Clark Ashton Smith

by The Death of Ilalotha

  INTRODUCTION

  Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter, and author of fantasy, horror, and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics (alongside Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Sterling, Nora May French, and others) and remembered as ‘The Last of the Great Romantics’ and ‘The Bard of Auburn.’ As a member of the Lovecraft circle, (Smith’s literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft’s death in 1937), Smith remains second only to Lovecraft in general esteem and importance amongst contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, where some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. (It has been said of him that “Nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse.”) His work is marked chiefly by an extraordinarily wide and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humour.

  Early Life and Education

  Smith was born Jan 13, 1893 in Long Valley, California, of English and Yankee parentage. He spent most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California, living in a small cabin built by his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith. His formal education was limited: he suffered from psychological disorders including a fear of crowds, and although admitted to high school after attending eight years of grammar school (Long Valley School, whence dates the earliest known photo of him), he never went to high school. His parents decided it was better for him to be educated at home.

  However, he was an insatiable reader, and continued to teach himself after he left school. His education began with the reading of Robinson Crusoe (unabridged), Gulliver’s Travels, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and Madame d’Aulnoy, the Arabian Nights and (at the age of thirteen) the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He read an unabridged dictionary (the 13th edition of Webster’s) through, word for word, studying not only the definitions of the words but also their derivations from ancient languages. Having an extraordinary eidetic memory, he seems to have retained most or all of it.

  The other main course in Smith’s self-education was to read the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica through at least twice. Smith later taught himself French and Spanish in order to translate verse out of those languages. Smith professed to hate the provinciality of the small town of Auburn but rarely left it until he married late in life.

  Writing Career

  His first literary efforts, at the age of 11, took the form of fairy tales and imitations of the Arabian Nights. Later, he wrote long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life. By fourteen he had already written a short adventure novel called The Black Diamonds which was lost for years until published in 2002. Another juvenile novel was written in his teenaged years—The Sword of Zagan (unpublished until 2004). Like The Black Diamonds, it uses a medieval, Arabian Nights–like setting, and the Arabian Nights, like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, are known to have strongly influenced Smith’s early writing, as did William Beckford’s Vathek.

  At age seventeen, he sold several tales to The Black Cat, a magazine which specialised in unusual tales. He also published some tales in The Overland Monthly in this brief foray into fiction which preceded his poetic career.

  However, it was primarily poetry that motivated the young Smith and he confined his efforts for poetry for more than a decade. In his later youth, Smith made the acquaintance of the San Francisco poet George Sterling through a member of the local Auburn Monday Night Club, where he read several of his poems with considerable success. On a month-long visit to Sterling in Carmel, California, Smith was introduced by Sterling to the poetry of Baudelaire.

  He became Sterling’s protégé and Sterling helped him to publish his first volume of poems, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, at the age of nineteen. Smith received international acclaim for The Star-Treader, which was received very favorably by American critics, one of whom named Smith “the Keats of the Pacific.” Smith briefly moved among the circle that included Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, but his early fame soon faded away.

  Prolific Fiction-Writing Period

  At the beginning of the Depression in 1929, with his aged parents’ health weakening, Smith resumed fiction-writing and turned out more than a hundred short stories, nearly all of which can be classed as weird horror or science fiction. Like Lovecraft, he drew upon the nightmares that had plagued him during youthful spells of sickness. He published at his own expense a volume containing six of his best stories, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, in an edition of 1000 copies printed by the Auburn Journal.The theme of much of his work is egotism and its supernatural punishment; his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality.

  Most of Smith’s weird fiction falls into four series set variously in Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique. Hyperborea, which is a lost continent of the Miocene period, and Poseidonis, which is a remnant of Atlantis, are much the same, with a magical culture characterised by bizareness, cruelty, death, and post-mortem horrors. Averoigne is Smith’s version of pre-modern France, comparable to James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme. Zothique exists millions of years in the future. It is “the last continent of Earth, when the sun is dim and tarnished.” These tales have been compared to the Dying Earth sequence of Jack Vance.

  In 1933 Smith began corresponding with Robert E. Howard, the Texan creator of Conan. From 1933-1937, Smith, Howard and Lovecraft were the leaders of the Weird Tales school of fiction, and corresponded frequently although they never met. The writer of oriental fantasies, E. Hoffman Price, is the only man known to have met all three in the flesh.

  Mid-late Career: Return to Poetry and Sculpture

  In Sept 1937, Smith’s mother Fanny died. Smith spent the next two years nursing his father through his last illness. Timeus died in December 1937. Aged 44, Smith now virtually ceased writing fiction. He had been severely affected by several tragedies occurring in a short period of time: Robert E. Howard’s death by suicide (1936), Lovecraft’s death from cancer (1937) and the deaths of his parents, which left him exhausted. As a result, he withdrew from the scene, marking the end of Weird Tales’ Golden Age.He began sculpting and resumed the writing of poetry. However, Smith was visited by many writers at his cabin, including Fritz Leiber, Rah Hoffman, Francis T. Laney and others.

  In 1942, three years after August Derleth founded Arkham House for the purpose of preserving the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Derleth published the first of several major collections of Smith’s fiction, Out of Space and Time (1942). This was followed by Lost Worlds (1944). The books sold slowly, went out of print and became costly rarities. Derleth published five more volumes of Smith’s prose and two of his verse, and at his death in 1971 had a large volume of Smith’s poems in press.

  Later Life, Marriage and Death

  In 1953 Smith suffered a coronary attack. Aged 61, he married Carol(yn) Jones Dorman on November 10, 1954. Dorman had much experience in Hollywood and radio public relations. After honeymooning at the Smith cabin, they moved to Pacific Grove, California, where he set up a household with their children. (Carol had been married before and had three children). For several years he alternated between the house on Indian Ridge and his wife’s house in Pacific Grove. Having sold most of his father’s tract, in 1957 the old house burned — the Smiths believed by arson, others said by accident.

  Smith now reluctantly did gardening for other residents at Pacific Grove, and grew a goatee. He spent much time shopping and walking near the seafront but despite Derleth’s badgering, resisted the writing of mor
e fiction. In 1961, he suffered strokes. In August 1961, he quietly died in his sleep, aged 68. After Smith’s death, Carol remarried (becoming Carolyn Wakefield) and subsequently died of cancer.

  The poet’s ashes were buried beside, or beneath, a boulder to the immediate west of where his childhood home (destroyed by fire in 1957) stood; some were also scattered in a stand of blue oaks near the boulder. There was no marker. However, in more recent times a plaque to his memory has been erected at the Auburn, California Placer County Library.

  Bookseller Roy A. Squires was appointed Smith’s “west coast executor,” with Jack L. Chalker as his “east coast executor.” Squires published many letterpress editions of individual Smith poems.

  THE DEATH OF ILALOTHA

  Black Lord of bale and fear, master of all confusion!

  By thee, thy prophet saith,

  New power is given to wizards after death,

  And witches in corruption draw forbidden breath

  And weave such wild enchantment and illusion

  As none but lamiae may use;

  And through thy grace the charneled corpses lose

  Their horror, and nefandous loves are lighted

  In noisome vaults long nighted;

  And vampires make their sacrifice to thee —

  Disgorging blood as if great urns had poured

  Their bright vermilion hoard

  About the washed and weltering sarcophagi.

  — Ludar’s Litany to Thasaidon.

  *

  According to the custom in old Tasuun, the obsequies of Ilalotha, lady-in-waiting to the self-widowed Queen Xantlicha, had formed an occasion of much merrymaking and prolonged festivity. For three days, on a bier of diverse-colored silks from the Orient, under a rose-hued canopy that might well have domed some nuptial couch, she had lain clad with gala garments amid the great feasting-hall of the royal palace in Miraab. About her, from morning dusk to sunset, from cool even to torridly glaring dawn, the feverish tide of the funeral orgies had surged and eddied without slackening. Nobles, court officials, guardsmen, scullions, astrologers, eunuchs, and all the high ladies, waiting-women and female slaves of Xantlicha, had taken part in that prodigal debauchery which was believed to honour most fitly the deceased. Mad songs and obscene ditties were sung, and dancers whirled in vertiginous frenzy to the lascivious pleading of untirable lutes. Wines and liquors were poured torrentially from monstrous amphorae; the tables fumed with spicy meats piled in huge hummocks and forever replenished. The drinkers offered libation to Ilalotha, till the fabrics of her bier were stained to darker hues by the spilt vintages. On all sides around her, in attitudes of disorder or prone abandonment, lay those who had yielded to amorous license of the fullness of their potations. With halfshut eyes and lips slightly parted, in the rosy shadow cast by the catafalque, she wore no aspect of death but seemed a sleeping empress who ruled impartially over the living and the dead. This appearance, together with a strange heightening of her natural beauty, was remarked by many: and some said that she seemed to await a lover’s kiss rather than the kisses of the worm.

  On the third evening, when the many-tongued brazen lamps were lit and the rites drew to their end, there returned to court the Lord Thulos, acknowledged lover of Queen Xantlicha, who had gone a week previous to visit his domain on the western border and had heard nothing of Ilalotha’s death. Still unaware, he came into the hall at that hour when the saturnalia began to flag and the fallen revelers to outnumber those who still moved and drank and made riot.

  He viewed the disordered hall with little surprise, for such scenes were familiar to him from childhood. Then, approaching the bier, he recognized its occupant with a certain startlement. Among the numerous ladies of Miraab who had drawn his libertine affections, Ilalotha had held sway longer than most; and, it was said, she had grieved more passionately over his defection than any other. She had been superseded a month before by Xantlicha, who had shown favor to Thulos in no ambiguous manner; and Thulos, perhaps, had abandoned her not without regret: for the role of lover to the queen, though advantageous and not wholly disagreeable, was somewhat precarious. Xantlicha, it was universally believed, had rid herself of the late King Archain by means of a tomb-discovered vial of poison that owed its peculiar subtlety and virulence to the art of ancient sorcerers. Following this act of disposal, she had taken many lovers, and those who failed to please her came invariably to ends no less violent than that of Archain. She was exigent, exorbitant, demanding a strict fidelity somewhat irksome to Thulos; who, pleading urgent affairs on his remote estate, had been glad enough of a week away from court.

  Now, as he stood beside the dead woman, Thulos forgot the queen and bethought him of certain summer nights that had been honeyed by the fragrance of jasmine and the jasmine-white beauty of Ilalotha. Even less than the others could he believe her dead: for her present aspect differed in no wise from that which she had often assumed during their old intercourse. To please his whim, she had feigned the inertness and complaisance of slumber or death; and at such times he had loved her with an ardor undismayed by the pantherine vehemence with which, at other whiles, she was wont to reciprocate or invite his caresses.

  Moment by moment, as if through the working of some powerful necromancy, there grew upon him a curious hallucination, and it seemed that he was again the lover of those lost nights, and had entered that bower in the palace gardens where Ilalotha waited him on a couch strewn with overblown petals, lying with bosom quiet as her face and hands. No longer was he aware of the crowded hall: the high-flaring lights, the wine-flushed faces, had become a moonbright parterre of drowsily nodding blossoms, and the voices of the courtiers were no more than a faint suspiration of wind amid cypress and jasmine. The warm, aphrodisiac perfumes of the June night welled about him; and again, as of old, it seemed that they arose from the person of Ilalotha no less than from the flowers. Prompted by intense desire, he stooped over and felt her cool arm stir involuntarily beneath his kiss.

  Then, with the bewilderment of a sleep-walker awakened rudely, he heard a voice that hissed in his ear with soft venom: “Hast forgotten thyself, my Lord Thulos? Indeed I wonder little, for many of my bawcocks deem that she is fairer in death than in life.” And, turning from Ilalotha, while the weird spell dissolved from his senses, he found Xantlicha at his side. Her garments were disarrayed, her hair was unbound and disheveled, and she reeled slightly, clutching him by the shoulder with sharp-nailed fingers. Her full, poppy-crimson lips were curled by a vixenish fury, and in her long-lidded yellow eyes there blazed the jealousy of an amorous cat.

  Thulos, overwhelmed by a strange confusion, remembered but partially the enchantment to which he had succumbed; and he was unsure whether or not he had actually kissed Ilalotha and had felt her flesh quiver to his mouth. Verily, he thought, this thing could not have been, and a waking dream had momentarily seized him. But he was troubled by the words of Xantlicha and her anger, and by the half-furtive drunken laughters and ribald whispers that he heard passing among the people about the hall.

  “Beware, my Thulos,” the queen murmured, her strange anger seeming to subside; “For men say that she was a witch.”

  “How did she die? “ queried Thulos.

  “From no other fever than that of love, it is rumored.”

  “Then, surely, she was no witch,” Thulos argued with a lightness that was far from his thoughts and feelings; “for true sorcery should have found the cure.”

  “It was from love of thee,” said Xantlicha darkly; “and as all women know, thy heart is blacker and harder than black adamant. No witchcraft, however potent, could prevail thereon.” Her mood, as she spoke, appeared to soften suddenly. “Thy absence has been long, my lord. Come to me at midnight: I will wait for thee in the south pavilion.”

  Then, eyeing him sultrily for an instant from under drooped lids, and pinching his arm in such a manner that her nails pierced through cloth and skin like a cat’s talons, she turned from Thulos to hail certain of the
harem-eunuchs.

  Thulos, when the queen’s attention was disengaged from him, ventured to look again at Ilalotha; pondering, meanwhile, the curious remarks of Xantlicha. He knew that Ilalotha, like many of the court-ladies, had dabbled in spells and philtres; but her witchcraft had never concerned him, since he felt no interest in other charms or enchantments than those with which nature had endowed the bodies of women. And it was quite impossible for him to believe that Ilalotha had died from a fatal passion: since, in his experience, passion was never fatal.

  Indeed, as he regarded her with confused emotions, he was again beset by the impression that she had not died at all. There was no repetition of the weird, half-remembered hallucination of other time and place; but it seemed to him that she had stirred from her former position on the wine stained bier, turning her face toward him a little, as a woman turns to an expected lover; that the arm he had kissed (either in dream or reality) was outstretched a little farther from her side.

  Thulos bent nearer, fascinated by the mystery and drawn by a stranger attraction that he could not have named. Again, surely, he had dreamt or had been mistaken. But even as the doubt grew, it seemed that the bosom of Ilalotha stirred in faint respiration, and he heard an almost inaudible but thrilling whisper: “Come to me at midnight. I will wait for thee... in the tomb.”

  At this instant there appeared beside the catafalque certain people in the sober and rusty raiment of sextons, who had entered the hall silently, unperceived by Thulos or by any of the company. They carried among them a thin-walled sarcophagus of newly welded and burnished bronze. It was their office to remove the dead woman and bear her to the sepulchral vaults of her family, which were situated in the old necropolis lying somewhat to northward of the palace-gardens.

  Thulos would have cried out to restrain them from their purpose; but his tongue clove tightly; nor could he move any of his members. Not knowing whether he slept or woke, he watched the people of the cemetery as they placed Ilalotha in the sarcophagus and bore her quickly from the hall, unfollowed and still unheeded by the drowsy bacchanalians. Only when the somber cortège had departed was he able to stir from his position by the empty bier. His thoughts were sluggish, and full of darkness and indecision. Smitten by an immense fatigue that was not unnatural after his day-long journey, he withdrew to his apartments and fell instantly into death-deep slumber.