The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith Read Online Free Page A

Folsom out of Auburn, and about five miles from the northern reaches of Boulder Ridge where Smith was to spend the major portion of his life. In 1902, his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith, moved to Boulder Ridge, to a spot about a mile south of Auburn and about one-fourth of a mile east of the Folsom Road. Here his father with the help of the then nine-year-old boy, built a cabin and dug a well, and here Smith lived almost continuously until 1954, apart from visits to Sacramento, San Francisco, Monterey, the neighboring state of Nevada, and a few other places. He almost visited New York City sometime in 1942 under the ægis of his friends Benjamin and Bio De Casseres.
    One can easily imagine the effect that the surrounding countryside had on the sensitive and imaginative boy; a countryside that was and still is a veritable garden of fruit trees—pear, plum, peach, cherry, apple—located on the rolling foothills of the Sierras and alternating with copses of evergreen and deciduous trees and with broad park-like areas; the foothills filled with deserted mines, some of them still containing gold; and arching overhead, the diurnal or nocturnal immensitudes of the heavens rendered remarkably clear in the clean smog-free country air.
    He attended the equivalent of the first three grades of grammar school (in Smith’s own words) “at the little red schoolhouse of the precinct.” He completed the five remaining grades of grammar school in Auburn. Smith wrote later that “As a schoolboy, I believe that I was distinguished more for devilment than scholarship. Much of my childhood was spent in the neighborhood of an alleged gold mine; which may be the reason why the romance of California gold mining failed to get under my skin.” However, in spite of his disclaimer, this neighboring gold mine—the “Old Gaylord Mine” close to his grandparents’ property—evidently had some influence on the young Smith because his mature literary work, both poetry and prose, abounds in mining and geological terms. Without realizing it, he had succumbed to the greater romance of telluric splendor, as numerous references to precious and semi-precious metals and stones attest in his poems and in his tales.
    Smith did not go on to either high school or college; he preferred to conduct his own education and later, when he turned down the opportunity for a Guggenheim scholarship, it was for the same reason. Thus early in his life he manifested what was to be his lifelong independence. To judge by his creative work, we may be sure that Smith—always an omnivorous but discerning reader—proved to be his own best teacher.
    From the very first Smith seems to have been attracted to the exotic, the far away, and the literally astronomically far away. The gold mine near his grandparents’ home, with its hints of precious, untold wealth, may account to some minor degree for Smith’s predilection for the exotic. The fact that his father Timeus Smith had travelled extensively as a young man, and that he would often reminisce to his son about those travels, may also explain Smith’s early attraction to the far away and the fabled, to the Orient and to those mysterious lands of the imagination so beloved by visionary youth.
    The last receives ample confirmation when Smith would later report that his “first literary efforts at the age of eleven, took the form of fairy tales and imitations of The Arabian Nights . Later, I wrote long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life, and much mediocre verse.” These “long adventure novels dealing with Oriental life” culminated in Smith’s first professional short-story appearances in magazines: “The Malay Krise” and “The Ghost of Mohammed Din” in the then well-known West Coast literary magazine The Overland Monthly , in the issues for October and November 1910, respectively; and “The Mahout” and “The Raja and the Tiger” in The Black Cat , in the issues for August 1911 and February 1912,