INTRODUCTION
By Richard A. Lupoff
Of the many great names of those who wrote for Weird Tales, “The Unique Magazine,” three stand above all. If you have access to a file of Weird Tales—or, lacking that, a cumulative bibliography of its near century of issues—you will find bylines ranging from such pioneers of modern science fiction and fantasy as Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and Catherine L. Moore to some far more surprising personalities: Tennessee Williams, Robert A. Heinlein, John D. MacDonald, and scores of others. And those, of course, represent only stories original to Weird Tales. Never mind the reprints.
Some of those writers are forgotten today, but they were acclaimed in their own time, and some of them—your guess is a good as mine, as to which—are due for a kind of literary resurrection, thanks especially to today’s penchant for rediscovering long-neglected works and their creators. Will it be Henry S. Whitehead? Eli Colter? Donald E. Keyhoe, remembered now for his pioneering “nonfiction” work, The Flying Saucers are Real, but popular in an earlier decade for his pulpish gems?
Vincent Starrett, Seabury Quinn, E. Hoffmann Price?
Who can say?
Still, one returns inevitably to the three titans of Weird Tales: H. P. Lovecraft, “The Old Gentleman of Providence,” Robert E. Howard, “Two Gun Bob,” and Clark Ashton Smith, “The Emperor of Dreams.”
Their lifetimes overlapped. Lovecraft: 1890–1937. Smith: 1893–1961. Howard: 1906–1936. They lived in widely separated sections of the United States: Lovecraft, in Providence, Rhode Island; Howard, in Cross Plains, Texas; Smith, in Auburn, California.
Excellent biographies have been written of Lovecraft and Howard. Donald Sidney-Fryer’s splendid “bio-bibliography,” Emperor of Dreams, is as close to a full-scale biography of Smith as has yet been achieved. In any case, I will not attempt to duplicate, in miniature form, the treatment that all three have been justly accorded. But I will point out that despite their great differences there were remarkable parallels among them.
As far as I have been able to determine, all three were sole offspring of their parents. All three had less than happy and conventional family lives. None of them followed the “standard model” of American life in their era. This model, as manifested in countless novels, radio dramas and motion pictures of the 1930s, called for an early and happy marriage, children, a steady job for the father, a contented career as homemaker and caregiver for the mother, and a cozy suburban home for the family.
How many families actually achieved this dreamlike existence is debatable. Certainly neither Howard Phillips Lovecraft nor Robert E. Howard nor Clark Ashton Smith came anywhere close.
Lovecraft’s father went mad, was hospitalized, and died. Then Lovecraft’s mother went mad, was hospitalized, and died. Raised by a pair of doting aunts, Lovecraft married a woman seven years his senior. After a couple of years he decided that marriage was not for him and returned to the quasi-maternal nest for the rest of his days.
Howard never married. He reportedly bragged of his sexual exploits but his claims were at best unsubstantiated. The details of Howard’s suicide are well known. The reason or reasons may be more complicated than the following bald statement: His mother lay dying, her nurse told him that the end was near, he took a gun and put a bullet through his brain. Chronic depression, financial stress, a failed relationship, and what I am informed is now known as “Caregiver Stress Syndrome” may all have contributed to his act of self-destruction.
And Clark Ashton Smith spent most of his life struggling against poverty while caring for his own ill and elderly parents. Only after their death, and himself in late middle age and in failing health, did he marry.
Three brilliantly talented men, each of them a stranger in a world he never made nor lived in happily or comfortably. All three, perhaps surprisingly, expressed their pain and alienation in poetry. They were not unaware of this aspect in their natures. In a 1937 letter to R. H. Barlow, Smith said, “I could never live in any modern city, and am more of an ‘outsider’ than HPL. His ‘outsideness’ was principally in regard to time-period; mine is in space, too.”
But even by the modest economic yardstick by which each lived, poetry could not provide sustenance. Each turned to creating fiction for the pulp magazines of the day—most notably, in all three cases, Weird Tales, a periodical that paid poorly even by the low standards of the pulps, but that welcomed offbeat and alienated world-views like those of these three tortured geniuses.
Lovecraft’s visions were dark, moody, and pessimistic tales of old New England and cosmic doom that inevitably awaited all of humankind. Howard’s tales were the most varied of the three, ranging from boxing yarns to sea stories to westerns, but most of all to tales of barbarian combat. Imbued with overwhelming violence and drenched in gore, they found a special niche and inspired a whole school of imitators.
But what of Clark Ashton Smith?
I suspect that, of the three writers under discussion, he was the most alienated from his surroundings. His fiction is the most remote from the mundane world. It is also, in a sense, the most remote from the fiction to which contemporary readers have become conditioned.
The modern novel, especially the modern genre novel, tends to be driven by a relentlessly urgent plot. The modern reader’s attention is constantly sought by the demands of his work; his leisure life, by motion pictures filled with chases, gunfire, explosions, deadlines. Even as I sit at my computer working on this essay my telephone rings, a siren screams as an ambulance rockets past my house, there is little opportunity and regrettably little inclination to settle down for an uninterrupted hour with a book.
Clark Ashton Smith’s prose—if prose it is!—is of a different sort. Every arcane word is chosen with care and purpose. Every glittering image demands our time and attention. We do not read these stories with an urgent need to find out what happens next, and what happens next, and always, always, what happens next.
Of course Clark Ashton Smith’s works were not of uniform quality. I am by no means the first to point this out. But at his best each of his stories is like a glass of the finest—but also the strongest—of liquors. To gulp it down is to do injustice both to the liquor—the story!—and to the taster—the reader.
Instead, to appreciate the artistry of Clark Ashton Smith we must calm ourselves, settle into a comfortable chair, and shut out distractions and interruptions. It may be best to read Smith in silent surroundings. Or then again, one may put on music, but not the jarring, cacophonous sounds of contemporary popular composers and performers. The classical sounds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are most appropriate. The specific works one chooses, I leave to each individual, although the appeal of the divine Mozart is eternal.
Let Smith’s words carry you away to realms of glittering beauty—and evil and irony at times, yes. It does not matter whether you read a Smith tale set in a sumptuous Oriental court, a decadent world of the far future or a remote, alien planet. These settings are arbitrary, and in my opinion they are really interchangeable.
I have my favorite stories in this collection. As the Romans said, De gustibus, non est disputandum. Still, I will indulge myself by mentioning just three.
“The Death of Malygris” is vintage Smith. Just see how he draws the reader into his world of whispers and of shadows:
At the hour of interlunar midnight, when lamps burned rarely and far apart in Susran, and slow-moving autumn clouds had muffled the stars, King Gadeiron sent forth into the sleeping city twelve of his trustiest mutes. Like shadows gliding through oblivion, they vanished upon their various ways; each of them, returning presently to the darkened palace, led with him a shrouded figure no less silent and discreet than himself.
In this manner, groping along tortuous alleys, through blind cypress-caverns in the royal gardens, and down subterranean halls and steps, twelve of the most powerful sorcerers of Susran were brought together in a vault of oozing, death-grey granite, far beneath the foundations of the palace.
What an opening scene! What irresistible imagery! It is impossible not to go on reading, not to want—no, to need to know about those twelve mutes and those twelve sorcerers and what plan is brewing in the mind of King Gadeiron.
Then there is “The Coming of the White Worm.” Smith uses odd and intriguing words that weave an enchantment all their own, a kind of imagistic poetry whose very sound and texture is hypnotic, regardless even of their content:
Evagh the warlock, dwelling beside the boreal sea, was aware of many strange and untimely portents in mid-summer. Frorely burned the sun above Mhu Thulan from a welkin clear and wannish as ice. At eve the aurora was hung from zenith to earth, like an arras in a high chamber of gods. Wan and rare were the poppies and small anemones in the cliff-sequestered vales lying behind the house of Evagh; and the fruits in his walled garden were pale of rind and green at the core. Also, he beheld by day the unseasonable flight of great multitudes of fowl, going southward from the hidden isles beyond Mhu Thulan; and by night he heard the distressful clamor of other passing multitudes. And always, in the loud wind and crying surf, he harkened to the weird whisper of voices from realms of perennial winter.
Nothing has happened. A character has been named but all that we know of him is his profession. No shots have rung out, no hoofs have pounded, no zombies have lurched, no bosoms have heaved. Instead, Smith has created a living, breathtakingly strange and fascinating place, and we are drawn to enter it and listen, our hearts pounding in our ears, while this male Scheherazade spins a thousand and second tale.
One more, “The Chain of Aforgomon.” Curl up and let that insidious voice tell you this story:
It is indeed strange that John Milwarp and his writings should have fallen so speedily into a sort of semi-oblivion. His books, treating of Oriental life in a somewhat flowery, romantic style, were popular a few months ago. But now, in spite of their range and penetration, their pervasive verbal sorcery, they are seldom mentioned; and they seem to have vanished unaccountably from the shelves of bookstores and libraries.
Even the mystery of Milwarp’s death, baffling to both law and science, has evoked but a passing interest, an excitement quickly lulled and forgotten.
I was well acquainted with Milwarp over a term of years. But my recollection of the man is becoming strangely blurred, like an image in a misted mirror. His dark, half-alien personality, his preoccupation with the occult, his immense knowledge of Eastern life and lore, are things I remember with such effort and vagueness as attends the recovery of a dream. Sometimes I almost doubt that he ever existed. It is as if the man, and all that pertains to him, were being erased from human record by some mysterious acceleration of the common process of obliteration.
This is what academics refer to as recursive narration: a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer.... It is hard not to believe that this is Smith writing about Smith, if not the actual man struggling against a difficult fate on that hardscrabble mountainside above Auburn, California, then the Clark Ashton Smith of his own fantasies, the Emperor of Dreams.
“The Chain of Aforgomon” may not be the greatest of Smith’s stories. It is certainly not the most famous. But it has a very special place in my personal list of favorites.
What, indeed, did Smith think of himself and his works? With what endorsement did he leave his remarkably extensive body of prose and poetry—and painting and sculpture!—to the world?
I recently came across the text of Charles Baudelaire’s famous and scandalous volume, Flowers of Evil. Let me share with you just a few lines from Baudelaire’s introduction:
You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people... ...(My detractors) deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don’t care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron.
Just so, the collected works of Clark Ashton Smith will make their way into the memory of our own lettered public. They will stand on a plain with the best prose and poetry of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert Ervin Howard. He was their equal; I am tempted to say more than that but will not. Each had his merits. Those of Clark Ashton Smith are lovingly displayed in this and its companion volumes of his collected fantasies.
In the same 1937 letter earlier cited, Smith referred to one of his stories, “The Death of Ilalotha,” as “unusually poisonous and exotic.” That story is included in this volume, and the reader is invited to consider it in the light of the author’s assessment. How aptly the phrase applies to Smith—whose works, however glowingly lovely, were seldom optimistic and never Pollyannaish—as well as to Baudelaire!
As you read this book or any collection Smith’s wondrous gems, do not hasten to the next story, the next scene, or even the next paragraph. Turn the clock to the wall. Put your wristwatch in a drawer. Disconnect the telephone and shut off your cell phone. Draw the blinds. Make yourself comfortable with the book in your lap, and perhaps with a glass of some fine, rare vintage at your elbow. Wade into the warm, scented sea of words. Give yourself over to the experience. Do not worry about emerging.
All too soon the world will summon you back to reality. The spell will be broken. When this happens, do not be ashamed to weep.
—Richard A. Lupoff
Berkeley, California
2010