Literature of the outré and the fantastic
reached a milestone this March with the publication by Penguin Classics of The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, an
annotated selection of stories, prose poems and verse by Clark Ashton Smith,
edited by S. T. Joshi. One of its most important precursors was Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith,
a book of signal importance to the study of Smith’s work, which contains some of the most trenchant remarks about the importance of
language in fantastic literature this side of Ursula K. Le Guin's “From
Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. This review was written in 2003 for All Hallows: The Journal of The Ghost Story
Society.
SELECTED LETTERS OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH
edited by Scott Connors and David E.
Schultz
Arkham House, 2003;
xxvii + 417 pages; Hardcover; ISBN 0-87054-182-X
In spite of detractors who claim
his work is too richly ornamented and his plots either excessively elaborate or
little more than trellises upon which to festoon his verbal bouquets, American poet
and fantasist Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) has never been without his
champions. Against shifts in literary fashion and continuing hostility from a
significant segment of American readers and critics against any trace of
sophistication in its art and entertainment, Smith’s adherents have continued
to publish and promote greater understanding of his work: from the attention
paid his early poetry by such literary luminaries as George Sterling, H. L.
Mencken, and Ambrose Bierce in the early decades of the 20th century;
through his reception by the readership of the science fiction and horror pulps
during the 1930s; the slow, steady accumulation of his work in hardcover
volumes by Arkham House since the 1940s; the widespread exposure given to
Smith’s story cycles and poems set in worlds widely separated from our own in
terms of time, space, and dimension by Lin Carter and Betty Ballantine’s Adult
Fantasy Series during the 1970s; and the
painstaking work of such genre scholars as Donald Sidney-Fryer, Steve
Behrends, Scott Connors, Ron Hilger, David E. Schultz, S. T. Joshi, and others
in establishing the inception, creation,
and market-driven adaptation of Smith’s work; the world has been granted a clearer
and fuller appreciation of Smith’s aesthetic and the scope of his accomplishment. The Smith Renaissance of the
past two decades has seen collections of his short stories published by a
number of presses specializing in horror and fantasy, as well as the UK
publisher Gollancz and the University of Nebraska Press; a five-volume series
from Night Shade Books devoted to the complete fiction based on texts carefully
edited from all known sources (several of which have only recently come to
light); a volume of critical essays devoted to Smith published by Hippocampus
Press (The Freedom of Fantastic Things);
the emergence of a new journal devoted to Smith studies (Lost Worlds); a selection of
the best fantastic poetry and the first complete edition of Smith’s verse, both
from Hippocampus Press; the announcement of a full-length biography from the
indefatigable Scott Connors; one volume collecting the correspondence between
Smith and George Sterling (The Shadow of
the Unattained) as well as another planned to collect the correspondence between
Smith and H. P. Lovecraft; and the present volume—one of the cornerstones upon
which all future Smith studies will be based.
This first comprehensive
collection of Smith’s correspondence casts light on all aspects of Smith’s life
and artistic endeavors, revealing an extremely inquisitive, independent autodidact
capable of articulating his creative intentions with enviable grace and
clarity. Smith’s limitations as a draughtsman may compromise many of his
drawings and paintings, but the man who wrote these letters knows exactly what
he wishes to convey when he takes up his pen, and is fully aware of the verbal
and rhetorical tools he must use to accomplish these ends.
‘My own conscious
ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series
of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the
achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color,
counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.’
Letter 109, to H. P. Lovecraft (c. 24 October 1930).
‘The problem of “style” in writing is certainly
fascinating and profound. I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to
establish at once what might be called the appropriate “tone.” If this is
clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining
it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. Obviously, the style of
“Mohammed’s Tomb” wouldn’t do for “The Ghoul”; and one of my chief
preoccupations in writing this last story was to exclude images, ideas and locutions which I would have used freely
in a modern story.’ Letter to 112, to H. P. Lovecraft (16 November 1930).
From an early point in his
career, Smith was also conscious of the wide gulf separating his artistic
vision from that embraced by the majority of his contemporaries, reflecting
upon it with bitter humor, while resisting the lure of outright misanthropy:
‘I’ve no quarrel
with the slogan of “art for life’s sake,” but I think the current definition or
delimitation of what constitutes life is worse than ridiculous. Anything that
the human imagination can conceive of becomes thereby a part of life, and
poetry such as mine, properly considered, is not an “escape,” but an extension.
I have the courage to think that I am rendering as much “service” by it (damn
the piss-pot word!) as I would by psycho-analyzing the male and female
adolescents or senescents of a city slum in the kind of verse that slops all
over the page and makes you feel as if somebody had puked on you. [. . .]’
Letter 86, to George Sterling (27
October 1926)
‘One could attack the current literary humanism, with
its scorn of all that has no direct anthropological bearing, as a phase of the
general gross materialism of the times. If imaginative poetry is childish and
puerile, then Shakespeare was a babbling babe in his last days, when he wrote
that delightful fantasy, The Tempest.
And all the other great Romantic masters, Keats, Poe, Baudelaire, Shelley,
Coleridge, etc., are mentally inferior to every young squirt, or old one, who
has read Whitman and Freud, and renounced the poetic chimeras in favour of that
supreme superstition, Reality.’
‘Ben [De Casseres] says somewhere that poets pay their
debts in stars and are paid, in wormwood. But I’ll pay some of mine in nitric
acid.’ Letter 87, to George Sterling (4 November 1926).
‘Misanthropy is the inevitable end, if you have both
sense and sensibility. But it’s a waste of spiritual energy: people aren’t
worth despising. They seem to exist for the same reason that Coventry Patmore
said the Cosmos existed: “To make dirt cheap.” ’ Letter 79, to Donald A.
Wandrei (24 July 1926).
Smith’s was a
lonely and often desperate existence, tending to elderly parents on their homestead
in California, his grand visions shared with a few close friends in the
vicinity, a few kindred souls among his correspondents, and a small but loyal
readership among lovers of poetry and fantastic fiction. At the encouragement
of friends, he began writing short stories for the pulp magazines, instilling
them with the same strange, multihued fire that had characterized his verse,
but as his parents became increasingly frail, these fiction sales became ever
more crucial, and with this necessity came the need for grudging compromise, a
bane that continues to plague the collector of Smith’s fiction to this day, and
a steady source of frustration for a man who crafted his tales as meticulously as he did his verse:
‘I would have told [Weird Tales editor Farnsworth] Wright to go chase himself in regard
to “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” if I didn’t have the support of my parents, and
debts to pay off.’ Letter 130, to H. P. Lovecraft (c. early November 1931).
‘ “Necromancy
in Naat” seems the best of my more recently published weirds; though Wright
forced me to mutilate the ending.**********’ Letter 209, to August Derleth (13 April 1937).
In a letter dated 27 January 1930
Smith reassured Lovecraft (and himself) that the ‘full text’ could always ‘be
restored’ whenever his tales were ‘brought out in book-form’, a project he was
not fully capable of accomplishing due to poor eyesight and the scattering of
his manuscripts by the time his short story collections first started to appear
from Arkham House, though Smith did manage to produce one slim volume of
preferred texts at his own expense in 1933, The
Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. Often Smith edited his own stories following
their initial or subsequent editorial rejection, paring away descriptive
passages, downplaying eroticism, simplifying vocabulary, and generally making
them more generically appealing, while attempting to retain as much of the
original’s unique flavor as possible. In other instances, notably the
disastrous publication of ‘The Eidolon of the Blind’ as ‘Dweller in Martian
Depths’ in the March 1933 issue of Wonder
Stories, with the addition of a new character and a happy ending by the
editorial staff, magazines made their own substantial changes to Smith’s work without
his consent. This constant editorial
interference, lengthy delays and legal disputes over monies owed him for work
already published, the unfortunate tendency of such valuable correspondents as
Sterling and Lovecraft to abandon him through death, and the saddening release
of the burden imposed upon him by his ailing parents led to a marked reduction
of Smith’s fictional output, a resumption of his verse on a smaller, often more
intimate scale, and the discovery of a hitherto unknown talent for carving
outré shapes from local stone.
Smith’s
subsequent life, his loves, the languages he taught himself to aid his
appreciation for French and Spanish verse, his love for the geography of the region
in which he lived, the steady appreciation he received from the discerning few,
and the wider recognition he began to receive as the first quakes in the fantasy
boom started to register are all chronicled here as well. Connors and Schultz
have done a splendid job of gathering these letters, adding succinct glosses to
the text where needed, providing photographs of Smith and his colleagues to
highlight the text at different junctures in the man’s life, and setting all
this in context with a brief bio-critical introduction. This is an essential book
for anyone interested in the work of Clark Ashton Smith or the aesthetics of
fantasy.