The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith

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Authors: Clark Ashton Smith
may his style be defined as baroque—a literary baroque quite unlike any other. By literary baroque we intend a style wherein certain Gothic elements—such as savageness, grotesqueness, antithesis, changefulness or metamorphosis, redundance or, in Smith’s case, largely pseudo-redundance—have evolved from an ultimately classic matrix. To these we might also add the preoccupation with illusion, sometimes manifested in the use of the mirror, the mirage, the mask, and the maze; the fascination and obsession with death and gruesome physical detail; the love of paradox; the use of symbolic ambiguity; the emphasis on extravagance of color and an often outrageous efflorescence of vegetation and décor; the preference for objects and words and imageries of splendor; the element of the theatrical, often manifested in a kind of theatrical spotlighting on crucial objects or persons at critical moments; and a delight in what Leon Edel once termed “the familiar symptoms of decadence” but which are equally as well those of literature in its primal stages—a delight in the wonderful, the marvellous, the strange, the exotic, the bizarre, the hypernatural, and we might add, the unknown and the unknowable. For all the poetic denseness of his prose style—a style which makes heavy and deliberate use of the technique of poetic compression—Smith’s syntax remains remarkably clear, and with striking rhythmical effects.
    In his poems in prose and in his tales and/or extended poems in prose, there are prose rhythms that challenge comparison with those of the finest stylists in the language, including those of Sir Thomas Browne; whom, in sheer sustained stateliness and sombre splendor of style and subject, Smith surpasses in many instances, or at the very least fully equals. Smith’s genius for creating and sustaining a powerful mood—partly through a more or less related system of imagery and through a lucid, even if elaborate, syntax—simplifies the baroque antitheses and complications inherent in his tales, and thereby succeeds in giving his tales their characteristic tense unity. The prose of Clark Ashton Smith features, as does the prose of Sir Thomas Browne (and as does, of course, Smith’s own poetry), a skillful, often uncanny juxtaposition of Anglo-Saxon words with those of Græco-Latinate polysyllables—this creates an effect approximating the incantatory effect of poetry. The prose of Smith’s tales is as studied and deliberate as the prose of his poems in prose and as the language of verse. It goes without saying that such a prose demands an unusual and a careful quality of reading to be fully grasped and appreciated. While Smith’s style is based in part on Poe, and suggestive in certain respects of Sir Thomas Browne, yet the result is wholly original, quite unlike the style of any other writer. And despite its elaboration and seeming excess, it is essentially a highly compressed, compact, and economical prose. Without such a prose style it would have been impossible for Smith to have created the illusion of reality so characteristic of his tales of superficial unreality.
    As poetic and mythical considerations of death and mortality, such poems in prose as “The Memnons of the Night,” “From the Crypts of Memory,” and “The Shadows,” together with such extended poems in prose as “The Planet of the Dead,” “The Empire of the Necromancers,” or “The Death of Malygris,” form worthy twentieth-century companion-pieces to the last chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall , i.e., Hydriotaphia .
    Merely regarded as short stories told in a heavily poetic style, Smith’s fictions would appear extraordinary. Regarded more exactly as extended poems in prose, which is what many of them are in all actuality, his tales are nothing less than astonishing. To sustain a poem in prose for one or two pages is not an impossible feat; but to sustain one for ten, fifteen, even twenty pages, as Smith has undeniably

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