He has, as Sterling has said in his gracious preface, “lent himself the more innocently to the whispers of his subconscious daemon.” He is for the most part not of the world. He roams a strange world beneath the wan light of fleeing moons,
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
59
beside dark pools where lilies gleam—a land where geography need not be more specifically cited than as lying somewhere between Saturn and the sun.
A sense of space is his, and its natural correlative, an enormous distaste for
limitation. He cries out for vast prospects. He is at peace among the thunder of planets. Comets are his familiar spirits; on the far rim of space he sifts falling star-dust for strange words of gold; he is intoxicated with the reel of nebulae, and in the cold fire of Sirius his mind finds a natural affinity.
It is the fate of most poetry today to revolt more or less madly against things as they are. This poetry is no exception; but the intensity of Smith’s revolt has effaced all consciousness of itself and become pure creation, erecting a new cosmos with laws and beauties peculiar to itself. It is not a pose. The far-off, the fabulous, the exotic, are necessary to him; and though now and then one finds a trace of preciosity in his phrasing, the most notable fact in this poetry is its almost desperate sincerity.
————————
Naturally enough, it has the defects of its qualities. No man may turn his back completely upon common things without loss. Earth takes her revenge. It was not in the mere fancy that the old Greeks pictured the giant with whom Hercules wres-tled as gaining new vigor with each contact with the soil. Poetry is such a giant, and may also be conquered by removal from earth; but with the conquest goes an inevitable loss of sheer human vigor in the verse.
In the case of Ebony and Crystal the result of this alienation from life is a certain sterility even in the midst of its greatest beauty. The poet describes himself as having
“—placed my wealth before thy fabled eyes
Pallid and pure as jaspers from the moon.”
And much of his verse is like the eyes of this goddess of Lemuria—fabled,
pallid, pure, beautifully wrought with an almost flawless technique, but infinitely remote, a thin high music as of crystal bells beaten far off in the night.
————————
But there are unforgettable pictures on almost every page, and in certain po-
ems—notably in the sonnet “Transcendence” and the lyric “Solution”—there are
definite traces of a broader comprehension and a richer harmony. It seems as if in these Clark Ashton Smith had set a foot over the borderline of pure imagination and breathed for a moment an atmosphere of sympathy which could fertilize his
art and give it a far wider significance.
But one must not find too much fault with such work as this, and one would
find none at all if it were not that the fineness of this poet’s achievement leads one inevitably to hope for him, as time goes on, a conquest finer still.
He has had courage to avoid the sentimental, the obvious, the trite. He has
withstood the much more subtle seductions of the Time-Spirit, which would make
poetry out of street cars, hucksters, slum harlots, and the dregs and refuse of life.
His life bears no date line; it is neither modern nor ancient; it is merely beautiful.
60 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
This, it may be repeated, is no small achievement. He has a vivid imagination,
a copious and personal vocabulary, an unfailing sense for literary form. With some disciplining of the seductions of his own temperament, some warmer recognition
of the beauty that also lies in loves and hates, struggles, failures and successes of the world that surges about the base of his ivory tower it would be hard to match him in the fold of present-day poetry.
III. Sandalwood
[Frank Morton Todd.] “The Bard of Auburn.” Argonaut (14 November 1925): 9.
Clark Ashton Smith dedicates his latest volume of verse to George Sterling, and the dedication is significant for the reason that “Sandalwood” marks the author’s eman-cipation from the Sterling influence. Not that it was a bad influence, but simply that it was something not the poet himself. Even more remarkable is the fact that although the collection includes nineteen translations from Baudelaire the original verse is far less in the mood of Baudelaire than was that in “Ebony and Crystal.” By translation and dedication the poet pays his debt and burns the mortgage.
Smith now sings for himself in his own tones and in the key of his own emo-
tion. He is singing out of life as he is living it, and not devising variations on the themes and moods of others. Others he might imitate when addressing nature, but not when appealing to human nature—to the woman or women of his inspiration.
One would as soon offer a woman a second-hand engagement or marriage ring, as
a second-hand simile or a shop-worn sentiment.
Though scarcely more than a boy when he began to write verse of great prom-
ise and some achievement, Smith has been slow of emotional development. Only
now do we find him swayed by the passion without which pulsating poetry is not
written. In earlier poems he spoke of love, but not as one absorbed by it. His tributes to Eros were carven of fine gold, but the carving almost concealed the precious metal. In other words, he was writing and not singing. All this has been
changed. He now dips his pen in ink that has been “tempered with love’s sighs.”
We find him singing:
Queen, whose perilous bosom bare
Was the field of Love’s emprise,
I would hush my weary sighs
In the silence of thy hair.
In my heart thy kisses wrought
Raptures of the fabled faun;
Seal my lids before the dawn
With thy lips and lift them not.
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
61
The translations from Baudelaire are poems in themselves, as good transla-
tions of poetry ought to be. Of what value are mere literal versions if their very literalness necessitates loss of the original music?
IV. Out of Space and Time
Anthony Boucher. “Among the New Books.” San Francisco Chronicle (15 November 1942): “The World,” p. 31.18
Clark Ashton Smith is the sort of obscure and admirable artist that California has a way of producing. He was born in Long Valley in the ’90’s, has lived and worked around the State (in San Francisco for a while), and now lives in Auburn. He has been a fruit packer, a hardrock miner, a sculptor, a windlasser and a poet.
In the last role he has published four volumes, was a protege of George Ster-
ling, and has been praised by William Rose Benèt. There his story might stop, and he would seem just another talented individual of chiefly local reputation. But in 1930 he took up another career—that of a pulp fantasy writer.
Pulp fantasy, best represented by the magazines Weird Tales (for which Smith does most of his work) and Unknown Worlds, is a unique and largely misunderstood genre.
Fantasy of any sort, humorous or horrible, is frowned on by most markets. I remember an editor of the Saturday Evening Post telling me, “The Post has only three editorial tabus: Sex, religious controversy, and fantasy-except-by-Stephen-Vincent-Benèt.”
But fantasy is an essential part of the tradition of the English short story—see any anthology for proof. It has its writers and its readers, and the general editorial opposition has driven them, the supercilious might say, underground, into a few pulps. Don’t be too hasty to sneer at the word “pulp.” These pulps provide the
only market that would publish the work of a latter-day Bierce or Machen or Poe.
Outside of anthologies, these often excellent pulp stories have been unknown
to the book-buying pub
lic until August Derleth, the Wisconsin Saroyan and him-
self a noted pulp practioneer, founded Arkham House for the express purpose of
giving permanent form to the pick of the pulp crop. Arkham House has so far
published a selected volume of Derleth and a titanic complete volume of the master, H. P. Lovecraft; now it offers this mouth-watering collection of the best of Clark Ashton Smith.
Smith’s fantasy is possibly the purest now going, and for that very reason,
sometimes less effective than it might be. Where Machen or Lovecraft makes you
feel the world is a horrible and uncertain place, Smith transports you to horrible and uncertain worlds—Hyperborea before the ice age, the medieval French land of Averoigne, or Zothique, the last continent on earth. They are strange and beautiful, these worlds, but they do not impinge upon your own; there is rarely the later-than-you-think sensation of “This could happen to me.”
62 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Much of Smith, perhaps too much, is strongly under the influence of Love-
craft and Dunsany, adorned with the arabesques of his own fantastic and poetic
prose. Where his originality shows most clearly is in a peculiar blend of horror and irony, a fantasy so extreme that you hang poised between the shudder and the
smile. Such a memorable classic as “The Monster of the Prophecy” is pure Smith, and incomparable.
If you are an aficionado of pulp fantasy, you need no urging; Out of Space and Time is just what you’ve been waiting for. If the field is strange to you, this volume might well make a convert. Here is a poet singing dark and unmentionable horrors, while the ironic sparkle in his eye provides the one ray of light through such monstrous gloom.
V. Genius Loci and Other Tales
Arthur F. Hillman. “The Lure of Clark Ashton Smith.” Fantasy Review 3, No. 1
(February–March 1949): 25–26.
When a critic cannot find major blemishes in a book he is reduced to seeking minor faults in order to flight his shafts of wit and pronounce his omniscient judgements. Therefore, it is with a tinge of malice that I point to the fact that this volume is five tales short of the contents originally proposed by the publishers.
Doubtless rising costs are responsible for this lamentable curtailment; and only the promise of further collections of the Sage of Auburn’s work will alleviate the disappointment of his followers.
Meanwhile, it must be admitted that this third assembly of Mr. Smith’s tales is the equal of its predecessors; perhaps even better, since several of them belong to the realm of science fiction. In the beginning, the weird and fantastic provided the motifs for his colourful stories, but the gradual development of his work towards the sort of material he produced, in particular, for Wonder Stories, was all to the good. For his science fiction, despite its utter variance to modern trends in this field, will always stand as a superb example of imaginative writing.
For instance, the cosmic sweep and majesty of “The Eternal World” and its
supramundane guardians, the Timeless Ones; the spell-binding mystery of ancient Mars wrapped in the eldritch despotism of “Vulthoom;” the inconceivable torture of the other-dimensional world of “The Visitors from Mlok” (now re-titled “A
Star-Change”). The weird stories, too, ranging from the enchanting irony of “The Disinternment of Venus” to the powerful malignancy of “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” are not only full of intriguing elements in themselves, but are presented in words of glowing fire and poetic imagery.
Clark Ashton Smith may be a Prophet of Doom, but he is robed in hues of
gorgeous purple and gold. Although the fatalistic acceptance of the utter inhumanity of Fate and Death runs like a sombre thread through his tapestries, all are beau-
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
63
tiful. His men and women are but puppets twitching to the strings suspended from alien talons but the puppets, stage and scenery are fashioned and contrived by a master craftsman. His devotion to beauty, the ultra-imaginative outlook which pervades his plots, and the avoidance of outworn stock situations and characters,
place his tales in the highest level of fantastic literature.
Today, many writers have succumbed to the realistic or humanistic trend of
science fiction; and there is a disturbing schism between their work and the science fiction in this book. Even in the past, there was a bitter struggle between the two schools of thought. But Mr. Smith has remained faithful to the views he expounded in 1932: “One of literatures most glorious prerogatives is the exercise of imagination on things that lie beyond human experience—the adventuring of fantasy into the awful, sublime and infinite cosmos outside the human aquarium. The real thrill comes from the description of ultrahuman events, forces and scenes
which properly dwarf the terrene actors to comparative insignificance . . . Science fiction, at its best, is akin to sublime and exalted poetry in its evocation of tremendous non-anthropomorphic imageries” [ PD 14–15].
To all the subscribers to such a doctrine this book will need no urging, for true delvers into the ultramundane will know what Mr. Smith has to offer. It is to the protagonists of the modern school that it throws down a challenge: whether they too, in spite of their inclinations, can resist the lure of Mr. Smith’s kind of science fiction. I venture to suggest that if they once dip into these tales, they will find it as potent an attraction as the singing of the Lorelei to the sailors of old.
VI. Edwin Markham19
From California the Wonderful. New York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1914, p. 360.
Gossip on Parnassus
The wind of poesy bloweth where it listeth; poesy is a mystery deep as the
world. She strikes her chords in unexpected places. Up in the leafy coverts in our Auburn hills, there is a young man who has felt the thrilling touch of her rushing wing; and not he has a gift of song that colleges cannot confer. This young man is Clark Ashton Smith.
His first volume of verse shows that his mind tends toward the vast, the re-
mote, the mysterious. Shall I say that he exhorts Orion, instructs the Shadow, admonishes Demogorgon, explores the Abyss? He has some of the excess of
youth—yes: yet how much nobler is the excess of youth than the poverty of age.
Ashton Smith is a true poet: he has caught sight of the wonder behind the appearance of the world, the vision that forever allures and forever eludes.
64 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
From a letter to Smith from Albert M. Bender, undated but sometime after the
publication of Odes and Sonnets in 1918 (CAS Papers, John Hay Library).
Dear Clark,
I take great joy in passing on this compliment from Edwin Markham:
“I was especially delighted to receive from your hand a copy of the poems of
Clark Ashton Smith. For a long time I had been wanting a copy of his poems, for they have lines of unusual beauty, glints and gleams of true genius. There is something terrific in Smith as there was in John Martin, the illustrator of Paradise Lost. It cheers me to know that you Californians have honored yourselves in your honoring of this distinguished poet.”20
From “The Judgment of Mr. Markham.” Literary Review (New York Evening Post) (12
September 1925): 6.
[. . .] Since I have already mentioned in The Literary Review (August 1) the
fine lines of George Sterling, Louis Untermeyer and others, I will merely name
them, as I have close with a hasty reference to Clark Ashton Smith of Auburn, Cal.
Mrs. Chauncey Juday sends a line from his poems, but I like better this one:
Were I God,
What rapture it would be if but to watch
Destruction crouching at the back of Time.
This seems to me to be one of the highest reaches of the wing of the imagination.
From “Clark Ashton Smith Pub
lishes New Book. Late Poems and Translations
Contained in New Work of Poet.” Auburn Journal (5 November 1925): 3.
West New Brighton, N.Y.
September 20, 1925.
My dear Clark Ashton Smith:
A few days ago I sent you a copy of The Literary Review of New York City,
wherein I had the happiness to quote two or three of your remarkable lines of poetry. I fancy that my article will interest you as it touches upon the poetic realm to which you have dedicated your intellectual powers. I have already heard good reports of this summary of the great line symposium.21
If I mistake not, you had the kindness to send me a copy of your book of po-
ems a long time ago. I fear that I did not acknowledge it. If I failed in this matter, I wish you to know that the failure was not due to any lack of interest in your remarkable contribution to modern verse. No, it was due to the fact that much of my time has been in eagle-flights over the continent, lighting at times in the great cities to read from my own verse and to proclaim the gospel of poetry.
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
65
I now wish to express my keen admiration of some of your lines and passages,
for there are moments when you rise to the high realms of the creative imagina-
tion. In these moments you stir our hearts with beauty and wonder.
I trust that you will have the strength and courage to go on with your noble
devotion to the Muse. I can assure you that the circle of those who admire your distinguished work will continue to widen, for that circle will include all discriminating and intelligent readers who happen to come into contact with your poetry.
Ever
cordially
yours,
EDWIN MARKHAM
VII. Vachel Lindsay22
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (22 April 1913).23
My dear Clark Ashton Smith:
Greeting and god speed to you. You have already done wonders. On the
Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc Page 9