Author: Ryan Shea

“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams / Crown me with the million-colored sun.”

So declares the young poet of California in “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil” as the light goes out. With the cracked, bifurcated bust left to posterity — the dough-faced poet spliced into a moustachioed wizard, a worker in stone and paint — the reader will think modernity left Clark Ashton Smith behind; or that Smith left it behind by the end of his life in 1961. It is only in recent decades that a unity has resurfaced in Smith’s legacy through collections like Penguin’s The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (2014). Out of a languorous dusk, Smith appears to gain the day as both the fresh faced boy-poet of California and the smoking-jacket wizard of the 1950s. Plentiful divisions in creative identity, from poetry to soapstone, caused Smith to slip away until he was reduced to an appendage, a nameless name, only attributed as to contextualize Lovecraft. Collections such as The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies then offer a resurrection of Smith as a singular writer rather than a name between Poe and Lovecraft.

Clark Ashton Smith is casually reduced to two interpretations: either a mere opponent of, or victim of, modernity. The original literary reputation of Smith, when acknowledged, was that he was a generational talent of the 1920s seduced by foolishness. He and his errant master, George Sterling, represented a last gasp of Romanticism, at the edge of America, that would surrender to realism. The critics said Smith would grow up. Smith, though, was struck by that terrible enchantment with the supra-mundane universe which was best preserved in magazines like Weird Tales, a pulpy sensualism of the supposed gutter. Here then arose the second reputation of Smith which has been upheld along the fringes since the 1950s: Smith was the awful sensualist to H. P. Lovecraft’s doubtful logician, and the wine-drunk poet next to Robert E. Howard’s bloody barbarian. Abandoning poetry for ornate prose, Smith wantonly declared science and magic were the same. Everything was perfectly irrational, bent, like the titans of ancient Egypt, towards a wonderful ruination. As the decades unfurl, the gaining predominance of the second reputation has given birth to a reinvigorated legacy that, ultimately, suggests Smith was victorious over the, now, collapsed titans that constructed the first reputation.

Smith though was doubtless a California poet of a generation obsessed with a sudden closure, apocalypse. The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, abandoning the purity of a perfect isolate sat next to Lovecraft, sets Smith as one of the canonical California poets after the latter day Romantic George Sterling and next to the Inhumanist Robinson Jeffers. Smith’s younger period is highlighted here through a delicate collection of poems and prose-poems which betray his heavy French influence. “The Star-Treader”, “To The Deaemon Sublimity”, “The Eldritch Dark”, all works obsessed with the aesthetic sensations of human experience, such as the pleasure at the sight of rich color and animal unease at eerie song, rather than the objective reality of it. Smith’s reality is a scene of sanguines and a “scythed moon” rather than a reality of reds and night. Smith derides doubt but admits terror is a universal substance as in the extensive piece “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil”. “The Hashish-Eater” is a lengthy work of aesthetic philosophy, but too much of a good drug: “Of utter night and chaos, I convoke / The Babel of their visions, and attend / At once their myriad witness.” Wine and ruin, these two substances dominated Smith’s poetry as a disciple of Charles Baudelaire. Smith, again, was more in love with the romance of them, the color, rather than physical objects. The redness in wine to Smith is decadent drunkenness rather than drink, tumbled stones in ruins are testimony to a horrible greatness rather than artifacts, and hashish is a profound (even cosmic) poison rather than a substance. “Anterior Life”, “Hymn to Beauty”, and “The Remorse of the Dead”, surprising translations of the French Icarus, Baudelaire, speak again to Smith’s taste for the colors of impermanence rather than a precise archaeology of concept. In the California canon, the poet Robinson Jeffers, a then contemporary, was made an outcast for his sheer brutality, but Smith, deemed a trespasser, was made an outcast for his wry bemusement.

This dynamic continues on in Smith’s later prose which abounds with a similar opposition towards time and chronology. Pieces from Smith’s fantasy cycle Zothique are of course included; a far-flung, retrograde future where a guttering sun will soon burn out above wilted empires who have exhausted everything from minerals to originality. Smith’s short story “Xeethra” reads as a decadent parable set in this timelessness after history: a shepherd boy rediscovers his illustrious pedigree only to comprehend, in a Faustian pact, that fact and fiction do not matter in a shattered illusion.

“Xeethra” is often compared to Lovecraft’s “The Quest of Iranon” due to being published within a year of each other in 1935 and 1936. The later “The Quest of Iranon” is a sort of inverted, almost reverse “Xeethra”, that too deals with a near-anonymous youth obsessed with a lost, perhaps illusory, kingdom of glory and pleasure. Lovecraft’s “The Quest of Iranon” though is a tale defined by nostalgic character and exotic history as can be heard in the alien names: “The lights of Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magically as shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon’s mother once rocked him to sleep with song.” Smith’s “Xeethra”, the earlier of the pair, is more a timelessness where character evaporates in aesthetic sensation: “But the veils of twilight were tender upon the ruin; and the sea sighed as of yore under a purple shrouding; and the mighty star Canopus climbed in the east, with the lesser stars still faint around him.” One is struck by the suspicion that Smith prefers floating stars to characters. Colors predominate in Smith in contrast to Lovecraft’s scalpel-like biography. As much as there is an analytic Anglicism in Lovecraft, there is an indulgent Gallicism throughout Smith’s work.

Smith’s vocabulary is replete with odalisques, sarabands, and plentiful bale or bane. The decadent timelessness of Zothique provides him a conceptual space to fill with poetics. The eponymous short story “The Dark Eidolon” features a literal danse macabre of skeletons where archaic Latin and decrepit English are revived with the poetic sensibilities of French: “At every step they grew taller and heavier, till the saltant mummies were as the mummies of the Anakim, and the skeletons were boned like colossi; and louder and more lugubrious the music rose, drowning the faint cries of Zotulla’s people.” All this anachronism in vocabulary becomes literal anachronism with Smith’s medieval Averoigne tales, such as “The Holiness of Azédarac”, where characters are jostled about history through a magic which does not bend to history. There are other works such as “The City of the Singing Flame” which features a disorienting procession of exotic creatures in an extra-dimensional city of no possible location. All, in the end, are consumed by an incendiary song at the center of this phantasy, or, as the story closes, “…the glorious doom which is still in store.”. Smith never concludes with a concussive ending, excepting “The Treader of the Dust”, but his craft of concept is superb.

Smith’s writing is the slumped exoticism of what was, what could have been, and, in the future, what could be left behind after. There is a pertinent emptiness in all things, a vacuum to be filled with destruction, which Smith intensely contemplates in his final poem: “Cycles”. The poem sees a perennial sorcerer, at once old and young as in the obeisance of dream, invoke the nameless name as to overthrow time. It is in the knightly dream ballad “Amithaine” where Smith displays his dusky richness. The bale-red suns, the swan-throat towers, the chatelaine in the fallen garden of sunset, all charge forth in “glamorous wars” against “doom-preparing stars”, but, as the dream evaporates, the poet calls out with the couplet: “Dreamer, awake! … but I remain / To ride with them in Amithaine.”

One day then, out of the darkness, that exiled hashish-eater will return to be crowned emperor, crowned emperor with the sun of Amithaine. Smith’s legacy shakes itself awake to impose upon a reality far less legitimate than Smith’s otherwhere ruins.

Ryan Shea is a New England Tom of Bedlam. His writing focuses on the antipodes of literary culture and the Internet. His work has previously appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Atlas Obscura, and in French translation in the review Librarioli. He is currently a columnist for the music site Invisible Oranges. He looks forward to each project that requires one thousand and one nights to complete. His meandering cross sections can be found at Zoflyoa on Instagram.