Theophile Gautier was a poet and weird fictionist to whom Clark Ashton Smith offered the sincerest form of flattery (imitation). The female vampire in Smith's first really popular prose fantasy "The End of the Story", is based upon Gautier's "Arria Marcella", and not the more traditional vampiric female in Gautier's "Clarimonde" as some believe. Smith essentially lifted the exorcism scene from "Arria Marcella" and rewrote it as the climactic scene of "The End of the Story". Other works of Gautier, his poems in particular, redoubled his influence on Smith's prose and even the melancholia of his prose poems, which were more influenced by other French poets. "One of Cleopatra's Nights" and "The Mummy's Foot" are probably more familiar to fantasy fans, but all of these center around women of transcendent beauty from an idealized, lushly detailed antique world (the antiquities of the shop from which the mummy's foot is acquired are, like the descriptions in Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop", a world unto themselves). Since Smith also liked the lush, micro-description style of A. Merritt, whose novel "The Ship of Ishtar" is very much in the Gautier vein, isn't it a wonder that he never married until late in life? What are some examples of Smith's treatment of the vampire theme in his poetry?

jkh



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 25 Sep 23 | 02:59PM by Kipling.

Gautier's most exuberant idealization of feminine perfection, clothed, partially clothed, and unclothed is that of Queen Nyssia, whose description in lingering detail and extended metaphor, in "King Candaules", occupies about a third of the tale's length. As the King exclaims, Nyssia is "the ideal made real, the dream accomplished, a form which no painter or sculptor has ever been able to translate upon canvas or into marble..." (translated by Lafcadio Hearn)

jkh