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to use Lovecraft’s description of August Derleth, “self-blinded little earth gazers,”
because “how shall any detached philosopher believe that the whole universe,
which may be infinite, is nothing but an enlarged edition, or an expurgated edition, of human life?” (180).
This desire to transcend the bounds of human existence, more than his use of
traditional prosody or Latinate vocabulary, is probably the main reason for Smith’s
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lack of recognition. Other poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert
Frost employed traditional forms, and Edna St. Vincent Millay also used a difficult Latinate vocabulary. However, none of these poets had any desire to tread the
stars. “I am astonished to find how few really grasp the sublimity and vastness of the stars and star-spaces,” Smith told Sterling early in their friendship. “One acquaintance did not think such things suitable for poetic treatment, and from the indifference or bewilderment with which most who have seen it regard my cosmic
work, I must regard those fitted to understand such things as being very rare”
( SL 5). Consider the comments of the poet Wittner Bynner on the cosmic elements of Sterling and Smith’s poetry: “It is too stellar for me . . . There’s too much Aldebaran in it. It gives me cosmic indigestion. Someone at the Bohemian jinks
called Sterling and this young poet Clark Ashton Smith the Star Dust Twins”
(O’Day 7). Robert Frost’s lines concluding “Desert Places” states eloquently the Modernist objection to Cosmicism:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places. (296)
As D. W. Harding put it, “For what is unintelligible, the judgment of ‘abnor-
mal’ is available, serving to insulate the deviant behaviour or opinion, denying it social relevance and excluding it from the network of mutual support and mutual contact that makes up society” (33). The verdict of “deviant” was handed down by those poets and critics who still thought of man in pre-Copernician terms. Nonetheless, Smith refused to bow to fashion: “perhaps I am merely one of those un-
fortunate and perverse individuals who are constitutionally ‘agin the Government.’
When fantasy is acclaimed by Irving Babbitt . . . I may take refuge in the writing of case histories!” ( PD 22) As he so well put it in the title poem of his first collection, Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay! ( SP 11)
Works Cited
Aiken, Conrad. “The Monroe Doctrine in Poetry.” Dial 62 (3 May 1917): 389–90.
Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919. New York: Meridian, 1955.
Barbarese, J. T. “Ezra Pound’s Imagist Aesthetics.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Benediktsson, Thomas E. George Sterling. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Bierce, Ambrose. “An Insurrection of the Peasantry.” In The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. 10. 1912. New York: Gordian Press, 1966
“Boy Publishes More Poems.” San Francisco Examiner (17 December 1922): 20.
Gesturing Toward the Infinite
193
Burleson, Donald R. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Cowley, Malcolm. After the Genteel Tradition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.
Crane, Stephen. Excerpt from War Is Kind. In Three Centuries of American Poetry, ed. Allen Mandelbaum and Robert D. Richardson, Jr. New York: Bantam, 1999.
Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Elliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950.
Farber, Marjorie. “Atlantis, Xiccarph.” New York Times Book Review (19 November 1944). Rpt. in Klarkash-Ton No. 1 (June 1988): 26–27.
Flint, F. S. “Imagisme.” Poetry 9 (March 1917): 198–200.
Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969.
Goodrich, Peter H. “Sorcerous Style: Clark Ashton Smith’s The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies.” Paradoxa Nos. 13–14 (1999–2000): 213–25.
Harding, D. W. “The Character of Literature from Blake to Byron.” In From Blake to Byron, ed. Boris Ford. (The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 5.) London: Penguin, 1976.
Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West. Mercer Island: Starmont House, 1990.
Materer, Timothy. “T. S. Eliot’s Critical Program.” In The Cambridge Companion to T. S.
Eliot, ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Mencken, H. L. “The Merediths of Tomorrow.” Smart Set 33 (April 1911): 161–64.
Monroe, Harriet. “Notes and Announcements.” Poetry 1 (December 1912): 99.
———. “The Poetry of George Sterling.” Poetry 7 (March 1916): 307–13.
———. [Review of The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith.] Poetry 2
(April 1913): 31–32.
———. [Review of Some Imagist Poets—An Anthology.] Poetry 6 (June 1915): 150–53.
O’Day, Edward F. “Varied Types—XC: Witter Bynner.” Town Talk (7 September 1912): 7.
Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’t by an Imagiste.” Poetry 1 (March 1913): 200–206.
Rabate, Jean-Michel. “Tradition and T. S. Eliot.” In The Cambridge Companion to T. S.
Eliot, ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
“Recent Poetry” [review of The Star-Treader and Other Poems]. Current Opinion 54 (February 1913): 150.
Santayana, George. The Genteel Tradition. Ed. Douglas L. Wilson. 1967. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Shusterman, Richard. “Eliot as Philosopher.” In The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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Smith, Clark Ashton. Letter to August Derleth, 13 December 1944. Ms., August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
———. Letter to “The Poet Speaks.” Epos 8, No. 1 (Fall 1956): 27.
———. Letter to Donald Wandrei, 11 November 1926. Ms., Donald Wandrei Papers,
Minnesota Historical Society.
Stableford, Brian. “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.” In American Supernatural Fiction, ed. Douglas Roillard. New York: Garland, 1996.
Sterling, George. “To Science.” In The Thirst of Satan. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003.
Clark Ashton Smith:
A Note on the Aesthetics of Fantasy
Charles K. Wolfe
Clark Ashton Smith was one of our foremost practitioners of fantasy, but he was also a writer very much aware of exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who all too often saw themselves as enter-tainers rather than artists, Smith from the very beginning of his writing career saw himself as a serious artist, and saw his work as the realization of a cogent and well-formed aesthetic theory. This essay is an attempt to partially define that aesthetic, at least as it existed for Smith’s fiction, and to relate it to the mainstream literary tradition.
During his lifetime Smith wrote well over thirty nonfictional essays of varying lengths. Unlike his friend, H. P. Lovecraft, Smith seldom wrote essays on topics of
“general interest,” such as cats or geographical locales; nearly every one of Smith’s essays deals directly with literature or literary influences. Included among these essays are assessments of George Sterling, Lovecraft, M.
R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Poe, William Hope Hodgson, and Donald Wandrei. But the most interesting essays
are those in which Smith talks about his own art. Significantly, he never talks much about his poetry in these public essays (though he did frequently in his private letters); his attention is directed almost exclusively to his stories. A possible reason for this is that his short stories were much more public than his poetry; they were being exposed to all manner of reader in the pages of mass circulation magazines like Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories. With such a wide and occasionally hostile audience, Smith was more inclined to explain his intentions and defend his art.
Since over half of Smith’s stories were written and published in the early to
mid-1930s, it is not surprising that most of his important critical statements also date from that time. Especially interesting are a series of public debates Smith engaged in through the letter columns of Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Strange Tales, and the Fantasy Fan in 1932–33. Smith came under attack from those who were insisting upon more “realism” in science fiction; psychological realism was in vogue in mainstream literature in the 1930s (with Anderson, Dreiser, and Hemingway setting the pace), and various writers and fans of speculative fiction insisted that the only way by which speculative fiction would ever be accepted as
“serious” literature would be for it to adopt more “realistic” modes. Smith perceived that realism was only one tradition, and that romanticism was an equally
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valid tradition. He rejected the definition that literature was a study of human reactions and character development; he called such a definition “narrow and lim-
ited.” In the August 1932 issue of Wonder Stories, Smith wrote:
To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away
from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one’s own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly
symbolised as “incest.” What we need is less “human interest,” in the narrow
sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—
can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. ( PD 12) Smith saw the folly of people who equated “realism” with quality in literature; only in the last decade has literature begun to recover from the tyranny of the realism criterion, the assumption that the only function of literature is to tell it “how it is.”
Smith fought his lonely battle during the height of the realistic movement, in the 1930s; only today is the literary mainstream beginning to appreciate the fact that some writers are not trying to be “realistic,” and that reading them requires a different set of standards. Oddly enough, Smith today is quite at home in a contemporary literature in which the most respected writers are neo-romantics like Barth, Borges, Vonnegut, and Hawkes. (The only concession to “realism” Smith made was in regard to writing ability as opposed to intention; he repeatedly insisted on the all-important distinction between realism as a literary school and simple writing ability; he suggests that much of the criticism of speculative fiction launched in the 1930s would be eliminated if writers would simply write better, not in a different mode.)
But to simply say Smith is a “romantic” is hardly enough; the term is hope-
lessly broad and inclusive, and means a dozen different things. In what specific ways is Smith romantic and not romantic, and according to what standards? We
must deal with these questions before we can really come to terms with what
Smith was doing in his fiction.
Of course, no one can deny that Smith’s prose style is romantic by any defini-
tion of the word; the texture, color, sentence structure, and, especially, the vocabulary is in the best tradition of the self-conscious story-teller, always reminding us that we are in the hands of an artist, and what we are reading is indeed art, and reminding us of the difference between the world of art and the everyday world. The recent textual work of Lin Carter and others is showing us just how rich Smith’s prose style was; it was richer even than we had imagined, for the editors of the time apparently were quite ruthless in editing his stories. One could, indeed, make a good argument for style being the most important aspect of Smith’s art, and that his style is frequently an end in itself. But for the sake of argument, let us artificially divide style from content, and look at some of the structural patterns in Smith’s stories: how are they romantic?
If any basic structural pattern emerges from Smith’s various stories, it is one of
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the journey by the hero into some other world, some sort of magic world; it may be via a space voyage, via dimension, via the past, or via a mystic experience. But frequently Smith’s heroes must make this journey; they must cross the threshold into some sort of alternative reality. (This term seems better than the term “fantasy world,” since “fantasy world” implies an unfair distinction; it implies that the “real”
world—the common, recognizable world—is more basic or more important than
the other world; Smith would have insisted that both worlds were equally impor-
tant, were equally “real.”) Stories of this sort are multifold; the titles of two Smith collections, Lost Worlds and Other Dimensions, testify to the pervasiveness of this theme in his work. Perhaps the most centrally significant of these threshold stories is “The City of the Singing Flame,” which suggests multiple alternative realities.
In many stories Smith goes out of his way to stress the significance of this
threshold; he does this by creating in his readers a feeling of incredible remoteness from these alternate realities. A reader is hardly impressed by a threshold to a world very much like his own; thus a successful fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland, will strive to make the alternative reality as different as possible from the “control,” everyday reality. Smith was fond of manipulating his readers by attempting, through various devices, to “distance” the events of his story from the reader’s world. For example,
“The End of the Story” is presented through the manuscript of a law student found sometime after 1789; the real plot of the story thus is distanced from us, first, by the fact that it is second-hand, coming in a manuscript, and second, by the fact that the manuscript is removed from us by history. In “The Testament of Athammaus,” we
have the obviously ancient narrative of a chief headsman in Commoriom, who then tells the story of his youth of how Commoriom fell; again, we have two stages of distancing. The story of Commoriom has already become a misty legend to the narrator; and yet the narrator is already remote to us because he is from Hyperborea; the actual story of Commoriom is thus infinitely more remote to us. But Smith did not need to rely on the past in creating a sense of remoteness; he just as easily used space travel and the future. For instance, “The Dweller in the Gulf” contains no less than four “distancing” elements: (1) the Martian setting; (2) the time setting (obviously the future); (3) the antiquity of the cavern into which the party wanders and the antiquity of the Martian surface; and (4) the bizarre descent into the sub-world of Mars. In short, we have an alternative reality within an alternative reality, et al., like a series of Chinese boxes, one within the other. Of course, these distancing devices have been used since the time of Irving and Hawthorne to try to lend an aura of antiquity to relatively recent and commonplace events; but Smith’s imagination allowed him to develop this art of distancing to striking perfection. And when it works, his readers are made acutely aware of the alien quality of Smith’s other worlds. This is perhaps what Smith meant when he said the function of imaginative literature was to lead the imagination outward. (Smith admitted in a 1940 essay,
“Planets and Dimensions,” p
ublished in Tales of Wonder, No. 11, that among his science fiction tales, “the majority have dealt either with worlds remote in space or
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worlds hidden from human perception” [ PD 56]. This would seem to indicate that Smith used his science fiction stories to illustrate the same basic themes as he developed in his stories of antiquity.)
But what happens to characters who encounter these remote alternative reali-
ties? And what is the nature of these realities: are they hostile, beneficent, or what?
These complicated questions need longer answers than we can provide here, but
one or two points are obvious. We might first note that Smith’s basic plot—the
hero crossing the threshold into an alternative reality—is closely related to the classic hero myth as traced throughout the ages from primitive myth to folk legend to literature. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, has defined this basic structural pattern or monomyth, as follows: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (italics mine): fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (30).
Now the first part of this structure fits the stories of Smith well; the hero does go, frequently, from a recognizable world into a world of wonder: the past, a remote planet, another dimension, or even occasionally a dream. But here the pattern
breaks down, for in many of Smith’s stories, the heroes do not return from their alternative realities. Some of them strive to return, but fail; witness stories like
“The Dweller in the Gulf,” “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan,” “The Weaver in
the Vault,” “The Second Interment,” or “Master of the Asteroid.” Others, like
Giles Angarth in “City of the Singing Flame,” make it back but are shattered by the experience. A few, like the law student in “The End of the Story,” prefer to stay in the alternative reality; the speaker in the poem “Amithaine” says, “who has seen the towers of Amithaine / Shall sleep, and dream of them again” and, in the end, chooses to remain in the romantic dream world, the “fallen kingdoms of romance”