The interrelations between Smith’s prose poems and his fantastic tales
would, indeed, require extensive discussion. Can such works as “From the
Crypts of Memory” and “The Peril That Lurks among Ruins” be seen as antici-
pations of the Zothique cycle, set in the far future on the last inhabited continent of earth? There too the accumulated weight of the centuries has robbed the final denizens of the world of the will to live except as fleeting shadows. “From the Crypts of Memory” actually served as the nucleus of the story “The Planet of the Dead,” written on 4 April 1930. In a letter Smith explicitly notes the derivation of the story from the prose poem, but goes on to note that the story “would differ . . . in having an earthly hero, drawn to this planet by his spiritual affinity with the inhabitants” ( SL 105). In this comment Smith unwittingly points to the central weakness of the story. “From the Crypts of Memory” is almost entirely sym-
bolic; in contrast, “The Planet of the Dead” makes fleeting attempts to be a tale of supernatural realism, but in the process the delicate symbolism of the prose poem is destroyed, substituted by a trite action-adventure scenario whereby one Francis Melchior, melding his consciousness with that of the poet Antarion in
the land of Charmalos, must rescue the beauteous Thameera from the clutches
of King Haspa, who wishes to possess her before death overtakes the planet with the snuffing out of its sun. “The Planet of the Dead” does not rank high among
146 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Smith’s prose tales, and his attempt to adapt his splendid prose poem was a serious error in judgment.
On the other hand, the story “The Demon of the Flower” (begun in 1931 but
not completed in 1933) actually improves upon the prose poem “The Flower-Devil”
( NU 2). Admittedly, the latter is not one of Smith’s stellar works, and its narrative of an evil flower inhabited by an “evil demon” and a king who is fearful of destroying the flower lest the demon inhabit some other entity, including that of his own beloved, is marred by a pomposity and purple prose that render it almost comical.
Smith has taken the core elements of the prose poem and transformed them into an effective tale that combines beauty and horror in exquisitely balanced proportions.
Other prose poems, while not serving as the basis for later stories, nonetheless come closer to prose narrative than to lyrical verse, although the distinction is really more of emphasis than of genre. Consider “The Black Lake” ( NU 3–4), one of the more overtly horrific of the prose poems. Although narrated in the first person, the work proves to be little more than a succession of baleful images. “The Princess Almeena” can be considered a narrative of sorts, in which the princess longs for the return of her lover, a commander of a trireme; but the fact that the work is narrated in the present tense, rather than the historical past tense more common in prose tales, suggests that it is meant to be more a frozen image than a narrative of events.
“Ennui,” although having far more plot in the conventional sense, is surprisingly similar: it too is narrated in the present tense (“In the alcove whose curtains are cloth-of gold . . . reclines the emperor Chan” [ NU 7]), but it develops a modicum of suspense when the emperor is threatened by an assassin who injures him slightly—
an all too fleeting relief from the overwhelming ennui under which he labours.
“The Touch-stone,” although plainly a narrative, is almost entirely symbolic. The philosopher Nasiphra, seeking a touchstone that would “reveal the true nature of all things” ( NU 19), appears to find the object of his quest; but upon his handling it,
“the fingers that held the pebble had suddenly become those of a skeleton”—a
rather transparent metaphor for the horror that lurks behind the search for truth. Although the most storylike of all Smith’s prose poems, “The Touch-stone” is marred by an arch pretentiousness that spoils its message. More successful is “The Forbidden Forest,” a delicate tale of a child, Natha, who is repeatedly told by his parents not to venture into the forest near their home, but who on one occasion does so, only to get lost and fall into an everlasting sleep. It is difficult, however, to attach any significant symbolism to the events of this work. Then there is the curious “The Osprey and the Shark,” unpublished prior to its appearance in Nostalgia of the Unknown.
This appears to be not so much a prose poem as a fable, strikingly similar to those included in Ambrose Bierce’s Fantastic Fables (1899).
We are reaching the stage where the distinction between Smith’s prose poems
and his fantastic tales is becoming thin to the point of vanishment. Is “Sadastor” a prose poem or a tale? Given that it is substantially longer than any of his other prose poems and contains a more liberal dose of narrative thrust, one would in-
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cline to categorise it as a tale. But what, then, do we make of “The Abominations of Yondo,” written about the same time in 1925? George Sterling, when reading
that story, referred to it as “prose-poetry” ( SU 252), and he was not the only one to come to that opinion. As Smith relates in a letter to Sterling, Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, in rejecting the story, concluded that it was “more of a prose-poem than a narrative” ( SU 263). To the extent that nearly all Smith’s prose tales employ poetic prose, they could all be classed as prose poems. Recall one of Smith’s celebrated discussions of his theory of fantastic fiction:
My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the
achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color,
counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. ( SL 126) This could serve as a characterisation of his prose poems as well, although in those works he is not striving to convince the reader of the reality of the “impossibilities” expressed in them, since the “events” of the prose poems are (and are understood by the reader to be) metaphors for the philosophical conceptions that
underlie them. At the very least, the prose poems can serve, both thematically and chronologically, as a bridge between Smith’s poetry and his prose fiction. But, relatively few in number as they are, they deserve consideration in their own right as some of the most flawless and delicate of Smith’s literary productions—and as potent embodiments of that “nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound” ( NU 4) at the core of Smith’s fantastic imagination.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Poems in Prose, with La Fanfarlo. Edited, introduced, and translated by Francis Scarfe. London: Anvil Press Poetry, [1986].
Bertrand, Aloysius. Gaspard de la Nuit. Translated by Donald Sidney-Fryer. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press, 2004.
Merrill, Stuart. Pastels in Prose. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald, et al. Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography. West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978.
Wilde, Oscar. Poems in Prose. Boston: Brainerd, 1909.
Outside the Human Aquarium:
The Fantastic Imagination of
Clark Ashton Smith
Brian Stableford
Clark Ashton Smith was born in 1893 and died in 1961, having lived for almost all of his life on the outskirts of Auburn, California. He had three overlapping vocations, working as a poet, as a writer of fantastic short stories, and as a sculptor and graphic artist. These careers brought him relatively little financial reward; he probably made a significant income only from the second-named, and that only for a few brief years in the 1930s, when he wrote fairly prolifically for two pulp magazines, Weird Tales and Wonder Stories.
The stories which Smith produced during this brief professional phase consti-
tute one of the most remarkable oeuvres in imaginative literature. They were reprinte
d in a series of collections issued by the specialist publisher Arkham House: Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960); Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), Poems in Prose (1964), and Other Dimensions (1970). The best of them were rearranged and reprinted in a series of paperbacks in the Ballantine “Adult Fantasy” series: Zothique (1970), Hyperborea (1971), Xiccarph (1972) and Poseidonis (1973), which helped to renew interest in Smith’s work; various collations of his best works have been issued in more recent years. The last remaining vestiges of his fiction were eventually assembled in Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith edited by Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman. Many of Smith’s highly
ornate and sometimes vividly erotic works suffered censorship at the hands of the magazine editors, but for some reason he did not correct the book versions; most of the originals were destroyed by a fire but a few survived to be reconstructed for a series of booklets issued by the Necronomicon Press in 1987–88, whose six volumes are The Dweller in the Gulf, Mother of Toads, The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, The Monster of the Prophecy, The Witchcraft of Ulua and Xeethra.
From the viewpoint of modern critics and historians Smith is one of three writ-
ers associated with Weird Tales in its heyday whose work stands out as being possessed of extraordinary originality. The other two—H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E.
Howard—both died in the late thirties, but despite the fact that Smith survived them by a quarter of a century he wrote very little after that period. In a curious sense, Lovecraft’s and Howard’s deaths did not inhibit the extrapolation of their
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careers, because other hands took over where they left off, completing story-
fragments they left behind and writing pastiches as close as possible in style and spirit to the originals. Lovecraft stands as father-figure to his own sub-genre of weird fiction, his “Cthulhu Mythos” having been used as a background by many
other writers, while Howard is one of the key figures in the tradition of “sword and sorcery” fiction, and his violent heroes—most notably Conan the Barbarian—have
continued their adventures in the care of other chroniclers. Smith has not been subject to necrophiliac attentions on anything like this scale, partly because he was always the least celebrated of the three writers and partly because his style is virtually inimitable. Although there are certain recurring patterns in his work it has not the kind of homogeneity and stereotypy which would be capable of mass-production.
In terms of popular taste all three of these Weird Tales writers were ahead of their time. Their pioneering endeavors appealed in the first instance to a small corps of admirers, whose enthusiasm kept the work alive in the margins of the marketplace until the general evolution of fantastic fiction accustomed a much wider range of readers to the vocabulary of ideas with which they worked. The communicative efficacy of their work had to wait until an audience appeared whose context of understanding could be tuned in to their idiosyncrasies. There are still readers and critics who cannot abide one, two or all three of them and who stigmatize key features of their work as evidences of bad writing. For this reason, Howard is often written off as a hack producer of fast-moving blood-and-thunder narratives; Lovecraft is taken to task for his stilted prose and piled-up adjectives; Smith is criticized for his love of exotic words and his highly-ornamented descriptions.
Such accusations tend to miss the point of the characteristics in question,
each of which is a necessary corollary of the particular virtue and virtuosity of the writer’s work. The pace and violence of Howard’s work, and the adjectival awk-wardness of Lovecraft’s, are part and parcel of their distinctive moral and existential contexts. Critics out of sympathy with Howard’s and Lovecraft’s different
varieties of quasi-paranoid world-view can hardly be expected to become connoisseurs of their literary development, but it is a pity that this has sometimes prevented the critics from recognizing that what they are seeing is unusual method rather than literary incompetence.
It is particularly necessary to make this point in discussing Smith’s work, be-
cause although he too was extrapolating in his fiction a quasi-paranoid world-view he was the most unusual of the three writers. Lovecraft was extrapolating a particular kind of anxious consciousness that was already detectable in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, while Howard was
offering a more hard-bitten version of a species of Romanticism already popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Smith was not without literary forebears, and he
was prepared to borrow from both Lovecraft and Howard, but his ambition was to
go as far beyond his models as he possibly could. His phantasmagoric Decadent
Romanticism was directed to the ultimate purpose of building dream-worlds
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stranger and more bizarre than had ever been described before. It was not enough for him to escape the mundane world; he wanted also to outdo in imaginative
reach all the established mythologies of past and present.
Smith summed up this ambition in a prose-poem, “To the Daemon,” where
he offered up the following prayer to the fountainhead of his creativity:
Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have
ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Nay, tell me not of anything that lies within the bourns of time or the limits of space; for I am a little weary of all recorded years and chartered lands. . . .
Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the lore of legend
and of which there are no myths in our world or any world adjoining. . . . Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached. ( NU 17–18)
There is almost nothing in Smith’s work of what is usually called “human in-
terest.” Those of his characters who live in the mundane world think of it as a drab and desolate place whose tedium is barely tolerable, and they are usually eager to take the opportunities which Smith’s imagination offers them: to cross thresholds into worlds where the bizarre and the inexplicable are commonplace. Many of
these fantasy-worlds are dangerous in the extreme, but the fascination which they exert on his protagonists is irresistible.
In the jargon popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien, Smith’s stories are mostly set in Secondary Worlds which have their own “inner consistency of reality,” but the
most ambitious of them have do not seem to have the customary relationship with the Primary World that most imaginary worlds in fantasy fiction have. These milieux exhibit neither the heroic permissiveness of Howardesque sword and sorcery fiction, nor the moral crystallization of Tolkienesque fantasy. The excuses offered in Tolkien’s famous apologia for fantasy “On Fairy Tales”—that Secondary
Worlds provide for Recovery, Escape and Consolation—are effectively scorned by
Smith; there is no “eucatastrophe” in any of his most striking and heartfelt stories.
His fiction is certainly escapist in its fashion, but the “freedom” which his protagonists win by their escape—and which is set to tantalize, by proxy, the reader—
is freedom without security, strangeness without safety, and in many cases leads only to doom or bitter disappointment.
Smith did back up his work with a measure of aesthetic theory. He was pre-
pared to defend, in articulate fashion, the notion that it was entirely proper for a writer to be unconcerned with the human world, or with such issues as careful
characterization and the conventions of narrative realism. In a letter to Amazing Stories published in the issue for October 1932 he proposed that:
Literature can be, and doe
s, many things; and one of its most glorious pre-
rogatives is the exercise of imagination on things that lie beyond human experience—the adventuring of fantasy into the awful, sublime and infinite cosmos
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151
outside the human aquarium. . . . For many people . . . imaginative stories offer a welcome and salutary release from the somewhat oppressive tyranny of the homocentric, and help to correct the deeply introverted, ingrowing values that are fostered by present-day “humanism” and realistic literature with its unhealthy
materialism and earth-bound trend. Science fiction, at its best, is akin to sublime and exalted poetry, in its evocation of tremendous, non-anthropomorphic imageries. ( PD 14–15)
It is not obvious, however, that the kind of escape offered by Smith’s fantasies is really all that “salutary and welcome,” and its grimness is something which may invite further explanation. If a case is to be made out for there being special merit in Smith’s work then his fiction may require an apology more far-reaching than those usually offered for fantastic fictions. Smith’s fantasy lies, for the most part, beyond the range of Tolkien’s apologia just as its exoticism extends beyond that of more conventional fiction. In order to pave the way for any such explanation and apology, it is necessary to look more closely at the nature, history and sources of inspiration of Smith’s work.
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