SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON SMITH’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.
Standing apart from the volume and Smith’s over-all output of poetry, the compressed epic “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil” remains an unparalleled masterpiece of cosmic invention and imagination. It stands as the unique example of the seemingly impossible combination of the epical with the lyrical. Its apparently endless pageant of wonders and episodes forms a veritable catalogue of things to come in Smith’s tales of 1929/1930 and 1936/1937. Even more than that sovereign poem “Nero,” it exemplifies in an unique manner the all-important concept of the Man-God in the person of the hashish-eater, “the emperor of dreams,” empanoplied with demiurgic powers. Arranged into ten clearly-defined sections, the epic, with an apocalyptic splendor of imagery and language, plunges in medias res and relates the already-begun “supreme ascendance” of the Man-God (through the supreme drug or liberating agent of the imagination) to his arch-sublime throne of “culminant omniscience manifold,” wherefrom in a series of visions or “memories” and “dreams” he surveys the divers pageantries of the cosmos; the epic then relates the muffled threat to the Man-God’s omnipotence by some innominate evil; then the brief but evil-omened respite enjoyed or endured by the Man-God; then the first full-scale apocalypse of evil in the form of the monsters of classical mythology cosmically extrapolated; then, ever pursued by “the dragon-rout,” the flight of the Man-God to the utmost edge of the cosmos beyond which plunges the arch-abyss of the void or of chaos; then, rising up from the very depths, the ultimate revelation or realization of evil: the “huge white eyeless Face” “With lips of flame that open,” which involves into it (but logically without destroying either) both the Man-God and the rout of now rather childish monsters however macrocosmic. “The Apocalypse of Evil,” the subtitle of this epic (for such it is in everything but length—it satisfies all the desiderata of an epic), has a considerable significance since it indicates for the poem a literary tradition stemming in part directly from The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. Whatever this compressed epic may owe apropos of general structure and style of imagery to its ultimate model, “A Wine of Wizardry” by George Sterling (which is essentially a brief travelogue of imaginary wonders, a literal “flight of fancy,” which Smith first read in late 1907 when he was almost fifteen—the poem was first published in The Cosmopolitan for September 1907), yet “The Hashish-Eater” has no true parallel in cosmic concept or in sustained power of imagination. It stands alone. Perhaps the closest thing to Smith’s compressed epic is that highly poetic prose-piece in semi-dramatic form by Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine,—with its saintly anchorite-hero Anthony who undergoes a series of fantasmagoric visions instigated by the Devil to tempt him. Ignoring the over-all differences in narrative-purpose of the two pieces as well as the differences in symbolic intent of the endings of both, yet these endings outwardly do have a considerable resemblance.
The Poems in Prose which conclude Ebony and Crystal possess a paramount significance in terms of the over-all canon of Smith’s work, for these twenty-nine poems in prose—representing a logical continuation of the thematic material in the preceding poems in verse—lead directly to Smith’s two extended poems in prose of 1925, “Sadastor” and “The Abominations of Yondo,” and on through them to the tales and/or extended poems in prose of 1929–1937. Many of these poems in prose are essentially condensed or implied tales, and two of them, “The Flower-Devil” and “From the Crypts of Memory,” served as the inspiration or nuclei (in regard to the over-all plot, atmosphere and even as to actual phrases) for the later extended poems in prose, “The Demon of the Flower” and “The Planet of the Dead,” respectively. Smith is one of the very, very few poets in English who have fully understood the technique of this difficult and eminently French genre (the poème en prose) more or less created by Baudelaire (under the dual influence and/or suggestion of that unique collection of prose ballads Gaspard de la Nuit by Aloysius Bertrand, published in 1842, and of such poems in prose by Poe as “Shadow - A Parable,” “Silence - A Fable,” “Eleanora,” and “The Masque of the Red Death”). Indeed, it is not too much to say that as a practitioner of the poem in prose Smith has no peer in English, and that, considering his achievement in this genre from a universal literary viewpoint, he takes equal rank with Baudelaire, the technique of whose Petits Poèmes en prose influenced Smith in the technique of his own. These poems in prose clearly pave the way toward the highly baroque prose of Smith’s later tales and/or extended poems in prose, as of where the latter designation applies. Even if little recognized or heralded, the publication of Smith’s over-all more than forty poems in prose in one volume (the total is now known to be only a little less than sixty) has helped to establish his pre-eminence in the literature of this genre.
The remarkable love poems in Ebony and Crystal find their complement on an extended scale in the even more remarkable love poems that make up most of Sandalwood, published in 1925, and concluding with nineteen translations from Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire. After the cosmic and exotic splendors of The Star-Treader and Ebony and Crystal, and the oftentimes monumental tone of those two volumes, the tender, muted, vertumnal or gently autumnal tone of this third major poetry collection by Smith, comes as a surprise, almost—paradoxically—as a quiet shock. Many of the love poems, as well as some of the non-love poems, Smith has cast into many beautiful forms of his own invention that suggest the old French forms of the rondeau, the triolet, the ballade, and the villanelle, without actually being the same. The poems in Sandalwood are above all remarkable for haunting song-like effects, with all manner of refrain and echo-like devices. Smith’s successful experimentation with lines of differing lengths and metres suggests on the one hand the similar experimentation by the poets of the Pléïade and on the other the same by the most eminent Elizabethan poet influenced by the Pléïade, Edmund Spenser. Perhaps the single most beautiful and artistic poem in the entire volume is the incomparable “We Shall Meet.” But the entire collection is rife with excellent poems, haunting, unforgettable, of a rare poignance, charting as many of them do the course of love that runs disastrously and ultimately perishes. Like Ebony and Crystal, Sandalwood is a talismanic, touchstone volume. The nineteen poems from Baudelaire, as well as Smith’s Baudelairian translations elsewhere, establish Smith as a sovereign translator of the French genius, far superior to Edna St. Vincent Millay or even Arthur Symons.
Of Smith’s tales and/or extended poems in prose there is little that one can say in this brief space save that they are prodigies of invention whose style is integrally one with their themes. They synthesize and extrapolate the themes, backgrounds, concepts and stylistic elements of Smith’s three major early poetry collections. Smith’s unique type of science fiction (contributed mostly in the 1930s to Wonder Stories) represents a return to the cosmic-astronomic material of his very first volume of some twenty years earlier. As a perfectly logical consequence Smith’s tales employ the same immense vocabulary to be found in his poetry; a vocabulary used with a precision fully as creative and as masterly as that evident in his poems. Not only does the same vocabulary used in his poetry reappear but even the same or similar phrase-patterns and mannerisms. Such tales as “The Dark Eidolon,” “The Empire of the Necromancers,” “The Last Hieroglyph,” “The Isle of the Torturers,” “Xeethra,” “The White Sybil,” “The City of the Singing Flame,” and so many, many others, have no parallel in the creations of any other writer. They are unique like the genius that created them. They form in their entirety a worthy congener to “The Hashish-Eater.” In them Smith again gives striking embodiment to the concept of the Man-God, whether personified in such archimages as Malygris, Maal Dweb, Avyctes and Namirrha or in such necromancers as Mmatmuor, Sodosma, and Vacharn or in such kings as Adompha, Euvoran and Xeethra. Such protagonists of Smith’s, like true heroes Baudelairian, despite their frequent sovereignty of temporal and/or necromantic power, are yet paradoxically often impotent to escape that ultimate bane of godhood or of the Man-God, to wit, ennui or spleen. (This last is, of course, one of the central Baudelairian themes, both in Les Fleurs du Mal and in the Petits Poèmes en prose, the alternate title of which is Le Spleen de Paris.) The poet-author himself may be seen in an ideal sense as a literary Man-God creating and peopling many worlds of his imagination; the tales and/or extended poems in prose may be seen as the complement and fulfillment of the seemingly endless procession of visions or episodes that make up the compressed epic “The Hashish-Eater.”
Smith’s tales, because of their efflorescent richness and their baroque combination of seemingly contradictory and incongruous elements, become very difficult to characterize. The love poems in Ebony and Crystal and Sandalwood find their fictional counterparts in the love interest in a great many of Smith’s so-called “tales of horror.” But the label of “tales of love” is also inadequate. What should one call them? Tales of death? Tales of splendor? Tales of beauty? Tales of deathly beauty? Tales of necromancy? Tales of demonology? Tales of magic? Tales of the supernatural? Tales of sorcery? Tales of metamorphosis? Tales of wonder? Tales of cosmic irony? Tales of deity, destiny and nemesis? Perhaps, after all, the label “weird tales” serves as well as any. Smith’s weird tales were certainly among the most ineffably weird ever to appear in the magazine of that same name.
And then there is the “magic” of Smith’s style. One seems to be reading some sort of incantation or litany with measured invocations and responses. Just as Smith’s subject-matter, his symbolism and his philosophies, so may his style be defined as baroque—a literary baroque quite unlike any other. By literary baroque we intend a style wherein certain Gothic elements—such as savageness, grotesqueness, antithesis, changefulness or metamorphosis, redundance or, in Smith’s case, largely pseudo-redundance—have evolved from an ultimately classic matrix. To these we might also add the preoccupation with illusion, sometimes manifested in the use of the mirror, the mirage, the mask, and the maze; the fascination and obsession with death and gruesome physical detail; the love of paradox; the use of symbolic ambiguity; the emphasis on extravagance of color and an often outrageous efflorescence of vegetation and décor; the preference for objects and words and imageries of splendor; the element of the theatrical, often manifested in a kind of theatrical spotlighting on crucial objects or persons at critical moments; and a delight in what Leon Edel once termed “the familiar symptoms of decadence” but which are equally as well those of literature in its primal stages—a delight in the wonderful, the marvellous, the strange, the exotic, the bizarre, the hypernatural, and we might add, the unknown and the unknowable. For all the poetic denseness of his prose style—a style which makes heavy and deliberate use of the technique of poetic compression—Smith’s syntax remains remarkably clear, and with striking rhythmical effects.
In his poems in prose and in his tales and/or extended poems in prose, there are prose rhythms that challenge comparison with those of the finest stylists in the language, including those of Sir Thomas Browne; whom, in sheer sustained stateliness and sombre splendor of style and subject, Smith surpasses in many instances, or at the very least fully equals. Smith’s genius for creating and sustaining a powerful mood—partly through a more or less related system of imagery and through a lucid, even if elaborate, syntax—simplifies the baroque antitheses and complications inherent in his tales, and thereby succeeds in giving his tales their characteristic tense unity. The prose of Clark Ashton Smith features, as does the prose of Sir Thomas Browne (and as does, of course, Smith’s own poetry), a skillful, often uncanny juxtaposition of Anglo-Saxon words with those of Græco-Latinate polysyllables—this creates an effect approximating the incantatory effect of poetry. The prose of Smith’s tales is as studied and deliberate as the prose of his poems in prose and as the language of verse. It goes without saying that such a prose demands an unusual and a careful quality of reading to be fully grasped and appreciated. While Smith’s style is based in part on Poe, and suggestive in certain respects of Sir Thomas Browne, yet the result is wholly original, quite unlike the style of any other writer. And despite its elaboration and seeming excess, it is essentially a highly compressed, compact, and economical prose. Without such a prose style it would have been impossible for Smith to have created the illusion of reality so characteristic of his tales of superficial unreality.
As poetic and mythical considerations of death and mortality, such poems in prose as “The Memnons of the Night,” “From the Crypts of Memory,” and “The Shadows,” together with such extended poems in prose as “The Planet of the Dead,” “The Empire of the Necromancers,” or “The Death of Malygris,” form worthy twentieth-century companion-pieces to the last chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall, i.e., Hydriotaphia.
Merely regarded as short stories told in a heavily poetic style, Smith’s fictions would appear extraordinary. Regarded more exactly as extended poems in prose, which is what many of them are in all actuality, his tales are nothing less than astonishing. To sustain a poem in prose for one or two pages is not an impossible feat; but to sustain one for ten, fifteen, even twenty pages, as Smith has undeniably done on many occasions, must be accounted a technical achievement of genius.
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.