The freakish weather that brings about “The Metamorphosis of the World” seems more ominous now than when it was written. It develops Smith’s transformation of landscape with an intensity and apocalyptic ruthlessness that prefigure Ballard, though the documentary approach is Lovecraftian—indeed, it recalls that author at his bleakest. Perhaps Smith found that the approach insufficiently engaged his imagination, but it’s not apparent in the telling; the tale is emphatically not the work of a hack. Still, his dissatisfaction with it may have driven him back to the weird in the shape of “The Epiphany of Death”, to some extent a tribute to Lovecraft and published as such, if one decidedly more ghoulish than Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars”.

Smith was also unhappy with “Murder in the Fourth Dimension”. Perhaps the trouble was that, having trapped his narrator in a landscape out of Poe (who is directly recalled in the early pages), Smith can find little for him or the authorial imagination to do (though that’s part of the point of the tale). “The Devotee of Evil” gives him more scope; indeed, its project is unexpectedly close to Lovecraft’s cosmicism—the isolation of evil not incarnate but wholly abstract, a principle underlying all existence and as disinterested as the colour out of space. “The Satyr” takes us back to Averoigne, which once more embodies the inmost feelings of those who enter its landscape. In this case the feelings are erotic, and—in the image of “limp unison” revealed in this restored text—may be seen as so potent they’re enacted after death.

“The Planet of the Dead” takes its protagonist on an interstellar voyage, the product of a yearning powerful enough to overcome the shock of the alien. Few apocalypses are so succinct or so romantic. The alienation experienced on “The Uncharted Isle” is temporal as well as spatial, and all-embracing while the delirium lasts. Smith thought of it as metaphorical. Despite the shifts of tone in “Marooned in Andromeda”, which rollicks from monster to monster in order to embroil its mutineers in fresh adventures and ends by conjuring a sequel, Smith’s inventiveness sees him through, and his evocation of the dread attendant on making planetfall at dead of night is especially memorable. As for “The Root of Ampoi”, might it have begun in Baudelaire? Certainly its colossophilia recalls that poet’s, though here it is put to satirical use.

“The Necromantic Tale” revives Smith’s theme of a romantic yearning so great that (as in “The Planet of the Dead”) it can effect bodily transference. The piece also celebrates, however darkly, the incantatory power of language. His fecund prose reaches full flood in “The Immeasurable Horror”, a science fiction nightmare set on a Venus of the fantastic kind to which a 1968 anthology bade farewell. Its landscape reappears in “A Voyage to Sfanomöe”, where it proves capable of the most spectacular transformation Smith had conceived to that date.

Many more will be found in the succeeding volumes of the present edition—greater wonders too. The crypts of memory that store the classics of our field are vast, and it’s time to illuminate once again the hall of gorgeous treasures and extravagant chimeras that is the legacy of Clark Ashton Smith. It’s my privilege to hand you the taper. Don’t go too fast through this treasure house or the light may desert you. Take your time to savour the imagination and the language. It has aged like Atlantean wine.

Ramsey Campbell

Wallasey, Merseyside

Halloween 2006

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Clark Ashton Smith considered himself primarily as a poet and artist, but he began his publishing career with a series of Oriental contes cruels that were published in such magazines as the Overland Monthly and the Black Cat. He ceased the writing of short stories for many years, but, under the influence of his correspondent H. P. Lovecraft, he began experimenting with the weird tale when he wrote “The Abominations of Yondo” in 1925. His friend Genevieve K. Sully suggested that writing for the pulps would be a reasonably congenial way for him to earn enough money to support himself and his parents.

Between the years 1930 and 1935, the name of Clark Ashton Smith appeared on the contents page of Weird Tales no fewer than fifty-three times, leaving his closest competitors, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, and August W. Derleth, in the dust, with forty-six, thirty-three and thirty stories, respectively. This prodigious output did not come at the price of sloppy composition, but was distinguished by its richness of imagination and expression. Smith put the same effort into one of his stories that he did into a bejeweled and gorgeous sonnet. Donald Sidney-Fryer has described Smith’s method of composition in his 1978 bio-bibliography Emperor of Dreams (Donald M. Grant, West Kingston, R.I.) thus:

First he would sketch the plot in longhand on some piece of note-paper, or in his notebook,

The Black Book

, which Smith used circa 1929-1961. He would then write the first draft, usually in longhand but occasionally directly on the typewriter. He would then rewrite the story 3 or 4 times (Smith’s own estimate); this he usually did directly on the typewriter. Also, he would subject each draft to considerable

alteration and correction in longhand, taking the ms. with him on a stroll and reading aloud to himself […](p. 19).

Unlike Lovecraft, who would refuse to allow publication of his stories without assurances that they would be printed without editorial alteration, Clark Ashton Smith would revise a tale if it would ensure acceptance. Smith was not any less devoted to his art than his friend, but unlike HPL he had to consider his responsibilities in caring for his elderly and infirm parents. He tolerated these changes to his carefully crafted short stories with varying degrees of resentment, and vowed that if he ever had the opportunity to collect them between hard covers he would restore the excised text. Unfortunately, he experienced severe eyestrain during the preparation of his first Arkham House collections, so he provided magazine tear sheets to August Derleth for his secretary to use in the preparation of a manuscript.

Lin Carter was the first of Smith’s editors to attempt to provide the reader with pure Smith, but the efforts of Steve Behrends and Mark Michaud have revealed the extent to which Smith’s prose was compromised. Through their series of pamphlets, the Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith, the reader and critic could see precisely the severity of these compromises.

In establishing what the editors believe to be what Smith would have preferred, we were fortunate in having access to several repositories of Smith’s manuscripts, most notably the Clark Ashton Smith Papers deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, but also including the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, Special Collections of Brigham Young University, the California State Library, and several private collections. Priority was given to the latest known typescript except where Smith indicated that he had been forced to make changes to satisfy editorial requirements. In these instances we compared the last version that satisfied Smith with the version sold. Changes made include the restoration of deleted material, except only in those instances where the change of a word or phrase seems consistent with an attempt by Smith to improve the story, as opposed to the change of a word or phrase to a less Latinate, and less graceful, near-equivalent. This represents a hybrid or fusion of two competing versions, but it is the only way that we see that Smith’s intentions as author may be honored.