The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE DARK EIDOLON AND OTHER FANTASIES

  CLARK ASHTON SMITH (1893–1961) was a poet, a sculptor, a painter, and the author of more than one hundred tales of fantasy and horror. A disciple of George Sterling and a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft, Smith was a member of the famous Lovecraft circle and was a regular contributor to Weird Tales in the 1930s. He began his writing career as a poet, composing more than one thousand poems over the course of more than fifty years, much of his work exploring the realms of fantasy, terror, wonder, and the supernatural. His noteworthy volumes of poetry include The Star-Treader, Ebony and Crystal, and Sandalwood. His stories, sometimes written in the Cthulhu Mythos, were lush and vivid, wildly speculative, reminiscent of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, and often deeply sardonic. Later in life, he wrote less and turned to visual art as his preferred mode of expression. Smith died in 1961.

  S. T. JOSHI is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, as well as Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories, Arthur Machen’s The White People and Other Weird Stories, and American Supernatural Tales. He has also written critical studies on Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft; edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. L. Mencken; and completed a two-volume history of supernatural fiction entitled Unutterable Horror. He was recently honored with the creation of the S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship at Brown University Library and was awarded the Robert Bloch Award by the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council at NecronomiCon 2013.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2014

  Selection copyright © 2014 by William Dorman, Executor of the Estate of Clark Ashton Smith

  Introduction and notes copyright © 2014 by S. T. Joshi

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  The selections in this book first appeared in issues of Academy, Acolyte, Arkham Sampler, Auburn Journal, Bohemia, Different, Fantasmagoria, Fantasy Fan, Kaleidograph, Live Stories, Lost Worlds, Measure, Overland Monthly, Poetry, Smart Set, Town Talk, Troubadour, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, in the following volumes of Clark Ashton Smith’s works: The Complete Poetry and Translations (Volume I), edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2007–08), The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn Journal Press, 1933), Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (Auburn Journal Press, 1925), Nero and Other Poems (Futile Press, 1937), Odes and Sonnets (Book Club of California, 1918), Poems in Prose (Arkham House, 1965), Selected Poems (Arkham House, 1971), The Star-Treader and Other Poems (A. M. Robertson, 1912), and in the anthologies Fire and Sleet and Candlelight, edited by August Derleth (Arkham House, 1961) and Time to Come: Science-Fiction of Tomorrow, edited by August Derleth (Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954). “The Hill of Dionysus” (1961) and “Cycles” (1963) were published as chapbooks by Roy A. Squires.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Smith, Clark Ashton, 1893–1961.

  [Works. Selections]

  The Dark Eidolon and other fantasies / Clark Ashton Smith ; edited with an introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-14-310738-5 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-0-698-13746-2 (eBook)

  I. Joshi, S. T., 1958– editor of compilation. II. Title.

  PS3537.M335A6 2014

  813'.52—dc23 2013047586

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by S. T. JOSH

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A Note on the Texts

  SHORT STORIES

  The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

  The Last Incantation

  The Devotee of Evil

  The Uncharted Isle

  The Face by the River

  The City of the Singing Flame

  The Holiness of Azédarac

  The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

  Ubbo-Sathla

  The Double Shadow

  The Maze of the Enchanter

  Genius Loci

  The Dark Eidolon

  The Weaver in the Vault

  Xeethra

  The Treader of the Dust

  Mother of Toads

  Phoenix

  PROSE POEMS

  The Image of Bronze and the Image of Iron

  The Memnons of the Night

  The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty

  The Corpse and the Skeleton

  A Dream of Lethe

  From the Crypts of Memory

  Ennui

  The Litany of the Seven Kisses

  In Cocaigne

  The Flower-Devil

  The Shadows

  The Passing of Aphrodite

  To the Daemon

  The Abomination of Desolation

  The Mirror in the Hall of Ebony

  The Touch-Stone

  The Muse of Hyperborea

  POETRY

  The Last Night

  Ode to the Abyss

  A Dream of Beauty

  The Star-Treader

  Retrospect and Forecast

  Nero

  To the Daemon Sublimity

  Averted Malefice

  The Eldritch Dark

  Shadow of Nightmare

  Satan Unrepentant

  The Ghoul

  Desire of Vastness

  The Medusa of Despair

  The Refuge of Beauty

  The Harlot of the World

  Memnon at Midnight

  Love Malevolent

  The Crucifixion of Eros

  The Tears of Lilith

  Requiescat in Pace

  The Motes

  The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil

  A Psalm to the Best Beloved

  The Witch with Eyes of Amber

  We Shall Meet

  On Re-reading Baudelaire

  To George Sterling: A Valediction

  Anterior Life

  Hymn to Beauty

  The Remorse of the Dead

  Exorcism

  Nyctalops

  Outlanders

  Song of the Necromancer

  To Howard Phillips Lovecraft

  Madrigal of Memory

  The Old Water-Wheel

  The Hill of Dionysus

  If Winter Remain

  Amithaine

  Cycles

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  Clark Ashton Smith’s prose fiction and poetry reveal to us realms, creatures, and events that never were and never could be, doing so in an idiom that utilized the linguistic resources of the English language to their fullest. This body of work embodies an exhilarating liberation of the imagination beyond the known and the mundane.

  Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13, 1893, in Long Valley, California, the son of Timeus and Fanny (Gaylord) Smit
h. In 1902 the Smith family moved to nearby Auburn, in the Sierra foothills, where Timeus and young Clark built a cabin about a mile outside of town. Smith remained there for most of his life. Smith’s formal education was intermittent—several years’ attendance at two different grammar schools in or near Auburn, and only a few days’ attendance at Placer Union High School—but his prodigious self-education, which included teaching himself Latin and reading through Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, rendered him one of the most learned autodidacts of his time.

  It was in his preteen years that Smith developed an interest in writing. At the age of eleven he began composing fairy tales and stories based on the Arabian Nights. Two long narratives, probably dating to 1907 or thereabouts—The Black Diamonds, nearly 100,000 words in length, and a slightly shorter work, The Sword of Zagan—survive and have recently been published; they are longer than any of the fiction he would write as an adult. Although they do not generally involve the supernatural, these works evoke not only the Arabian Nights but also William Beckford’s vivid Arabian novel, Vathek (1786).

  In 1906 Smith discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe’s poetry in particular fired his imagination. This discovery was fused with Smith’s fascination for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward FitzGerald, and by a long fantastic poem, George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry,” which appeared in the September 1907 issue of Cosmopolitan. Together, these works led to Smith’s own early experiments in poetry.

  Sterling (1869–1926) was then a relatively young poet whose first book, The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems (1903), had created something of a stir in California for its cosmic perspective: its long title poem depicts the cosmic flux of stars and constellations and its implications for human life. A Long Island native transplanted to San Francisco, Sterling fell under the tutelage of the venerable Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), who spent years trying to find a publisher for “A Wine of Wizardry,” finally succeeding in placing it in the magazine for which he himself was a contributing editor. The poem was published with a laudatory article by Bierce and created an immense furor both locally and nationally, as Bierce’s many literary and political enemies lambasted him for what they believed was his flamboyant praise of an esoteric poem devoted to fantastic and horrific imagery. Sterling’s reputation was established—in California, at least—and he became both the leader of a bohemian colony of writers and artists based in California and the uncrowned poet laureate of the Bay Area.

  Smith’s own early poetry was already tending toward the cosmic, so it is unlikely that Sterling was a direct influence on it; nevertheless, it made sense for Smith, in early 1911, to send his verse to Sterling for comment and analysis. Sterling was understandably impressed. Smith had already published a few poems and even some short stories in magazines the year before, but the poetry he showed Sterling was of significantly higher quality. Perhaps recognizing the valuable aid Bierce had lent him as a young poet, Sterling took Smith under his wing and sought to promote his work as best he could. He quoted Smith’s sonnet “The Last Night” in an interview in Town Talk, a San Francisco weekly paper that regularly featured articles about Sterling and his circle (which included Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Mary Austin, the photographer Arnold Genthe, the painter Xavier Martínez, and for a time the young Sinclair Lewis). He sent Smith’s remarkable “Ode to the Abyss” to Bierce; the elderly curmudgeon’s favorable comments on the poem were quoted—and misquoted—in several papers in the summer of 1911.

  Smith himself became a media celebrity the next summer, when several San Francisco newspapers hailed the “boy poet of the Sierras” and compared his early poetic brilliance to that of Keats and Shelley. A local lawyer named Boutwell Dunlap claimed to have discovered Smith, but that honor surely rests with Sterling. It is true that Dunlap had introduced Smith to his first publisher, A. M. Robertson, but it was Sterling who ushered Smith’s The Star-Treader and Other Poems into print in late 1912. The book received fairly wide notice (including, belatedly, a favorable review from the great Anglo-Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen1) and also sold more than a thousand copies—a remarkable figure for a first book of poetry, especially given that Sterling’s own poetry volumes did not sell nearly as well. Smith seemed on the threshold of establishing a reputation for himself in the realm of poetry.

  That reputation never materialized, however, partly because of Smith’s extreme shyness as a youth and partly because of his problematical health. Although Smith had spent a month with Sterling in June–July 1912, he was too diffident to meet Bierce and London, in spite of Sterling’s repeated efforts to arrange a gathering of his closest literary colleagues. And from 1913 to 1921 Smith seemed to be in constant ill health—indigestion, nervous troubles, and the like. There is good evidence that he was afflicted with tuberculosis; perhaps depression—conjoined with, or perhaps partly caused by, the severe financial worries that would plague Smith for much of his life—was also a factor. The result was that, even though the prestigious Book Club of California issued Smith’s Odes and Sonnets in 1918, his celebrity as a poet remained local. He was writing no fantastic fiction at this time.

  Smith’s financial worries were real. He was saddled not only with two aging parents who could not work but also with a mortgage on their property on which he could barely meet the interest payments. In 1917 Smith suggested that Sterling should try to encourage his many wealthy friends in the Bay Area to give him a lump sum of $1500 to $2000 to set up a chicken ranch. Sterling didn’t think he could raise such a large sum of money, but he did attempt to persuade some wealthy socialites to give the Smith family a monthly stipend. One of the first to do so was Mrs. Celia Clark, the wife of a mining magnate, who (perhaps in conjunction with others) agreed to supply $75 a month. This stipend appears to have lasted until the spring of 1920, when Mrs. Clark inexplicably stopped giving (perhaps she simply forgot about the matter in planning for an upcoming tour abroad).

  Smith himself, in spite of his health problems, did attempt work—but for someone who did not even graduate from high school or attend college, such work was hard to come by. Smith actually became a migrant worker for a time, engaging in wood chopping, fruit picking, and other forms of manual labor; this work at least had the good effect of getting him out in the open air and causing his tuberculosis to go into remission.

  • • •

  In 1920 Smith wrote a six-hundred-line poem, “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” that caused Sterling to go into ecstasies:

  “The Hashish-Eater” is indeed an amazing production. My friends will have none of it, claiming it reads like an extension of “A Wine of Wizardry.” But I think there are many differences, and at any rate, it has more imagination in it than any other poem I know of. Like the “Wine,” it fails on the esthetic side, a thing that seems of small consequence in a poem of that nature.2

  But a poem of this sort—written in strict iambic pentameter and portraying its protagonist’s ventures into exotic realms of cosmic fantasy—was not likely to be met with favor either by the general public or by the literati. Both Smith and Sterling had published some poems in Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry shortly after it was founded in 1912, but their work was antipodal to that of such Modernists as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams. Although Smith was, over the course of his poetic career, occasionally praised by such poets as Vachel Lindsay and Edwin Markham, there was little chance he would establish a national reputation with work that already seemed old-fashioned, overly formalistic, and devoted to a kind of fantastic imagery that was increasingly coming to be regarded by Modernist poets and critics as an illegitimate form of literary expression. As Harriet Monroe wrote in a patronizing review: “Life will bring him down to earth, no doubt, in her usual brusque manner, and will teach him something more intimate to write about than winds and stars and forsaken gods.”3

  Smith’s poetry, in the course of the 1910s, was in fact evolving beyond the emotionally remote cosmicism th
at typified his earliest work. Increasingly, he was producing powerful yet delicate verse focusing on romantic love, natural beauty, and other elements aside from the dance of the stars and galaxies. Sterling welcomed this development and actively worked to get Smith into the pages of H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set and other periodicals. Whether some of Smith’s elegiac poems were inspired by actual love affairs is unclear; some of them—such as his poignant “Requiescat in Pace” (1917), written on the death of Mamie Lowe Miller—clearly are. He seemed to enjoy creating the impression of the dashing poet-lover who liked to shock the staid bourgeoisie of Auburn; as he once wryly wrote to Sterling, “Marriage is an error I was never tempted to commit: I have not been in love with an unmarried woman since I was fifteen!”4 But how many affairs with married women—if any—he actually carried on is not known.

  It was a sign of Smith’s flagging reputation that he had to publish his next book of poetry, Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (1922), himself. He subsidized its publication by his local newspaper, the Auburn Journal, and when sales of the book failed to meet printing costs, Smith had to write a column for the paper as reimbursement. Sterling vigorously promoted this book and its successor, Sandalwood (1925), also published by the Auburn Journal, but to little avail.