THE SORCERER DEPARTS
Smith remained the poet to the very end. He composed his last poem, the sonnet “Cycles,” (to quote his own words) “in the midst of the Sabbath pandemonium of dogs, brats and autoes” of June 4th, 1961. A little more than two months later, on the 14th of August, Monday night, at the age of sixty-eight, Clark Ashton Smith died quietly in his sleep at his home in Pacific Grove, attended to the last by his devoted wife Carol.
Smith’s true literary affinities have been given little serious recognition. The affinity with Poe manifests itself primarily in a certain weirdness, in certain phrase mannerisms, and in the extreme musicality of much of Smith’s verse and of his prose. Indeed, for sheer gorgeousness of sound the student of poetry must go back to the lyrical beauty of Edmund Spenser’s strikingly baroque epic The Færie Queene for a just comparison. In the cosmic range of their fancy Spenser and Smith have much in common, as well as in an inexhaustible sense of wonder. Smith’s tale “The Garden of Adompha,” with its infernal and sentient vegetation, seems like a curious amalgam and extrapolation of “The Garden of Proserpina” (Book II: Canto VII) and of “The Garden of Adonis” (Book III: Canto XII) in The Færie Queene. There is an interesting evolution from the idyllic mediæval dream-garden in Le Roman de la Rose to such examples of the Spenserian garden as “The Garden of Proserpina,” “The Garden of Adonis,” and “The Bowre of Blisse” (Book II: Canto XII) and then the garden of venomous flowers in Hawthorne’s tale “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and then to “The Garden of Adompha.”
Smith’s affinities with Baudelaire are so obvious as to pass almost without mention. However, we must allude to one fundamental affinity between Smith and Baudelaire. The French poet sought to create beauty out of the filth, the squalor, the disease, the evil and the horror of a great metropolis (Paris). Similarly, Smith sought to create beauty not so much out of the filth, the evil, the implicit or actual horror of one great city as he did out of the ugliness of death and decay and destruction, out of the horror of an irrevocable doom, out of the terror of an ultimate nothingness beyond death (what Sir Thomas Browne terms “the uncomfortable night of nothingness”), or paradoxically out of the possibility that there is no death, that all animate things whether in life or in death as well as all things inanimate—in short, absolutely all things—by virtue of their theoretically indestructible atoms are part and parcel of an inconceivably monstrous and perverse arch-life-form without beginning and without end whether in space or in time that involves not only the cosmos but also the void beyond the cosmos. (This last is given its most powerful symbolic embodiment in the “huge eyeless Face, / That fills the void and fills the universe, / And bloats against the limits of the world / With lips of flame that open,” in the tenth and final section of “The Hashish-Eater.”) If, as averred by Victor Hugo, Baudelaire did introduce into the literature of poetry “un frisson nouveau,” then Smith has in his own turn introduced “le frisson cosmique.”
Smith also has a certain similarity with such Jacobean dramatists of death and the perverse as Cyril Tourneur and John Webster and their arch-imitator of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. However, Smith has far more than the single string of death on his harp; there are also, among others, the strings of love and beauty. His love poems alone would rank Smith as a poet of unique attainments. For form, for originality of imagery, for originality of created poetic forms, for choice of line length, and for depth of emotion, such collections or cycles of love poems as Sandalwood and The Hill of Dionysus compare favorably with the best of the series of love poems and sonnets by such English poets as Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, or Ernest Dowson or by such poets of the French Renaissance as Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé.
There is besides an unmistakable resemblance between Smith and the French Protestant, eminently baroque poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, in their love of antithesis and their preoccupation with death and destruction. For example, d’Aubigné devotes at least two, Les Feux and Les Fers, of the seven principal divisions of his epic Les Tragiques, to catalogues of people meeting violent deaths through civil war and the tortures of martyrdom. Such a poem by Smith as “The City of Destruction,” published in The Arkham Sampler, winter 1948, seems especially d’Aubignesque: its long lines, strong rhythms, relentless piling-up of images, all suggest the forceful alexandrines of d’Aubigné, with their realization of emotional intensity through the steady accumulation of synonyms and phrases of a similar nature.
The much “quaint and curious… forgotten lore” to be found in the canon of Smith’s works, especially of his tales, has extended parallels in the works of Sir Thomas Browne, particularly in the latter’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors (1646)—with its inquiry into and consideration of the basilisk, of griffins, of the phoenix, of the salamander living in fire, of the chameleon living only upon air, of the unicorn’s horn, of the ostrich digesting iron, of “the musical note of swans before their death”, of “the pictures of mermaids, unicorns, and some others,” etc., etc. That which Lytton Strachey once cited as the peculiarities of Browne’s style—“the studied pomp of its latinisms, its wealth of allusion, its tendency toward sonorous antithesis”—could be cited just as well as being the peculiarities of Smith’s own style. However, there are far more than stylistic affinities between these two highly baroque literary creators. Browne’s works demonstrate a sense of wonder and a taste for wonders real or imaginary equal to the same demonstrated by Spenser or by Smith. Browne was a great student of Dante’s theological fantasy in epic verse La Divina Commedia. Just as Hydriotaphia (1658) with its theme of death and of implicit hell connotes with Dante’s Inferno; and just as The Garden of Cyrus (1658) with its implicit theme of life eternal and ever-renewing connotes with the Italian poet’s Paradiso; so does Hydriotaphia connote with the emphasis in Smith on death, on funereal monuments and paraphernalia, on deserts, on desolation, on an ultimate nothingness; and so does The Garden of Cyrus connote with the emphasis in Smith on verdure, on the vernal, on extravagance of color, on an ultimately outrageous efflorescence, or on the green fire of “the singing flame.” In Smith’s compressed epic “The Apocalypse of Evil” the ultimate conclusion, that immortality is part of an infinite and eternal arch-life-form of the cosmos and of the void, is similar to but yet distinct from—due to Browne’s over-all Christian perspective—the sentiments implicit in some of the concluding pensées in Urne-Buriall, such as: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us,” and “Ready to be anything in the extasie of being ever…” Such a phrase by Browne as “The night of time far surpasseth the day…” could serve as the motto or moral of Smith’s poem in prose “The Memnons of the Night.” Such a phrase by Browne as “The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live,” finds an unexpected similarity to the phrase “…the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living,” in Smith’s poem in prose “From the Crypts of Memory,” and to the phrase “…its immemorial dead, who had come to outnumber infinitely the living,” in Smith’s extended poem in prose “The Planet of the Dead.” And the following selection from Browne’s posthumously published Christian Morals (1716), Part the Third, Section XIV, is amazingly similar to the spirit animating so much of Smith’s verse and prose, and could easily have been written by Smith himself: “Let thy Thoughts be of things which have not entered into the Hearts of Beasts: Think of things long past, and long to come: Acquaint thyself with the choragium of the Stars, and consider the vast expansion beyond them. Let Intellectual Tubes give thee a glance of things, which visive Organs reach not. Have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and Thoughts of things, which Thoughts but tenderly touch.”
The extended short story by William Beckford, The History of the Caliph Vathek, and much of Oriental fiction as exemplified in The Arabian Nights, connote with the extravagance of color, incident, and décor or background in many of Smith’s tales. For sheer color and bizarrerie the extended poem in prose “The Dark Eidolon” out-Vatheks Vathek. If Poe did create the extended poem in prose in such masterpieces as “The Masque of the Red Death,” it remained for Smith to re-create the genre and create extensively within it. Stylistically the tales of Clark Ashton Smith are, in part, a continuation and a fulfillment on the one hand of the work of Edgar Allan Poe (the Poe of “Shadow - A Parable,” “Silence - A Fable,” and of course “The Masque of the Red Death”) and on the other of the Petits Poèmes en prose of Baudelaire, as well as of Smith’s own earlier Poems in Prose in Ebony and Crystal.
The critical pontiffs of the twentieth century have so far passed over the work of Smith in verse and prose through a peculiar series of circumstances. Smith’s poetry, because it was published mainly in private and limited editions, has become the property of only a fortunate few. His prose has been known principally to a specialized audience. The reviews of Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds in The New York Times Book Review proved almost completely inadequate: one cannot help but wonder as to the reception that would be given to Sir Thomas Browne if he lived today, with its distaste for an elaborate style and for anything that might seem a little bit of too much. And there is much else in Smith’s work to make an adequate larger critical recognition difficult, at least during the present century with its frequent and tasteless emphasis on creative literature primarily as autobiographical revelation or as a happy hunting ground for “specialists” in critico-psychoanalysis or for “professors with a system” (to quote in part an early epigram of Smith’s). It is, alas, the age of “the brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows” (to use George Sterling’s phrase). But, like the ones antecedent, this convention as well as its fostering age will in their own turn pass on to the special nirvana reserved for such, leaving the way clear mayhap for better, more generous ones to take their place.
In an admirable and perceptive essay on Baudelaire first published in 1875, the great English critic George Saintsbury once stated: “It is not merely admiration of Baudelaire which is to be persuaded to English readers, but also imitation of him which is with at least equal earnestness to be urged upon English writers.” He then states further, rather ruefully, that “we have always lacked more or less the class of écrivains artistes—writers who have recognized the fact that writing is an art, and who have applied themselves with the patient energy of sculptors, painters, and musicians to the discovery of its secrets,” and that if the sense of a distinguished prose style has been lost in English, nothing could be more effective for its rediscovery than a study of Baudelaire’s prose as a model and a stimulant to writers in English. Less than half a century later, in 1922, as if in answer to this earnest exhortation, appeared Ebony and Crystal with its twenty-nine Poems in Prose. Alas, Saintsbury is dead, and critics of his stature, of his broad culture and perspective, are rare indeed in this present day and age. Perhaps somewhere in the long circle of eternity there will come a people who will take unhesitatingly to their hearts Smith’s brilliant creations in verse and in prose. As the barriers of space and time are steadily removed through the white magic of modern science, Smith with his emphasis on the cosmic and the astronomic could easily become “the poet of the space age.”
The poetry and the prose of Clark Ashton Smith represent, in part, a continuation of the humanities of the Renaissance and of classical antiquity. But by giving them a cosmic framework, that is, by emphasizing the surrounding cosmos, Smith has indicated a new avenue of approach to those old, old, old human values and relations. And at the same time, for a literature tending toward an over-anthropocentrism, he has indicated an avenue toward the stars, toward the outer cosmos, and toward possible other universes. He thus avoids the greatest pitfall, the greatest handicap of so much of the serious creative literature of the twentieth century, as well as of the attendant serious literary criticism,—“that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as ‘incest.’” (From Smith’s letter to the editor, Wonder Stories, August 1932.) Curiously, much of Smith’s literary work certainly satisfies the thesis put forth by Arthur Machen in his study Hieroglyphics (1902) “that great writing is the result of an ecstatic experience akin to divine revelation.” Much of Smith’s works also satisfies the present writer’s contention that great writing should give the reader a sense of cosmic universality and, above all, a sense of unlimitedness.
The first major poet in English to be influenced by Poe and very likely to remain the last as well, Smith certainly does not belong to any Weird Tales “school”—nor yet does he belong to any Gothic or neo-Gothic tradition except, in part, that of his own synthesis and creation. He is essentially sui generis. In the words of his own epigram: “The true poet is not created by an epoch; he creates his own epoch.” Never lived a poet more than Smith of whom this could be said: Smith, the creator par excellence not only of one epoch or of one world but the creator of many epochs, of many worlds. A deliberate independent and outsider, he belongs to no particular time nor literary period or school: only to that mystical mainstream of literature and art which is one with all cultures and all ages. His tales and/or extended poems in prose are far more than mere exotic “divertissements.” They represent a return to the fantastic fictions of serious intent of the Renaissance—to the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, to the Gargantua et Pantagruel of Rabelais, to The Færie Queene of Spenser. They are informed with the seriousness of theme and concept and with the wealth of artistry, of technique, of invention that distinguish Smith’s finest poems or that distinguish any great poetry. His finest poems, poems in prose and extended poems in prose are deliberate gestures toward the infinite and the eternal, toward those legendary eternal verities which ultimately can be neither proven nor disproven, and which in that sense are indeed timeless. He uses fantasy both in his poems and in his tales deliberately and manifestly in order to transcend the prosaic and unstable reality of a mere ephemeral contemporariness, and to attain to a greater and eternal reality beyond. He searches not only the ultimate meaning of man and his principal emotions of love and fear but, far more than those, the very significance of life and of the cosmos itself.
Smith, in translating himself and his readers to the elaborate worlds created of his imagination, seems to be fulfilling the Baudelairian aspiration to be transported “Anywhere! Anywhere! as long as it be out of this world!” In Baudelaire’s poem in prose “Anywhere Out of This World,” the poet asks his soul where they should go: to an idealized and picturesque Lisbon, Rotterdam, Batavia, Torneo, the Baltic, or the North Pole with its splendors of the aurora borealis. After the poet has finished his inquiry, the soul shouts in answer: “Anywhere! Anywhere! as long as it be out of this world!” This aspiration Smith embodies in one of his own poems, the sonnet “To the Chimera,” wherein the poet cries out: “Unknown chimera, take us, for we tire / Amid the known monotony of things!” and then entreats the chimera not to pause “Till on thy horns of planished silver flows / The sanguine light of Edens lost to God.” The first complete publication of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose (the French poet’s last work, one which in many respects he regarded as his most important) took place posthumously, in 1869, two years after his death in 1867. The third poem in prose from the end of the book is the one entitled “Anywhere Out of This World”. This fact has considerable significance as three has been, from primal times down to the present, the mystical number of creation, re-creation, and of life eternal. Thus, in one sense, Smith takes up where Baudelaire has left off. Nor can we over-emphasize here—in regard to this inspired aspiration toward the unknown and the otherworldly—the essential trinity of souls formed by Poe, Baudelaire and Smith; for the title of this poème en prose is a quotation by Baudelaire out of the canon of the works of the elder American poet.
There are certain things in the works of a literary creator of which the industrious and systematic student can cite catalogues of examples, in which he can discern principal themes and concepts, of which he can analyze the style, of which he can trace the evolution, and in which he can trace or discern the influence of other writers. But there is something which cannot be treated or understood in this way; and that something is the genius which in Smith manifests itself as the “sheer dæmonic strangeness and fertility of conception” (to use Lovecraft’s happy and perceptive phrase). It is almost as if Smith were literally from another sphere than our own, or at least were literally inspired by some cosmic or otherworldly genius or dæmon; and ultimately these two words have meanings remarkably alike: genius, a tutelary spirit; and dæmon, a tutelary spirit or divinity.
In the crystal of his mind’s eye Smith beheld strange, ineffable things. His consummate art was the arch-magician’s mirror through which he permitted others to view and share his visions: those curious pageantries of doom, of death, of beauty, of love, of wonder, of destiny, of stars and planets, and of the cosmos. Let us therefore be grateful to him for the enchantment and ecstasy and revelation that he created for kindred souls. And let us salute the passing of a generous and a noble spirit whose like we shall not see again.
Quotations from Smith used in this essay, unless otherwise noted, are principally from “George Sterling—An Appreciation” in The Overland Monthly for March 1927, and from “An Autobiography of Clark Ashton Smith” in The Science Fiction Fan for August 1936. Quotations from Sir Thomas Browne, unless otherwise noted, are all from Chapter V of Urne-Buriall.
CYCLES
The sorcerer departs… and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all…
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,
Widening, deepening ever outward without bound…
Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;
And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall
Above a re-beginning cycle, turret-crowned.
New-born, the mage re-summons stronger spells, and spirits
With dazzling darkness clad about, and fierier flame
Renewed by æon-curtained slumber. All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory the bored hours,
He calls upon Shem-hamphorash, the nameless Name.
Clark Ashton Smith
June 4th, 1961.