Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  Sterling had provided the succinct and pithy foreword (dated “Bohemian Club, /

  April 17, 1918”). Among other cogent statements, the foreword maintained that,

  vis-à-vis the “devotees of [poetic] austerity” (that is, the adherents of non-

  traditional modern poetry), “an even partial use of the intelligence that is their one asset will cause them to shrink from the stern conclusions involved in some of the passages of this book—to turn from its terrible vistas. Clark Ashton Smith is

  unlikely to be afflicted with present-day popularity” ( SU 289–90). If this statement emerged as a true prediction—and it did at that time—then such was the price to be paid by the poet who donned the figurative Cloak of Elijah in the manner of

  Ambrose Bierce.

  Although a great honor to the young but evolving author, Odes and Sonnets at best served as a mere stopgap or update on his progress as a poet. Whatever he

  may have achieved with The Star-Treader in late 1912—a volume that had gained in sustaining power during the ten following years—it now paled before Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose, issued by Smith himself in December 1922

  (printed by the Auburn Journal press)—one of the most remarkable volumes of pure poetry ever published in any language. Once again Sterling had continued his

  Klarkash-Ton and “Greek”

  25

  advocacy with another preface (dated “San Francisco, October 28, 1922”), mak-

  ing even more audacious claims than he had made on behalf of Odes and Sonnets. As it turned out, his claims were and are completely justified. We quote his first paragraph in full.

  Who of us care to be present at the accouchement of the immortal? I think that we so attend who are first to take this book in our hands. A bold assertion, truly, and one demonstrable only in years remote from these; and—dust wages no war

  with dust. But it is one of those things that I should most “like to come back and see.” ( SU 290)

  Because Smith published his second major collection himself, the edition to-

  talled only 500 copies, rather than the 2,000 that Robertson had brought out of The Star-Treader in 1912, this figure being the usual number of copies mandated for the collections by Sterling that Robertson issued. Because Smith had self-published, Sterling took it upon himself, in person or by mail, to distribute the review copies that Smith sent him, with most of them going to the San Francisco daily newspapers and other periodicals. With such copies distributed under Sterling’s aegis, Smith’s latest major production was virtually guaranteed critical attention.

  At over 150 pages, with over 90 short to medium-length poems in verse, almost

  30 poems in prose, and one very long poem (totalling almost 600 lines) positioned after the first third of the volume, Ebony and Crystal ran almost two-thirds longer than any collection by Sterling in actual material, with the exception of Sterling’s Selected Poems. The one very long poem, The Hashish-Eater, could have better and more profitably appeared as a separate book. Printed as it was at almost forty lines per page, and filling sixteen very full pages, the format just avoids being too crowded for its typeset layout. Whereas The Star-Treader sold for $1.25 per copy, Ebony and Crystal went on sale at $2.00 per copy, an incredible bargain even for 1922, given the extremely high quality of the contents, no less than its overflowing abundance.

  In general the book received excellent reviews wherever it managed to get

  them, and it managed to get them principally because of Sterling’s assiduous and effectual ministrations. In addition to his general and long-term advocacy on behalf of Smith’s poetry, Sterling in a direct manner had contributed to the physical wel-fare and maintenance of both Smith and his parents. Sometime during the 1910s

  the elder poet managed to get a pittance mailed to the Smiths on a regular basis from one of California’s authentic multimillionaires. He had convinced “Old Man”

  Templeton Crocker to send the family the monthly sum of $10.00, which must

  have proven useful, and which still represented something of real value back in the second decade of the 1900s, however small it may seem to us today. Then, beginning sometime in the later 1910s or early 1920s, two well-known patrons of the

  arts mailed Smith a small quarterly allowance, one of them being the well-known bibliophile and fin-de-siècle Bohemian Albert M. Bender (actually a successful lawyer) and the other being James Duval Phelan, one of the U.S. senators from California.

  26 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  Bender sent Smith the allowance from the later 1910s until sometime in the early to middle 1930s. Phelan sent Smith the allowance from the later 1910s or early

  1920s until sometime in the later 1920s.

  Despite all these positive developments in Smith’s life and career, the still young poet (he was almost thirty when Ebony and Crystal made its appearance) had just committed two major tactical errors in his career, as it has now become apparent in hindsight. Although he had submitted the manuscript of his second major collection to at least one New York publisher (Knopf, which turned it down with no more ado than with the customary form letter of rejection), for some reason or other he did not want to submit it to A. M. Robertson, although Sterling encouraged him to do so. Smith stated that he did not like the manner in which Robertson had conducted business with Smith in regard to The Star-Treader. Possibly Smith felt cheated, but in his letters to Sterling he did not state that overtly. However, Robertson’s books regularly received reviews, and generally good ones, on both the west and east coasts, he had perfectly adequate book distribution, and whatever the business part of the deals he struck with his authors may have involved, he promoted them and their books

  efficiently and effectively.

  Had he accepted the manuscript of Ebony and Crystal for publication, Robertson probably would have suggested that The Hashish-Eater be detached from the main mass of the contents and brought out in a separate edition, printed in the same style as any of Sterling’s collections, thus allowing about twenty lines of blank verse per page, and furnished with a short preface by Sterling or some other notable, not to mention a brief introduction about the poem and its purpose by the poet himself. Such an edition would have totalled somewhere around 35 to 40

  pages on good rag paper, and Robertson could have issued it as a companion vol-

  ume to Ebony and Crystal. The chief volume, presented in a similar format but with far more pages, probably would have totalled around 240 pages, quite a large

  book of poetry for that time. Whether he liked or disliked Robertson’s mode of

  business, Smith could have achieved much, much more career-wise if the San

  Francisco bookseller-publisher had issued his latest major collection, in however many volumes it might have required. The poems in prose could easily have constituted their own separate volume, say, as in the manner of The Hashish-Eater suggested above. The young poet certainly missed out on what could have developed

  into a major chance not necessarily for fame and fortune but simply overall recognition for him as a major poet by the literary mainstream.

  The second tactical error in his career that Smith had just made involved the

  Smart Set, and sending a copy of Ebony and Crystal to the magazine for review.

  Mencken himself would probably have reviewed it, and quite favorably. He had already published in the magazine a number of the poems in verse and in prose that Smith had included in Ebony and Crystal, he certainly knew the high regard in which Sterling held Smith and his poetry, and he probably shared something of the same high value that Sterling put on the poems of his protégé. Mencken, like Bierce, had

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  27

  quite a fondness for romantic poetry, especially when profound and intelligent

  thought might lie behind romantic effusions.

  George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken edited the Smart Set, the disti
n-

  guished precursor to the New Yorker, from 1914 to 1923, and Sterling in his letters to Smith had mentioned the possibility of sending a copy to Mencken to

  review. Smith decided not to do so, thinking that the book would not prove to

  Mencken’s taste. Whatever else such a review might have been worth, Smith

  would not have lost anything even if the only thing he might have received at

  the hands of Mencken was a mere capsule review. Such a review published in a

  magazine of national circulation and acknowledged prestige might have ac-

  complished much for Smith in terms of national recognition at this time in his

  career. But it was not to be. The decision would haunt the young poet into the

  early 1940s.

  In 1923 the New York publisher Henry Holt brought out the definitive

  collection of Sterling’s own Selected Poems, which gathered all his best work into one volume. Because they had appeared in published form within half a year or

  less of each other, Benjamin De Casseres reviewed both Ebony and Crystal and Sterling’s own volume, a large one, together for the magazine Arts and Decora-tions in the issue for August 1923, in De Casseres’ regular department “And a Little Book Shall Lead Them.” Once again the two poets were yoked together as

  a team in the public’s collective mentality. Although this critic gave the books a favorable reaction, he himself had apparently burned out on poetry in general

  around that time.

  The printing and binding costs for the 500 copies of his own new collection had forced Smith to become indebted to B. A. Cassidy, the editor and owner of the Auburn Journal and its press. Although the edition was apparently selling well enough, the sales did not suffice in themselves to take care of Smith’s indebtedness to Cassidy, who nevertheless offered the poet another way to handle it. He suggested that, if Smith contributed a column more or less for each weekly issue, as prorated over a period of a few years, this would repay the newspaper’s owner-editor for having printed Ebony and Crystal.

  The poet was free to make of his column what he wished, to feature poems or

  epigrams or whatever in it. Clearly this represented an exceptional deal, and

  Smith agreed. Thus it was that Smith became a journalist, and “Clark Ashton

  Smith’s Column” came into being. The new department would now see some

  of the newest, as well as most remarkable, pure poetry, no less than some of

  the most adroit and profound epigrams and penseés, ever produced in America

  during the next three years.

  During the first half of the 1920s the Auburn Journal published 101 install-ments of “Clark Ashton Smith’s Column”—the first dated 5 April 1923, the last

  7 January 1926. The columns highlighted both poems and epigrams, but mostly

  poems: overall, 81 poems (59 original ones and 22 translations from Baudelaire),

  28 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  plus 329 original, and 17 selected, epigrams, etc. To the Journal overall, Smith contributed 84 poems. Most of the poems in Sandalwood—that is, 49 of the total 61

  poems in that collection (37 of the 42 original ones and 12 of the 19 translations from Baudelaire)—made their first appearance in this column or department. Although most of the poems first published in the Journal have since reappeared elsewhere, almost all of the 329, or 346, epigrams and penseés have not, that is, until recently, languishing uncollected in the files of Auburn’s leading local

  newspaper for over half a century.

  Some east-coast publisher tentatively considered publishing a selection of

  them (as made by Smith himself) during the early 1940s. The epigrams and pen-

  seés appeared in the Journal under the following titles: “Epigrams” (once),

  “Cocktails and Creme de Menthe,” “Points for the Pious,” “Unpopular Sayings”

  (once), “New Teeth for Old Saws” (once), “The Devil’s Note-Book,” and “Para-

  dox and Persiflage.” “The Devil’s Note-Book,” as a title, has obvious analogies with Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, originally named The Cynic’s Word-Book. At long last, after sixty-five years of languishing uncollected and unpublished in book form, a complete collection of Smith’s epigrams and apothegms,

  as published by Starmont House, came forth in December 1990, compiled by

  Donald Sidney-Fryer, and edited with an introduction and notes by Don

  Herron, and under the overall title The Devil’s Notebook. This chapbook-sized and softbound booklet totalled almost 100 pages. Smith’s epigrams and penseés have obvious affinities with Bierce’s definitions in The Devil’s Dictionary.

  Because once more Smith published another major collection of poems

  himself—his third, under the title Sandalwood, in October 1925—the edition totalled only 250 copies (plus the usual extra ones), and thus only half of that for Ebony and Crystal. The book, dedicated to Sterling, is about the same size in terms of width and height, but is paperbound, rather than hardcover, and at

  about only fifty pages overall, totalling about only sixty poems, Sandalwood contains about only one-third the amount of material that had gone into the sec-

  ond major collection. The book went on sale at only $1.00 per copy, another

  incredible bargain, given the extremely high quality of the contents, even if

  much less abundant than those of the previous volume. Whereas much of Eb-

  ony and Crystal seems epic in subject matter and monumental in tone, the character and subject matter of the original poems in Sandalwood appear much more gossamer and evanescent.

  Once again Sterling took it upon himself, both in person and through the post

  office, to distribute the review copies that Smith sent him, with most of them going to the San Francisco daily newspapers. However, this time a book of poems by Smith received less than half a dozen reviews, even though the critical reaction proved favorable in general wherever the collection managed to get it. Because of its less than widespread distribution in a limited edition, Sandalwood at first underwent the same fate as Ebony and Crystal of being little better than unknown, and in fact of

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  29

  being even more unknown than the former volume. Nevertheless, whether in terms

  of technique, inspiration, or new directions in an imaginative sense, the new volume is no less remarkable and innovative than the last one. In particular the twenty or so translations from Les Fleurs du mal of Baudelaire represent a real triumph on behalf of Smith’s technical mastery, inasmuch as he had learned sufficient French to make his translations in something less than a year, no mean accomplishment. Fancifully

  speaking, perhaps we can perceive in his mastering a new language some possible evidence of “ancestral memory,” descended as he was from Norman-French counts

  and barons on his mother’s side, the Gaylords or Gaillards, who had fled to Britain from France when the Edict of Nantes was revoked.

  Let us ponder some of the implications of Smith’s creativity during 1911–

  25, and the various personal and poetic statistics, that we have cited. When he is eighteen and nineteen, during 1911–12, he composes his first mature poetry,

  resulting in The Star-Treader, published in late 1912. However, a long period of self-education and apprenticeship has preceded this, from 1906 to 1910, during

  which he writes his earliest or juvenile poetry, imitations of Poe’s extant poetry, as well as of Edward FitzGerald’s version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, among other models. The greatest influence has derived from Poe and (even

  more) Sterling’s own opus “A Wine of Wizardry.” The five years of this ap-

  prentice work suddenly results in a period of rapid and fervent creativity,

  1911–12, and his first book. A period of mature apprenticeship ensue
s during

  1912–22, when everything slows down again as during 1906 to 1910. Then in

  early 1920 things pick up speed again when from mid-January to mid-February

  he creates his greatest and longest poem, The Hashish-Eater, finishing it on 20

  February, and totalling almost 600 lines of highly imaginative blank verse, most of it the result of white-hot inspiration.

  The whole decade of 1912–22 culminates in Ebony and Crystal, published in late 1922. However, following the decade in question, things do not slow down,

  but throughout 1923–26 Smith maintains the speed, facility, and high quality of his poetic productiveness, over eighty original poems at least and two dozen or more translations. Although his productiveness and speed lessen somewhat,

  possibly by as much as half, he remains quite prolific all during 1926–30. By the latter date fictioneering takes over almost exclusively until 1934, when he resumes creating poems in verse in some noticeable quantity. Obviously we are dealing here with a great or major poet, but rather strangely, following his greatest period of productiveness in poetry, say, 1911–25, there is no major mainstream recognition of Smith as the great poet that he has patently become, a great poet who has just produced a major body of work as represented in three major collections, published in 1912, 1922, and 1925, respectively. (The highly productive years of 1923–

  25 have culminated in Sandalwood, issued in late 1925.) Has his long and patient apprenticeship under the poetic tutelage or mentorship of George Sterling amounted to nothing more than three or four volumes acclaimed only by a small chorus of

  30 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  discerning voices in California and Britain? Thus it would appear. Something is gravely wrong in this configuration.

  Let us look around at the national and international situation regarding poetry (at least in English), and see if we can find a clue as to what else may have conspired against Smith receiving his just recognition as a major poet. The year 1922 saw the beginning of the apotheosis for that modernist poet par excellence, T. S. Eliot. During that year he won the Dial Award of $2,000 for his 434-line poem The Waste Land, which (including the fascinating notes) he had carefully prepared for publication with the help and advice of Ezra Pound. The latter figure would reveal his own poetic vision in all its abundance a little later in his own major work The Cantos. These two great poems, along with works by other significant modern poets, anticipated or sig-nalized in advance the major shift in taste and sensibility that was occurring early in the 1920s, and that gained critical momentum as the decade progressed. In the case of his own major poem Eliot, only in his mid-thirties at the time, had summed up, in a thoroughly novel and then modern manner, the disillusionment and the disenchantment that had become prevalent among the younger generation following the