The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith Read online

  “Dawn of Discord” and “House of Monoceros” appear on Smith’s completed stories log after “Double Cosmos” (originally “Secondary Cosmos”), which was completed on March 25, 1940 although he had been working on it intermittently since 1934.

  Late in 1938 Weird Tales was purchased by a New York businessman, William J. Delaney, who already published the highly successful pulp Short Stories. Delaney relocated the operation to New York City. Wright was kept on as editor and made the move, but was let go with the March 1940 issue. An interview with Delaney appeared in a fanzine at the time of Wright’s dismissal that boded ill for Smith. After promising that Weird Tales would continue to publish “all types of weird and fantasy fiction,” the interview went on to add:

  There is one rule, however: Weird Tales does not want stories which center about sheer repulsiveness, stories which leave an impression not to be described by any other word than “nasty”. This is not to imply that the “grim” story, or the tale which leaves the reader gasping at the verge of the unknown, is eliminated. Mr. Delaney believes that the story which leaves a sickish feeling in the reader is not truly weird and has no place in Weird Tales. . . . And, finally, stories wherein the characters are continually talking in French, German, Latin, etc. will be frowned upon, as well as stories wherein the reader must constantly consult an unabridged dictionary.8

  The interviewer was Robert A. W. Lowndes, who shed some light on this in a letter published years later:

  Delaney, who was a pleasant and cultured man, was very fond of weird stories, but he was also a strict Catholic. . . . He also found some of the Clark Ashton Smith stories on the ‘disgusting’ side and told me that he had returned one that Wright had in his inventory when he left. It was about a monstrous worm which, when attacked and pierced, shed forth rivers of slime. Later in 1940, when Donald A. Wollheim was starting Stirring Science Stories, Smith sent him ‘The Coming of the White Worm’ and Don used it. When I read it, there was no doubt that this was the story Delaney had been talking about. . . . Concerned about the magazine’s slipping circulation, he felt that the “more esoteric” type of story was a handicap, so this was mostly cut out.9

  The memoirs of E. Hoffmann Price illustrate just how frustrated and upset Smith was with this development and with magazine publishing in general. When Price visited Smith later that year, Smith presented him with the typescripts of “House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord.” Smith told Price to do what he wanted to do with them: “Scrap the god-damn things if after all you don’t like them. The less I hear of them—.”Price’s take on this was that Smith realized “his stories did not fit into the publisher’s new pattern. Clark, fed up with adverse criticism or outright rejection, rejected the rejector, and gave me the scripts.”10

  The Spicy line of pulps that were published by Culture Publications (a subsidiary imprint of Harry Donenfeld’s Trojan Publications) were one of Price’s main markets, and he pared Smith’s prose to fit their formula, which he, according to fellow writer Henry Kuttner, described as “sex, sadism, and destruction of valuable property.”11 (Kuttner also observed that “words over three syllables seem to be out, definitely.”) “Dawn of Discord” appeared in the October 1940 issue of Spicy Mystery Stories, while “House of the Monoceros” was published (as “The Old Gods Eat”) in the February 1941 issue. According to Price’s records, the proceeds were split 33-67 in CAS’ favor,12 although both stories appeared under Price’s byline alone. Smith did acknowledge his authorship to friends, writing in a letter that “My latest yarn is a filthy mixture of sex and pseudo science...which won’t appear under my own name but under that of a friend, a very successful pulp-writer, who had more commissions on hand than he could get through with.” (SL 330) “House of the Monoceros” was reprinted, under its original title, in Price’s collection Far Lands, Other Days (Carcosa, 1975), without credit to Smith, but “Dawn of Discord” has not been reprinted until now.

  When Price was asked about the whereabouts of CAS’ original versions many years later, Price claimed that he destroyed them, stating that “Scripts were not sacred relics.” In the absence of Smith’s original manuscript it is impossible to determine just where Smith ends and Price begins, but it is still possible to wager a guess. “Dawn of Discord” resembles the science fiction stories that CAS had written for Hugo Gernsback, especially “The Letter from Mohaun Los” and “The Dark Age,” but the misanthropy that had long embued Smith’s work had taken center stage. Smith’s letters make it clear that he was observing the deteriorating world situation with alarm. Writing shortly after Lovecraft’s death to R. H. Barlow, who was at that time advocating communism as a panacea to contemporary social-economic problems, Smith observed bitterly that:

  I have no faith in any political or economic isms, schisms, and panaceas. Theoretically, almost any kind of a system might serve well enough, if human beings were not the stupidest and greediest and most cruel of the fauna on this particular planet. No matter what system you have—capitalism, Fascism, Bolshevism—the greed and power-lust of men will produce the same widespread injustice, the same evils and abuses: or, will merely force them to take slightly different forms.

  He concluded “In my opinion, the whole fabric of western civilization is nearly due for a grand debacle” (SL 300). A few letters later, he told Barlow that “the word ‘civilization’ would make a jackal vomit in view of the general situation” (SL 313) We speculate that the conclusion of Smith’s version of “Dawn of Discord” ended with the discovery that John King’s temporal excursion itself was responsible for introducing warfare into history, but unless the original typescript should turn up in the late Mr. Price’s papers, it remains mere conjecture.

  We suspect that “House of the Monoceros” originally was similar to Smith’s contemporary horror stories such as “The Nameless Offspring,” but where bits of Smith occasionally flash through in “Dawn of Discord,” little remains outside of the name Treganneth and the word “monoceros” itself. There may be little of Smith’s original concepts left in these two stories, but the Smith afficionado may find something of interest in them.

  “The Dead Will Cuckold You” was described by Smith as one of his “few unpublished masterpieces” (SL 373). While the author’s omnipresent touch of irony was almost certainly not entirely absent from this evaluation, this play in blank verse (written during the winter of 1951 and revised in 1956) his penultimate story set in Zothique (the last continent of earth under a dying red sun) contains some of his most vivid, and most macabre, writing. Although it remained unpublished until after Smith’s death, he and his friends enjoyed acting out or reading aloud its sonorous, rhythmic lines.13

  “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil” is Clark Ashton Smith’s longest and most well-known poem; and was described by his friend H.P. Lovecraft as “the greatest imaginative orgy in English literature.”4 Written in early 1922 and published later that same year in Ebony and Crystal, this epic poem owes at least some of its inspiration to George Sterling and “A Wine of Wizardry,” which the young Smith discovered in the pages of Cosmopolitan in 1907. Smith would later describe his intentions and rationale behind his cosmic masterpiece in a letter to S.J. Sackett: (SL 259)

  . . . The Hashish-Eater, a much misunderstood poem, which was intended as a study in cosmic consciousness, drawing heavily on myth and fable for much of its imagery. It is my own theory that, if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in the end, like the hero of the poem.

  During the preparation of his Selected Poems, Smith would slightly revise the poem, removing many commas and asterisks and adding a few lines and word-changes. He would also replace such British spellings as colour, harbour, and rigour, with standard American. More significantly, Smith increased the number of episodes from ten to twelve, perhaps to impart more of a classic aesthetic structure. Although this revised version has superseded the original as Smith’s own preferred
text, the editors felt it important to keep the Ebony and Crystal version in print as well for the sake of the CAS scholar who may wish to compare texts or, perhaps, who wish to experience Smith’s magnum opus exactly as it appeared in 1922.

  Unlike the other works that we have included in the Night Shade Books edition of Clark Ashton Smith, “The Hashish-Eater” is not prose, yet it contains so many germs and ideas that would find maturation in his short stories that its inclusion is warranted. This may also be said of the other pieces included in this collection: they do not represent his best work, but for the devout acolyte at the altar of Klarkash-Ton they provide glimpses of ideas that failed to come together for some reason, as well as signs and portents of wonders yet to come.

  Notes

  1. Clark Ashton Smith, “Story-Writing Hints” (Ms, Clark Ashton Smith Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University).

  2. Donald Sidney-Fryer, Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978): 19.

  3. F. E. Dyer (President, The Shortstory Publishing Co.), letter to Clark Ashton Smith, April 13, 1910 (TLS, Clark Ashton Smith Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University).

  4. L. Sprague de Camp, “Sierra Shaman.” Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976): 198.

  5. Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003): 11 (hence SL).

  6. The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005): 86.

  7. The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979), item 65.

  8. “Weird Tales Stays Weird.” Science Fiction Weekly (March 24, 1940): 1.

  9. Robert A. W. Lowndes, “Letters.” Weird Tales Collector no. 5 (1979): 31.

  10. Henry Kuttner, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, September 5, 1937 (TLS, private collection).

  11. See Don Herron, “Notes on Clark Ashton Smith,” Hyperborian League mailing 12 (July 1978).

  12. See William C. Farmer, “Clark Ashton Smith: A Memoir,” in Smith’s The Sword of Zagan and Other Writing, ed. W. C. Farmer (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004): 178.

  13. Quoted in George Haas, “Memories of Klarkash-Ton.” In The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979): 137.

  THE SORCERER DEPARTS

  Donald Sidney-Fryer

  I pass… but in this lone and crumbling tower,

  Builded against the burrowing seas of chaos,

  My volumes and my philtres shall abide:

  Poisons more dear than any mithridate,

  And spells far sweeter than the speech of love…

  Half-shapen dooms shall slumber in my vaults

  And in my volumes cryptic runes that shall

  Outblast the pestilence, outgnaw the worm

  When loosed by alien wizards on strange years

  Under the blackened moon and paling sun.

  “The Sorcerer Departs”

  Clark Ashton Smith

  Fragment of unfinished poem (The Acolyte, Spring 1944).

  A BIOGRAPHY OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH

  or those of us who recognize in the late Clark Ashton Smith a poet and a poet in prose as remarkable as the French genius Baudelaire, the preceding “fragment”—actually far more complete than many a longer poem—cannot but possess certain poignant autobiographical associations. The eventuality stated symbolically in the last lines is devoutly to be wished: that connoisseurs of fantasy, whether in the immediate or the far future, shall indeed come to know the canon of Smith’s works and appreciate his quite considerable achievement, and that Smith shall thus come to realize the only type of immortality any human being may reasonably expect, at least as far as such is known.

  When Clark Ashton Smith died on August 14th, 1961, his death passed almost completely unnoticed, apart from a few local newspapers in his native state of California. No Saturday Review of Literature, no Atlantic Monthly devoted an entire memorial issue to the man and his writings. To the knowledge of the present writer, not a single science fiction or fantasy magazine even mentioned the fact of his death. Smith’s connections with the main literary river of his own time were at best tenuous, if not just about non-existent; his connections with the tributary or sub-tributary of the science fiction and fantasy magazines, proved only a little less gossamer. The echoes of his earlier poetic fame in the Bohemian circles of San Francisco and Monterey had long since died away, and thus he died, little better than unknown to his own time.

  The biography of Smith’s external life is relatively uneventful, although still significant; but this relative uneventfulness places a greater importance on the life of the inner man, on the inner life of the literary creator, where such is known to us and where it is revealed in his works. However, it will still be to some purpose to review the more salient facts of biography with particular emphasis on those details which strongly relate to his creative life.

  Smith was born of Yankee and English parentage on January 13th, 1893, in Long Valley, California, about six miles south of Auburn, in the house of his maternal grandparents (the Gaylords) located along the old road leading south of Folsom out of Auburn, and about five miles from the northern reaches of Boulder Ridge where Smith was to spend the major portion of his life. In 1902, his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith, moved to Boulder Ridge, to a spot about a mile south of Auburn and about one-fourth of a mile east of the Folsom Road. Here his father with the help of the then nine-year-old boy, built a cabin and dug a well, and here Smith lived almost continuously until 1954, apart from visits to Sacramento, San Francisco, Monterey, the neighboring state of Nevada, and a few other places. He almost visited New York City sometime in 1942 under the ægis of his friends Benjamin and Bio De Casseres.

  One can easily imagine the effect that the surrounding countryside had on the sensitive and imaginative boy; a countryside that was and still is a veritable garden of fruit trees—pear, plum, peach, cherry, apple—located on the rolling foothills of the Sierras and alternating with copses of evergreen and deciduous trees and with broad park-like areas; the foothills filled with deserted mines, some of them still containing gold; and arching overhead, the diurnal or nocturnal immensitudes of the heavens rendered remarkably clear in the clean smog-free country air.

  He attended the equivalent of the first three grades of grammar school (in Smith’s own words) “at the little red schoolhouse of the precinct.” He completed the five remaining grades of grammar school in Auburn. Smith wrote later that “As a schoolboy, I believe that I was distinguished more for devilment than scholarship. Much of my childhood was spent in the neighborhood of an alleged gold mine; which may be the reason why the romance of California gold mining failed to get under my skin.” However, in spite of his disclaimer, this neighboring gold mine—the “Old Gaylord Mine” close to his grandparents’ property—evidently had some influence on the young Smith because his mature literary work, both poetry and prose, abounds in mining and geological terms. Without realizing it, he had succumbed to the greater romance of telluric splendor, as numerous references to precious and semi-precious metals and stones attest in his poems and in his tales.

  Smith did not go on to either high school or college; he preferred to conduct his own education and later, when he turned down the opportunity for a Guggenheim scholarship, it was for the same reason. Thus early in his life he manifested what was to be his lifelong independence. To judge by his creative work, we may be sure that Smith—always an omnivorous but discerning reader—proved to be his own best teacher.

  From the very first Smith seems to have been attracted to the exotic, the far away, and the literally astronomically far away. The gold mine near his grandparents’ home, with its hints of precious, untold wealth, may account to some minor degree for Smith’s pred
ilection for the exotic. The fact that his father Timeus Smith had travelled extensively as a young man, and that he would often reminisce to his son about those travels, may also explain Smith’s early attraction to the far away and the fabled, to the Orient and to those mysterious lands of the imagination so beloved by visionary youth.

  The last receives ample confirmation when Smith would later report that his “first literary efforts at the age of eleven, took the form of fairy tales and imitations of The Arabian Nights. Later, I wrote long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life, and much mediocre verse.” These “long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life” culminated in Smith’s first professional short-story appearances in magazines: “The Malay Krise” and “The Ghost of Mohammed Din” in the then well-known West Coast literary magazine The Overland Monthly, in the issues for October and November 1910, respectively; and “The Mahout” and “The Raja and the Tiger” in The Black Cat, in the issues for August 1911 and February 1912, respectively. Significantly enough, all these tales are laid in the Orient, the first-named in the area of Singapore and the last three in India. “The Ghost of Mohammed Din” is important as being Smith’s first professional story in which he features the element of the supernatural (handled with considerable skill, it may be added). In “The Raja and the Tiger” the climactic action of the story takes place in the Jain cave temple where “Huge stone pillars, elaborately sculptured, supported the roof, and around the sides great gods and goddesses of the Jain mythology, called Arhats, glared downward. The torch illuminated dimly, leaving much in shadow, and in the shadow imagination created strange fantasies.” (The present writer’s italics.) Smith later re-used the theme of “The Mahout,” of a mahout who trains and uses an elephant to wreak his revenge upon a hated Oriental despot. When Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, came to found in 1930 a companion magazine called Oriental Stories (later changed to The Magic Carpet Magazine), Smith contributed two tales: “The Justice of the Elephant” in the Autumn 1931 issue of Oriental Stories, and “The Kiss of Zoraida” in the July 1933 issue of The Magic Carpet Magazine. In the former laid in India, Smith used again, in slightly altered form, the theme of “The Mahout.” In the latter laid in Damascus, appears one of Smith’s principal inspirations, the manifestation of death. The Oriental background continued in “The Kingdom of the Worm,” a tale of the mediæval adventurer Sir John Maundeville, published in The Fantasy Fan for October 1933; and it continued in “The Ghoul,” published in the same amateur magazine for January 1934; this last is a tale laid in Bagdad during the reign of the Caliph Vathek, William Beckford’s fictional “grandson” of Haroun al Raschid.