The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (9 page)

Smith’s finest tales are in the nature of condensations, distillations, quintessences. They have all the richness of element usually associated with the novel; indeed, many of them could well have been told as novels; in fact, at least one of them (to wit, “The Chain of Aforgomon”) Smith did first project as a novel; but the poet-author preferred to condense his stories into as small a space as possible. A few of Smith’s tales are allegories; but many are parables of emotional truth, although often allegorical in part. Regarded as strange parables of love and death, or as quintessences of beauty, fear, love, wonder, ineffable strangeness, and much, much else; the tales of Clark Ashton Smith must in all truth take rank as something unique in the annals of prose fiction.

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Smith remained the poet to the very end. He composed his last poem, the sonnet “Cycles,” (to quote his own words) “in the midst of the Sabbath pandemonium of dogs, brats and autoes” of June 4th, 1961. A little more than two months later, on the 14th of August, Monday night, at the age of sixty-eight, Clark Ashton Smith died quietly in his sleep at his home in Pacific Grove, attended to the last by his devoted wife Carol.

Smith’s true literary affinities have been given little serious recognition. The affinity with Poe manifests itself primarily in a certain weirdness, in certain phrase mannerisms, and in the extreme musicality of much of Smith’s verse and of his prose. Indeed, for sheer gorgeousness of sound the student of poetry must go back to the lyrical beauty of Edmund Spenser’s strikingly baroque epic
The Færie Queene
for a just comparison. In the cosmic range of their fancy Spenser and Smith have much in common, as well as in an inexhaustible sense of wonder. Smith’s tale “The Garden of Adompha,” with its infernal and sentient vegetation, seems like a curious amalgam and extrapolation of “The Garden of Proserpina” (Book II: Canto VII) and of “The Garden of Adonis” (Book III: Canto XII) in
The Færie Queene
. There is an interesting evolution from the idyllic mediæval dream-garden in
Le Roman de la Rose
to such examples of the Spenserian garden as “The Garden of Proserpina,” “The Garden of Adonis,” and “The Bowre of Blisse” (Book II: Canto XII) and then the garden of venomous flowers in Hawthorne’s tale “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and then to “The Garden of Adompha.”

Smith’s affinities with Baudelaire are so obvious as to pass almost without mention. However, we must allude to one fundamental affinity between Smith and Baudelaire. The French poet sought to create beauty out of the filth, the squalor, the disease, the evil and the horror of a great metropolis (Paris). Similarly, Smith sought to create beauty not so much out of the filth, the evil, the implicit or actual horror of one great city as he did out of the ugliness of death and decay and destruction, out of the horror of an irrevocable doom, out of the terror of an ultimate nothingness beyond death (what Sir Thomas Browne terms “the uncomfortable night of nothingness”), or paradoxically out of the possibility that there is no death, that all animate things whether in life or in death as well as all things inanimate—in short, absolutely all things—by virtue of their theoretically indestructible atoms are part and parcel of an inconceivably monstrous and perverse arch-life-form without beginning and without end whether in space or in time that involves not only the cosmos but also the void beyond the cosmos. (This last is given its most powerful symbolic embodiment in the “huge eyeless Face, / That fills the void and fills the universe, / And bloats against the limits of the world / With lips of flame that open,” in the tenth and final section of “The Hashish-Eater.”) If, as averred by Victor Hugo, Baudelaire did introduce into the literature of poetry “un frisson nouveau,” then Smith has in his own turn introduced “le frisson cosmique.”

Smith also has a certain similarity with such Jacobean dramatists of death and the perverse as Cyril Tourneur and John Webster and their arch-imitator of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. However, Smith has far more than the single string of death on his harp; there are also, among others, the strings of love and beauty. His love poems alone would rank Smith as a poet of unique attainments. For form, for originality of imagery, for originality of created poetic forms, for choice of line length, and for depth of emotion, such collections or cycles of love poems as
Sandalwood
and
The Hill of Dionysus
compare favorably with the best of the series of love poems and sonnets by such English poets as Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, or Ernest Dowson or by such poets of the French Renaissance as Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé.

There is besides an unmistakable resemblance between Smith and the French Protestant, eminently baroque poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, in their love of antithesis and their preoccupation with death and destruction. For example, d’Aubigné devotes at least two,
Les Feux
and
Les Fers
, of the seven principal divisions of his epic
Les Tragiques
, to catalogues of people meeting violent deaths through civil war and the tortures of martyrdom. Such a poem by Smith as “The City of Destruction,” published in
The Arkham Sampler
, winter 1948, seems especially d’Aubignesque: its long lines, strong rhythms, relentless piling-up of images, all suggest the forceful alexandrines of d’Aubigné, with their realization of emotional intensity through the steady accumulation of synonyms and phrases of a similar nature.

The much “quaint and curious… forgotten lore” to be found in the canon of Smith’s works, especially of his tales, has extended parallels in the works of Sir Thomas Browne, particularly in the latter’s
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
or
Vulgar Errors
(1646)—with its inquiry into and consideration of the basilisk, of griffins, of the phoenix, of the salamander living in fire, of the chameleon living only upon air, of the unicorn’s horn, of the ostrich digesting iron, of “the musical note of swans before their death”, of “the pictures of mermaids, unicorns, and some others,” etc., etc. That which Lytton Strachey once cited as the peculiarities of Browne’s style—“the studied pomp of its latinisms, its wealth of allusion, its tendency toward sonorous antithesis”—could be cited just as well as being the peculiarities of Smith’s own style. However, there are far more than stylistic affinities between these two highly baroque literary creators. Browne’s works demonstrate a sense of wonder and a taste for wonders real or imaginary equal to the same demonstrated by Spenser or by Smith. Browne was a great student of Dante’s theological fantasy in epic verse
La Divina Commedia
. Just as
Hydriotaphia
(1658) with its theme of death and of implicit hell connotes with Dante’s
Inferno
; and just as
The Garden of Cyrus
(1658) with its implicit theme of life eternal and ever-renewing connotes with the Italian poet’s
Paradiso
; so does
Hydriotaphia
connote with the emphasis in Smith on death, on funereal monuments and paraphernalia, on deserts, on desolation, on an ultimate nothingness; and so does
The Garden of Cyrus
connote with the emphasis in Smith on verdure, on the vernal, on extravagance of color, on an ultimately outrageous efflorescence, or on the green fire of “the singing flame.” In Smith’s compressed epic “The Apocalypse of Evil” the ultimate conclusion, that immortality is part of an infinite and eternal arch-life-form of the cosmos and of the void, is similar to but yet distinct from—due to Browne’s over-all Christian perspective—the sentiments implicit in some of the concluding pensées in
Urne-Buriall
, such as: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us,” and “Ready to be anything in the extasie of being ever…” Such a phrase by Browne as “The night of time far surpasseth the day…” could serve as the motto or moral of Smith’s poem in prose “The Memnons of the Night.” Such a phrase by Browne as “The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live,” finds an unexpected similarity to the phrase “…the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living,” in Smith’s poem in prose “From the Crypts of Memory,” and to the phrase “…its immemorial dead, who had come to outnumber infinitely the living,” in Smith’s extended poem in prose “The Planet of the Dead.” And the following selection from Browne’s posthumously published
Christian Morals
(1716), Part the Third, Section XIV, is amazingly similar to the spirit animating so much of Smith’s verse and prose, and could easily have been written by Smith himself: “Let thy Thoughts be of things which have not entered into the Hearts of Beasts: Think of things long past, and long to come: Acquaint thyself with the
choragium
of the Stars, and consider the vast expansion beyond them. Let Intellectual Tubes give thee a glance of things, which visive Organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and Thoughts of things, which Thoughts but tenderly touch.”

The extended short story by William Beckford,
The History of the Caliph Vathek
, and much of Oriental fiction as exemplified in
The Arabian Nights
, connote with the extravagance of color, incident, and décor or background in many of Smith’s tales. For sheer color and bizarrerie the extended poem in prose “The Dark Eidolon” out-Vatheks
Vathek
. If Poe did create the extended poem in prose in such masterpieces as “The Masque of the Red Death,” it remained for Smith to re-create the genre and create extensively within it. Stylistically the tales of Clark Ashton Smith are, in part, a continuation and a fulfillment on the one hand of the work of Edgar Allan Poe (the Poe of “Shadow - A Parable,” “Silence - A Fable,” and of course “The Masque of the Red Death”) and on the other of the
Petits Poèmes en prose
of Baudelaire, as well as of Smith’s own earlier Poems in Prose in
Ebony and Crystal
.

The critical pontiffs of the twentieth century have so far passed over the work of Smith in verse and prose through a peculiar series of circumstances. Smith’s poetry, because it was published mainly in private and limited editions, has become the property of only a fortunate few. His prose has been known principally to a specialized audience. The reviews of
Out of Space and Time
and
Lost Worlds
in
The New York Times Book Review
proved almost completely inadequate: one cannot help but wonder as to the reception that would be given to Sir Thomas Browne if he lived today, with its distaste for an elaborate style and for anything that might seem a little bit of too much. And there is much else in Smith’s work to make an adequate larger critical recognition difficult, at least during the present century with its frequent and tasteless emphasis on creative literature primarily as autobiographical revelation or as a happy hunting ground for “specialists” in critico-psychoanalysis or for “professors with a system” (to quote in part an early epigram of Smith’s). It is, alas, the age of “the brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows” (to use George Sterling’s phrase). But, like the ones antecedent, this convention as well as its fostering age will in their own turn pass on to the special nirvana reserved for such, leaving the way clear mayhap for better, more generous ones to take their place.

In an admirable and perceptive essay on Baudelaire first published in 1875, the great English critic George Saintsbury once stated: “It is not merely admiration of Baudelaire which is to be persuaded to English readers, but also imitation of him which is with at least equal earnestness to be urged upon English writers.” He then states further, rather ruefully, that “we have always lacked more or less the class of
écrivains artistes
—writers who have recognized the fact that writing is an art, and who have applied themselves with the patient energy of sculptors, painters, and musicians to the discovery of its secrets,” and that if the sense of a distinguished prose style has been lost in English, nothing could be more effective for its rediscovery than a study of Baudelaire’s prose as a model and a stimulant to writers in English. Less than half a century later, in 1922, as if in answer to this earnest exhortation, appeared
Ebony and Crystal
with its twenty-nine
Poems in Prose
. Alas, Saintsbury is dead, and critics of his stature, of his broad culture and perspective, are rare indeed in this present day and age. Perhaps somewhere in the long circle of eternity there will come a people who will take unhesitatingly to their hearts Smith’s brilliant creations in verse and in prose. As the barriers of space and time are steadily removed through the white magic of modern science, Smith with his emphasis on the cosmic and the astronomic could easily become “the poet of the space age.”

The poetry and the prose of Clark Ashton Smith represent, in part, a continuation of the humanities of the Renaissance and of classical antiquity. But by giving them a cosmic framework, that is, by emphasizing the surrounding cosmos, Smith has indicated a new avenue of approach to those old, old, old human values and relations. And at the same time, for a literature tending toward an over-anthropocentrism, he has indicated an avenue toward the stars, toward the outer cosmos, and toward possible other universes. He thus avoids the greatest pitfall, the greatest handicap of so much of the serious creative literature of the twentieth century, as well as of the attendant serious literary criticism,—“that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as ‘incest.’” (From Smith’s letter to the editor,
Wonder Stories
, August 1932.) Curiously, much of Smith’s literary work certainly satisfies the thesis put forth by Arthur Machen in his study
Hieroglyphics
(1902) “that great writing is the result of an ecstatic experience akin to divine revelation.” Much of Smith’s works also satisfies the present writer’s contention that great writing should give the reader a sense of cosmic universality and, above all, a sense of unlimitedness.