The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (7 page)

Smith still chopped wood and did gardening during the last decade of his life, in addition to working on his quintessential sculptures. However, these last years saw relatively little literary activity on Smith’s part, although he did continue to write poetry, even if sparingly. During the 1910s, the 20s, the 30s, and the 40s, in addition to his literary work, Smith had done much hard manual labor. Among other things, he had been a fruit-picker, a fruit-packer, a cement-mixer, and a hard-rock miner, mucker and windlasser, as well as a wood-chopper and a gardener. Smith did this work primarily in order to earn enough money to support himself while writing his poetry and his prose. However, his literary output shows no or very little reflection of this manual labor.

It was toward the latter part of these last years in Smith’s life that the present writer—on two different occasions—had the pleasure of meeting Smith and his wife Carol at their home in Pacific Grove: in August of 1958 and in September of 1959. I recall with warmth and gratitude the unstinted way in which the Smiths gave of their hospitality to me, and made me feel perfectly at home. I had become so accustomed to the strong statement characteristic of much of Smith’s poetry in verse and prose that, prior to meeting Smith, I am afraid that I somewhat naively anticipated the poet to speak in a voice of brass and in a manner as sententious and orotund as that of a sorcerer in one of Smith’s tales. To my considerable surprise Smith spoke in a deep, quiet, pleasant voice that put me instantly at my ease. With his trim mustache and his handsome, distinguished features, he seemed a perfect gentleman, affable but not unctuously so, civilized and tolerant, about whom there hovered a certain aura of individuality that would have set him apart anywhere but not in any blatant, affected manner: that true individuality which comes from within and has nothing of the theatrical in it.

Of that first visit I recall in particular a delightful picnic we held on the beach about a block and a half east of their home. It was literally a “golden afternoon” with but a few fleecy clouds high overhead, with the gulls crying about us and the waves lisping among the rocks. Smith wore his beret and Mrs. Smith an immense straw hat which gave her the piquant appearance of a twentieth-century enchantress. With Mrs. Smith generously purveying the food from a straw hamper, we ate a simple but tasty repast of good, crumbly wheaten bread piled with miniature slabs of a sharp cheddar cheese, all washed down with one of the good red wines of California poured into paper cups: a wine of pomegranates from Hyperborea held in goblets of crystal and orichalch could not have tasted any better. Our conversation was informal and covered a wide range of topics, occasionally spiced by some wise, witty, and often ironic comment from Smith on the contemporary political and international scene.

Of my second visit I recall, among other things, a lengthy discussion Smith and I had apropos divers literary figures, especially Poe and Baudelaire. The discussion reached its climax when Smith, with an unforgettable intensity, read aloud in French one of the powerful sonnets of Baudelaire. Smith commented afterwards: “That’s terrific stuff!” I nodded my head in agreement and said, “Well, it certainly wasn’t written by Alfred Lord Tennyson!” Then we both laughed, breaking the tension. Earlier, upon my noticing and commenting upon a “complete works” of Poe in some eight or ten volumes on a bookshelf in the dining room, Smith had confided to me that he had read virtually everything written by Poe that he had been able to obtain. However, it was during my first visit that Smith showed me his portfolio of drawings and paintings. I must confess myself somewhat taken aback by their deliberately primitive technique, having become somewhat spoiled by the technical excellence of Smith’s verse and prose; but there were a number of demonic heads which struck me as powerful and original. Smith’s sculptures, on the other hand, as deliberately primitive as the paintings, impressed me far more favorably and suggested something Egyptian or Mayan or Peruvian of the Inca period, without being quite the same as those. These carvings of Smith’s possess a quality rare in sculpture, which generally surrenders its essence at once to the beholder, especially sculpture of a conventionally technical perfection. Smith’s carvings grow gradually in the onlooker’s appreciation: the more one sees them, the more fascinating they become, adumbrating an essence never fully revealed but extending itself infinitely.

Smith was as generous and fine a friend as Sterling must have been. I happened to lack only one of Smith’s volumes of poetry, the slender reprint collection
Nero and Other Poems
, published by The Futile Press. Smith took a copy he had given and inscribed to his wife, cut out the inscription page, wrote in a new inscription to me and then gave me the book gratis. I protested—somewhat feebly, I admit—but Clark and Carol insisted I keep it. I can still recall the thrill that I felt when Smith gave me out of his own hands that copy of
Nero and Other Poems
or, in the words of Smith’s inscription, “this relic from an ironically named printing press.”

Smith died on the 14th of August 1961, and in the latter part of the same year Arkham House published its second anthology of macabre poems,
Fire and Sleet and Candlelight
(the first had been
Dark of the Moon
). This included six largely hitherto-unpublished poems by Smith, in many respects the equal of much of his earlier verse, as all or most of them were evidently composed during the years 1911–1925. Smith demonstrates his admiration for Baudelaire and his works to the very last, as witness the title of the last poem in this group of posthumously published verse: “The Horologe,” which title is the English equivalent of the French “L’Horloge,” which Baudelaire uses as the title for the last poem in the first section
Spleen et Idéal
of
Les Fleurs du Mal
.

Thus, death finally came to him who had been, in part, one of death’s most lyrical celebrators. As stated earlier, no
Saturday Review
or
Atlantic Monthly
devoted an entire memorial issue to him and his works; and while Smith was alive, no
New Yorker
had ever allowed him into the charmed and perilous circle of its “profiles.” Neither the science-fiction nor fantasy magazines even mentioned Smith’s death. He died as he had lived, as an outsider for the most part.

As far as the present writer has been able to determine, Smith left comparatively little unpublished material at his death. Apart from his juvenile fiction, only some two dozen stories, including “The Face by the River,” “Like Mohammed’s Tomb,” “Double Cosmos,” “Told in the Desert,” “The Red World of Polaris,” “A Good Embalmer,” “Strange Shadows,” “Nemesis of the Unfinished,” and “The Dart of Rasasfa.” An unfinished novel,
The Infernal Star
, begun about 1936 with about 10,000 words written. Some incidental poetry. A play in blank verse (written before 1951),
The Dead Will Cuckold You
, telling in six tableaux a tale of necromancy in Zothique. Most important of all,
The Black Book
, the notebook used by Smith from about 1930 to 1961. Although some of this material appears irretrievably lost, much of it has appeared in published form, whether in collected form or individually between 1961 and the present day.

To judge by
The Hill of Dionysus—A Selection
(published in November 1962), and by the more abundant presentation in the
Selected Poems
(published in November 1971), the section with the title
The Hill of Dionysus
, this penultimate poem-cycle of Smith’s must be pronounced the equal of the earlier
Sandalwood
, if not perhaps in some respects the superior of the two collections.

Smith was by no means a prolific writer, except in the sense of creating many writings of a high literary merit. Over-all, there are about 140 tales extant, about 40 poems in prose, and indeed about 1000 original poems in verse, with about 500 thus not collected in the
Selected Poems
(this estimate includes the juvenilia, together with the original poems in French and Spanish, but excludes the almost 400 translations, almost all of them from French, with only about a dozen from Spanish).

For a person who dedicated most of his life to poetry, Smith issued comparatively few volumes. He maintained only about ten or fifteen correspondences of any importance or length. Smith, with his relatively small output of art in various form, provides a striking contrast to those authors whose complete collected works fill one, two, or three full library shelves, or sometimes even more. But if the quantity of his over-all output is negligible, the quality is the reverse.

S
OME GENERAL REMARKS ON
S
MITH’S POETRY AND PROSE

When Smith died at the age of sixty-eight, he left behind him a unique body of work; a body of work remarkable for its consistency in theme and quality from the very first to the very last. It serves as a notable example of an artist who, in his mature creative work, has remained faithful to the ideals, the dreams, and even the creations of his childhood. Fortunately, Smith never betrayed his enchantments.

His poems in verse and prose and his tales and/or extended poems in prose form the integral complement of each other. It is impossible fully to understand or appreciate the tales without some knowledge and understanding of the poems. Conversely, a knowledge of the stories aids toward a richer, a fuller understanding of the poems. Stylistically and thematically the tales grow out of the rich and varied emotiono-imaginative life of the poems.

If Smith had written nothing else but his first volume of poems,
The Star-Treader
, he would still take rank as an unique poet. The very title of the title poem forms a quintessential poem all in itself, a poem filled with amazing imaginative overtones. It seems incredible that such a poem as “Medusa” could have been written by a youth of only eighteen, or even more incredible, that such a hymn to death, destruction and night as “Nero,” so mature and controlled in concept and composition, could have been written by Smith
before
his eighteenth year. In “Nero,” the very first poem of his very first volume, Smith gives expression, for the very first time, to one of the principal concepts uniting his entire output, the concept or theme of the Man-God, first given crystallized expression by Baudelaire in his study
Les Paradis artificiels
, although it is actually a very ancient concept. In other poems Smith celebrates the astronomic splendors of the cosmos, or hymns the gods of antiquity, or combines the cosmic-astronomic with the mythological in striking and original fashion. The divination or evocation of past epochs, places and peoples appears for the first time, later to reappear in Smith’s unforgettable tales of necromancy. The theme of lost continents appears for the first time in the sonnet “Atlantis.” The sonnets are all of a uniformly high quality. Some of the sonnets as well as some of the other poems manifest powerfully Smith’s early and continuing preoccupation with death, destiny and doom. In the extraordinary sonnet “Retrospect and Forecast,” Smith strikes for the first time the superb baroque antithesis of life feeding on death, and death feeding on life: a concept that, along with metamorphosis, continues throughout a goodly proportion of Smith’s entire output. At the opposite pole there are charming nature vignettes, in addition to poems celebrating ideal beauty. Marked by an astonishing technical command and assurance, and by an immense vocabulary used with unerring and creative precision,
The Star-Treader
is as remarkable an achievement today as it was not quite one hundred years ago when it was published in 1912.

While it may have obvious affinities with
Les Fleurs du Mal
of Baudelaire as well as with the work of the Symbolists on the one hand and on the other with that of the Parnassians; yet
Ebony and Crystal
, published in 1922, remains an unique collection, quite unlike any other body of poetry whether in French or in English or in any other language. All the themes and ambiances in
The Star-Treader
—the cosmic-astronomic, the mythological, the implicitly necromantic, and those of splendor, death, beauty, nature, and of lost continents—reappear in the present volume. But, with what a wealth of difference. For not only have the poet’s technical and metrical skills attained their perfection, but a new and undeniably universal theme manifests itself—that of love. The poet uses an even larger vocabulary than in
The Star-Treader
, and with the same extraordinary precision. He has mastered the Baudelairian technique of treating a perverse or unpleasant subject (i.e., from a conventional viewpoint) with the utmost lyricism of imagery and language: such sonnets as “Love Malevolent” and “Laus Mortis” form worthy companion-pieces to Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne”. Over-all the sonnets reach a high-water mark of classical perfection and romantic fervor and, sometimes, baroque intensity and complexity. Smith’s handling of blank verse—especially in “The Hashish-Eater” and in the dramatic dialogue “The Ghoul and the Seraph”—is nothing less than supreme. The final speech of the ghoul Necromalor in the last-named piece provides a quintessential example of Smith’s unique literary baroque both as to subject and as to style, besides brilliantly illuminating his highly baroque philosophies of death and change, of life feeding on death, and death feeding on life; with everything informed by a burning romantic fervor, and controlled by a classic sense of tone and form. Much of the fascination of Smith’s poems (as well as of his poems in prose and of his extended poems in prose) stems from their baroque, shifting and kaleidoscopic imagery; such imagery as appears in the sonnets “Eidolon,” “Ave Atque Vale,” “Mirrors,” “The Orchid,” and others. An important technical innovation is Smith’s revival of that unjustly neglected and deprecated metre in English, the alexandrine. The most outstanding poem employing this metre, appositely entitled “Alexandrines,” is perhaps one of the single most perfect poems Smith ever penned; although it is admittedly difficult to point out even a few outstanding poems amid the plethora of excellent ones.