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by David E. Schultz

  denly the past lives again for him, and he is the king of a bountiful land. But in time he succumbs to ennui, and finds himself wishing for the simple life of a goatherd. In an instant he is back once more in the leper-peopled desert of Calyz.

  His heart was a black chill of desolation, and he seemed to himself as one who had known . . . the loss of high splendor; and who stood now amid the extremity of age and decay. . . . Anguish choked the heart of Xeethra as if with the ashes of burnt-out pyres and the shards of heaped ruin. . . . In the end, there was only dust and dearth; and he, the doubly accursed, must remember and repent for evermore all that he had forfeited. ( RA 363, 364)

  Xeethra can never return to either the powerful life of a monarch, or the carefree and uncluttered life of a shepherd.

  An even grander scale of suffering arising from “the loss of the past” is dis-

  played in the prose-poem “Sadastor.” On a distant planet, “dim and grey beneath a waning sun . . . a token of doom to fairer and younger worlds” ( OST 219), the demon Chamadis discovers the mermaid Lyspial wallowing in a small briny pool that had once been a far-flung ocean. She has witnessed the slow desiccation of the sea and the destruction of the glorious world of her past; she is tortured with the knowledge of her present state, and of all she has lost.

  “Of the seas wherein I swam and sported at leisure . . . there remains only this fallen pool. Alas! my lovely seas, with their mingled perfumes of brine and weed

  . . . Alas! the quinquiremes of cycle-ended wars, and the heavy-laden argosies with sails of cordage and byssus. . . . Alas! the dead captains, the beautiful dead sailors that were borne by the ebbing tide to my couches of amber seaweed. . . . Alas! the kisses that I laid on their cold and hueless lips . . .” ( OST 220, 221) Another fallen world is presented in the prose-poem, “From the Crypts of

  Memory.” The setting is a shadowy planet orbiting “a star whose course [was] decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past” ( NU 12). The people of this world are unspeakably ancient and have fallen far from their golden past. Only in memories can they haltingly recapture “an epoch whose marvelous worlds have

  crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow” ( NU 12). But such memories only add to the burden of age and sorrow, and by contrast their lives are made to seem even more pale and ghostly: “Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the

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  dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women . . . the same desire that the dead may feel” ( NU 13).

  And it doesn’t stop there—for Smith’s characters, not even death is an end to

  yearning and despair. On the contrary: while “a living death” was used in “From the Crypts of Memory” as a metaphor for a great suffering, a literal “life in death” is employed in “The Empire of the Necromancers” as a tool for generating feelings of loss. The legions of the dead, drawn forth from their tombs to serve as slaves to a pair of necromancers, find themselves living a sort of half-life: “the state to which they were summoned was empty and troublous and shadow-like. They knew no

  passion or desire, or delight.” We hear of their longings through the resurrected Prince of the people, who “knew that he had come back to a faded sun, to a hollow and spectral world. Like something lost and irretrievable, beyond prodigious gulfs, he recalled the pomp of his reign . . . and the golden pride and exultation that had been his in youth. . . . Darkly he began to grieve for his fallen state” ( RA 321).

  Smith tormented the poor souls of this story with the loss of their glorious pasts, their very lives, and even the peace of oblivion.

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

  Now how do I top that? Smith must have asked himself. We find his answer in a handful of stories in which individuals lose not simply the past, nor even life itself, but a glory beyond life, some “unnatural” state or condition. In every case the

  “unnatural state of being” is an ecstatic and desired one, and of course this makes perfect sense: Smith wanted his characters to long for the splendor they had experienced, beside which everyday life is wan and inadequate. And given such glorious experiences, they would naturally make the contrasts and comparisons of

  “then” and “now” that Smith liked to use, and feel the kind of regret and empty despair that so fascinated him.

  The visions presented to these hapless characters are often so completely

  strange and wondrous that they can only be seen or understood in part. They are too far beyond the mundane sphere of human experience, like the image of incarnate Beauty glimpsed in Smith’s poem “A Dream of Beauty”: “Her face the light

  of fallen planets wore, / But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment, / Mine eyes

  were dazzled, and I saw no more” ( LO 153). This itself is a technique Smith used to intensify and magnify the contrast of the inconceivable state of being, and the return to commonplace reality.

  Stories in this category include “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The End of

  the Story,” “The Light from Beyond,” and “The White Sybil.” There is no need to describe the distinct wonders found in each of these tales. We need only note the similarity of their characters attitudes as they “come off the high” of their unique experiences:

  Words are futile to express what I have beheld and experienced. . . . Literature is nothing more than a shadow. Life, with its drawn-out length of monotonous, reit-

  The Song of the Necromancer

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  erative days, is unreal and without meaning, now. (“The City of the Singing

  Flame” [ RA 194])

  I have forgotten much of the delirium that ensued. . . . There were things too

  vast for memory to retain. And much that I remember could only be told in the

  language of Olympus. . . . Infinities were rolled before me. . . . I peered down upon the utmost heavens. . . . I am a mere remnant of my former self. (“The Light from Beyond” [ LW 386, 387, 388])

  Of all that followed, much was forgotten afterwards by Tortha. It was like a

  light too radiant to be endured . . . ever afterward there was a cloudy dimness in his mind, a blur of unresolving shadow, like the dazzlement in eyes that have looked on some insupportable light. (“The White Sybil” [ AY 69, 71])

  For the heroes of these stories this past glory shall always be more resplendent and desirable than either the present or the future, a time always to be longed for. And for some it is a thing they must try to regain, whatever the cost.

  “. . . I would recall . . . a buried bliss . . .”

  “Song of the Necromancer” has been our general guidebook to Smith’s relation-

  ship to loss, and we take note that it begins with a declaration of intent: the unhappy sorcerer (we learn of his unhappiness in the subsequent stanzas) would seek to resummon his lost past, and to draw back his dead love from the tomb. As we have

  seen, the same is true of several of the characters we find in Smith’s short stories.

  Why Smith should have them strive to recapture what they have lost is obvi-

  ous—such striving serves to underscore their unhappiness, and the depths of their dissatisfaction. That all these attempts either fail or end in self-destruction reflects Smith’s generally pessimistic outlook. “You can never go home again,” he’s telling us, “it’s no longer there.” Or if it is still there, and somehow you succeed in making it back, the achievement will amount to a very mixed blessing.

  In a story like “Told in the Desert” what is sought after is literally unattainable, for though he may search the desert for the rest of his life, that young man will never again find the fertile oasis in which he lived so happily with Neria.

  What Malgyris seeks in “The Last Incantation” is just as unattainable, though

  more figuratively so. Believing that he would be content to have his lost Nylissa beside h
im again, he summons her specter from the grave. Once she has materialized, however, he begins to find fault with her manner and appearance. Dissatisfied and unsettled, he dismisses the phantom, at which point his familiar explains the true nature of his yearning and its predestined failure: “No necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless heart that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then” ( RA 97).

  This same lesson is learned in Smith’s unfinished tale “Mnemoka.” Space-

  Alley Jon, a drifter of the space-lanes, purchases an illicit Martian drug which brings back memories with all the strength of real experiences. Jon intends to relive

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  his first sexual experience, back in his innocent adolescence, with a girl named Sophia: “[R]emoved in time by years spent on half the solar worlds . . . [t]he thrill of that yielding . . . remained poignant in memory” ( SS 137–38). But after downing the drug, he is haunted instead by visions of a brutal murder he recently committed. His life has become too soiled to allow retrieval of the moment he longed for.

  The boy who had lain with Sophia no longer existed. Jon, like Malygris, has learned that the same river can never be crossed twice.

  Calaspa’s quest in “The Chain of Aforgomon” is also unsatisfying, and is self-

  destructive as well. His conjured hour with Belthoris vanishes back into the past just as a temporary spat develops between the two lovers. Ending on such a sour note, he proclaims that “vain, like all other hours, was the resummoned hour; doubly irredeemable was my loss” ( RA 225). Equally tragic is the price Calaspa pays, as he knew he must, for casting the time-distorting spell: he is tortured and killed by the local priesthood, and his soul is cursed to travel from body to body into the future, until in some other incarnation he shall die again for his crime.

  Indeed, even when the acknowledged price is their own destruction, Smith’s

  men go forward unhaltingly to retrieve what they have lost, so great is their despair.

  The narrator of “The City of the Singing Flame” ends the tale by saying that he wil return to the City and immolate himself in the Flame, that he might merge with the unearthly beauty and music that he had sampled and lost; and the hero of “The End of the Story” makes the same resolution, to die on the couch of a deadly lamia, from which he had been taken by force, rather than live out his years without her love: I lamented the beautiful dream of which [I had been] deprived. . . . Never before had I experienced a passion of such intensity, such all-consuming ardor, as the one I conceived for [the lamia Nycea] . . . and I know that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever rouse in

  me the same love and the same delight. ( RA 75)

  But whether they seek to regain their loss, or choose to suffer through a life of torment and regret, the characters in the stories we’ve discussed are all made to feel

  “the loss of high splendor,” to live through “sunken years,” and to long for the return of “a buried bliss”; and as each is the puppet-creation of Clark Ashton Smith, their songs of woe should be seen as those of the Necromancer himself.

  Works Cited

  de Camp, L. Sprague. “The Prose Tales of Clark Ashton Smith.” In In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Jack L. Chalker. Baltimore: Anthem/Jack L. Chalker and Associates, 1963, pp. 65–68.

  Leiber, Fritz. “Clark Ashton Smith: An Appreciation.” In In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith, pp. 71–73.

  Smith, Carol Jones Dorman. “The Man Who Walks the Stars.” Ms., Clark Ashton

  Smith Papers. John Hay Library, Brown University.

  Brave World Old and New:

  The Atlantis Theme in the Poetry and

  Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith

  Donald Sidney-Fryer

  One of the themes pivotal to the oeuvre of the late Clark Ashton Smith is that which may be identified, specifically and generically, as the Atlantis theme, whether it assumes the name of Atlantis or that of some other Atlantis-like locale, such as Mu or Lemuria, or Hyperborea or Zothique for that matter. It is a theme or background that runs through the tapestry of a lifetime in word-weaving from virtually his first published work to literally his last. Of all the writers who have used, or extrapolated from, Plato’s “quaint conceit,” the Atlantis myth (as detailed in the two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias), few have done so with the taste, invention, and seriousness that Smith has demonstrated in his handling of this theme and/or background.

  This is probably because Smith—of all such writers—is the closest to Plato in

  the quality of sheer poetic imagination. Just as much as Plato who created the Atlantis myth for didactic purposes, Smith has utilized it for his own serious ends, whether in verse or in prose. And Smith is undeniably the only major poet in English who has to date featured it in his own poetry and prose on a comparatively important scale, all discussion of novels by romancers of hackneyed imagination swept aside. This is odd when one considers the rare possibilities for splendor and

  “glamour” that this Platonic near-utopia proffers to the original poet.

  Whatever the reasons for its neglect as a source of poetry, Smith in his literary output overall is the first and foremost poet in English to achieve, radiating from this theme, a sizeable body of poetry that possesses genuine substance and beauty. However, Smith’s great patron and poetic mentor George Sterling had included in his magisterial narrative in verse “A Wine of Wizardry” (first published in the Cosmopolitan for September 1907, in which issue the young Smith first read the poem) an implicitly Atlantean passage, as follows:

  Shapes

  of

  men

  that

  were

  Point, weeping, at tremendous dooms to be,

  When pillared pomps and thrones supreme shall stir,

  Unstable as the foam-dreams of the sea. (150)

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  This especial passage, among others from the same source, would fructify the

  younger poet’s imagination and haunt it, long after he had first read and conned Sterling’s poem, not only in Smith’s own early but first mature poetry but just as much in his later tales of Atlantis, or (in his own employment of the fabled background) its embodiment as a good-sized final fragment, “Poseidonis,” a concept that Smith apparently derived from the Theosophist writings of Helena Blavatsky.

  The most salient examples in which Smith gives expression to the Atlantis

  theme are found for the most part not so much in his miscellaneously published

  poetry as in his collections of poetry, whether appearing early or late in his career.

  The first examples characteristically occur in Smith’s first volume of verse, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912). And the very first example, proto-Atlantean, is contained in the first stanza of the poem “The Cloud-Islands.”

  What islands marvellous are these,

  That gem the sunset’s tides of light—

  Opals aglow in saffron seas?

  How beautiful they lie, and bright,

  Like some new-found Hesperides! ( LO 91)

  In Greek mythology, the Hesperides were those islands in the extreme west

  (i.e., as such appeared to the ancient Greeks living in Greece itself), and which contained the gardens wherein grew the golden apples guarded by nymphs (also called Hesperides) with the aid of a dragon. Presumably these islands lay somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantis, according to Plato, lay somewhere in the North Atlantic and west of the Pillars of Heracles or Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar), and hence was undoubtedly a hesperian island continent. The Hesperides prefigure Atlantis and possibly may have served, together with other islands, as a model for the Atlantis of Plato, an island empery remarkable for its wealth, extent, and antiquity, as well as for its almost utopian justice and order.

  The next example, the sonnet “Atlantis” ( LO 89), g
ives us an impressive submarine tableau of the sunken capital of the empire of Atlantis:

  Above its domes the gulfs accumulate

  To where the sea-winds trumpet forth their screed;

  But here the buried waters take no heed—

  Deaf, and with closed lips from press of weight

  Imposed by ocean. Dim, inanimate,

  On temples of an unremembered creed

  Involved in long, slow tentacles of weed,

  The dead tide lies immovable as Fate.

  From out the ponderous-vaulted ocean-dome,

  A clouded light is questionably shed

  On altars of a goddess garlanded

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  241

  With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;

  And wingèd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,

  Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.

  In particular, amongst many other things, we might note what a subtle visual effect is achieved by line 10: “A clouded light is questionably shed”—but the sonnet is a highly creditable achievement throughout.

  Smith’s third volume of verse—and his second major collection of poetry—

  Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (published by Smith himself in 1922), contains some half-dozen references to Atlantis or Atlantis-like places. While these references may for the most part be but peripheral, they hint at a proto-historic world of unimaginable glamour and beauty.

  The secret rose we vainly dream to find,

  Was blown in grey Atlantis long ago,

  Or in old summers of the realms of snow,

  Its attar lulled the pole-arisen wind;

  Or once its broad and breathless petals pined

  In gardens of Persepolis, aglow

  With desert sunlight, and the fiery, slow

  Red waves of sand, invincible and blind.

  On orient isles, or isles hesperian,

  Through mythic days ere mortal time began,

  It flowered above the ever-flowering foam;

  Or, legendless, in lands of yesteryear,