What continues to make this group of works fascinating, however, is how Smith
achieved these aesthetic aims and the themes he chose to explore in this milieu.
Rhetoric is always an important consideration when discussing this author’s
work, and Smith makes clear his intent in two letters written to H. P. Lovecraft in the fall of 1930:
My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counterpoint, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. ( SL 126) The problem of “style” in writing is certainly fascinating and profound. I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate “tone.” If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. Obviously, the style of “Mohammed’s Tomb” wouldn’t do for “The Ghoul”; and one of my
chief preoccupations in writing this last story was to exclude images, ideas and locutions which I would have used freely in a modern story. ( SL 137)
In acknowledgment of this level of conscientious craftsmanship, Donald Sidney-
Fryer has referred to Smith as “The Lyricist of Lost Worlds,” pointing out that Smith had “deployed his poetical genius” to transmute the realm of imaginative poetry
“into the realm of imaginative or fantastic prose” to produce “fantastic narratives which must rank with some of the best and most original work that he accomplished” (Sidney-Fryer 9). Despite surface resemblances to the work of Dunsany, Poe, and others, this transmutation results in an incredibly rich and varied body of work, which demonstrates an even greater affinity with the malleable dramatic verse of Shakespeare’s contemporaries through a successful fusion of the utility of prose with the range of rhetorical effects available to the poet.
As Shadows Wait upon the Sun
281
Only the simple substitution of the words “tale” for “drama” and “prose” for
“verse” in these descriptions by M. C. Bradbrook of the conventions of speech in Elizabethan verse drama are necessary to make them apply equally to Smith’s
“imaginative and fantastic prose,” both in intent and practice:
The essential structure of Elizabethan drama lies not in the narrative or the characters but in the words. (Bradbrook 5)
Patterned speech may be defined as verse which, by an elaborate use of alliteration, assonance, balance of epithets and clauses, parallelism and repetition or the use of rhyme stands out from the rest . . . (97)
Patterned speech thus played a part in determining the degree of dramatic intensity or attachment . . . also how far an action was of symbolic weight and significance
. . . (103)
Nor is Bradbrook’s statement, “The greatest poets are also the greatest dramatists”
(5) inapplicable to Clark Ashton Smith or supernatural fiction in general if one agrees with Robert Aickman’s dictum, “The true ghost story is akin to poetry”
(Aickman, “Essay” 65).1
Although rhymed verse does not appear frequently in the Zothique cycle out-
side the poem bearing that continent’s name ( The Dark Chateau, 1951) and the posthumously published verse drama The Dead Will Cuckold You, Smith uses it to preface several of the tales in order either to forecast a portion of the plot or to reinforce its theme. The most spell-binding displays of rhetoric appear in the
speeches and descriptive passages.
The opening paragraph to “Xeethra” is an object-lesson in the infusion of
prose with poetic rhetoric in the service of narrative:
Long had the wasting summer pastured its suns, like fiery stallions, on the dun hills that crouched before the Mykrasian Mountains in wild easternmost Cincor.
The peak-fed torrents were become tenuous threads or far-sundered, fallen pools; the granite boulders were shaled by the heat; the bare earth was cracked and creviced; and the low, meager grasses were seared even to the roots. ( RA 347) Smith employs a variety of devices in this splendid passage, including alliteration and consonance (“wa s ting s ummer pa s tured it s s uns like fiery s tallions,” “c ra ck ed and c reviced,” “gra ss es were s eared even to the root s”—with the repetitive hissing sound in the first and third groups and the hard kay in the second each producing an onomatopoetic effect), assonance (“s u mmer . . . s u ns . . . d u n,” “f a r . . . f a llen”), metaphor (“pastured its suns, like fiery stallions”), and the pathetic fallacy (the prior example and “summer . . . crouched”). Parallelism appears in many forms:
the alliterative esses that dominate the beginning and end of the paragraph; the two pairs of hyphenated words with their efs flipped on either side of the hyphen and a third ef added as alliterative reinforcement; and a cunning pattern formed when the
282 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
third-person past indicative of the verb “be” is yoked to verbs in the passive voice four times in succession (three plural usages interrupted by one singular), each embedded in a distinct rhythmic accompaniment of nouns, adjectives, conjunctions, and prepositions. By a miracle of rare device, these and other rhetorical devices utilized by Smith in this passage combine to ease rather than hinder the flow of the prose, and in setting the scene so memorably increase the reader’s expectations for what is to follow.
With the appearance of The Star-Treader and Other Poems in 1912, Smith had already demonstrated an unusual facility for absorbing anything he found useful in the work of earlier writers, and adapting it toward the expression of his own ideas.
Even though he admits with some shame in a 1933 letter to H. P. Lovecraft that
he has not “looked into any of the old dramatists for ages” ( SL 230), it is clear that he was familiar with at least a portion of their work from his having read all of the books in the local Carnegie library, and the references he makes to Cyril Tourneur and John Webster in his letters. Nor, as Donald Sidney-Fryer observes, were these the only Elizabethans Smith had encountered or admired: one phrase from Sir
Thomas Browne’s celebrated Hydriotaphia (1658) stirs echoes in both “From the Crypts of Memory” and “The Planet of the Dead,” two of Smith’s works that anticipate the creation of Zothique (Sidney-Fryer, Sorcerer 31). If he prefers the Elizabethan pastiches of Thomas Lovell Beddoes for what he perceives as “a
superadded subtlety and atmosphere which none of the old dramatists seem to
have had” ( SL 246), this does not diminish the lessons he learned in the shaping of lyric poetry into dramatic prose from them—whether at first hand or through the second-hand examples of Beddoes or Samuel Loveman.
These tales are also not dissimilar to the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists in their focus on titanic figures, earth-shattering events, and victories that engulf the vanquished, the victor, and innocent victims alike. If comets foretell disaster and accompany the deaths of princes; entire kingdoms falter over a single murder or adulterous act; Faustus suffers damnation for seeking wisdom; Tamburlaine
strides through mountains of corpses in monstrous glory, with an emperor as his slave; and all manner of supernatural creatures clamor on the stage or merely fester in the verse of English Renaissance drama, Smith’s world makes use of like prodigies and magnifies them. In Zothique, astrology and other arts of divination summon the gods themselves, while the sun foretells its own demise; Xeethra is damned and
damned again “at all times and in all places” for striving after what he perceives to be a better life. A pair of necromancers enslave the very bones and mummies of past empire to create an empire of their own; and no nightmare creature appears in metaphor that is not also perilously present in the flesh.
Nor do the puissant figures in Smith fare any better than their counterparts in Renai
ssance drama. The Book of Samuel’s refrain “How are the mighty fallen”
would find a ready echo in this world, because power in Zothique is rarely wielded without hubris. Emblematic of this tendency is King Euvoran who, after losing
As Shadows Wait upon the Sun
283
every last shred of his power and dignity in a quest to restore his crown, is left figuratively eating crow while dining on the bird that had once symbolized his authority. Related to this, the concept of futility is felt even during the few moments of victory. Those like Xeethra, and Namirrha in “The Dark Eidolon,” who gain
their heart’s desire almost invariably live to regret it. And over all hangs the clotted, bloated, dimming specter of the sun, inescapable and ultimately fatal reminder of what Juvenal and Samuel Johnson term “the vanity of human wishes.”
The preponderance of larger than life figures and events in conjunction with the removal of mankind from the comforts of humanism, science, and technology could be considered alienating, which is precisely the point. The dying of the sun has resulted in a withering of the human heart. Pity, lust, and passion may be present, but very little love, and that invariably either unhappy or pathetic. Ilalotha’s belief in love lasting beyond death takes him into the clutches of a lamia, just as Morthylla’s lover rejects human love in favor of death and the dream of necrophilia. Predation and exploitation are more common than friendship. Vast deserts and turbulent seas separate one nation from another, leading to the development of island nations like those of Naat in “Necromancy in Naat” and Uccastrog in “The Isle of the Torturers”—
separated from each other and the mainland by what Matthew Arnold had ruefully
referred to as “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea”—which consider all foreigners nonpersons to be enslaved as corpses or subjected to the fine art of torture. Similarly, the king of Sotar in “The Garden of Adompha” decorates his unusual garden with
grafts selected from those among his subjects whose entire persons no longer amuse him. It is not just the incursions of “outsideness” that have no legitimate place in this world, but many of Zothique’s most notable human denizens. Namirrha is first rejected and abused by his countrymen as a child, then by his patron demon as an
adult. Xeethra the doubly damned finds no peace as king or shepherd, in the past, the present, or the future. “The Charnel God” welcomes the dead but rejects the living. In “The Empire of the Necromancers,” the founder of a dynasty awakens after millennia of peaceful death to an unfamiliar land, a distant era, and the toils of a slave. And beyond all these, it is Nushain the astrologer’s fate, in “The Last Hieroglyph,” to seek meaning and pattern from the stars only to find himself no more than a cipher in a book.
Will Murray has observed that “the original concept of Zothique as a platform
for extraterrestrial visitations never quite jelled. Instead, Smith focused on two themes that filled his own poetic soul—doom and loss” (Murray 9). The cycle’s
most memorable tales suggest there is some truth to this statement, as does Steve Behrends’s essay “The Song of the Necromancer: ‘Loss’ in Clark Ashton Smith’s
Fiction,” and the same author’s chapter on Zothique in Clark Ashton Smith. Nonetheless, a powerful if intermittent thread related to “incursions of ‘outsideness’”
appears throughout the cycle, which goes far toward reinforcing its author’s original concept. “The Dark Eidolon,” “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” “The Weaver
in the Vault,” “The Tomb-Spawn,” and even the star-sent plague that destroys Yo-
284 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
ros in “The Isle of the Torturers” all involve a variety of ultramundane phenomena that are no less outré than those witnessed in Hyperborea. In like measure, the prodigies that appear in “The Last Hieroglyph,” “The Black Abbot of Puthuum,”
and other tales, if less clearly extraterrestrial in origin, are no less novel and not a whit less astounding.
*
The first tale in the series, “The Empire of the Necromancers” (written 17 January 1932; first published Weird Tales, September 1932), offers an ideal introduction to the world of Zothique, outlining the differences in geography between the twentieth century and the distant future; distancing the reader from events through a multilay-ered network of references not only to the reader’s own time, but also three distinct eras within the story’s past spread over two thousand years; introducing three of the continent’s nations; providing several vivid images of the dying sun at dawn, day, and sunset; and contrasting its own grim story, which may “serve to beguile for a little the black weariness of a dying race, grown hopeless of all but oblivion” with the “glad legends of the prime” ( RA 315), just as it contrasts the “illimitable weariness” and hazily remembered nobility of the dead called back to “the bitterness of mortal being”
( RA 321) with the lazy and hedonistic necromancers who have left their native Naat to enslave them. Its nation’s fate long since “ordained and predicted from the first”
( RA 325), its planet’s doom clearly manifest in the “darkening stagnant blood of ominous sunset” ( RA 317), and the last of its citizens long ago fallen victim to pestilence, the tale is filled with images of dry decay, embers, and drying blood. Smith infuses the tale so thoroughly with desuetude that his readers sympathize not with the living but with the dead, “stirred like autumn leaves in a sudden wind” ( RA 324).
Prophecy and pestilence also figure prominently in the second tale, “The Isle of the Torturers” (written 31 July 1932; first published Weird Tales, March 1933). Again the young ruler of a dead race, like Hestaiyon in the preceding tale, must contend with the evil machinations of the denizens of an island nation intent upon practicing their dark art upon any non-native they encounter, except that King Fulbra’s hosts, though not unskilled in sorcery and necromancy, are not interested, as are the necromancers of Naat and Sotar, in blind obedience, but in the total destruction of their prey, mind, body, and soul. Anyone tossed onto the beaches of this land finds himself in the clutches of a vicious race possessed of “a dire longing that they could assuage only through the pain of their fellow-men” ( RA 462), who use “cunning and subtle” ( RA 458) gradations of pain, fear, confusion, anticipation, revulsion, and humiliation against their guests. Smith even develops a variation on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “La Torture par l’espérance” ( Nouveaux Contes cruels, 1888) so that hope and “brief, piteous love” appear in the story only to be replaced by “ashes steeped in gall” ( RA 461). Images of light shining out of darkness appear throughout the tale, but in keeping with the cruel direction toward which all symbols of life trend in this story, they are most often associated with pain and death:
The plague passed like an eerie, glittering light from countenance to countenance
As Shadows Wait upon the Sun
285
under the golden lamps; and the victims fell where they were stricken; and the
deathly brightness remained upon them. ( RA 449–50)
This would appear to be the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian interpretation of such imagery—“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light, and
they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light
shined” (Isaiah 9:2)—until the very end, when Prince Fulbra’s final desperate attempt to save his soul from “a long pilgrimage through monstrous and infamous
hells” results in an ironic and literal recreation of Isaiah’s metaphor—“his face shone brightly with the coming of the Death . . . and the pestilence remained like a glittering light on the faces and shone forth from the nude bodies of the women”
( RA 462–63).
Irony, dissolution, and contrasts between darkness and light, life and death are also on display in “The Charnel God” (written 15 November 1932; first published Weird Tales, March 1934). Here, the necrophagous god and his prie
sthood, despite their fearsome appearance and grisly activities, are viewed as “utilitarian,” and it is those with carnal rather than charnel interests who are to be despised. Smith handles the manifold significance of shadows, a motif that appears frequently in this series (note especially the direct interplay between shadow and substance in “The Black Abbot of Puthuum”), with exceptional deftness in this tale, thereby under-mining the significance of the human characters and their actions. Thus, Phariom searching for his cataleptic bride in the charnel fane, moves “like a shadow among shadows” ( RA 338), and once reunited feels that “he and Elaith were but faint shadows in the presence of embodied death and dissolution” ( RA 345). The god Mordiggian, on the other hand, though first perceived as “a colossal shadow that was not wrought by anything in the room” ( RA 344) and less stable in appearance than its human quarry, dwarfs everything around it, like the omnipresent specter of the planet’s faltering star; it is “more than a shadow: it was a bulk of darkness, black and opaque” that gleams “with eddying hues of somber iris, like the spec-trum of a sable sun” ( RA 345).
“The Dark Eidolon” (written 23 December 1932; first published Weird Tales,
January 1935) is the first of the Zothique tales Smith is known to have shortened or otherwise revised prior to its acceptance by the editor of Weird Tales; unfortunately it is the only one of those expurgated tales of Zothique whose original
manuscript continues to elude Smith scholars. Comparison of other texts revised for publication with Smith’s first versions reveal some clarification of action in the revision with a considerable loss of the original’s finesse, atmosphere, pacing, and precision in language, though “The Dark Eidolon” appears, like “Xeethra,” to have suffered less from expurgation than such extreme examples as “The Maze of Maâl
Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc Page 45
