Much of Smith’s finest work leavens his histrionic impulses with humor, generally sardonic or macabre. In these tales, the finale usually takes the form of the biter bit, the tables turned, the greedy or proud receiving their just, if unexpected, comeuppance. (See “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” for a good example.) Smith’s many decadent themes—black magic, doubles, Faustian pacts, metamorphosis, love potions, vampires and femmes fatales—readily invite such conte cruel treatment. But whatever the theme or plot, Smith ’s stories nearly always maintain their dreamlike and incantatory character, sometimes as the hypnotic testimonies of the doomed, at other times as folkloric legends of death and transfiguration recited by ancient bards. Smith’s protagonists seldom come to happy ends—and those who don’t would often prefer a clean death to the noxious destiny in store for them. For example, several characters in “A Vintage from Atlantis” become the host bodies, then the nourishment, for a parasitic alien entity.
Smith insisted throughout his life that his brilliantined style aimed to evoke “an atmosphere of remoteness, vastness, mystery and exoticism” and, unlike ordinary magazine prose, allowed him “more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as subtler shades, tints and nuances of meaning.” Certainly, “A Vintage from Atlantis” shows how well he could create his particular verbal magic, whether in visions of the sublime, spells of enchantment, or conjurations of sheer horror. Not every story in these pages is a masterpiece—after all, the great benefit of any author’s collected works is that it allows us to see a master trying out ideas that don’t quite succeed. Nonetheless, those drawn to Smith’s work will be glad to have virtually everything readily available, not just the classics like “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” “The Seed from the Sepulchre,” and “The Double Shadow.” Because of the scrupulous research, textual scholarship, and expert annotation of Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, coupled with Night Shade’s fine book-making, we can now read a major American author in an authoritative and handsome edition. This alone is cause for celebration.
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for
The Washington Post Book World
, is the author of the memoir
An Open Book
and of four volumes of essays:
Readings, Bound to Please
,
Book by Book
, and
Classics for Pleasure
.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Clark Ashton Smith considered himself primarily as a poet and artist, but he began his publishing career with a series of Oriental contes cruels that were published in such magazines as the Overland Monthly and the Black Cat. He ceased the writing of short stories for many years, but, under the influence of his correspondent H. P. Lovecraft, he began experimenting with the weird tale when he wrote “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925. His friend Genevieve K. Sully suggested that writing for the pulps would be a reasonably congenial way for him to earn enough money to support himself and his parents.
Between the years 1930 and 1935, the name of Clark Ashton Smith appeared on the contents page of Weird Tales no fewer than fifty-three times, leaving his closest competitors, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, and August W. Derleth, in the dust, with forty-six, thirty-three and thirty stories, respectively. This prodigious output did not come at the price of sloppy composition, but was distinguished by its richness of imagination and expression. Smith put the same effort into one of his stories that he did into a bejeweled and gorgeous sonnet. Donald Sidney-Fryer has described Smith’s method of composition in his 1978 bio-bibliography Emperor of Dreams (Donald M. Grant, West Kingston, R.I.) thus:
First he would sketch the plot in longhand on some piece of note-paper, or in his notebook,
The Black Book
, which Smith used circa 1929-1961. He would then write the first draft, usually in longhand but occasionally directly on the typewriter. He would then rewrite the story 3 or 4 times (Smith’s own estimate); this he usually did directly on the typewriter. Also, he would subject each draft to considerable alteration and correction in longhand, taking the ms. with him on a stroll and reading aloud to himself […]. (19)
Unlike Lovecraft, who would refuse to allow publication of his stories without assurances that they would be printed without editorial alteration, Clark Ashton Smith would revise a tale if it would ensure acceptance. Smith was not any less devoted to his art than his friend, but unlike HPL he had to consider his responsibilities in caring for his elderly and infirm parents. He tolerated these changes to his carefully crafted short stories with varying degrees of resentment, and vowed that if he ever had the opportunity to collect them between hard covers he would restore the excised text. Unfortunately, he experienced severe eyestrain during the preparation of his first Arkham House collections, so he provided magazine tear sheets to August Derleth for his secretary to use in the preparation of a manuscript.
Lin Carter was the first of Smith’s editors to attempt to provide the reader with pure Smith, but the efforts of Steve Behrends and Mark Michaud have revealed the extent to which Smith’s prose was compromised. Through their series of pamphlets, the Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith, the reader and critic could see precisely the severity of these compromises; while in the collections Tales of Zothique and The Book of Hyperborea Behrends and Will Murray presented for the first time the stories just as Smith wrote them.
In establishing what the editors believe to be what Smith would have preferred, we were fortunate in having access to several repositories of Smith’s manuscripts, most notably the Clark Ashton Smith Papers deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, but also including the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, Special Collections of Brigham Young University, the California State Library, and several private collections. Priority was given to the latest known typescript prepared by Smith, except where he had indicated that the changes were made solely to satisfy editorial requirements. In these instances we compared the last version that satisfied Smith with the version sold. Changes made include the restoration of deleted material, except only in those instances where the change of a word or phrase seems consistent with an attempt by Smith to improve the story, as opposed to the change of a word or phrase to a less Latinate, and less graceful, near-equivalent. This represents a hybrid or fusion of two competing versions, but it is the only way that we see that Smith’s intentions as author may be honored. In a few instances a word might be changed in the Arkham House collections that isn’t indicated on the typescript.
We have also attempted to rationalize Smith’s spellings and hyphenation practices. Smith used British spellings early in his career but gradually switched to American usage. He could also vary spelling of certain words from story to story, e.g., “eerie” and “eery.” We have generally standardized on his later usage, except for certain distinct word choices such as “grey.” In doing so we have deviated from the “style sheet” prepared by the late Jim Turner for his 1988 omnibus collection for Arkham House, A Rendezvous in Averoigne. Turner did not have access to such a wonderful scholarly tool as Boyd Pearson’s website, www.eldritchdark.com. By combining its extremely useful search engine with consultation of Smith’s actual manuscripts and typescripts, as well as seeing how he spelled a particular word in a poem or letter, the editors believe that they have reflected accurately Smith’s idiosyncracies of expression.