The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read Free

Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—became the dominant and, in the eyes of many, the only aesthetically respectable literary mode. This is why writers like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were forced to publish their tales in the pulp magazines: there was no other professional market for what they chose to write.
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    George Sterling’s death by suicide in November 1926 stunned Smith, but it represented a kind of transition from poetry to fiction in his own literary horizon. Although Smith had taught himself French in 1925 and at once undertook to translate the entirety of Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal,
7 it gradually became evident to him that prose fiction was his only viable means of earning a living. He was encouraged in this direction not only by Lovecraft but by other colleagues who were clustering around
Weird Tales
and other pulps, including Donald Wandrei (who had written a laudatory article on Smith in the December 1926 issue of the
Overland Monthly
and had subsidized the publication of
Sandalwood
), George W. Kirk (a New York bookseller who also became friends with Lovecraft), and August Derleth, who would later become his publisher. Moreover, a longtime woman friend, Genevieve K. Sully, laid down a kind of ultimatum to Smith, suggesting that, in the absence of a job, writing for the pulps would be perhaps his only way of making an income.
    Smith was slow in making this shift, but in late 1929 he suddenly began producing stories in substantial numbers. Over the next four years he would write nearly a hundred stories and would vigorously market them to such pulps as
Weird Tales, Wonder Stories,
and
Strange Tales.
By 1937 he had probably written more fiction than Lovecraft wrote in his entire career.
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    Smith’s fiction falls broadly into a number of subdivisions, chiefly distinguished by setting. Today, most of his fiction would be classified as fantasy—a genre distinguished from supernatural horror in that the author, instead of inserting elements of the bizarre into the objectively real world, creates worlds wholesale from his or her imagination, as with Lord Dunsany’s Pega goeteia| na or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. These realms, to be sure, can have intimate relations with or similarities to the known world, but the ontological rules that govern them are determined by the author rather than by the laws of physics, biology, or chemistry. Smith readily acknowledged this tendency in his fiction, writing to the prototypical prose realist Lovecraft: “I, too, am capable of observation; but I am far happier when I can create
everything
in a story, including the milieu. . . . Maybe I haven’t enough love for, or interest in, real places, to invest them with the atmosphere that I achieve in something purely imaginary.” 8
    The most extensive of Smith’s story cycles is that of Zothique, comprising sixteen stories, a poem, and even a blank-verse play,
The Dead Will Cuckold You.
Zothique is envisioned as an earthly realm of the far future: the sun is about to be extinguished, civilization has collapsed, and, paradoxically, society has reverted to a kind of primitivism with the return of royalty, superstition, and sorcery. This scenario allowed Smith to engage in tongue-in-cheek archaism of both language and setting. Some of his most powerful and poignant narratives, such as “The Dark Eidolon” and “Xeethra,” are set in Zothique. 9
    Hyperborea, the setting for ten stories and a poem, is, as its name implies, a continent in the far north, but the tales of this cycle are set in the distant past. Although this scenario also allowed Smith to engage in archaistic prose, the Hyperborea tales are enlivened by a sardonic humor reminiscent of Lord Dunsany’s
The Book of Wonder
( 1912 ). This cycle features the wizard Eibon, author of the
Book of Eibon,
an