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by David E. Schultz

  So runs one of Smith’s aesthetic apothegms.

  There were a number of poets who clung to the Baudelairean tradition and a

  surprising number of them were Americans. In a recent volume that samples their work ( Decadents, Symbolists, & Aesthetes in America, ed. Edward Foster [Talisman Press, 2000]), we find such names as Edgar Saltus, James Huneker, Bliss Carman, Stuart Merrill, Francis Viele-Griffin, and George Sterling. The last two English-language poems in the book, “The Eldrich [ sic] Dark” and “White Death,” are by Clark Ashton Smith.

  The poets included by Foster in his anthology are no longer names to conjure

  with. Except for Amy Lowell, E. A Robinson, Conrad Aiken, Sara Teasdale, and

  maybe Trumbull Stickney, most of them would be unfamiliar even to moderately

  well read students of our literature. Smith, because of his connection with H. P.

  96 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  Lovecraft and Weird Tales, is probably as well known as all but a few of the others.

  These writers do not cast shadows upon our contemporary landscape.

  But, as the editors remark, literary quality is not determined by contempora-

  neity. Baudelaire has not diminished as a poet because surrealism, dada, abstractionism, and the other schools supplanted his groundbreaking mode of writing.

  “L’Invitation au voyage,” “Hymne à la beauté,” “Sonnet d’automne,” and the other great poems remain great. There is, of course, an air of quaintness about some of them, a whiff now and then of musty velour, but lovers of poetry return to his

  lines and to those of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others again and again, as if—well, as if enchanted.

  Smith has neither Baudelaire’s authority nor his aesthetic judgment. Probably

  there is no poem in all his work equal to the finest of Symbolist poetry. But his best work can hold its own with almost all the pages of Catulle Mendès, say, and Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and the rest. His sonnets are probably his most admirable poetic achievements, better by far than similar efforts by his friends Lovecraft, Samuel Loveman, and Donald Wandrei.

  Personal taste is a problematic yardstick, but it is the one that all honest readers are forced to employ in matters of literary judgment. My list of favorite Smith poems is a lengthy one and even after severe pruning it remains too long to set down in toto. But here are some poems I recommend enthusiastically, all of them collected in The Last Oblivion:

  On Death: “White Death” (90), “The Moonlight Desert” (107), “Retrospect and Forecast” (151);

  Eros: “Love Malevolent” (124), “Adventure” (136), “The Sorceror to His Love”

  (145), “ Midnight Beach” (147);

  The deserted city: “A Dead City” (90), “The Prophet Speaks” (102), “Forgotten Sorrow” (159);

  The “cosmic”: “Ode to the Abyss” (33), “The Song of a Comet” (36), “In Saturn” (41);

  Antiquity and classical themes: “Nero” (49), “Memnon at Midnight” (98), “Fan-taisie d’Antan” (127), “Bacchante” (143), “The Hill of Dionysus” (145);

  Apocalypse: “Medusa” (51), “Desert Dweller” (108), “The Last Night” (118),

  “Dolor of Dreams” (121).

  These categories, like those that editors Joshi and Schultz devised to organize the contents of The Last Oblivion, are meant to be suggestive, not to establish tight classifications. Many of the poems could be listed comfortably under more than

  one heading. Two categories I came up with are sometimes nearly indistinguish-

  able—that of the poet and that of exile.

  I noted earlier that in Smith’s pages the figure of the poet exists only in order to give voice to the poem. Insofar as this fictive poet possesses definable personal characteristics at all, he is seen as an observer untrammeled by boundaries of time

  Communicable Mysteries: The Last True Symbolist

  97

  and space and bourgeois morality; his past history, when we are allowed to know it, took place in an area now in ruins or no longer extant. If that place still does exist, he is an exile from it, having been driven away or having left to follow his wandering star. He is grave, melancholy, skeptical, sometimes only nostalgic, but often filled with yearning.

  The second stanza of “A Song of Dreams” (119) is perhaps the most explicit

  portrayal of this figure of the poet, but such pieces as “Pour chercher du nouveau”

  (83), the allegorical “Necromancy” (176), the chilling “The Refuge of Beauty”

  (133), “Alienage” (135), “Zothique” (112), and a fair number of others employ this half-vanished bard as speaker. I think my favorite among these might be “Desolation” (155):

  It seems to me that I have lived alone—

  Alone, as one that liveth in a dream:

  As light on coolest marble, or the gleam

  Of moons eternal on a land of stone,

  The days have been to me. I have but known

  The silence of Thulean lands extreme—

  A silence all-attending and supreme

  As is the sea’s enormous monotone.

  Upon the waste no palmed mirages are,

  But strange chimeras roam the steely light,

  And cold parhelia hang on hill and scaur

  Where flowers of frost alone have bloomed . . . I crave

  The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save

  My spirit from the ravening Infinite.

  That last phrase, “the ravening Infinite,” is one that Baudelaire himself might have set down if he wrote English. Of all the American poets who are immensely

  indebted to the great poète maudit—T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Allen Tate, E. A.

  Robinson, and so many more—Clark Ashton Smith seems to me to come closest

  in temper of spirit and in tenor of language. Perhaps the scent of quaintness that clings to many of Smith’s lines recalls nineteenth-century diction more strongly than does the modernist idiom.

  If I knew a young poet who wanted to understand something of Baudelaire but

  had not had opportunity to study French, I would confidently recommend a list of Smith’s poems to communicate a vivid impression of what the Symbolist master

  had accomplished. This list would include [besides the translations and such homages as “Soliloquy in an Ebon Tower” (171) and “On Re-reading Baudelaire” (167)],

  “Love Malevolent” (124), “The Tears of Lilith” (132), “The Refuge of Beauty”

  (133), “The Last Oblivion” (134), “Lamia” (140), and “Selenique” (126). “Ennui”

  (162) not only borrows Baudelaire’s favorite theme, it is cast in that stately Gallic meter, the alexandrine.

  98 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  One of the most Baudelairean of Smith’s poems, and one of his best, speaks

  obliquely of his own artistic ambitions and, if I surmise correctly, speaks also to the composition of his tales of Hyperborea, Averoigne, and, especially, Poseidonis. It is called “Symbols” (95):

  No more of gold and marble, nor of snow

  And sunlight and vermilion, would I make

  My vision and my symbols, nor would take

  The auroral flame of some prismatic floe.

  Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow,

  Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake

  The night’s blue slumber in a shadowy lake.

  To body forth my fantasies, and show

  Communicable mystery, I would find,

  In adamantine darkness of the earth,

  Metals untouched of any sun; and bring

  Black azures of the nether sea to birth—

  Or fetch the secret, splendid leaves, and blind

  Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring.

  What Happens in The Hashish-Eater?

  S. T. Joshi

  The Hashish-Eater is probably Clark Ashton Smith’s longest poem, and certainly one of his mo
st complex. As such, it can be read on many levels. The title inclines one to consider it simply the random and chaotic visions of a drug-induced hallucination, and certainly the dense, even crowded imagery of the poem appears to foster this interpretation; but a closer reading may lead one to believe that The Hashish-Eater has a definite plot and direction, something perhaps confirmed by a recently published “Argument of ‘The Hashish-Eater’” included in the 1989 Necronomicon Press reissue of the poem.

  In a letter to Samuel J. Sackett of 11 July 1950 ( SL 366),1 Smith refers to The Hashish-Eater as “a much-misunderstood poem,” and his “Argument” now allows us to have a better idea of what he actually meant by the poem. (Whether he actually accomplished what he meant is something we shall reserve for later discus-

  sion.) Even without the “Argument,” it can be inferred from the very construction of The Hashish-Eater that the poem is something more than a series of unconnected tableaux. Its 582 lines are divided into twelve “paragraphs,” and this device—

  common in epic poetry, although it is rare to find these “paragraph” divisions occurring in the middle of a line, as here—suggests that the poem is meant to be read as some sort of narrative. This suggestion is now confirmed by the “Argument.”

  In the previously quoted letter to Sackett, Smith says that the poem “was in-

  tended as a study in the possibilities of cosmic consciousness,” and this suggests that the visions seen by the narrator are just that: “visions” of some actual realm or state of existence, not imaginary vistas spawned by the narrator’s imagination. It is true that occasionally the language suggests mere dream-visions: the very opening line, “Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams,” hints at it, as does a later passage:

  “Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold / Like tapestry, and vanish” (155–

  56);2 but in this passage, the word “forgotten” seems in context more plausibly to refer not to splendors “forgotten” by the narrator but forgotten by mankind generally because of their existence at some dim, anterior stage of cosmic history.

  It is possible to divide The Hashish-Eater into four fairly discrete sections, corresponding to the chapters of a story. They are as follows:

  I. A general description of the narrator’s visions (in the “Argument” it is

  said that “By some exaltation and expansion of cosmic consciousness . . . the

  dreamer is carried to a height [from] which he beholds the strange and multi-

  form scenes of existence in alien worlds”) (1–171).

  100 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  II. The narrator enters his visions and becomes a participant in them (the

  “Argument” states: “Then, in a state similar to the Buddhic plane, he is able to mingle with them and identify himself with their actors and objects”) (171–242).

  Ill. The narrator perceives an intruder into his visions (242–83) and is pur-

  sued by a series of horrors (283–476), including the monsters in those regions

  “that knew my trespassing” (417).

  IV. Fleeing, the narrator now falls into some strange realm described in

  the “Argument” as “the verge of a gulf into which falls in cataracts the ruin

  and rubble of the universe”; from this gulf “the face of infinity itself, in all its awful blankness . . . rises up to confront him” (476–582); the poem ends on a

  half-line to convey this sense of the narrator’s absorption into this realm.

  What strikes us about this skeletonic outline is the gradual transformation of the narrator from a position of power to one of helplessness: the figure who at the outset proclaimed himself the “emperor of dreams,” and who later refers to himself as a

  “suzerain” (174), is at the end a small, cowering creature overwhelmed by the chaos and vastness of existence. This transformation can be measured concretely by examining the varying uses of the personal pronoun “I.” In the opening sections this pronoun appears not merely with great frequency, but almost always in contexts

  denoting the strength and vigour of the narrator as master of his visions; in later sections, the use of “I” not only decreases, but when it occurs it is always linked with the narrator’s fear of and flight from the scenes and entities he beholds. In the first 113 lines of the poem, “I” occurs fourteen times, three times in the first six lines: Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

  I crown me with the million-colored sun

  Of secret worlds incredible, and take

  Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

  Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

  The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

  Later instances emphasise the narrator’s control: “I convoke” (54), “I behold” (56, 115), “I list” (60), “I see” (66), “I read” (72), “I know” (75, 91, 95), “I lean to read”

  (85). In an interlude (113–71), to which we shall return later, “I” occurs only twice, and in relatively passive contexts: “I see” (131), “I watch” (141); moreover, these two instances occur at the beginning of the line, whereas the previous instances occurred at the end of the line, where the enjambement creates a dynamic sense of the narrator’s power. In what I have deemed the second section of the poem (171–

  242), “I” occurs twelve times, and once again in positions and contexts of strength: If

  I

  will,

  I am at once the vision and the seer,

  And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,

  And still abide their suzerain . . . (171–74)

  What Happens in The Hashish-Eater?

  101

  And later: “It is I” (188), “I fare” (200), “I am page” (216), “I seek” (221), “I hear”

  (224), “I find” (231, 235).

  In the first forty lines of the third section (242f.) “I” appears only twice, both in the same line (246). It is here that the narrator senses an intruding presence in his realm and “Fear is born” (258). Subsequent occurrences of “I” are frequent, but the context is radically shifted, and the narrator is seen stumbling upon horrors (“I find /

  A corpse the ebbing water will not keep” [288–89]) and fleeing in utter terror: But I turn

  To mountains guarding with their horns of snow

  The source of that befouled rill, and seek

  A pinnacle where none but eagles climb,

  And they with falling pennons. But in vain

  I flee . . .

  (296–301)

  And in the rest of the poem the narrator is more the passive spectator of an apocalypse than an “emperor of dreams.”

  The suggestion that the narrator has entered into actual realms of entity on other planets (and possibly into past or future epochs) allows for the possibility of a philosophical interpretation of the poem: perhaps we are to see The Hashish-Eater as a reflection of Smith’s view of human and cosmic existence. Is there any dominant characteristic that can be detected in the narrator’s wanderings through space and time? Right from the beginning of the poem we are led to understand that conflict is a ceaseless component of the cosmos. Everything appears hostile and belligerent, as an early passage suggests:

  sorcerers,

  And evil kings, predominantly armed

  With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon

  Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,

  Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,

  With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,

  Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons

  Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,

  With antic gnomes abominably wise,

  Heave up their icy horns across my way. (17–26)

  Nature itself appears imbued with enmity:

  Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,

  The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,

  By jealous moons maleficently urged

  To follow
me for ever; mountains horned

  With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed

  102 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,

  Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain,

  And continents of serpent-shapen trees,

  With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,

  Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire

  By that supreme ascendance . . .

  (7–17)

  Here, aside from the obvious suggestions of conflict (“monsters roaring for their glut,” “maleficently”), we have subtler indications: the mountains are endowed

  with “peaks of sharpest adamant” for some hostile purpose; and the word “usurp”

  interjects an explicitly political tone, as if the mountains are intruding upon the domain belonging to the sky.

  Nevertheless, it is the narrator’s ability to surmount the obstacles of man and Nature that is highlighted in the opening 113 lines; perhaps the most emphatic utterance of this conception occurs at lines 49f.:

  Supreme

  In culminant omniscience manifold,

  And served by senses multitudinous,

  Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,

  With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields

  Of utter night and chaos, I convoke

  The Babel of their visions, and attend

  At once their myriad witness.

  The emphasis in these first 113 lines is the narrator’s intellectual triumph over hostile forces: he utilises many of his senses and powers of intellect in perceiving the cosmos around him (“behold” [56], “list” [= hear] [60], “know” [71, 91, 95], “read”

  [72, 85]). One passage here underscores Smith’s sense of the tireless conflict that dominates cosmic history:

  I

  lean

  to

  read

  With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,

  The monstrous archives of a war that ran

  Through wasted eons, and the prophecy