During his lifetime (1893 to 1961) Clark Ashton Smith was best known as a poet and a ladies’ man. My own experience teaches that the writing of poetry is an easy occupation and pleasant one—far easier and far more pleasant than building birdhouses, for example. The relentless pursuit of a variety of women is (I am told) laborious, costly, and frequently frustrating.
At one point the two find common ground: neither is remunerative. Today we have forgotten both the poet and the womanizer and know Smith only as a writer of fantastic and often frightful tales, one whose best work is literally inimitable. In its heyday, he was one of the three musketeers of Weird Tales, the other two being H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Let us pause briefly to notice that although Lovecraft has had many imitators (he is in fact quite easy to imitate) and Howard more than a few, no one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him. Klarkash-Ton, as Lovecraft called him, arrived in 1930 and departed in 1935, producing a staggering amount of fiction during those six brief years. May I give the barren years after 1935 a little personal perspective? I was four when Smith stopped writing his necromantic narratives, and thirty when he died.
No thoughtful reader should overlook the dates of his brief productive period. Smith began to write, and write frantically, at the time of the stock market crash. (Late October and early November of 1929.) He continued to write through the depths of the depression and stopped as soon as the economy had somewhat revived.
The pattern strongly suggests that Smith was dependent on dividends for income, probably dividends from inherited stock. Today, when we have forgotten how much a single dollar would buy in the nineteen thirties, we sneer at the one-cent, two-cent, and even half-cent word rates paid by the old pulps. We would do well to remember that Howard, a doctor’s son who wrote for those rates instead of going to medical school, had the highest income in Cross Plains, Texas. A recent issue of Weird Tales carried a cover price of five ninety-five. I have the May, 1940 issue, on which the cover price is fifteen cents. At two cents a word, this sentence would buy that Weird Tales and return change.
Does this mean that Smith’s output was mere hackwork? Far from it! Samuel Johnson, for decades the literary dictator of England, said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Charles Dickens, who worked in a factory as a boy, was given a little education and pulled himself out of poverty by writing. Smith’s contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, once wrote: “You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live . . . All write [sic] but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material . . . ” (Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald 1934)
Smith did not need Hemingway to tell him. He was a poet, with a poet’s high, almost satanic, pride. It was not in him to do less than his best, any more than it is in a thoroughbred stallion to race slowly.
At the time he wrote for the pulps, Smith lived in a cabin near an abandoned mine, far from any neighbor. The nearest town was Auburn, northeast of San Francisco; Auburn is not large even today. There can be little doubt that strange lights shone in the windows of that cabin by night, and that strange sounds emanated from it. No source I have found reports these; but when a man like Smith lives in a place like that, he has Visitors.
And that is where this introduction ought to end, but I cannot resist piling on a few more facts that seem to me to illuminate the extraordinary author you will soon begin reading.
The first is that although Smith was locally famous as a poet, he never attained a national reputation. This was undoubtedly because his sort of poetry was utterly out of fashion at the time he wrote it. He was (in Northern California in the nineteen thirties!) a poet of the French decadence. Baudelaire had published Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, thirty-six years before Smith was born.
The second is that many of Smith’s stories originally included strong sexual elements. These were removed, for the most part, by the editors who bought them. If you are inclined to excoriate the editors for it, as I am, we must remember that the postal inspectors of that day zealously impounded magazines containing material they felt prurient. The slightest nod in the direction of sexual intercourse was dangerous.
The third is that Smith was an amateur painter and sculptor. Those who have examined his work in both media feel that it was in sculpture that he excelled.
As is only to be expected, his sculptures are odd, to say the least. They are largely heads, of which only a few appear human; most might better be called the heads of aliens or demons. Although they are small enough that a man can readily hold them in one hand, they possess an air of massive antiquity. If you were shown a photograph of one without any other object present to provide scale, you might suppose that it would require a truck to move it, and that archaeologists would condemn you for moving it at all. Smith dreamed of antediluvian temples sunk beneath the sea or smothered among triumphant vines, this as he sat alone in the sunshine, carving the soft stone he found in the abandoned mine with a pocket knife.
A few of his carvings he mailed to friends, packing the little heads that loom so large in rags, and stuffing them into empty tins, packing those tins in more rags in cardboard boxes. Most he literally threw away. Since his death, his admirers have combed the area around his cabin, finding a good many.
Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.
“New-born, the mage re-summons stronger spells, and spirits
With dazzling darkness clad about,
and fierier flame
Renewed by æon-curtained slumber.
All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory
the bored hours,
He calls upon Sham-hamphorash,
the nameless Name.”