THE DEEP ONES: "A Night in Malnéant" by Clark Ashton Smith

"A Night in Malnéant" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins July 21, 2021.

First published in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/155/a-night-in-maln%C3%A9ant

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?68909

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The End of the Story: Volume One of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
Out of Space and Time

MISCELLANY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xt1xpCaiJo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
https://tinyurl.com/ce3x82mw

The story has a definite Poe vibe to it.

First, there are the alliterative phrases which sound Poe-like: "dim and dubious", "dismal and sepulchral menace", "dull and senseless daylight".

Second, the whole thing seems CAS' takeoff on Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" in that both feature protagonist responsible for the death of a woman.

I think I detected a bit of Byron too with the wandering and guilty hero.

I liked the atmosphere of the maze-like, fog-shrouded city with the clanging bells seeming to sound out of heaven.

There's also, with the repeated questioning, a fairy-tale element too.

The whole idea of a city given over to the funeral service for a woman who has already been dead for years was nicely weird, as if, somewhere in space and time, Mariel is always being buried.

It's quite Poesque, yes, both in style and theme.

It's some ten years since I read it last, but it's remained pretty well in my memory, a testament to the simplicity and power of the concept.

"Malnéant" may be taken as French for "bad void", which has to be deliberate.

I picked up on the similarities to Poe when I followed the link in >1 semdetenebre: and listened to Fritz Leiber's reading of the story. Actually I nodded off during it (I'm not good in hot weather) but that did let the rhythm and cadence predominate over sense, just before I went completely under, and that made the connection for me, which I hadn't noticed on previous readings.

I wonder if Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Mort was an inspiration. The stories are not similar but they use the same themes and imagery - grief, and a North European "dead city" almost a character in its own right.

Agree that, as in many other of his stories, this one has inevitability of a fairy or folk tale - no twist in the tale here.

Google Translate gives "Evil nothingness" (more literal, not as accurate as Bad Void, no doubt) for "Malnéant", and the French pronunciation, which was useful for me. I don't like it when my brain "sticks" at words it can't say, even if I'm only reading silently to myself. Of course the "English" pronunciation (which Leiber used) is as legitimate as not saying Paris as "Paree", but still, I'm more comfortable having the option of a native pronunciation.

I tried Google Translate with "Averoigne" as well - I can't say if either was definitive, but it offered both French and English pronunciations.

>4 housefulofpaper:

My French isn’t great, and I wouldn’t insist my rendering is necessarily better than Google’s.

(The memorious may recall I described my French as “exiguous” in our discussion of Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” some years ago. Since then my wife has cajoled me into actually studying the language, but I’m still a beginner.)

>4 housefulofpaper:

I was hoping that Fritz, given his family's acting background, would have been a bit more lively with that reading. Still, it is Fritz.

Wow. I suppose this story must have been personally important to Fritz Leiber. I've never heard his voice before, and now I can imagine him reading some of his own work--especially Our Lady of Darkness, which is so rooted in his own bereavement and was published in 1977, the same year as the con at which the recorded reading was delivered.

>6 semdetenebre: I was hoping that Fritz, given his family's acting background, would have been a bit more lively with that reading.
Wikipedia also credits him with working as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College. I think his impassive, creaky delivery suits the story here.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

I've long assumed that this blog post had been a previous Miscellany link, otherwise how on Earth would I have found it?

But never mind how I came to discover it, here (download links in the post) is Fritz Leiber interviewed for radio in 1977, inter alia talking about and reading from Our Lady of Darkness.

https://cthulhuwho1.com/2010/10/07/fritz-leiber-audio-files-part1-being-intervie...

>7 paradoxosalpha: I think his impassive, creaky delivery suits the story here.

Agree, though Leiber does inflect at a few points, to all the greater effect: a small, tired laugh as the narrator enters the city, an example.

Smith does not disappoint, capturing an experience rather than providing a moral (excepting perhaps the implied lesson that such an experience resonates at all).