by S. T. Joshi
“The Maker of Gargoyles” is authentically mediaeval, not only in its chronological setting, but in its focus on the artist Blaise Reynard, who seeks to fashion gargoyles for the cathedral at Vyônes. He is disconcerted to find that these gargoyles have come to life and wreaked havoc on the populace; and his attempt to destroy them does not end well for him.
Several other stories cleverly unite the themes of a repressive religion with Smith’s dominant motif of sexual love. “The End of the Story” not only introduces us to the redoubtable Château des Faussesflammes, whose ruins lie near the abbey of Périgon, but also to a baleful lamia, Nycea, who seduces the unwary traveler Christophe Morand. Although nominally “saved” from her clutches by the abbot Hilaire, Morand finds that Nycea’s allure is more than he can resist:
Soon I shall return, to visit again the ruins of the Château des Faussesflammes, and redescend into the vaults below the triangular flagstone. But, in spite of he nearness of Périgon to Faussesflammes, in spite of my esteem for the abbot, my gratitude for his hospitality and my admiration for his incomparable library, I shall not care to revisit my friend Hilaire.
“The Disinterment of Venus” is one of Smith’s most sardonic tales, and the satire directed against the sexually inexperienced monks of Périgon is pungent and unrelenting. The fact that the monks’ unearthing of a marble statue of Venus in the abbey garden leads them to commit lechery could conceivably be accounted for non-supernaturally, as the statue’s lascivious outlines inflames the sexuality they have so diligently suppressed; but when the pious Brother Louis attempts to destroy the statue with a hammer and is later found in a pit, with the statue lying on top of him, “crushed beneath her marble breasts,” we are to understand both the story’s supernatural premise and a further underscoring of the unnaturalness of the sexual repression of medieval religious life. Smith acknowledged that the story was an echo of another celebrated tale of an animated statue, Prosper Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille” (1840).
A similar fate meets Pierre, the protagonist of “Mother of Toads”: when he scorns the advances of the loathsome Mère Antoinette, a witch who is also called La Mère des Crapauds, he is not only pursued by legions of toads but is drowned in a marsh full of toads—but in fact his death occurs when “two enormous breasts were crushed closely down upon his face.” Smith wrote this story in the hope that it would be published in Spicy Mystery Stories, one of several pulp magazines of the period in which sexual elements were mingled with hard-boiled crime, supernaturalism, and other genres. But the tale was rejected by the magazine, and an expurgated version was published in Weird Tales.
A pleasanter fate meets Anselme, who in “The Enchantress of Sylaire” falls under the influence of the enchantress Séphora. It is telling that, when a werewolf and former lover of Séphora gives Anselme a “mirror of Reality” that would allow him to visualise the true nature of Séphora, Anselme throws it away, preferring to preseve his illusions of Séphora’s seductiveness and beauty. This conclusion brings to mind Smith’s memorable prose-poem “The Touch-Stone” (1929), where “Nasiphra the philosopher” comes upon the “fabled touch-stone, which was said to reveal the true nature of all things”; but once its depressing revelations become all too apparent (“it revealed to him the fact that his house was a mouldy sepulchre, that his library was a collection of worm-eaten rubbish, that his friends were skeletons, mummies, jackdaws and hyenas, that his wife was a cheap and meretricious trull,” and so on), he discards the touch-stone, “preferring to share with other men the common illusions, the friendly and benign mirages that make our existence possible.”
The Averoigne tales do not feature supernatural entities quite as exotic as those of the Zothique and Hyperborea cycles, but lamias, witches, and vampires are found in abundance. In “The Mandrakes,” both Gilles Grenier and his wife Sabine dispense mandrake roots as love-potions, in the manner of mediaeval witches; but when Gilles kills his wife, he suffers dreadful consequences that result in his own execution for sorcery. “A Rendezvous in Averoigne” is a well-told story of relatively traditional vampires, the Sieur de Malinbois and his wife, the lady Agathe; and they are dispatched in the customary fashion, with a wooden stake to the heart.
A more eccentric entity is found in “The Beast of Averoigne.” This entity, having descended from a comet, nourishes itself by eating human bone marrow. It is destroyed when a necromancer, Luc le Chaudronnier, releases a monster from the “ring of Eibon” that overwhelms the beast. This story reveals the influence of Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space,” where a mysterious entity (or entities) descends to earth on a comet from the depths of space.
Indeed, it could be said that the invention of the wizard Eibon himself—an explicit worshipper of Iog-Sotôt and Sodagui (medieval French versions of the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth and of Tsathoggua, invented by Smith in the Hyperborea story “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”)—owes much to Lovecraft. Eibon is Smith’s equivalent of Abdul Alhazred, the “mad Arab” who wrote the Necronomicon in the eighth century c.e. Eibon was first cited in the Hyperborea story “The Door to Saturn” (1930), while the Book of Eibon—“that primordial manual of sorcery”—is first cited in “The Holiness of Azédarac.” Smith later declared that Gaspard du Nord, the pupil of the necromancer Nathaire, translated it into old French. Lovecraft in turn cited the work in his own stories, either as the Book of Eibon or as the Livre d’Eibon or (in a purported Latin version) as Liber Ivonis.
“The Colossus of Ylourgne” also features an eccentric entity. It is bad enough that the ruined castle of Ylourgne is being restored by the reanimated dead; it is worse that they are fashioning an immense human body, made of disparate parts of other human beings, into which Nathaire will infuse his soul. Gaspard du Nord succeeds in destroying the entity, but not before it has ravaged the countryside. One wonders whether this story influenced Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” (in Books of Blood, Volume 1, 1984), which similarly features a huge humanoid creature made up of a multitude of human beings fused together.
As with the tales of the Zothique cycle, the consciously archaistic prose that Smith uses in the Averoigne tales substantially enhances their verisimilitude and atmosphere of antiquity. Whatever historical errors Smith may have made, his richly textured prose convinces the reader of the reality of the unreal—and his evocation of both piety and heresy, romantic love and sexual passion, witchcraft and necromancy conveys an aura of remoteness that is undeniably effective. It is a shame that Smith never wrote a novel-length tale of Averoigne: “The Sorceress of Averoigne” was to have been such a work, but only a synopsis of it survives. Nonetheless, the existing Averoigne tales each build upon the other to create a vivid picture of a past where anything can occur, and where love and death exist in close proximity.
ii. Hyperborea and Atlantis
Clark Ashton Smith’s tales of Hyperborea—a land of the frozen north, roughly corresponding with Greenland, and the original home of the human race, more than a million years ago—are striking examples of their author’s sardonic view of humanity. These tales, written over a long period of time (the earliest dates to 1929, the latest to 1957), allowed Smith to infuse a particularly pungent brand of satire into tales that would otherwise be expressions of pure fantasy.
Smith has no interest in depicting a world of primitive cavemen. His Hyperborea already bears such hallmarks of civilisation as priests, wizards, temples, and immense wealth. A curious intimacy is established between human beings and the baleful gods of the region, often leading to spectacular punishments whereby the gods assert their autocratic power over their hapless human worshippers.
The satirical impulse was never far from Smith’s consciousness. Alienated as he was from many of the intellectual, cultural, and social currents of his time, he repeatedly rebelled at being an unwilling inhabitant of the early twentieth century. He was taken aback when his friend and mentor George Sterling criticised one of his earliest tales of fantasy, “The Abominat
ions of Yondo” (1925). Sterling had written:
All highbrows think the ‘Yondo’ material outworn and childish. The daemonic is done for, for the present, so far as our contemporaries go, and imagination must seek other fields. You have squeezed every drop from the weird (and what drops!) and should touch on it only infrequently, as I on the stars. The swine don’t want pearls: they want corn; and it is foolish to hope to change their tastes. (Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, November 28, 1925)
Insensitive as this sounds, Sterling was only reflecting the general opinion of both “highbrows” and mainstream critics of the 1920s, who regarded any deviation from social realism (as embodied in the work of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald) as illegitimate. Tales of fantasy, horror, and the supernatural represented to them evasions of “reality”—pure escapism that could have no aesthetic value.
Smith rebelled against this narrow and constricted view of literature:
I can’t agree with the high-brows that the “weird” is dead—either in poetry or anywhere else. They’re all suffering from mechanized imaginations. But I, for one, refuse to submit to the arid, earth-bound spirit of the time; and I think there is sure to be a romantic revival sooner or later—a revolt against mechanization and over-socialization, etc. If there isn’t—then I hope to hell my next incarnation will be in some happier and freer planet. Neither the ethics nor the aesthetics of the ant-hill have any attraction for me. (Letter to George Sterling, December 1, 1925)
This statement could serve as a virtual manifesto for Smith’s fantasy fiction: his refusal to “submit to the arid, earth-bound spirit of the time” meant that he would cast off the fetters that bound him to his own time and his own planet, using his imagination to fill the universe with gods and monsters, and scorning the present moment to dwell in fantasy realms of the distant past or far future. The act of fantasy, far from being an exercise in escapism, thus becomes a gesture of defiance against the aesthetic impoverishment of the present day.
Hyperborea was for Smith a land where gods and human beings could mingle freely, even if the outcome was disastrous for the latter. In this regard, Smith drew upon a celebrated contemporary, the Irish writer Lord Dunsany (1878–1957). Dunsany had achieved spectacular fame in the early twentieth century with his own tales, plays, and novels of “the edge of the world.” His earliest books, The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906), depicted an imaginary realm, Pegāna, where such gods and demons as Sish (the destroyer of hours), Slid (whose soul is in the sea), and Yoharneth-Lahai (the god of little dreams and fancies) interact with their human worshippers. It was a realm of exquisite beauty, but not without its moments of terror: the gods of Pegāna punish even lesser gods (such as the “home gods” Eimēs, Zānēs, and Sagástrion) who rebel against them.
Smith seemed to be drawn particularly by Dunsany’s later collection The Book of Wonder (1912), a seminal volume in the literature of fantasy. In this book, the great weird artist Sidney H. Sime drew a series of fantastic illustrations, and Dunsany wrote stories to accompany them, thereby reversing the usual creative process. In many of these tales, Dunsany speaks with ponderous gravity of the lamentable fate that comes upon those who seek to profit by criminal acts: their punishment is meted out not by the police or any other mundane force, but by the very gods whose domains they have invaded in the course of their criminal enterprise.
And so, in “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1929), we find two robbers who seek to take refuge in the temple of Tsathoggua but encounter a hideous fate. Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, explicitly pointed to the influence of Lord Dunsany when he rejected the tale as “extremely unreal and unconvincing.” He went on to say: “Personally I fell under the spell of its splendid wording, which reminded me of Lord Dunany’s stories in The Book of Wonder. However, I fear that Lord Dunsany’s stories would prove unpalatable to most of our readers” (letter to Clark Ashton Smith, January 18, 1930).
One reader who had a much more enthusiastic response was Smith’s great colleague H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote ecstatically:
I must not delay in expressing my well-nigh delirious delight at “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” . . . I can see & feel & smell the jungle around immemorial Commoriom, which I am sure must lie buried today in glacial ice near Olathoë, in the land of Lomar! It is of this crux of elder horror, I am certain, that the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred was thinking when he—even he—left something unmention’d & signify’d by a row of stars in the surviving codex of his accursed & forbidden Necronomicon! You have achieved in its fullest glamour the exact Dunsanian touch which I find it almost impossible to duplicate . . . (Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, December 3, 1929)
Lovecraft makes it clear that Smith’s tale seemed uncannily to echo some of his own earlier conceptions (“Olathoë, in the land of Lomar” is a reference to his story “Polaris” [1918], while Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon is the celebrated treatise about the evil gods cited in numerous tales of the 1920s). Lovecraft was also a devotee of Dunsany, whose work he had ecstatically discovered in 1919. For the next several years Lovecraft wrote a series of stories that strove (not entirely successfully, as he himself suggests) to capture the atmosphere of ethereal fantasy found in the work of that inimitable Irish writer.
Lovecraft was especially taken with the invention of the toad-god Tsathoggua. He cited it in a work he was writing at the very time he read Smith’s tale—“The Mound,” a story he was ghostwriting for Zealia Bishop. Here there is a reference to “certain temples . . . in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terrible black toad-idol . . . called Tsathoggua.” “The Mound” was not published at this time, but a later story by Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), also featured several glancing mentions of Tsathoggua, as well as a joking reference to “the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.” This story appeared in Weird Tales (August 1931), preceding the publication of “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” which was finally published in Weird Tales for November 1931. Therefore, many readers believed that Lovecraft had invented Tsathoggua and that Smith had borrowed the invention from Lovecraft!
The influence of Smith’s tale on Lovecraft extended still farther. The protoplasmic entity that the robbers encounter in the temple of Tsathoggua bears a striking resemblance to the hideous shoggoth that two explorers in the Antarctic come upon in the climactic scene of Lovecraft’s short novel At the Mountains of Madness (1931). There, shoggoths are described as “multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community.” It is scarcely to be doubted that this is another tip of the hat to the grotesque entity that kills one of the robbers and tears off the hand of the other in “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.”
The elementary theme that “crime does not pay” is enforced in another tale of elephantine satire, “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan,” where the title character, pursuing two emeralds that roll away from him, literally drowns in an immense mountain of jewels. One can scarcely help thinking of a story in Dunsany’s Book of Wonder, “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men,” where the three characters cited in the title suffer an equally loathsome fate as a fitting retribution for their attempt to steal a “golden box” filled with “poems of fabulous value.” (Smith’s story is also of interest for resurrecting the archaic noun “weird,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “That which is destined or fated to happen to a particular person.”)
One of the more distinctive characters in the Hyperborea tales is the wizard Eibon, introduced in “The Door to Saturn” (written July 25, 1930). Strangely enough, the eponymous Book of Eibon is first cited in a tale of Averoigne, “The Holiness of Azédarac” (written May 19, 1931), where it is described as “that primordial manual of sorcery.” The Book of Eibon is then cited as an epigraph to “Ubbo-Sathla” (written February 15, 1932). This i
s the most peculiar of the Hyperborea tales in that it begins in the recognisable world of the present day, only to drift insensibly into the remote past.
The story is often considered a contribution to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but its relations to that cycle are surprisingly tenuous. It is a brilliant tale of regression, in which a man of the modern world, Paul Tregardis, comes upon a crystal once owned by the Hyperborean wizard Zon Messamelech and finds himself falling back through time, inhabiting a succession of increasingly remote human and animal forms until he finally unites with Ubbo-Sathla, “a mass without head or members, spawning the gray, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life,” as the epigraph states.
In the sense that Ubbo-Sathla appears to be only the ultimate source of life on earth (the epigraph states: “And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla”), the entity could be considered somewhat less cosmic than Lovecraft’s alien gods Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep, whose domain extends throughout the entire universe. But the spectacular reach of the story into the remotest depths of earthly life makes it cosmic enough for anyone’s taste. But in what sense is it Lovecraftian? Can Smith be said to have been influenced by Lovecraft at all? His own cosmicism is certainly not derived from Lovecraft, for it is evident in his earliest poetry, written a decade before he ever encountered the Providence writer. True, Ubbo-Sathla is said to be a “formless, idiotic demiurge,” bringing to mind Lovecraft’s standard portrait of Azathoth (“that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity’s centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth”); but Smith could have devised this formulation without reference to any Lovecraft tale.
