In a conclusion that fulfills Smith’s vow to Wandrei about concealing the “hydrocyanic acid” of satire in his science fiction, these products of deranged science kill their creators by eating through their metallic craniums and devouring their huge brains.
Smith’s satirizing of the Tloongs’ pride in their science and technology show-
cases his keen sense of irony, with word-play that simultaneously blurs the very distinctions being made while dropping hints of the aliens’ appalling fate. The bodyguards of the magisterial Koum are “cyclopean-headed” (102), signifying not only a greater fund of knowledge, but also a narrowness of vision. The adjectives
“Babelian” and “Atlantean” describe the sky-cleaving towers and vast terraces of Tloong architecture, and on one of his guided tours, Volmar sees the construction of a tower from desert sands integrated into “ever rising walls and floors, like Ilion rising to the music of Apollo” (100). These allusions to mythical and historical sites where architectural marvels were brought to nothing anticipate the tale’s superb climax, in which “planetary paroxysms of doom and destruction” (106), are described with a panoramic intensity rivalling Smith’s best science-fiction story, “The City of the Singing Flame.” The Tloongs have evaded death psychologically and
physically by becoming literally wrapped up in themselves. When an alarm warns
of the deadly recrudescence of the ravenous Murms, their “four-eyed” surgeons,
clutching “formidable knives and saws” are sent into a panic reminiscent of the doomed revelers in “The Masque of the Red Death.” We are left with a rear-view
mirror vision of the dying planet, and the reflection that, as beings housed in robes
224 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
of flesh, humans may be less vulnerable to the creeping insanity that overtakes the intellectual Tloongs, but in our ignorance we are no less dangerous to ourselves.
A Freudian interpretation of Smith’s humor as a form of displaced aggression
is certainly plausible, especially considering the scorn heaped upon authoritarian figures (or the self-blinded values they represent) in wildly imaginative works such as “The Last Hieroglyph,” “The Seven Geases,” “The Door to Saturn,” and “The
Planet Entity” — the latter a being whose relation to mankind is “like a god in comparison with insects” ( TSS 149). Of course, it is hard to see how else humanity could be regarded from the vantage of the omniscient consciousness portrayed in that story. Smith’s lighter moments are more often than not a blending of Balzacian drollery with black humor, presumably because a sustained approach to
satire wasn’t market-friendly in the 1930s. Consider what happens when Domitian Malgraff and Li Wong, his housekeeper and valet, “escape from the machine-ridden era” ( LW 329) of the twentieth century in Malgraff’s time-machine, in
“The Letter From Mohaun Los.” Reaching the surface of a planet, their senses are assaulted by an astonishing variety of weirdly commingled plant, vegetable, insect, and animal forms, some of the latter “in varying stages of decomposition,” and
spawning “huge, pale, flabby leaves with violet veinings in which I seemed to detect the arterial throb of sluggish pulses” ( LW 336). Other disturbing visions follow, yet after this surrealistic rendering of grotesque horror, Smith indulges in levity:
“Me no likee this.” He shook his head gravely as he spoke. “Can’t say that I care much for it, either,” I returned. “Considered as a hiding place, this particular planet leaves a good deal to be desired. I fear we’ll have to go on for a few more million or trillion years, and try our luck elsewhere.” ( LW 338)
Here both fantasy and satire are sublimated by mere frivolity; nevertheless, the satire and the cosmic imagery are mutually supportive. Cosmicism involves a deliberate suggestion of “concepts vast and mysterious” and an emphasis on “startling, unearthly imagery” (Behrends 12). Smith’s tales so frequently aim for this effect (as do his paintings and stone carvings) that astute readers will discern why Bierce wasn’t cited as an influence in a 1949 autobiographical letter to Samuel J. Sackett ( SL 359–62). He theorized that weird fiction properly deals with “man’s relationship—past, present, and future—to the unknown and infinite” ( BB 82). A manifesto, stressing the artistic vitality of cosmicism and proving that the poet did not regard the art of prose composition as less challenging than verse. In this he was affirmed by Lovecraft, whose first letter to Smith enthused about his ability to conjure “abysses of infinity and elder time” in the 1922 poetry collection Ebony and Crystal. The aesthetics of the weird tale is very relevant to the subject at hand because it accounts for the Juvenalian humor in the Hyperborea series—fantasies set in a mythical prehistoric realm of the far north, doomed by the coming of the Ice Age (this generally refers to the Pleistocene Epoch though there were other ice
Humor in Hyperspace: Smith’s Uses of Satire
225
ages even more remote in time). Naturally, we find humor to a greater or lesser extent depending on the setting, but it would be a mistake to view the Hyperborean tales as less serious or effective weird fiction than the tales of Zothique on this basis alone. While the sardonic tone of the Hyperborea series is suited to the time-lost setting for the tales, that setting itself is grounded in Smith’s pessimistic Welt-anschauung, and the series as a whole represents his most cogent indictment of the coarseness, stupidity, and credulous vanity of the human animal. The “Rabelaisian rogues and scoundrels” within these tales, most of which, as he told August Derleth, “were written in a vein of grotesque humor” (Murray 8) have names like
“Veezi Phenquor,” “Hoom Feethos,” “Ralibar Vooz,” and “Avoosl Wuthoqquan,”
all suggestive of the unctuous sleaziness of their possessors. Driven by greed or the desire for notoriety, they receive their comeuppance through encounters with
forces “vast and mysterious,” which do not submit to man’s attempts to know
them. The attitude conveyed, albeit obliquely, accords with the sad but true observations of de Tocqueville:
In Europe, people talk a great deal about the wilds of America, but the
Americans themselves never talk about them; they are insensible to the wonders
of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight . . . they . . . march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature . (557)
Smith bemoans this mindless consumerism in a few of his letters, even wist-
fully expressing a desire to move to the East Indies ( SL 292). Distanced from the mainstream and contemporary movements in art and culture at-large, he used humor at strategic moments in his stories to manipulate the sense of distance be-
tween his fantasy worlds and the familiar world of the reader’s experience. In the macabre fiction that he preferred writing, verisimilitude, defined as “the semblance of reality in dramatic or nondramatic fiction” ( EOL 1162) must be established.
Smith pushed the envelope by asking readers to accept temporarily the idea of an alternative reality, instead of the extension of reality sought by Lovecraft. In other words, he encourages us to adopt an aesthetic attitude. That is one reason why he
“unleashes his wide and esoteric vocabulary without restraint” (Joshi 504), for as Terry Heller observed, “In order to be pleased by terror, they [readers] must exercise . . . all those faculties which are necessary for the arts of reading and understanding” (47). Heller quotes Edward Bullough on the necessity of reducing
narrative distance in fiction: “What is, therefore, both in appreciation and production most desirable is the utmost decrease of distance without its disappearance” (43).
“Mother of Toads,” from the series placed in the imaginary medieval French
province of Averoigne, exemplifies how humor noir, which basic
ally attempts to disorient and upset the reader, may also serve to reduce narrative distance. The contro-versial temptation scene describing the grossly fat body of the witch, Antoinette, is
226 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
unsettling because it forces us into a receptive attitude, even as the narrative switches from the sensual to the psychological at that point (“This time he did not draw away. . . .”). We would feel disgusted with ourselves if we were much titillated by its explicit eroticism because of the earlier description of her voice, eyes, throat, breasts and hands as hideously “batrachian” ( MOT 9). So we reestablish our distance, our uneasiness negotiating the tension between the real and the unreal, making Pierre Baudin’s dramatic drowning in marshy waters by a crushing multitude of frogs more terrifying—especially the final sentence’s confirmation of our fear that the witch is not merely a repulsively fat woman, but an inhuman changeling as well.
The best of Smith’s purely comical stories are “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoq-
quan,” wherein a deceitful money-lender is served his just desserts by a cave-
dwelling monster hoarding a mountainous pile of gems, and “The Great God
Awto,” a very clever piece of satire that envisages how the architectural relics of our car-loving culture could be misinterpreted by sixtieth-century anthropologists.
A few others, notably “Schizoid Creator” and “Symposium of the Gorgon,” are
slight farces. The former toys with Gnosticism’s concept of the demiurge, a secondary deity who originated evil and was sometimes identified with the Jehovah of the Bible. It may have been conceived as a jocular tribute to his friend E. Hoffmann Price’s story, “The Stranger from Kurdistan” ( Weird Tales, July 1925). Each focuses on the personification of good and evil. Smith’s ill-fated protagonist, Dr. Carlos Moreno, is obsessed with the idea that God and Satan are the twin personas of one and the same deity. Standing in an occult protective circle robed in black, ritualistic knife and specially modified hazelwood staff in hand, with metallic sigils attached to his chest and forehead, he determines to conjure and cure the schizophrenic godhead, or die trying. But psychiatrists make delusional demonolo-gists, for Moreno only manages to capture the demon Bifrons, and compounds his
error by assuming that Bifrons is the real deal (Satan). The demon, piqued at the interruption of an “amorous dalliance with the she-imp Foti” ( TSS 215), pretends to be cured after enduring an elaborate form of shock therapy: “You have restored Me to My Divinity, O wise and beneficent doctor. Pronounce the formula of release and let Me go. Hell is henceforth abolished, together with all evil, sin and disease.
The Devil is dead. God alone exists. And God is good” (218). Overconfident of success, Moreno complies, whereupon Bifrons trashes his makeshift laboratory, leaving the human in a state of gibbering lunacy. Predictably, the ending confirms Moreno’s theory, as Satan, exiting by “the small postern door of Hell,” transforms into his holy alter ego and steps “across the sill into Heaven” (221).
The first-person narrator of “Symposium of the Gorgon” is transported to the
ancient palace of the Gorgons after a night of heavy drinking. Written late in the author’s life, its best moment is a speech by the mythological winged horse, Pegasus, who, “neighing in excellent Greek,” refuses to carry the drunkard back to his point of origin, the New York of the twentieth century:
I cannot visit the century, and, in particular, the country, that you name. Any
Humor in Hyperspace: Smith’s Uses of Satire
227
poets who are born there must do without me—must hoist themselves to inspira-
tion by their own bootstraps, rather than the steed of the Muses. If I ventured to land there, I should be impounded at once and my wings clipped. Later they
would sell me for horse meat. ( TSS 225–26)
Smith is simply reaffirming his disgust with the drabness of most modern po-
etry, and reflecting upon his youthful disappointment with the changing tastes of the literary establishment. This attitude found its clearest expression in his satirical masterpiece, “The Monster of the Prophecy.” The plot is an allegory of Smith’s
writing career, with many amusing points of departure. Everything from astrology to furniture fabric to unfair labor laws is touched upon. The protagonist is Theo-philus Alvor, a “country-bred” poet with “lodgings so humble as almost to constitute the proverbial poetic garret” ( OST 303).
He is dissuaded from jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge by a clairvoyant
stranger who takes him to his lodgings. The stranger’s ability to read thought
waves is proven by his knowledge of the friendless poet’s unpublished writings, and he compliments Alvor on his “Ode to Antares,” which he ominously says was
written “with an inspiration more prophetic than you dream” ( OST 306). Identifying himself as Vizaphmal, an intergalactic sojourner from the planet Sattabor in the Antares system, and a scientist whom “the more ignorant classes” regard as a wizard ( OST 307), he reveals his true appearance as a seven-foot tall being with an incredible morphology of five arms, three legs, and an elongated, curved neck
supporting a red-crested head with three eyes that give forth a “green phosphorescence.” In addition, “the head, the limbs and the whole body were mottled with
interchanging lunes and moons of opalescent colors, never the same for a moment in their unresting flux and reflux” ( OST 309). This extravagance of description is typical of Smith’s humor—his bemused way of seeing Alvor’s fixation with his financial problems, and his willingness to compromise his art for money—through
an imaginative lens. When Alvor returns to Sattabor with the alien, he is employed in a scheme to gain political control of Ulphalor, a realm covering the northern part of the planet. Exploiting the weakness of a populace hopelessly steeped in “religious sentiment and the veneration of the past,” they stage a quasi-fulfillment of an ancient prediction by the revered prophet Abbolechiolor, who foretold the
coming of a great wizard and “a most unique and unheard-of monster with two
arms, two legs, two eyes and a white skin,” which would result in the deposing of the king before noon ( OST 324). The hyper-religious Sattaborians do indeed revolt when Vizaphmal and the “monster” make their appearance, timed in conjunction
with the lunar phases of Sattabor’s three moons as detailed by the “long-winded”
prophet. An amusing coda to the spoof is supplied by the triumphant Vizaphmal’s glib statement to Alvor: “You must agree with me that the great Abbolechiolor
was happily inspired” ( OST 331).
Eventually the deception wears thin, and a counter-revolution forces Vizaph-
mal’s Dr. Who–like decampment to points unknown in the cosmos. Alvor is cap-
228 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
tured and tortured by a priestly class, on the pretext that his ugliness is an insult to
“Cunthamosi, the Cosmic Mother” ( OST 335), but he escapes to Omanorion, a southern realm free of religious strife, and becomes the paramour of the empress, Ambiala. By an absurd coincidence, she is also a poetess who wrote an ode to our own sun, known to her as Atana. Smith clearly implies that Ambiala’s ode, “replete with poetic fancies of a high order” ( OST 345) is superior to the one by Alvor, whose thoughts about his own sexual reorientation to Ambiala’s anatomy are contrasted with her more respectable conviction that they are truly compatible. Even in a rare happy ending, Smith cannot resist a jest at the expense of human dignity.
We can only respond by echoing the sentiments of Domitian Malgraff, who after
precipitating himself into the Void, would say, “Even in the bleak abyss that yawns unbridgeable between the stars, I was not allured by the thought of the stale and commonplace world I had left” ( LW 346).
Works Cited
Behrends, Steve. “Clark Ashton Smith: Cosmicist or Misanthrope.�
�� Dark Eidolon 2
(1989): 12–14.
Bullough, Edward. “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle.”
In Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt, 1971.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Library of America, 2004.
Heller, Terry. “Poe’s Ligeia and the Pleasures of Terror.” Gothic 2, No. 2 (December 1980): 39–48
Hilger, Ronald S., and Scott Connors. “The Magellan of the Constellations: An Introduction.” In Red World of Polaris. By Clark Ashton Smith. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2003.
Joshi, S. T. H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick: Necronomicon Press, 1996.
Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield, MA, 1995. [ EOL]
Murray, Will. “Introduction.” In The Book of Hyperborea. By Clark Ashton Smith. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996.
Smith, Clark Ashton. Mother of Toads. The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Steve Behrends. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988. [ MOT]
Stauffer, Donald Barlow. The Merry Mood: Poe’s Uses of Humor. Baltimore, MD: The Enoch Pratt Free Library and The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1982.
Song of the Necromancer:
“Loss” in Clark Ashton Smith’s Fiction
Steve Behrends
The writings of Clark Ashton Smith display a continuity of idea and image that can only be described as remarkable. Fantastic settings and happenings from his early poems crop up twenty years later as the bases for short stories; prose-poems written in Smith’s mid-twenties were fleshed into the elaborate fictions of his forties; he would write of Medusa in 1911, in his verse masterpiece “Medusa,” and in 1957, four years before his death, in the ironic tale “The Symposium of the Gorgon.” Evidence for the interconnectedness of Smith’s literary output is discernible in nearly every poem and story. The endurance of this imaginative vision should give us all pause.
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