Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  tends to a spondaic rhythm, “which by some mysterious law, reproduces the at-

  mosphere of ordinary life.”2 An atmosphere of remoteness, vastness, mystery and exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler shades, tints and nuances of meaning—all of which, of course, are wasted or worse than wasted on the average reader, even if presumably literate. [. . .]

  As to coinages, I have really made few such, apart from proper names of per-

  sonages, cities, countries, deities, etc., in realms lying “east of the sun and west of the moon.” I have used a few words, names of fabulous monsters, etc., drawn

  from Herodotus, Mandeville, and Flaubert, which I have not been able to find in dictionaries or other works of reference. Some of these occur in “The Hashish-Eater,” a much-misunderstood poem, which was intended as a study in the possi-

  bilities of cosmic consciousness, drawing heavily on myth and fable for its im-

  agery. It is my own theory that, if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in the end, like

  the hero of this poem.

  I hope that I have made it plain that my use of rare and exotic words has been

  solely in accord with an esthetic theory, or, one might say, a technical theory. ( SL

  365–66)

  Notes

  1. Quite apart from any real critical or literary value that Blish’s essay may possess intrinsically, it may also serve as a pertinent illustration of the difficulties involved in conducting research, bibliographical and otherwise, among materials not collected by, or easily accessible in, academic or other libraries associated with institutions, usually the best homes for uncommon materials. Fanzines, perzines, and semiprozines (i.e.,

  84 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  semiprofessional magazines) by their very nature did not or do not lend themselves easily to the status of conventional printed collectibles. Although a few college or university libraries may now possess random and meager holdings of the fanzines from the 1930s and 1940s, researchers academic and otherwise have had to rely for the most part on individual collectors for any kind of access to such idiosyncratic publications.

  The present writer states this directly from personal experience. While conducting the research for his Clark Ashton Smith bio-bibliography Emperor of Dreams (1978), he was fortunate enough to have access to Forrest Ackerman’s unparalleled collection of all types of books and magazines dealing with fantasy and science fiction, including what must have amounted (if piled one item on top of another) to a twenty-five- or thirty-foot stack of fanzines of every description, as faithfully amassed by Ackerman from the 1930s on into the early or middle 1960s. This overall collection proved an invaluable resource, even if (as it turned out) Ackerman did not have any copies of Tumbrils, and even if we had thought to ask at the time. (We could not have done so because we did not know yet that Tumbrils had existed.) It was Fritz Leiber who, following our principal search among Ackerman’s archives, let us know of the existence of Blish’s essay, of which otherwise we would not have known anything at all. We wrote at once to James Blish himself (address courtesy of Fritz again), then living somewhere on the east coast, requesting of him a copy of his own essay as politely as we could. What better strategy could there be to get a copy than applying directly to the very source himself?

  Alas, as the essay’s author kindly replied almost at once, his own file of Tumbrils, along with many other valuable papers, had undergone such damage in a flood at a previous place of residence near a river that they had emerged from this disaster in a state beyond repair or any further usage. He had no choice except to throw most of them away. Since we had no other clue as to where else to search (nor did Blish himself), we gave up any further quest for the elusive piece, and nobody else appeared to know either.

  Many years later, acting on this datum about Blish’s essay as reported in our bio-biography, Don Herron finally discovered a copy and bought it at great expense, later sharing it quite generously with others, including Scott Connors, Ronald Scott Hilger, and myself. Otherwise we could not have reproduced Blish’s essay here, nor could we deliver our present riposte.

  2. In Strachey’s essay, the original wording reads: “which seems to produce (by some mysterious rhythmic law) an atmosphere of ordinary life.”

  The Last Romantic

  S. J. Sackett

  The late Edwin Markham, author of “The Man with the Hoe” and other poems,

  once called Clark Ashton Smith “the greatest American poet.” Benjamin De Casseres ranked Smith as a poet with Poe, Baudelaire, Shelley, Rimbaud, Keats, and Blake.

  And yet, as George Sterling—himself once the leading contender for the laurel

  in this country, at least in the eyes of H. L. Mencken—has pointed out, “to our everlasting shame, he is entirely neglected and almost unknown.”1

  The busy circles of professional esthetes have never heard of Smith. The not-

  so-high-brows, who get their introduction to modern poetry through the antholo-

  gies of Oscar Williams and Louis Untermeyer, will not find him in the indices to those volumes. At the best, you may get a facetious “Smith? Smith? The name is

  familiar . . .”

  It is clear to those who know Smith’s poetry and prose that the reason for his

  undeserved eclipse is purely a lack of timing. He lived at the wrong time. If he had been born in 1793, instead of a hundred years later, you would have studied him in your undergraduate English survey course. But the currents of his age have passed him by. He never heard about the wasteland; he thought it was a garden all along.

  For Clark Ashton Smith is the last of the Romantic poets. There are other

  writers of traditional verse, but none of them are really Romantics as Smith is. In an anything-but-Romantic age, it is no wonder that his remarkable talents have

  been too little appreciated. He has refused to conform to the patterns of Pound or the accents of Eliot. He has gone on in the great traditions of poetry no matter what his contemporaries do. He has chosen, deliberately, to be unconfined by his historical period and to write for all time, if not for his age. It is therefore perhaps not wholly surprising that his age ignores him.

  The general tone of Smith’s poetry can best be described by the words fin de siècle. He is a brother-in-arms of Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and the other “decadents” of the turn of the twentieth century. He is a translator of Baudelaire and often writes of his own garden of evil in much the same way. Through these Bunthornes of the gay nineties, he looks back also to the Romantics, to Keats and Poe and Coleridge, and through them also to Milton.

  He is, of course, derivative. His detractors—who have been surprisingly vocal,

  considering the little impact Smith has made on the world of letters—have deprecated him as “a creative scholar.” And this, in a sense, he is. Surely it is an

  86 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  achievement in itself to be so good a “creative scholar” as Smith is. After all, one could say the same for Eliot.

  But Smith is original, too. Or, rather, if not original, neither were Tennyson or Keats or Poe or Coleridge, for they were all derivative poets as well. There is something about Smith’s work at best which marks it as distinctive, although it is true that in some poems his influences are incompletely amalgamated. And it is dangerous to try to find a source for all of Smith; his affinity to certain writers has occasionally led critics to assign to him influences in other poets whom he has never read.

  Smith does not attempt to mirror the neurosis or frustrations of his age. He

  does not try to express his reactions to the ills of our world, except in his withdrawal from them. He has no political or psychological axe to grind. All he wants to do is write poetry, write beautiful poetry, write poetry wit
h singing words that will delight the reader. He wants to amuse, in the most noble meaning of the word, just as Poe and Coleridge amused their readers with haunting beauty.

  Smith’s poetry has appeared in five collected volumes, of which The Dark Chateau, published in 1951 by Arkham House, is the most recent and the only one which is readily obtainable. It contains a good sampling of Smith’s output; there are the moody and romantic evocations which are his most characteristic utterances, such as “Amithaine,” “Averoigne,” “Zothique,” “The Witch with Eyes of Amber,”

  and “Luna Aeternalis”; there are some examples of his dabblings in Spanish and

  French poetry, both in his own compositions and in translations from other poets; and there are some of his more ironic pieces, like “Sinbad, It Was Not Well to

  Brag,” “Sonnet for the Psychoanalysts,” and “The Twilight of the Gods.” From

  these poems, and the others in this collection, it is possible to get an impression of what Smith can do and what he can do best. It is possible also to decide whether or not one likes him, for this is a matter of individual taste; but, for those who may approach The Dark Chateau in order to make this decision, I have one caution. Read the poems aloud, for they have been written with a painstaking attention to sound.

  A volume of Selected Poems has been advertised for imminent publication ever since The Dark Chateau appeared; I have been awaiting its advent but so far have been disappointed.

  Smith also writes prose. He does not write short stories so much as short

  prose tales, more in the vein of Poe than of de Maupassant. The style is the important thing in Smith’s fiction; he is concerned with his diction, with getting the exact word in the right place. Character does not interest him at all, and plot is only the framework for style. The best of his stories, however, are very good, once you have made the initial concession to judge Smith’s work on its own merits and not to

  measure him against contemporary followers of Hemingway.

  With Smith, as with Poe, the aim of fiction is the creation of a single emo-

  tional effect. Also as with Poe, the effect Smith most often aims at is terror.

  Whether he achieves his effect or not depends on the amount of co-operation he

  can extort from his reader. You have to approach his fiction with standards differ-

  The Last Romantic

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  ent from those by which you would judge most modern writers. You have to be

  willing to make that suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith. But once you have made that effort of mind, Smith’s prose will carry you into lands of long ago and far away where strange and wonderful things happen. It is the music of Smith’s language, rather than any empathy with the characters, which most frequently achieves the effect. For this reason, Smith’s stories deserve more than any others in English since Poe’s to be called “prose poems.”

  And yet these tales are not all emptiness. There is some substance to them.

  Smith has things to say about the nature of humanity and of human existence, and he says them in his own way. The vision and the expression are both unique.

  They are, frankly, fantasies. In the letter column of Wonder Stories for 1932–33, Smith defended fantasy against more realistic forms of literary art. Speaking of realism, Smith said, “The best possibilities lie in the correlation of observed data about life and human problems with inspired speculation as to the unknown forces of

  cosmic cause and effect. . . .The evil lies in a meaningless Dreiserism, an inartistic heaping of superficial facts or alleged facts which . . . may be erroneous or, at least, too incomplete to permit the safe drawing of dogmatic inferences. . . . It is partly because of this shifting, unstable ground on which the thing called realism stands, that I regard pure, frank fantasy as a more valid and lasting art-expression of the human mind” [ PD 20–21].

  It is, then, his considered judgement that imaginative writing—fantasy—is the

  only enduring type of art. As he has put it elsewhere, “The animals alone, without having imagination, have no escape from reality. From paretic to psycho-analyst, from poet to rag-picker, we are all in flight from the real. Truth is what we desire it to be, and the facts of life are a masquerade in which we imagine that we have

  identified the maskers” [ PD 39]. On epistemological grounds then, because it is impossible to ascertain reality, Smith has written entirely in the fantastic vein.

  Smith’s prose style has been accused of “verbosity” and of being “Byzantine.”

  It has been called “intolerably arty.” In defense of his ornate style, Smith has written that “it is designed to produce effects of language and rhythm which could not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to what is known as ‘basic English’.

  As Strachey points out (in his essay on Sir Thomas Browne), a style composed

  largely of words of Anglo-Saxon origin tends to a spondaic rhythm, ‘which by

  some mysterious law reproduces the atmosphere of ordinary life’. An atmosphere

  of remoteness, mystery, and exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler shades, tints and nuances of meaning” [ SL 365]. If those are Smith’s purposes, certainly it would be a mistake for him to adopt a monosyllabic style.

  And, in an age dominated by Hemingway, it is difficult for the average reader to see that such a style as Smith’s can achieve the effects its author wants. Such, however, is the case; and the styles of Poe and Sir Thomas Browne, which have influenced Smith, are evidences.

  88 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  Four collections of Smith’s short stories have been published; one, by the au-

  thor himself, The Double Shadow, of which I understand that copies are still available; and three more, by Arkham House, of which the first, Out of Space and Time, has long been out of print, the second, Lost Worlds, is also unobtainable, and the third, Genius Loci, may still be available. A fourth Arkham volume, The Abominations of Yondo, and a fifth, Tales of Science and Sorcery, have for some time been reputed to be in preparation.

  I have never seen Out of Space and Time, but I can give brief descriptions of the other three published collections. The Double Shadow is a paper-bound booklet containing six stories, many of them available by the same or other titles in his other collections. Some of them are purely tales of terror; but two have additional significance.

  “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” for example, teaches that pride can destroy us by driving us to go on when it would be wiser to admit defeat, and “The Maze of the Enchanter” affords a flash of insight into the soul-weariness and disgust with life of a man who can accomplish all things and for whom, therefore, defeat is never possible.

  As long as he lives, Tiglari, the hero, will have the memory of having dared a brave thing, fully aware of the price he must pay for defeat; Maâl Dweb, however, who does defeat him, lives, by contrast, an empty and unhappy life.

  Lost Worlds contains twenty-three stories, fifteen of them set in imaginary worlds created by Smith—Atlantis, Averoigne, Zothique, and Xiccarph. Apart

  from “The Maze of the Enchanter,” which reappears here as “The Maze of Maâl

  Dweb,” my own favorites are “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” “The Door to Sat-

  urn,” “The Coming of the White Worm,” “The Last Incantation,” “The Death of

  Malygris,” “The Holiness of Azédarac,” “The Flower-Women,” and “The Demon

  of the Flower.” Most of these are tales of terror or of wonder, the other emotion principally exploited by Smith; but “The Door to Saturn” and “The Holiness of

  Azédarac,” at least, display Smith’s mastery of a kind of sardonic humor, in both of them directed against the priesthood. In “The Last Incantation” Malygris, the Atlantean philosopher, restores to life Nylissa, his long-dead love, only to find he
r disappointing; through this situation Smith demonstrates that, as Thomas Wolfe

  put it, “you can’t go home again”—that it is impossible ever to recapture the past.

  Smith’s most recent collection, Genius Loci, contains fifteen stories, only two of which, in my opinion, at all approach the best in Lost Worlds: “Vulthoom” and

  “The Charnel God.” Both are terror stories, but the first is particularly interesting because of Smith’s effort to combine his customary weirdness and exoticism with some of the trappings of the science-fiction story. Although the combination is not always successful, the result is one of Smith’s most suspenseful stories, and the ending is suitably spine-tingling.

  Structurally, most of these stories are distinctly “tales” rather than short stories; one turns instinctively to the French word conte to describe them. The short story, in our day, is either a smoothly plotted but artificially constructed narrative or a “slice of life” without much plot at all. Smith’s contes fit neither definition. They have a

  The Last Romantic

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  plot, but it is usually not dominant; it merely provides what one is used to in modern fiction than like folktales or travelers’ yarns.

  The novice reader of Smith needs one caution: these contes need to be read slowly and seldom, Smith needs to be sipped to be enjoyed. You cannot read him

  hurriedly, or you will lose some of the bouquet. Similarly, if you read him for too long at a sitting, you will probably find that you have lost your taste for him, just as too much sweetness cloys. But read with attention and sympathy, and dipped into occasionally, his stories can be a rewarding experience.

  Some day, a long time from now, there may be another Romantic revival.

  People may be less concerned than at present to find the poet who can most satis-factorily complete fuzzy-minded confusion. They may again turn to poets whose

  chief interest is in beauty and entertainment.