THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF
CLARK ASHTON SMITH
Edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger
With an Introduction by Donald Sidney-Fryer
Night Shade Books
San Francisco
The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith
© 2011 by The Estate of Clark Ashton Smith
This edition of The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith
© 2011 by Night Shade Books
Jacket art © 2011 by Jason Van Hollander
Jacket design by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
All rights reserved.
Foreword © 2011 by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger
Introduction: The Sorcerer Departs © 2011 by Donald Sidney-Fryer
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-297-0
E-ISBN: 978-1-59780-360-1
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FOREWORD
by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger
ith the completion of The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, all of Clark Ashton Smith’s mature stories in the genre have been brought back into print. There remains a sizeable body of work, mostly juvenile stories (some of which were published professionally) and a number of experiments in ironic writing that he made in the early twenties, and again in the early 1930s. Many readers have requested these works, which can not even be called journeyman’s pieces, so we bring them together here, where they are presented as not being more than what they are, the lesser works of a major fantasist, along with a few treats for the hardcore casophile.
Clark Ashton Smith was a lonely and precocious child who found comfort in books, and by the age of eleven he was writing fairy tales based upon those of Hans Christian Andersen and the Countess D’Aulnoy. The vistas of his writing were widened to encompass the Arabian Nights, William Beckford’s gothic phantasmagoria Vathek (one of whose uncompleted episodes he would later complete in an early exercise in “posthumous collaboration”), and Rudyard Kipling’s tales set in British colonial India. Stories told by his father, Timeus Ashton-Smith, who had traveled extensively in Asia and South America before settling in California, undoubtedly contributed to the young Smith’s developing imagination. Curiously, although the discovery of the works of Edgar Allan Poe at the age of thirteen seemed “to have confirmed me in a more or less permanent slant” toward the weird and decadent, Smith’s earliest stories fail to reveal much overt influence. Poe cast a more subtle, and profound, shadow on the fledgling writer in an unpublished document from this period, “Story-Writing”:
The first thing essential to a good short-story is clear and logical construction. Every incident should be in its place, and should tend to the climax. No incident or person unneccesary [sic] to the plot must be included. A good plot poorly developed or illy-constructed [sic] is inferior to a poor or commonplace plot well developed and constructed.
Clearness and terseness of style is the second requisite. Express your thoughts as clearly as possible and as tersely as is compatible with clearness—omit every unessential word, phrase, or sentence. The shorter the story the better—but nothing neccessary [sic] must be left out. The idea is to tell the tale in the fewest words possible without sacrificing clearness and force, or omitting any essential detail. Avoid all padding. Repetition of ideas in the same words is unbearable. A thorough knowledge of synonyms is invaluable to the story-writer.
Most stories are spoiled by lack of finish. A commonplace idea when well told is more acceptable than a brilliant thought poorly expressed.
Always revise your stories. Close and vigorous scrutiny will often reveal some hitherto unobserved crudity, and a crudity, no matter how small, spoils the story. All errors of grammar, spelling, and punctuation must be corrected, for tho [sic] the tale is otherwise good, an editor has no time to correct such mistakes—and punctuation will save you many postage stamps. It is desirable that you should have some talent to begin with but talent without perseverance is of little use. Success in literature, as in other things, is largely a matter of hard work.1
Several points are apparent in this document. First, Smith had grasped the principle of “unity of effect” outlined by Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition.” Second, even at this early age he had a sense for the nuances of language. He had by this time read Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, making a thorough study of both the meanings and etymologies of its contents and would develop a knack for distinguishing the subtle variations between words of nearly (but not quite!) identical meaning. Third, the technique of composition which Sidney-Fryer describes in Emperor of Dreams2 and elsewhere, involving several re-writings and revisions, complete with reading aloud on strolls with a sense as to the musicality of the prose, originated early in Smith’s career. This is an altogether remarkable and not unsophisticated aesthetic theory for one not yet past the middle of his teenage years.
When dealing with the juvenilia of any given author, many factors are involved in the decision regarding whether or not to publish this material, assuming that the author is deceased or otherwise unable to grant his or her permission. The author’s wishes, insofar as they can be discerned, must still be considered, along with the actual literary quality of this material, the author’s reputation and popularity, what the writings contribute to our understanding of the author’s life and work, and the amount of such material already available to interested readers.
In the specific case of Clark Ashton Smith, we can surmise something of his intent regarding his juvenilia even though he left no direct instructions regarding it. The very fact that Smith saved his juvenilia for some fifty years before distributing it among his friends and family during his last years tells us that he obviously did not want it destroyed, and believed (or hoped) that his first literary endeavors would be of interest to someone, someday. This is in contrast to the destruction of much of his writings between the publication of his first two collections of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems and Odes and Sonnets, in 1912 and 1918, respectively.
In recent years much of Smith’s juvenile writing has seen publication, beginning with The Black Diamonds, a long (over 90,000 words) and involved adventure story written before his fifteenth year, followed by another shorter novel, The Sword of Zagan, written a few years later. In addition to these substantial works, a number of short stories have also been published, but more remain unpublished among the Smith Papers deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, where they may be found alongside the manuscripts of Smith’s great friend H. P. Lovecraft. One story which has not previously been collected is a brief vignette entitled “Prince Alcouz and the Magician,” which was first published as a chapbook thirteen years after his death. (An earlier draft, “Prince Alcorez and the Magician,” was among the papers that Smith gave to a young friend, William C. Farmer, who published it along with The Sword of Zagan and other early works in 2004.) While not much more than a vignette, this brief story displays one of Smith’s principal themes, irony, in a manner that he would display to greater advantage in such stories as “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan,” while also displaying a contempt for self-important autocrats that would come to fruition in such stories as “The Seven Geases” and “The Voyage of King Euvoran.”
Also published in The Sword of Zagan was an untitled fragment which concerned a stolen sapphire and a lost turban. While researching the index of the Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown University, it became apparent that a two page fragment titled “The Red
Turban” might well be the lost beginning to this untitled piece. A subsequent examination of the pages in question confirmed that the two fragments fit together seamlessly, and detail the investigation by the chief of police in Delhi into the theft of a large and valuable sapphire. This hand-written piece is apparently influenced by the Indian tales of Rudyard Kipling, and closely resembles “The Bronze Image” in style and format. Written over one hundred years ago and separated shortly before Smith’s death in 1961, we proudly include this recently re-assembled tale as yet another example of the hard-working young Clark Ashton Smith.
And what of the quality of CAS’ juvenilia? If “The Animated Sword” (which dates from around 1905–06 when Smith was twelve or thirteen) is any indication it is obvious that the young Smith was light-years ahead of even the most precocious of his peers. Smith exhibits a natural talent for story telling even in his earliest works, a talent that he developed constantly throughout his lifetime. We are pleased to present this gem to Smith’s readers as a harbinger of future glories.
Smith’s first known appearance in print was with a poem, “The Sierras,” in the September 1910 issue of Munsey’s. The next month saw the appearance of his first published short story, “The Malay Krise,” in The Overland Monthly, a prominent West Coast magazine founded by Bret Harte. This is a reworking of a story called “The Afghan Knife” that may be found in a notebook bearing the title of Tales of India.
The November 1910 issue of the same magazine contained a second story, “The Ghost of Mohammed Din,” which is notable for being his first published story with a supernatural theme. As is evident from the title, the most apparent influence is that of Kipling, with perhaps some of Robert Louis Stevenson, but these stories also reveal a taste for exoticism and irony, as well as a surprising competence for plot. Some critics would charge that in his later stories Smith failed to handle plot well. If we follow the definition of Smith’s friend E. Hoffmann Price, that a story is a narrative in which something happens, then these early stories demonstrate Smith’s mastery of this aspect of the short story at a very early stage of his career. What these critics fail to grasp is that as Smith’s aesthetic evolved, he would advance the story less by action and more by atmosphere.
Two of Smith’s stories were also published in The Black Cat: “The Mahout” in August 1911 (later reworked for Oriental Stories in 1931 as “The Justice of the Elephant”), and “The Tiger” appeared in the February 1912 (as “The Raja and the Tiger.”) Smith was paid thirty dollars for the last story, which was not a bad sum for a lad still shy of his twentieth birthday.3 L. Sprague de Camp offered the opinion that they were “undistinguished tales of popular adventure but up to the professional standards of the popular fiction of the time”,4 but failed to see in them signs and portents of one who would become pre-eminent among American poets and fantasists of the twentieth century.
Despite these early successes, Smith wrote no more short stories for many years. This is due to a great extent to the influence of the uncrowned King of Bohemia, George Sterling, with whom Smith began a correspondence and a friendship in 1911. Under Sterling’s tutelage, Smith devoted his energies to mastering pure poetry, resulting in several fine collections beginning with 1912’s The Star-Treader and Other Poems. A close reading of the letters exchanged between Smith and Sterling reveals that Sterling regarded prose as an inferior form of expression to poetry. This attitude was not peculiar to Sterling, but was a part of the Romantic aesthetic that went back to John Milton and his “Essay on Education.” (Put succinctly, poetry was regarded as the product of imagination and emotion, while prose [also called “history,” “philosophy” and “science,” depending upon the commentator] was the product of reason and depicts what is “real.”) For example, shortly after writing what may well be the most remarkable poem in The Star-Treader, the dramatic monologue “Nero,” Smith half-apologized to Sterling, describing it as “four-fifths [...] prose, and not particularly good prose at that”.5 When Sterling attempted to write some short stories for sale to magazines, he sheepishly referred to his efforts “to earn a dishonest living”.6 As late as 1927 Smith would commiserate with Sterling: “Too bad you have to write prose. It’s a beastly occupation” (SL 91). And “I don’t blame you for writing prose, if you can make money by it. But it’s a hateful task, for a poet, and wouldn’t be necessary [sic], in any true civilization” (SU 292).
Despite these reservations, Smith would attempt some short stories before 1925. CAS wrote Sterling on September 9, 1915 that he had “a few short-story plots” (SU 132). Sterling had some influence with a romance magazine called Snappy Stories, and he encouraged Smith to submit some of his work, such as the prose poem “In Cocaigne.” CAS reported that “Snappy Stories has accepted a little prose-sketch of mine, entitled ‘The Flirt.’ They pay 2 cents a word for prose. Maybe I’ll do some more whore-mongering, at that price” (SL 65). For many years the only clue to the publication of “The Flirt” was a tear sheet or galley proof of the story found among the papers of Smith’s friend Genevieve K. Sully. In 2007 Phil Stephensen-Payne announced on Fictionmags ( a Yahoo newsgroup) that he had located “The Flirt” in the March 1, 1923 issue of Live Stories, a companion magazine to Snappy Stories.
Another sketch, “Something New,” appeared in the August 1924 issue of 10 Story Book, for which CAS received the munificent sum of $6. He told Sterling that “the story was rotten, anyhow—except for the spanking—which was what I ought to have administered, some time back, to a certain badly spoiled female person.” (SU 242)
After completing (on February 28, 1923), and failing to sell, “The Perfect Woman,” Smith would not write another short story until early 1925, when he wrote his first true weird tale, “The Abominations of Yondo.” When he began the composition of short stories for commercial markets in late 1929, CAS directed most of his efforts to markets such as Weird Tales and Wonder Stories, but he apparently still harbored hopes that he might expand upon his prior beachhead in the realm of “sophisticated” adult irony by writing “The Parrot” (also “The Pawnbroker’s Parrot” and “The Parrot in the Pawn-Shop” [written January 5, 1930]), “A Copy of Burns” (February 27, 1930), “Checkmate” (November 7, 1930). It does not appear that Clark ever submitted these to any markets. All of these stories, along with “A Platonic Entanglement” and “The Expert Lover,” are discussed in more detail by Donald Sidney-Fryer in his essay “O Amor Atque Realitas!” elsewhere in this volume.
Although we have generally decided not to include fragmentary stories in this edition (these are available in Strange Shadows, edited by Steve Behrends, and published by Greenwood Press in 1989), it was decided that “The Infernal Star”, which is even in its unfinished state still one of Clark Ashton Smith’s longest chunks of prose, deserves inclusion. Smith recorded its germ in his notebook of story ideas, the fabled Black Book, thus: “An extra-galactic world from which an influence of stupendous evil emanates, seeping through the farthest reaches of the cosmos”.7 This theme, which would appear to be an expansion of the core idea of “The Devotee of Evil,” also appears in the famous lines from “Nyctalops,” “We have seen the black suns/ Pouring forth the night.” He described it in a letter to August Derleth as
a weird-interstellar novelette de luxe. The tale involves a harmless bibliophile in a series of wild mysterious happenings, ending in his translation to Yamil Zacra, a star which is the fountain-head of all the evil and bale and sorcery in the universe. It mixes wizardry and necromancy with the latest scientific theory of “radiogens,” or atoms of sun-fire, burning at a temperature of 1500 Centigrade in the human body. I am using the innocuousness of the hero’s normal personality as a foil to that which he temporarily assumes beneath the influence of an amulet that stimulates those particles in his body which have come from Yamil Zacra. (SL 199)
As Smith worked on “The Infernal Star” he realized that it was rapidly becoming a novel. Weird Tales ran one or two serials per issue during this period. While Farnsw
orth Wright was willing to publish stories that he perhaps thought might be too good for his readership (the list of tales that the fickle Farnsworth originally rejected includes H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain,” Carl Jacobi’s “Revelations in Black,” Robert E. Howard’s “The Phoenix on the Sword” [the first adventure of Conan of Cimmeria], Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” and “The Seven Geases,” among many others), he was much more conservative in his choice of serials; of all the serials that ran in Weird Tales, only those by Robert E. Howard, as well as Jack Williamson’s “Golden Blood” (April to September 1933) are generally well-regarded today. One reason why “The Infernal Star” (which according to a fragmentary holograph first draft was originally to be titled “The Dark Star”) grew was that it seemed that CAS wanted to use it in the same manner that Lovecraft did “The Whisperer in Darkness,” tying together elements of his own invented mythologies (Hyperborea, Averoigne, Poseidonis, Zothique) along with those of Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce. Smith eventually bowed to reality and put “The Infernal Star” aside “since there is no prospect of landing it as a serial even if completed. Wright is so heavily loaded down with long tales (all of them tripe, I dare say) that he can’t even consider anything over 15,000 words till next year” (SL 203).
After a brief spurt of productivity in the early fifties, Smith began to exhibit a reluctance to write anything, even letters. He had toyed with the idea of completing “The Infernal Star”, and August Derleth encouraged him with an offer of Arkham House publication despite his own lack of enthusiasm for the work itself.
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