Clark Ashton Smith

This year Santa (apparently in partnership with amazon.com) brought me a gift that I will probably keep for the rest of my days --a pristine, 2006 hardcover edition of The End of the Story, volume 1 of the collected short fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.

I have several other small collections of Smith's work, all of which I found by hunting through the discount racks of used bookstores over the last ten years. Those paperback volumes are all older than me. Some are water-damaged; most show their age on their yellowed pages, broken spines and brittle brown edges. I love every one of them. I re-read them often and I never tire of them.

If you're not familiar with Clark Ashton Smith, you're not alone. Sadly, he is all-but forgotten these days, except by a core of dedicated fans who continue to keep a taper lit in his memory, and in memorium of his unique brand of bizarre horror-fantasy. To attempt to describe the kind of strange fiction Smith crafted, and put on display across the pulp pages of Weird Tales and other magazines of the thirties and forties would be to insult his work. There is nothing else quite like it. It cannot be explained. It cannot be suggested. It must be experienced.

Smith is at once an inspiration, a marvel and an enigma.

Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he began his career as an acclaimed young poet while still in his twenties, despite having had only five years of formal schooling. It seems he was one of these individuals afflicted with both poor physical health and uncommon genius. He is said to have taught himself all manner of things, not the least of which was a rare mastery of this language.

His writing bubbles over with obscure words and phrases that were probably falling out of use even when he wrote them, seventy years ago -- many of which are almost as forgotten as the man himself today. In Smith's conception, one did not wear old, rusty armor, one was fully caparisoned in verdigrised chain-mail. In Smith's dark and terrible world you find fallen gods frowned in rotting psammite and evil-looking fungi with stems of leprous pallor. It is a feast of sights and sounds and smells and ancient horrors.

That he wrote as he did continues to inspire, that he wrote as much as he did -- cranking out dozens upon dozens of stories during his period of greatest production betwen the late thirties and mid-forties -- is stunning.

But Smith puzzles as much as he inspires. Just as he was at the zenith of his work, he quit writing almost altogether. He seems to have retired to his preferred pursuit, sculpture, for the remainder of his days. Much like his contemporaries, H.P Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith appears to have been something of a social misfit, although it would seem he eventually did do a little better with the ladies than either of his two Weird Tales comrades. He married sometime after the mid-forties, which I suppose would have put him somewhere in his fifties at the time, and he passed away quietly in 1964.

When you read anything that I write, you are reading echoes of Clark Ashton Smith.