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

bottom of the pages carrying poems, quotations from the works of the established poets of the past, including the great names in the poetry of the English language.
    In 1936 the output of Smith’s tales started to drop off, and by the latter 30s, during the 40s and the 50s, Smith had virtually stopped writing fiction. However, he continued writing verse until his death in 1961. The reasons for this cessation of Smith’s writing fiction are not clear: it could have been that he had exhausted even his seemingly inexhaustible fancy; or perhaps the dæmon no longer told him “tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love”; or Smith may have found the production of his small sculptures more interesting. This last seems likely as Smith once wrote, in a brief autobiography published in The Science Fiction Fan for August 1936, that he found “the making of these [small sculptures] far easier and more pleasurable than writing.” He had begun the carving of these small sculptures possibly in the early 1930s, and it may have been that this was now the new step in Smith’s further creative evolution; he made besides hundreds of paintings and drawings, starting in the early 1920s or earlier. Also, the death of his parents as well as that of his correspondent and friend Lovecraft, may have removed some of Smith’s incentive for creating fiction. His mother, Fanny Smith, died in 1935; his father, Timeus Smith, died in 1937; and in March of this same year Lovecraft died, and death thus robbed Smith of one of his greatest, most sympathetic and understanding friends. H.P.L. had always proved an enthusiastic and perceptive audience for Smith’s short stories: both Smith and Lovecraft had been in the habit of exchanging manuscripts of stories before their publication, and mutually commenting on them.
    Smith paid homage to H.P.L. in the lovely and moving memorial poem “To Howard Phillips Lovecraft” and in a letter in “The Eyrie” in Weird Tales , both published in the issue for July 1937. Two tributes in prose had also appeared earlier: “In Memoriam—H.P. Lovecraft,” in Tesseract for April 1937; and in a letter published in The Science-Fiction Critic for May 1937, in “A Note From The Editor.” His last tribute appeared in 1959, the sonnet “H.P.L.,” published in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (Arkham House) and dated July 17th, 1959.
    Lovecraft, before he died had paid his homage to Smith in the sonnet “To Clark Ashton Smith” (published posthumously in Weird Tales for April 1938), which concludes with the lines: “Dark Lord of Averoigne—whose windows stare / On pits of dream no other gaze could bear!” In Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” H.P.L. concludes the section “The Weird Tradition in America” with a paragraph of high and perceptive praise of Smith’s fictional art.
    During the late 1930s Smith began another of his notable correspondences, this one with Lilith Lorraine, the founder and principal poet of the Avalon Poetry Foundation. In Lilith Lorraine’s volume of science-fiction poetry Wine of Wonder , she pays Smith a lovely and worthy tribute in the poem “The Cup-Bearer”. Also during the late 1930s Universal Studios considered the possibility of filming two of Smith’s most extraordinary tales “The Dark Eidolon” and “The Colossus of Ylourgne.” This project never materialized, and this may have been a blessing rather than a misfortune, however much Smith could have used the money from the movie rights. To have adapted either of these tales would have required not the typically conventional treatment of Universal Studios but such combined talents as those of Vincent, Alexander, and Zoltán Korda as demonstrated in their classic fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad with its excellent score by Miklós Rózsa. Conrad Veidt, the evil Vizir and archimage in this film, would have been superb as the archimage Namirrha in “The Dark Eidolon” or as the mediæval