the Gautieresque touches of “The End of the Story,” “The Holiness of Azédarac”
and “The Enchantress of Sylaire” (1941)—are nowhere to be seen. Necrophilia is a theme which crops up several times, most strikingly in “The Death of Ilalotha” and
“The Charnel God” (1934).
This repellent eroticism exists side-by-side with savage cruelty—torture is a
commonplace in Zothique and sadism is the norm. These quasi-pornographic fea-
tures are not evidences of any depravity on the part of the author, but rather represent a determined effort to confront and make manageable the most nightmarish
products of the imagination. Here, the most awful and terrifying creations of delirium and anxiety are submitted to the command of a rigorous literary imagination.
The characters usually move in quasi-ritual step toward their predestined dooms, sometimes taking entire cities with them, as in “The Witchcraft of Ulua” and the very violent “The Dark Eidolon” (1935). The latter story, concerning a sorcerer who defies his supernatural protector in order to carry forward his vendetta against a king who abused him in his youth, features a literal feast of horrors:
In the wide intervals between the tables, the familiars of Namirrha and his other
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servants went to and fro incessantly, as if a phantasmagoria of ill dreams were embodied before the emperor. Kingly cadavers in robes of time-rotten brocade, with worms seething in their eye-pits, poured a blood-like wine into cups of the opalescent horn of unicorns. Lamias, trident-tailed, and four-breasted chimeras, came in with fuming platters lifted high by their brazen claws. Dog-headed devils, tongued with lolling flames, ran forward to offer themselves as ushers for the company.
And before Zotulla and Obexah, there appeared a curious being with the full-
fleshed lower limbs and hips of a great black woman and the clean-picked bones
of some titanic ape from there upward. And this monster signified by certain indescribable becks of its finger-bones that the emperor and his odalisque were to follow it. ( RA 381)
The background against which these stories are set is described in terms as far from naturalistic as the mechanics of their plots. Idiosyncrasy is displayed with un-ashamed extravagance, as in the opening paragraph of “The Witchcraft of Ulua”:
Sabmon the anchorite was famed no less for his piety than for his prophetic
wisdom and knowledge of the dark art of sorcery. He had dwelt alone for two
generations in a curious house on the rim of the northern desert of Tasuun: a
house whose floor and walls were built from the large bones of dromedaries, and whose roof was a wattling composed of the smaller bones of wild dogs and men
and hyenas. These ossuary relics, chosen for their whiteness and symmetry, were bound securely together with well-tanned thongs, and were joined and fitted with marvelous closeness, leaving no space for the blown sand to penetrate. This house was the pride of Sabmon, who swept it daily with a besom of mummy’s hair, till it shone immaculate as polished ivory both within and without. ( AY 21)
In stories such as these the possibility of a happy ending is simply out of the question. For this reason they cannot be considered tragedies, or even simple horror stories, for no fate can really be considered tragic or horrific if it cannot possibly be avoided. Indeed, such is the inversion of values permitted by these stories that it is the echoes of affection and success which resound therein which seem in the end to be the most awful things of all. This can be seen in what are perhaps the finest of the tales of Zothique, “Necromancy in Naat” (1936) and “Xeethra”
(1934).
In “Necromancy in Naat” a ship carrying a prince who is searching for his lost
love (who has been carried off by slavers) is caught by a black current and wrecked near the island of Naat. The prince is the sole survivor, but finds himself reunited with the drowned crew of the ship—and with his loved one, also dead but reanimated—in the service of a family of necromancers, whose intention is to feed him to their vampiric familiar. He avoids this fate by joining in a plot to help the two sons murder their father, but in the hideous conflict which follows (in which the intended victim will not be still despite mortal wounds) he is killed. The sole surviving necromancer commits suicide, leaving the resurrected servants to find a
164 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
“ghostly comfort” in their liberation: “The quick despair that had racked him
aforetime, and the long torments of desire and separation, were as things faded and forgot; and he shared with Dalili a shadowy love and a dim contentment” ( RA 436).
In “Xeethra” a goat-boy strays into the underworld realm of the dark god
Thasaidon, where he eats fruit which recall to him consciousness of a former existence as a king. He sets off to find his kingdom, but after a long journey finds it desolate and inhabited by lepers. He sells his soul to enter a dream in which the kingdom’s lost glory is restored to him, agreeing to surrender it if ever he regrets his estate. Thasaidon eventually sends a dark piper to him in a time of strife, to seduce that all-important moment of regret. Xeethra becomes a goat-boy again, but the real horror of his fate is that Thasaidon does not need to snatch him away into some infernal region, because the anguish of his loss is hell enough for him, and the “dark empire” of Thasaidon is now within his soul.
It is in these images of special suffering, of death-in-life or hell-in-life, that Smith reaches the true culmination of all his trafficking with nightmares. In these two denouements more than in any of his myriad tales which end with ugly death, he
achieves a true moment of climax. If his quest into the farthest and strangest reaches of the imagination can be said to have reached a destination, this was surely it.
“Necromancy in Naat” was published two years after Smith’s major phase of
writing activity had petered out. Three more Zothique stories—“The Death of
Ilalotha,” “The Garden of Adompha” (1938) and “The Master of the Crabs”
(1948)—were yet to appear, and a handful of other stories left over from the prolific phase filtered into print over the years, but Smith was never able to get back into the writing of prose on any significant scale. Those stories which seem to have been written at a much later date—“Schizoid Creator” (1953), “A Prophecy of
Monsters” (1954) and “The Symposium of the Gorgon” (1958)—are brief literary
jokes, manifesting none of the author’s earlier fascinations.
This abrupt draining away of inspiration is in its way as remarkable as what his inspiration produced while Smith was possessed by it. It implies some essential change in Smith, whether in his personality or his environment. He offered no explanation himself, and was presumably unconscious of any reason.
One can only speculate about the possible psychodynamics of his literary en-
deavors and their frustrating conclusion, and such speculations are inevitably haz-ardous. Any conjecture remains untestable. There is, however, evidence in Smith’s work of the motive force which carried him away to such far-flung fantasy worlds, and contemplation of this motive force does encourage certain hypotheses regarding possible reasons for its decline.
None of Smith’s stories are in any straightforward sense autobiographical, but
they do contain several pen-portraits of characters imbued with an escapist fervor which bears metaphorical comparison with his own. The writer Philip Hastane is a character who appears in several stories. He relays the manuscript which forms the
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story of “The City of the Singing Flame,” and then becomes the protagonist of
“Beyond the Singing Flame.” He is also the narrator of two Lovecraftian tales:
“The Hunters from Beyond” (1932), which is strongly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s
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story “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Devotee of Evil” (1933).
In these stories it is not Hastane who is the focus of interest but the characters to whom things happen: the writer Giles Angarth, the sculptor Cyprian Sincaul and the occultist Jean Averaud. Each of these three is seduced by the allure of the extraordinary into an encounter which destroys them (Angarth actually survives, but expresses the wish that he were dead). Averaud’s fate is the most graphic—he
builds a machine to put himself in touch with the ultimate evil, whose emanations apparently extend through all Creation, and is petrified by the possessive force of that evil. Although he is only a witness, Hastane too is touched and changed by this exposure:
Vainly, through delirious months and madness-ridden years, I have tried to shake off the infrangible obsession of my memories. But there is a fatal numbness in my brain, as if it too had been charred and blackened a little in that moment of overpowering nearness to the dark ray that came from pits beyond the universe. On my mind, as upon the face of the black statue that was Jean Averaud, the impress of awful and forbidden things has been set like an everlasting seal. ( AY 42) To some extent, this must be seen simply as the kind of conclusion which a
Lovecraftian story demands—the genre is characterized by its emphasis of the awfulness of moments of revelation which reveal the hideousness of the hidden order of the universe. But the lessons which Hastane learns from these encounters with men similar to himself seem to be accepted with real feeling.
Even in Smith’s most romantic and sentimental stories, though there is noth-
ing in their formula which demands it, there is nothing really to be gained from visionary experience. Among the least horrific of all Smith’s stories is “The Planet of the Dead” (1932), which features a much more kindly vision, and a much more
gentle visionary:
By profession, Francis Melchior was a dealer in antiques; by avocation, he was an astronomer. Thus he contrived to placate, if not to satisfy, two needs of a somewhat complex and unusual temperament. Through his occupation, he gratified in a measure his craving for all things that have been steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages, in the dusky amber flames of long-sunken suns; all things that have about them the irresoluble mystery of departed time. And through his avocation, he found a ready path to exotic realms in further space, to the only spheres where his fancy could dwell in freedom and his dreams could know contentment. For Melchior was one of those who were born with an immedicable distaste for all that is present or near at hand; one of those who have drunk too lightly of oblivion and have not wholly forgotten the transcendent glories of other eons, and the worlds from which they were exiled into human birth; so that their furtive, restless
166 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
thoughts and dim, unquenchable longings return obscurely toward the vanishing
shores of a lost heritage. The earth is too narrow for such, and the compass of mortal time is too brief; and paucity and barrenness are everywhere; and in all places their lot is a never-ending weariness. ( RA 287)
Melchior—whose situation is surely a fanciful transfiguration of Smith’s
own—shares for a while the consciousness of the poet Antarion, and his idyllic
love-affair with the lovely Thameera—a love-affair brought to its conclusion by the death of the sun which lit their world. Though it is something to be treasured, Melchior’s vision leaves him unhappier than ever, possessed by a “dull regret that he should ever have awakened.”
These stories exemplify the most constant and oft-repeated pattern in Smith’s
work. No good ever really comes of dalliance with the supernatural. Very rarely is a character invigorated by it, and the exceptions belong to works in the flippant and satirical vein. The metempirical order of things is always either hostile or pregnant with doom. In most of his horror stories Smith’s assumptions are very like those of H. P. Lovecraft or William Hope Hodgson, both of whom supposed that anything
godlike must be implacably opposed to man, essentially evil. But Smith’s version of this world-view does not concentrate on the evil nature of these hypothetical
forces—even when, as in “The Devotee of Evil” such a case is made explicitly. His emphasis is on the utter irrelevance and insignificance of man, and the sheer helplessness of human ambition in the face of cosmic processes which render human
efforts meaningless and absurd. Thus, in “The Planet of the Dead” human affec-
tion is impotent in the face of cosmic catastrophe, just as in the Zothique stories everything is overshadowed by the impending end of earth. This sensibility is what links Smith to the Jansenist-influenced aspects of French Romanticism. Where can it have come from?
All Smith’s notable fiction was written before the spring of 1934. His parents
were then in their eighties, and both were soon to die. It seems highly probable that the problem of caring for them (in a lonely cabin with no electricity and no running water) became increasingly difficult, and that Smith was ultimately forced to stop writing largely because of the necessity of devoting his attention wholly to his parents’ needs. His mother eventually died in September 1935 and his father in De-
cember 1937. One might expect that this would have freed him to begin writing
again, but it did not, and this must surely make us wonder whether it was actually the situation of living with his aged parents, and the continually escalating strain which that situation put upon him, which is distortively reflected in his fantasies.
The preoccupation with the inevitability of extinction, the idea that such inevitability made the longings of human affection impotent and absurd, and the constant emphasis on the sheer claustrophobia of real-world experience could all be linked in this way. If this is true, then the culmination of Smith’s wilder stories in images of hell-in-life reflects no mere ennui or spleen, but rather a terrible anguish.
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The memoirs written of Smith suggest that he was a very devoted son, and
that he loved his parents dearly. If he was imprisoned on Boulder Ridge it was by honest affection rather than by force. It is surely not too difficult to understand how the paradoxical character of such an imprisonment might lend itself well to expression in such paradoxical fantasies as Smith’s. If the escapism of his fiction is to be seen as the “escape of the prisoner” rather than “the desertion of the soldier,” then it was an escape which brought him very little in the way of consolation, perhaps because he was never quite able to see it that way himself. It might make more sense to see his creative burst of the early thirties not so much as an escape but as an expulsion—in which case his fantasy worlds were not so much
places for him to visit as places into which he could pour the constructed phantoms of his resentments, his frustrations, and his fears—none of which would have been easy to accommodate or express in any other way. If one sees the creative period as a special purgation, then it may no longer be puzzling to ask why, once it was finished, it was finished for good.
To read and appreciate the work of Clark Ashton Smith requires more than a
broad vocabulary and a sympathy for stylistic ornamentation. It requires the possibility of identifying with the curious world-view enshrined in that work: with a determination to get as far away from mundanity as language and the imagination can take one, and yet be content to discover there a universe utterly alien and inhumane, and to find in that revelation a sense of propriety which outweighs in value any mere comfort or pleasure. This may make Smith a difficult writer to enjoy, but it should not detract at all from the respect to which he is entitled.
An imagination which is bound by the aim of wish-fulfilment (as in so much
romantic and heroic fantasy) could not begin to match Smith’s achievement. Nor
could an imagination narrowly directed to the production of the thrill of horror or disgust (as displaye
d in most horror stories). Smith’s work is more exploratory in character, though it would not be confined, either, by the boundaries of scientific possibility which the science-fictional imagination respects. No other writer has been able to match him (including his own later self), not because none could master such an esoteric vocabulary or equal his teratological ingenuity, but because none has ever found that same combination of motive force and attitude, that
same determined “alchemy of the word.”
As with all true experiments in alchemy, Smith’s literary work remains unique.
Clark Ashton Smith: Master of the Macabre
John Kipling Hitz
The short stories and poems of Clark Ashton Smith display a freshness of conception and a coincidence of thematic treatment that establish him as the one author who reflects, most nearly, the versatile genius of Edgar Allan Poe. Even more
overtly than his famous correspondent H. P. Lovecraft, Smith, who for most of his life was a native of Auburn, California, pays homage to Poe. The fact that he translated the rather outré verses of Charles Pierre Baudelaire, the great Poe enthusiast, is pertinent. Smith was indebted to Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé for poetical inspiration just as these Symbolists were inspired by the bard of Richmond. In
prose, his other noteworthy influences were his friend Lovecraft, William Beck-
ford’s arabesque novel Vathek, and Ambrose Bierce, the San Franciscan satirist and short story writer.
The title of Smith’s first major volume, Out of Space and Time (1942), derives from Poe’s “Dream-Land.” Both Poe and Smith began writing poetry in their early teens, and each regarded himself as primarily a poet. However, this article comprises only a modest overview of Smith’s fiction, and those tales that bear especial reference to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The most compelling feature of Smith’s weird fiction, which represents the
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