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world of mundanity—through a new linguistic lens. This is what his best prose fiction intends to accomplish.
* * * * *
Smith’s earliest ventures in the marketing of prose fiction were tales of the ori-
ent written in his late teens. Four were published in The Black Cat and The Overland Monthly during 1910–12. Some ten years later Smith began writing light contemporary fiction aimed at “sophisticated” magazines, but the only one known to have sold was “Something New” in 10 Story Book in 1924. His earliest experiments with extended poems in prose, the brief but highly ornate fantasies “Sadastor” and “The Abominations of Yondo,” were produced soon afterwards, in 1925. Both were
submitted to Weird Tales but rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright. “The Abominations of Yondo” appeared in The Overland Monthly in 1926. Smith did try his hand at material in a more orthodox Weird Tales vein, selling “The Ninth Skeleton” to Wright in 1928, but it was not until 1929 that he established a better working relationship with the editor, which encouraged him to produce more adventurous ma-
terial. In 1930 Smith had five stories in Weird Tale s (including “Sadastor”), and also placed two stories with Hugo Gernsback’s pulps. Thus began Smith’s prolific
phase, which lasted from the autumn of 1929 until the spring of 1934 (although
the stories continued to appear in print for some years thereafter).
“Sadastor” and “The Abominations of Yondo” both prefigure clearly the di-
rection in which Smith’s work would develop. The first begins as an Oriental tale, with a demon telling a story to amuse a fretful lamia, but the story concerns a “forgotten and dying planet” set “among the remoter galaxies.” The same ambition is confirmed in the opening lines of “The Abominations of Yondo”:
The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells. ( AY 55) This passage might serve as an introduction to Smith’s work in general, promising as it does a blending of the notions of the satanic and the alien.
The location of Yondo in space and time is vague, and in his early days Smith
had some difficulty finding an appropriate milieu for his fiction. “The End of the Story” (1930) was the first of numerous stories which Smith set in the imaginary French province of Averoigne. It is a standardized story of a young man’s seduction by a lamia, and of his determination to return to her embraces even after he has been “saved” from her attentions by an older and wiser man. It echoes the
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theme of Keats’s “Lamia” and several stories by Théophile Gautier (especially
“Clarimonde” and “Arria Marcella”), and has a similar outlook to Gautier’s tales, which celebrate the superiority of deliciously dangerous supernatural consorts over mere mundane women.
In his subsequent tales of Averoigne Smith was able to recapitulate his enthu-
siasm for French Romanticism, sometimes coming close to pastiche. He is fre-
quently close to the spirit of Anatole France’s tales in The Well of St. Clare—
especially “San Satiro”—and “The Disinterment of Venus” seems to have been
inspired by Prosper Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille.” An imaginary French province was, however, too close to home to accommodate Smith’s wilder imaginings, even
when he imported an alien invader (in “The Beast of Averoigne,” 1933). Only in
“The Colossus of Ylourgne” (1934) was his taste for the bizarre allowed full rein, though “The Holiness of Azédarac” (1933) shows off his sense of irony to good
advantage in a tale which borrows from Robert W. Chambers’s “The Demoiselle
d’Ys” and from H. P. Lovecraft.
The other scenario used in an early tale which was to be further explored was
Atlantis, featured in “The Last Incantation” (1930). This is another extended poem in prose, in which the sorcerer Malygris, suffering from ennui, conjures up an image of a lost love, but cannot recover the innocence of viewpoint which made the girl so beautiful in the sight of his earlier self. “The Uncharted Isle” (1930) is a timeslip story which also seems to feature a fragment of an Atlantean civilization, though this is not stated. “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (1931) is an interplanetary story which begins in Atlantis, but the exoticism of Atlantean sorcery is only displayed to its fullest advantage in “The Double Shadow” (1933) and “The Death of Malygris”
(1934), which are both stories in which curious supernatural dooms claim the main characters—a favorite Smith formula.
In order to find more open imaginative territory Smith borrowed another
mythical civilization from Greek mythology: Hyperborea, which he first featured in
“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” in 1931. This is the story of two thieves who at-
tempt to plunder a shrine erected to the dark god Tsathoggua in a city which now lies in ruins; they are unwisely undaunted by the evil reputation which the place has. The protagonist escapes, though not intact, after seeing his companion horribly killed.
The characterization of the evil god in this story owes something to H. P. Lovecraft, to whose Cthulhu Mythos Tsathoggua is sometimes attached. The formula of following the fortunes of characters who invite awful supernatural judgment with their recklessness is here rendered in a sarcastic vein, and this appears to reflect the fact that—as in many of the Averoigne stories—wherever Smith consciously borrowed
from other writers his tone tended to become more ironic, and sometimes rather flippant, his auctorial voice being distanced from the substance of the tale.
The irony of the Hyperborean tales (in the first of his Arkham House collec-
tions, Out of Space and Time, they are aptly dubbed “Hyperborean Grotesques”) was
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something which Smith chose to conserve and exaggerate when he used the setting further. “The Door to Saturn” (1932) describes how the priest Morghi pursues the sorcerer Eibon through a doorway to another world, where they combine forces in order to explore until they find a place to settle down. This is one of the least violent and most sardonic of all Smith’s stories. It also includes some of his most tongue-wrenching nomenclature—a trend continued in “The Weird of Avoosl
Wuthoqquan” (1932), which follows the familiar pattern of reckless greed leading to macabre extinction, as do “The Ice-Demon” (1933) and the magnificently bizarre “The Coming of the White Worm” (1941).
Less irony is to be found in “Ubbo-Sathla” (1933), the most Lovecraftian of
the Hyperborean stories, in which a modern occultist finds a magic lens which
unites him with the personality of its wizard owner, and allows him to share that owner’s visionary quest to find the parent of all Earthly life, in which is incarnate Smith’s typical blend of the evil and the alien:
There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it
sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay
the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the premundane gods. ( OST 299)
By contrast, the most savagely ironic of the Hyperborean tales is “The Testa-
ment of Athammaus” (1932), told by a hapless headsman who is called upon to
execute a demonic bandit. Each time the task is complete the bandit miraculously rises from the dead, and each time his head is struck from his shoulders he becomes more loathsome, until his hideousness forbids further interference. Like
“Ubbo-Sathla” this is essentially a tale of devolution—a regression from order toward chaos (a devolution which is, in a sense, implicit in the very nature of the stories as they use a modern viewpoint to look back at a more disturbed and rough-
hewn era).
All these chief elements of the Hyperborean tales are combined in the best of
them all: “The Seven Geases” (1934). Here the vainglorious magistrate Ralibar
Vooz goes hunting for extraordinary prey but falls prey himself to the wrath of the sorcerer Ezdagor after venturing into a strange underworld. Ezdagor places him
under a geas which requires him to descend further into the Tartarean realm to
present himself as a blood-offering to Tsathoggua. But Tsathoggua has no need of him, and so sends him further on, and the pattern repeats. In the company of the bird-demon Raphtontis, Ralibar Vooz delivers himself in turn to the web of the
spider-god Atlach-Natha, to the palace of the “antehuman sorcerer” Haon-Dor, to the Cavern of the Archetypes, and to the slimy gulf of Abhoth, “father and mother of all cosmic uncleanliness”:
160 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Here, it seemed, was the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in
manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side
through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes’ fins; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that grew in size as they departed from the
neighborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore when they fell
into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent
bulk. ( OST 63)
By this time, though, the magistrate is in a realm so remote that his own or-
dered world is known only by vile rumor, so Abhoth can think of no more awful
place to send him than home. Alas, the journey back is fraught with far too many dangers for it to be safely made, so Ralibar Vooz, who is too puerile even to be worth devouring, cannot capitalize on the good fortune of his insignificance.
Here, despite the ironic voice with which the story opens, Smith is clearly carried away by the impetus of his constructed nightmare, and this is a key story in his oeuvre. The descent into the underworld is a fine representation of the metempirical reality in which Smith embeds his fantastic tales. The revelation that the ultimate reality is utterly loathsome is, of course, something which Smith echoes from Lovecraft’s tales, but Smith’s version is far more elaborate and far more colorful.
Lovecraft is essentially a monochrome writer, but Smith’s imagination is lush and fecund—his universe is not simply a horrific one, but a multitudinously populous one, in which there are not merely more things than are dreamt of in the Lovecraftian philosophy, but more things than are dreamt if in any philosophy.
This can be seen well enough in Smith’s work for the sf pulps. It is surprising, in a way, that Gernsback made room in his magazines for a writer so ill-fitted to his declared manifesto (to the effect that sf was a futurological species of fiction which would anticipate technological developments), but Smith did have an imaginative verve which enlivened the pages of Wonder Stories quite considerably. His first story there, “Marooned in Andromeda” (1930), set the pattern for many others, featuring an odyssey across an alien landscape replete with strange life-forms.
Some of these stories of strange alien life-forms are hard to distinguish from
his horror stories of vile godlings and devolved protoplasmic entities—“The Im-
measurable Horror” (1931) and “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (1932) both ap-
peared in Weird Tales despite being notionally science fiction, and “The Dweller in the Gulf” (published as “The Dweller in Martian Depths” in Wonder Stories [1933]) might have been better suited to Weird Tale s—but others are content to rejoice in their representations of the exotic. The best are those which deal with radical transfigurations of space and time, particularly “The Eternal World” (1932) and
“The Dimension of Chance” (1932).
It is clear that Smith found some of these science-fictional tales impossible to take seriously, and some—like “The Letter from Mohaun Los” (1932) and “The
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161
Monster of the Prophecy” (1932)—decay into uneasy satire. The seductive attraction of the exotic, however, was something which Smith was capable of taking very seriously indeed, and his best sf stories are pure celebrations of that allure. The most famous of them is “The City of the Singing Flame” (1931), which is combined in most book versions with its sequel “Beyond the Singing Flame” (1931).
The narrator of this story discovers on a lonely Californian ridge (effectively identical to the one where Smith lived) a gateway to a parallel world, where an assortment of alien creatures trek in pilgrimage to a fabulous city in order to achieve ecstatic immolation in a fountain of flame which attracts them with mesmeric music. Like some of the stories of A. Merritt (especially “The Moon Pool”) this story presents an archetypal image of the irresistible temptations of the imagination.
“Beyond the Singing Flame” is a much weaker story, and does the original no
favors when combined with it, because the passage through the flame (which turns out to be a multidimensional gateway to other modes of existence) cannot help but be a de-mystification, and hence an anti-climax. The science-fictional imagination is inextricably involved with such de-mystifications and dis-enchantments, because it must deal in pretended possibilities. For this reason Smith could not find sf a sat-isfactory genre in which to work—the problem is just as obvious in “The Light
from Beyond” (1934) as it is in “Beyond the Singing Flame”—but he was enthusi-
astic to borrow some elements of the science-fictional imagination, in order to add a more grandiose sweep to his fantasies. Two of his most gaudy and fanciful fantasies, “The Maze of the Enchanter” (1933) and “The Flower-Women” (1935) take
advantage of an extraterrestrial setting to increase their exoticism.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Smith developed the most dramatically
appropriate of all his imaginary milieux by placing it not in the remote past but in the farthest imaginable future. This was Zothique, “the world’s last continent,” in which decadence could be allowed unchallenged sway. The name may be derived
from Rimbaud’s Album dit “Zutique,” which title involves a fanciful piece of wordplay on the French expletive zut! —which might be paralleled (appropriately, if this is indeed where Smith got the name Zothique from) by some such English expression as “to hell with you!”
Because Hyperborea existed in earth’s past, the viewpoint of stories set there
had to accept the implication that Order would ultimately oust Chaos, but in
Zothique the implied future is empty; science and civilization are gone and utterly forgotten, and all that happens there is but part of a prelude to annihilation.
The first Zothique story was “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), a
marvelous extravaganza in which two magicians conjure themselves an empire out
of the dust of the ages and the corpses of the ancient dead, but then reap a just reward after the re
bellion of their subjects. This is one of the most graphic of all Smith’s horror stories, and its tone is pure nightmare:
All that night, and during the blood-dark day that followed, by wavering torches or the light of the failing sun, an endless army of plague-eaten liches, of tattered
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skeletons, poured in a ghastly torrent through the streets of Yethlyreom and along the palace-hall where Hestaiyon stood guard above the slain necromancers. Un-pausing, with vague, fixed eyes, they went on like driven shadows, to seek the subterranean vaults below the palace, to pass through the open door where Illeiro
waited in the last vault, and then to wend downwards by a thousand steps to the verge of that gulf in which boiled the ebbing fires of earth. There, from the verge, they flung themselves to a second death and the clean annihilation of the bottomless flames. ( RA 324–25)
Not all the Zothique stories have this intensity of feeling. Some are ironic in the vein of the Hyperborean grotesques, most notably the excellent “The Voyage
of King Euvoran” (1933), whose eponymous hero offends a necromancer and is
punished by the loss of his remarkable crown, which is carried away by the re-
animated fabulous bird that topped it. Misled by an apparently-favorable oracle the king goes in quest of his lost crown, but finds instead a peculiarly apt humiliation.
Nor are all the Zothique stories entirely original—“The Isle of the Torturers”
(1933) has echoes of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” and Villiers de l’Isle-
Adam’s “Torture of Hope” embedded in its account of a sadistic orgy whose vic-
tim eventually wins a Pyrrhic victory over his tormentors. In general, though, the best of the Zothique stories are each possessed of an unparalleled dramatic surge which carries them helter-skelter through a mass of bizarre detail to a devastating conclusion.
The Zothique stories frequently contain erotic elements, but consummation is
usually denied, and the seductive sorceresses who feature in “The Witchcraft of Ulua” (1934) and “The Death of Ilalotha” (1937) are certainly not treated with the same sentimental affection as the sorceresses and lamias of the tales of Averoigne—
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