The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (4 page)

The four earlier tales of 1910–1912 are written with a control, a sense of selection that would have done credit to a mature writer. If it were not for the evidence to the contrary, a reader might very easily mistake the four later Oriental tales as being of the same period as his four earlier ones; or vice versa. These four early stories serve as testimony to the care with which Smith has schooled himself for one of his self-appointed spheres of creation.

Besides witnessing the appearance of the very first of Smith’s professional short stories, 1910 was also the very first year that saw Smith professionally in print, whether in verse or in prose. Then, for some reason Smith lost interest in writing short stories, and devoted himself almost wholly to poetry from 1911, from the time he was eighteen, until 1925, when he was thirty-two. Smith’s parents proved fortunately sympathetic to their son’s creativity all during this time, and indeed up until the time of their death in the 1930s.

In 1906, when he was thirteen, Smith had made an important literary discovery for himself, one which profoundly influenced his own writing. Let Smith tell this in his own words: “Unique, and never to be forgotten, was the thrill with which, at the age of thirteen, I discovered for myself the poems of Poe in a grammar-school library; and, despite the objurgations of the librarian, who considered Poe ‘unwholesome,’ carried the priceless volume home to revel for enchanted days in its undreamt-of melodies. Here, indeed, was ‘balm in Gilead,’ here was a ‘kind nepenthe.’” Later, and equally important, Smith discovered Poe’s short stories. Then, when Smith was almost fifteen, he made yet another important discovery: “Likewise memorable, and touched with more than the glamour of childhood dreams, was my first reading, two years later, of “A Wine of Wizardry” [by George Sterling], in the pages of the old
Cosmopolitan
. The poem, with its necromantic music, and splendours as of sunset on jewels and cathedral windows, was veritably all that its title implied…” Meanwhile and after, Smith was writing the “much mediocre poetry” which served as the practice prerequisite to the creation of his mature verse. Also it was probably during this period of poetic apprenticeship that Smith worked out of his system any and all desire to create slavish imitations of such poems by Poe as “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and company. The cosmic-astronomic poetry of Sterling, “The Testimony of the Suns” above all, may have suggested to Smith to try his hand at the same theme; that, together with the beauty of the Auburn countryside with its immense blue skies at day and its black profundities of heaven ablaze with stars and planets at night.

Through the suggestion of Emily J. Hamilton, a teacher at the Auburn high school (officially Placer Union High School), Smith came into personal contact with Sterling, at that time the unofficial poet laureate of the West Coast and very much the social lion. In Smith’s own words: “Several years later—when I was eighteen, to be precise—a few of my verses were submitted to Sterling for criticism, through the office of a mutual friend; and his favorable verdict led to a correspondence, and, later, an invitation to visit him in Carmel, where I spent a most idle and most happy month. I like to remember him, pounding abalones on a boulder in the back yard, or mixing pineapple punch (for which I was allowed to purvey the mint from a nearby meadow), or paying a round of matutinal visits among his assorted friends.” This personal friendship and correspondence with Sterling lasted for sixteen years, until Sterling’s death in November 1926.

It was during these years, 1911–1912, when he was eighteen and nineteen, respectively, that Smith wrote his first mature poetry—the bulk of his first volume
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
. Evidently with some taste for art and literature, Boutwell Dunlap, a well-known property-owner in Placer County (in which both Auburn and Long Valley are located) and an acquaintance of Smith’s, assisted the young poet in securing publication for his book. The San Francisco publisher A.M. Robertson, owner of a much-frequented bookshop and publisher of much of Sterling’s poetry, agreed to bring the volume out. Sterling himself helped Smith with the reading of the proofs, and otherwise advised him; and in November of 1912
The Star-Treader
appeared. The leading San Francisco newspapers proclaimed Smith “the Keats of the Pacific Coast,” and discerning critics hailed him as a prodigy and a genius. Sterling later wrote that “the story of… [Smith’s] triumph with his neighbors, when hundreds of copies of his first book of verses were promptly bought up in a small California hill town, is a romance in itself.”

Thus, Smith made his début into the Bohemian literary and artistic life of the West Coast, centered in San Francisco and the surrounding area, a life that included and had included such notables as Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Jack London, George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Edwin Markham, Ella Sterling Mighels, Charles Warren Stoddard, Nora May French, Ina Coolbrith, Gertrude Atherton, and many, many others. As the “discovery,” protégé, and friend of Sterling, Smith may have had access into the charmed circle of San Francisco’s haut ton. However, it is important to remember that, for all the éclat of his introduction to this San Francisco literary and artistic life, Smith continued to live with his parents at their cabin on Boulder Ridge. It is fascinating to learn that Smith in fact almost met “Bitter” Bierce, who with Poe and a few others ranks as one of the greatest masters of the macabre. Before he departed in 1913 for Mexico where he later disappeared, Bierce had been living and working in Washington, D.C. Just before his departure for Mexico, he returned to California for a few months to renew old acquaintances. He did see Sterling again (even though Bierce had broken with both Sterling and Jack London when they had taken up Socialism), since Sterling had been one of the chief protégés of the older writer, who had once enthusiastically championed the younger man and his poetry. On one occasion Smith and Bierce almost met in San Francisco by means of Sterling, but the young Auburn poet was unable to travel to the city at that time. One cannot help but wonder what Bierce might have said in person to Sterling of the young Smith’s poems.

Between 1912 and 1922, the year that Smith’s second major poetry collection appeared, we hear relatively little of the poet. Sometime during this decade Smith first came to know both
Les Fleurs du Mal
and the
Petits Poèmes en prose
of Baudelaire, possibly in 1912, but not however in the original French but in some English translation, probably that of Arthur Symons. Smith was not to learn French and come to know Baudelaire in his original language until the middle 1920s. Smith later acknowledged that Baudelaire’s poems as well as his poems in prose had exercised a considerable influence on Smith’s work, especially on the latter’s poems in prose. However, the Baudelairian influence manifests itself perhaps more in the technique of the
poème en prose
rather than in the subject matter. Also during this decade Smith began to contribute to a wide variety of magazines.

Violet Nelson Heyer, a long-time resident of Auburn as well as a long-term friend of the Smiths, recalls Clark’s family during this period in the following words: “our family home adjoined Clark’s family acres from the years 1908 until 1919, and the three personalities (Clark and his parents) are well-remembered by us,—the dark, reticent father and the happy, light-hearted soul who was Clark’s mother… a lady of beautiful spirit and intense dedication to her family.”

Sometime after the publication of
The Star-Treader
, Smith suffered a nervous breakdown and an attack of tuberculosis; from the former he fortunately recovered but the latter, while arrested, continued to bother him intermittently the rest of his life. Smith had endured terrific nightmares from his early boyhood onward—he based at least one of his later stories on a nightmare experienced in his early youth (see “The Primal City”)—and the terrible nightmares that he suffered during this difficult period left a profound impression on his memory: he later recalled for friends that many of his later horror tales he founded on these frightful dreams. Vivid dreams and nightmares often accompany the occurrence of fever; and the victim of tuberculosis, alternating as he does between bouts of raging fever and periods when the body temperature falls below normal, experiences dreams and nightmares of even greater intensity. The student of Smith’s works may well wonder as to the white-hot intensity of the nightmares endured at this particular time by Smith, always a highly sensitive and imaginative person. All of this—the nervous breakdown, the attack of tuberculosis, the terrible nightmares, and the dreadful uncertainty of whether he would or would not be cured, whether he would live or die—all of this must have had a shattering effect on Smith: he must have lived an eternity of lives during this period. It would serve to explain the rich and varied emotional background which undoubtedly inspired much of the work in Smith’s next major poetry collection,
Ebony and Crystal
.

That he had been putting his inner life to excellent poetic advantage, he demonstrated beyond a doubt when in 1918 the Book Club of California issued fifteen of Smith’s poems in an
édition de luxe
of 300 copies, under the title of
Odes and Sonnets
, with decorations by Florence Lundberg of New York City and with a preface by George Sterling. The first four poems were reprinted from
The Star-Treader
; the remaining eleven reappeared in
Ebony and Crystal
. The preface contained not only a discerning appreciation of Smith’s genius but also an incidental prophecy that, alas, sadly came to eventualize, that Smith was “unlikely to be afflicted with present-day popularity.” Distinguished recognition, however, was immediate. Edwin Markham, a poet now most famous for the poem “The Man with the Hoe,” wrote: “These poems have lines of unusual beauty, glints and gleams of true genius. There is something terrific in Smith, as there was in John Martin, the illustrator of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. It cheers me to know that you Californians have honoured yourselves in your honouring of this distinguished poet.” Grace Atherton Dennon, editor of the West-Coast poetry magazine
The Lyric West
, wrote: “Your poems are rich in feeling and expression. I regard you as a genuine poet, one whose name will endure.” And from across the Atlantic the distinguished English poet and essayist Alice Meynell Smith wrote: “I think the imagination in your poems very remarkable, and wonderfully original. They are poems of true genius.” In recognition of his services to literature the Book Club of California presented Smith with a bronze plaque designed by the noted San Francisco sculptor Edgar Walter, an honor bestowed only on such literary notables as Sterling and Edwin Markham.

About this time Smith began a number of important correspondences, one with the poet Samuel Loveman, a close friend of Ambrose Bierce and the author of
The Hermaphrodite and Other Poems
; and, in 1922, through the offices of Loveman, with H.P. Lovecraft. This last was the beginning of what emerged as a wonderfully rewarding friendship through letters for both men, as it is evident that they held many views, opinions, and tastes in common—in archæology, astronomy, astrology, languages ancient and modern (and a consequent interest in the systematic invention of personal and place names for fictional purposes), demonology, sorcery, mythology, legendry, folklore, and only Cunthamosi, the Cosmic Mother (in Smith’s tale “The Monster of the Prophecy”), knows what else!

As an example of how much Smith and Lovecraft had in common, it is of interest to compare their respective lists of “favorite weird stories.” In
The Fantasy Fan
, December 1934, appeared (through the “Courtesy of H. Koenig”) the following list of Smith’s ten favorite weird stories: “The Yellow Sign,” by Robert W. Chambers; “The House of Sounds,” by M. P. Shiel; “The Willows,” by Algernon Blackwood; “A View from a Hill,” by M. R. James; “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” by Ambrose Bierce; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe; “The Masque of the Red Death,” by Edgar Allan Poe; “The Novel of the White Powder,” by Arthur Machen; “The Call of Cthulhu,” by H.P. Lovecraft; and “The Colour Out of Space,” by H.P. Lovecraft. In the preceding issue for October of the same amateur magazine, had appeared (also through the “Courtesy of H. Koenig”) Lovecraft’s list of ten favorite weird stories. Six of them duplicate Smith’s choices, with only four titles different: “The Novel of the Black Seal,” by Arthur Machen; “The White People,” by Arthur Machen; “Count Magnus,” by M.R. James; and “The Moon Pool” (original novelette), by A. Merritt. Yet for all such similarities in taste and opinion, the creative work of each man is strikingly different from that of the other; and each fully appreciated the other’s genius.

In 1922, Smith selected and arranged into book form the best from the work of the years following the appearance of his first volume, and in December 1922, he published in Auburn his second major poetry collection
Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose
, with a preface by George Sterling and dedicated to Samuel Loveman. Again distinguished recognition was immediate. Henry Anderson Lafler wrote: “I wonder that you speak so slightingly of these poems. It seems to me that nothing being written today overtops them. You and George Sterling are two eagles in ‘strong level flight,’ winging sunward above flocks of sparrows.”

The novelist and poet Frank L. Pollock wrote: “I must make you all possible compliments on your magnificent piece of blank verse, ‘The Hashish-Eater.’ The technique is superb, the verse hard-spun and close-woven. It would be difficult to conceive of greater power and variety of imagination, or a greater splendour of vocabulary. Almost every episode has the material for a long poem in itself—in fact you have used up enough poetical material to make half a dozen volumes of modern poets. As a decorative poem, it seems to me that this is one of the finest things I have ever read. I do not think there are six men living who could have done it—certainly no one else in America. Continually one comes cross absolutely right and infallible lines, giving the joy of a thing perfectly said; or some burst of metaphor that is like a flash of lightning; or some violent and vivid feat of imagination. I could pick examples by scores; there is only an
embarras des richesses
.”