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by David E. Schultz

  What we know of Smith’s life, from memoirs penned by people who met him

  and from short biographies compiled by L. Sprague de Camp and Donald Sidney-

  Fryer, suggests that it was remarkable for its uneventfulness. Apart from his artwork Smith had no career, though financial necessity drove him to many short periods of casual labor. His parents were relatively elderly when he was born—his father was nearly forty and his mother some years older—and he lived with them

  until they died, his mother in 1935 and his father in 1937. He did not marry until he was in his sixties, though his biographers suggest that he had earlier love affairs, perhaps with married women. Once the family moved into the small house which

  his father built on lonely Boulder Ridge in 1907 Smith very rarely left it until he married—visits to friends who lived further away than Auburn seem to have been

  very few and far between. Although he was highly intelligent, and read voraciously, Smith never attended high school or college, preferring to educate himself.

  Despite this virtual isolation, however, there was nothing parochial about

  Smith’s view of the world. In his correspondence he gave every indication that he loathed Auburn, and longed to be elsewhere, and yet he never left it. When he was in his twenties his health broke down, and for eight years between 1913 and 1921

  he was unwell, suffering from various aches and pains and from periodic bouts of fever. A local doctor tentatively diagnosed tuberculosis, but de Camp considers this diagnosis to have been unreliable. By the time he had regained his health (and he recovered it sufficiently to undertake some hard manual labors in subsequent years) Smith may have felt that he was bound to Boulder Ridge by the aging of his parents, who needed to be looked after, but it is not easy to say why he did not leave Auburn once they were dead—or, for that matter, why he accomplished almost nothing during the remaining quarter-century of his life. Almost all of his best poetry, and all of his best fiction, was written before 1935.

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  Smith’s interest in the exotic began, it appears, at an early age. He was a precocious child, and records in his brief autobiographical statements (written for the pulp magazines in the thirties) that he began to write in his early teens, producing many oriental fantasies. His interest in the Orient had apparently been provoked by reading the Thousand and One Nights at the age of eleven. At the age of thirteen his interest in the exotic was further encouraged by his discovery of Edgar Allan Poe, whose poetry was an important early influence on his own. At fifteen he discovered the work of the California poet George Sterling, who was to become an

  important influence and eventually a friend.

  Though George Sterling is almost forgotten today he published frequently in

  the popular middlebrow magazines of his day and was a celebrity on the West

  Coast; his major collections were each reprinted several times during the 1900s.

  Smith sent some of his poems to Sterling in 1911, at the suggestion of a schoolteacher friend, and began a correspondence which led to a meeting in 1912. At that time Smith stayed with Sterling in Carmel for about a month, and met other admirers who had formed a kind of coterie around him. Shortly afterwards Smith

  came briefly under the wing of would-be patron of the arts Boutwell Dunlap, who took him to San Francisco and introduced him to the publisher A. M. Robinson,

  who issued Smith’s first book, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912). This brief venture into the wider world was never repeated, perhaps because of Smith’s

  health troubles. He continued, though, to correspond with Sterling and several

  other writers, building up a network of pen-friends which was eventually to include H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.

  George Sterling wrote prefaces for Smith’s second and third volumes of po-

  etry, Odes and Sonnets (1918) and Ebony and Crystal (1922), but he ceased to exercise any direct influence on Smith when he died in 1926, having taken poison—though

  Smith apparently doubted that he had really committed suicide.

  There is a sense in which some of Smith’s work takes over where Sterling left

  off, and Smith was influenced in particular by two of Sterling’s poems: “A Wine of Wizardry” and The Testimony of the Suns. The former poem, which first drew Smith’s attention to Sterling when it was published in Cosmopolitan in 1907, describes in a fashion made literal by its mode of presentation a flight of Fancy, which takes her at hectic pace through various mythological scenarios of dark and Satanic character until she quits the earth entirely and sets forth for a distant star. At the end of this peculiar odyssey the poet, despite the fact that his vision has shown him that the world of the imagination is redolent with sinister and malignant figures, declares himself well content to have indulged in its intoxication. The Testimony of the Suns had been the title poem of a collection first issued in 1903; it ventures even further into distant realms of the imagination, and Smith wrote that it contained

  lines that evoke the silence of infinitude, verses in which one hears the crash of gliding planets, verses that are clarion-calls in the immemorial war of suns and systems, and others that are like the cadences of some sidereal requiem, chanted by

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  153

  seraphim over a world that is “stone and night.” ( PD 5)

  Though these two poems are exceptional in Sterling’s canon they are not en-

  tirely without echoes in the work of other California poets. The work of another sometime resident of Carmel, Edwin Markham (a much older man than Sterling,

  having been born in 1852), includes much religious poetry of a visionary nature, and Markham was ultimately to produce a spectacular supernatural odyssey of his own in “The Ballad of the Gallows Bird,” published in the American Mercury in 1926. This long poem includes a transit of Hell and is replete with morbid imagery, as when skeletons erupt from their graves. These poems remind us that Smith’s work—

  though undeniably extraordinary—is by no means entirely disconnected from the

  culture of its place and time

  Sterling knew Markham well (Markham wrote the poem “Sarpedon” in Ster-

  ling’s memory) and he was also well acquainted with Ambrose Bierce, the most

  famous of all the Californian writers of the day, to whom he showed some of

  Smith’s poetry. Both Markham and Bierce must be counted among Sterling’s influ-

  ences, and hence among Smith’s. Of greater importance, however, in determining

  the shape of Smith’s career as a poet were more distant influences upon “A Wine of Wizardry” which Sterling called to Smith’s attention: influences from French literature.

  Sterling apparently introduced Smith to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal—in English translation—in 1912, and impressed him sufficiently to inspire him eventually to learn French in order to be able to translate such works for himself. The Arkham House volume of Smith’s Selected Poems includes along with thirty translations and

  “paraphrases” of Baudelaire translations from several other writers, including Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo, José-Maria de Heredia, and Charles Leconte de Lisle (as

  well as some fake “translations” which are actually Smith’s own pseudonymous

  work). He seems to have discovered a strong affinity with the particular current in nineteenth century French poetry which extended from the lusher products of

  Romanticism to the morbid extravagances of the Decadent Movement.

  Many nineteenth-century French writers had a profound fascination for the

  Orient, which drove many of them actually to undertake eastward voyages (though few got any further than North Africa). There was also a prolific and potent supernatural element in nineteenth century French literature, where the influence of Poe was supplemented by the influence of such English writers as Edward Young

  (whos
e Night Thoughts, translated by Letourneur in 1769, had been very popular) and Lord Byron. A “genre macabre” was extrapolated from collections by Théophile Gautier—notably La Comédie de la mort (1838)—into the work of Baudelaire, Petrus Borel and Gérard de Nerval’s “supernaturaliste” poems. The slightly less fevered “Parnassian” poets also made abundant use of mythological material, to

  which Leconte de Lisle added a broad cosmic perspective strongly influenced by

  the evolutionist ideas of the day. Many writers of the period, influenced by the fashionable idea that genius was closely akin to madness, were happy to borrow

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  inspiration from delirium, whether it was visited upon them by accidents of fate (like Alfred de Musset and Gérard de Nerval) or whether they had to induce it by means with opium, hashish or even ether (as Baudelaire, Gautier, Rimbaud and

  Jean Lorrain were interested to do).

  All of these concerns are echoed in Smith’s work. He presumably came by his

  interest in Oriental and supernatural exoticism independently, and it is probable that his acquaintance with drugs was limited to those opiates which were used as pain-killers and sleeping-draughts, but he must have found a wonderful coincidence of outlook in the work of the French poets. He probably did not have the

  opportunity to familiarize himself thoroughly with the abundant short fiction produced by writers associated with the Decadent Movement—most notably Remy de

  Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Marcel Schwob and Catulle Mendès—but he would have

  found common cause with them too, and there is a sense in which Smith may be

  regarded as the last and most extravagant of the masters of Decadent prose.

  Another element of the French literary tradition which may warrant considera-

  tion in the light of its influence on Smith’s work is its religious context. France was a country very much aware of its Catholic traditions (always under stress after the revolution of 1789) and the atheists among the above-named writers formed their atheism in opposition to Catholic theology. Although reconsideration led some

  Decadents back from their literary flirtations with evil to a kind of repentance—

  Verlaine and Joris-Karl Huysmans are the cardinal examples—others remained

  firmly committed to the flagrant literary Satanism of Baudelaire and Anatole

  France. The Catholicism whose mythology provided the metaphysical context of

  all this work—even, and perhaps particularly, that which was moved by a spirit of strident opposition—was a Catholicism heavily influenced (thanks to Pascal,

  Racine and Alfred de Vigny) by the desolate world-view of Jansenism.

  Jansenists believed that man had been abandoned by an indifferent God, so

  that all that a cosmic voyage of the imagination could possibly reveal was a bleak and impassive universe, empty of any real comfort. Smith had no apparent links

  with the Catholic faith (although Sterling had; his parents had tried unsuccessfully to bring him up in the faith); he nevertheless acquired and carefully extrapolated a world-view which was in close correspondence with the Romanticized Jansenist

  pessimism of the French tradition.

  In his own poems, Smith sent his Fancy on more extended flights than Ster-

  ling’s ever took, into the remoter regions of the imagined universe, where it found a multitude of monstrous and baleful apparitions, and an illimitable cold indifference which could offer no comfort to mankind. In “Nero,” which led off his first collection, Smith imagines the Roman emperor wishing that he were a god, so that he could supervise the conflict of Chaos and Creation, and play with the stars so as to “tear out the eyes of light.” Though such a god is not the quiet, hidden God of the Jansenists he is certainly a deity which offers cold comfort to mankind. In the title-poem of that first collection, “The Star-Treader,” the dreaming narrator is

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  155

  given a similar god’s-eye view of the universe, and finds a similarly bleak awe in its rapt contemplation. Cosmic perspectives which reduce the earth and its inhabitants to insignificance are offered also in the “Ode on Imagination” and “The Song of the Comet.”

  In Ebony and Crystal this interest in cosmic perspectives—and particularly in the lushness and bizarrerie of the visions available to such perspectives—reaches fuller flower. Its most extended development is to be found in Smith’s longest, and perhaps finest, poem: The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil, which begins with the memorable lines:

  Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

  I crown me with the million-colored sun

  Of secret worlds incredible, and take

  Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

  Throned on the mountain zenith, and illume

  The spaceward-flown horizon infinite. ( LO 15)

  The intoxicating wine of wizardry which dispatched George Sterling’s Fancy

  clearly had less impetus than the hashish which impelled Smith’s emperor of

  dreams. Sterling’s vision is essentially a syncretic amalgam of Earthly myths; to this Smith adds a breadth borrowed from the discoveries of astronomy and speculations of cosmogony, but he adds too a particular viewpoint in which the extremism of the vision is both necessary and inadequate to answer the pangs of imaginative suffocation and stultification. The violent and macabre elements of Smith’s vision—its decadent dalliance with satanic imagery—are provocations to an imagination which (it is implied) could not be drawn to awe by any lesser stimulus. For Smith, conventional appeals to the imagination are effete and jejune. This is where Smith found his intellectual kinship with Baudelaire and Rimbaud: for them too

  the ultimate enemy of the human soul was not evil but ennui, and they too sought release from spiritual anaesthesia in magniloquence of vision and cultivation of mordant exoticism.

  The influence of Baudelaire is most clearly seen in the twenty-nine poems in

  prose which Smith published in Ebony and Crystal. Indeed, the first of these to be published (in The Smart Set in 1918) is entitled “Ennui”; like “Nero” it features an emperor for whom earthly pleasures are inadequate to secure any spiritual release.

  Here, though, the emperor is brought to momentary sensation not by dreams of

  godhood but by a close brush with death.

  These poems in prose contain the seeds of much of Smith’s later fantastic fic-

  tion. It is not just that some of his stories are built around images recapitulated from the prose-poems (“The Demon of the Flower” around “The Flower-Devil”

  and “The Planet of the Dead” around “From the Crypts of Memory”) but that it

  was in the prose-poems that he cultivated the tone and world-view of so much of his later prose fiction.

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  The way in which Smith developed his poetry in prose has both significant

  similarities and important contrasts to the way that French prose-poetry developed from Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit through Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose to Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Bertrand’s medievalism gave way to the more varied exoticism of Baudelaire, and Baudelaire also began to produce more extended prose-poems, notably “L’Invitation au voyage,” whose theme is recapitulated by

  Smith in “In Cocaigne.” Rimbaud was not much concerned with the further devel-

  opment of Baudelaire’s exoticism, but he did import a special kind of fervor into the form, seen especially in some of the most memorable passages of the patch-work prose-poem Une Saison en enfer—a kind of horrified rage which ultimately comes to delight in delirium and celebrate “the alchemy of the word.”

  The manner in which Smith’s work sets off in a different direction is to do with his adoption of a rather different mythos, which draws upon the fantasies of science. It was not simply the largeness of the cosmic
perspective which impressed him, but also the detachment and clinicality of the scientific outlook, and its calmness in confrontation with the alien and unimaginable. In this respect he is a distinctly twentieth century writer, and though the work he did for the science fiction pulps is mostly weak by comparison with his Weird Tales stories he nevertheless drew something important from the scientific world-view. For most pulp science

  fiction writers (and, for that matter, most scientists) the modern world-view simply invalidated all the fabulous beings of ancient mythology, and so science fiction writers developed their own distinct vocabulary of ideas; for Smith, though, it was only the attitude of mind which one adopted to demons, sorcerers, satyrs and the like which needed to be transformed: he could achieve a remarkable synthesis of scepti-cism and credulity, which is one of the unique features of his work.

  In discovering this new direction, Smith was of course aided by one of his

  American literary heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, whose own poems in prose presumably

  influenced Baudelaire. Like Smith, Poe had also imbibed something of the scientific world-view, and was himself given to cosmic visions, but in Poe there is no synthesis—such works as “Mesmeric Revelation” and Eureka remain quite distinct from his tales of the supernatural. Only in the extended prose-poem “The Masque of the Red Death” do we find in Poe’s work a real precursor of Smith’s fiction.

  What Smith shares most intimately with the French tradition is his notion of

  the goad which drives the imagination to construct rhapsodies in prose, one of

  whose facets is ennui, another spleen. One may borrow (taking it, admittedly, out of context) Rimbaud’s reference to the “alchemy of the word” to describe Smith’s method, because he was a great exponent of the alchemy of words. He used his

  vocabulary to transform descriptions into incantations directly evoking a sense of the strange, a distortion of attitude and feeling. Smith’s prose is geared to apply to the reader an experiential wrench or jolt, to permit the relief of “seeing” worlds of the imagination—which might otherwise have gone stale along with the hopeless