Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”
19
ness. Although he had others, his one outstanding protégé was Clark Ashton
Smith, “The Bard of Auburn.” In addition, as we have already indicated, Sterling was one of the first to “discover” Robinson Jeffers, and with his monograph
on Jeffers (the very first ever dedicated to him) to play a pivotal role in establishing him as a major new poet.
Paradoxically, as he approached the end of his life and career, Sterling in-
creasingly felt himself to be a failure, so much had poetic tastes changed since the fin-de-siècle when he had come of age. During the 1920s the whole trend of literary art, at least in English, was radically changing from the long-established romance tradition, that is, from the highly imaginative, to the disillusioned and ironic nitty-gritty of modern realism. In a bold and innovative fashion Sterling had specialized in creating highly imaginative poetry, but quite apart from his manner, his matter had presumably much less relevance and appeal to the young intellectuals taking over the emerging literary establishment.
Despite this radical and catastrophic shift in literary taste—catastrophic at
least from the elder poet’s perspective—Sterling nonetheless managed to leave
behind him quite a substantial output, especially from the very last decade of
his life: eight collections of lyrical poems, three volumes of occasional pieces, four or five verse dramas, one study of a fellow poet; and then between 1928
and 1939 three posthumous collections appeared. Sterling scholars rate his last three verse plays as ranking among his very best work, comparable to such
early extended pieces as The Testimony of the Suns and “A Wine of Wizardry.”
Just as important, perhaps, Sterling also left behind him one protégé and poet
similar to himself in style and substance, but with far greater depth. This person would not only redeem Sterling’s own type of make-believe, as the direct inheritance of the full-blown romantic tradition, but would also redeem—incidentally
and in an indirect manner—Sterling’s own substantial poetic output, and justify its existence despite the condition of half-oblivion into which it would lapse, leaving behind it a curious legend as of fabulous treasures but remotely known and unintentionally buried amid the shifting sands of time. This person was the still young
“Bard of Auburn.”
Clark Ashton Smith: Poet Laureate of the Otherworldly
Smith was in his early thirties when his great and good friend, patron, and poetic mentor died in San Francisco, whether by deliberate or accidental suicide, on 17
November 1926. Of course, his death proved an extraordinary loss to the younger poet, but it also occasioned, as was to be expected, near universal regret in much of northern California, and even to some extent in the southern part of the state, where Sterling had accomplished some script writing for Hollywood on a sporadic basis. We can gauge the depth of Smith’s own loss by reading his first and most extended poem to Sterling’s memory, which first appeared in the Overland Monthly
for November 1927, and of which the first stanza reads as follows:
20 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Farewell, a late farewell! Tearless and unforgetting,
Alone, aloof, I twine
Cypress and golden rose, plucked at the chill sunsetting,
Laurel, amaracus, and dark December vine
Into a garland wove not too unworthily
For thee who seekest now an asphodel divine.
Though immaterial the leaf and blossom be,
Haply they shall outlinger these the seasons bring,
The seasons take, and tell of mortal monody
Through many a mortal spring.
—“A Valediction to George Sterling” ( SP 258)
If Smith, thus left behind, would redeem the full-blown romantic tradition,
with its complete appanage of imaginative efflorescence, as he had inherited it from the elder poet, he would achieve this, paradoxically, by doing it in the very manner which Sterling had counselled him overtly not to use. Noting the trend that Smith’s creativity was taking, as observed in the twenty-nine poems in prose included in Ebony and Crystal—and even more recently in the two short stories (actually extended poems in prose), “Sadastor” and “The Abominations of Yondo,” both composed in
1925—Sterling had sincerely advised his protégé to give up “this macabre prose.”
However, if Smith had done as counselled, the very avalanche of highly imaginative tales that he would produce from 1928 to 1938 for Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and other pulp magazines of the period before World War II would never have materialized, and neither Smith nor Sterling would be as well known as they are today.
Although he had seemingly tended to disparage himself and his kind of
imaginative poetry as he neared the end of his life and career, the truth is that Sterling did, of course, take himself quite seriously as an artist. It would seem that to some of his friends and correspondents the elder poet depreciated his own
work, but he did not do so to all of them. As perceptively noted by Thomas E.
Benediktsson in his excellent biography-cum-critical-study George Sterling (1980), Sterling’s “correspondence with various literary figures is of great biographical and historical value” (174). It is much less in his letters to such well-known figures like Jack London and H. L. Mencken than it is much more in his letters to
such lesser-known writers like Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith that
the true and serious artist reveals himself. As proof of this seriousness we may cite the three dramatic poems Lilith (1919), Rosamund (1920), and Truth (1923), which occupied much of Sterling’s chief creative energy during his final decade.
Poets and writers in general cannot produce great or outstanding work by tak-
ing the attitude that their output does not matter or has no value. It is this earnest aspect of Sterling’s output to which Smith responded in depth, and which
he continued as his own special inheritance from the elder poet.
After 1926 Smith continued it in a new mode, in prose, but he had already
done so in verse for sixteen years, that is, for the period of his correspondence
Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”
21
and friendship with Sterling, which began in early 1911. Two major discoveries had triggered Smith’s development as a poet. In 1906, at the age of thirteen, he came upon the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, in the library of the grammar school in Auburn that he was attending. Taking the volume home in a veritable trance, he revelled for days in Poe’s innovative meters and otherworldly melodies. Whatever
poetry he may have experienced before, nothing impacted him as did the small but individual corpus of Poe’s extant poems. In 1907, at the age of fifteen, Smith
made another discovery, and this had an even greater impact on him and his
poetic evolution. Twenty years later he described this discovery in “George
Sterling—An Appreciation,” published in the Overland Monthly for March 1927: Likewise memorable, and touched with more than the glamour of childhood
dreams, was my first reading, two years later, of “A Wine of Wizardry,” in the
pages of the old Cosmopolitan. The poem with its necromantic music and splendours as of sunset on jewels and cathedral windows, was veritably all that its title implied; and—to pile marvel upon enchantment—there was the knowledge
that it had been written in my own time, by someone who lived little more than a hundred miles away. In the ruck of magazine verse it was a fire-opal of the Titans in a potato-bin; and, after finding it, I ransacked all available contemporary
periodicals for verse by George Sterling, to be rewarded, not too frequently, with some marmoreal sonnet or “molten golden” lyric. I am sure that I more than
agreed, at the time, with
the dictum of Ambrose Bierce, who placed “A Wine of
Wizardry” with the best work of Keats, Poe and Coleridge; and I still hold, in the teeth of our new Didactic School, the protagonists of the “human” and the
“vital,” that Bierce’s judgement will be the ultimate one regarding this poem, as well as Sterling’s work in general. Bierce, whose own fine qualities as a poet are mentioned with singular infrequency, was an almost infallible critic. ( SU 294) This poem represented Smith’s introduction to Sterling, and it would haunt and
fructify the younger poet’s mature work in verse and in prose from start to finish, and not just in the most obvious way. True, generically Sterling’s poem anticipates, it is patent, Smith’s later (and greater) compressed epic The Hashish-Eater, and many episodes in the latter poem anticipate some of Smith’s later short stories; but by the same token Sterling’s earlier poem not only prefigures Smith’s own mature fiction of 1928–38, but at least one episode or passage, the one involving Satan and Lilith (not far from the poem’s conclusion), directly anticipates one of Smith’s very last stories,
“Schizoid Creator.”
At some point after his initial discovery of Sterling, Smith would have ob-
tained the elder poet’s first two collections The Testimony of the Suns and A Wine of Wizardry, and from The House of Orchids onward Sterling himself would have supplied Smith with copies of his own books as they came off the press. In January 1911 the two poets began their correspondence, the elder poet taking on the role of poetic mentor to the younger one and advising him during 1911 and 1912 not
22 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
just concerning the first mature poems that Smith was creating at the age of
eighteen and nineteen but just as much concerning which poems would consti-
tute his first collection, The Star-Treader, brought out by Sterling’s own publisher in November 1912. The subjects range from the cosmic-astronomic spaces and
Graeco-Roman mythology to charming nature vignettes and little-known ar-
chaeological or mythic topics. Despite Sterling’s obvious influence in terms of cosmic-astronomic subjects, this first book of poetry still remains very much
Smith’s own.
Meanwhile, during June and July 1912 poetic mentor and younger poet met in
person when Sterling had Smith come down from Auburn to Carmel to spend an
idyllic month of great happiness, during which the latter shared almost all aspects of the older poet’s ideal Bohemian existence. It proved a major eye-opener for Smith, and in quite a positive way. It was the younger poet’s first prolonged exposure to residing by the sea, and it left a lasting impression on him (as found among other instances in the gorgeous lyric in alexandrines “Sea-Memory,” created at the same time as analogous lyrics included in Ebony and Crystal) . Things now happened rapidly in Smith’s ongoing literary career after he returned home to Auburn.
By means of San Francisco’s half a dozen daily and weekly newspapers, a
wealthy property owner in Placer County, Boutwell Dunlap, who had just discov-
ered Smith and his poetry for himself, triggered in August 1912 the official public discovery of Smith as a youthful poetic genius. The resultant uproar of
publicity thus prepared poetry lovers, as well as the general public in California and elsewhere, to receive both poet and first volume with heightened interest,
and (just as important) actually moved them to purchase copies of that first
volume, which at one hundred pages made up a substantial volume of solid
poetry. All this alerted the east-coast critics to the presence of a significant new voice. Despite the inevitable negative reactions incited by all the publicity—
relatively low-key and not amounting to much numerically—Clark Ashton
Smith had made his entrance, and then some, on the American literary scene.
Interviewing the poet Witter Bynner in Town Talk: The Pacific Weekly, in the issue for Saturday, 7 September 1912, Edward F. O’Day (he and editor-in-chief
Theodore Bonnet served as the weekly’s principal literary critics) provides us
with an amusing sidelight on Smith’s new-found fame, and how he and Sterling
became yoked as poetic partners in the public’s collective mentality. This interview or profile appears in the department “Varied Types,” invariably written by O’Day himself.
Bynner and George Sterling are friends, such good friends that Bynner is not
afraid to speak freely of Sterling’s poetry.
“It is too stellar for me,” he says. “There’s too much Aldebaran in it. It gives me cosmic indigestion. Somebody at the Bohemian jinks called Sterling and this
young poet Clark Ashton Smith the Star Dust Twins. It is shocking to me to see
such a young man write poetry which might be written by Sterling. In saying so
Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”
23
I’m not deprecating Sterling. The young poet has some prodigious lines. But as
Harry Lafler says, two are less than one. I like Sterling best when he comes closest to earth. For that reason I was delighted with that little poem of his about the coyote. I regard that poem as a most hopeful sign in Sterling’s development.”
The poem about the coyote is “Father Coyote,” later gathered by Sterling into
his fourth major collection, Beyond the Breakers. Already recognized nationally, Witter Bynner would go on to have a very long life and career, outliving both Sterling and Smith. His patronizing remarks about Smith imitating Sterling, however, are typical of other such comments at the time as well as later. Also, how two are less than one is at best a moot point. To have written cosmic-astronomic poetry such as Smith wrote—with the same depth and power of emotion, insight, and imagination as the younger poet commanded—would have been impossible for Sterling,
all evidence to the contrary. He wrote only one such poem, and it remains his
greatest, The Testimony of the Suns, even if the general sensibility permeates his overall output. To judge from Bynner’s remarks, the significance of Sterling’s as well as Smith’s greatest achievements in verse completely passed over Mr. Bynner’s head.
Yet for all their poetic and even personal similarities the two figures and their respective bodies of work are noticeably distinct, even without the difference in age between them. On the one hand, whereas privately Sterling was a true artist who took his art quite seriously, he went out of his way publicly to disguise the fact that he had often to work hard at his poetry. In addition to the demands made on him by his own creativity, he increasingly had to play the role of a public figure as the most conspicuous poet in California, and hence as the poet laureate of the Far West. Here his Apollonian good looks, his great charm, his practiced ease in society helped him enormously in such a role. On the other hand, although very
poor in a monetary sense most of his life, Smith managed to have the luxury of
leading a more or less quiet private existence during which he could concentrate on his own creativity almost completely. Relative to the extraverted Sterling, Smith was almost painfully shy and ill at ease around groups.
If Sterling reigned as the poet laureate of the Far West for the period of
1903–26, then his protégé would soon reveal himself as the uncontested poet
laureate of the otherworldly, as “the emperor of dreams,” and moreover one
who would reign as such for a termless while. Whereas Sterling’s life seems at
times rife with bustle and animation, Smith’s uneventful existence appeared to
come to life only when his ongoing creativity manifested itself externally from time to time in a book of poetry and later in a book of short stories, not to mention the rare exhibit of drawings and paintings, together with his small but fascinating sculptures (which he would begin during the spring of 1935 and continue the rest of his life). The exte
rnal uneventfulness of Smith’s existence compels us to concentrate on the products and events of his creativity almost exclusively as the source of the greatest excitement.
24 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Meanwhile, as formerly, Sterling did not let up in his advocacy for Smith. During his brief period back on the east coast (mostly based in New York City), from spring 1914 to spring 1915, when invited to read aloud from his own output before a
group of influential or wealthy littérateurs and other solid members of the arts community there, Sterling instead insisted on reading largely from Smith’s works. Then, late in 1915, before the Panama-Pacific International Exposition closed up for the last time, Smith came down from Auburn to see the fair during a visit to San Francisco with Sterling as his cicerone. The exposition’s exuberant and grandiose architecture impressed and pleased the young poet, but not the amusement zone. All this occurred while, from January 1911 onward, the two poets were exchanging letters as well as manuscripts of their new and old poems, no less than the occasional clipping from newspaper or periodical.
In the year following the publication of Sterling’s own Thirty-five Sonnets (1917), the Book Club of California brought out a small selection of only fifteen pieces of Smith’s poetry, under the title Odes and Sonnets. Like Sterling’s own volume, this is one of the few books of poetry ever published by this book
club, probably the oldest in the U.S. Just as Sterling had secured publication
for Smith’s very first book of poetry, by his very own publisher, the elder
poet’s advocacy without a doubt played a decisive part in the publication of
Odes and Sonnets in a small but elegant Art Nouveau édition de luxe of only 300
copies. The volume has only thirty pages. Each page is surrounded by the same
decorative design by Florence Lundborg of New York, a design featuring pea-
cocks, grapes, and pomegranates.
Distributed only to the club’s members, like all their editions, this choice
volume did not appear for sale in bookstores. Much more than general advocacy,
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