The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (10 page)

The first major poet in English to be influenced by Poe and very likely to remain the last as well, Smith certainly does not belong to any
Weird Tales
“school”—nor yet does he belong to any Gothic or neo-Gothic tradition except, in part, that of his own synthesis and creation. He is essentially
sui generis
. In the words of his own epigram: “The true poet is not created by an epoch; he creates his own epoch.” Never lived a poet more than Smith of whom this could be said: Smith, the creator par excellence not only of one epoch or of one world but the creator of many epochs, of many worlds. A deliberate independent and outsider, he belongs to no particular time nor literary period or school: only to that mystical mainstream of literature and art which is one with all cultures and all ages. His tales and/or extended poems in prose are far more than mere exotic “divertissements.” They represent a return to the fantastic fictions of serious intent of the Renaissance—to the
Utopia
of Sir Thomas More, to the
Gargantua et Pantagruel
of Rabelais, to
The Færie Queene
of Spenser. They are informed with the seriousness of theme and concept and with the wealth of artistry, of technique, of invention that distinguish Smith’s finest poems or that distinguish any great poetry. His finest poems, poems in prose and extended poems in prose are deliberate gestures toward the infinite and the eternal, toward those legendary eternal verities which ultimately can be neither proven nor disproven, and which in that sense are indeed timeless. He uses fantasy both in his poems and in his tales deliberately and manifestly in order to transcend the prosaic and unstable reality of a mere ephemeral contemporariness, and to attain to a greater and eternal reality beyond. He searches not only the ultimate meaning of man and his principal emotions of love and fear but, far more than those, the very significance of life and of the cosmos itself.

Smith, in translating himself and his readers to the elaborate worlds created of his imagination, seems to be fulfilling the Baudelairian aspiration to be transported “Anywhere! Anywhere! as long as it be out of this world!” In Baudelaire’s poem in prose “Anywhere Out of This World,” the poet asks his soul where they should go: to an idealized and picturesque Lisbon, Rotterdam, Batavia, Torneo, the Baltic, or the North Pole with its splendors of the aurora borealis. After the poet has finished his inquiry, the soul shouts in answer: “Anywhere! Anywhere! as long as it be out of this world!” This aspiration Smith embodies in one of his own poems, the sonnet “To the Chimera,” wherein the poet cries out: “Unknown chimera, take us, for we tire / Amid the known monotony of things!” and then entreats the chimera not to pause “Till on thy horns of planished silver flows / The sanguine light of Edens lost to God.” The first complete publication of Baudelaire’s
Petits Poèmes en prose
(the French poet’s last work, one which in many respects he regarded as his most important) took place posthumously, in 1869, two years after his death in 1867. The third poem in prose from the end of the book is the one entitled “Anywhere Out of This World”. This fact has considerable significance as three has been, from primal times down to the present, the mystical number of creation, re-creation, and of life eternal. Thus, in one sense, Smith takes up where Baudelaire has left off. Nor can we over-emphasize here—in regard to this inspired aspiration toward the unknown and the otherworldly—the essential trinity of souls formed by Poe, Baudelaire and Smith; for the title of this
poème en prose
is a quotation by Baudelaire out of the canon of the works of the elder American poet.

There are certain things in the works of a literary creator of which the industrious and systematic student can cite catalogues of examples, in which he can discern principal themes and concepts, of which he can analyze the style, of which he can trace the evolution, and in which he can trace or discern the influence of other writers. But there is something which cannot be treated or understood in this way; and that something is the genius which in Smith manifests itself as the “sheer dæmonic strangeness and fertility of conception” (to use Lovecraft’s happy and perceptive phrase). It is almost as if Smith were literally from another sphere than our own, or at least were literally inspired by some cosmic or otherworldly
genius
or
dæmon
; and ultimately these two words have meanings remarkably alike:
genius
, a tutelary spirit; and
dæmon
, a tutelary spirit or divinity.

In the crystal of his mind’s eye Smith beheld strange, ineffable things. His consummate art was the arch-magician’s mirror through which he permitted others to view and share his visions: those curious pageantries of doom, of death, of beauty, of love, of wonder, of destiny, of stars and planets, and of the cosmos. Let us therefore be grateful to him for the enchantment and ecstasy and revelation that he created for kindred souls. And let us salute the passing of a generous and a noble spirit whose like we shall not see again.

Quotations from Smith used in this essay, unless otherwise noted, are principally from “George Sterling—An Appreciation” in
The Overland Monthly
for March 1927, and from “An Autobiography of Clark Ashton Smith” in
The Science Fiction Fan
for August 1936. Quotations from Sir Thomas Browne, unless otherwise noted, are all from Chapter V of
Urne-Buriall
.

CYCLES

The sorcerer departs… and his high tower is drowned

Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all…

While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall

Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,

Widening, deepening ever outward without bound…

Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;

And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall

Above a re-beginning cycle, turret-crowned.

New-born, the mage re-summons stronger spells, and spirits

With dazzling darkness clad about, and fierier flame

Renewed by æon-curtained slumber. All the powers

Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;

And there, to blaze with blinding glory the bored hours,

He calls upon Shem-hamphorash, the nameless Name.

Clark Ashton Smith

June 4th, 1961.

A
FTERWORD

Reading again after many years this biographico-critical essay that I wrote in the early 1960s, I discover that there is very little about it that needs correction or other changes except the purely statistical data (mostly found at the end of the first and longest of the essay’s three major sections) and other material of a similar nature. These few corrections and changes (some of them still involving an educated guess) I have accordingly made, but for the most part the essay remains more or less as it was when it made its first appearance in August of 1963. Other tributes and memorial publications in honor of Clark Ashton Smith have since presented themselves to the interested reader. However, the Klarkash-Tonophiles (that solid core of Smith’s admirers both inside and outside the U.S.A.) remain indebted to Jack L. Chalker and his associates, then centered at Baltimore, Maryland, for sponsoring and publishing their chapbook
In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith
, that initial and large-scale tribute, during that long-ago summer of 1963. Apart from the few corrections and changes deemed fundamentally needed, the opinions and evaluations expressed in this essay by me concerning Smith’s output in verse and prose remain the same. I formulated these in my latter twenties, and albeit I am in my early seventies now, I have not changed my mind in regard to the general or specific uniqueness, beauty, and worth of his poetry and fiction. At least on this one subject I still hold the same opinions now that I held back then, and (if such is possible) even more obdurately.

Looking back on the person that I was then—in that era just before the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S.A.—I note how concerned I was, and with very good reason, to give Smith his just critical due. Apart from those articles and reviews (1911–1927) resulting from his early poetic career (beginning in 1910 and ending in the latter 1920s), there existed in the early 1960s very little critical writing on C.A.S., especially material that interrelated the poetry with the later fiction. That Smith like H.P. Lovecraft had become by the time that he died one of the great outsiders of his over-all period, seemed obvious enough, and I made this condition the solid basis for my critical evaluation. If he did, or does, not quite compare with anyone else born in the latter 1800s, and expiring sometime in the 1900s whether early or late—except perhaps his poetic mentor and progenitor George Sterling, as well as his counterpart in fiction, H.P. Lovecraft—then that fundamental condition freed me completely. I could thus roam through the literary history of the Western World—from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to find those writers and poets with whom I sincerely felt that Smith could honestly compare.

As a poet in verse and in prose Klarkash-Ton (as H.P.L. playfully dubbed him) ranks as a great and unique artist, particularly in view of all the profound changes that have happened just in the art or science of verse technique, that is, of prosody, in the English language. Smith remained true to the poetic tradition to which he was born, and which he learned, painstakingly, with genius and originality, to use from the time of his early adolescence until his death. Such a poet does not change his practice to suit the latest fad or fashion of the passing moment—a poetic tradition, moreover, inherited from hundreds of years of experimentation as well as of genuine achievement. At this late date in time one is constrained to admire such rare integrity, no less than the solid belief that he maintained in the poetic tradition that he received and that he mastered. As he was in life, so is Smith in death:
sui generis
.

Tsathoggua Press rendered a real service by republishing this essay in January of 1997 as a separate booklet, thirty-three years after its first appearance, just as Silver Key Press, the English-language imprint of the French nonprofit small press La Clef d’Argent, renders a no less valuable service by republishing it again today. On behalf of Klarkash-Ton I personally give the successive publishers of this essay—Mirage Press, Tsathoggua Press, and Silver Key Press, and now Night Shade Books—all possible credit and gratitude.

Donald Sidney-Fryer

Westchester, Los Angeles, February 2007.

T
HE
A
NIMATED
S
WORD

  he blade is not for sale, sahib, nay, not for ten times a hundred rupees.”

Of Benares workmanship, sharply curved, razor-edged, with a jewel-studded hilt, and grooves down the blade containing those little pearls which are known as “the tears of the enemy,” the sword was one that a king might have been proud to own. But the price I had offered Pir Mohammed, a hundred rupees, was a high one even for such and I was greatly surprised when he refused to sell it. It was in his stock, with a number of other blades, of all kinds, from Hussaini scimitars to khitars and Malay krises and I had naturally assumed that it was for sale. I am an inveterate collector of curios, and certainly the sword would have been a valuable addition to my collection.

“Why?” I queried.

The old sword-dealer did not answer at once. A faraway look had come over his face at my question, as though something past and far distant had suddenly been called to mind. At last he spoke.

“The tale is a strange one, sahib, and haply thou wilt not believe it. But if it is thy wish, then will I unfold it and thou shalt know why I will not sell the blade.”

I begged him to tell it, and in his thin, quavering voice, with his hands caressing the hilt of the sword, he spoke:

“Long ago, sahib, long ere the great earthquake in Kashmir, even before the Sepoy Mutiny, I dwelt in a large city of the Deccan, under the rule of one of its most powerful chieftains. I was but twenty at the time, but my father was dead and I had succeeded to a considerable fortune. I was a merchant, a dealer in rugs, as was my father before me and his father before him. I had no family and but one man whom I might call friend. This was a young Moslem of about my own age, a native of the same town. We had played together, learned the Koran under the same moolah, and, in short, had grown up together.

His name was Ahmed Ali. His father, Shere Ali, was a horse-trader, and as he was, so was the son after him. When Shere Ali died we concluded to live together, and though we conducted our respective trades apart, we broke bread on the same table. No two men were ever truer to each other, sharing each other’s secrets and allowing no woman to come between us.

One evening when Ahmed came home he brought with him a sword, the very same that you see before you. He said he had bought it of a Hindu in the bazaar, paying him much money for it.