The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  O no! no!

  Thou shalt as soon tear from the giant girth

  Of this wild oak that haunts the quiet sky

  A branch that cleaves there moaning, as from me

  This new-found joy, this treasure! Let us be!

  We, that have but discover’d a strange world,

  Would find a little happiness therein.

  Let us depart, and if thou dost, why then,

  Thy sleep shall be as sweet as that which hangs

  Droop-lidded from the dewy cherubim! (L 140)

  The “Scene for Macbeth,” as Lovecraft’s prefatory note states, is to be inserted between scenes 3 and 4 of Act 5; it is only in scene 5 that Macbeth hears from Seyton, his attending officer, of Lady Macbeth’s death from grief and remorse over the deaths she has brought about, specifically those of the wife and children of Macduff. It is the deaths of those children that lead her to lament:

  Here’s where it hurts!

  O little baby hands that pluck me close,

  Poor wandering atoms in this night of pitch—

  Fordone, foredone, fordone! (L 145)

  There may be a certain boldness, even arrogance, in Loveman’s attempts to augment two of the towering landmarks of English drama in this fashion (he wryly admits as much when he prefaces his “Scene for King Lear” with an epigraph from the Shakespearean scholar Walter Raleigh: “No man, even if he had the mind to do it, would now dare to write like Shakespeare” [L 136]), but Loveman’s additions are manifestly in the spirit of homages, with not the least suggestion that King Lear or Macbeth are in any sense aesthetically deficient. That Loveman chose death scenes for all three of his additions suggests his interest in visualising scenes of high drama that earlier dramatic conventions had decreed must take place off stage. In this sense, for all Loveman’s exquisite replication of Shakespearean diction, prosody, and even imagery, he betrays a distinctly modern sensibility.

  Much of the poetry of Samuel Loveman is too delicate and gossamer to endure analysis: its flawless craftsmanship, refined aestheticism, and depth of conception can only be appreciated and treasured. Marred as some of it is by obscurity of thought and expression, it can nonetheless take a high place among the poetic work of its time, standing as a pungent refutation of the facile view that adherence to standard rhyme and metre can no longer facilitate authentic poetic feeling. Why Loveman abruptly ceased the writing of poetry just at the time when he seemed on the brink of achieving a modicum of general recognition must remain a mystery: did the deaths of his great friends, Hart Crane and H. P. Lovecraft, dry up his pen? Whatever the case, we can be grateful for the surviving literary productions of his first five decades—testimonials to the power of art to infuse at least a soupçon of ecstasy into the mundanity of life.

  Clark Ashton Smith: Poet of the Stars

  A. The Fiction

  i. Zothique and Averoigne

  The tales of Zothique constitute Clark Ashton Smith’s most extensive attempt to build an imaginary world purely from the depths of his imagination. With nearly twenty completed stories, a poem, and the distinctive play The Dead Will Cuckold You, the Zothique cycle surpasses in scope and substance any of Smith’s other fabricated realms—Averoigne, Hyperborea, Poseidonis, and others. And yet, the Zothique tales are not radically different from Smith’s other stories of fantasy and imagination: they merely underscore more exhaustively what Smith had outlined in tales, poems, and prose-poems throughout his career. The very fact that one story, “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” was initially conceived as a tale of Hyperborea suggests a fundamental relation between that realm of the distant past and the Zothique of the far future.

  What immediately strikes us about the Zothique tales is how they depict a world that, although purported to be millions of years in the future, has reverted to primitivism. Nowhere do we find even the vestigial traces of such things as skyscrapers, telephones, automobiles, and other tokens of the technological civilisation that we today take for granted: these things have all fallen away into the maw of oblivion, and Smith seems to be suggesting that they were nothing but superficial excrescences upon human civilisation, a civilisation whose basic focus will always be the seemingly contradictory but essentially related phenomena of love and death.

  The symbol for this return to primitivism is the re-emergence of what Smith, in “The Dark Eidolon,” calls “the older gods”: “the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes.” Religion itself was born from primitive man’s sense of wonder at a world whose natural origins and natural phenomena he failed to understand, forcing him to attribute the workings of nature to anthromorphic gods. If a river flowed downstream, it was only because a river god caused it to do so; if a tree grew upward, it was because a god in the tree compelled it. From this primitive animism arose first polytheism—a multiplicity of gods, which in the Hindu, Greco-Roman, and other religions each presided over some specific aspect of the natural world—and then monotheism, which itself remained fundamentally polytheistic in its proliferation of angels, demons, and other godlike entities.

  But because Smith’s Zothique is a dying world, its gods must be gods of death. Mordiggian, the god of the city Zul-Bha-Sair who makes his debut in “The Charnel God,” is explictly referred to as such: “And all who die within the walls of the city are sacred to Mordiggian.” So it is fitting that this baleful god exacts a fitting punishment on those who dare to steal the dead from his temple.

  The chief god of Zothique appears to be Thasaidon, “lord of Evil.” He is introduced in “The Dark Eidolon,” but makes his most vivid appearance in “Xeethra,” a tale poignantly expressing the futility of seeking happiness on earth. An emissary declares that “Thasaidon is the master of all sorceries, and a giver of magic gifts to those who service Him and acknowledge Him as their lord.” But, paradoxically, Thasaidon is also called a “Demon.” The world of the far future is a world where even death is not the end—only the beginning of the terrors and miseries that life itself has inflicted upon a weary and effete humanity.

  It is also a singular irony that, in this world of the far future, the democracy so dominant in today’s societies has been utterly overthrown and a reversion to monarchy has occurred. Zothique is filled with kings, queens, princes, and their customary retinue of handmaidens, courtiers, and sycophants. They are by no means benevolent rulers, and their cynical self-aggrandisement underscores for Smith the irremediable moral corruption of a humanity in which altruism is a myth and ruthlessness and brutality are the norm.

  Smith augments the sense of the future returning, ouroboros-like, to the past by the stately, archaic prose he utilises in the Zothique tales. He drew from a long line of prose writers in English and other languages whose dense, richly textured idiom creates something of the effect of an incantation. In English, such prose was employed by writers from John Lyly (Euphues, 1578) and Sir Thomas Browne (Hydrotaphia, 1658) to Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lord Dunsany. It is in his use of language that Smith establishes a tight bond between his early poetry, his magnificent prose-poems, and his tales. Late in life Smith defended his use of evocative prose:

  As to my own employment of an ornate style, using many words of classic origin and exotic color, I can only say that [it] is designed to produce effects of language and rhythm which could not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to what is known as “basic English.” As [Lytton] Strachey points out, a style composed largely of words of Anglo-Saxon origin tends to be spondaic rhythm, “which by some mysterious law, reproduces the atmosphere of ordinary life.” An atmosphere of remoteness, vastness, mystery and exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler shades, tints and nuances of meaning—all of which, of course, are wasted or worse than wasted on the average reader, even if presumably literate. (Letter to Samuel J. Sackett, July 11, 1950)

  The inter
section of love and death is at the heart of many tales of Zothique. It is no accident that in Smith’s first Zothique story, “The Empire of the Necromancers,” the corpses who are resurrected by sorcerers suffer a second death when the reanimated dead lop off the sorcerers’ heads. As a further ironic twist, these corpses are once again revived by the ancient ruler Hestaiyon, so that they find “no peace or respite from their doom of life-in-death.” In these stories Smith revels in the depiction of death—and also of the anguish and torture of mind and body that lead inexorably to extinction. The imagery of death is pervasive in “The Dark Eidolon,” where we encounter this memorable scene of dancing skeletons:

  . . . a troupe of skeletons pirouetted with light clickings of their toe-bones; and a rout of mummies bowed stiffly; and others of Namirrha’s creatures moved with mysterious caperings. To and fro they leapt on the bodies of the emperor’s people, in the paces of an evil saraband. At every step they grew taller and heavier, till the saltant mummies were as the mummies of Anakim, and the skeletons were boned like colossi . . .

  It is no wonder that Smith felt that this story in particular would make an effective film!

  “The Witchcraft of Ulua” effects the love-death fusion with particular felicity. The Princess Ulua, who “had inherited the sorceries of her mother Lunalia,” seeks to seduce the young Amalzain, but fails. And although she herself is killed and “has gone to her black lord, Thasaidon, in the seventh hell,” she nonetheless plagues Amalzain with terrible dreams in which the symbols of death (“charnel-worms and death-scarabs and scorpions”) are prevalent. Uncharacteristically, Smith tacks on a simple but powerful moral at the end of the story: the pleasures of the flesh end in corruption. Amusingly, Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, rejected the first version of his tale because it was, in his assessment, nothing but a “sex story.” Smith subsequently toned down the seduction scene, and in this expurgated form the story was accepted by Weird Tales.

  “Necromancy in Naat” is perhaps a still more powerful exemplification of the intermingling of love and death. Here, Prince Yadar seeks his lover, Dalili, who has been sold into slavery, and finds that she is on the island of Naat, ruled by necromancers. In the course of time both Yadar and Dalili become members of the extensive cadre of the undead on that island—and in this altered form they are able to renew their romance: “he followed her during the day, and felt a ghostly comfort in her nearness; and through the night-time he lay beside her, and she was a dim sweetness in his shadowy dreams.” This conclusion reminds us of Smith’s powerful prose-poem “From the Crypts of Memory” (1917), where, in a realm in which “the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living,” the world-weary inhabitants still manage to find love of a sort: “We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads.”

  And what can we say of “The Death of Ilalotha,” where a love triangle between Queen Xantichla, Lord Thulos, and Ilalotha, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, results in Ilalotha’s death, her subsequent resurrection as a lamia, and her killing of Thulos in a sarcophagus? Even this is not the end, for as Xantichla explores his tomb she “seemed to hear from Thulos’ lips an indistinct murmur, more of ecstasy than pain.” Death itself is a seduction surpassing anything that the living can provide.

  There is in many of the Zothique tales, as Scott Connors has pointed out, a fairy tale quality that harkens back not only to such things as the Arabian Nights but also to the work of Lord Dunsany, whose The Book of Wonder (1912) may well have been a decisive influence on Smith. But Smith’s Zothique is a far darker realm than the imagined worlds of the Irish fantasist, and he populates it not only with a wide array of sorcerers, witches, and even more eccentric creatures. “The Garden of Adompha” exhibits hybrid entities formed from the grafting of humans with plants. As with so many of Dunsany’s sardonic fairy tales, Adompha, the king of Sotar who had orchestrated this unnatural melding, faces a revolt from the very creatures he had ordered his court magician, Dwerulas, to fashion.

  Another pungent moral appears in “The Voyage of King Euvoran.” He is seeking to kill the “gazolba-bird” so that he can use its features to decorate his crown; but he soon finds himself captured on an island ruled by birds and is placed in a cage. What would seem to be an elementary case of role reversal goes somewhat awry when Euvoran escapes from captivity and finds himself on another island where there is an abundance of gazolba-birds—which he finds better as food than as ornaments.

  Ujuk, a “half-human fiend,” is the focus of “The Black Abbot of Puthuum,” a tale that in some ways might have been more fitting in the Averoigne cycle. For this creature, who seeks to pass himself off as the abbot of Puthuum, is the offspring of the union between the real abbot and a succubus. The real abbot, Uldor, suffers a fate common to Smith’s protagonists, thrust as he is in a sarcophagus: “Here I have remained ever since, dying and rotting eternally—and yet eternally alive.”

  The most bizarre creature in the Zothique cycle may well be the one encountered in “The Weaver in the Vault.” Here, three men commanded to retrieve the mummy of King Trepreez from the vaults at Chaon Gacca come upon this entity:

  A coldly shining, hueless globe, round as a puffball and large as a human head, had risen from the fissure and was hovering above it like a mimic moon. The thing oscillated with a slight but ceaseless vibratory motion. From it, as if caused by this vibration, the heavy humming poured, and the light fell in ever-trembling waves.

  It is no surprise that the character who encounters this unnatural being finds that “his brain was humbed as if by a merciful hemlock.”

  *

  Smith’s Averoigne stories are nominally less purely fantastic, as they are purportedly set in a time and place that must outwardly conform to the historical record. Scott Connors has touched upon H. P. Lovecraft’s mild criticism of Smith’s assertion in “The Holiness of Azédarac” that the enchantress Mariamis, in the year 475, spoke a language that was “an obsolete variant of the French of Averoigne.” Lovecraft wrote to Smith (November 18, 1933):

  I assume you realise that in 475 no such language as French existed, the vulgar Latin of Gallia not being sufficiently differentiated from the parent stock to be any sort of separate speech. Gaul was the last centre of culture in the declining Empire, (following Italy, Spain, & North Africa) as such figures as Ausonius, Avienus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Paulinus, Vigilantius, &c. attest; & towns like Burdigala (= Bordeaux) were notably erudite. Lutetia Parisiorum, even under occupation by German barbarians, was a great Roman town with baths, temples, palaces, & a cultivated life. By no stretch of the imagination could the popular Latin of 475 be called “old French”. The Frankish tribes in Gaul (entering about 350 A D & being nominal allies of Rome) still spoke their German dialect & mixed not at all with the Gallo-Romans. Ditto for the Visigoths & Burgundians who entered in 406. Only a handful of remote backwoodsmen could have adhered to the primal Celtic speech of pre-Roman days. The name Averoigne would undoubtedly have had a pure Latin form Averonia or (if derived from a tribe of Averones, as the name of Auvergne was derived from the Arverni) Regio Averonum.

  Smith acknowledged the validity of Lovecraft’s criticism, but he never prepared a revised version of the story to correct the error. However, it is possible that Lovecraft’s comments led Smith to devise the plot of a never-written story, “The Oracle of Sadoqua,” explicitly set in the later Roman empire in the “recently-conquered province of Averonia.”

  It is, indeed, somewhat misleading to state that the stories in the Averoigne cycle are set in “medieval” France. The chronological range of the stories is, in fact, very wide. The first, “The End of the Story,” is set as recently as 1789—a not insignificant date in the early-modern history of France. We are, however, very far from the tumult of the French Revolution. “The Mandrakes” is set in the fifteenth century; “The Beast of Averoigne” in 1369; “The Holiness of Azédarac” is a time-travel na
rrative ranging from 475 to 1230; “The Maker of Gargoyles” takes place in 1138; “The Colossus of Ylourgne” in 1281; “The Disinterment of Venus” in 1550, or the later Renaissance. Other stories in the cycle are not given precise dates.

  Given that Smith was required to maintain some level of historical and cultural accuracy in the Averoigne tales, it is not surprising that religion—specifically the Catholicism of mediaeval France, with its abbeys and monks—plays a central role in several tales. Smith was in all likelihood an atheist, although not as vociferous a one as his friend Lovecraft; and we so we are regaled by any number of cynical reflections on the efficacy of religion and the hypocrisy of its practitioners. Central to this motif is “The Holiness of Azédarac,” whose central character—Azédarac, bishop of Ximes—becomes, to the discomfiture of his enemy, Brother Ambrose, a saint following his death. Azédarac makes no secret of his impiety, given that he makes open profession of his devotion to “the secret, man-forgotten lore of Iog-Sotôt and Sodagui”; and Ambrose, pursuing heresy claims against him, is flung back in time, then forward again to a period 55 years beyond the date of the tale’s initial scenes, set in 1175; coming to the year 1230, is astounded to learn the legendry that has built up around his foe. In a tavern he learns of reports that St. Azédarac “was transported to heaven alive, and that his body was never buried in the great mausoleum reared for him at Ximes.” Smith envisioned several additional tales focusing on Azédarac, but never found the time to write them.