The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

by Clark Ashton Smith

The Miscellaneous Fictions of Clark Ashton Smith gathers together the adventure, juvenilia and other non-fantastic fiction of Smith. While he is known best for his fantastic work, these adventure and mainstream stories shed light on the development of Smith’s writing and his constantly evolving style.
The Miscellaneous Fictions is a perfect companion to the five volume Collected Fantasies set. As with that set, editors Scott Connors and Ron Hilger have prepared this volume by comparing original manuscripts, various typescripts, published editions, and Smith’s notes and letters, in order to prepare a definitive set of texts.
Contents of The Miscellaneous Fictions include “The Animated Sword,” “The Malay Crise,” “The Ghost of Mohammed Din,” “The Mahout,” “The Rajah and the Tiger,” “Something New,” “The Flirt,” “The Perfect Woman,” “A Platonic Entanglement,” “The Expert Lover,” “The Parrot,” “A Copy of Burns,” “Checkmate,” “The Infernal Star,” “The Dead will Cuckold You,” “House of the Monoceros,” “Dawn of Discord,” and many others.

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Weird Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Adventure

233 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Clark Ashton Smith was a poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. It is for these stories, and his literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937, that he is mainly remembered today. With Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, also a friend and correspondent, Smith remains one of the most famous contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

His writings are posted at his official website.

Reviews

[Kip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally the mini-odyssey that has been Night Shade Book’s Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith is over… And very splendid a journey it has been too, if highly delayed and pleasantly extended by this widely available companion volume to the series. The original concept was five volumes, plus an extra companion volume of odds and sods for those who took up the, what has turned out to be, dubious ‘offer’ of subscribing to the series. I and many like me, felt nothing but relief in sidestepping anything to do with Night Shade’s dodgy distribution. But their loss is our gain…

Anyway, kudos to Night Shade, where it’s deserved: so kudos has to be given for expanding the scope and availability of this companion volume. The only loss, as far as I can see, for the new-look book is the loss of its old name, Tales of India & Irony, to the generic blandness of Miscellaneous Writings of… Klarkash Ton would not approve!
But enough of that… let’s move onto the tales. Well, basically they can be divided into three: tales of India, tales of irony and other miscellaneous writings. Let’s go…

The tales of India (or the first seven stories) consist of juvenile stories, written as an adolescent and in a few cases published at the time. The quality of these stories isn’t exactly going to win over any new fans, but to CASophiles they offer a fascinating glimpse of an artist’s development. The tales themselves are not-quite thrilling adventures set in India and are only slightly reminiscent of the Arabian Nights, but much more so of Kipling’s Indian stories. They’re mostly short, prosaic and unremarkable and – to be brutal – show little signs of the arcane word alchemy that, only a few years later, Smith would be associated with. Three of the tales have a supernatural elements and by and large these are the most successful, with the shortest ‘Prince Alcouz and the Magician’ being highly reminiscent of the sorcerous twists and turns of Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle. Of the mundane adventures ‘The Rajah and the Tiger,’ a tale of poetic justice is probably the best. The others are marred with far too much exposition and all-round heavy-handedness – the worst of which is ‘The Red Turban,’ an Indian detective story, which reads like an unfunny synopsis of a proto-Pink Panther movie, without the laughs. Still, one mustn’t be too hard on the adolescent CAS. They are what they are and no doubt they helped the young Smith find his true voice.

Interestingly there is probably more plot on show here than in a lot of his later stories and judging by the extract of CAS’ ‘Story Writing Hints’ in Scott & Ron’s intro it seems bizarre to read the emphasis that our apprentice sorcerer put on plot, terseness and structure. Not things, in fairness, Smith is known for. Yet there’s no doubt that the importance of discipline Smith instructs in his writing theory here (his ‘Hints’ were unpublished) must have helped develop the skills and discipline needed to shape the poetic and linguistic structures that abound in his writing.

The next eight stories in the collection are Smith’s ironic tales, short and witty tales of seduction, flirtation and more than a touch of poetic justice. It is a pity that only two of these gentile-erotic tales appeared in print in Smith’s lifetime as they are delightful realistic vignettes and are most intriguing to any CASophile; although minor works when considered in the wider realist tradition, they are delicately wrought, combining Smith’s poetic touches with a subtle economy that is rare in his fantasies. Interestingly they are also amongst the most autobiographical of Smith’s fiction, telling of clandestine small town romances between married women and single men that must be representative of his love life before his own late marriage. There is no doubt more than a bit of exaggeration or wish fulfilment to them, yet one can’t help but feel that they offer a fascinating insight into the real life of Smith (beyond his letters) and also show the many CAS-sceptics that he is a much more adaptable writer than he is often given credit for. But as fascinating as these Tales of Irony are, it is neither in the realm of reality or realism where Smith made his name and it is back to the more familiar realms of fantasy that the remainder of this collection takes us.

First of the miscellaneous fantasies is The Infernal Star: Smith’s only mature attempt at a novel, albeit only the first few chapters of one. It is a fairly typical Smith piece, telling of a cynic who by happen stance discovers an artefact which transforms his perceptions and in this case his personality. All the principle themes of smith’s great tales are there: altered states of consciousness, other dimensions, alien beings, pseudo-science, grimoires, necromancy and other outré trappings – all imbued with Smith’s unique cosmic mysticism and fatalism. Increasingly I’m identifying a underlying theme of freewill or the lack of it in Smith’s work and this is no exception. It’s a great tale, begging to be finished… Alas it never will (or at least it never will by Smith). According to Scott & Ron there was just no market for a serial in Weird tales by then. It’s a tragedy for CASophiles that Smith never persisted with it just for his own curiosity, yet we have to remember that Smith wrote fiction to support himself and his two ailing parents and the luxury of art for art’s sake was just not a priority for a man already jaded by the fiction market. One wonders if any notes remain as to where Smith was going to go with this piece and could anyone take up The Infernal Star from where Smith left off… It’s hard to think of anyone who could imitate Smith without resorting to characture and parody, but it would make a fascinating experiment.

The next two tales, ‘Dawn of Discord’ and ‘House of the Monoceros,’ are two of the rare examples of a Smith collaboration. By the late 30s/early 40s Smith’s despondency with a disinterested fiction market that he had serviced so well only a few years and (I’m guessing) with the declining quality of his own efforts lead to him passing on two incomplete tales to E. Hoffmann Price with instructions that he could do whatever he liked with them. Reading them now it is hard to believe that much of smith’s original tales survived Price’s re-write, as they lack almost all of Smith’s verve and poetry – but equally it must be remembered that, with the exception of a couple of excellent tales, little of Smith’s fiction after this date is of any great quality. Both are straight from the pulps and are full of fisticuffs, ravishing of wenches and crude innuendo. Not that Smith is totally beyond such things but rarely to such excess… Saying that, for all their faults, I enjoyed them. ‘Dawn’ reminds me of Philip Jose Farmers early science fantasies and is the most interesting and CASian, being distinctly fatalistic and misanthropic. While ‘Monoceros’ is almost a parody of gumshoe, with hilarious Chandleresque narration and endless double-entendres. It has a vaguely interesting premise of a vaguely dead Lovecraftian monster-god-thing having a ghost, but really this is dross. Interesting for the scholars and lovers of pulp.

The next inclusion, The Dead Will Cuckold You, is (as far as I’m aware) a rare/unique example of CAS stage play and it is worth the price of admission by itself. Its six scenes, all set in Smith’s sunset Zothiqu-cycle, tell a courtly tale of seduction, poisoning, jealousy, vengeance, necromancy and necrophilia… A typical day on the Last Continent really… And told by Smith at his sardonic best. Possibly the end is a little anticlimactic, but it’s a great tale and to my mind should be held up there with Smith’s greatest work.

Speaking of which, the collection finishes with an early version of the poem that first broke Smith to the wider world, ‘The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil.’ I’m not familiar enough with its more widely available and longer version to really tell you if it’s an improvement or not, but I will say that, while I’m no poetry officinardo, it lacks none of its cosmic vastness and baroque intricacy. For a modern read, of which I’m one, it is hardly the most accessible thing you’ll ever read, indeed it might even be entirely impenetrable to readers weaned upon terser prose; however it is truly worth persisting with and it is key to understanding Smith’s philosophy and Cosmicism in general.

So, how does one sum up a collection like Miscellaneous Writings? It’s certainly not for a casual fan nor for a CAS newbie, yet there’s several items in here (The Infernal Star & The Dead Will Cuckold You) that I’d consider essential Smith and aren’t widely (or cheaply) available elsewhere; whereas the Indian tales and the E. Hoffman Price collaborations are not going to be of any real interest to anybody but hardcore CASophiles; while the ironic tales are probably not essential, yet I’d struggle to imagine how anyone could find them anything but charmingly cheeky. The slightly schizophrenic nature of Miscellaneous Writing is no fault of Smith not its esteemed editors, but just the nature of the beast. As a hardcore, if relatively new CASophile I consider it an essential buy and a fitting amendment to the Night Shade collection. To anybody who hasn’t been snuffling up the NS editions upon each and every volume, then this is not the place to start and if you are a CASoholic then I’m guessing that you pre-ordered it long ago and have either got a copy or are waiting for NS to get off their arse and post you one…

Believe it or not but this is a slightly abridged version of a 'review' that can be found here: http://journalofthecambridgephasmatol...

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before reading this collection of Clark Ashton Smith's works, I would consider myself briefly exposed to, but not well versed in his contributions. So, I picked up "Miscellaneous Writings" with not a clear idea of what to expect, but I realized once I read the preface that this is actually a collection of works that were written in his adolescent years and miscellaneous drafts/incomplete offerings from him. That said, I wouldn't say this collection is intended as an introduction to Smith's work, because if you go into it completely blind, it's likely to confuse or might be a bit underwhelming. Rather, I would treat it as an accompaniment to his larger collection of works, and a way of seeing into what his work was like through the years before his respective career successes. This is evidenced even in the inclusion of a draft of one of his most prolific poetic works: "The Hashish-Eater; or the Apocalypse of Evil."

The way the book is written however, seems to provide a decent (if a bit long) introduction to the author, his life and overall works. Then, included are twenty of his various short stories, prose, and poetry for the reader to peruse. The collection has quiet a few engaging gems, which evoke tales akin to something like the "Arabian Nights" collection, including "Rajah and the Tiger" - an adventure involving a harrowing tiger hunt for the protagonist, "The Ghost of Mohammad Din," which unveils an unsolved mystery behind an eerie specter, "The Animated Sword", and a prose offering in "The Infernal Star" - which seemed like a promising beginning to a future work, but was (unfortunately) unfinished. There were others I was equally impressed by that lent more to his style of writing in the latter part of his career, including a six scene drama called "The Dead Will Cuckold You", "House of the Monoceros" and "Dawn of Discord." Some of the works read a bit rough, but there are strokes in the offerings that show very imaginative and vivid ventures into fantastical realms.

Yet where the gems in this collection were concerned, there were also several ones where the offerings could've amounted to much more. I'm not so sure that offerings like "Something New" and "The Perfect Woman" ever amounted to much, because neither of them (and I enjoy romantic short fiction very much) developed into a full story for me to connect with them. And the characterizations with them felt quite bland. But I reinterate that these stories were penned primarily before the author's career best, so I may not have as much of an appreciation of them as someone who wants to look into where Smith began and developed gradually over time.

The primary audience for "Miscellaneous Writings" seems to be those who are familiar with his works, and I would think that audience would probably enjoy this collection even more than myself, but taking it for what it is, and reading it through on my own, I actually enjoyed this glimpse into the developing writer Smith became, and it pushes me enough to satiate my curiosity into the author's larger contributions.

Overall score: 3.5/5

Note: I received this as an ARC from Netgalley, via the publisher Night Shade Books

[Alex Sarll]

Casting this as something separate from the Complete Fantasy series is a bit of a misnomer, when many of the tales include supernatural elements. At first I thought the distinction was that they're more contemporary in their settings, albeit still often set in some strange orientalist dream of foreign lands. Which, if Smith wasn't quite as spectacularly racist as his mate Lovecraft, can all the same read very awkwardly in places. Beyond that, though, there's often a sense of insubstantiality which seems strange from someone who could make such unimaginably strange and remote lands come alive so well in his more famous work. Zothique, the City of the Singing Flame, the Memnons of the Night – all of them feel somehow real when you read about them, whereas much of this just comes across as imitation Kipling minus the first-hand knowledge that made that solid. Turns out I wasn't far off; these were inspired by the tales CAS' father told of the East. More to the point, they're juvenilia, and that's why these works have been shunted off to an annex; they're the early experiments, the unsuccessful branchings-out, the abandoned work mangled by lesser talents. Strictly for the hardcore, in other words, which is saying something when even CAS hits remain very much niche interests compared to his Weird Tales peers, fellow TLAs HPL and REH.

Still, they're not without interest, especially when the introduction includes Smith's early thoughts on prose, in which he emphasises the importance of economy, stating "Clearness and terseness of style" is essential – a description which could hardly be bettered as the exact opposite of the material for which he's known. We get his efforts as a fashionable ironist, coming off at best as the most minor F Scott Fitzgerald, and with the tame perversities of Something New standing as foothills compared to the baroque degradations at which his fantasies would hint obliquely. As for the collaborations...well, that's probably too strong a term for works Smith abandoned after 'more esoteric' stories fell out of fashion with his old outlets. These ended up in the Spicy line, considered trashy even by pulp standards, and which was very suspicious of words over three syllables – so, again, exactly the worst match for Ashton Smith's prose. Accordingly, he threw them at E. Hoffman Price, who had too many commissions, and was given permission to do as he would in exchange for a cut. On House Of The Monoceros only the title feels at all CAS, and even that was gone in the original publication, where it was The Old Gods Eat. Beyond maybe the skeleton(s), it reads like pure Price, because I can't see Smith coming up with passages like "The wind howled into the court, and pulled her dress tight. She had nice legs, a perfect thirty, speaking of age, not measure; ripe for the picking, and not picked over enough to be spoiled." I'm not saying Smith was too proto-feminist, you understand – only that his objectification was a lot more baroque and less noir. The piece also seems to invent 'yeep' as a verb describing the noise made by a startled woman; once is onomatopoeia, but then it makes a return appearance as what seems to be an accepted term. For the British reader of a certain age, though, the biggest problem may be the protagonist of this two-fisted gothic sharing a name with Carry On mainstay Jim Dale.

The other 'collaboration', Dawn Of Discord, feels more Smith simply for its fascination with why people are so terrible. To quote his own summary of his politics, elsewhere in the volume, "I have no faith in *any* political or economic isms, schisms, and panaceas. Theoretically, almost any kind of a system might serve well enough, if human beings were not the stupidest and greediest and most cruel of the fauna on this particular planet." Which, yeah, fair enough. Though it finds better expression in one of the few pieces here that really deserves more exalted company, The Infernal Star, a regrettably incomplete attempt at a sort of unified field theory of Smith's various fictional worlds, but also of magic and weirdness and evil in general. It opens when the narrator is summoned to a police station to find the protagonist, Woadley, "in a state of what may be termed Adamic starkness" – an incident recalling something which once happened to a mate of mine, but also a consequence of the astral travel method beloved in SFF of the time, which wasn't normally treated with such punctiliousness about the consequences on return. The story within that framing device recalls the heady ride of A Wine Of Wizardry, by Smith's friend and mentor George Sterling: "it seemed that circles of fire were woven about him, and his brain whirled with the vertigo of one who walks on a knife-edge wall over cataracts of terror and splendor pouring from gulf to gulf of an unknown cosmos". I would love to have read where it would have gone after this fragment, but in the meantime it's wonderful that this cosmic vision should be experienced by a dry bibliophile, and kicked off by a substituted volume in an edition of Jane Austen. A certain note of dry comedy was always within Smith's grasp, but seldom played so wonderfully deadpan as here.

One of the longer pieces is the verse drama The Dead Will Cuckold You, and it goes without saying that this is a fabulous title. Alas, while many accuse Smith's prose of straining for effect, for me it's in poetry that he most often falls flat on his face, and this is no exception, tending often to recall Beddoes, or maybe the more awkward passages of Bosie's Salome translation. There are some passages which, like that notorious passage from Morrissey's novel, almost make me forgive the existence of the Bad Sex Award:
"She is a darker goddess here, where blood
Mingles too often with delight's warm foam"
Or:
"You have a voice to melt a woman's vitals
And make them run to passion's turgid sluice."
As for "nard-born vapours"...no, it's not Clark Ashton Smith's fault that I've seen The Monster Squad, but yes, I do interpret that as 'smells like balls'. Even bits which seem to be shaping up better will have sudden bathos lurking: "Out of the sunset, fires are lit from beams
And spars of broken galleys on the sand,
Around whose nacreous flames the women dance
A morris old as ocean."
Barring the Macarena, could any other dance have ruined that mood more thoroughly?

Finally, there's The Hashish-Eater; Or, The Apocalypse Of Evil – an even more transparent Wine Of Wizardry rip-off than The Infernal Star, but also a rare piece of CAS verse which mostly works for me. Leaping from sphere to sphere, its rush of giant monsters, lost treasures and impossible worlds still has occasional moments of silliness which don't feel altogether intentional – "beasts/Wherein, the sloth and vampire-bat unite" sound like a moneyspinning cuddly toy idea more than a terror, and Smith the poet's gift for choosing the exact word to break the spell undoes him again on "raised wings that flail the whiffled gloom". Elsewhere, though, he mostly pulls it off – "Above a universe of shrouded stars,/And suns that wander cowled with sullen gloom,/Like witches to a Sabbath." The debt to Sterling is clear, but there's a decadent edge to it all, an additional note of fungal phosphorescence, which is pure Smith. The sense of bathetic overreach is (mostly) eclipsed by visionary conviction, mystic union with a still more mystical cosmos, such that one believes him when he says "I am at once the vision and the seer".

In short: for the love of every outlandish deity Clark Ashton Smith ever gave us, then if you're not familiar with his work, on no account start here. But if, like one of his depraved and weary necromancers, you have exhausted all of the normal and most of the abnormal pleasures of his work, then you may find something here to tickle your jaded appetites.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

As the editors of this volume rightly point out, quite a bit of what is contained in these pages is of minor interest, even for the devoted Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) fan. On the other hand, "The Infernal Star" seems like the kernel of something that might have been quite good, and more importantly, "The Dead Will Cuckold You" and "The Hashish-Eater" are essential CAS works. The latter is his most famous poem, and is readily available in several other modern CAS collections.

The play "The Dead Will Cuckold You" is a rarer item, and both confirms that CAS' fantastical continent Zothique was his most potent creation, and demonstrates that he could spin an engaging tale without his characteristic florid descriptive language. By the nature of being a play, most the of the text of "The Dead Will Cuckold You" is dialog, and the dialog and the story are both rich and fast-paced, with an economy of language that is somewhat atypical for CAS.

[Georgi Nikolaev · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good, some bad, but mostly not good enough. And too miscellaneous indeed.

[Robert Jr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

As Clark Ashton Smith goes this basically just rounds out the Night Shade Books collection. There's nothing really exceptional here and a lot of it lacks the strange visions and vibrant descriptions of most of his better work. The stories in this book were very simplistic and somewhat amateurish short stories with a supernatural element, very bland murder mysteries, and so-so romances. The play The Dead Will Cuckold You and his famous poem The Hashish Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil which are okay, there are elements in these worth reading. Again, these are not the best of CAS's oeuvre.

I would recommend this book to CAS completists but not really to anyone else.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Containing an excellent literary biography of Clark Ashton Smith, as well as a number of miscellaneous writings (including some rather naughty erotic or pseudo-erotic "romances") and juvenilia (of dubious quality, but still fun) . . . a perfect companion volume to the 5 volumes of the Collected Works. CAS is a master of weird fiction, a noted and notable absence from Appendix N, and this book gives some insight into how his writing evolved over time and his biography. Five stars for its value, even if some of the juvenilia is not exactly five-star work!

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what I've just read. I get the feeling that this book was designed for people that were already fans of Smith's work rather than being designed to introduce his work to new readers. Some of the stories were entertaining while others lacked depth. Most didn't have any true ending and each felt as though I was reading a single chapter plucked from a longer novel. Lastly, I am confused as to how the cover art was chosen since it doesn't seem to relate to any of the stories or perhaps I missed the correlation.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

As noted by others this is a rounding out of the complete clark ashton smith work done by night shade. It is not a good starting point and for fans only. I found a copy of this cheap and bought it after reading about three volumes of CAS work and enjoyed it enough.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine collection, but definitely for completist the jewel of this collection for me is " The Hashish Eater"