Let Smith’s words carry you away to realms of glittering beauty—and evil and irony at times, yes. It does not matter whether you read a Smith tale set in a sumptuous Oriental court, a decadent world of the far future or a remote, alien planet. These settings are arbitrary, and in my opinion they are really interchangeable.
I have my favorite stories in this collection. As the Romans said, De gustibus, non est disputandum. Still, I will indulge myself by mentioning just three.
“The Death of Malygris” is vintage Smith. Just see how he draws the reader into his world of whispers and of shadows:
At the hour of interlunar midnight, when lamps burned rarely and far apart in Susran, and slow-moving autumn clouds had muffled the stars, King Gadeiron sent forth into the sleeping city twelve of his trustiest mutes. Like shadows gliding through oblivion, they vanished upon their various ways; each of them, returning presently to the darkened palace, led with him a shrouded figure no less silent and discreet than himself.
In this manner, groping along tortuous alleys, through blind cypress-caverns in the royal gardens, and down subterranean halls and steps, twelve of the most powerful sorcerers of Susran were brought together in a vault of oozing, death-grey granite, far beneath the foundations of the palace.
What an opening scene! What irresistible imagery! It is impossible not to go on reading, not to want—no, to need to know about those twelve mutes and those twelve sorcerers and what plan is brewing in the mind of King Gadeiron.
Then there is “The Coming of the White Worm.” Smith uses odd and intriguing words that weave an enchantment all their own, a kind of imagistic poetry whose very sound and texture is hypnotic, regardless even of their content:
Evagh the warlock, dwelling beside the boreal sea, was aware of many strange and untimely portents in mid-summer. Frorely burned the sun above Mhu Thulan from a welkin clear and wannish as ice. At eve the aurora was hung from zenith to earth, like an arras in a high chamber of gods. Wan and rare were the poppies and small anemones in the cliff-sequestered vales lying behind the house of Evagh; and the fruits in his walled garden were pale of rind and green at the core. Also, he beheld by day the unseasonable flight of great multitudes of fowl, going southward from the hidden isles beyond Mhu Thulan; and by night he heard the distressful clamor of other passing multitudes. And always, in the loud wind and crying surf, he harkened to the weird whisper of voices from realms of perennial winter.
Nothing has happened. A character has been named but all that we know of him is his profession. No shots have rung out, no hoofs have pounded, no zombies have lurched, no bosoms have heaved. Instead, Smith has created a living, breathtakingly strange and fascinating place, and we are drawn to enter it and listen, our hearts pounding in our ears, while this male Scheherazade spins a thousand and second tale.
One more, “The Chain of Aforgomon.” Curl up and let that insidious voice tell you this story:
It is indeed strange that John Milwarp and his writings should have fallen so speedily into a sort of semi-oblivion. His books, treating of Oriental life in a somewhat flowery, romantic style, were popular a few months ago. But now, in spite of their range and penetration, their pervasive verbal sorcery, they are seldom mentioned; and they seem to have vanished unaccountably from the shelves of bookstores and libraries.
Even the mystery of Milwarp’s death, baffling to both law and science, has evoked but a passing interest, an excitement quickly lulled and forgotten.
I was well acquainted with Milwarp over a term of years. But my recollection of the man is becoming strangely blurred, like an image in a misted mirror. His dark, half-alien personality, his preoccupation with the occult, his immense knowledge of Eastern life and lore, are things I remember with such effort and vagueness as attends the recovery of a dream. Sometimes I almost doubt that he ever existed. It is as if the man, and all that pertains to him, were being erased from human record by some mysterious acceleration of the common process of obliteration.
This is what academics refer to as recursive narration: a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer.... It is hard not to believe that this is Smith writing about Smith, if not the actual man struggling against a difficult fate on that hardscrabble mountainside above Auburn, California, then the Clark Ashton Smith of his own fantasies, the Emperor of Dreams.
“The Chain of Aforgomon” may not be the greatest of Smith’s stories. It is certainly not the most famous. But it has a very special place in my personal list of favorites.
What, indeed, did Smith think of himself and his works? With what endorsement did he leave his remarkably extensive body of prose and poetry—and painting and sculpture!—to the world?
I recently came across the text of Charles Baudelaire’s famous and scandalous volume, Flowers of Evil. Let me share with you just a few lines from Baudelaire’s introduction:
You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (
Fleurs du mal
) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people... ...(My detractors) deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don’t care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron.
Just so, the collected works of Clark Ashton Smith will make their way into the memory of our own lettered public. They will stand on a plain with the best prose and poetry of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert Ervin Howard. He was their equal; I am tempted to say more than that but will not. Each had his merits. Those of Clark Ashton Smith are lovingly displayed in this and its companion volumes of his collected fantasies.
In the same 1937 letter earlier cited, Smith referred to one of his stories, “The Death of Ilalotha,” as “unusually poisonous and exotic.” That story is included in this volume, and the reader is invited to consider it in the light of the author’s assessment. How aptly the phrase applies to Smith—whose works, however glowingly lovely, were seldom optimistic and never Pollyannaish—as well as to Baudelaire!
As you read this book or any collection Smith’s wondrous gems, do not hasten to the next story, the next scene, or even the next paragraph. Turn the clock to the wall. Put your wristwatch in a drawer. Disconnect the telephone and shut off your cell phone. Draw the blinds. Make yourself comfortable with the book in your lap, and perhaps with a glass of some fine, rare vintage at your elbow. Wade into the warm, scented sea of words. Give yourself over to the experience. Do not worry about emerging.
All too soon the world will summon you back to reality. The spell will be broken. When this happens, do not be ashamed to weep.
—Richard A. Lupoff
Berkeley, California
2010
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Clark Ashton Smith considered himself primarily a poet, 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.