Clark Ashton Smith Redivivus
By S. T. Joshi
Smith, Clark Ashton. Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by David E. Schultz and Scott Connors. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003. xxvii, 417 p.
Smith, Clark Ashton. Red World of Polaris: The Adventures of Captain Volmar. Edited by Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003. 115 p.
I believe it is safe to say that a Clark Ashton Smith renaissance is underway. For years his major fiction and poetry were unavailable, and little critical or biographical work has been done since Steve Behrends's brief monograph, Clark Ashton Smith (Starmont House, 1990). The Necronomicon Press editions of Smith's Tales of Zothique (1995) and The Book of Hyperborea (1996) were successful but quickly went out of print. But now Arkham House has reissued its hefty edition of Smith's best fantastic tales, A Rendezvous in Averoigne (1988); the Hippocampus Press edition of The Last Oblivion (2002), edited by David E. Schultz and myself, has made much of Smith's best fantastic poetry available to a new readership; and my edition of Smith's unpublished juvenile novel, The Black Diamonds (Hippocampus Press, 2002), and W. C. Farmer's edition of more unpublished juvenile work, The Sword of Zagan (Hippocampus Press, 2004), are shedding new light on Smith's development as a prose fantasist. Efforts seem to be afoot to get Smith's major fiction back into print. Scott Connors is at work on a full-scale biography. It may be years before we see that work, but Connors and Schultz have now lain the groundwork for it by their meticulous, superbly edited volume of Smith's selected letters.
As an epistolarian, Smith cannot compare in voluminousness or panache with his colleague H. P. Lovecraft; and yet, his letters are surprisingly revelatory and engaging. Only relatively small scraps of his correspondence have so far appeared, the most extensive previous selection being Steve Behrends's edition of Smith's Letters to H. P. Lovecraft (Necronomicon Press, 1987). While illuminating, that slim volume cannot hold a candle to Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith in scope, breadth, and editorial acumen.
Of the fifty years worth of letters in this volume (1911-1961), the first fifteen are dominated by letters to the great California poet George Sterling (1869-1926) and are almost exclusively concerned with Smith's meteoric rise to fame as a poet. Sterling at once recognized Smith's poetic brilliance from such early specimens as "Ode to the Abyss" and "Nero"; one suspects, indeed, that he was struck by the anomalous paralleling of his mentoring of Smith with his own tutelage under Ambrose Bierce, who was electrified by Sterling's youthful cosmic poems, The Testimony of the Suns and A Wine of Wizardry. Bierce himself read "Ode to the Abyss" and liked it, contributing his weight to the furor that erupted in 1912 upon the emergence of Smith's first volume of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems. It was not long before Smith and Sterling were addressing each other as virtual equals; indeed, it is very likely that Sterling tacitly acknowledged Smith's actual superiority as a poet.
The tremendously shy, introspective, and perhaps even neurotic teenager we see in the opening pages of this book is a striking contrast to the debonair, wine-bibbing man of the world we recognize from Smith's later years. So diffident was he that, although he did come to San Francisco to meet Sterling on several occasions, he was terrified at the prospect of meeting California's Great Cham of Letters, Ambrose Bierce, when the latter paid a lengthy visit in 1912, and he also never met Sterling's great friend Jack London. But Smith grew up fast; by 1921 he could write to Sterling: "Marriage is an error I was never tempted to commit: I have not been in love with an unmarried woman since I was fifteen!" Smith quickly gained notoriety among the townsfolk of Auburn as a Don Juan ever on the hunt for other men's wives; how much of a foundation there was in these rumours I shall leave to Connors to reveal in his biography.
Over the years the Smith-Sterling relationship grew occasionally tense. Sterling warned Smith (unjustly, I think) against being a Johnny-one-note in his focus on cosmic poetry, and Smith replied hotly: "Why shouldn't the Abyss be the dominant theme of my work? Other poets have made their main work a series of expatiations on some central subject, and no one has risen up to rebuke them for monotony or self-repetition." Smith's ventures into pictorial art only earned Sterling's scorn (here I think he was on firmer ground), but Smith persevered to the extent of having some of his paintings exhibited and sold for small sums. But an even sharper clash came when Smith wrote his first significant fantastic tale, "The Abominations of Yondo" (1925). Sterling (in a letter obviously not included here) wrote tartly, and quite absurdly, that the weird was played out and warned Smith against indulging in it--advice that Smith wisely ignored.
It is worth pointing out that Smith, who is often thought of merely as a leading figure of the "Lovecraft circle," actually met many of the members of this circle independently, some of them years before they came in touch with Lovecraft himself. The great poet Samuel Loveman was a longtime correspondent of Smith since at least the mid-1910s; Smith met George Kirk, the bookseller, around 1920, and it was Kirk whose bestowal of one of Smith's poetry volumes to Lovecraft led the latter to write to Smith in 1922. Smith established contact with Donald Wandrei in 1924, a full two years before Wandrei ever wrote to Lovecraft; in fact, it was Smith who put Wandrei and Lovecraft in touch with each other. Smith's letters to Lovecraft, Wandrei, and August Derleth are certainly among the most substantial of those included in this volume, at least as far as the development of Smith's career as a prose fictionist is concerned. Smith devotees become hotly contentious when they think of Smith as merely an ancillary to Lovecraft, and are particularly exercised by any suggestions that Lovecraft's tales directly influenced Smith's. But it seems difficult to deny that Smith--who did not begin writing fiction voluminously until 1929, seven years after he first came in touch with Lovecraft--as in part inspired by Lovecraft's example to commence the writing of fantastic prose. The frequency with which Smith asks to borrow and re-borrow Lovecraft's tales makes this conclusion inescapable. By 1930 Smith and Lovecraft were exchanging fascinating letters regarding their own understanding of the scope and aims of weird fiction, and the varying aesthetic methodologies each used in achieving those aims. It is difficult to find a more compact and precise account of the difference between these two giants of weird fiction than the following letter of October 1930:
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. You attain a black magic, perhaps unconsciously, in your pursuit of corroborative detail and verisimilitude.
It is, however, dismaying to see Smith, in desperate poverty and with two increasingly frail parents to support, having to prostitute his art by catering to the weird and science fiction pulps of the day, not hesitating to alter a work, or to write a work to order, if it could yield some much-needed cash. Lovecraft, scarcely less impoverished but with some additional revenues from a dwindling family inheritance and his poorly paying revision work, could afford "barely" to tell editors like Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales to jump in the lake if they did not care for a story or asked for revisions that Lovecraft was not inclined to make. Smith told numerous colleagues that he could always restore the cuts or tamperings of clumsy pulp editors if and when the stories were published in book form, but, because of eye problems, he was unable to do so when Derleth and Wandrei, having founded Arkham House, lined up Smith as one of their earliest authors.
Perhaps Smith's carelessness, or lack of interest, is understandable. Letters for the period 1938-41 are in very short supply, and it is sad to see Smith writing pleading letters to Derleth asking for cash advances on his royalties to meet various financial "emergencies" that were plaguing him at this time. Smith's fiction writing had come to a virtual end by 1935; the deaths of his mother in 1935, his father in 1937, and Lovecraft in 1937 no doubt had much to do with what might well have been a prolonged period of depression and unproductivity. Smith's early Arkham House volumes were successful enough in a limited way, but they did not lead to paperback editions (as happened almost immediately with Lovecraft's tales) and, hence, to increased revenue. In the middle 1940s Smith returned to his first love, poetry; and it seems undeniable that his massed poetic output is, as an aesthetic product, far superior to his collected short fiction.
The letters of Smith's last decade or so are almost exclusively written to Derleth and Wandrei, with occasional missives in response to fans like Sam Sackett and Rah Hoffman or fellow fantasists like L. Sprague de Camp. One wonders whether Smith felt weirdly posthumous in his own time when young scholars like Donald Sidney-Fryer and the New Zealander T. G. L. Cockcroft began compiling bibliographies of his work well in advance of his death.
It is difficult to speak of the Selected Letters in short compass. The editors' luminous introduction; their keen selection of just those letters that most clearly illuminate Smith's long literary career and his distinctive personality; their careful elucidation of historical, literary, and other references in the letters; and the substantial bibliography that concludes the volume all make this a landmark, not only in the understanding of Smith but also in the long and distinguished array of Arkham House publications. It is true that the Smith renaissance has, to date, mostly consisted of the issuing of work (published or unpublished) by Smith himself rather than by critical or biographical studies; but those studies will inevitably follow once the primary texts are made available to a wider readership.
Which brings us to Red World of Polaris. This slim volume is noteworthy for the first publication of a long-lost Smith tale, "The Red World of Polaris" (I am not sure why the The was dropped from the title of the book), one of three stories revolving around a daring space adventurer, Captain Volmar, whose ship, the Alcyone, ventures into far-off realms and encounters the most bizarre flora and fauna along the way. "The Red World of Polaris" was the second Captain Volmar tale, after "Marooned in Andromeda" (written in May 1930), although here it is placed third, after the final extant Volmar story, "A Captivity in Serpens." "Red World" was rejected by Wonder Stories, evidently because it did not have a sufficient amount of "action" and was "almost wholly descriptive." The story languished unpublished for years, and in the 1950s Smith sold the manuscript to a young fan, Michael DeAngelis; but instead of publishing it, DeAngelis disappeared from the scene, and the text was only recently excavated with the help of his former colleague, Alan H. Pesetsky.
It is plain, however, that on a purely aesthetic level "The Red World of Polaris" is far and away the best of the Volmar stories. The other two often seem merely a succession of bizarre adventures with no order, coherence, or artistic purpose; "Red World," on the other hand, focuses on the spectacularly outré beings encountered on a planet near Polaris and makes a serious attempt to envision their biology, history, and culture. Written in the fall of 1930, the tale may well have helped to inspire Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness in its depiction of protoplasmic monsters resembling the shoggoths of that tale (although the kernel of the shoggoth idea had apparently been created in Lovecraft's ghostwritten tale, "The Mound" [1929-30]). In any event, the tale is a substantial addition to Smith's corpus of science fiction, and certainly superior to most of the contents of such a volume as Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964).
It is reassuring "even thrilling" that such major discoveries can be made at this late date. Whether we will ever see anything so spectacular as the unearthing of a lost story by Smith or Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard or anyone of their stature is unlikely; but, as for Smith, more excavation is in the offing. The joint correspondence of Smith and Sterling (both sides survive nearly intact) is being edited for publication; if one could ever get a hold of all of Lovecraft's letters to Smith, a joint Smith-Lovecraft correspondence would be monumentally illuminating. Smith's letters to Derleth, Wandrei, R. H. Barlow, Samuel Loveman, and others deserve publication, with suitable commentary. His complete poetry "including dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unpublished poems" deserves publication as well, even if it fills three or four weighty volumes. The criticism of Smith is at a relatively primitive level, but the raw materials for a more profound study of him are gradually being made available for those with the diligence and the intellectual resources to use them.
As Lovecraft said in one of his stories: "Expect great revelations."