The Dark Eidolon and other fantasies

348 Pages·2014·2.17 MB·English

by  Clark Ashton Smith

PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE DARK EIDOLON AND OTHER FANTASIES
CLARK ASHTON SMITH (1893–1961) was a poet, a sculptor, a painter, and the author of more than one
hundred tales of fantasy and horror. A disciple of George Sterling and a close friend of H. P.
Lovecraft, Smith was a member of the famous Lovecraft circle and was a regular contributor to
Weird Tales in the 1930s. He began his writing career as a poet, composing more than one thousand
poems over the course of more than fifty years, much of his work exploring the realms of fantasy,
terror, wonder, and the supernatural. His noteworthy volumes of poetry include The Star-Treader,
Ebony and Crystal, and Sandalwood. His stories, sometimes written in the Cthulhu Mythos, were
lush and vivid, wildly speculative, reminiscent of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, and often
deeply sardonic. Later in life, he wrote less and turned to visual art as his preferred mode of
expression. Smith died in 1961.
S. T. JOSHI is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P.
Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other
Weird Stories, as well as Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories, Arthur
Machen’s The White People and Other Weird Stories, and American Supernatural Tales. He has also
written critical studies on Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft; edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Clark
Ashton Smith, and H. L. Mencken; and completed a two-volume history of supernatural fiction
entitled Unutterable Horror. He was recently honored with the creation of the S. T. Joshi Endowed
Research Fellowship at Brown University Library and was awarded the Robert Bloch Award by the
Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council at NecronomiCon 2013.

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First published in Penguin Books 2014
Selection copyright © 2014 by William Dorman, Executor of the Estate of Clark Ashton Smith
Introduction and notes copyright © 2014 by S. T. Joshi
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The selections in this book first appeared in issues of Academy, Acolyte, Arkham Sampler, Auburn Journal, Bohemia, Different,
Fantasmagoria, Fantasy Fan, Kaleidograph, Live Stories, Lost Worlds, Measure, Overland Monthly, Poetry, Smart Set, Town Talk,
Troubadour, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, in the following volumes of Clark Ashton Smith’s works: The Complete Poetry and
Translations (Volume I), edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2007–08), The Double Shadow and Other
Fantasies (Auburn Journal Press, 1933), Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (Auburn Journal Press, 1925), Nero and Other
Poems (Futile Press, 1937), Odes and Sonnets (Book Club of California, 1918), Poems in Prose (Arkham House, 1965), Selected
Poems (Arkham House, 1971), The Star-Treader and Other Poems (A. M. Robertson, 1912), and in the anthologies Fire and Sleet and
Candlelight, edited by August Derleth (Arkham House, 1961) and Time to Come: Science-Fiction of Tomorrow, edited by August
Derleth (Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954). “The Hill of Dionysus” (1961) and “Cycles” (1963) were published as chapbooks by Roy A.
Squires.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Smith, Clark Ashton, 1893–1961.
[Works. Selections]
The Dark Eidolon and other fantasies / Clark Ashton Smith ; edited with an introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-14-310738-5 (pbk)
ISBN 978-0-698-13746-2 (eBook)
I. Joshi, S. T., 1958– editor of compilation. II. Title.
PS3537.M335A6 2014
813'.52—dc23 2013047586
Version_1
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by S. T. JOSH
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
SHORT STORIES
The Tale of Satampra Zeiros
The Last Incantation
The Devotee of Evil
The Uncharted Isle
The Face by the River
The City of the Singing Flame
The Holiness of Azédarac
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
Ubbo-Sathla
The Double Shadow
The Maze of the Enchanter
Genius Loci
The Dark Eidolon
The Weaver in the Vault
Xeethra
The Treader of the Dust
Mother of Toads
Phoenix
PROSE POEMS
The Image of Bronze and the Image of Iron
The Memnons of the Night
The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty
The Corpse and the Skeleton
A Dream of Lethe
From the Crypts of Memory
Ennui
The Litany of the Seven Kisses
In Cocaigne
The Flower-Devil
The Shadows
The Passing of Aphrodite
To the Daemon
The Abomination of Desolation
The Mirror in the Hall of Ebony
The Touch-Stone
The Muse of Hyperborea
POETRY
The Last Night
Ode to the Abyss
A Dream of Beauty
The Star-Treader
Retrospect and Forecast
Nero
To the Daemon Sublimity
Averted Malefice
The Eldritch Dark
Shadow of Nightmare
Satan Unrepentant
The Ghoul
Desire of Vastness
The Medusa of Despair
The Refuge of Beauty
The Harlot of the World
Memnon at Midnight
Love Malevolent
The Crucifixion of Eros
The Tears of Lilith
Requiescat in Pace
The Motes
The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil
A Psalm to the Best Beloved
The Witch with Eyes of Amber
We Shall Meet
On Re-reading Baudelaire
To George Sterling: A Valediction
Anterior Life
Hymn to Beauty
The Remorse of the Dead
Exorcism
Nyctalops
Outlanders
Song of the Necromancer
To Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Madrigal of Memory
The Old Water-Wheel
The Hill of Dionysus
If Winter Remain
Amithaine
Cycles
Explanatory Notes
Introduction
Clark Ashton Smith’s prose fiction and poetry reveal to us realms, creatures, and
events that never were and never could be, doing so in an idiom that utilized the
linguistic resources of the English language to their fullest. This body of work
embodies an exhilarating liberation of the imagination beyond the known and
the mundane.
Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13, 1893, in Long Valley,
California, the son of Timeus and Fanny (Gaylord) Smith. In 1902 the Smith
family moved to nearby Auburn, in the Sierra foothills, where Timeus and young
Clark built a cabin about a mile outside of town. Smith remained there for most
of his life. Smith’s formal education was intermittent—several years’ attendance
at two different grammar schools in or near Auburn, and only a few days’
attendance at Placer Union High School—but his prodigious self-education,
which included teaching himself Latin and reading through Webster’s
Unabridged Dictionary, rendered him one of the most learned autodidacts of his
time.
It was in his preteen years that Smith developed an interest in writing. At the
age of eleven he began composing fairy tales and stories based on the Arabian
Nights. Two long narratives, probably dating to 1907 or thereabouts—The Black
Diamonds, nearly 100,000 words in length, and a slightly shorter work, The
Sword of Zagan—survive and have recently been published; they are longer than
any of the fiction he would write as an adult. Although they do not generally
involve the supernatural, these works evoke not only the Arabian Nights but also
William Beckford’s vivid Arabian novel, Vathek (1786).
In 1906 Smith discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe’s poetry in
particular fired his imagination. This discovery was fused with Smith’s
fascination for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward
FitzGerald, and by a long fantastic poem, George Sterling’s “A Wine of
Wizardry,” which appeared in the September 1907 issue of Cosmopolitan.
Together, these works led to Smith’s own early experiments in poetry.
Sterling (1869–1926) was then a relatively young poet whose first book, The
Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems (1903), had created something of a stir
in California for its cosmic perspective: its long title poem depicts the cosmic
flux of stars and constellations and its implications for human life. A Long
Island native transplanted to San Francisco, Sterling fell under the tutelage of the
venerable Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), who spent years trying to find a
publisher for “A Wine of Wizardry,” finally succeeding in placing it in the
magazine for which he himself was a contributing editor. The poem was
published with a laudatory article by Bierce and created an immense furor both
locally and nationally, as Bierce’s many literary and political enemies lambasted
him for what they believed was his flamboyant praise of an esoteric poem
devoted to fantastic and horrific imagery. Sterling’s reputation was established—
in California, at least—and he became both the leader of a bohemian colony of
writers and artists based in California and the uncrowned poet laureate of the
Bay Area.
Smith’s own early poetry was already tending toward the cosmic, so it is
unlikely that Sterling was a direct influence on it; nevertheless, it made sense for
Smith, in early 1911, to send his verse to Sterling for comment and analysis.
Sterling was understandably impressed. Smith had already published a few
poems and even some short stories in magazines the year before, but the poetry
he showed Sterling was of significantly higher quality. Perhaps recognizing the
valuable aid Bierce had lent him as a young poet, Sterling took Smith under his
wing and sought to promote his work as best he could. He quoted Smith’s sonnet
“The Last Night” in an interview in Town Talk, a San Francisco weekly paper
that regularly featured articles about Sterling and his circle (which included Jack
London, Upton Sinclair, Mary Austin, the photographer Arnold Genthe, the
painter Xavier Martínez, and for a time the young Sinclair Lewis). He sent
Smith’s remarkable “Ode to the Abyss” to Bierce; the elderly curmudgeon’s
favorable comments on the poem were quoted—and misquoted—in several
papers in the summer of 1911.
Smith himself became a media celebrity the next summer, when several San
Francisco newspapers hailed the “boy poet of the Sierras” and compared his
early poetic brilliance to that of Keats and Shelley. A local lawyer named
Boutwell Dunlap claimed to have discovered Smith, but that honor surely rests
with Sterling. It is true that Dunlap had introduced Smith to his first publisher,
A. M. Robertson, but it was Sterling who ushered Smith’s The Star-Treader and
Other Poems into print in late 1912. The book received fairly wide notice
(including, belatedly, a favorable review from the great Anglo-Welsh fantasist
Arthur Machen1) and also sold more than a thousand copies—a remarkable
figure for a first book of poetry, especially given that Sterling’s own poetry
volumes did not sell nearly as well. Smith seemed on the threshold of
establishing a reputation for himself in the realm of poetry.
That reputation never materialized, however, partly because of Smith’s
extreme shyness as a youth and partly because of his problematical health.
Although Smith had spent a month with Sterling in June–July 1912, he was too
diffident to meet Bierce and London, in spite of Sterling’s repeated efforts to
arrange a gathering of his closest literary colleagues. And from 1913 to 1921
Smith seemed to be in constant ill health—indigestion, nervous troubles, and the
like. There is good evidence that he was afflicted with tuberculosis; perhaps
depression—conjoined with, or perhaps partly caused by, the severe financial
worries that would plague Smith for much of his life—was also a factor. The
result was that, even though the prestigious Book Club of California issued
Smith’s Odes and Sonnets in 1918, his celebrity as a poet remained local. He
was writing no fantastic fiction at this time.
Smith’s financial worries were real. He was saddled not only with two aging
parents who could not work but also with a mortgage on their property on which
he could barely meet the interest payments. In 1917 Smith suggested that
Sterling should try to encourage his many wealthy friends in the Bay Area to
give him a lump sum of $1500 to $2000 to set up a chicken ranch. Sterling
didn’t think he could raise such a large sum of money, but he did attempt to
persuade some wealthy socialites to give the Smith family a monthly stipend.
One of the first to do so was Mrs. Celia Clark, the wife of a mining magnate,
who (perhaps in conjunction with others) agreed to supply $75 a month. This
stipend appears to have lasted until the spring of 1920, when Mrs. Clark
inexplicably stopped giving (perhaps she simply forgot about the matter in
planning for an upcoming tour abroad).
Smith himself, in spite of his health problems, did attempt work—but for
someone who did not even graduate from high school or attend college, such
work was hard to come by. Smith actually became a migrant worker for a time,
engaging in wood chopping, fruit picking, and other forms of manual labor; this
work at least had the good effect of getting him out in the open air and causing
his tuberculosis to go into remission.
• • •