If you are seeking a self-made West Coast Renaissance man from the early 20th century, you could hardly pick a better candidate than Clark Ashton Smith. But don't look for a full-scale biography of this fascinating figure—none has been published. No statues or monuments commemorate his legacy, except for a small grave marker placed many years after his death next to the boulder in tiny Auburn, California were his ashes were scattered. When one of his original watercolors was put up for bid recently on eBay, it sold for one hundred dollars— and there was just one bid!
Smith deserves better. In his early days, his poetry gained him the nickname of "the Keats of the Pacific Coast." He was also a sculptor, painter and prolific author of prose fiction—with the exception of Poe and Lovecraft , no one did more than Clark Ashton Smith to define the modern horror story. Yet his many out-of-print books are now rare collectors' items, and for the saddest reason of all: because very few copies were printed when they were first issued. When Arkham house published a volume of Smith’s Selected Poems a decade after his death, the print run was limited to 2,000 copies—and those sold slowly.
Frankly, I’m puzzled by this conspiracy of neglect. Smith may have been the most erudite genre fiction writer of his generation— you won’t find another pulp writer with a larger vocabulary or more esoteric knowledge. In fact, if you asked me to pick the modern authors with the most expansive taste in words, I put him on the short list alongside Vladimir Nabokov and John Banville . And his myth-infused tales anticipate so much that is current in contemporary storytelling, and not just in narrative fiction. I could easily imagine Smith stories such as "The Maze of the Enchanter" or "The Weaver in the Vault" serving as the basis for megahit video games. And fantasy film screenwriters could learn a few tricks from Smith’s canny thieves Satampra and Tirouv, whose adventures propel "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros."
But Smith would attract our attention if only for his compelling life story, which deserves to be told in a full-scale bio. Born in the midst of California’s gold country long after the prospectors had moved on, Clark Ashton Smith had virtually no role models for the intellectual life he proposed for himself. To compensate for his lack of formal education—he never completed grammar school—Smith read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica . And when he finished it, he read it a second time. To improve his knowledge of words, he did the same with Webster’s unabridged dictionary. When he felt he had learned all the nuance of English, he taught himself Spanish and French, and eventually translated poetry from those languages.
Smith was already writing stories at age eleven, and poetry at age thirteen. He first saw his work in print at age 17, when The Overland Monthly accepted two of his stories. This was no small feat—Overland, launched by Bret Harte, had also helped launch the careers of Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, and stood out as the most prestigious American literary periodical west of the Rockies. Still a teenager, Smith could now boast that his writing appeared in the same magazine that had published Mark Twain and Willa Cather. He soon became a protégé of influential San Francisco litterateur George Sterling, who championed Smith’s poetry and helped the young author establish a reputation as one of the leading young writers on the West Coast.
But Smith was much more than an ivory tower aesthete. Over the years, he also worked as a miner, fruit-picker, lumberjack, cement-mixer, gardener, and in other blue collar capacities. When Smith fills his tales with mythic landscapes, richly described with elaborate botanical and meteorological details, he is not simply showing off his book learning, but drawing on his first-hand expertise in the great outdoors. These experiences would make for a riveting biography, as would Smith's busy love life—he didn’t marry until age 61, but his affairs, some with the wives of his neighbors, were the scandal of his community. Strolling through the tiny town of Auburn with his goatee and beret, he must have seemed a strange sight, a Parisian flaneur magically transported to the wild west.
Smith mixed with the leading California writers of his day, but the most influential relationship came via mail with H.P. Lovecraft , the master of the pulp fiction horror tale. Over a period of fifteen years, from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937, the two corresponded regularly, and the influence of the older writer could soon be detected in Smith’s work. If Smith had first promised to gain renown as the "Keats of the Pacific Coast" he would eventually gain his greatest fame as the "Lovecraft of the Far West." By the late twenties, Smith was focusing on horror, fantasy and science fiction, and entering into the most productive period of his career. Between 1929 and 1937, he published more than fifty stories in Weird Tales , and also was a frequent contributor to other pulp magazines.
Yet editors often complained about his dense writing and choice of arcane words. The modern day reader who turns to Smith’s fantasy fiction will understand these concerns. No genre writer in the present day could get away with such demanding writing, and it is testimony to the literacy of the American general readers of the 1930s that Smith could operate at all in the world of mass market commercial fiction. Let me take one example: Smith’s story "The Uncharted Isle," a ten-page story that appeared in Weird Tales in November 1930. Here readers encounter words such as eroclitic , armillary , pell , wried , irremeable , and parapegm . Many were no doubt confused, but Smith probably didn't mind—after all, he later explained that this story was an "allegory of human disorientation." You couldn’t get away with using those words in a highbrow periodical nowadays, let alone a mass market magazine. But such was Smith's modus operandi, and he maintained it even as he had to ramp up his rate of acceptances in order to survive the economic decline of the Great Depression and pay the medical bills of his ailing parents.
These stories stand out even more for their eerie ambience than for their demonstrations of verbal virtuosity. Reading his finest stories, such as "The Double Shadow" or "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," you will feel an encroaching claustrophobia and an unsettling despair that, in later years, might be labeled existential angst. No, Smith never enjoyed the adulation from French readers that Poe, Lovecraft and other American horror writers received—although he translated works from French, and was a Francophile himself—yet I could easily imagine his stories fitting into fashionable Parisian modern and postmodern discourse.
I suspect that this pervasive psychological malaise has limited Smith’s ability to reach a crossover audience in the years following his death, in the way that Poe and Lovecraft somehow managed. The typical Smith hero dies at the end of the story, and often because of a deliberate choice to embrace the horrifying unknown. In "The City of the Singing Flame" this acceptance of self-destruction involves leaping into a beguiling musical pyre in an alternative universe temple. In "Genius Loci," the narrator is captivated by a malevolent meadow that has already killed several others, and announces in the closing paragraph his decision to journey there to meet his own demise. In "The Face by the River," a murderer returns to the scene of the crime to succumb to a death similar to the one inflicted on his victim. In “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” the sole survivor of a horrific expedition can’t resist the temptation to go back to the place of his companions’ violent destruction, and join them in death. No one apparently told Smith that readers, even of horror stories, prefer a happy ending. You get few of those in his stories, although examples of Freud’s thanatos (the so-called ‘death instinct’) show up every few pages. Are you surprised, then, that film directors haven’t snatched up the movie rights to Smith’s stories?
But the very reasons why Hollywood stays away from Clark Ashton Smith are the ones that should draw serious readers to this pioneer of genre fiction. He may have the darkest worldview of any of the pioneers of the horror idiom, and grasped with more intensity than his peers the particular essence of twentieth century scaremongering. Even more than Poe or Lovecraft, Smith anticipated a deadly age in which the greatest destruction came not via ghosts or goblins but from deep inside the human soul.
That’s a horror that doesn’t go away, even in the light of day and the greater light of lucid, rational thinking. For that reason, Smith’s stories may well be filled with all the mythic creatures and supernatural trappings you find in other horror writers, but he rarely assigns them the blame for the calamities that ensue upon their arrival. His darkest landscapes are hardly the richly-described misty meadows and fog-drenched labyrinths where his stories transpire, but rather the psychic ones inside his protagonist’s heads. That’s a horror that can’t be defeated with a magical sword or whispered incantation, and still resonates in an age that no longer fears ghosts and ghouls.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
In his day, he was the 'Keats of the Pacific Coast' and the 'Lovecraft of the Far West'. Yet Clark Ashton Smith is omitted from most discussions of major Western authors. Is it time for a revival of his work?
When one of his original watercolors was put up for bid recently on eBay, it sold for one hundred dollars—and there was just one bid!
Smith read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica . And when he finished it, he read it a second time...He did the same with Webster's unabridged dictionary.