The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (36 page)

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Authors: Clark Ashton Smith

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The two further excerpts from Smith’s letters to Sterling from the early 1920s which we still need to consider are unusually revealing, not only for the light that they throw on his ironic-romantic fiction but just as much for what they tell us of his life for that period, as well as before and after. In his letter of December 27th, 1920, Ashton Smith had mentioned that he might visit George Sterling in San Francisco with the clear implication that this would be soon. However, writing again on January 31st, 1921, he has now decided, after all, not to visit his friend and mentor at the latter’s place in the celebrated “Monkey” or Montgomery Block situated in the downtown area of the City. (The reference below to Bologna is to the Cafe Bologna in San Francisco, a well-known haunt of creative people and their friends.) Smith continues:

I doubt if I’ll visit San Francisco, I don’t feel that I can afford the trip; anyway, there wouldn’t be much pleasure in it for me. I’ve sworn off prohibition-booze, and have no time to bother with semi-virgins of the Bologna variety. Anyway, I never make love to girls. Only married women need apply.

Later that same year Smith expatiates a little on this rule of behavior. From the context of this letter and others, as well as from the known circumstances of his life, especially during the over-all period from 1910 until 1930, this rule appears to be one which he reached after careful deliberation, and to which he more or less adhered until his last decade. When he did finally marry, it would be to a woman more or less his own age, and past the capacity to conceive and bear any further children. The next letter in which he mentions the topic again is dated September 5th, 1921:

Marriage is an error I was never tempted to commit: I have not been in love with an unmarried woman since I was fifteen!

The reader should keep in mind that Ashton Smith had been fifteen during 1909. It is probably safe to say that, if his very first complete sexual experience with a human female did not occur precisely when he was fifteen, then it must have happened sometime between his eleventh and fifteenth years. The advantages of such a stance—i.e., making love only to married women—for a man of limited income are perfectly obvious. At best it represents a sensible and responsible compromise between his own erotic drive and the human world outside his own person. It must be recalled and emphasized that the modes of controlling human conception, even early in the first half of the twentieth century, were still relatively limited and crude, apart from actual sterilization. However, apart from the threat of conception and unwanted children, the principal problem was to avoid arousing the suspicions not only, and primarily, of the husband involved but also, and in its way just as importantly, of such of the local citizenry as were given to gossiping.

We must not forget that Ashton Smith was living if not right inside, then certainly not far from, a small town already celebrated for its gossipmongers when Ambrose Bierce was residing there, off and on, during the 1880s, just before Smith would be born in January of 1893. In such circumstances as these, a discreet young man would not go out of his way to advertise his amorous and sexual preferences and proclivities—even when they were of the accepted heterosexual variety—if he could help it! Such a stance or attitude on the part of Ashton Smith does not by any means indicate that the noncorporeal aspects of love did not have considerable importance for him. Rather, he had clearly chosen a method whereby he could enjoy those aspects of a mature loving relationship which possessed the greatest value for him, and also whereby he could minimize, biologically and socially, those potentially negative possibilities of such a regular relationship with a woman.

For anyone who can read between the lines of Smith’s letters to Sterling for the first half of the 1920s—and who can correlate his behavior
vis-à-vis
his women friends with the amorous duplicity or two-timing on the one hand, as well as with the discreet cuckoldry on the other, such as he describes in his ironic-romantic fiction—it is quite obvious that Smith was directly writing out of his own life, or was directly and strictly extrapolating therefrom, when he was writing these particular stories. In other words, these richly ironical tales can make perfectly decent claims on our attention as examples of oldest but genuine realism. It is therefore appropriately ironical that, when they were finally published as a group, they should have been greeted as, inter alia, “trite tearjerkers.” Making love to married women continued to claim Smith’s creative attention to some degree even after he had turned his principal energies to writing prose fantasies sometime between the middle and latter 1920s. Why otherwise would he have composed, or completed, such a tale as “Checkmate” in late 1930 when such a type of comparatively realistic fiction had become much less salable for him than the type of prose fantasies that he was creating for and selling to
Weird Tales,
and by then with undoubted popular and artistic success? While it is extremely dubious that he would have gone on to become a major realist of any type—if we may judge at least by such marginal prose—yet Smith’s ironic-romantic fiction will probably remain as a fascinating and not unfruitful byroad that marketing circumstances alone caused him to pursue no further than he did.

For permission to quote excerpts from the letters of Clark Ashton Smith to George Sterling, cordial acknowledgement is hereby made to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection / The New York Public Library / Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. The New York Public Library is the physical proprietor and custodian of the Sterling-Smith correspondence, together with related MSS. and art-work. For further permission to quote these same excerpts, grateful acknowledgement is likewise made to “CASiana Literary Enterprises,” representing the literary Estate of Clark Ashton Smith.

Note

1. Additional non-fantastic fiction includes “The Parrot” (1930) and “A Copy of Burns” (1930), both collected in
Strange Shadows.
Both are “ironic” rather than “ironic-romantic” —Ed.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

THE SORCERER DEPARTS