Introduction
Behind all the colorful gods and heroes of Greek and Roman mythology—behind even Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos who measured out and snipped off the length of a man’s life, and more unanswerable even than Zeus and Hera together—stood Fate. This force—not a person, personifying it would be as hard as personifying entropy—was what made Tantalus kill his own son and abominably serve him as dinner to the unwitting gods, what led Agamemnon to kill his daughter, what drove the Bacchantes to commit perverse murders incomprehensible even to themselves.
Those figures, so remote in ancient history, helplessly acted out their fated, prophesied roles. Free will was a mocking lie for Theseus and Oedipus and Hercules. Foreordained fatal error was the true story.
We live in a different universe now, or a differently-perceived one, at any rate. The Judeo-Christian world-view, even just coasting on past momentum as it mostly is these days, has introduced the ideas of justice and mercy—redemption. Even the Gnostic philosophy, with its bleak belief in an insane demiurge responsible for the creation of this world, acknowledged a perfect God, unapproachable but at least out there somewhere.
Modern writers can write stories set in those ancient Fate-cursed days, but they can’t really assume or convey the perspective of being an organic part of that sort of world. Well, none of them besides Clark Ashton Smith.
I leaned from some black precipice, to see
The pits beneath. One came, not far from me,
Who hurled therein the sockets of the stars
And shells of worlds that rattled emptily.
—Clark Ashton Smith
Really it’s only in dreams, when the oldest catacombs of our brains serve up symbols that mystify as much as terrify, that we dimly comprehend the grammar of that merciless unredeemed universe. And dreams, like fairy tales, have their own compelling pre-rational “logic”—as Chesterton said of the stories in mythology, “we do not know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable.”
We don’t know why the culminating event in Smith’s “The Testament of Athammaus,” impossible though it is, is clearly inevitable. The Singing Flame, in its vast temple in the weirdly besieged city of Ydmos, is an image that seems to spring authoritatively from the earliest dreams we ever had.
I use the word “dreams,” not specifically “nightmares.” It would be careless to label Smith’s fantasies as “horror.” Certainly horror is an element in them, but the ugly or terrifying aspects are incidental features of a world that is simply not ours. They never seem to be the main point, and to focus on them is like paying attention only to the familiar-seeming instruments in a profoundly strange orchestra. The narrative voice often describes the most appalling scenes as dispassionately as it describes the most gorgeous ones. They’re often the same, in fact—the standard lumber of horror stories, all the decrepit old houses and possessed children and cosmopolitan vampires, fades to relative mundanity beside Smith’s vaultingly glamorous dooms.
Smith’s stories are truly “magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” They’re shot through with an antediluvian beauty which is indifferent to human security or even comprehension, but which is more siren-like because of that remoteness. Each of the creatures who gladly immolates itself in the Singing Flame has made a vast pilgrimage to attain it. And even then, Fate scrawls the last, bitter hieroglyph.
“And, leaning from the mouldered bed of lust,
Love’s skeleton writes Nada in the dust.”
—Clark Ashton Smith
Not surprisingly, true love never seems to work out, in Smith’s worlds. Smith’s typical luckless protagonist is more likely to be endlessly seeking a long-lost lover, or endlessly mourning an irretrievably dead one, than enjoying the beloved’s company. Eroticism abounds, though, whether as dangerous as the variously deadly ladies in “The Kiss of Zoraida” and “A Rendezvous in Averoigne,” or as grotesque and ultimately funny as the “national mother” in “The Door to Saturn,” but it’s a fatal eroticism, and to give in to it is generally to be obliterated—though often we can queasily sympathize with the brave and foolhardy souls who choose just that. Lamiae, succubi, sirens—for the duration of a story, at least, Smith can convince you that plain love between a human man and woman is the lowest possible reading on a meter than stretches very high, though nearly all of the calibrations are in the red-lit danger zone.
Ultimately we realize that the dazzling glamors we find in these stories are inextricable from, are in fact a consequence of, the merciless field-equations of Fate—the cold stone beneath the ornate and enchanted Bokhaira carpets. Even for the Emperor of Dreams, the narrator of Smith’s grandest poem, “The Hashish-Eater,” there waits at the end of all the splendors of a million universes,
“... a huge white eyeless Face
That fills the void and fills the universe,
And bloats against the limits of the world
With lips of flame that open…”
Tim Powers
March 2007