Clark Ashton Smith: "The Holiness of Azedarac," "The Demon of the Flower," "The Second Interment," and "The Double Shadow"

It is time once again to commune with Clark Ashton Smith, poet, sculptor, painter and storyteller, California's gift to the weird!  Today's stories were all printed first in 1933, and I am reading them in an electronic library version of 2007's Smith collection from Night Shade Books, A Vintage from Atlantis, Volume Three of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith.

"The Holiness of Azedarac"

Dateline: France, 1175 A.D.  Azedarac, the Bishop of Ximes, has a problem.  You see, an agent of the Archbishop of Averoigne, Brother Ambrose, has been spying on Azedarac and discovered that the Bishop of Ximes is not as serious a Christian as you might hope a bishop to be; in fact, Avedarac is a sorcerer who worships Satan, Yog-Sothoth, and other prehistoric and alien monster gods.  Ambrose is on his way to Vyones, the seat of the Archbishop, to deliver his report and Azedarac sends his crony Jehan to intercept the spy.

We follow the young monk Ambrose as he is accosted by a disguised Jehan and tricked into drinking a potion that sends him back in time to 475 A.D., where he is rescued from Druids keen on sacrificing him by a beautiful sorceress with pale skin and a long braid of golden-brown hair.  This friendly lady magician, Moriamis, takes a liking to Ambrose and invites him into her home, where she reveals that Azedarac and Jehan were alive in her time--in fact, she was Azedarac's lover!  Azerdarac tired of her, and then he and Jehan vanished, Moriamis surmises they travelled to the future, to Ambrose's own time.  Moriamis seduces Ambrose, and for a month they live happily as lovers, but then Ambrose feels he must return to the medieval period to fulfill his duty and report to the Archbishop on the evil of Azerdarac. Moriamis has two potions she stole from Azedarac, one that sends the imbiber to the future, one that sends users to the past, and she gives them to Ambrose.  The mischievous beauty is not ready to surrender another lover, and has intentionally tinkered with the dosage of the future-spiriting potion; Ambrose reappears not in 1175 but decades later, and learns that Azerdarac was never denounced and after disappearing was canonized as a saint!  So he drinks the back-in-time potion, which Moriamis dosed out very precisely, and they resume their life-long love affair.

A fun little story that forgoes horror to make light of both Yog-Sothery and Christianity; what is important, this story suggests, is not duty or justice or religion, but sexual love, in the pursuit of which all tactics are justifiable.  

This tale of successful deceptions made its debut in Weird Tales, in the same issue as C. L. Moore's famous "Shambleau," another story about a tricky manipulative woman who seduces some dude.  It has reappeared in many Smith collections, but hasn't been anthologized very often.   

"The Demon of the Flower"

This one first appeared in Astounding under the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine.  Since then it has appeared in Smith collections and one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies of short shorts edited by Robert Weinberg, Martin H. Greenberg and Stefan Dziemianowicz.  

Planet Lophai is dominated by intelligent mobile plants, snake-like monsters with colorful blossoms that dance in the light of the planet's two suns.  An intelligent race of people much like humans lives on this planet, at the sufferance of the monster flowers, and they worship the greatest of the plants, the Voorqual, an ancient thing rooted atop a pyramid in the very center of their capital city.  Since time immemorial they have obeyed this vegetative dictator's commands, including his demands for a yearly human sacrifice!  

After Smith sets the scene, describing all these flowers in detail, we get our plot.  The king of the humans and high priest of the Voorqual has always followed tradition and obeyed the monster, but then the Voorqual selects for this year's sacrifice his fiancé, driving the king to turn rebel against this system of plant-based authoritarianism!  He sneaks off to consult a legendary being in the mountain in the desert; this oracle, a sort of monumental living cross of shining blue stone, explains how to kill the Voorqual, which, he reminds the king, is inhabited by an elder demon.  The king fails to take the hint, and when he kills the flower the demon's temporarily homeless life force simply takes up residence in the body of king's fiancé--she walks to the top of the pyramid and her human body undergoes dreadful transformation into a monster plant--Voorqual 2.0!  The revolution has failed!  

A solid story, though the descriptions of the flowers go on a bit too long.

"The Second Interment"

Here we have a story of being buried alive.  I feel like there are a lot of premature burial stories out there, and the editors of A Vintage from Atlantis, Scott Conners and Ron Hilger, point out in their notes that Smith didn't set out to write such a story on his own; it was suggested to him by Harry Bates, editor of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror.  Conners and Hilger quote Bates's letter, which includes many of the plot points that turn up in the published story.  (Conners and Hilger in their series The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith have really done a great job of providing us fans of the weird all kinds of fun anecdotes and gossip like this.)

Since he was a kid, Sir Uther Magbane has feared death more than have his peers, been obsessed with it.  In his adulthood, just when he is about to marry some delightful girl and maybe be happy, he is struck by a strange malady that puts him into something like a coma.  Believed to be dead, he is buried, but wakes up minutes after being interred, and those who just buried him hear his desperate thrashing and horrible cries for help and rescue him.

For the next three years Sir Uther is haunted by this terrible incident and becomes even more obsessed with death; his obsessions drive away his friends and his fiancé.  When he gets sick again he is horrified that the same thing will happen, and has an alarm system with a button installed in his coffin, just in case he gets buried alive again.  Well, of course he gets buried alive again, but the alarm doesn't work.  Smith, poet that he is, describes in detail the agonies of Sir Uther's death and his feverish conjectures that his brother, who will inherit the family wealth, is somehow behind his fatal misfortunes, offering many outré metaphors about the experience of dying of asphyxiation in total darkness, constricted into a tiny space.

Pretty good.  After first appearing in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, "The Second Interment"  would be included in the various editions of the Smith collection Out of Space and Time.

"The Double Shadow"

In 1933 Smith self-published a 30-page booklet of stories entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies.  In an April 1935 letter to C. L. Moore, HPL recommends Smith's little publication to the creator of Northwest Smith, saying that he is sure she "will find the contents of 'The Double Shadow' highly impressive" and telling her that his "favourite items are 'The Maze of the Enchanter', 'The Double Shadow', & 'A Night in Malneant'."  Smith sent a copy to Moore, who lived in Indianapolis, and, in a letter to Lovecraft written on May 27 of 1935, Moore told HPL that he had been right, that "the book was all I had expected of it."  (I read these letters in my copy of Hippocampus Press's tenth volume of Lovecraft's letters, which includes Moore's letters to Lovecraft as well as those extant letters sent to Moore by HPL.)

Lovecraft and Moore's praise is fully justified: "The Double Shadow" is a great story about being a wizard, showing you what it is like to devote your life and career to living in a remote place, pursuing forbidden knowledge, animating the dead, summoning demons, communicating with beings from other dimensions, and all that sort of stuff.  The descriptions of the magic workers' lair, their familiars, the spells they cast, and their ultimate black fate, are vivid and evocative.  Even though the story is full of elements we've seen many times before--a wizard's apprentice, animated mummies, demon summoning--Smith makes them feel fresh and exciting.  

The narrator is the apprentice of one of the greatest sorcerers of Poseidonis.  The story describes how the two wizards discover a metal tablet with a spell inscribed on it, and all the things they have to do to ascertain the origins of the tablet, decipher the tablet's text, and cast the spell.  And then the terrible results of the casting, which inflict upon wizard, apprentice, and one of their weird assistants, an animated mummy, a fate worse than death!  In some of his stories Smith overdescribes, giving you a list of descriptors like colors or something that don't really register, but this time out he constructs the images and relates the feelings of the narrator with just the right amount of verbiage.  "The Double Shadow" joins stories like "Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" and "The Testament of Athammaus" as one of my favorite Clark Ashton Smith tales!

Highly recommended.  "The Double Shadow" would eventually see publication in Weird Tales in 1939 and later in many Smith collections as well as anthologies of stories about Atlantis or black magic.  A widely acknowledged weird classic!

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These stories are all entertaining, one being great, and I think they show different aspects of Smith's career.  "The Holiness of Azedarac" actually has a happy ending and limited horror or gore elements, going against our expectations when we read a story by Smith.  "The Demon of the Flower" is very much a poetic story with long descriptions of bizarre sights.  "The Second Interment" shows Smith, who needed money in a way Lovecraft did not, writing a story based on somebody else's outline (but, as Conners and Hilger describe with copious primary source documentation, bringing to it plenty of his own distinctive ideas.)  And then in "The Double Shadow" we get a top notch sample of the kind of story we expect from Smith, a vivid and perfectly crafted story about amoral necromancers suffering an inconceivably horrible and physically disgusting doom.

Another fun foray into the weird world of the pulp magazines of the 1930s--and there's more where that came from in future installments of MPorcius Fiction Log.