The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read online

  But one fortuitous result was that some of these books were placed in the hands of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who in August 1922 sent Smith what could only be called a fan letter expressing wonderment at the exquisite beauty and imaginative power of his verse. As a result, Smith established a correspondence with the Rhode Island writer that would only lapse with the latter’s death. The next year, the pulp magazine Weird Tales was founded, and Lovecraft found a ready haven for his weird fiction there. He later claimed that he had persuaded the magazine’s first editor, Edwin Baird, to renounce his “no poetry” policy, and some of Smith’s poems began appearing there as well.

  Whether it was through constant rereading of Lovecraft’s tales (many of which he requested directly from the author) or from his disenchantment with the progress—or, at least, the recognition—of his poetry, Smith began pondering a return to prose fiction, something he had not attempted in a decade and a half. He had written some prose poems (included in Ebony and Crystal) in 1914–15, but these were closely allied to his poetry and were chiefly inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose and Stuart Merrill’s translations of French prose poetry, published as Pastels in Prose (1890). Now, in 1925, Smith undertook the writing of more extended narratives; one of the first was “The Abominations of Yondo.” He was taken aback at Sterling’s hostile response:

  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.5

  Smith shot back: “I . . . 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. . . . Neither the ethics or the aesthetic of the ant-hill have any attraction for me.”6

  But Sterling was making a valid enough point: mainstream literature was in the process of outlawing expressions of weirdness, fantasy, or supernaturalism almost in toto, as social realism—embodied in the work of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—became the dominant and, in the eyes of many, the only aesthetically respectable literary mode. This is why writers like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were forced to publish their tales in the pulp magazines: there was no other professional market for what they chose to write.

  • • •

  George Sterling’s death by suicide in November 1926 stunned Smith, but it represented a kind of transition from poetry to fiction in his own literary horizon. Although Smith had taught himself French in 1925 and at once undertook to translate the entirety of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal,7 it gradually became evident to him that prose fiction was his only viable means of earning a living. He was encouraged in this direction not only by Lovecraft but by other colleagues who were clustering around Weird Tales and other pulps, including Donald Wandrei (who had written a laudatory article on Smith in the December 1926 issue of the Overland Monthly and had subsidized the publication of Sandalwood), George W. Kirk (a New York bookseller who also became friends with Lovecraft), and August Derleth, who would later become his publisher. Moreover, a longtime woman friend, Genevieve K. Sully, laid down a kind of ultimatum to Smith, suggesting that, in the absence of a job, writing for the pulps would be perhaps his only way of making an income.

  Smith was slow in making this shift, but in late 1929 he suddenly began producing stories in substantial numbers. Over the next four years he would write nearly a hundred stories and would vigorously market them to such pulps as Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Strange Tales. By 1937 he had probably written more fiction than Lovecraft wrote in his entire career.

  • • •

  Smith’s fiction falls broadly into a number of subdivisions, chiefly distinguished by setting. Today, most of his fiction would be classified as fantasy—a genre distinguished from supernatural horror in that the author, instead of inserting elements of the bizarre into the objectively real world, creates worlds wholesale from his or her imagination, as with Lord Dunsany’s Pega goeteia| na or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. These realms, to be sure, can have intimate relations with or similarities to the known world, but the ontological rules that govern them are determined by the author rather than by the laws of physics, biology, or chemistry. Smith readily acknowledged this tendency in his fiction, writing to the prototypical prose realist Lovecraft: “I, too, am capable of observation; but I am far happier when I can create everything in a story, including the milieu. . . . Maybe I haven’t enough love for, or interest in, real places, to invest them with the atmosphere that I achieve in something purely imaginary.”8

  The most extensive of Smith’s story cycles is that of Zothique, comprising sixteen stories, a poem, and even a blank-verse play, The Dead Will Cuckold You. Zothique is envisioned as an earthly realm of the far future: the sun is about to be extinguished, civilization has collapsed, and, paradoxically, society has reverted to a kind of primitivism with the return of royalty, superstition, and sorcery. This scenario allowed Smith to engage in tongue-in-cheek archaism of both language and setting. Some of his most powerful and poignant narratives, such as “The Dark Eidolon” and “Xeethra,” are set in Zothique.9

  Hyperborea, the setting for ten stories and a poem, is, as its name implies, a continent in the far north, but the tales of this cycle are set in the distant past. Although this scenario also allowed Smith to engage in archaistic prose, the Hyperborea tales are enlivened by a sardonic humor reminiscent of Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder (1912). This cycle features the wizard Eibon, author of the Book of Eibon, an imaginary grimoire similar to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.10

  Averoigne was, in Smith’s fiction, depicted as a realm in medieval France. The name was no doubt derived from the actual region of Auvergne, in south-central France. Averoigne is the setting for ten stories. These tales tend to be somewhat more conventionally supernatural than Smith’s other tales, as he is obliged to respect the historical constraints of the period. Many of the Averoigne tales are relatively routine accounts of vampires, werewolves, lamias, and the like, but several feature a fusion of weirdness and eroticism that recalls his best poetry.11

  Other tales fall into smaller cycles, such as Atlantis (five stories), set on that mythical continent before it sank into the Atlantic Ocean, and Mars (three stories), nominally set on the red planet. A number of stories, whether in the above cycles or written as independent narratives, draw upon Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but in such a way as to expand the parameters of that imaginary cosmogony well beyond what Lovecraft had envisioned. Smith created the toad-god Tsathoggua and the Book of Eibon, both of which Lovecraft quickly appropriated. As early as 1933, noting how many other writers were borrowing elements from his stories, he wrote: “It would seem that I am starting a mythology.”12

  All this raises the question of influence. The pioneering Smith scholar Donald Sidney-Fryer tended to discount the influence of Dunsany and Lovecraft on Smith’s fiction,13 but it is difficult to deny that, in the case of Dunsany, Smith found a significant precursor in the creation of imaginary realms, and, in the case of Lovecraft, an example for the writing of serious weird fiction, even if Smith recognized that the kind of fiction he wished to write was very different from Lovecraft’s. The frequency with which, in the course of the 1920s, Smith asked Lovecraft to lend him copies of his tales speaks strongly of the inspiration Smith derived from a writer who, although he placed his work regularly in Weird Tales, retained his aesthetic integrity and adhered courageously to an “art for art’s sake” attitude.

  Smith attempted to do the same in his fiction, but his financial situation increasingly militated against it. For the sad fact is that his two ailing parents required more and more care on Smith’s pa
rt, and he was compelled to generate—and, more significantly, sell—fiction at a brisk pace in order to support his family. This is why he could not follow Lovecraft’s example and refuse to revise a tale to ensure its sale to a magazine. Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales repeatedly belabored Smith about his esoteric prose idiom and the fact that many of his tales lacked the narrative drive that would keep his readers turning the pages, and Smith felt he had no option but to rewrite his tales to suit Wright’s tastes. He was even more ruthless in targeting stories to Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, an early science fiction pulp magazine that occasionally manhandled Smith’s stories after submission such that they became virtually unrecognizable. In one memorable instance, “The Dweller in the Gulf” appeared in the March 1933 issue of Wonder Stories with a butchered ending as “The Dweller in Martian Depths.” To compound the absurdity, the young Forrest J Ackerman lambasted the story in the pages of the legendary fan magazine The Fantasy Fan, declaring: “Frankly, I could not find one redeeming feature about the story.”14 This led to a furious war of words between Ackerman on the one side and Lovecraft, R. H. Barlow, and other defenders of Smith on the other, with Smith largely watching from the sidelines in bemused wonder.

  It is manifest that Smith’s move toward science fiction—or, more accurately, a fusion of fantasy and science fiction—was impelled largely by market considerations. That said, the result was often scintillating. “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (1931) is one of Smith’s most intense and horrific narratives, even if nominally set on Mars, and “The City of the Singing Flame” (1931) is a breathtaking tale of fantasy that perhaps represents the pinnacle of his fiction writing.

  Smith was, in fact, unjust to himself in declaring that he had little interest in the real world and therefore could not depict it vividly and realistically. “The City of the Singing Flame” begins with a vibrant description of the rugged locale near Smith’s home, while “The Face by the River” is a gripping tale of psychological horror. Even some of Smith’s stories of pure science fiction, such as “The Secret of the Cairn” (published as “The Light from Beyond”), have much to recommend them.15

  • • •

  A little-known body of Smith’s prose work deserves to be singled out—his poems in prose. He resumed work in this form in late 1929, generating some of his most vital works, such as “To the Daemon” and “The Touch-Stone.” As the genre designation suggests, these works meld prose and poetic idiom into an inextricable amalgam; and because they are not constrained by such conventional features of prose fiction as connected narrative or recognizable characters, they allowed Smith to engage in pensive philosophical speculation by means of poetic prose in a manner that no other literary mode could have permitted. It is not too much to say that Smith is one of the masters of prose poetry in English. A work such as “From the Crypts of Memory” (1917) evokes, in a few hundred words, all the poignancy and substance of narratives many times its length.

  But prose poetry was an aesthetic luxury for Smith in the 1930s, and he relentlessly marketed his fiction to generate income. At one point, the ever-procrastinating Gernsback owed him nearly $1000, and Smith had to hire an attorney to force Gernsback to cough up payment. It is not surprising that Smith’s output of fiction declined drastically around the time of the deaths of his mother (September 9, 1935) and father (December 26, 1937). The death of Lovecraft on March 15, 1937, also affected him deeply.

  For the next several years Smith seems to have done little. There is some evidence that he was drinking heavily. In the mid-1930s Smith had taken up the art of sculpting, producing exquisite small carvings from all manner of materials, including dinosaur bones. This artistic impulse followed on his earlier dabbling in pictorial art, something he had begun as early as the mid-1910s. Smith’s paintings have evoked widely differing judgments, some believing them crude and ungainly while others see them as remarkable products of self-taught skill and a vivid expression of his fundamentally pictorial imagination. The fact that Smith held several exhibitions of his paintings and sculptures in the Bay Area in the 1930s is sufficient testimonial to their merits.

  In terms of Smith’s career, a lifeline of sorts was lent by his old friend August Derleth, who, with Donald Wandrei, had founded the publishing firm Arkham House in 1939, initially for the purpose of publishing Lovecraft’s work in hardcover. Derleth quickly lined up other weird writers for his fledgling press, and Smith’s Out of Space and Time (1942) was Arkham House’s third publication. This was followed over the years by other volumes of prose fiction: Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci (1948), and The Abominations of Yondo (1960), and the posthumous Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964) and Other Dimensions (1970). Derleth also published two slim volumes of Smith’s newer poetry, The Dark Chateau (1951) and Spells and Philtres (1958). He commissioned Smith to compile his Selected Poems, and Smith spent five backbreaking years (1944–49) assembling the large volume, selecting poems from his previous volumes, significantly rewriting a number of early poems, and adding new ones, including poems written in French and Spanish, as well as a large batch of haiku that he had written in 1947. But Arkham House’s always perilous finances prevented the issuance of the volume until 1971.

  Poetry, indeed, was clearly Smith’s first love, and after his virtual abandonment of prose fiction he reverted to it sporadically but effectively in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1938 he had met the poet Eric Barker and his wife, the dancer Madelynne Greene; their repeated visits led to a close friendship and to Smith’s assembling a brilliant cycle of love poems, The Hill of Dionysus. A selection appeared posthumously in 1962. Smith was little inclined to write fiction, although Derleth managed to persuade him to write the effective science fiction tale “Phoenix” for the anthology Time to Come (1954).

  In late 1954, Smith met Carol Jones Dorman, and after a brief romance they married on November 10, 1954. The couple alternated between Smith’s home in Auburn and Carol’s home in Pacific Grove until the former was burned by an arsonist in late 1957. Smith died on August 14, 1961, of a stroke.

  • • •

  As with Lovecraft, the resurrection of Smith’s reputation rested with his friends and disciples. Derleth had done yeoman’s work in collecting Smith’s fiction, and these volumes were later reprinted in England by Neville Spearman (hardcover) and Panther Books (paperback). Lin Carter, a fantasist whose work is heavily influenced by Smith, issued several volumes of tales in his Adult Fantasy series published by Ballantine, but they sold poorly. Donald Sidney-Fryer edited three volumes of paperback editions of Smith’s tales for Pocket Books in the early 1980s. Arkham House lent a hand by issuing a major retrospective volume, A Rendezvous in Averoigne (1988). Many foreign-language editions appeared beginning in the 1970s, first in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and later in Finnish, Greek, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages.

  By this time a cadre of Smith scholars began probing his work more profoundly. Smith himself had maintained that, when he came to issue his stories in book form, he would restore the cuts and other editing that he had been compelled to make for sale to the pulp magazines, but he inexplicably failed to do so when he assembled his tales for Arkham House. After Smith’s papers were deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, the Smith scholar Steve Behrends consulted manuscripts of his tales and issued a succession of slim pamphlets presenting restored editions of several Smith stories. This work was continued by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger in their landmark five-volume edition of Smith’s Collected Fantasies (2006–10). Meanwhile, David E. Schultz had been spending decades gathering Smith’s published and unpublished poetry, and, with my collaboration, he edited Smith’s Complete Poetry and Translations in three volumes (2007–8). Smith’s prose poems, essays, and letters have also been published, and more editions are in the works.

  Smith’s final place in the history of both American poetry and the literature of fantasy has yet to be determined, but that he has an honored place is without question. It would be narrow a
nd simplistic to maintain that he merely created a succession of fantasy realms as an escape from “real” life and its concerns; in fact, those realms serve as the backdrop for keen investigations of human emotions—the poignancy of loss in “Xeethra,” the inescapable lure of the bizarre in “The City of the Singing Flame,” the soul-annihilating terror of an encounter with the utterly alien in “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” and so on. Like Lovecraft, Smith believed that “the main object [of the weird tale] is the creation of a supernatural, extra-human atmosphere; the real actors are the terrible arcanic forces, the esoteric cosmic malignities.”16 He differed from Lovecraft in that he rejected realism as the means to this end, writing that “weird, fantastic writing, by its emphasis of the environing cosmic wonder and spirit of things, may actually be truer to the spirit of life than the work which merely concerns itself with literalities, as most modern fiction does.”17

  Smith’s cultivation of a prose and poetic idiom of richness, depth, and luxuriance—reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, Lord Dunsany, and others—was avowed and deliberate, as he wrote to Lovecraft: “My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.”18 Such a style may not have been in favor in the heyday of Hemingway, but a more expansive understanding of the effectiveness of prose for the purposes for which it is designed may help us to appreciate Smith’s idiom as an essential element in the exotic fantasy he was seeking to create. His devotion to “lands forgotten and unfound”19 was unremitting, and out of his unbridled imagination he created realms of beauty and terror that have permanently enriched the literature of fantasy.