Letters from Zothique

CAS on Robert E. Howard

I thought the last issue of W.T. rather punk, apart from the verses and one or two fine passages in Howard's tale. I couldn't stomach this last as a whole that bloody battle stuff is so stale that it gives me what Sterling called "the Molossian pip." [REH, BOTD in 1906.]

One last snippet of CAS on Poe in honor of Poe’s birthday:

It is damnable to reflect that America has either killed her finest artists or has driven them into exile. Poe certainly died from hardship rather than drink…

CAS on HPL and Poe:

"The Outsider" is a masterpiece of shadowy cobweb horror, with illimitable suggestive values and overtones. Honestly, I think it more successful than two-thirds of Poe!

[Illustration by Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu (1902--1988), her third and last for Weird Tales]

Poe seems to have confirmed me in a more or less permanent slant, which led later to Baudelaire and the French Romantic School.

Yet more CAS on Poe:

My real education began with the reading of Robinson Crusoe (unabridged), Gulliver's Travels, the fairy tales of Andersen and the Countless D'Aulnoy, the Arabian Nights and (at the age of 13) Poe's Poems.

…which, to the narrator's fancy, appeared to emanate from the melancholy House of Usher and its inexplicably dismal surroundings.

More CAS on Poe:

In much of Poe's best work, the atmospheric elements are so subtly blended, unified and pervasive as to make analysis rather difficult. Something beyond and above the mere words and images seems to well from the entire fabric of the work, like the "pestilent and mystic vapor"…

CAS thoughts on Poe:

Unique, was the thrill with which I discovered for myself the poems of Poe in a grammar-school library; and, despite the objurgations of the librarian, who considered Poe "unwholesome," carried the priceless volume home to revel for enchanted days in its undreamt-of melodies.

The Poet in A Barroom

Faces of the four seasons
Throng the bar:
One peers from a time-lost star.

(Likely the actual Auburn barroom pictured below - Happy 133rd Birthday, CAS)

My lips are moist, and I know the art of losing in a deep bed the antiquated conscience.

But, ah, it was a thousand years ago
I took the lovely lamia for bride...
And nevermore shall they that meet me know

It is a thousand years since I have died.

Sitting for I knew not how long on its bleak basaltic shores, where grew but a few fleshly red orchids, bent above the waters like open and thirsty mouths, I would peer with countless fantastic conjectures and shadowy imaginings, into the alluring mystery of its unknown and inexplorable gulf.

I write the poems down
Line by line from old anthologies
Printed on the air and ether,
Shelved amid the leaves of trees,
Between the stars, or under stones
And mouldered bones.

In their lidless implacable eyes of staring stone, is the petrified despair of those who have gazed too long on the infinite.

These beings, known as the Ispazars … had become formidable sorcerers and had developed an intellection beyond that of their kind, together with many esoteric faculties. Preserving the cold and evilly cryptic nature of reptiles, they had made themselves the masters of an abhuman science.

Ancient and imperial wines were poured for them in moonstone cups by the fleshless hands of their servitors; and they drank and feasted and revelled in fantasmagoric pomp, deferring till the morrow the resurrectiom of those who lay dead in Yethlyreom.

But still there were compensations: the fungus-wine of the Ydheems was potent though evil-tasting; and there were females of a sort, if one were not too squeamish.

The voices of the necromancers mounted and fell as if in some unholy paean. Imperious, exigent, they seemed to implore the consummation of forbidden blasphemy. Like thronging phantoms, writhing and swirling with malignant life, the vapors rose about the couches…

We, the friars of Perigon, and all others who have knowledge of this thing, agree that its advent was coeval with the first rising of the red comet which still burns nightly, a flying balefire, above the moonless hills.

In Averoigne the lamia sings
To lyres restored from tombs antique,
And lets her coiling tresses fall
Before a necromantic glass.
She sees her vein-drawn lovers pass,
Faintly they cry to her, and all
The bale they find, the bliss they seek,
Is echoed in the tarnished strings
That tell archaic things.

The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.

The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,

There was the same sense of utter loss and alienation…the same vertiginous, overwhelming bewilderment, the same ghastly sense of separation from all the familiar environmental details that give color, form and definition to our lives and even determine our very personalities.

Beneath, immeasurably beneath, at recurrent intervals, I hear a hollow and solemn sound. Perhaps it is the sigh of sunken waters ... of cavern-straying winds ... or the respiration of One that abides in the darkness, meting with his breath the slow minutes, the hours, the days, the ages...

But in the mirror a scene limned itself darkly, and he seemed to look on the marble towers of the city of Miraab beneath overlooming bastions of ominous cloud…and he saw the palace hall where Famorgh nodded in wine-stained purple, senile and drunken, amid his ministers and sycophants.

Subtle and manifold are the nets of the Demon, who followeth his chosen from birth to death and from death to death, throughout many lives.
—The Testaments of Carnamagos

For Quachil Uttaus is the ultimate corruption; and the instant of his coming is like the passage of many ages; and neither flesh nor stone may abide his treading, but all things crumble beneath it atom from atom. And for this, some have called him The Treader of the Dust.

Immense and drear and gray beneath a waning sun, far-fissured with enormous chasms, and covered from pole to pole with the never-ebbing tides of the desert sand, it hung in space without moon or satellite, an abomination and a token of doom to fairer and younger worlds.

Exactly!