Conference noted::sf

1202.0. "Clark Ashton Smith" by VERGA::KLAES (Quo vadimus?) Wed Dec 15 1993 18:11

Article: 461
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Unnumbered Reviews #3: Clark Ashton Smith
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 15 Dec 93 02:15:48 GMT
 
	    Unnumbered Reviews #3:  Clark Ashton Smith
 
The Big Three fantasists in the 1930s were H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E.
Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith.  Smith was probably the best wordsmith of
the three, but he wasn't driven the way Lovecraft and Howard were.
 
His stories (overall rating of ** for story and ****- for style on an
uncalibrated four-point scale) are the hardest of the three to
characterize.  The settings had a lot in common with Howard's (he was
placing stories in Hyperborea before Howard was placing stories in the
Hyborean Age), but his characters were a lot less heroic -- often being
the sorts of wizards, thieves, and despots that Conan would have for
lunch.  The creatures his characters tended to encounter had a lot in
common with Lovecraft's, but Smith was far less interested in milking a
story for its horror.  Where Lovecraft's characters would gaze into cosmic
madness and shudder, Smith's would prosaically get eaten. 
 
But every bite would be a pleasure to read.  Clark Ashton Smith was a
poet, and it showed in the care with which he constructed his prose, as
well.  The language was carefully chosen for its sound, its cadence, and
the images it was meant to convey.  (I imagine this was a disadvantage in
a market that was paying about a penny a word.)   
 
Most of Smith's work has been collected by Arkham House, but I know his
writing primarily through the more economical medium of the Ballantine
paperback reprints of the early seventies.  "Xiccarph" is a collection of
fantasies set on other worlds.  "Hyperborea" collects the stories set in
Hyperborea -- a land of wizards and demons that flourished untold millenia
ago, before being overrun by glaciers.  "Zothique" collects the stories
set in Zothique -- the world's last dying continent in an unimaginably
distant future, once more a land of wizards and demons.  
 
(The 1981 Pocket/Timescape collection "The City of Singing Flame", has
nine stories in common with those collections, and four more from other
settings.  A cover blurb promised further reprint volumes to come, but
I don't remember seeing any.)
 
In one sense, the setting is unimportant.  Any single story from one setting
could be fitted almost seamlessly into one of his other settings.  Within
a given cycle, though, the stories carry enough cross-reference to build a
picture of the milieu and its history.  A major city in one story might be
mentioned in another as being long abandoned to the sand or the ice.  An
ancient tome in one story might be attributed to a wizard from an earlier one.
 
Smith wrote over a hundred short stories in a few years, mostly in the
early thirties.  Then he quit, producing little fiction in the last quarter
century of his life.  (Lin Carter, who edited the Ballantine anthologies
seemed to find this puzzling.  I'm personally inclined to the simplest
explanations:  He started writing the stories because even at a penny a 
word that many stories translates into a few thousand dollars.  And he quit
because that's a pathetic remuneration.  If you didn't make volume your
main consideration, you couldn't make a living at it.  If you weren't 
driven to write fantasy, you stopped trying.  (Lovecraft and Howard, with
whom he corresponded, both died at about this time, which may have also
lessened his motivation.))  
 
It's the use of language that stands out, not the stories, which are
otherwise not very good.  The fantasy isn't very fantastic, the horror 
isn't very horrific, the heroes aren't very heroic, bad things happen to
people we don't particularly care about anyway.  (The Zothique stories are
weakest in this respect, featuring a faceless procession of necromancers 
who keep finding ugly ways for themselves or those around them to die.) But
the writing makes the stories a pleasure to read. 
 
Will the stories appeal to you?  It's hard to say.  I've been comparing
Smith to Howard and Lovecraft, but his style probably has more affinities
to that of Edgar Allen Poe.  Which still means that readers who don't like
short stories and readers who don't like non-modern fantasy probably won't
care for Smith's writing.  In general, if you like the *style* of early
fantasists such as Dunsany and the early Lovecraft, you'll probably enjoy
Smith's work.  (If you haven't read Dunsany or Lovecraft, try them first.)
And if you're interested in fantasy as a genre, Smith's stories are important
as inspirations for many later writers.  Collections of Smith's stories
aren't hard to find used (though I don't know whether any are in print),
and any one picked at random will probably give you a fair impression of
his writing.  
 
Because it's the writing that matters, rather than the specific stories,
it hasn't seemed very profitable to discuss individual stories.  The one
I probably liked the best was one of the Hyperborean stories -- "The
Seven Geases" -- a tongue-in-cheek tale of horror:  A noble angers a
wizard, who punishes him by sending him off to a nether god -- who
appreciates the thought but has no use for him, and sends him off to a
netherer god --- who appreciates the thought...  
 
The term Carter keeps using to describe the writing of Clark Ashton Smith
is 'lapidary'.  I wouldn't characterize Smith's prose as lapidary in the
common sense of a lapidary style, but in the sense that he seems to pick
his words the way a jeweller might pick and set precious stones, the
description seems appropriate.
 
	And one by one we died, and were lost in the dust of
	accumulated time.  We knew the years as a passing of
	shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight
	unto night.
			-- from "From the Crypts of Memory", which is
		   	   technically a 'prose poem', rather than a story.
 
Disclaimer:  Don't think of this as a review series.  It's just unnumbered
to help me keep track.
 
%A  Smith, Clark Ashton
%T  Zothique
%T  Hyperborea
%T  Xiccarph
%I  Ballantine
%D  1970, 1971, 1972, respectively
%O  These three anthologies collectively reprint about a third of Smith's
%O  stories, and are relatively easy to find.  There are other collections,
%O  including a fairly comprehensive one from Arkham House.
 
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
 
   "You have the reputation of being one of the nicest guys in the field.
    We both know you're a hyena on its hind legs.  How have you fooled
    everyone?"  "By keeping my mouth shut when I read garbage." -- Gene Wolfe