Today, January 13, is the birthday of one of the greatest writers of fantasy of the Twentieth Century or any other. Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was one of the big three in what many consider to be the best years of Weird Tales. The other two are Robert E Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.
I last looked at some of Smith’s work last summer when I reviewed Zothique from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. I had started Hyperborea, which was the next volume Lin Carter published in that line, but summer school started. Trying to figure out how to teach online in a summer session was time consuming, and I never got back to it. I’m going to try to get back to in sometime in the next few months.
Smith doesn’t seem to be as well-known these days as REH and HPL. Part of that, I think, is because his writing isn’t light and breezy. Neither are Howard’s nor Lovecraft’s, but Smith used a vocabulary that was extensive. As a result reading him can be something of a challenge. You see, kids, back in the day, we had these things called dictionaries, and anytime we didn’t know what a word, meant, well, we just looked ’em up. Now git off my lawn.
I’m not sure what story of Smith’s I’m going to read tonight. Maybe I’ll reread “The City of the Singing Flame”. It was the first story by CAS I ever read. I was in the seventh grade, and the junior high library had a nice collection of Robert Silverberg anthologies. It was in one of those.
Regardless, I’ll raise my glass to Clark Ashton Smith and enjoy some of his fiction this evening.
I get misty-eyed every time I read CAS’s The Last Incantation. Every time.
Have you seen the short film made from this story? It’s available on the Best of the HPL Film Festival dvd/blu ray.
“Smith used a vocabulary that was extensive”
Much the same could be said of A. Merritt and is often given as the reason for his fall from fame. ‘Course even Burroughs and Zane Grey will send many modern readers to the dictionary app on their ereader.
I think pretty much any writer from that time period would challenge the vocabularies of modern readers.
I grew up reading ERB, Poe and REH, plus, I read dictionaries for fun as a child and tweener. So, when I really dove into CAS–when the Timescapes came out–it was a stretch, not an unbridgeable gulf.
‘Maybe I’ll reread “The City of the Singing Flame”. It was the first story by CAS I ever read. I was in the seventh grade, and the junior high library had a nice collection of Robert Silverberg anthologies. It was in one of those.’
That is EXACTLY how I first read CAS. The same story, the same age and the same antho.
I reread it. The version I read also contained the sequel “Beyond the Singing Flame”, which didn’t do as much for me as the original. I hadn’t read that one before, or if I had, I had no memory of it.
I was always reading above my grade level, so I had no trouble with CAS. If I didn’t know a word, I looked it up in the dictionary. (I read the World Book encyclopedia for fun.)