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by David E. Schultz

  chooses a dangerous escape from the safe tedium of “reality.”

  Tales relying on familiar Gothic elements are always reinvigorated by Smith’s intense imagination. His first published tales were several arabesque fantasies dating from his teenage years, but he made his breakthrough with popular fiction readers by using the vampire myth in “The End of the Story” and “A Rendezvous in Averoigne.” The medieval province, named after the Old French province of Auvergne, provides the ideal milieu for an encounter with the Undead. The “ruinous and

  haunted Château des Faussesflammes,” and the “double tomb” of “Sieur Hugh du

  Malinbois and his chatelaine” ( OST 26), are situated in the mazes of a thick forest, to entrap nocturnal wayfarers. As Charles M. Collins wrote in 1965:

  Smith’s vampires occupy a weird, Kafka-like castle in which illusion and reality are inextricably joined. They are of obscure noble lineage, obnoxious in the company of men, and retain the charnel odor of the grave. . . . It is as if Smith restored the image to its rightful position; to a proper historical perspective wherein the image may exist against its heraldic tapestry of legend and myth. (Collins 16–17)

  Smith’s werewolf fable, “The Beast of Averoigne,” exists in two strikingly dif-

  ferent versions. It originally began with “The Deposition of Brother Gerome,”

  who gave an account of a sighting of the beast, but is later found dead, a mangled corpse, in his cell. This was followed by “The Letter of Theophile to Sister

  Therese,” relating how the fiendish attacks have occurred even within the hallowed grounds of the abbey of Perigon, and relinquishing all hope: “Pray for me,

  Therese, in my bewitchment and my despair: for God has abandoned me, and the

  yoke of hell has somehow fallen upon me, and naught can I do to protect the ab-

  bey from this evil” (quoted in Dziemianowicz 8). The abbot is himself the were-

  wolf, his body invaded by a demon from a passing comet. The standard version,

  being told from a single point of view, omits both accounts. Longest and most

  wildly impressive of the Averoigne chronicles is “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” con-

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  cerning the dire form of vengeance taken on the citizens of Vyones by the dwarfish necromancer, Nathaire. He puts together a titanic corpse, “formed from the

  bones and flesh of dead men unlawfully raised up” ( GL 151) and “energized” by the passing of his soul into it when his body dies. A rampage of devastation is ended by the countering magic of Gaspard du Nord, and the colossus, its many

  constituent parts seeking return to earth, lays down in “a monstrous and self-made grave” ( GL 155) by the river Isoile.

  A few of the Averoigne stories benefit from touches of Zola-esque realism.

  “The Maker of Gargoyles” is a grim study of jealousy and unclean passion as motivating factors. Blaise Reynard, a stone-cutter, is responsible for two of the gargoyles

  “that frowned or leered from the roof of the new-built cathedral of Vyones” ( TSS

  168). Rebuffed by Nicolette Villom, the taverner’s daughter, he resorts to the occult.

  The gargoyles become animate and terrorize the town, imbued with the same lust

  and anger as their creator. As Nicolette’s father and two of his cronies are slain, one of the monsters seizes her, its brushing wing knocking the petrified Reynard sense-less. Nicolette is crushed in the embrace of the incubus. Staggering to the roof of the cathedral, the distraught and repentant Reynard raises a hammer to strike one of the gargoyles when he is caught from behind by the other one, which glares down at him as he lies with his head and shoulders over the edge of the precipice. After he falls to his death, his body is found by the archbishop, who also observes that one paw of the gargoyle (returned to stone) “was stiffly outthrust and elongated, as if, like the paw of a living limb, it had reached for something, or had dragged a heavy burden with its ferine talons” ( TSS 184).

  In “The Mandrakes,” a disputatious witch named Sabine gains revenge on the

  husband who murdered her and buried her body in a meadow. The mandrakes

  grow in unnatural profusion over the site, but the love potions made from them

  are reversed in their effect: they incite violent hatred instead of amorous passion.

  The outcome recalls Poe’s “The Black Cat,” as one of the uncanny mandrake

  roots, “cloven in the very likeness of a woman’s body and legs” ( OD 258), emits audible words, telling the constabulary where to dig with their shovels.

  Smith once said that he was compelled to believe that evil exists in some abso-

  lute sense because of its manifestations. If horror, as a mode of artistic expression, is validated when the images it presents point a finger of blame at the course of human existence, then the horror in Smith’s fiction derives from the human center in evil.

  Replete with the imagery of death—of moldering skulls and “mausoleums sinking

  slowly in the dunes” ( OD 315), his best macabre stories convey an ineffable sadness for diminished rather than perished lives, often dealing with the theme of self-division in a manner that breaks with Poe by stressing mankind’s insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things, instead of the idea of tragic choice.

  A marvelous exception is “The Chain of Aforgomon,” wherein Calaspa, a priest

  of the titular god of Time, is a well-developed tragic figure. When his betrothed dies just prior to their wedding date, he performs a blasphemous ritual that enables him

  176 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  to reexperience one stolen hour from the past with her. The vain hour of reunion ends at a symbolic moment of dissension between the lovers, and Calaspa is brought back to face the desolation and doom wrought by his folly. The cleverly inverted plot begins in modern San Francisco with the hideous death of writer John Milwarp,

  whose body is branded with “blinding coils of pure white fire, in the form of linked chains” ( OST 145). A manuscript he had been writing at the time of his death, under the influence of the drug “souvara,” contains the very thoughts of Calaspa, whose execution by “fiery chains” (ordered by Aforgomon in the body of the high priest) occurred in an incalculably remote epoch. Calaspa’s soul is reincarnated throughout all the cycles of earth-time, forever debarred from uniting with the various incarna-tions of his beloved until, remembering his crime at last, he must “perish out of time” ( OST 162). Milwarp’s published writings mysteriously disappear from the bookstalls, and all memory that he ever existed fades away, implying that the story itself, like all our hours stolen from time, will be swallowed in oblivion.

  “Necromancy in Naat,” with its walking dead, patricide, and necrophilia, is probably the best of a half-dozen excellent horror tales written between 1935 and 1937, when the pace of Smith’s production had slackened. During this period he became very frustrated with the restrictions placed upon him by editors, as well as delays in payment for his work. Farnsworth Wright had insisted that Smith soften the unremittingly bleak ending; consequently, the story has a slightly upbeat tone in the final paragraph, as in one of Robert E. Howard’s popular sword-and-sorcery melodramas. Smith followed it up with “The Black Abbot of Puthuum,” which is even more reminiscent of Howard’s work, but a signed typescript of that story, now in the John Hay Library collection, is inscribed, “First Version Rejected by Weird Tales.”

  Many earlier works had also met with editorial interference. Smith trimmed about 1700 words from “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (1931) to satisfy Wright. In so doing, what had been intended as a preface to “The Narrative of Rodney Severn” (a suggestive name) became a “postscript.” This preface, by an unnamed medical interne who took Severn’s account by dictation, tells of a self-destructive mania, exhibited by this lone survivor of the Octave expedition to the ancient ruins of Yoh-Vombis, on the pl
anet Mars. The harrowing doom that befalls the expedition is related with a consummate economy of prose. Unfortunately, the most chilling aspect of the story (a suicidal mania dooming the already traumatized victims) is undercut by the relocation of the preface. Smith’s condensation of the text also lessens the cumulative atmosphere; the reader feels more detached from the horror than was intended. He surely compromised his idea of having a concentrated build-up of weird atmosphere for an interplanetary setting by cutting such a sentence as this: “The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation” ( Vaults 2).

  The plots of two stories with modern settings follow a Poe-like progression of

  obsession leading to madness and the “shock” ending. “The Devotee of Evil” is minor, but has the same premise as an unfinished novel, The Infernal Star. Occultist Jean

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  Averaud, after years of study, postulates a metaphysical basis for evil: the extra-galactic radiation of a black sun. Determining that some locations are more naturally receptive, he buys the dilapidated, reputedly haunted Larcom house in Auburn, converting one room into a triangular structure suitable for magnifying the baleful emanation. The grounds of the property have “the charm of rampancy and ruin” ( AY

  33) for novelist Philip Hastane, an autobiographical character who also narrates “Beyond the Singing Flame” and “The Hunters from Beyond.” He becomes the unfor-

  tunate witness of Averaud’s immersion in the cosmic rays:

  There was a sickness inexpressible, a vertigo of redeemless descent, a pandemonium of ghoulish phantoms that reeled and swayed about the column of malign omnipotent force which presided over all. Averaud was only one more phantom in this delirium, when with arms outstretched in his perverse adoration, he stepped toward the inner column and passed into it till he was lost to view. ( AY 41)

  Smith waggishly echoes a line from “The Fall of the House of Usher” (“From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast”), by writing, “I went forth for the last time from that chamber and from that mansion” ( AY 42).

  “Genius Loci” is the title story in the third of six volumes published by Ark-

  ham House. Essentially in the tradition of Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James, it is original in its treatment of the main idea. It opens with a landscape artist named Amberville nervously describing to his writer-friend a place he found while walking in a hilly area near a deserted ranch:

  There is nothing but a sedgy meadow, surrounded on three sides by slopes of yellow pine. A dreary little stream flows in from the open end, to lose itself in a cul-de-sac of cat-tails and boggy ground. The stream, running slowly and more slowly, forms a stagnant pool of some extent, from which several sickly-looking alders

  seem to fling themselves backward, as if unwilling to approach it. A dead willow leans above the pool, tangling its wan, skeleton-like reflection with the green scum that mottles the water. ( RA 231)

  With an air of compulsion, he shows the two sketches he’s made of the dismal

  scene. After Murray scrutinizes them, Amberville says that he also had a peripheral vision of a sinister old man watching him as he was drawing, who vanished when the artist looked at him directly. The narrator comments on the artwork: “fantastic as this will seem—the meadow had the air of a vampire, grown old and hideous with unutterable infamies. Subtly, indefinably, it thirsted for other things than the sluggish trickle by which it was fed” ( RA 233). Amberville’s speech and mannerisms soon give evidence of an insidious obsession, prompting Murray to contact Avis Olcott, a close friend of the artist. She is caught “in the same phantasmal web” ( RA 244), and in a catastrophic conclusion, they are both found dead, with Avis held and dragged in the arms of Amberville, her face covered by the scum of the pool, and Amberville’s hidden under her shoulder. Simultaneously, Murray sees what caused their deaths:

  178 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  The true horror lay in the thing, which, from a little distance, I had taken for the coils of a slowly moving and rising mist. It was not vapor, nor anything else that could conceivably exist—that malign, luminous, pallid emanation that enfolded

  the entire scene before me like a restless and hungrily wavering extension of its outlines—a phantom projection of the pale and death-like willow, the dying alders, the reeds, the stagnant pool and its suicidal victims. The landscape was visible through it, as through a film; but it seemed to curdle and thicken gradually in places, with some unholy, terrifying activity. Out of these curdlings, as if disgorged by the ambient exhalation, I saw the emergence of three human faces that partook of the same nebulous matter, neither mist nor plasm. One of these faces seemed

  to detach itself from the bole of the ghostly willow; the second and third swirled upward from the seething of the phantom pool, with their bodies trailing formlessly among the tenuous boughs. ( RA 245–6)

  The interplay of imagery here is a characteristic technique; the pool becomes a wellspring of unnaturally coalescent images. Seldom is Smith content to merely

  suggest what he can so vividly describe. It is in what Lovecraft called his “fertility of conception” ( Dagon 412), or sheer imaginative genius, that Smith surpasses other weird-fantasy authors. Such central or climactic passages strive for an effect combining a sense of beauty with the sensation of horror. The sound of certain re-

  peated consonants tends to act in concert with what is being delineated, to

  underscore the image like a musical background. “The Gorgon,” a run-of-the-mill effort in which a despondent man is led through the foggy streets of London to a viewing of the head of Medusa, has these lines of Shelley’s as a preface:

  Yet it is less the horror than the grace

  Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone.

  It may easily be inferred, from Smith’s persistent fascination with archaic settings and the lore of antiquity, that the ancient world was aesthetically preferable to the modern. A rejection of an advancing machine-age culture was intrinsic to some writers of his generation, and the perished beauty and wonder of ancient Greek

  and Roman civilization engaged him as deeply as all but a few of them. In 1932, he replied to a criticism of science fiction with the statement that “The intolerable conditions of modern life and mechanistic civilization, will, one thinks, be more and more conducive to the development of a literature of imaginative ‘escape’”

  ( PD 16). This attitude underlies the mockery of tone in such humorously absurd fantasies as “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” and “The Seven Geases.” He fit-fully expressed the disquieting idea that our search for significance, our bland assurance of self-importance or self-control, is an illusion: an uneasy truth, but a common experience in realistic American novels of that era.

  Given the facts of Smith’s strong preference for poetry, the failure to finish his only novel, and his rationalizing complicity in the continual misprinting of some of his best fiction, it seems unreasonable to say that his prose is as good as his verse.

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  179

  It is better to assert their unity; the rest is a matter of taste. Smith’s adherence to the aesthetic principle, declared by Coleridge and Poe, that exalts imaginative thinking above what is merely fanciful, humorous, or critical, relates his fiction to his poetry. In the words of Shelley:

  Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with

  thoughts . . . which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. (Shelley 606)

  This intersection of poetical themes with weird fantasy is Smith’s greatest virtue as a storyteller. His musical style, exotic vocabulary, and genre-spanning variety of story ideas are attributes that contribute, unevenly,
to “a literature of imaginative escape.” And, as Edgar Allan Poe said of Imagination: “Its materials extend

  throughout the universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test.”

  Works Cited

  Altick, Richard D., et al. A Literary History of England. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

  Behrends, Steve. “An Annotated Chronology of Smith’s Fiction.” Crypt of Cthulhu No.

  26 (Hallowmas 1984): 17–23.

  ———. “The Last Hieroglyphs: Smith’s Lost or Unpublished Fiction.” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 26 (Hallowmas 1984): 9–12.

  ———. “The Song of the Necromancer: ‘Loss’ in Clark Ashton Smith’s Fiction.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 1 (Summer 1986): 3–12.

  Collins, Charles M. “Introduction.” In A Feast of Blood. Ed. Charles M. Collins. New York: Avon, 1965. 9–17.

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. “Into the Woods: The Human Geography of Clark Ashton

  Smith’s Averoigne.” Dark Eidolon No. 3 (Winter 1993): 2–9.

  Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” In Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.

  Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1986.

  ———. Selected Letters. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–76. 5 vols.

  Marigny, Jean. “Clark Ashton Smith and his World of Fantasy.” Trans. S. T. Joshi.

  Crypt of Cthulhu No. 26 (Hallowmas 1984): 3–8.

  Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Poetical Works of Shelley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

  Smith, Clark Ashton. The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis. Edited by Steve Behrends. The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988.

  Gesturing Toward the Infinite:

  Clark Ashton Smith and Modernism

  Scott Connors

  When Current Opinion reviewed Clark Ashton Smith’s first book of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912), it began by noting that “The appearance of a new poet ought to be of at least equal importance with the discovery of a new comet. For what have the comets ever done except to frighten us out of our wits in the past with their portents of disaster?” (150). Although Smith’s collection was both a critical and financial success, these words were ominously prophetic. When his next major collection appeared, the reviewer for the San Francisco Examiner wrote that “A volume more at variance with the spirit of the poetry of today would be hard to conceive of”