THE READING RHEUM: POSEIDONIS (1973)

 As it happens, the last Ballantine collection of Clark Ashton Smith works I'm reviewing for my blog was also the last one the company published. Of the four, ZOTHIQUE was the only sub-universe for which Smith wrote enough stories to fill a paperback book. Thus, POSEIDONIS, like XICARRPH and HYPERBOREA, includes only a comparative handful of stories/poems set in the titular world. The rest of the three books were perforce filled with a lot of one-off horror and SF stories, that, while interesting, aren't Smith's strength in comparison to the magical fantasy stories.                                                                   

Since I didn't get much more than moderate entertainment from the majority of this collection, I'll get those out of the way first, though I'll pass on commenting on either the verse or prose poems. THE DOUBLE SHADOW-- A narrator from Poseidonis describes the dire fate of his perceptor Avyctes (who's loosely tied to the character Malygris, whose stories are discussed below). A VOYAGE TO SFANOMOE-- Two Atlantean inventors flee their doomed home to take refuge on the planet Venus. And Venus welcomes them with an irresistible embrace. A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS-- A group of buccaneers happen across an ancient bottle of Atlantean wine, and quaffing it opens their way into the limbo of its vanished glories. "And only a teetotaler escaped to tell thee." AN OFFERING TO THE MOON-- Two archaeologists investigate the moon-worship of the vanished people of Mu, little realizing that they will be offering up their own lives in their pursuit of knowledge. THE UNCHARTED ISLAND-- A castaway finds himself on an isle not quite deserted, as he encounters an ancient people who seem to be re-enacting, like habit-afflicted ghosts, the actions that led to their collective doom. THE EPIPHANY OF DEATH-- A quasi-Egyptian scholar witnesses the fate of his colleague Tomeron in his family's tomb. Worms are involved. SYMPOSIUM OF THE GORGON-- A modern New Yorker somehow ends up in the palace of Medusa just as she's beheaded. I had hopes for this one since Smith followed the part of the Medusa-myth in which Pegasus is born from the gorgon's blood. Then Pegasus takes the narrator to the place he most desires to visit, and the tale turns into a shaggy-dog story about frustrated cannibals. THE INVISIBLE CITY-- What a surprise! Two explorers in Africa comes across an invisible domain, whose denizens don't want the explorers to leave. But in a departure from the norm, both of the guys escape with their lives and the aliens are either exiled or destroyed. THE ROOT OF AMPOI-- In the best of the "fair-to-poor" stories, a conniver seeks treasure in the Papuan Mountains and finds a tribe where the women have rebelled against their gender's natural shortcomings. All the females eat a special root that makes them grow eight feet tall, thus making matriarchal rule a slam-dunk. To the adventurer's surprise, the queen takes a shine to him (the reader never knows why) and marries him. This gives the man the chance to plunder the secrets of the "tall sex," but he does not profit thereby.                                                                                                         

  Only three stories in POSEIDONIS make my cut for high-mythicity stories, and two of them take place in the titular Atlantean city, examining the doomed career of the sorcerer Malygris. In my review of the XICCARPH collection, I wondered if the sorcerer Maal Dweb, who appeared in two stories, was Smith's only continuing character. But I forgot that he devoted the same number of stories to Malygris, and I found both tales more psychologically astute and ornately written than those about the Xiccarph magician. In THE LAST INCANTATION, Malygris, who's become the world's supreme sorcerer, becomes overtaken with ennui despite his vast knowledge of cabalistic matters. He remembers his former love Nylissa, whom he lost to disease, and whose loss precipitated his pursuit of rare magicks. He gets the idea of bringing her back from the dead, but with true ambivalence, once he's done so his memory has become too distorted to know whether he conjured up the real thing or just a pleasing illusion. In THE DEATH OF MALYGRIS, several of the magician's rivals haven't seen him about for years, and become obsessed with learning whether or not Malygris has been claimed by death at last. Since it's a Smith story, the experienced reader can be pretty sure that even though the wizard is dead, he's still not too dead to take his enemies with him. Not only was the sorcerer and his magicks a correlation for the author and his ability to conjure word pictures, he also more or less marked the end of Smith's only productive writing-period, for after MALYGRIS was written in 1933, editor Lin Carter asserts that the writer only produced a handful of stories in the last 26 years of his life on Earth.                                                                                                           

But of all the stories in POSEIDONIS, the best is one I don't even remember reading the first time, however many years that may have been. Like some of those covered above, THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII is a story of a white explorer finding a lost civilization in Africa-- and though Smith probably coined the place name "Azombeii" in response (conscious or not) to Haitian voodoo's origins in Darkest Africa, nothing remotely like a zombie appears in the tale. But unlike most lost cities full of white or Asian people, Azombeii is a lost city full of Black people. However, these Blacks become appealing to explorer Julius Marsden because their ancestors intermarried with some ancient Roman legion, who bequeathed to all of their descendants "classic" Roman features and a fertility goddess, Wanaos (Venus under a new name).                                   

  However, the true "Venus" of the story is the high priestess Mybaloe, who falls in love with Marsden at first sight. The two seem destined to be united in eternal bliss-- and actually, Smith does strongly suggest that the white American and the dark African with Roman features at least have some ecstatic encounter during a pagan orgy. But there's almost always a worm in every CAS apple, and this time it's an envious high priest, Mergawe, who poisons Marsden with a mystic potion that causes his flesh and bones to contract until he perishes, which is how the story ends, after Marsden has returned to the US and a boon friend reads the backstory of his demise in a memoir. But arguably the real star of the story is Mybaloe. I've not encountered that many distinctive female characters in Smith's stories-- usually just one-dimensional vampires and undead corpses. But Smith really tries to make Mybaloe an "ideal woman," possessed of humor and courage despite her isolated origins. In fact, this story saw print in 1931, long before the rise of jungle-girls in pulps and comic books-- and to demonstrate the resourcefulness of this "Venus," Smith even gives her a "Tarzan moment," where she saves Marsden from crocodiles by stabbing two of the reptiles to death. Obviously, whether from personal taste or in deference to his mostly Caucasian readers, Smith gives Mybaloe European features so that she's not exotic in a displeasing way. But in 1931, it was pretty daring to imagine a pulp story in which a white man and a colored woman were joined in an entirely serious romance, in contrast to the many times white explorers canoodled with high priestesses on the right side of the color line. Despite my earlier statement that Smith's magical fantasy stories played best to the author's greatest strengths, I now regard this 1930s exotic tragedy to rate as one of his top ten short stories.