The Freedom of Fantastic Things
BOOKS BY CLARK ASHTON SMITH ALSO PUBLISHED BY HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS
The Black Diamonds (2002)
The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems (2003)
The Sword of Zagan (2004)
The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith (2005)
The Freedom of Fantastic Things
Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith
Edited by Scott Connors
with maps by Tim Kirk
Hippocampus Press ————————— New York
Copyright © 2006 by Hippocampus Press
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
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All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Cover illustration “Resistance, or the Black Idol” (1903) by Franz Kupka © 2005
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert.
Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.
First Edition
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Hardcover: ISBN 0976159244
Paper: ISBN 0976159252
Contents
INTRODUCTION 7
Scott Connors
THE CENTAUR 11
Clark Ashton Smith
KLARKASH-TON AND “GREEK” 13
Donald Sidney-Fryer
CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH 34
EBLIS IN BAKELITE 71
James Blish
JAMES BLISH VERSUS CLARK ASHTON SMITH;
TO WIT, THE YOUNG TURK SYNDROME 76
Donald Sidney-Fryer
THE LAST ROMANTIC 85
S. J. Sackett
COMMUNICABLE MYSTERIES: THE LAST TRUE SYMBOLIST 90
Fred Chappell
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE HASHISH-EATER? 99
S. T. Joshi
THE BABEL OF VISIONS: THE STRUCTURATION OF
CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S THE HASHISH-EATER 108
Dan Clore
CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S “NERO” 124
Carl Jay Buchanan
SATAN SPEAKS: A READING OF “SATAN UNREPENTANT” 132
Phillip A. Ellis
LANDS FORGOTTEN OR UNFOUND:
THE PROSE POETRY OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH 138
S. T. Joshi
OUTSIDE THE HUMAN AQUARIUM:
THE FANTASTIC IMAGINATION OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH 148
Brian Stableford
CLARK ASHTON SMITH: MASTER OF THE MACABRE 168
John Kipling Hitz
6 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
GESTURING TOWARD THE INFINITE:
CLARK ASHTON SMITH AND MODERNISM 180
Scott Connors
CLARK ASHTON SMITH: A NOTE ON THE AESTHETICS OF FANTASY 195
Charles K. Wolfe
FANTASY AND DECADENCE IN THE WORK OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH 200
Lauric Guillaud
HUMOR IN HYPERSPACE: SMITH’S USES OF SATIRE 221
John Kipling Hitz
SONG OF THE NECROMANCER:
“LOSS” IN CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S FICTION 229
Steve Behrends
BRAVE WORLD OLD AND NEW: THE ATLANTIS THEME IN THE
POETRY AND FICTION OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH 239
Donald Sidney-Fryer
COMING IN FROM THE COLD:
INCURSIONS OF “OUTSIDENESS” IN HYPERBOREA 259
Steven Tompkins
AS SHADOWS WAIT UPON THE SUN: CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S ZOTHIQUE 277
Jim Rockhill
INTO THE WOODS: THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF AVEROIGNE 293
Stefan Dziemianowicz
SORCEROUS STYLE: CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S
THE DOUBLE SHADOW AND OTHER FANTASIES 305
Peter H. Goodrich
LOSS AND RECUPERATION:
A MODEL FOR READING CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S “XEETHRA” 318
Dan Clore
“LIFE, LOVE, AND THE CLEMENCY OF DEATH”: A REEXAMINATION OF
CLARK ASHTON SMITH’S “THE ISLE OF THE TORTURERS” 324
Scott Connors
REGARDING THE PROVIDENCE POINT OF VIEW 334
Ronald S. Hilger
AN ANNOTATED CHRONOLOGY OF THE FICTION OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH 338
Steve Behrends
BIBLIOGRAPHY 347
CONTRIBUTORS 357
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 361
INDEX 363
Introduction
Scott Connors
The late L. Sprague de Camp was fond of referring to the “Three Musketeers” of
Weird Tales, meaning H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith.
Regardless of the merits or accuracy of this nomenclature, it does suggest the close connection that the three writers enjoy in the popular consciousness. While the first two writers have achieved popular success, and in Lovecraft’s case even a measure of canonical recognition, Smith has remained, to use Benjamin De Casseres’s phrase, the “Emperor of Shadows,” often seeming about to breakthrough
into a wider public consciousness, but never quite managing to do so. Why this is so is a source of constant frustration to the cognoscenti who consider Smith to be in many ways the most interesting of the three men most responsible for shaping American weird fiction since their time, but there it is.
There are of course as many theories about this state of affairs as there are
readers. One school of thought attributes Smith’s relative obscurity to the lack of a touchstone or “brand” with which the public might associate him. Lovecraft has
the eldritch horrors of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, and Howard’s character Conan the Barbarian ranks with Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan of the Apes as one of
the most recognized literary figures of all time. Both writers have spawned multitudes of imitators. Smith, on the other hand, created whole secondary worlds such as Zothique, Averoigne, and Hyperborea, but as distinctly Klarkash-Tonic as these worlds might be, it is what he does with them that makes them memorable, and
not anything intrinsically notable about them per se. Another theory, first proposed by the late Robert Bloch, suggests that because he outlived his peers by almost three decades, and because he scrupulously protected his privacy, Smith did not become the focus of the sort of legendry that arose following the premature deaths of Howard and Lovecraft ( SS xvi–xvii).
Part of Smith’s distinctive flavor may be found in his cosmic perspective,
which he shared to a large degree with Lovecraft. “Literature can be, and does, many things; and one of its most glorious prerogatives is the exercise of imagination on things that lie beyond human experience—the adventuring of fantasy into the awful, sublime and infinite cosmos outside the human aquarium” ( PD 14).
Many people, including Smith’s friend and mentor George Sterling, mistook his
intent: “It is art in unhuman, almost unearthly form—a deliberate evasion of reality” ( SU 291).
8 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
This did not, and does not, do anything to enhance Smith’s chances of making
the best seller lists. As he remarked to an early reviewer, “work like mine, which is so far removed from the everyday interest of the immense bulk of mankind, stands in little danger of being overestimated in these days” ( SL 18). However, the fact that the reviewer wrote his notice indicates that sympathetic and perceptive readers
did indeed exist.
Even in his lifetime Smith was the sub
ject of considerable attention, more
than either of his two colleagues. First he was praised and damned extravagantly as a poet, one of the so-called “California Romantics,” a pupil and protégé of George Sterling and a nine-day wonder as the “Boy Keats of the Sierras.” He attracted the attention and praise of such figures as Ambrose Bierce, Edwin Markham, and Vachel Lindsay, and was widely reviewed on both coasts and in England. Much of
what was written about him failed to understand him or his work properly, but
much did. Many of the avant garde regarded his work, and especially The Hashish-Eater, as being a mere extension of Sterling’s; Witter Bynner’s half-joking references to “the Star Dust Twins” are typical. This did not prevent the publication of Smith’s work in venues such as the Yale Review, Poetry, Smart Set, and Laughing Horse, and it was no stranger to popular anthologies and even school and college textbooks.
As a writer for Weird Tales and later Arkham House, Smith became the object of an enthusiastic following among the science fiction fan movement. Much of
what was written about him in the “fanzines” was impressionistic, uncritical and superficial, but as fandom matured so too did the quality and sophistication of the writing for the ’zines. Smith singled out articles by Stanley Mullen (“Cartouche: Clark Ashton Smith,” Gorgon, July 1947) and Richard Stockton (“An Appreciation of the Prose Works of Clark Ashton Smith,” Acolyte, Spring 1946) for special attention, noting that the latter in particular “really showed some understanding of my work” ( SL 366). Occasionally the larger literary world would take notice in the form of a rare review of one of his collections, or the avant garde would see in Smith and his fellow writers qualities with which they themselves identified, as when Robert Allerton Parker praised Smith and Lovecraft in the surrealist journal VVV (“Such Pulps as Dreams Are Made On,” March 1943). The increasing respectability of
Lovecraft sometimes reflected some light onto Smith, as when August Derleth sent a copy of Out of Space and Time to William Rose Benét after he made some favorable remarks about Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others, saying that Benét should also
“know Clark Ashton Smith.” In the October 10, 1942 issue of Saturday Review of Literature, Benét pointed out that he was already quite familiar with Smith from when he was part of Sterling’s literary colony at Carmel, and praised Smith’s “extraordinary rhetoric.” Benét would later publish some of Smith’s poems in the Review. The
“hip” monologist, Brother Theodore, would pay him tribute when he performed a
version of a Smith story in concert that was later recorded.
Introduction
9
After Smith’s death in 1961, his study for many years was largely the private
preserve of one man, Donald Sidney-Fryer, who had actually visited Smith twice
with a view to compiling a bibliography. Assisted by a few of Smith’s friends and fans, Sidney-Fryer not only established the foundations for all future scholarship in this field, but he also wrote some of the most insightful and valuable evaluations of Smith’s oeuvre ever written, culminating in his magnum opus, Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography, published in 1978.
Interest in Clark Ashton Smith has ebbed and waned since his death, but he
has retained both a core audience and a reputation that has led others to seek out his books on the second-hand market when they were temporarily out of print.
The first paperback reprints of his work from Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series and the adaptation of “The Return of the Sorcerer” for the television show “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery” brought Smith to the attention of a new generation of readers. Reprints of his Arkham House collections in both hardcover and paperback in England and an increasing number of translations of his work into German, Ital-ian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Japanese and Finnish made his reputation an international one. His stories have been adapted for graphic novels and role-playing games. Scholars such as Dennis Rickard, Charles K. Wolfe, Marvin R.
Hiemstra, and especially Steve Behrends advanced our understanding of Smith’s
work through their own work and especially in the preparation of primary source material such as his letters to H. P. Lovecraft. There would be periodic episodes of drought when prospective readers had to search out Smith on the used book market, making him highly collectable, but then there would come an explosion of new editions of his work to satisfy the pent-up demand.
The quality of scholarship in the weird fiction genre has improved tremendously over the past couple of decades, with the rise of a type of independent scholar who has brought a new discipline to the study, and Smith has not escaped their attention.
At the same time a new generation of writers has arisen who name Smith among
their influences; as they become better known, their tide lifts Smith’s boat.
It is going on half a century since he drew his last breath, and yet his volumes and his philtres yet abide. Smith will probably never achieve the type of phenomenal popularity achieved by either of his two pen-pals, yet he undoubtedly will endure. Smith loved to watch the skies above his home in northern California, and as Leonard Cline observed “By starlight some men work, hoping for their books not
the success of a season, but the success which established by a few readers keeping them on their shelves dusted by loving use.”* I think that it is safe to conclude that we have not seen the apex of interest in the Emperor of Dreams.
*Leonard Cline, “Logodaedaly,” Book Notes Illustrated 6, No. 1 (October–November 1927): 13–19; in The Dark Chamber (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005), p. 258.
10 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Abbreviations used in this work are as follows:
ALS autograph
letter,
signed
AY
The Abominations of Yondo (1960)
BB
The Black Book (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979)
BH
The Book of Hyperborea, ed. Will Murray (West Warwick, RI: Ne-
cronomicon Press, 1996)
CAS
Clark Ashton Smith
CAS
Steve Behrends, Clark Ashton Smith (1990)
DC
The Dark Chateau (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1951)
DN
The Devil’s Notebook (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990)
DS
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn, CA: Auburn Journal,
1933).
EC
Ebony and Crystal (Auburn, CA: Auburn Journal, 1922)
EOD Donald
Sidney-Fryer,
Emperor of Dreams (West Kingston, RI: Donald M.
Grant, 1978)
GL
Genius Loci (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948)
JHL
John Hay Library, Brown University (Providence, RI)
LL
Letters to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Ne-
cronomicon Press, 1987)
LO
The Last Oblivion: The Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. S. T.
Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002)
LW
Lost Worlds (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944)
NU
Nostalgia of the Unknown: The Complete Prose Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, ed.
Marc and Susan Michaud, Steve Behrends, and S. T. Joshi (1988)
OD
Other Dimensions (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970)
OST
Out of Space and Time (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942)
PD
Planets and Dimensions (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973)
RA
A Rendezvous in Averoigne (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988)
RWP Red World of Polaris (San Francisco: Night Shade, 2003)
S Sandalwood (Auburn, CA: Auburn Journa
l, 1925)
S&P Spells and Philtres (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1958)
SL
Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and Scott
Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003)
SP
Selected Poems (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971)
SS
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith,
ed. Steve Behrends (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989)
ST
The Star-Treader and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1912) SU
The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005)
TSS
Tales of Science and Sorcery (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964)
The Centaur
Clark Ashton Smith
I belong to those manifold Existences
Once known, or once suspected,
That exist no more for man.
Was it not well to flee
Into the boundless realms of legend
Lest man should bridle me?
Sometimes I am glimpsed by poets
Whose eyes have not been blinded
By the hell-bright lamps of cities,
Who have not sent their souls
To be devoured by robot minotaurs
In the infamous Labyrinths of steel and mortar.
I know the freedom of fantastic things,
Ranging in fantasy.
I leap and bound and run
Below another sun.
Was it not well to flee
Long, long ago, lest man should bridle me?
Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”
Donald Sidney-Fryer
Preface
This commemorative essay is being written on the eve of the one hundred and
tenth anniversary of Clark Ashton Smith’s birth, 13 January 2003. On that occasion a group of friends and admirers will dedicate a monument to Smith’s memory in
Bicentennial Park in Old Auburn, California. This essay seeks to honor not only Smith as a great poet but also that other great poet without whom there might not have existed any Smith as poet at all: George Sterling.
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