume distinguished not only for its many beautiful love poems but also for nineteen translations from the French of Charles Pierre Baudelaire. The translations are indeed a remarkable accomplishment in view of the fact that Smith knew virtually nothing of the French language a year prior to October 1925, and hence had learned the language in something less than a year, beginning his study of it and subsequently of Baudelaire in November or December 1924, or during the very first part of 1925. This volume, because of its private printing in a limited edition, has shared the fate of
Ebony and Crystal
of being little better than unknown. In addition to the recognition given Smith’s poetry of 1911–1925 by divers distinguished literary persons, the newspapers of the San Francisco area accorded long, elaborate, and overall excellent reviews to at least the first two of Smith’s three major early poetry collections. As the result of
Ebony and Crystal
, one critic wrote apropos of Smith that “Among the living [poets] he stands alone.”

The year 1925 also saw a new development in Smith’s creative evolution: in this same year he had written two short stories, “The Abominations of Yondo” and “Sadastor,” stylistically and thematically growing out of his earlier poems in prose as well as out of his poems in verse. He submitted them to Farnsworth Wright, the editor of
Weird Tales
. The latter, always wary as to negative reader reaction to something overly new, rejected both stories, which he very well may have considered a little bit of too much, since both tales are essentially extended poems in prose. Later Wright did accept “Sadastor,” printed in
Weird Tales
for July 1930; and
The Overland Monthly
accepted “The Abominations of Yondo,” printed in the issue for April 1926, with the following note on Smith in the section entitled “April Contributors”: “Clark Ashton Smith is a California poet and he proves something else in his ‘Abominations of Yondo.’” Indeed, he had proven himself a unique poet in prose—that is, a practitioner of the poem in prose—and had proven the possibility of writing an extended poem in prose, in the manner of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” that unique creation in the canon of the elder writer’s works. In fact, it is not too much to say that technically Smith had almost created—or at least re-created—the genre of the extended poem in prose.

In November 1926, at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, occurred the death of George Sterling, Smith’s great friend and mentor, ostensibly by suicide, a theory with which Smith never agreed: “…As Smith points out in his article [of personal reminiscences of Sterling written in 1941], the evidence indicating suicide was largely circumstantial. At the time of his death, Sterling had in his possession not only the fatal poison (cyanide) but also a morphine derivative that he had sometimes taken against sleeplessness. He was ill and perhaps suffering the profound mental confusion that often accompanies illness. What could have been more probable than a mistake? Sterling’s last letter, written to Smith less than a week before his death, gave no evidence of mental depression or a failing of his vital interests.” (From
The Auburn Journal
, Dec. 15, 1941: see article “Notes on Clark Ashton Smith.”) Moreover, Sterling had been eagerly awaiting a visit from H. L. Mencken.

His death was a source of great bereavement to Smith, who paid a beautiful and moving tribute to his friend in the memorable poem “A Valediction to George Sterling,” published in
The Overland Monthly
for November 1927. Earlier in the same year had appeared in the same magazine, in the issue for March, an article of reminiscences by Smith of Sterling entitled “George Sterling—An Appreciation.” In it Smith recalled Sterling in the following words: “Always to me, as to others, he was a very gentle and faithful friend, and the kindest of mentors. Perhaps we did not always agree in matters of literary taste; but it is good to remember that our occasional arguments or differences of opinion were never in the least acrimonious. Indeed, how could they have been?—one might quarrel with others, but never with him: which, perhaps, is not the poorest tribute that I can pay to George Sterling.… But words are doubly inadequate, when one tries to speak of such a friend; and the best must abide in silence.” Later (in 1941), Smith recalled Sterling in these words: “He was essentially lovable, gave himself without stint and assisted scores of young poets.” Smith remained devoted the rest of his life to Sterling’s memory and to his poetry.

A few weeks before his death, Sterling had said to David Warren Ryder: “Clark Ashton Smith is undoubtedly our finest living poet. He is in the great tradition of Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley; and yet, to our everlasting shame, he is entirely neglected and almost completely unknown.” Also shortly before his death, Sterling had advised Smith, apropos of the latter’s poems in prose of death and similar subject-matter, to give up “this macabre prose,” a piece of advice Smith fortunately ignored. One of the very last services which Sterling performed for Smith and the cause of his poetry occurred when the elder poet brought an article for publication into the editorial offices of
The Overland Monthly
in San Francisco. This article was a highly enthusiastic, almost ecstatic essay on Smith’s poetry entitled “The Emperor of Dreams” and written by the then eighteen-year-old Donald A. Wandrei. The monthly subsequently published the essay in its issue for December 1926.

Sometime after the publication of
The Star-Treader
, Vachel Lindsay had read some of Smith’s poetry and had begun a correspondence with him. This correspondence-friendship lasted until Lindsay’s death in 1931.

After
Sandalwood
, Smith had evidently given up the creation in quantity of poetry. He had now turned his attention once more to the writing of fiction. Earlier, in 1924, in the August issue of
10 Story Book
—a magazine which featured a piquant combination of short stories with what are now known as “girly pictures”—had appeared Smith’s first professional short story since his contributions to
The Overland Monthly
and
The Black Cat
in 1910–1912: this is an amusing, deft, and very brief short story entitled “Something New,” in which Smith incidentally mocks the extraordinarily rich style of imagery characteristic of
Ebony and Crystal
. In 1925 he had written the two extended poems in prose “The Abomination of Yondo” and “Sadastor.” As we have seen, Farnsworth Wright rejected them. However, Smith continued to contribute to
Weird Tales
his own original poems in verse as well as translations from Baudelaire, all of an expectedly high quality. The issue for August 1928 included Smith’s first appearance in prose in
Weird Tales
; this was in the form of translations in prose of three poems originally in verse by Baudelaire—“L’Irréparable,” “Les Sept Vieillards,” and “Une Charogne”—presented to the readers as
Three Poems in Prose, by Charles Pierre Baudelaire and Translated by Clark Ashton Smith from the French
. Smith had translated the verse originals of the poet into a supple and idiomatic English prose. In the succeeding issue for September 1928 appeared Smith’s first short story in
Weird Tales
—a strange parable of love and death entitled “The Ninth Skeleton,” but giving relatively little indication of the shape of things to come. The tale is significant, however, in that it is one of the very few laid by Smith in his general natal area: the action takes place on Boulder Ridge not far from the narrator’s cabin; and the description of the area in the story is a poetic but exact one of the area around Smith’s own cabin during his lifetime.

However, Smith did not begin the writing of fiction in any quantity until the beginning of the Depression in 1929. We may postulate the years 1926 to 1929/1930 as the period in which Smith was carefully preparing in his imagination the divers backgrounds for his stories. In the poem in prose entitled “To the Dæmon” and dated December 16th, 1929, Smith wrote: “Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent dæmon.… Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love.…” And tell him many tales the
dæmon
veritably did. Between summer 1928 and summer 1938 Smith wrote something less than 140 short stories and novelettes.

His next story to appear in
Weird Tales
was “The End of the Story,” laid in Smith’s imaginary province of mediæval France, Averoigne; this was in the issue for May 1930. The tale proved immediately popular with the readers of “The Unique Magazine,” and the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin De Casseres, in “The Eyrie” for July (“The Eyrie” was the readers’ letter department in
Weird Tales
), commended Smith’s tale as a story “which is not only a philosophic thriller but possesses real literary quality, which is not lost (quite the contrary) on readers, such as you have, of imaginative tales.” The majority of Smith’s tales appeared in either
Weird Tales
under Farnsworth Wright or
Wonder Stories
under Hugo Gernsback. To the latter Smith contributed a highly imaginative, not to say unique, type of science-fiction story. To the former he contributed all manner of tales, many of them laid in Smith’s carefully constructed backgrounds: the primeval continent Hyperborea; “the last isle of foundering Atlantis,” Poseidonis; mediæval Averoigne; the last continent Zothique; the planet Xiccarph; and many other worlds. Although these stories may have become known only to a specialized audience, they introduced a new dimension in the art of the short story: many of the more characteristic tales are actually extended poems in prose in which Smith has united the singleness of purpose and mood of the modern short story (as first established by one of Smith’s literary idols, Edgar Allan Poe) together with the flexibility of the
conte
or tale; an entire short story being unified and, in part, given its powerful centralization of effect, mood, atmosphere, etc., by a more or less related system or systems of poetic imagery and language (simile, metaphor, archetype or allegory). This ranks as a technical achievement of the first order, although it has received relatively little or no recognition.