By these, by these I claim thee for mine own. . . .
Even as I have claimed thee long ago. ( SP 378)
Some especially poignant Atlantean references feature in the opening and clos-
ing of “Amor Hesternalis.” The opening stanza is particularly haunting: Our blood is swayed by sunken moons
And lulled by midnights long foredone;
We waken to a foundered sun
In Atlantean afternoons:
Our blood is swayed by sunken moons.
[. . .]
We are the specters of past years:
But soon Atlantis from the main
Shall lift; and Sappho bring again,
Risen from ancient brine and tears,
The living Lesbos of past years. ( SP 387)
The entire lyric that is “Sea Cycle” adumbrates, but only implicitly, an At-
lantean content as the opening and closing of the poem in question clearly demonstrate:
Below the cliff, before the granite stair,
The foam-crests curl and feather in blue air,
Numberless as the helmet-plumes of hosts
Resurgent from millennium-foundered coasts.
[. . .]
Though prayer be vain, this thing shall come to pass,
For still the solemn cycles wane and flow,
Bringing again the lost and long ago.
All that the sea has taken, the sea restores:
Somehow, somewhere, on ocean-winnowed shores,
Again we two shall wander, and shall not stay,
Finding the golden wrack of yesterday. ( SP 399–400)
Another example of a lyric doing so implicitly, the very final poem in the en-
tire cycle, the sonnet “Avowal,” adumbrates many an Atlantis arising out of the far future—deep in “the cosmic sea sublime”—but all of which shall arise in vain, if it does not restore to us the pristine beauty, wonder, love, and mystery from our collective past, immeasurable and immemorial:
256 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Whatever alien fruits and changeling faces
And pleasances of mutable perfume
The flambeaux of the senses shall illume
Amid the night-filled labyrinthine spaces,
In lives to be, in unestablished places,
All, all were vain as the rock-raveled spume
If no strange close restore the Paphian bloom,
No path return the moon-shod maenad’s paces.
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. ( SP 403)
The last completed poem that Smith created (insofar as our present information
allows us to state) is the sonnet in alexandrines, “Cycles,” written on 4 June 1961, a little more than two months before his death on 14 August 1961. Donald Sidney-Fryer commissioned this lyric expressly for his Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography, omitted therefrom by happenstance. This thus contains Smith’s very last reference to Atlantis in print:
The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,
Widening, deepening ever outward without bound . . .
Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;
And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall
Above a re-beginning cycle, turret-crowned.
New-born, the mage re-summons stronger spells, and spirits
With dazzling darkness clad about, and fierier flame
Renewed by aeon-curtained slumber. All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory the bored hours,
He calls upon Shem-hamphorash, the nameless Name. ( LO 174)
The love specifically taking place between Smith and Madelynne, which waxed
at its strongest, it would seem, during 1939–47 (approximately), had enabled Smith to discover a late-blossoming period of intensely poetic activity and creativity. During the middle to latter 1940s the poet was concurrently preparing the enormous typescript of his Selected Poems, a task that represented a huge challenge for him in
Brave World Old and New
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terms of collating manuscripts, and of rethinking and retyping a vast amount of material. The whole task became hampered and complicated by the fact that during much of the process Smith was experiencing serious eye trouble.
Nevertheless, despite such problems, out of this enormously fruitful period,
like some unexpected Atlantis arising out from the ocean of time and memory,
there came into palpable being his last major cycle of new poetry, and of new love poems at that. This new corpus of pure but accessible lyricism presents a remarkable efflorescence of creativity, indeed, for a poet at the half-century mark of his lifetime, when some commentators might have considered him already to be past
his most fruitful prime. As formulated elsewhere, “Phoenix-like, the poet had been reborn out of the ashes of the fiction-writer” (Sidney-Fryer, 19).
Acknowledgments
Together with other materials by other authors, this essay was originally pre-
pared for a special issue (No. 5) of the then promising semi-prozine Anubis. The issue was projected to appear sometime during the late 1960s (or the early 1970s).
Most of the contents were written or compiled c. 1966 or 1967. For a variety of reasons not quite explained or made clear, the number in question has never made its appearance, nor has any other issue of Anubis, for that matter.
When a photocopy of this essay (as laid out on sheets readied for photopublish-
ing), together with a copy of a map of Poseidonis by Tim Kirk, found their way back into the hands of the present author (courtesy of Don Herron and Ronald S. Hilger) in May 2002, the original conclusion was completely missing (i.e., following the first mention of the 1958 Arkham House collection of poems Spells and Philtres). The present author perforce had to re-create it from a re-reading of the cycle of love poems The Hill of Dionysus and other materials, with a discussion of which he had originally finished the essay. To this he has added some biographical details never before vouchsafed concerning the relationship among the poet Eric Barker, the dancer
Madelynne Greene, and Clark Ashton Smith himself.
Otherwise, during the latter half of September 2002, the present author has also revised this essay in ways both major and minor. In particular he would like to thank his personal friends Don Herron, Ronald Hilger, and Rah Hoffman for verifying information or for the use of books and other materials.
Notes
1. Nora May French, a remarkably gifted poet, was born at Aurora, New York, in 1881
and died by her own hand at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in late 1907 while residing there as a guest of George and Carrie Sterling. (GS was the unofficial poet laureate of the west coast from about 1903 until his death in 1926.) Nora May’s body was cre-mated, and a group of friends in a special ceremony scattered her ashes into the Pacific Ocean from Point Lobos just south of Carmel. Posthumously gathered and edited by Henry Anderson Lafler (with the help of GS and critic Porter Garnett), her one and
258 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
only collection Poems appeared in 1910, as published by the Strange Company, San Francisco. (Porter Garnett himself did the actual printing of the volume.)
2. CAS eliminated the reference to Atlantis when he revised this poem for SP. In the first published version of this poem, “the boughs of Eden” reads “the palm of Eden.”
3. In the first
published version of the poem above, l. 4 reads: “A sphinx that peers on lost Lemuric moons.”
4. The original version of this poem was republished in the Arkham Collector for Summer 1968.
5. The young Madelynne Greene was a strikingly beautiful woman of Irish descent with dark auburn hair, green eyes, and well-shaped body, which she kept supple, strong, and well-toned by means of her daily dance exercises.
Works Cited
Greene, Madelynne. Letter. In EOD, p. 154.
Guillard, Lauric. “Fantasy and Decadence in the Work of Clark Ashton Smith.” Paradoxa 5 (1999–2000): 189–212.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald. The Sorcerer Departs. 1963. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press, 1997.
Sterling, George. The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003.
Coming In from the Cold:
Incursions of “Outsideness” in Hyperborea
Steven Tompkins
This primal continent seems to have been particularly subject to incursions of
“outsideness”—more so, in fact, than any of the other continents and terrene
realms that lie behind us in the time stream.
—Clark Ashton Smith, Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, February 1931
Humanism: a sort of cosmic provincialism; the egomania of the species; the jingo-ism of earthlings; the religion of Lilliput.
—The Devil’s Notebook
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces.
Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds.
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:
A sound magician is a demi-god.
—Christopher Marlowe
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea is usually just a flyover on the nonstop trillion-year flight to Zothique. Critical attention has for the most part followed the migra-tory route of the gazolba-bird in “The Voyage of King Euvoran”; before leading
that monarch on the end-times equivalent of a wild-goose chase to “the archipelagoes of wonder” and “far coasts of dawn” in the finalized story, the fowl in question first had to wing its way from the Hyperborean setting of Smith’s initial
inspiration across sundering series-seas to the Last Continent.
Even the distinction Smith confers upon Hyperborea in the letter to H. P.
Lovecraft that yielded this article’s first epigraph endures for only one sentence, and then, as so often, the last shall be first:
But I have heard it hinted in certain obscure and arcanic prophecies that the far-future continent called Gnydron by some and Zothique by others, which will rise millions of years hence in what is now the South Atlantic, will surpass even Hy-
260 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
perborea in . . . incursions of “outsideness” . . . and will witness the intrusion of Things from galaxies not yet visible; and worse than this, a hideously chaotic
breaking-down of dimensional barriers which will leave parts of our world in other dimensions and vice-versa. ( CAS 24)
Steve Behrends has pointed out that the Hyperborean cycle “acts in some ways
as a foil to the Zothique series” ( CAS 38), and the Last Continent, which would be a tough act to follow were it not for the fact that nothing will follow, is certainly a tough act for Hyperborea to precede. The earlier landmass, “at the opposite extreme of Earth’s habitability” ( CAS 38), lacks the necrotic appeal of Zothique, the stories about which can be read in the dark by the light of their own ghastly viridescence. As the ne plus ultra of “terrene realms,” Zothique has going for it “the black weariness of a dying race, grown hopeless of all but oblivion.” Constituting as it does a definitive refutation of Andrew Marvell’s assertion in “To His Coy Mistress” that The grave’s a fine and private place / But none, I think, do there embrace, the Last Continent offers a modicum of carrion comfort to the reader and more than that to the author, deemed by Donald Sidney-Fryer to be “one of death’s most lyrical celebrators” (Sidney-Fryer 22). The consensus on this subject choruses from commentators like L. Sprague de Camp (“Nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse” [de Camp 206]), James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock (“If Death had ever decided to hire a good PR
man, Smith would have filled the bill” [Cawthorn and Moorcock 95]), and Fritz
Leiber (“Death in all its phases—from maggot-banquets to mere forgetting (erasing forever from all tables of memory)—seems to be his chief inspiration and theme”
[Leiber 72]). Theodore Sturgeon suggested that the attraction was mutual: “Death always loved and wooed you, Klarkash-Ton” (Sturgeon xiv).
Zothique at its most Zothiquean, as a congeries of death’s other kingdom[s],”
could be the “last of meeting places” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star. . . .
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
Hyperborea by comparison is aglow by the dawn’s early light; “the world is
new and fresh . . . and humanity is a relative newcomer” ( CAS 38). But humanity’s tomb would turn out to be a livelier place than humanity’s womb. The Hyperboreans are not the last of any, but merely the first of many, to be damned or
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261
doomed. The quick and the dead of Zothique model their cerements on their
doom-black runway with the glamour of the lost and the last, while the inhabitants of the earlier landmass seem afflicted with rigor mortis. They come to bad ends without having come to life first; they are often consumed but never by doubts, and their egos dwarf even the still-abundant local megafauna. The stories of the Primal Continent are a bonfire of the vanities over which Smith roasts his not-so-grand inquisitors, and although his indebtedness to Lord Dunsany has been dis-
puted, the stratospheric altitude of the Hyperborean cycle, the sense of some eyrie from which Smith looks down upon even the toploftiest tip of what would be considered high tragedy from a less elevated perspective, is very much in the tradition of the Dunsanian agenda cited by S. T. Joshi in his introduction to The Complete Pegāna: “One of the most chilling lines in all literature, perhaps, is the simple utterance of the gods in ‘Of How Imbaun Met Zodrak’: ‘Let Us call up a man before
Us that We may laugh in Pegāna’” (Joshi x).
And yet the theme of these weird fiction stories is not just Oh, what fools these mortals be, but also Oh, how mortal these mortals be. Mindful of Smith’s strictures in his
“Macrocosmic Horror” essay, we need to look at how weird things get in Hyper-
borea, and how they get weird:
the main object is the creation of a supernatural, extra-human atmosphere; the real actors are the terrible arcanic forces, the esoteric cosmic malignities; and the element of human character, if one is to achieve the highest, most objective artistry, is properly somewhat subordinated. . . . One is depicting things, powers and conditions that are beyond humanity; therefore, artistically speaking, the main accent is on these things, powers and conditions. ( PD 18)
As “the proper focus of interest,” the “terrible arcanic forces” and “esoteric cosmic malignities” that are “the real actors” on the Hyperborean stage deserve our consideration.
It is a pleasant departure from the ridicule that the late Lin Carter was so assiduous in bringing upon himself to be able to note that Steve Behrends and Will Murray have complimented his “conject
ural ordering” of the Hyperborean stories
as “an ingenious job” ( CAS 43) and “quite sound” (Murray, BH 14). This article will mostly review Hyperborea’s “incursions of outsideness” in the Carter-dated sequence, so as to avoid the chronological rewinds and fast-forwards cheerfully acknowledged by Murray:
The reader coming to Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea for the first time will find that the story sequence skips back and forth through Hyperborean eras, with cities rising up and falling back into ruin at random, and doomful hints and portents
bearing cold fruit in later tales while older dooms are explained long after the fact.
(Murray, BH 14)
In “The Seven Geases” with none of Murray’s cold fruit in the offing as of yet
262 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
we meet Hyperborean hubris incarnate in the person of Lord Ralibar Vooz, “High
magistrate of Commoriom and third cousin to King Homquat” and a Nimrod in
more ways than one, with the blue-blood’s passion for bloodsports. He disdains
“the great sloths and vampire-bats of the intermediate jungle, as well as the small but noxious dinosauria” in favor of the peak experience of hunting the most dangerous, because most nearly human, game on Mount Voormithadreth in “the black
Eiglophian mountains”—the Voormis, autochthonous hominids known for “the
uses to which their captives were put before death and after it,” as a spare but un-sparing Smith disclosure tells us ( BH 126).
The hunting party is divided against itself—lordling on one side, retainers on
the other—when it comes to the origin of the Voormis. Conventional wisdom has
it that they are
the offspring of women and certain atrocious creatures that had come forth in
primal days from a tenebrous cavern-world in the bowels of Voormithadreth.
Somewhere beneath that four-coned mountain, the sluggish and baleful god
Tsathoggua, who had come down from Saturn in years immediately following the
Earth’s creation, was fabled to reside; and during the rites of worship at his black altars, the devotees were always careful to orient themselves toward Voormithadreth. ( BH 126)
Ralibar Vooz prides himself on being a freethinker, or at least sees no reason to worship anything but his own ancestors:
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