by S. T. Joshi
“The Coming of the White Worm” (written September 15, 1933) is purportedly a chapter of the Book of Eibon. Smith made the curious remark that the story “might be regarded as a direct contribution to the [Cthulhu] Mythos.” It is not entirely clear why he came to this conclusion. The story concerns the warlock Evagh, who joins a band of other warlocks in accompanying an immense white worm as it floats along an immense iceberg. At one point Evagh “knelt then and prayed to the Old Ones, who dwell secretly in subterrene caverns, or abide under the sea or in the supermundane spaces.” It would appear that the worm, Rlim Shaikorth, is one of the Old Ones—Lovecraft’s generic designation for the cadre of gods he had invented in his various tales. As Rlim devours each of the warlocks in turn, Evagh feels he has no option but to kill the creature—which he does. Once again, as with other Smith tales, the atmosphere of the story is more reminiscent of Dunsany (or, perhaps, of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales), and therefore sharply in contrast with the central narratives of Lovecraft’s Mythos.
Whereas the tales of Zothique and Averoigne feature a piquant fusion of fantasy and romance or even eroticism, these latter elements are generally subdued in the Hyperborea tales, where gods dominate and female characters are rarely found. One exception is “The White Sybil” (written July–November 1932; Smith has unfortunately misspelled the word “sibyl”), where a poet seeks to embrace the White Sybil but finds her dissolving into dust. Nonetheless, his forehead bears the white mark of her kiss. This is more a prose-poem than a story, along the lines of the actual prose-poem “The Muse of Hyperborea” (written December 22, 1929), where a figure very much like the White Sybil—a mysterious female entity whose kiss, “if one should ever attain it, would wither and slay like the kiss of lightning”—appears.
As for “The Theft of the Thirty-nine Girdles” (begun in 1953, completed in April 1957), the sexual undercurrent is patent: the girdles in question are worn by the “virgins consecrated to the moon-god Leniqua,” although Smith notes wryly that “the virginity of the priestesses was nominal.” But this tale once again becomes a tale of thievery and deception, evoking The Book of Wonder one final time and underscoring the satirical thrust of the entire Hyperborea saga.
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Smith’s Atlantis cycle (focusing on Poseidonis, the last portion of that realm to sink into the Atlantic Ocean) was, unlike the Hyperborea cycle, written over a highly compressed period of time—two years, from 1929 to 1931. But it becomes plain that Atlantis—a symbol of a lost realm of wonder, terror, and beauty—exercised Smith’s imagination from the very beginning of his career. The poem “Atlantis” was included in his first poetry volume, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912), published when Smith was nineteen. The prose-poem “From a Letter”—here titled “The Muse of Atlantis”—was first published in 1922.
The Atlantis tales run the gamut of genre (from fantasy to horror to science fiction) and also of tone and atmosphere, from the sardonic to the romantic to the grisly. Smith did read some books on Atlantis (especially Lewis Spence’s The History of Atlantis [1926]), but he was unconcerned about what occultists like Spence or Ignatius Donnelly (Atlantis: The Antediluvian World [1882]) had to say about this realm, which Smith well knew was mythical. Like Lord Dunsany—who refused to read Herodotus’ discussion of the Egyptian queen Nitokris when he wrote a play about her, The Queen’s Enemies—Smith preferred to let his imagination have free play in envisioning this realm.
Sorcery is, once again, essential to the Atlantis tales, and the figure of Malygris is a central focus of two tales. “The Last Incantation”—written on September 23, 1929, and the first story that Smith wrote in his remarkable five-year period of fiction-writing (1929–34), during which he wrote nearly one hundred tales—is an exquisitely poignant tale of disillusion and heartbreak. When Malygris resurrects the body of his dead sweetheart Nylissa, he finds that she doesn’t look quite the same as in life; worse, his own sentiments are not the same as when he was in rapturous love with her as a young man: “He could believe no longer in love or youth or beauty . . .” This story is a flawless embodiment of the way in which fantasy and terror can serve to underscore the depth of human emotion in a particularly evocative manner. A mainstream writer could have written a tale or novel about how the incandescent love of youth inexorably decays with the passing of the years and the hardening of one’s heart; but Smith has utilised the supernatural to convey the same point in a highly condensed and vivid fashion.
“The Death of Malygris”—written three and a half years after “The Last Incantation,” in April 1933—features that mingling of weirdness and cynicism that we have seen is characteristic of many of Smith’s fantasy tales. Here there is something of the graveyard humour of Ambrose Bierce, something of the ponderous satire of Dunsany’s Book of Wonder, and something of the physical gruesomeness that Smith could unleash in his more unrestrained moments. When the dead but undecaying Malygris counteracts the spell that twelve sorcerers have cast over him by hurling his own spell, causing the sorcerers to decay while alive, the result is hideous: “Trying to run, each was aware of his own limbs that rotted beneath him, pace by pace, and felt the quick sloughing of his flesh in corruption from the bone.” There is no profound message in this tit-for-tat revenge motif, but the omnipresence of Death was a theme close to Smith’s heart.
Malygris figures glancingly in “The Double Shadow” (written on March 13, 1932), as the central figure, the sorcerer Avyctes, is a pupil of the elder mage. Here Smith refers to a number of other “lost” continents, such as Mu and Lemuria. Mu, a purportedly sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean, was the invention of British occultists James Churchward, who wrote several books on the subject in the 1920s and 1930s. Smith shows some familiarity with the work of Churchward: in 1930 he wrote to Lovecraft that he was thinking of setting a tale in the “Uighur empire (supposedly 17,000 years old) mentioned in Churchward’s ‘Lost Continent of Mu’” (Churchward’s book was published in 1926). Smith elaborates on the matter in a later letter:
The book by James Churchward, “The Lost Continent of Mu” (which I obtained from our State Library) is truly interesting, especially in the mass of data relative to South Sea ruins which is presented. Churchward also gives a purported translation of some ancient Burmese tablets (called the Naacal tablets) which contain a description of Mu, its far-flung colonies and its destruction. Of course, I have no means of knowing how much reliance can be placed upon this interpretation, and on Churchward’s reading and co-relation of various ancient symbols which he supposes to have reference to Mu. (Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, c. November 17, 1930)
But Smith never set a tale in Mu, probably because that realm lacked the historical resonance of Atlantis, which had been conjectured to exist as far back as Herodotus and Plato. As for Lemuria—a supposedly sunken continent in the Indian and/or Pacific Oceans—it was a scientific hypothesis devised by zoologists in the later nineteenth century as a way of accounting for the existence of the fossil remains of lemurs and other primates in both Madagascar and India. Occultists seized on the idea in very much the same way that they embraced the idea of Atlantis. The theosophist William Scott-Elliot wrote a treatise, The Lost Lemuria (1904), later fused with another book and republished as The Story of Atlantis and The Lost Lemuria (1925). This book influenced Lovecraft, who mentioned it by name in his seminal story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). Smith never read Scott-Elliot, but heard much about his theories from Lovecraft.
Another element in “The Double Shadow” may come from a very different source. Avyctes finds a tablet containing an incantation devised by “serpent-men, whose primordial continent had sunk aeons before the lifting of Hyperborea from the ooze.” This may be an allusion to the work of Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), who wrote a whole series of stories set in the mythical realm of Valusia, which had once been ruled by “snake-men,” as he writes in “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929). Smith and Howard were not close colleagues, but Smith was clearly
aware of Howard’s work as it appeared in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines.
“A Voyage to Sfanomoë,” written on July 17, 1930, suddenly thrusts us into the realm of science fiction, as two scholars of Poseidonis, seeking to escape the destruction of the continent, fashion a spaceship that takes them to Sfanomoë (i.e., Venus). It is, however, prototypical of Smith that he cannot be troubled to spend a great deal of time or effort in envisioning the mechanics of space travel; the key to the story is what happens once the scholars land on Venus. Here they encounter a favourite motif of the author—animate plants. Smith had broached this subject in the prose-poem “The Flower-Devil” (1920), which served as the basis for the short story “The Demon of the Flower” (1931); he would return to the theme again in “The Flower-Women” (1932–33), a tale of Xiccarph. In “A Voyage to Sfanomoë,” the insidious transition of the scholars into half-human, half-flower entities is not a source of terror but of wonder and delight.
“A Vintage from Atlantis” (written November 1931) allows Smith to glory in images of Atlantis in its prime. The story is something of a wish-fulfilment fantasy on Smith’s part. For just as his protagonist wishes he could enter bodily into the realm that the wine from Atlantis presents to his imagination (“I longed to tread the streets of the alien city; and a deep desire was upon me to mingle with its people and pass into the glowing fane”), so did Smith—far more than his friend H. P. Lovecraft—sense that he was an outsider in his own time. A reluctant inhabitant of the twentieth century, he longed for the archaic vibrancy of the Middle Ages (the setting of his tales of Averoigne) or the cultural richness of the nineteenth century—the century of Poe, Baudelaire, and Verlaine.
But he longed still more to cast off all allegiance to present-day reality and plunge himself into realms of his own imagination—the magic of the distant past (Hyperborea), the strangeness of lost planets and continents (Atlantis, Xiccarph), and even the far future (Zothique), where conditions have reverted to the primitivism of the mediaeval age. In all these imaginings the notion of loss is paramount—the loss of love, the loss of wonder, the loss of entire civilisations more vital and compelling than the one into which Smith was born. It is this intense nostalgia for the unattainable that fuels the best of his fiction and lends it its distinctive poignancy.
iii. Other Realms
Clark Ashton Smith was a poet even when writing prose. The origins of his literary work extend to his teenage years, when he began writing both poetry and fiction in large quantities, inspired by his voracious readings. Largely self-taught as an intellectual and as a creative artist, Smith lacked formal education, having attended only a few years of grammar school and only a few days of high school in Auburn, California. But he taught himself Latin and also read the entirety of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and by the age of eleven he was already writing stories and poems based chiefly on his early fascination with the Arabian Nights.
In the course of this work, he produced two lengthy prose narratives: The Black Diamonds, a novel of nearly 90,000 words set in Baghdad, and probably written in 1907; and The Sword of Zagan, a 40,000-word narrative written a year or two later. Both tales have been published,[118] and they provide fascinating glimpses into Smith’s early writing. Neither, to be sure, is a literary masterwork in its own right, but both are entertaining stories that keep the reader’s interest from beginning to end. Unlike Smith’s later prose work, they are almost entirely non-supernatural; but interest in The Black Diamonds is maintained through its bewilderingly convoluted plot, while The Sword of Zagan is a rousing adventure story set in India in the late nineteenth century (here we may conjecture the influence of Rudyard Kipling’s tales).
Smith was also writing poetry at this time, and its chief influence might have been the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated into English verse by Edward FitzGerald (1859). Much of Smith’s early poetry is considerably inferior to both the prose tales he was writing at this time and his later poetry, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, George Sterling, and other weird poets. But it remains important as a formative influence and a foreshadowing of the superbly crafted lyric poetry he would soon be writing.
It is well known that Smith first gained a literary reputation as a poet, with the publication of such early volumes as The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912), Odes and Sonnets (1918), Ebony and Crystal (1922), and Sandalwood (1925). Much of this poetry was written under the tutelage of the great California poet George Sterling (1869–1926). It was, however, at this very time that English and American poetry was undergoing a revolution. The so-called Modernist poets (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others) were, from their different directions, rejecting the entire range of Romantic poetry—the poetry of Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Poe, Tennyson, Swinburne, and others—for a radical new idiom that either emphasised obscurity of expression (Eliot, Pound) or a simple, conversational idiom scarcely distinguishable from prose (Williams). Both schools largely rejected rhyme and metre, notably the champions of vers libre such as Amy Lowell. In this environment, the lush and richly textured work of Smith, Sterling, and others—still written in formal metres, especially the sonnet—was regarded as outmoded and artificial, and Smith in particular had increasing difficulty securing a reputation purely as a poet.
Smith’s mature poetry is chiefly lyric and elegiac, and it bears only approximate relations to the prose fiction he would later write: a generally “cosmic” backdrop where the vast depths of the cosmos, and the resultant inconsequence of humanity and all earth life, are suggested; the creation of fantastic worlds and the fantastic creatures that inhabit them; a melding of fantasy and romanticism (and, at times, eroticism). Smith wrote no ballads that tell a straightforward narrative, although some of his lengthier odes (such as the extraordinary “Ode to the Abyss,” which was appreciated by no less a figure than Ambrose Bierce) have some narrative elements.
The one exception is the spectacular 582-line epic poem The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil, first published in Ebony and Crystal. Its imperishable opening line (“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams”) has rightly been seen as an emblem of Smith’s own supremacy in the realm of fantasy literature. But even this work was long thought to be nothing but a kaleidoscopic outpouring of bizarre imagery. My own later discussion of it (see below) will establish that it has a quite different focus and direction.
Sterling’s unfortunate death by suicide in 1926 coincided with the emergence of another influence on Smith’s work, H. P. Lovecraft. In 1922 Lovecraft had written Smith an enthusiastic letter of praise based on the reading of Smith’s poetry volumes, and the two writers maintained close epistolary contact until Lovecraft’s death in 1937. While Lovecraft wrote a modicum of poetry (much more outmoded and artificial than Smith’s, based as it was on eighteenth-century models), his main avenue of aesthetic expression was prose fiction; and he no doubt markedly influenced Smith’s gradual turn to that medium.
Smith underwent a transitional phase between poetry and prose by cultivating the prose-poem. Ebony and Crystal bore the subtitle “Poems in Verse and Prose,” and this volume contains some of his most poignant prose-poems, including “From the Crypts of Memory.” In the prose-poem—whose models in the work of Baudelaire (Petits poèmes en prose, 1869), Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany (Fifty-one Tales, 1915), and others he studied carefully—Smith was able to fashion narratives combining the dense idiom characteristic of his best poetry with a narrative thrust that would eventually be put to use in his later fantasy tales.
The prose-poem is, next to poetry, the most concentrated form of expression in literature. While it allows for the use of such poetic devices as archaism, simile, metaphor, and alliteration, it also allows philosophical conceptions to be expressed more directly than in prose fiction. For Smith, the prose-poem was the ideal vehicle to convey his understanding of the universe—a universe that he felt was bereft of gods, in which humanity had little refuge from the manifold wretchedness of existence except by an
escape into fantasy and the emotional exuberance of romantic passion and eroticism. “The Shadows” (first published in Ebony and Crystal) is more of a sustained narrative than many of Smith’s prose-poems, but it etches with unforgettable intensity the weight of years that hang over an ageing civilisation. The “shadows . . . of desolation” that cluster around the palace of Augusthes are the accumulated memories of past lives that burden us as we drag out our own meaningless existence—an existence that leads inexorably to “irretrievable oblivion.”
It was no accident that, in 1925, Smith wrote both a superb prose-poem, “Sadastor,” and the prose tale “The Abominations of Yondo.” Although it was at this very time that he was teaching himself French—after which he began translating Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and other French poets, such as Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle—Smith also recognised that prose fiction might allow him both a creative outlet and a source of income. The pulp magazine Weird Tales had been founded in 1923; and while Smith did publish a few poems in early issues, he came to understand that tales of fantasy and terror might help him establish a reputation among readers of this magazine as well as of pulp magazines in the field of science fiction.
Sterling expressed disdain for “The Abominations of Yondo,” but Lovecraft was enthusiastic:
I must lose no time in expressing my delight at “Yondo”, which safely arrived this time, thanks either to fate or registry—or both. It is a masterpiece of atmosphere; & whilst your critic-friends may be right in attributing an absolute literary superiority to the Baudelaire translations, I must insist that the tale is a splendid specimen of its kind, alive with a terror & strangeness which few other pens could parallel. The style is exquisite, & the pictures burn themselves unforgettably on one’s mind. (Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, August 28, 1925)