Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  alien horror, and shall come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth. ( SS 62)

  The evil of the stars is, indeed, not as the evil of earth. For as Smith shows repeatedly throughout the Averoigne stories, the human heart and mind hold in their unexplored recesses truths that are in some ways more awesome and terrifying than the secrets of the cosmos.

  In his correspondence with Lovecraft and other writers, Smith has little to say about his Averoigne stories. Indeed, it appears that he did not think of them any

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  differently from the other sorts of fiction he wrote, save for his science fantasies. It is left for readers to surmise why this series distinguishes itself so noticeably from the rest of Smith’s work. It could be that, because the stories constitute his second largest integrated series, after the tales of Zothique, Smith was able to develop their background with a coherence lacking in the shorter story cycles. It also could be that Smith’s choice of a more realistic, earthbound milieu in the Averoigne stories enforced upon his writing a stricter set of guidelines from those used in his more fanciful works of fantasy. But such distinctions are beside the point. It is enough that Averoigne stories reveal a side of Smith’s writing more serious and engaging than many of his best and worst critics have given him credit for, and that even those works that have been deemed the ephemera of his oeuvre continue to yield

  up deeper meaning upon re-examination.

  Notes

  1. In his original synopsis for the story, CAS expressed no intention to explain the story in terms of the supernatural ( SS 166–67). Furthermore, the original victims of the statue’s influence were to be peasants working in a turnip field; the shift of setting to the abbey of Périgon was clearly intended to exploit the incongruity of the events that follow, and better render the “moral” of the story.

  Bibliography

  There are eleven full stories and three fragments in the Averoigne cycle. All but one story, “The Satyr,” first appeared in Weird Tales. Steve Behrends has established the year in which the stories are set for nine ( CAS 54). The list below presents the Averoigne stories as they were published, followed by the year in which they are set, their magazine appearance date, and the collection in which they were first published.

  The End of the Story [1798] (May 1930; OST)

  A Rendezvous in Averoigne [ca. 1550] (April–May 1931; OST)

  The Satyr [1575] ( La Paree Stories, July 1931; GL)

  The Maker of Gargoyles [1138] (August 1932; TSS)

  The Mandrakes [ca. 1400] (February 1933; OD)

  The Beast of Averoigne [1369] (May 1933; LW)

  The Holiness of Azéderac [1175] (November 1933; LW)

  The Colossus of Ylourgne [1281] (June 1934; GL)

  The Disinterment of Venus [1550] (July 1934; GL)

  Mother of Toads (July 1934; TSS)

  The Enchantress of Sylaire (July 1941; AY)

  Sorcerous Style: Clark Ashton Smith’s

  The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies

  Peter H. Goodrich

  Explanations are neither necessary, desirable, nor possible. ( BB 57)

  The Californian poet, short fiction writer, and artist Clark Ashton Smith was described by his friend and frequent correspondent H. P. Lovecraft in terms that created the model for subsequent Smith criticism: “In sheer daemonic strangeness

  and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale? His short stories deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as with strange regions and aeons on the earth. . . . Some of Mr. Smith’s best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies” (74–

  75). Due to a voluminous correspondence, the memoirs of his friends, and the invaluable spade work of independent scholars like Donald Sidney-Fryer, Steve

  Behrends, and Scott Connors, we know a good deal about Smith’s life and work.

  But Smith has remained a writer more eulogized than interpreted. His symbolist

  poetry and fictional art, typified by the short story collection so praised by Lovecraft, deserve more study than they have received.

  Lovecraft’s hyperbole calls into question Smith’s own acknowledged influ-

  ences, which include such “feverishly distorted” stylists as William Beckford, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Baudelaire. Did these writers not see such extraordinary visions and live to tell the tale? Or is there some gift peculiar to Smith that sets him apart from them? As a romantic mannerist in his art, Smith does stand out as a ro-coco among the baroque practitioners of weird fiction. His literary art at least is analogous to the gorgeously decorative Art Nouveau drawings and sculptures of

  Erté that enjoyed a modest revival near the end of the twentieth century. As Smith himself observed, “In art or literature, it is better to err on the side of over-flamboyance or exuberance than to prune everything down to a drab, dead and flat level. The former vice is at least on the side of growth; the latter represses or even tends to extirpate all growth” ( BB 55). Despite a certain similarity between the logos-destroying horror of Hemingway’s nada and Smith’s mal-néant, it seems unlikely that Smith would have approved the extreme spareness of a modernist

  short story like Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Unlike Hemingway’s

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  THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  Sorcerous Style: Clark Ashton Smith’s The Double Shadow

  307

  aesthetic, Smith’s ornateness did not become famous or dominate literary culture, although it has continued to attract adherents with a taste for exotic worlds and rhetoric. Smith was well aware of, and perhaps even relished this marginalization—

  never anticipating that his own voice would become appropriate to a millennial

  postmodern period which has revived interest in profusion and marginalized dis-

  courses of all kinds.

  Curiously, none of the six stories in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies pamphlet that Lovecraft admired so much is included in the recent “best of” collection, A Rendezvous in Averoigne (1988), published by Arkham House. However, The Double Shadow remains particularly significant because it was selected and published by Smith himself using the stock and press of his local newspaper, the Auburn Journal. It provides a cross-section of Smith’s fictional subjects and settings and gives us a personal perspective on his work that no second-party collection can.

  One thousand copies were printed at a frightening expense ($125) to the im-

  pecunious Smith. Produced between February and June 1933, it was termed “ill-

  omened and disastrous” by Smith in a letter to Lovecraft a year later. By 1937

  fewer than 400 copies had been sold, many of which had been given away by

  Smith—despite the reasonable asking price of twenty-five cents ( CAS 8, 21). Perhaps Lovecraft was in his way trying to boost sales by praising his friend, but it does not appear to have helped. My second-hand, somewhat battered, but autographed copy purchased in 1964 from bookseller Gerry de la Ree cost less than

  seven dollars. However, according to a source at the Dawn Treader bookstore in

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, the pamphlet sold at auction a decade later for fifty dollars and by the turn of the century was probably worth “between fifty and one hundred dollars.” According to Scott Connors, more than 700 copies may have survived,

  mostly in libraries and the hands of Smith friends and collectors.

  The primary motivation for the collection appears to have been Smith’s prob-

  lems getting his work published, untampered with, by the science fiction pulps.

  The first draft of his advertising flyer for the pamphlet reads rather defensively:

  “The Devotee of Evil & six other tal
es unpublishable in magazines. For lovers of weird atmosphere & arabesque fantasy. . . . Poetic rather than plotty. Will not appeal to devotees of action” ( BB 4–5). However, in the second draft of the flyer the word “unpublishable” was wisely changed to “unpublished” and the total number

  of stories was reduced from seven to six, along with a price reduction from thirty to twenty-five cents ( BB 5). Although these changes may have been as much coincidental as politic or cost-related, it appears likely that in the meantime one of the intended (but apart from “The Devotee of Evil” unnamed) stories had indeed

  been published and consequently omitted for copyright reasons. The remaining,

  published tales each represented a different setting selected from Smith’s emerging work: Zothique in “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” Xiccarph in “The Maze of the

  Enchanter,” Poseidonis, the remnant of Atlantis in “The Double Shadow,” neo-

  medieval Europe (possibly Averoigne) in “A Night in Malnéant,”1 Smith’s home

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  town in “The Devotee of Evil,” and Mandarin China in “The Willow Landscape.”

  The settings not included were Hyperborea and Mars. Hyperborea is mentioned in

  “The Double Shadow,” but most of the fantasies set in that primeval continent

  were already finding publication in Weird Tales, where Smith was one of the favorite authors. Stories set on Mars, however, which he had been writing since 1931, are not even mentioned in the pamphlet and are therefore the group most likely to have furnished the omitted tale. This likelihood is increased by the red-penciling misfortunes they had been suffering at the pulps.

  Smith’s first Martian story, “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” had been substan-

  tially edited for publication in Weird Tales, and his second Martian story was even more ill-starred. Its original 1932 version, titled “The Eidolon of the Blind,” had been rejected by Weird Tales as too dismal; retitled “The Dweller in the Gulf,” it was accepted by Wonder Stories only on condition that Smith include more “scientific motivation” (Ashley 6, CAS 63). Smith wrote in a new character to satisfy Hugo Gernsback, but didn’t hear back until the revised story appeared in the

  March issue with its ending and many descriptive passages cut out, under Gerns-

  back’s title “Dweller in Martian Depths.” Smith was furious at this “hog-

  butcher[y]” (Ashley 6) and even mailed uncut versions to many of his friends ( CAS

  63). With its motifs of blindness, perverse worship, and ironic reversal, this story would have been thematically well suited for The Double Shadow pamphlet Smith was planning. For these reasons it is the most likely tale for Smith to have wished to include with the other six—although “Vulthoom,” written but unpublished

  about this time, is also a strong possibility. Partly in response to the editorial treatment of his Martian stories, Smith’s original publicity specifically deplores plotti-ness and action. Most pulp editors demanded these propulsive qualities, yet Smith considered them the qualities least essential for his craft.

  The other important change in the revised flyer is the shift from “The Devo-

  tee of Evil” to “The Double Shadow” as featured story. Perhaps Smith thought the initial title might seem too autobiographical, but more likely, he recognized “The Double Shadow” as the better story and the more central to his artistic conception.

  The flyer that eventually appeared stresses the qualities “of glamor, sorcery, terror and exotic beauty, written in atmospheric prose.” Despite the listed order of contents, Smith revised the actual order of the stories in the pamphlet to make better transitions and conceptual sense. In doing so, he created a pattern that reveals his mannerist poetics of fantasy as preeminently a conjuration of the Other.

  For Smith, whose first vocation was poetry under the tutelage of Californian

  Symbolist poet George Sterling, language is the lever that shifts reality. As he observed in The Black Book, his personal grimoire or writer’s journal, “All things conceivable exist, have existed, or will exist somewhere, sometime” (47). Since “all things conceivable” require language in order to be shaped and represented, Smith believed that both the actual and the imaginary are linguistically equivalent,

  whether or not they ever exist in any humanly verifiable form. In his “Philosophy

  Sorcerous Style: Clark Ashton Smith’s The Double Shadow

  309

  of the Weird Tale,” a manifesto from The Black Book printed in the Acolyte for Spring 1944, he applied this logocentric idea to his preferred fictional genre and to human consciousness:

  The weird tale is an adumbration or foreshadowing of man’s relationship—past,

  present, and future—to the unknown and infinite, and also an implication of his mental and sensory evolution. Further insight into basic mysteries is only possible through future development of higher faculties than the known senses. Interest in the weird, unknown, and supernormal is a signpost of such development and not

  merely a psychic residuum from the age of superstition. ( BB 82)

  Smith would scarcely be surprised by the agreement among literacy theorists like Walter Ong, futurists like Ray Kurzweil, and science/culture synthesizers like Leonard Shlain that technologies of the word change and develop human consciousness.2

  Moreover, he would probably feel thoroughly at home with New Age esotericism and neopaganism. What is surprising is that the New Age market has not yet discovered and revived Smith’s work. Perhaps that is because Smith’s work has never been widely known or available, or because esotericists have never been very conscientious or sys-tematic about crediting sources; more likely, it is because his stories do not push any mental or social agenda but exist for their own sake.

  The magical roots of words, then—their ability to evoke correspondences be-

  tween matter, spirit and human perception—are at the core of Smith’s aesthetic.

  Rhetorically, Smith’s diction favors exotic coinages and archaic words; along with these, the evocative devices of hyperbole, synaesthesia, oxymoron, and onomato-poeia characterize his fantasies in The Double Shadow pamphlet. In compiling these tales, he was not only striking a blow against the technocratic and commercial bias of his publishers, but delineating his prose as a form of sorcerous incantation that replaces and controls reality by images—signs that conjure not only semiotic absences that hold power because they continually escape language, but the Incon-

  ceivable itself. And such a thaumaturgic art aims at growing a text that will

  ultimately absorb both its producer and its perceiver into the remade image. For Smith sequences the stories in his pamphlet to induce in the reader growing doubts about the rigidity of perceptual boundaries and the nature of selfhood.

  The first of these stories, “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” immediately estab-

  lishes as the existing state of its far-future alternate world the excessive selfishness and materialism that Smith so deplored in twentieth-century American culture. It begins by describing in detail the magnificent, gazolba-bird-surmounted crown

  worn by King Euvoran of Ustaim. Euvoran’s name is etymologically significant:

  the prefix “eu-” meaning alternatively that which is good and that which is not or non-existent, and the root word “-vor” meaning greedy, insatiable, lacking, vain, and finally containing the Indo-European root “-or” meaning “large bird.” He had ascended the throne after his father expired “from a surfeit of stuffed eels and jellied salamanders’ eggs” (5). Habituated to the royal “we,” this absolute monarch of

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  a tame and subservient “us” is diverted from a boring session of law-giving by the arrival of an outlandish wild man, whose somersaulting appearance between two

  constables is described as simultaneously goat- and bird-like. Identifying himself as a necromancer, the strange figure is
condemned to the rack where, “to the stupe-faction of all present, it became plain that the elasticity of his arms, legs, and body was beyond the extensibility of the rack itself” (6). Calling “a foreign word that was shrill and eldritch as the crying of migrant fowl that pass over toward unknown shores in the night” (6), the necromancer reanimates the stuffed gazolba-bird on Euvoran’s crown, which flaps seaward as the magician also departs. Since the rare bird represents the kingship itself, Euvoran has effectively been deposed and must recapture it. The remainder of the story relates his seafaring quest—modeled on the Irish genre of marvelous immrama like the voyages of Bran, Maelduin, and Saint Brendan3—to regain his lost kingship by finding and slaying another gazolba. As Euvoran sails eastward toward the land of origins, his fleet is progressively stripped of ships and crews by flying vampires and birds that ironically reverse the selfish indifference and abuse of power that Euvoran has been accustomed to. Finally he is shipwrecked and cast alone upon an uncharted island abounding in gazolbas.

  There he subsists upon the birds, unkinged, with his sole companion a ship-

  wrecked commoner, until they both die of old age.

  The elastic, unnamed necromancer is the first of the implied author figures

  that inhabit each story, and the fate that he imposes upon the antiheroical Euvoran typifies the fate that Smith’s fictional heroes frequently meet. Charles K. Wolfe and others have identified the “basic structural pattern” of Smith’s fiction as “the journey by the hero into some otherworld, some sort of magic world” (10). This magical voyage metaphor becomes a leitmotif of the remaining stories just as the

  necromancer becomes the metaphor of the artist-creator. Smith’s own published

  opinion confirms these metaphors: “To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals”—symbolized in the story by