The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (6 page)

It is indeed fortunate that both
Weird Tales
and
Wonder Stories
existed during this period of intense creation in Smith’s life: by providing a more or less ready market for Smith’s stories, they served as the necessary commercial incentive which Smith, genius or not, financially needed. Smith paid tribute to the needed existence of such magazines for writer and reader alike in a letter published in “The Eyrie” in the December 1930 issue of
Weird Tales
: “Speaking as a reader, I should like to say that
Weird Tales
is the one magazine that gives its writers ample imaginative leeway. Next to it comes three or four magazines in which fancy can take flight under the egis of science; and after these, one is lost in a Bœotian desert. All the others, without exception, from the long-established reviews down to the Wild West thrillers, are hide-bound and hog-tied with traditions of unutterable dullness.” Hugo Gernsback, the editor of
Wonder Stories
, appears to have welcomed Smith’s stories quite enthusiastically. However much Farnsworth Wright may have appreciated their literary excellence (Wright himself was a considerable scholar who professionally edited, among other things, a very fine version of Shakespeare’s play
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
), the editor of
Weird Tales
appears always to have been rather anxious as to how his readers would react to Smith’s extended poems in prose. Undoubtedly this is what caused Smith to publish privately six of his finest tales in his first collection of short stories
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
, in February 1933, at Auburn.

Outwardly during this period Smith led a quiet, uneventful life. However, in August 1934, Smith successfully fought a severe wood and grass fire on his ranch. All during this time (1929–1937) Smith continued to write verse but necessarily in a much smaller quantity. In 1933, George Work, the author of
White Man’s Harvest
, and one of the then best-known writers in the country, declared Smith “the greatest American poet of today” whose “poems do not compare unfavorably with those of Byron, Shelley, Keats or Swinburne.” In
Controversy
for November 1934 appeared the article
The Price of Poetry
, by David Warren Ryder. In this article Ryder acclaimed Smith as “a great poet” and as being “in our generation… the fittest to wear the mantle of Shakespeare and Keats,” thus adding his considered opinion to the similar one of George Sterling, George Work, and the well-known and respected educator and man-of-letters, Dr. David Starr Jordan, one-time president of the University of Indiana and the first president and “the builder” of Stanford University. Ryder’s article was reprinted in June 1937 to accompany the slender collection
Nero and Other Poems
, published in the preceding month of May by The Futile Press, Lakeport, California: this volume included ten reprints (somewhat altered from their original versions) from
The Star-Treader
. Just as the poetry magazine
The Step-Ladder
had devoted its entire issue of May 1927 to his poems, the California poetry journal
Westward
in the issue for January 1935 honored Smith by making numerous quotations from poems in
The Star-Treader
and
Ebony and Crystal
. This magazine featured in its early issues, at the bottom of the pages carrying poems, quotations from the works of the established poets of the past, including the great names in the poetry of the English language.

In 1936 the output of Smith’s tales started to drop off, and by the latter 30s, during the 40s and the 50s, Smith had virtually stopped writing fiction. However, he continued writing verse until his death in 1961. The reasons for this cessation of Smith’s writing fiction are not clear: it could have been that he had exhausted even his seemingly inexhaustible fancy; or perhaps the
dæmon
no longer told him “tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love”; or Smith may have found the production of his small sculptures more interesting. This last seems likely as Smith once wrote, in a brief autobiography published in
The Science Fiction Fan
for August 1936, that he found “the making of these [small sculptures] far easier and more pleasurable than writing.” He had begun the carving of these small sculptures possibly in the early 1930s, and it may have been that this was now the new step in Smith’s further creative evolution; he made besides hundreds of paintings and drawings, starting in the early 1920s or earlier. Also, the death of his parents as well as that of his correspondent and friend Lovecraft, may have removed some of Smith’s incentive for creating fiction. His mother, Fanny Smith, died in 1935; his father, Timeus Smith, died in 1937; and in March of this same year Lovecraft died, and death thus robbed Smith of one of his greatest, most sympathetic and understanding friends. H.P.L. had always proved an enthusiastic and perceptive audience for Smith’s short stories: both Smith and Lovecraft had been in the habit of exchanging manuscripts of stories before their publication, and mutually commenting on them.

Smith paid homage to H.P.L. in the lovely and moving memorial poem “To Howard Phillips Lovecraft” and in a letter in “The Eyrie” in
Weird Tales
, both published in the issue for July 1937. Two tributes in prose had also appeared earlier: “In Memoriam—H.P. Lovecraft,” in
Tesseract
for April 1937; and in a letter published in
The Science-Fiction Critic
for May 1937, in “A Note From The Editor.” His last tribute appeared in 1959, the sonnet “H.P.L.,” published in
The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces
(Arkham House) and dated July 17th, 1959.

Lovecraft, before he died had paid his homage to Smith in the sonnet “To Clark Ashton Smith” (published posthumously in
Weird Tales
for April 1938), which concludes with the lines: “Dark Lord of Averoigne—whose windows stare / On pits of dream no other gaze could bear!” In Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” H.P.L. concludes the section “The Weird Tradition in America” with a paragraph of high and perceptive praise of Smith’s fictional art.

During the late 1930s Smith began another of his notable correspondences, this one with Lilith Lorraine, the founder and principal poet of the Avalon Poetry Foundation. In Lilith Lorraine’s volume of science-fiction poetry
Wine of Wonder
, she pays Smith a lovely and worthy tribute in the poem “The Cup-Bearer”. Also during the late 1930s Universal Studios considered the possibility of filming two of Smith’s most extraordinary tales “The Dark Eidolon” and “The Colossus of Ylourgne.” This project never materialized, and this may have been a blessing rather than a misfortune, however much Smith could have used the money from the movie rights. To have adapted either of these tales would have required not the typically conventional treatment of Universal Studios but such combined talents as those of Vincent, Alexander, and Zoltán Korda as demonstrated in their classic fantasy film
The Thief of Bagdad
with its excellent score by Miklós Rózsa. Conrad Veidt, the evil Vizir and archimage in this film, would have been superb as the archimage Namirrha in “The Dark Eidolon” or as the mediæval sorcerer Nathaire in “The Colossus of Ylourgne.” Alas, the might-have-been.…

Whatever may have been the reasons for the cessation of his writing fiction—the continued production of his quintessential sculptures or the loss of his parents and of his literary
frère et semblable
H.P.L.—Smith only wrote little more than a dozen stories between the late 1930s and his death in 1961. Increasingly, it has now turned out that the real or chief reason for his apparent abandonment of writing fiction was his ever-growing disgust with the arbitrary capriciousness of magazine editors, a not inconsiderable factor for a sensitive artist in words as Ashton Smith. Also, he had returned to his first love, the creation of poetry in verse: by late 1941 Smith had three collections or cycles of verse in preparation:
Incantations
,
The Jasmine Girdle
, and
Wizard’s Love and Other Poems
(later retitled
The Hill of Dionysus
). Thus, it was during the penultimate decade of his life that Smith composed and/or assembled his final poem-cycles.
Incantations
contains mainly poems composed during the 1920s and 1930s, hitherto largely uncollected, as well as many unpublished poems.
The Hill of Dionysus
and especially
The Jasmine Girdle
both contain many poems never-before published; both are cycles of love poems. And if all the preceding mass of poetry, much of it new, were not already quite enough for a man in his fifties—a man who had moreover in the early part of his career created three major collections of poetry—Smith also experimented with such miniature forms as the quintrain and the haiku, the last surely the quintessence of quintessential forms. All-told, he now created over one hundred miniature poems, a small sampling of which is presented in
Spells and Philtres
(Arkham House, 1958). These divers collections are included in the
Selected Poems
that Smith was concurrently engaged in assembling during the 1940s. In addition, Smith learned Spanish during this decade, made translations from Spanish poets, and even wrote a small number of poems in Spanish. Such productivity, much of it in new forms and in new directions and some of it even in a new language for Smith, must be considered remarkable indeed for a man in age already past the half-century mark. Phoenix-like, the poet had been reborn out of the ashes of the fiction-writer.

The founding of Arkham House in 1939 by August Derleth assured the publication of six collections of Smith’s short stories in book form:
Out of Space and Time
(1942),
Lost Worlds
(1944),
Genius Loci and Other Tales
(1948),
The Abominations of Yondo
(1960),
Tales of Science and Sorcery
(1964), and
Other Dimensions
(1970). Upon publication of
Out of Space and Time
, the well-known writer and man-of-letters Benjamin De Casseres in his syndicated column “The March of Events” dated Sep. 23, 1942 (this column appeared on the editorial page of the Hearst newspapers), commented briefly on Smith’s first major prose collection and hailed Smith not only as a great poet and a great story-teller but as “a great prose writer” as well.

Only to the encouragement of his publisher do we owe the existence of the omnibus volume of Smith’s first Arkham House poetry, the
Selected Poems
. This volume was originally entitled
The Hashish-Eater and Other Poems
and was intended by Smith’s publisher to be a complete collection of all of Smith’s poetry. Subsequently Smith decided instead to make it a selective volume. Produced during the period 1944–1949, it contains about 500 poems, virtually two-thirds of the 800 poems or so extant at the time of Smith’s death. Delivered to his publisher in December 1949, this collection of collections contains the following sections:
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
,
Ebony and Crystal
(minus the twenty-nine poems in prose),
Sandalwood
,
Translations and Paraphrases
(from Baudelaire, Verlaine, Victor Hugo and other poets both French and Spanish),
Incantations
,
Quintrains
,
Sestets
,
Experiments in Haiku
(
Strange Miniatures
,
Distillations
,
Childhood
,
Mortal Essences
),
Satires and Travesties
,
The Jasmine Girdle
,
The Hill of Dionysus
. (
Incantations
and
The Jasmine Girdle
between them contain some ten examples of the small body of poetry Smith composed in French.) This omnibus poetry collection had to wait until November 1971 to see publication. During that long wait of twenty-two years a large sampling of the
Selected Poems
appeared in Smith’s first published Arkham House poetry collection
The Dark Chateau
(1951), which Smith dedicated significantly “To the Memory of Edgar Allan Poe” and which contains many remarkable poems: eighteen of its forty poems are taken from the omnibus volume. A further and still larger sampling of the
Selected Poems
appeared in Smith’s second published Arkham House poetry collection
Spells and Philtres
(1958): fifty-one of the sixty poems in this last collection are taken from the same volume.

About the end of August 1953, Smith received a personal visit from his publisher, correspondent, and friend August Derleth, in company with his then wife, the former Sandra Evelyn Winters. Before his death in June 1971, Derleth managed to bring out under his Arkham House imprint three more volumes by Smith: the two final collections of short stories
Tales of Science and Sorcery
(1964) and
Other Dimensions
(1970), and an almost complete collection of his unique prose-poems under the title
Poems in Prose
(1965).

A near lifetime of celibacy, brightened here and there by the bowers of divers “enchantresses” (as Smith was wont to call them), came to an end in 1954 when Smith married Carol Jones Dorman, the last and “The Best Beloved” of Klarkash-Ton’s enchantresses. To his wife he pays a delicate and a gallant tribute in the sonnet which opens “From this my heart, a haunted Elsinore, / I send the phantoms packing for thy sake:” This sonnet, originally entitled “The Best Beloved,” was used by Smith under the title “Dedication/to Carol” to preface
Spells and Philtres
, which in its entirety is dedicated to his wife. Between 1954 and his death in 1961 Smith maintained his residence alternately in Pacific Grove and near Auburn. The old cabin of the Smiths, in which Clark had lived for over half a century, from 1902 to 1954, burned down to the ground in August 1957. This was understandably a source of deep distress to Smith, even though he had sold the major portion of the Smith ranch, about forty acres, in 1937 (to a local contractor for the purposes of a private airport), sometime after the death of Smith’s father. This left about two and a half acres, including the land upon which stood the cabin.