The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith Page A

Sestets , Experiments in Haiku ( Strange Miniatures , Distillations , Childhood , Mortal Essences ), Satires and Travesties , The Jasmine Girdle , The Hill of Dionysus . ( Incantations and The Jasmine Girdle between them contain some ten examples of the small body of poetry Smith composed in French.) This omnibus poetry collection had to wait until November 1971 to see publication. During that long wait of twenty-two years a large sampling of the Selected Poems appeared in Smith’s first published Arkham House poetry collection The Dark Chateau (1951), which Smith dedicated significantly “To the Memory of Edgar Allan Poe” and which contains many remarkable poems: eighteen of its forty poems are taken from the omnibus volume. A further and still larger sampling of the Selected Poems appeared in Smith’s second published Arkham House poetry collection Spells and Philtres (1958): fifty-one of the sixty poems in this last collection are taken from the same volume.
    About the end of August 1953, Smith received a personal visit from his publisher, correspondent, and friend August Derleth, in company with his then wife, the former Sandra Evelyn Winters. Before his death in June 1971, Derleth managed to bring out under his Arkham House imprint three more volumes by Smith: the two final collections of short stories Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964) and Other Dimensions (1970), and an almost complete collection of his unique prose-poems under the title Poems in Prose (1965).
    A near lifetime of celibacy, brightened here and there by the bowers of divers “enchantresses” (as Smith was wont to call them), came to an end in 1954 when Smith married Carol Jones Dorman, the last and “The Best Beloved” of Klarkash-Ton’s enchantresses. To his wife he pays a delicate and a gallant tribute in the sonnet which opens “From this my heart, a haunted Elsinore, / I send the phantoms packing for thy sake:” This sonnet, originally entitled “The Best Beloved,” was used by Smith under the title “Dedication/to Carol” to preface Spells and Philtres , which in its entirety is dedicated to his wife. Between 1954 and his death in 1961 Smith maintained his residence alternately in Pacific Grove and near Auburn. The old cabin of the Smiths, in which Clark had lived for over half a century, from 1902 to 1954, burned down to the ground in August 1957. This was understandably a source of deep distress to Smith, even though he had sold the major portion of the Smith ranch, about forty acres, in 1937 (to a local contractor for the purposes of a private airport), sometime after the death of Smith’s father. This left about two and a half acres, including the land upon which stood the cabin.
    Smith still chopped wood and did gardening during the last decade of his life, in addition to working on his quintessential sculptures. However, these last years saw relatively little literary activity on Smith’s part, although he did continue to write poetry, even if sparingly. During the 1910s, the 20s, the 30s, and the 40s, in addition to his literary work, Smith had done much hard manual labor. Among other things, he had been a fruit-picker, a fruit-packer, a cement-mixer, and a hard-rock miner, mucker and windlasser, as well as a wood-chopper and a gardener. Smith did this work primarily in order to earn enough money to support himself while writing his poetry and his prose. However, his literary output shows no or very little reflection of this manual labor.
    It was toward the latter part of these last years in Smith’s life that the present writer—on two different occasions—had the pleasure of meeting Smith and his wife Carol at their home in Pacific Grove: in August of 1958 and in September of 1959. I recall with warmth and gratitude the unstinted way in which the Smiths gave of their hospitality to me, and made me feel perfectly at home. I had become so accustomed to the strong statement characteristic of much of Smith’s poetry in