THE READING RHEUM: XICCARPH (1972)

I started seriously reading prose science fiction in the late 1960s, and aside from horror tales, that was close to being the only form of metaphenomenal fiction around for most of the decade. There were a few exceptions to this tendency-- J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis-- but I didn't happen to read them during that decade.

As I remember, though, I got my first substantial taste for reading prose fantasy in the early 1970s, and Tolkien's best-selling LORD OF THE RINGS was the cause, because it stimulated Ballantine Books to issue a substantial series of fantasy reprints from 1969 to 1974. To be sure, Lancer Paperbacks had already started the ball rolling by issuing new editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, but somehow I didn't encounter these in the early 1970s either. 

It didn't take me long to find out that devotees of early fantasy spoke in reverent tomes of the 1930s pulp magazine WEIRD TALES, and that of all horror-and-fantasy authors who appeared in its pages, Robert E, Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were deemed the top of the heap. Lovecraft's horror-and-fantasy works had seen paperback reprint in the 1960s, but Smith-- who for most of his life was more of a verse poet than a prose-story writer-- had wait for the Ballantine imprint. Editor Lin Carter did a sterling job of selecting some of the choice stories, and though Smith never became as popular as the other two with later generations, these volumes still give one the easiest access to this writer's ouevre.

As I do these days with everything I read or re-read, I wanted to evaluate Smith's work through the lens of myth-criticism. The Carter selections are organized into four reprints, each of which is given the title of one of Smith's fantasy-lands. Not all stories in every volume take place in the titular locale, for Smith tended to toss off new landscapes at the drop of a hat rather than devoting himself to any particular one, as Howard did with Hyboria. My chosen volume, XICCARPH, boasts six subdivisions, all devoted to different locales.

Many of the tales in XICCARPH were just decent reads, but not worth discussing in detail (SPOILER warnings for those I do so discuss). Here are the exceptions:

The entries for "Xiccarph" focus upon what may be Smith's only continuing character, for just two stories. In "The Maze of Maal Dweb," a young man, native to the fantasy-planet Xiccarph, finds out that his beloved has been abducted by the evil wizard Maal Dweb, who rules the world with his magical skills. The youth successfully penetrates the wizard's sanctum, full of bizarre garden-growths and weird automatons, but Maal Dweb has the hero outpaced from the first, so it's an unhappy ending for him. The sorcerer's triumph is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he only steals young women for aesthetic purposes, turning them into beautiful stone statues for his contemplation. Smith must have liked the character, for he then wrote "The Flower-Women," in which Maal Dweb journeys to another world and decides to play hero, liberating a race of delicate flower-women from a cabal of wizards descended from lizards-- lizard-wizards, if one chooses. Smith's depiction of his worlds are highly colorful but not particularly mythic.

Three stories are set on a loose SF-locale, "Aihai," but all of these I found unexceptional. The only point of interest is that one story, "Vulthoom," is named after a Lovecraftian-styled alien god, and that comics-writer Gardner Fox recycled the name, slightly altered to "Volthoom," for a Silver Age JUSTICE LEAGUE continuity.

"The Doom of Antarion," though, presents a more mythically-dense concept. Modern-day Earthman Francis Melchior (note the Biblically inspired name) runs an antiques shop and spends all his free time star-gazing. He holds an enduring fascination with two seemingly contradictory spectacles: those that are "steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages," and those that suggest "the transcendent glories of other aeons." Smith incisively notes that these desires are both rooted in Melchior's distaste for "all that is present or near at hand," which might be seen as a comment on the tastes of horror-and-fantasy readers in general. While pursuing his astronomical observances, the protagonist, not unlike that other Melchior, fixates on one heavenly body in particular, "one minute star" that fills the antiquary with "intimations of loveliness and wonder." In due course, Melchior finds his earthbound spirit drawn to the planet Phandion that orbits the distant star, and that spirit merges with the living body of a poet named Antarion. But even though Phandion satisfies all of Melchior/Antarion's desire for exotic beauties-- including Antarion's beloved Thameera-- the world is doomed to perish when its sun dies. Thus "transcendent glories" fall victim to "mortuary shadows," and the antiquary Melchior then returns to his own body, haunted by the memories of the transcendence he so desired. I might observe that Edgar Allan Poe showed a similar passion for both "glories" and "shadows," and that here Smith produced a very Poe-esque take on the psychology of both passions.

Of the other four stories in the collection, only one other, "The Monster of the Prophecy," stands out, and it's interesting in that it reverses the verdict of "Antarion."  On contemporary Earth a poet named Theophilus feels estranged from his fellows by his poetic sensibilities (which may make this character a stand-in for Smith himself). Theophilus considers suicide, but a scientist invites the poet to join him in an experiment. Though the scientist looks like an Earthman, in reality he's a non-humanoid alien-- possessed of five arms, three legs, and three eyes-- from a world called Sabattor. The alien wishes to return home with a specimen of an Earthman, and asks Theophilus to accompany him voluntarily. The poet has no attachments to his Earth-life and he accepts. Though for some time the human finds it fascinating to learn the ways of an alien world, the attractions of being a scientific curiosity pale, and his existence brings him trouble from Sabattor's small-minded priesthood. Oddly, though, Smith gives Theophilus a somewhat happy, if macabre ending, as he ends up living out the rest of his life as the love-mate to one of the non-human alien females, who, like the protagonist, is a poet without an audience on her native world.  The happy ending is not without a certain irony, but here the irony is directed not at the main character but at the world in which he was born.