Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  Equally impressive is the tenacity with which Smith clung to certain emotional

  themes throughout his work, and of these, he returned most frequently to “loss.”

  Perhaps a quarter of Smith’s fantastic stories (25 or 30 out of some 110) deal

  in a basic fashion with the subject of loss, and in this essay we shall concern ourselves with the most prominent of these; but nearly every Smith tale and many of his poems make some reference to loss, or use an image of loss metaphorically to set an emotional tone.

  In this article attention will be paid to the types of loss we find in Smith’s fiction (with some discussion as to why he chose to present those types), and to his attitude toward attempts to regain whatever was lost. The structure of the essay has been inspired by “Song of the Necromancer,” a poem in Smith’s jotting notebook, The Black Book, that seems to encapsulate nearly all the major aspects of his relationship to loss. The poem strikes me as a piece of some importance for an understanding of Smith’s work in fiction:

  I would recall a forfeit woe,

  A buried bliss; my heart is fain

  Ever to seek and find again

  The lips whereon my lips have lain

  In rose-red twilights long ago.

  Lost are the lands of my desire,

  Long fled, the hours of my delight,

  The darkling splendor, fallen might:

  In aeons past, the bournless night

  Was rolled upon my rubied pyre.

  230 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  * * *

  In far oblivion blows the desert

  Which was the lovely world I knew.

  Quenched are the suns of gold and blue. . . .

  Into the nadir darkness thrust,

  My world has gone as meteors go. . . . ( BB 23)

  Coming from a man whose tales abound with mages and wizards, and who

  had a poetic image of himself as a solitary sorcerer (an entire cycle of his personal love-poems was to have been called “Wizard’s Love”), the poem’s title is a very suggestive one. In fact, “The Song of the Necromancer” is Smith’s own “song.”

  Like any writer who has ever had to scramble to provide motivation for some

  character, Smith used loss as a plot-element in several of his tales, including “The Ghoul,” in which a man’s despair over the death of his wife drives him to bargain with a demon; “The Flower-Women,” wherein Maâl Dweb’s yearning for his action-filled youth leads him to challenge the denizens of an untamed world; and

  “Thirteen Phantasms,” whose main character is plagued by bizarre hallucinations of his lost beloved. But for Smith there was an importance to loss that went far beyond plot: his real interest was not in what loss could make his characters do, but in how it could make them feel.

  Smith created scores of situations in which individuals lose the things closest to their hearts and live on only to regret their loss and to contrast their fallen state with the glory they once knew. He gave his characters the capacity to realize the extent of their loss, and to express the pain they felt; and he used their scrutiny—

  their comparisons of “now” and “then,” of “what once had been” and “what is no

  more”—to spotlight the emotions he wished to convey to his readers.

  These emotions, attendant to “falls from grace” of one sort or another, were

  very special to Smith, and he worked all their shadings and manifestations into his literary output: regret, nostalgia, homesickness, alienation, grief, ennui, loss of innocence, age, death, decay. Certain verbs and adjectives literally ring in our ears after a session with his stories or poems, so often do we encounter them: “sunken,”

  “faded,” “fallen,” “lost,” “irretrievable,” “longing,” “yearning,” “seeking.”

  Having just argued for such a central role for “loss” in Smith’s fiction, permit me a brief aside. You have in your hands, to the best of my knowledge, the very first essay to discuss Smith’s profound fixation with “loss”; I have never encountered this word linked to Smith in any forum whatsoever. How, then, is it possible that the overarching concern of Smith’s literary life has gone entirely unnoticed by generations of his critics? Why has this “Pattern in Smith’s Carpet,” so to speak, not been recognized before now? Good questions; but for all that I might speculate on their answers, my most honest reply really boils down to “Beats me.”

  But having said that . . . perhaps it’s partly been a case of mistaken identity. This has been true, I believe, for those critics who have viewed Smith as an individual preoccupied with Death. Fritz Leiber, for instance, wrote that “Death in all its

  The Song of the Necromancer

  231

  phases—from maggot-banquets to mere forgetting, erasing forever from all tables of memory—seems to be [Smith’s] chief inspiration and theme” (72). But this is a mis-diagnosis, an oversimplification, a mistaking of the symptom for the disease. It may well be true, as L. Sprague de Camp once said, that “no one since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse” (65), but Death in itself never obsessed Smith. Rather, Death opened a doorway; and through it would come Death’s handmaidens, Yearning and

  Loss. These were the real objects of Clark Ashton Smith’s obsession, the ground-notes to his emotional life. We hear them sounding clearly in the voice of John Milwarp, writer of imaginative fiction and hero of Smith’s “The Chain of Aforgomon”:

  “In the background of my mind there has lurked a sentiment of formless, melan-

  choly desire, for some nameless beauty long perished out of time” ( RA 216).

  Taking “Song of the Necromancer” as our guidebook to “loss” in Smith, we

  note that the Necromancer of the poem recites a litany of his greatest losses: love, youth and vigor and power, a world of impossible splendor—all have vanished.

  These three varieties of loss will be discussed in turn. While it is true that the sources for his characters’ feelings of loss were of lesser interest to Smith than the feelings themselves, this choice of organization provides us a ghoulish opportunity for some biographical muckraking. We will look for significant events and circumstances in Smith’s own life, the echoes and shadows of which may represent the different kinds of loss we find in his fiction.

  We conclude the essay by discussing the fates of those who choose “to seek

  and find again” what they have lost.

  “. . . the lips whereon my lips have lain . . .”

  As might be expected of a poet, Smith was greatly attracted to the strength of

  the emotion of love, and the fervor with which we cling to it and to our lovers.

  (Note that his love-poems certainly outnumber his more famous “fantastic” or

  “horrific” poems.) Since it looms so large in our lives, Smith found love an ideal thing for the characters of his stories to lose.

  And as it happens, Smith himself had suffered such a loss. Facts are scanty at

  present, but Smith is known to have fallen in love with “Iris,” a “nymph of . . .

  harvest-colored hair” (as he said of her in an unpublished poem, “For Iris”), perhaps in the early 1920s. His eventual wife, Carol Jones Dorman, wrote that “he lavished his love upon his first, hopelessly ill beloved, who died of consumption

  before she was thirty. . . . And always, after the first tragedy of love for the beautiful blonde separated from her husband . . . [Smith] chose brunettes for his deepest loves.” And among the poems Smith wrote to or for his Iris, we find the following item, untitled and unpublished, from February 1923:

  Your hair, a memory of gold

  Alone remains from buried years:

  What love was ours, what grief, or happy tears,

  Is now a tale untold.

  232 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  But Smith would tell the tale of this lost love, veiled and fictionalized perhaps, in many poems and stories.

  The textbook
example of such a “loss of love” story is “The Venus of Azom-

  beii.” The central character of this tale, Julius Marsden, has felt throughout his life

  “the ineffable nostalgia of the far-off and the unknown” (compare this against

  Smith’s own “wild aspiration toward the unknown, the uncharted, the exotic, the utterly strange and ultra-terrestrial,” as he stated it to Lovecraft in October 1930

  [ SL 127]), which compels him to make a journey to dark and mysterious Africa. In a wilderness region he meets a beautiful black woman, Mybaloë, whom he comes

  to love. Marsden experiences a time of wild happiness: “A powerful fever exalted all my senses, a deep indolence bedrugged my brain. I lived, as never before, and never again, to the full capacity of my corporeal being. . . . The world and its fullness were ours” ( OD 229, 231; emphasis added).

  As Smith would have it, though, their life together is soon shattered through

  the treachery of a rival suitor to Mybaloë. Both lovers are poisoned with a slow-killing brew, by which, please note, Smith gives them plenty of time to realize the sadness of their fate and the fullness of their loss. “Dead was all our former joy and happiness. . . . Love, it was true, was still ours, but love that already seemed to have entered the hideous gloom and nothingness of the grave. . . . The leaden lapse of funereal days, beneath heavens from which for us the very azure had departed”

  ( OD 236–37). Smith shows us the high peak of their love, and in contrast the low ebb of their fallen state.

  Identical in its emotions but with a slight twist to its development is the extended prose-poem “Told in the Desert.” A young traveler loses his way while crossing a desert expanse. He eventually stumbles upon a cool and fertile oasis where dwells a beautiful girl, Neria. We are told that the young man’s sojourn with Neria, like that of Marsden and Mybaloë in “Azombeii,” was “a life remote from all the fevers of the world, and pure from every soilure; it was infinitely sweet and secure” ( OD 327).

  Unlike Marsden in “Azombeii,” however, the hero of “Desert” abandons his

  idyllic love-nest, his “irretrievable Aidann,” rather than having it taken away from him. But Smith does not end the story there. The man comes to yearn for his “bygone year . . . of happiness”; and seeking in later years the splendor of the oasis, he is doomed to wander in vain, and all his days thereafter are filled with “only the fading visions of memory, the tortures and despairs and illusions of the quested miles, the waste whereon there falls no lightest shadow of any leaf, and the wells whose taste is fire and madness” ( OD 329).

  The next two stories to be discussed, “The Chain of Aforgomon” and “The

  Last Incantation,” have necromancers as their main characters rather than adventurous young men, and possess some other common features to which we will re-

  turn later.

  In “Aforgomon” the sorcerer Calaspa invokes the powers of an evil god to

  win back a flown hour with his dead beloved, Belthoris. The past is temporarily

  The Song of the Necromancer

  233

  regained through this necromancy, and in typical fashion Smith presents their resurrected love in the grandest of terms. “We dwelt alone in a universe of light, in a blossomed heaven. Exalted by love in the high harmony of those moments, we

  seemed to touch eternity” ( RA 224). We are left to contrast this with Calaspa’s mood after the hour has passed: “Sorrow and desolation choked my heart as ashes fill some urn consecrated to the dead; and all the hues and perfumes of the garden about me were redolent only of the bitterness of death” ( RA 218).

  “The Last Incantation” contains some of Smith’s finest descriptions of the

  emotions of loss, and the story also serves as a bridge between the “loss of love”

  and “loss of the past” tales.

  At the height of his powers as the mightiest sorcerer of Poseidonis, Malgyris the Mage sees only the empty, unchallenging years ahead of him, and the barren moments of the present, and takes but a cold and hollow joy from his exalted position. Smith’s description of this state of mind is worth quoting in full:

  . . . and turning from the greyness of the present, from the darkness that seemed to close in upon the future, he groped among the shadows of memory, even as a blind man who has lost the sun and seeks it everywhere in vain. And all the vistas of time that had been so full of gold and splendor, the days of triumph that were colored like a soaring flame, the crimson and purple of the rich imperial years of his prime, all these were chill and dim and strangely faded now, and the remembrance thereof was no more than the stirring of dead embers. . . . There was nothing left but

  shadow and greyness and dust, nothing but the empty dark and the cold, and a

  clutching weight of insufferable weariness, of immedicable anguish. ( RA 94, 97) Amid this desolation, Malgyris is sustained only by a gentle memory from his innocent youth which “like an alien star . . . still burned with unfailing luster—the memory of the girl Nylissa whom he had loved in days ere the lust of unpermitted knowledge and necromantic dominion had ever entered his soul” ( RA 94).

  Like the male protagonists of the other stories discussed, Malgyris aches for his lost love. Unlike the others, however, his mind also dwells upon the passing of his former, untarnished self, the “fervent and guileless heart” of his youth, and the glorious, sun-filled days of his past. This sentiment leads us to a group of stories featuring Smith’s second method for bringing loss and regret into the lives of his characters.

  “. . . the darkling splendor, fallen might . . .”

  Smith set his most famous cycle of stories, the tales of Zothique, in a “fallen”

  world where the past infinitely outweighs the future. “On Zothique, the last continent, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood” ( RA 365). There are constant reminders of age and decay, of a glory withered away by Time: vast deserts of tombs and buried cities, frequent references to the greater potency of potions and spells of elder wizards, etc.

  On the level of the individual, Smith dishes out the same bitter meal. His fic-

  tion is filled with characters haunted by memories of a more desirable past, from

  234 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  whom Time has stolen precious years. Depending on the character in question—

  again, Smith’s focus is on loss itself, not the object lost—they may desire the power and glory they once knew, the simplicity and vigor of the years of youth, a lost innocence, some splendorous state of being, or the vanished beauty and grandeur of incomparable cultures and beloved worlds. (Here, of course, one notes the title of Smith’s second collection of short stories, Lost Worlds, originally The Book of Lost Worlds.)

  Just why Smith was so obsessed with the notion of “a fall from a past of grace”

  is a matter for speculation, and we should bear in mind that “armchair psychoanalysis” is a dubious profession. Still, it is possible that at the time he wrote the bulk of his stories, Smith felt that he had suffered a profound “fall from grace.” Smith’s late teens and early twenties had certainly been a heady period: he’d been taken under the wing of a personal idol, the poet George Sterling, and his first book of poetry had brought him comparisons to Keats and Shelley. This notoriety must surely have

  raised his standing in his small hometown, not to mention his own expectations for the future. And yet the Depression found Smith without a job or viable occupation, unable to eke out a living as a poet, with girlfriends berating him for his lack of ambition. And while his switch to writing fiction for the pulps did put bread on the table, he found it a very distasteful business at times—he once said to Sterling that writing prose was “a hateful task, for a poet, and [one which] wouldn’t be necessary in any true civilization” ( SU 283). In short, it may be that Smith suffered that variety of “let-down” or loss peculiar to child p
rodigies.

  As a simple example of this yearning for the past, consider the following para-

  graph from “The Testament of Athammaus,” a story that details the desertion of

  the Hyperborean capital Commoriom as seen through the eyes of the one-time

  public executioner.

  Forgive an aged man if he seem to dwell, as is the habit of the old, among the

  youthful recollections that have gathered to themselves the kingly purple of removed horizons and the strange glory that illumes irretrievable things. Lo! I am made young again when I recall Commoriom, when in this grey city of the sunken

  years I behold in retrospect her walls that looked mountainously down upon the

  jungle . . . ( OST 257–58)

  Note that the years after Commoriom are “sunken,” and its glory is “irretriev-

  able.” Also note that Athammaus is alone in his suffering: “And though others forget, or haply deem her no more than a vain and dubitable tale, I shall never cease to lament Commoriom” ( OST 258). Though others are healed, Smith chose to center his tale on a man whose feelings of regret have remained strong and vivid.

  In “Xeethra,” perhaps his most famous tale of Zothique, Smith presents mul-

  tifold loss alongside monstrous irony. A young goatherd, Xeethra, eats an en-

  chanted fruit and is henceforth tormented by the memories of a past life wherein he was Prince Amero, ruler of the fair kingdom of Calyz. The bewildered and

  The Song of the Necromancer

  235

  newly awakened king is repelled by the rude and simple life of Xeethra; he longs for a dimly recalled life of opulence. He journeys in search of Calyz, but discovers that the land has become a parched desert. Xeethra/Amero is “whelmed by utter

  loss and despair” at the sight of his ruined and crumbled homeland.

  At this point in the story an emissary from Thasaidon, the Satan of the future, appears and offers him a strange deal. At the price of his soul, the life Amero once knew will be returned to him—but it will remain only so long as he wishes it to.

  Not really understanding this clause, the young man accepts the bond; and sud-