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( LO 109).
Now exactly how romantic is this pattern? On one level, readers of extremely
popular writers like Burroughs expect and receive their heroes’ return from the alternative reality to the “natural” world; here Smith is writing a different sort of fiction, to be sure. But on a literary level, even with a more abstract definition of romance, it would seem Smith is writing something different. One of the keystones of romanticism as a philosophy is the ability of man to triumph over his environment; Smith’s characters seem defeated by their environments, even though the environments are alternative environments created by Smith. In one respect, there’s not much difference between Stephen Crane’s Maggie being crushed by social and
economic forces—a hostile environment—and Smith’s heroes being destroyed by
the Dweller in the Gulf; in both cases, attempts of the heroes to assert themselves and to escape are futile. (The editors of Wonder Stories, incidentally, found the ending of “Dweller” so bitter that they changed it; Smith wrote to a friend, “In the tale as I submitted it, no escape was possible for any of the three earth-men, since the
Dweller was filling the whole of the narrow path ahead of them. Bellman met the
Clark Ashton Smith: A Note on the Aesthetics of Fantasy
199
same fate as the others. . . . The tale is hopelessly ruined . . ., and I am writing a letter of protest to the editor.”1) Nor is this pessimism simply apparent in Smith’s fiction: he often seems quite naturalistic in certain aspects of his critical statements. In a letter he published in Amazing Stories, October 1932, Smith protested the view that saw man as the center of the universe; the real thrill of properly done fantastic fiction, he said, “comes from the description of the ultrahuman events, forces and scenes, which properly dwarf the terrene actors to comparative insignificance” ( PD
14). Fantasy should emphasize the non-human or extra-human; “isn’t it only the
damnable, preposterous and pernicious egomania of the race” ( PD 16) that insists on realistic fiction? In “The Tale of Macrocosmic Horror,” in Strange Tales, January 1933, Smith said that in the “tale of highest imaginative horror,” “the real actors are the terrible arcanic forces, the esoteric cosmic malignities” ( PD 18). Thus most of Smith’s characters are hopeless pawns in the face of some alternative reality; they seldom assert themselves, and all too often pay the ultimate price for crossing the threshold.
In this respect, then, we can hardly call Smith a romantic. This side of Smith
certainly has affinities with someone like Ambrose Bierce (who was a major influence on Smith, though Smith made perfectly clear in private letters—especially one to R. H. Barlow, 19 September 1933—that he never met Bierce), or Kurt Vonnegut, whose notion of human civilization in Sirens of Titan would surely have appealed to Smith. The point is that, like most serious writers, Clark Ashton Smith was too complex to be pigeonholed by a single term. He was uniquely himself, and, for me at least, his appeal lies in this uniqueness. But I hope this discussion has shown us that “fantasy’ and “romance” are not necessarily synonymous terms, that Smith knew this, articulated it, and illustrated it in his fiction.
Notes
1. CAS to R. H. Barlow, 8 February 1933; ms., JHL.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. 1968. Rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of
Clark Ashton Smith
Lauric Guillaud
According to literary critics (Rancy 3), the aesthetic and decadent literary periods extends from 1880 to 1900. We should ask, however, whether this “fin-de-siècle” period does not spill over into the twentieth century, blurring the dividing line between them and the next literary movement. While some critics view the decadent period as the end of an era (see Buckley, Houghton), others perceive it as the beginning of the next (see Kermode), or at least as a transitional period (see Gerber).
If we consider the evolution of fantastic literature as it continued at the beginning of the twentieth century, we see that the pursuit of escapist literature, with all its usual themes—the unknown, modernity, the “call of the abyss,” “elsewhere”—
continued well beyond the decadent period. The weariness of modern humankind,
and despair at the apparent decline of Western nations, all began to coalesce as the prospect of world conflict loomed on the horizon. The degeneration of the human race was to become a topical literary theme.
The “call of the abyss” is so often present in the genre of fantasy that we may legitimately ask whether fantastic literature is not inherently haunted by the theme of decadence: “pre-decadent” in the case of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and “post-decadent” with respect to H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and R. E.
Howard? What characterizes the “call of the abyss”? A pessimistic conception of existence, an idealization of the past, an exploration of the beyond, a predilection for the macabre, a mythical renewal, the “fatal” nature of women, refined surroundings, and an obsession with snakes (“ophidianism”), are all customary elements in the fin-de-siècle decadent literature. Indeed, all these tropes and themes can be found, with variations, in the literature of the 1830s as well as in that of the 1930s; the fantastic is well and truly at home within the decadent literary period.
Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard have several points in common. All three were
scholars; even though they were mostly self-taught, they demonstrated precocious talent. They were recluses who hardly ever traveled, and they were contemptuous of the literary set. They all had difficult, often short lives (Howard committed suicide at thirty) and went through depression or serious illness. They had eccentric imaginations, and they delighted in transposing their nightmares onto paper. They were, above all, poets who favored the short story. They were fatalists haunted by the past, who turned to the future, to science fiction, but their panoramic vision of
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith
201
the future was pessimistic. They shared a sensibility for strange, exotic, and macabre things, especially a fascination for the “beyond” in all its spatial and temporal shapes and forms. Finally, all three men were united by a similar intellectual and ludic complicity that led them to elaborate and consolidate Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos ; ten “Cthulhian” short stories were written by Smith, four by Howard.
Where should we place Clark Ashton Smith in this continuum? And within the
genre of fantasy, what is his relationship within the decadent literary movement?
Smith and Howard are often labelled authors of heroic fantasy. In the years 1920–30, they created never-never lands; fabulous and wonderful places which
owed more to their creators’ imaginations than to geographers, more to the Middle Ages than to expansionism, and more to fantasy than to reason. The “lost” continents of Zothique, Commoriom, Cimmeria, and Aquilonia belong to a lost histori-
cal period somewhere off the modern map. Science and verisimilitude were
abandoned in favor of myth, legend and the impossible; in their work, the imaginary was given free rein.
According to some critics (van Herp 240; de Camp 14), heroic fantasy was officially launched in 1880 by William Morris. Morris was fascinated by the Middle
Ages, so it is especially in this historical epoch that one must look for the exact source of the genre. Morris led the way with three novels that form the very foundations of heroic fantasy: The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896), and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), all novels that bridge the gap between medieval courtly novels and the beginnings of the modern heroic fantasy genre (as exemplified in Tolkien’s work). The great epics of heroic fantasy grew out of medieval chansons de geste, out of Arthurian legend, out of the courtly novel, out of the eighteenth century’s A Thousand and On
e Nights. In England, during the Romantic period, diverse currents merged and gave life to the Gothic novel (Wal-
pole’s The Castle of Otranto, 1764), and the historical novel (Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly, 1814). Fantastic novels, then, under the influence of the romanticized medieval atmosphere, gave birth to heroic fantasy.
Subsequently, Lord Dunsany’s mythology, his use of kingdoms and cities set in
an improbable past, appealed to a wider cultural obsession with an imaginary world that offered perspectives on a breathtaking and infinite void. Dunsany’s works— The Gods of Pegāna (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), The King of Efland’s Daughter (1924)—greatly influenced both Lovecraft and Smith. Among other important precursors to Smith
and Lovecraft, we must also cite E. R. Eddison ( The Worm Ouroboros, 1922) and James Branch Cabell ( Figures of the Earth, 1921; The Silver Stallion, 1926).
From 1919 to 1927, Lovecraft had his own “Dunsanian period” (Burleson 24),
during which he created a fantastic, almost Oriental, universe of kingdoms and allegorical or dreamlike cities (“Polaris,” “The White Ship,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”). Such stories as “The Cats of Ulthar,” “Celephaïs,” “The Quest of
Iranon,” “The Other Gods,” and “The Silver Key” led naturally to The Dream-Quest
202 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
of Unknown Kadath (1926–27), in which he sketched a world of demons inhabiting a land of somnolence.
Smith’s and Howard’s use of the fantastic also stems from a romantic and lyri-
cal Dunsanian tradition, but the “heroic” dimension emerges from a dark vision of the world, a world doomed to inevitable and contagious degradation. In Smith’s
oeuvre, as we shall see, the theme of contagion is expressed through an attraction to the macabre, whereas in Howard, the theme of contagion is manifest in an attraction to violence. Like all decadent writers, including Poe, they did not hesitate to shock their readers, and they employed a vision which, in Smith’s case, included the darkest, most disgusting views of the world, a world in which the beauty inherent in horror was exposed.
Smith spent practically all his life in Auburn, California. Despite his fierce loyalty to Lovecraft (which was reciprocal; on several occasions Lovecraft voiced his admiration for Smith’s work) and Howard, and an obvious inspirational connection with them, Smith distinguished himself from the others through his unique
imaginative skills and style. He had a rich range of artistic talents: he wrote several collections of poetry, which the critics compared to those of Chatterton, Rossetti, and Bryant; his paintings shared the same imaginative sources as the symbolist
Odilon Redon; and he took up sculpture, drawing his inspiration both from pre-
Colombian art and Lovecraft’s creations.
Smith’s Poetry
After publishing his first collection of poetry, The Star-Treader (1912), and following an attack of tuberculosis, Smith developed a nervous depression. The fever during his illness made him delirious and provoked nightmares that the author would later incorporate into his poems and tales, in a manner similar to Lovecraft’s.
While Smith’s fiction is moderately well known, his poetry (1911–28) is more
or less unknown, even in North America. No fewer than twelve collections of his poetry were published in the U.S., seven during his lifetime. Indeed, the man called the “Keats of the Pacific Coast” (Rickard 5) or the “last great Romantic poet”
(Sidney-Fryer 1) was the best-known figure of the “West Coast Romantics,” a po-
etry circle that included Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and Nora May French.
Lovecraft greeted the publication of Ebony and Crystal (1922) with much acclaim. In response to one of Smith’s poems, he said, “The Hashish-Eater is the greatest
imaginative poem in English literature” (Sidney-Fryer 4).
In his collection Selected Poems Smith published an English translation of Gérard de Nerval’s poem, “El Desdichado”:
The star upon my scutcheon long hath fled,
A black sun on my luth doth yet remain.1
This “black sun” became an obsessive figure of cosmic decline in Smith’s
work and set the general tone of his poetry. Smith felt he was a “disconsolate
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith
203
prophet,” out of place in his own country. He felt that his literary heritage went back as far as the twelfth century, where he found inspiring examples of epic and romance novels, the chansons de geste, historical songs, the novels of antiquity, and the romans de la rose, not to mention Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Smith, like Spenser before him, created works that fused different elements, although it was Smith
who created a link between the courtly age and the space age. This synthesis of genres, which led among other things to the creation of the romance genre, was
used by Poe (Smith first encountered Poe in 1907), by Swinburne, and by the other practitioners within the decadent period, including George Sterling, whose poetry already presaged the “discovery” of Zothique:
Then, wave to wave in deeper anthems roared,
And realm by realm, the belted sunset soared,
As tho’ a city of the Titans burned
In lands below the sea-line, undiscerned,
Till desolation touched it, zone by zone,
Its splendors gone, like jewels turned to stone,
And sad with evening sang the ocean-choirs,
Doomed by the stars’ imperishable fires.
(George Sterling, “Duandon,” 135)
The image of the decline of the “city of the Titans” was taken up by Smith in
his sonnet “The City of the Titans,” in which he developed Sterling’s ideas in a more metaphysical manner, with a melancholy figure that prefigured the author’s future lost continents:
I saw a city in a lonely land:
Foursquare, it fronted upon gulfs of fire;
Behind, the night of Erebus hung entire;
And deserts gloomed or glimmered on each hand.
Sunken it seemed, past any star or sun,
Yet strong with bastion, proud with tower and dome:
An archetypal, Titan-builded Rome,
Dread, thunder-named, the seat of gods foredone.
Outreaching time, beyond destruction based,
Immensely piled upon the prostrate waste
And cinctured with insuperable deeps,
The city dreamed in darkness evermore,
Pregnant with crypts of terrible strange lore
And doom-fraught arsenals in lampless keeps.
(“The City of the Titans,” 1911, SP 58–59)
204 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Smith’s later collection, Ebony and Crystal (1922), marked a new creative phase.
The “romance” previously to be found in his earlier work was gradually transposed from the medieval world to futuristic worlds, in which we encounter evidence of an inability to live in the present, but as a consequence, a diffuse feeling of fascination and fear when faced with cosmic otherness.
Beyond the far Cathayan wall,
A thousand leagues athwart the sky,
The scarlet stars and morning die,
The gilded moons and sunsets fall. [. . .]
Ere love and beauty both grew old
And wonder and romance were flown
On irised wings to worlds unknown,
To stars of undiscovered gold.
And I their alien worlds would know,
And follow past the lonely wall
Where gilded moons and sunsets fall,
As in a song of long ago.
(“Beyond the Great Wall,” LO 93)
In the context of his hyperawareness of and fascination with entropy, Smith
sought desperately to
find once more the lost world of his youth, of love, and of beauty.
Voices of love and the autumn sun,
In my heart ye are one!
Fairer the petals that fall,
Dearer the beauty that dies
And the pyres of autumn burning,
Than a thousand springs returning . . .
O, perishing love that call
In my heart and the hollow skies!
(“Chant of Autumn,” SP 126)
The “cosmic troubadour,” as Sidney-Fryer calls him (13), attempted to redis-
cover fragments of worlds and beauty that lay outside the ineluctable decay of the universe. Adventure remained possible, but paradoxically, only where the quest
was without hope. An infinity of worlds remained to be discovered, yet the heavens seemed hollow. Faced with decay and destruction, the poet must attempt to
restore a lost sense of wonder by fusing tradition with modernity, the classic with the futuristic, the sublime with the horrific.
Whatever alien fruits and changeling faces
And pleasures of mutable perfume
Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith
205
The flambeaux of the senses shall illume
Amid the night-furled labyrinthine spaces, [. . .]
Yea, for the lover of lost pagan things,
No vintage grown in islands unascended
Shall quite supplant the old Bacchantic urn,
No mouth that new, Canopic suns make splendid
Content the mouth of sealed rememberings
Where still the nymph’s uncleaving kisses burn.
(“Avowal,”
1938,
SP 403)
In his poetry, Smith can be seen as the depository of the sacred flame of ro-
manticism and as a prophet of the apocalypse, as a seeker after purity and as the bard of degradation. Admittedly these contradictions would seem to place him