The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith Read Free Book Online

correspondence-friendship lasted until Lindsay’s death in 1931.
    After Sandalwood , Smith had evidently given up the creation in quantity of poetry. He had now turned his attention once more to the writing of fiction. Earlier, in 1924, in the August issue of 10 Story Book —a magazine which featured a piquant combination of short stories with what are now known as “girly pictures”—had appeared Smith’s first professional short story since his contributions to The Overland Monthly and The Black Cat in 1910–1912: this is an amusing, deft, and very brief short story entitled “Something New,” in which Smith incidentally mocks the extraordinarily rich style of imagery characteristic of Ebony and Crystal . In 1925 he had written the two extended poems in prose “The Abomination of Yondo” and “Sadastor.” As we have seen, Farnsworth Wright rejected them. However, Smith continued to contribute to Weird Tales his own original poems in verse as well as translations from Baudelaire, all of an expectedly high quality. The issue for August 1928 included Smith’s first appearance in prose in Weird Tales ; this was in the form of translations in prose of three poems originally in verse by Baudelaire—“L’Irréparable,” “Les Sept Vieillards,” and “Une Charogne”—presented to the readers as Three Poems in Prose, by Charles Pierre Baudelaire and Translated by Clark Ashton Smith from the French . Smith had translated the verse originals of the poet into a supple and idiomatic English prose. In the succeeding issue for September 1928 appeared Smith’s first short story in Weird Tales —a strange parable of love and death entitled “The Ninth Skeleton,” but giving relatively little indication of the shape of things to come. The tale is significant, however, in that it is one of the very few laid by Smith in his general natal area: the action takes place on Boulder Ridge not far from the narrator’s cabin; and the description of the area in the story is a poetic but exact one of the area around Smith’s own cabin during his lifetime.
    However, Smith did not begin the writing of fiction in any quantity until the beginning of the Depression in 1929. We may postulate the years 1926 to 1929/1930 as the period in which Smith was carefully preparing in his imagination the divers backgrounds for his stories. In the poem in prose entitled “To the Dæmon” and dated December 16th, 1929, Smith wrote: “Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent dæmon.… Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love.…” And tell him many tales the dæmon veritably did. Between summer 1928 and summer 1938 Smith wrote something less than 140 short stories and novelettes.
    His next story to appear in Weird Tales was “The End of the Story,” laid in Smith’s imaginary province of mediæval France, Averoigne; this was in the issue for May 1930. The tale proved immediately popular with the readers of “The Unique Magazine,” and the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin De Casseres, in “The Eyrie” for July (“The Eyrie” was the readers’ letter department in Weird Tales ), commended Smith’s tale as a story “which is not only a philosophic thriller but possesses real literary quality, which is not lost (quite the contrary) on readers, such as you have, of imaginative tales.” The majority of Smith’s tales appeared in either Weird Tales under Farnsworth Wright or Wonder Stories under Hugo Gernsback. To the latter Smith contributed a highly imaginative, not to say unique, type of science-fiction story. To the former he contributed all manner of tales, many of them laid in Smith’s carefully constructed backgrounds: the primeval continent Hyperborea; “the last isle of foundering Atlantis,” Poseidonis; mediæval Averoigne; the last continent Zothique; the planet Xiccarph; and many other worlds. Although these stories may have become known only to a specialized audience, they introduced a new