Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  whole I think you have chosen the finest and most representative poem for your

  book title. For many reasons though, I prefer section III and section V of “The Butterfly” (though they could on the whole, more appropriately refer to Mount

  Shasta). There’s not much Butterfly in your universe yet.

  If I have any technical advice it would be to study Japanese prints and Whis-

  tler, and after that to read and re-read the life, not necessarily the works, of John Ruskin. Though Ruskin and Whistler were at war, I owe a debt to both.

  But I suppose everyone is recommending their own patent medicine.

  Please read my poem in the May American. That may perhaps show how the

  Ruskin and Whistler motives may be combined in a fashion. That poem is my

  whole gospel in rhyme.

  But what is advice? My only advice to you is to be good, say your prayers, keep sacredly your health and follow the dream. When you reach the Dark Tower, blow

  your horn bravely and when you find the Grail, make the Pacific echo with your music.

  And so, good morning. You have already done wonders.

  Very

  sincerely,

  Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

  VIII. H. P. Lovecraft24

  Yes—I certainly would like to meet Smith, who is in some ways the most un-

  usual person I know. I have been a close correspondent of his since August 1922, when I was ‘put next’ to him by my friend Samuel Loveman (the “Harley Warren” of my “Statement of Randolph Carter”), who in turn got in touch with him through the late poet George Sterling. Smith was born in Auburn, California, in 1893, and has never been out of his native state. He lives with his parents in a cottage on a hill side

  66 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  somewhat outside Auburn village—within easy access of a rather weird type of

  mountain scenery (Crater Ridge etc.—cf. “The City of the Singing Flame”) which

  has figured in some of his tales. His family has always been in very straitened circumstances, and his parents are now in the 80’s—having married late in life. His father is a gentleman of a very ancient English Catholic family—born in England, and bearing the hyphenated name of Ashton-Smith. (C A S does not use the hyphen) The elder

  Smith in his youth was something of a soldier of fortune, and travelled in many odd corners of the earth, including the Amazon jungles of South America. Clark probably derives much of his exotic taste from the tales told him by his father when he was very small—he was especially impressed by accounts of the gorgeously plumed birds and bizarre tropical flowers of equatorial Brazil. On his mother’s side Smith comes of American Southern blood—Huguenot and English. From childhood he was a

  poet, artist, and dreamer—obviously something of a boy wonder. He attended ordinary public schools and never went to a university, but has amassed an immense and curious erudition through private study. When 17 he published his first book of poetry—“The Star-Treader”—[. . .] and attracted the favourable attention of George Sterling. At the same time he conducted his original and untutored experiments in art—evolving a fantastic style of drawing and painting which is really ineffably powerful despite its lack of technical smoothness. When he had an exhibition of paintings at Berkeley many critics highly praised his work. Smith’s tastes have always inclined toward the cosmic and the fantastic, and his poetry is mainly concerned with bizarre themes despite occasional excursions into more mundane lyrical fields. Much of his verse shows the influence of Sterling; whom he has visited many times, and who wrote prefaces for some of his books. At one period—when he was about 18—

  Smith wrote several stories . . . . in a vein somewhat less non-terrestrial than his present work . . . . but he did not keep up the practice. His present series of tales dates from 1925. Until lately he suffered from very poor health—including a now-vanished touch of tuberculosis. During his ill period he displayed the greatest disregard of health rules—exposing himself recklessly to all kinds of weather—but his rashness cured instead of killed him. I believe he was at one time inclined toward a touch of artistic “pose”—wearing a picturesque shock of hair and even growing a full beard—

  but that is all over now. Naturally, he is rather misunderstood and unappreciated by the provincial villagers among whom he lives, but as he gets into middle age this disturbs him less than it used to. I can see a perceptible mellowing and growth of genial-ity in him during the last five years. He no longer has the touch of active, cynical bitterness that he once had. At one period Smith conducted a column—largely

  verse—in his local paper, The Auburn Journal. At the age of 32 he took up the study of French—at home, and without a teacher—and in six months was writing French

  poems of marvellous power. He has since contributed verse to some of the leading Paris magazines—the editor of one of which wrote him that he could hardly believe he was not a Frenchman. And yet Smith has never known any French-speaking person, and could hardly pronounce the language intelligibly! His translations of Baude-

  Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith

  67

  laire—both free paraphrases in verse, and literal ones in prose—are the best I have ever seen, although they have not yet found a publisher. Smith has read the magazine W T [ Weird Tales] from the start—and was the first to direct my attention to it. At that period he did not expect to contribute to it, but at my urging he sent in several poems—many of which were accepted. I kept urging the editors—first Edwin Baird

  and then Wright—to use his art work, but they were very slow to respond. Indeed, it was not till this year that any picture of his was accepted. His new period of fiction writing was very slow in developing. In 1925 he wrote “Sadastor” and “The Abominations of Yondo”, but Wright rejected both. Not till about 1930 did he become

  prolific—and persistent in bombarding editors. Then his success as a fictionist began quite suddenly—both W T and the science-fiction magazines accepting his tales in unlimited quantity. This unfortunately caused him to write many cheap hack tales, but such pot-boiling has never spoiled his real style. When he sets out to write something really serious, he does it! His pictorial work would require a chapter in itself.

  Some of his hideous heads—proboscidian, semi-reptile, semi-insect—are classics of their kind, and no one excels him in drawing unearthly, abnormal, and poisonous vegetation. His large landscapes—scenes on Saturn, and on still remoter worlds—are full of a mysterious spell. If you’d like to see some of Smith’s smaller drawings I’ll gladly lend you those in my possession—as soon as their present borrower returns them. I have met two people who have seen Smith face to face—one friend of his in Auburn who visited the east last year, and one easterner (George Kirk) who visited him in California in 1921. He is very kindly and likeable, and incredibly brave in his lifelong struggle against illness, poverty, and misunderstanding. He has at times helped out his revenues by fruit-picking, but is always forced to struggle hard. His home is a very small one, with no running water—just a primitive well outside. He writes in the open a good deal—at a table in his front yard—and takes many walking trips in the picturesque mountains of his region. The responsibility of his aged parents (who are inclined to domineer a bit) has kept him chained rather closely at home—if it were not for them, he would probably manage to see more of the world.

  Perhaps, though, his localism has been a blessing in disguise—his limited acquaintance with this world (San Francisco being the only metropolis he knows) giving his imagination all the keener force in depicting other worlds and other universes!

  Notes

  1. Porter Garnett (1871–1951) was a librarian at the Bancroft Library from 1907 to 1912. He was also a printer of some note. He edited The Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club (3 vols., San Francisco, 1919), which lists “C. A. Smith” among the participants in the chorus (p. xxviii). He later taught at the Carnegie Institute of Te
chnology in Pittsburgh.

  2. Actually “The Cloud-Islands.”

  3. Uncredited newspaper clipping, A. M. Robertson Papers, Bancroft Library

  2002/203c, Box 2 folder 2.

  68 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  4. Sophie Treadwell (1885–1970) is today regarded as one of the foremost women

  playwrights of the twentieth century. She worked as a journalist while attending the University of California at Berkeley and was the only American reporter granted an interview with Pancho Villa after the Mexican Revolution.

  5. CAS to GS, 12 April 1913: “The enclosed is Stanley Braithwaite’s review of my book, in the Boston Transcript. The tag at the top doesn’t mean that I’m subscribing to a cutting-bureau. The Komicke firm keeps sending me samples, along with an invitation to subscribe. This is the third or fourth that they’ve sent; and I think you admit that it’s a prize. Think of getting a hundred such for only five dollars! (the subscription price) Don’t return the thing” ( SU 85). William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962) was a conservative critic and poet who exercised immense influence during this period, despite the fact that he was of African-American ancestry (something which he down-played). As literary editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, he commissioned GS to write an “Ode on the Centenary of the Birth of Robert Browning,” which won second prize in the Lyric Year contest for 1912. GS later fell out with Braithwaite concerning delays in responding to submissions, requests for “occasional” poems, and the general opinion he formed that Braithwaite was “opaque to pure poetry, that you miss ‘the soul and inner light of song,’ and fail to note when the baser rock passes into crystal. You care for assertions, optimisms, and pieties, and become art-brother to that absurd old hunker [William Lyon] Phelps, whose breath of life is platitudes and sanctimonies” (GS to Braithwaite, 8 April 1919). See Dalton Gross, “George Sterling’s Letters to William Stanley Braithwaite: The Poet Versus the Editor,” American Book Collector 24, No. 2

  (November–December 1973): 18–20. GS contributed an article on “The Poets of the Pacific Coast” to Braithwaite’s Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1926; the paragraph that discussed CAS’s work was reprinted in the Step-Ladder for May 1927 (rpt. SU 291–92).

  For a discussion of Braithwaite’s relationship with Lovecraft, see S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996), p. 200.

  6. “The Star-Treader,” IV.8.

  7. “The Star-Treader,” V.5.

  8. “The Star-Treader,” VII.1.

  9. “The Star-Treader,” VII.9.

  10. “Ode to Music,” l. 49.

  11. “Ode on Imagination,” l. 10.

  12. “The Soul of the Sea,” ll. 5–7, should read as follows:

  It pours adown the sky,

  And rears at the cliffs of night

  Uppiled against the vast.

  13. “Ode to Music,” l. 15.

  14. Monroe (1860–1936) was founder of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.

  15. Frank Morton Todd was the author of The Story of the Exposition: Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal (New York: G. P.

  Putnam’s Sons, 1921). See CAS to GS, 17 December 1922: “I was delighted with the Argonaut review—I hadn’t expect [ sic] anything half so intelligent and sympathetic from a San Francisco reviewer” ( SU 221).

  Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith

  69

  16. See GS to CAS, 4 October 1912: “Thanks for the poems, one of which I return with a suggestion. . . . It’s a beautiful thing, tho ‘nenuphar’ is a bit puzzling—I had to look it up in the dictionary” ( SU 66).

  17. CAS to GS, 3 January 1923: “Here’s the latest review of my book. It appears simultaneously in the Fresno ‘Bee’ and the Sacramento ‘Bee,’ and was written by the assistant editor of the former, William Foster Elliot, who is also a poet and has written some uncommonly good stuff” ( SU 225). GS to CAS, 16 January 1923: “I return the

  ‘Bee’ man’s review, which is by much the most discerning and adequate of any you have (so far as I know) yet received. I could wish I’d written it for the preface of the book” ( SU 225).

  18. Anthony Boucher (1911–1968) was a founding editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote book columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the New York Times. In another review of Out of Space and Time that Boucher published in Unknown Worlds for April 1945, he refers to CAS as “the outstanding disciple of H. P. Lovecraft, a disciple, in fact, who was not without his influence in turn upon the master,” adding the following:

  The Lovecraft influence is perhaps fading now, with the rise of the newer school of fantasy exemplified by de Camp or Sturgeon or [Jane] Rice; but the best of the Lovecraft school remains incomparable for the creation of the dire extremities of horror. And Smith, because he is a poet and a craftsman, has produced by far the best work in the Lovecraft tradition.

  How much Smith himself has added to the field of fantasy is more difficult

  to estimate. In most of his work the echoes of Lovecraft and Dunsany drown out

  his own voice. Possibly two features, aside from the sometimes self-conscious,

  sometimes macabrely evocative poetic prose, are distinctively Smith.

  One, which is odd in a man experienced in so many workaday fields, is the

  absoluteness of his fantasy. Lovecraft wove his mythos into our everyday life until we were haunted by the suspicion that the world was a dark and uncertain place.

  Smith rather transports us to dark and uncertain worlds and relates their appalling histories. These are wonderful and horrible; but they happened long ago or are to happen long hence—they do not bring you up against the choking realization that it is darker than you think.

  The other, Smith’s most important contribution, is a guignol irony—a gentle

  skill in telling that which is so inhumanely fabulous as to be neither horrible nor farcical, but balances on the razor edge between the shudder and the titter. Read

  “The Monster of the Prophecy,” my favorite Smith story, or “The Testament of

  Athammaus,” and try to analyze your reaction.

  The corpse of a strychnine victim wears on its face a sardonic smile. That

  smile is as exact an expression as any of the sensations evoked by these unique Smith grotesques.

  There is much else in this volume, almost four hundred pages of magnificent

  fantasy reading. There are three stories of Averoigne. There is the novelette, “The City of the Singing Flame,” which is something akin to science-fiction, but transfigured by Smith’s extraordinary visual imagination. There are stories of Zothique, including the nightmarish “The Dark Eidolon,” and of Hyperborea, including

  possibly the most popular of Smith’s works, “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.”

  70 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  There is the interplanetary horror of “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” which gave me my first authentic shudder in some time, and there are two exquisitely melancholy prose poems never printed in popular magazines.

  19. Edwin Markham (1852–1940) was a colleague of Ambrose Bierce and George GS

  who achieved national celebrity with “The Man with the Hoe” (1899), although Bierce, GS, and CAS did not care for that poem’s didacticism.

  20. Quoted in “Clark Ashton Smith Publishes Poems. ‘Ebony and Crystal’ is New Masterpiece of Auburn Genius,” Auburn Journal (14 December 1922): 1.

  21. Markham started a running symposium in the Literary Review, a supplement to the New York Evening Post, in the 1 August 1925 issue, “Searching for the Magic Line,” in which he invited readers to send in their favorite lines of poetry. In a letter to GS dated 2 August 1925, CAS made his observations regarding its theme: “The symposium of great poetic lines is interesting; so many of the selections lean
toward the didactic, which is just what one would expect! Personally, I am quite unable to select any particular line in English verse that seems more beautiful than all others. I think, however, that Keats is richer in fine lines than any other English poet. He was able to play on more than one string, too:—‘Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed;’ ‘Savour of brass and poisonous metal sick’; ‘Her open eyes where he was mirrored small in paradise;’ ‘Aea’s isle was wondering at the moon,’ etc.” ( SU 254).

  22. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) achieved fame when “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” was published in the fourth issue of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry (January 1913). It was set to music by Charles Ives in 1914. CAS’s first book of poems was brought to Lindsay’s attention by E. Olon James, a friend who taught at Mills College in Oakland, California. According to an interview with CAS published in the Sacramento Union for 21 December 1941, Lindsay initiated a correspondence with CAS after first reading his poetry; however, from the context and the wrong date given for Lindsay’s death (1937, not 1931) it is clear that the interviewer, Eleanor Fait, was confusing Lindsay with H. P. Lovecraft (“Auburn Artist-Poet Utilizes Native Rock in Sculptures”; rpt. Dark Eidolon No. 2 [July 1989]: 27). In any event, no correspondence between CAS

  and Lindsay has come to light, save the following letter. Lindsay also mentions CAS, along with GS and Edwin Markham, in Golden Whales of California (New York: Macmillan, 1920): “If California has a shining soul, let her forget her seventeen year old melo-dramatics [Lindsay is referring to the infant motion picture industry], and turn to her poets who understand the heart beneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star-treader, George Sterling . . . have, in their songs, seeds of better scenarios than California has sent us” (p. xviii).

  23. Ms., Special Collections, University of Iowa Library.