Personally the present writer feels that, in the case of a little-known but quite exceptional author, it is better to overpraise than to underestimate. At least the former calls attention to itself and the author in question. Some critics will never like or admire certain work of unusual value, no matter what. Today, compared to Smith’s period, the cultural scene abounds in excellent poets of every and all schools, whether
78 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
working in traditional prosody or in free but carefully structured prose. Gifted poets today seem to gain recognition early, receive the benefit of scholarships and fellow-ships, become teachers and professors, have their collections issued by prestigious publishers in New York City, etc. Almost none of this apparatus existed in the early part of Smith’s literary career, and it is unlikely that he could or would have taken advantage of it, given his independent nature. Ironically, and quite contrary to the statement made in “From the Persian,” one of Smith’s juvenile couplets, Smith as poet received, apart from recognition in California and Great Britain, nothing less than dross for all the gold that he so lavishly purveyed. This early couplet reads: “I read upon a gate in letters bold: / Let him that giveth dross expect not gold.” In Smith’s case this must be emended as follows: “I read upon a gate in letters bold: / Let him that giveth gold expect but dross.”
Contrary to Blish’s assertion that “nor did any general anthology include a line of his much-lauded poetry,” almost three dozen different poems of Smith’s made
their appearance in some two dozen anthologies of diverse types in the period between 1914 and 1945 alone, and our list is probably not complete. Also, contrary to Blish’s assertion that until 1942 “there was no anthology of Smith’s work (i. e., in fiction),” Smith himself had issued six of his best but up-to-then unsalable stories in a single collection during mid-1933 after the press of the Auburn Journal had printed some 1000 copies of The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. Although not noted in our reconstituted bibliography following Blish’s essay, it is quite possible that Blish may have bought a copy of this now rare first collection for 25¢ and at the same time a copy of Ebony and Crystal for $1.00. Smith still had a small remainder of the latter collection from the early 1920s, and he was advertising and selling both books, from the early to the middle 1930s, and probably later. However, Out of Space and Time in 1942 and then Lost Worlds in 1944 do represent in fact Smith’s first two major prose collections, and are now, contrary to Blish’s negative assessment about Out of Space and Time, generally considered excellent collections made from among Smith’s best fiction in short-story form.
Blish’s original suggestion about assembling a register of typical paragraphs from some of the best articles about Smith “with comments appended in the style of the Institute of Propaganda Analysis” is actually quite witty and profitable, and has much to recommend it, inasmuch as it would form an idiosyncratic method for analyzing literature written in praise on behalf of little-known but worthwhile authors. “Does Smith deserve the damnation that his admirers have visited upon him?” Well, a littérateur can react to what seems excessive praise about something unknown but artistic in at least one of two ways: either negatively, if a few typical examples fail to live up to the high praise—or positively, if the characteristic samples more than justify the laudation, thus opening the way to further discovery and exploration.
However, it is anomalous that, after admitting that “Smith at his best is a fine creative scholar,” Blish then cites “The Kingdom of the Worm,” no less than the special conclusion that Smith provided for “The Third Episode of Vathek,” as
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prime examples of Smith at his best. True, both are worthwhile pieces of (short) prose fiction, perfectly at home in the styles of their respective centuries, the 1400s and the 1700s. Nevertheless, they are not the major efforts represented by “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The Dark Eidolon,” “The Colossus of Ylourgne,”
“The Ice-Demon,” and “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” among others.
As for Smith’s poetry being “the product of a pyramid of influences”—such
as from Poe, Wilde, Shelley, Milton, James Thomson, no less than other poets but to a lesser extent—S. J. Sackett has already answered this issue. We can do no better than repeat what he states: “It is dangerous to try to find a source for all of Smith; his affinity to certain writers has occasionally led critics to assign to him influences in [i.e., from] other poets whom he has never read” (23). Like other poets before and after him, Smith for profound personal and poetic reasons of his own sometimes treats with all due seriousness certain universal themes first handled in depth by his predecessors. Just as Shakespeare in The Tempest and Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d derived in part out of Spenser and his epic-romance-allegory The Faerie Queene (1590–96) , and above all out of the Mutabilitie Cantos (1609), so did Smith in such pieces of blank verse as “Satan Unrepentant” derive from Milton and his two great epics.
However, in “Satan Unrepentant” and the sonnet “A Vision of Lucifer” Smith
introduces a viewpoint strongly opposite to Milton’s (at least in a personal sense for the elder poet), and remarkably sympathetic to Satan-Lucifer, no less than undeniably hostile to the usual portrait of the God limned in the Old Testament of the Bible, whom Smith perceives in terms of some Oriental despot, or tyrant-king. In these two poems the Californian poet is clearly continuing, and extrapolating from, selected aspects of the discourse begun by Milton in Paradise Lost. With Poe and Wilde, Smith has a genuine personal and poetic affinity, but his “Requiescat” is not just a mere derivative of Wilde’s poem of the same name. If Smith uses a concept or theme em-
ployed by some predecessor, it is to express something, a creative comment or
feeling, of his very own. This brings up the related issue of conscious or unconscious plagiarism, but possibly quotation is the better word. There exists little such in Smith, except what may be perceived as “enrichment,” in the sense of the practice favored by Renaissance poets deliberately “imitating” the poets of Graeco-Roman antiquity.
The present writer would venture the guess that almost all of Smith’s poetry is his own, and that it is technically quite original and not a direct copy of some other poet’s lines, despite all the inspiration that Smith may have derived from an intensive study of the work of other poets.
George Sterling, probably more than any other poet, had the greatest influence
on Smith, inasmuch as the two poets were contemporaries and particularly close
friends during 1911–26. Sterling acted as mentor to the younger poet and encouraged and inspired him. For example, “The Ministers of Law” has nothing to do with
“The Massacre at Piedmont,” and the title that Blish uses to identify Smith’s own sonnet derives from line 13, i.e., “The Constellations of the Law.” “The Ministers of
80 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Law” derives indeed from Sterling’s epic “rumination” The Testimony of the Suns (line 258) . The phrase comes from quatrain 65 (lines 257–60) , which reads in full: What powers throng the pregnant gloom!
Unseen, the ministers of Law
Reach from eternity to draw
The suns to predetermined doom.
Blish apparently knew Smith’s poetry only, or primarily, from Ebony and Crystal (1922) and Nero and Other Poems (1937), in addition to the poems published in Weird Tales, but had no knowledge in depth of The Star-Treader (1912) and Sandalwood (1925). The poetry of Poe and Sterling (e.g., “A Wine of Wizardry”), first experienced and selectively memorized by Smith when he was thirteen and fifteen, re-
spectively, exercised with no doubt about it the greatest influence on Smith and his own subsequent work; but Blish—by not knowing the full range of Smith’s early
poetry as laid out chronologically in his three major collections—could n
ot thus follow the logical progression of Smith’s development first as poet and then as prosateur, and how each major volume of poems led to the next, and then how the prose-poems in Ebony and Crystal led to his major (mature) prose fictions, as well as his extended poems in prose, c. 1925/28–1938.
Also, it is perhaps too facile to see Baudelaire’s influence on Smith in the genre of the poème en prose as greater than what it actually was. The influence of (selected) very short pieces by Poe (such as “Shadow—A Parable,” “Silence—A Fable,” “Eleanora,” and “The Masque of the Red Death”) proved undoubtedly greater, inas-
much as it came into operation earlier in Smith’s life, and moreover in the English language that perforce both Poe and Smith shared. As far as we are able to discover, Smith first underwent the influence of Baudelaire, his poems both in verse and in prose, thanks to George Sterling and his copy of some translations by Arthur Symons, in the course of his month-long visit with Sterling in Carmel in June 1912.
On the other hand, the earliest and possibly strongest influence from the French genre of the poem in prose upon Smith came c. 1910–11, or possibly even earlier, when he first read and studied that rare collection Pastels in Prose, translated by Stuart Merrill from the French of thirty-two poet-authors (including Louis Bertrand and Baudelaire, among many others), and published in 1890 by Harper & Brothers.
Smith retained a remarkable affection for the book in question all his life, when he would often read and reread this extraordinary anthology. He continued studying the book up to the last years of his life.
Despite Smith’s affinities with Poe and Baudelaire among other poets, the mood
or effect of the Californian’s most serious prose-poems, as for example “The Shadows” and “From the Crypts of Memory,” or “The Black Lake” and “The Memnons
of the Night,” or “The Crystals” and “The Passing of Aphrodite,” turns out to be more often than not much more “terrific” or Miltonic than anything else, much of the portentousness of the tone deriving from the strong emphasis not only on fate or des-
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tiny but especially on the succinct and vivid cosmic-astronomic element. There is another curious result of Blish’s ignorance of the overall corpus of Smith’s early (mature) poetry, curious inasmuch as Blish was primarily a science fiction writer, and one might think that he would have made a point of overtly noting this. He not only fails to emphasize the paramount importance of the cosmic-astronomic element or subject matter in Smith’s oeuvre, whether positively or negatively (in an artistic sense), but he does not even directly mention it in any way, a curious oversight.
Why Blish especially singles out “Medusa,” “In November,” and “Chant of Au-
tumn,” from among so many others, is puzzling because they are not any more
noteworthy than most of the other lyrical poems, or pieces in blank verse, but instead are equally remarkable. “In November” is only one of not quite a dozen lyrics cast in alexandrines, that is, in iambic hexameter. The alexandrine does not work quite the same in English as in French, and must be handled with great care to avoid the heaviness and monotony often inherent from its use in such a strongly accented language as English, at least for the purposes of the traditional prosody. However, for his greatest and most extended poem cast in non-rhyming verse, Smith chose the traditional iambic pentameter, or expressed otherwise quite genuinely, it chose him.
Contrary to his usual practice of slow and careful workmanship, Smith created the roughly 600 lines of blank verse making up The Hashish-Eater in about a month and a half, or even somewhat less, literally a fantastic or astonishing achievement. This enormous poem literally came exploding out of his subconscious and remains his
most ambitious and exhilarating composition. Most critics or commentators have
assessed this amazing exercise in cosmic-astronomic imagination at a high level of accomplishment. Blish stands alone in characterizing this imagery-fraught narrative as “merely the sewage of a plastic-and-chromium Eblis.” It is not clear what he means by the phrase “mashed-potato language” whether written by Lovecraft or De Casseres, unless what he purposes by this usage is just “muddled language.” Blish’s own language is less clear than the phrase that he castigates while criticizing Smith’s magnum opus even more severely.
Again, Blish stands alone in his extremely negative stance not only in regard to the carefully cultivated style of Smith’s mature prose fictions, c. 1928–38, immediately derived from that of the prose-poems of c. 1914–22 (as gathered into Ebony and Crystal ), and also from that of those of c. 1925–29—but above all in referring to the style of Sir Thomas Browne in Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall, as “glaucous logorrhea”—although just what Blish means by “yellow-green talkativeness” (or verbosity) is not that clear. Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, and other masterpieces of baroque prose by the same author are probably the closest things to poetry created in prose before the later experiments in prose style of Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and others in English, not to mention those of the French poets of the nineteenth century, beginning with Louis Bertrand and continuing through Mallarmé. We would be singularly impoverished if our ultimate preferences in prose style would shrink
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down only to those favored by admirers of Ernest Hemingway as well as other well-known but serious writers of the twentieth century just past.
While certainly not a novice writer at that time, by mid-1945 James Blish had
not yet established himself as one of the leading masters of imaginative narratives or of a rigorously extrapolated scientifiction, such as would later gain for him a richly deserved celebrity. Why then at that stage in his career did he attack an elder scrivener, of little or no wealth, who had no great fame for the most part except among the readers of Weird Tales and similar pulp magazines, except among specialists of poetica Californiana, and surely not among the mainstream academic and intellectual communities at large? Such a question might elicit an explanation like the one that follows. There are at least two courses open to an unestablished writer on his way up. He can be pious and reverent in regard to one or more eminent
writers in the genre to which he aspires, and he can attach himself to that same writer in some accommodating capacity; or he can call attention to himself by attacking some eminent scrivener in that same genre, and thus make a name for himself by writing one or more stringently critical essays of quite a negative type attacking that established scrivener. Such an individual on the attack can be called or considered a Turk, either a cruel or tyrannical person, or a young Turk, that is, a young dynamic person eager for change, and attempting to bring it about, if necessary, by attacking somebody conspicuous.
Was James Blish during the early to middle 1940s infected or influenced by
such a syndrome, the young Turk syndrome? Or was he only expressing some le-
gitimate gripes about a writer whom he sincerely thought was quite overpraised?
Well, possibly both, but there can be no doubt that he was absolutely serious in his intention, positive or negative, especially when he states that “the sheer wordage concerning [Ashton Smith] nearly equals that written about Branch Cabell, a truly fantastic numeral if one attempts, as I have, to run most of it down.” Although this attempt did not apparently extend to the earliest reviews and critical pieces about Smith, those for the period c. 1911–26, just discovering those for the period c.
1930–43 would have represented a real task. Anyone who goes to such lengths to
discover such rare materials must be adjudged utterly sincere and serious. Still, it seems like a great amount of bother to undergo merely to attack a writer at that time but obscurely known, if at all, to the mainstream audience or public.
Blish’s no-nonsense condemnation of Smith’s prose, with which he concludes
his essay “Eblis in Bakelite,”
came to Smith’s attention at some point, as well it might, and it is obvious that he reacted to it. Specifically, noting the challenge implicit in Blish’s statement that Smith “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,” he responded by writing one of his briefest stories expressed in some of his sparest prose, “Monsters in the Night,” which he composed or finished on 11 April 1953.
It first appeared in print as “A Prophecy of Monsters” in the Magazine of Fantasy
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83
and Science Fiction for October 1954, the only such tale that he ever contributed to that periodical. However, Smith had already responded in general to Blish’s austere attack on his characteristic prose, but somewhat earlier, that is, by mid-1950. A gentleman to the last, Smith answered this overt condemnation with his characteristic graciousness, and we shall therefore allow him to have the final word in this debate.
In explanation of the elaborate style characteristic of his poems in prose and
of his tales and extended poems in prose—as well as in explanation of his use of rare and exotic words and of word-coinages—Smith commented as follows, in his
letter to S. J. Sackett dated 11 July 1950. He also defended, but indirectly, The Hashish-Eater and his modus operandi in that epic poem:
As to my employment of an ornate style, using many words of classic origin
and exotic color, I can only say that it is designed to produce effects of language and rhythm which could not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to
what is known as “basic English.” As [Lytton] Strachey points out [in his essay on Sir Thomas Browne], a style composed largely of words of Anglo-Saxon origin
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