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

respectively. Significantly enough, all these tales are laid in the Orient, the first-named in the area of Singapore and the last three in India. “The Ghost of Mohammed Din” is important as being Smith’s first professional story in which he features the element of the supernatural (handled with considerable skill, it may be added). In “The Raja and the Tiger” the climactic action of the story takes place in the Jain cave temple where “Huge stone pillars, elaborately sculptured, supported the roof, and around the sides great gods and goddesses of the Jain mythology, called Arhats, glared downward. The torch illuminated dimly, leaving much in shadow, and in the shadow imagination created strange fantasies. ” (The present writer’s italics.) Smith later re-used the theme of “The Mahout,” of a mahout who trains and uses an elephant to wreak his revenge upon a hated Oriental despot. When Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales , came to found in 1930 a companion magazine called Oriental Stories (later changed to The Magic Carpet Magazine ), Smith contributed two tales: “The Justice of the Elephant” in the Autumn 1931 issue of Oriental Stories , and “The Kiss of Zoraida” in the July 1933 issue of The Magic Carpet Magazine . In the former laid in India, Smith used again, in slightly altered form, the theme of “The Mahout.” In the latter laid in Damascus, appears one of Smith’s principal inspirations, the manifestation of death. The Oriental background continued in “The Kingdom of the Worm,” a tale of the mediæval adventurer Sir John Maundeville, published in The Fantasy Fan for October 1933; and it continued in “The Ghoul,” published in the same amateur magazine for January 1934; this last is a tale laid in Bagdad during the reign of the Caliph Vathek, William Beckford’s fictional “grandson” of Haroun al Raschid.
    The four earlier tales of 1910–1912 are written with a control, a sense of selection that would have done credit to a mature writer. If it were not for the evidence to the contrary, a reader might very easily mistake the four later Oriental tales as being of the same period as his four earlier ones; or vice versa. These four early stories serve as testimony to the care with which Smith has schooled himself for one of his self-appointed spheres of creation.
    Besides witnessing the appearance of the very first of Smith’s professional short stories, 1910 was also the very first year that saw Smith professionally in print, whether in verse or in prose. Then, for some reason Smith lost interest in writing short stories, and devoted himself almost wholly to poetry from 1911, from the time he was eighteen, until 1925, when he was thirty-two. Smith’s parents proved fortunately sympathetic to their son’s creativity all during this time, and indeed up until the time of their death in the 1930s.
    In 1906, when he was thirteen, Smith had made an important literary discovery for himself, one which profoundly influenced his own writing. Let Smith tell this in his own words: “Unique, and never to be forgotten, was the thrill with which, at the age of thirteen, I discovered for myself the poems of Poe in a grammar-school library; and, despite the objurgations of the librarian, who considered Poe ‘unwholesome,’ carried the priceless volume home to revel for enchanted days in its undreamt-of melodies. Here, indeed, was ‘balm in Gilead,’ here was a ‘kind nepenthe.’” Later, and equally important, Smith discovered Poe’s short stories. Then, when Smith was almost fifteen, he made yet another important discovery: “Likewise memorable, and touched with more than the glamour of childhood dreams, was my first reading, two years later, of “A Wine of Wizardry” [by George Sterling], in the pages of the old Cosmopolitan . The poem, with its necromantic music, and splendours as of sunset on jewels and cathedral windows, was veritably all that its title implied…”