The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Page 39
New-born, the mage re-summons stronger spells, and spirits
10
With dazzling darkness clad about, and fierier flame
Renewed by aeon-curtained slumber. All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory the bored hours,
He calls upon Shem-hamphorash, the nameless Name.
Explanatory Notes
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES:
AY: The Abominations of Yondo (Arkham House, 1960)
BL: Clark Ashton Smith Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley
CAS: Clark Ashton Smith
CF: Collected Fantasies (Night Shade, 2006–10; five volumes)
CPT: Complete Poetry and Translations (Hippocampus Press, 2007–8; three volumes)
DC: The Dark Chateau and Other Poems (Arkham House, 1951)
EC: Ebony and Crystal (Auburn Journal, 1922)
FFT: Scott Connors, ed., The Freedom of Fantastic Things (Hippocampus Press, 2006)
GL: Genius Loci and Other Tales (Arkham House, 1948)
GS: George Sterling
HD: The Hill of Dionysus: A Selection (Roy A. Squires, 1962)
HPL: H. P. Lovecraft
JHL: Clark Ashton Smith Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)
LW: Lost Worlds (Arkham House, 1944)
OED: Oxford English Dictionary (1933 edition)
OS: Odes and Sonnets (Book Club of California, 1918)
OST: Out of Space and Time (Arkham House, 1942)
PD: Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays (Mirage Press, 1973)
PP: Poems in Prose (Arkham House, 1965)
S: Sandalwood (Auburn Journal, 1925)
SL: Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith (Arkham House, 2003)
SP: Selected Poems (Arkham House, 1971)
SS: Strange Shadows (Greenwood Press, 1988)
ST: The Star-Treader and Other Poems (A. M. Robertson, 1912)
SU: The Shadow of the Unattained (Hippocampus Press, 2005)
TSS: Tales of Science and Sorcery (Arkham House, 1964)
INTRODUCTION
1. The review appeared in the London Evening News (February 12, 1916). See Scott Connors, “An Arthur Machen Review of Clark Ashton Smith,” Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, no. 6 (Autumn 2000): 31–38 (the entire review is quoted in the article).
2. GS to CAS, June 10, 1920 (SU 183).
3. Harriet Monroe, “Recent Poetry” [review of The Star-Treader and Other Poems], Poetry 2, no. 1 (April 1913): 31–32 (quoted in FFT 52).
4. CAS to GS, September 5, 1921 (SL 59).
5. GS to CAS, November 28, 1925 (SU 263).
6. CAS to GS, December 1, 1925 (SU 264).
7. CAS ultimately did produce translations of nearly all the 158 poems of Les Fleurs du mal, but many of these are literal prose translations that Smith did not get around to versifying. They were first published in their entirety in CPT 3.
8. CAS to HPL, January 9, 1930 (SL 108).
9. The Zothique stories were gathered in Tales of Zothique, edited by Will Murray and Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1995). For an analysis, see Jim Rockhill, “As Shadows Wait upon the Sun: Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique” (FFT 277–92).
10. The Hyperborea stories were gathered in The Book of Hyperborea, edited by Will Murray (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996). For an analysis, see Steven Tompkins, “Coming in from the Cold: Incursions of ‘Outsideness’ in Hyperborea” (FFT 259–76).
11. For an analysis, see Stefan Dziemianowicz, “Into the Woods: The Human Geography of Averoigne” (FFT 293–304).
12. CAS to August Derleth, January 4, 1933; quoted in David E. Schultz, “Notes Toward a History of the Cthulhu Mythos,” Crypt of Cthulhu, no. 92 (Eastertide 1996): 20. See my discussion of Smith’s Lovecraftian work in The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2008).
13. Donald Sidney-Fryer, “The Alleged Influence of Lord Dunsany on Clark Ashton Smith,” Amra (January 1963); reprinted Klarkash-Ton, no. 1 (June 1988): 9–13, 15. Donald Sidney-Fryer, “Klarkash-Ton and Ech-Pi-El: On the Alleged Influence of H. P. Lovecraft on Clark Ashton Smith,” Mirage 1, no. 6 (Winter 1963–64): 30–33.
14. “The Boiling Point,” Fantasy Fan 1, no. 1 (September 1933): 6.
15. For a recent collection of CAS’s science fiction tales, see Star Changes, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (Seattle: Darkside, 2005).
16. Letter to Strange Tales (January 1933); PD 18.
17. Letter to Weird Tales (February 1933); PD 23.
18. CAS to HPL, [c. October 24, 1930] (SL 126).
19. From the prose poem “Nostalgia of the Unknown.”
SHORT STORIES
THE TALE OF SATAMPRA ZEIROS
This story was completed on November 16, 1929. CAS sent it to HPL, who responded enthusiastically: “I must not delay in expressing my well-nigh delirious delight at ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’—which has veritably given me the one arch-kick of 1929! . . . what an atmosphere! I can see & feel & smell the jungle around immemorial Commoriom . . . You have achieved in its fullest glamour the exact Dunsanian touch which I find almost impossible to duplicate . . . Altogether, I think this comes close to being your high spot in prose fiction to date” (letter to CAS, December 3, 1929; Selected Letters 1929–1931 [Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971], 87–88). But the story was rejected by the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales also rejected it upon its initial submission in early 1930. Toward the end of the year, however, Wright reconsidered the story and accepted it; it was published in Weird Tales (November 1931), and later in FW and CF 1.
The tale is the first of CAS’s narratives to be set in the realm of Hyperborea, and it not only introduces the ancient and now deserted capital of that realm, Commoriom, but also the toad-god Tsathoggua. HPL was so captivated by this entity that he elaborated upon it extensively in a story he ghostwrote for Zealia Bishop, “The Mound” (1929–30); and he also dropped a mention of it in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), which appeared in Weird Tales in August 1931, a few months before CAS’s tale was published there; this led many to believe that HPL had created the entity.
HPL’s comment about the “Dunsanian” quality of the story suggests that the tale is an echo of the fantastic narratives in Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder (1912), many of which deal with baleful punishments meted out by bizarre entities upon those venturesome individuals who seek to pilfer valuable objects from them. Farnsworth Wright remarked on this when he rejected the story: “Personally, I fell under the spell of its splendid wording, which reminded me of Lord Dunsany’s stories in The Book of Wonder” (letter to CAS, January 18, 1930; quoted in CF 1.263).
See Dan Clore, “Satampra ‘Lefty’ Zeiros,” Lost Worlds, no. 3 (2006): 32–33.
1. Lemuria was thought to be a sunken continent in the Indian Ocean. Its existence was conjectured by the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) to account for the presence of lemurs and other animals and plants in southern Africa and the Malay Peninsula. Occultists seized upon the idea and wrote fanciful books about the continent; see W. Scott-Elliot, The Lost Lemuria (1904).
2. In one of the earliest entries in his Black Book, CAS writes of a story titled “The White Sybil of Polarion,” noting that the creature is “a pale, beautiful, unearthly being, goddess or woman, who comes and goes mysteriously in the cities of Hyperborea, sometimes uttering strange prophecies or cryptic tidings” (entry 2). CAS’s story “The White Sybil” (written July–November 1932) does not in fact deal with any such prophecy, but rather with a man who falls in love with the entity. CAS habitually misspelled sibyl as sybil. Polarion might be meant to suggest Polaris, the polestar.
THE LAST INCANTATION
This story was completed on November 23, 1929. CAS discussed his purpose in writing the story in a letter to Donald Wa
ndrei (August 26, 1929): “My main intention and endeavour, just now, is the writing of a few short stories, in a weird, fantastic vein. One, ‘The Last Incantation of Malygris,’ which I am just beginning, deals with an old sorcerer who tries to evoke the dead sweetheart of his youth, with disastrous results” (manuscript, Minnesota Historical Society). The tale was readily accepted by Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales and was published in the June 1930 issue; it was reprinted in LW and CF 1. CAS wrote several other stories mentioning Malygris, notably “The Death of Malygris” (Weird Tales, April 1934; in LW and CF 1).
1. A balas ruby is a spinel ruby of a pale rose color.
THE DEVOTEE OF EVIL
This story was originally titled either “The Satanist” or “The Manichaean.” CAS describes the plot in a letter to HPL: “‘The Satanist’ won’t deal with ordinary devil-worship, but with the evocation of absolute cosmic evil, in the form of a black radiation that leaves the devotee petrified into a sable image of eternal horror” (January 27, 1930; SL 110). See also the fragmentary plot synopsis in SS 157. CAS finished the story on March 9, 1930, and submitted it to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright rejected it, as did Harold Hersey of Ghost Stories. In November 1931 CAS revised the story “with a view to ridding it of certain vague verbosities; and I also cut down on the pseudo-scientific element” (letter to HPL, [early November 1931; manuscript, JHL), but Wright rejected the story again, as did several other periodicals, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Finally, CAS included it in his slim self-published pamphlet, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933). It was reprinted in AY and CF 1.
As noted by Scott Connors and Ronald S. Hilger (see CF 1.271), the house on which the story is based is a real one at 153 Sacramento Street in Auburn, reputed to be haunted. The first-person narrator, Philip Hastane, returns in “The City of the Singing Flame” and several other stories. The story may have been partially inspired by HPL’s “From Beyond” (1920), in which an unnamed first-person narrator visits the house of a friend, Crawford Tillinghast, who has built a machine that will purportedly break down the barriers imposed by the limitations of our senses and allow us to see entities normally withheld from our sight. As a result, a multitude of hideous creatures are seen, and in the end Tillinghast dies, apparently of a heart attack. Although the story was not published until it appeared in the June 1934 issue of the Fantasy Fan, CAS appears to have read it on several occasions in manuscript. A mention that he had “re-read” it in March 1930 (SL 111) suggests that his first reading had occurred some time before, probably before he had conceived his own tale.
1. Auburn’s Chinatown is just down the hill from the house where this story takes place, near the downtown area. A series of underground tunnels runs through the region—a common feature of Chinatowns on the West Coast.
2. The Auburn Public Library at 175 Almond Street, one of the Carnegie libraries, built in 1909, was well known to CAS. “There is not a volume of Ambrose Bierce among the two thousand-odd in the local Carnegie library—and I suppose Auburn is average enough in its tastes” (letter to GS, April 12, 1912; SL 9).
3. Ahriman is the evil spirit in the Zoroastrian religion, opposed to the spirit of good, Ahura Mazda.
4. Beausobre is fictitious. For CAS’s translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, see the Introduction.
5. Actually, “l’Enfer où mon coeur se plaît” (as translated by CAS, “The hell wherein my heart delights”). “Horreur sympathique” (number 84 of Les Fleurs du mal). For CAS’s translation (“Sympathetic Horror”), see CPT 3.145.
6. Malebolge (“evil ditches”) is, in Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of hell, consisting of a series of concentric circles of ditches; at the center of Malebolge is the ninth circle of hell. See also “The Hunters from Beyond” (1932), another story involving Philip Hastane: “Then, behind her, where stood an array of carven Satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede, the walls and floors dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge” (CF 2.262–63). CAS wrote a 1937 letter from “Auburn-in-Malebolge” (SL 299).
THE UNCHARTED ISLE
This story was completed on April 21, 1930, and first published in Weird Tales (November 1930), and subsequently in OST and CF 1. It remained one of CAS’s favorites, and he wrote a heading for it in Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend’s anthology My Best Science Fiction Story (1949) in which he stated that one of the reasons he was pleased with it was that “while having a basis in theoretic science, the tale is not merely an ordinary science fiction story, but it can be read as an allegory of human disorientation” (quoted in CF 1.274).
1. Callao is the most significant port city in Peru; Wellington is the capital of New Zealand, on the southern tip of the North Island. Accordingly, the voyage across the Pacific Ocean would span about seven thousand miles.
2. Mu was thought by occultists to be a lost continent that had sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Colonel James Churchward (1851–1936) wrote several fanciful books about Mu, including The Lost Continent of Mu (1926). For Hyperborea and Atlantis (and CAS’s tales set in those realms), see the Introduction.
3. The phrasing recalls Poe’s celebrated couplet “And much of Madness and more of Sin, / And Horror the soul of the plot” (“The Conqueror Worm” [1843], lines 23–24).
4. heteroclitic: abnormal, anomalous.
5. A pell is a roll of parchment.
6. A parapegm is an engraved tablet set up in a public place.
7. For Lemuria, see note 1 to “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.”
8. wried: writhed, contorted.
THE FACE BY THE RIVER
This story was written on October 29, 1930. The next day he wrote to HPL: “There’s not much of the cosmic in it; but it might interest you as an attempt at psychological realism” SL 130). HPL was indeed interested, writing: “The element of relentless Nemesis-pursuit in ‘The Face’ is very effectively handled—& given a realism too seldom cultivated in tales with this theme” (letter to CAS, November 7, 1930; manuscript, JHL). There is no evidence that CAS submitted the story anywhere. Although a typescript appeared to survive among CAS’s papers after his death, it was subsequently lost; but a carbon copy was found among the papers of Genevieve K. Sully. The story was first published in Lost Worlds 1 (2004) and reprinted in CF 2. An extreme anomaly in CAS’s work, and in apparent contrast to his own avowed hostility to realism (“To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as ‘incest’”: letter to Wonder Stories [August 1932], PD 12), the tale is evidence that CAS could write tales focused on human psychology with a minimum of fantasy or supernaturalism.
See Scott Connors, “The Face Behind the Mask,” Lost Worlds, no. 3 (2006): 15–18.
THE CITY OF THE SINGING FLAME
This story was completed on January 15, 1931. It first appeared in Wonder Stories (July 1931) and was reprinted in OST and CF 2. The story was based on CAS’s visits to Crater Ridge, near the Donner Pass in northern California close to the Nevada border. In late January 1931 he told HPL that he had written “a new trans-dimensional story, ‘The City of the Singing Flame’, in which I have utilized Crater Ridge . . . as a spring-board. Some day, I must look for those two boulders ‘with a vague resemblance to broken-down columns’. If you and other correspondents cease to hear from me thereafter, you can surmise what has happened! The description of the Ridge, by the way, has been praised for its realism by people who know the place” (letter to HPL, January 27, 1931; SL 144–45).
The story proved so popular with the readers of Wonder Stories
that editor Hugo Gernsback commissioned a sequel, which CAS titled “Beyond the Singing Flame” (completed on June 30, 1931; published in Wonder Stories, November 1931). But this story—recounting how the writer Philip Hastane found his way into the transdimensional realm, came upon both Giles Angarth and Felix Ebbonly, and eventually returned with Angarth to the real world—is widely regarded as a rehashing of the original story, although CAS himself thought highly of it (“This is, by all odds, my best recent story”: letter to Donald Wandrei, August 18, 1931; manuscript, Minnesota Historical Society). Walter Gillings, editor of Tales of Wonder, stitched the two stories together into a single narrative when he published them in the Spring 1940 issue of his magazine. When CAS was preparing OST for publication, he could not find either the carbon of his original typescript of “The City of the Singing Flame” or the Wonder Stories appearance, so he submitted to Arkham House the tearsheets of the Tales of Wonder appearance; this version has been reprinted in several anthologies.
1. In the Bible, the Anakim were a race of giants (descended from Anak) who dwelt near Hebron; they were largely expelled by Joshua (see Joshua 11:21–22).
2. “Of course, it would seem that the arguments of material science are pretty cogent. Perhaps it is only my innate romanticism that makes me at least hopeful that the Jeans and Einsteins have overlooked something.” CAS to HPL, [c. early November 1933] (SL 236). CAS refers to the British astronomer Sir James Jeans (1877–1946).
3. For Thebes, see note 3 to “Sadastor.” Heliopolis is the Greek name for Iunu, one of the oldest cities in ancient Egypt, whose ruins now occupy a northern suburb of Cairo. Its name (“city of the sun”) is derived from the fact that it was a place associated with sun-worship.
THE HOLINESS OF AZÉDARAC
This story was completed on May 19, 1931. It was first published in Weird Tales (November 1933) and reprinted in LW and CF 3. It is one of the most vivid and pungent of the tales set in the medieval realm of Averoigne. In a letter to August Derleth (June 15, 1931), CAS wrote: “I agree with you about ‘Azédarac,’ which is more piquant than weird. But I like to do something in lighter vein occasionally” (SL 154). HPL took issue with one element of the historicity of the tale: “Did I make a certain historical criticism when I read the manuscript a year or so ago? I meant to, but may have become sidetracked. The thing is, that I’m in doubt about the picture of Roman Gaul in A.D. 475 . . . especially the idea conjured up by the phrase ‘an obsolete variant of the French of Averoigne’. I assume you realise that in 475 no such language as French existed, the vulgar Latin of Gallic not being sufficiently differentiated from the parent stock to be any sort of separate speech. . . . By no stretch of the imagination could the popular Latin of 475 be called ‘old French’” (Selected Letters 1932–1934 [Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976, 319–20). CAS replied: “You have certainly pointed out my vagueness and ignorance in regard to Gallic history! Of course, if I had stopped to reflect, I ought to have known that the Romans were still strong in Gaul about the time of Moriamis, and that French, as a language was not yet born from the Latin womb. I suppose that the fact that I was dealing with a realm no less mythical than Cabell’s Poictesme made me doubly careless about correlating its chronology with that of historic Europe. If ever there is any prospect of issuing Azédarac and the other Averoigne tales in book form, I shall certainly correct the anachronistic reference to the ‘obsolete variant’ of French spoken by Moriamis” (letter to HPL, [circa December 4, 1933; SL 239). CAS did not in fact alter the passage when he prepared LW for publication.