The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  Lovecraft himself submitted the story to Weird Tales, but the editor, Farnsworth Wright, rejected it. In spite of Sterling’s reservations about the story, he arranged for its publication in the Overland Monthly.

  As for “Sadastor,” there has been some debate as to whether it is a long prose-poem or a very short story. Perhaps the distinction is meaningless; what we can say with certainty is that the work exquisitely evokes the fusion of weirdness and romantic love that we find in much of Smith’s poetry of this period.

  Four years would pass before Smith would undertake the writing of prose fiction, but by the fall of 1929 he had begun producing stories in earnest. It was, coincidentally, at this very time that he also wrote a new sheaf of prose-poems, including “To the Daemon” (December 16, 1929)—a work that could stand as a virtual manifesto of the fantasy fiction he was now determined to write. In ordering the daemon to tell him tales of exotic wonder and strangeness (“tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space”), Smith was uttering a sentiment he expressed to Lovecraft at about the same time. While admiring the meticulous realism of his friend’s tales, Smith acknowledged that his purpose was different: “I agree with you that your best things show evidence of the closest literal observation. The blending of qualities is simply marvellous in its effect. I, too, am capable of observation; but I am far happier when I can create everything in a story, including the milieu” (letter to Lovecraft, January 9, 1930).

  It was this principle that led Smith to invent all his imagined worlds—Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, Poseidonis, Xiccarph, and so many others. Only Averoigne—nominally set in mediaeval France—bears any tokens with the objectively “real” world. The other worlds are realms of pure fantasy where Smith allows his imagination complete freedom to create landscape, history, and characters both human and non-human without the restrictions imposed by known reality.

  “A Night in Malnéant” (written on October 14, 1929) has sometimes been considered a tale of Averoigne, but—aside from the coined French name Malnéant, which suggests the evil inherent in the very nature of existence—it is in fact set in a never-never-land of Smith’s imagination with little to place it in mediaeval France or any other known locale. It is a particularly potent example of Smith’s penchant for mingling his favourite motifs—the all-pervasiveness of death and the fleeting salvation that can be provided by romantic love.

  The particularly intimate relationship between Smith’s fiction, poetry, and prose-poetry is underscored by “The Demon of the Flower.” This tale, set on the planet Lophai, which is ruled by a demon-flower, is an explicit elaboration of a prose-poem, “The Flower-Devil” (first published in Ebony and Crystal), where it is stated that “the Flower-Devil is supreme, in its malign immortality, and evil, perverse intelligence”; moreover, the king of this realm (the work is set on Saturn) “dares not destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king’s subjects—or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest, and most beloved queen!” This is exactly the scenario of “The Demon of the Flower.”

  Another transformation of a prose-poem into a story occurs in “The Planet of the Dead” (here titled “The Doom of Antarion”), clearly based on “From the Crypts of Memory.” Here, perhaps, the prose-poem retains its aesthetic superiority; indeed, “From the Crypts of Memory” is one of the transcendent gems of Smith’s literary output, and its evocation of a world where “the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living” (a phrase also used in the story) is a grimly potent symbol for the omnipresence of death in our own advanced civilisation. Smith’s resurrection of the plot of this prose-poem in a short story perhaps suggests a flagging of his imagination—or a need to direct his imagination toward money-making ventures. Whereas there was no viable professional market for prose-poems in Smith’s day, “The Planet of the Dead” was readily accepted by Weird Tales.

  Smith continues his melding of plant life and human life in the two stories set on the planet Xiccarph, both featuring the sorcerer Maal Dweb. Neither story has much to do with the delicate fantasy of “The Flower-Devil” or “The Demon of the Flower”; instead, they emphasise the malevolence of the plant world in narratives that stress terror over beauty.

  If Xiccarph (as well as the Lophai of “The Demon of the Flower”) are fantasy realms in spite of their setting on imaginary planets, other tales in this volume strive for somewhat greater realism in their interplanetary settings. Smith had discovered that the pulp magazine Wonder Stories could be a lucrative market for tales that made at least an outward show of belonging to the new genre of science fiction, however much an atmosphere of pure fantasy overlay them. Weird Tales was also amenable to certain tales of science fiction that had a due modicum of weirdness and terror.

  In most of his science fiction tales, Smith did not emphasise the science to any great extent, especially since his own knowledge of the sciences appears to have been relatively weak. His interstellar voyagers seem to have little difficulty flitting about from planet to planet, and Smith—like many other writers of his era—exhibits no awareness of the physical and technological complexities of space travel. His stories utilise a science-fictional framework to convey his highly cynical attitude toward human achievement and humanity’s place in the universe.

  Of “The Monster of the Prophecy” Smith writes: “It struck me on re-reading the thing that I had consciously, or unconsciously[,] satirized pretty nearly everything. Even science, and the pseudo-scientific type of yarn now prevalent, are made a josh of in the first chapter, in the creation of the absurd ‘space-annihilator . . .’ But of course the profoundest satire is that which is directed at intolerance of all kinds” (letter to Lovecraft, December 10, 1929). The intolerance Smith refers to is the notion that the denizens of another world would regard as a “monster” a creature with two arms, two legs, and white skin—a timely message indeed, as people of our own day seem increasingly inclined to segregate human beings into narrow and mutually exclusive groups based on supposed distinctions of race, gender, and political preference.

  Smith’s “Mars cycle” similarly dispenses with what little was known in his day about the actual conditions of the planet Mars. “Vulthoom” is an entertaining fantastic adventure story, although the central figure cited in the title—the “evil god” Vulthoom—makes it clear that his place of origin is far more exotic than Mars: “I am neither god nor demon, but a being who came to Mars from another universe in former cycles.” The determined work of the human protagonists prevent Vulthoom from being a menace to the inhabitants of our own planet and cause him to lapse into a sleep of a thousand years—but as Vulthoom states blandly at the end, this sleep is like a single night to him, and his ultimate conquest of the Earth seems assured.

  “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” is perhaps Smith’s most quintessentially terrifying short story, and its relentless progression from one horrific episode to the next is unparalleled in his work. The hideous entity that the explorers on Mars encounter in the ruins of the city of Yoh-Vombis, taking the shape of a black cowl, may perhaps have been meant to evoke the black protoplasmic shoggoth in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. As I stated earlier, Lovecraft himself might have been partially inspired by Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” in the creation of the shoggoth. Now Smith seems to have repaid the favour by borrowing elements of the shoggoth for his own entity.

  Smith read At the Mountains of Madness no later than August 1931. Lovecraft had sent the typescript of the story on a circulation list to various colleagues, and Smith reacted with enthusiasm when the text reached him: “I read the story twice—parts of it three or four times—and think it is one of your masterpieces. For my taste, anyway, it is vastly superior to Poe’s Antarctic opus, ‘Arthur Gordon Pym.’ I’ll never forget your descriptions of that tremendous non-human architecture, and the on-rushing shoggoth in an underworld cavern!” (le
tter to Lovecraft, c. early August 1931). It is perhaps no accident that Smith wrote his story in August–September 1931.

  Lovecraft’s shoggoth is much larger than Smith’s entity, but otherwise they share striking similarities, as do the overall narratives in which they are found. The general scenario of human explorers probing the ruins of cities built thousands or millions of years ago by an alien species, and the encounter with an incomprehensible horror that proves difficult to destroy, is identical in each tale. Lovecraft greatly enjoyed Smith’s tale, although he expressed irritation that Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales wanted Smith to truncate the earlier parts of the narrative. Smith felt obliged to accede to Wright’s wishes, since he needed the income that the sale of the story would yield. The full text of the story was not published until 1988.

  Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction spans the spectrum of genres—pure fantasy, supernatural horror, science fiction—and his best tales fuse these and other genres into an unclassifiable amalgam. His work may perhaps never be as popular as that of his friend H. P. Lovecraft, but it is a distinctive contribution to literature, and its influence on the writings of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Jack Vance, and many others is evident. The totality of his output—including his superlative poetry, his evocative prose-poetry, and even his essays and letters—is only now beginning to receive wide dissemination, and he is finally attaining the celebrity and recognition that were denied him in his lifetime. His coronation as the “emperor of dreams” is long overdue, but it has come at last.

  B. The Prose-Poetry

  The prose poem, as its very name indicates, is a hybrid form that draws equally upon the distinctive qualities of verse and the distinctive qualities of prose. Because it has been practiced relatively rarely in European literature, it has proven difficult to define. William Dean Howells, in the brief essay, “The Prose Poem,” prefacing Stuart Merrill’s Pastels in Prose (1890), noted that the prose poem is “a peculiarly modern invention” but went on to say: “I do not mean that poetical prose has not always been written; it has not been so much written as prosaic poetry; but our language abounds in noble passages of it, and it will always be written as often as a lift of profound feeling gives thinking wings” (Merrill v). Howells observes that the entire Bible, especially the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, could be considered a prose poem, and states:

  In fact, every strain of eloquence is a strain of poetry; every impassioned plea or oration is a poem in prose. At times, at all times, deep emotion takes on movement and cadence, and the curious have often selected rhythmical passages from prose authors, and given them the typographical form of poetry, to show how men might be poets without knowing it.[119]

  Canonically, the prose poem as a concrete genre dates to Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit (1842), and it is fitting that Clark Ashton Smith’s leading interpreter, Donald Sidney-Fryer, has recently produced a splendid new translation of this esoteric work. Charles Baudelaire claimed direct influence from Bertrand when he wrote his Petits poèmes en prose, first published in magazines in 1861–62 and appearing posthumously in book form in 1869. That first word of Baudelaire’s title (“small,” here meaning “short”) may be the most significant; for, apparently in consonance with his great idol Edgar Allan Poe’s strictures regarding the impossibility of a long poem to create the desired “unity of effect,” Baudelaire regarded brevity as a critical element in the prose poem: its heightened language and compressed expression were evidently meant to duplicate the effect of a short lyric poem. As Francis Scarfe points out, Bertrand consciously modelled his prose poems, even in form, upon poetry:

  Unlike Baudelaire’s poems or anyone else’s, Bertrand’s have their basis in conventional prosody. He equated the paragraph to the poetic strophe or stanza. He instructed his printer to arrange his text in such a way that each prose-poem was clearly divided into four, five, six or seven “alinéas ou couplets” (indentations or versicles) with wide spaces between them.[120]

  I am not certain that Smith was acquainted with Bertrand’s work (although one might infer it from his later invention of Gaspard du Nord, protagonist of “The Colossus of Ylourgne”); but he was definitely familiar with Baudelaire’s prose poems, as translated by Arthur Symons (1905), as well as the selections from Baudelaire’s (and many other French writers’) prose poems found in Merrill’s scintillating Pastels in Prose (1890). Smith refers to both volumes in a letter of 1918,[121] but it seems evident that he had absorbed them well before this date. Smith also refers glancingly to Oscar Wilde’s prose poems (SU 132), but neither these nor, for that matter, Baudelaire’s, can be said to have exercised any significant influence upon Smith’s own work.

  The first of Smith’s prose poems, “The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty,” dates to 1913, and is manifestly an outgrowth of his poetry. Indeed, Smith had, with characteristic modesty, said of his splendid poem “Nero” (written in May 1912) that “four-fifths of it is prose” (SU 47), suggesting that his prose poems were in some sense extensions of the free-verse odes he was writing at this time. George Sterling, reading an unidentified prose poem sent to him by Smith in November 1913, correctly noted: “It is prose in form only” (SU 99). As early as 1916 Smith was envisioning the assembling of “a volume of fantastic prose”—but by this he does not mean the lengthy tales that would later bring him celebrity in the pulp magazines, but rather a succession of shorter works: “fables, allegories, and prose-poems” (SU 139), a comment that leads one to conclude that Smith had, like Baudelaire, identified brevity as a central component of the prose poem. The occasion to publish his prose poems in book form did not arise until 1922, when he issued Ebony and Crystal, with its significant subtitle “Poems in Verse and Prose.” After this, it would be many years before many more of Smith’s prose poems appeared in his books: a few were included, almost as afterthoughts, in Out of Space and Time (1942) and The Abominations of Yondo (1960), but Smith chose to include none in his Selected Poems, assembled in 1944–49 and published posthumously in 1971. It required Sidney-Fryer’s posthumous assemblage of Poems in Prose (1965) for (nearly) all of Smith’s prose poems to be collected. At a later date, some unpublished prose poems were discovered in Smith’s papers, leading Marc and Susan Michaud to produce a new volume, Nostalgia of the Unknown (1988), although whether even this constitutes a complete collection of Smith’s prose poems has yet to be determined. Indeed, Sidney-Fryer himself included “Sadastor” in Poems in Prose but then categorised it as a short story in his 1978 bibliography.

  It is evident that, at least at the outset, Smith used the prose poem as a means of expressing, without even the relatively loose restrictions of free verse, certain moods and conceptions that had also been encompassed in his early poetry. In particular, Smith adopts a quasi-stanzaic structure in a number of his prose poems, whether it be such collections of separately titled works as “Images” or “Vignettes” or such a work as “The Litany of the Seven Kisses,” with its seven clearly demarcated sections, each consisting of a single luxurious sentence. It is significant that in “The Flower-Devil” we actually see Smith affixing the accent to the adjective “ribbèd,”[122] a transparently poetical device that underscores the importance that Smith placed in the rhythm of his prose poems. This rhythm comes into play in a number of prose poems that utilise alliteration, or identical phraseology at identical places in the paragraph. Once again, “The Litany of the Seven Kisses” is noteworthy, each of its seven sections beginning with “I kiss . . .” The later prose poems “Preference” (with its use of the phrase “I would rather . . .” at the beginning of each of its four short paragraphs) and “Offering” (where “Such is my love for thee” or variations thereof appear following each of the four paragraphs) come even closer to verse.

  Balance is another element that unites the prose poem with poetry, and Smith uses it in highly ingenious ways. The section of “Images” entitled “Tears” contains a remarkable example. Opening, “Thy tears are not as mine,” Smith then contrasts t
he tears of his beloved (“Thou weepest as a green fountain among palms and roses, with lightly falling drops that bedew the flowery turf”) with his own (“My tears are like a rain of marah in the desert, leaving a bitter pool whose waters are fire and poison”) (N 2)—only upon reflection do we note that each sentence is 27 syllables (counting “flowery” as a dissylable, as it would be in verse). “The Days” similarly contrasts a beloved’s days with the narrator’s, utilising contrasts of both happiness and sadness as well as of brightness and darkness.

  One of the chief distinguishing features of poetry, as contrasted with prose (at least, prior to the work of such Modernists as William Carlos Williams, who deliberately chose the language of the common man in their verse), is elevated language. This is, indeed, the most transparent means by which prose poems in general are distinguished from prose, although in Smith’s case the distinction was more one of degree than of kind. His use of Biblical diction in such works as “The Traveller” and “Offering” underscore Smith’s use of archaism to suggest a removal from present-day concerns and an emphasis on the timelessness of such elements as the quest and the search for love; indeed, “Offering” could be a kind of appendage to the Bible’s extraordinary exercise in seduction, the Song of Solomon. The section of “Images” entitled “The Wind and the Garden” encapsulates in a single sentence many of the stylistic elements Smith habitually used in his prose poems:

  To thee my love is something strange and fantastical, and far away, like the vast and desolate sighing of the desert wind to one who dwells in a garden of palm and rose and lotus, filled by no louder sound than the mellow lisp of a breeze of perfume, or the sigh of silvering fountains. (N 3)