The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read Free Page B

the result was often scintillating. “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” ( 1931 ) is one of Smith’s most intense and horrific narratives, even if nominally set on Mars, and “The City of the Singing Flame” ( 1931 ) is a breathtaking tale of fantasy that perhaps represents the pinnacle of his fiction writing.
    Smith was, in fact, unjust to himself in declaring that he had little interest in the real world and therefore could not depict it vividly and realistically. “The City of the Singing Flame” begins with a vibrant description of the rugged locale near Smith’s home, while “The Face by the River” is a gripping tale of psychological horror. Even some of Smith’s stories of pure science fiction, such as “The Secret of the Cairn” (published as “The Light from Beyond”), have much to recommend them. 15
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    A little-known body of Smith’s prose work deserves to be singled out—his poems in prose. He resumed work in this form in late 1929 , generating some of his most vital works, such as “To the Daemon” and “The Touch-Stone.” As the genre designation suggests, these works meld prose and poetic idiom into an inextricable amalgam; and because they are not constrained by such conventional features of prose fiction as connected narrative or recognizable characters, they allowed Smith to engage in pensive philosophical speculation by means of poetic prose in a manner that no other literary mode could have permitted. It is not too much to say that Smith is one of the masters of prose poetry in English. A work such as “From the Crypts of Memory” ( 1917 ) evokes, in a few hundred words, all the poignancy and substance of narratives many times its length.
    But prose poetry was an aesthetic luxury for Smith in the 1930 s, and he relentlessly marketed his fiction to generate income. At one point, the ever-procrastinating Gernsback owed him nearly $ 1000 , and Smith had to hire an attorney to force Gernsback to cough up payment. It is not surprising that Smith’s output of fiction declined drastically around the time of the deaths of his mother (September 9 , 1935 ) and father (December 26 , 1937 ). The death of Lovecraft on March 15 , 1937 , also affected him deeply.
    For the next several years Smith seems to have done little. There is some evidence that he was drinking heavily. In the mid- 1930 s Smith had taken up the art of sculpting, producing exquisite small carvings from all manner of materials, including dinosaur bones. This artistic impulse followed on his earlier dabbling in pictorial art, something he had begun as early as the mid- 1910 s. Smith’s paintings have evoked widely differing judgments, some believing them crude and ungainly while others see them as remarkable products of self-taught skill and a vivid expression of his fundamentally pictorial imagination. The fact that Smith held several exhibitions of his paintings and sculptures in the Bay Area in the 1930 s is sufficient testimonial to their merits.
    In terms of Smith’s career, a lifeline of sorts was lent by his old friend August Derleth, who, with Donald Wandrei, had founded the publishing firm Arkham House in 1939 , initially for the purpose of publishing Lovecraft’s work in hardcover. Derleth quickly lined up other weird writers for his fledgling press, and Smith’s
Out of Space and Time
( 1942 ) was Arkham House’s third publication. This was followed over the years by other volumes of prose fiction:
Lost Worlds
( 1944 ),
Genius Loci
( 1948 ), and
The Abominations of Yondo
( 1960 ), and the posthumous
Tales of Science and Sorcery
( 1964 ) and
Other Dimensions
( 1970 ). Derleth also published two slim volumes of Smith’s newer poetry,
The Dark Chateau
( 1951 ) and
Spells and Philtres
( 1958 ). He commissioned Smith to compile his
Selected Poems,
and Smith spent five backbreaking years ( 1944 – 49 )