Behind the Veil

The three greatest writers of the Weird Tales era in the 1920s and 30s were Howard, Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft and Howard have gone on to greater fame in death than they ever knew in life, but Smith – often acknowledged by his peers as the best of the three – is today almost forgotten, a footnote in the pulp era, read only by fans. It is ironic in a way his own morbid imagination would appreciate – that he outlived his contemporaries by decades, and yet his literary legacy is so much lesser.

Smith was an odd, reclusive man. Born in 1893, he lived all his life in California. He married late in life, and his health was often poor. He wrote fiction intensively only between the years of 1926 and 1935, largely under the epistolary influence of Lovecraft, with whom he corresponded until the latter’s death in 1937. Smith’s first love was poetry, and he turned out an impressive body of verse in the course of his life, consisting of hundreds of poems marked by their vividness and bizarre, often macabre imagery.

Later in life, he turned his hand mostly to visual arts, carving strange sculptures from soapstone and turning out sketches and paintings. Despite his friends’ urging, he wrote almost no fiction after 1937, and spent the last decades of his life pursuing other forms, though he never ceased creating.

It has been said that he was affected by tragedy, and that seems to be true. It was his friend Lovecraft’s influence that turned him to fiction in the first place, and in the years 1935 - 37 there was a barrage of loss in his life. His mother died in ‛35, and while he was nursing his father through terminal illness, he had word of Bob Howard’s suicide in ‛36 and then Lovecraft himself died in ‛37. Shortly after this, his father passed away, and he must have felt himself very, very alone. I suppose it can be understood why he laid down his pen and never really picked it up again.

The tragedy of that is the fact that his stories were marvelous. Smith brought the same lyricism and ardent imagery to his prose that he wielded so well in poetry, and he was undoubtedly the best writer, line by line, that Weird Tales ever printed. His stories were perhaps the ideal of what was then called “weird fiction” - a brew of fantasy, mystery, and horror that marked the pulp era. Smith imagined fevered, bizarre, rich fantasy worlds filled with darkness and a sense of the macabre. His worlds lived and breathed in a way many fantasy worlds still do not.

He is often said to have written Sword & Sorcery, and indeed many of his works bear the marks of the style, such as the exotic “Empire of the Necromancers” and the horrific “Isle of the Torturers”, or the classic fantasy/terror story “The Double Shadow”. One can see his influence on Howard – the dense lyricism of the Kull stories in particular – and the way he urged Lovecraft away from the refined, drawing-room prose of Poe imitation and into a new, more modern world of horror. I would say he pushed both of them, simply by virtue of his great talent.

He faded into obscurity, after the heady years of the 30s. He was marked by a sense of loss and failure. As a young poet he had been briefly lauded, and had traveled in literary circles among the likes of Bierce and London. He was once hailed as “The Keats of the Pacific”, but it did not last. Then, when he rose again as a story writer, it was again ephemeral. Tragedy and ill health blunted his abilities, and changes in the markets left him behind.

The later years of his life seem to have passed quietly enough, and he died peacefully in his sleep in 1961, a generation past his time. He was buried under a stone near his childhood home, and there was no marker. He left us - as so many writers do - only his words. It is sad that his work often passes unnoticed beside the work of his friends, who would have been the first to laud his over their own. Smith is the hidden jewel of the Weird Tales era, and I believe he is the very root of the lyrical imagery that often marks Sword & Sorcery, the unseen hand, the wizard behind the veil.