North. In any event, decades before the seasonal affective disorders of Kay, Wil-
274 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
liams, or Martin, Clark Ashton Smith called down the cold upon the hapless characters of “The Coming of the White Worm” and “The Ice-Demon.” Where the
later fantasists disposed of hundreds, or thousands, of pages in their biblio-
behemoths, the Hyperborean tales continue to impress us with what we might pil-
fer from Satampra Zeiros and term “the unbelievable speed and celerity” of
Smith’s storytelling. He is the poet laureate of any permafrost Parnassus.
Conscripted by the White Worm, Evagh swears “the threefold vow of un-
speakable alienation” ( BH 115), but of course his creator swore it first. The rock critic Robert Christgau once provided the crucial insight into the Rolling Stones when he characterized Mick Jagger as being “obsessed with distance,” the co-creator of music defined by its compulsion to gaze “across (and down) the generation gap and the money gap and the feeling gap and the meaning gap . . . [The
Stones’] following will never be as huge as that of the high-spirited Beatles (or of a techno-cosmic doomshow like Led Zeppelin)” (Christgau, “The Rolling Stones”).
To adopt Christgau’s phrasing, Smith’s following will never be as huge as that
of the high-spirited Howard (whose darkness is always fire-shot with defiance) or of a techno-cosmic doomshow like H. P. Lovecraft. Many readers keep their distance because of Smith’s insistence upon keeping his. The notorious vocabulary is a contributing factor here, and he is remarkably unfazed by the prospect of creating and communicating from his defining distance. Fritz Leiber comments on that disengagement in “Clark Ashton Smith: An Appreciation”:
And certainly Smith didn’t seem to have been much interested—for literary pur-
poses—in “the little things that are so dear to civilized men and women. He was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life. . . . The warm intricacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men’s lives were meaningless to him.” This quote, which seems to me at the moment to fit Smith’s writing, is—perhaps quite oddly—from a description of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard in “Beyond the Black River.” Not—
Crom forbid!—to suggest any particular connection between their writings, but
simply to point out that the Smith of the writings fits very well the role of the lone-wolf artist, standing apart, seeing precious little in human behavior but fear and desire, looking upon his own culture as a rather grotesque and tasteless show . . . with hardly an atom of loyalty to the human adventure. (Leiber 72)
This passage would be an embarrassment of riches—one fantasy grandmaster
quoting another to explain a third—were it not for Leiber’s critical acumen. He offers the Smith student not hype but Hyperborea : precious little in human behavior but fear and desire; a rather grotesque and tasteless show—into our minds “with boneless ease” there slides the “wholly and outrageously unhuman” entity of “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, still “grinning sardonically.” And as for hardly an atom of loyalty to the human adventure, recall the whim of Dunsany’s pantheon: Let Us call up a man before Us, that We may laugh . . . Smith calls up Ralibar Vooz, and Avoosl Wuthoq-
Coming In from the Cold
275
quan, and Athammaus, and Morghi, and Quanga, and Satampra Zeiros and Tirouv
Ompallios, before us, that we may laugh and perhaps flinch at the sound of our
own laughter. We have met the incursions of outsideness, and they is, well, us, if only for a moment.
But Smith stays outside. Writing to him in March 1934, Robert E. Howard professed to be fascinated by his fellow Weird Tales regular’s “comments on the forces that play upon the earth,” and speculated that “human life” might be “affected
vastly more than we guess by electrons or emanations from outside” (Howard 62).
Did it occur to the Texan that at least insofar as his fictioneering was concerned, Smith knew whereof he spoke? One of the most perceptive if regrettably unpublished students of Howard, Larry Richter, is wont to refer to him as the god of Hyboria; if Smith is the god of Hyperborea, his characters are sinners in the hands of a sardonic rather than an angry god.
The sorcerer may depart, but the pantocrator remains, more demiurge than
thaumaturge: Donald Sidney-Fryer sees Smith “in an ideal sense as a literary Man-God creating and peopling many worlds of his imagination” (Sidney-Fryer 27).
Leiber, too, espies something extra, or something extraterrestrial: “It’s as if Smith looked at the world and then, instead of concentrating on or falling in love with this or that part of it, simply looked toward the sky and with the materials on hand and a keen silver poetic knife carved all manner of strange other worlds” (Leiber 72).
Don Herron also implies a particular positioning in his observation that
“When CAS sets out artistically to evoke a mood or create a doom, he enters the story without any personal or artistic reservations as to whether or not he should be coy or straightforward” (Herron 101).
He enters the story; one can only enter something from outside. If Smith is usually without empathy, mercy, or compassion; that is only to be expected from
someone who is, after all, without. The Hyberborean stories are not so much emotionally stunted as they are perspectivally enhanced. Most stories of heroes are campfire tales told to fend off the surrounding cold and dark, and perhaps Smith’s work approximates other tales told, or even enacted, by the cold and the dark as those Forces wait for the campfire to go out. The “incursions of outsideness”
which beset Mhu Thulan and Commoriom are authorial; just as the single most
perceptive comment on Howard’s stories remains that of his pen pal/sparring
partner Lovecraft, that the Texan himself was in every single one, of Smith’s stories we might observe that he himself is external to every one of them. To accept his invitation to Hyperborea is to accept an invitation to step outside.
Works Cited
Cawthorn, James, and Michael Moorcock. Fantasy: The 100 Best Books. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988.
Christgau, Robert. “The Rolling Stones.” http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/
stones-76.php.
276 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
de Camp, L. Sprague. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976.
Douglass, Sara. “Creating the Modern Romance Epic.” http://www.saradouglass.
com/epic.html
Harvey, Ryan. “The Fantasy Cycles of Clark Ashton Smith, Part II: The Book of Hyperborea.” http://www.swordandsorcery.org/cas1.asp.
Herron, Don. “The Double Shadow: The Influence of Clark Ashton Smith.” In Jack Vance, ed. Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. New York: Taplinger, 1980.
Howard, Robert E. Selected Letters: 1931–1936. Ed. Glenn Lord et al. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1991.
Joshi, S. T. “Introduction.” In The Complete Pegāna. By Lord Dunsany. Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1998.
Lee, Tanith. The Book of the Damned. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Leiber, Fritz. “Clark Ashton Smith: An Appreciation.” In In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Jack L. Chalker. Baltimore: Jack L. Chalker & Associates, 1963.
Martin, George R. R. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam, 1996.
———. A Storm of Swords. London: HarperCollins, 2000.
Rodgers, Alan. “Introduction.” In The Throne of Bones. By Brian McNaughton. Black River, NY: Terminal Fright Publications, 1997.
Rohan, Michael Scott. The Winter of the World, Volume One: The Anvil of Ice. New York: Avon, 1995.
———. “Welcome to My Worlds, The Winter of the World: The Ice.” http://
www.users.zetnet.co.uk/mike.scott.r
ohan/first_page.htm.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald. Clark Ashton Smith: The Sorcerer Departs. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press, 1997.
Sturgeon, Theodore. “Clark Ashton Smith 1893–1963.” In In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Jack L. Chalker. Baltimore: Jack L. Chalker & Associates, 1963.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
———. “Kortirion among the Trees.” In Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth. By John Garth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
———. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
———. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
Wagner, Karl Edward. “The Dark Muse.” In Night Winds. New York: Warner Books, 1978.
As Shadows Wait upon the Sun:
Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique
Jim Rockhill
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites;
Sweetest breath and clearest eye,
Like perfumes go out and die;
And consequently this is done.
As shadows wait upon the sun.
Vain the ambition of kings,
Who seek by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
—John Webster, The Devil’s Law Case (1620), 5.4.122–31
Over a period of twenty-five years, Clark Ashton Smith completed one poem, one
verse drama, and sixteen stories set on Earth’s last continent. The Zothique cycle represents its author’s most sustained contribution to created-world fantasy literature and has been one of his most popular conceptions since “The Empire of the
Necromancers” first appeared in the September 1932 issue of Weird Tales. British fantasist and genre scholar Brian Stableford has aptly termed this series, set during the last epoch of mankind reveling in its decadence beneath a dying sun, “the most dramatically appropriate of all his imaginary milieux” (Stableford 245). The first attempt to gather all the works in this cycle, the 1970 paperback Zothique, issued as part of the popular Ballantine Adult Fantasy series under the editorship of Lin Carter, was also the first collection of Smith’s work to reach a mass market. That book received a warm welcome from the master fantasist and science fiction writer Fritz Leiber, has been included among James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock’s
Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, and is still eagerly sought by fantasy readers. Tales of Zothique, a small-press trade paperback, which adds the play The Dead Will Cuckold You and utilizes all the unexpurgated texts available at that time, appeared twenty-five years later and is even more highly prized.
The sources of inspiration for Zothique and its development from the early es-
chatological sonnet “The Last Night” in 1911 to the synopsis for an unwritten story titled “A Tale of Gnydron” in 1931 have been covered in depth by Steve Behrends in Clark Ashton Smith and Will Murray’s introduction to the Tales of Zothique. The se-
278 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
ries owes many of its most salient characteristics to the author’s childhood love for the Arabian Nights and William Beckford’s Arabian Gothic Vathek (1786), H. P.
Blavatsky’s Theosophist vision of the final race of men in The Secret Doctrine (1888), and the peculiarly dry climate and desolate terrain of the author’s native California.
The potent effect of this last is suggested in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft dated 11 November 1929, in which Smith writes of atmospheric phenomena around his cabin in terms that forecast later manifestations in Zothique:
Our dry fall is becoming a drouth. I hear that conditions will become serious if there is not rain before long. The atmospheric conditions here strike me as being genuinely abnormal: among other things, our sky (though the stars are very bright) has a peculiar iron blackness at night which I have never seen before. And a
woman-friend of mine tells me that she saw the noon sky actually whiten the other day, as if there were some intense momentary radiation. That sort of things sets one’s imagination to working. ( SL 104)
Smith’s fullest description of the geography, population, and language of this ultimate continent appears in his letter to L. Sprague de Camp of 3 November 1953: Zothique, vaguely suggested by Theosophic theories about past and future
continents, is the last inhabited continent of earth. The continents of our present cycle have sunk, perhaps several times. Some have remained submerged; others
have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. Zothique, as I conceive it, comprises Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India, parts of Northern and eastern Africa, and much of the Indonesian archipelago. A new Australia exists somewhere to the south. To the west, there are only a few known islands, such as Naat, in which the black cannibals survive. To the north are immense unexplored deserts; to the east, an immense unvoyaged sea. The peoples are mainly of Aryan or Semitic descent,
but there is a negro kingdom (Ilcar) in the north-west; and scattered blacks are found throughout the other countries, mainly in palace-harems. In the southern islands survive vestiges of Indonesian or Malayan races.
The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners.
There are no fire-arms—only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc., of antiquity.
The chief language spoken (for which I have provided examples in an unpublished drama) is based on Indo-European roots and is highly inflected, like Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. ( SL 374)
It “lies at the other end of the time-cycle from Hyperborea, Mu, etc.” and its mores would give pause to those like the Theosophists who deem man a perfectible
species, “since the Zothiqueans as I have depicted them are a rather sinful and iniquitous lot, showing little sign of the spiritual evolution promised for humanity in its final cycles” ( SL 367).
*
As Shadows Wait upon the Sun
279
It is characteristic of Clark Ashton Smith’s aesthetic aims that the description he offers to H. P. Lovecraft in his description of “A Tale of Gnydron” dated February 1931—
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. 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 is to rise millions of years hence in what is now the South Atlantic, will surpass even Hyperborea in this regard 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. When things get to that stage, there will be no telling where even the briefest journey or morning stroll might end. The
conditions will shift, too; so there will be no possibility of charting them and thus knowing when or where one might step off into the unknown. ( SL 149)
—not only marks the inception of what would become his most extensive series of fantasy tales, but that it should also create, in a discussion of his prose fiction, an echo of a desire he had expressed to George Sterling five years earlier concerning his poetry: “Indeed, my fondest dream is to find a Hyperborea beyond Hyperborea, in the realm of imaginative poetry. I have the feeling that my best and most original work is still to be done” ( SL 94).
Zothique, even more than the fantasy worlds he had fashioned from the vari-
ously distant past, such as Hyperborea, Poseidonis, and Averoign
e, offers the author an exemplary location for the creation of what he perceived as an ideal fantasy literature—
I, too, am capable of observation; but I am far happier when I can create everything in a story, including the milieu. This is why I do best in work like “Satampra
Zeiros.” Maybe I haven’t enough love for, or interest in, real places, to invest them with the atmosphere that I achieve in something purely imaginary. ( SL 108)
—conceived not as an excuse for wallowing in “the sentimental, erotic bog in which Occidental literature is floundering” ( SL 91), but as an extension of life through the renunciation of his age’s “supreme superstition, Reality” ( SL 95):
I’ve no quarrel with the slogan of “art for life’s sake,” but I think the current definition or delimitation of what constitutes life is worse than ridiculous. Anything that the human imagination can conceive of becomes thereby a part of life, and
poetry such as mine, properly considered, is not an “escape,” but an extension. I have the courage to think that I am rendering as much “service” by it (damn the piss-pot word!) as I would by psycho-analyzing the male and female adolescents or senescents of a city slum in the kind of verse that slops all over the page and makes you feel as if somebody had puked on you. ( SL 93–94)
280 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
As for the problem of phantasy, my own standpoint is that there is absolutely no justification for literature unless it serves to release the imagination from the bounds of every-day life. ( SL 123)
The creation of a future world in Zothique with no future of its own and the con-comitant removal of all the crutches that bolster “the current literary humanism”
and “general gross materialism of the times” ( SL 95) provides Smith with the perfect platform from which to divorce his blinkered readers from the mundane, and confront them anew with the concepts of eternity, mystery, and the sublime:
When the novelty of modern discoveries, etc., has worn off, it seems to me that people must go back to a realization of the environing, undissipated mystery, which will make for a restoration of the imaginative. Science, philosophy, psychology, humanism, after all, are only candle-flares in the face of the eternal night with its infinite reserves of strangeness, terror, sublimity. ( SL 123)
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