24. Letter to F. Lee Baldwin, 27 March 1934; ALS, JHL. In Lord of a Visible World, Ed.
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 254–56.
Eblis in Bakelite
James Blish
with an addendum by Donald Sidney-Fryer
The shaddow of that Body heer you find
Which serves but as a case to hold his mind,
His intellectual part be pleas’d to look
In lively lines described in the Booke.
—Thomas Cross: “In Effigem Nicholai
Culpeper Equitis” ( A Physical Directory, 1649)
Clark Ashton Smith has been called “the greatest American poet” by Edwin Mark-
ham, and while it is obvious from internal evidence that “The Man with the Hoe”
was a fluke, it is possible for a man to be right twice in his life. Benjamin De Casseres, once a considerable figure in American letters before he took a job with one of Hearst’s brothels, spoke for Smith in glowing terms; David Warren Ryder and
George Sterling, as well as Samuel Loveman, may be added to the list of discerning people who have found things in Smith’s work to admire. If one adds to this list the nearly endless columns written about Smith by fantasy fans from Lovecraft on down, it becomes evident that this one man has been one of the most extravagantly eulogized figures in American literary history—the sheer wordage concerning him nearly equals that written about Branch Cabell, a truly fantastic numeral if one attempts, as I have, to run most of it down.
In the attempt another fact soon becomes evident: except for one or two
short articles, totaling perhaps 2000 words, no true criticism of Smith ever has appeared in professional or amateur print. I have sought nearly fruitlessly for paragraphs about the man which set forth a clear perception of the kind of work he
does, its relationship to the rest of literature past and present, its antecedents and progeny; for any paragraph about him not crammed with sweeping dogmatic
statements, false associations, bases of judgement that shift at the whim of the writer sometimes in the course of a line, report of estimates without documenta-tion or demonstration, and emotional assessments which clearly indicate nothing save that their author likes fantasy no matter who writes it, or how badly. More: until last year, despite the fact that Smith has been active for more years than most fans can remember, there was no anthology of Smith’s work, nor did any general
72 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
anthology include a line of his much-lauded poetry—nor are any of the latter ever likely to do so now, since the Arkham bookbinders in their expected way have
crammed every turkey egg Smith ever laid into print without the slightest discrimination, so that Smith in book form actually means less than Smith hidden from
sight in pulp, amateur and private publications.
It would be interesting to compile a list of representative paragraphs from
some of the best articles about this man with comments appended in the style of the Institute of Propaganda Analysis, but the space limitations of Tumbrils being what they are, a bibliography must serve. In the meantime, the pertinent question is: Does Smith deserve the damnation his admirers have visited upon him? And
the business with which I concern myself is to answer this question in a milieu as remote as possible from the unselective happiness with which the average Weird Tales reader has greeted every tale of Zothique or Averoigne, upon the premise that such an estimate is grossly unfair to the poet and scholar which is Smith at his best.
For Smith at his best is a fine creative scholar. I know of no more impressive
way to introduce Smith to a stranger than with “The Kingdom of the Worm,”
which was published in The Fantasy Fan many years ago. The episode was perfectly in the style of its ostensible period; it could have been slipped into The Voyage and Travel of Sir John Mandeville, Knight without the unwary reader’s detecting it in his perusal of that recondite volume; as an entity in itself it held together beautifully, and preserved throughout that atmosphere of naive wonder mixed with uneasiness
which is the literary signature of the great French liar—and a far more difficult thing to achieve than a mere parroting of stylistic tricks. Some time later, in R. H.
Barlow’s excellent mimeographed magazine Leaves, Smith addressed himself to the fragmentary narratives of the prisoners of Eblis which Beckford had planned for Vathek but never included. If anything, this performance was the more exacting of the two; Vathek anticipated the main course of literary development by a century in several ways, but in general Mandeville’s way of doing things is much closer to what we know as the “Smith style” than Beckford’s, since the last-named remained always an undoubted child of the Eighteenth Century, wherein neither Smith nor
Lovecraft, despite the propaganda, could reasonably be expected to feel at home; but Smith carried it off with manifest ease and pleasure.
One of the consequences of these observations is to separate his poetry rather
sharply from his prose, in a manner which will become clear in a moment. A study of the poetry will convince anyone seriously interested that its idiom is the product of a pyramid of influences—Poe and Wilde particularly, and then Shelley, Milton, James Thomson and a lengthening list of stragglers, who exert their effects not in concert but one at a time in the most marked fashion. “The Constellations of the Law,”* for instance, is “The Massacre at Piedmont” to the life; “Satan Unrepentant” advertises its parentage too loudly for me even to bother naming it; “Requiescat” is Wilde’s,
*I.e., “The Ministers of the Law” [ EC].
Eblis in Bakelite
73
wel -thumbed; and so on. It is not so easy to attach single names to individual prose stories of Smith’s, though the influences are plain enough. (I am not counting, naturally, the prose-poems, though even there Lanier occasionally nibbles at the edge of the Baudelaire.) One expects poets, however, to be an ancestor-worshiping race, and if Smith appears to be more than a little overly sensitive to the decadent-Romantic universe of discourse, still and all such a pressure is not lightly to be shrugged off. In addition, the synthesis of the best of bygone poems, up to and including direct quotation, has become through “The Waste Land” and the “Cantos” a nearly standard
Twentieth Century technique; and Smith has occasionally achieved some really moving effects with such eclectic material—witness the ending of “Medusa,” or “In November,” or even more markedly, in “Chant of Autumn” where the intoxication is
no less magical for being the heritage of Swinburne. Occasionally the results are more unfortunate and Smith gushes forth a “Hashish-Eater”—“perilous nightmares
of superterrestrial fairylands accursed,” in Lovecraft’s mashed-potato language,* but to the sober reader merely the sewage of a plastic-and-chromium Eblis. . . . The matter, it appears, is not entirely under Smith’s control, and until he decides just who he is, we must be content to spear the effective poems like fishes as they float by.
In prose the matter is entirely under Smith’s control. In the two works I have named above, and in one or two others, he has demonstrated conclusively that he has the sensibilities and the sensitivity to handle nearly any prose style that happens to appeal to him, excepting only the very tightest and sparest of modern idioms.
The inevitable conclusion is that his characteristic prose manner, with its material drawn exclusively from the Poe horror story and the Wilde fairy tale, and its style from the glaucous logorrhea of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, is a conscious choice. And from almost any angle it is a bad one. It is incomprehensible and boring to the pulp readers whom he has—perhaps perforce—addressed most often. It
is moribund and intolerably “arty” to a literate reader. The best he can hope from it is that it will please the very tiny segment of the reading public which is made up of men like Derlet
h and Lovecraft, who, incapable of distinguishing the artistic from the arty, can pass it through their digestive tracts and absorb from it the little nourishment that it contains.
As a product of irresistible influences and inclinations it might have been for-givable. As the conscious choice of a man who has shown that he can do better, it is funny. And tragic? Yes; if you think Smith could do that much better. When the laughter is over, it might also be counted as evidence for damnation, however; and probably it is better, in the long run, to let his admirers attend to that.
(Bibliography upon request.)
N. B. Because there is evidently no way to discover or obtain the “Bibliography upon request” mentioned at the end of Blish’s essay, we have attempted here to
reconstitute what may have been this listing of books and articles, at least relative
*Actually Samuel Loveman. [DSF]
74 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
to Smith’s own life and career, or output, in the present addendum, but only in the order of appearance for the said books and articles as discussed by Blish in his critique. In this reconstitution we have used our own Clark Ashton Smith bio-
bibliography Emperor of Dreams (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978). We have also appended here and there any relevant comment where such appears to
warrant it. A strategic detail concerning the general date of composition for “Eblis in Bakelite”: although his essay appeared in June of 1945, it is clear that Blish apparently wrote it sometime in 1943, a fact that we deduce from the reference to what must be Smith’s collection Out of Space and Time, published in August of 1942.
The reference reads in part: “until last year . . . there was no anthology of Smith’s work,” and thus the statement cannot refer to the second Arkham House collection by Smith, Lost Worlds, published in October of 1944.
Benjamin De Casseres, “Clark Ashton Smith: Emperor of Shadows,” a brief
but incisive appreciation written c. August 1937, and published by The Futile Press (Lakeport, California), c. November 1937 (70 copies), evidently at Smith’s own request, and evidently included with some copies of Smith’s collection Nero and Other Poems, published by The Futile Press in May 1937 (c. 250 copies), along with the separate article “The Price of Poetry,” by David Warren Ryder, published by the same press in June 1937 (reprinted from Controversy for 7 December 1934).
George Sterling, prefaces to Smith’s two poetry collections Odes and Sonnets (published June 1918) and Ebony and Crystal (published December 1922).
Samuel Loveman, no known published source, but Smith dedicated Ebony and
Crystal to this fine lyrical poet, who was also a friend to H. P. Lovecraft. Loveman’s one and only major collection is The Hermaphrodite and Other Poems, published by The Caxton Printers (Caldwell, Idaho), 1936.
Clark Ashton Smith, Out of Space and Time (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, August 1942), with an introduction by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. The curious phrase “the Arkham bookbinders” undoubtedly refers to Derleth and Wandrei as the then owner-editors of Arkham House.
Smith, “The Kingdom of the Worm,” first published in The Fantasy Fan, October 1933, and included in Smith’s collection Other Dimensions (Arkham House, April 1970), but under his preferred and final title “A Tale of Sir John Maundeville.”
Smith, “The Third Episode of Vathek: The Story of the Princess Zulkais and
the Prince Kalilah,” by William Beckford, first published in Leaves, issue “1”
(Summer 1937). Conclusion only (c. 4000 words) written by Smith to this final episode deliberately left unfinished by the original author. Included in Smith’s collection The Abominations of Yondo (published by Arkham House, February 1960), wherein the completed episode occupies pp. 177–222; Smith’s conclusion occupies pp. 212–22 only.
Smith, Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose, published by Smith himself but printed by the press of The Auburn Journal (Auburn, California, December 1922).
This collection contains nearly all the poems mentioned by Blish in his text. “Me-
Eblis in Bakelite
75
dusa” is either the sonnet “The Medusa of Despair” or the ode “Medusa” (first
published in Smith’s first collection The Star-Treader and Other Poems, November 1912, later republished in Nero and Other Poems).
Smith, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, A. M. Robertson (San Francisco); Odes and Sonnets, The Book Club of California (San Francisco); Nero and Other Poems, The Futile Press (Lakeport, California). For dates of publication and other data, see the entry above and also the entries under De Casseres and George Sterling. Blish may or may not have had copies of these three collections.
James Blish versus Clark Ashton Smith;
to Wit, the Young Turk Syndrome
A RIPOSTE
Donald Sidney-Fryer
By an odd coincidence—and it surely must remain as no more than that—two of the strongest negative criticisms of Clark Ashton Smith and his writing appeared at almost the exact same time during the mid-1940s. These criticisms came to light in two different fanzines, or perhaps more accurately, perzines, or personal magazines. The first one appeared in the May 1945 issue of Diablerie, “Of Corsets and Flea-Traps,”
by one “Maliano” (otherwise unidentified). Of the two criticisms this is the less interesting, despite its piquant appellation. Its main item of attention remains the illustration chosen to accompany it: a rather charming caricature-portrait of Smith by Virgil Partch, of all people. No, Smith and Partch never met; instead, the artist worked from a photograph of Smith supplied him by Forrest J. Ackerman c. 1945. At that time Ackerman was the editor of the camp newspaper at the U.S. Army induction
center Fort MacArthur near San Pedro (the port of Los Angeles located between
Rancho Palos Verde to the northwest and Long Beach to the northeast). Partch was one of the staff artists on the newspaper and was officially assigned to do caricatures of the officers at that military base. However, between his official assignments, Ackerman would furnish him with photos of various fantasy and science fiction au-
thors, from which Partch would create his caricatures. This was how the cartoonist-artist happened to make his caricature-portrait of Ashton Smith, who is observed winking at us with his left, or sinister, eye!
But it is the second of these two rare negative criticisms that will detain us here, and at some length. Oddly enough (again), this made its appearance just one month after the one in Diablerie, and in the second issue of Tumbrils, rather wel named as it turns out, thus dated June 1945 . This overall unfavorable essay concerning Smith and his writing took the form of a brief but penetrating censure entitled “Eblis in Bakelite,” by James Blish, a title referring to the Mohammedan concept or image of Satan as physically realized in bakelite, an early form of plastic, or in this case, a synthetic resin, whose uses were like those of celluloid or hard rubber. “Eblis in Bakelite”—it makes an arresting and memorable title, in the same way as is this uncommon piece itself. Tumbrils was Blish’s own perzine and remains an excellent example of this type of magazine, such as flourished from the middle to later 1930s to the 1940s. Other writers of the same period, who later became famous like Blish, also put out similar publications, sometime regularly, often irregularly, usually mimeographed or hecto-
James Blish versus Clark Ashton Smith
77
graphed. For example, Fritz and Jonquil Leiber published on a regular basis for half a year or so their own perzine under the title New Directions.1
In Blish’s case, as the title (in the plural) indicates, it provided the writer-editor the opportunity to express critical opinions, if not Olympian judgments, and, it would seem in his case, more unfavorable criticisms than any other type. Tumbrel or tumbril generally refers to the farmer’s cart or wagon that during the French Revolution was employed to transport to the guillotine the people condemned to death. In this particular es
say, rather unusually for a fantasy and science fiction critic and writer of that general period, Blish concerns himself not just with Smith’s prose fictions (as we might expect) but also with some of his best poetry. It remains to this day one of the most vivid and incisive of the very few negative criticisms ever written about Clark Ashton Smith as an overall artist and creative scholar. Let us examine the essay’s major points or issues in their order of appearance.
A word of caution. We are not disputing either the opinions held by Blish rela-
tive to Smith and his output, or his right to these opinions. To quote the ancient saying: De gustibus non disputandum est. There is no disputing in regard to (individual) tastes, or expressed otherwise, there is no arguing about opinions. Nevertheless, it is possible and permissible to suggest other, and possibly more fruitful, approaches to Smith and his oeuvre, and this is that we shall do, using Blish’s essay as our criterion of reference.
* * * * *
Surely, if people as diverse as Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Edwin Mark-
ham, Samuel Loveman, Arthur Machen, Donald Wandrei, H. P. Lovecraft, David
Warren Ryder, Benjamin De Casseres, Vachel Lindsay, George Work, David Starr
Jordan, and yet still others of similar stature considered Smith “the greatest American poet,” or simply a true genius and a great poet, they all must have had excellent reasons for believing as they did, contrary to what Blish somehow suggests that these folk obviously erred in holding such elevated opinions of Smith just as a poet. Blish patently overstates the case when he declares that, apart from a very few brief articles that he managed to find, no true criticism of Smith, especially as poet, has ever made its appearance in print. The official discovery of Smith by the San Francisco press, no less than the reviews accorded to Smith’s first three major poetry collections, contain much excellent criticism of Smith, not all of it positive and admiring, and firmly locate him in the poetico-cultural climate and landscape of 1910/11–1925/26. Blish evidently, and not surprisingly, knew nothing of this early critical reaction and acclaim, but even then, had he known of it, he would probably not have reacted positively to the laudatory tone that still is the prevailing one overall.
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