Free The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith Page A

volume is the incomparable “We Shall Meet.” But the entire collection is rife with excellent poems, haunting, unforgettable, of a rare poignance, charting as many of them do the course of love that runs disastrously and ultimately perishes. Like Ebony and Crystal , Sandalwood is a talismanic, touchstone volume. The nineteen poems from Baudelaire, as well as Smith’s Baudelairian translations elsewhere, establish Smith as a sovereign translator of the French genius, far superior to Edna St. Vincent Millay or even Arthur Symons.
    Of Smith’s tales and/or extended poems in prose there is little that one can say in this brief space save that they are prodigies of invention whose style is integrally one with their themes. They synthesize and extrapolate the themes, backgrounds, concepts and stylistic elements of Smith’s three major early poetry collections. Smith’s unique type of science fiction (contributed mostly in the 1930s to Wonder Stories ) represents a return to the cosmic-astronomic material of his very first volume of some twenty years earlier. As a perfectly logical consequence Smith’s tales employ the same immense vocabulary to be found in his poetry; a vocabulary used with a precision fully as creative and as masterly as that evident in his poems. Not only does the same vocabulary used in his poetry reappear but even the same or similar phrase-patterns and mannerisms. Such tales as “The Dark Eidolon,” “The Empire of the Necromancers,” “The Last Hieroglyph,” “The Isle of the Torturers,” “Xeethra,” “The White Sybil,” “The City of the Singing Flame,” and so many, many others, have no parallel in the creations of any other writer. They are unique like the genius that created them. They form in their entirety a worthy congener to “The Hashish-Eater.” In them Smith again gives striking embodiment to the concept of the Man-God, whether personified in such archimages as Malygris, Maal Dweb, Avyctes and Namirrha or in such necromancers as Mmatmuor, Sodosma, and Vacharn or in such kings as Adompha, Euvoran and Xeethra. Such protagonists of Smith’s, like true heroes Baudelairian, despite their frequent sovereignty of temporal and/or necromantic power, are yet paradoxically often impotent to escape that ultimate bane of godhood or of the Man-God, to wit, ennui or spleen. (This last is, of course, one of the central Baudelairian themes, both in Les Fleurs du Mal and in the Petits Poèmes en prose , the alternate title of which is Le Spleen de Paris .) The poet-author himself may be seen in an ideal sense as a literary Man-God creating and peopling many worlds of his imagination; the tales and/or extended poems in prose may be seen as the complement and fulfillment of the seemingly endless procession of visions or episodes that make up the compressed epic “The Hashish-Eater.”
    Smith’s tales, because of their efflorescent richness and their baroque combination of seemingly contradictory and incongruous elements, become very difficult to characterize. The love poems in Ebony and Crystal and Sandalwood find their fictional counterparts in the love interest in a great many of Smith’s so-called “tales of horror.” But the label of “tales of love” is also inadequate. What should one call them? Tales of death? Tales of splendor? Tales of beauty? Tales of deathly beauty? Tales of necromancy? Tales of demonology? Tales of magic? Tales of the supernatural? Tales of sorcery? Tales of metamorphosis? Tales of wonder? Tales of cosmic irony? Tales of deity, destiny and nemesis? Perhaps, after all, the label “weird tales” serves as well as any. Smith’s weird tales were certainly among the most ineffably weird ever to appear in the magazine of that same name.
    And then there is the “magic” of Smith’s style. One seems to be reading some sort of incantation or litany with measured invocations and responses. Just as Smith’s subject-matter, his symbolism and his philosophies, so